Sunday, December 30, 2012

THREE A-GRADE FILMS TO LET YOU KNOW ABOUT

It's a season for staying home sick, layed up with a pile of films to watch, and a season for leaving the house, too, spending $12 at the multiplex because the weather's so bad there's nothing else to do. With that in mind, I thought I'd catch you up with a film and 2 documentaries I've consumed in the past week. Each was outstanding, and earn Hedonist Jive's much-coveted "A" grade. I'd encourage you to see each of them immediately if not sooner - but please read my short reviews first.

DJANGO UNCHAINED - I may be in minor company here, but it's my belief that Quentin Tarantino was in a 15-year directing slump from the time he finished "Pulp Fiction". "Inglourious Basterds" brought back the director that blew me away with his first two films, and now "Django Unchained" keeps his new 2-film winning streak going. Nearly 3 hours, this does for American slavery what "Basterds" did for the Jews of WWII Europe. At no point was I even a little bit bored or anything less than fully entertained and gripped by what is at turns a funny, comically violent (of course) and tense drama in which the good guys win and the bad guys get their brains & guts splattered against the wall. The dialogue, as in "Basterds", is extremely comic, and yet is not comedy in a we're-gonna-make-you-laugh-at-our-jokes sense. You know Tarantino's style - this is him at his very best, doing his thing as well as he did in "Reservoir Dogs", "Pulp Fiction" and "Inglourious Basterds". The other ones can take a friggin' hike. (Oh, and I'm posting a picture of Samuel L. Jackson because he's the best thing in a film crammed with great performances). A.

BALLPLAYER (PELOTERO) - Let me say right up front: this is not just for baseball fans. A near-perfect documentary about teenage would-be ballplayers in the Dominican Republic, and the Major League Baseball ecosystem of money and fame that corrupts and yet drives them. When you hear about Dominicans in the MLB who lie about their ages, take steroids and so on, watch this film. You may not approve, but you'll understand a bit more about the grinding poverty of the country and the pride of its many amazing ballplayers who are dying to get to the big show in the USA. The filmmakers who set out to put this documentary together may not have known it at the time, but the 2 players they chose to focus on were just note-perfect in stitching together the broader themes of corruption, ego, poverty and greed. It makes me want to closely follow the careers of these guys and frankly anyone coming out of the Dominican - which is, get this, 1 in 5 major leaguers....! A.

MY PERESTROIKA - The very same night I watched "Ballplayer" I was also fortunate to also see this amazing documentary, a meditative rumination on the current lives of 5 1970s-era Soviet Union classmates in modern Russia. Not only does it exist as an elegant film about choices made when growing into middle age, regardless of the country it was made in, it's an eye-opening first-person look into how people who were brought up in the Communist Soviet era adapted in the 1990s and 2000s to first Yeltsin- and then Putin-era Russia. Several are very happy with their lot; several are not. All seem to loathe what Russia has become under Putin. It's not a "political" film; it is instead a close look at the social attitudes, mores and proverbial dashed hopes and future dreams of some ordinary people who've lived through some pretty "interesting times". One of the best documentaries I've seen in years. A.

Friday, December 28, 2012

PRETTY SURE I'M GETTING INTO SOCCER

If you follow the sporting life in the United States, you may have noticed that football aka soccer seems to have clicked a notch or two higher than ever before in American consciousness. Denigrated as an effete sport for "the rest of the word" during most of my lifetime, or dismissed as ponderously impenetrable or out-and-out boring by everyone else, there's still always been that hope that soccer could "take off" beyond the thousands of youth leagues around this country and actually have a professional class of athletes and a citizenry who truly care about the outcomes of games. The last two World Cups were a start; the Women's World Cup in 2011 also generated a ton of coverage and interest (as well it should have - those were some of the most tense and dramatic sporting events I've ever seen), but it seems like this past year we might have seen a slow tipping point, in which the US of A finally admits that soccer, aka original recipe football, is actually a pretty spectacular game.

Like any frontrunner, I'm right there with 'em. It also has something to do with hockey being on strike, and the slow-in-coming realization that the NBA is virtually meaningless until the playoffs start, what with 16 teams, several with sub-.500 records, getting in. Any hey, it's not like I just discovered the sport. As a card-carrying 45-year-old, I can attest to having attended NASL professional matches back in the late 70s. San Jose Earthquakes vs. the Tulsa Roughnecks, anyone? I was there. I got swept into the US's quickie enthusiasm for Pele and this league for a year or two, and when that evaporated, I barely paid attention to professional soccer again until this past decade. (In the US, there really wasn't much to pay attention to - and before the internet, trying to follow the English Premiere League was for hardcore soccer freaks or expats only).

In the internet era, I've had several false starts in trying to get into the game. About five years ago I swore I'd learn everything I could about the sport - not just rules, but history, strategy, players' names, all the teams and so on. I reckoned I'd focus on the English premier league, because that's where the majority of the world's great players are (a little less true now than it was even a half-decade ago). I needed a team. Having learned a little bit about Tottenham Hotspur on a trip to the UK in 2000, and understanding from having read "Fever Pitch" that they were the perennial London underdog to cross-city arch-rival Arsenal, I cast my lot in with them. That lasted about two weeks, when I got busy at work or something and forgot to check the standings for a few games. I concluded that my heart wasn't in it, and since the games weren't on TV anyway, I went back to the NHL and NBA for my non-baseball sports fix.

Things have changed pretty intensely the past few years. While I've been able to go deep during the World Cup every four years, having watched at least 10-12 games each in 2002, 2006 and 2010, it's only the past few years that ESPN has regularly shown English Premiere League games on their main channel, the one I get, albeit usually at 6 in the morning where I live. That's OK - that's what TiVo's for - and it ain't like I've got a dozen pals who are going to text me smack-talk about the Everton vs. Stoke City game. The US league, the MLS, is growing rapidly and seems to have finally found financial stability. Some of the markets - Kansas City, Seattle and Portland in particular - have a large and absolutely rabid fanbase, easily as intense and devoted as the fans of virtually any NHL or NBA team.

The MLS "game" is admittedly minor-league stuff, years behind its EPL counterpart across the pond in developing and recruiting top talent. I watched some of this year's playoffs, and was not only frustrated with the dumb rules (you play 2 games against your opponent, and whomever has the most goals across both games in total advances), I found the play a sad shadow of the English (and Spanish, and Italian, and German) league. Yet it's a start. There's a whole infrastructure of soccer resources I'm discovering to feed my growing mania for the sport. Dozens of websites, obviously; the Fox Soccer Channel (I don't get it, but their mobile app is pretty sweet); ESPN's weekly live games from England (more on the Watch ESPN app); a SiriusXM radio station devoted to 24/7 coverage and talk about the sport; and tons of podcasts and blogs. I'm soaking it all up and paying an inordinate amount of attention to the sport these last few months.

On that last note, I need to make a particular callout to the Men In Blazers podcast, SiriusXM radio show and blog. These guys - Rog and Dave-o - are British expats living in the US, on a mission to bring football/soccer mania to Americans in the manner they grew up in back in the UK. They're extremely cutting, funny, quick-witted and full of weirdo in-jokes that you need to be a GFOP (Good Friend of the Pod) to understand. It's done a great deal to stoke my new soccer fandom, and I thank them profusely for it. 

So now all I need is a team. There's no way I'm going to go for one of the sheik- or conglomerate-owned powerhouses like Manchester United (who are OMG amazing to watch, however) or Chelsea or Manchester City. Arsenal is too storied and popular. Tottenham, maybe. But what about some upstart whom I can grab onto now while they're decent enough, and ride all the way to glory when they get better? Someone like West Ham, or Aston Villa, or Fulham or even a team lurking in the Championship league (the minor league one step below the Premiership)? I'm still working on it. If you've got any ideas, let me know.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

"THE IMPOSSIBLE"

One of my big cinematic frustrations this time of year is that I don't live in New York or LA, but being a "cinephile" of sorts, I keep up on all the December new releases that sneak out in order to get in under the wire for Oscar consideration. Unlike in years past, say a decade ago, the indie or foreign films that I actually want to see are only in those two cities, where the critics are. San Francisco, one of the more literate and disposable income-heavy cities, totally gets the shaft - as does Seattle, Chicago, Boston, DC and so on - to say nothing of other places, where it's a holiday season toss-up between going to see "The Hobbit" or "This is 40". No thanks.

I had a tailor-made afternoon to go to the movies - family otherwise occupied, rain pouring down - so I did that best I could last weekend and went to see Juan Antonio Bayona's family-caught-in-a-tsunami-thriller "THE IMPOSSIBLE". All things considered, it was a pretty right-on choice. "Based on a true story", and certainly modeled on the horrific 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami that killed 250,000 people (!!), it tracks an English family who come to Thailand for a Christmas holiday vacation and get literally and figuratively swept away and apart by the tsunami. I'm sure you've heard the scenes of the family and everyone around them getting swallowed and sucked for miles by a wall of water are quite intense, and they certainly are. Yet to the film's credit, the panic and confusion and psychic pain continue the entire rest of the way, as the family tries to recover from wounds and reunite in the midst of absolute death, destruction and chaos.

I've had a low-grade adoration for Naomi Watts on many levels and for many years, and she's the glue that holds the film together. She's the mom, in case you were wondering, and she gets the worst of it: torn in multiple bodily places by the tsunami, and clinging to life for at least half the movie. She and her oldest son are separated from her husband, who just happens to be Ewan McGregor, and their young twin boys. I'd venture to guess that the film's pretty realistic in its portrayal of how people attempted to heal their own battered bodies and find the dead and injured in the days after this catastrophe, and the film definitely has a nice you-are-there perspective that kept me pretty wrapped up and tightly-wound for nearly two hours. Watts puts in a very strong performance as a mom trying to play both the role of the mother/protector and the victim/protected at the same time, and letting her injuries dictate which one she's able to actually accomplish.

The only criticism I read of "THE IMPOSSIBLE" before I saw it was that it focused on the ordeal of the white tourists, and not of the many dead and hurt Thai people around them. This is true to an extent, but it didn't bother me in the least. The film clearly centered its lens early on on one resort, one family in that resort, and far be it for me to know for sure, but I'll bet that there are a lot of wealthy white people in Thailand's resorts at Christmastime - and therefore a lot of who got hurt or killed on its beaches. (Dead and injured Thai people are in fact part of this film, by the way, as well as Thai doctors and nurses and Thai villagers who help everyone around them).

It's a little maudlin, sure, and when the family reunites and the strings soar, you'll either be dripping silent tears or doing your tough-guy/gal best not to. It may not be one of the big 2012 Oscar contenders, and I'm not arguing it should be, but it was an excellent use of $8 in rainy day matinee bucks and I'm glad I saw it on the jumbo screen.

Monday, December 24, 2012

"SLEEPWALK WITH ME"

It's hard not to like the comedian and monologist Mike Birbiglia, though I wouldn't be surprised if he totally sets plenty of people off who are rubbed wrong by his child-like innocent doofus act. I've enjoyed his stuff on "This American Life" over the years; grew to like him when he broke bread with Mark Maron on the latter's "WTF" podcast; and then even paid to see his stage show (read: standup act) "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend" a year or two ago. Then I hear that Ira Glass of This American Life made it his personal crusade a couple years ago to get Birbiglia's most renown monologue, "Sleepwalk With Me", about his comic-scary struggles with a sleeping disorder and adult human relationships, made into a film. I marked the calendar, waited until it came onto DVD and streaming after a brief run in the theaters, and then watched it - for you - to see if they pulled it off.

I know people were kind of split on this one. It's certainly a "lite" film, definitely in the quirky-indie-comedy with a dollop-of-romance and a heavy-dose-of-angst camp. When deeper truths are reached, they'll force no epiphany in how you think about your life. But I liked it, more than I think many people did, including my cinematic partner for life, aka my wife, who watched it with me. Essentially it's about an amateur stand-up comedian (who's terrible at what he does) who is also in a long-term, but stagnant live-in relationship with a trusting, patient girlfriend (played by Lauren Ambrose, whom you of course remember for her flaming red ginger hair and for playing Claire on "Six Feet Under"). He - Birbiglia, now transformed into "Matt Pandamiglio" - also has this increasingly disruptive sleepwalking disorder, which causes him to take his sleep-world dreams into the real world, where he acts them out at considering physical expense to himself.

The film moves quickly from one sort-of gag to the next, always charming and suffused with material for guffaws, chortles and even some bellylaughs. Pandamiglio continues to blow every opportunity he's given to settle into life with his girlfriend, but has a deep current of anxiety about it that manifests itself in his crazy sleepwalking events. Yet as he changes his performance approach from stand-up comedy to monologues, he starts experiencing some minor success and an actual paycheck, yet this only ups his existential terror of life and of growing up all the more. It's a short movie and very easily digestible. You might not remember much of it in 2013, but it's sort of the perfect weeknight DVD rental/stream and a solid "B" sort of indie-comedy film, not too cloying and not too dumb but almost just about right.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #2

DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO PODCAST #2
Here’s the second edition of my phony radio show, turned into a podcast, with all sorts of music from the hitmakers of today, yesterday and tomorrow. Download it now and you’ll get 70 minutes of music from the likes of The Morlocks, Freelove Fenner, The In/Out, Die Kruezen, The Huns, Honeysuck, The Junior Chemists, The Long Blondes, Meat Puppets and much….much…..more.
Track listing:
LONG BLONDES - Darts
PARQUET COURTS - Light Up Gold II
HACKAMORE BRICK - Oh! Those Sweet Bananas
THE MAX BLOCK - Sonic Blur
TELEVISION - Friction (1974 demo)
FREELOVE FENNER - Workshop
2x4s - Zipperheads
LOVE IS ALL- Motorboat
KEEL HER - Riot Girl
THE MAYFAIR SET – Desert Fun
HONEYSUCK - Sleepaway Camp
DIE KRUEZEN - Don’t Say Please
PETTY CRIME - Mathematics
MEAT PUPPETS - Foreign Lawns
BUD & KATHY - Hang It Out To Dry
THE MORLOCKS - In The Cellar
THE MAKERS - Little Piece of Action
THE HUNS - Destination Lonely
JUNIOR CHEMISTS - Building a Fort
XYX - Sobrenada
NUMBERS - Intercom
THE IN/OUT - Club Blackout
HOUSEHOLD - Our Song
THE NIGHTS AND DAYS - These Days
USELESS EATERS- Year 11 
THE WHINES - Straybird
If you missed the first edition of Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio, which I posted last week, you can download that here.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #1

Well, that wasn’t so difficult. I’ve created the first of what will hopefully a regular series of 60-minute “radio shows” under the DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE brand name - that's my music blog, which you can start reading over here if you haven't already - and all things considered (like, I had zero idea how to use the GarageBand software I created this in last night even 24 hours ago), it turned out pretty much all right.

Download DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #1

My aim with this thing is to create playlists of music that I like & that you wanna hear; you might just not know it yet. You’ll find clusters of music that slot loosely into underground pop; classic punk; weird psych/noise; 60s garage, pop and girls-in-the-garage; proto-punk; bedroom DIY recordings and even a little undie rock.

I personally have not hosted a radio show in which I talk, “back announce” etc. in over 22 years – proving not only how ancient I am personally, but how rusty my on-mic skills are, which is all too apparent in this first radio show/podcast. You’ll even hear the local dogs barking in the neighbor’s backyard during one segment. My goal is to keep these to a digestible hour in length when I make them, and to not worry so much about flubs & various vocal tics and bad habits that make up my radio persona. In other words, the first take will always be the only take, and I’ll try to do better next show, OK?

With that in mind, let me state for the record that the band Bette Davis & The Balconettes were a late 90s band, not a late 80s act as claimed on Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #1.

Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #1 Tracks:

Rondelles – Indication
Hank Wood and the Hammerheads– It’s Murder
King Tuff – Bad Thing
Tea Cozies – Muchos Dracula
Red Cross – Tatum O’Tot and The Fried Vegetables
Desperate Bicycles – Handlebars
Pups – P.E.I.
Sally Skull – Mean Woman
The Yummy Fur – Car Park
Feral Beat – Canned Heat
Bette Davis and the Balconettes – 0898
Constant Mongrel – Reflex
XYX – Tal
Spray Paint –
Pro Knife
The Lamps – An Irrational Fear of Sailors
White Fence – Swagger Vets & Double Moon
Pink Floyd – Candy and a Currant Bun
The Minders – Right as Rain
Times New Viking – Y2K2
Chapter 24 – Spindle
Freelove Fenner – Vicky’s Day


You can also stream the full show on Soundcloud if you prefer.

Drop me a line at thejayhinman(at)gmail(dot com) if you’ve got any feedback, suggestions, corrections or pure, unadulterated hate – and enjoy….!

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

"THE LONG GOODBYE"

"THE LONG GOODBYE" was Robert Altman's weirdo 1973 take on the Raymond Chandler noir novel, made as Altman was truly at the height of his improvisational, experimental powers. When I watch films he made in this era like "California Split" and "3 Women", I still have trouble believing that they were financially backed by major studios. They're so "of the auteur" and so personal, abstract and unusual - and yet hugely entertaining, funny and engrossing - they truly point to a moment in time (the 70s) justly celebrated for this type of cinematic creativity. Friends of mine have said this one is their favorite of all Altman films. I won't go that far, but after finally checking the box on it, I'll say it's a singularly unique achievement and right up there with his best. I'm going to watch it at least another two or three times and pick it apart some more before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

As you may know, Altman let his actors and actresses take his rough script and plot outlines and go almost anywhere they wanted to with them. While not as wild and verbose as he was in "California Split", the excellent Elliott Gould (private Los Angeles detective Phillip Marlowe) is a motormouth mumbler who talks to himself, to his cat, and has some trouble having normal, intelligible conversations with the people around him - though Altman portrays all the strange dialogue in this film as "normal". This was also at the height of Altman's "everyone talk at once" phase, so the scenes of the beautiful hippie nudist yoga women on their balcony as they talk to their neighbor Marlowe, and each other, are as jarring and otherworldly as anything in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller". Combine that with his gauzy technicolor style and the filters he put on his lenses, and you've got something that definitely exists in its own world.

However, it is a fairly straightforward noir/detective adaptation at its core. I saw the name "Jim Bouton" in the opening credits and thought, ha, that's funny, same name as the Seattle Pilots baseball player who wrote the 1969 tell-all book "Ball Four" that was one of my fave books as a teenager. Turns out it is Bouton, in his only film role ever, as Terry Lennox, the man whom Marlowe unwittingly shuttles down to Mexico to escape from killing his wife and stealing a big load of money from drug dealers, an act that sets some - not all - of the film in motion. Sterling Hayden, as the alcoholic writer Roger Wade, is amazing and a real site to behold - a stumbling, staggering Popeye brute of a man who looks ready to pop anyone & everyone in the mouth at any time, and who literally walks into the sea to end his life in the course of the film.

Gould is on camera the entire film, pretty much. Marlowe is a restless, hunch-driven, seat-of-his-pants sort of detective, and at no point do you ever get any sense that he's exceptional or has prior success at his job. That said, he solves this case in a big way. A cigarette is in his mouth at virtually all moments in the film, and he appears nervous and yet composed and confident at the same time. He gathers some clues and flirts a bit with Eileen Wade, played by Nina Van Pallandt, and as mentioned previously, runs into her crazy drunk of a husband in several classic scenes. It's clear that Altman's deconstructing the "private eye movie" and Chandler's work, and pulling it all into a worldview that only he and a generation of film studies studies might be able to explain. I can't. I just know when it ended I laughed out loud, the way I do when I've seen something wholly original and wild.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

"THE WOODMANS"

Last year I saw the 1975-81 photographs of Francesca Woodman for the first time when they came through San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, and was suitably blown away. Forget for a moment that she took most of her staged photos of herself, nude and ghostly, when she was still a teenager. Forget as well that she killed herself at the age of 22. Her work, as was posthumously discovered, and which Woodman herself knew from an early age, speaks for itself as innovative, confrontational and abstractly weird and way ahead of its time. When I learned that a documentary had been made in 2010 on her life, legacy, and how her artistic family helped shape who she became - for better and for worse - I figured I should probably check it out.

"THE WOODMANS", directed by Scott Willis, is a moderately decent documentary that nonetheless falls well short of explaining this complex woman and the forces that shaped her. The reason I enjoyed watching it is because it shows Francesca Woodman's photographs and videos over and over again, and her limited body of work is still incredibly stunning to behold. We learn that she was so driven and tormented by her own talent that she worked at it up to 24 hours a day - wrapping herself in wallpaper; posing on the floor in flour and then removing herself, as in at a crime scene outline; covering her arms with white birch and photographing them next to white birch trees, and so on. She shows how the truly gifted artist is just born with it. Her artistic temperament and talents eclipsed even those of her parents by the time she was a teenager, yet she veered off into a semi-disturbing vain exploration of sexuality and gothic themes, all with herself as her own muse.

Her parents, Betty and George, were and remain very talented in their own rights, and though reasonable people can disagree, I don't think they had a whole lot to do with the death of what I believe was probably a manic-depressive daughter in an age before well-tuned medication. I'm glad the film didn't go down the path of portraying them as overbearing, flighty/artsy parents who forced her into the life she chose. That said, they themselves are actually not all that interesting as people. Their explanations of "their art", as good as it is, and of "the artist's temperament", are trite and dull. The film lingers on their tentative, cautious statements as if they're being handed down on high from the Oracle of Delphi, and what follows out of their mouths is barely coherent or interesting. These are visual, not verbal, people.

Certainly I wish we could have learned more about Francesca while she was around, but she was reduced to taking fashion photos for a big photography house, when, as the head of that house realizes later, "We had one of the great artists of the 20th century working alongside us all along and didn't know it". This documentary is decent enough and a good introduction to Francesca Woodman's work, but is very flawed as a film and definitely deep in a third tier of documentary craft.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

"YOUR SISTER'S SISTER"

Even if she'd never made another film again, I'd always be culturally indebted to filmmaker Lynn Shelton for her 2009 comedy "HUMPDAY", one of the best comedies and studies of humanity I've ever seen. Ostensibly about two straight male pals who make a drunken, boastful pact to enter an an amateur porn-making contest in which they have sex with each other - and then have to live with the sobering consequences of their public boasts - it's also a terrific study of male bonding rituals, friendship, and the difficulty for many of easing from a bohemian, alternative lifestyle into something more stable. It was an instant classic, and it starred Mark Duplass, who might just be my favorite actor going these days and certainly one of my Top-10 directors.

Took me a while to see it, but Shelton came right back with a film every bit the equal of her first, with Duplass again by her side in the unsettled man-child role, with "YOUR SISTER'S SISTER". In the Hedonist Jive Oscars, these two would be taking home some serious hardware year after year; as it is, I don't see this film on anyone's critical radar for these sorts of awards, which is a goddamn shame. This film is a crazy, personal three-way of emotion and cover-ups and hurt feelings, all delivered through ham-handed comedy, drunken admissions and, ultimately, breakthroughs of truth and honesty.

Duplass is an embittered drifter named Jack who's struggling with the year-old death of his brother, who used to date Iris (Emily Blunt, always in our hearts for the amazing "My Summer Of Love"). Iris, whom we learn is Jack's best friend, sends him off to her parents' cabin in the Washington coast wilderness - I'm assuming it's the San Juan Islands - for a bit of solo, contemplative me-time. There he stumbles onto Iris' sister Hannah, who too is fleeing from life's troubles and is trying to gather her wits at the cabin by herself. Hannah, who is played by Rosemarie Dewitt, had us going "we know her! We know her!" for about twenty minutes before it hit us - the junkie artist "Midge" from Mad Men, Don Draper's first mistress at the very start of Season One. Dewitt puts in perhaps the finest performance in the entire film - she's fantastic as a desperate, ungrounded but ultimately sweet and vulnerable child-desiring lesbian on the wrong side of 35.

It doesn't take long for the needy and lonely Jack and Hannah to land in bed together - and yeah, I just told you she's a lesbian, and no, it's not desire that drives her to sex with him. Iris then surprises everyone by showing up - and - well - complications ensue. They involve, among other things, suppressed love, inability to communicate and a leaky condom. Duplass, as always, is superb. He can play this guy over and over (and he does - this character dresses and acts the same as the one he played in "Safety Not Guaranteed") and it's absolutely fine with me. No actor can see-saw between comedy and emotionally-fraught drama as well as this guy can.

I think my big three films this year, heading into the final weeks of December, are "Beasts of the Southern Wild", "A Separation" (technically from last year) and "Your Sister's Sister". Make sure you see all three, and please report your findings back to me when you get a chance.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

BOOK REVIEW: "WE GOT POWER: HARDCORE PUNK SCENES FROM 1980s SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA" by David Markey & Jordan Schwartz

Now that the late 1970s Masque punk scene has been so fully mined in literary form by numerous books of photos and prose (examples are here, here, here, here and here – all worth your $$$), I believe that posterity will now begin recognizing the outsized musical and cultural contributions made in Los Angeles by the immediate children of the late 70s scene: the hardcore punks, the paisley underground, the gothcore weirdos, the experimental free-music freaks and the SST crew – among many others. Now that I think about it, that documentation is already well underway, with Black Flag and Paisley Underground books and films about The Minutemen and so on all having come out the past decade.

Hardcore punk left an indelible stamp on Southern California in the early 1980s. I continue to be supremely jealous of my friends who came of age in this location at a time when fast/hard/raging punk rock music was played on commercial radio every night at 8pm; when being a "punker" might expose you to some high school ridicule but also put you in a well-defined and exploding subculture of thousands of local kids; and where amazing records came out nearly every month. If you were a little more enterprising and clued in, you could tap into the over-21 scene and take a peek at what was going on with the Gun Club, Flesh Eaters, Dream Syndicate, Bangs, Green on Red camps, and so on. As Dave Markey and Jordan Schwartz's "WE GOT POWER" photo and essay book makes clear, there was considerable overlap between the prime movers of these scenes as well.

These two enterprising latchkey kids gathered up their cameras & skateboards and used their love of the exploding punk scene to begin documenting and living it in every way, shape and form. They started WE GOT POWER fanzine, a hand-written, somewhat silly magazine with photo collages that nonetheless captures the essence of the day exceptionally well, at least from the partyin' hardcore punk's perspective. Their definition of what was rad was expansive enough to include and celebrate The Minutemen, Red Cross, Saccharine Trust, 45 Grave and other heroes of mine, as well as a big reliance on and friendship with the bands who  had their own gangs: Circle One and, later, Suicidal Tendencies. As Markey helpfully explains why they befriended many of the lunkheads who formed their own punk armies, "You know that Beach Boys song 'I Get Around' - 'The bad guys know us, and they leave us alone'?"

This book's a big cut above most punk rock photo books because it's at almost a snapshot level. By that I mean, rather than focus solely on bands posing or jumping in the air, there are a lot of candid photos of punk parties, graffitied locations, people lounging around at Oki-Dog and the like. The book provides a rather bounteous picture of what it was like to be a 16-year-old punk rocker in 1982 Southern California, lying to your parents about a sleepover at a friend's house so you could see Circle One, Sin 34 and RF7 at The Fleetwood on a Friday night. The best photos are ones of bored skate punks hanging out in front of drugstores, or trying to make a makeshift ramp, or getting wasted at some 3am party in Pico Rivera or Downey or Canoga Park.

Markey himself drummed in Sin 34, which is barely mentioned in the book despite numerous photos of the band hanging out and getting drunk. I always thought that We Got Power was Schwartz's thing and his alone, not realizing until now the contributions of his sister Jennifer (from the Love Dolls, and who overlapped with me at school in the 80s at UC-Santa Barbara), of Kim Pilkington (who sounds like a legendary piece of work) and the guy whose name escapes me now and whose dorm address was listed on the first two issues, but who's persona non grata in the book itself. Their collective looked to be a pretty tight unit, and they were obviously out and about at least 4 times per week, wherever the shows and the parties happened to be.

"WE GOT POWER"
is a collection of over a dozen essays by folks close to the beating core of the 'core. Henry Rollins, the McDonald brothers of Red Cross/Kross, Mike Watt, Keith Morris, Janet Housdon, Chuck Dukowski and more. There are a few interesting and surprising takes on the scene that capture the excitement certain bands generated for a few months, like Jula Bell's essay on the wacky Nip Drivers. Most folks aren't too snotty or bitter about their teenage and early twenties involvement in this ephemeral scene, except for Jeff & Steve McDonald, who, rather than coming off as the funny and insightful pop culture punks they were in their youth, are actually still sort of angry about the motley collection of junkies, alcoholics and intolerant jocks whom they used to pal around with and who came to their shows. I suppose that, to me, hardcore is "funny" is many ways, when it's not still exhilarating and still a blast to listen to. Even if my tastes had greatly evolved from those I had at 16 – and I believe that they have – I'd be somewhat proud to have caught, ridden and helped to define this low-culture wave when it was at its peak & blowing suburban minds all over the Los Angeles basin. I was surprised to see them get the last word, and for it to be a dismissive one at that.

I figured the best way to experience my review of this book would be to listen to some crazy-ass SoCal hardcore while you read it. So here are a couple of my favorites that aren't the usual 'Flag, 'Jerks, 'Men etc.

Listen to Sin 34 - "Nuclear War"
 


Listen to Circle One - "Destroy Exxon"