There’s a reason I’m not a critic. A critic would need to respond in something approximating sentences when seeing/hearing/whatever a new piece. I respond with various little explosions inside my head and lots of incoherent mumbling, especially if I really like the work. It’s hard to make critical essays out of little explosions (unless you’re Mark Kermode, in which case your explosions come complete with syntactic structure and hilarious examples), and people don’t really want to listen to/read my mumblings. So I wander around, distracted by the little explosions, mumbling to whoever will listen, until the explosions die down to the point where I can form complete sentences again on the subject at hand. Given that this has been known to take several years in extreme cases, timely and topical criticism isn’t really much of an option for me.
So you might want to look away, as I’m going to mumble for a while.
A week or so ago the truly wonderful Huck Brock (pictured here) loaned me the truly wonderful documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston. It took me a couple of days to gain access to the TV to watch it, but man was it worth it. A strange and amazing story that opens door on so many things, and a remarkably modern life, with a level of self-documentation not possible even a few decades earlier.
I’ve been a fan of Johnston for several years, but mostly indirectly. Kathy McCarty’s album Dead Dog’s Eyeball: Songs of Daniel Johnston has been a super-fave of mine for many years, and I’ve got several covers of Daniel’s songs in various places that I love. I never actually bought one of his tapes when I lived in Austin, but I did play his stuff on my radio show when I lived there back in. Johnston’s work is prototypical lo-fi, for years recording and dubbing home-made cassettes, passing them out to anyone who would listen (and probably loads of people who didn’t).
For me he was always just this legend that people talked about, like Raul’s, but covers of his songs by bands like the Reivers were often the highlights of shows or albums, so I was certainly interested. I was lucky enough to see him when he played at the Austin Music Awards, although I had no idea until I watched this movie that he pulled the keys out of the plane home in mid-air, nearly killing himself and his father.
There’s so much that’s amazing in this story and this film, but I think one of the most remarkable things is how clearly this lays out the enormous challenges someone like Johnston present to the family, friends, and colleagues. Here we have a creative genius who can also be a serious threat to himself and others. People around him typically want to do “the right thing”, but it’s obviously not a simple thing to determine what that might be, especially when what’s good for Daniel, for Daniel’s art, and for those around Daniel aren’t always in alignment. His parents, for example, certainly aren’t always angels in this deal, but lord knows that they drew a damnedly tough hand.
I definitely recommend this film. You may or may not dig Daniel’s music and art, but this speaks to so many issues of art and culture, family and responsibility.
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