A while back I wrote about taking my hand-held video camera out one night to document my brother doing standup comedy at a rock club. Well it’s been several months since then, and I’ve gotten to see the fruit of that labor.

My brother ended up using some of the footage I shot that night as part of a reel of his entertainment work. It includes live comedy I shot, and three short films he acted in.

His making use of my footage is satisfying. Also it proves how powerful cameras are. Some of the comedy from nights I’ve shot (the night at the rock club was not the first time I’d brought my camera out) would have been lost or forgotten if my camera hadn’t captured it. With all that material now on mini-DVD, he can watch, remember and relearn it anytime he wants which can’t help but remind me of why documentary filmmaking is so important.
My brother put the reel together to take with him to Los Angeles. As I write this he’s still in L.A. He’s been there a week, dining and drinking and working comedy gigs in Hollywood.

The fun part for him is getting to sit in the same bar seats that famous writer Charles Bukowski used to sit on. He even ran into David Yow, the lead singer of The Jesus Lizard (a now defunct band), at the same bar two nights in a row.

But the real reason my brother’s in LA is not to rub elbows with his idols. It’s for him to make a career for himself as an entertainer. Hopefully some of the footage I shot, my start as a documentary filmmaker, helps him achieve his goals.

Chris here, writing from the hallowed halls of DOC HQ. I just wanted to take a quick second to try and bully you into checking out the three feature pieces on the Doc.com homepage this week. First and foremost, we’re very proud to have an interview with filmmaker Peter Raymont. Peter’s film “Shake Hands With the Devil” is one of the more powerful political docs in recent memory, and it was a genuine pleasure to have been able to premiere it on our channel. We wish Peter the best of luck with the film’s recent Emmy nomination. Also, I finally had the opportunity to say a few words about a doc that has intrigued me for a while, “Unknown White Male.” It’s great to watch any film that pushes the reality envelope and weaves a tale so strange that it’s a bit hard to wrap your head around on first viewing. Finally, I hope you’ll read our own Greg Crofton’s feature on new Doc Channel addition “McLibel,” the other great doc that sets its sights on the unhealthy state of a certain Golden Arched fast food slinging empire. So there it is. I’m done tooting the horn of my own website, at least until next week.

It happens literally every year. I go through a period of several weeks where my ears simply demand that I do a bit of returning to my roots and dust off a number of the records that soundtracked my angst-ridden high school years.
This sonic tour-of-duty never fails to open the floodgates on a full-fledged annual punk rock renaissance, and before I know it, I’m digging through old boxes of LPs and cassettes in search of my copy of Flipper’s “Sex Bomb Baby” reissue or Black Flag’s “Damaged” LP or even re-reading choice excerpts from Legs McNeil’s brilliant oral history of the movement “Please Kill Me.”
It’s loads of fun, and it goes a long way toward getting all that pent up aggression that can stack up with repeated listens to the fluff that populates more of the radio waves than it doesn’t these days. It reminds me of the anger I felt and of the exhilaration of forming my own ramshackle punk bands and picking out bad covers of Smiths songs we weren’t technically proficient enough to play straight versions of (though I’d still wager that “Girlfriend in a Coma” actually sort of lends it self to power chords).
I happen to be going through just such a period right now. And that is among the myriad reasons that when I discovered the website for filmmaker Susan Dynner’s new doc, “Punk’s Not Dead” (a phrase that actually adorned an Exploited t-shirt I owned at one point), I felt an overwhelming twinge of pure glee. Though certainly the punk era on the whole has had more inked spilled on its behalf than say the Louisiana Purchase (which is just as exciting really, give or take a few thousand safety pins), Dynner’s film seems like it takes a fresh angle on the subject (which is a must considering the exhaustive job filmmaker Don Lett’s recently did with his excellent doc “Punk: Attitude”).
So there you have it, another music doc on the horizon to be excited about. If the finished film is half as entertaining as its trailer (which you can watch HERE) than we’re in for some cool times at the local cinema. I’ll keep you posted with more about this film as I discover it.

The comedian Demetri Martin once said, and I’m paraphrasing, “bumper stickers to me are like a sign that clearly says, let’s never hang out.” That’s a sentiment with which I agree, for the most part. Whether they be campaign slogans, trashy attempts at off-color humor (“keep honking, I’m reloading), or worse yet, stickers for bands my current level of pretentiousness doesn’t even allow me to acknowledge as having recorded music, bumper stickers generally leave me cold.

That having been said, I have to confess that on the back of my car, there is one small, simple, understated sticker emblazoned with the logo of one of the greatest record labels known to man. I’m speaking, of course, about Stax Records.

My lifelong love of blues, soul and sixties rock was programmed into my head by my audiophile father, who has a great record collection from which, over the years, I’ve borrowed liberally. I have very early memories of grooving to well-worn vinyl copies of The Beach Boys’ “Endless Summer” compilation and stacks of 45s with classic singles ranging from “Respect” to Sweet’s “Fox On the Run” (OK, admittedly a guilty pleasure on that one).

Anyway, the point of all this blog-based nostalgia is simply to say I think it’s mighty cool indeed to have the interview with author/journalist/filmmaker Robert Gordon up on the DOC home page this week (bask in it’s multifaceted splendors HERE).

If Gordon’s name is familiar to you, it’s possible you may have read his extensive bio of bluesman Muddy Waters “Can’t Be Satisfied” or maybe even saw the companion film. Very cool stuff to be sure, and quite the appropriate followup to a Friday evening well spent checking out the sights and sounds of our Sound Check block. The viewer response to Sound Check has been overwhelmingly supportive, and it’s very encouraging to see docs about artists as obscure as Half Japanese and well known as Roy Orbison capturing the imaginations of the folks we are doing this for in the first place. Ummm, you know, you.

So take care out there, and please take a moment to get a little more background on the label that defined the word “soul” by checking out the Robert Gordon piece. And for even more ways to get your sonic ya-ya’s, check in with DOC Channel Friday nights. And be sure to wear hearing protection.