The newest Martin Scorsese/Terence Winter series Vinyl is in many ways like their last one, Boardwalk Empire: A pulpy concoction of jagged historical anecdotes thrown into the HBO antihero blender. This time, instead of bootleggers and crooked politicians conniving during Prohibition in a glitzed-up Atlantic City, it’s an origin story for punk (and potentially hip-hop) set in a rotting 1973 New York.
Vinyl is running Sunday nights on HBO. My review of the two-hour Scorsese-directed premiere is at PopMatters:
It’s easy to see what’s grabbing the attention of cocaine-dusted record exec Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale) at the concert that bookends the two-hour premiere episode of Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger’s HBO series Vinyl. First, he’s watching the New York Dolls, slashing and burning their way through “Personality Crisis” at the downtown firetrap Mercer Arts Center before a crowd of rangy and be-glittered kids with the look of fervent religious converts. Second, although his company, American Century, seems to have once had a few hits, it’s now a creatively irrelevant laughingstock (nickname: “American Cemetery”) that he’s trying to unload to a cabal of clueless Germans before they realize just how cooked the books really are. His life is unraveling, and his juices are dry (more on that in a minute). The guy needs a fix. Rock and roll is there to save him, for the first time in far too long..
Joe Strummer, playing with the Pogues (photo by Masao Nakagami)
There’s a great new collection of essays about the inestimable Joe Strummer (1952–2002) that came out last month from Ashgate Publishing called Punk Rock Warlord: The Life and Work of Joe Strummer. I was lucky enough to be asked to contribute a chapter.
Strummer wanted to be a lot of things: writer, artist, revolutionary, world-champion cigarette smoker. But what was probably most important to him was communication, whether about racial equality, how consumerism was crap, or just whatever was running through his roiling mind that week. He wanted to use his songs to get the word out. Rock stars can get the word out; they have a megaphone louder than that of the street-corner busker or pub-rocker that Joe started out as. If he was going to be a rock star, he needed a proper stage name…
Just for kicks, here’s a New York local news report from when Joe and the Clash barnstormed through the city in 1981:
Liv LeMoyne, Mira Barkhammar, and Mira Grosin in ‘We Are the Best!’ (Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)
A trio of disaffected 1980s Swedish punks form a mostly tuneless band with one great should-have-been-a-hit song in Lukas Moodysson’s We Are the Best! It opens in limited release tomorrow after a batch of well-received festival dates.
It’s assumed that the thorny flowers of punk need rocky, hostile ground to take root. Think of how the gone-to-seed, junkie-littered, class warfare cityscapes of late-1970s New York or Maggie Thatcher’s Britain bred those first mohawked shock troops. But that wasn’t always the case, as Lukas Moodysson’s slight but charming growing-up story We Are the Best! shows. Just as punk could flourish as easily in America’s sprawling, sunny suburbs as its bombed-out cities, its seething fury was also an enticing reaction to the complacent communitarianism of 1980s Sweden. The scrawny kids gelling their hair and scornfully twisting up their faces aren’t just angry about the miserable state of the world, they’re furious that nobody else seems to get it…
Emilio Estevez gives his best punk-rock face in ‘Repo Man’
At first it might seem strange that the folks over at Criterion would bother putting out an edition of Repo Man. After all, isn’t it really a film meant to be watched on a bad $2 bargain-bin DVD or a miserably grainy VHS tape from a decades-old cable broadcast? Possibly, but on new viewing, this is one of those cult films that actually deserves getting this treatment, brand-spanking new transfer, deleted scenes and all.
The scuzz-punk doom comedy of Alex Cox’s 1984 underground touchstone makes for a creepy visitation from a fracturing society. Released at the midpoint of the Reagan era’s celebration of suburban consumerism, it had a gutter-level view of Los Angeles’ bleached-out sprawl and social entropy. Its characters tend toward the feral: repo men who hunt the cars whose owners can’t pay up, shotgun-toting punks, cold-eyed federal agents, or bugged-out cult followers. Hints of an oppressive police state are everywhere, and the scent of nuclear apocalypse is on the land. In the middle of all the science-fiction-tinged end-times bleakness, though, Cox mines a catchphrase-studded seam of absurdist humor that’s one of the film’s most durable qualities…
Here’s the trailer, in all its grotty gloriousness:
The best sports-as-life documentary of the year, and a great story to boot, Stacey Peralta’s Bones Brigade: An Autobiography is playing now in pretty limited release. It should come to DVD and cable soon and is well worth seeking out.
Stacey Peralta’s bright and curiously lovely new film takes up not longer after Dogtown and Z-Boys ends, with the dissolution of the Z-Boys. This time, the filmmaker puts himself front-and-center in the interviews that provide a spine for a stream of old VHS skate footage and faded photographs. As he tells it, Peralta refashioned himself as the ringleader for a new crew of bright young skateboarders. After co-forming the skate equipment company Powell-Peralta, which would serve as munitions factory for the sport’s underground resurgence in the 1980s, Peralta put together a squad of improbably talented and driven pre-teens he could mold into stars. Given that the roster included guys like Tony Hawk, Steve Caballero, and Lance Mountain, the feat that Peralta accomplished is something akin to discovering the entire Dream Team before they had even entered high school…
A much shortened, adapted version of that essay ran at PopMatters under the title “
Chris Barsanti 
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