Mediacology

The Internet is all about tomorrow, but the way my schedule is, it’s all about yesterday. But like the pile of books growing in my flat like slime mold (if only they could pay rent!), it may take ten years to get through them, but when the time is right, they’ll get read. Which brings me to a few movies that without the assistance of Netflix, I would never have gotten to, even in ten years. As it stands, a week sitting in the pretty little unopened red envelopes seems like decades in Net time. Anyhow, this brings me to two documentaries that appropriately arrived within days of each other, and in a way are bookends to this all-important religion of mine, DIY (do-it-yourself).

Rize and Punk: Attitude are tributes to two great subcultural movements that emerge from those 5% living in the margins that somehow find each other in the primordial muck of civilization to flower into beautiful lilies of culture. Punk Attitude, a documentary that almost tries to do too much, covers all the bases, going back to early rock and roll, detouring with Warhol and the Velvet Underground, taking a piss with MC5, the Stooges, NY Dolls, Ramones, and so on, culminating with hardcore in ‘81, and jumping to Nirvana. Whew! I agree with Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) who in the film called the ’80s a secret history. I concur, and I should know because I was there. But more on that at a different time, in a medium with more air than a blog can offer.

In general, Punk: Attitude is a good primer, made by now prolific punkumentarian, Don Letts, also maker of the great video, The Clash: Westway to the World. It’s prime focus, the ’70s, is the film’s strength. For this period I would recommend The Filth and the Fury for a more detailed look at the Sex Pistols, and 24 Hour Party People for a narrative version of British punk’s nascent movement. Of course the recent Ramones documentary, End of the Century, is required viewing.

I haven’t seen the Minutemen movie yet, We Jam Econo, but a friend from the old LA scene complained that it reflected how male dominated the punk music scene was. True, but it was vastly better than any other music movement of the time. I’m still waiting for the DVD of the Decline of Western Civilization (what the hell!), the movie on LA’s punk underground released in ‘81 that got me to shave my surfer boy hair. So it remains, the ’80s is yet to be adequately documented from the vantage of history, although Dogtown and Z Boys definitely does it for skate culture.

On to Rize. This is pop photographer David LaChapelle ’s ode to Krunk, the hip hop clown-inspired street dancing that is part theater, part kung fu, part subterranean Africa, the sum of which is most definitely LA. Krunk makes me happy. It’s the ghetto doppelganger of punk. It is DIY style, uplifting culture, an alternative to BS you see in what my rootsy MC friend Mike 360 calls “shit hop.” Krunk kids remind me so much of what punk felt like pre-Nirvana (not to dis on my boys). Of course the danger of turning the lens on any subculture is to immediately commodify it. To see it is to destroy it. I don’t know the state of Krunk in the wake of LaChapelle ’s film, but I hope it had the same impact on some alienated youth the same way that Decline had on me. Personally I found the documentary a sincere gesture, a moving tribute to a bunch of kids who remain, even today in 2006, an underclass in American because of their race.