Jawnts: Memories of a hip '70s NYC

The New York of the 1970s is one of America's mythic spaces. It's remembered as either a hellish cityscape, wracked by violence and questionable haircuts, or a hellish cityscape with cheap rents that allow the latitude to create fine art.

Contemporary New York would be unrecognizable to the stars of Ivan Kral and Amos Poe's The Blank Generation, a jangling black-and-white documentary of the early days of punk rock. It's stitched together from shots of Blondie, Richard Hell, and the Ramones playing CBGB, the now legendary bar that - as James Wolcott tells it - denizens of a men's shelter upstairs would periodically bomb with urine-filled Thunderbird bottles. That footage is interlaced with mundane shots of city streets, the opposite of the soaring glories offered by Woody Allen's Manhattan.

The Blank Generation is an odd film. The music was recorded on different nights than the footage, so the songs don't sync up with the performance. "It wasn't meant to be a movie," as Kral said years later. His goal was to capture a memento of his time stateside, in case he was deported back to Czechoslovakia, and "to have my friends come over and watch themselves and have a good time."

So The Blank Generation is basically a home movie with a killer soundtrack, featuring people who actually have reason to strut around wearing sunglasses indoors. For fans of the 1970s CBGB scene, it's great fun to see Blondie lolling around beneath a glowing Miller High Life ad, or passing shots of the near-perfect snottiness of Richard Hell, whose song inspired the name of the documentary and whose ripped-up shirts and spiky hair indirectly inspired every punk rocker ever.

New York will always be a media and cultural capital, but may be too expensive now to allow an artistic flowering of the profound proportions captured on film. If so, Philadelphia would be a fine successor as a capital of avant garde weirdness. It's close to major media outlets, the cost of living is way cheaper than NYC, and there simply isn't the economic engine that will drive the kind of sweeping, rapid gentrification occurring in other major Northeast cities. It's a perfect setting for a new no wave. Contemporary imitators of Richard Hell: C'mon over, sans Thunderbird.

"The Blank Generation" is showing at the International House, 3701 Chestnut St., Wednesday at 7 p.m., with introduction by Amos Poe. $9 for general public, $7 for students and seniors.