Behold the rarely seen music video for Bongwater’s feminist indie rock anthem, The Power of Pussy, from the album of the same title.

When The Power of Pussy came out, in 1991, I became obsessed with doing a music video for this song. I was, and still am, a huge, huge Bongwater fan. Luckily, at the time,  I was working at the studio where Ann Magnuson’s Cinemax special Vandemonium had been produced and one of the partners knew Ann and introduced me to her. Ann and I have been great friends ever since. (Bongwater’s Kramer and I went on to author a screenplay together, a conspiracy theory comedy about homicidal mailmen, called Mailman, which we’re going to adapt into a graphic novel one day).

Partnering with a friend of mine named Alan Henderson, I had been working on various low budget music videos for a couple of years—-mostly for “underground” and indie acts from New York’s East Village. We’d shoot and edit them in the Manhattan-based Windsor Digital Video post production house where we both worked, off hours and on the weekends. The highest budget we ever got was, I think, $3000. (This Bongwater video had a budget of $1000 and $600 of that went to Ann’s hair and make-up, with the remainder going to pizza and videotape stock.). We did videos for John Sex, two for Larry Tee, one for an absolutely brilliant band called The Beme Seed, whose lead singer was Kathleen Lynch, the naked, gyrating go-go dancer from deep within the bowels of Hell who made the live Butthole Surfers experience so deeply berserk in the mid-80s. I’m going to post them all here in the coming week.

I had just left this job at the post house and had taken a new gig downtown at this production studio when this was in the planning stages. One of the principal animators in the studio, Glen Claybrook (who had projects like Pee-wee’s Playhouse and the opening credits for Madonna’s Who’s That Girl film under his belt) came up to me one day and said “Hey, I hear you are going to do a video for Bongwater’s Power of Pussy and I have had a vision….”

That, as you will see from the animation Glen produced, was a coy understatement! A vision, indeed! The best thing was, we didn’t pay a single cent cent for any of the animation costs because it was all shot on 35mm short ends and was processed, transfered and charged off to a huge advertising agency’s budget. We probably buried about two grand of the costs in that way. Sometimes you have to be a little creative, right? It never would have happened otherwise.

And speaking of getting creative, we also needed, to be able to pull off the title, as seen above, a woman who wasn’t shy about getting naked. I’ve read on the Internet that she is supposed to be Christina Martinez from Boss Hog (and wife of Jon Spencer) but this is inaccurate. It’s a good guess, it’s just not true. We found the performer for this, a woman with the first name Gina, at the New York Dolls topless bar near Wall Street. As you can see from the video, she was staggeringly beautiful. When she would change stages, as dancers tend to do, the entire gravity of the room would shift as every guy in the house moved across the floor, clamoring to get a better look. She was Megan Fox hot. Probably made $5000 a day in tips, which she spent on putting herself through medical school as I recall.

The feral felines were shot on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy. An eccentric old lady fed dozens of stray cats and someone I knew suggested that I just needed to show up with a few soup bones to see them totally go nuts. And they did indeed (see video). I shot that part on Super 8.

In the end, as will come as no surprise to anyone, this video got played very, very, very few times in public: twice on Playboy’s Hot Rocks (a music video show hosted by Jenny McCarthy and produced by my old friend Eric Mittleman) and once on Al Goldstein’s Midnight Blue cable access program when Bongwater’s Kramer was a guest on the show). It’s in the permanent collection of 17 museums around the world (mostly in former Soviet client states, believe it or not, but one is in California).

Ann threw a big party to premiere the video and it was the first time I was ever in Los Angeles. There were tons of TV and movie stars there (Albert Brooks, Richard Lewis), rockstars (members of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Fishbone) Russ Meyer actress Kitten Natividad and even Simpson’s creator Matt Groening, who asked me for a copy for his personal collection, which was a thrill. (When his wife arrived at the party he even made me play it a second time). The party was written up in the LA Weekly. It was my first evening in Los Angeles and that night I decided I wanted to move here and did, six months later.

I haven’t seen this video in years, but today Eric made a digital copy for me from the sole tape I have of this piece—a 3/4” tape, I might add—and I laughed my ass off watching it. Now it’s your turn… Enjoy!

Credits, as I recall them after 19 years… Directed by Alan Henderson and Richard Metzger. Animation directed by Glen Claybrook. Produced by me, and shot and edited by Alan. Billy Beyond did Ann’s make-up and Danilo did that ‘leaning tower of wig’ that Ann’s wearing (she had worn this same wig the week before in London, giving an award to ZZ Top(!) with Justin Hayward and John Lodge of Moody Blues on the Brit Awards program). Thanks would be appropriate also to Peter Rosenthal who helped shepherd this through the production process as cheaply as possible via his former production company.
 

 
After Rebel Without a Cause, my next exposure to director Nicholas Ray probably came through Lightning Over Water, Wim Wenders’ incredibly moving documentary on Ray’s last days before succumbing to lung cancer.

Then came Johnny Guitar, On Dangerous Ground, and, most recently, Criterion‘s bang-up resissuing of 1956’s Bigger Than Life.  James Mason plays a milquetoast school teacher, who, thanks to the “miracle drug” Cortisone, releases with near-tragic consequences his inner Übermensch.  You can watch a great, Mason-hosted trailer for the film here.

If you haven’t seen Bigger Than Life, please do—it remains one of the more scathing critiques of the “American Dream” ever committed to film.

After dying 31 years ago this month, Nicholas Ray popped up again in yesterday’s NYT.  During the years preceding his death, Ray devoted himself to his experimental film, We Can’t Go Home Again.

Made in collaboration with his college students at the time, segments of the film pop up in Lightning Over Water, but now Ray’s widow, Susan, in honor of what would have been her husband’s 100 birthday, is assembling a full print of We Can’t Go Home Again for next year’s Venice Film Festival:

“It was an experimental film, a difficult film and I think a visionary film that is particularly important today,” Ms. Ray said from her home in Saugerties, N.Y., where she has also been organizing the storehouse of original scripts, notes and movie storyboards for a sale.  Ray worked on the project from 1972 to 1976 with students he taught at Harpur College at the State University of New York at Binghamton.  An early version was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, but Ray continued to revise, reshoot and re-edit it until his death.  The film employs what Ray called “mimage” (short for multiple image), in which a number of camera images are simultaneously projected on the screen.

In certain respects his ideas were ahead of their time. On screen Ray and the students play versions of themselves, a conceit that smoothly fits into this era of reality television. Today’s digital techniques would also make it easy to create the effects Ray painstakingly tried to achieve on a shoestring budget.  Ray and his students, for example, used Super 8 millimeter and 16 millimeter formats and early video technology, projected the images onto a screen and then refilmed these multiple images using a 35 millimeter camera.

Jean-Luc Godard famously called Ray, “the camera,” and for a man whose conflicts—bisexuality, drug and alcohol abuse—always seemed on the verge of overwhelming his talents, it’s not surprising the director’s life was the subject of more than one documentary.

What follows is another look at Ray, ‘74’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself.  Directed by David Helpern Jr. and James C. Gutman, the doc covers Ray’s Harpur College teaching years, and features several sequences of Ray working on We Can’t Go Home Again.  Remaining parts follow at the bottom.

In light of Dennis Hopper’s recent passing, it’s also definitely worthwhile checking out Wenders’ The American Friend.  Hopper plays Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, and Ray, in the opening scene, contributes a small but impactful cameo as a painter who’s faked his own death.  That scene, restaged with a frail and sickly Ray, opens Lightning Over Water.

 
I’m a Stranger Here Myself, Part II, III, IV, V, VI

Reclaiming Causes of a Filmmaking Rebel

 
Clip from a mockumentary about how Africans view white culture in Austria, a land where “no black man has ever stepped foot.” Does anyone know what this is from? It reminds me of the brilliant retro comedy series, Look Around You created by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz. I’d love to see the entire thing, this clip is but a cruel tease! (Reminds me of Martin Mull’s mid-80s HBO series, The History of White People in America. I will never forget the scene with Fred Willard as a clueless white man (his forte, obviously) barbecuing in his backyard wearing an apron with a cartoon hot dog asking “What Do You Want on Yours?”)

 
What with John Waters seemingly everywhere these days (Salon, the NYT, Fresh Air) as he promotes his new book, Role Models, I thought it’d be a fine time to revisit one of his former film muses, Edith Massey.

Along with Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce, Massey was a stock player in the Dreamlander universe, and a key contributer to that trilogy of Waters films I and many others consider particularly essential: Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living.

Watching those three films growing up (and watching them, and watching them), Massey always struck me as being infinitely stranger than larger-than-life drag queen, Divine.  Maybe it was because I somehow grasped that “drag” was, by definition, “performative,” and thus safer than the whacked-out maternalism that Massey so artlessly channeled.  In fact, whereas Divine’s acting method might be described as quotation-marks-within-quotation-marks, Massey seemingly acted without the cushion of any marks whatsoever—quotation or otherwise.

Massey’s life after Waters was perhaps no odder than her life before it, and its trajectory has an arc straight out of Dickens: from orphanage to reform school, from freight train rider to brothel madam, and then, as these things sometimes go, to Hollywood.

Some of this ground is covered in the ‘74 documentary on her life: Love Letter To Edie (you can watch a clip from that film here).  The below interview from the early 80’s is also amusing:

 
Of course, no Massey entry would be complete without the infamous “Egg Man” moment from Pink Flamingos.  That follows below:

 
After a battle with cancer and diabetes, Massey passed away in Venice, California, in 1984.  That was 2 years after Massey and her band, called, naturally, Edie and the Eggs, released the below Rodney on the Roq staple, Punks, Get Off The Grass:

 
I was thrilled to read Vaughan Bell’s short essay at Slate about Milton Rokeach’s rarely encountered 1964 book, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. It’s one of my all time favorite books, but alas, one that no one else I’ve ever met has heard of or read. It’s nearly impossible to find for a reasonable price. The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is a psychiatric case study by Rokeach, a detailing of his experiment with a trio of schizophrenic patients at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The three men—who each harbored the delusional belief that he was Jesus Christ returned—were forced to live with each other in a mental hospital to see if their beliefs could be challenged enough to effect a break-through in at least one of them.

But it wasn’t that simple, as Rokeach found out. Bell writes:

But the book makes for starkly uncomfortable reading as it recounts how the researchers blithely and unethically manipulated the lives of Leon, Joseph, and Clyde in the service of academic curiosity. In one of the most bizarre sections, the researchers begin colluding with the men’s delusions in a deceptive attempt to change their beliefs from within their own frame of reference. The youngest patient, Leon, starts receiving letters from the character he believes to be his wife, “Madame Yeti Woman,” in which she professes her love and suggests minor changes to his routine. Then Joseph, a French Canadian native, starts receiving faked letters from the hospital boss advising certain changes in routine that might benefit his recovery. Despite an initially engaging correspondence, both the delusional spouse and the illusory boss begin to challenge the Christs’ beliefs more than is comfortable, and contact is quickly broken off.

In fact, very little seems to shift the identities of the self-appointed Messiahs. They debate, argue, at one point come to blows, but show few signs that their beliefs have become any less intense. Only Leon seems to waver, eventually asking to be addressed as “Dr Righteous Idealed Dung” instead of his previous moniker of “Dr Domino dominorum et Rex rexarum, Simplis Christianus Puer Mentalis Doctor, reincarnation of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.” Rokeach interprets this more as an attempt to avoid conflict than a reflection of any genuine identity change. The Christs explain one another’s claims to divinity in predictably idiosyncratic ways: Clyde, an elderly gentleman, declares that his companions are, in fact, dead, and that it is the “machines” inside them that produce their false claims, while the other two explain the contradiction by noting that their companions are “crazy” or “duped” or that they don’t really mean what they say.

In hindsight, the Three Christs study looks less like a promising experiment than the absurd plan of a psychologist who suffered the triumph of passion over good sense. The men’s delusions barely shifted over the two years, and from an academic perspective, Rokeach did not make any grand discoveries concerning the psychology of identity and belief. Instead, his conclusions revolve around the personal lives of three particular (and particularly unfortunate) men. He falls back—rather meekly, perhaps—on the Freudian suggestion that their delusions were sparked by confusion over sexual identity, and attempts to end on a flourish by noting that we all “seek ways to live with one another in peace,” even in the face of the most fundamental disagreements. As for the ethics of the study, Rokeach eventually realized its manipulative nature and apologized in an afterword to the 1984 edition: “I really had no right, even in the name of science, to play God and interfere round the clock with their daily lives.”

There’s another piece I found mentioning the book that’s worth bringing in here, too, because it uses the Three Christs of Ypsilanti as a microcosm of how the world’s major religions all believe they have the one truth and worship the one true god. A guy named Steve Bhaerman who writes a humor column under the pen name “Swami Beyondananda” at a New Age website called InnerSelf had a profound insight about the book, seeing the three messianically-challenged protagonists as stand-ins for the world’s big three religions, each under the delusion that their “truth” is the true truth and it’s the other guy’s religion that is superstitious bullshit:

I hadn’t thought about that book for years, until I was reminded of it by two seemingly unrelated news items. The first involved the Middle East peace process, which recently has been neither peaceful nor much of a process. A huge seemingly unresolvable dispute involves Jerusalem, which houses the sacred sites of three major religions. Someone had the enlightening suggestion that Jerusalem be ruled by God. Of course, the next question was, whose God?

The other news item was about the Catholic church declaring that for all intents and purposes, IT alone is the one sure way to heaven—and perhaps more important, the only certain way to avoid hell. A friend of mine who owns a marketing business (and incidentally grew up Catholic) says, “I can only dream of having such an unbeatable marketing premise. Buy my product, go to heaven. Buy the other guy’s, go to hell.” Not to single out the Catholics, though. Fundamentalists of every stripe play out a dyslexic version of that childhood taunt, “My dog’s better than your dog.” Except that “my God’s better than your God” has caused millions of deaths and oceans of tears.

And that’s when it occurred to me that the three major religious systems are like the Three Christs of Ypsilanti. Each lives in a delusional system that it alone is the One True Path. And now, God has placed them all in a therapy group to see if they can accommodate one another.

Brilliant. If you are interested, some parts of The Three Christ of Ypsilanti can be read online here.

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (InnerSelf)

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus: In the late 1950s, three men who identified as the Son of God were forced to live together in a mental hospital. What happened? (Slate)