Hello, my name's Justin Niclu, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club. And today, we're going to be talking about

the no wave, because we're cool kids, right, Will? That's right. And I'd like to take you in your

DeLoreans back to the late 1970s in New York City. The greatest city in the world

is on the verge of bankruptcy. Huge swaths of Lower Manhattan are virtually abandoned. And what is

one of the things that happens in impoverished cities? They become mechas for artists and art.

And in the case of no wave, it's art that's made by people's bootstraps with

very little materials. No technical polish, just putting it out there. And in fact, fuck technical

polish. We hate technical polish. Technical polish is bourgeois. And we should point out that we're

not going to be talking about the music scene that was happening around this time and punk and all that stuff that was coming out of this

whole scene because while it is involved in some of the movies we'll mention, I know nothing about that.

I don't either, but it is worth mentioning the fact that this was a creative flowering that was

happening in like all the arts in the Lower East Side, literature, music, you know, CBGB was a hub of activity.

People like Debbie Harry and Lydia Lunch, especially Lydia Lunch, are major figures in both the film and music scenes.

And, you know, there's art as well.

Jean-Michel Basquiat is in one of the

movies you watched this week, Downtown 81. I mean, I don't need to talk about it too much. It's

essentially like a pictorial travelogue through the New York of the time. I should say, too,

though, that when we're talking about no wave, I feel like what we're really talking about

are two

different overlapping movements, two movements or maybe scenes, is the correct word,

that have some of the same players, and the second one is kind of an escalation of the first.

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