Stay tuned to Randomville for Mackenzie McAninch’s daily coverage of this year’s event. Click here to see photos from each day of Bumbershoot throughout the weekend.

 

What I thought was an allergy attack all week turned out to be a cold, so I got to the festival a little late today. The first destination was to go see Tacoma's The Fucking Eagles, who were playing at a stage inside of the Experience Music Project.

Little did I know there would be a long line just to even get into that room. I'd already been dealing with people walking extremely S L O W all weekend long (it's a "Seattle, lollygagging, we're in no hurry" type thing which constantly drives me insane in this city), so add that with the effects of being sick, and there's no way I'm waiting in a line this afternoon, especially for a fairly local band.

This left just enough time to run over to the 1 Reel Film Festival to catch the Best of SIFF, Jury Prize Winners. Maybe just sitting and relaxing a little was what I needed for a while. The first of four short films was called Look Sharp and had an English woman in her 40's waking up in a bed with two young men in a cracked-out looking apartment. They are presumably musicians as her goal is to capture unique images of them.

One is a tall and lanky blonde man who is mild-mannered and soft spoken. The other is a hot head who probably has a substance abuse problem to go along with his accelerated hostility. Angry man seems to be her main focus and she wants a shot of him as his natural self, but he's reluctant; especially when she tells him to take off his shirt. He really explodes when she asks him the last time he received a hug.

Throwing her to the bed, he hits her and takes pictures of her in fear with her own camera. Mild Boy finally raises his voice to get him off of the lady. After some quarreling, Angry Man seems about to strike Mild Man, and as he lunges, he ends up grasping for a hug American Beauty-style. As he's hugging and weeping, the woman takes a picture of their toes touching and the film ends.

Pick Up was my favorite of the four, opening with a payphone ringing on a city street in Paris and yes, the movie Phone Booth comes to mind. This time the culprit is an alleged schizophrenic, Penelope Cruz-resembling brunette in her apartment across the street. Most of the time no one answers to her dismay, but finally what she deems as a cute young man answers and they have an obviously strange chat for a while. She has many amusing conversations but is the most intrigued with younger men she talks to. Plus, she has the power here because most women would not speak to a strange man on a phone for a very long time.

It seems as if the woman never leaves her apartment and this is her only means of communication with the outside world. Eventually she talks to a black man named Jacky and she's finally comfortable enough to identify herself as Lea. Jacky even comes back later in the evening in hopes that the phone will ring again and it does. She asks if he would come up if invited. Jacky says yes and asks Lea if she would come down if invited. She fidgets and it seems like she will, so he tells her he'll hang up and wait for her arrival. But just when you think she'll go, she redials the phone and the screen goes black.

Wigald is a story about a kid who is simply better off dead; but can't seem to get there. The shot opens with an early-20’s loser falling face-first on to a scaffold above a building. He rolls over with a cut on his head and just seems amazed.

Next he's in his apartment and he swallows a massive concoction of pills, goes and turns on his gas oven, sits in front of it and puts a gun to his head. Then his father
knocks on the door so he has to quickly hide the gun in the oven. His dad lights the stove for his dazed son, not knowing about the gun. Father is there to complain about his marriage and is completely oblivious to his sweating and convulsing son. He even sends the kid out for a beer run.

Eventually back in the apartment the kid passes out as the gun begins firing after being over-heated. The story gets pretty comical from here with his bumbling parents still arguing in the hospital and not noticing the kid has flat-lined. The three eventually make it to therapy where the father explains he doesn't see his own part in any problems here.

 

That's the last straw for the son and he gets up, runs to the window and dives out....onto the scaffold. Realizing he can't even kill himself right, he decides to climb down the fire escape, but he slips and as he's falling upside down, the screen pauses and the credits role. Tons of laughter from the crowd for this film.

As for The Girl Who Swallowed Bees, I was bored to death within the first five minutes. It's a dark fairy tale with a cartoon background that is somewhere between Alice in Wonderland and Beetlejuice. The girl in the story is thinking of the several ways to commit suicide and every sentence rhymes along the way. She decides to choose swallowing bees. Uh-huh.

I liked Greg Proops’ The Chat Show well enough last night that I decided to give it another round. Part of the reason is that I'm a big fan of one of his guests in Greg Fitzsimmons. Fitzsimmons and Proops traded insults back and forth and the show flowed much more smoothly tonight. He of course had Colin Hay from Men at Work as a musical guest, as well as The Watson Twins and local pianist Victor Noriega. Afterwards, Proops was kind enough to grant Randomville a fun and charming interview:

 

Randomville: It seems like you mess with your crowd a lot. Do you always plan to involve them?

 

Greg Proops: Not really, but here in Seattle it’s a more fun and engaging audience, so I just kind of went with it. They’re a pretty well-informed, liberal crowd.

 

 

Rv: You made some jokes about Portland and even Wenatchee, WA this weekend. Do you have jokes ready when people say they’re from those places, or was that all improv?

 

GP: Well, I have been doing stand-up for a long time, so I usually have something about somewhere. But sometimes I make it up on the spot.

 

 

Rv: So how did you get connected with Colin Hay? (Almost on cue, Hay and Victor Noriega enter the room.)

 

GP: Colin and I were lovers in school, and, uh well here he is now!

 

 

Rv: Was that in Kentucky?

 

GP: Yes, it was in Kentucky. Colin and I met at a club called Largo in Los Angeles, which was ages ago. We started joining up to do some gigs there and it just kind of blossomed.

 

 

Rv: Last night it seemed like you rode guest Janeane Garofalo pretty hard and made many interruptions while she spoke. Do your guests ever get upset with that?

 

GP: No, but remember she was reading from her journal at one point and I can’t let that go on. Read from your journal later.

 

 

Rv: So you didn’t know what she was going to talk about beforehand?

 

GP: Oh no, we never do. I let the guests and musicians bring up whatever they want.

 

 

Rv: Are you shopping The Chat Show to late-night television?

 

GP: Oh yeah, and what I would not like to change about it is what you saw: people talking about what they want. And it’s different. Like, where would The Watson Twins come from? They would be a country act thirty or forty years ago.

 

 

Rv: 1954 in Nashville? (This is re-visiting a joke Fitzsimmons made about Proops’ wardrobe tonight.)

 

GP: Yeah, where I got my hair. Now they are at Bumbershoot and we have them on and we let them do their thing. I mean you won’t see too many jazz pianists and blue-grass duos on other shows. I’ve even invited a Negro onto the show before. And I had women on today and I let them talk.

 

 

Rv: Well what if a late-night talk show wanted you to alter your style? Would you do it?

 

GP: Well I’m a whore like anyone else in Hollywood and I’d change it up to a certain point but I still would want to have loads of music and comics because those are my favorites.

 

 

Rv: Would you be comfortable if your show would be where youth turned to get their political info like on The Daily Show?

 

GP: Any kind of willful ignorance bothers me but I don’t think that watching a comedy show and getting your political content from there is necessarily destructive. At least it’s coming with a dose of satire. As opposed to just straight up lies, which is what the news usually is.

 

 

Rv: Why did Whose Line Is It? fade off?

 

GP: Not because of the artists. There was a lot of politics at ABC at the time and people were getting fired. It kind of had its run and Drew Carey’s show was ending. But we all work together all the time now still; I can’t keep these guys off me.

 

 

Rv: Has Wayne Brady ever really choked a bitch?

 

GP: (laughs) As far as I know....yes. He’s choked a lot of bitches in my time. No, Wayne is a lamb chop.

 

 

Rv: Your thoughts on Dane Cook? I understand he’s not always well-received on the comedy circuit?

 

GP: Yeah, whatever. He’s not for me. He’s for who he’s for.

 

 

Rv: Like all of his Myspace friends.

 

GP: Yeah, you know. If he introduces people to comedy and the idea of stand-up comedy then that’s a good thing. Then maybe they’ll move on to other types of comics who cover different kinds of categories than what Dane Cook does.

 

 

Rv: Maybe they’ll find The Chat Show?

 

GP: Find The Chat Show. Dane does what Dane does. Right on.

 

 

Rv: You lent your voice to Stripperella. Why didn’t that gem of a show last?

 

GP: You got me buddy. Jack Kirby was there. I got to meet him in the studio and that was pretty much the high point for me. And Pamela (Anderson) who is ridiculously small. She’s like a Christmas ornament.

 

 

Rv: Since you’ve worked with Joan Rivers and her daughter critiquing Oscar fashion, who designs your wardrobe?

 

GP: My wife and I (sitting with us in the room) construct it. Beyonce’s mother does a lot of the original designs. Hillary and Haylie Duff, they do my shoes. No, I just pick it out.

 

 

Rv: Give me your best drug-related story of your past.

 

GP: (sings) Where do I begin? The most fun taking drugs on stage was in Dublin years ago and we were doing a gig; an AIDS benefit. So I was talking a lot of shit and the crowd handed me dope and I got high. I started talking shit about the pope. The late pope; the one who looked like Robin Williams. Not the new pope; the Nazi.

 

Thanks to Greg Proops for the interview.

 

I have to admit that I was pretty bummed that Ryan Shaw cancelled on the festival, so I resorted to dinner around the beautiful International Fountain. It was a great scene on a cool evening. The weather has been perfect all weekend with plenty of sun and highs only around 75.

 

Keeping with my trend today of art over music, I headed over to see the Vau de Vire Society. It’s kind of like the Cirque du Soleil meets Burlesque meets The Dresden Dolls. There were too many things going on at once to even write about but over the hour we saw a “Cowboy Girl” use a B.B. Gun to shoot strategically placed balloons off of a rather homo-erotic male dancer; nature-ignoring acrobatics; trapeze artists; choreographed dancing, and a wild, spinning aluminum box. And Fire! Tons of fire! Fire breathing; girls with Freddy Krueger claws with fire tips; jump ropes made of fire and hula hoops made of fire. Bravo to these talented folks!

 

Finally my night ended with some music from Los Angeles band Devendra Banhart. Equal parts folk and classic, southern rock and jam, they made great background music to sit up against a tree while typing away on the laptop. They also pulled a great stunt by allowing a few kids who claimed to be musicians to come up to the stage and play a number. They sucked but it was still probably a thrill for them.