It’s post 9/11 and Giuliani had already finished gutting and renovating damn near the entire city into a playground for corporate real estate and snotty new residents from other states coming to claim the remnants that gentrification left behind.

Nocturnal activities were still there under the surface and by nocturnal animals. The thieves, the junkies, the drunk, the desperate, the horny, the lost, the abandoned, hookers, after-hours workers and the graffiti writers. Fuck Giuliani, Diblasio, Cuomo and all the like. The whole table is broken so, why bother trying to take a seat at it; start making your own. Seize your day. 

State Your Name is a 2005 graffiti film directed by OZ. Featuring footage and interviews with writers: Nov York, Noxer, Skuff, (R.I.P.) KEZ5, DG, KET, JA, QUEST, JEZ, GOUCH, KMS CRUE, RISK 9, SEN4 and more and more. Simplicity at its finest.

Keep your finger on that REWIND Button.

Mad Bull 34 was adapted into a four-part original video animation released from December 21, 1990 to August 21, 1992. A sequel manga, Mad Bull 2000 (マッド・ブル 2000) began in 1999.

Daizaburo “Eddie” Ban, a Japanese-American police officer assigned to the 34^th Precinct located in the Washington Heights neighborhood of NYC. Daizaburo is young, ambitious and soon to be partnered with John “Sleepy” Estes otherwise known as MADBULL.

The pairing seems like a mismatch from the get-go.
Mabbull is a take-no-nonsense, hair-triggered, maniac with a badge. He runs a prostitution ring and has no hesitation to murder suspects and criminals. That being said he isn’t a complete sociopath. He takes the earning from the Prostitution ring to donate to charity and he does after-all look out for the little guy. He’s the typical cliché late 80’s antihero with a shotgun and a grenade jockstrap. Madbull as a character and anime is a critique of western culture and entertainment; violent, misogynistic, amoral and full of raunchy language.  This is what anime once was. No BS. No restrictions. No rules. Anything goes. Amen.

Not as violent as Genocyber or ANGEL COP but, the realistic setting and over the top action is the icing on this cake. The english voice acting is just as over the top as the action. The accents are thick and at times cartoonish, even for a cartoon. The villains are run of the mill Streets of Rage bad guys and the buddy cop dynamic helps to sell the story. There’s nudity and sex and drugs and bullets. It might as well be a 42nd street anime. The four movies are a hoot. Not for the squeamish.

I can see why this anime is both revered by those old enough to have seen it and never heard of by casual fans today.   

 Mad Bull 34 (マッド★ブル34, Maddo Buru Sanjūyon) was based on  a Japanese manga series written by Kazuo Koike and illustrated by Noriyoshi Inoue, serialized in Shueisha‘s Young Jump between 1985 and 1991, and collected in 27 tankōbon volumes.

ALL FOUR OVA’s can be seen below.

Link: PART 2 SCANDAL
https://youtu.be/uYEWBrMEkvc 

Link PART 2: Manhattan Project
https://youtu.be/Ra0Wn0S4a1s

Link Part 3: City of Vice
https://youtu.be/mQ9-RVJ7QeA

Link Part 4: Cop Killer
https://youtu.be/kMQge6te_v8

Stay clean and keep your finger on that REWIND button.

Cobra Wipeout ‘Venom Denim’ is out now on Bandcamp and Spotify.

I discovered this film on Amazon Prime and sweethearts let me tell you. This movie is one of the best worst films I’ve ever seen. A complete gumbo stew of schlocky 70’s Italian cinema and early 1980’s straight to the VHS bargain bin Grindhouse delight.

I have not seen the MST3K episode featuring this and I have no interest because, there is no way they could enhance what is already one hell of a lunatic frenzy this movie really is. And don’t expect a “Happy Ending” or some type of closure here. If this were remade today (God forbid) this could be a profitable trilogy.

Filmed in The Bronx as well a movie studio in Rome for some of the interior set pieces; you get the full atmosphere and desolation of the South Bronx during the late 70’s and early 80’s; a time I remember the most fondly when I think of NYC (1980’s-1990’s). The 70’s specifically (although before my time) was a vibrant time when HipHop was just born and so much innovation in subculture was being cultivated and building from the ground up in the shadows of bombed tenements and the ruins rubble, abandoned cars, open fire hydrants all due to a city at the brink of bankruptcy … but, still very much alive.

The movie is set sometime after 1990; the Bronx has devolved into a lawless territory run by gangs. The General Construction Corporation has designated the entire Burrough for evacuation and demolition for new condo’s and high-rises. The residents are being forcibly evicted from their homes and incentivized to relocate to New Mexico (“Yeesh”).  The pretext for this being some sort of viral outbreak spread by rats. Could it be a hoax? Who knows.

Trash is the former leader of a biker gang in the area that has become a loner and enemy of the state. His parents are flambéed by Corporate GCC goon squads running vagrants out of their homes and it pisses him off. Trash is on paper a, rugged, take-no-nonsense rogue, with a steel gaze and a wolverine’s tenacity. However, the part is played by an inexperienced young actor that lost a lot of muscle mass between this film and the previous film; an inexperienced actor that saunters around looking off camera like the director is pointing to his marks. It doesn’t matter because the movie works in all the wrong ways.

Trash is thrown together with a troublesome reporter trying to get to the bottom of the GCC and the city’s corrupt plans of gentrification. Later they are joined by the leader of a subterranean confederation of gangs as well a former bank robbery turned mole man and mercenary.

The shit is sure to hit a giant fan by the time the movie ends and I LOVE IT. I LOVE NY.

Escape from the Bronx has a runtime of 89 minutes, was released on August 1983 in Italy and premiered in the U.S. on January of that year. It is available to stream on Amazon Prime and here with subtitles on YouTube.

Enjoy this gift I’ve found for you. Keep yourselves safe, nasty and disobedient …. But, above all else “Keep your finger on that REWIND button”.

The Brooklyn born child of a Puerto Rican mother and a Haitian father, what better chemistry for a brilliant child. A brilliant and radiant star that burned out too fast. But left a wonderful impact on the artworld as one of the best of his generation.

Jean Michel Basquiat left home at the age of 17 to live on the streets of the Lower East Side to make his living as an artist.

It was the late 70’s and he found himself at the center of the world in terms of art, music and culture. There was CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, LES; there was art rock, punk rock, new wave, HipHop and all the cool kids, down-n-out kids, the losers, the weirdos, the young, the artistic, the ugly, the glamorama, the lace curtain kids, uptown kids, Manhattan kids, Brooklyn kids, the Bronx & Queens kids, the willing and the dangerous were creating and expressing themselves in an economically depressed (almost lawless) city and man was it a good time.

  On the walls of burnt out buildings, subway walls, doorways and postcards. He started writing graffiti under the name SAMO with abstract lines of poetry and then sold art on postcards to random people on the street. SAMO was beginning to attract attention from the curious forward-thinking eyes of the art world. A literal “Rags to Riches” story, From NYC to Europe, he traveled the world and shown his art in galleries internationally garnering equal acclaim as well disdain and prejudice from the orthodox bourgeoisie detractors of the High-ART elite. Truly, one of a kind. Avant-garde, musician, artist and, at one time, actor.
This Documentary is a perfect time capsule of what New York City use to be before the cornballs, transplants, Karens and douchebags took it over and ruined it.

Radiant Child is curated, produced & directed by Tamra Davis (Half Baked, CB4, Billy Madison). Built around an interview she did with Jean Michel in California after an art show in 1986. Tamra buried the interview to never to be seen by the public until 2010, after a few decades and suggestions by peers to release the interview, she decided to cutup the interview with compiled stories from people that knew him with archival footage and photographs to piece together the life and greatness of  the Radiant Child himself. This is a documentary you must see right now.

The Hollywood Reporter wrote: “Naturally, the doc is well illustrated with examples of Basquiat’s work, some of which are little-seen. But even those who dispute his place in art history should come away with a feeling for the man whose brief career is a textbook example of a flame burning too bright to last.”

The Artforum wrote: “The movie gives a sense of how driven he was, how it seemed as if he aimed, by sheer volume, to assure himself a place in the pantheon of twentieth-century painters, when in fact he achieved that position by virtue of a necessarily smaller number of masterpieces, produced in the early and late stages of his heartbreakingly short career.”

Recommended viewing : Keep Your Finger on that REWIND button.

Ricky Powell, the downtown New York Zelig who with his point-and-shoot camera documented the early years of hip-hop’s ascendance as well as a host of other subcultural scenes and the celebrities and fringe characters who populated the city, was found dead on Feb. 1 in his West Village apartment. He was 59.

–

When asked by Interview Magazine what people can maybe learn from images he has taken over the years? He answer was:

This film was featured on my best of 2021 list a few weeks back. Well the time has finally come for a proper review.

It was the 1980’s, NYC, there was a young boy sitting in front of the television. It was a normal after-school afternoon. There was Thundercats, G.I. Joe, Different Strokes, Gummi Bears, shit even Darkwing Duck. Then, my uncle came into the room and took command of the TV; switching the channel from MTV to some random channel on MNN (Manhattan Neighborhood Network).  The little boy was burning up into a temper tantrum when the screen turned into the Manhattan Skyline with lightning effects and a giant boombox rising from the horizon and the words VIDEO MUSIC BOX in giant letters stretching across the screen.  It was the Video Music Box show hosted by Uncle Ralph McDaniels and that little boy now captivated with what he saw was a young SamHaINe.

VMB was created in 1983 by Ralph McDaniels and Lionel C. Martin, who also serve as the series’ hosts. It aired on the New York City-owned public television station WNYC-TV (now WPXN-TV) from 1984 to 1996. In 1996, the program moved to WNYE-TV after WNYC-TV was sold by the city to a private company. Presenting new R&B music alongside popular rap videos, the show appealed to teens and young adults. The program still runs to this day and some footage from its video archives consisting of live footage and interviews can be seen on their own YouTube channel and uploaded by lifelong fans.

The brainstorm of a Queens DJ with an internship at Manhattan Neighborhood network to produce and host a Video Show consisting of mostly HipHop artists with a supporting team consisting of Lionel “The Vic”, Crazy Sam and others. They promoted events in the Five Burroughs and elsewhere. They filmed new, unsigned and Industry artists either in large arena venues and more intimate concerts at places like the TUNNEL, The Roxy and even the SKATE KEY. They interviewed artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, X CLAN, Wu Tang Clan, Dipset, Queen Latifah, Kool Kieth, Bad Boy Entertainment and anyone you can name. But, it wasn’t just the artists. It was our culture being showcased back to us. Most VMB episodes consisted of partygoers and locals grabbing the mic for their five minutes of fame. Video Music Box was the birthplace of the “SHOUT OUT” and where we picked up our Hip Hop slang and Fashion.  

The documentary covers all of this perfectly with the direction of Nasir “Nas” Jones and produced by MASS APPEAL. The interviews are all over the place with appearances by Tracy Morgan, Jay Z, Roxanne Shante, Raekwon & Ghostface, Mike Tyson, Puffy Combs, Havoc of MOBB DEEP, Crazy Large Professor, Wendy Williams, Fat Joe, Chuck Chillout and others. But, it’s the show footage that is the gem. Moments in time frozen for our nostalgia and the future generation to see and appreciate what paved the way for the corporate backed rappers of today.

A beautiful documentary about a wonderful artistic culture birthed from a wonderfully gritty and cultured place that you had to live there to know it. In the words of DJ PREMIERE, “Underground will live forever.”

Stay sharp, Stay fly, Stay in the know and have knowledge of self. But, always keep your finger on that REWIND button. Because, you won’t know how far you’ve come until you understand where you’ve been.

Movie Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7v_JeZBKNg 

This will probably be the most serious movie I’ve ever viewed and reviewed for your nostalgic pleasure.

Fort Apache the Bronx is a 1981 American crime drama film directed by Daniel Petrie. The film is about a hard-drinking, lonely veteran cop, Murphy (Paul Newman), and his young partner Corelli (Ken Wahl), who work in a crime-ridden precinct in The Bronx. Although Murphy’s life takes a good turn when he falls in love with Isabella (Rachel Ticotin), a young nurse, the arrival of a new, law-and-order-minded police captain commanding the precinct, Connoly (Ed Asner) threatens to tip the neighborhood’s delicate balance into anarchy. Danny Aiello, Kathleen Beller, and Pam Grier play supporting roles. It was written by Heywood Gould and produced by Martin Richards and Thomas Fiorello, with David Susskind as executive producer.
It was filmed on locations in the Bronx.
– Wikipedia

The nineteen-seventies and eighties were turbulent times for the people of New York City. Before the Covid problem and the restrictions on society that came with it, before the towers fell and the Patriot Act open the doors and windows into our private lives, New York City was a bankrupt, filthy, impoverished and crime infested city with bombed out buildings, lack of order and neighborhoods controlled by local gangs of children from the neighborhoods. And among one of the worst areas in the city outside of Brooklyn was the South Bronx.

Fort Apache the Bronx is a very straight forward gritty 70’s style film about being a police officer in those times. Our protagonists and antagonists are all fleshed out and given motivations and flaws with some very witty and poignant dialogue. No one is truly pure in this film, it is very pessimistic and bleak but, with pockets of joy and sadness, regret and grief in the marrow of the stories and perspectives within.

Paul Newman gives an amazing performance that carries the emotional weight of the piece.

All shot on location in the BX and features legendary Puerto Rican writer, poet and actor Miguel Pinero in a minor but scene stealing role.

I loved this movie. It’s another slice of life from a time I lost a long time ago. It’s my memory lane and my nostalgic fix.
Stay safe, stay distant but don’t forget to be human beings and keep your finger on that REWIND BUTTON.

Fort Apache the Bronx
https://youtu.be/VGDh69tzD1M

The Kitchen is a little quiet film that was under promoted by the studio and after just one viewing, I can see why.

It’s not a bad film. Actually, I liked it. However, it did feel empty with an odd pacing.

The story follows the wives of three members of the Westside Irish Mob, I guess you can call them the WESTIES. Although for a better depiction of the Hell’s Kitchen I recommend you go watch State of Grace (1990) starring Gary Oldman and Sean Penn. Back to the film. So, The Kitchen is the story of three wives of Hell’s Kitchen gangsters who after their husbands are arrested robbing a local store are left to fend for themselves to support their families.

All three women (McCarthy, Moss, Haddish) are very good in the film. Each one dealing with their own personal struggle; Haddish being a black woman married into an Irish Crime family, Moss dealing with an abusive marriage and McCarthy being thrown into the drivers seat as a breadwinner to her household. Overall, inspite of the pacing, the performances were well done although the performances didn’t have much to chew on from the script.

The Soundtrack is good with some nice selections here and there. If you like Fleetwood Mac, you might want to go pick it up.

Now the cinematography was good. Majority of the film was shot on location in the Kitchen and I got more enjoyment from admiring the set pieces and cross streets and how they made it look like the New York City of my youth and of the era as I did following what was going on.

The big negative was the pacing of the story. I understand that it is difficult to take a comic book and stretch it and adapt it to live-action while maintaining the essence of the source material while fleshing it out for the big screen. I get it. However, the beginning feels like your sticking your head out of a Lamborghini at top speed. You’re barely settled into the film after fifteen minutes of Coming Attractions to films you know you’re not going to watch… “*cough*cough*starwars”. Star Wars, I’d rather buy a bootleg dvd of the Jeffrey Epstein suicide watch than sit through episode ix of that zombie of a franchise anymore.
The Kitchen’s pacing about midway through the first act starts to slow down and the second half does get better with some spots here and there that could’ve been chopped from the film however, it does get better and you start liking it. The third act is good. I was genuinely absorbed into the film for it’s closing note. And there is a very nice twist during the last moments of the film but, that should’ve been the ending of the film however, a bad choice of ending on one note and not another deflates the film and you’re there watching the ending credits like “Oh. well that was interesting”.

Overall, the film is enjoyable and good for what it is. A small crime film that wasn’t trying nor marketed as anything more than what it is. I think if you took the two subplot climaxes and switched them and fixed the pacing, you might have had a more fleshed out film. But I did like it.

What did you think about THE KITCHEN (2019)?

I was still in co-ed catholic school at the time this movie was released. I can’t remember if it was successful in the theaters. I do, however, remember it staring that really attractive chick from CYBORG 2 before we all knew her as Angelina Jolie. It also starred Johnny Lee Miller who was sickboy from the classic film Trainspotting.

The concept of the film was completely foreign to me, as i said before – not too many people had home computers and majority of us even bothered to use them outside of homework, chat rooms, Mech-Warrior or DOOM and its fps offspring. However, this wasn’t the first movie featuring Hollywoods interest in the hacker subculture. The first and very successful hacker from from Hollyweird was the 80’s classic War Games. The only other film I can recall off the top of my head would be SNEAKERS which was a very very good movie also featuring the act of ‘Phreaking’ as it was called.

Phreaking is a slang term for hacking into secure telecommunication networks. The term phreaking originally referred to exploring and exploiting the phone networks by mimicking dialing tones to trigger the automatic switches using whistles or custom blue boxes designed for that purpose. Generally speaking, it was curiosity about how phone networks operated that motivated phreaks, rather than a desire to defraud telecommunications companies.

Phreaking has become synonymous with hacking now that networks have gone cellular and cracking them requires more clearly illegal methods.

So 1995 was the year that Hollyweird decided to give it another crack.

Now HACKERS is not a top-tier film. But through the avenue of Home Video and bootlegs in some of our neighborhoods it has become somewhat of a cherished classic by my generation. It featured realistic concepts (I say that loosely) but for the sake of entertainment used some unrealistic methods. The hacking is done using visual graphics and 3-D dioramas, instead of the real world program coding and displays. There are actual corporations and companies that hire security techs that were or are hackers and there are communities and groups of hackers that socialize and engage in friendly (mostly legal) competitions. We didn’t know this then because, well it was mainstream news except for very large hacks. These days the term is synonymous with treason, whistleblowing and anonymous cyber-vigilantes like Edward Snowden and Julian Asange (Wiki-leaks).

I’ve always said the hacking subculture is very similar to graffiti subculture. I love that. People going out of there way to get a rep. ‘Destroy N Build’ as i head once as a child. Using esoteric coding and monikers to get a name for themselves either for legal or illegal reasons or just for the sake of fun. Going where people aren’t supposed to go and raiding the nest.

The film follows Johnny Lee Millers character of Zero Cool as he moves with his mother to New York City and starts school in a pretty lit public school. There he meets other hackers Joey, Lord Nikon, The Phantom Phreak and Cereal Killer and becomes friends with them. Experiencing the fun NYC of the 1990’s, some of the fashion may be tragic but the decade was fabulous for house parties, indie record labels, dance music and subculture in general.

After a hacking into a GIBSON, Joey becomes entangled in a FBI investigation targeting hackers. When the corporate security tech The Plague gets involved, Zero Cool and his friends find themselves backed up against the wall being chased by the FBI and blackmailed by THE PLAGUE with the threat of a massive environmental disaster approaching.

The hacking itself may be fantastical and unrealistic but, the film is so much fun and innocent to its bone. However, there is a great Jolie nip-slip in the movie if you can spot it.

The locations were very low-budget and mostly on location all throughout Manhattan. The actors definitely look way older than they are supposed to be. But, meh – things happen that way in Hollyweird. If you can expect me to suspend disbelief enough to accept that teenagers are flying through cyberspace like the friggin Lawnmower Man then, I can look past an actor in his mid-twenties playing a teenager.

The music in this film is fantastic and date the movie very well. If you were like me and haunted TOWER RECORDS whenever, you cut class to either purchase or shoplift cd’s then you remember that the 90’s was the decade of the film soundtrack.. Soundtracks were everything. And Hackers had one of the best damn soundtracks ever; so good that it spawned three additional volumes of additional music= EPIC.

Songs featured: ‘Voodoo People’ by The Prodigy, ‘Protection’ by Massive Attack, ‘Halcyon+On+On’ by Orbital and songs from Luke Slater, Underworld, Leftfield, Carl Cox, Stereo MC’s and more and more and more.

It gets 4 erect modems out of 4. Watch It.

Hackers stars Johnny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Fisher Stevens, Matthew Lillard, Jesse Bradford, Laurence Mason, Lorraine Braco, Renoly Santiago, Marc Anthony and directed by Ian Softley.

Some critics praised the film for its stylish visuals but criticized its unconvincing look at hackers and their subculture. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “The movie is smart and entertaining, then, as long as you don’t take the computer stuff very seriously. I didn’t. I took it approximately as seriously as the archeology in Indiana Jones“.^[17] On the show Siskel & Ebert, Ebert gave the film thumbs up while Gene Siskel gave the film thumbs down, saying, “I didn’t find the characters that interesting and I really didn’t like the villain in this piece. I thought Fisher Stevens was not very threatening… The writing is so arch” – wikipedia

 

Performances by Dance With The Dead, Gost, Betamaxx, Night Club, Teeel Dead Astronauts, Protector 101 and many more. This line up in insane guys.

Make sure to get your tickets today: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2914639

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