Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Excerpt From The Philosophy of Modern Song: Chapter 9, My Generation

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CHAPTER 9
MY GENERATION
THE WHO
Originally released as a single
(Decca, 1965)
Written by Pete Townshend
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THIS IS A SONG THAT DOES NO FAVORS FOR anyone, and casts doubt on everything.
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In this song, people are trying to slap you around, slap you in the face, vilify you. They’re rude and they slam you down, take cheap shots. They don’t like you because you pull out all the stops and go for broke. You put your heart and soul into everything and shoot the works, because you got energy and strength and purpose. Because you’re so inspired they put the whammy on, they’re allergic to you, and they have hard feelings. Just your very presence repels them. They give you frosty looks and they’ve had enough of you, and there’s a million others just like you, multiplying every day. [Read more…]

Please Baby Please

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Manuel Betancourt

The opening moments of Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please (2022) play like an archly stylized West Side Story by way of Kenneth Anger. Only, instead of the Jets, we have the “Young Gents,” a group of leather-clad rascals who dance their way through the streets of a neon-tinged, foggy 1950s Manhattan before descending on an unsuspecting couple and, well, beating them to death. Looking like Marlon Brando circa The Wild One cosplayers, this ragtag group is interrupted by two stunned bystanders, Arthur and Suze (Harry Melling and Andrea Riseborough). The moment will change the bohemian couple forever. The lustful gazes exchanged between Arthur and Teddy (the always delectable Karl Glusman, here in full leather boy cruising mode), as well as the electrifying fear-turned-titillation Suze experiences (Arthur may want, but Suze wants to be Teddy), set them both on a conquest to undo the relationship they thought they wanted. In the process, Kramer sketches out a feverish queer manifesto on gender that feels both novel and familiar. [Read more…]

Anthony Hassett’s Last Evenings on Earth

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at The Harwood Museum of Art, Taos NM
Reviewed by Erin Currier

Not unlike tin scraps gathered, then painstakingly crafted and painted into ex-voto offerings under the dim flicker of propane lamps in the outer rings of Mexico City, Antigua, or Salvador, and not unlike the mid-century Beat “cut-ups” of William S. Burroughs scattered like lotus petals on a mosaic tiled floor in the junk-sick dawn of Tangiers, and not unlike the embroidered Ayahuasca-dreamt songlines of the Amazonian Shipibo, Anthony Hassett’s pen, ink and glaze drawings in Japanese Moleskin albums are rhythms of a history at once autobiographical and universal: poetic calling cards shuffled and laid bare in a line by an adept renderer’s hand that has the strength and fury of a fighter’s fist combined with the mystical empathy of a Stigmata. [Read more…]

Apocalypse Now

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Michael Wood

Apocalypse Now (1979)
directed by Francis Coppola

This spectacular film, long delayed and said to be 17 million dollars over its budget, ends in a welter of bathos that has to be seen to be believed, and that weighs down the whole work with its mournful freight of clutching, unappeasable ambition. But the film holds together well enough until it reaches its final muddle, and it has scenes and moments unequaled in recent European or American movies. Indeed, it has one long sequence so right and so powerful that it actually causes the confusion of the end, since it leaves Coppola with nothing to say. He cannot discover the promised “heart of darkness” in the murk of his conclusion, because he stumbled across it much earlier—earlier in the finished film and in the shooting—on a bright, noisy beach strewn with soldiers and helicopters, sheets of flame lighting up the background, as a plausible imitation of napalm devoured the jungle. He went on looking—writing, directing, editing—for the horror he had already found. [Read more…]