TV PARTY
Bryant-Lake Bowl, Tuesday at 10:00 p.m.; and the Bell, Thursday, October 13 at 9:45 p.m.
"We're the TV show that's a party, but might also just be...a political party," exclaimed Glenn O'Brien at the start of each episode of TV Party, the New York hipster's public access show, which ran sporadically from 1978 until 1982. To O'Brien, public access was the last bastion of democracy in the inherently autocratic mass media--as well as an opportunity to host the ultimate starfucker's bacchanal (with music by Blondie and superimposed titles by Basquiat). One minute, O'Brien would be swapping saliva with every female in the studio; another, Chic's Nile Edwards would be doing a marionette act with a miniature Hitler figure, the latter performing "Rapper's Delight" in German. As this doc's copious clips suggest, you can't create a new TV format without threatening the corporate-network hegemony.--Eric Henderson
PUNK ROCK HOLOCAUST
Oak Street Cinema, Friday, October 14 at midnight
For years, pop punk has given off the stench of disposability--and thank God the people behind this movie know it. How else could they get all revved up about the 2003 Vans Warped Tour and then decapitate, electrocute, and zombify dozens of its participants? Rather than argue the meaning of "punk," Holocaust embraces the tour's commercialism--and it works. Characters push YooHoo and joke that the lineup is "as punk as Pee-Wee Herman." No one is safe from derision or death--and, yes, even Atmosphere gets the knife. What the movie loses to muffled audio and sloppy editing is recouped in the slapdash fun had by kids clutching their own protruding intestines. Some mall rats may even find that seeing their favorite band get killed is cooler than seeing them perform. --Lindsey Thomas
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LA FABRI-K/THE CUBAN HIP-HOP FACTORY
Oak Street Cinema, Saturday, October 15 at 7:30 p.m.
Reared on cribbed Miami radio signals and hipped to the need for Cuban instrumentation by a godfather/shaman and his magic flame (no kidding), the subjects of this hour-long look at a Cuban hip-hop collective score a rare U.S. tour and arrive earnest and naive into the maw of expat hostility in Florida. Moving up the coast for a climactic engagement at Harlem's Apollo Theatre, they encounter their hero Afrika Bambaataa spouting spacey profundities over dinner and have their preconcert jitters assuaged by the Buddha-like grace of the Roots' ?uestlove. Even more than the rooftop vistas and vintage autos of the rappers' neighborhoods, the sense of Cuba comes through in their alternately perplexed and joyful relationship to American capitalism.--Britt Robson
