Back in the day, when I was a teenager, spring of ‘88(?), before pissing off to Europe on my first legit skateboarding trip for H-Street, I was in a bit of a bind. I was dropping out of dorm life at UCSC and I had to leave my junk somewhere: A real piece of crap car and chest full of school papers and random items of garbage that teenage boys save for whatever reason. But being from a different state and without many Cali-connections, I had no real place to store said junk whilst I was off Euro-railing around the Continent. Luckily, at the final countdown, my good buddy Janitor Jake, still in Jr. High, without permission from his parents, offered to let me leave all my crap at his house. God bless the child that’s got his own (parents with a large enough driveway to let me park an eyesore for months on end and a house with an extra closet able to store a bunch of useless detritus for what turned out to be what, 2 whole decades or something?!)
Which brings us to the present.
See, Jake just contacted me via email with a little mystery surprise: a super 8 film that I must have made almost a decade prior the two decades ago when I left all the shit at his house in the first place. I still don’t know all the details, but somehow in that pile of trash sat collecting dust in his closet, Janitor Jake found a reel of Kodak (developed or undeveloped? not sure) with a movie on it that I shot when I was maybe, just barely, in double digits? Something I had never seen before. Something I can’t even remember making. But low and behold, it’s definitely me up on that celluloid (is super 8 celluloid?), sporting my yellow and red “Nowhere, Boredom” Sex Pistols’ tour buses Tee-Shirt, but still rocking the bowl cut-which was definitely gone by the 80s, if memory serves. And there are more clues as to the approx. date, given the subject matter of the film. If I’m not mistaken, this was not long after Sid Vicious had died of an opiate overdose, which my newly self-anointed contingent of punk rockers and I had seen as a major betrayal of our newfound “year zero” ethos. Dying of a drug overdose was something hippies did, not punk rockers. We were too cool and clued in for that kind of hedonistic stupidity. Only morons like those of our bell-bottom wearing parents’ generation would go out in such a mindless way. So when Sid died just like all the hippy rock star idiots before him, we were really angry and disillusioned. Hopelessly naïve, granted. But still undoubtedly on to something. In response, we must have made this film [click on the still frame above].
I really like how it suggests we were aware of the fact that mainstream media would so easily write you off if you succumbed to such nonsense.
Sadly though, it shows how little I’ve grown as a filmmaker over the years
p.s. good thing kurdt cobain didn’t attend AS#1; just think, we could have been subject to an awful reunion tour by this point, had he kicked the habit and stuck around.
