Three Films Make A Post: How to fail in the music business and succeed as a legend.

Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah (2011): I’m not completely sold on the jumping about Kevin Triplett’s Duct Tape Messiah does in the chronology of legendary – and legendarily unlucky – Texas songwriter Blaze Foley’s life; it doesn’t really add anything, and seems to obfuscate things rather than make them clearer. On the other hand, the film is such a labour of love about a figure at once intensely influential and obscure, full of interviews with friends, lovers, family and peers, as well as some incredibly valuable archive material of the man itself, I can’t find it in me to pick formal nits for too long. Particularly not in a film that’s also not pretending the bad, self-destructive elements of its subject’s character didn’t exist; it just knows this changes nothing about the love (or the great songs).

Travelling for a Living (1966): For the British folk revival and folk rock, the subjects of this short documentary, The Watersons, as well as the work they did afterwards, were an incredibly important and influential group. Here, in Derrick Knight’s grainy verité footage, you can witness the group as working musicians, at the cusp of reaching something new via the traditional, following a very personal idea of freedom and individual expression. If you’ve listened to music by or influenced by the Watersons and their peers for a few decades like I have, you’ll probably be shocked/delighted by how young and hopeful they were here, how very much of their time in the very best way; how much these people feel like their voices, coming from more years away than I’ve been alive.

Tenebrae (1982): These are just a couple of thoughts after a recent re-watch of this Argento giallo. I don’t need to reiterate my love for the man’s visual powers as a director, or how much he manages to turn an absolutely improbable plot believable in so far as it seems to fit the visual world he creates so perfectly. Rather, what was going through my head this time around is how much Argento must have been bothered by the accusations of misogyny and idolation of violence thrown at him regularly, seeing as they are mirrored rather exactly in what his writer protagonist Peter Neal here has to hear. Like Neal, Argento’s not terribly good at defending himself here; but then, given that Neal is also an insane murderer, he’s probably not supposed to, and may very well be meant as a way for Argento to poke fun at himself (or at least his public image) as well as his detractors.