Louis Prima BiopicBiography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified. Wednesday, October 25, 2000 Even though the seattle-swing-chat mailing list has been very quiet for a long time, there is one online place that has some Seattle-related swing discussion. Tacoma Tony had the idea to start a thread on the Lindycafe discussion forum, and it actually took off and has remained active for a month. Check it out!
Because the Century Ballroom was having a concert rather than a dance tonight, there'd been some talk on swing-seattle-chat about a movie that was playing at the Experience Music Project's movie theater. I decided this would be a good thing to go to! So I sent word to the Vanguard discussion list (no response there) and to my weblog buddies Dan "Brainlog" Sanderson and Lisa "Bird on a Wire" Winn. They were up for joining me, yay! So we arranged to meet at the museum. I'd not been down that way since the EMP opened. It's a confusing but festive building on the outside. They had signs directing me to the correct entrance for the theater, but once inside the building, I had to wander through the gift shop to the theater entrance, then back once I realized that the checkout stand at the gift shop was where I needed to buy my ticket. The pillars and wind-y corridor were disorienting! After congratulating the clerk on maintaining his patience with the annoying woman who preceded me, I went into the theater and grabbed seats. The room was a reasonable size, and decorated in stark simplicity. Director Don McGlynn and the man who was curating the movie series both spoke for a few moments into a portable sound system. Dan and Lisa slipped into their seats just as the room got dark, relieving my mind.
The movie, Louis Prima: The Wildest, was a good survey of his career. You've probably heard his music. His biggest hit was "Just a Gigalo/I ain't Got Nobody", which was copied note for note by David Lee Roth some years back with none of the fun and charm. Prima was quite a character! He started as a trumpeter, in the thirties, from New Orleans. I hadn't been aware of that part of his career before seeing this movie on AMC a few months ago. I was slightly annoyed by the lame gasps, hoots of inappropriate laughter, and random comments from a guy sitting behind me, but other than that I liked seeing the film with an audience. After the movie, McGlynn talked about the film making process and why he chose Louis Prima as a subject. He said he'd spent about nine years doing a film on Charles Mingus, an agonizing process about a sad life. He wanted something more fun! So when a friend with a huge stock footage collection showed him material of Prima and partner Keely Smith on the Ed Sullivan Show in the early sixties, he made up his mind. There were lots of questions from the audience, but mostly about things that made me wonder if the questioners had been watching the film! A few were knowledgeable Prima fans, though. He also told us about the extra goodies that will be on the DVD when it's released next year. McGlynn has produced three Prima CDs from recordings he collected while making the movie -- stuff that had never been released. I bought all three -- one from the thirties, one from the forties, and one from the fifties and sixties. All are on Reflections, a Danish label.
Lisa, Dan and I went upstairs to the Liquid Lounge (a redundant name for a bar, surely?). We grabbed a booth and drank a few beverages. The topics of discussion: weblog stuff, the latest journal scandals. Is there such a think as the weblog community? I think even less than an online journal community. There was actually a band playing -- Pearl Django. I liked their stuff! (Sound samples on their website) They feature guitar (natch, they are named after Django Reinhardt) and violin. I've heard of them before, but I haven't ever danced to them. If I'd known this was going on, I'd have made an effort to recruit dancers. I offered Dan and Lisa a ride back to the U-district, but they insisted that taking the bus was just fine. A fun evening!
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