Jon Moritsugu's first feature, My Degeneration, followed a string of well-received shorts, including 1987's Der Elvis, which was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the 50 best films of the 1980s. His next film, the awesomely primitive grunge-punk MY DEGENERATION (1989), about a female rock group that sells out to the meat industry, was originally slated for thirty minutes and stretched out with a practically 1-to-1 shooting ratio into a feature length seventy minutes. Again the live footage was leavened with all manner of experimental interludes from negative frames to emulsion scratching to model shots and crude animation. Except for getting your ankle chewed by a rat, this film remains the most low-tech experience you can have in a movie-theater, and while his two previous shorts were usually screened in galleries and bars, the feature length of MY DEGENERATION conditioned people to except something closer to a "real movie" and this made the final product seem all the more radical. While the film got some good reviews, others weren't prepared for such a thoroughly primitive movie-going experience and introduced him to his first rabidly negative press -- and it seems to have somehow energized him. MY DEGENERATION remains in many ways his most radical and gutsiest film. Moritsugu was a fan of the French New Wave and the immediacy of those films, but it was John Water's damn-the-torpedoes gutbucket approach to movie-making that exerted the most obvious influence on his first three films, all of which were stylistically very similar. They figure today as key contributions to punk cinema and led him, in the late eighties, to be lumped in with the NYC-based "Cinema of Transgression" who were also showing their films in galleries, bars and any underground dive big enough to set up a projector in. But he never fit in comfortably with the black leather crowd. The fact that he was a University student, and looks back positively on the experience, should be enough by itself to disqualify him from inclusion into this "movement". MY DEGENERATION burlesqued the eighties punk scene with the same low tech piss and vinegar that PINK FLAMINGOS burlesqued the trash-hippie scene, but it wasn't 1972 anymore and there was no midnight movie boom to give life to a feral child like this - although amazingly it was selected that year for both the Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals - both bastions of mainstream status-quo film ideology. MY DEGENERATION will hang forever like a skeleton in their closets.