Pitchfork

All photos: stills from Imagine Our Love, the film

A year ago, ethereal L.A. folkies Lavender Diamond issued their debut album, Imagine Our Love. Flash forward to right now, and Lavender Diamond are once again gearing up for the release of Imagine Our Love. No, it's not some silly reissue with a bonus track tacked on. This Imagine Our Love is an epic film crafted in a somewhat clandestine and assuredly unorthodox fashion by the band, director Maximilla Lukacs, artist Alia Penner, and members of their close-knit Echo Park community, using the Imagine Our Love LP as its jumping-off point.

We recently chatted with Lavender Diamond frontwoman Becky Stark about the Imagine Our Love film, her role in Alia Raza's Pure White Light, co-starring Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, and her involvement writing songs and acting in Gil Kenan's science fiction epic City of Ember, a film produced by Tom Hanks and starring Bill Murray, Tim Robbins, Mackenzie Crook, and Martin Landau.

As if she wasn't busy enough, Stark will also be heading out on the road with M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel's She and Him summer tour, providing backing vocals.

"When we made the record [Imagine Our Love], I just wasn't satisfied with making one video," Stark confides over the phone. "I wanted to make lots of videos of us dancing in costumes, and there's so many incredible people in my neighborhood, there's so many ladies, I just really wanted to make a video with lots of ladies dancing, with, you know, costumes. I also so much wanted to tell a story, create a mythology for younger people. We have a lot of kids who are like three and four who love our record. They've listened to it a million times. But it's not just a movie for three and four year olds!"

Instead, what began its life as a "gangster earth liberation fantasy with [songwriter and friend] Ariel Pink as the kidnapper" has evolved into a truly magisterial story involving "an interplanetary journey to visit the cosmic mother's council to get the wisdom for how to liberate the Earth." There's a real lavender diamond, a stint in jail, a rescue from a bail bond-settling "secretary angel bird," and a climactic trip to a Chinese gem factory. Scenes routinely explode into Busby Berkeley-esque musical extravaganzas.

Stark explains, "We just decided to stage these really incredible celebrations, you know, fantasies. I feel like there really needs to be more dancing, and full celebration. Especially with women. Because in order for the Earth to come back into balance, I think that there really needs to be a strengthening for all people, but really for the feminine element. For women to really become equal in the world and our society is really how the Earth is going to come back into balance."

Imagine Our Love the film is still a work in progress, though the band screened a portion of it at an event in L.A. on Tuesday, May 27.

The way the film has come together seems nearly as important to Stark as the finished product. "It's an interesting process in terms of integrating our green philosophy with our production," she says, "because the story is about recognizing, hearing, and answering the call that the Earth is in trouble."

The ever-fashionable Stark found painting the faces you'll see onscreen deserving of particular concern. "After going on tour a while back, I had a really weird vision that everything I was putting on my face, like makeup, I was eating by the teaspoonful. The other vision was that anything I was throwing away in the trash, I was like, putting in a cup of tea and making a cup of tea out of my trash. Because that's true, too! Throwing things away and buying things and putting crazy shit and chemicals in our bodies! All this madness, production and consumption of chemicals totally has to stop.

"Obviously, it's impossible to live in the Western world and not produce any trash and not consume chemicals. But the makeup in the film is edible. I paint my cheeks with beets."

As Stark explains, this unorthodox process is actually only strange in these modern Maybelline times. "The root of 'cosmetics' is 'cosmos,' so it's like, to express the order of the universe through beauty, and cosmetics was originally a healing art. So I discovered all these ways that people had originally done it, where it's all nutritive and healing and perfect. People also paint their faces with rose, which is like, the most healing substance, herb, plant on the planet. And people paint their eyes black with charcoal. Charcoal is a de-toxifying thing, and that whole area around your eyes corresponds with your liver, so if your eyes are sallow, painting your eyes with charcoal is good. It's like a medicine for toxicity. I don't know, I just don't want to be dancing in the wind and the ocean and have weird shit on my face."

Even the very nature of the filming of the movie has a connection to the natural world. Stark says, "Alia's father is an old school 3-D IMAX cinematographer, and he's also an old hippie from Topanga. Alia was like, 'you know, if we time it right, we can probably get my dad to work with us, 'cause I bet he'd be really excited to work on an earth liberation fantasy movie.' So we decided to work around his schedule. He's an amazing cinematographer! He invented the rig that shoots 360-degree IMAX footage. So the cameras we're shooting on are IMAX cameras!" Not bad for a weird movie from a bunch of art rockers.

But Imagine Our Love isn't the only film project that Stark's working on. First, there's Pure White Light, the Alia Raza-directed short film that features Stark as a "lonely ingénue", Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon as a "sadistic doctor," plus OK Go's Damian Kulash and writer/fashion designer Liz Goldwyn.

"Oh my God, it was so cool! Kim Gordon's the funniest person I've ever met in my entire life -- she's hilarious!" Stark enthuses. "There's only a couple of scenes in the movie; it's a 12-minute short, but Kim is a great actress. Oh my God, she's so terrifying! We really had kismet on that film. I can't wait to see it. Knock on wood. It's really good, people will enjoy it, Miranda will be proud."

"Miranda" would be Miranda July, a friend of Stark's and author of the short story upon which the film is based. Stark also revealed that July will play a role in the "musical comedy variety show" she's working on, which may see the light of day "in the next couple of months."

While all of these projects may seem pretty strange, there's only one film that Stark herself describes as "the crazy experience of all crazy experiences." That would be her role in City of Ember.

Like many of Stark's stories, this one begins in southern California, and ends in a far off place: in this case, Northern Ireland, on the shipyards where the Titanic was built. Explains Stark, "So when I moved to L.A., I first started playing my songs at the Smell, 'cause the Smell is where weird shit happens and where nobody would judge you. When I first started playing, I'd play by myself with a guitar and just make songs up. I would always play with noise bands.

"One of the first people I met was Dean Spunt [of No Age], but back then he was in Wives. Everybody at the Smell is so weird and open-hearted. It's a really interesting place. There was this guy there named Gil who was friends with Dean and the other guys at the Smell, and he was in film school. I've known him since back in those days, but I hadn't heard from him in a couple of years.

"Last summer he wrote to me and he was like, 'I'm working on this movie, and I wanted to know if you'd write some post-apocalyptic children's hymns for my movie. I was like, 'yes, of course! I was born to write post-apocalyptic children's hymns! That's my middle name!' So he was telling me the story of the movie, and it's this amazing science-fiction story about this underground city that's built when there's a disaster on the surface of the Earth. People have to go underground for 250 years. They're supposed to come back up after 250 years because the surface of the Earth will have healed, but they lose the thread of knowledge of how to get back up."

That, it seems, is where Stark comes in. Having penned several songs for the film, she leads a huge chorus through the streets in a pivotal point in the film. "We filmed the scene [in Belfast] with 600 people singing and I'm leading them in song, and then the mayor [played by Bill Murray] comes out on the balcony and then he points to me and I lead the people in song. It was pretty incredible to have that grand cinematic experience. I've never had anything like that before."

Stark adds, "The funny thing is, I knew Gil from the Smell, so when he asked me to write post-apocalyptic children's hymns for his movie, I thought it was a video he was making in his backyard or something." City of Ember is set for wide release later this year.

While we were on the subject of Becky Stark popping up in unlikely places, I had to ask about Free People's "Lavender Diamond" dress that recently popped up on the Nordstrom website and caught the watchful eye of Matador's Matablog. Stark seems both excited and repulsed by the idea. "Oh my God, you've seen that dress! An old friend of mine from high school wrote me an email about it, and how crazy is that? Do you think that they did name it after Lavender Diamond?" It's certainly possible. Stark seems to agree. "There's no lavender diamond on it, and it is like a hippie dress, you know. A hippie clown dress. I guess it's sort of... whatever I am. But yeah, how crazy is that? I want one!" Still, Stark characterizes the "scale of production in the fashion industry" as "really horrifying," and mentions that she is generally averse to buying non-used garments.

Still, Stark's admirably unwavering social consciousness shouldn't be read as a stern lecture from a holier-than-thou sort. "We're definitely not here to talk about necessarily what's bad, but more to celebrate the solutions, and what's amazing," she says. "We just hope that this little project that we're doing can in some way be inspiring to people in that there's a bunch of crazy girls in Los Angeles that are like, 'We're here to make this crazy IMAX fairy movie about liberating the earth, and we did it!' We're just acting wild. And that's really the bottom line. We're wild, and we want everyone else to get wild, too."

She and Him (featuring Becky Stark):

07-23 Toronto, Ontario - Opera House
07-24 Northampton, MA - Academy of Music
07-25 Philadelphia, PA - Trocadero
07-26 New York, NY - Terminal 5
07-28 Carrboro, NC - Cats Cradle
07-29 Atlanta, GA - Varsity Playhouse
07-30 Nashville, TN - Mercy Lounge
07-31 Asheville, NC - Orange Peel
08-02 Newport, RI - Newport Folk Festival
08-05 Chicago, IL - Park West
08-07 Minneapolis, MN - First Avenue
08-08 Madison, WI - Barrymore
08-10 Baltimore, MD - V Fest