Uncle Dave's House of Useless Crap

A Quick Note

Went to Southfield today to record with de fenestra. This was the last time with Adam Moakan, as he is moving to Arizona. pbk joined us. We recorded about nine-ten pieces, totalling about 90 minutes of music. I think we can get a mini-album out of the best moments.

I'm to play Flint again next Saturday. this time it's a party. I get a 20 minute set by myself, and then I'm supposed to play between set changes. I don't know what I'm gonna do, and where I will get all that material, but I'll work something out.

This has been a very virus heavy weekend. I got a virus Friday that totally took my new computer down. Had to re-format. While I was defragging the old computer a virus was trying to get in even as the computer was defragging. Someday the spammers and hackers are going to make the internet itself totally unusable.

Thoughts on All-Black Cast Films

Picked up a bunch of good LPs at Recycle Ann Arbor yesterday. Also found my lost videotapes of "Dark Manhattan" (1937) and "Swing!" (1938). The first title is a Harry Fraser film and the first all-black cast picture made in Hollywood. I like Harry Fraser a lot - among his pictures are "Randy Rides Alone" (1934), "Chained for Life" (1951) a murder mystery starring those "other" Hilton sisters, Violet and Daisy; I've never seen "The White Gorilla," said to be one of the worst films ever made. Usually when that's the case, the film turns out to be at least entertaining. Harry Fraser's 80-odd films were all independently made between 1926-1952 for little companies. Even when he's got a script full of holes and enthusiastic, but inexperienced actors to work with, he usually still turns out a picture that plays pretty well. He was a pro who didn't allow routine to fully take over his approach, even when grinding out Westerns in three days, one right after the other.

Compared to the Fraser, Oscar Micheaux' "Swing!" looks like an underground film. Two women have a conversation across an alleyway; at first all you see is the alley, with the disconected voices audible on the soundtrack. After this Samuel Beckett-like opening, the scene which follows shows the two sides of the conversation in frontal view, with the speaker facing the camera, cutting in between the two. From the way it's cut, you get the impression that the two women are speaking from windows above and below one another in the same building. But going back to the first shot, you realize from the heads peeking into either side of the frame that the women are supposed to be holding their exchange facing one another.

Pseudo avant-garde conflicts of continuity of this kind are found in all parts of "Swing!" That's partly what makes Micheaux so fascinating - clearly he did not intend his storytelling to be so complex, but it is. This film is also full of the kind of moralizing and preaching you find in his other works, even though it was meant as an entertainment vehicle - a musical, technically. He replaces the typical rural black stereotypes with urban ones - the useless, fussily dressed, stuck on himself city slicker who plays all the women and soaks them for capital; the hard-working maid who is married to him, the hard-working railroad engineer who is so jealous of his wife that he is homicidally inclined, etc. Who do you think his wife ends up with? At least the Fraser film had not a single stereotype of any kind.

But I must say, the Fraser is more impressive through its professionalism and forward-looking approach to black talent than it is entertaining. The Micheaux, though, always has me rolling on the floor laughing, trying to hold my sides in, trying to keep from turning blue. Scene after scene affects me in this way - it's a riot. "Swing!" is DEFINITELY the more entertaining of the two, probably for all the wrong reasons.

Uncle Dave Lewis