Dance to ZE Beat August 15, 2008

DANCE TO ZE BEAT IN AUGUST!!!

This month: DJ Ellie Erickson (Erase Errata/Kill Rock Stars), DJ Weasel Walter (XbXrX/Flying Luttenbachers/No Wave Book), host DJ Tristes Topiques (Radio Rhythm)

EDINBURGH CASTLE, FRI AUG 15, 10pm

FREE!

Dance to ZE Beat: A Monthly Post Punk Dance Party & Movie Night. Celebrating the short lived era from the late 70s to early 80s primarily in New York City where musicians such as James Chance, Lydia Lunch & Suicide and filmmakers such as James Nares, Jim Jarmusch, & Amos Poe ruled downtown nightlife, often wandering on to each other's stages, screens, and canvasses. Showcasing the sounds of the dancier side of no wave on record labels including: ZE Records, 99 Records, Sleeping Bag, Y Records, Celluloid, Les Disques Du Crepuscule, Factory, & Rough Trade.

Screening in the background: Rome '78 (1978, James Nares). Super rare Super 8 film with star studded downtown New York cast: James Chance, Lydia Lunch, Patti Astor, John Lurie, Anya Phillips. Spectacular portrayal of the "I Claudius" Roman times executed to low budget perfection.

Review from the Village Voice:
Not far into Rome 78, James Nares's unlikely rendering of a sword-and-sandal costume drama on the minuscule format of Super-8 sound film, two soldiers clad in armor and togas lean against what one might generously imagine to be the walls of the Roman Senate, but is more likely a cheaply renovated East Village apartment. The pair discusses the increasingly erratic actions of Emperor Caligula without the genre's usual pseudo-Shakespearean gravitas; they sound like two deadbeat downtowners bullshitting at a bar. "If he insists on fucking his sister, what do you expect?" one asks. Well, the other says, "her ass is pretty imperial.

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Punctuated by in-camera flash-frames, off-kilter shots, and inappropriate laughter, Rome 78 (1978) embraces shabby-chic as a formal objective. Nares mocks up Ancient Rome by shooting in faux-classical sites like Grant's Tomb and Tribeca's American Thread Building, where a decrepit penthouse loft with a peeling-paint dome serves as an echoey stand-in for the imperial palace.

At every moment in the film, New York circa 1978 bleeds uncontrollably into a flimsy pretense of first-century Rome . Scheming courtiers allude to intrigues in Gaul , Brittany , and the Lower East Side ; Mitchell chain-smokes while seducing a black-lingerie-clad Lunch on a zebra-skin rug; the Emperor himself?astonishingly portrayed by twitchy, gap-toothe..omorph David McDermott?declares his own divinity at Grant's Tomb by screaming above the honks and engine rumbles of the West Side Highway.

Seen now, Rome 78 collapses three layers of dead civilization: The script conveys the waning days of the Roman imperium; the sets evoke the Empire State 's 19th-century robber-baron capitalism; and the cast memorializes the last days of urban bohemia's counter-kingdom. "I don't think I was the first to draw a connection between the Roman Empire and the American empire," Nares states. "At that time, it really felt like things were falling apart. A real 'decline and fall' seemed very obvious, with the blocks of abandoned buildings and so forth. It was an easy call, really . . . .

Official Website: http://www.myspace.com/djtristestropiques