Well-executed buffet

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Meeting David Walker, the man behind BadAzz Mofo

The Stumptown Comics Fest is a yearly event in Portland, Oregon that emphasizes the comics artist community in Portland. Portland is a comics town in much the same way it is an indie music town or micro brew mecca. There is a whole heck of a lot of all three and there definitely is a community surrounding each of these that is quite extensive.

Portland, Oregon also seems to be a place where people who are into niche extreme interests in culture and art do their thing quite visibly. Do you know of another town that features the likes of a Zombie film festival with eleven media sponsors or an annual HP Lovecraft Film Festival and Cthulhu Con that seems to get bigger every year?

Portland is also the home of David Walker, also known as the writer, editor, designer, publisher, and HNIC (apparently an acronym featuring a certain ethnophaulism) of BadAzz Mofo a pop culture zine dedicated to the 1970s filmmaking which has been given moniker, blaxploitation for both better and worse. He also is the the co-author of a new book, Reflections on Blaxploitation: Actors and Directors Speak. He has also made some films including a documentary on the blaxploitation era, provided some pretty entertaining writing on film for Willamette Week for several years and is currently the director of a computer technology after school program that Intel sponsors.

I met up with Walker at Stumptown where he had a corner table. I was getting overwhelmed by the volume of young dedicated artists who with their homegrown books and quirky visions that take more than a passing glance to truly appreciate so on my third or fourth turn around the large room in the Lloyd Center DoubleTree tended to gravitate towards the room's perimeter and folks who were obviously dealers selling graphic novels and so forth. Walker and I quickly found ourselves in a multi-layered discussion about independent film, blaxploitation and the history of exploitation filmmaking in Portland. I was glad to have met up with him. I haven't met anyone who could finish my sentence "I have a theory that all the films of that era were somehow templated in Superfly, Shaft, and ..." "Sweetback's," Walker interjected. And he agreed with me that they wouldn't have had the impact they did if it weren't for the kind of Renaissance men who made them (Gordon Parks Sr., Gordon Parks Jr., and Melvin Van Peebles.)

Since this meeting, I have much been enjoying his book and the issues of Badazz Mofo he gave me. I like his writing about this era because he takes it on from so many perspectives: historical, sociological, but mostly as a fan of kick-ass movies that had their own style and swagger. He started his print zine in the nineties. And there is a parallel to the discussion he and I had about independent filmmaking both then and now. I truly believe that independent filmmaking in the pre-digital era was a heroic act, more than it is now due to the finicky technology of 16mm celluloid film stocks, sync sound and the multiple prints needed to even get your work completed and so forth. The image of Cassavetes putting mortgages on his house to finish films always come to mind. In print, Walker took his love for a genre and did what folks do now, seemingly ubiquitously with blogging. Here's to you, Mr Walker. I'll be ordering up some back issues soon.

posted by well-executed buffet at 1:19 PM

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