TICKETS $15

Doors 6:30 p.m.; Film at 7 p.m.; author talk following screening.
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THE EXPERIENCE

James Spooner joins PAM CUT for a screening of his film Afro-Punk, followed by an author talk for his new book It Starts With Anger. Books will be available for sale on site.

IT STARTS WITH ANGER is a coming-of-age graphic memoir exploring race, identity, and rebellion through James Spooner’s teenage years in 1990s New York into his young adulthood in the early 2000s. Confronted with systemic racism, microaggressions, and Nazi extremism within punk spaces, Spooner traces how reactionary anger evolved into a creative force and a path to self-determination, along the way following the founding of the Afro-Punk movement, his eventual decision to leave the company, and an ongoing raw examination of the tensions between underground culture and mainstream success.

While not a traditional graphic memoir, IT STARTS WITH ANGER combines black and white zine-inspired visual elements including photos, illustrations, and cartoon panels with traditional narrative in a unique package that recounts the story behind Afropunk. James Spooner has not talked publicly about his reasons for quitting Afropunk previously and the book is a damning indictment of its corporatization. But more importantly it also offers a look at issues of Black identity, representation, and the lack thereof in a movement that had often prided itself on allyship, while being completely myopic to all the ways it fell short in that regard as a scene that was ironically both liberating and alienating for the Black people drawn to it.

ON SCREEN: Afro-Punk

2003. Directed by James Spooner. Runtime: 1 hour 6 minutes. 

This film, which many may assume is a historical punk documentary, actually is an honest and needed treatment of race and identity. Punk and Hardcore music is simply the microcosm in which it is told. First time Director, James Spooner, in telling this story, has opened new dialogues on these crucial subject both intra and interracially. Many times funny, sometimes sobering, a wake up call to America. An examination of the duality of racial identity that DuBois called “double consciousness.” What could have been “The Bad Brains Story” is a story about kids, alienated by two cultures and two communities. Many of these punk and hardcore kids have never questioned their role in the punk scene or the black community until their interviews, and it’s obvious as they struggle on camera to reconcile a fragmented self.

ON STAGE: James Spooner

James Spooner is an award-winning graphic novelist, filmmaker, and tattoo artist. His debut graphic novel, The High Desert, was named a Best Book of 2022 by Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, and the New York Public Library. The book went on to receive the American Library Association’s Alex Award and the Cartoonist Studio Prize.

Spooner is the co-editor of Black Punk Now, an anthology of Black punk writers and comic creators. The collection was named one of the top music books of 2023 by Pitchfork, among the top five music books by The Guardian, and received a starred review from Kirkus. His forthcoming hybrid prose-and-comics memoir, It Starts with Anger, will be published by Pantheon Books on August 4.

Spooner directed the seminal documentary Afro-Punk, which premiered at national and international film festivals including the Toronto International Film Festival and the American Black Film Festival. He also co-founded the Afro Punk Festival, which has grown to attract worldwide audiences in the hundreds of thousands. A Kickstarter campaign to restore and preserve Afro-Punk is slated to launch in May.

His work has been featured in outlets including NPR, The Los Angeles Times, Vice, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, MTV, NBC News, and Variety. He is a recipient of the ReNew Media Rockefeller Grant, has served as a guest curator for the Broad Museum in Los Angeles and the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas, and previously programmed for the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

James continues to screen Afro-Punk and give talks on punk, comics, authorship, and Black identity.