October 14-20, 2004

cover story

Ted and the Moldy Peach

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

One man's adventures with directing, documenting and the Motherfucking Clash.

by Juliet Fletcher

Ted Passon claims the last time he got into performing music was when he took guitar lessons at age 7, from a teacher who forced him to first learn the accordion. If he learned much from the experience, he doesn’t let on, but he’s realizing that on some projects the most scenic route isn’t the one most signposted. In the scheme of music-video planning, where the Temple film grad’s experience of the past year mainly lies, there’s advance, last-minute and "on the fly." He comes equipped to discuss the last. He’s turned his camera on live performances by Atom and His Package (for Ben Berman’s documentary, Boy, Stop Playing With Your Package), Anti-Flag (live footage for a 2003 video) and The Motherfucking Clash (in a documentary currently being shot, featuring performance and interviews). Then this May, he undertook his "first commissioned music video." Course, he happened to be working with Kimya Dawson of the Moldy Peaches. Her outlook, described as relentlessly "open-minded" by her grateful director in how she gave him lease to interpret her song "Lullaby for the Taken," may explain why the shoot turned out to be thankfully softball. This despite the video being rushed over eight days on Dawson’s hectic Midwest tour. While she pins down the ease within their collaboration to feeling "really comfortable with Ted" -- who initially got in touch with her to ask if he could use a couple of her songs in his senior thesis film, Robot Boy -- Passon admits there was more to the musician-director working dynamic than that.

"I was worried Ö mostly because I’m a huge fan of Kimya Dawson! The worst thing would be if this artist that you totally admire thought that something you did sucked." The shoot included cameos by The Butchies (as Mormon street preachers), renegade school kids (allowed as extras after being denied access to an over-21 gig), and, most rockily, an unscheduled shoot indoors (which prompted Passon to burst into CVS declaring, "Give me all your 200-watt bulbs"). He admits "[Kimya] knew I was nervous, in the planning stages. But whenever I was looking into the camera, I was able to be lost in it and feel good about it."

That’s what happens, Passon says, when a filmmaker shoots certain bands -- "visually interesting ones." When there’s "live music playing, people are going nuts, you get lost in the visuals. Ö Even if you don’t know the music, you can get a sense of the rhythm, where the breaks are going to fall, and you find yourself almost dancing with the camera."

Sure, it sounds easy -- almost point-and-shoot compared with a music-vid format. Directors might choose from three different approaches -- live footage (which puts you there), abstract visuals (favored by shy rockers or to complement dance twiddlings) or narrative. (Elements of two or all of these are even more likely.) But it’s narrative that presents pitfalls, especially for a director seeking not to alter the musician’s original work.

Shooting "Lullaby," the obstacle was to find a format that fit Dawson’s tender song, which concerns the abduction of her nephew by his mother. Passon settled on using Super 8 film: "It’s grainy, it’s rough, it’s lo-fi, it can’t pretend to be anything but what it is -- and neither can she. I think it’s a really sweet, sincere medium to shoot in." The emotional appeal is vital, says Passon: The style should "capture the core of the song," he reckons, and "narrative can be a useful tool to get an emotional reaction out of it." To accomplish that, Passon admits, he and Dawson had to devise a linear story, which was only as true as the song, no more. But Passon (whose high-school film teacher once synched up Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon to prove that synchronized themes, images and lyrics can be matched up randomly) keeps in mind "how often we see things that aren’t intended to be narrative, and we make a narrative out of them. Ö I don’t know if this is because in the everyday world we’re used to seeing an object produce a sound, that when we watch a video or visuals with sounds you look for patterns, for relationships to happen."

The finished product, which Dawson admits almost made her cry, features the mother (Dawson in a wig) on the lam, careening with a stroller through small-town America. (Melissa York stars as the father, who cries animated tears.) But the song, as much about shades of vulnerability and childlikeness in adulthood, is illustrated in its middle verses with softer images of Dawson outdoors, what she terms "more of an abstract way of expressing ways to deal with severe grief." Much of this was captured almost by accident: As we watch Dawson scribbling, drawing one of her trademark rabbit cartoon characters, a ladybug lands in shot, crawls into her hand and rests there.

A body of experimental filmmaking rests on what Passon recalls as "the Robert Flaherty moment -- just sit there and wait, just watch and something will happen." What this approach adds to his work with Dawson, in her view, is a reflection of herself that nailed her dislike of pretense almost in spite of the camera. "I have always hated myself on film/video," she says, explaining that she wore what she wears all the time in this one. "Ted made the whole thing look so real and natural and nice. Ö I would never try to foxy myself up for a video, or for anything."

And watching and waiting is a sound technique, Passon believes, in his work on the upcoming Motherfucking Clash documentary. Despite being what MFCer Carolyn Chernoff terms part "performance project," part "walking experiment in cultural destabilization," she admits that until Passon expressed interest in a film project, she’d never seen her band perform. "We don’t rehearse in front of mirrors." For her, an important element in the film will be taped responses from the audience, "from the highest of compliments to the standard lesbian-baiting dismissals from people who don’t understand performance," which in Passon’s view critique the avant-garde scene. Despite including endless MFC live performances, the film may, in a way, end up being all about the fans.

And isn’t that what music videos are, anyway? A reflection of the listening experience, allowing people to see what they enjoy? Dawson loves "soft rock and cheesy pop, [as] those sort of videos are Ö pretty entertaining in their own way," while Chernoff respects The Darkness, for being "transgressive and amusing."

And Passon? "I like films and think of music videos as a kind of film, some of them really cool, some of them I don’t like. I think this sounds pretentious, but thinking about it right now, I realize I never separated them from films."

Look for a DVD collection of Ted Passon’s shorts to be distributed by K Records.