“Growing up punk in Texas was much different than punk anywhere else in the country,” explains filmmaker Bill Daniel. “It’s incredibly hot, so we’d have to wear cut-offs and t-shirts. We wore cowboy hats too, and that really fucked with the indigenous culture.”
So when Daniel got to California in ’82 and saw the punk scene there, he was blown away. “It was like a sea of punks. I mean, our scene in Texas was like, 20 or 30 kids. In California there was this army of punks; I couldn’t believe it,” he says.
Because it was so small, Daniel and his crew were completely insular–similar to other punks around the country, but with their own breed of Texas hardcore. “It was so great to watch different things contribute to it. I remember when Minor Threat came through for the first time and all of a sudden everyone had an X on their hand.” Commemorating the scene in video and photography is especially crucial to Daniel because, as he puts it, “This is an evolution of a family; it’s kind of like a scrapbook.”
That’s why Daniel will be loading all his equipment into his 1965 Chevy Van and driving from San Francisco to Portland to exhibit Texas Skatepunk Scrapbook. It’s a collection of photos and films about punk in Texas and all over the nation, with a DJ spinning punk records during the films. Daniel is even bringing a sampling of his zine collection from his youth. One of them, Throbbing Cattle, was done by Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey when we was in high school. “I could only bring a few, so I chose zines that have that raw, naîve energy,” Daniel says.
His one-night-only show is so big, Daniel built a special compartment in the roof of his van for his equipment. “Packing this stuff around the country is really an absurd way of doing it. But I love doing film as a kind of installation art, so that it’s not like a gallery where you have to make an appointment, nor is it like a Hollywood film where you pay 8 bucks to see a glossy production and then leave,” he says. Daniel often incorporates several different films at once, layering projectors on top of each other and relying a lot on Super 8.
Daniel works almost exclusively in 16mm film, like his own distinctive filmmaking signature. “We edit on flatbeds the old fashioned way, and we literally scrape off magnetic oxide from audio stock. I love the way it looks. I’m getting more and more turned off to digital video because it all looks the same. The filming process can be very creative, and this is the way I make sure that’s true.”
Daniel is also aware of his limitations. Working in 16mm doesn’t allow the filmmaker the same sophistication as digital, but he loves this simplicity. “The tools leave a print on your work, and to be good at it you’ve got to be aware of that. In 16mm, you’ve got to have a pretty simple audio design, so that means working with low-tech, low-fi materials.”
Daniel has shown his films in Houston, Albuquerque, and Baton Rouge already. “This guy I knew had a basement in Baton Rouge, so we just did a show down there.” Though Daniel isn’t making any money (“If the turnout is good I’ll pay for my gas down here and two burritos on the way back,”) he’s encouraging a kind of art that can’t be done any other way. “The network of small theaters, people who are interested in this kind of stuff, is fucking great. I mean, these people are working in the trenches. They don’t have funding, they’re not 501-C3 registered, and they’re totally at the whims of real estate agencies. But they make things like this possible.”