In 2006, Quentin Stoltzfus was forced to retire Mazarin, the dreamy, strummy Philadelphia-based project he debuted in 1999, due to threats from a litigious Long Island classic-rock band of the same name. If not for that, the new Light Heat album would be a Mazarin album, and could have come out years ago. The catalyst for Light Heat’s debut came from Stoltzfus’ friends and former tourmates the Walkmen. That band, minus singer Hamilton Leithauser, backs Stoltzfus on the LP, although Light Heat itself, like Mazarin, is essentially Stoltzfus and whomever he plays with. Stoltzfus will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new feature on Light Heat.
Stoltzfus: One of the first people I met when I moved to Philadelphia was Michael Chaiken. He was a serious VHS bootlegger and had more VHS tapes than Blockbuster Video. At this time, I had a fairly pedestrian film education, and Michael helped to remedy that. We’d get high and watch everything from classic Godard, Bresson and Trouffaut to dusty copies of the scatological art cult hero Otto Muehl. He loaned me his precious copy of Film As A Subversive Art by Cinema 16 founder Amos Vogel, which I subsequently devoured. I managed to procure a beat-up copy of my own and worked my way through any of the films in the book I could get my hands on. It introduced me to what have become some of my favorite films and directors. Even Dwarfs Started Small, Salesman, Permutations, Andrei Rublev, WR: Mysteries Of The Organism, Samahdi; Werner Herzog, the Maysles brothers, the Whitney brothers, Andrei Tarkovsky, Dusan Makavejev and Jordan Belson, respectively. Beyond the films and directors, the book introduced me to an elusive world-view philosophy adeptly presented by Amos Vogel.
Video after the jump.
