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Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies

I remember buying a copy of Hated, the Todd Phillips documentary about GG Allin, in 1995. It was right after my last student loan disbursement, and I bought a copy on VHS at Karma Records for some outrageous price, like $40 or $50. Blockbuster didn’t have this one as a rental, and this was way before torrent, so I ponied up full price and bought my own copy. I was with my pal Larry, and we went over to his apartment and watched the tape, hoping for some insane footage of the then-deceased shock rocker.

I remember at the time being somewhat unimpressed by the movie; this was before YouTube, which made the notoriety of characters like Allin much larger. Unless you caught the Geraldo show or traded video tapes with someone who recorded it, the only exposure (no pun intended) to GG’s antics would be third-hand, like the way urban legends used to be spread. That’s where I heard about him — I used to hang out in this bagel shop with this punk guy named John, and in 1992, while he played Hated in the Nation on the store jambox (much to the chagrin of the store patrons) he told me all about this guy who ran around stage naked, beating up fans, shoving the mic up his ass, and cutting himself with bottles.

I remembered the movie as being a bit flat, not capturing this rawness, and being a bit of a let-down. After the first viewing, I almost completely forgot it. It’s something that pops in my head when I fall down a k-hole about GG or old New York, but I haven’t revisited it, until yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised at what a nice little time capsule of the early 90s New York this has become.

Hated was directed and produced by Todd Phillips, who later became an accomplished Hollywood director of such films as Old School and The Hangover. But this is anything but a Hollywood blockbuster. It was filmed when Phillips was a junior at NYU (and employee at Kim’s Video) with a budget of only $12,000. The film looks like a student film, and is even more dated now, in a pleasant way. It resembles 1970s news footage shot on film, then tele-cined to betacam video and back to film again, with old pre-computer titles and washed out lighting.

My first thought on this was that it reminded me of a Nick Broomfield movie, like Kurt and Courtney, which I also saw recently. It had the same feel, with voiceover between segments, establishing the story. Phillips isn’t actually in the film, in the same way Broomfield does the on-camera gonzo interviewing. But I looked it up and there’s a good interview on the Suicide Girls site where Phillips said Broomfield was a huge influence for him to get into documentary.

Another reason I really liked this film was it captured a New York that is now gone, an early-90s lower east side grimy New York. If you consider a generation to be twenty years, New York moves at five times that speed; a mayoral term is four years, and the average restaurant lasts a year. At any given point on Broadway, every business will have turned over in four years. When I arrived in 1999, there had been at least two cycles of this renewal, and there were only small hints of this old world for me. It was like standing in an average city in 2000 and thinking about 1960, like the level of nostalgia Mad Men brought about, any time I would see a speck of graffiti from the era of this film. So I really loved the washed-out views of St. Marks and alphabet city in this.

(Side note: GG’s last show was at a club called the gas station at 2nd and B. Here’s a great article about it, with some film: http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2015/01/2b.html. The site of this infamous club is now a Duane Reade and high-end condo.)

The film is hilarious, in an unintentionally hilarious way. GG’s brother Mearle and other various hangers-on are over-the-top bizarre, and even though they are being straight-up serious, I could not stop laughing at them. It’s a total Jerry Springer guest type of humor, but the film takes it further by showing the various scatological antics of the crew. It’s not for the squeamish; like there’s a scene where they get a hooker to piss in Allin’s mouth at a barbeque, and he starts puking up beans and franks while she’s squatting over him and urinating on his face. So it’s not exactly family entertainment.

The film in general though made me think more about who the “real” GG Allin was, and if such a persona could survive in today’s always-on media. Phillips has professed that Allin only acted the way he was when he was drunk or high, and that drugs fueled this persona. He claims that when he was sober, he was a calm and rational guy you could hold a conversation with. It seems like in the days of paper news and videotape journalism for only an hour a day, it was easier to ration out his antics, to only go insane and knock teeth out for a rare show, or save the “I am Jesus and the Devil and I will die for rock and roll” speeches for televised court appearances. Could he have kept up the persona in an era of TMZ, 24-hour news cycles, and every passer-by carrying a video-enabled iPhone? Would he have killed himself much sooner? Or would he have become a person like Marilyn Manson, who had a brief tenure as a crazed satanist, then vanished from the limelight and spent years holed up in a mansion with various Hollywood starlets?

I feel like GG was close to his persona, the product of deranged parents and crippling substance abuse issues. But I also think it could have been the ultimate Kauffman-esque ruse. Most people dismiss his music as noise, but sometimes I listen to Hated in the Nation and think this stuff is far too catchy to be written by a completely blotto drug addict on the verge of murder/suicide. And I wonder if total exposure in the media would have cracked the shock-rock image and showed a person behind it.

At any rate, this is worth seeing if you’re interested. I believe this was re-released on DVD with more footage from GG’s funeral, although once you fall down a YouTube k-hole, you’ll see it there, too. (A good starting point is this three-part camcorder video of the riot ensuing after GG’s last performance at the gas station: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F9yk8X1TAw)

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general reviews

Ex Machina

Finally saw Ex Machina last night, which I didn’t see in theaters for whatever scheduling reason earlier this year. I liked it quite a bit, for a few reasons. It’s a basic premise: The Island of Doctor Moreau, but robots. Oscar Issac plays a brogrammer CEO of a google/facebook type company, hunkered down in some remote location Lost-type secret bunker to develop an AI robot. Domhnall Gleeson is a nerdy programmer who wins a contest to spend a week at the hidden fortress and run a Turing test on the robot’s AI. Antics ensue, what is intelligence and reality, etc.

The first thing I took away from this is how writer/director Alex Garland uses Issac’s character to depict the trend of uber-genius CEO types in Silicon Valley, and how they all want to become god in some grandiose way, be it creating driverless cars or their own private space program or achieving the singularity. It was an interesting jab at this current industry trend, a nice touch to the typical genius mastermind profile.

The other thing I really liked about the movie was the general feel of this British indie sci-fi genre. The movie it reminded me of in some odd was was 2009’s Moon, not in content, but in the ambience. Both had a modernist desolation, where the technology was futuristic but realistic, and the general mood of the film was enhanced by the director taking the pace slow, with lots of dead space around a muted action that gave the opposite effect of a glossy science fiction future with an artificial sped-up bustle to it.

I really appreciate this school of thought, because I always feel that the future isn’t about this “bustle” — I think there’s an expectation, based on eighties sci-fi or even older Asimov-type books that these super-populated worlds of fifty billion people in deeply-tiered cities will mean a great unity of humanity, that you would always be interacting with other people. But I have a strong feeling that as population grows, people will be more alone, more desolate. It’s the way I felt living in New York; at any given time, I was surrounded by thousands of people, yet I felt far more alone than when I was in the middle of nowhere in the midwest. These films seem to capture this perfectly, that Ballardian loneliness, and I really appreciate that.

The plot of the film itself has the requisite number of twists and flip-flops to keep a viewer interested, and Alicia Vikander is certainly easy on the eyes. But my main takeway from the film was the general feel of it, which I can barely describe, but it makes me greatly appreciative of this type of film, outside of the Hollywood summer tentpole billion-dollar sci-fi mega-blockbuster, which often seems like the only way sci-fi films get made these days.

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general reviews

The Wolfpack

(I have a half-resolution this year to try to write down something about every movie I watch, which I’ll probably stop doing by mid-January, but it’s only the third, so bear with me.)

The Wolfpack is a documentary about a group of seven kids who were never allowed to leave their New York apartment, and were homeschooled and cloistered by their weird hippy Peruvian father and slightly altered mother (played by Gary Busey.) The kids, unable to see reality, fell into a world of Hollywood films, and spent all their time remaking old classics like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction shot-for-shot, using cardboard props and cheap camcorders. Then the oldest son decides he wants to explore outside the apartment, and the whole thing falls apart, or comes together, I guess.

The situation is an interesting premise, although I didn’t feel there was enough content to fill a 90-minute film. The director, Crystal Moselle, took a more poetic structure to the documentary, instead of being expository, and the more artistic approach didn’t hold my attention, and presented more questions than answers. (How much was their rent? Where did they get money? What happened to everyone after the film? How did they do things like go to the doctor?) Also, the oldest kid, Mukunda, looked enough like Adam Driver that it really bugged me (especially after Star Wars) and I spent the second half of the movie playing Scrabble and making jokes about this. So yeah, I’m the asshole for not paying more attention, but it didn’t fully click with me.

But here’s what did throw me, and made me waste half the movie scouring Google Maps: these kids lived a few blocks from the last place I lived in New York. For those interested, they lived in Seward Park Extension, which is at 65 Norfolk Street. I lived in Seward Park, at a building at Grand and Pitt.

I don’t know the exact history of Seward Park, but they lived in a much more run-down public housing building, whereas we lived in the co-op buildings. (Also weird trivia: one of the guitarists of Guns ’N Roses lived in my building, which would have been a weird mindfuck for these 80s-obsessed kids.) But yeah, while they were locked away on the 16th store of that building, I used to walk past it almost every day on the way to work. Maybe their camcorder footage of the streets below has an image of a dude with coke bottle glasses and a leather jacket, walking to the McDonald’s on Delancey to shove another Quarter Pounder meal into his fat face.

There are the usual allegations of “is this fake” and “was this exploitative” and I don’t care either way. All documentaries are fake now, and they all exploit someone; it’s a carryover from reality TV, and it’s why they largely bore me. As a metafiction nerd, I’m much more into reflexive documentaries, that play with the idea of their constructedness and dance around going meta with it. David Holzman’s Diary is my favorite example of this, although good luck getting anyone to pay attention to a film that bizarre.

This ultimately didn’t blow my skirt up, but I did enjoy the random bit of scenery reminding me of my old home. There’s a brief bit where Mukunda breaks free and goes to the grocery store, and I was thinking “oh my god, that’s the Swine Fair on Clinton Street!” So, interesting, but a bit of a nostalgia trigger, and not much else for me.

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general reviews

The Martian

I saw Ridley Scott’s The Martian as my final film of 2015, and it encapsulated 2015 in film well for me, because I found it mostly meh.

The basics: a 141-minute Robinsonade about a guy that gets left for dead on Mars; the next mission won’t arrive for four years, antics ensue. It’s based on the 2011 novel of the same name by Andy Weir. The screenplay was written by Drew Goddard with the intention that he’d direct, but then he got the chance to direct Sinister Six, and direction shifted to Scott.

I don’t know if or how this shift in direction colored the final film, but it’s most definitely not a typical Ridley Scott film. It has none of the darkness of Alien or atmosphere of Prometheus. It’s much more of a cheery attempt at wittiness with a dose of ha-ha funny bits by Matt Damon, a typical Hollywood overcoming adversity vehicle with enough light-hearted cheer and a typical plot curve to keep Christmas audiences entertained.

The science aspect of the film was decent. They spent a lot of time working with NASA, trying to get the technology and astrophysics aspects of the story correct, and that seemed to work. (The film passed the Neil deGrasse Tyson test, which seems to be the bar for these sorts of things.) I think I had some minor quibbles on it, like the fact that the film put great plot priority on the shortage of food and water, but the Mars station seemed to have endless air and power. (Yes, solar cells, but if I was stuck there, I’d probably start shutting off interior lights.) And Damon is a perpetually dopy actor for me, and I couldn’t believe he would be a genius botanist academic. He also kept a totally ripped six-pack body while eating a starvation diet of only potatoes for like a year, which seemed unlikely.

I did not like the sanitized, high-design aesthetic of the film’s space stations and mission control interiors. It was way too slick and artificial-looking, like bad CGI from the early 2000s. These were supposed to be ships built by the lowest bidder, hurtled through the stresses and wear of space with people living in them, and they looked as perfect as a European modern art museum, not a single scratch or smudge on them. This was incredibly uncharacteristic of Ridley Scott. I realize Alien was a long time ago, and the intention was different, but look at the two back-to-back and it’s striking.

I also did not care for the overly generic plot. The film basically took the most crowd-pleasing parts of Gravity, Armageddon, and Apollo 13, and threw them in a choose-your-own-adventure story. Taking a film and swapping out this for that like a Lego set might be entertaining to the masses, but it’s ultimately unchallenging and bland. This was the kind of film where I immediately knew the first and second attempts at a task would fail, because the third would be the payoff. I don’t expect huge plot twists and payoffs, but this formulaic writing makes a film have no real repeat value, which was the case here.

The film was ultimately successful at the box office. I’m sure Star Wars stepped on the back end of their campaign. I actually thought the film was still in theaters, and was surprised to see it had already moved to VOD. I’m still used to the old days when a video came out on VHS for rental half a year later.

I didn’t hate the film, but didn’t love it, either. That sums up my entire 2015 experience with film, where everything seemed to play it safe and go through the motions. Without digging through notes, I can’t think of what my 2015 standout movie would be. Anyway, I hope 2016 picks up.

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2015

I hate January 1.

It’s a double-barreled hate. First, I have an overwhelming urge to look at what happened in the last 365 days, and that sends me down a horrible nostalgia spiral. That makes me think of what I missed, who is gone, what I screwed up, what I didn’t do, and imposes a thick layer of shame and regret that’s difficult to escape.

But also, the whole “new year, new me” thing cripples me. I feel like I can’t do the same thing I did on December 31, because I need to reinvent myself, do great things, set lofty goals, become healthy. I need to learn new things, start new projects, and instantly become a better person. And just thinking about all of this overwhelms me.

2015 was a shit year, for a lot of reasons I can’t even list here. I seriously had about five years’ worth of bad things happen this year. Health stuff, relationships, work, writing – it all went south in a big way. I managed to almost get out of the deep hole I dug myself into, but in many ways, I feel like 2015 was a wasted year. There’s more pressure for me to not do this with 2016, and find some relief and balance.

I did publish a book. It wasn’t that well received, and my book sales as a whole have completely dried up. But it was a long struggle to get anything done this year, so I’m glad that came out of it. I had a lot of fun making stupid memes on facebook, which was probably my biggest source of joy this year. I walked almost a thousand miles this year. So some stuff happened.

But yeah. Fuck 2015. Looking forward to getting more done in the next year.