That’s right. If you missed it in our recent Silverdocs cover story, the documentary Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell screens tonight at 6:30 p.m. and tomorrow at 9 p.m. at AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring.

Of course you remember that Russell was the hugely influential composer, producer, and songwriter responsible for several forward thinking disco tracks while living in down town Manhattan during the late ’70s and early ’80s. But you know, I don’t want to give away the whole story.

Check the film’s blog for more screening info.

Here’s a preview:

And something to get you in the mood:

A few days before Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men won Best Picture–and a little over a year after I wrote a piece about McCarthy fandom among metal bands–I noticed a reference to the book’s protagonist, Anton Chigurh, in a review of a metal record.

It’s no secret that metal fans love violent flicks, and that actual reading is in decline. So, I’m guessing that all of the references to Chigurh and metal (Google it) have more to do with the silver screen than with the printed page.

If that’s true, the Coen brothers will no doubt enter the pantheon of headbanger faves. What an honor to mentioned in the same breath as Fulci and Romero.

The interactive/online project Capitol of Punk of late 2006 was one of the most interesting histories of the harDCore scene. It featured a series of maps, guided tour stops, and videos for every stop, and could either be viewed on the Internet or downloaded to your video iPod for walking, much like a 21st-century version of DC’s heritage trails. Viewers can learn about venues past (d.c. space) and present (Fort Reno), plus hear Ian MacKaye’s adoration of Marion Barry and Ian Svenonius‘ assertion that D.C.’s landmarks were deliberately plotted in the shape of a pentagram. Oh, Ians!

But if you don’t have a video iPod, or you just like seeing your films on a big screen, tonight you might want to head down to the Black Cat. Capitol of Punk: Places and Stories of Hardcore in DC will be screened at the Backstage from 9 to 11. And for free! All ages, even! The scene lives on.

If they thought it would be tough to find a Biggie, then who the heck will play the Biz? From allhiphop.com:

A character driven story inspired by the true life events of DJ Marley Marl, Biz Markie, Big Daddy Kane and Roxanne Shante, The Vapors chronicles the early days of the legendary Juice Crew rap collective.

While filming was scheduled to begin in January, casting is still underway for the majority of parts in the film, casting director Red Sable told AllHipHop.com.

“We have four principals confirmed,” Sable revealed. “Clifton Powell, who will be playing Mr. Magic; Keke Palmer as Roxanne Shante; Evan Ross as MC Shan; and Cuba Gooding, Jr. as Marley Marl. All other roles are still under negotiation.”

David Banner apparently was supposed to be the Biz, but dropped out because of a “scheduling conflict.”

The Onion’s AV Club blog yesterday published an interview with Ice Cube by resident film guru and hip-hop fanatic Nathan Rabin. He correctly notes that “Ice Cube has traveled a long, strange road from incendiary controversy magnet to kiddie favorite…[he] paved the way for an entire generation of rappers-turned-actors.” Rabin mixes questions about acting and music pretty equally.

That balance is artificial. A comparison of his IMDb and Allmusic entries confirms that Cube has gone from a rapper who occasionally does movies to an actor who occasionally records music. It almost warrants a comparison with 1960s Elvis…but Elvis always did his soundtracks. If you pick up Cube’s recent In the Movies compilation, you’ll notice how few of those tracks appeared in his own films, and of those few how old most of them are.

Indeed, even in the Rabin interview, questions about rap have an alarming tendency toward the past tense, while movie questions are decidedly present-tense.

There are a lot of questions to ask here. Setting aside the easy ones of onscreen vs. musical persona and whether a musical artist who spends proportionately little time on music can remain relevant, one of the interview questions raises an interesting point:

AVC: You’ve been very critical of the music industry for a long time. Do you think major-label hip-hop has a future?
IC: I’m not sure. I’m not sure if music got a future. We have all these electronic ways to download and steal music and get music, but there’s no money in makin’ music. That money’s startin’ to dry up. So what’s gonna happen in 20 years, 25 years, when the new artists of the day are all “There ain’t no money in music, so I’ma go use my creative talents to do something else”?

Gary Giddins, among others, has remarked on the surprising number of rappers who’ve turned into talented actors. The question is, does that already qualify as an exodus of talent from an increasingly less viable music industry? Or at least as a clue to where hip-hop artists will go once commercial music is finally tapped out?

As Oprah knows, Brad Pitt is officially “gay” for architecture. And as anybody with a TV is sure to hear this week, ad nauseam, some Katrina victims will be better off because of Brad’s avocation.

Ice Cube actually studied architecture at the Phoenix Institute of Technology. But so far, he’s just made comments about Katrina. (And had beef with Oprah.)

Cube told Blender: “I liked architecture at one point. I got turned onto it by a teacher. I thought if this rap thing didn’t work, then I could make a career of it.”

For the record, if I was a box-office draw like Cube, I wouldn’t let Brad Pitt kick my ass at anything.

Writer-director Todd Haynes (above, with Charlotte Gainsbourg) first attracted attention with Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which was staged with Barbie dolls. He later did a fanciful treatment of glam-rock, Velvet Goldmine. His new study of Bob Dylan, I’m Not There, is no more conventional in its approach. The film, which opens today, splits Dylan into six characters, an approach that baffled Hollywood studios when they first encountered the screenplay: “I knew if it if was conventional biopic script, with these actors, and Dylan’s approval, it would have been no problem,” he says. “But there would never have a script that was conventional, because Dylan would never had said yes to it, and I would never have wanted to write it.”

And you wouldn’t gotten the cast.

Well, we wouldn’t have needed six Dylans anyway. It would have just been Adam Sandler.

Have people complained that you don’t explain Dylan?

So much less than I thought I would get. All my films have a strong conceptual or experimental element to them. Usually when you market them, that’s the thing you hide. With this one, it’s the concept that sells the movie. Everyone knows that, [whispers] ‘Oh, it’s the movie with all those people playing Bob Dylan. Cate Blanchett’s playing Bob Dylan! There’s a black kid playing him!’ That’s actually what’s drawing people to the film. Anyone who goes to see it is going to know that.

How does your interest in Dylan compare to that in other musicians you’ve
treated in your films?

I was never a major Karen Carpenter freak. I loved those songs, but they were like little time capsules of when I was a kid. But glam-rock and David Bowie, and Dylan, were instrumental in my psychic, creative, and emotional development. They showed that identity is protean, mutable, and open. People say Dylan is like, an elusive series of shadows. He’s not! He’s mighty and ferocious. He’s just ferociously being this thing today, and then he’s ferociously being that thing tomorrow.

Do the film’s various cinematic styles reflect Dylan, or your own interests?

My own taste was always determining my choices. But the determining factor for me in the styles was always the music at that particular time in Dylan’s life. Like the Jude story, that Cate stars in, I wanted to be black and white. I thought immediately of Dont Look Back, which is a beautiful documentary that I love. But I watched it and I was like, ‘Wait a minute. This is about the music of Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited. And yet this movie is cinéma vérité, and that couldn’t be further from what the music is doing at this time — it’s not social realism. I was looking at all the cinema of the ’60s, so I watched 8 1/2 again, and I was like, ‘Now that’s getting close. The baroque, urbane wit and distortion. The collapse of an artist at the peak of his insanity of fame, and his own dream and desires. And the film is about a director being hounded by the press to explain why his movies are weird, and they aren’t the way they used to be.’

Did you follow Dylan’s whole career?

I checked out for a lot of it. I first found Dylan for myself in high school. That was already the mid- to late-’70s. I definitely remember the release of Street Legal and Slow Train Coming. But I loved Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks and Bringing It All Back Home, and those films, uh, those movies –

Records.

Records! That’s it! But they were like movies, right? Those records, and that voice, will always be associated for me with the thrill of being young, and excitement about the future. Every adolescent should be exposed to that fearlessness in Dylan’s voice. And feel like they discovered it themselves.

Julien Temple began documenting the Sex Pistols and the Clash while in film school in London. Thirty years later, the director’s credits include several fiction films, but he’s best known for such rock documentaries as Glastonbury. Temple’s latest, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, is an account of a punk icon who became a friend. The film, which opens today, is warmer and less polemical than Temple’s most recent account of the
Pistols, he says:

The Filth and Fury was designed to try to fly the audience into the punk moment. To explain how the fuse was lit. The band to do that through was clearly the Pistols. The film about Joe is a very different thing. It’s following the story of a man’s life over 50 years. Seeing how the culture created him, but also how he changed the culture. It’s a more emotional film in a way, because it is a film about a friendship.

How did your relationships with Strummer and John Lydon differ?

I’ve never really lived with John in the way I did with Joe. I had an intense relationship with the Clash in ‘76, ‘77. But I had to choose between them and the Pistols. I didn’t see Joe very much for the next 20 years. By a strange accident, he came to live down the road from me in the English countryside. We were living in each others’ houses, looking out for each other’s kids, which is the way to get to know someone very closely. With John, I only see him when I go to L.A., or he’s in London, and it’s very intense.

It’s probably also a class thing, which unfortunately underpins life in Britain, still. I was from more of a similar background to Joe’s. As a result, I probably shared intellectual interests more easily. I do think John is a brilliant thinker. There’s something about his personality that’s unnerving to everybody. Which made him the one who could spark that
movement.

The first time I interviewed Strummer, in 1989, he described 1977 London as
stultifying.

In those days, the three TV channels turned off at 11 o’clock. Everything shut down. We were always very aware that New York City or somewhere was not like that. Britain was still very much a Victorian society, despite the attack on that in the ’60s. London was a white city with no respect for any immigrant culture. Punk helped break that down.

You largely skip Give ‘Em Enough Rope, the second Clash album.

Partly because I didn’t like it very much. It was worrying to me at the time. It sounded like they were going in a more heavy-metal direction. And I knew that Joe didn’t like that album was much as others.

You filmed reminiscences around campfires. That must have hard to shoot.

Yeah, it was. But I liked that it was quite a punk-rock thing. We didn’t have any electricians; we didn’t have any lights. We just lit it with the fire. Recording conversations was difficult, and at times I would take people to another fire, 30 meters away or something, and record it there.

The campfires started at festivals like Glastonbury. That’s one of the great things about Glastonbury; it’s a city of campfires, 180,000 when you look down the hill. Joe had one, which became very different. It was a kind of ideas factory, people exchanging their life experiences. An incredible mixture of people, and Joe would be DJing. That’s where the Mescaleros came from.

Why did you decide not to ID the participants on screen?

No one had name-tags around these campfires. “Hi, I’m Mandy from Hertz rent-a-car.” But more importantly, I like the idea that there’s a bit of detective work: Who is this person? Why do they look like that? It invites you think around it a bit more. I did suggest that, at the end, we put the photograph next to the credit, but we didn’t have the money, apparently. You could say “John Perkins, school friend.” But then you’d also have to say, “Bono, rock star.” There are some ironies in it.

Fox Searchlight apparently is desperate to find its Notorious B.I.G., because the movie studio is not only still collecting audition tapes from would-be Biggie Smalls and testing out actual rappers, it’s also holding an “in-person casting call” at 10 a.m. on Saturday in Manhattan.

This begs the question: Why not scrap the plan for a flesh-and-blood actor to play the lead in Notorious, and simply go with computer animation? I mean, if fuckin’ Beowulf can be animated, why not Biggie?

A long, lazy YouTube trawl yielded some clips from Jeff Bagato’s 1999 film The Blab, which features Baltimore performer-poet-writer Mary Knott, who, among other things, is part of The Dirt. Bagato, who runs the monthly Electric Possible show and is a fixture in D.C.’s experimental music scene, plays tonight as part of the group Spaceships Panic Orbit at the Sonic Circuits Festival. Here’s what Bagato had to say via e-mail about filming Knott:

I basically aimed the camera at Mary and let her talk. I can’t claim to have done much as a filmmaker, as there were no edits or camera angles or anything. The blurb was “One Woman, One Camera, No Cuts.” I can’t even claim the idea was original; an artist named Tentatively a Convenience had the idea of filming Mary for an indefinite period, but he
never did it. I thought that was a great way to document the experience of hanging out with Mary. She talks about meeting Perry Farrell, and her fandom for Marilyn Manson, hanging out with Gwar, and all kinds of stuff. The clips on YouTube are pretty funny, but some guy in Philly put them up there after he bought a copy of the tape from me. Since then, Mary has put a whole bunch of stuff up–you can search for her name or Geeky Dorks or the Dirt. I always figured Mary was destined to be a YouTube star, so maybe her time has come.

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