Of the two David Yow films I’ve seen this year, Joshua Erkman’s A Desert is easily the best, mostly because the other one – a documentary about the Butthole Surfers – isn’t at all about David Yow, and barely features him for more than the time it takes for him to adamantly state that he and Gibby Haynes in fact did do acid together. So.
A Desert is a slippery one. Because of the flavor of praise accorded the film in its bulletins, and partly because of who the praise is accorded by, I kinda thought I was going to hate it; reviews made it sound like a pile of nostalgic jerk-off referentialism without a soul of its own. But A Desert very much has its own soul, and takes the lessons of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho 65 years into The Future, to seedy, shattering effect.
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