J Church and Honey Bear - May - That means they're gonna take photos of your ugly faces...

J CHURCH
Our split single with Chicago’s Sound On Sound is here. It’s the final in that big volley of split singles we started back with the Plungers split. It’s a great looking record and our second on Underground Communique. Our tracks are the original version of “Flirting With The Bourgeois Dream” (different from the LP version) and our cover of “Where Eagles Dare”. You can get it (and all of the other splits) from me for $4 ppd. You can scroll down to the bottom of this newsletter to find out about the other splits as well as other mailorder items.

THE FALSE
I know it might seem dumb. But I am going back over some of the bands I’ve been in and sorting out which are decent enough for a few limited edition 7”s. Even though I think the quality of the Cringer LPs is really lacking, I do like the fact that they are out there. So the next group up is The False, an idea more than anything. This is a group I did in that weird time after “Drama of Alienation” and before “One Mississippi”. Aside from a lot of J Church demo recordings from those four years, I also did this one off band in 1999. We only ever did record this 12-song demo tape that was pretty raw. But it does the job and is at least worth a 7” or two. The idea behind the False, and this is when I started getting more into improvisation and J Church was doing Raahsan Roland Kirk covers live, that we take basic punk and hardcore as a structure but let the bass and guitar completely freestyle. The result was that no song was ever played the same. The first 7” will be out along with the next two J Church live LPs. It will be titled “Tragedy Is Endless And Insatiable” and will feature the songs “Bodies By The Water Hole”, “Aberrant”, “Bankrupt Lie pt. 1” and “Jesus In His Heart pt. 1”. I think it’s interesting. Think early Ex or Dawson but recorded on a four track. If people dig it, I’ll put out two more 7”s.

CILANTRO TAPE
“Broken Melody” is the new Cilantro tape. It’s a dozen new songs including “Drowning Dreams”, “Cockfighting Janitor Blues”, “Hollywood Billiards”, “Across The Hall”, “Rendez-Vous”, “Photosynthesis”, “In Memory Of Karen Lancaume”, “Suicide Is Impossible”, “The New Mistake”, “Saint Thomas’s Dilemma”, “Rain Dance Remorse” and “Venice Beach”. You can buy this tape for $5 ppd from me. My Pay Pal info is honeybearrecords@yahoo.com.

IN THE J CHURCH VIEWING ROOM
DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION PART III (Dir. Penelope Spheeris)
I finally got around to watching the third Decline. I expected to hate it. I didn’t even bother to see it in the theater when it came out. Am I the only person on the planet who thinks the second one is amusing for five minutes but is otherwise unwatchable? Anyway, I dug it… almost as much as the first one.

No, of course it doesn’t have the same meaning. But if I could divorce my relationship with West Coast punk rock for a moment and just look at this as a documentary, it’s really great. The kids are a lot more interesting than I would have thought and I’ve dealt with several of them first hand. Shit, I remember that one kid fucking some girl at Epicenter and then freaking out because someone stole his leather jacket. At the time I thought they were all morons.

The kids in this one are actually just about as interesting as the kids in the first Decline though in a very different way. I feel a lot more empathy towards them maybe because we actually get to see how they live in the streets. Knowing what shit it is to be a squatter in America and how tough you have to be to survive that way; it’s amazing that most of these kids are still lucid and kind of witty. In fact, living on the streets, coming from abusive families almost across the board, you would expect these kids to be all really unstable and fucked up. But most of them are actually quite pleasant. At the end, when the epilogue shows that one of them had been murdered by his girlfriend it really comes as a surprise.

Obviously if you were around for the first Decline you are gonna be skeptical about this one. These kids are all new jacks and even though I like Final Conflict and Naked Aggression, you can’t compare it to Flag and X. But if you think of Decline III as a sociological study and not a music documentary, it’s very compelling with unbelievable insights in to a world that seems beyond incredible. With the fucked up punk house, the kids being abused, the danger of street life, the whole movies makes you continually wonder how the human spirit can adapt to the most fucked situation. When some of the kids discuss a squat fire that killed one of their friends, it’s really tough and the most real moment of all three films.

What I really want to know is how many of the kids have died since and what happened to the girl on trial for murdering her boyfriend. Anyone?
(VHS given out free direct from Decline web site)

RED DOORS (Dir. Georgia Lee)
I have a tendency to check out anything Asian American especially if it has to do with film. Shit, I even watched “The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift”. It’s funny because even in films I don’t like I find myself searching for something I can relate to. But even with films I liked, like “Better Luck Tomorrow” or “Yellow”, there’s overall something bland about most of these movies. With the exception of Jon Moritsugu, I dunno, the only thing indie about these films that make them outside of the mainstream is the fact that there are Asians. It’s all so middle class in a way.

“Red Doors” isn’t so different. But I really dug this film. I think it’s because the main characters didn’t feel obligated to act how Asian audiences want them to act. I really enjoyed seeing three Asian Americans closer to my age group (ie. Not a bunch of school kids) dealing with seemingly mundane issues. The eldest sister, in her way, is walking away from her fiancé and her life of yuppiedom. The middle sister is crashing into a new friend’s completely different lifestyle eventually learning something about her own sexuality. The youngest is a crazy riot grrrl who runs a high school hip hop dance troupe. In their way, all three women are strong and the very thing that lights up the bulletin boards is another thing I relate to; it’s a film about Asian Americans who don’t feel obligated to date other Asian Americans.

Sorry, but that’s life. As someone who has made it a point to try and not be surrounded by any one ethnicity, I’ve never felt obligated to “date Asian” and I rarely find myself in a social setting that’s 100% Asian. I never could relate to that in a lot of these films. Instead, this movie really does reflect what it’s like for most Asian Americans, the new generation who think of themselves as something other than Asian or American. You date who you know and if you’re lucky that’s a diverse group of people.

I know that there was some hoopla (very little when I think about it) with Asian dudes whining about how there are no Asian male actors in the film and that all of the characters are dating gwai los. It’s so embarrassing and shallow. What a stupid reason to attack a film! Some guys wrote that it reinforced Asian stereotypes which is crazy as all three of the women are VERY dominant in their roles. One of them is a lesbian, for fuck’s sake, which seems to also blow Asian dude brains. Then there are the people complaining that Asian American filmmakers should hire Asian American actors to keep them working which is such a hunk of shit. Jon Moritsugu is the most important Asian American filmmakers of all time. Shit, he’s one of the most important filmmakers period. He’s done entire films where none of the main characters are Asian. That sure as fuck doesn’t diminish the final product. What is with these people making such trivial attacks on one of the few Asian American directors working at all?

Georgia Lee is pretty cool. She seems like a nice person and smart as hell. A couple of her short films got picked up by PBS and she apprenticed under Scorsese. She is often compared to Ang Lee and “Red Doors” defo has an “Eat Drink Man Woman” quality to it. A little hipper, it’s still a movie about reconciliation and compromise from both sides of the Asian American puzzle. Three sisters are living their own independent lives finding love in their own convoluted ways. The family is brought back together when their father, suicidal after his retirement, leaves home without telling anyone to live at a Buddhist monastery. It’s not so complicated; in fact, the basic plot is quite mundane. But what happens along the way shows aspects of modern Asian American life that doesn’t appear in other films. I grew up in a very different background. This film is in bourg-y Connecticut whereas I grew up in slummy Nanakuli. But I still recognized a lot of things in terms of family interaction that I almost never experience in films. Georgia Lee is a lot like Ang Lee in some ways. But if I had to pick a filmmaker that also captured her sexual expressiveness as well as cerebrally satisfying silent introspections, she reminds me of some of Wayne Wang’s earlier works.

Also, this is a pretty movie. The footage at the monastery is especially nice looking. Lee’s earlier shorts like “Educated” were great and sort of hyper-stylistic. So it was nice to see so much of this film as being subtle. When it isn’t, it’s still rich with color. Of course, it is hard to go wrong any time you shoot a Chinese dinner sequence.

I guess there still isn’t a movie that completely captures what it means to be Asian American for me. I’ve yet to find an Asian American male character in any film that I can totally get behind. Filmmakers at this point aren’t writing that way and maybe have no intention of writing an Asian American male that doesn’t relate to guys without worrying about stereotypes. I guess I should be happy there are characters at all that I relate to regardless of sex, ethnicity or whatever. But isn’t it possible to be unique even within the things that I was born into?
(Warner Home Entertainment)