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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The headline pretty much says it all - well, most. Tonight at the Avalon Theatre up in Chevy Chase (DC), you can catch a screening of Bluegrass Journey: A Documentary, Ruth Oxenberg and Rob Schumer’s chronicle of the 2002 Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival and the World of Bluegrass conference, featuring Jerry Douglas, Del McCoury, Tim O’Brien, Rhonda Vincent, and dozens of other bluegrass luminaries.

In addition, a quartet of local bluegrass musicians - Randy Barrett, Mike Marceau, Tom McLaughlin, and Mike Rychlik - will perform immediately following the film. All this for 12 bucks.

The film and performance are tonight only at the Avalon, 5612 Connecticut Avenue NW, at 8 pm.

Unfortunately, there’s no “Gypsy Music” category in either the Billboard charts or the Arbitron ratings, so it’s awfully hard to know exactly how many people are even interested in hearing, let alone have actually heard, the music of the Roma (or Romani) ethnic diaspora. But for those of you with a closet curiosity, you have until tomorrow night to see the documentary Gypsy Caravan. (Mark Jenkins’ review of the film is here.)

Directed by Jasmine Dellal (who also made 1999’s acclaimed American Gypsy) and shot by the legendary Albert Maysles, here follows five Romani music acts on American tour together: Two (Fanfare Ciocarlia and Taraf de Haidouks) from Romania; Maharaja, from India; Antonio El Pipa, from Andalusia, Spain; and Esma Redzepova, from Macedonia. Their music, though strongly founded in folk forms, is complex and unexpectedly polished, and is one of two major themes in the film; the other is of the musicians hanging out between shows and getting to know each other. Dellal also fills in the blanks by telling stories about the musicians: particularly pleasurable are anecdotes about Taraf de Haidouks’ leader busking around Berkeley while the band was playing there, and about Esma Redzepova and her 47 adopted children. Oh, and Johnny Depp gives his insights as a fan of Romani music, too.

Though it sounds arcane, like an ethnomusicology project, Gypsy Caravan is warm, human, and features lots of thrilling and deeply moving music and moments. You can see it either today or tomorrow (Friday, July 12) at the Avalon Theater, 5612 Connecticut Avenue NW, where it shows twice each day (3:20 and 8:15 pm).