beats, piracy - book - 1991 - Ghost of Chance

Ghost of Chance
William S Burroughs
Serpent’s Tail
1991
56 pages

Ghost of Chance is a short fictional work that surveys many of the ideas that Beat writer William S Burroughs was working with through the 1980s (and also through much of his career).  The core idea of Burroughs work from this era was to bring figures from outlaw history into his literary concerns of drugs, disease, language and authority.  Ghost of Chance returns to Burroughs exploration of the terrain of pirate utopias (c.f. Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes by Peter Lamborn Wilson) the he first traversed in his 1981 novel Cities of the Red Night, with legendary Captain Mission returning as a primarily character in this novella.

The only textual account of Captain Mission is from A General History of the Pyrates, a 1724 book by Daniel DeFoe that essentially serves as a reference guide to the golden age of pirates.  According to DeFoe, via Burroughs’ afterword, Mission was one of the first pirates to establish a short-lived libertarian community.  In Ghost of Chance, Mission appears as a leader of his community, and as a man who communes with the indigenous population (and their customs) and with the animal population as well.  He cares greatly for the lemurs of Madagascar (where his community had settled) and keeps one that he called Ghost as a pet.  

The Captain Mission narrative eventually dissolves into Burroughs ruminations on Christ and a surrealist vision of bizarre disease (referred to as ‘the hairs’ in the text, a disease where hair-like organisms consume a host-body and spread to other hosts by contact), as well as devastation and incompetent authority in the contemporary period.  In some ways this book is a short glimpse into the things that concerned Burroughs around the time of writing, including a turn towards a fondness for animals that continued until the author’s death, and an interest in the environment.  The Captain Mission character is a central site for the interrelated spheres of Western anarchism, indigenous life, and the natural environment.  Mission is an embodiment of some of Murray Bookchin’s ideas of social ecology, and members of his community are expected to show respect to plant and animal life as they show respect to their fellow pirates.  The pirate captain represents the opposite of the European colonists who overrun and destroy Madagascar and its natural environment, which sets a pattern of force meeting counter-force that carries through the short book.

This book may also be a tribute to Burroughs close friend, Bryon Gysin, who died in 1986, a few years before this volume’s publication.  Burroughs and Gysin developed a number of ideas together (the cut-up, the dreammachine) that were intended to break down our perceptions of reality and by extension its apparatus of control.  Captain Mission was an experimenter of breaking down control systems via new forms of political and social organization.  Gysin, in collaboration with Burroughs, was an experimenter of breaking down control systems via new forms of language and sensory perception.  Burroughs makes a number of references to insights Gysin had through his text.  Furthermore the book is rife with black-and-white representations of uncredited abstract paintings of the kind Gysin (a painter who was, at one time, a member of the Surrealists) produced.  

abstract calligraphic work by Bryon Gysin

Ghost of Chance is probably one of Burroughs most accessible texts.  It is not fully linear, although it is also not oriented around cut-up text fragments and choped bits of narrative like many of his other novels are.  His rewriting of the Captain Mission story recalls the work Jorge Luis Borges did rewriting fragments of Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York and other texts, although Burroughs pushes Mission into an extreme that extends well beyond the figure’s textual origins.  This short book may serve as an entry point into Burroughs heavier Cities of the Red Night that covers some of the same ground via Captain Mission.

vagabondia - book - 1995 - The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City

The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City
Margaret Morton
Yale University Press
1995
148 pages

Margaret Morton is a New York City based professor at The Cooper Union School of Art and a photographer who has made a career out of producing images of the city’s homeless communities.  The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City is one of a series of photo-books Morton has published in which the dwelling structures of such marginal populations are represented.  She has called her photographic project The Architecture of Despair, and she has functioned as an advocate for the unpropertied urban poor, in addition to representing their dwellings and lifestyles via the camera lens.  

Morton’s The Tunnel is a photographic companion to Jennifer Toth’s The Mole People, a book already profiled on this blog.  Morton takes a different approach to the subject matter from Toth, choosing to structure it around photographs of the makeshift underground domestic spaces belonging to particular individuals, rather than deploying the journalist's strategies of information gathering.  Still, there is a significant amount of overlap between the two tunnel books.  Toth discusses a man named Bernard who assumes the role of tunnel-dweller representative.  The Tunnel begins with images of a man named Bernard, presumably Toth’s Bernard, and all other individuals in Morton’s book allude to some kind of personal relationship with Bernard.  For both of the tunnel authors Bernard was a diplomat of the underground realm.  Morton’s book is quite rich in the detail it provides of the people who live beneath New York streets, but like with The Mole People, the reader (myself, specifically) is left wondering what existed in the dark underworld beyond the reach of the author’s guide.

Morton creates a immanent experience of the tunnels and their inhabitants for her readers.  She focuses on appealing to the senses of the reader.  Her book includes 60 black and white photographs of tunnel habitations, many of which display many of the amenities of an above ground home (albeit these amenities conditioned by the circumstances of homelessness), including cooking space, decorations (sometimes graffiti murals), seating and bedding, and even pets.  Morton also includes a number of poetic images of the empty tunnels which sometimes featuring graffiti murals, sometimes featuring some of the plant life that manages to grow under the street.  Such photos of vacant tunnels convey a sense of the isolation the tunnel dwellers may feel, but they also convey a sense of peace from the dangers of the city at street level.

In addition to the sense of sight, Morton also appeals to the reader’s sense of hearing.  The book is subdivided into short sections, often under the heading of an individual dweller’s first name.  Accompanying the images pertaining to that dweller is a text of his or her words, transposed from tape-recorded interviews conducted by Morton.  The Tunnel is a textual-oral account of how a number of individuals came to live in NYC’s tunnel system, as the subterranean’s of Morton’s acquaintance describe their (often fractured) relationships with their families, their addictions, and their often Thoreau-esque daily routines.  Morton edited the discussions with the dwellers in her transposition although she attempted to preserve their language.  Many of the individuals describe a preference for the tunnels to the street-level life, and they also speak proudly of their abilities to take care of themselves rather than accept charity.  Morton has produced an artful book of images and statements of a marginal group of people that is both respectful of their pride, and sensitive to their condition.  The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City, is a strong addition to the literature on the communities who live in the underground infrastructure of an American city.  

anti-globalization - book - 2007 - What Would Jesus Buy?: Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse

What Would Jesus Buy?: Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse
Reverend Billy
PublicAffairs
2006
214 pages

Reverend Billy (aka Billy Talen) is the figurehead of an anti-globalization activist group called The Church of Stop Shopping (at some point since 2006 it has been rechristened The Church of Life After Shopping).  The Church is essentially a radical theater troupe with an activist focus on critiquing conspicuous consumption in America via performing a parody of Pentecostal revival meetings in public settings.  The Church of Stop Shopping is one of a number of “culture jamming” activist groups that emerged from the mid-90s to the early 2000s to combine media theory, performance, and radical politics (c.f. The Yes Men for another example of such groups) into an overall strategy for direct action activism that looks back to the 1960s Yippies and Digger movements.  

Talen’s group of pseudo-revival anti-capitalists is interesting for a number of reasons.  While a number of religious groups are already heavily involved with social justice movements (c.f. some of the recent works by Marxo-Catholic literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, such as Reason, Faith and Revolution, also Goran Therborn discusses such activity in his short survey of global Marxism, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?), Talen, who takes on the appearance of a slick and savvy preacher when he performs, adopts the form of spiritual representation most closely associated with ‘televangelism’ and the American religious right.  Talen subverts that religious form by investing it with anti-capitalist fervor but he also maintains the ecstatic immanence of the Pentecostal revival, projecting it onto the image-addicted, senses-deadened shopper of the heavily mediated contemporary urban environment.  

What Would Jesus Buy?: Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse appears to be a book of different aspects of the Church of Stop Shopping experience transposed into text.  The first few chapters are, presumably, transcriptions of some of Reverend Billy’s sermons, replete with neologisms such as “Change-a-lujah!”, words that combine the ecstasy of gnostic exclamations with the soundbyte quality of political slogans.  Thankfully, Billy included a glossary of these terms at the end of his book.  Billy moves from his sermons into describing what motivates his group to act, and describes some of the lead-up to an action.  The Church of Stop Shopping performs often in public or in private (commercial) spaces, and while their actions often appear spontaneous, Talen insinuates that there is careful planning involved when he alludes to having cues that he waits for before springing into full reverend mode.  The book also describes a cross-country tour the Church went on, that brought them to locations such as the Wal-Mart head office and culminated in a visit to Disneyland.  This tour is also covered in a 2007 documentary about the Church, also called What Would Jesus Buy? that is viewable on video.google.com and in segments on Youtube (here's part 1):

What Would Jesus Buy? is an odd book.  It is a textual counterpart to a documentary film, and to a performance group, and naturally the experience of reading the book cannot be the same as crossing the path of a Reverend Billy performance action in person.  Talen’s text is not exactly a strong critique of consumer culture but it is amusing relief from reading heavy anti-globalization texts like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s near-500 page opus, Empire.  The book is, however, useful to anyone conducting research on radical street theater.  Furthermore, there is something interesting about the (fairly long) segment of the book that includes Talen’s responses to individuals who left messages or ‘confessions’ on the Church of Stop Shopping website.  The impression is created that there are many people out there who do seek Talen’s counseling regarding their consumption habits, and Talen always obliges these seekers in his Reverend Billy voice.  This recalls the criticism that Raymond Williams leveled against advertising as a kind of imagery that adopts the forms and representational modes of spiritual art while emptying out it spiritual content.  It also recalls numerous suggestions made by cultural commentators that consumerism leaves people spiritually unfulfilled.  While Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping (now Life after Shopping) may not be a real reverend and church, they ironically seem to return some form of spirituality to the lives of people made desolate by consumerism.

new left - book - 1989 - Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s

Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the ‘60s
Peter Collier and David Horowitz
Summit Books
1989
352 pages

The suburban square-dom represented on the television series, MadMen, may represent what was actually the predominant mode of being for American's during the 1960s.  That was the world of the man in the grey flannel suit, one-dimensional man, organization man, the air conditioned nightmare, the mechanical bride, the paranoid style of American politics, these were the metaphors used to describe the prevailing social conditions by the sharpest critics of the era.  With some exceptions, popular culture has most frequently represented the socio-cultural features of that era produced in reaction against the dominant cultural order.  A new counterculture emerged to react to the suburbs, professional life, valorization of the military, religious and social tradition, family structure and political structures.  The era also gave us the term “counterculture”, invented by historian Theodor Roszak in 1968.  Roszak's term extends to social movements well beyond the 1960s, however that period has become the centre with all other aspects of countercultural history trapped in its orbit.  

Peter Collier and David Horowitz were there, in the 1960s, as active participants in the New Left.  Specifically, they were editors at Ramparts magazine which was one of the premiere leftist periodicals of the era.  Since the 1960s the pair have moved to the right, to the far right actually, and this book represents a look back upon their radical activities from their newfound ideological perch.  David Horowitz is now best known as a neoconservative bigot whose website, FrontPageMagazine.com is a popular purveyor of anti-Muslim ideas and rhetoric.  Horowitz (and to a lesser extent, Collier) is a practitioner of the paranoid style of American politics which can be read in his recent work that shows a failure to distinguish between radical Muslim groups and any other form of being for America’s tiny Muslim population, and also in his view that America is in danger of infiltration by radical Muslims who are uncritically supported by American leftists and academics.  Horowitz’s view is a paranoid fantasy that has less ground in reality than that old cold war fear that the US was in danger of communist takeover from the inside.  

Horowitz current project, as exemplified by the content on FrontPageMagazine.com is to construct America’s Muslim population as a threat to the United States for the purpose of creating a cultural climate that is dangerous to America’s Muslim population.  Horowitz’s FrontPageMag.com recently published commentary on the attacks in Norway by right-wing anti-immigration extremist, Anders Behring Breivik, suggesting that ‘The Left’ is already cynically  using this atrocious event to criticize anti-immigrant hate-bloggers for binding Islam to terrorism in their rhetoric.  The issue, clearly, is that these bloggers construction of terrorism as a Muslim (or leftist, alternatively) phenomena is threatened by Breivik’s rampage and therefore they must scramble to defend their chief weapon in the campaign to intimidate a tiny religio-ethnic population through symbolic violence.

The reason why I mention any of this is in part because its timely, Breivik’s day-long terror campaign has brought Horowitz’s name into my news feeds, but also because the roots of Horowitz’s bigotry and lack of intellectual consideration (despite an impressive education) can be found in Destructive Generation.  Some aspects of the book are quite interesting.  The first essay, titled ‘Requiem for a Radical’, about a lawyer named Fay Stender who dedicated her career to working with prisoners, and was particularly focused on the case of late Black Panther Party leader, George Jackson was especially fascinating.  Stender was a ‘movement lawyer’ focused on changing a corrupt political system through the courts.  Ultimately, however, a follower of Jackson shot her five times during a home invasion, and Horowitz and Collier represent the situation as the lawyer’s leftist values turning on her.  The authors extend this principle values gone awry to Stender’s milieu of movement lawyers who came to her defense when someone representing the people they helped almost killed her.  ‘Requiem for a Radical’ tells a story of the values of the sixties destructively colliding into one another and exploding across the new spaces created by the short-lived radical culture.  

The second essay ‘Doing It’ treads across nearby thematic ground to ‘Requiem for a Radical’.  It focuses on leftist values gone wrong, this time by examining the phenomena of the ultra-left group Weather Underground, an ultra-left group that broke from the larger national leftist organization, Students for a Democratic Society.  Horowitz and Collier provide details for the inner-workings of the group, describing how the WU's efforts to smash state power were frustrated by internal power struggles.  Furthermore, the authors describe behavior that, in their telling, the Weathermen considered subversive even though it was merely boorish.  An example was their description of a scene on an airplane where WU leader ‘J.J.’ (probably referring to Weatherman John Jacobs) while flying with Weatherwoman Bernadine Dohrn, began walking up and down the aisle to take food from other passengers.  Horowitz and Collier quoted Dohrn as stating “They (passengers) didn’t know we were Weathermen, they just knew we were crazy.  That’s what we’re about - being crazy motherfuckers and scaring the shit out of honkey America.”  This sentiments of the previous statement are not exactly revolutionary although they may echo through the actions and statements of a myriad of contemporary activist movements.  Horowitz and Collier successfully argue that the Weather Underground’s commitment to violence brings them into contact with the spirit of their book title.

After its first two essays, Destructive Generation becomes an articulate but mean spirited series of anti-left rants.  The book was published during the denouement of the Cold War era and it appears to speak about the 1960s as though they had never ended, as though the legacy of the 60s radical-left/commie-sympathetic zeitgeist was at a high-point during the 1980s.  In reality, those sentiments were never dominant although history has caused them to loom larger in the social memory.  Horowitz and Collier's rantings exemplify the paranoid style - their assertion that the spirit of the sixties was a continued threat during the Reagan years, despite America's fierce turn to the right during that decade, is made repeatedly by the authors.  ‘The sixties’ has become such a huge field in the study of counterculture, holding everything else in its orbit, that I appreciate when I find a text that is not purely laudatory of the period.  The authors 'critique' is seldom more than conspiracy theory as they speak of the left as an eternally unified movement that is fixed solely on the destruction of the United States - meanwhile they managed to grow up into people with changed perspectives.  They speak of the left as a social phenomena that is a threat to American freedom while never explaining what is threatening about it, which indicates that they were writing for a readership that already takes the dangers of the left for granted.  Furthermore, in an essay titled ‘McCarthy’s Ghost’ the authors argue that McCarthy was, current to their writing, being exploited by leftists who evoke the term ‘McCarthyism’ as a means of shutting down dialogue pertaining to a socially relevant issue.  This essay gives a glimpse into the ideological perspective of the authors, as anyone who has ever witnessed the evocation of Commie persecutor Senator Joseph McCarthy’s name in argument knows that it is always brought up in defense against an effort to shut down communication.  Horowitz and Collier end ‘McCarthy’s Ghost’ by arguing that many of McCarthy’s victims were genuine communists, and therefore the senator was doing good work.  The authors printed this statement without explaining why the ideals American freedom could not accommodate an American who was also a communist.

Destructive Generation is not so much a critique of the radical sixties as it is a work of Cold War era propaganda, against leftist political activity, that gives the surface appearance of being a wide-ranging critical-historical study.  Horowitz and Collier use their status as former New Left insiders to invest their neo-conservative anti-communist rantings with the credibility of people who have been there.  While they, at times, cite the criticisms American leftists had of the Soviet Union, for example, they mostly attempt to lead the reader to believe that American leftists were unified in their unquestioning support of the USSR’s struggle with the United States for global dominance.  Horowitz cites his own father’s break with the Soviet Union despite his lifelong adherence to Marxism, however everyone else on the political left is a secret soldier waiting for activation orders from Moscow.  The willingness to associate all leftists with America’s enemies, shown by Horowitz, is repeated in his current work where he and his editorial colleagues at FrontPageMagazine.com put all leftists, academics, and Muslims in league with radical Muslim terrorists.  It is such loose and acritical study of the flows of political sympathies that gives Horowitz his current status as a neo-conservative bigot.

My comments above are only a sampling of the contentious issues found in Horowitz and Collier’s book.  Destructive Generation is teeming with racist undertones, paranoid ravings, contradictions, historical distortions, and just a general meanness that indicates Horowitz and Collier have at least preserved a sense of humourless self-righteousness from their radical-left days.  This book is not a critique of the radical past to be read by other former radicals, instead it is a thin reminder to the people who voted for Regan that leftism is wrong, performed from a stage set with distorted figures and objects that resemble the forms of the 1960s.  Overall the book is not really useful as a history of 1960s radicalism although it is interesting as a study of attitudes towards the 1960s and of neoconservative attitudes towards leftist politics.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2002 - Ridin' High, Livin' Free: Hell-Raising Motorcycle Stories

Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free: Hell-Raising Motorcycle Stories
Ralph “Sonny” Barger with Keith and Kent Zimmerman
Harper
2002
277 pages

Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free is a collection of fourty-one motorcycle related stories collected by Sonny Barger, the former national president of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, and Keith and Kent Zimmerman, the twin brothers who collaborated with Barger on his 2000 autobiography, Hells Angel and also worked with John Lydon (also known as Johnny Rotten, the frontman for seminal punk group, The Sex Pistols) on his autobiography, Rotten.  Barger and the Zimmerman brothers present the reader with biker tales from a number of different aspects of motorcycle culture (many of them about 1% bikers) and demonstrate just how varied the subculture of motorcycle enthusiasts can be.

The book begins with the story 'The Wandering Gypsy and The Silver Satin Kid', with photos of the ‘kid’ showing a young Sonny Barger.  The story tells how Barger became the leader of the Oakland Hells Angels and thus transitioned motorcycling from a practice to a subculture in the popular imagination.  From this story of outlaw genesis, Barger and associates tell a number of stories that shine a light onto a number of lesser-known aspects of the motorcycling subculture, both outlaw and lawful.  

Many of the stories contained in Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free are stories of outlaws, some are tales of interaction with celebrities such as actor Steve McQueen, singer David Crosby, and outlaw country musician, Kinky Friedman.  Many of them are stories of kindness, done by or for outlaw motorcyclists, in an effort to oppose the stereotype of the maniac biker, however others are stories that detail the outrageous biker behavior we all expect from such a book.  ‘Blake’s World Record Whore-House Jump’ for example, describes a biker jumping a motorcycle into a brothel bedroom that was already in use by a fellow brother.  ‘On the Lam’ is a story of running from law enforcement personnel.  The most interesting stories, however, are those that highlight some aspect of biker culture that is seldom made visible by other media coverage.  One of the first stories describes a long running black biker club called the East Bay Dragons, a club that the Zimmermans have recently devoted a full book to, distorting the concept of the 1%ers as a purely white (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) phenomena. Other stories discuss the experiences of women bikers, and another story, 'The Ballad of Rocky's Green Gables,' discusses the conversion of an old biker bar into a Christian ministry and church....for bikers.  These stories illustrate how people of all kinds gravitate towards the technology of the motorcycle and make it mean more than a mode of transportation.

Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free is also interesting because it points towards something that simply must exist although its almost completely absent in literature.  That is, it points towards a folklore of counterculture.  In one sentence in A Secret History of the IRA, Ed Moloney makes a passing reference to IRA folklore, but presents no examples of it.  Barger et. al. have created a volume of biker stories that has many similarities to folklore.  The authors even using the folklorist term of ‘capturing’ stories, to refer to their transcription of the tails included.  The stories of Ridin' High, Livin' Free are all told in what is presumably a outlaw vernacular of rough speech, and while many of the stories are probably based on a kernel of truth (with accompanying photographs of the people who populate them) they also often have a fantastic edge to their tellings that suggests the embellishments that build with repeated oral transmissions.  

The book also presents a fuller range of biker activities than other biker books and not the simply criminal that are represented by true crime authors and former undercover infiltrators, not is it bogged down by the rhetoric of a victim of social misconception.  Finally, Ridin' High, Livin' Free conveys the appeal of the activity of riding to the reader, an aspect of the subculture that should often be foregrounded but is actually often absent from too many biker books that instead focus on the wild lives of the people who join 1% clubs.

street art - book - 2008 - Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution

Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution
Cedar Lewisohn
Tate Publishing
2008
160 pages
 

Cedar Lewisohn, a curator at Tate Modern gallery in London, U.K. has written an insightful study of the international phenomena known as graffiti and street art.  Street Art is, by my estimation, far more substantive than such publications as the already profiled Stencil Graffiti or Graffiti NYC.  Lewisohn’s book attempts to theorize the differences between graffiti and the new, emerging forms it inspires, which he refers to as ‘street art’ proper.  Furthermore, Lewisohn’s text comprises an attempt, which has already been seen in Tristan Manco’s Stencil Graffiti, to formulate a canon of street artists.  

This book was released to coincide with a Lewisohn-curated Street Art exhibition held at the Tate Modern from 23 May – 25 August 2008.  I am often skeptical of the relevance of graffiti or street art gallery exhibitions because I believe the loss of the ‘street’ setting empties such works of much of their essence.   Lewisohn’s show was accompanied by a walking tour lead by a number of practicing street artists, thus returning the street to the academic discourse on the cultural form.  In Street Art, the author makes calls for academic and high-art institutions to recognize street art and in particular he requests that museums begin including such works in their collections.  While Lewisohn’s arguments are more nuanced and articulate than the simplistic griping about lack of recognition done by Hugo Martinez in Graffiti NYC, the call for graffiti to appear museums still sounds problematic to me.  The transposition from street to gallery for a work of art creates for it a radical change of status, because graffiti/street art is not simply imagery and its street setting is of critical importance to its value.  

Graffiti and Street art (its questionable whether or not people who are not hip to the scene differentiate between the two the way Lewisohn does) normally exist in a tension between the street artists and the city officials who believe that nothing can improve upon the appearance of an unadorned concrete wall.  Spectators play in the balance, choosing their level of engagement with the art as they move through the city, and making evaluations as they proceed.  Combining a gallery exhibition of street art with a walking tour is perhaps a strategy for attempting to reconcile the transposition of street art into the gallery, with the original experience of viewing such art in the street.

As has already been stated, Lewisohn’s book operates in a manner different from many other street art texts, and this is first evidenced in the images he uses.  While Stencil Graffiti and Graffiti NYC often displayed closely cropped images (with some exceptions) of street art, Street Art often displays a work of graffiti surrounded by a number of other markings, tags, stickers, etc.  The images in the book display the hypergraphic reality that works of street art exist in.  They are seldom discreet graphic objects and are almost always on a surface with a myriad of other ‘works’ of similar art.  

Another aspect to Lewisohn’s text that makes it an interesting book in the graffiti art literature is its construction of a history for the craft.  Lewisohn operates along two lines of history, the first is with regards to the art, which he grounds in NYC graffiti of the 1970s and 1980s as well as practices by the “high-art” artists who used the street as a showplace, including Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Fekner, and some others.  Lewisohn reaches as far back as Brassai, a photographer of mid-20th-century streetlife and his photos of children’s scratchings on the sides of Parisian buildings.  Lewisohn’s history of the art draws on both folk and fine art traditions, radical politics, and desires for illegal thrills, which lead into his descriptions of the most reputable contemporary practitioners of street art.  Street Art, for Lewisohn, is the culmination of the convergence of all of these traditions.  The canon of contemporary street artists includes Blek Le Rat, Banksy, Judith Supine, Lady Pink, Shepard Fairey, and Miss Van.  The author's prehistory of street is varied and comprehensive and it is fitting that Lewisohn's list of currently relevant artists is also varied in terms of location, style, motivations, and materials.  

The other history Lewisohn presents is that of the documentation and theory about graffiti and street art.  Lewisohn includes discussions with Henry Chalfant (author of early books about graffiti and director of the 1984 graffiti documentary film, Style Wars).  He also includes photographs and discussions with Martha Cooper who produced the 1988 book Subway Art a seminal photobook of the era of NYC subway graffiti.  Numerous references are made throughout the book to seminal writings on the art form, including Norman Mailer’s text The Faith of Graffiti, and French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of NYC tagging in Symbolic Exchange and Death.  Interspersed with Lewisohn’s profiles of the most reputable members of the international street artist scene are some notes considering specific cultural influences such as punk culture or the formative art-school environment.  Lewisohn’s text and innovative 2008 exhibition has placed himself as a recent figure in the field of graffiti research, and his book is as much about the history of graffiti history as it is about the emerging street art scene.  It should also go without saying but this Tate publication is filled with full colour images of examples of the art Lewisohn finds to be such a vital form of modern expression.

 

punk, zines - book - 2005 - On Subbing: The First Four Years

On Subbing: The First Four Years
Dave Roche
Microcosm Publishing
2005
128 pages

    Dave Roche is a zinester who writes in a very plain, straightforward style, about his personal experiences.  Recently he has released a zine titled About My Disappearance, that describes his experience of developing Crohn’s disease and coming to terms with it.  On Subbing: The First Four Years, is a compilation of Roche’s On Subbing zine which describe the day-to-day experiences of his work as a substitute Education Assistant.  

    An Education Assistant helps teachers manage students who have special needs.  As a substitute EA, Roche works temporarily at schools all over his area, helping students with various disabilities and challenges.  Such challenges can range from issues with aggression, to severe autism. Roche appears to enjoy the work and he often notes how the students respond favorably to him.  The teachers seem to give Dave more trouble than his students do, and at one point Roche says something to the effect that it was the other adults who were the real problem in his profession.  Roche's book is primarily about work, about existing on the edge of a career and an institution, but also about finding rewards in the work being done on that edge. 

    One interesting subtext to On Subbing is Dave Roche’s punk lifestyle.  He is vegan, straight-edge, plays in a band, shoplifts (in a couple of scenes), and at least once in the book he hitchhikes between cities.  Often Dave recalls when students make fun of his nerdy appearance, however he also is lucky enough to occasionally bond with some of the kids over his punk interests.  He is not pushy about his veganism and sometimes his students show an interest in his diet and lifestyle without his prodding.  Sometimes his students are impressed in the fact that he knows about music and mentions that his band has a show.  At the end of the book, in the afterword, Dave describes himself as an alternative/anarchist teacher and it appears from his text that he has had a lot of success in working with students through his 'alternative' methods.

    On Subbing is formatted as a diary, with text recalling his experiences divided into discreet entries appearing under headings that include dates and the name of the school he was working at.  Roche has a very ‘matter-of-fact’ style of writing, and he describes the things he experiences and sometimes his emotional responses to those things in very plain language.  This is not to say that his writing is not good, and I for one very much appreciate the tone he sets through his unadorned language.  Enough zine-writing out there is already condescendingly self-righteous or self-indulgently whiny.  In very simple terms Roche conveys the human experience of working with children who are on the margins of the education system, and in doing so, also outlines the details of a profession that is on those same margins.

Also, On Subbing includes a number of funny black and white illustrations, depicting particularly funny EA situations, by a selection of underground cartoonists.