jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Photo sharing site Flickr added video uploads last week, and some users are up in arms. I think the video player integrates well, quality is great, and the restrictions — clips can’t be longer than 90 seconds — appeal to me. After all, every single muckfilm I ever uploaded to YouTube could have been improved by more rigorous trimming. Here are a few soothing/dull trial vids we shot this weekend. More to come!

We’re proud to present the April issue of the Mississippi Review Web, dedicated to fiction inspired by the movies. Check it out at MississippiReview.com or go straight to the pdf download. Featuring:

• Brandon Scott Gorrell: Godzilla
• Colin Bassett: Dance Party, U.S.A.
• Emma Garman: Talking with Françoise Sagan
• John Minichillo: Nearly Here
• Katherine A. Gleason: Fred Astaire Refuses
• Lori Romero: Rockfall
• Meghan Austin: Requiem for an Almost Lady
• Myfanwy Collins: Verbatim

I’ll have photos from holiday sojourn on Cape Cod later, but in the meantime I wanted to point to Commander König’s eerie and beautiful Easter-inspired photo series.

I just happened to mention Phish’s 1998 Prague shows the other day — turns out, the second night is being officially released on LivePhish today. You can listen to the Ghost for free. Some other time, I’ll tell you about how we stayed at an expat commune stalked by a mysterious “sickness” and the mirthless lectures on materialism I received from a future Park Slope real estate agent. I still have the poster we managed to rip off a downtown wall without being arrested by the Czech secret police.

Screening-wise, it’s been a slow week. I walked out of Olivier Assays’ Boarding Gate after it became clear that the tats on Asia Argento were the only interesting thing about it. Instead, I’ve been obsessing over my There Will Be Blood DVD — much more on this later.

Boarding Gate. Olivier Assayas, 2007. N/R

From The Last Waltz to Shine a Light, most concert movies leave me wishing for a more democratic, inclusive view — even if they’re not directed by Martin Scorsese. Instead of focusing on faces and fingers, I find myself longing for wide shots, audience shots, the view of the stage and crowd as a whole. The usual approach implies that the camera is somehow superior to the regular flesh-and-blood attendee because it has VIP access to the close-ups. But the concert isn’t just in the guitarist’s fingers, and in my experience, the best bands know how to make the music fit the space and all the people in it. At the very best shows, it doesn’t matter where your seats are, or if you’re standing half a mile away.

More than any other band I’ve seen, Phish completely owned any place they found themselves in, from sweaty pubs to summer sheds, hockey rinks, Indian reservations, abandoned military bases, Madison Square Garden, and the top of air traffic control towers. There’s ample proof of this in a motherlode of videos I stumbled upon last night.

Among the stash of 300+ handheld clips (think Awesome! I Fuckin’ Shot That!) uploaded by YouTube user silverchair97, I want to draw your attention to a few choice tunes that emphasize the spectacular lighting design by Chris Kuroda, famous for improvising along with the band on the light board and sometimes referred to by fans as CK5 — the fifth member of Phish. (Once upon a time in downtown Prague, Kuroda paid Marcy a compliment — but that’s a story for another post.)

Who needs closeups of Mick Jagger’s cracked face (or Bono in 3D) when you can feast your eyes on Kuroda’s work, which manages to meld the sound, the crowd, and the stage into an oozing vessel of rock’n roll that can be appreciated from any angle?

Also Sprach Zarathustra (as always, a cover of the Deodato disco version from the Being There soundtrack rather than the Richard Strauss original Kubrick used in 2001):

The Velvet Underground’s Rock’n Roll in two parts:

The alien mothership has landed in this infamous jam out of Twist, from the Island Tour:

.. and a few more after the jump…

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Marcy and I will be editing the Spring issue of the Mississippi Review Web. Here’s the call for submissions. Please feel free to forward this to any and all interested parties, and to post wherever appropriate.

24 Words Per Second: The Movies Issue
We are writers who watch a lot of movies. Maybe it’s no surprise that the films we see have a way of seeping back into our fiction: plots that echo silent film, narrative gimmicks borrowed from the French New Wave, characters who spend too much time at the multiplex or model their lives after movie stars. For the MRW Spring issue, we are looking for short stories with a cinematic bend. What that means, exactly, is up to you. Perhaps your story references Aki Kaurismäki, moves like a screwball comedy, or features cinemaniacs trying to kick the habit. Maybe it’s narrated from the perspective of Natalie Wood’s ghost. As long as it’s inspired by the movies, we’re interested.

The deadline is March 15. Send submissions (3000 words max) to mississippireview.movieissue@gmail.com.

It’s hard to believe I’ve had this gig since last century, but it says right there under my picture: Guide since 1999. After months of planning and frenzied behind-the-scenes work, About.com rolled out the new design for our site this morning.

I dig it — it’s much less cluttered and more web-2.0-y, with support for tags on all articles and a new row of tabs that’s supposed to let you access accumulated content more easily. A number of widgets in the sidebar highlight reviews, photo galleries, and our all-but-dead forums. In exchange for a new promo spot up top, they’ve pushed down the blog a little, but you can still subscribe to the feed or get nothing but the blog on a dedicated page. Vain as we are, we’re most concerned with our mugshots, which weren’t the ones we submitted and will hopefully change any moment now.

What do you think?

These are bittersweet days for the nostalgic Phish fan. The tenth anniversary of the legendary Fall tour of 1997 is bringing a few things into sharp relief: how lost we are with Trey in rehab and Mike in hiding, how we still haven’t gotten over Coventry, and how embarrassed we still are by just how much we love this band. Mike was right: they had another 21 years in them, easily. That’s the bitter part.

And the sweet part? As always, the music. I’ve been embroiled in a fiendish listening orgy, making my way through the tour set by set, often dropping everything I was doing to stand in awe of the continuously developing sound and earth-shaking improvisation. Since they first graduated to arenas in 1994, Phish had perfected its tension-and-release jamming for big venues, but it wasn’t until the low-pressure European tour of 1997 that they discovered new spaces and rhythms in the music — a style that came to be known variously as cow funk, intergalactic space funk, and porno funk. Whatever you call it, it was groovy and psychedelic and very, very tasty. Bow-chicka-wow-wow!

At the time, that magnificent noise, sometimes driving, rising, sometimes standing still in imperceptibly morphing waves, sounded like the future to me: this was the mothership. Now it comes heavy with nostalgia for a season when I was setting off on a road trip from the Deep South to New York City with a new haircut and a brand-new girlfriend, a promising writer with a funny name and an even funnier sensibility. I met my future Schwiegereltern, saw movies that never made it to Mississippi, and crashed the Mayflower Hotel with Andy Gadiel’s crew for an epic holiday run at the Garden — only the first of four memorable New Year’s Eves I spent with Phish. Ten years later, the band is gone but the girl’s still with me.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be listening to a lot more Fall 97, and I doubt I’ll be able to resist posting about it again. For now, here are a few tunes from the beginning of the tour, sorted by ascending dankness: Black-Eyed Katy is friendly enough, but anyone except the hettiest brahs might get hurt listening to Tweezer and Run Like an Antelope. (These are all audience recordings, which accounts for the somewhat muffled quality. Just turn it up. If you dig any of this, I highly recommend Live Phish 11, the official release of 11/17/97 Denver.)

From 11/13/97 Las Vegas, Black-Eyed Katy, a new song that defined the tour and later, with added lyrics, became The Moma Dance.

[audio:Phish-BlackEyedKaty-971113.mp3]

Gumbo from 11/14/97 Salt Lake City

[audio:Phish-Gumbo-971114.mp3]

Timber Ho! from 11/16/97 Denver

[audio:Phish-TimberHo.mp3]

The half-hour Tweezer that opened 11/17/97 Denver, and a cover of Jimi Hendrix’ Fire. Again, you can get this in soundboard quality on Live Phish 11.

[audio:Phish-Fire-971117.mp3]

[audio:Phish-Tweezer-971117.mp3]

Also Sprach Zarathustra and Run Like An Antelope from 11/19/97 Champaign

[audio:Phish-AlsoSprachZarathustra-971119.mp3]

[audio:Phish-Antelope-971119.mp3]

• More from This Month in Phish History
• Download every show from Fall 1997
• Setlists from the tour so far after the jump.

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This space was reserved for a quick reaction to one of the season’s most buzzed-about independent releases, but instead I have a tiny tale of woe for you. Last night was the first New York screening for Juno, the comedy ominously billed as “this year’s Little Miss Sunshine,” but somebody had recklessly overbooked the screening room on Sixth Avenue. Even though we had sent RSVPs and arrived with time to spare, about a dozen of us were left standing in the lobby while the publicist counted and recounted the remaining seats. I was at the front of the line and Marcy was already inside holding a seat, so there was hope — until a voice from the back of the line spoke these blood-curdling words: “I am David Denby, from The New Yorker.”

You can imagine what happened next. Now, I have no illusions about the pecking order among film critics, but — ah, let’s leave it at that. Unlike airplanes, there’s no compensation when you get bumped from a screening, except for the faint promise that next time, your RSVP might be honored. Marcy and I both left and had a drink or two toasting American Sucker.

The last screenings I remember being shut out of were The Royal Tenenbaums and Brokeback Mountain, neither one of which I cared for. Coincidence? Juno beware.