Russ Meyer in the Archives

A few years ago, I thought it would be fun to post some short archival-encounter quickies, but alas, my enthusiasm sometimes snowballs into verbosity, the ostensible quickies took as much effort as full posts, and I guess it trailed off, after an expose of a night with Fassbinder, the gay-leather mag Star Wars review, antigay jerks with eggs in 1980s Wisconsin, and some unearthed 1970s New Jersey lesbian cat poetry.

So, to flare that old archive fever back up, and tersely at that:

My Own Private Zebedy Colt: From Mondo Video to GLQ

I first discovered Zebedy Colt in early 2002, at Mondo Video back when it was located on Vermont just north of Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles’s rapidly-gentrifying Los Feliz. It wasn’t Colt who drew me to Farmer’s Daughters, but rather the mind-blowing (to me, at least) presence of Spalding Gray in a particularly grimy-looking hardcore film.

Alas: this was before easy streaming or downloading of movies, and some rat bastard kept the tape checked out so long that I had moved into the neighborhood, right across the street, but Mondo Video then moved out (after its transgender mud-wrestling matches on the rooftop and huge poster of Osama bin Laden sodomizing George W. Bush in the front window apparently violated both the terms of its lease and the increasingly hip-genteel community standards), to a stretch of Melrose Avenue far east of anything Aaron Spelling ever put on TV, before I ever saw Farmer’s Daughters.

Curt McDowell, with Love and Leather

I’ve just finished a feverish four-day run of attending “Loads of Curt McDowell” at the Anthology Film Archives, truly a cinematic highlight of 2016 for me; I love McDowell’s work, and much of it is near-impossible to see, hence the exhausting commitment. McDowell arguably captured the queer, freewheeling sexual currents of 1970s San Francisco better than any other filmmaker, and the features and shorts included in “Loads” range from outright smut to ethnography, surrealism to musical to melodrama. It’s a beautiful, dizzying mixture, and I’m posting this fast and artlessly in the hopes of inspiring someone, anyone, to go check out the series as most of it repeats in the next few days.

As well, I’m posting some documents I came across in the archive on the very days of the screenings, a serendipity too delicious to pass up:

Archive Fever: New Jersey Lesbian Cat Poetry of the 1970s (and a brief election rant)

I hate everything about this election. I hate the candidacy of a garbage-monster fascist, and I hate that I’m related by blood to people who will vote for him. I hate the neoliberal emotion-management of the DNC, and the fact that brilliant, progressive people I know and admire seem genuinely enthused about a warhawk candidate whose loyalty to the international 1% is so strong that she had to be shamed into supporting a $15 minimum wage (and ecstatic too about Cory Booker, who has made a remarkable career in government without doing much in the way of actually governing). I hate that she and her VP are pretending not to support the TPP until after the election, when they will most assuredly support it (“oh, we didn’t support it as then written; now we fixed that semicolon, all good!”). I hate the third-party-shaming by friends who in some cases actually teach and write about the concept of hegemony but still insist on the need to be reasonable, and I hate the futility of supporting third parties, which I have done since I cast my first vote against Bill Clinton’s reelection. I hate that Facebook is cracking down on dank memes, which often feel like the only worthwhile political commentaries out there. I hate it all.

So what better relief, I ask you, my fellow Americans (and others, of course!), than previously undigitized lesian cat poetry from the 1970s?

Archive Fever: Pelting Gay Marchers with Eggs and Busting Porn, a 1980s Wisconsin Flashback

Here’s a depressing spectacle, but one that bears witnessing and remembering: Ray Fisher of Sparta, Wisconsin, waiting with smile on face and egg in hand, to pelt participants in what would have been the town’s first gay rights march.

Would have been the first march, “but no gays showed up.” I wonder why.

Pornography in Newark, Part 2: The Failure of Decency

If part 1 of this Brick City smut saga ended with the Cold War, part 2 began here, at a talk last year by Gail Malmgreen at the New Jersey Historical Society, discussing her work on the wonderful Newark Archives Project.

 

Well, that caught my attention. As did learning that Newark’s Legion of Decency left its files to Seton Hall University, just outside Newark city limits in neighboring South Orange.

I see Andy Milligan everywhere: a birthday tribute/confessional/tour

It’s true: I see Andy Milligan everywhere. Today is his birthday, or would be—born Feb. 12, 1929, he’d be 87 were he still alive, rather than a casualty of the AIDS epidemic. To honor his memory, I thought I’d knock out a quick blog post—messy, unsystematic, written between work-related emails, but roaming over the places where he’s entered my life (and I’ve followed his). Some cool images, too–

Seeing Milligan everywhere, case in point: Philadelphia

Browsing the out-of-print books at the wonderful Molly’s Books & Records in the Italian Market, I come across this relentlessly bleak precursor to Taxi Driver:

The promised movie never appeared (not sure how it could at the time: the book just wallows in solipsistic urban alienation for 150 pages, then stops), but the one in the background did, and then disappeared—it’s Andy Milligan’s lost Depraved. Could there be a better tribute to the misanthropic filmmaker than using his work as the backdrop to a title that would easily fit into his filmography? And could it better resonate with the Milligan aesthetic than by effectively disappearing? (Jeffrey Frank has gone onto other books, but this one left barely a ripple in cultural memory).

Star Wars in Leather: A Lost Movie Review, and Some Notes on Smut-Mag Print-Media Historiography (!)

Okay, I confess: I haven’t seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I’m not a hater; I’m too old to relive my sneering Teenage Adorno years of smug condescension toward anyone who engages with mass culture for such sniveling epiphenomenal pleasures as, oh, entertainment. Nah, I appreciate populist film, even from Hollywood, and thought Creed was great. I just can’t be arsed on this one, I guess (also, apparently we’re supposed to collectively pretend the great river of crap known as episodes I-III never came along and destroyed our—my—goodwill?).

Nonetheless, I thought it was great when Samuel Delany’s original review of Star Wars from Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy popped up online, so in my already-faltering effort to post a few quick-hit archival treasures with minimal blathering, here’s this: the review of Star Wars from Drummer.

Merry Belated XXXMas, and Out of the Archives, Into a Book

Not particularly timely update here, but just to log this in the way of eight-newscycles-late blogging lethargy, I co-wrote a fun piece with the great Laura Helen Marks that wound up on Salon on Christmas Day: “Merry XXX-Mas: a brief history of Yuletide smut“!

Archive Fever: My Night with Fassbinder (Stallion, 1983)

I was sifting through old issues of Stallion last week, and came across this.

As far as I can tell, the only digital trace this has left is some skeevy, inordinately expensive rip-off pay-to-scan site that I won’t link to, but it seemed a loss to history to leave forgotten a nice little article about my favorite filmmaker of all time. If Google Books is to be trusted, Fassbinder’s biographers and scholars have all missed this gem!