Mar 28, 2017 Anarchy in Asian America at USC with Gregg Araki, Jon Moritsugu, and Roddy Bogawa
On Friday, I attended a panel of underground filmmakers called Anarchy in Asian America featuring Gregg Araki (Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation, Mysterious Skin), Jon Moritsugu (Mod Fuck Explosion, Fame Whore, Scumrock), and Roddy Bogawa (Junk, Some Divine Wind, I Was Born, But…). Although their styles are wildly different–from eye-popping to eye-gouging to insular, each of the panelists defied the diasporic themes and traditions of Asian American cinema with roots in rebellion and punk rock.
Moderator Marcus Hu goes way back with the filmmakers as a producer, distributor, and champion of indie, underground, arty, and Asian cinema. He started off by showing clips from each of filmmakers including an entire short Araki somewhat recently made for Kenzo. Topics of discussion included how music informed the panelists’ aesthetics, their “bad boys of Asian cinema” image, and the challenge of being punk but old. There was a subtext that although they are breaking conventions of cinema, they are also students of it. (And now teachers.)
The most fun portion was probably when Hu invited Mortisugu and Araki’s favorite actors onstage to talk about how they were “discovered.” Amy Davis successfully stalked her future collaborator and husband when they were based in San Francisco, while an unemployed Jimmy Duvall just happened to hang out at Double Rainbow on Melrose where Araki was working on his scripts!
I was already pals with Jon and Amy, and the event attracted a lot of other old friends. My wife and I sat next to Anderson Le from the Hawaii International Film Festival, got to hang out with both Wendy Yao and Emily Ryan from Emily’s Sassy Lime who we see now and then but not together, saw another old magazine contributor Pete Lee, and reconnected with Jimmy Duvall, who I haven’t seen since I interviewed him for Doom Generation. Amazingly, he remembered that I gave him this weird imported Jazz Butcher CD!
Naturally, there was a concert afterward. My friends in SISU opened it up, and their swirling and ethereal post-goth sounds would go perfectly in a movie by Gregg Araki, who name-checked the Cocteau Twins in his Q&A. Jon and Amy’s garage fuzz band LOW ON HIGH played afterward, providing noisy, post-punk party jams to make everyone’s eardrums ring for the rest of the night. A perfect ending, and I bought a zine and 7″ single from them, too!
USC’s Visions and Voices puts on some pretty cool events–I caught the free Julie Ruin show last year–and they’re free even for non-students, non-faculty, non-alumni like me. Check out their calendar at crue.usc.edu/visionevents/ and keep an eye out for book events by Roddy and Jon from co-presenters Kaya Press, too!
Stalk Jon and Roddy at jonmoritsugu.com and roddybogawa.com (couldn’t find Gregg Araki’s site) and follow Imprint on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, too.