Reply to Topic
This week I watched two documentaries which, while they might not qualify as 'great' film-making, I found greatly informative about a particular time and place - New York in the mid to late seventies.
VH1's NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell (2007) focuses on that one year, 1977, when lots of New Yorkers wondered if their city was indeed going to hell. It was the New York of Taxi Driver. The city was almost broke, with barely enough money to fund services and pay their cops, and bombed-out buildings were everywhere. The verge-of-anarchy feeling came to the fore in July '77 with the mass looting during the city-wide blackout, and that same summer Son of Sam was on the loose.
NY77 shows how amid, and in many ways because of, that urban blight and decay, several cultural revolutions were in the making, particularly in the world of music. In the Bronx DJs spliced into streetlights to get the electricity to fuel their battles in the parks, and with the blackout looting many obtained turntables and other necessary DJ equipment: the birth of hip-hop. On the Lower East Side, socially isolated gays took refuge in a large loft where they danced the night away: the birth of disco. And in the Bowery, bands stripped rock to the basics, combined with fast loud rhythms and rebellious lyrics: the birth of punk and New Wave. And in between all the neighborhoods rode trains covered with illegal, outrageous, colorful graffiti.
Each movement had clubs and bands/singers that epitomized them. Hip-hop had Afrika Bambaata and DJ Wiz scratching and on the mic, and when hip-hop moved indoors to the club Disco Fever, Grandmaster Flash. Disco blossomed in Studio 54 where the rich and famous hustled to the records of Gloria Gaynor and the Bee Gees. And at CBGB, which only bands playing original songs on the stage, punks nodded their heads vigorously to the Ramones, the Talking Heads and Blondie. (For an excellent movie on the Ramones check out End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones.) Many of the clubs and parties were fueled by drugs, drinking and underage teens; but the cops were too underpaid and understaffed to do anything about it.
And then there was another club that was very specific to this time and place: Plato's Retreat, then the most-well known and infamous heterosexual swingers/sex club in the world. The documentary American Swing (2008) details the rise of the club and its owner Larry Levenson, from swingers' parties on Coney Island to prestigious and grand locations on the Upper West Side and later midtown; and then their fall.
Plato's Retreat, like Studio 54, had a DJ and large dance floor. It also had a large Jacuzzi, large swimming pool and a large room for anonymous group sex. It was also far more democratic in its admissions policy than Studio 54, and for the price of 25 bucks per couple the working class could penetrate, so to speak, the upper class, as well as eat all they wanted at the all-night buffet.
The sexual revolution, of course, had started to flourish in the sixties, and Larry Levenson took it to an extreme of public experimentation. As one interviewee in the NY77 said of disco: If blacks and whites, straights and gays can dance together, then they can live together too. The same could be said of having sex together, and in American Swing many former swingers, now elderly folk with knowing smiles, wistfully recall those days as a kind of sexual utopia - although some are noticeably repelled by memories of being surrounded by overflowing bodily fluids.
Financial scandal sounded the first death knell for Plato's Retreat, and then in 1984 AIDS and safe-sex ordinances closed its doors - along with those of the gay baths and sex clubs - for good. Ed Koch, elected as mayor with a turn-New York-around/get-tough-on-crime platform, began the process of reining in the underground clubs. Real estate investment started to take off, and with it mass gentrification and the beginning of the city's unaffordability for most people, including struggling artists. In the 90s Rudy Giuliani and his Quality of Life enforcement turned Times Square into a theme park and ran the remaining alternative scenes out of Manhattan; even in the boroughs it became a tenuous existence for many artists and musicians.
Now Manhattan is a playground for the very rich, the upper middle class, tourists and corporations, while the middle class can squeak by in the boroughs. It's a much safer place to walk around, day or night, but as Chris Stein of Blondie says wryly at the end of NY77: 'I don't think big cities should be safe for women and children and families. It's just not good for the arts, you know....It all becomes f**king real estate after a while.'
VH1's NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell (2007) focuses on that one year, 1977, when lots of New Yorkers wondered if their city was indeed going to hell. It was the New York of Taxi Driver. The city was almost broke, with barely enough money to fund services and pay their cops, and bombed-out buildings were everywhere. The verge-of-anarchy feeling came to the fore in July '77 with the mass looting during the city-wide blackout, and that same summer Son of Sam was on the loose.
NY77 shows how amid, and in many ways because of, that urban blight and decay, several cultural revolutions were in the making, particularly in the world of music. In the Bronx DJs spliced into streetlights to get the electricity to fuel their battles in the parks, and with the blackout looting many obtained turntables and other necessary DJ equipment: the birth of hip-hop. On the Lower East Side, socially isolated gays took refuge in a large loft where they danced the night away: the birth of disco. And in the Bowery, bands stripped rock to the basics, combined with fast loud rhythms and rebellious lyrics: the birth of punk and New Wave. And in between all the neighborhoods rode trains covered with illegal, outrageous, colorful graffiti.
Each movement had clubs and bands/singers that epitomized them. Hip-hop had Afrika Bambaata and DJ Wiz scratching and on the mic, and when hip-hop moved indoors to the club Disco Fever, Grandmaster Flash. Disco blossomed in Studio 54 where the rich and famous hustled to the records of Gloria Gaynor and the Bee Gees. And at CBGB, which only bands playing original songs on the stage, punks nodded their heads vigorously to the Ramones, the Talking Heads and Blondie. (For an excellent movie on the Ramones check out End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones.) Many of the clubs and parties were fueled by drugs, drinking and underage teens; but the cops were too underpaid and understaffed to do anything about it.
And then there was another club that was very specific to this time and place: Plato's Retreat, then the most-well known and infamous heterosexual swingers/sex club in the world. The documentary American Swing (2008) details the rise of the club and its owner Larry Levenson, from swingers' parties on Coney Island to prestigious and grand locations on the Upper West Side and later midtown; and then their fall.
Plato's Retreat, like Studio 54, had a DJ and large dance floor. It also had a large Jacuzzi, large swimming pool and a large room for anonymous group sex. It was also far more democratic in its admissions policy than Studio 54, and for the price of 25 bucks per couple the working class could penetrate, so to speak, the upper class, as well as eat all they wanted at the all-night buffet.
The sexual revolution, of course, had started to flourish in the sixties, and Larry Levenson took it to an extreme of public experimentation. As one interviewee in the NY77 said of disco: If blacks and whites, straights and gays can dance together, then they can live together too. The same could be said of having sex together, and in American Swing many former swingers, now elderly folk with knowing smiles, wistfully recall those days as a kind of sexual utopia - although some are noticeably repelled by memories of being surrounded by overflowing bodily fluids.
Financial scandal sounded the first death knell for Plato's Retreat, and then in 1984 AIDS and safe-sex ordinances closed its doors - along with those of the gay baths and sex clubs - for good. Ed Koch, elected as mayor with a turn-New York-around/get-tough-on-crime platform, began the process of reining in the underground clubs. Real estate investment started to take off, and with it mass gentrification and the beginning of the city's unaffordability for most people, including struggling artists. In the 90s Rudy Giuliani and his Quality of Life enforcement turned Times Square into a theme park and ran the remaining alternative scenes out of Manhattan; even in the boroughs it became a tenuous existence for many artists and musicians.
Now Manhattan is a playground for the very rich, the upper middle class, tourists and corporations, while the middle class can squeak by in the boroughs. It's a much safer place to walk around, day or night, but as Chris Stein of Blondie says wryly at the end of NY77: 'I don't think big cities should be safe for women and children and families. It's just not good for the arts, you know....It all becomes f**king real estate after a while.'
Last edited by CelluloidChild; 05-03-13 at 05:09 AM.
