HEAD TRIP ONLINE WORLD MOVIE PREMIER

A MOVIE FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY AND FOR ALL YOUR FREAK FRIENDS TOO!!

NEVER BEFORE SEEN ONLINE – 

WATCH THE WORLD FAMOUS DOGGIE DINER DOGHEADS & BIKE OG’s CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO TRAVERSE THE ENTIRE COUNTRY SPREADING GOOD CHEER. 

The Infamous Doggie Diner/Cyclecide American Tour during the early days of the 2nd Iraqi War

CD cover for the film Head Trip 2009 - never released online til NOW!

WATCH FULL FILM BY CLICKING HERE

 

Head Trip, co-directed and produced by John Law & Flecher Fleurdujon, written by Law and edited by Fluerdujon, premiered on screen in 2008 at The San Francisco Documentary Film Festival & at Rhythmix Cultural Works in Alameda California. This is the first time the entire film will be available online.

WATCH MOVIE HERE:

Head Trip is a full length documentary film featuring the Doggie Diner Dogheads on a cross country trip to New York City during “Shock and Awe” 2003. The idea was to spread good cheer cross-country during a tough time. As you will see in the film there was some success. The tour and film were made in collusion with San Francisco Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, Rodeo Captain Jarico Reece.

Please watch this short trailer for the movie to be found in this wonderful article on the cross country road trip that inspired the movie

Kevin Evans, co-author (along with yours truly & Carrie Galbraith) created dozens of EC Comic style “factoids” for the book.

 

ONLINE MOVIE RELEASE:

The film was recently spruced up by Suicide Club/Cacophony and Burning Man stalwart filmmaker/composer Steve Mobia using the original mini-dv tape and it looks better than ever! Head Trip has never lived on line ever with the exception of a short trailer on Youtube and various news articles about the road trip and film premier in 2008.

SAN FRANCISCO CYCLECIDE BIKE RODEO:

Bike Rodeo “Captain” Jarico Reese

San Francisco Cylecide Bike Rodeo was officially founded by Jarico Reese and Erin Peruse in 1996 though some future members of the troop had been working together with altered bikes under the auspices of The Los Angeles Cacophony Society, Circus Redickuless and The Hard Times Bike Club since earlier in the decade.

https://grokipedia.com/page/cyclecide

Cyclecide was among the very first punk rock bicycle clubs, and inspired dozens of other bike clubs around the nation and in Mexico and even a bit in Europe.

Cyclecide grew out of an earlier bike club in Minneapolis Saint Paul called the Hard Times Bike Club. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Label_Bike_Club

Hard Times influence the founding of Cyclecide in San Francisco and eventually morphed into The Black Label Bike Club in New York City and Minneapolis – St. Paul.

Cyclecide also grew in part out of a traveling performance troop called Circus Redickuless.

https://grokipedia.com/page/circus_redickuless

This group, was conceived of as a “punk rock circus” with absolutely no talent. The various performers and set pieces were humorously designed to be artless and stupid. The idea was very punk DIY and it was simply that like bands that formed in the late 70s comprised of individuals with little or no musical experience, you could run a circus on the same principal. The combination of the two ideas, a locally based punk rock bike club that did events and performances and a traveling performance troop that went cross country and did shows in various venues is how Cyclecide was originally conceived of and created. A feature documentary was made about Circus Redickuless that won best picture at New York Underground Film Festival in 1998.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_New_York_Underground_Film_Festival

Members of Cyclecide and Hard Times comprised the first official bike wrangling group at The Burning Man Festival in 1997 after some of them crewing at the desert event in 1996.

After forming in 96, Cyclecide toured the United States several times, also performed multiple times in Mexico and participated in one European tour.

https://laughingsquid.com/cyclecide-bike-rodeo-presents-pedal-monster-2007/

Cyclecide bike rodeo was what I might call the Johnny Appleseed of punk rock bicycle culture. Everywhere the troop performed the following year all the teenage kids would have Janky tall bikes and choppers that they had hacked together. 

Cyclecide was one of the very early and extremely influential performance/maker groups that presented for multiple maker fares over more than a decade. 

https://makerfaire.com/maker/entry/cyclecide-60716/

Cyclecide performed at multiple Coachella events over a decade long period as well.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/music/articles/coachella-archives-visual-journey-desert-100000476.html

Largely forgotten now, Cyclecide had an important influence on later day American punk rock culture.

—

 

 

SOME MORE DOG INFO (STUFF ABOUT HEAD TRIP, the movie) :

CD cover for the film Head Trip 2009 - never released online til NOW!

CD cover for the film Head Trip 2009

 

                                                                Starting back in 2003 my friend Flecher Fleurdujon & I made a feature movie about a journey spanning the breadth of America accompanied by three 10 foot tall 300lb chef’s hat & bowtie adorned dachshund heads and a crew of punk rock bicycle clowns called Cyclecide Bike Rodeo. Completed in 2008, the movie was in a couple of film festivals, played at The Roxie in SF for a week & at two showing of almost 500 folks at Rythmix Cultural Works in Alameda CA.  The movie played a few more times, but that was it. It has never been online in all the intervening years.

Well before we embarked on our road trip/movie shoot, the giant grinning heads had been the official mascots of The Cacophony Society and The First Church of the Last Laugh. They were recognized all about the SF Bay Area from their tenure as totemic representatives of a local fast food franchise and our contribution to the Doggie Diner legacy was to deconstructed the former commercial icons and facilitate their “re-christening” as disembodied former commercial icons.  By the time we started our film project, we had been hauling the three fiberglas objects all around to various non-commercial, often non-profit, nonsensical events as well as City events and parades of various stripes for years.

Late in 2002 I was sitting in $teven Ra$pa’s lovely apartment on Rincon Hill along with Scott Beale, Helena “Noona” Sullivan, and a half dozen other local event folks and we were planning a Laughing Squid hosted and underwritten NYC event to take place at CBGB’s 313 Art Gallery (affiliated with & next door to the infamous punk club) that would showcase a roster of our SF and NYC underground performers and characters. The session was lively and productive. Then, out of the blue, Noona shouted: “HEY! John! we HAVE TO BRING THE DOGS!!” – like that was a good idea… I literally cringed and shrunk back in my comfy chair, shouting loudly and to the derisive laughter of my associates: “no, No, NO, NO!!!”  because I KNEW just how much really dirty heavy work, planning and $ that such a feat would require……. It was obvious: the only bunch I knew in San Francisco that would be up for the job of hauling a 20 foot long trailer of 300 pounds (apiece!) fiberglas Dog Heads to NYC would be Cyclecide Bike Rodeo. The Club mottos: “Too Dumb To Die” and “No Brakes? No Problem!!” pretty much summed it up. If I was dumb enough to propose such a silly idea, Cyclecide would be dumb enough to agree to such a ridiculous endeavor. Head Trip…

I hope that you enjoy the feature movie that Flecher and I made with the help of a cast and crew of hundreds, showcasing The Doggie Diner Dog Heads as they traversed the great American continent to New York City falling into many improbable and serentypical adventures along the way

Thanks to Scott Beale and Laughing Squid for helping produce the original cross country trip the movie is based upon and later help producing and exhibiting the movie on screens in California, NYC & Florida in 2009 & 2010. Thanks to my ex-wife   & Christina Harbridge for her support during the making of the movie and special thanks also to Cyclecide Bike Rodeo for wrangling the whole shebang and all the heavy lifting…

MISC DOGGIE PRESS:
With an interest in providing as much information as might be available in order for people to kind of understand a little bit about what the Doggy Diner Dog Heads are and why they “might” be important im some bizarre fashion, I have compiled a very partial list of past articles. Read en masse by anyone bored and or obsessive enough to actually take the time to read all of this stuff, maybe it will become clear to you. I wouldn’t bet on it though!
Here’s a good place to start. This is a fairly in depth, delightfully thoughtful article by Chronicle writer Amanda Bartlett:
Following are two pieces about the recent placement of the DogHeads in Golden Gate Park. Thanks to Ben Davis and SF Park & Rec for engineering this installaton and for (respectively) allowing it to occur:
Restoration process:
I am quotes here under my retired Cacophony pseudonym “Sebastian Melmoth”
Some history:
Road trip with DogHeads to New York City with Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, supported by Laughing Squid in 2003:
Almost kicked out of Oakland 22 years ago:
Official San Francisco Doggy Diner head restored at original location by City of SF:
Only in San Francisco politics!:
One of the many celebrations after San Francisco Made Doggy Diner into a city landmark. We had several speak engagements over the years including presentations by Mayor Ed Lee. Did I say, “only in San Francisco”?
I just saw the following video for the first time. I didn’t realize that it existed. It’s hard to actually believe that such things can happen and have some actual resonance and small importance in the larger scheme of things. This is why I still love San Francisco, despite all of the ills that we know so well. It’s still the best town in the country.
Art(?):

https://laughingsquid.com/?s=Doggie+Diner

https://johnwlaw.com/2014/01/20/dog-days/

https://sfist.com/doggie-diner/

Doggie Diner history video youtube

 

One of dozens of Doggie-Zippy cartoons by Bill Griffith

 

 

 

Doggie Diner history video youtube

CINEMASTHESIA MOVING IMAGE SERIES

co-sponsored by Monkey Brains & Central Services

933 Treat St, SF. Doors 6PM Movies 7PM

FREE!

donations gladly accepted

 

1st run: Psychgeography

Artwork by Hugh D’Andrade

A subjective take on filmic representations of various aspects of urban exploration (urbex, UE, place hacking, etc)

WEDNESDAYS> August 13th, Sept 10th, October 8th, November 5th & December 3rd – Doors 6PM, movies 7PM. 

 

August 13th: 

–To Live and Die in LA

Movies are the next best thing to real life, if your real life is dramatic, exciting, unnerving, joyous, terrifying, confusing, engaging, deeply depressing, and reflects all those and other feelings. If your life is not like that, then there are always movies.
The first two movies that I remember seeing as a young child are Santa Claus Conquers the Martiansstarring Pia Zadora and First Men in the Moon, starring Edward Judd.
I saw both of these films in a theater when I was about seven years old. I certainly saw stuff on teevee before that – we got our first B&W teevee a few months before John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and that is the first “teevee show” or rather ongoing dramatic news story that I remember vividly. I imagine that my memories of that horrible event were “baked in” due to how distraught and vocal my typically stolid and calm parents were.
That sort of thing has an effect on a youngster.

-LA River (short)

 

–Dark Days

To be clear, I don’t really remember much as far as actual full length narrative films before the moon and the martians. Both of these films really scared the poop out of me! They were really creepy. This deep impression has stayed with me til now, despite an adults eye revealing the undeniable hokeyness of both films.
The next, forever ingrained in memory movie experience of mine, was one that I shared with millions of Americans. And that would be the annual showing on television of The Wizard of Oz. This peculiar societal ritual might seem strange to younger people nowadays, but in the mid 1960s, it was a major event that millions of children & child-like adults awaited with great anticipation.  The Wizard of Oz became a deeply felt and profound collective cultural experience shared by so many fellow Americans (as far as phenomenal fantasy films of the 30’s I would vigorously champion MGM’s Max Reinhardt’s stupendously magical A Midsummer Nights Dream. I actually prefer it to WOZ.)

September 10th: 

–Subway

For me, as I grew older, going to the movies became a thing. I grew up mostly in a little town in Michigan that had one movie theater. My friends and I would go there as often as we could. I remember one night in 1973 when I went with three of my buddies to an evening showing of Richard Lester’s Three Musketeers. Rolling out of that movie house, we immediately grabbed the closest sticks and spent the next several hours chasing one all throughout the dark and quiet streets of Big Rapids Michigan sword fighting and leaping about as energetically as humanly possible. We eventually ended up climbing the old water tower right at the edge of town, where the Ferris College grounds started. We were thoroughly energized and brilliantly inspired by that fabulous action adventure movie. ATHOS!! PORTHOS!! AREMUS!!! and KEN!!      

That run around town under the cover of night pretending to Aramus after seeing one of the greatest adventure films ever, was a truly unforgettable experience, not to mention my first exposure to one of the gods of acting: Oliver Reed.
As we got a little bit older, we realized that if you went to the very back exit out of the theater, the one by the screen, that we could walk in backwards, while people were walking out and nobody would notice, and then we would quickly burrow down deep into the very front row of seats, where nobody from the back of the theater could see us. From there we would watch the movie, actors and movie scenarios towering high above us. We did this a lot. It’s how we, three 14 year-old kids, saw the scandalous and X-rated A Clockwork Orangewhen it first came out.

 

October 8th:

–Stalker

I finally made it to San Francisco in 1976 and a year later I joined the Suicide Cluband Communiversity. Suicide Club avatar and “first among equals” Gary Warne, along with his friend Ron Sol ran a thing they called Fantasy Film Festival out of Gary’s bookstore The Circus of the Soulon Judah at 10th Ave in San Francisco.

 

–Mad God 

 Gary stashed dozens and dozens of pillows atop the towering bookshelves in the store and every Sunday night we would move some things around, drag the pillows down and throw them on the floor; Gary would fire up his 16mm film projector and would show a double bill of what he & Ron thought were the strangest movies.

 

November 5th:

–The Element of Crime

2 years ago my friend Rob Schmitt created Films With Friends a wonderful North Beach film series taking place monthly at various venues. This series was unique to my knowledge because multiple films were screened at a number of venues simultaneously in the same neighborhood, the primary intent being to liven up the hood by encouraging folks both local and from other corners of the city to invite friends to wander about North Beach, either settling on one program or dropping in on a few.

 

-LA River (short)

 

–The Naked City

As you can see, I have been enamored of and involved in many atypical movie showings and series over the decades Fantasy Film Festival. Brain Wash Film Festival (a very scrappy low budget film series ongoing since the mid – 90s where films are shown in a great variety of peculiar places), original film premieres in the sewers under Yonkers, New York, Old Suicide Club movie showings in abandoned theaters as aesthetic programming for an actual physical event to follow, and all sorts of other great venues and peculiar methods of screening.

 

December 3rd:

–RoboCop

Not to mention the late 70s through the early 90s when San Francisco had as many as 25 repertory movie houses around the city that showed odd bills. The Strand, the Embassy with its 10-0 Win and one dollar entry cost. If you came to the Embassy when they opened at 10 in the morning, you could stay all day until midnight or 1, and people did.

–Big Trouble in Little China

I’ve wanted to do my own movie series for a long long time, but was always busy with other stuff or just didn’t really have the right venue. I would like to thank Rudy Rucker Jr. and “Devo” for graciously offering up their small company theater for this ongoing series. I am sure that like me most of you have your favorite end of the world movies. We’ll see how it goes. If we get a decent turnout for the first chapter, psychogeography then will run the second chapter Apocalypta.

Well, there are a lot of end of the world films, some of them are pretty obscure. I’ve wanted to run my favorite list of apocalypse films for a long long time. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to do it…

If we do get through to the third iteration, I encourage all of you to come out for the films of Larry Cohen. It’s impossible to describe them.

Seriously. If any film auteurs deserve their own category, Larry Cohen would surely be in there with Scorsese, Ingmar Bergman, Fellini, Polanski, and all the rest of the unique filmmakers. I’m not necessarily comparing Cohen to those others on a qualitative level mind you. But I can honestly say that at least for me as far as entertainment, it gets no better.!