Rockin' Out On Presidents Day

Among its many notable days (Black History Month, Groundhog's Day, Valentine's Day - the latter occurring in the month also designated as National Condom Month and National Mend a Broken Heart Month), "Festive February" marks the birthdates of American presidents Abraham Lincoln (February 12) and George Washington (February 22), the latter purportedly the "Father of Our Nation" - albeit in the days before paternity testing. And while cynics like me tend to view President's Day (February 20) as more of a capitalist pretext for a shopping spree than a real holiday, a number of musicians have found inspiration in these guys.


President's Day: a time to KISS you money goodbye?

So, in the spirit of the day, here are my favorite Presidents Day Tunes!

*** ABRAHAM LINCOLN (February 12) ***

The Skeptics - "Ghost of Abraham Lincoln"


Frederick, MD's own Skeptics (guitarist Andy McCutcheon, bassist Dennis Crolley, drummer Stephen Blickenstaff) pay homage to The Great Emancipator, "honest Abe, long tall Abe, good old Abe" - whose ghost is out to find John Wilkes Booth and kick his conspiratorial thespian ass.


Abe has a bone to pick with John Wilkes Booth

This video was directed by local boy-made-good Chris LaMartina, who as director of the horror-gore-galore film President's Day (2010) knows a thing or two about Mr. Lincoln! (See City Paper's "The Golden Abe of Horror," 2/10/2010.)



*** GEORGE WASHINGTON (February 22) ***

Cox & Combes - "Washington"


"Cox & Combes" is the alias of Brad Neely, a comic book artist and television writer/producer (South Park). Though we've all heard the mythic tales of our first Prez who couldn't lie when he cut down cherry trees and who single-handedly won the War of Independence, it's refreshing to learn that these deeds were merely the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Neely informs us that no only was George six-foot-eight (bigger than life!) and blessed with "two sets of testicles so divine" (you need hefty hydraulics power to be able to father your country), but he also ate redcoats's brains and invented cocaine. (Knowledge is power, kids!)

*** THE OTHER PRESIDENTS WE HONOR ON THIS DAY ***

Though Presidents Day officially associates itself with Washington’s Birthday (and thus is celebrated on the third Monday of February, which is closest to George's February 22nd birthdate), it's still regarded as a day to honor all former presidents of the US of A. Here's a good way to remember the other chiefs we once hailed.

The Animaniacs celebrate "The Presidents" up through Clinton.


Nickelodeon sings "Presidents Song" up through George W.


Thanks to They Might Be Giants, President James K. Polk ("The Napoleon of the Stump"!) gets his due in song, too.

Watch TMBG's "James K. Polk."


Of course, Robert Smigel's Saturday Night Live videos have ensured that we don't forget about the superheroic exploits of the more recent X-Presidents: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush.

Watch the "X-Presidents."


But for a definitive list of Presidential Pop, I kowtow to A.V. Club's definitive "Hails to the Chief: 70 songs about American presidents" that lists everything from The Blind Robins' "That Goddamn Herbert Hoover"/"We'd Like To Thank You Herbert Hoover" (from the Annie soundtrack) and The Ramones "Bonzo Goes To Bitburg" (not to mention Zappa's "Reagan at Bitburg") to Ashford & Simpsons' "Solid (As Barack)." Their list even credits Devo's "Whip It" - ostensibly about sex and masochism - as being a call out ("When a problem comes along, you can whip it!") to a beleaguered Jimmy Carter, who was was at the time beset by the Double Whammy of the recession and the Iranian hostage crisis.

But one of my faves is The Legendary K.O.'s "George Bush Don't Like Black People," one of the many George W. Bush ditty-disses.

Watch "George Bush Don't Like Black People."


*** More Festive February Working Holidays Songs ***



OK, on a related note...Festive February made me think back to Simple Machines Records' great "Working Holidays" series of 7" vinyl singles from the early '90s. One of these was the split single for February that featured two local bands - Lungfish 's "Abe Lincoln" and The Tinklers' "James Brown" (an homage to Black History Month by the whitest of white boy bands!). I remember it had a wraparound picture sleeve with the month's calendar on the reverse side. According to Charles Browawn, The Tinklers wrote the poetic intro to "James Brown," but the song itself came from a 1970 Folkways LP called Ghetto Reality by Nancy Dupree and her elementary school class.

Watch The Tinklers' "James Brown."


Listen to Lungfish's "Abe Lincoln."


The rest of SMR's "Working Holidays" releases are shown below:

Experimental Film Gets Punk'd

The color of infinity inside an empty glass
I'm squinting my eye and turning off
and on and on and off the light

It's for this experimental film
Which nobody knows about and which
I'm still figuring out what's going to go
In my experimental film
- "Experimental Film" by They Might Be Giants

Some - what am I saying...most - experimental films take themselves way too seriously. Which is why I love filmmakers who occasionally take the stuffing out of experimental film's pretensions. Coleman Miller's Uso Justo is one such film.



Uso Justo
I was lucky to see this short in 2005 at Skizz Cyzyk's MicroCineFest film festival, where it won Best EXperimental Film and Audience awards. It also won the "Ken Burns Best of the Fest" Award at the 2005 Ann Arbor Film Festival. Uso Justo is a hilarious restructuring of an obscure 1959 Mexican film, created in the same recontextual spirit as Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily? and the restructured narratives of experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin (Tribulation 99, Spectres of the Spectrum, Mock-up On Mu).




You used to be able to see the whole film at the digital mag Wholphin's website, but no longer. This is an Internet Archives/Open Source Movie clip from Coleman Miller's film "Uso Justo":


Even as You and I

Even as You and I: Hy Hirsch as the Idiot Savant

Of course, an earlier spoof of the experimental excesses of avant-garde cinema was Roger Barlow, Harry Hay and Leroy Robbin's hilarious 1937 short Even - As You and I, which you can find on the Kino Video DVD collection Avant-Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s.

You can also see this film on YouTube, as shown below:

Even as You And I - Part 1


Even as You and I - Part 2


(Roger Barlow, Harry Hay & LeRoy Robbins, USA , 1937, b&w, 12 minutes)

This brilliant spoof of surrealist films highlights the fine line between making “amateur” home movies and serious “high art.”

In it, three men come across an ad for an amateur filmmaking contest and, after failing to come up with a standard Hollywood scenario (their script gets as far as “boy meets girl”!), they see an article on Surrealism in Time Magazine and take to the “hot” genre like melting watches to a Salvador Dali landscape painting. In fact, the film’s narrative was based on a real-life amateur film contest sponsored by Liberty magazine and MGM’s Pete Smith “Specialty Films” unit that the film’s three directors entered (two of the directors, Roger Barlow and Harry Hay, portray themselves in the film). As Nicolas Rombes comments on his Professor DVD blog:

Many of the images in the film are shocking and surprising in a surrealist way, and yet because we know this is a comedy--and because the film is linked to "amateur" practices--they are easy to dismiss. I think the fact that this short movie uses the amateur context to make a mock avant-garde film is sort of telling: even though amateur film and avant-garde seem at opposite ends of the spectrum (one highly self-conscious, difficult, and artistic, one almost purely mimetic and supposedly artless) they are in fact closely linked.

The Enoch Pratt Free Library owns another great spoof of experimental films its 16mm film collection, Carson Davidson's award-winning Help! My Snowman's Burning Down (1964, 9 minutes, 16mm).

Help! My Snowman’s Burning Down
In this Oscar-nominated satire on avant-garde surrealistic films (1965, Best Short Subject, Live Action Subjects), a beatnik in a homburg hat sits in a bathtub on a New York pier, typing on toilet paper and later fishing by casting his ring-baited line down the bath drain. When a female hand emerges from the drain, he paints one fingernail and it disappears. When he opens a medicine cabinet, he finds another guy shaving on the other side. Eventually his bathtub sets sail in the harbour, only to encounter a toy sub in the film’s climax. Check this item in Pratt's catalog. Don't have a 16mm projector? Not to worry, somebody uploaded this film to YouTube:

Help! My Snowman's Burning Down


A YouTube commentator claims that HBO used to air Davidson's short between movies "back in the old days when they played short films between top-of-the-hour showtimes." That sounds pretty cool; wish I had HBO!

I dunno much about Carson Davidson. Some sources say he was a cinematographer on a cult film called The Flesh Eaters (1964) that was directed by Jack Curtis. Other sources say "Carson Davidson" was a pseudonym of Jack Curtis (!)(?). Whatever, his films are pretty interesting and worth checking out.

The Pratt Library also owns another Oscar-nominated short (1956, Best Short Subject) by Carson Davidson, 3rd Ave. El (1955). And yes, it's also on YouTube.

Related Links:
www.colemanmiller.com
Coleman's Blog: the seemless universe