Arts Writer Extraordinaire: Josef Woodard

Lifelong Santa Barbara arts journalist and musician Josef Woodard wrote for the Independent’s predecessors, the News & Review and The Weekly, and so was with this paper from day one. For this week’s edition, Woodard interviewed Santa Barbara–raised director Max Barbakow, whose film Palm Springs is breaking streaming media records.

Your band flapping, Flapping [CQ] recently came out with a new album. What is a musician’s life like during COVID?
Fortunately, we had finished all the tracking and most of the mixing by the time of the hermitage/lockdown, so we were able to release our album, seeyoutonite, by our old and renewed rock band flapping, Flapping. The pandemic has had an extremely punishing effect on live music and musicians, but one positive is spending time working on new music, begging for ideas from the muse, and, in my case, learning about recording remotely.

You’ve covered theatrically released films for us for years, but Palm Springs came out on Hulu. What are your thoughts on streaming versus traditional movie releases?
Another positive about this period is the extra time to catch up on cinema — and the “good” television — from vintage to modern eras, and there is a thrill sinking into a quirky feelgood treasure like Palm Springs, along with the collective civic pride of Barbakow’s prime-time moment. That said, I desperately miss the old-school virtues of the movie-house experience, the way films are supposed to be seen. It’s a shared experience, with massive screen and wrap-around sound, the whole sticky-floored enchilada. Some day.…