Last Friday at the New Design HS we went to see the Rooftop Films premiere of this: 

Packed with portraits of LES scenesters (from drag queens to squatters to all those hardcore dudes), Captured spans time from Clayton Patterson’s arrival in 1979 to 2007. Despite issues with pacing, the film succeeds in presenting the panoply of characters that made 80s LES seductive and dangerous. (Edgy. Interesting. All those nostalgic terms bandied by old timers.) The immediacy of Patterson’s photos and videos captures (haha) the energy of the period from the Pyramid Club shows to the streets– culminating to the Tompkins Square riots. Community. Community. Funny how that word gets tossed around. Whose streets? Whose park? Whose poetry? Whose latte?

 Funny, too, during the Q&A how the crowd applauded the resistance. But who are all these clean cut hipsters?

clapping in a rooftop cage with subsidized graffiti, in an IFC-sponsored event.

Seems everyone was too busy yapping about community, fighting the cops, who are the arms of the banks…but that was their New York. 

I’m sure there is some clean binary to relate their gentrification to our gentrification. 

At least we have swedish meatballs to look forward to…maybe a new Billy to fill with chapbooks and literary journals.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 11:49 pm. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.