The Devil and Daniel Johnston set for release on Sony Pictures Classics?!?!

I just saw this. I drive past a big "Hi, How Are You?" frog every day on the way to work, but I'd never heard Johnston's music before seeing the doc. Incredible stuff.

Louis Black came off looking like a clueless old hipster. It's depressing to know he's the guy that runs my alt weekly.

When a rock star smears himself with peanut butter on stage, we like to imagine that he means to signify something -- something intentional enough to differentiate his act from the homeless schizophrenic smearing himself with peanut butter on the street outside. Even more simply: it's art when an actor plays Napoleon, madness when a layman thinks he is Napoleon.

So: it's art when a singer deliberately inserts the sound of suffering and tears into his song. But what about when the suffering it uncomfortably real? This would explain our discomfort with people like Daniel Johnston -- or, as a better example, Wesley Willis. With Willis on a stage, we are confronted with just how unable we are to differentiate the intentional, signifying actions of art-space from the diseased, non-signifying actions of mental illness. And once we start dwelling on that fact, we begin to realize that the same is true on different levels of every artist, right up to the most canny and "intentional" among them (Madonna! Bowie!).

This is Matthew, Mark, Luke & John, btw.

that's a very witty way to say otm, big hoos

i do what i can

<i>Louis Black came off looking like a clueless old hipster. It's depressing to know he's the guy that runs my alt weekly.</i>

More black people and less white college dudes with guitars on the cover of the Chronicle please.

Speeding Motorcycle
A musical drama based on Daniel's music by Jason Nodler
at the ZACH Theatre, Austin, Texas, Feb 14 - Apr 13

totally going to this

This was actually disappointing. No mention of the Kids soundtrack, anti-semitism, Mark Linkous-produced 'comeback' album, etc, very light on the Jad Fair stuff, too many detours into personal stuff that ultimately didn't amount to much. I don't really give a shit about K MCarty or Louis Black.

aesthetic masterpiece >>>>>>>>> complete biography

Yes, but was it an aesthetic masterpiece? Really?

yeah. i don't think it's that it's dissatisfying because it omits parts of the story, just that it doesn't link everything together or deal with everything "holistically". it's a really difficult story and fundamentally difficult to reconcile the art with some of the biography (like the woman jumping out of the window), and i don't think the film ever got there. it's obviously good in some sense, and is ridiculously privileged in being a documentary that actually has handheld, subject-authored footage of a lot of the main points of the story to call on (ie going missing in ny &c). just a difficult story i think.

also it kills me how great, how absolutely enduringly zaprudingly classic, super eight blow ups look on screen, whenever you see people old home movies etc. how anyone can object to dubbed lo-tec film-shot footage mystifies me.