Well, it's the weekend, and you did what you could, and you lost most of the battles but you won a few too, and anyway it's not even about winning and losing. At this point, it's about slathering yourself in weed cream and sliding into Saturday.
"I'm Charles Mudede. This is my crib. In the back of my house in Columbia City. As you can see it's made of wood, but more about that in a minute," the longtime Stranger staffer and Sundance-approved filmmaker says before never saying anything further about wood.
"Before I go into describing how I made my film Police Beat, which is now streaming on The Stranger's website, I want to introduce you to a few characters."
You want to introduce us to a few characters?
Police Beat is the most beautiful movie ever made about Seattle. Its scenery is distinguished by its variety. Because it's about a cop on a bike going from 9-1-1 call to 9-1-1 call, you see the city whoosh by him, and the juxtapositions create frictive beauty: deeply green leaves, blood-splattered walls, bodies of water.
It is one of those brilliant, one-of-a-kind indie films that is unstreamable—or at least has been unstreamable until now.
And on DVD?
"There are only two copies in the city available for rent on DVD: one at Scarecrow Video and the other at Reckless Video in North Seattle. Reckless has it in storage, so you'll have to call ahead so they can pull it for you," Jasmyne Keimig has reported. Good luck getting your paws on that one Scarecrow copy.
Thankfully, The Stranger has a website where we can do whatever we want, and what we want—at least for the moment—is transform into a movie theater.
Police Beat is available to stream right here, right now. (There is no other place I'd wanna b-eeeeeeeee!)
If you think it's worth $5, pay $5. If you think it's worth $20, pay $20.
It is without question the finest film in the American canon about a man who refuses to go camping.
As for what it is like to work with Charles: He is the kind of employee who says, in a Stranger editorial meeting, after a dramatic silence, "I know it's going to sound a bit crazy, but I want to write about pigeon's feet."
The editor, baffled, naturally asks him to go on.
"Why are pigeon's feet so fucked up?" Mudede says simply. "They're nuts. They're mutilated. I just can't get over them."
Lo and behold, the resulting essay, "Why Are Pigeon's Feet So Fucked Up?", a masterwork of pigeon-interest reporting. (Representative sentence: "There are some who blame the feet deformities of pigeons not on predators or humans but on pigeons themselves.")
Though esteemed, Mudede's pigeon-feet tour-de-force is not his all-time best feature. Nor is it "How to Be a Father: The Sadness, the Supidity, the Lies," though that is some people's favorite, and led to his title being changed to Parenting Issue Editor.
His all-time best feature is a tie between the time he accidentally killed a horse and the time he lived in an elevator shaft in Pioneer Square, with the slight edge going to the elevator shaft.
Anyway...
Pop some popcorn, stream Police Beat this weekend, and if you like it, write Charles a fan letter, for god's sake. No doubt he will be too oily with CBD unguents to write back, but the whole reason artists do what they do is fan letters. It's not like they earn anything else.
And will we even have movie theaters when this is all over? Maybe Charles will be at the forefront of the motion picture business a year from now. Butter him up now, when he's more approachable. Another film of his, his directorial debut, Thin Skin, will be released at some point approximately halfway between "imminently" and "to be determined," who knows how powerful Charles will be after that.
Thank you, Charles, for being yourself—beyond category, hilarious, interesting, obscure, and good.
Thank you for releasing your first film, one of the best films ever made in Seattle, to all of us to enjoy when there's nothing the fuck else to do.
Happy May Day, everyone.
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Previously in this series:
