How to Live
in the City:
The Story of The American Music Show
#2: Early Years
with James Bond and Potsy Duncan in person
Thursday, October 5, 2017
7:30 pm
at Gallery 992 in West End
992 Ralph David Abernathy Blvd, Atlanta, GA 30310
$8
A wholly successful, twenty-five-year project in do-it-yourself media, The
American Music Show is a landmark of television and moving image history.
But the story begins well before its characters and performers became legends –
before RuPaul became Starbooty and DeAundra Peek’s Hi Class Hall o’Fame Theatre
ruled public access. The American Music Show came into being through an
unlikely conjunction of Civil Rights history, Atlanta politics, mixed gay and
straight social networks, and musical subcultures. These fascinating origins are
the subject of the second screening in How to Live in the City, Film
Love’s American Music Show retrospective.
James Bond, who
co-founded and co-hosted the show, was also a member of the Atlanta City
Council. Alongside his brother, the well-known Civil Rights activist Julian
Bond, James Bond played a crucial political role in establishing public access
cable television in Atlanta in the late 1970s. With Dick Richards, a gay man who
had met Bond while volunteering for the Democratic party in the 1972 election;
Potsy Duncan, a veteran cable access advocate in Atlanta; and a tight circle of
performers, comedians and musicians, The American Music Show was
launched. For its first three years, it was taped in the home of James’ and
Julian’s mother, Mrs. Julia Bond, near Atlanta’s West End.
On Thursday,
October 5, Film Love screens a selection of very rare material from these early
years. James Bond and Potsy Duncan will join curator Andy Ditzler for a
discussion of The American Music Show’s formation and the establishment
and evolution of public access TV in Atlanta. What happens when an Atlanta city
councilman transforms himself into an onscreen trickster comedian? And when an
irrepressible young man named RuPaul writes a fan letter to the show in 1981 and
finds himself performing on television? And when Julian Bond stops by to run the
video camera? Interracial Twister games, dirty jokes in French, Christmas
greetings from the city council president, and other skewed forms of
entertainment will demonstrate that The American Music Show’s political
context helped produce its pioneering brand of anarchic humor – a humor that
would provide a cultural beacon for Atlanta in the strange days of the Reagan
era.
For this screening, Film Love returns to West End’s Gallery 992, in
the same neighborhood where The American Music Show was first produced.
Program includes clips from The American Music Show and related
programming, 1981-1984.
Gallery 992
992 Ralph
David Abernathy Blvd.
Atlanta, Georgia 30310
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/Gallery-992-1356018754415055/
How to Live in the City: The Story of The American Music Show is a Film Love event. The Film Love series provides access to great but rarely seen films, especially important works unavailable on consumer video. Programs are curated and introduced by Andy Ditzler, and feature lively discussion. Through public screenings and events, Film Love preserves the communal viewing experience, provides space for the discussion of film as art, and explores alternative forms of moving image projection and viewing.