avant-garde - book - 1985 - The Dada & Surrealist Word Image

The Dada & Surrealist Word Image
Judi Freedman & John C. Welchman
The MIT Press
1989
141 pages

The Dada & Surrealist Word Image is a hardcover catalogue for a travelling exhibition of Dada and Surrealist works of art.  The exhibition’s first location was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where it was shown from June 15-August 27, 1989 before being transported to other locations around the United States and Europe.  

I think that the title of the catalogue makes its content, and the theme of the exhibition, quite clear.  Play with language featured prominently in the programs of the Dada and Surrealist movements who sought to unlock the liberatory potential of nonsense and incongruity in written and visual creative work.  The Dadaists focus on language is driven by a desire for nonsense and a will to break down the structures of control that edify culture.  The ‘word salad’, jumbles of words juxtaposed with jumbles of images, often in the photomontage, became the primary Dadaist mode of representing language in visual art.  Raoul Hausmann was a particularly strong proponent of this kind of work.

Raoul Hausmann - Elasticum (1920) 

More specific to this catalogue however, are detailed analyses of two of the most famous word/image works of these two movements.  Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q., from 1919:

Marcel Duchamp - L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)

a postcard reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa featuring a hand-drawn moustache and goatee over the famous portrait, and the letters LHOOQ written at the bottom, which, when pronounced out loud in French, are meant to sound as: "Elle a chaud au cul" which translates to English as, "She has a hot ass."  Duchamp was intentionally bringing bathroom stall humour to the eminent High Renaissance portrait.  

The other work of great importance to this exhibition was The Treachery of Images, the famous “this is not a pipe” painting of 1928 by the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte (side note: Magritte is heavily represented in this text!).  This is the work that inspired Michel Foucault to investigate relationships between written language and its visual referrents, and is perennially used as a background or an introductory image to semiotic lectures and academic discussions on representation and reality.

Rene Magritte - The Treachery of Images (1928)

While the written component of this catalogue focuses on these particular works of art, or on the overarching concepts and strategies that these movements were working with, the actual catalogue component shows a variety of images from a wide swath of the Dada/Surrealism ranks.  Max Ernst, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann, Jean Crotti, Francis Picabia, and many more are represented.  There are also a number of works by figures such as Jean Cocteau, who were only tangentially connected to Surrealism, but whose visual works bear the influence of that movement’s ideas.  All of the images are in black and white, which isn’t so bad, since many of the works are drawings.  Also, the catalogue includes an interesting essay about Joan Miro and Magritte and critical theory (mostly Julia Kristeva’s) by University of California, San Diego professor John C. Welchman.

lgbt liberation - book - 1971 - The Gay Militants

The Gay Militants
Donn Teal
Stein and Day
1971
355 pages

I purchased The Gay Militants for two dollars from the man who sells books on the street at the corner of Bloor St. West and Brunswick Ave. in the Annex neighborhood of Toronto.  The small number of street-bound booksellers who set up within a one kilometer radius of the University of Toronto St. George campus have some good books.  In addition to The Gay Militants, I have also found books by Herbert Marcuse and Henri Lefebvre from either the man in the Annex or the man who sells books just outside of St. George subway station.  Don’t ignore these guys!

The Gay Militants is a comprehensive (300+ pages) history of a then new radical homosexual activism, starting in June 1969 with the Stonewall Riots, and ending with discussions of the event of Christopher Street Liberation Day (essentially the first NYC pride parade), on July 27, 1970.  Barely over a year of action is chronicled, in great depth, by Teal - and this book can be read almost as a survey of the underground (and overground) press coverage of the burgeoning gay liberation movement, as each chapter contains dozens of article excerpts.

Teal, who died in 2009, was an insider to the gay liberation movement, and he wrote his text in the voice of someone who was present at many of the events he described.  He was a founding member of the Gay Activist Alliance, an organization that is also one of the primary subjects of his text, and therefore was at the heart of these matters as an active participant, and not just their historian.  The book is an incredibly dense look at all of the events from that first year, from battles with police, to the management of dances, to the establishment of an underground press (as well as commentary on items in both the activist and popular press that showed difficulty in accepting that there was any such need for gay liberation).  The Gay Militants also, towards its end, quotes statements of support for  from members of The Black Panther Party as well as critique of other (macho-man) radicals who ignored their cause or didn’t see it as valid.  

black metal - film - 2008 - Until The Light Takes Us

Until the Light Takes Us
Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell
2008
93 minutes

The 2010 documentary film Lemmy, focusing on the life and times of Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmeister, was an extended study in perpetual adolescence and obsessive fandom that characterizes all levels of the culture of rock music.  Reknown rockers like Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters and Nirvana) and.... uhm... some Metallica guys... hang on Lemmy’s every word, just happy to bask in his aura, while their hero regales them with his own boring fan-stories of having met Little Richard and whoever else.  Lemmy was largely composed of talking head interviews with rock stars who profess their undying love, interspersed with scenes of the object of everyone’s affection showing off his toy collection and his hi-scores at some bar-top video-game.  Right after watching Lemmy, I watched Until the Light Takes Us, a documentary film about the Norwegian black metal scene that formed in Oslo during the late-1980s and early 1990s that turned out to be quite a palette-cleanser to the two-hour rock-star geek convention I had just finished watching.

Since the punk documentary American Hardcore came out, based on a Feral House book title of the same name, I have heard that a documentary version of the Feral House book Lords of Chaos was also in production. Until the Light Takes Us is unaffiliated with Lords of Chaos, it is a documentary directed by Aaron Aites, former songwriter and member of the indie rock band, Iran, and Audrey Ewell, a filmmaker who is currently working on a documentary about the %99/Occupy movement (according to her twitter page).  The documentary looks into the events that made the Norweigian black metal scene so notable (the burning of medieval churches, the intense personalities, the gloomy record store, the suicides and murders) but also into the legacy of these matters.  

Aites and Ewell’s documentary profiles the history of the black metal scene as something that formed from an intense opposition to everything in waking life.  The musicians hated mainstream society, Christianity, and in the case of Dead (the original lead singer of the original black metal band, Mayhem), life itself.  Tabloid newspapers and books like Lords of Chaos have covered the events that made this scene world famous, Dead’s suicide captured on camera, to be used as an album cover, the group’s relentless destruction of medieval Christian churces as a symbolic gesture towards reclaiming a pagan spiritual heritage, and Varg Vikernes murder of Mayhem lead guitarist Euronymous, are all discussed at length in this documentary.  Fenriz of Darkthrone and Vikirnes (formerly of Emperor, presently of Burzurm) are the two main interview subjects although a number of other individuals are interviewed as well in order to investigate the attitudes and actions of the “Inner Circle” (the name these individuals gave to their little social scene).  Vikirnes discussion of the murder is especially interesting, as he switches between two voices, one of an individual killing another in self-defense, and the second voice is of a killer for whom scenes of extreme violence are no big deal.

Dead: Mayhem's suicidal frontman.

Varg Vikernes smiling in court. 

This documentary has been criticized for being a work of uncritical fandom.  After watching Lemmy, a more highly regarded documentary, I know that it can get a lot worse than Until the Light Takes Us if you can’t stand relentless adulation on film.  Personally, I don’t see how this documentary can be read as such.  This film about a small music oriented subculture features a musical score that is largely of experimental and melodic electronic music by artists such as Boards of Canada rather than the sounds by the bands that make up this movie's focus.  The black metal content of the score is mostly of Burzum’s atmospheric keyboard pieces or of pieces by contemporary doom metal operators like Sunn O))).  Black metal music is played in short referential bursts that play a semiotic role in the film’s structure.  Otherwise this scene appears on film as, in present, through isolated interview subjects, most notably Fenriz of the band Darkthrone, who appears as a loner, and through Varg Vikirnes, a prison inmate.  These subjects look back upon a small music scene that never appeared vital, but instead was always isolated.

The legacy of this scene is also covered, as, for example, the Norweigan artist Bjarne Melgaard is made an interview subject, and his visual work, assemblage paintings with black metal themes, and some kind of black metal performance piece, is featured prominently, (Fenriz seems to hate it).

 Additionally, the store run by Euronymous, Helvete, where metal records and evil music was sold, and a centre for the black metal scene, is shown where it currently stands as a bright boutique of some sort.  These aspects of the film suggest that while the legacy of this tiny scene has greatly expanded beyond its origins in an Oslo shop basement, its original scene and the authentically dark pathos that made it so noteworthy is long gone.  



PS, the film is viewable in its entirety on Vimeo here.

vagabondia, toronto tent city - book - 2004 - Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown

Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big City Shantytown
Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall
Random House
2004
475 pages

Hiya!  My copy of Down to This was acquired at the U of T Victoria College book sale held every fall.

From some indeterminate moment of genesis in the late 1990s, until September 2002, a homeless community thrived on the south-east corner of Toronto’s downtown.  At the mouth of the Don river there’s a post-industrial wasteland that joins the waterfront with the decaying portlands that a group of self-reliant vagabonds built shelters on.  These grounds were apparently contaminated with beryllium and other toxins, and many of the people who lived there were struggling with mental health, substance abuse issues, and other personal issues.  Still, they built a community that, to some extent, worked.  The people who lived at this site were evicted in fall 2002, and now, almost a full 10 years later, the site remains a fenced off waste.

 

Tent City Toronto: 2001

 

2005 view of Tent City grounds, taken from Citynoise.org

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall is a writer who, in the spirit of gonzo journalism, lived at Toronto’s tent city from November 2001 until the date of eviction.  Bishop-Stall, however, went beyond any of Hunter S. Thompson’s endeavors, by becoming fully integrated into the community.  He drank with the Tent City dwellers, occasionally smoked crack with them, fought with them, and talked and joked with them over that ten month period.  When Bishop-Stall was beaten up by some of the rougher inhabitants of the place, he didn’t pack up and leave immediately, in fact he stayed for many more months.  Down to This is a day-to-day account of Bishop-Stall’s experiences as a part of this community, with text under date headings to show the movement through time.  The precession of events at Tent City during this period went from a cold winter of communal bonding, to a hot summer of crack that brought the city to an end.

Bishop-Stall’s work is not just an account of life in the temporary makeshift village, it’s also a story of his own problems, as he weaves in memories and accounts of dreams of a failed relationship into his on-going narrative.  Furthermore, the activity of writing, of protecting his notes, and the signing of his publishing deal for Down to This are all incorporated into his story of living at the Tent City.  After the author secured publication for this book he began interviewing many of his neighbors about their lives, what brought them to this point, what kept then on the street, etc.  Bishop-Stall appeared to become good friends with many of the tent city inhabitants, and he manages to humanize them in his writing without idealizing them or treating them as either charity cases or lost causes (even if they did have long-term issues with addiction, committing crimes, mental health, etc).  

The most interesting aspect of Down to This are the detailed descriptions of the lifestyles of tent city’s inhabitants.  The dwellings made from plywood and found (or often donated) materials, the often unseemly methods of bringing in an income (Bishop-Stall hustles pool at a dive bar and he discusses one scenario where he sees an acquaintance crash his bike into cars and then demand money from the drivers), the constant drinking (tall cans of Crest Strong) and shouting and screaming and fighting.  One persistent feature of life in tent city was illness, the author was perpetually suffering from a variety of ailments throughout the book, recalling similar accounts of rough living as told by authors such as Ted Conover in his personal hobo adventure tale Rolling Nowhere, and others who have thrown themselves into this kind of lifestyle for the sake of writing.  

Tent City was a major embarrassment to the Toronto municipal government, and garnered international media attention for a brief period of time in the early 2000s.  The city had to shut it down to hide its shame... not only that but during the city’s final summer crack dealers were setting up shop, and the tent city was becoming an example of a Sadistic counterpart to Hakim Bey’s concept of the ecstatic and carnivalesque temporary autonomous zone.  It was not only residents of tent city who were consuming the crack, but Bishop-Stall described scenes of middle-class teenagers coming down to buy the stuff.  At that point tent city was becoming a high-profile law-free zone open-air drug market that no government could knowingly tolerate.  For Bishop-Stall, the eviction of the tent city population was bitter sweet, as the community was broken up but everyone was given housing.  

A filmmaker named Eric Weissman made a documentary film about the tent city and its inhabitants, and followed the lives of some of them well after the date of eviction. Weissman's film appears on youtube in segments, here's part 2 (for some reason blogspot's internal youtube video search couldn't locate part 1:

unorganized militias - book - 1996 - A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate

A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate
Kenneth S. Stern
Simon & Schuster
1996
303 pages

A Force Upon the Plain is an alarm call about the far right Militia movement in America that garnered widespread attention after the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995.  That attack on a federal building, by Timothy McVey, an American terrorist and veteran of the 1991 US/Iraq conflict, put the spotlight on a national anti-government “patriot” movement of armed paramilitaries, due to McVey’s alleged (and eventually disproven) connections to the Michigan Militia.  Kenneth S. Stern’s text was one of the first in-depth responses to the attack, and its publication cemented the author’s expert status on topics concerning the radical right-wing.  Stern has also become a popular TV pundit for discussions about such topics on 24 hour news channels and an assortment of other media outlets.  

 
April 2010: Stern discussing the Huttaree Militia on CBS News 

Stern, a lawyer, approaches the subject of unorganized Militias in the United States as an emerging form of criminal organization.  He treats them as wholly devoted to white supremacism and the violent overthrow of the government.  While it is clear that racism is present, if not widespread, among the militias, and they have a clear dedication to gun ownership, it is not actually clear how pervasive racism is in the militias.  Many unorganized state militias, for example, have charters which contain clauses that denounce racism within its ranks.  While this may not mean racism is absent from these groups of armed men and women, it certainly means that racial hatred is a more nuanced issue with the state militia’s than it is with the Ku Klux Klan or the Northern Hammerskins.  Stern thus asks all of the wrong questions about the Militia’s and treats them as folk devils rather than actual and complex social entities.

One of the main reasons why Stern’s book veers towards the absurd is that he refuses to acknowledge any semblance of legitimacy or rational grounding for any of the anti-government positions held by militia members.  Presumably his attitude extends from his professional life as a defense attorney where he argues a case as though it only has one true side.  Stern simply wants to identify militia adherents as racist for a readership who presumably already hates racism.  The blunt rhetoric of his text, then, is a missed opportunity to investigate the complexities of the militia phenomenon: for example an actual militia member may state that they refuse racism, and may even state that racial tension is some form of social control exercised by a ruling elite, and at the same time give the name of Zionism, or ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government), to that conspiratorial elite.  What is going on there?  I don’t quite know, the anti-Semitism is obvious, and I suspect Stern’s analysis wouldn’t go beyond denouncing such a statement as such. Instead of investigating the subtleties of meaning in such rhetoric, Stern denounces every single form Militia activity in a straightforward fashion, even while defending forms of federal misconduct, such as the fiasco perpetrated by the FBI at the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992.  Stern does not investigate why militias formed at the moment and places they did but rather leads the reader to think these groups are simply an irrational mix of race-hate and anti-government sentiments. In militia's racial hatred appears to be a fairly common feature of the subculture (although it is not consistently distributed) and anti-government sentiments are a dominant feature of the militia movement, but how these groups have come to be constituted and continue to express these themes is a much more complicated matter that no one has really investigated.  Because Stern is playing attorney-as-author, he does not, for example, consider how militias, a largely rural phenomenon, may feel alienated by a political system that they perceive to privilege big business and urban centres, and instead flattens a complicated social formation into a one-dimensional courtroom defendant.

Stern’s shrill and hysterical rhetoric calls for new and harsh legislation against militias, mostly on the grounds of an event that had limited connections to this movement.  Stern’s text appears to portray the Militias as conspiratorial units, hellbent on subverting the social order and political system.  His own portrayal of the militia’s are ensconced in an edifice of paranoia that sounds quite similar to the Militia leader’s discussions regarding the ‘New World Order’ that threatens what they see as traditional ways of living in the United States.  The Militia obsession with Zionism is something Stern, as a crusader against Anti-Semetic currents in American society, should have investigated in greater detail (instead of making basic and dismissive arguments), because the repeated use of that term by Militia members is something different and more nuanced than the more traditional anti-semitism practiced by full-on hate groups.  I suspect Stern’s writing on Holocaust denialism is much better than this paranoid book-length rant.

radical media - film - 2000 - Cecil B. Demented

Cecil B. Demented
John Waters
Studio Canal+
2000
87 Minutes

Roger Ebert bothered to give a this movie a poor review, commenting on its poor acting and the sense it creates that its the result of a group of friends goofing around.  These charges can be levelled against ANY John Waters film, but there’s a mild sense of jouissance in that he said it about this particular anti-Hollywood Waters production.  John Waters is one of a few reknown countercultural filmmakers.  His work is always transgressive, willfull schlock, hence William S Burroughs honoured the director by naming him the “Pope of Trash.”  One of the recurring themes in Waters work is the blending of the transgressive with the transcendant in what is often a weird and carnivalesque spectacle augmented by intentionally low production values.

This film’s central character, Cecil B. Demented, is a terrorist film director who is followed by a crew of violent movie revolutionaries who seek to dismantle the system that produces mainstream films.  Each crew member is tattooed with the name of one of the great non-mainstream auteurs of cinema, including “David Lynch” (on the art director’s knuckles) and the occultist director, Kenneth Anger (across the chest of the satanist, recalling Anger’s own chest tattoo that reads ‘lucifer’).  

Each crew member has a unique anti-social personality which they bring to the whole, drug abuse, deviant sexuality, a relentless will to violence, they’re all represented in Demented’s crew.  The crew kidnap a major Holywood film star and make her the central figure in their film, recalling the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst (who appears in this film) by the Symbionese Liberation Army.

The film operates as an exaggerated telling of some of Water’s own methods of filmmaking.  In a 1988 documentary about Waters he discusses how he would jump out a car, shoot a scene with Divine on the Baltimore sidewalk, then jump back into the car.  

Cecil B. Demented’s directorial methods are similar, except that he threatens outsiders to his crew with death if they don’t participate according to his orders.  Demented's goal is to achieve a representation of "real terror" in film.  To make a film in such a way, with a Hollywood star, is perhaps a fantasy to film terrorists everywhere.  The film progresses in such a way that Melanie Griffith's superstar character becomes integrated into the group to the extent that she starts participating in the havoc they wreack. and many of the crew (including Demented) die over the course of a number of shootouts and violent melees with opposing forces, including the Baltimore Police, the Teamsters, and the security personnel of the theaters the Demented crew raids.  

The group bonds tighten over these shootouts (even as they shed members) and the Hollywood star becomes one of them.  They also bond over rituals as each member forments their dedication to the group by being branded with a group logo (they already have the director-name tattoos as a group thing) and howilng “demented forever.”  Cecil B. Demented displays a group fanatically dedicated to an art form, and intertwining terror and art in a way that recalls Don DeLillo’s art and terrorism novels, Mao II and Falling Man, except that for Waters, the terror is combined with fun.  Ultimately, even though most of the Demented crew dies, they succeed, because they finished shooting their film.

flq, quebec nationalism - film - 1973 - Action: The October Crisis of 1970

Action: The October Crisis of 1970
Robin Spry
1973
National Film Board of Canada
87 minutes

For centuries, Quebec was essentially under the control of the Catholic Church and English Canada (first British colonial rule, and then the primarily English federal Government of Canada).  Beginning in the early-1950s, the social climate changed in the province, and the Quiet Revolution began to undermine the power held by the French political bosses that were friendly to English buisiness interests and to the church.  The events that set this cultural revolution in motion included the emergence of the surrealist-inflected avant-garde art movement Les Automatistes and the publication of their radical manifesto Refus Global, and the "Richard Riot" that errupted at a Montreal Canadiens hockey game on March 17, 1955 (see footage of the riot on the Canadiens Website).  The slow revolution put in motion by such events built over the next two decades, leading to increasing unionization among Quebec laborers, the election of socialistic politicians, and by the late 1960s, to the formation of an intensely radical organization fighting for Quebec nationalism called the Front Du Liberation du Quebec (FLQ).

Robin Spry’s (a late NFB filmmaker whose early work focused on Canadian social issues) documentary film, Action: The October Crisis of 1970, focuses on the political discourse that revolved around the most intense period of FLQ activity.  During that month, the FLQ took two men, British Trade Commissioner James Cross, and Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte, and held them for ransome for the purpose of advancing their cause of Quebec liberation from English Canada.  These events provoked a response from the Federal government, then led by Pierre Trudeau, that has been controversial ever since, namely the evocation of the War Measures Act.  This clampdown on civil liberties legitimated by the Act has been represented in Spry’s documentary (and elsewhere) by Trudeau’s “just watch me” speech where the Prime Minister spoke casually to CBC journalist Tim Ralfe about the need to reduce freedom for the sake of public safety.  The scenario is explicitly ironic as Trudeau appears unprotected on an Ottawa street, calling for an increase in military presence in Quebec for the purpose of restricting individual mobility.

The FLQ were revolutionaries in a similar vein to the Red Army Faction of West Germany, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army.  They were less accomplished, perhaps, than those two organizations, however their commitment to both politically radical rhetoric (primarily through the FLQ’s intellectual leader, Pierre Vallieres) and revolutionary violence, was similar.  In Spry’s film, the FLQ never appear outside of media clips, and their “voice” is mostly heard through a CBC broadcaster reading an FLQ statement as part of their ransom demands.

Otherwise, FLQ members appear mostly as still shots when the narration refers to them, a number of Quebec/Canadian political figures appear as interview subjects, while the FLQ members are the mostly absent referent around which those politicians orient their thoughts.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 1991 - The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers

The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers
Daniel R. Wolf
University of Toronto Press
1991
372 pages


Hi there friendly fellows, I bought my copy of The Rebels from Willow Books, near the St George University of Toronto campus at the corner of St. George and Bloor St. West.
The Rebels were an Alberta based outlaw motorcycle club with a few chapters scattered across western Canada during the 1970s, 80s and 90s.  In 1998 the club (alongside a couple of other western Canadian outlaw biker clubs) were absorbed into the multi-national corporation known as the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club to become that organization’s presence in Canada’s western provinces.  In the mid/late 1980s, a doctoral student of anthropology, and biker, named Daniel R. Wolf, befriended members of the Rebels Edmonton chapter and collected much of the information that made up his doctoral dissertation which was published as The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers.

The book contains a statement about the permission Wolf received from The Rebels Motorcycle Club to publish this text.  The statement ends with Wolf noting that a newer generation of Rebels wanted him to NOT publish this book, but because they were not the same Rebels he rode and fought with (and Wolf did ride and fight with the Rebels, otherwise he would not have been permitted to hand around them, according to himself) he chose to proceed with publication.  Now, carrying out field research with outlaw bikers is an impressive achievement, and because of this work, The Rebels is probably one of the best books out on the biker subculture.  I’ve tried to expecting to find Wolf ensconced in a faculty position in a sociology or criminology department somewhere, and the book jacket on my copy states that Wolf works at the University of Prince Edward Island.  Unfortunately I cannot find any information about Wolf’s current status, and its tempting to believe that the publication of this book has something to do with that.  In The Brotherhoods by Arthur Veno, an Australian biker researcher, Wolf is referred to as “the late,” so he has passed at some point between 1991 and The Brotherhoods publication in 2002.

The Rebels covers virtually every aspect of Motorcycle Club operations, from the maintenance of their clubhouse, to their attitudes towards women and outsiders, to their methods for balancing work, family, and a commitment to a biker club.  Everything about a club is closely examined by Wolf, who presents a detailed and comprehensive report on the unique social and cultural formation that is the outlaw biker group.  Wolf’s primary point of contact was the Edmonton Alberta Rebels chapter, and when he uses direct quotations from bikers, they usually come from members of this specific group.  He does, however, discuss anecdotes pertaining to outlaw clubs from elsewhere in Canada including the King’s Crew of Ontario, the Grim Reapers (another Alberta club that was absorbed into the Hells Angels) and the Vagabonds MC of Toronto.  It is important for the reader to recognize that Wolf is dealing in outlaw bikers in the Canadian context, and primarily with a focus on western Canada.  It is my understanding, for example, that the term ‘striker’, used to describe potential incoming club members, is a specifically Canadian biker expression.  It is also important to take note of the time frame, that through the 1990s, as have already been discussed in this post, many of the clubs Wolf writes about were absorbed into larger American clubs and therefore no longer exist.

Wolf’s contribution to the literature is unique as it’s one of two anthropological studies of this particular social phenomena (the other is Arthur Veno’s The Brotherhoods - which investigates the outlaw biker in the Austrailian context).  These texts are a counterweight to the sixteen tons of true crime books and undercover agent and/or biker memoirs, where the author claims some kind of distance to their subject matter.