The Berkeley Arts Festival 2011 presents OFF, the Old Friends Festival, highlighting the best of the 1990s Bay Area music scene. 25 musicians, six bands, two nights!
What Not
The Spitters
Just dug up this nugget – an entire Spitters show (almost 21 minutes long!) filmed live at The Cooler, a great 1990s downtown NYC rock club. This performance is from 1998 and features the post “boy-band” Spitters; Bill, Tim and Louis have all graduated to other pursuits (including high-school teacher, fatherhood and life imprisonment, roughly [...]
City of Strangers
Original Beats is a short documentary film by Francois Bernadi on Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke.
A fascinating and informative portrait on the eldest and the youngest of the original Beats, filmed shortly before Huncke’s death in 1996.
City of Strangers
Over the holidays, reader Jerry Rio sent me this charming doc about changing mid-90′s New York: The Urban Eye. This ‘video time-capsule’ was made in 1995, when market forces, and Rudy Guiliani, were shifting the city into its present phase. Jerry Rio interviews people on the street and a mock-serious narrator charts the ‘unofficial landmarks [...]
City of Strangers
What always interested me about NY when I first came here in the late 80′s was how, like London, it was essentially a working class city. The working classes lived in the heart of the city, and constituted a great deal of its personality. Sure, the economic, media, and fashion elites, the beautiful people [...]
Flame Schon
Snow Advisory was shot in ’99 at Plaza Blanca in Abiquiu and at Tsankawi Caves right near Bandelier National Monument near the Jemez Mountains and the infamous Los Alamos New Mexico.
Sir Andre Bemler
I remember when I was a mere tot, I’d see old Rolling Stones albums (yes, these were actual physical objects made from vinyl, a fragile black petroleum-based substance) at the used record store, selling for what was a small fortune back then, $25 or more. And written on the plastic sleeve, with an exclamation point, [...]
Sir Andre Bemler
George Kuchar, RIP. Kuchar and his twin brother Michael practically invented the “camp” genre. He prided himself on making films with non-actors, script, or theme, for almost no money. The 8mm movies he made in the 60s were as important a part of the underground film scene as those made by by Andy Warhol, Kenneth [...]
Sir Andre Bemler
Have you ever wondered what North Korean rock sounds like? Wonder no more! She begins to shred around the :45 mark…
Mark McCawley
Whenever anyone asks me who my top transgressive Canadian writers happen to be, Philip Quinn is always at the top of that list. Hamilton-born, Quinn’s writing takes the familiar and makes it strange; then takes the strange and makes it quotidian. He is one of those few Canadian writers whose works are consistently transgressive and [...]
