Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Cream Atlanta's Local Rock Community Could Use Our Help
Posted by Adam Gold on Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 4:27 PM
Many of you are familiar with Nashville filmmaker Matthew Robison's (Silver Jew) newest project We Fun, which covers Atlanta's burgeoning music scene. Local Atlanta music figure Bobby Ubangi (a.k.a. B Jay Womack), one of We Fun's subjects, is coming to the end of a nine-month battle with lung cancer. Robison, along with many in the Atlanta music community, including members of The Black Lips, King Khan and Deerhunter, have set up a fund to help pay for funeral costs as Ubangi has no family outside of his local rock brethren. The Black Lips will play a benefit show tonight at Atlanta's Drunken Unicorn as the Renegades.
If you get in the car right now you can probably make it. If you can't make it but would like to donate, then follow this link. If you'd like to read more about Ubangi then check out this week's Creative Loafing cover story. According to an email from Robison:
Anyone who is a fan of [Atlanta rockers] would be doing them all a personal favor...It's one of those times where the hand-to-mouth arts community comes up a bit short, and fans and well-wishers and supporters can make up the difference.
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According to Chunklet, he passed away tonight at age 34. Sad.
http://www.chunklet.com/index.cfm?section=blogs&ID=519
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I started shooting this documentary two weeks after my friend Jaime Jones hung himself in October of 2007, so the feature is now weirdly bookended by the death of two friends.
It must be in poor taste to even talk about this in a public online forum, but I'm waiting for the sun to rise on another day. I realize that I make flawed movies (Silver Jew: 2.4 on Netflix), but even if I made great ones I think there is a universal NO that would come along with them. I mean that it's hard, like with anything else, to get anyone to notice even a great project. That it's mostly a world of rejection (festivals, distributors, etc).
Getting used to that part of it makes it easier to make them as time wears on. I care a lot less about the individual rejections. They have nothing to do with making movies, but I do get used to the sense of NO about my collected projects in general. For instance, We Fun was rejected by Nashville Film Festival, so there's a NO about my own city. I might've thought it was just a bad movie, but Atlanta Film Festival loved it and Pitchfork was waiting to show it after I'd done at least one festival premiere.
I'm going somewhere with this. It's just that it is quite early and Bobby Ubangi has indeed passed. There was an urgency about yesterday, and it's the same urgency I feel while making these things. As in I have no time to wait around for them to get good: I simply have to make them. I never want to be one of those people who is eternally writing a script or whatever. So yesterday felt like that, but it was a fear that BJ would be gone before he could be buried they way he wanted. It's not the same as those things you see where someone needs ongoing-and-ever funds for treatments that are a medical bill that'll never get paid. It was a fixed amount of money.
Yesterday, me and Creative Loafing writer Chad Radford brainstormed a bit and sent links and letters to a lot of outlets, and the lot of them responded. NME, Pitchfork, Paste, etc. And I was really worried that the Scene was going to let it go. By the afternoon, I was already blown away by all the responses and donations from all over and the fact that people cared to help someone they didn't know and had not met.
I went on a bike ride to enjoy the breeze and the bent light we're getting right now (it's got a violet strain, too, from the volcano eruption I think but maybe I imagine that from having read it somewhere). I ended up in Jersey Mike's on White Bridge Road. It was empty until a couple in their sixties came in. When they sat down to eat the woman said a long prayer which seemed to have many points as the husband was nodding often and stating the affirmative. With death around, I get annoyed with religion, but this was distant and sincere and nice to see. It means nothing, but it was nice to see.
When I got home, I saw Adam's post and it really made the day for me. It feels more like Yes here. I have so much to say in the way that I feel like I had my fellow humans pegged all wrong; that I had forgotten how good people can be. Thank you, Scene, for the local support for BJ. That kind of thing makes me want to live here and contribute and make more movies even if they don't get played here.
It's just before six, and the party at Drunken Unicorn in Atlanta is still going. B Jay was gone by the time Renegades played last night. We're going to get that funeral, and everybody got to say good bye.
If you watch the video posted here, the exterior stuff with BJ is from when he wanted me to shoot him reading a chapter from Moby Dick for his funeral. He had just received his diagnosis. As time went by, he was less interested in using it for that purpose, so I ended We Fun with it. He had a thing for the line, "Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself."
Maybe I'll finally read Moby Dick.
Thanks again for caring.
XOXOXO
Matthew Robison
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