This is a review of a documentary feature called Nightcrawlers. The movie makes its world premiere at the Defy Film Festival in Nashville, TN this weekend. This review originally appeared in print in The Contributor.

In the opening scene of Nightcrawlers, a young man sits cross-legged on a bathroom floor. He glances at the camera in a lo-fi image that reads more like a video found on a phone than the first scene of a documentary feature. He wraps a belt around his arm and bites the end between his teeth to keep a tight squeeze above his elbow. He picks up a hypodermic syringe before the shot cuts to the same young man looking into the same camera, sitting against a block wall in a hoodie with a black backpack, and seemingly homeless.

Filmmaker Stephen McCoy received his first camcorder in 2011 in the last semester of his senior year in high school. After the sudden death of his father, McCoy began obsessively documenting his everyday life in a small town outside of Boston, MA. In Nightcrawlers, McCoy ceaselessly films his friends and teachers during a day at school. It’s a bleak and wintry spring day, but the kids are already restless to graduate. He lenses his adorable toddler little sister who shouts “baby!” when she recognizes herself on the camera’s display. Then we cut to a swing music dance at a public park. Nightcrawlers began as a visual diary, but evolved into a film about street people in Boston. Before long drugs and an unraveling personal life found McCoy living among his subjects, swallowed by addiction, poverty and his own dangerous art.

The film includes footage McCoy captured over his first five years out of high school, and seeing his transformation from a sweet young kid to a desperate heroin addict is like watching a horror movie monster metamorphosis in slow motion. But McCoy also captures the decline of America in the background of his scenes: the 2008 economic crisis and the Occupy Movement, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the opioid/heroin epidemic are all contemporaneous echoes of McCoy’s own exodus on the nightmare side of the American dream. Many of the images in this film are almost a decade old, but Nightcrawlers feels up-to-the-minute timely despite is beautifully dated hi8 camcorder images. The film is never preachy or moralizing, and McCoy even brings some humor to the proceedings in his naturally charismatic, very respectful interviews and interactions with a gallery of Boston street people whose stories are captured in the film.

Nightcrawlers‘ structure dismisses common narrative and editorial presumptions. The film’s unscripted capturing of actual people in real situations certainly qualifies it as a documentary film, but there’s a surreality to the nomadic days of homeless artists and wandering subway singers, and there’s a twilit somnambulism to the scenes of McCoy’s strung-out subjects living on junk time. Nightcrawlers definitely doesn’t glamorize drugs, but McCoy and editor Luc Benson’s gorgeous, repetitive, free-associative montages communicate a feeling of what attracted McCoy to this life in the first place. And the inventiveness of McCoy’s lensing and Benson’s cutting finds this project hovering between journalism and an art film. McCoy gives viewers a seductive mix of sounds and images that range from the grimly realistic and difficult to watch to the purely poetic. And even though he acknowledges debts to filmmakers like Werner Herzog and Harmony Korine, McCoy’s movie stands on its own merits as the relentlessly intimate memoir of a uniquely obsessed filmmaker.

See the world premiere of Nightcrawlers on Friday, August 23 at 8:10 P.M. at the Defy Film Festival at Studio 615 in East Nashville. Stephen McCoy will be doing a Q&A immediately following the screening. Go to www.defyfilmfestival.com for tickets and a full schedule for this two-day experimental cinema celebration.

Watch a trailer for this weekend’s festival…

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Over the weekend I was stoked to find out that a new biography of Led Zeppelin guitarist, Jimmy Page, had recently hit the book shelves. According to a review in The London Times the book is a no-holds-barred excavation of Page’s debauchery and excess with a particular emphasis on the musician’s associations with the occult and especially with Aleister Crowley. Here’s a bit from the review…

“In 1970, Jimmy Page bought Boleskine House, an 18th-century lodge on the banks of Loch Ness. The monster that drew Led Zeppelin’s guitarist there was not Nessie, but Aleister Crowley, the late ‘great beast’ of British occultism who had bought the house in 1899. Boleskine, built on the site of a 10th-century church that burnt down with its congregation inside, had allegedly been left brimming with demons after Crowley was called away mid-ritual, which was all part of its appeal to the 26-year-old Page, who had been in thrall to Crowley’s ideas since adolescence.

“For a generation of long- haired rock fans, ownership of Boleskine House confirmed Page’s apparently close alignment with supernatural forces. ”

Read the full review here, and check out this great video that traces the connections between the magus and rocker…

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The premiere episode of Trust begins with a scene of John Paul Getty III running through a sunflower field in a panic. The scene cuts to a Hollywood party at the Getty mansion in 1973 where a band is playing Pink Floyd’s “Money” before George Getty kills himself with a barbecue fork to the chest in the middle of a dark garage. George was high on a deadly mix of uppers downers and alcohol. This new anthology series on FX tells the sex drugs and rock ‘n’ roll story of one of America’s richest families, and the scandal that rocked their oil empire at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius.

Created by Simon Beaufoy and directed by Danny Boyle — the team that brought us 127 Hours and Slumdog Millionaire — Trust offers a peek at American royalty through the lens of a central storyline about a teenage JP Getty III getting perpetually wasted and laid before being kidnapped by Roman Mafiosi and testing the mettle, love, and resources of his extended family including his tight-assed grandfather and namesake, John Paul Getty I.

The big attraction here is the casting of Donald Sutherland as JPG I and Brendan Frasier as a cowboy hat-wearing family problem fixer named Fletcher Chase. I’m planning to cover the series’ episodes here on Insomnia because of the countercultural milieu that JPG III wades through with his bell bottom jeans and long red locks. JPG III is played by Harris Dickinson, and his performance along with those of Sutherland and Frasier form a triumvirate of hubris and humor at the center of this true crime drama that revels in the lifestyles of the decadent and infamous. Sutherland is particularly effective as the family’s parasitic patriarch, and the script serves him especially well in a soliloquy on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean where he explains how the family’s oil-shipping-refinery-gas station-hotel businesses avoid paying any taxes by operating at a loss on paper. JPG III likens the arrangement to a spider’s web while Sutherland laughs through a leer.

In the first episode JPG III appears at his grandfather’s English estate which he shares with a harem of girlfriends. He befriends the old man through their mutual appreciation of art and JPG III gains his namesake’s trust before the publication of a European sex magazine reveals that the boy has fallen for the same sex and drugs vices that killed his uncle and debilitated his father — JPG II befriended the Rolling Stones and partied with them in Morocco. After his grandfather reneges on paying his debts to the Italian toughs, JPG III returns to Rome in hopes of outrunning his family name and his personal troubles.

One of the most effective ways the series evokes its period milieu is through its killer soundtrack which includes tunes by Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Argent’s “Hold Your Head Up” which pulses through the first episode’s closing scene when gangsters catch up with JPG III.

I’ve been looking forward to this series for months now and this first episode did not disappoint. More on the next episode next week.

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After some recent posts about the Summer of Love, Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, and Swinging London this video caught my eye while I was working on sprucing up my YouTube Channel. You could paint a pretty full picture of the Summer of Love and the culture it inspired just looking at drugs and the Vietnam War. Of course drugs and war were nothing new in 1967, and LSD and marijuana were just the latest forms of mind-expansion for the contemporaneous iterations of humanities most ancient poets, philosophers, visionaries and mystics.

In The Archaic Revival, Terence McKenna wrote:

And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are.

Here’s a trippy documentary tracing human appetites for altered states from the Dawn of Man to the present…

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A few years ago I stumbled across this biopic about The Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones: Stoned tells the story about the British rockers with an eye on their multi-instrumentalist and original leader. Before Mick and Keith became the Glimmer Twins, The Rolling Stones were Brian’s band. The story goes that Brian got deep into drugs before he was unable to call upon his preternatural musical talents in the recording studio. Add to Jones’ decline the emergence of Mick and Keith as an original songwriting team, and Keith’s stealing Brian’s girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, and maybe it wasn’t very surprising that Brian Jones was found dead in his swimming pool after he was fired from the band.

Here are a few words from the Wiki…

Original Rolling Stones bass guitarist Bill Wyman said of Jones, “He formed the band. He chose the members. He named the band. He chose the music we played. He got us gigs. … he was very influential, very important, and then slowly lost it – highly intelligent – and just kind of wasted it and blew it all away.”

At around midnight on the night of 2–3 July 1969, Jones was discovered motionless at the bottom of his swimming pool at Cotchford Farm. His Swedish girlfriend, Anna Wohlin, was convinced Jones was alive when he was taken out of the pool, insisting he still had a pulse. However, by the time the doctors arrived it was too late and he was pronounced dead. The coroner’s report stated “death by misadventure” and noted his liver and heart were heavily enlarged by drug and alcohol abuse.

Here’s the thing: Stoned is a conspiracy movie at heart:

Stoned, also known as The Wild and Wycked World of Brian Jones in the UK, is a 2005 film about Brian Jones, one of the founding members of The Rolling Stones. The film explores the idea that Jones was murdered by Frank Thorogood, a builder hired to renovate Jones’s Cotchford Farm in East Sussex. The film also illuminates Jones’s use of alcohol and drugs, and his relationship with Anita Pallenberg.

Anita Pallenberg’s passing on June 13, makes Stoned‘s YouTube presence timelessly timely. Here’s Stoned…

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After recent posts about The Doors and Easy Rider, I’m on a bit of a hippy jag, and the fact that 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love means that I’ll likely linger on the longhairs for a lot of posts during these warm weather months. It’s always fun to celebrate the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll generation, but what about the darker side of that cultural revolution? What if the flower children were actually grown by the military industrial complex in order to undermine opposition to the Vietnam War? And what if Laurel Canyon was the hothouse where this strange strain was synthesized?

Meet writer Dave McGowan, author of Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon…

David McGowan was born and raised in Torrance, California, just twenty miles south of Laurel Canyon. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in psychology and has, since 1990, run a small business in the greater Los Angeles area. Currently single, he is the proud father of three daughters. He is also a lifelong music fan who still frequently keeps his radio tuned to classic rock stations. McGowan’s previous books include Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder, and Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion.

How did an uncanny amount of rock superstars emerge from the rustic Laurel Canyon scene of the mid 60s when the primary music centers of the US at that time were NYC, Nashville, and Detroit? Why were many of these future stars sons and daughters of the military/intelligence complex and extreme privilege who just happened to all arrive in LA at the same time? From the Lizard King Jim Morrison to Frank Zappa, the Mamas and Papas, the Byrds, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, even the Monkees, they all had conspicuous family heritages that did not exactly jive with what would become the free love, anti war soundtrack of a generation. Meanwhile, looming behind these musicians was a dark underbelly of Hollywood stars, young turks, the mob, shadowy intelligence assets, and charmers like little Charlie Manson who everyone liked at first.. How and why did this all happen? And what about that covert military installation on Lookout Mountain? Are you ready to have your rock and roll fantasies challenged? You may never listen to this music the same way ever again.

Here’s The Antidote interview with McGowan…

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This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967. During that auspicious season about 100,000 young Americans traveled west to the Fog City to twist in the gyre of a countercultural hurricane while similar youth movements blossomed in Canada an across Europe. Suspicious of government oppression, aligned against the Vietnam War and consumerist values, the hippies seeking out the Summer of Love embraced sex, art, music, meditation, and the expanded consciousness that could be accessed through drugs and meditation. From this scene a radical value system based on communal values, community care, cultural transformation, and freedom from bourgeois hypocrisy and political tyranny came to light. They were weird, wild, wacked-out, and their impact on the culture has been permanent and lasting despite their many critics and naysayers. Here’s the story of the Summer of Love from PBS’s “American Experience…”

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Yesterday morning I came across this The Guardian author interview with Norman Ohler whose new book, Blitzed, is an exhaustive excavation of the drug culture at the center of the Third Reich. Here are a few words…

…“Yes, it is strange,” he says, smiling at my giddiness. But then he has long believed in a certain kind of time travel. “I remember the 90s. The wall had just come down, and I was experimenting with party drugs like ecstasy and LSD. The techno scene had started up, and there were all these empty buildings in the east where the youth [from east and west] would meet for the first time. They were hardcore, some of those guys from the east – they didn’t understand foreigners at all – and the ecstasy helped them to lose some of their hatred and suspicion. Sometimes, then, you could step into a room, and you could just see the past. Of course, it’s not like that now. I don’t take drugs any more. But I can remember it, and maybe that was why I was able to write this book.”

The book in question is The Total Rush – or, to use its superior English title, Blitzed – which reveals the astonishing and hitherto largely untold story of the Third Reich’s relationship with drugs, including cocaine, heroin, morphine and, above all, methamphetamines (aka crystal meth), and of their effect not only on Hitler’s final days – the Führer, by Ohler’s account, was an absolute junkie with ruined veins by the time he retreated to the last of his bunkers – but on the Wehrmacht’s successful invasion of France in 1940.

Here’s an episode of “Nazi Underground” investigating the drug culture at the center of the Third Reich…

Stay Awake!

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I think of this blog primarily as a “countercultural” clearing house. It’s hard to define what “counterculture” even means in a world where sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll won the war a long time ago. My movie posts are always counter cultural in their way and today’s post is no different. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis debuted on February 10, 1927. This film stands outside of culture in the sense that all pioneering works of art are necessarily outside the culture in that they represent a newly won front — a temporary autonomous zone where whimsy and beauty and chance and chaos dance before the wicked stepparents of commodity and class kick over the punch bowl. Lang’s pioneering vision was so intense that even descendants like Blade Runner are considered pioneering in their own right — those are some long-ass cybernetic coattails. I also consider Lang and all of the artists forced to flee from Europe following the rise of Hitler to be – obviously – countercultural artists.

With all that in mind here’s Fritz Lang’s Metropolis synched to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here…

Stay Awake!

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Contemporary artists are caught between two cruel poles that simultaneously demand startling originality while declaring “It’s all been done before.” The study of art history is rather like playing with a Russian doll: separating artists and movements contained within the influences of other artists and influences ad nauseam. Most artists and creative schools necessarily build on the masters that came before them, but, occasionally, an artist like the Early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch will seem to materialize out of nowhere.

This 1980 documentary attempts to unravel the origins of the mysterious artist and his paintings…

Interpretations of Bosch’s paintings have been varied and extreme: heresy, alchemy, drugs, witchcraft and, the most popular, that he was a member of a secret sect which practised orgies.
Nicholas Baum , who has been fascinated by these haunting paintings for many years, began his investigation in the belief that we would never know their full meaning. After a journey which took him to Holland, Spain. and Portugal, he is convinced that he has found the key…

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