Seattle Is Burning: Danny Denial Speaks On BAZZOOKA Webseries
The multimedia Seattle artist talks about the challenges of filming under lockdown, the legitimacy of low-budget art, and the goal of platforming the city’s underground BIPOC art network.
Photo by John Puschock.
It’s recognizable enough: the gray corners of Capitol Hill, the otherworldly stage of the Pioneer District’s Central Saloon, the counter of Everyday Music that world-touring rock star Gab (played by The Black Tones’ Eva Walker) leans against as she nonchalantly browses CDs. Yet the Seattle that BAZZOOKA takes place in is an obvious dystopia, albeit one with evident similarities to the latent one we inhabit. The streets lay empty and cracked, sounds of unrest blanket the nights, and tall buildings bear the hasty branding of TUNDRA, a parasitic corporation pointedly reminiscent of another one.
One that, even within the series’ punky scrappiness, is still nearly inescapable; a scene from the series’ fifth episode features a character discussing the ongoing rebellion via a Twitch livestream. When I mention this to series creator Danny Denial, they respond with a sense of surprise that reads more as amazement than shock.
“I guess there’s something in that,” he muses. “It becomes almost omnipresent. Shit’s everywhere. I mean, let alone Seattle, there’s a poetry to it: it being from Seattle but also being omnipresent in American culture, at this point.”
Regardless of the intent, the Amazon service’s presence in the scene reflects a running plot line throughout the series, which features a host of local musicians – many in first-time acting roles – collaborating on taking down the aforementioned fictional conglomerate, which may or may not be operated by aliens. Though the plot is certifiably silly at times, the sentiment is not. Seattle’s underground has long burbled with resentment towards the titanic impact the online retailer has made on the city’s cultural trajectory. That resentment bubbled over during the tumult of the past year, when anti-racist demonstrations morphed into anti-fascist, anti-capitalist demonstrations partially aimed at Amazon itself. The unrest culminated in a weeks-long organized occupation of a handful of blocks near Cal Anderson Park that thrust Seattle into the center of a culture war that raged far outside the city’s bounds.
Denial and I rest on a wooden bench in a shadeless spot of Cal Anderson, where even in the budding warmth of mid-spring the park remains mostly free of people. Many of the sounds around us, instead, are animals: the caw of a crow, the jingle of a dog loosed from its leash, the occasional bumblebee zooming past our ears and startling us both. The scene is a stark difference from the live assault of an MSNBC reporter on the same grounds nearly a year ago.
Our conversation sticks mainly to the making of the series, which came about during another distinct period of turbulence. Denial, along with cinematographers Leo Ramos & Rajah Makonnen, shot the majority of BAZZOOKA over four days in November, during which Seattle found itself not only fresh into a new lockdown over rising COVID cases but also anxiously dealing with the potential fallout of a high-stakes election cycle. The filming, naturally, found itself considerably hampered by uncontrollable outside forces. Its most recent episode proved to be a daunting challenge; unlike its first five installments, it was shot months later over three sessions and after months of precautions, schedule conflicts, and the occasional COVID scare.
“God, that scene with them outside the Central was one of the worst things to ever shoot.” he says before detailing every hiccup in the process. The shoot apparently required two separate sessions after one of the actors required a stand-in, and then a third was added to insert more footage from a separate character. By its end, green screens were utilized, masks were worked into the plot, and Walker was forced to act out an action scene as if she were a motion capture artist, gesticulating outside the venue without any cues or bodies around to support her.
At the time, Denial felt discouraged by the effort. “Honestly, I was really in a bad place,” he admits. “I viewed the whole thing really badly, and it wasn’t until we had a cut done where I’m like, “Oh, this is fine! It kind of works!” I thought it was gonna be a fucking disaster, I was so defeated and so upset.”
Despite everything, the scene still carries a strong sense of denouement that can’t be undone by the limitations of the shoot. It feels perfectly in line with the moments that came before it. Without spoiling anything, it also presents a huge shift in tone from the series’ start, which felt tied to the past year’s strife in ways that felt searingly transportive.
“The funny thing about BAZZOOKA,” he says, “is when it was first conceived, ironically I think it was conceived more like, “Well, we’re gonna do this so DIY, let’s just be really hokey and watch a lot of Blaxploitation movies, and interestingly enough when we were shooting it, maybe because of the time we were shooting it in, it got kind of earnest along the way. And then when the first episode came out I thought, “This just reads hokey, this just reads like a short film or a PSA,” and it was very Eva-focused and Eva kind of played it very heavy. Everyone was feeling very heavy in November.”
That heaviness creates an absorbing dynamic across the series between the gravity of resistant art and the simple pleasures of goofy schlock. That dynamic, according to the filmmaker, was ultimately wholly intended. “There’s that whole “art-as-resistance” kind of parable that was definitely in mind. I think in the beginning people thought, especially from the trailer, that it was going to be a protest show of something. Which is, I think, such a derivative limiting way to look at it, but it’s definitely in the DNA of it, and in the DNA of a lot of work that artists are doing just by necessity, just by surely existing.
“I know Eva and Cedric [Walker, of Black Tones] have mentioned the pressure last year of having to be mouthpieces, because it sets this precedent that your existence is political, and so to then criticize work for being political…it’s like, even being there is political! So with BAZZOOKA, it’s like yeah, there’s going to be protesting involved, there’s activism involved but…yes and no.”
“One of the main ideas of BAZZOOKA as a platform kind of came out of this idea of people kind of tokenizing people in alternative music, especially Black performers, and this idea that everyone’s sort of competing when they’re not.”
Throughout, BAZZOOKA aspires to find the middle ground between campiness and grim reality, and in the process it finds its unique identity. Its premiere episode leans hard to the latter early on, blitzing through protest footage out of the gate while laying police sirens and fiery scuffles over dark rooms and grimy, fluorescent lighting. It closes, however, with a fight scene that brings to mind the twenty-four person melee from Anchorman. By the time Jenny Durkan counterpart Jan Tums (played by Twin Peaks’ Andrea Hayes) starts speaking in tongues and squishing watermelon between her fingers in unsettlingly long takes, Denial’s vision becomes clear.
“I feel like it’s frustrating because…there becomes this expectation of what your expression should be,” he explains. “Which is kind of why I did BAZZOOKA the way I did it, starting it by coming back to a riot-torn city that’s very similar to what was going on with CHOP, and then leaning into this more absurd kind of otherworldly thing. I think it was almost this rejection of what the expectation is, of what is my expression is supposed to be. I didn’t want my expression to be a delivery of what people want from a “mouthpiece,” you know what I mean? It would be so easy to be like, “Yeah, 2020! Let’s give you the experience of a Black actor in 2020!” That’s just too straightforward. I think there’s a lot of actual, reputable, reliable narrators to tell us that experience. I think, to that end, maybe we are seeing more reactive artistic expressions; they’re just not how we envision.”
“People expect “art,” when it’s reactive, to be reactive in a way that they’re anticipating,” he continues. “I just think in general we’re in a moment where everyone is sort of exercising opinion, and I think art becomes an opinion of that as well. Childish Gambino’s “This is America” is a perfect example where you see so many people…it wasn’t about the video, it was about people’s take on it, you know what I mean? It becomes sort of this push/pull, where we expect this and get this and react, it’s just…I dunno, when you make something that’s a little harder to pin down, it’s a bit more fulfilling artistically, or interesting. Even for me on my little micro level, the reaction to something like BAZZOOKA has been different than something like DETHHEADS U.S.A., which was more singular and visceral and kind of in the ‘This is America’ vein where it’s like, ‘This is the reaction to it. This is how you respond.’ With BAZZOOKA, I’m loving the confusion of it.”
“I think people are looking for a talking point for 2020, and this is not it,” he concludes. “It’s a little bit weirder than that. But if people are open to having a more layered-context discussion about different kinds of expressions, that’s the cool thing. If people are open to thinking beyond, then you can have a really cool dialogue about it.”
Self-lacerations aside, it’s easy to sense their unabashed pride in the project. Over our two-hour chat, he frequently overflows with enthusiasm not only for the end result but for the people that helped him achieve it. In one moment he raves about the first time he listened to Ex-Florist’s “.925” during screenwriting and demanded it (and the rapper) be included in the series; in another he speaks at length about Walker and about their longtime mutual support for each other’s artistic endeavors. Connecting it all is a deep appreciation for how the project succeeded from collaboration rather than auteurism.
“I’m a story person, I’m not a visual person,” he says. “Sometimes I think with filmmaking I like to see something and then figure out how I want to approach it, kind of like more like a documentary style. I’m not a set dresser or anything. For BAZZOOKA I thought, if everyone can bring a piece of their visual, whether it’s a wardrobe or props or set design for something…I guess at the end of the day we were the sum of our parts. Which is why I can’t take credit for so much of it, because so much of it is what people brought to the table. The story was mine, but in honesty BAZZOOKA‘s something where I think people respond most to the personalities and the art and the music: basically the stuff that I didn’t really do, but I kind of curated.”
If BAZZOOKA is camp as resistance (or vice-versa), its gleeful sense of irreverence is balanced with another important role: highlighting the BIPOC artists working in a city that still fights its reputation as a surface-level progressive haven. To that end, the cast is stacked with familiar faces from Seattle’s underground arts scene. Cozell Wilson of Beverly Crusher; drag duo LÜCHI; Nicolle Swims of grunge revival act Black Ends; Bearaxe singer Shaina Shepherd; Ex-Florist mastermind Olivia Hatfield; they, along with many others, join Eva Walker in Denial’s vision of Seattle as a city on the brink of dissolution.
Danny stresses that hiring an untrained, all-artist cast was a conscious decision, though part of it has to do with his preference for natural performances. “I’ve always liked working with non-actors,” he says. “You tap into things that people didn’t know they had. Even if it’s not natural to them, they find the part of them that connects with it and whatever that is ends up being, to me, more authentic because they’re not just ‘doing the actor thing’.”
More important, however, is his intention to showcase the incredible talent present in Seattle’s BIPOC underground. “I wanted to approach [BAZZOOKA] very communally, where people can platform things they want to platform. To me the feeling is successful when it’s people saying, “I can’t believe I didn’t know more about Ex-Florist,” and being a platform in a way, and so I like the fact that people have pieces of themselves so that people can respond to that and go see more of that. I think LÜCHI is such an incredible performing duo; they do so many stylized incredible things, everything they do is so methodical. If people could just see, even if they could just visually see them and say, “I wanna see more of them,” it’s like, “You can! There’s so much more out there!” And they should be more supported. It’s stuff like that where I think if more of that happens I’ll feel even better about the project.”
The link goes beyond cameos via a number of show-stopping performances during each episode’s credits roll. Shepherd closes the fourth episode with a captivating rendition of “The Virus”; Keif Urban lays his weary, grimy “Rolling” onto the end of an episode dedicated to queer love; Swims’ “Monday Mourning” provides a blunt, devil-may-care coda that pairs naturally with the surreality of Hayes’ long takes. Those performances form little pockets of magic spread across the series that, divorced from their context and available to stream on Youtube, double as easily-accessible demonstrations of Seattle’s BIPOC artist community. Denial’s previous experience as a music video director shines through in these segments, as does his zeal at integrating them into a series partially devoted to celebrating the diversity of artistic voice.
Yet his palpable excitement stemming from his community-based aspirations belies an equally-palpable anxiety about unwittingly shutting out other deserving voices. Several times during our conversation he utters concern about the potential downsides of his platforming approach, from the comprehensiveness of the series’ accompanying soundtrack to his future plans on turning BAZZOOKA into a sprawling music festival.
“If you could create a platform that could pay all of these artists equitably and we could make this a thing that was successful, that would be awesome,” he stressed, referring to the festival potential organizers. “And also it could do what I really wanted it to do, which is make BAZZOOKA something bigger than just a web series. It’s about platforming.”
“I gotta be more inclusive,” he asserts on more than one occasion. “If we do more, my first step would be to say, ‘Could everyone recommend me somebody or something?’ We’ve been doing this BAZZOOKA Live thing on Instagram and I asked LÜCHI, ‘Who would you want to see spotlighted if we do more?’ and they gave me all these names, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s so many people, we’re just skimming the surface.’ I don’t want it to ever be this thing where other artists are like, “Well I wasn’t asked, you know?”
Something akin to guilt surfaces as he speaks, which perhaps signals the pressure he puts on himself as a potential torchbearer for his community. There are, of course, the restrictions that forced him to stick to familiar, dependable faces (“To be fair, COVID made things harder to get people together”) as well as the common problem of finding new people willing to commit to the project (“I know as an artist that time is the most precious thing…I always try to be conscious of that”). There’s also the simple tautology that people don’t know who they don’t know. Still, Denial is acutely aware of the related criticisms that could be lobbed at the series.
“I know some people probably look at BAZZOOKA and think it’s the same handful of Black artists that are the most talked about in Seattle, Black Ends and Black Tones and Shaina,” he says. “But to me that’s our starting point. In a post-lockdown world, I’ll then be doing the homework to open it up to people that are outside of these circles, people who are less well-known. I have some ideas of how to do that, you know, different curations and asking people to curate things and putting out different posters, some kind of social media campaign maybe of people nominating people, ways to keep it open.”
“I just don’t want it to be that thing that people do…” he starts before pausing. When I offer that people tend to make things monolithic, he agrees. “I hate that. There’s so much more than that, and I think we’re better than that.”
That sentiment ties into the performance that arguably hits hardest across the series. Ironically, it’s one that takes place in the afterlife. Episode Six concludes with the sludgy riffs of “Ground Zero,” a track recorded in 1984 by unsung grunge progenitors Bam Bam. Tina Bell’s vibrato spreads out as Walker’s Gab flees from the city, and as the episode settles to a close, the stage (having been vacated by the characters earlier) is occupied by the invisible specter of Bell. Given the context, the effect is exquisite: as poignant as it is haunting.
Denial originally wrestled with the idea of giving the episode’s slot to another act, but eventually decided that the tribute to Bell was necessary. “I definitely think that story is so emblematic of a deeper problem in band culture and in localized music communities. I think its so easy to fall in the trap of like…everyone knows what it’s like to be on the outskirts and not be accepted, and to have something that people respond to but then other people feel like they’re not being included in it.”
Fitting Bam Bam into the project, he says, highlighted the series’ latent themes in an ideal fashion, specifically his intent to act as a counter-platform against a particularly insidious force in American culture. “I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this anywhere, but one of the main ideas of BAZZOOKA as a platform kind of came out of this idea of people kind of tokenizing people in alternative music, especially Black performers, and this idea that everyone’s sort of competing when they’re not, and people tokenizing artists when it has nothing to do with them. And so what’s more powerful than trying to be championed and platformed by all these gatekeepers than making your own?”
Over it all, Denial acknowledges the familiar hard road ahead of him, one originally trodden by musicians belonging to a more challenging past era. “I look up to people like Poly Styrene and Bette Davis and Tina Bell and people where it always seemed like they were lone wolves. It didn’t seem like there was this sense of…the community wasn’t really supporting them, so what is there to bring that’s back in the community? I feel like, in a way…I dunno, I always look at how…Tina and Bette and – well Poly may be a different case – but the way they kind of just walked away in the end…you try so hard and get so far, you know?”
He laughs. “It’s true though! You do so much against the grain, and then you say, ‘Okay, I’ve done it,’ and you just run out of energy. I believe in the idea of elders having created a precedent to which contemporaries can build something, which again is why BAZZOOKA wanted to pay homage to that, because it’s important to trace that. This wouldn’t be possible if these people didn’t do it when it was really, really not a fun time to do it, where there was no one having your back. As shitty as it feels for us sometimes, and knowing as it is being tokenized or whatever, it’s at least a big improvement.”
It’s nothing new for Denial to feature music as a center in his work. Besides the myriad music videos he’s directed, his previous films (including the metal-cum-punk violence of DETHHEADS U.S.A and the winding, Araki-esque Kill Me To Death) employed the same tactic by integrating the feel of dark, downcast songs into every nook and cranny of their respective runtimes.
Denial’s own history as a musician, from his role as the lead songwriter of Dark Smith to his sporadic solo albums, certainly factors into it. But it’s Denial’s persistent interest in the combination of the arts – the cross between music, filmmaking, visual art, performance art, and everything in between – that provides a heavier influence, especially when contrasted with the city’s apparent attitude toward multimedia artists.
“I’d always been frustrated by this idea that you can only be a musician or a filmmaker,” he says. “When I came to Seattle as a musician, there was this feeling of, ‘Well, now you’re just a musician who does music videos and stuff.’ One of the few things I do miss about L.A. is that people do everything. Actors produce themselves and everything. Here in Seattle it’s very much an “us and them” attitude, and the communities don’t really intersect, and that’s why for me with BAZZOOKA, built into the premise I was saying, ‘Why can’t we have musicians and drag performers and filmmakers, why can’t we work together?’ And so many times it came up: ‘We would have never been in the same room together.’ Well, why not?”
Though he’s native to Los Angeles, Denial rebuffs the concept of “nativeness” where it pertains to artistic influence. Instead, as a transplant, he can better notice the apparent differences between a more image-conscious city like L.A. and a city like Seattle, which can fetishize “authenticity” to the point of insularity.
Of the two, he asserts that Seattle is his true home; when I ask him if he considers himself a “Seattle artist,” he embraces the label. “Because I’m not from here, sometimes I feel like certain people will try to contest it. But home is where you work and operate. Home is what you make. It would be false for me to call myself a Los Angeles artist.”
Because of his love for the city, however, he also readily addresses what he believes are the most bewildering parts of Seattle’s higher arts community. Besides its weird tendency to separate the art forms into their individual mediums, Denial also takes umbrage at the city’s cloistered film scene and their stifling attitude around the validity of certain art styles.
It’s an attitude that’s clearly given him grief before; for yet another year, a project of his was rejected for SIFF, Seattle’s annual international film festival and a critical attraction for filmgoers across the country. Denial’s frustration with the decision came out in a handful of social media posts in which he lambasted the organization, a move that his friends and co-stars openly supported.
“I embrace lo-fi, lowbrow,” he explains. “There’s definitely a place for it in film, but when you look at a localized film scene, that’s kind of excluded from it. Which is why I suspect I’m always – well, that and also me being known as a musician – that’s why I’m always excluded from SIFF and a lot of the film festivals here. But I’ve gotten into international film festivals in other cities, so I don’t know. Here, I feel like people will spotlight it or recognize it if it gains enough traction, but they’re still putting it in that box. “I harp on it a lot, but The Stranger, they went out of their way to cover my film from four years ago, and they wrote the nastiest review of how I was the lowest of lo-fi and the worst of the worst. They wrote this whole thing about it and it’s like, ‘You could have just not even acknowledged it!’”
“People expect ‘art,’ when it’s reactive, to be reactive in a way that they’re anticipating.”
He continues. “It’s interesting because that energy is always what I’ve sense from this community about the orientation about film to music to art that’s not seen as highbrow, and The Stranger‘s done that a bunch with me. It’s this thing of like, ‘Okay, if I’m doing anything or if I’m in a festival, how are they gonna spin it now?’ I was in a festival for a short, I had DETHHEADS in a festival two years ago, and they made this weird highlight and said, “Well you can see everything from can-can dancers and strippers and clowns or…Danny Denial.”
“I was like, ‘Hold on. My film is in the festival, I’m not this sensationalized topic that was part of this ridiculous…I’m a filmmaker in the festival with a film and you’re lumping me in with the can-can dancers and the clowns.’ That’s the kind of stuff where I’m like, ‘I get it, because it’s lowbrow it’s trash, so therefore it doesn’t matter if it’s in a festival or on a streaming service, we’re still categorizing you here.’ That’s where I’ve been frustrated. Even in those reviews, they’ll still validate the music part. ‘Oh, but it has a great soundtrack! But as a film, no, we’re not gonna validate it, we’re not gonna validate this person as a filmmaker because that’s not real film.’”
BAZZOOKA likely won’t shake the sense of misunderstanding from those that prefer their films to be pre-packaged, pristine chin-strokers. But recently Denial came to a realization that’s allowed him to move past the consistent snubs.
“It’s not about quality, it’s about something else. Once I realized that, I stopped letting other people’s tiers and ideas validate what I’m doing. I think then that I was a lot more content with the idea of not being in SIFF. It’s not because I don’t deserve to be in SIFF, it’s because their idea and my idea of what’s valuable are different. And so coming to terms to that was a very healthy thing from an artistic standpoint.”
In the fight scenes and the callbacks, in the Lynchian pastiches and the earnest performances, BAZZOOKA definitively transcends the limitations of highbrow art. It’s an honest statement that isn’t held down by a sense of pretense, and the responsibility it bears is not to its viewers but to the people it seeks to lift. But on top of that, it is an absurdly entertaining watch peppered by brief, non-comprehensive glimpses into Seattle’s gemlike underground music scene.
And, according to Denial, it may not be over when the curtain is called. There are plans in the wings for an accompanying festival featuring not only the cast of the show but a whole slew of artists and new friends, forming a network that Denial hopes will make the project inclusive to more people. He also wants to make BAZZOOKA a recurring series, complete with a rotating cast and more performances, to be potentially filmed without the limitations of a global pandemic. And outside of that, there’s a graphic novel in the works that Denial says could expand on the quasi-mystical world of BAZZOOKA. The opportunities feel endless.
“The coolest thing about it, honestly, is that there’ve been people reaching out to me,” he says. “There’s this teen, all Black, all femme band out of Indianapolis, and they bought BAZZOOKA face masks in this video and they were like, ‘Can we make a song for BAZZOOKA?’ and I was like, ‘Absolutely!’ I think that’s so cool! It’s cool that people can view it as a platform! I think that’s a sign that we’re doing something right.”
Danny Denial with co-star Eva Walker. Photo by Melissa Wax.
BAZZOOKA is available to stream in its entirety on YouTube. A running GoFundMe exists for its creation, which you can donate to here. All proceeds for the sale of its soundtrack go to King County Equity Now.
Lives in Seattle, terrible diet, loves music, has hope for people