Seen maker

I'VE LONG BELIEVED my cultural inclinations are wired into the commercial possibilities of the moment in a way that's almost uncanny – as if I were a low-rent version of the woman in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition – defying all manner of rhyme and reason, as does the popularity of Sting, or Tony Danza, or a person who can instantaneously tell you what day of the week any date in the next 100 years falls on. So when an e-mail from Amoeba Music arrived in my inbox over the weekend announcing that the mighty retail indie was hungry for music-related DVDs, well, all I can say is it came as no surprise to me.

Ever since the morning last fall when I opened West Koasta Nostra, the then-new album by the too-long-MIA Boo Yaa Tribe, and found a biopic in progress on DVD, I figured it was on and began snapping up all things DVD. What I've come across is a marketplace where demand outstrips supply; what's available is of decidedly mixed quality – beware home movies and comparisons with Springsteen, for instance. And remember that in the main, MTV videos don't get better with age. Still, if you stretch the definition of amazing to include an eye-opening negative judgment as well as a positive assessment, you can say that I've run across some truly amazing work.

In Target Video Presents the Cramps: Live at Napa State Mental Hospital (Music Video Distributors), the band's hour-long set is about as grainy, surprising, delightful, bent, and rocking a documentary as you're ever going to find anywhere – 10 minutes into the thing I was so ecstatic that I pushed the Pause button and ran through my building shouting at the top of my lungs for my neighbors to come down and share the majesty of this one. On June 12, 1978, San Francisco's once-pioneering Target Video followed the Cramps to a gig at the infamous regional mental hospital and caught a short, fiery, action-packed set on video. Singer Lux Interior shares the stage and the mic with the audience; the camera captures dance moves that are strictly out of this world, and the band rocks the roof right off the place. After a couple of songs, Lux addresses the energetic crowd (which numbers about 40), saying something like, "They say you all are crazy. Well, you don't seem so crazy to me." But, Lux and his newfound fans seem pretty darned crazy, if you ask me; all I could think was "Who booked this gig, and how'd the camera crew get into the facility?" This is – and I mean it from the bottom of my heart – a punk classic, a must-have for anyone curious about the scene in its early days. I heard that the Mutants were also on the bill; if anyone has footage of their performance, could you please send it to me?

If that isn't enough, the DVD also has a bonus Target Video segment that seems to have been put together in the early '80s. Self-satisfied Target head honcho Joe Rhees cracks a Budweiser while sizing up the state of video, which he describes as a tool to challenge boredom and unleash creativity, and "the ultimate medium to distribute new wave."

A young, fresh-faced Jello Biafra offers a testimonial to punk rock, describing it as "something that's been missing for a while, something with some guts." Flipper – out in the Flipper zone, for sure – perform "Lowrider." Someone describes Mark Pauline as the greatest performance artist in the United States, "There's no question about it," and then the picture shifts to fuzzy black-and-white video of a go-cart driving through fire, an unmanned vehicle with a large circular saw on one end looking like a metallic scorpion attacking some metal plates, while a voice-over promises a one-armed rocket launcher or something and fires erupts on-screen. Then MDC perform "John Wayne Was a Nazi" at the On Broadway, Throbbing Gristle preside over white noise and a sexually aroused, enthusiastic crowd at Kezar Pavilion, Crime perform on a stage in front of the main gate at San Quentin, and there's a lot of footage of a guy banging metal around onstage at the Mab and later – after donning roller skates and doffing his shirt – doing the same thing at Target's South Van Ness headquarters.

I ran out of space before I was able to write about my experiences sharing controlled substances with a famous political punk rocker from another country in the lavatory at Target. Likewise, lack of space eighty-sixed my plans to write about the incredible DVDs available of Martin Scorcese's Blues series, L.A. hardcore film The SLOG Movie; One Man Army's The Show Must Go Off; Paul Simon's Live at the Tower Theatre October 7, 1980; Decasia: The State of Decay, a Film by Bill Morrison; The Work of Director Michel Gondry; Can DVD; or Heartworn Highways, James Szalapski's documentary about country music in Nashville and Austin in the mid '70s. Stay tuned, please.