Welcome to Amusing Jews, where we celebrate Jewish contributors and contributions to American popular
culture. I'm Jonathan Friedman and I'm Joey Agelfield. Producer engineer Mike Tomern is
working somewhere behind the scenes. Amusing Jews is a project of a Data Savareine
Congregation for Humanistic Judaism, the Cool Shool Jewish Cultural Community, and Atheist United
Studios. Hey Joey, the theme song to the long running PBS animated series
Arthur, performed by Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, begins every day when
you're walking down the street and everybody that you meet has an original point of
view. Questions about what constitutes originality aside, there's nothing new under the sun
and all that, this song touches on something deep. The way we see
the world is shaped by our unique experiences. This is a big reason why
we like stories. It's the closest we'll ever get to truly knowing about someone
else. Where they came from, what they've been through, where they're going,
how they think, how they feel, and how they develop and express
their points of view. Our guest today is passionate about learning from and sharing
these kinds of stories. We're delighted to talk with Maggie Rowling Smith, a
writer, filmmaker, and activist who directed the documentary Tucson Salvage, co written
with her husband Brian Javis. Smith co adapted Brian's collection of short stories into
the Amazon Prime series Spent Saints, and directed the documentary Whole Enchilada, about
the roots of Tucson's desert rock music. She is also the author of a
forthcoming young adult novel, Catamopus, and edits the literary magazine Glue Gun.
Maggie, welcome to Amusing Jews. Hey, thanks so much, thanks for
having me on. So as I mentioned Tucson Salvage, Whole Enchilada, and
much of your work centers on Tucson, Arizona, where you live. What
makes Tucson such a right place for storytelling? Well, Tisson was built on
the spirit and literal bones of the Tajona o Odum tribe, and it's a
very haunted place by many people over many years accounts. It's also super close
to La Fronterra and No Gallas and all of the border crossing casualties that we
have every year. So there's a really great synergy between native culture and Hispanic
specifically Mexican culture here. And it's also a really great town because u of
A is such a good college public wise, so we have some curious and
interested people between the professors and their families and the students, which makes it
neat. And then it's also along the I tend the major stop between Los
Angeles and El Paso, so we have a lot of truckers and trains and
I don't know, transient people that come through here, So it makes it
a pretty great place for storytelling. Yeah. So I'm a big advocate for
local stories, local history, and I remind people that everyone is, in
fact the historical figure. History is a process and it's always unfolding, and
human history is a collective story of all of us. Are kind of impossibly
intricate story of all types of people, not just the rich and famous and
powerful and so forth. I'm wondering if you share that point of view.
That's something that I pick up on when I'm looking at your documentaries in particular.
Absolutely, I think that we've kind of settled as a society for the
Bell curve. You know, it's like, as long as everyone has like
a mediocre like C plus life. It's fine, and a few people rise
to the top and a few people fail. And I guess I'm very not
interested in the top one two percent that is well covered by regular media.
I'm much more interested in either the people who are doc in the middle and
realize it and are trying to do something about it, or the people that
have just completely fallen through the crass. So your documentary, Whole Enchilada explores
Tucson's rock scene. What about that scene makes it so special and what attracted
you to it and maybe to the subject of music in general. Well,
Tucson is a strange place because we're so isolated with desert all around us.
But we do have that awesome Mariaki influence coming up from Mexico and Marteno influence,
and then we also have like hip hop because of the reservation nearby,
and heavy metal because of the reservation nearby, and then we have this kind
of like college rock jangle rock scene too. It's a great confluence of stuff.
And of course there's the legend of the Cowboy, and we're only fifty
minutes from the OK Corral, so you definitely have the gun toting libertarians here
represented as well, So it makes for great storytelling, but it also makes
for great music and great self expression, and the way that it's been able
to stay niche all this time and not blow up like Seattle or you know,
even somewhere like Tempe. You at the gym Blossoms years ago experienced that
kind of temporary spotlight that kind of amalgamized everything. We've always kind of stayed
out of the fray, except for maybe Linda Ronstadt. So we're doing pretty
okay for originality here. I don't know if you want to share about this.
I know that you mentioned before to me that you have a little bit
of rock and roll history in your family. I believe with Susie cream Cheese.
Ah, yes, that's true. My mom's stepsister is actually purported to
be the actual Sezee cream Cheese of Frank Zappa fame, and did in fact
run off from rural at North Carolina where she was from, and disappear into
the hill and canyons of LA for several years. She confirmed the is you
know on a few liner notes as credited with tambourine and some other things.
So it was very exciting when I saw Zapple plays ZAPPI wore my Sez cream
t shirt and had Dweezl sign it, so it felt like we were coming
back to the roots. Very cool. So I think when we think about
popular culture, we generally think of big entertainment projects, mainstream appeal, monetary
success, that kind of thing. But in the broader sense, pop culture
is really the people's culture. I would even call it our contemporary shared collective
folk culture. Film, television, radio, books, comic books, magazines,
and all of that, whether or not they attract a large audience.
So you know, if we have big budget, blockbuster spectacles on one side
of this pop culture spectrum, your films are perhaps on the other side of
that spectrum. Both types of movies, of course, tell stories, but
in a profound way. The stories you tell in Tucson Salvage in particular,
are more real, both because they are unvarnished non fiction and because the people
you profile are, at least on the surface ordinary. But as anyone who
has ever lived lives knows, there are many complicated and sometimes tragic layers that
make up what we call ordinary. So my question for you is how and
why did you decide to give voice to these people in Tucson Salvage and some
of your other projects. So my husband, Brian Smith does a column called
Tucson Salvage in the Tucson Weekly, and there's a story that appears every two
weeks, and he's specifically trying to give voice to the underserved. And he
gave me access to eight and a half year's worth of columns and said,
you can pick the people you want for the documentary. So the way that
I kind of analyzed that was sort of people that I thought no one had
ever seen on screen before, or people who were so rarely put on screen
that they were often stereotyped or undermined when they were put on screen. And
I tried specifically to take out as much movie magic as possible, Like I
didn't use any music during there to underscore or change any of the emotion.
I just let them tell the story and their own words and tried to really
edit it with the flow of their own personal monologue. And I spent a
lot of time with the people in the places where they either lived or or
camped or just tried to get a really authentic feel for who they were and
then bring them to the big screen. And some of the people are very
specifically kind of like scary to the main screen, and I feel like most
people wouldn't stop and even give them a dollar through their window. So I
think it's important that they have the chants as viewers behind the safety of their
screen to actually hear these people out and see what's going on in their lives.
Yeah. I really appreciate the way you humanized these stories, and the
bare bones approach is really effective. I'd prefer it. I think the stripping
down, stripping away all of that glitz and glamour and just showing people how
they are, it's really powerful. The coolest thing about doing that was The
Loft is like the Art House theater in Tucson, and when it debuted,
we had a screening there and we invited all the participants and they all brought
their entourage of their families or whoever they wanted to bring, and they sat
in the first like ten rows, and just watching their faces when they saw
themselves on the big screen was super powerful, because not only did they think
they didn't have stories worth telling in almost every single case, but when their
friends saw them, it was like they totally validated their lives and some of
the people who really had I mean, most people in the film had really
tough lives, but you know, some of the kids of the people,
for example, were really like for the first time, perhaps in respect or
in awe of their mom or dad for all they had been through, instead
of just feeling marginalized or like, oh, we're just crappy, poor people
no one cares about in this town. So it was super super moving for
us Arizona outsiders. You know, might you explain a little bit about the
substantent differences between Phoenix and Tucson, for instance, Sure, Well, Phoenix
is the big metropolitan area that strives to be as popular as Denver or Miami,
right, so you get all the plastic surgery and the Kardashian aspirations.
Over there, you see a lot more suicide doors and amazing cars, and
it coincides with there being very low taxes and very poor education publicly, and
also sadly a huge discrepancy of wealth, which leads to a lot of gang
violence and racial tension in Phoenix proper, because there's essentially the white part of
Phoenix, and then South Phoenix is black, and then everywhere in between as
Mexican and near the three shall meet, except perhaps on the west side at
a head shop. So it's an interesting place, but it's it's pretty problematic
when you're a kid. Most people I knew grew up there and left as
soon as they could at age eighteen, or you know, at least moved
to a suburb for college, and then people come back when they have their
corporate job, you know, or their merrill lynch job, and then they
retire there. Because there's lots of golf courses and lots of green grass despite
the desert, Tucson is a little you know, blue dot in the midst
of a reddish purple or perhaps just red state. And because we're close to
the border and have a lot of well edged cad people in a smaller population,
I think we tend to you know, you'll you'll tend to see a
lot more empathy, a lot of signs of you know, giving people water
is not a crime, that kind of thing. Lots of bumper sticker cars
keep Tucson weird. You know. There's a real civic pride about being nicer
and being better here, and Phoenix could care less about Tucson and just just
pretty snobby towards us and they pretty much just leave us alone, which is
probably pretty good. Yeah. One of the things that I think you're drawing
out is the local nature of our lives, and maybe there are these kind
of amazing stories that we would never think of right outside our door, wherever
we might be living. I think there's something inspirational about your approach to focusing
on the local, because ultimately that's where we all live and there are stories
all around us. That's right. I do like to focus on the local
because when you're you know, so when you live in La most things have
been over media saturated, and so you can't ever cover anything that hasn't already
been covered by a much bigger lens and broader perspective. But here you can
really focus on the guy on the corner holding up the sign that's been holding
it up for four years, and what is his story and why is he
still there? And what's his dog's name? And it is It's a nice
specificity that I think becomes sort of universal pretty quickly because everyone has that guy
in their town, and you know, everyone is reminded like people aren't transparent.
You know, you can't just look through the lawn worker because you just
want to see the pretty grass. You need to stop and see hello to
them and really get to know them. I hope that the Pulm does.
That's that's the idea of the work is just that it inquires people to give
other people a chance. Okay, so I understand you're working on sort of
a follow up to The Whole Enchilada. I am. It is the Last
Night and it's about the band Gentleman after Dark, which is featured in the
Whole Enchilada, who was originally produced by Alice Cooper and Dick Wagner and was
really going places and they were on People's People magazines like Next Best Hit Thing
List like really alongside Princess Diana. And then Inner Records chose to go with
hip hop and they dropped all their rock and roll and their stuff just fell
through the cracks. It's sad and bins for twenty years, and then Forever
Records purchased their recordings seeing that they are really quality eighties new wave band that
know not many people knew outside of Arizona, and so their job is to
place songs in television programming and Gentlemen after Dark have actually done really well and
had three songs played so far, and one of them was featured in its
entirety in Stranger Things, and as a result of the cult following of that
show, they have now over a million hits on Spotify and have playlist presence
and all like they can see the list like seventy two countries or something like
that. So this documentary will splice to get their current interview and concert footage
with old footage from the eighties and late eighties and sort of present a band
that could have should have been but no one quite knew about. So maybe
you'll help to give them a new audience. I think so. I think
they might be at the point of retirement though, because they didn't really want
to be the old guy band in rock and roll. You know, they
were young, in excited and very beautiful, and you know, their whole
look was something else. So it's hard for them. They're they're a band
struggling with their own mortality. Could you tell us a little bit about your
literary magazine, Blue Gun and its publisher are An R. Pressure, so
are Our press is named after two of my kids, Reese and Ricky Rose,
and it was established because, much like creating your own record label when
you're an independent. You know, after my husband had gone through working with
two small publishers and felt like they were not up to the standards, and
basically we had to make up the difference, whether it was with our own
tr or our own touring or whatever for the books. We decided to create
our own press, both to put out our work and also to put out
work that maybe other people that were more money conscious or success conscious would never
put out. And so we just put out work that we love, and
we do a literary magazine twice a year and it's a labor of love.
We just secret basically seek to regain our money and not go into the red.
That's our only goal with it. So we can really choose content that's
meaning full to us. And it spans you know, photography and art and
line drawing, and then beyond that, you know, any genre of writings.
So we've really enjoyed doing it, and it's given voice to a lot
of people that you know, haven't been published before and kind of got them
further so they can either apply for grants or apply for bigger magazines. So
it makes us feel like it's kind of a good way of giving back to
the community too. Speaking of writing, you're working on your first novel,
Katamappis. What's it about? So? Katamappis is the first day of fifth
grade for Delilah M. Pennymaker, and she is a latch key kid about
to go to middle school and have to get there by herself on her bike
and deal with all of the grown up things of her mom being at work
and her dad's a truck driver and he's gone a lot. And on that
day for talking mice appear to her. Katamappis and his friends Mug Blue and
round Face, who happened to be the same characters that her dad always tells
her bedtime stories about and that he grew up with. The book kind of
goes back and forth, and the two perspectives of, you know, mirroring
her life of wanting attachment to her dad, which she never has because he's
always gone, and clinging to being a kid and imagine the world of imagination
and adventure and then being at school and kind of dealing with social pressure and
bullying and things that you do in middle school. And it's sort of the
dichotomy of her life. And yeah, I hope there's two more I have
a trilogy in me, so hopefully, hopefully it works out. Sounds great
and sounds like you have a very specific message in audience in mind for the
work as well. Yeah, absolutely, and I try to cheat in a
lot of social consciousness. One of the main characters is a social justice activist
Mouse, and he is going for the anti specist camp of being kind to
roof Rats and Reufrats and Phoenix are totally expendable, and they're very in a
similar position to immigrant families, unfortunately, undocumented workers and things like that,
the way that people talk about them and find them to be totally either transparent
or if they get in their way, they just want to get rid of
them and trap them. And so it's very deliberate. I sneak that in
there about being crind to all animals and valuing them, which also sort of
serves my vegan agenda, which I always secretly have as well. Seth.
I also have that secret or not so secret agenda myself, so I appreciate
that. And as far as personal ties to the work, my grandfather was
a failed cartoonist and he actually came up with a cat whose name was Catamophus,
and so I turned it into a mouse who lost his leg and his
eye fighting a cat, and so I bring I bring my grandfather's sort of
desire to have a character into the mix. And then my dad did used
to tell me stories about catamopus, and so then I, you know,
I didn't. My dad died when I was pretty young, so it sort
of represents my family a little bit too, which is really nice. Yeah,
you wear many hats, you're a lull, you work, you have
your creative pursuits, you're an activist, and you're studying towards the Masters and
Jewish studies. Any tips on how to keep somebody's played spinning, Just to
do proper self care, I mean, that's honestly the ground of everything.
You have to be in balance to be able to spin anything, right.
So just trying to make sure I always get my exercise, always get sneep,
always eat pretty well decently at least, and try not to drive myself
too crazy, make make my brain shut down at night, which is the
big challenge. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Maggie and
two are all audience. Now back to your regularly scheduled lives. Amusing Jews
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