Rod Filbrandt

Cranky old punks whining about all the idiots in the world and passive-aggressively trying to defuse the aging and lamening process by snarling about it? Sounds awful, right? But most of these are actually seriously funny--the early ones have this anarchic glee, and while the quality falls off somewhat later on as the character acquires a personality and history and isn't just this punk revenant any more (a bad sign is when he acquires his own haint, the ghost of Montgomery Clift, who was show more stabbed at Frankie's in Vancouver, which later became a divey punk hangout--I like how this is a part of our local heritage [appeared in the Georgia Straight 1984-94] and how it draws continuities. Everything seems so new and unprecedented when it happens, but in retrospect punk is drawing on the fifties and on the whole noir thing as clearly as glam and metal and girl groups, and as clearly as grunge remembered the sixties or the hippies remembered the Romantics or etc., etc.), there are also some actual moments of pathos. Filbrandt cares about his craft, and no matter how superficially primitive the product, that care shows. show less