Interview

Still from Wild Combination, Arthur Russell on the Staten Island Ferry. Photograph of the director. Both courtesy of Matt Wolf.

Matt Wolf is the director of the Arthur Russell documentary Wild Combination, which has played at IFC and for which he recently concluded a tour of Scandinavia in support. Today Wild Combination screens at MoMA; a DVD is also available, with 65 minutes of DVD extras and archival clips, including an extended Buddhist mantra that Allen Ginsberg read at his funeral, and long cassette recording that Russell sent to his father, asking for money in a roundabout way so that he could go to India to buy flutes.

Wolf first became interested in Russell three years ago, when a friend described the musician as "a farmboy disco auteur who wore flannel and rode back and forth on the Staten Island ferry." Wolf couldn't resist, but the tale also spoke to a more solemn interest in, "making nostalgia in the recent past," related to the development of queer biographies—"quite frankly a lot of people died of AIDS." Here we've asked Wolf to highlight two more harrowing tales:

Manic Street Preachers lyricist and guitarist Richey James Edwards, who disappeared in 1995 and was declared as presumed dead only weeks ago. A journalist said he had affected his melancholy, so he carved "for real" in his arm. Copycat fans jumped off bridges near where he was rumored to have disappeared. Does Matt like him because he's cute: "No, I like him because he's goth and dead."

Post-punk afro-popper Lizzy Mercier Descloux was a friend of Patti Smith, a visionary musician who died of cancer very young and released the hit "Mais où Sont Passées les Gazelles ?" ("But where have the gazelles gone?").