Regional U.S. Horror : Richard Griffin

Regional U.S. Horror : Richard Griffin May 4, 2019 1:37:01 GMT

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Post by petrolino on May 4, 2019 1:37:01 GMT

Richard Griffin is the 21st century horror filmmaker who surprises me most because he can make a stack of pebbles look like a pile of gold. This is achieved through hard work and dedication. He has a loyal stock company, determined technical crew and appreciative fanbase which he's built up over many years. His early digital work was speedily shot, heavily industrialised, cheaply produced and rough as hell yet (somehow) it still appears relatively polished when viewed today. The imaginative nightclub / parking lot drug deal horror 'Raving Maniacs' (2005) serves as a good example, though it's not a film I'm especially fond of.

In the last 10 years, Griffin's produced some of the finest American horror film product, to my mind. He's also lit a raging fire under so many aspects of New England's alternative culture, celebrating everything from the psychological rage of Throwing Muses (Rhode Island) to the philosophical musings of sister band Pixies (Massachusetts), something that will always get my vote. I need to see 'Nun Of That' (2008) with Sarah Nicklin so bad.

"Back in the socially awkward years of late high school, Throwing Muses’ first album and the subsequent Chains Changed EP were the most cathartic albums I owned. Although I was also a big Joy Division fan, I preferred the conversational, open-ended quality of singer/songwriter Kristin Hersh’s often harrowing narratives — they were fearless but also approachable, humane, sharp. They felt like real life to me. I don’t think I’d ever seen a songwriter write so matter-of-factly, and so un-self-pityingly, about some of the bleakest experiences of her life — or with such wry humor."

- Andrea AD, Warped Reality

"There is a childhood photo of Tanya Donelly and Kristin Hersh that documents, as Donelly puts it, “a really horribly awkward disgusting stage.” The two were about 11. “We were cute when we were little, but then Kristin developed physically very young, and I didn’t develop — or grow, really — until I was literally about 16. I was such a runt. So there was this period of time where she looked like a woman, and I was a homunculus.” (Homunculus: a little man, a dwarf.)
Donelly is picking at lunch — vanilla ice cream, and why not? — in a London restaurant whose tall windows showcase the gray afternoon drizzle. “Sometimes people would literally think that because my mother’s name was Kristin that [Hersh] was my mother,” she says. “I know it sounds insane, but it actually happened.” She gazes out the window. “Just lately, though, I can go back and look at pictures of myself, and I have such affection for that child.”
Donelly’s earliest memories come from the first four years of her life, when her family moved around a lot in a Land Rover before settling in Rhode Island. These recollections apparently resemble Blind Melon videos. “I remember lying in lilies of the valley,” she says. Then there are the dreamlike ones: “I remember weird little animal things. This can’t be right, but I remember tigers outside the tent in Arizona and giraffe feet outside the door in San Francisco.” She laughs. “I think those were actually high heels, but because I was raised around hippies, I didn’t know what they were.”
Donelly was exposed to a “Dear Mr. Fantasy” lifestyle at a young age — there were plenty of drugs, a lot of nudity, a parade of people coming and going. She says in a recent book that it left her with a lot of “images that I wish I didn’t have, pictures that won’t go away.” But she stresses that “as far as the parent thing goes, they set us in a place where we felt loved and secure. I don’t feel wounded by my childhood. I’m lucky to have been raised in an environment that allowed me freedom to figure out what I wanted to do. I have a hard time with the blame culture. It’s really boring.”
A waiter offers water. “Thank you,” Donelly says graciously. The best word to describe Donelly is kind, which is reiterated by every person remotely close to the band. She is very aware of the feelings of others. She has a lilting speaking voice and a frequent laugh. When she talks to you, she sometimes reaches over and grabs your arm.
Donelly is a bit shy at first, which is not surprising considering that every morning before first grade and most of second, she threw up. Donelly had been used to being around adults (except for a stint at a hippie kindergarten called the Pink Pussycat), and the pack of kids terrified her: “I was so stressed out by it, I just wanted to be invisible.” In a Dickensian move, the teacher “literally separated me from the rest of the class.” She shrugs. “It was fine by me. I wanted to be back there.”
She found solace in a tight friendship with Hersh when they were 8. “We pretty much instantly became friends.” Donelly says. “It was very romantic because I had a best friend at the time, and she did too, so we used to sneak off together like lovers. Little girls are so territorial about the best-friend thing.” Later, Donelly’s father married Hersh’s mother, which “got a little bit strange because it turned into more of a sibling thing.” Donelly and Hersh shared a room three nights a week (Donelly’s parents had joint custody) and taught themselves to play guitar while listening to the Beatles, the Pretenders and the Velvet Underground. “We had a picture of the Hardy Boys up at one point — very brief,” Donelly confesses. She buries her head in her hands. “Oh, she is going to chop my head off.”
In high school the two became more self-assured, hanging with the art chicks. “Tanya was always ambitious,” says her brother Christopher, a jeweler. “She always hung out with the crowd of people that you knew were going to go someplace. They weren’t necessarily the most popular people, but they were the fastest movers.”
Hersh and Donelly formed Throwing Muses in ’81. One of their first gigs was a fund-raiser at the Cushing Gallery, in Newport, R.I.”It was a sit-down event, a lot of parents,” says Christopher Donelly. “It was almost like you were going to watch an orchestra, and then this rock & roll band comes on.” He laughs. “It was daytime, too. The sun was coming in.”
By the time Donelly hit 17 — when most girls were decorating lockers for the pep club — the Muses were a fixture in local clubs. “When I think of myself then, I don’t think of myself as being young,” Donelly says. The band built up a rabid following enticed by swirling songs that lurched and shifted and by Hersh’s unmistakable voice and obtuse lyrics whose images often hinted at her struggle with a form of schizophrenia known as bipolarity. When Donelly was 19, the Muses were signed to Britain’s 4AD."

- Jancee Dunn, Rolling Stone

"The Newport Folk Festival is where my parents met when they were teenagers. Well, they met before that but they both worked the Folk Festival and that's how they fell in love yadda yadda. I will tell you, as an Islander, that's when most of us get out of town (laughs). It's very exciting and wonderful, but it also depends on what's going on. The Folk Festival has always been separate from what we were doing here, and oddly—and this is something my sister Kristin and I have always wondered—how is it that we have never been invited? Not the Throwing Muses. Not The Breeders. Not Belly. Neither myself nor Kristin as solo artists. Our parents worked it. We grew up here. We're here, always been here. Never invited."

- Tanya Donelly, Billboard

Pixies & Throwing Muses on TV / ‘In Shock’ – Kristin Hersh