NUKE YORK VOL. 1: EAT THE RICH ON LSD
dir. Dracula O, 2019
NYC, 75 min.

FRIDAY, MAY 31 – 7:30 PM w/ filmmaker Q&A
FRIDAY, MAY 31 – 10 PM w/ filmmaker live commentary and Q&A
(These events are $5 with a canned food donation, $10 without.)

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Crawling through the sewers and out the shadows of subterranean New York City, this menacingly feral collage discloses the schismatic wildness of the city’s vital punk scene as it leads its vexed existence within a waking nightmare. The nightmare, of course, being a disgraceful police state among an ever-more sprawling cancerous gentrification. Against this bleak backdrop, NUKE YORK offers an inside look at a thriving renegade underbelly. Utilizing a raw assemblage of DV and found footage, we observe the essential punk dissatisfaction aligning its ideologies in solidarity with the distinctly marginalized. An ever-evolving subculture since its inception here four decades ago, the scene depicted demonstrates not only a pounding pulse of sonic survival, but its consistent claim to an eminent opposition to the foul and oppressive power structures which seek to subdue us.

New York ghost stories, grim on-the-street accounts from legit Brooklynites, yuppie harassment, and cameos by vintage horror fiends and legendary rock ’n’ rap artist abound, running a chaotic vaudeville interrupted only for a slew of inflamed performances by the cartel of Toxic State Records’ finest, including Warthog, Anasazi, L.O.T.I.O.N., Creeping Dose, Eyes Of Hate, Hank Wood & The Hammerheads, La Misma, Dawn Of Humans, Mommy, Sadist, Crazy Spirit, and other lewd acts. Encouraged by its makers to be bootlegged off the press, this film will serve as a incendiary time capsule documenting the NYC punk scene of yesterday, today, and forever for years to come.

[Canned food donations will be collected for Club A Kitchen, which distributes free community meals, warm clothes, sleeping gear, basic material necessities, and harm reduction supplies in Bushwick.]

SELEX
dir. Various, 2019
40 min.

THURSDAY, MAY 9 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Grow a new tongue to lick the saltwater off the second Savory Selections. Only the greatest grassroots vid zine cavorting down the render halfpipe since the days of Tellus, Target, or Toy Machine; the Vid Art Lifeguard with a “Message of the Medium” tank top is running to give you mouth to mouth syllabus: but then whoa, shotgun weed instead- so Be Kind and puffpuffpass to a friend your copy of this Actual Physical Mixtape of Modern Marvels. Savory II parasails off the Zeit-crest Kahuna wave of post-Mind’s Eye pixelklutz neo-Jacolby landscape, thus transforming into a condor-faced Art Video humor jet shark firing turbo horror film signifiers but never abandoning Kucharian cardboard can-do. Assembled with unparalleled curatorial dexterity by samurai whizkid Mike Jensen, steeped in teas of both coastal undergrounds and with a dollop of cream for academic werewolves churning butter for undergrads, SELEX is an array of jewels to put bower birds to shame and cause temples of trustees to collapse heave a sigh of “I give up- you win”, sexy and smart as a dolphin talking a scientist into a handjob.

-Matt Thurber

FEATURING:
Theodore Sefcik
Erica Magrey
Ololade Adeniyi
Lilli Carré
Maya Ben David
LJ Frezza
Saige Rowe
Xela Flactem
Barry Doupé

[A limited run of VHS tapes will be available for purchase at the screening, and through RANDOM MAN EDITIONS.]

Ken Brown, a New York filmmaker and illustrator, has been exuberantly documenting American pop culture, road side attractions, outsider art and all intersections thereof for over five decades. His documents of each decade fully embrace and embody the zeitgeist of their times, down to the medium on which his films were captured. Giving back to the wellspring from which he drew, his illustration and animation work permeated pop culture in the 1990s with work he and his partner Lisa Crafts created for MTV and Sesame Street. An evening with Ken Brown will goes on a breathless tour of Ken Brown’s work spanning the late 1960s to the present day.

Ken Brown attending for a Q&A!

THURSDAY MAY 23 – 7:30 PM: SELECTED SHORTS
(This event is $10)

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The shorts program forms a fabric of documentaries of road trip oddities, Ken Brown’s “Chika Chika” films with their frame by frame by frame captures of New York institutions such as Wigstock in 1990s Tompkins Square, shorts created for Sesame Street and MTV Idents, and recent work such as GIFs and films the artist shot on his phone. These films take us outside of time to view New York City and the artist’s work as a thematically linked continuum.

THURSDAY MAY 23 – 10:00 PM: PSYCHEDELIC CINEMA
(This event is $10)

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Ken Brown’s psychedelic films played regularly with the light show at the Boston Tea Party, and other music venues in New England, where they served as an accompaniment to some of the most notable musicians of the 1960s. In their original context these films were joined with slides, strobes and liquid projections. The version shown was filmed with a live score by Ken Winokur and the Psychedelic Orchestra.

NOT A DAY GOES BY
dir. Joe G.M. Chan, 2001
71 mins. United States.

SUNDAY, MAY 19 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY with director Joe G.M. Chan in person for Q&A
(This event is $10.)

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While Spectacle’s founding edict – to show “lost and forgotten” films – sometimes ruffles the feathers of world-traveled directors, we’re very happy to host this one-night-only screening of Joe G.M. Chan’s deep-cut NYC indie drama NOT A DAY GOES BY, rarely exhibited since it played the 2002 Asian-American Film Festival. Shot over three weekends at a cost of $20,000, Chan’s feature debut follows Wolfgang (Larry Chin), a self-hating 20something in Giuliani-era Chinatown recoiling from the death of his more traditional immigrant mother, as well as the recent departure of his girlfriend who (according to Wolfgang) left him for a white dude. Foul-mouthed and confrontational, film is essentially a series of conversations – at his mother’s magazine shop, out in the streets, at the pre-reupholstered version of Winnie’s Karaoke Bar – between Wolfgang and his friends about the hypocrisy he finds at ladder of Chinese-American upward mobility, matched by his own refusal to speak Cantonese or accept the gift of a chicken in his mother’s honor. Chan will join us for a Q&A after the film, including the lurid details of his featured turn as Alfred Molina’s long-suffering right hand man in 1997’s BOOGIE NIGHTS – a story Chan has refused multiple historians of the legendary porn drama.

“Some scenes work better than others, and Chan wisely makes no attempt to sew things up too tightly. Project was six years in the making, but any stop-and-start unevenness on view has been successfully integrated into the film’s overall desultory loose-ends feel. Lensing is superior, as are all tech credits and music. Hopefully the imaginative, skillfully synched rock-song samples can be cleared for final release: They counterpoint pic’s original scoring quite nicely.”– Variety

“I enjoyed it and found it very interesting and quite well made”. – Martin Scorsese

FRIDAY, MAY 17th – 7:30PM

FILMMAKERS IN ATTENDANCE!

The Psychedelic Film and Music Festival invites you to an evening of mind altering shorts featuring the best of sci-fi horror, and psychedelia.

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TRATAK-ANTARS THE ICE AROUND TIME – Ep. 1
dir. Davide Carlini, 2019
Italy, 8 min.

The first chapter of this experimental mid-footage introduces Edam’s experience; a man like everyone who is between the sky and the abyss, between doubt and faith and among the endless “Influences of the Dark.”

CHESS AND THE STRANGER
dir. Charles Ortiz, 2016
USA, 24 min.

A desperate man encounters a stranger eager to play a chess match but the game becomes a path to something more.

CROWNED AND CONQUERING
dir. Zareh Tjeknavorian, 2019
USA, 12 min.

Shot on 16mm film, “Crowned & Conquering” is inspired by the philosophy of the occultist, ceremonial magician, and writer, Aleister Crowley. The work visualizes the alchemical process of chrysopoeia, the transmutation of the spirit from lead into gold: a cinematic allegory of the gnostic path in sight and sound.

MUSICA DE ESFERAS
dir. by Logan Fry, 2019
USA, 7 min.

A brain scan sequence set to music.

PROPOLIS
dir. Pat Wells, 2018
USA, 3 min.

Monsters reside in all of us for a reason.

Liz and Beaux are a sister and brother, trapped in a closet as punishment by an alcoholic mother, but escape means they must face a far more nefarious world outside the doors of the closet.

IN A FOREIGN TOWN
dir. Michael Shlain, 2019
France, 11 min.

Based on the stories of acclaimed horror author, Thomas Ligotti.
A troubled man recounts a strange childhood journey to a town with no name.

EVE
dir. Marcelo Mottola, 2017
USA, 13 min.

Eve, a young teen, is abducted and hidden away in a new city. She becomes captivated with a foreboding house and a young girl that astonishingly is her spitting image. Seduced by the cryptic house and mysterious girl, Eve is infused with their supernatural powers and readied for battle against the very evil that enslaves her.

ARTIST BURLESQUE
dir. John Bickerton, 2018
USA, 7 min.

This film uses found footage, public domain footage and stock footage to create a surrealist tone poem extending the collage techniques pioneered by Cornell in works like “Rose Hobart.”

ALEPH
dir. Jonathan Sirtes-Sharon, 2018
Israel, 5 min.

A writer prolongs his life to write a perfect suicide letter. This is not about death. This is about perfectionism.

STORMS
dir. Joao Pedro Oliveira, 2018
Brazil, 8 min.

A moving meditation on storms. Storms are unpredictable. They move fast and change suddenly. There is rain, static energy, light, noise
and movement. Colors are grey, dark blue white.