One of the most legendary figures in zine culture and spoken word music, David Greenberger, is the subject of new documentary “Beyond the Duplex Planet” which premieres March 12 at Austin’s South By Southwest festival. Go here for showtimes.
I’ve known about Greenberger for a long time; I began publishing a zine in the early 1990’s and then an e-zine version of it in 1995. I was interviewed about this in “Factsheet Five,” the great zine review publication where I read about Greenberger’s “Duplex Planet” publication. It was a 16-page saddle-stitched zine in which he documented the droll and often humorous conversations he had with the elderly men he worked with at the Duplex Nursing Home in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. He published 187 issues between 1979 and 2010.
The 25-year-old Greenberger had just finished a college degree in painting when he took the job as activities director at Duplex. The senior citizens tended to clam up when asked about their past. They’re more interested in their future, David points out. He asked them non-traditional questions like “Which do you prefer: coffee or meat?” When asked “Who invented sitting down?” one of the men answers “Edison.” Another says, “Geez, I thought it must be me.” “This is not just ‘old people say the darndest things’,” David explains in the doc. Though he had no background in social work, he applied his skills as an artist to document the lives of people who don’t get much attention in our youth-focused culture.
A local TV station turned down the first filmed interviews of his conversations, saying that he was making fun of the elderly. But the growing fan base of his zine recognized his genuine love for these men and the charm and inventiveness of their imaginations. He encouraged them to make their own art, to write poems and collaborate with him on music projects. The first “Duplex Planet” CD I bought (you could find them at WFMU radio fairs) was “Downloading the Repertoire,” (1981) in which his patient Jack Mudurian sang all 129 songs he knew a cappella. (Unfortunately it’s not mentioned in the film.) Greenberger also collaborated with celebrated comic book artist Daniel Clowes and others in a limited series of comic book adaptations of his zine.
Greenberger is now 71 and says he has come full circle in his investigation of aging. Four decades of talking to the elderly has prepared him for dealing with his own senior years. “How do you know you’re getting old?” Louie Pérez of Los Lobos asks in the film. “When you have lunch with David Greenberger and he pulls out a notebook.”
Though David played bass in several bands in his twenties (one was a Captain Beefheart cover band!) in the past two decades he has been recording spoken word music with a variety of artists including keyboardist Tyler Rogers and has become a fixture on NPR.
Director Beth Harrington grew up in the same 1980’s Boston rock scene as David did–she was a member of Jonathan Richman’s band The Modern Lovers. Her film is a warm and funny portrait of a unique artist, including a wealth of archived conversations with the seniors David worked with and testaments by the many other artists who championed his work: Penn Jilette, Jad Fair, Ed Ruscha, Los Lobos and others. For lovers of zines and alternative publications and outsider art this is a must-see. And for those who are unfamiliar with these important genres this can serve as an entertaining, genial introduction.
My friend Adam Shartoff just published his interview with Greenberger and Harrington about the film. Go here to listen or here to watch it.