The garish glamor of “Honky Tonk Angels”

Meggen Heuss’ “dessert project”—a video accompaniment for a Westley Heine poem—premieres at Project Projection at Arts + Literature Laboratory on April 30.

Oversized fluorescent lights of a vanity mirror strobe over potted cacti and a preserved arachnid. Vertical streaks of opaque, multi-colored glass shimmer like a spectral curtain before dissipating into an obscured glimpse at lower bodies in leather boots shuffling across a dive-bar floor. While this collage of footage is only 15 seconds, the visually superimposed mix of “garish and glamor,” as Madison filmmaker and video artist Meggen Heuss characterizes it, contains all manner of the “sad, tragic, beautiful, romantic, nostalgic, and smells like ancient cigarette smoke and stale beer.”

The musky literal and metaphorical atmosphere of the poem “Honky Tonk Angels” by Chicago-based writer and blues guitarist Westley Heine served as the basis for this three-and-a-half-minute video project from Heuss. But it’s also not just a simple transmutation of the scene set and rhythmic reading by Heine either; it’s a singular mood-based, psychedelic translation through the lens of an artistically spiritual peer. Along with a potpourri of other local experimental shorts, Honky Tonk Angels will premiere at the spring 2025 Project Projection showcase at Arts + Literature Laboratory on Wednesday, April 30, at 7 p.m.

Heuss and Heine have known each other for the past 20 years, as Heuss tells Tone Madison in a recent phone conversation. They go way back, since being “young punks, the [teenage] counterculture of Jefferson County, Wisconsin,” Heuss quips. And so she was “tantalized from the beginning,” five months ago, when the idea came to her via email. Heine wanted to time a presentation of Heuss’ video project with his poetry and short-fiction collection, Cloud Watching In The Inferno, and its release party planned at Lizard’s Liquid Lounge in Chicago on May 3. But, as chance would have it (and as this local screening showcase was coincidentally slated), Honky Tonk Angels is making its public premiere in Madison a few days prior.

With Heine’s dulcet baritone voiceover already arriving pre-recorded with Guitar Mike’s twangy electric guitar and Matt Jensen’s auxiliary synth beats, Heuss instantly responded to the mystique they collectively conjured for the particular poem. She approached the collaboration as the building of a music video. Sinking into the rhythm of the music and words for the first time, Heuss says she “closed her eyes and started taking notes right away on what images she wanted.”

Ultimately, those image layers unite Heine’s words about dancing figures and aura of dustier, more western-bound spaces with fragments of Midwestern locations—a sort of “I Spy” game for anyone who may call Wisconsin’s capital city home. An angled wall of glass brick at the Tip Top Tavern, a cozy corner at Mike’s Horseshoe Bar & Grill, and a near-neon negative fish-eye close-up of a calico goldfish in an aquarium wall at the Atomic Koi Cocktail Lounge are a few of the local spots Heuss trekked to gather her own clips, which she later edited with CapCut Premium software.

Beyond the borders of the Madison area, Heuss incorporated a striking ghostly hologram—grabbed secondarily from a CRT TV—of a Spanish singer tossing a tissue. She candidly recorded that during a trade show at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. Later in Honky Tonk Angels, a low-angled time-lapsed bloom (and un-blooming) of a large flower can be seen. Heuss snagged that at the Sphere in Las Vegas, when she was out there to experience Darren Aronofsky’s nature documentary Postcards From Earth (2023).

For anyone familiar in the abstract with the found-footage film, Heuss’ work indeed may give that initial appearance of incorporating stock clips from the Internet Archive, for example. But in conversation, Heuss emphasizes that everything in Honky Tonk Angels was originally part of her personal phone-recorded media library. It’s her general modus operandi to abstain from anything that isn’t wholly from her own point of view. This is not only for purposes of personal connection, but keeping things contained to what she can stage and control herself invigorates the production and editing process. 

As she discovered over past video projects, Heuss often isn’t able to precisely find what she wants in her web-bound hunting and scouring, but is more than willing to go the extra mile to achieve a desired effect. As for Honky Tonk Angels‘ myriad moments of hypnotic whirling on splintered jewels? Heuss “had a lot of fun pulling out kaleidoscopes as a natural filter,” she says. And with that, she manually spun crystal glass on a lazy Susan, filtered through transparently colored sheet plastic that covered her phone camera lens.

Even with all the conscious effort put into the making of Honky Tonk Angels, Heuss still playfully and humbly refers to it as a “dessert project, where a big chunk of it was already done for me.” She wasn’t commissioned to create something out of thin air, but rather to elevate something preexisting. This was also the case, to an extent, with Heuss’ first film collaboration last year, which spilled into this year (and completed the night before Trump’s second inauguration), Love Letters From Our Oligarchs. She worked with local artist Melissa Minkoff on the two-and-a-half-minute experimental short, which splices audio from various grossly pandering, hateful, and misogynistic political speeches, along with slides of campaign mailers cut up and rearranged as ransom notes. It was an enduring challenge especially in the sound mix, Heuss confesses, but her role extended beyond that to include photography and lettering animation.

Since 2022, Heuss has been steadily experimenting with different aspects of production. Full disclosure, but I got a firsthand glimpse at her vision and abilities in the spring 2022 class we both took at Arts + Literature Laboratory, where, in Adobe Premiere, she was developing (somewhat literally, in the film’s prominent static shot of Polaroid photograph) what would become Surfacing: A Hedged Ephemera. That five-minute film was later accepted into the 2023 Wisconsin Film Festival.

For her next (and imminent) project, Heuss is taking another ambitious leap, while sticking with a second Westley Heine poem, “Bullfight At The Supermarket,” which she hopes to have ready in time for Cloud Watching In The Inferno book-release event just a few days after the Project Projection screening. Heine and Jensen recorded over 12 minutes of voiceover with synthesizer and old educational film audio collages. Heuss was inspired to craft even more ambiguous superimpositions involving analog synthesizer wires and ethereally orange thunderstorm clouds. It’s all absorbed into split-second still-image vintage magazine collages and what she’s defined as “energy exchanges”—between “someone breathing in and then out… a woman shopping at the grocery store with shots of slaughterhouses… a sun coming up and a plant blossoming.”

In addition to tapping into the creative essence of this standalone poem, as with Honky Tonk Angels, Heuss concludes by saying that she hopes her painstaking approach here distinctly “hones in on the title of [Heine’s] book itself.”