Dub dot dash

New doco about Arthur Russell (Dinosaur L/Loose Joints)
Reviewed at The Playlist, excerpt...
Chances are pretty good that, some possible BBC4 venture aside, "Wild Combination" will be the only Arthur Russell documentary to be made in my lifetime. And while I am thankful that a good one exists, I can’t help but feel that a few of this story’s chapters, the very ones that make Arthur an underappreciated giant of late 20th century music, were given short shrift by filmmaker Matt Wolf.

To be sure, it’s not like Wolf gets anything wrong ... but there’s also the very real sense that Wolf is learning the story - and the music guiding it - as he’s making the film; and this makes for a missed opportunity in the narrative of a cellist-composer born and raised in Iowa, who came of age on a Buddhist commune in San Francisco, relocated to mid-‘70s New York where he played conduit between the downtown minimalist music scene, the early art-punk scene, and the gay disco scene, became a great (semi-) reclusive obsessive composer/songwriter, and died of AIDS in 1992.

Generally speaking, "Wild Combination"s deepest flaw is how little play the disco side of Arthur’s legacy gets ... Some minor insight into the film-maker’s disco/not disco decision was given by Wolf at the Q&A that followed last Thursday’s 9pm screening, when he spoke of not wanting those passages to be portrayed in the shadow of the hedonistic Studio 54 cliché. His explanation made it seem like he himself entered the film-making process under the spell of such cultural biases. That’s too bad – ‘cause those biases show through, and continue to under-estimate the power and repercussions of New York’s great disco story."

Read the full review here. Trailer for the film here. Official movie site here, which lists the film as screening here in the NZ Film Festival circuit in July.

There's a great article in Wax Poetics issue 23 on Arthur Russell (scans by the article's author Stuart Aitken, here), and author Tim Lawrence (Love Saves The Day) is currently writing a biography of Arthur. The image above is from Audika Records, a company dedicated to reissuing Arthurs' recordings. It's takne by Arthur's father, with Arthur playing cello, sitting by the lake near his family home.