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

I came late to the party, as always, in Manhattan, hanging out beginning only in 1990; couch-surfing all along 2nd Ave, I've seen it all happen. You know this blog. You read my 2011 piece, Manhattan Sinking Like a Rock, wherein I admonished the average New Yorker so comfortable in his city he can go to some park or pier at night for an outdoor screening of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S. I admonish! "All tends towards chaos and this little sneeze of righteous nanny-state micromanaging we're mired in too shall pass... just as the ex-meek have inherited the earth, so too will the nouveau-meek re-inherit, and the summer will be electric... and the city shall be sleazy.... and crime-ridden once more."

Man, what genius. Three years later and I finally spell-checked the proper spelling of 'nouveau.'

Godard homage indicated by pose and striped shirt

I know I'm a genius because of a young turk named Ashley Cahill who feels as I do about NYC not being dangerous enough to foster the arts correctly. And he's done something about. Oh shit, you're in trouble now, Disneyfiers! A Brit filmmaker who has lived in NYC for most of his life (but still rocks a posh accent) and looks like a weird cross between a Williamsburg hipster Seth Meyers and Beck, writes, stars and directs but best of all kills random citizenry in order to set the fuse on what he hopes will be a rent-lowering, Summer of Sam-style fear-upping citywide 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. But please do.

Celebrity friends should always be displayed proudly.

Note ironic T-shirts

I'm kind of in love with the girl on the left; mmm that Andie MacDowell hair.

It's one of those first person meta-documentary films ala MAN BITES DOG, with Cahill as Malcolm, a slightly more homicidal version of, presumably, himself. Since Cahill knows cinema inside the film and out the movie's automatically superior to most such endeavors (90% of filmmakers know nothing of film history). Malcolm doesn't just talk the talk, he knows that in order for NYC to return to its former affordable rent and artistic downtown glory days, he'll need to fire the first shot. He doesn't just rage against the Disneyfication of the New York night, he tinges the frame with Godard-esque metatexual in-jokes (the film is dedicated to Sam Fuller for a reason). He can talk the talk-- and though he never says so outright, he shares my dislike of the second-guessing anxiety that sabotages so many homicidal comedies, i.e. the need to balance it all out with goodness --to have Winona Ryder feel bad when she kills teens in HEATHERS, or she just puts them into comas until she finds true love in 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. 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; he's going deep into the morally ambivalent jugular.


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. 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. Most of us in NYC 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 is still. 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 getting a text and being afraid to answer it. Even if it's a bit unnerving, one must applaud the filmmaker's full commitment to the tenets of starting a crime wave and his own sadness when copycats start but in all the wrong ways. Gradually 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 the girlfriend's reaction aside, 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 anymore, thus not only denying us the promised cathartic pleasures and making us feel bad for wanting them. We've learned a long time ago to distrust anyone who tries to lecture us, we're Americans - and we know, deep down the bigger the demonstration of regret and "this is serious" morality, the more likely the person is a two-faced scoundrel.


With its attention to the world of downtown art film fanatics (I even thought I recognized my buddy Jamie Frey outside the Film Forum - above left), sly Godardian winks, and gradually escalating disturbing behavior that pushes our audience identification 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 that show deep absorption of GODFATHER 2 ("you gonna help me with these things I gotta do, or what?"), TAXI DRIVER, GOODFELLAS, and BREATHLESS to name only a handful. I applaud the deadpan misanthropy on display, and how much it ties into film lovers' rejection of banal reality (we live only to be transported out of ourselves as often as we can via movies) 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.

Vince Gallo!

BLANK CITY (2010) is a real documentary about the time and place Cahill longs to return to in RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE, specifically the underground film scene centered in the then-crime ridden East Village / Alphabet City. Full of exquisite glimpses into the early 8 and 16mm films, from the artsty downtown glory days that Cahill wants back. Of course as underground / outsider filmmakers (see my output here), we can't go back if for no other reason than youtube, Final Cut, and digital video which makes video-making so easy there's no magick or mystery like there was 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 they 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 and talking heads like Lydia Lunch, Richard Kern, Steve Buscemi, Thurston Moore, John Waters, Deborah Harry, Amos Poe, 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 --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 films so impressive (though I probably wouldn't be able to sit through the whole thing), while the problems faced getting a film distributed didn't exist, since every weekend there were underground screenings, and everyone showed since everyone was in them and/or heard there'd be free wine. The inclusiveness is impressive (a coordinated effort merged the downtown punks with the uptown African American WILD STYLE graffiti artists, breakdancers and street poets) as is the proletarian mix of kids kicked out of their working class Bronx neighborhoods for being gay or fleeing their midwestern nowheresville hometowns, 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. Sudden wealth 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' law (alcoholic beverages okay as long as they're in a brown bag, supplied by bodega guys who would also open the beer for you if it had a cap); 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 David Dinkins again.


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 any given night in the City has so many options that none of them end up being anything interesting. Why go anywhere when you can download the scene from home? Man, I remember when shit was still immediate, urgent, vital - you know, like with Friendster.  

Lydia Lunch

I remember my last film screening, in 2007 for QUEEN OF DICKS - held in my friend's loft, with an impressive cross section of new friends and old - it was great to have an audience and hear the laughter. But I realized that this was it - I made this films for this purpose - an impromptu video screening. I knew I never really wanted to go beyond that - to make the festival rounds. It held no appeal. My camera broke during my follow-up - HIPPY IN A HELLBASKET. And I've kind of been out of the game ever since.

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

What's the future, then? For these scene makers, some of them anyway, the future was staggering wealth. The 80s exploded the art scene, and now people who used get kicked out of clothing stores for looking too shady became icons plastered on the walls of NYU dorms or huge American Apparel ads; the art they used to sell by the yard is now going for millions of dollars. John Lurie, one of the few whose stayed true to the underground, laments the big change in Jean Michel Basquiat (above) who used to sleep on Lurie's floor and suddenly was a pretentious millionaire who made it about money; the scene followed suit and then home video became super cheap and real estate became too expensive to allow for squatters and ragamuffins. In a sense, that large influx of money, the cash deluge of Reagan's 80s, is what's been holding the city back from returning to its dank cellar roots.


Is Detroit waiting for us degenerate artists to settle it like a mix of the wild west and SUBURBIA? I have my doubts. Detroit's just not that congested you can get around without a car. But I respect some are out there, already trying. But to me that's the best part of NYC, especially during my drunk days - being arrested for drunk driving used to be one of my big fears, especially since I did it so often. But in NYC it wasn't necessary. If you liked to walk and enjoyed looking at people without needing to wave hello or feel skeevy, NYC was your only hope. Detroit would undo all that. Then again, I'm sober so with the money I'd save on booze and rent I could lease a goddamned Beemer (see Free Houses for Writers Program).

Vince Gallo!

But anything can happen, and the future is cyclical and in the meantime every so often a film sneaks by the guards that isn't afraid to smash the icons and moral signposts that have been in place so long most filmmakers don't even know their morals are not their own but serve the status quo, set up by a rich and privileged white bourgeois patriarchy. If a film can illuminate this status quo con job (the way, say, THE MATRIX, FIGHT CLUB, AMERICAN BEAUTY, LAST SEDUCTION, and PULP FICTION did), it can leave you feeling invincible and open for anything the whole drive home. Outside the box is still far too close to the box.  RANDOM is a good sign that at least somewhere in NYC the kind of box-cutting we see in BLANK CITY is still going on. The box. Bro. From the safety of my one bedroom hermitage doth I protest. One way or another, the box gets too big to escape. The walls are so far out now that raw fish, gayness, marijuana, and "rebellion," have been ironed into familiarity.


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 and it would seem to contradict all I've said, except for the whole rule-following aspect (strangest are the emails from around the world of people 'asking' to start chapters of the group in their home towns. Dude, what kind of prankster asks permission - just do it, take credit, pretend to be the guy. And I've never been good at highly organized 'spontaneity' - it's fine for some people but the New Yorker embodied by Cahill or the filmmakers in BLANK CITY would never belong to a club that would want to have them as members - hence the whole "blank generation" concept of the No Wave / New Wave / Blank Generation monikers (as in, the lack of a genuine distinctive signifier), a bunch of people brought together by drugs, desire, and genuine artistic streaks, not the urge to connect or be told what to do by some pale hipster, to make some safe PG groupthink connection doing line dances at Virgin Megastore or doing pantless subway rides.

safe for mainstream consumption

I can respect the original gaggle 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 itself. Such change is as inevitable as the thawing of the ice caps, or the closing of CBGBs and the opening of the CBGBs exhibit at the Vegas Hard Rock Cafe.

Thank god there's one artist who will never break that seal. Abel Ferrara, I dedicate this site to you.