I recently got a DVD of a film called ” The City ,” made by a local director named James Vogel and shot, as far as I can tell, mostly around six blocks of downtown Minneapolis. The film was made in 2009, but Vogel, to his credit, is still plugging away at it, trying to find an audience. And why not? The film is available on Amazon.com , and presumably will be forever. We no longer live in a time when culture is tied to the calendar, with a film coming out, appearing in a theater, and then disappearing except, perhaps, for revivals at movie houses or on late-night television. Instead, we’re in a sort of permanent now, where all culture exists simultaneously and can be accessed instantaneously. “The City” might as well be a new release, because I have just heard of it, and will be a new release as long as people continue to discover it. I fully expect there will be a time in the near future when the top-grossing film in America is something Mae West made in the 40s. Why not? To most audiences, it will be just new as the latest film by Michael Bay, and just as accessible, and probably better. “The City” is never likely to be a top-grossing American film. It has a rating of 4.7 out of 10 stars on IMDB.com, and that’s fair. It’s a genre piece about psychopathology that isn’t lurid enough to distinguish itself for going too far (it is, after all, competing with mainstream entertainment like the “Saw” franchise, which makes an annual showing of rending of flesh). Nor is it insightful enough to stand out as a credible portrait of murderousness, as “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,” among others, managed to do. The film does offer an intriguing satiric edge, though, in that it details a rather blank aspiring screenwriter, played by cowriter Matt Franta, who responds badly to academic criticism of his thriller screenplay. He immediately goes out and locates a lunatic, played by Greg Hernandez, and the two begin a series of thrill kills – most of the remainder of the cast is listed in the credits as “victim.” The film seems to constantly be commenting on itself. The screenwriter’s teacher complains that his characters seem poorly motivated, and, indeed, the screenwriter himself seems poorly motivated – it often feels as though we are actually watching the script that the screenwriter himself is writing. The murders take place in a world without consequences – not only do we never hear of police investigations or hear the anguished words of bereaved love ones, there doesn’t even seem to be a body to clean up. I presume the bodies are, in fact, disposed of in some way, but it is never addressed; the film does not share, say, Hitchcock’s obsession with the tricky question of how do you get rid of a body. Instead, they might as well just evaporate after the killing. I can imagine the film’s screenwriting teacher complaining about this, although the filmmakers did not include this scene. No, the film is interested in the frenzy of the moment of the murder, and the godlike feelings that follow it – it keeps returning to a terrific image of the two killers dancing in slow motion in a blood-drenched room atop a floor covered with a plastic sheet. And I have to say, every so often it’s nice to see a film about people who love their work. Although I started this column talking about the permanent now, there is some culture that, sadly, has been left behind, at least for the moment. I have spent years trying to track down a movie that, briefly, enjoyed great attention, and has been slipping into obscurity since the youthful death of its creator and its general unavailability. And that’s a damn shame. The film is called ” Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore ” by filmmaker Sarah Jacobson, who died of cancer in 2004 at the absurdly young age of 32. This past week, I manged to track down a DVD somebody had burned from somewhere, after trying to locate a copy of the film for years (I have yet to find her even more celebrated short film, “I Was a Teenage Serial Killer”), and I am determined to keep at least word of the movie alive until it gets a proper release. It’s a genuinely terrific film, and should have a cult that adores it and preserves it. I am sure it will. First of all, there is a lot about the film that is not as it seems. The movie is credited as having been made in 1998, but that’s not right – in the days before digital video, shooting and distributing an independent feature was an enormous commitment of time, and so three years went by between when Jacobson began the project and when it was released. Secondly, the film was shot in San Francisco, where Jacobson then lived, but it’s not a West Coast film. Jacobson was raised in Minnesota and did a stint working at the Uptown Theater, and so that’s where the film is set. References to the Twin Cities abound: The characters go to see bands at Nye’s, and take off for road trips to Madison, Wis. Babes in Toyland play on the soundtrack. “Get out of the Midwest,” one advises another, but nobody in the movie is really old enough or experienced enough or has enough money to do anything but work at a movie theater and retire to the basement to drink Scotch by the jugful. The film received mixed reviews when it came out – it was a creature of festivals, where it was competing with filmmakers who wanted to pass off their product as mainstream Hollywood productions, and so mimicked the slick production values and cleanly written narrative of mainstream filmmaking. Jacobson, in the meanwhile, wasn’t part of that – her film feels more inspired by zines, which are referenced throughout the film, than mainstream filmmaking. The whole project has the feel of an intimate, handwritten tale, interspersed with hand-drawn cartoons, made at 2 a.m. at Kinkos and stapled together and intended to be distributed in independent music stores and through the mail to friends. It’s a legitimate aesthetic, but Jacobson was alone in applying it to films, which were, after all, more expensive and time-consuming undertakings. Nowadays, a whole new generation seems to have taken up that approach – the entire mumblecore movement could be directly borrowing from Jacobson, if they knew who she was. Now a film actually can be made like a zine, and for about the same price. Jacobson starts her film with Mary Jane losing her virginity. She’s played by Lisa Gerstein, an enormously appealing actress who looked like a Jewish Madchen Amick, and who genuinely looked to be the teenager she played here (she was actually already a veteran of two feature films and one failed television series). Her deflowering is an uncomfortable affair, made even more uncomfortable by the fact that everybody at the movie theater she works at knew it was happening and had bets placed on it. Jacobson’s Uptown Theater is populated by a small staff of very young people, all in untucked white shirts and skinny ties, who have extraordinarily close relationships, even when they irrirate each other. They all share the same peer group, go to the same shows, party at each other’s houses, drink with each other in the basement, and, when they get bored, sleep with each other, even though they often can’t stand each other. Lisa Jacobson Lisa Gerstein in “Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore”

While the subject of the film is ostensibly sex – Mary Jane discusses the subject with everybody, and her own self-fulfillment comes as the result of advice from a coworker on the subject of self-pleasure, which is then demonstrated in a montage – Jacobson is really more interested in affection. Even when the characters bother and trouble each other, they have a sort of collective protectiveness toward each other. All of this is carefully detailed in a series of loopily comic sequences, as though recounted by a friend at a crowded bar who is a bit tipsy but wants to tell you something they find hilarious. The resulting film is utterly charming and relentlessly honest, and what happened? Where is it? Why is it not widely available for people to stream online in this permanent now? Jacobson was a revolutionary. There is a video of her interviewing John Waters at the opening of “Cecil B. Demented,” Waters’ film about cinematic terrorists who kidnap an actual movie star and force her to star in their low-budget film, and Jacobson keeps pelting Waters with questions about how to create a film revolution, ignoring his responses that the film is satire. She wanted to create a community of independent filmmakers, and, particularly, of independent female filmmakers, and perhaps she was simply premature, as her death was.

We are just now starting to love the revolution envisioned by Jacobson. Films should be made like zines, on iPhones at 2 a.m., by people who want to tell their own stories; now they can be. There is, it should be noted, a film grant that is offered in Jacobson’s name intended for aspiring female directors. I found a video online of director Tamra Davis , who was an early supporter of Jacobson’s, which is an odd thing to say, as Jacobson only ever got around to having early supporters. But Davis was impressed enough to invest in “Mary Jane,” and, for whatever reason, she decided recently to just look into her iPhone and remember the filmmaker. The video seems to have been made about a year ago, and Davis, for one moment, looks utterly heartbroken: “Sarah, are you the only one?” she asks. “I miss you. Please, let there be another Sarah Jacobson.” Let’s start by getting people aware of the original. Click to write a comment or read comments about this post. MinnPost.com Full RSS Articles brought to you by: MinnPost Young Professionals Network MinnPost Asks: Joe Dowling, Kaywin Feldman, James Sewell — Get your Young Pro tickets by Wed., June 15

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The Republican majorities in the state House and Senate are caught between a rock and a hard place and are figuring out a plan to get free without sacrificing their budget ideals.

The rock is Gov. Mark Dayton’s message that voters want balance, not extremes, in closing the budget gap and his effective use of the bully pulpit, now backed by $1 million media campaign from the Alliance for Better Minnesota.

The hard place is more of a hard line. Republican legislators claim, and say they have are internal polls to prove it, that voters believe that the biggest budget in state history is big enough. “I would say we are really strong inside our caucus and the feedback we are getting is not just from Republicans but the middle,” says Rep. Keith Downey, the Republican from Edina. “They sent us here for fiscal restraint.”

This week and next, House and Senate Republican leaders are tackling two major questions: how to communicate their position as effectively as Dayton has communicated his and, once the communication is on equal footing, which items will be in play for a budget deal.

Legislators privately agree that communication has been inconsistent: a problem of too many messengers (Sens. Amy Koch and Geoff Michel, Rep. Kurt Zellers, freshman legislators, the Republican Party) and too many themes (“live within our means,” “Governor Dayton is erratic,” “Republicans have already compromised.”) GOP sources say the public can expect more discipline in the coming weeks.

Legislators are also wondering if there will be outside support to counter the Alliance for Better Minnesota campaign. Groups like Minnesota Forward, Minnesota’s Future and the Minnesota Majority, all backed by business money and active in the 2010 election, have yet to make a big splash in the budget debate. Charlie Weaver

Charlie Weaver, head of the Minnesota Business Partnership, says business groups have already back a “targeted” campaign of radio and internet ads, but with the Alliance for Better Minnesota effort, “it reinforces the need for messaging.”

But Weaver was non-committal about television advertising. “The Alliance will always have more money than we do,” he said. “With union money and personal wealth, they will outspend us two to one.”

Weaver maintains that the outcome of the budget debate will be determined by what he says is public support for the Republican position, not how much money is spent.

Despite the Republican Party’s exhortations that “a compromise to the left is a compromise of good and evil” and that “the state party will continue to oppose any scheme to generate revenue as a means to avoid spending reductions” (which some legislators regard as unhelpful), the GOP leadership has a list of negotiating items for a budget deal. They include expansion of gambling and a bonding bill to improve the balance sheet for the next biennium and policy points like education reforms and a Vikings stadium.

These options are the lesser of the negotiating evils for Republican legislators, who genuinely believe that they have crafted a reasonable budget solution and who are equally sincere in their opposition to a solution that increases spending through gambling or borrowing through a bonding bill. But they cannot imagine a scenario that involves an income tax increase.

Weaver sympathizes with their dilemma. “Almost every other state is reducing government, being smarter and more efficient about the way it operates,” he said. “It’s insane for Minnesota to go in the other direction.”

Republicans give Dayton points on efficiency. Downey, a lead legislator on government redesign, cites Dayton’s support of changes in teachers’ licensure, reforms to the environmental permitting process and a recent request from the governor’s office for bids to audit and suggest improvements for a variety of government functions.

Again, though, there’s Republican frustration that even though many of the reforms stemmed from Republican legislation, Dayton, with the power of the governor’s office, has received a large share of the credit. Headed toward another special legislative session, they are learning that the use of that power has given Dayton the negotiating edge that they are scrambling to blunt. Click to write a comment or read comments about this post. MinnPost.com Full RSS Articles brought to you by: MinnPost Young Professionals Network Get your hands dirty — and help those in need — at Open Farms

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Phew. Harold Camping’s prediction of a rapture last weekend didn’t materialise – though like all good self-publicists, he’s doing his darnedest to ensure the story won’t go away . But happily, he didn’t distract readers from last week’s task of suggesting songs about the afterlife.

Music, too, can have an afterlife. Songs can disappear and then re-emerge years later in unexpected forms, amazing and delighting us. According to the 600-year-old traditional English song The Unquiet Grave, mourning for longer than a year and a day won’t allow the dead to rest. This ancient song was resurrected by a young Shirley Collins in 1960 in a recording by Alan Lomax that signalled a folk revival.

Members of the Velvet Underground used to be fined $10 for playing blues licks during rehearsals, presumably to distinguish them from their peers. But that über-modern policy, the squalling feedback, and the arty New York drug scene trappings didn’t stop them from borrowing lines from delta bluesman Son House’s Death Letter in the lyrics of I Heard Her Call My Name, in which the progagonist is haunted by his dead lover. But being remembered seems the most likely route to some sort of post-death existence. Iron & Wine’s The Trapeze Swinger is a message from outside the pearly gates to loved ones left behind. It carries a sense of life’s precariousness, its absurdity and preciousness.

The strange thing about Bob Dylan’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door is that it’s simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible: everyone knows the song, but they’ve mainly heard buskers’ versions or the inferior, bombastic cover versions favoured by radio stations. Meanwhile Bob’s vastly superior original is rarely heard. It’s anthemic, but not epic – at just two and a half minutes, it’s a model of economy. Written for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, it’s a gospel song but the tragedy lies in the narrator’s lack of faith. Washington Phillips, a travelling Texan preacher who recorded just 18 gospel songs in the 1920s, doesn’t lack faith. In fact, if there is a heaven, I imagine it sounds like Denomination Blues, on which Phillips tinkles away on a celestial zither-type instrument while offering simple instructions on reaching paradise.

So much for getting to heaven. What about the afterlife itself? For such a wilfully bewildering film, David Lynch’s Eraserhead contained a song that was simplicity itself. In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song) could have been tailor-made for Pixies. “You got your good thing, and I’ve got mine,” screams Black Francis, with such intensity that the strong suspicion arises that his “good thing” might not be entirely wholesome. But it raises the possibility of heaven on earth.

The fuzz guitar blues wig-out Gratefully Dead languished on an Animals b-side. Which is a shame, as Eric Burdon and co appear to have aggressively out-garaged American bands like the Seeds and invented heavy rock in the process. Not entirely sure what Eric’s on about, but he appears to be ranting at us from the other side. And the other side could of course, be decidedly un-heavenly. So what’s hell like? Wilco’s Hell Is Chrome suggests it might surprise us, But the track’s quiet terror underlines the belief that hell is worth avoiding if at all possible.

The concept of hell has spawned entire genres of music, usually made by gurning ne-er-do-wells eager to convince us that their bad behaviour qualifies them for entry, but that they just don’t care. But Highway to Hell, of course, has added resonance, as it was AC/DC’s late singer Bon Scott’s swansong, thanks in no small part to the hard living he eulogised.

But let’s end on a high note. And who better to hit it than General Johnson, whose transcendent I’m on My Way to a Better Place reaches something close to heavenly bliss. Even dyed-in-the-wool atheists can suspend disbelief for the kick of getting swept along with his unstoppable euphoria.

Here’s the A-list:

The Unquiet Grave – Shirley Collins

I Heard Her Call My Name – The Velvet Underground

The Trapeze Swinger – Iron & Wine

Knocking on Heaven’s Door – Bob Dylan

Denomination Blues (part 1) – Washington Phillips

In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song) – Pixies

Gratefully Dead – the Animals

Hell Is Chrome – Wilco

Highway to Hell – AC/DC

I’m on My Way to a Better Place – Chairmen of the Board

Here’s the B-list:

(Ghost) Riders in the Sky – The Ramrods

Twangy guitar version of the influential song about damned cowboys chasing (presumably damned) cattle across the sky. Removes lyrics; adds Lee Perry-style mooing noises.

Brink of Death – Childe Harold

One of many songs more about the process of dying than the afterlife itself, though its glimpsed vision of heaven allows it to qualify. It’s dreamy and otherworldly, written by Bert Sommer of baroque’n'rollers the Left Banke and produced by synthesiser pioneer Walter Carlos, famed for Switched on Bach and the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange.

We Won’t Need Legs to Stand – Sufjan Stevens

Stevens’s view of the afterlife is Christian – we turn into angels, basically – but also characteristically idiosyncratic, and childlike in its simplicity without being naive or mawkish. Also, I was at his gig in Brighton a couple of weeks ago, and he was magnificent.

Spirit in the Sky – Dorothy Morrison

The glorious singer of Edwin Hawkins Singers (Oh Happy Day) gives Norman Greenbaum’s hit the hallelujah treatment. What with My Sweet Lord also topping the charts in 1970, there seems to have been a real vogue for hands-in-the-air rejoicing.

Resurrection Shuffle – Ashton, Gardner and Dyke

It’s thumbs-in-the-belt-loops time on this superior 70s stomp from ex-Creation/Remo Four musicians. Its horns riff had an afterlife on Adam and the Ants’ Goody Two Shoes.

The Wife of Usher’s Well – Karine Polwart

Traditional Scottish song about a mourning mother whose sons died at sea but who return in ghostly form, unable to eat the feast she’s prepared for them. It’s a similar theme to The Unquiet Grave (see above). Polwart’s rendition is suitably stark.

My Daddy Is a Mummy – Richard Thompson

Song about the afterlife of ancient Egyptian pharoahs, written for a school project, Thompson says, and played in a rocking style “linking the two Memphises”.

Ghosts (First Variation) – Albert Ayler

Opening salvo on free jazz masterwork Spiritual Unity, on which conventional assumptions about harmony, melody and rhythm were jettisoned in the name of freedom and spontaneity. It liberates the listener’s mind to make free associations. Here’s one: is it me, or does the theme at the beginning and end sound surprisingly similar to Monty Python’s Lumberjack Song?

Afterlife – Avenged Sevenfold

Metal’s not dead; or if you prefer, it’s undead. There will always be an audience for Loud and Fast. And anyway, how can it die, with tunes like this? Afterlife is a first and foremost a pop song.

Heavenly Pop Hit – The Chills

As is this. Big-time success eluded the Chills, hence this ironically titled song. For singer Martin Phillips, the afterlife “all seems larger than life to me/ I find it rather hard to believe”.

* Here’s last week’s blog , from which I’ve selected the songs above

* Here’s a Spotify playlist containing many of these songs

* There’ll be a fresh theme at guardian.co.uk/readersrecommend Pop and rock Jon Dennis guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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