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Tonight Senator John Edwards, the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, is hosting Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove on Turner Classic Movies. It all makes such perfect sense. Exchange the mad generals for chickenhawk policy wonks and the administration in Dr. Strangelove becomes the Bush administration. It will be interesting to see what Edwards says to preface the film.
I’ve been reading the adventures of Philip Sherburne, a music writer and DJ out of San Francisco, for a few weeks now. His accounts of traveling the globe to play gigs in cities like Santiago, Ciudad Juarez and Sao Paolo are nothing short of amazing. He has finally hit some sort of Wanderjahr critical mass with today’s entry about playing a gig in Berlin with a group of international electronic artists headlined by Ellen Allien. It reads like the very best late 80’s cyberpunk only it’s real and now.
I suggest going back to late July and reading forward from there.
Last night I watched the excellent Criterion Collection DVD reissue of Slacker, the seminal Richard Linklater film about eccentric Austinites. Slacker was a very important film to me when I was a 17 year old kid, way back in 1992. I was pretty troubled then. I had dropped out of high school, I was depressed, I was struggling with my identity and basically had absolutely no idea of what to do with myself. I knew I wanted to do something creative, I was always 'good' at art but was having trouble establishing any sort of meaningful practice or development.
My mother's boyfriend at the time, a painter and graphic design instructor at Delgado, loaned me a dub he had made of Slacker late in the summer of '92. He was constantly feeding me excellent movies to watch and I saw many of my all time favorites for the first time through that exchange. This movie was different though, it blew me away. The first thing I loved about it was the way that it had no apparent narrative structure. At the time I had never seen anything like it. It was just a series of meandering vignettes following around brilliant losers who seemed happily unengaged in the spectacle of "life", who preferred to spend their time on non-traditional pursuits. Immediately I saw this and thought here are these great characters that don't know what they want but they know they want something different than what we are told to look for. They were rambling, freethinking, off-the-cuff, smart as a whip and had these incredibly bizarre pursuits and specific interests that didn't correlate with any acceptable subject taught at my school or talked about amongst my peers. They also looked totally ratty and disheveled which appealed greatly to me at the time.
It all seemed so exciting and cutting-edge. It made me feel excited about the possibility of getting out into the world to meet interesting people, read cool books and hang out at the coffee house for hours, chain smoking cigarettes and talking about Jean-Paul Sarte or Hegel's Master and Slave Dialectic. Some of that seems so cheesy and naive to me now but those notions and desires also helped me to become who I am today. If I hadn't watched Slacker I might never have started hanging out at Kaldi's regularly or hitchiked through Texas, twice. I might never have started frequenting some of the bars I was a regular at when I met Shanna. I'm not saying that this film was the sole motivating force for me to get up off my scronny, malcontented ass but it sure was one of them.
Before last night it had been a good 4 years since I'd seen it last and I think that time may have been at 3 in the morning on IFC one night. My fuzzy memory is a good indicator of the impression that it made on me. This time my first impression was, "Everything looks so old in this movie! Everything looks so much more real and organic." Even the cars looked older and different. The dialogue and some of the ideas discussed seem really bad now. But it also made me think about how my generation was an authentic vibrant cultural force. This was B.I., way Before Internet and man what a difference that made. It's so easy to find out about "cool" or interesting music, cinema, books, art and ideas now. It was really hard back then. You had to read magazines, talk to tons of people until you found reliable sources, listen to college radio to hear new and interesting stuff then track down the albums they palyed on it, stay up until absurd hours of the night to catch cool music videos or even cool television and really really dig into the culture at large to pull up a few solid chunks of decent cultural ephemera. I think the act of seeking out and acquiring innovative works is something that we've lost with instantaneous media delivery.
This could also be my subjective view because I grew into adulthood during the maturation of the internet. Regardless, watching Slacker on a criterion DVD on my powerbook made me nostalgic for a freethinking America that is already harder to find. I feel like the piece of Americana that this movie represents is gone forever, never to be recovered. I actually enjoy the world I inhabit now more but there was just something so much more visceral and well, real about that old one.