GRINDSTONE REDUX: The story of the 1980's US underground music network (2009); DVD Music/Art/Culture/Documentary DVD GRINDSTONE REDUX is the story of the underground music network of the 1980s?and how it transformed the music business. In response to an industry with a narrow spectrum of work being released and promoted, artists decided to self-publish and distribute before the internet made it commonplace.  The advent of affordable recording equipment, synthesizers and photocopiers made it possible for musicians and bands to form a network by producing home recordings and exchanging them through the mail. For the first time, musicians were able to produce and distribute their work without a major record company. They formed their own record labels, produced independent magazines and began the first generation of radio shows devoted to independently-released music. The network was supported by small, independent record stores (which have all but disappeared) where musicians could place their work for sale, as well as discover other like-minded artists and 'zines.

THE KILLING OF AMERICA (1981); DVD Documentary/Shockumentary/Cult DVD Documentary featuring footage of some of America's most well known murders and assassinations. It's filled with a lot of statistics and done with a very serious tone giving it a sort of newsworthy 'importance'. (If narrator Chuck Riley's voice got anymore resonate of stern you'd swear he'd have to be a robot.) Yet it offers no real solutions and after ninety minutes of almost complete carnage does it only briefly mention the issue of handgun registration. Thus despite it's pretensions it's really at home with the rest of it's mondo/exploitation brethren which were made simply to cash in on the shock value of it's content.  Just the way we like it....

SHUT UP LITTLE MAN (2011); DVD Cult/Documentary/Art DVD In 1987 San Francisco, Eddie Lee Sausage and Mitch Deprey began recording the squabbles of their stranger than fiction neighbors, the bigoted Raymond Huffman and the out and proud Peter Haskett. The recital of the pair's outrageous reality quickly took on a life of its own. This darkly funny documentary chronicles the history of Raymond and Peter, as well as what happened to former slackers Eddie and Mitch, who paint a picture of not only their outrageous neighbors, but also of San Francisco's Lower Haight neighborhood in the late 1980s. Interviews with others who were influenced by the recordings document their broad influence on a variety of artists, near and far.

PIGSTY (PORCILE) Pier Paolo Passolini (1969); DVD Arthouse DVD Two stories form the whole: 1) one young man (Pierre Clementi) who has killed his parents and ate their flesh walks around from village to village after being sentenced to perish in the vast desert. The only thing he'll be able to do is to kill whoever show up on his way and then eat them too. That's the story of the young cannibal, marvelously presented without words (he only has one spoken line repeated towards the ending). Beautiful cinematography, scary and thrilling sequences in it. 2) this story, very talky and quite messy brings Jean-Pierre Léaud (who was also in "Week End") as the son of an German industrialist who can't connect with people, preferring the company of the pigs ("Porcile" translates to "Pigsty"). He tries some involvement with a girl (Anne Wiazemsky) but with no luck. And there's his father (Alberto Lionello) business deals with a former Nazi of name Herdhitze (Ugo Tognazzi) also businessman but a rival of his, who hasn't aged through the war years after successful plastic surgeries. Foggy speeches about life, politics, mankind are dissolved into this other story and it's very hard to form a whole idea.