"$1.25 a Pint": Blood, Guts & Degradation with Transgressive Filmmaker Richard Kern

Here’s a curious artifact, although many will doubtlessly find it depressing and abhorrent.

I’ve spoken about transgressive filmmaker/photographer Richard Kern a bunch of times here (notably here, here and here), but he was a big pal and creative contemporary of the Cop Shoot Cop guys, as well as a primary figure in the Cinema of Transgression scene and former member of The Black Snakes. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, as I said on those posts, please explore it with discretion, as it’s not really appropriate for every audience, and all that that entails.

In any case, this video clip finds Kern being interviewed in 1985 on what appears to be an L.E.S. rooftop by a strangely listless interviewer named Victoria from a program called "Videowave." Kern here is fresh off the filming of the gratuitously gory video for Sonic Youth’s “Death Valley `69” (which I spoke about not long ago here), and doing so with characteristic low-key nonchalance. Fittingly, about 47 seconds in, when Victoria is asking about Kern’s penchant for drugs and violence, there seems to be the sound of gunshots from the streets below.

It just gets weirder from there, really. Victoria awkwardly gets Kern to out himself and seems to fish for purely salacious content, and the filmmaker remains fairly blunt and understated throughout. He does make a fairly prophetic prediction, at one point. After Victoria fails to re-engage Kern on a correlation between his depictions of abuse and his own experience “in the Gay movement,” they switch topics to music, and Kern exclaims that “music videos are gonna die.” He was right about that.

In any case, it’s a bizarre glimpse of Lower East Side life from a different era. I wonder what transpires on this rooftop today. It’s probably someone’s private roof-deck.

New York hardcore trainspotters like myself might appreciate that Kern’s wearing a vintage VIRUS shirt.

Lastly, as unconventional Victoria's interview style may have been, "Videowave" did manage to stage quite a few interesting chats. See more of them here.