Listen to the City

I see a new world. Do you see it? If you listened to the city back in 1984, here's what it told you: there are dark days coming, and the only way to survive them is by being rich. Made during the re-election year of Ronald Reagan, the election year of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and the very beginnings of the shattering saving and loan scandal that would come to look like candy store shoplifting a generation on, Ron Mann's rare early non-documentary movie is like a downtown artist's poster collage of DIY urgency: from the opening sequence, in which the poet/punk (Jim Carroll) rises like Lazarus from his hospital bed and takes to the streets with a vertical IV drip and a message about better days, to the ensuing satirical depiction of a corporation coldly deciding to cut the unprofitable heart out of the city it calls home, the movie plays as fearless, street-art inspired pastiche: part experimental polemic, part political cartoon, part video art installation, part performance prank.