INFAMOUS IN THE IDEA

WORLD FOR THE MOST

DESIGN CLASSIC ICONIC COVER. THE BOOK OF

RICHARD KERN'S SCUMBAG SUPER-8's. THE MOST

DIRECT TO (LOW) RENTAL MOVIES IN THE HISTORY OF

THE LOWER EAST SIDE.

SIGNED IN BLOOD RED FELT PEN AND EVER SO HAVE TO HAVEABLE. JUST WANT IT.

R. Kern aka Richard Kern the photographer of New York Girls and pretty much girls everywhere. In the eighties he shot films on Super-8 and music videos for Sonic Youth. As revealed in this excellent blog post on PleaseKillMe Kern and his cohorts had one clear objective in making films: "We were just trying to be as offensive as possible."
 

Lydia Lunch and Marty Nations in Fingered. Strangely enough the full film isn't on YouTube any more. Gone are those days. But one great clip, from somewhere around the time this still image was taken, is there to be seen and heard. Dialogue is amazing. 

Also from PleaseKillMe, this quote from Kern on the approach to Fingered: “You know when you see previews and the whole movie is in the preview? I saw one for the Gates of Hell. It’s a Lucio Fulci movie, Italian gore director. I thought, ‘This is so great. We can just make Fingered into a trailer. We won’t have to make the rest of the movie because we’ll put it all in the trailer.’” If only all filmmakers had such wisdom. 
 

And the true scumbag superstar of this newsletter and the Richard Kern oeuvre is... Lung Leg. Indie readers may know her face - and indeed this image - from the cover of Sonic Youth's Evol album. It is a still from the action-unpacked super short Submit To Me. Somewhat of a mystery, even to the internet, Lung rarely gave interviews; she hardly needed to, with performances as telling and as expressionistic as hers. 
 

Cassandra Stark from X is Y, Kern's genre-defining entry into the girls with guns cinema category. 
 

Linda Serby from the same movie. Obviously we think gun ownership is madness - but if the US is so determined to have them at least give them all to women. 
 

Lung Leg from Fingered. A little worse for wear from her run in with Lydia and Marty. Lung was the Winona Ryder of the downtown East Village movie scene: no question about it. 
 

Artists David Wojnarowicz and Karen Finley played the parents in 1985's epic drama (it was 11 minutes long!) You Killed Me First. Both will be shot dead by Lung Leg in the final reel. 
 

Lung again. The newsletter is a love letter to her. Here she is as the bedraggled back cover lover. 

Scumbag Super-8's is rare already. It was published in London in 1995 to accompany the National Film Theatre season of Kern's super-8-nasties. This copy extra scarce as signed to the cover by Richard Kern in red felt pen.