“They’re All Out Without You” is lush and rich, showcasing Roecker as a superlative filmmaker, well versed in the language of cinema, bold and passionate. Whether TAOWY will last online through the New Year remains to be seen, so see it while you can here.

Punk rock dads facing the challenges of being, well, punk rock dads are the subject of tonight’s movie The Other F Word, directed and written by Andrea Blaugrund Nevins and produced by Cristan Reilly. It’s hard enough to be a parent these days, but punk rock papas face a unique set of challenges as they walk the pater-path.

In interviews with over twenty fathers involved in punk rock –as well as pro skating and BMX riding, sports which have been heavily influenced by punk culture–the filmmakers have crafted portraits of men whose own childhoods were not exactly perfect (absentee and abusive fathers/parents are a prevailing theme), and are attempting to be better fathers to their own kids, to heal themselves through parenting.

In 1991, the band Sonic Youth asked filmmaker Dave Markey to come along on their European festival tour which included several other bands, and document the goings on. Having Markey film the tour was a very prescient decision, since one of the bands, Nirvana, had just shot the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and was about to release Nevermind…And then punk broke.

Firing bean bags and rubber bullets while spraying mace into a crowd of concert goers, Los Angeles Sheriff Department deputies closed down Sunset Boulevard from Doheny Avenue to San Vincente Boulevard for two hours last night. Backed up by members of the Los Angeles Police Department’s riot squad and the Beverly Hills Police Department, LASD arrived as patrons exited a punk rock nostalgia show featuring Ill Repute TSOL and Youth Brigade at the Key Club on Sunset Blvd.

I really believe rock ‘n roll can change the world. Can, has and will. Well, okay music, because before there was rock ‘n roll there the waltz, jazz, samba…all forbidden, scandalous, shocking and prone to cause dancing which could lead to more horizontal and well as cerebral activities!

My musical revelations and cultural epiphanies coincided with punk rock; I cut my heart on it and just kept going. And as an Angeleno, I am proud of our SoCal music tradition from the early days of Crenshaw Avenue jazz combos through now, which is why we feature a lot of punk rock movies with lots of local heroes and history on movie night

For Los Angeles punk rockers, sprawl of the city, the swaths of freeways gave punks from all parts of the city–the Valley to the South Bay– opportunities to merge and mosh. When sixteen year old Dave Travis’ dad gave him a video camera, Dave began documenting the flourishing scene, and out of thousands of hours of footage comes A History Lesson Pt 1 which links four bands that helped shape modern American music.

SST Records was a pivot point for punk music with a roster of acts and a flourishing touring network. In A History Lesson Pt 1, we meet four different acts associated with SST: The Meat Puppets, the Minutemen, Twisted Roots and Redd Kross. Live footage–including full length songs–is interspersed with interviews from the bands. The anarchistic roots of SST are clear in the story of the Meat Puppets–the band shared a bill with SST’s Black Flag in Phoenix and was invited to open for them in Costa Mesa, CA. The Meat Puppet’s country-tinged psychedelic punk jams caused a riot a the club; surf soaked hard core fans just couldn’t wrap their heads around the jams. The musical anarchy appealed to Black Flag guitarist/SST founder Greg Ginn who immediately signed the Meat Puppets to his label.

Tanem Davidson’s New Brow: Contemporary Underground Art presents a through line for the development of this uniquely American genre of painting which burst out of Abstract Expressionism through the Pop Art’s screened realism into a chrome flecked, hyper-sexualized, fuel-injected dream state. The icons of childhood–Rat Fink, hot rods, movie monsters, robots, toys, cartoons–conjoin in transgressive, illicit intercourse with tikis, animals, dead presidents, dollar signs, slogans, guns, girls, raw meat, and bombs; characters live in their own universes fraught with action and symbols, caught in moments just before, just after Something Happened.

Today, the New York Times announced that Malcom McLaren, the man behind the Sex Pistols–and Adam & the Ants and BowWowWow–has died of mesothelioma at a hospital in Switzerland. He was 64.

Los Angeles based film director and artist John Roecker created this inspirational short film. It’s an artistic overview and a love letter to Los Angeles, punk rock and the creative spirit, plus a call for everyone to manifest their dreams. Though um, in places it’s NSFW.

I loved Brendan Mullen, I loved how he changed our world. he will be sadly missed. And during the process of seeing him pass yesterday with his beloved wife Kateri, his friend of 32 yrs/bandmate Steve and his cousin Naill, I saw as well true compassion from the doctors and nurses in the ICU, I [...]