Raymond HuffmanI got a decent dinner ready…nothing happened with the dinner…BECAUSE YOU CRUCIFIED IT!
In Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, the director listens to audio recorded when star grizzly lover Timothy Treadwell was mauled to death. Herzog squirms between headphones, which he finally pulls off to implore Treadwell’s ex-girlfriend Jewel Palovak never to listen to it. There’s a similar sequence in director Matthew Bate’s documentary Shut up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure. We watch a series of fucking hipsters entertainment professionals listen to surreptitious recordings of angry alcoholic roommates. We can’t hear what they’re hearing, but watch their reactions, which vary from dryly amused (Daniel Clowes of Ghost World fame) to kind of disgustingly gleeful. What are they listening to? Should we even listen to it?
In 1987, a couple of twenty-somethings yclept Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitchell D moved into an apartment on Steiner Street in San Francisco. Soon afterwards they discovered their alcoholic neighbors’ penchant for shouting middle-of-the-night vitriol. Thus began the curious rise to prominence of Raymond and Peter. The film Shut Up Little Man! begins with a brief definition of “audio verite” and a kind of greatest-hits sampler, including clips from the Tube Bar (which inspired Bart Simpson’s prank calls) and my favorite, Daddy’s Curses (you can discover more such recordings in the “found sounds” section of San Francisco’s Aquaruis Records). But what are the ethics and legality of releasing such private (if publicly audible) recordings into the ether?
The culprits behind what later came to be known as “Shut Up Little Man LLC” took to holding a microphone outside their neighbor’s window when the shit flew. Which was often: Sausage and D released over ten hours of recordings of the pair, with volumes entitled, “I can kill you from a sitting position” and “Stop stealing my vodka!” Raymond and Peter were a living Odd Couple, Peter an old queen who repeatedly teased his queer-hating straight roommate, “Shut up little man!” Some find the recordings hilarious; others find them merely uncomfortable, though none of the latter are heard from in the movie.
It’s a funny story how the LLC got there. Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitchell D initially distributed the recordings and gave their blessing to anybody who wanted to use the material for their own work. Many took them at their word: comic book artists imagined what Raymond and Peter looked like and created verbatim stories from the transcripts; bands like Devo wrote songs about or flat out appropriated the recordings; painter/actor Gregg Gibbs adapted the work for a stage play. In the mid-’90s, three different groups tried to get a film version of the Raymond and Peter story produced, but none of them got made. It was around this time that Eddie Lee Susage decided to lay a copyright notice on the recordings. But can you own somebody else’s conversations?
Do we have the right to listen to this surreptitiously recorded material? Various interview subjects wrestle with the question and their answers are self-serving, perhaps none more than the playwright who says that while recording the rantings was not art, and adaptive work is. From video clips of his stage show, which turns Raymond and Peter into a grand guignol spectacle of disembowelment and decapitation, his “art” seems like standard-issue hipster shock value. In fact, none of the derivative works created from the Shut Up Little Man! recordings add substance to the sad poetry of the two lonely people with their symbiotic yet destructive relationship. I’ve never felt comfortable listening to the Raymond and Peter tapes, but the recordings are out there, and thanks in part to YouTube, viral voyeurism is here to stay. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure is most fascinating and moving when it goes beyond the story of hipster phenomenon and investigates the actual story of Raymond and Peter. You may find the film funny or infuriating. But it’s an intriguing study of how information spreads, and a sober meditation on human relationships.
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Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
Written and directed by Matthew Bate
Starring Mitch Deprey, Eddie Lee Sausage, Peter Haskett, Raymond Huffman, Daniel Clowes.
Running time: 90 minutes
Not rated; contains profanity and graphic violence.
Opens today at West End Cinema.
