LLIK YOUR IDOLS/YOU KILLED ME FIRST

If your youth was altered by the work of Lydia Lunch, Richard Kern and Bruce LaBruce…if its soundtrack starred the Butthole Surfers, the Swans and Sonic Youth…if you aspired to the nihilism and fuck-all snarls of New York City’s downtown underground in the early 1980s…if you are, despite your better avant-garde angels, nostalgic for No Wave, don’t tamp down the self-revulsion that irony evokes. Instead, indulge your reactionary self: Go see Angelique Bosio’s film Llik Your Idols at Hallwalls tonight (December 13). The film looks back on the art and music scene that produced filmmakers like Nick Zedd, who wrote a manifesto naming and defining the Cinema of Trangression: “…We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men…There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed…We propose transformation through transgression—to convert, transfigure and transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full of unknowing slaves.” Kern’s 1985 short You Killed Me First follows Bosio’s documentary, as an example of the era.

—geoff kelly

8pm. Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, 341 Delaware Avenue (854-1694, hallwalls.org).