 We're going to have some Q&A. I don't know if I have any more helpers around. Do I have any more helpers? Anybody left? I guess we're just going to have people yell out their questions. I'd like to start a question, though, with Liz. Your film is really fascinating, and it seems like it was filmed over a kind of a wide period of time. I can tell by my hair length. Can you talk a little bit about how you started it and then where it went and how it ended up being what it is? Yes. It was, for me in some ways, a bit of a home movie. I was working with a friend of mine, Karen Merchant. And we were both in film school. And I'm not one of those kinds of filmmakers that can write some fabricated story and do all the production. Someone who really loves to kind of capture what I observe. And at the time, I was spending most of my time just chasing the bands that I particularly enjoyed. And also, it was the energy. And it was just the time. And it was where I wanted to be. So whatever we had, whether it was our still cameras, our super eight cameras, occasionally we could get a 16-millimeter camera and the nagra out. When there was no equipment that was working, we would find a reel to reel in those days, in the 1970s with the big old TV camera. And basically, this is a film that we never finished, as you can tell. All that slug at the end, my apologies. And it was, in some ways, that slice of life, what we were doing, kind of what we were listening to at home, the vinyl we were spinning. So you get all that kind of intermixing in. It makes it extremely messy. So I hid this film for as long as I could in some box in the back of a closet. And it got seen by a couple of people who liked it, the way it was. And the kind of energy we didn't, in some ways, I guess, have time to edit that raw kind of feeling we had about where we were at out. And so because we just let it go. So that's what it is. And recently, I'm one of the film curators at the Exploratorium. And we had an amazing archivist up from UCLA, Adino Everett. And he managed. Yeah, he's a phenomenal guy, incredibly knowledgeable. And during lunch, he mentioned playing music and punk. And I was like, oh, well, I did this whole thing in the 70s. And so he asked to see it. And I ran away. But my someone who works with me pulled out the DVD and showed it to him. And I was surprised. He just thought it was quite remarkable. So he's actually taken as much of the original I can find. And he's in the process of restoring it. And he received a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to transfer it to digital and create an HD. And so in the meantime, I'm looking for whatever other artifacts. So thank you for mentioning the history department because there's plenty that I've got in that closet. Oh, cool. Great. So whatever else in the process now, kind of repaying attention to it. But so apologies for how messy it is. Glorious mess. But see, it makes a great companion in many ways. Because Mindy's film, you can identify the bands. We're all over the map. But it's the same time. And I also want to thank Mindy because encountering him at the Mab, he was phenomenally generous when we show up finally with our 16 and the Nagra sound recorder. And he would help. Hey, you guys, we're going to set up some lights here. But you can stand here instead of going, this is my territory tonight. Get out of here, kid. So just phenomenal people to work with. Well, Mindy, I think that your film is probably one of the most important films to come out of the early punk scene. And I'm super happy that we were able to show it tonight. Do you know if PFA is planning on restoring it? And will they also show it? Well, they've already restored it. They were very generous. And they made a new internegative copy. And they made two prints that are available for rental from the Pacific Film Archives. So when I made the film, I never even thought of those kinds of things. And it keeps on living. Yeah, right on. Wonderful. That's great sound. It's so exciting to see all those folks. I'm going to open this up to questions. Did anybody think of anything clever or not clever or curious? A gentleman in the front row? There were some interesting sweaters during that time. Yes, that's a statement. We had interesting sweaters. We always shopped at the thrift stores. That was Dave Riggur. So sweaters was a lot of what you got. We have a question from Marion. This is kind of technical. But I was wondering, Liz, you had a spot. I think it was the Dills where you just did stop motion. I wondered why. Or was there something technical? I think some of that is just the way we were editing it. We would shoot. I would blow up, instead of eating whatever, you take whatever little money you have. And we would blow up all the super eight to 16. And then out of all that, I wanted that mix of materials. I wanted there to be that materiality. And so cutting it up with other things. And sometimes it would be maybe I had a little trigger on my super eight. So you could do a little bit of that with the camera. But some of it, we also, some of it was optically printed. We did some of that. I was in film school. So you were, besides testing a bunch of stuff, it was whatever you could get your hands on. And then I just loved the 16 millimeter. You could work with it so much better. So getting all of it blown up for us meant that we could work with it. And it was, in some ways, it was, as I said, it was for me a phenomenal time in terms of the kinds of issues that were being addressed. But also that physicality, the mosh pit, all of it. And I wanted that captured as much in the material as it was kind of captured on film. I just want to say thank you for the Will Shatter footage. Well, you can, yeah, it was an amazing person. I see a question in the back there. I didn't know about the deaf club. And that scene was kind of interesting. So I didn't know if half the people were deaf, and then they could feel the music through their feed and their body, or what was happening there. It was interesting. I can give you a lot of info on the deaf club. There was a manager of the Goof The Office that you saw in the film named Bob Hanrahan. And he got kind of out with Dirk Dirksen at the Mabuhay. So he was looking for an alternative venue. And he was cruising down Valencia near 16th, where the deaf club is located. And the deaf club is part of a whole consortium of deaf people in the United States. They're a very democratic organization. They don't care if you're black or white or what young or old deafness brings them together. And so he went upstairs when he saw the sign hall for rent. And he saw a television set on, no sound. He didn't make much notice of that. And there were two guys sitting in front of it. And then when he tried to talk to them, he realized that he was talking to two deaf people. And he explained to them that he would like to rent the hall for his band. And the most, two of the most interesting things that occurred was that deaf people don't make any noise. And it's located near a lot of apartment buildings in the Valencia quarter. And it was like a jet engine took off one night. And suddenly there was noise. And it used to be visited by the police almost every night. It had a short existence, I think, about six months. And two things which were phenomenal was that the young people, because it was all ages, deafness brought them together, was that they could not hear the music, but they felt it viscerally, like the thump of the bass and the drums. And there was almost an ecstatic look in their face because they finally realized that they could dance. And it was just delightful to see that. And the other thing was the police coming there every night. And I remember coming down the steps once in this lady cop and a male cop were coming up the stairs and the lady cop was a black American woman. And I had my black leather jacket on. She looked at me and she says, black is beautiful. I thought that was really cool, but it didn't last very long, simply because of the noise level that occurred in the neighborhood. So that's the short history of the deaf club. And there was a little artifact in the film. You saw this notebook. I don't know how many I noted it because sitting at the bar, a lot of the ways that those of us that don't know how to sign would communicate was we would just write back notes back and forth. And so there was an intermixing of the communities. It was a prime spot for as long as it lasted. I just wanna add that it was a rather shoddy structure and that the floor would move. And one of the reasons why the deaf people could dance was because they could feel the music through the floor, which was going like this, pretty much. Yeah. Any more questions out there? Yes, the gentleman in the back. Yeah, did you ever get a brass? That I recall, not that I recall, but it's like that's 40 years ago, maybe I've diminished those memories. I think that we probably wouldn't have considered you guys the media. Right. Considered you our friends who somehow got their hands on some film cameras. I couldn't play guitar, but I certainly wanted to do something besides jump up and down, which was wonderful. But it was participatory. I mean, in some ways, if we think about how a community's made and all the elements, making music and making cinema and writing and producing and posters and all of it, it was the impulse was the same for us, I think. No, it was a very communal or community existence in that you would see people in the audience and they would look up and they say, man, you only need to know one chord or maybe two or three and you can make music. I can do that. So the next week, they would be on the stage and it had a delightful continuing resurgence. And because I'm 83 years old, I've been around the block a couple of times and I've been a beatnik and a full-time hippie and a punk. And I think all those three elements are still in me. And I always look for community and in the United States, the way things are going, we are being alienated from each other, irrespective of race or creed or anything. And I think that my reason for joining that scene was that it was when people themselves were feeling certain things and they needed to express these things and that's a very human attribute and I think we can't deny it. I mean, otherwise we wind up in a concentration camp and Nazi Germany is an excellent example of that. They would never last because the spirit to be free is totally ingrained in our DNA, I believe that. So I think these kinds of expressions are very useful in promoting our humanity, if you will. I would also like to add that I think the media was fairly unified in ignoring the punk scene in the early days. The people that wrote about it in the papers were really scoffing at us and then for television or any other level of media it was really very little, very few radio stations were playing, maybe two radio stations. So yeah, we didn't really have that much interaction with the media at all and that's another reason why I would love to have anybody donate whatever they can to the archives so that we can sort of keep the real record of what happened alive. I think we have one more question here. Hey, growing up in Southern California I didn't get into it until the late 80s but we still got harassed a bunch. Like it was dangerous to be into it but I'm a kid, I'm only 40 right now, right? So like, but I got into it really young but in all the books and I obsess about sociology so much in all the youth tribes and I really dig on all like the scene documentation but one thing I don't hear that much in the SF scene documentation is how dangerous it was or wasn't to be punk at that time. Like, can you talk about that a little bit because all the SoCal ones you hear about how dangerous it was just to be walking around the street which it is dangerous to walk around the street in SoCal to this day because no one does, right? Everyone drives but we don't hear about it up here as much was it more permissive or do you do people just not talk about it that much? I would say that the scene in 77, 78, 79 really was pretty small and I think a lot of people, I had blue hair sometime and I guess 78 and a lot of people just had never seen that they just their mouths would just drop open and kids on the bus would be like, oh, your hairdresser hates you, you know? It's like they did not recognize what we were if you were walking around. For the older brothers and sisters of mine in the scene they've turned me on to just how sketchy that was to be that person where we grew up back then and then I moved to SF because of that reason like in the mid 90s but I was younger but since we don't hear about it that much as being up here and my older buddies which I have shitloads like I have a lot like all my I'm on Jack's team a lot of my bros obviously we're in the scene with you guys you know Nosmo and Paul Castile and John Marsh and everybody you know like Kevin O'Connor you guys know those dudes growing up but they don't talk about how sketchy it was back then maybe it wasn't that bad up here. Well, I personally feel we live in much more dangerous times now. I'm noticing a lack of manners when you walk down a street and a person's coming towards you he totally does not seem to be aware of your presence and you are the one that has to step out of their way and when I was growing up as a child in Los Angeles you stepped a little bit to your right and the other person stepped a little bit to the left and now also because of the electronic media people are totally not paying attention to reality they're paying attention to virtual reality and I think that's a very fascistic direction and I think that the powers that be love to see that because power needs control and anyone that is out of control however that manifests itself is a danger to the powers that be and I think they're producing a bunch of sheep and I find that very much more dangerous now than, you know, don't forget because of my age I grew up after the Second World War when the GIs came back and Nirvana was on the headlines, you know and you were able to as a working person buy a home, send your kids to school you can't do that anymore and I think that the powers that be like that because they're consolidating their hold over you and the more electronic media comes into play the less you will understand reality that's just my personal view but I've seen that every day I live in North Beach so I see both the tourists and I see, you know, the people that live in North Beach and it's chaos, let me tell you it is chaos Oh, we've got one from Kathy Peck up here Yay, Kathy! I have to say, you really captured the old Mab and all the bands in the deaf club and also, you know also there's a lot of folks there that aren't here anymore like Britley Black and Dave Bacon and Ricky Sleeper you know, these guys, it was just like and Don Vinyl, man, that was incredible so it's awesome and you captured every how you felt and how the bathroom felt and how the... The bathroom and how people were like just, you know on stage, just like into it the feeling of it, it was awesome you're great, too, you're awesome So anyway, I just wanted to say thank you Well, thank you and thank you everybody for coming We're going to wrap it up and just get off yourself on and look at other people in the eye every now and then I think that's a good idea I hope you all can come to the other film nights we are having and thank you for coming I was thrilled seeing those films myself It was great and I'd just like to shout out to speaking of our fallen brothers I'd just like to say, you know a moment for Ralph Carney and for Zev Yeah Super creative musicians in this SF scene Thank you again for coming Have a wonderful evening