"Watch Me Jumpstart" takes 36 minutes not to teach you a great deal about Guided By Voices, which makes it better than most other music documentaries, a genre that tends towards the overlong and self important*. I think the director was in film school but if not, it certainly seems like he was, given the general '90s hand-held video aesthetic, all weird angles and cuts and illogical transitions. This works, considering the band in question and their cut-and-paste aesthetic both literal (the hundreds of collages Robert Pollard made as album art for records that existed only in his head) and figurative (the careful copy-reshape-chop down approach he uses to cribs bits and pieces from radio rock and morph them into GBV's perfectly condensed songs). You pick up those details, but mostly the movie takes place in cars and basements in Dayton where grown ass men with day jobs drink beers, smoke cigarettes, shoot baskets, and play guitars, living out a life that somehow, accidentally, curved nearer towards their teen dreams than they had a right to expect. It seems chill as fuck.
When Banks Tarver shot "Watch Me Jumpstart" in Dayton in the mid-90s, I was 50 minutes away in Symmes Township, Ohio, the suburb of Cincinnati where I lived until my dad took a new job when I was 13 and we moved east. Inspired by my snobby New York Review Of Books-reading, opera-loving parents who ceaselessly ragged on Cincinnati for being a cultural backwater with no good crusty bread, I vowed (actually! in my diary!) never to return to those stupid suburbs. I would live in a real big city where I could walk to the store, with sidewalks and museums and a wide variety of breads--NYC baby! And I did, and I have never been back to southern Ohio. But watching this movie a few weeks ago, as people decamped upstate and westward and the city's density started to feel at once poisonous and pointless--because why live so close to people and things when you can't go outside--I felt sick with longing and I wasn't sure what for.
I like to think that the city where I have lived for 20 years has formed me in more ways than I can express, but sensing it unravel at the edges as it has necessarily done during this state of emergency has me tearing away a little bit at myself. I'm just a little younger than GBV were in Watch Me Jumpstart. What if I had gone back to Ohio or never left? Would I have lived with all these trappings of normalcy and banged out covers in the basement with my friends on the weekend and felt ok with that? Would I be a cool secret suburban freak instead of a being a foot soldier in the women-with-glasses-and-Arthur-Russell-records gentrifier army? Would I drive drunk? Would I have a basketball hoop? Would I, instead, be more like one of the unseen wives of the GBV men, a presence implied only by their wedding rings, presumably home with the kids while the boys practice? Isolated in my house, driving to the grocery store in my boyfriend's car, I start to lose sight of how it was that I thought the city made me, somehow, different from who I might have been.
I went on Google Street View. I found my old house and clicked from there out of the sub-development, to the Loveland public library in the strip mall in one direction and to my elementary school in the other. Everything looked surprisingly unchanged, more recognizable to someone who last saw these places in 1997 than Williamsburg would to someone returning after a five year absence. I saw images of places I have seen only in my dreams for over 20 years: interstitial patches of woods we'd drive past on the way to school, the sinister biker bar called Shady O'Grady's across from the United Dairy Farmers, the steep downhill cul de sac I'd shoot down on my bike, daring myself not to brake until I absolutely had to. On the computer, I turned onto the onramp of 275 and headed north to I-75, towards Dayton; on my couch, I rubbed my foot. One of those baby foot foot peels had started to work and as the surfaces of calluses formed from walking miles around the city flaked off I remembered the first line of the movie's title song, "watch me jumpstart as the old skin is peeled," which seemed comically literal but I still don't know where to go next.
*the greatest music documentary of all time is, of course, "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster" which I recommend even and especially if you don't like Metallica
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