As we wait for Philae to land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, I just wanted to give a shout-out to one of our fellow Houston bands, The Wild Moccasins.
They just had their video for “Eye Makeup” premiered on NPR last week with a nice write-up by Ann Powers (which is a big deal for a Houston Band if your name is not Beyoncé). It’s been fun to watch the Moccasins develop musically and artistically over the years. It almost seems like one minute they were playing a warehouse party and the next minute they are on tour with Of Montreal. (There’s a lot of hard work in between all that of course.) Now, in their most cuckoo move yet, they’ve gone all out Andy Warhol (which goes with nicely with the whole disco thing) for the new video and it’s a total hoot. You should check it out.
I find one coincidence here a bit amusing and that’s the location of Galveston Island. It’s impossible to call two videos in the space of about two weeks a trend in Houston music, but it is funny how both their video and our video feature Galveston island and the Moccasins video just kind of hammers the point home for me that Houston is just too damn respectable these days. Its architecture and trees seem to be constantly demolished to make way for the next great luxury apartments – out with the old in with the new. That may be wonderful to those oil workers sucking off the teat of the current oil boom, but it makes for a very dull and uninteresting backdrop for any filmmaker. When you’re filming, you need character and that new fancy luxury apartment complex with the expensive “simple southern food” restaurant that serves $21 meatloaf just ain’t gonna cut it. On the other hand, do you think a place like Lafitte would ever survive in Houston these days? Helks no! That’s why you gotta drive down a ways to get to some real character and Galveston still has that intact.
I know that when I went to go shoot backdrops for Cthulhu’s island on the jetties and at Fort Travis as well as the beach for the closing scene, I remember thinking how lucky I was to have Galveston nearby because Houston just wasn’t gonna cut it. Houston is money now and the thing is, money is kind of dull. I mean yes, of course you need it to get you by and all that junk but, in and of itself, it’s somewhat boring stuff and I guarantee you that any one of the Galveston queens in the Moccasin’ video has more interesting stories to tell you than any passel of Houston bourgeois. So, thank you Galveston and thank you Moccasins for keepin’ it real.
