Last week Roethke made a comment here about my sprinkling asides about my other projects in the context of these columns. I had to think about that because I guess I conceive of things a little differently than I imagine other people do. I don’t really separate the “Zen” part of my life from the other things I do like writing books, writing for Suicide Girls, making documentaries, working for the guys who make the Japanese monster movies or even sitting around watching the fireworks and stuff like that. It’s all sort of the same thing. Life.

In a way my life as a Zen dude is sort of an experiment. I want to see if it’s possible to live the principles expounded by Buddha and Dogen and all the rest of them without running off to a mountain and living in a cave with moss growing off my beard or whatever it is people imagine you should do as a Buddhist. If this practice and this philosophy don’t work for people in the real world with real jobs and real lives, then what good are they?

And what I’m doing lately in my real life is promoting the documentary I made about the hardcore scene in Cleveland and Akron, Ohio in the early Eighties. The film will have its premier on Wednesday July 25th at 7:30 PM at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. It’s showing with a film called Screaming Masterpiece, which is all about the pop music world of Iceland. Get your tickets here. I haven’t seen that movie yet myself. But it seems like a pretty good match. We’re both dealing with rock music in obscure places featuring mainly bands no one’s ever heard of.

So let me tell you why I made Cleveland’s Screaming! and why it’s a Buddhist movie as well as a punk rock one, plus why it’s way the fuck better than American Hardcore could ever hope to be. In December of 2005, a bunch of us from the old NE Ohio hardcore scene reformed our bands for a show called Cleveland’s Screaming put on by a guy named Jim Lanza. I decided to bring along my camera and film the event. As long as I was doing that I thought, why not interview the band members and fans and try to put it together into a little commemorative movie for the people that showed up?

That’s what I did. But as I started editing the movie together I began thinking that what was coming together was pretty interesting. In fact, I think it’s one of the best movies about punk rock ever made. I know people hate to see some artist bragging about his own stuff. But any decent artist is a fan of his or her own work. And I am certainly a fan of Cleveland’s Screaming!. Here’s why I think it’s great.

When I started working on the movie I had no idea somebody was trying to turn Steven Blush’s fantastic, amazing, classic book American Hardcore: A Tribal History into a movie. When I heard about it, I thought, “Aw shit, somebody’s already done the movie I wanted to do.” But when I saw the film I realized that wasn’t the case at all. As much as I like American Hardcore – and I do, it’s a truly awesome movie that you all must run out and buy on DVD right now – my movie is way better.

I hope I’m making it clear that this isn’t a put down of American Hardcore. American Hardcore is great. It’s just that my movie’s way, way better.

In a sense I think the guys who made American Hardcore sort of missed the point. No. That’s too strong. But they missed the point that I wanted to make. Really, though, any sane filmmaker would have avoided the particular point I was trying to make about the hardcore movement. Which is that hardcore was not about the big players, the nationally and internationally known acts. The real hardcore scene was a totally grassroots local phenomenon. American Hardcore tried to address it as a single nationwide movement. And in some sense it was. But the nationwide scene wasn’t nearly as significant as the little pockets of hardcore all over the country and all over the world that were each just a little different from each other.

Personally when I got into hardcore I had no interest at all in the nationally known bands. While I was a member of 0DFx, I had exactly three records by nationally known h/c groups; The Misfits Walk Among Us, the first Millions of Dead Cops record and the first Meat Puppets record. All of them I bought from the bands themselves when we played with them. To me, the most important hardcore bands were the bands I knew like The Offbeats, Starvation Army, Agitated, The Dark and the rest of our scene. I had every one of their 7 inches and cassettes.

I think people involved in their own scenes in other cities felt pretty much the same. And for years I always hoped that someone maybe in Detroit or Minneapolis or, I dunno, someplace like Boise, Idaho or Wallawalla, Washington would make a movie about their hardcore scene. Even if I’d never heard of any of their bands, I’d want to see what it was like in their neck of the woods. When nobody made that movie, I figured it was up to me to do one about NE Ohio.

As I said, though, any sensible person making a movie about hardcore would do one with at least a few recognizable “names.” I mean, even the biggest stars in hardcore barely register on the public’s radar. But even so, to me, if you’re gonna make a movie about hardcore you have to look at the real underground, the underground that’s so deep under the ground it makes even bands like the Circle Jerks or Minor Threat look like superstars. Cleveland’s Screaming! doesn’t have Moby or Flea or Henry Rollins or even H.R. from the Bad Brains in it. Unless you’re a total completist hardcore geek you’re not gonna recognize a single one of the bands in this film. So once I started editing I looked at my interview subjects – my friends – as characters, just like a fiction filmmaker would. These were people who’d had a tremendous influence on my life when I was younger. I wanted to find out what had happened to them and what it all meant.

Why the hell were we all in this thing together anyway? I mean it was fucking dangerous to be a punk rocker in Akron, Ohio in 1982. Big fat hairy guys in pickup trucks would attack you physically just for having a weird hairstyle or strange clothes. I’m glad things aren’t like that anymore. Nobody believes me when I say this now, but in 1981 I was threatened with real violence because I had a mullet. A mullet, for God’s sake! (We didn't call 'em mullets then, by the way, I just asked my friend Mary to cut my hair like David Bowie's on the cover of Pinups) That’s how bad it was there in those days. So why on Earth did we risk that kind of abuse? How did that attitude shape the adults we became? What was it really like to take that kind of a stand in that kind of a place? That’s what I went for in the film and I think I got it.

And what’s the Buddhist aspect in all of this? For one thing, as I’ve said before, it was the attitude I found in hardcore that led me to Buddhism in the beginning, the honesty of it, the rejection of what was considered normal for a higher sense of morality. But more than that, I could not have even made this movie at all if I hadn’t practiced Zazen for all those years. In order to make a film, especially one like this whose commercial prospects are pretty much nil, you have to be able to do something for the sheer sake of just doing it. You can’t worry about the results, you can’t think of success or failure. These are the lessons you learn in Zen practice. I know other filmmakers make movies without having done Zen practice. But, as for me, I could not have even begun this process without it. So in that way, the film is an expression of Buddhism. This in spite of the fact that the word Buddhism only comes up one time in the entire film. The movie itself is Buddhism in action.

At some point I want to do a more specifically “Buddhist” film. But I hate how preachy and self-righteous all the other Buddhist movies I’ve seen are. For now, Cleveland’s Screaming! is my Buddhist movie.

Here’s another clip from the film (see more here). Show up at the Egyptian July 25th and see the whole thing!




Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

On Wednesday July 18 at 7PM, he'll be at Still Point Center 4347 Trumbull Ave. (South of Warren Ave. on the corner of Canfield and Trumbull) Detroit, MI 48208 Phone: 313-831-1005

Plus, the very first record by his old hardcore band 0DFx (Zero Defex) has just been released by Get Revenge Records. Get yours today!