So I watched the documentary American Artifact: the Rise of the American Rock Poster (as yet unreleased on DVD) at a special screening at Mississippi State University Thursday night. Merle Becker, our director-cum-narrator, apparently quit some staid, high-paid 9-5 to travel the country talking to poster artists. In itself, this requires slight suspension of disbelief, but when she made the inflated claim that she was unaware of what she terms “the rock poster art movement” until roughly five years ago, my bullshit trigger immediately tensed; not optional audience sentiment at the start of an amatuerish documentary. American Artifact is mostly talking heads and posters that flash too quickly for real visual contemplation, betraying Becker's background as the made-for-TV editor and producer that she's been (often for MTV...I know it's Industry, but come on, did she really not know about rock posters?) But the film serves its purpose as a crash course in the poster art that accompanied the dawn of rock and roll and experienced a revival alongside the digital era’s disdain for handmade commercial illustration. It even manages to be entertaining, thanks to the gregariousness, passion and wit of the involved artists (Stanley Mouse, Rick Griffin, Frank Kozik, COOP and Lindsey Kuhn to name a few). These guys are almost charismatic enough to rescue the film from its warm and fuzzy (and altogether viewer-alienating) personal journey narration and (always a bad idea) re-enaction scenes. With the exception of some amazing MC-5 concert shots, American Artifact also suffers from a lack of raw vintage footage or even stills—show footage, backstage footage, footage of the artists doing their thing—and the editing is often a cut-and-paste cheese-fest. In Becker’s defense, this footage may not even exist, and the outtakes during the credits are pretty fun. But in the hands of a more skillful filmmaker or a person intimately familiar with the material or the “community” (buzzword alert) being covered, this could have been a great documentary. Instead, it comes across like the Cliff Notes version of Paul Grushkin & Dennis King’s 2004 book Art of Modern Rock: the Poster Explosion, and I was the fifteen year old geek that devoured Crime and Punishment. So for me, the film was a disappointment—worth seeing, sure, but not worth seeing more than once.

1. Danny Robert's Blogger Portraits

In Southern California, Ming Donkey is better known as Jay Grumpy of the former Recess Records punk band The Grumpies. Now a one-man rockabilly show, Ming spends his days perfecting the washtub bass, teaching drawing at Mississippi State University and making (very affordable, somewhat political) Worker Art, which is on display at Echo Park’s L’Keg Gallery through November 20.

Cheree: How did you first become interested in art?

This morning I chatted with Jason Baldwin about the Left Field exhibit that opens TONIGHT at the Echo Park art/music collective, L’Keg Gallery. A soft-spoken professor  at Vermont’s Norwich University, nothing about Jason’s attire or demeanor suggests counter-cultural affiliation but growing up as a skate-punk in central Louisiana, he was a rarity. His first art lessons came from board designs and comic books. Now he makes collages that manage to exploit the graphic archetypes of Nuevo-Americana (think adolescent Rauschenberg) while communicating highly personal narratives from his own life.

Cheree: You’re from Mississippi?

Once upon a time Herb Rieth traveled the country playing punk shows (and sometimes punk rock banjo!), even touring with Michelle Shocked with his old band the Pony Stars. Now he makes neo-apocalyptic fabric collages, wanders the earth in a paint-splattered hoodie, teaches drawing at the University of Alabama and laughs heartily at just about anything. Recently we spoke about outsider art, punk rock and his upcoming opening at L’Keg Gallery.Cheree: You organized the Left Fielders, didn’t you? Where did the name come from?

Herb: I don’t like taking full credit because I see it as more of a collaborative effort. Maybe that’s a bad thing on my part, maybe I lack business acumen…It Came From Left Field because I always feel myself as an outsider, and one of my favorite Hank Williams songs is Outside Looking In. Also, I like to use esoteric phrases. I love reading Thomas Wolfe, you know, the North Carolina one, and early Cormac McCarthy. They’re just rich with these beautiful turns of phrase, and old country music, oh my gosh—Lefty Frizzell, ‘dancing all over the place till the floor came up and hit me in the face.’ Old bluegrass and country, it’s just full of these folkisms, so there was Left Field. And I was never one to play solo guitar, but I love playing with a band, so you know someone’s got your back. I find three people is really good. Three is a magic number. A stool needs three legs to stand, with three people you’ve got your vendigram of commonalities.

C: What makes you an outsider?