I've recently obtained some master VHS copies of several hardcore shows from the eighties. It's been such an educational experience to watch so many of the great bands from that time who I never had the pleasure of seeing perform live. It's also been a good way to make a few bucks to help pay off the record presser, but that's a different story entirely. One example of a band who's greatness I had no idea about were SNFU. I'd always seen the photos of their lead singer leaping through the air, and as cool as that looked I could never reconcile how dramatic those photographs looked with how lackluster their records sounded to me. I always suspected that I was missing the point, and it turns out that I was. The video footage of SNFU playing a small Ohio club in the late eighties is incredible, and the singer not only gets an incredible amount of air, but he is also in complete control of the audience. He even scolds those in attendance at one point for being too much of an audience, and forgetting the half of the punk rock equation where the audience plays as big a part in a shows success as the band does. A lesser front man would have been run out of town, but in this case just the opposite happens. Members of the crowd begin to move toward the stage at first, and then finally onto the stage where their previous lethargy turns into exuberant stage diving.

A couple of bands who are pretty well known and respected in the hardcore community for their recordings made a true believer out of me when I was able to watch them live via video tape. The first was NEGAZIONE, who were just so much more dynamic than anything I was listening to at the time this concert was shot that I'm almost ashamed of my previous musical ignorance. The other band are the SKEEZICKS who hailed from Germany, and who recently put out a CD discography on Max's 625 label. They were a powerhouse, and before they even reach the stage for their set, members of the audience can be heard chanting, "SKEEZICKS - SKEEZICKS!". The SKEEZICKS were quite a site when they played. Their lead singer looks like he could wrestle Jerry A from POISON IDEA in a strongman competition, but the coolest part are all of the bandanas and lumberjack shirts. These guys should be much more known today than they are.
Long Life Potstickers and Iron Monkey

In the early days of Hong Kong Theater at the U.C., Q and I used to make it a point to stop into Long Life Veggie House to stock up on potstickers and other delicacies for our Wednesday ritual of taking in the latest -then- obscure martial arts flicks that would always replace the previous week's films as our favorites. I started to slack off when everyone got super serious and began to actually attend Kung Fu classes in Oakland, but I recently had a flashback of sorts while watching CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON in a sold out East Bay theatre.
First of all, CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON is way more of a thrill for a novice viewer. Second of all it wasn't completely terrible, but how much better could it have been if only I had been allowed to bring in an order of Long Life potstickers. Movie houses are really missing the mark when it comes to allowing outside food into their theatres. Nothing is better than watching martial arts flicks while enjoying some righteous veggie food from Long Life (which isn't as good as it once was by the way. I now go to the Great Wall in Oakland), and just imagine the other various cuisine's one could incorporate into his or her movie viewing experience. You could even take it one step further with a film like BARFLY. Think about it. Every time Mickey Rourke raises his drink to toast all of his friends, the audience could raise their drinks with him. And afterwards we could all go out into the alley and watch the lushes beat each other to a pulp.
Well obviously I'm hungry, and a bit thirsty, so let's move ahead with this installment of Punk Movie Nights.

It's hard for some filmmakers to be real when they are so concerned that noone will care about who they are or what their work is about. It's a possibility that most of the people who's attention they may have hoped to capture are so consumed by their own reality that they often don't see any point in further piling on the misery. Just think about the type of films that are typically churned out one after another in Bombay, India. They tend to more closely resemble the films of Hollywood during the Great Depression than they do a work by Ken Loach. There is a need and an audience for Ken Loach films, and his working class fiction that tends to be more real than any actual person or situation could literally be. Reality, as seen through a camera can serve as a cathartic and educational experience that, if only for the moment, is capable of making an audience empathetic for their same fellow human beings that they may curse and blame for their own misfortune on a daily basis. But if you make a documentary about the urban poor in sevral different countries, will there be an audience for it? The braintrust behind MEGACITIES must have guessed that this wouldn't be the case, and they must have also reasoned that the reality of poverty in many parts of the world is so surreal that attempting any kind of artistic, original turn on the idea behind MEGACITIES would have proved too alienating for entirely different reasons, and hence just as unpopular with film goers. That is exactly the reason why so many of the interesting artists of our generation, and those of the past, never even stop to consider the tastes of a mainstream audience. I wouldn't say that they all went as far as Frank Llyod Wright,dismissing them as the uneducated, unenlightened "mob" who's opinions are to be ignored. There is a case to be made however for staying true to your work regardless of how unseen or unheard or misunderstood it could be when it's first shown, and often for many years to come. The filmmaker responsible for MEGACITIES takes a premise that could have produced work of significant importance, and turns it into fodder for the sensational tastes of an audience that prefers it's reality to be full of voyeuristic exploitation, and manipulated so as to not require an overabundance of critical thought.
MEGACITIES doesn't wait too long before revealing it's contrived nature to us. I was only twenty minutes or so into the film when I realized that there was a significant amount of staging and choreography used to achieve what were supposed to the most ironic moments the film had to offer. The transparent nature of every shot became more and more clear as the film progressed, until I found myself all but throwing my hands in the air to protest the low level of respect the filmmakers had for me, and everyone else in attendance on that particular night at the Roxie in San Francisco. It was then that I realized the newspaper article about MEGACITIES outside of the Roxie was brilliantly deceptive in the way that it referenced the filmmaker's previous work, pointing out how weird and unconventional his ideas were, and also mentioning how taken aback some audience members were. This would have been a bad bit of advertising if I'd come across it at any other movie theater, but at the Roxie it was as if a challenge were being issued. I took up the challenge, and after only a half of an hour I knew that what I had undertook was less of a challenge than it was test of my tolerance for mediocrity.
The darkest hour for MEGACITIES comes when a single mother from Mexico allows the filmmakers to follow her to her job as a dancer in a Mexican strip club. There is scene after scene of the woman being fondled, penetrated, spanked, and in probably the most gratuitous shot of the entire film we get to watch as the woman apparently has an orgasm while having cunnilingus performed on her by a male member of the audience. A most likely staged shot of the woman sitting alone in a dressing room is repeatedly shown as if to suggest that the woman and mother of two children is only doing what she has to do to survive, and this may in fact be the case, but the idea that this scene was staged on one particular day, and that the scenes from the club were shot over at least a couple of days serves to only to present an inside look at the psyche of the filmmaker himself.
If you were so inclined, you could find past Punk Movie Night columns at www.wethepunx.com - and if you have an underground film/video that you'd like reviewed in the Punk Movie Night column, then send it to: Jay Dead, PMB #419, 1442A Walnut Street, Berkeley, CA 94709, USA. By the way, the new TRAGEDY album is pretty fucking incredible.