The Gun Is Loaded

Let's face it, calling someone an "asshole" is not the best way to gain a viewer's (or a critic's) sympathy. But that is one of the less colorful monickers that performance artist Lydia Lunch regularly tosses at viewers in this walking fireside chat. Coming to less than national prominence in 1977 at the age of 16 as lead singer of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Lunch has gone on to become the queen of nihilist chic, and in this walk around the big city, Lunch espouses her basic philosophy: everything sucks (but not in equal proportions). Men are at the top of Lunch's hit list--although her remarks are not exactly what you'd call enlightened feminism. Men are power-hungry sadists, they've created power structures which will ultimately lead to total annihilation, blah, blah, blah... Although there is an occasional poetic turn of phrase here, Lunch, for the most part, speaks in non sequiturs, bits of sentences which seem to be going somewhere but never quite arrive before veering off on a new fragment. It's sometimes difficult to see this since every third word out of Lunch's mouth is a shopworn profanity. Some will find this shocking, but devoid of content as it is, it's really no more than plain boring. Lunch's idea of good advice is to tell people to kill themselves, something she brags she has tried to do herself on a number of occasions--unsuccessfully, apparently. Surely, suicide is not that difficult of an act to pull off. Sid Vicious, former bassist for the Sex Pistols and true nihilist, managed it. But Lunch is all mouth; her gun loaded with blanks. Not recommended. (Available from: Mystic Fire Video, Box 1092, Cooper Station, New York, NY 10276.)