jumpin punkins

One can feel nostalgia not only for times before one’s own but, surprisingly, for things that never existed.

— Maps and Legends (Michael Chabon)

Indeed, there is nothing more vexing, for instance, than to be rich, of respectable family, of decent appearance, of rather good education, not stupid, even kind, and at the same time to have no talent, no particularity, no oddity even, not a single idea of one’s own, to be decidedly ‘like everybody else.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot (via atom-heart)

For decades relegated to lone VHS copies buried in college libraries, Dan Graham’s dense DIY documentary traces a history of rock‘n’roll in which Patti Smith is, to quote the film itself, “the Mary Magdalene to the fallen rock idols of the 60s.” Graham primarily draws a line between the ecstatic trances of 18th-century Shakers to the performative primitivism of art-punk (via Patti and Sonic Youth) and the ascendant circle-pit culture of hardcore bands Black Flag and Minor Threat. In the film’s second half, however, he branches out to Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, the hippie counterculture and even Jerry Lee Lewis as part of a mesmerizing thesis on rock as embodied belief system (at one point, an archival recording of a theological conversation between Lewis and Sun Records’ Sam Phillips is revelatory). The VHS aesthetics and crude editing take a second to get used to (they’re raw even by 1984’s tape-to-tape standards), but it’s all appropriately punk— collaged together with the seams showing.

— For Pitchfork, I wrote about the transcendent Rock My Religion and 19 other music documentaries currently available on Netflix Streaming and other locales around the web. (via marathonpacks)