Shut Up, Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
by Michael Sicinski
Here's a film about two smug San Francisco hipsters who turned invasion of privacy into decades of self-aggrandizement and underground cool. In 1987, two self-described punks, Mitch D. and Eddie Lee Sausage (yeah, I know), moved into a shithole SF apartment, where their neighbors — two alcoholic lifers by the names of Peter Haskett and Ray Huffman — would get wasted and engage in extremely loud, nasty arguments. Part of the "humor" inherent in this scenario, particularly for the young tourists who stuck a microphone out the window and taped the men fighting, was that Peter was an aging queen and Ray a virulent homophobe. How did these guys end up in this real-life Samuel Beckett drama? (Hint: it's called dead-end poverty.) So Messrs. D. and Sausage began sending tapes of the men to friends. And dub upon dub, the cassettes went viral. ("Shut up, little man!" was Haskett's frequent taunt to Huffman. The "catchphrase" became the de facto title of the series.) So Matthew Bate's documentary is about this early pre-Internet phenomenon, but aside from drawing the medium-to-medium parallel, neither he nor any of the commentators on screen has anything meaningful to say about how the unexpected dissemination of one's private failures can be personally (and writ large, sociologically) harmful. Everyone's too busy laughing at these bitter old men, their lives irretrievably squandered, shouting obscenities at each other as they guzzle their disability checks. Somebody recorded it, so it must be art, right? (Oct. 21-22 at The Belcourt)
