Watched: Nightclubbing: The Birth of Punk Rock in NYC 🍿

Nightclubbing chronicled the rise and fall of Max’s Kansas City, a legendary New York club that helped birth the NYC punk scene and was sort of a rival of CBGB. I sensed that it didn’t take too much embellishment to highlight the wildness of that time and place. My favorite line in the film is uttered by trans singer Jayne County when she describes fighting with a guy who was heckling her and jumped on stage while she was performing at CBGB. To paraphrase, “I punched him and he fell off the stage, hit his head on a table, and gave himself a concussion.” Amazing how easy it is to self-administer head trauma when someone punches you. That was the scene at those clubs 45 years ago.

Read More…

Buddy cop movie, The Mandolorian and Grogu hit theaters this weekend. The film is expected to gross about $102 million dollars over the Memorial Day holiday weekend. A sizable chunk of change. It’s probably fair to say those box office receipts, more than any other factor, drive the direction of the series.

Lest we ever forget that Star Wars is a product promotion vehicle as much as it is a film franchise, there’s Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs character Yogurt reminding us with his phrase, “merchandising, merchandising, merchandising,” as he hawks various Spaceballs products like breakfast cereals. It’s probably near incalculable how many units of toys the Star Wars franchise has moved over the years.

Read More…

Every time I finish a novel in which I have invested a lot of time and emotion, I feel a bit unmoored. What other worlds are out there now that this one is gone? It’s like the characters in that world died and will be grieved. Some even after entering a new story.

After I wrapped up reading Demon Copperhead last weekend, I had these feelings. I almost shed tears at the end of the book. There are no novels piling up in a stack for me to read, so I was bereft. I was almost present in Lee County, that little corner of Appalachia where most of the book takes place, for some period. My own trip to Appalachia recently only reinforced that feeling.

Read More…

The third edition of John Brady’s This & That. zine reached my mailbox this week. As I read through it, I thought about the slower pace of communication from the past. In the book Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham, the residents of a small British town at the turn of the 20th century share a newspaper, each taking shifts throughout the day.

Soon after breakfast Mary Ann brought in the Times. Mr. Carey shared it with two neighbours. He had it from ten till one, when the gardener took it over to Mr. Ellis at the Limes, with whom it remained till seven; then it was taken to Miss Brooks at the Manor House, who, since she got it late, had the advantage of keeping it.

There’s something quaint and romantic about having such little and proscribed access to information. It’s almost the exact opposite of what we have today, with the glut of news and entertainment that we can barely hold off.

Read More…

W. David Marx writes on his blog Culture about 10,000 Maniacs and the earnest progressivism of the early alternative music culture.

Certainly 10,000 Maniacs were a bit over-the-top, but they fit seamlessly in the general aesthetic of “alternative” culture. Progressivism was cool in the 1980s. Merchant worked at a health food store, and before joining the band, considered a career in special-needs education. She was the one who pushed REM’s Michael Stipe to lurch towards more political content. These were the Reagan-Bush years, and artists resisted by drawing attention to the social ills that conservatives didn’t care about.

He contrasts that sort of authentic hope for change with today’s music, which has a very cynical live for the moment ethos. “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

Read More…

Back when our local newspaper, The News & Observer, was more of a going concern, I used to dig following the columns from Craig D. Lindsey. Lindsey, AKA Uncle Crizzle, had a keen eye for culture and finding overlooked treasures. When the paper let him go as part of broader cutbacks, I considered it a real setback to their coverage of the arts.¹

I remember reading on Lindsey’s Tumblr around the time of this dismissal from the newspaper that he was going through a time of real struggle. This was right around the time that the nation was facing a particularly strong sense of outrage about the treatment of minorites by the authorities. He felt a lack of self-worth. The demand for those in his profession was abating (at least in the sense that they could find paying work). Frankly, I was worried about the guy.

Read More…

One of my all-time favorite films is John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King. I was first introduced to the movie adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling short story from 1888 by my English teacher in my senior year of high school. Kipling’s novel encapsulates some of the folly and hubris of the British adventures in Afghanistan in the 19th century by infusing its characters with the attitudes of empire. In the film, Michael Caine and Sean Connery play British ex-military who dream much and doubt their abilities little. They set their sites on bringing the martial prowess learned in their earlier days to a remote area of Afghanistan known as Kafiristan to form their own kingdom.

Read More…