The Devil and Daniel Johnston

I finally watched "The Devil And Daniel Johnston" last night, and I have to say that it deserves all the raves it's getting. It helps that Johnston seems to have recorded everything that happened to him, ever, giving the filmmakers a lot to work with. In a subtle way, the movie was something of an indictment of the way people romanticize artists with mental illness, when mental illness is mostly just a tragic waste. Indicts to a degree---more interestingly, the filmmakers allowed that Johnston's manic depression is personally hellish, but quite probably one of the factors that makes him a genius songwriter. All in all, it's hard to make a movie that's even-handed and still intriguing, and this movie is it. I particularly liked how the filmmakers were able to show Johnston's parents sympathetically without whitewashing the way their fundamentalist religious methods of bringing him up seemed to have escalated his mental problems.

This mural Johnston did is a bona fide city landmark, and the city even stepped in to protect it when the record shop it was on was bought out by a Baja Fresh. I can attest that it's something of an arresting bit of graffiti---whenever I've taken people who don't know about it down to the Drag, they usually remark upon it. It makes people happy.

If you've never heard Johnston's music, I recommend checking it out. Here's a particular favorite of mine:

"Like A Monkey"---Daniel Johnston

Frequent Pandagon commenter Kathy McCarty is interviewed extensively in the movie, and she's done an album of Johnston cover songs, with the idea being that a lot of his stuff is inaccessible because of the obtuse way he performs it and her covers might make it more accessible. Here's her lovely cover of "Walking the Cow".

"Walking the Cow"---Kathy McCarty