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Interview With Rohit Rao, Director of Ultrasonic

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My interview with Rohit Rao about the movie Ultrasonic:

Local filmmaker Rohit Colin Rao, the writer/director/cinematographer/editor/composer/musician behind the remarkable film Ultrasonic sat down with BYT to talk about his second feature, a true labor of love. The film is a compelling, hypnotic homage to chiaroscuro, shot in black and white, with occasional flourishes of sepia tones, and its adept use of depth-of-field camera work recalls a certain Drive-esque sensibility. While harkening to the conspiracy-thriller aesthetics of Pi, Ultrasonic’s cinematography is not frenetic and claustrophobic. It lends itself seamlessly to the purposely-ambiguous narrative arc–the smoke and mirrors aspect of “reality” and “normalcy.” Is the protagonist Simon really hearing a noise no one else can hear [ha] or is it all in his head?
Rao does a superb job of writing a script that allows that ambivalence to linger without resorting to heavy-handed, beat-the-audience-over-the-head tactics. Ultrasonic is a story of one man’s isolation and a testament to tenuous nature of reality. It’s engrossing and moody but never sinister. Rao’s love for DC is palpable in his selection of locations to shoot–with nary a “DC landmark” in sight, this is what our city really looks like at night, with shadows moving in waves, falling away then taking over. The brilliant soundtrack adds an extra element to the milieu, the hum inside Simon’s head resembling the undercurrent of threat that underpins the film.


1. Could you please talk a little about your background? How difficult was it to shoot a feature, from a logistical perspective, especially in DC, a place not normally associated with movie-making?
Well, I made my first short film when I was 24.  It was called Blocks.  I made another one a year later called Someone and Someone, Inc. Since then, aside from my day job, I focused on my bands and songwriting, until of course 2010 when I picked up the Canon T2i.
Regarding how difficult it was to shoot this feature… I’m not trying to deter anyone from doing this, in fact I think that anyone with a real desire to make a feature should stop reading this and go out and start it now.  But, this thing almost broke me.  I was a walking shell of a human being by the end of this process.  Logistically, it was a bit more difficult to get started in DC, specifically because the pool of cast and crew is smaller than someplace like LA or NY.  In the beginning, it was four of us that were the team that was going to make this happen.  Mario (sound recordist), Mike (my co-writer and script supervisor), Tayne (art direction, key grip, all around go-to guy) and myself.  I was the only one who had been on a set before, so I knew there was going to be a learning curve there.  I didn’t believe I could get it all done without having at least one more person on set who has been on a crew before.
I was lucky to be referred to Nabou, who ended up producing the film with me.  Nabou has her MFA in Film Studies from Chapman University and understood all the ins and outs of how a production should run, so I was able to breathe easier knowing things like the script breakdown and schedule could be taken off my plate.  Finally, I was lucky to find Liza Gipsova, an American University film grad, who had run camera on sets before and came on board as my Assistant Camera and Gaffer.  With the three of us having on-set experience, it became clear to me that we had a small but competent and committed team of people and could really do something potentially big here.
2. The cinematography in the movie is spectacular.  Could you talk a little bit about the conscious choice you made in shooting the movie in black-and-white/sepia tones? There is also really interesting use of the depth of field/focus–was this with the intention of creating the claustrophobic/tense atmosphere of the movie?
Thanks. The cinematography was one of the pieces that was on the forefront of my mind from the start. One of the things I knew I wanted for the film was for it to be visually striking.  Once I bought the camera, I started shooting a LOT of test footage, and doing various color grades on them. I bought the camera before we wrote the script, so I used the entire time we were writing the script to learn the camera and its idiosyncracies, and to also figure out what I wanted the color palette to look like. Ultrasonic was always meant to be a color film, right up to about a month before I finished post-production.  I had a really sweet color scheme of deep reds and greens that I felt would be perfect for the film.
However, as with just about everything else with this movie, the B&W decision came from a limitation of budget.  I didn’t have the money to buy or rent a decent color grading monitor, and without it, I would have had a nearly impossible time matching color between cuts/shots, so I started thinking of other options.  Straight Black and White was an option, and I was messing with the B&W contrast one night when the tv was on, and on came Sin City. I really liked his use of yellow in the highlights so I started playing around in Apple Color and was able to push some yellow through in the post-color part that comes through in the highlights nicely. It met my “visually striking” requirement, so Ultrasonic became black and white.
The focus issue was a different choice altogether.  During my testing-the-camera phase, I realized that the focus ring on these cameras is really difficult to use accurately.  A change in focus from one point to another would be something like a few millimeters shift in the focus ring, and to do that in the middle of a shot, especially with a moving shot, would prove incredibly difficult. So I decided to use the out of focus look as-is.  There are a few shots where I had the subject walk to their mark, and rather than following focus, I just left them blurry in the background until they got to their mark when the essentially “walked into focus.” I think it worked. I hope it worked.

3. Talk a little bit about the more “banal” logistics of making the movie–getting permits to shoot on the Metro, casting actors, budget?
After the script was done, I began the process of looking for actors.  Mike and I went to this mass-audition called Stonehenge in Baltimore.  I didn’t get much of an idea of actors who would be good for the parts from that, so I decided to hold a casting call of our own.  We had the call early in November 2010, and had over 100 actors show up to audition throughout the day.  By the end of the day, we had pretty much everyone cast but Simon.  I was interested in this one guy and started talks with him about it.  He was good, but ultimately I’m glad it didn’t work out with him as Ultrasonic would have been a much different film than it was.  A couple of weeks later, Mamoy, my bassist (who you see playing bass in the opening credits of the film), texted me and asked if I was still looking for actors and that he had run into someone at a party who would like to audition.  I told him we had everything cast but the main role, and he was welcome to come audition for it.  Enter Silas; he came and read with Cate (Ruth), as she had already been cast.  He nailed it.  My big thing with all the actors was that I really wanted their performances to be subdued (well, except Jonas).
4. The sensibilities of Ultrasonic are very Pi-like. Did Pi influence you?
You know, I think I’m subconsciously influenced by it more than I know.  I’m starting to get the Pi reference kinda regularly.  I watched Pi on opening night at the now-defunct Outer Circle on Wisconsin Avenue.  Damn if I wasn’t blown away by it.  Aronofsky immediately became one of my favorite directors.  Interestingly enough, though, I feel that I’ve been more influenced by his later films than by Pi.  Requiem for a Dream kicked my ass.  Then I watched Black Swan in the theater with Tayne about three weeks before filming Ultrasonic and that kicked my ass even harder!  I remember coming home and being suuuper depressed because of how good it was and what I felt I had to live up to.  Anyway, I think there’s definitely some latent Pi influence going on though, because it seems a lot of people are seeing that correlation.  I will say I know one thing for a fact that was a conscious influence on me was Clint Mansell’s scores.  I first noticed it in Pi but it was so incredible in Requiem, that it made me realize the importance of score in a film, and that a score can actually help shape whether a film is good or not, as well as shape the audience’s reaction to what is going on on-screen.
5. How did you initially come up with the story for the movie? Were you at all interested in conspiracy theories before?
When I made the decision to make the film, I contacted two writing buddies of mine, Mike Maguire and Chris Peloso.  We met at the bar at Clydes in Rockville and from the first meeting, began throwing out ideas.  I had just moved back from Seattle where I lived for about three years.  We moved there in the summer, which was amazing.  Crisp, no humidity, everyone out and about, everyone nice… it was awesome.  My neighbor, and future Translucents guitarist Ryan, warned me about the coming winter.  He said, “It doesn’t get cold, but the low cloud-cover and the rain… it messes with your mind.”  The rains came in October and I remember thinking it was no big deal.  Come November, I had gone crazy… well, relatively.  A weird paranoia set in.  It got so bad I began to see a therapist who put me on Paxil.  Paxil helped but it made me feel not quite like myself, so I stopped taking it.  It did take away the feelings of paranoia though, and the feeling that someone was following me, etc.. Over the next couple of years, I learned to deal with the winter there, but man, it was a psychological trip, to say the least.
Anyway, so when I met with Mike and Chris, we had initially come up with a story about a musician who had figured out a formula to write the perfect song, but the more we talked, the more I found us discussing a lot of these ideas of paranoia and such.  I never told them about the Paxil, I don’t think I did anyway, but I did tell them a little about what I went through during that time.  I’m not really into conspiracy theories, but I’m definitely interested in the psychological disorder part of the story.  That’s really what I think the storyline is about, it’s about Simon’s state of mind, as opposed to the conspiracy.
6. Did you have to do research on the psychological causes of auditory hallucinations [which are actually very common for people under stress]?
No, not really.  We made all that up.  I never had auditory hallucinations during that period, it was more just an idea that we liked that we went with.
7. The music for the movie was entirely composed by you. Was it difficult for you to wear so many hats in making this? Could you discuss your music background a little bit?
Yeah, I scored the film, and the rock songs in the film are by my band in Seattle, The Translucents, and the band I started when I moved here, Tigertronic.  Initially, Tigertronic was going to write the entire soundtrack, but Mario was called to Honduras on account of his father being ill, and ended up not being able to produce the thing.  There are two main piano lines in the film that I had come up with during pre-production that I knew I wanted to use, so I began to think of ways to turn those licks into songs, without having someone who could produce a live band playing it.  The answer came in a small $60 piece of beat-slicing software called Renoise.  I had been messing with it for a while, and decided to pull in the piano loops and put some beats on it myself.  In the late ’90s, I became a bit fixated on how Aphex Twin got his beats to be so fast, so “ripped,” and it wasn’t until I found Renoise that I understood how he did it.  It also wasn’t until I found Renoise that I began enjoying making electronic music.  Anyway, so I pulled the analog piano loops into Renoise, and started slicing beats to it.  The sound I was getting from it sounded insane (to me), so I decided to continue and do the entire score that way.  The beats ended up adding a complexity and frenetic quality to the soundtrack that I really fell in love with.
As far as my musical background goes, music is my first love.  I studied classical violin for about 10 years until my sophomore year in high school when I traded my violin for an electric guitar.  That’s around the time I began making music with my buddies, with whom I used to sneak off to watch shows.  Dischord Records is all I can say about that period of my life (well, and DeSoto records).  Fugazi with The MakeUp at Fort Reno Park in ’96 will forever be etched in my brain.  Jawbox was (and in a lot of ways will always be) my favorite band.  I wanted to be Bill Barbot. The band we started was called Substationine, and we decided to create a zine.  The farthest I got with the zine was to do an interview with Bill Barbot and Kim Colletta backstage at a University of Maryland show they did.  Anyway, music is a form of expression that I hope to continue making for the rest of my life.
8. Discuss your relationship with DC as a setting. Clearly, it lends itself especially well to the “conspiracy theory” angle of the film, but you shoot in neighborhoody DC and the film runs like it was shot by someone in love with his city.
I do love DC.  I grew up in Silver Spring and went to high school in Takoma Park in the early ’90s.  My first trip to the city as a teenager, without my parents, was with a couple of buddies from school.  We told our parents we were going to “Physics is Phun” at UMCP for extra credit, and instead we went to see this band called “Therapy?” at the original 9:30 Club on F street. I was 16 years old.  I remember walking up to the door and seeing the “9:30” on the window above the door.  It’s still so vivid in my mind.  We watched the show, hung out drinking our cokes in the back bar, and life wasn’t the same anymore.  We began voraciously consuming the DC music scene, and that period definitely helped shape my musical tastes/sensibilities today.  Anyway, that’s where my DC loyalist mentality first took root, it’ll be always be home to me, it’s where I cut my teeth growing up.

Music, Reviews

ReadySetDC June Monthly Mixtape

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This month’s Monthly Mixtape is from Jangala DJ, a DC native behind the trail-blazing Temporal Fusion podcast, which showcases talented electronic dance music producers and DJs from around the world. Jangala, along with long-time co-conspirator Xunfusion, has been on a mission to expose unknown deejays and producers to a wider audience Temporal Fusion‘s seven year reign is a testament to its draw of a true “head” audience with a voracious appetite for drum’n’bass, glitch hop, hip hop, dubstep, and trip hop.

When Jangala DJ first added me as a friend on Facebook, his profile picture was that of a shell (not to mention he is so humble, I had to convince him to actually send me a picture of himself for the article). The shell was a reference to a poem about “the shell of jangala.” In Hindi, jangal means forest–appropriate reference for the offshoot/kind of drum’n’bass music known as jungle. The metaphor of the shell always stayed with me–Jangala’s style has an organic echo and resonance to it and his flair for chiaroscuro is palpable here. This set starts out sort of quietly ominous and brightens up as the sun shining through the leaves of a forest. Few drum’n’bass DJs are able to freely pick from the many branches of the genre’s tree, usually staying grounded in one style, but Jangala has a facility and an unique talent in that regard.
“I mixed this with a thoughtful attitude, wanting to harmonize the dark and light; the old and new; the masculine and feminine; the complex and simple. Mixed together in this set are tunes from new school d’n’b badboys like Dub Phizix, Roy Green, Protone, and DatA along with up-and-coming Russia producers Nuage, Getz, Z Connection, topped off with smatterings of Dillinja and Ray Keith for nostalgia and a sense of completeness.”
“Now settled in DC, I have spent a greater part of my life split between the East and the West and have finally been able to embrace the contrasting and contradictory nature of the universe by mixing heavy baselines and effervescent drum beats.”
Check out his exclusive boundary and genre-defying set for ReadySetDC here and open your ears up to the sounds of the shell of Jangala.

Reporting, Reviews

Feature: Baltimore Tattoo Convention

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My interviews and feature from the Baltimore Tattoo Convention

The Baltimore Tattoo Convention was a colorful celebration of all things body art–and str-ink-ingly its spirit was communal and well…downright cheery. For all intents and purposes, it might as well have been an environmental fest for all the smiling and good will going around.

It was a microcosm of what has happened in the world of tattooing for a while now–tattoos have long moved past the “freak factor” or its subculture roots and boldly flashed themselves to the mainstream. Not selling out in the process yet with the dissipating of their stigmatization, they have now become truly a medium of very creative and intensely personal self-expression. The artists who create them and the people who commission them come from all walks of life and have an equally broad palette of reasons for getting them.
Baltimore Tattoo
It could be purely aesthetic motivation like Baltimorean Caitlyn Meyer who says, “my tattoos mean nothing in particular at all. I just have so much respect for the artists that I trust that they will put something on my body that they think represents me. I just think they are beautiful so I am happy to wear them.” Or it could be a celebration of one’s heritage like the Japanese tattoos or a deep seated drive to really morph into a “different species,” as Baltimore’s Blue Comma.

Why do people go to tattoo conventions, you might ask? For one, for many people who do not live close to specific artists they wish to work on them, this is their one opportunity to get the work done. For some, like tattoo artist Marvin Silva’s friends, who had come all the way from New York, it’s a chance to both promote the studio/their friend and meet new people. “Yeah, I could have had him do the work in New York, but this is an experience. We wanted to party in Baltimore a bit.” [DC, for shame–people go to Baltimore to party!]. Then, there are all the stage shows taking place–think burlesque and sideshows like The Enigma and Serana Rose.

And the tattoo contests, which further give people a chance to promote the artists they admire–all the winners took their plaques to the booths of the tattoo artists that did the work. In other words, tattoo convention are regular lovefests of good will and camaraderie. Everyone I approached was all too happy to talk.

Baltimore Tattoo
Amongst the local tattoo shops represented was Way Of Ink, an apropos pun on Way Of The Samurai considering artist Duong Nguyen specializes in Asian-themed art. There, I met a mild-mannered pharmacist-by-day/sporting a full samurai suite tattoo under the lab coat–Ken Lee. He is friends with Duong and came to the convention to support him and to also get a Japanese-themed leg piece on Friday, which won him third place in the tattoo contest. On Saturday, Duong was diligently working on another Japanese-themed piece–the guy under the needle had already sat there for seven hours. Oh, that’s another thing–tattoos take a long time and a lot of hard work. Stafford, VA local, Cupcake, won 1st place for her massive tiger vs. dragon backpiece, which she explained symbolizes the balance between strength and peace. “It took 20 hours a week of work, for several weeks, to finish it!”

Then there was Jim Hall, aka Blue Comma, who by his own admission is the second most tattooed man in the world. You might wonder what compels an erudite, eloquent Baltimore city planner of 40 years, now retired, to cover his entire surface area in blue ink and undergo a series of major body modifications [think implants] to attain this new vision of himself. When talking to him, one gets the sense that this was a deep and well-thought out conversion and not one conducted for the sake of passerby attention-grabbing. He had a lot to say about the city of Baltimore and was clearly a man of ideas and a man with an intense love for his city, warts and all.
Baltimore Tattoo
So what’s “hot” right now in the world of tattooing? Well, for one, there was blacklight ink–ravers, take note. Oh, and bio-organic tattoos–as artist Marvin Silva described it, “it’s plants and nature but it’s all fantasy. Beautiful stuff like that may not exists in every day life–kind of like a meeting of sci-fi and plants.” I ask him what kinds of tattoos people are getting a lot of lately–“bigger work. People come in asking for half-sleeves as their first tattoo!” Julia Grow of Fyre Body Arts says,  “People either come in looking to do something small but meaningful or very large pieces. Whatever it is though, they really plan and think this through. We don’t get too many impulse tattoos.”

Julia Grow, the owner of Fyre Body Arts in Perkasie, PA, is only 28 and has owned a tattoo shop since she was 18. As she describes it, the job requires her to be “a psychologist, a mother, and a boss,” to her eleven employees. Her soft-spoken ways and kindness (she studied veterinary science in college, adores animals, and has four horses) bely the image of a business woman, especially in the very male-dominated world of tattooing, but a business woman she is and a good one at that. “I graduated high school at sixteen and was attending college so I needed a job. I started managing the shop and the owner eventually sold it to me when I was eighteen.”

How, you might wonder, is she able to have a booming business–the shop is about to expand to a second location in the future–in the farmlands of Pennsylvania. With Donald Trump-envy-worthy business skills–“Since everyone who works for me is a contractor, I am really very careful about who I hire to work for me. I look at portfolio, demeanor, loyalty…It’s important for me to have people that are not just talented artists but that also have the right attitude. I have too much on my plate to deal with primadonna egos. Sometimes the artsist that come here look around and see just farmland and they wonder who would get tattoos here, but we are super busy!” Julia’s own tattoos and body modifications have gotten recognition as well–she won a prize at the Philadelphia Tattoo Convention and has a cutting/scarification piece that was done by Steve Truitt, who studied under body modification guru Steve Hayworth.

Reviews

Concert Review: Beats Antique

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My concert review of Beats Antique for The Vinyl District

On Wednesday, the 9:30 Club opened its doors to the dubby, world-music-fusion sounds of Beats Antique.
David Satori and Tommy Cappel (who grew up in Springfield and gave a shoutout to his Mom, who was in attendance) provided a seamless sonic tapestry that was refreshingly organic despite the band’s seemingly electronic roots. With surprisingly minimal knob-twiddling and laptop-fidgeting, both spent a lot of time percussively propelling the show forward, with the flourishes of David’s banjo and violin-playing and a French saxophonist blending into the mix.
DJ Laura Low opened for the band, with a lackluster poppy-dubstep-by-the-numbers set that showcased why Skrillex has a lot to answer for and was especially bad following the brilliant Forward Festival this past weekend. Her dubstep remixes of M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” and even the Cranberries’ “Zombie” were downright cringe-inducing and her own amped-up demeanor was hardly contagious.


And speaking of the audience, there was a heavy belly [dancing-clad] contingent, along with the well-dreaded Burning Man cohort. In other words, there was plenty of hair-tossing about [“I whip my hair back and forth, real or not”], but more on that later.
The show opened with “The Porch” from the band’s 2011 album Elektrafone, and to their credit, Beats Antique’s musicianship is nigh perfect—the songs unfurled in a languid yet sonically-sound fashion and none of the usual concert-muddiness problem was present. They also played “Alto” and “Siren Song” from Elektrafone, as well as debuting a new more dubstep-leaning song, which was very well-received by the crowd.

The band clearly has a keen sense of showmanship; their roots in San Francisco’s performance art scene and their work on the music for the Bellydance Superstars (with whom Zoe Jakes dances) have influenced the stage show, which is very much carnival/sideshow-esque in its aesthetic.
Oddly enough, however, raucous and boisterous are not exactly words I would use to describe the show last night—despite the consummate musicianship and the fact that it very quickly started to sound like one long jam session as the songs started to meld into each other, it lacked a certain kind of playfulness and just general elan. In other words, this wasn’t a Balkan Beat Box show and definitely not an Eastern-European wedding (despite the band’s dabbling in the Roma/Bulgarian brass elements). In other words, it was oddly sedate. Yes, there was some dancing in the crowd, but I saw more at the Little Dragon show.

And speaking of dancing, Zoe Jakes, a renowned tribal belly dancer who is considered part of the band, performed almost throughout the entire show. Some of Jakes’ routines were truly beautiful, such as in the burlesque-influenced jazz dance she performed with giant feather fans, or the skeleton-Mexican-Day-of-the-Dead-like routine during “Beauty Beats.”
At other times, her style, which is essentially a mix of popping-and-locking (think breakdance) and some of the shimmies and hip and shoulder isolations from belly dance, is downright snooze-inducing when viewed for an hour and a half. Jakes’ dancing relies far too much on her wildly tossing her hair about, and the routines where she performed with another belly dancer were out-of-sync enough to make a pre-teen dance teacher cry. No doubt Jakes is a hard-working, seasoned performer… As to whether it is the kind of performance one could watch for extended periods of time is a matter of viewer preference.
Beats Antique’s stage presentation is definitely visually unique and showcases their knack for showmanship. Musically, the band’s palette of glitch, dub, and Middle Eastern and brass motifs is masterfully presented in their live show.

Music

May Mixtape!

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The May Monthly Mixtape: Toni Tileva

Listen Here: http://open.spotify.com/user/1213004545/playlist/40xONqLnsWufNUpcJ5IGjK

“Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.”
-A Field Guide To Getting Lost

“Lost in the city
Running out of choices
Going nowhere fast
Still hearing voices
Come on legs come on feet
I’m just tryin’ make a little bit of history.”
– Cool Calm Pete “Lost”
“I just wanna live life and survive it.”
– Ghostpoet “Survive It”
“I spread my mind’s wings and watched these verbs take flight.”
– Emskee “Dreams”
When I set out to make the May playlist, I wanted to encapsulate the ethos of summer, while playing homage to my two great musical loves–indie/old-school-vibe hip hop and trip hop/downtempo. The idea was to [wax] tailor together a pastiche of beats and samples and tell a sonic story, with a palpable flow. Only when I was done making the playlist did some themes start to emerge, as though bubbling up from my subconscious. Summer always reminds me of being in the city, kind of finding one’s way, weaving and wandering through the urban terrain [Blockhead’s Insomniac Olympics is Jack’s Insomnia in musical form]. That’s why I had to put in DJ Vadim, Blockhead, Dan The Automator, DJ Shadow, MF Doom, who literally live and breathe the New York aesthetic.These tracks showcase the organic and very natural synergy between turntablism, hip hop, even dubstep, and downtempo, and showcase why the genre has managed to stay fresh because of its broad influences. Trip hop has long transitioned to/been a turntablist’s game, even if the most obvious examples one can think of are Geoff Barrow’s scratching on Portishead’s “Only You” or the seminal DJ Shadow Endtroducing. In the early 2000s, artists like DJ Krush, Blockhead, J. Dilla, Nujabes, and DJ Vadim continued to carry the torch, despite public opinion that “trip hop was dead” or relegated to Buddha Bar compilations–i.e. pretentious “chill-by-the-numbers” CDs.
If I had to name the themes here [as any respectable English major would], it would be the city, being lost in the city, dreams/miasmas, and love [not the cheesy “summer lovin'” type, I promise. See Murs’ “Love And Appreciate” and Slum Village’s “Fall In Love”] and its dark underbelly [Cage’s Scenester, Ivan Ives’ “Wedding Funeral,” Mickey Avalon’s “So Rich, So Pretty”].
Everyone has a summer.

Reviews

Sound Of My Voice Movie Review

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My review of Sound Of My Voice

Following in the chilling footsteps of last year’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sound of My Voice’s premise is simple enough: couple Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) set out to infiltrate a cult, make a documentary about it, and expose the leader as a fraud. As in Martha Marcy May Marlene, however, reality and truth are eerie, elusive concepts. The process of joining  this cult is a disorienting and de-personalizing experience. To be allowed into the cult, they have to assume the identities of believers and, in the process, relinquish their real ones. Needless to say, Peter and Lorna’s journey quickly becomes an honest-to-god identity crisis. What’s more, the line between wanting to do a documentary on a cult and being in one is as enigmatic as the cult’s enigmatic leader. Who is she? Is she just a manipulative hack, or is she really from the year 2054, sent here to impart knowledge to a select group of “chosen ones?”
Co-writers Brit Marling and Director Zal Batmanglij, both Georgetown graduates, bring a mesmerizing, minimalist ethos to this film. In Marling’s other film Another Earth, Marling’s ethereal, luminous presence embodies her walking-wounded character. Her beautiful otherness is appropriately otherworldly and futuristic. Sci-fi tinge notwithstanding, Another Earthwas grounded in its human element, yet had enough of a flight of fancy to transport the viewer to a different dimension. The existential “anywhere but here” quest that underpinned is present in The Sound Of My Voice as well. Ultimately, there is this escapist search for meaning the viewer keeps hearing about in both.

The Sound Of My Voice is a gripping look down the rabbit hole of joining a cult. It thoroughly explores the psychology of the process. The stage of “preparing on the outside,” [which includes learning the at-first-seemingly-silly but later on important to the plot elaborate hand signals] is followed by Peter and Lorna’s first encounter with Maggie, to whom they are taken blind-folded and thoroughly cleansed [literally]. They are forbidden from asking questions or making any sudden movements—they are told these precautions are necessary because of the “special”/”chosen” status that is about to be bestowed upon them. The thrust of the message is one must have a great deal of faith and that faith comes at the expense of reason—in one of the movie’s most engrossing, stomach-turning scenes, Maggie likens the eating of an apple to the ingestion of reason and logic, which is bitter. Reason must literally be purged from the minds of the cultees [by throwing up the apple] and replaced by blind devotion. She demands that everyone “stop thinking and start feeling.” In that scene, however, the viewer also gets insight into the predatory, abusive, and manipulative nature of the relationship—when Maggie inexorably extracts the story of Peter’s abuse as a child, telling him how he was powerless then but is not now, the crushing reality of one abuser’s supplanting by another is made starkly obvious. The Sound Of My Voice does a phenomenal job of asking the tough question about who joins cults—at the beginning, Peter is convinced that these people “are weak and they are looking for meaning.” Despite Lorna and Peter’s superficial veneer of normalcy and their seemingly being different from the other members, ultimately, they are both brought here by a search for meaning and are no less “damaged” than the others or than anyone else, for that matter.

. Sure, Peter and Lorna’s very hipster/I am so tired of the scene asides add some levity to the matter [ e.g. bemoaning the superficiality of getting drunk at art installations and one’s life playing out like an episode of Entourage], but this search for something substantive and meaningful belies sweeping generalizations about the cult members as “damaged people” doing damning things.

Reviews

Book Review: East Of The West by Miroslav Penkov

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My review of East Of The West
Not only are we the only people to reverse the head signals for yes and no, but we Bulgarians also hold the dubitable honor of being really sad people. To some readers, Miroslav Penkov’s East Of The West: A Country In Stories may not seem to dispel the idea much. There is a profound difference between sad and melancholic and a large chasm between lugubrious and stoically wistful. Penkov’s book is about Bulgaria and a very Bulgarian ethos informs it, but ultimately, it is a thoroughly moving, beautifully-written collection of short stories about love, blood, ideals, and borders. Its stories are the product of exile–literal and metaphorical, yet this homelessness is also the story of a journey–at times a very Odyssian journey to a place that only exists in one’s mind and resides in our blood.
Language plays an integral role in East Of The West–like a lot of writers for whom English is a second language, Penkov’s love affair with it is palpable and he engages the readers’ senses with its richness. He is “lexicon drunk.” With great ingenuity, Penkov wryly inserts Bulgarianisms throughout the book [Sinko, for example, refers to a “young son,” and is not just a proper name] or yad is defined as “what lines the inside of every Bulgarian soul. Yad is like spite, rage, anger, but more elegant, more complicated. It’s like a pity for someone, regret for something you did or did not do, for chance you missed, for an opportunity you squandered.”
East Of The West is also an eerily accurate yet non-didactic primer on Bulgarian history–it manages to cover almost all pivotal points such as the Ottoman Empire [or Turkish yoke, as it is commonly referred to], komiti, gorilla fighters living in dugouts, the advent of communism, the Macedonia-Bulgarian separation, the fall of communism. To read it is to inhale and grasp some important milestones in the shaping of the Bulgarian spirit, if you will. At times the “centuries-old wrath of the slave,” moves mountains, literally, at other times, these ideals ring hollow and only reaffirm their own meaninglessness as in the story of “East Of The West” where a young couple dies just because they live on the opposite sides of a river separating Bulgaria from Macedonia. As the protagonist’s seemingly-communist-for-life Grandfather in “Buying Lenin,” says “What kind of a world is this where people and goats die in dugouts for nothing at all? And so I lived as though ideals really mattered.” Ideals are simultaneously metaphoric and metamorphic.
One of these ideals is the struggle for freedom/liberation and here the very Bulgarian theme of the mountain really towers. The mountain is where all the freedom fighters hide, where people live in hideouts, but more than its geographical advantage, the mountain is literally the mother that holds anyone in need in her bosom and protects those who call for her help. People move mountains and the mountain is moved by them/moves for them. In “Devshirmeh,” the girl beset by the sultan’s army begs, “Planino, please hide us in your bosom.” The song, “I got no father, I got no mother. Father to scorn me. Mother to mourn me. My father – the mountain. My mother – the shotgun,” really underscores its mythical, moving power.
Penkov also uses incredibly evocative metaphors to underscore the pull of that blood–not in a literal genetic sense but in the sense of some ancestral knowledge or visceral call that cannot be erased by distance or time. In “Buying Lenin,” he poignantly describes the intense loneliness and longing for [a] home he feels as a student here in the US; he has mastered the language but this knowledge is at times pointless and even worse…poisonous in further removing him from home: “My ears rang, my tongue swelled up. I went on for months, until one day I understood that nothing I said mattered to those around me. No one knew where I was from, or cared to know. I had nothing to say to this world…I cradled the receiver, fondled the thin umbilical cord of the phone that stretched ten thousand miles across the sea.” He desperately wants to make anyone hear, or at least feel, what he is experiencing in this exile, but ultimately, he can only reassure himself that “blood is thicker than the ocean.” And even though he had rebelled against his Grandpa’s seemingly laughable veneration of Lenin, he comes to realize that he and Lenin are alike in some small but human sense –“Like me he had spent his youth abroad, in exile. He sounded permanently hungry and cold.” In “Devshirmeh,” blood literally speaks, underscoring the pride in one’s heritage that is so integral to the Bulgarian ethos: “It is your blood you spill. My blood runs in her veins and hers in mine. Blood will make us see.”
The life in exile is a thread that runs through many of the stories and is a trenchant commentary on the immigrant limbo. One of the characters yearns to just sit with his Grandfather under the black grapes of the trellised vine. They are all looking back, nostalgic and wistful, to a place that really only lives in their minds, but looking back is dangerously heavy and weighs one down–“you either turn to a pillar of stone or lose your beloved into Hades.”
East Of The West’s heroes are not heroic in the traditional sense–in an incredibly creative way, the book lauds the “un”heroic cowards, if you will, because “cowardice” is reality and living alone takes courage. In “Makedonjia,” a husband bravely reads to his ailing wife letters she had received from her first love–“their love was foolish, childish, sugar-sweet, the kind of love that, if you are lucky to lose it, flares up like a thatched roof but burns as long as you live. I am just her husband and she is my wife.” The story is a melancholic but beautiful rumination on aging and love and love’s aging as well. “Isn’t it good to be so young that you can lose a tooth and not even notice?” it asks. The line “a man ought to be able to undress his wife from all the years until she lies before him naked in youth again” illustrates Penkov’s brilliant gift of prose and profound skill at character studies. East Of The West is not a sad book–it is existential yet thoroughly in touch with magical that lives in everything seemingly pedestrian. Ultimately, it is a truly penetrating yet drolly mirthful look into the “deep dark Slavic soul.”

Reviews

Book Review: Another Bullshit Night In Suck City by Nick Flynn

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My book review

Another Bullshit Night In Suck City [on which the film Being Flynn is based] is Nick Flynn’s autobiographical memoir, yet it is as much his story as it is his father’s story, especially apropos because his father’s “literary masterpiece,” will not see the light of day save through his son’s pen. It’s as though through the chain of words, like a literary trail of crumbs, he is attempting to both know and locate his absentee father. The book simultaneously constructs a father out of letters and words, and masterfully documents Nick’s bifurcated take on him—equal parts fascination with this man who or may not be the literary genius he proclaims himself to be and equal parts dread that he may be “like his father.”

Another Bullshit Night In Suck City is set in and around Boston, where Nick grows up with his brother, raised by his far-too-overworked Mom, after his father leaves when he is 4. After a stint in jail and a series of alcohol-induced screw ups, Jonathan resurfaces when he comes to the homeless shelter where Nick works. His limited sense of his father up to that point comes from the bravado-laden letters to Nick, filled with Jonathan’s self-avowals about his earned spot in the pantheon of great American writers and his always upcoming but never really materializing masterpiece of a novel. While Jonathan manifests as an absence in his son’s life, his non-presence couldn’t be more momentous to Nick, not the least of which because Nick is a writer. That very absence is ample kindle for the “who am I and what is my blood” fire and the mythos of him can only grow by virtue of his larger-than-life persona. At its most fundamental level, the source of the tension of their father-son relationship is not wanting to be like his “deadbeat Dad” while wondering how much like him he really is, especially if he really is the undiscovered writing genius he says he is. Discovering the family history is, thus, a road to a more complete sense of personhood yet it is littered with emotional potholes and craters.

Nick Flynn is a talented poet and it shines in his prose, which often flows like a Zen koan. For one, the story is not told chronologically and relies on some really interesting devices—there is a play in one of the chapters, a poem in another, extended allegories in several other spots, like the ones about Noah and Dostoevsky. His language is phenomenally rich and vibrant and beats with a life of its own. And more importantly, while the subject matter is sad, it is not lugubrious or self-pitying, nor is it matter-of-fact. A beautifully-written, instantly gripping story, refreshingly devoid of hero-villain dichotomies, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City’s title rings especially true–this story could take place in any city, on any night. One gets the sense that this is some kind of archetypal tragi-comic play that has been and will be acted out eternally: “Each man has a role—one will be the lunatic king, one will be the fool. One will offer dire warnings, one will plot against us, one will try to help.” And the role of the son will, inevitably, be played by Nick or someone else. The parts of the book that narrate Nick’s time at the Pine Street Inn offer a rare glimpse into the lives of the nameless and the faceless. Nick steers clear of moralistic asides, instead opting to offer us a glimpse of the daily but not the pedestrian. “Nothing in this shelter makes more sense, makes me understand my purpose more, than to kill bugs on a homeless man’s flesh, to dress him well in donated, cast-off clothes, to see him the next day laughing besides a burning barrel.”

Another Bullshit Night In Suck City is, essentially, about homelessness—literally and in the sense of being permanently lost and adrift in the sea of life. Nick Flynn’s metaphor of standing in one place, if you are lost, so you may be found is especially poignant when he adds, “but they never tell you what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting.” Later on, he continues, “I see no end to being lost. It isn’t a station you reach but just the general state of going down.” The novel is haunted by the specter of the ever-presence yet utter invisibility of being lost, especially palpable and trenchant when personified by the ghosts of the homeless who are seemingly all around us, yet entirely invisible to us. The vent that his father sleeps on in the winter is no less a prison because it has no walls: “The blower is a room of heat with no walls. My father stands in this room, an invisible man in an invisible room in an invisible city.” He has “plenty of places to go, but no place to be.”

Reporting

My Interview With Chef Jacob Hunter from Matchbox

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Fashion District Flavors w/Chef Jacob Hunter of Matchbox

Chef Jacob Hunter of Matchbox literally wears his love of cooking on his sleeve–he’s got a vibrant, palate-stirring/palette-spanning array of food tattoos on his forearms, including a so, so scandalously delicious giant scanwich. And like a true Atlanta-ite, he references Outkast as one of his favorite groups, who often give nods to Atlanta’s rich culinary heritage in their lyrics [“And if you like fish and grits and all that…”].

Growing up in Atlanta, he was cooking with family from an early age–his Mom is Italian and he cooked BBQ and gumbo with his Dad. “In high school, I worked as a busboy and server and eventually, when it was time to go to college, I decided to go to culinary school because it sounded kind of easy–I hadn’t really thought about how much work and what long hours chefing is. It’s intense.”
After attending the Art Institute of Atlanta, Jacob started working with Levy Restaurants, a massive food group that works with most of the major arenas and stadiums. One of the perks of the job was getting to see concerts. Jacob rattles off The Beatles, Pearl Jam, Jane’s Addiction, Tool, Bjork, and his hometown Outkast as his favorites. After stints in Chicago, and travel in Florida, California, and Wisconsin, he joined McCormick & Schmick’s as executive chef. He was looking to move South until things went south with his girlfriend and he stayed in DC, finding a job with Matchbox as a sous chef. “I turned down a lot of money to start at what seemed like a lower position, but you gotta go with your gut, you know. It just seemed like the right move for me.” Working his way up, he is now an executive chef and also serves on the operations board, which allows him to consult on the opening of new locations.

“I still really enjoy cooking Italian, BBQ [we participated in the BBQ Battle last year and it was a lot of fun and a lot of work–there is an art to good BBQ], and Asian. I also really like putting a fine dining spin on comfort food, kind of like what Thomas Keller does at the French Laundry.” He laments the lack of a proper taco stand here in DC and cites Little Serow, Toki Underground, Mandu, Mike Isabella’s Graffiato, and small noodleshops in Chinatown as some of his haunts.
“Sandwiches are my favorite food and I love Scanwiches so much that I got one of theirs as a tattoo. I also have a beet, fried eggs, a pig, and utensils on my forearms. I plan on getting some peanuts, as well as bottle of wine pouring out a giant wave ala the stylized Japanese waves. I go to Butch at Champion Tattoo. Some of these he did totally freehand–like the beet one, he just drew on there with a Sharpie! I was a little nervous, but it turned out amazing!”

For Fashion District, Chef Hunter will be preparing a tuna tartare in a crispy rice paper cup [fry a rice paper wrapper normally used for spring rolls], with some sesame, sriracha, soy sauce, nori, and a diced apple and golden beet.

Reporting

Interview with Chef Ian Reeves From The Queen Vic

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My interview with Chef Ian Reeves from the Queen Vic

I knew I was in for a treat when The Queen Vic‘s Chef Ian Reeves asked if I could Marco Pierre White-ify the photos [which, alas, I miserably failed in due to technical difficulties]. In other words, shoot them in that iconic black-and-white, cigarette-dangling-from-the-corner-of-the-mouth, literally dripping with bad boy swagger style. You know…like back in the days when chefs weren’t “famous” for peddling Teflon pans on TV, but were instead infamous for true rock star-worthy antics like physically tossing unappreciative rubes of patrons out of their restaurants [which Marco has done plenty of]. For those of you not in the know–and what kind of a self-respecting foodie do you fancy yourself to be if you do not, for shame–Marco Pierre White is THE eponymous British chef, the youngest chef to earn three Michelin stars, and a veritable maniacal workaholic. He also is probably one of the few men who have made Gordon Ramsay cry in the kitchen–small consolation, Hell’s Kitchen contestants.

So, when Ian Reeves cited Marco Pierre White as one of his major influences, I knew he had good taste! He was also a really good sport, a jocular and jolly fellow, and a frequent user of the “luv” appellation [like, “are you hungry, luv?”]. In other words, he was the perfect host and a brilliant interview subject.

Chef Reeves has been cooking for a decade, with no formal training, “just working his way up in kitchens.” Born and raised in Gloucestershire, England, he touts the home economics course he took in what we Americans would call high school, as well as his Grandma and mother’s cooking as great learning experiences. The holidays he spent in Brittany also contributed to his culinary stylings. In the UK, he worked in country house hotels and honed his skills in “upper-end modern European cooking.” In 2005, he worked as a Chef De Cuisine in Vikram Garg’s Indebleu, where he picked up some of the Indian influence that shows up in The Queen Vic’s menu.

“I would say that one big focus of The Queen Vic is roasted meats, slowly braised. We break down half a side of beef, or pig, every couple of weeks right here on the premises. We have four blackboards in the restaurant, with ten specials on a daily basis. I often incorporate Indian or Northern African dishes, like stews, on the menu. I also have a good basis in Italian and French so we do things like gnocchi.” After a recent stint back home, Chef Reeves came back to the US with his wife. “I am really glad to be here. There are a lot of opportunities.”

At Fashion District, Chef Reeves and his wife will be serving a braised and pulled pork with a Szechuan sauce in a lettuce wrap, with a cucumber/carrot/cilantro/roasted peanut garnish.