Dawn of the Dinkins: RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE (2013), BLANK CITY (2010)

I came late to the party in Manhattan, but in 1992, moving in gradually via couch osmosis, it was still at least a party. The white boy funk thing was big - Spin Doctors, Blues Traveller, my band, the Mud -Wetlands, New Music Cafe, Tramp's, Nightingale's, most closed or sold. It didn't matter, we never went in - you could drink on the street if your had a brown paper bag around it. So I've seen it all happen, on the curbs. You read my 2011 piece, Manhattan Sinking Like a Rock, wherein I admonished the average New Yorker for letting all our lovely sleaze disappear. I predicted a time when the city shall be sleazy and crime-ridden once more, to allow cheap rents, and flourishing arts.
Man, was I wrong. This is where money goes to regroup and get its second wind. No one is taking the accursed city down into the artistic abyss anymore, not without a grant, you know, to cover the insurance.

Godard homage indicated by pose and striped shirt

Ashley Cahill feels as I do about NYC and he's done something about. A Brit filmmaker who has lived in NYC for most of his life (but keeps a posh accent trimmed and burning), Cahill looks like a weird cross between Seth Meyers and Beck, but he's made a fauxcumentary where he kills random citizenry in order to set the fuse on what he hopes will be a rent-lowering, Summer of Sam-style fear-upping art-blooming crime wave. The film's had more than a few titles, CHARM, for example, but here it's RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE and its on Netflix Streaming with one of those ubiquitous torture porn-looking covers. You have to look really close to see the blood around his mouth is the NYC skyline. If you share my mistrust of all the healthiness NYC is touting these days, you should look that close.

Celebrity friends should always be displayed proudly.

Godard and Truffaut T-shirts

scenebomber

It's one of those first person meta-documentary violence commentary films ala MAN BITES DOG (or Wayne Gail's film about Mickey and Mallory Knox), with Cahill as Malcolm, a slightly more homicidal version of, presumably, himself. Since both he and his character are Godard-hip and so able to use the low budget and stolen shot approach as contextual meta commentary beyond just the subject (the film is dedicated to Sam Fuller). And though he never says so outright, he clearly shares my dislike of the second-guessing anxiety that sabotages so many homicidal comedies, i.e. the need to have Winona Ryder feel bad when she kills teens in HEATHERS, or just putting them into comas for SEX AND DEATH 101 (see "Why Can't We All Just Morally Compromise?); or to have Dexter only kill other serial killers. You know, they're afraid to get all Alex and his 3 Droogs-level challenging to our limits of audience identification. They want to be Scorsese but are afraid of Tommy DeVito. But once Malcolm does his first random stabbing you know he's not fucking around.

From the first, when he stops addressing the camera in his blithe discourse on the greatness of 70s NYC (when it beat out Detroit as "the murder capital of the world") when someone answers the random door he's been knocking on, we expect some kind of standard pre-arranged greeting (wherein a camera is already inside waiting for him as per so many reality shows). Instead, he races in, grabs the unlucky inhabitant and stabs her repeatedly and rapidly, without any drama or Bernard Hermann scissor music; the effect is chilling. He's suddenly moved faster than the camera man and become a real threat. We're just not expecting it and its genuinely shocking. Even though we know it's not 'real' per se it's hard not to shiver. So many faux-que-mentaries have tried to get to this spot, only to pull back like little pussies. But Cahill dives in, and ignores our ashen complexions.

Your reaction will probably be centered around your own neighborhood; to me the suburbs are far scarier at night than the city --there's usually at least three doors and dozens of ground floor single pane windows that even a child could break into out in suburbs. In NYC we have deadbolts on thick metal doors, and only one possible entry window (the one above the fire escape), and that has bars -all leftover from the 60s-70s crime era. But if your buzzer goes off or there's a knock on the door while you're watching this film, it could be quite scary, and going to theaters has become the last bastion of social vulnerability. When Malcolm garrotes a guy for texting in what looks like the Anthology Film Archives' downstairs screening room it's fun to imagine seeing the film there and realizing you forgot your turn your phone off. Even if it's a bit unnerving, one must applaud the filmmaker's full commitment to the tenets of starting a crime wave even as, as is always the way, he turns on his director, and quirky girl friend friend, and even his own French girlfriend when she objects to his SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE-style birthday present. Well that's to be expected. What's not expected is the deader-than-deadpan approach that never trivializes the violence Malcolm commits while never judging it either, so we end up in a very unique zone in that it's the opposite of HEATHERS' hypocritical inference that we're all so impressionable we need a pretty girl's buzzkill morals to remind us killing our high school enemies isn't "cool."

Jamie Frey (of the Brooklyn What?) left

But even if our sense of identification is pushed to HENRY or RICHARD III extremes, we trust Cahill because he's so openly homicidal he shatters walls well past the 'fourth' and beyond the metatextual infinite. The phrasing Cahill incorporates into his speech conveys a deep absorption of GODFATHER 2 ("you gonna help me with these things I gotta do, or what?"), TAXI DRIVER, GOODFELLAS, and BREATHLESS. He's in the zone, and I applaud how much that zone ties into film fans' sweeping rejection of banal reality and I can't help myself for applauding Cahill's brazen ballsiness - a near Don Quixote-esque quest to exhume the twitchy corpse of New York's badass past, to go all MS. 45 on SEX INTHE CITY. Like all great quests, it's doomed to backfire, but then again NYC hasn't ever been the same, not once in its 390 year history. It's like a mutating geographical variation of THE THING. Any chance to shape its mutant rapid evolution to our liking has long since gone - it's just too big to frighten.

Vince Gallo!

BLANK CITY (2010) is a real documentary about the time and place Cahill longs to return to, specifically NYC's underground 70s scene. Full of exquisite glimpses into the early 8 and 16mm films of the artsty downtown druggie enclaves centered around CBGB's, Max's Kansas City, Tompkins Square Park and the Alphabet City shooting galleries. The age of youtube, Final Cut, and digital video put an end to the uniqueness of the scene. When we used to project 8mm and 16mm films on white walls or sheets for gathered friends and/or family members, each showing was a one-time event, special in the way no amount of today's day Skyy Vodka sponsorship and gift bags can equal. And the kids then had more drugs -they could afford them living in $10 a month loft apartments with ten other people. So with ample footage from the original films (by people like Amos Poe and Richard Kern) and talking heads like Lydia Lunch, Steve Buscemi, Thurston Moore, John Waters, Deborah Harry, and various members of various punk bands, it's better than being there, I'm sure - at least smell-wise, and has a good sense of humor about the poverty-enforced ingenuity of these early filmmakers. I especially loved the snippets of ROME 78 - a re-enactment of the fall of an empire as filmed on the sly around the City's more Roman-esque landmarks --so while a kid in a toga dies in the Central Park fountain, tourists walk by; a coliseum scene occurs in front of the Bronx Zoo lion cage, etc. It's the kind of gutsy shot stealing that makes New York City great!

ROME 78 - John Lurie (bottom)

It's that kind of poverty-is-the-mother-of-invention ingenuity that makes these film clips impressive and invaluable, and the scene's inclusiveness is impressive (a coordinated effort merged the downtown punks with the uptown African American WILD STYLE graffiti artists, dancers and street poets) as is the proletarian mix of thick New York accents, kids kicked out of their working class Bronx neighborhoods for being gay or fleeing their midwestern nowheresville hometowns like MIDNIGHT COWBOY, the idea that if you're literate, young, and hot you can never be considered homeless in a land where everyone takes care of everyone else and the class system is part of what's being rebelled against.

But then money and the eighties led to skyrocketing rents, which meant big real estate investments, which meant the need to protect those investments, which meant Republican mayors, so gradually, especially with the incursion of Giuliani in 1994, the herald of zero tolerance smoking, the abolition of the 'brown bag' drink, and the Cabaret Law that Kevin Bacon fought successfully in FOOTLOOSE in the 80s but we lost in the 'real life' of the New York streets; the crackdowns on the drugs in the club scene, the rise of swing dancing and my own near death over and over from alcoholism. I blame Giuliani for all of it. We could use a man like Ed Koch again.

Lydia Lunch

Shooting your own shit is so easy now it's hard to warrant a film festival at all, hard to motivate people to go find some shady address and sit on the concrete floor for three house when the movie you're showing them is a mere click away on the home screen - but back then if you had a projector and a camera you could make a movie on Monday and show it to a waiting crowd that weekend, since everyone knew everyone else and half the people were squatters, and half the people were in the movie anyway, it would just happen. Huge crowds packed into abandoned buildings. I used to love that! Showing my movies to a big audience was great, but Youtube has made public screenings too unreliable - there's no word of mouth anymore because word of mouth itself has vanished, and posting invites to Facebook is so easy that there are now so many options none of them end up being anything interesting. Man, I remember when shit was still immediate, urgent, vital - you know, like with Friendster. 

I left the red loading circle in, for art's sake

POST SCRIPT - There's this other documentary on Netflix, WE CAUSE SCENES: THE RISE OF IMPROV EVERYWHERE (2013), about a group of NYC hipsters who do big flash mob-ish pranks and I'm a little jealous of their huge turnouts, which would seem to contradict all I've said here, except for the whole rule-following aspect and I've never been good at highly organized 'spontaneity' - it's fine for some people but the New Yorker embodied by Cahill in RANDOM ACTS or the filmmakers in BLANK CITY might think it's just cult conformity in a new package.

safe for mainstream consumption

I can respect the original gaggle of dudes involved in the 'sudden improv' concept, but the idea that whole masses of people want to join up and be led into safe, happy flash mob style stuff makes me realize that cigarettes are essential to true revolution (and I say this as part of Shelley Jackson's SKIN project). It kind of lacks the 'everyone's in charge' freedom of similar movements (as in the Merry Pranksters or the Cockettes or Diggers) that relied on chaos and true freedom of the sort impossible without very strong psychedelics and tobacco. The idea that sober people eagerly participate in chances to get told what to do in order to 'break away' from the social reality makes no sense. This is how ideas like the Diggers morphed into cults like the People's Temple, and how the Rolling Stone mossed, and how Times Square became 'family-friendly.'

Thank god there's one artist who will never break that seal. Abel Ferrara, where is MARY and GO-GO TALES?