There’s been a whole lot of chatter about “Caught Stealing,” director Darren Aronofsky’s ambitious new film project set in the East Village of the 1990’s. In the last several weeks, certain stretches of Avenue A and some surrounding byways have undergone a sort of “regression” back to their alleged earlier iterations. I, myself, was stopped in my tracks by one particular detail of this only two weeks ago. More about that in a bit.
I’m not going to try to encapsulate all the elements – there have been plenty of attempts to this end, notably in Curbed and EV Grieve. Personally speaking, I don’t know much, if anything, about the source material for this film, but I’ve seen fleeting pictures of one of the characters who, I gather, portrays a “punk rocker,” replete with spikey, black-leather jacket, bondage trousers and a gravity-defying, colored mohawk. For my money, the portrayal isn’t really that spot-on. The guy (portrayed by British actor Matt Smith, I believe), just looks a bit too clean and pressed, his `hawk just a little too robust. He looks more like a cartoony stereotype from a tourist’s postcard than an authentic replication of the crusty punks that one can still periodically spot swigging forty-ounce malt liquors around Tompkins Square Park. I am reminded of Spike Lee’s similarly ham-fisted portrayal of punk rockers in the otherwise well-intentioned “Summer of Sam.” The only director to really do the subculture justice, to my mind, is Martin Scorsese, who drafted bona fide scene regulars like John “Gringo” Spacely, Bobby Steele of the Undead and my late friend Fran Powers for the Club Berlin scenes in “After Hours.”
Oddly enough, I used to periodically interact with Darren Aronofsky. Back in the latter-half of the 2000’s, both of my kids went to the same pre-school as Aronofsky’s child (with then-partner Rachel Weisz). My wife, kids and I attended a few social events alongside them. Rachel was always lovely, but Darren was a bit shy. He was perfectly nice, but a little reserved. Had I known he’d one day be making a movie about our mutually revered East Village, I’d have probably given him a laundry list of unsolicited details to feature.
Anyway, about two weeks back, I started noticing Aronofsky’s re-imagining, predominantly via some of old Shepard Fairey’s wheat-pasted posters (I actually don’t remember them being prominent in the East Village so much as in SoHo, as long as I’m being pedantic), and the re-casting of Avenue A’s Double-Down Saloon as a venture I don’t remember called Paul’s Bar.
The small detail that did catch my eye, however, were some posters for Bowery Ballroom gigs that clearly weren’t current (some featuring a band I used to periodically see at Luna Lounge called Muckaferguson). Those certainly struck me for a loop, reminding me of stumbling upon this similarly retro (and since abandoned?) film project set in 2019, right before the pandemic shut everything down.
This, appropriately enough, was Muckaferguson:
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