THE DOOM GENERATION + UN/NO (Aaron Michael Smith)

Boston-based composer, violist and multimedia artist, Aaron Michael Smith (UN/NO) is interested in exploring the way that various practices and mediums overlap, reflect and contradict one another. A large part of his practice has been making experimental films which have gone on to be featured at numerous international film festivals, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Tribeca Festival, Atlanta Film Festival and the Chicago Underground Film Festival, garnering awards at festivals such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Montreal Underground Film Festival and the Marseille Underground Film Festival. Aaron has presented his work, given lectures on electronic music and held multimedia workshops at various institutions including the New Orleans Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival and Universidad Austral de Chile Acoustics Institute. Aaron is a co-curator, along with Jordan Kokot, of field|guide, a collaborative multimedia art project released annually. In 2021, Aaron began a podcast, plink plonk, with Berlin-based composer, Georg Hilmarsson, in which they analyze music that they are influenced by and interview fellow composers and musicians. Aaron is one third of grein, an experimental improv trio, with Jay Rauch. and is one half of G R I M M E R, an electronic duo, with André Mestre. He releases solo albums under the name, UN/NO. 

The Doom Generation Remixed and Remastered! (Dir Gregg Araki, 83 minutes)

Featuring music by: the Jesus and Mary Chain, Nine Inch Nails, Slow Dive, Curve, mc 900 ft. Jesus, Meat Beat Manifesto, Pizzicato Five, ride, Cocteau Twins, Love and Rockets, The Verve, Aphex Twin, Lush, Medicine, Babyland.

Headed home after a wild night at a Los Angeles club, young lovers Jordan White (James Duval) and Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) pick up a dangerously handsome drifter named Xavier Red (Johnathon Schaech). Jordan doesn’t see a problem with offering Xavier a quick ride, but his acid-tongued girlfriend thinks he’s a creep. When Xavier inadvertently kills a convenience store clerk, they are forced to go on the run, traversing a bizarre and ultra-violent America. Somehow, every random thug, drive-thru operator, and neo-Nazi they encounter seem to recognize Amy as a past fling or alter ego, adding to the already explosive sexual tension brimming among the renegade trio.

Born from a tradition of films like REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and BADLANDS, DOOM essays the genre with a nitro-burning mix of black comedy and subversive sexuality. The result is disturbingly original portrait of three teenagers going nowhere fast, very fast. DOOM chronicles the journey of three natural born byproducts of decaying America: alienated teenaged slackers raised in the glow of music videos, whose veins pump nihilism. Sent careening through a nocturnal wasteland of mini-marts, motels and open highways. Araki’s band of outsiders are in a constant state of sexual evolution. As they flee the violence that erupts around them with clocklike regularity they explore and re-define their sexual identities, discovering along the way just how open and tolerant society is towards people who are “different.”

Araki pioneered a groundbreaking “Queer New Wave” cinema that dealt with gay themes and sexuality in a straightforward, unabashed style. With DOOM, Araki continues, albeit in a “heterosexual movie,” to explore sexuality with the same unflinching honesty. Using humor as a kind of pressure-release valve, Araki has the great good sense to never let DOOM become too portentous or meaningful—So the film’s sexual subversion is always played with a healthy undercurrent of irony.