Moby’s “Punk Rock Vegan Movie” aims to help viewers make the connection between meat and murder as it navigates the punk rock music scene.
When Moby comes up to The City this week to promote his new animal rights film, “Punk Rock Vegan Movie,” he says his first stop will be Rainbow Grocery. “I have this weird habitual ritual that I have adhered to every time I go to San Francisco from 1990 or maybe even earlier, which is when I’m driving from the airport to my hotel, I always go to Rainbow Grocery,” he says. “I love it because it is a gigantic workers’ collective co-op health food store that could only exist in the Bay Area. I’ve always loved what that represents.”
Ethical eating has become a way of life for the 57-year-old recording artist, who never misses an opportunity to promote a vegan diet. Over the past three decades, he’s produced the 1996 album “Animal Rights,” launched the Circle V vegan music and food festival, opened two plant-based restaurants and published a pair of books on the subject, 2010’s “Gristle: From Factory Farms to Food Safety (Thinking Twice About the Meat We Eat)” and 2021’s “The Little Pine Cookbook.”
His latest project and directorial debut, “Punk Rock Vegan Movie,” plays the Roxie Theater as part of S.F. IndieFest on Saturday. Featuring interviews with fellow music icons like Jane’s Addiction’s Dave Navarro, Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye and No Doubt’s Tony Kanal, the documentary sheds light on the little-known link between the hardcore scene and Moby’s diet of choice for the past 35 years. It’s also meant to remind viewers that meat is murder. It was in this progressive music scene that a teenaged Moby, playing guitar with the hardcore-punk band The Vatican Commandos, was first introduced to meat-free eating.
Playing with his late rescue cat Tucker, a few years later, pushed him to finally take the plunge and go plant-based. “All of a sudden, it felt like a synaptic bridge was created,” says Moby. “Up until that point, I had lived with the dominant paradox of our species, which is I didn’t want to contribute to animal suffering and death — but I also loved Burger King and pepperoni pizza. This one moment playing with Tucker, I was like, ‘Oh, that is inconsistent. You can’t love animals yet contribute to their suffering.’ That was when I became vegetarian and a few years later, vegan.”
While his family was not thrilled with his decision, he credits his regular arguments with his late mother over his dietary transformation with teaching him how to more effectively get his meat-free message across.
According to the artist, one trillion animals are being killed by and for humans annually while animal agriculture decimates water supplies and rainforests around the world. For these reasons alone, he feels that being a “militant vegan” is warranted. “Trust me, in my heart, I’m a judgmental, angry, strident, didactic vegan,” says Moby. “But I just try not to share that too often because I realize it can be very off-putting, which makes people less inclined to consider the message.”
That’s why he rejected early placeholder titles for his film like “XVX,” a recurring acronym in the straight-edge vegan community, and “Fuck You, We’re Vegan” for the reductive simplicity of “Punk Rock Vegan Movie.”
Moby misses the halcyon days of the early-90s rave era when ecstasy was bringing clubbers together on the dance floor and the country seemed more united around protecting human and animal rights and the environment. “The rave scene was so utopian, welcoming and loving and the music was so optimistic,” says Moby. “San Francisco was interesting because the rave scene there was very different than the rest of the U.S. It was much more house-oriented and very techno futuristic … people obsessed with Terence McKenna and William Gibson. It felt like the world had reinvented itself in this wonderful way. San Francisco seemed like the dreamy epicenter of this optimistic time.”
While he admits to feeling pessimistic about the current state of the world, he refuses to let that deter him from his animal advocacy efforts. That mission propels him to attend festival screenings of “Punk Rock Vegan Movie,” where he can educate audiences about the dangers of meat consumption. “I booked my ticket up to San Francisco,” he says. “I hate traveling and doing public stuff just because I like staying home and looking at trees. But I can’t in good conscience stay home and be lazy if I can go out and talk about animal rights. That’s my sole reason for existing.”
Original source: https://www.sfexaminer.com
Source: Auto Draft
