I’m sure we’re all pretty familiar with the Michael Alig/club kids story by now, but let’s face it, no matter how many times it is told it never fails to shock and entertain. Limelight is a new documentary which recounts the story yet again, but as opposed to Party Monster, Shockumentary or James St James’ excellent Disco Bloodbath book, the focus this time in on the Limelight club itself and its owner, the nightclub impresario Peter Gatien.
Gatien owned a string of venues in New York, Atlanta and London during the 80s and 90s, including the very successful Tunnel and Club USA in Times Square. The Limelight was perhaps the most notorious (due in no small part to the club kids’ involvement), and became the focus of Mayor Giuliani’s crackdown on the city’s night life and drug culture. Gatien made a fortune from his venues, but was found guilty of tax evasion in the late Nineties and deported to his native Canada. Gatien is interviewed in Limelight, along with a prison-bound Michael Alig and everyone’s favorite vegan porn-hound Moby (who describes the Limelight as being like “pagan Rome on acid”). The documentary is released on Friday, here’s the trailer:
“Star,” an Italo-disco version of Bowie’s “Starman” produced by Claudio Mingardi, manages, in my opinion, to improve upon the original by flavoring it with 80s synth effects and vocoder - cheesy futurism that works the song into an electronic vibe that suits lyrics like “Came back like a slow voice on a wave of phase/That weren’t no D.J. that was hazy cosmic jive.”
Images: Mission Mars and Fassbinder’s visionary Welt am Draht .
Hard to remember it now, but it was well into the 1980s before VCRs were commonplace in America life. I lived in lower Manhattan at the time and there were very few video rental stores there. The only ones I can recall are Kim’s Video (originally sharing space with a dry cleaner, then several locations, now down to one again) and the New Video mini-chain, now a DVD distributor. By mid-decade the “tape trading underground” was starting to organize itself (aided by the then burgeoning zine scene) and an unlikely character named “Dan the Record Man” became a key node in that machinery.
“Dan the Record Man” was probably in his mid 50s when I met him, but he was in such terrible shape that he looked far older. He was a classic example of what eating SHITTY FOOD 24/7—in his case dirty water sauerkraut and mustard slathered hot dogs sold by street vendors outside of the Canal Street flea market where his stall was located—could do to a human body. My god did he just reek of poor health and future strokes and heart attacks, but he was a super cool old guy who had been a dancer on Hullabaloo and knew everything about music and had records so rare it made my head spin. Case in point he had copies of The Great Lost Kinks Album as well as the live Yardbirds LP and the novelty record “Stairway to Gilligan” both which Led Zeppelin’s lawyers had yanked off the market. Once he knew you were “cool”—he was really paranoid—he’d pull back the black curtains covering the top shelves in his overstuffed corner booth and show you the bootlegs (there were thousands) and the real treasure he had, the bootleg videos.
Dan had EVERYTHING you ever wanted or could ever want. And if he didn’t have it, he could get it for you (he scored Nancy Sinatra’s TV special for me as I recall). Tapes were $20 and he’d do trade if you had something really good, but in keeping with his Gollum-esque character, you had to have two really good things in order to get one of his really good things for free. Those were his rules and you could fuck the fuck off if you weren’t prepared to play by them. Old school record collectors out there will feel me when I say: you did play by his rules. Otherwise you were cut off from so much illicit bootleg goodness.
Every once in a while you could surprise Dan with something incredibly rare. At the time I knew Dan, I was working in a digital video studio that did Super-8, 16mm and 35mm film transfers. On one occasion, photographer Robert Frank booked time to make a film transfer from his little seen documentary of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 American Tour with the title Cocksucker Blues. The Stones had an injunction against Cocksucker Blues being screened (unless for charity) because, well, it was a fairly decadent and at times quite unflattering portrait of them, let’s just say. The staff were told that under no circumstances could we make our own copies of what Frank was coming in to transfer. Yeah right! So, uh, this friend of mine, yeah this friend of mine, made copy, a copy of which I then traded to Dan, for, as I recall, a live video of David Bowie’s “Heroes” tour from 1978 and Bowie’s “1980 Floor Show” performance from The Midnight Special. Whenever I saw a bootleg of Cocksucker Blues, I would always look to see if it was a generation or two (or ten) away from the one I traded to Dan. Over the decades, most of them were my copy’s progeny (I can tell by a warble in the opening credits) although this has changed in recent years as a far better version has surfaced on DVD and torrent sites.
In any case, my rambling anecdote about the VHS tape trading underground of the late 1980s is because I wanted you to know that the legendary Cocksucker Blues documentary has been posted once again by some kind soul for viewing on the Internet. My 25-year-old copy is NOT the parent of this version, which looks pretty good (Note: The film was shot on Super-8 film to begin with, so it’s never going to look much better than this. You can find torrents for a great looking DVD version all over the place).
A brand-new HD restoration of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s seldom-seen World on a Wire will be screening at Cinefamily in Los Angles this Sunday, September 18th at 7:00pm:
“A textbook example of a film that was ahead of its time—a movie that anticipates Blade Runner in its meditation on artificial and human intelligence and The Matrix in its conception of reality as a computer-generated illusion.”—Dennis Lim, The New York Times
A dystopic science-fiction epic, World on a Wire is German wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s gloriously cracked, boundlessly inventive 1973 take on future paranoia. With dashes of Kubrick, Vonnegut, and Dick, but a flavor entirely and unmistakably his own, Fassbinder tells the noir-spiked tale of reluctant action hero Fred Stiller (Klaus Lowitsch, who also starred in Fassbinder’s WWII masterpiece The Marriage of Maria Braun), a cybernetics engineer who uncovers a massive corporate and governmental conspiracy. At risk? Our entire (virtual) reality as we know it. This long-unseen three-and-a-half-hour labyrinth is a satiric and surreal look at the weird world of tomorrow from one of cinema’s kinkiest geniuses.
This beautiful silent excerpt from Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished film on Mexico, ¡Que viva México!, is an exquisite example of avant-garde film making and a fragment of what Eisenstein described as his “greatest film plan and his greatest personal tragedy.”
Eisenstein went to Mexico in 1931 with assistant director Eduard Tisse and producer Grigory Alexandrov to shoot a film about the country’s mythic landscape with the financial help of writer Upton Sinclair, the muck-racking genius behind 1905’s controversial slaughterhouse exposé The Jungle, and his wife Mary Craig. Shooting stopped in 1932 after a series of financial mishaps with most of the work completed, though one of the film’s segments couldn’t be filmed. The Stalinist regime prevented Eisenstein from ever seeing Que viva México! as he had intended it.
Of the over 50 hours of film that Eisenstein shot, various versions of Eisenstein’s Mexican epic have been constructed, none are definitive. Ultimately, no one knows what the director’s final version might have been like, but even unfinished the results are quite magnificent.
Here in it’s entirety is Julian Temple’s very fine 2007 documentary on Joe Strummer.
Featuring members of The Clash, Don Letts, Jim Jarmusch, Bernie Rhodes, Joe Ely, John Cooper Clarke and many more.
Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten does justice to a complex and brilliant man who was constantly grappling with his fans’ expectations, his own demons, while all the while trying to age gracefully as the face of rebellion and punk rock music.
Jack Nicholson was ahead of the curve with his hydrogen-powered H2-4 Chevy Impala back in 1978.
Nicholson appeared on Canadian television show “Marketplace” to promote a hydrogen-fueled Chevrolet Celebrity, which he hoped would revolutionize the car industry.
Anticipating the green-car revolution (and Chevy’s Volt!) by nearly 30 years, Nicholson’s Celebrity was (per the video) “a standard Chev’, with a standard Chev’ motor,” but used a specially-designed carburetor which allowed the car to burn hydrogen gas instead of vaporized gasoline.
Nicholson brings his sardonic humor to the mix with this very funny line:
“If nothing else, this will revolutionize suicide. Instead of carbon-monoxide poisoning, you’ll just get a steam bath.”
Directed by Transformers star Shia LaBouef, Marilyn Manson’s self-produced video for his new song “No Reason” pays homage to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. Manson and Jodorowsky are friends (Alejandro wanted to cast Marilyn in an El Topo sequel) and I guess this is Manson’s way of honoring his master.
Other influences I detect floating through the video are from George Bataille’s “The Story Of The Eye,” Takashi Miike’s Ichi, The Killer, Joel-Peter Witkin and new wave porn flicks like Night Dreams and Cafe Flesh.
I don’t think Manson is challenging himself with this. Been there, done that. But, anything that calls attention to Jodorowsky is in my opinion a good thing.
The Hollywood film producer John Calley died September 13, at his home in Los Angeles, after a long illness.
Calley was responsible for The Loved One, The Americanization of Emily, Catch-22, and more recently The Remains of the Day, and the popcorn fodder Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code.
But it will be for his work at Warner Brothers that Calley will be best remembered, as the Los Angeles Times reports:
In 1969, [Calley] became executive vice president in charge of production at Warner Bros.; he became president in 1975.
“Under Calley, Warners became the class act in town,” Peter Biskind wrote in his 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.
“Urbane and witty, he gave the impression that he was somehow above it all, slumming in the Hollywood cesspool,” Biskind wrote. “As one wag put it, he was the blue in the toilet bowl.”
At Warner Bros., Calley created what Biskind called “an atmosphere congenial to ‘60s-going-on ‘70s filmmakers” and was known for relying heavily on his own taste in picking films.
Among Warner’s Calley-era bill of fare: Woodstock, A Clockwork Orange, Mean Streets, The Towering Inferno, “McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Exorcist, Dog Day Afternoon, Deliverance, Dirty Harry, All the President’s Men, Blazing Saddles, Superman and Chariots of Fire.
As a salute, here’s a brief video resume of that golden era of film-making.
