One night recently I borrowed a couple videos from my friend George Crawford (who always says I write about him but fail to mention him by name so there you go George). One was an art film called Biker Pigs from Hell and the other was a major motion picture futuristic thriller called Strange Days. The art film came complete with a plot, varietal tattooed muscular violence-prone even knife-wielding tops and their skinnier shave-headed or mohawked stoner bottoms-looking like that one who rode bitch with the villain in Road Warrior who got killed by a metal boomerang hitting his head, only a bit more butch than that. One punk stole the wallet and Harley of the main tattooed biker on the most steroids and with a frightening Samson-like mid-length bob. On his search for his bike he encounters a great deal of apathy from his biker friends when he asks them to help find his motorcycle and kick ass on the punk who stole it. With a cinematic rage one can only find demonstrated in art films like this one, he storms off to find it himself, leaving his friends behind to have sex in the bed of a pickup truck and take it to the ugly sofa in the garage for an inspired double-fuck on one of the bottoms. He may have dogged his biker brother earlier, but he proved himself at least a good sport in this scene. The protagonist continues his search, nearly interrupting a how-many-latex-things-can-I-put-in-your-butt scene, huffing and growling about his stolen bike, narrowly misses an abduction at knife point forced sexual encounter involving the thief, and after a shower in the outdoors(?), finally locates the culprit and teaches him a lesson that one would hardly consider punishment. It was the kind of film a viewer would enjoy seeing time and time again, good no-hidden-meaning entertainment.
Strange Days was quite different from the art film. It had a lot of real highlights, like seeing Angela Bassett kicking major ass frequently, a time frame set in the future which is always kind of fun, especially when it’s the not so distant future, the plot dealt with a high-tech black market virtual reality sort of thing that was treated like a new drug experience which of course I’ll always greet with enthusiasm, it featured a glorious performance by one of my fave actresses Juliette Lewis as a rock star who was slutty as all get out and performed the PJ Harvey song, “Rid Of Me”, and it featured the music of and an appearance by one of my favorite bands these days Skunk Anansie. The films story culminates on New Years Eve 1999, the dreaded move into the year 2000 in what seems to be Times Square and the band playing is Skunk Anansie but you only get a tiny glimpse or two of them. What was remarkable about this film was how it finally prompted me to consider the turn of the century, new year’s eve 1999, which is rapidly approaching. The main word and worry for most is the cryptic Y2K catastrophe, looming mysteriously over our heads like a giant question mark. Will it be overwhelming? Will it be underwhelming? Will we need a bomb shelter or bunker stuffed with necessities or will everyone’s ATM machines be down for one day like around Christmas then business as usual on the next day? Who knows, or at this point cares anymore? I think I’ll trust all of the authorities and regulatory committees and task force councils to have the Y2K crisis adequately under control with the millions of dollars spent in preparation for it by the time that clock strikes 12. Yet after seeing this fictionalized account of that big new years moment, I developed a whole new set of fears that eclipse all else, playing through my head like psychic visions. Thinking about it really frightened me to the core. I quickly consulted my checkbook calendar and ascertained that the blessed eve falls on a Friday night, a scheduled worknight for me. In the past working on new years eve would be my preference, a hot energetic shift promising to be busy with revelers bent on having a good time-what could be better? I’d be planning a special set of sorts, reflecting upon all the music of the year, choosing one special song for the stroke of midnight, etc. But watching this cinematic depiction of that future moment got my mind reeling with other thoughts regarding this auspicious moment when humanity reaches the year 2000. It scares me. In the movie the scene wasn’t depicted as out of control or total chaotic anarchy, the police seemed to have it all ultimately under control, so this film wasn’t what prompted my thoughts and visions of looted stores and burning automobiles and violent gang rapes and children trampled to death and minorities ganging up against the police and more cars on fire-police cars to be exact-and car-jackings left and right. In short, it could be like the Rodney King riots, which Strange Days drew more than a vague parallel to in its plot. I don’t know why I feel this way, perhaps it’s because I’ve always kind of disliked New Years Eve and found it to be like Amateur Night in the party department, a powder keg of testosterone and emotional alcohol impairment or perhaps it’s because I’ve seen what happens when a major metropolitan city’s pro football team wins the superbowl or perhaps it’s because the masses of America are just so base and retarded and weaned on steady diets of talk-show fisticuffs and exploitation of the unusual for open ridicule that violence is a desirable act in a party evening. Maybe there are a few other reasons in the news lately that might slightly foreshadow the coming mayhem, things like all the high school shootings, all the people killing their own children, all the Yosemite tragedies, all the hate crimes against women and Jewish pre-schoolers getting picked off like ducks in a shooting gallery, the third generation Woodstock music festival ending in destruction and fires and rioting and several reports of gang rapes in the mosh pits to the strains of yet more Afro-American rip-off white-boy rap/metal million sellers Limp Bizkit, war crimes and mass graves in Bosnia, dead Kennedys everywhere, heat wave related deaths by the refrigerated truckload, airplane accidents, etc. All of these elements seem to signal to me that things quite possibly aren’t gonna be all about the ball dropping in Times Square and Guy Lombardo and his orchestra, nor will they be all harmonic convergence and New Age-y beautiful for all you consciousness-forward age of Aquarius type optimists. I sense gigantic tensions building that people seem to be ignoring or not anticipating.
Just on a local front alone right here in my own little neighborhood where I work and live and where the SF nightclub scene was once said to flourish, tensions are already rising in a conflict between the city, property owners, the police and the proprietors of some of the most popular nightclub institutions and a number of smaller bars and taverns. There appears to be a concerted effort to shut down two of the largest Soma nightclubs, 1015 Folsom and (gasp) The End-up, the noise ordinance conflict with developers and residents of work/live spaces continues to rage on, the smaller bars are regularly persecuted due to the no-smoking ordinance and a variety of infractions suddenly being sited by the ABC, and as I mentioned in my last column, cruising the alleys for sex has become the easiest way to meet a different kind of man in uniform than ever. Since that column came out I’ve talked to four friends who were stopped by the police for walking down or even riding a bike down Ringold Alley at night, most of them residents of the area.
All of these thoughts really got my mind racing about New Years Eve and what may come to be on that night. It depressed me and scared me to a point where I had to do something to try to forget it. It also made me remember something my mother used to tell me whenever I wanted to see a scary movie at the theater. “No, it will only give you nightmares,” to which I’d respond, “It’s only a movie.” Funny how those things can still ring true some thirty years later. I put on my coat and headed for the place where I often go when I need to shake a bad mood-the record store. Time to shop for some new music for the millennium, or is that new music for the revolution? At any rate, by odd coincidence, Skunk Anansie’s new album Post Orgasmic Chill was the first thing I picked up. Strange days indeed!