Sheena is a Punk Rocker

It was my first outdoor movie of the summer and hopefully not my last.

After a three course dinner with a favorite musician discussing a May Dweezil Zappa show at the National where middle aged men smoked pot openly, why "Hazards of Love" may be the greatest Decemberists record of all time, the appeal of the new "Mad Max" movie and why an omelet is better for you for breakfast than a salad, it was on the the great outdoors.

Okay, maybe not the greatest of outdoors, but the grassy lot across from Lamplighter and behind Yesterday's Heroes Vintage. While surrounded by buildings, street and cars, there were clouds overhead in a deep blue sky and recently cut grass underfoot. And lightening bugs, lots of them, twinkling all around us as I set up my lowest beach chair by the fence with a great view of the movie screen.

People brought blankets and snacks, chairs and beer and a few sat on the wooden picnic tables near the back. Clouds scuttled overhead and the organizers delayed starting until the sky morphed from blue to dusky before beginning.

Before long a couple of guys set up camp next to me, one described as having a good heart and the other nicknamed Cowboy. It was he with the hat and vest (which he'd sewn himself, making him a most unusual but talented cowboy) who turned to me just as the movie was beginning, holding a beer and raising an eyebrow to see if I'd like one.

Thank you, no. Besides, from the first frames, I was too enchanted with the 1979 gem "Rock 'n' Roll High School," a Roger Corman-produced film that had to have been an instant cult classic by 1980, to do anything else.

As probably the only person in the crowd who remembers 1979, the first thing I noticed was that the star of the football team wore a tie to school. Listen, children, and you shall learn: no guys were wearing ties to public school in 1979. And no freshmen were wearing beanies, either.

Hollywood, pure Hollywood.

The corny film had every cliche firmly in place: a principal who looked more like a prison warden with lipstick and fitted uniforms, a character named Coach Steroid and teen aged girls in the shortest of '70s gym shorts (oh, we all had them) and the brightest of fitted tank tops (or possibly body suits, just as popular at the time).

During a scene in the gym where a student successfully climbs the rope only to fear coming down (she slides, which if she'd done in real life would have removed the skin from her palms), a fate I recall clearly from 7th or 8th grade. I wonder if kids even have to climb the rope anymore in gym class.

In a scene that surely was seen by the makers of "Spinal Tap," the principal demonstrates the destructive powers of rock and roll by cranking the music in her office. What's hysterical is the settings on the volume control, which begin with Pat Boone, go up to Donny and Marie and continue through Kansas, Foreigner, Led Zeppelin and the Who.

At the top of the volume meter is the Ramones, the source of all the trouble at Vince Lombardi High, motto: "Winning is better than losing." So naturally, the student body's favorite band is the Ramones.

Our heroine is Riff Randell, a girl with enormous, long hair tied up in pigtails with yellow yarn (soooo '70s), who defies authority and plays the Ramones on school grounds. Scandalous!

While the movie used plenty of Ramones music, much of it played by the band as they join the plot, there were also other bands of that era. "Smoking in the Boys' Room" accompanied a scene in, where else, the boys' bathroom, where clouds of pot smoke masked a line that snaked to one stall where a savvy student helped others with their dating woes.

Just so we didn't forget it was set in a time long, long ago, there was a shot of a teenager reading Crawdaddy magazine and another where glass bottles of milk were delivered by a milkman. No, really.

But the essence of '70s-era cliches was the football star's tricked out van, a place he hoped would get him laid.  At one point, he used the red, push button phone in the van to call up a girl and tell her he was in his van, on the water bed, listening to his expensive stereo. "Wanna go out and get drunk?" he proposes suavely.

Some men are masters of the romantic approach.

The movie was funny, both intentionally - "My daughter Kate? I thought she was in the basement splitting photons." - and unintentionally, as in when the Ramones pull up in their car (license plate: Gabba Gabba Hey) singing a fully electric version of "Come on Let's Go," except their instruments aren't plugged in and there are no drums to be seen.

Mostly, it was a cliched rehash of youth versus authority with enough bad '70s hair and clothing (in one scene Riff wears a striped bodysuit with alternately striped tights and a scarf, causing one guy to comment, "She looks like Grimes." Actually, that would be Grimes aping the '70s, but no matter) to keep the crowd agog constantly.

During the scene where the Ramones played a concert in their town, the words to "Teenage Lobotomy" scrolled underneath the footage of them singing, like some bizarre punk singalong.

Now I guess I'll have to tell 'em
That I got no cerebellum

One of the coolest parts of the entire film was the ending where the photon-splitting smart girl (nice touch for 1979 for it not to be a guy) sets off a bomb to blow up the school and thus prove to the principal who's in charge. Turns out it was the actual demolition of that L.A. school they used in the filming.

The only thing that could top that was the scene of the Ramones and Riff singing "Do You Want to Dance," a song, I admit, I hadn't even known they'd recorded.

Movie Club is always a learning experience. And if I'm learning things from it, god knows the Grimes contingent is.

Afterwards, there were trivia questions with prizes for those who knew the answers, but if you ask me, the real prize was watching the Ramones, hair hanging in their eyes, awkwardly sing and act their way through "Rock 'n' Roll High School" under a canopy of stars.

Vans with waterbeds, tube socks up to your kneecaps and black marks on your permanent record. Good times.

Cheap Wine and Loud Music

At no time was I ever punk.

About the closest I ever came was at a D.C. club called Poseurs back in the '80s and the name says it all. Poseur, not punk.

Despite an appreciation for the DIY ethic and a fondness for loud music, I think my taste always skewed less angry.

And certainly with age I've lost whatever punk rock attitude I may ever have had, if any.

Surely part of the reason is that I now have friends who message me late in the day asking if I would like to accompany them to Lemaire for wine drinking.

No punk gets her drink on at a four diamond hotel. But as a non-punk, why would I not?

Walking to the Jefferson, I stop at a corner and two skater kids join me to wait for the light.

"You look nice," one says, looking me up and down. He can't be more than 17.

"I like your top," the other says, pointing at my $3.25 thrift store find, a black sweater with leather trim.

I thank them and they take off down the hill on their boards. Live fast, die young, boys.

Wearing someone else's cast-offs, that's sort of punk, isn't it? Being complimented by under-age skater dudes, that counts for something, right?

Inside, I find my friend and it's discovery wine night so bottles are $15, meaning there's no reason on earth to drink a glass, not that this guy and I ever make do with a glass.

We order a bottle or two of Four Bears Chardonnay because he is devoted to both Chardonnays and California wine and it will go well with my crabcake.

He's not fond of Lemaire's crabcake (preferring Acacia's), but I find it full of lump crab meat and with a well-spiced remoulade, so I have no complaint beyond a slight excess of mayo as a binding agent.

First world problem.

We happily spend several hours catching up on his recent business dealings, what new places he's eaten at lately and what I've been up to.

Obviously, he's too busy to read the blog or he'd already know.

Midway through the second bottle, I have to say so long so I can get to the Criterion to see a one-night only screening of "CBGB."

Arriving at Criterion, I am amazed to find a line for tickets almost out the door.

Looking at the crowd, though, most of them don't look like the kind of people there to see a film about a defunct punk rock club.

I do some racial/sexual profiling and approach a middle-aged white guy with a beard, asking if he's there to see "CBGB."

He is, but as it turns out, 95% of the line is there for another movie.

Inside the theater are more middle-aged people including a guy wearing a ratty-looking CBGB t-shirt.

This must be the place.

It takes four tries for the projectionist to get the film started, and the film starts almost fifteen minutes late, but then what punk show ever started on time?

The movie begins with a caveat, "This story is mostly true," and a look at NYC's Bowery circa the late '60s.

I'm always happy to see an Alan Rickman movie, although I'm still not quite sure why they got an Englishman to play Jewish New Yorker Hilly Kristal, the man who started CBGB.

Here's where it gets personally embarrassing. I had no idea CBGB stood for "country, bluegrass, blues."

Please say I'm not the only one.

At this late date, it seems laughable that Kristal ever thought those genres were the next big thing, but luckily he had trouble booking those bands while local punks like Television showed up begging to play.

Kristal's only rule for bands was that they had to play original music. People accused him of trying to avoid paying ASCAP fees, but he claimed it was just a philosophy.

And thank god for that.

After Television gets some local press and David Bowie said Television was the real deal, bands start coming down asking to play, bands like Blondie, the Police and the Patti Smith Group.

"The name of our band is Talking Heads and we live across the street," David Byrne says when they audition for Kristal.

When the Ramones audition, all bad attitude and bangs, Kristal says to them, "No one is going to like you guys but I'll have you back."

Wise move. In 1974, they played CBGB's 74 times.

"Hey, isn't that the guy who made that awful feedback album?" a musician says to a friend when he spots Lou Reed in the crowd.

We see where Iggy Pop does the first stage-diving at CBGB's. Where even the local resident bikers are repulsed by the filth of the bathrooms.

All part of the legend.

The film didn't try to tell the whole 33 years of CBGB history, just the crucial early years when punk was being born.

The final credits had as much to see as the film, including footage when Talking Heads were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and David Byrne had Kristal up onstage so he could tell the world what a key a role he'd played in the birth of a scene.

There were some hilarious credits, too, like, "Special Thanks (the asses we want to kiss)" and "No animals were harmed in the making of this movie. The cockroach guts were Fig Newtons."

Considering there was a running gag of Kristal killing roaches in his litter-strewn office, that's a lot of Fig Newtons.

Was the movie well done? Not particularly. Did it tell an interesting story I hadn't known much about? Sure did.

When we went to leave the theater, a manager was standing there, handing each of us a certificate for a free movie, her way of making up for the delayed start and technical difficulties that began our evening.

Accepting a freebie for having to put up with a movie about the punk scene not starting on time seems kind of soft.

Poseur-like even. Sheena may have been a punk rocker, but clearly I wasn't.

Avoiding the Revenge Apology

I could say that my evening began highbrow and moved to lowbrow, but that's not really a fair representation of the two parts of my night. How about I began with the low key and moved on to the more raucous? Let's just say managed to cover two vastly disparate bases, both quite enjoyably tonight.

The Fresh Ink literary series was conveniently (for me) being held at the Library of VA and was to feature Jake Adam York and Kathleen Graber. He teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado Denver and she at VCU. And the man sitting next to me had on the most exuberant pair of blue, black and white plaid pants I've ever laid eyes on; it was hard not to stare.

Graber mentioned meeting the Scottish poet John Burnside and his comment that the tenderest kind of love is unexpressed or unrequited love. "Now that's an idea I can get behind," she enthused. "Let's not talk about it!" Spoken like a true poet, one who writes lines like, "Each living bone carries more than it can bear."

York began by telling us that he'd be reading "...five poems about music and two that are not." Several had song titles for names, including "Blue Velvet" and "Some Enchanted Evening" and dealt with the Civil Rights movement. About traveling south, he noted, "If you've never been to Oxford, Mississippi, pack an extra liver because you're going to need it." His final reading was a new poem he read off his phone because he hadn't had the time to print it out. It was a very 21st century reading.

And then for something completely different, I headed over to Strange Matter on Grace Street to see the documentary End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones. Apparently the guys in the band became friends because of shared musical taste. As Dee-Dee Ramone put it, "If you liked the Stooges, you had to be friends with each other. There were only three of us." Inspired by seeing bands like The New York Dolls and Television, it was the end of overblown 70s rock with narcissistic guitar solos (thank goodness). Joey Ramone explained the development of the group as a chemical thing.

To the world, the Ramones were proof of how good music could be without good musicianship and generations of kids were inspired to imitate that spirit. Between their first national tour and their second, a host of bands like the Replacements, Bad Brains, the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag sprung up in the Ramones' wake.

As was said in the film, "The songs were short and fast and these guys were dead serious." And no guitar solos ever. Footage of the early live shows were awe-inspiring with such energy and brevity; it's hard to fathom that these guys toured that hard and relentlessly for 22 years.

Now that Strange Matter is selling beer, the crowd for the movie was larger. I even ate there tonight, choosing the special, a turkey, Gouda and Granny Smith apple sandwich with honey mustard on rye bread, which was tasty. The most expensive item on the menu is the Apology for $10. It's turkey, prosciutto and bacon with fried bacon mayo between two grilled cheeses. Even funnier, though, was the Revenge Apology with vegan ham, vegan bacon, Jackfruit and basil mayo between two grilled teeses. Ha!

From poetry to punk with puns in between; now that's a hell of a Wednesday.