Ray Pride

Tim Kinsella and I met in 1997 and have been exchanging preoccupations ever since. Ever prolific, Kinsella, who began his public life as a musician at the age of 16 in the band Cap'n Jazz, has recorded dozens of albums since, and with the meltdown of the music industry, has shifted to filmmaking, itself a troubled medium for anyone wanting to make a career today. His writing-directing debut, "Orchard Vale," an experimental feature about a suburban band of outsiders, including an older man who’d toured with Willie Nelson, a woman who’s chosen to be mute, a religious obsessive, a hopeful young girl who dreams of being a princess and their haunted nights and days after an off-screen collapse of civilization, opens the 14th Chicago Underground Film Festival next Wednesday, just weeks after his decision to leave the band Make Believe.

"I don't get the impression it was ever very easy to make a living as a musician," Kinsella says of the notion of trying to make a career in either medium. "By the late 1990s, I saw my life as potentially fitting into the historical archetype of traveling bard far more so than any aspirations towards rockstardom. I think I had a pretty realistic idea at a relatively young age that those ambitions would only end in bitterness and a sense of personal failure. So to a large degree, I feel I have been able to exist outside the music industry and whether the alt-fad that year is electro-clash or folk, I wouldn't really be fazed. I guess the music-industry life lesson that enabled me to embark on this ‘Orchard Vale’ pit would be more a matter of internalizing the DIY ethics of my formative punk-rock years and extrapolating that approach from hanging your own flyers to making a movie."

Why is that economically possible? "The economic reality of it is, I'm a bartender. That frees up a lot of mental space regarding popular reception of an idea I may want to pursue, like nudging a note over here and there and straightening out the structure of this song just a teeny-weeny bit might make it more palatable to the masses, and then I can pay my rent easier or whatever. But I don't need to worry about that because I am a bartender."

So this uncertainty of being able to recoup time, let alone money, isn’t one of the reasons to drop out of Make Believe? "The cost/benefit ratio has certainly stayed about the same, that is, lousy from day one, but I think I have just changed some. I was perfectly happy drifting around a different city every day for months at a time through my twenties and just being able to get away with it was enough. If we could make enough money traveling that I wouldn't need to work too much when I got home, then I'd be able to work on the next record, and recording is when I truly feel most myself and most alive and like I am doing what I should be doing. And having just returned from some adventure, I'd have plenty of material to think through. But tour eventually becomes twenty-three hours a day of mostly waiting around. You can't get anything done. The way things were going in Make Believe, it didn't seem worth sacrificing every other aspect of my life anymore."

So, a movie. Unlike Kinsella’s lyrics for songs in bands like Joan of Arc, there’s not much wordplay. His characters have been dulled into a banality beyond survival. They've survived to survive, to live in a few daydreams, each of what came before. "That was never an issue. The mediums are so totally different that even if the ambitions of my efforts with either form overlap in some ways, creating a half-dream state of some kind, the means of aiming towards those ends are so different. I think a lot of what I've learned through music in broader terms, both administrative and dynamic, gave me a boost towards engineering this fiasco. But there was never a temptation to try to replicate anything that might be seen from the outside as some signature style of mine or whatever."

But music does wind up carrying the discordant emotions the alternately taciturn and explosive characters hold inside, much like Jon Brion's score for "Punch-Drunk Love." "I had really hoped to make something like the Dardenne brothers or Michael Haneke. I am pretty excited about this contemporary approach to filmmaking, that is, demanding such patience from the audience is certainly a subversive act. But as our movie was beginning to take shape, it became apparent that certain dimensions were lacking to see that vision through successfully. It just wasn't kinetic enough or compositionally developed enough to survive like that. So it needed a little boost. I felt unsure about how to approach it and wasn't into corrupting the original idea for months until I stopped thinking about it and then all at once I just knew how it should be."

I ask Kinsella his biggest fear as the final tweaks of sound and color are ironed out. "Just the general public humiliation and ridicule before one’s peers. These fears are requiring an awful lot of attention these days."

"Orchard Vale" opens the Chicago Underground Film Festival Wednesday, August 15. Go to cuff.org for more information. For a lengthier version of this conversation, go to Newcity.com on Friday.

(2007-08-07)

Also by Ray Pride

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Charles Burnett’s great, fluky, lyrical, post-neo-realist, nearly lost, eighty-minute valentine of verisimilitude to 1970s Watts and to the struggles of the American working class is a 16mm student film, black-and-white with offhanded yet lyrical photography (yet always of documentary intensity), shot over a year of weekends for about $10,000, but it is a loving, attentive dream, detailed with the rhythms of a life almost none of us have lived
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Tip of the Week
Injustice to resist and a quest redemption are powerful components to make a documentary dramatic, memorable and necessary, and Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg’s powerful, infuriating, ennobling advocacy doc, "The Trials of Darryl Hunt," about a North Carolina man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and rape, imprisoned for twenty years and was later freed through DNA testing, draws on two decades of footage
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Somewhere Over the Rainbo
A reformed Rainbo Club regular visiting from out of town always calls this Ukrainian Village mainstay a "self-selecting slum-ocracy," but on his current visit he’s fixed on but one thing: "The ugly bus pulled up outside, and it’s got big wheels"
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The Odyssey
While almost all of the roaring eighty-eight minutes of "The Simpsons Movie" was fresh to me, the reason why is also the reason why some fast-moving bits and details were lost to me: I’ve seldom seen more than five minutes of the series in all its years on the air
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Tip of the Week
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Space Odyssey
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Tip of the Week
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Bombs Away
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iPhone Has a Home
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Tip of the Week
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Well Enough in the Margins
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Bay Watching
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