2022 Directed by Will Lovelace, Dylan Southern
Set against the backdrop of 9/11, this documentary tells the story of how a new generation kickstarted a musical rebirth for New York City that reverberated around the world.
I liked this… but it’s really funny to juxtapose 9/11 footage with images of Julian Casablancas making sad eyes because he’s too rich and too famous.
fuck it, i have decided to go long on Meet Me in the Bathroom because 14-Year-Old Me had the titular song's lyrics in the Favorite Quotes section of her now-defunct Facebook! i miss her naïveté ...
well, here's Present Me's review. watch if you are a fan of any of these bands: The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, The Moldy Peaches, TV on the Radio, The Rapture. then read Lizzy Goodman's oral history from which this was adapted. it's about 10000% more in-depth and satisfying, not just because it's liberated from the constrictions of runtime/lack of archival footage or access, but because it's told sans inhibition. it's raw, vulnerable, textured, lived-in; the documentary is somehow too polished and…
My cousin saw Julian Cassablancas at a hotel bar and the bartender said he uses the pseudonym Harvey Wallbanger
Speaking as a guy who owns a giant vinyl box set of Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops” and a copy of Lizzy Goodman’s exhaustive oral history (not to mention saw all these bands live during the early aughts - often in church basements and/or shitty bars around NY/Philly), it feels necessary to admit to being an easy mark for this film right off the bat. Yet this is still such a tremendous document. Like Haynes’ THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, it captures a hyper-specific time in New York subcultural history (maybe the last?) when a bunch of devoted young weirdos could just build and create in their own world together. The archival footage is pretty mind blowing, placing you in these tight spaces…
INDIE ROCK WAS A MISTAKE, WE NEED TO GO BACK
assuredly Not Good and actively annoying at its worst runs, but also exposes the utter hollowness at the center of this whole project (the book, this documentary, probably inevitable fiction adaptation in 5-10 years) that the film goes to great lengths to obfuscate: these are all entitled rich children of yuppie parents that got seduced by the mythological downtown NYC of the 70s, subsequently pissed off that it was already gone by the time they arrived, and used money/resources that that original generation of artists and creatives never had to facsimile their own “scene” (actually just a highly complex network of fledgling PR managers and coke-addicted SPIN magazine interns). The…
When Kimya Dawson told the story of Winona Ryder and Courtney Love coming up to Julian Casablancas at a party and saying, “Come be famous with us,” I imagined them as the twins from The Shining. Also as gross as that statement was for them to make, I 100% would have joined them anyway.
