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Rick Schmidt’s Emerald Cities was filmed primarily 1979-1981, capturing the uneasy period when Ronald Reagan’s television Presidency began and daily fear of nuclear annihilation was perhaps as extreme as during the during the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet at a constant slow boil. So, if you’re going to chart the end of the world in progress as a kind of pre-Repo Man black comedy, why not turn to San Francisco’s the Mutants and Flipper to appear on screen as a sort of Greek Chorus to provide the music? Both bands specialized (and still do, decades later) in arch critiques of popular culture, but one did it as impossibly catchy pop-punk with a dirty edge (the former), and one did it by scraping out the grimiest and most deceptively plodding-tempo scum-rock on earth.Read More »