Josh Dolgin in The Socalled Movie

So many people complain about the death of gay culture, the dearth of new queer genius, the sameness and staleness of what we might broadly term Abercrombie arts, yet when a true original like Socalled comes to town, the midsize auditorium is two-thirds empty. Tuesday night after three flights getting to JFK, after Josh Kilmer-Purcell's reading, I saw The Socalled Movie and was blown away. Whatever the documentary lacks in structure and flow is irrelevant compared to the excitement of spending 86 minutes with a visionary talent. Canadian musician John Dolgin mixes Klezmer with hip hop, r&b, and drum & bass to amazing effect. In the opening seconds of the trailer below he overlays a 30s sample with a 70s groove, saying, "...and they go together! It's absurd!"  His video for You Are Never Alone has been watched 2.4 million times on YouTube. His other songs have garnered a few thousand views. Go figure.

Initially Dolgin resisted the idea of doing a documentary but relented after a couple weeks when he realized it would be an ideal vehicle to drive people to the artists who inspire him: Katie Moore, James Brown trombonist Fred Wesley, Lounge legend Irving Fields, clarinetist David Krakauer, and cellist Matt Haimovitz, all of whom make music with him. Another inspiration to him is adult filmmaker Toby Ross, whose old porn Dolgin loves so much he started making his own documentary about Ross. Dolgin screened Ross's gay porn Cruisin 57 with live band accompaniment in Montreal. He says he intentionally showed it downtown (in an old porn palace that was originally a Yiddish theater), not in the gay neighborhood, because he wanted to share queer culture with a nongay audience.

As for his own sexual awakening, Dolgin said it was two gay skin magazines that he shoplifted while on a class trip to NYC when he was 14 that got him through his adolescence. He also said it was Ryan McGinley -- with whom he went to the Montreal gay strip club Taboo -- who told him about Toby Ross. McGinley was invited to last night's screening but was too busy to attend.

You'll hear him in the trailer below sounding exactly like another master, John McPhee, saying he has no confidence in his work, yet he's compelled to create. 

The JCC (along with the New Festival) held a rooftop reception for Dolgin after the screening Q&A. When an older guy described his taste in men, Dolgin asked, "What's a Wonder Bread Queen?" I told him that was my favorite thing he said all night; he told me he had been reading a lot Somerset Maugham (so I mentioned the new biography) and a lot of Stephen King. I took this second comment for what it was -- an obvious cry for help -- and insisted that since he loved the Russians he needed to know Tatyana Tolstaya and her magnificent stories newly collected as White Walls.

When you're ordering that book, also get Socalled's album Ghettoblaster with tracks like "(These Are) The Good Old Days," "You Are Never Alone," and "(Rock the) Belz."

You can watch the whole movie now, as the documentary is one of the four debut films in YouTube's new pay per view program. It's 99 cents.