Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America
Peniel E. Joseph
Henry Holt & Company
2006
399 pages
Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour is a historical survey of ‘black power’, an umbrella term applicable to social movements dedicated to empowering black communities in 20th century United States. The book charts a path from figures such as the pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey to the millenarian Nation of Islam, through to the American Civil Rights movement (and the specific organizations that constituted it) up to the Black Panthers. Author Peniel E. Joseph (a professor of history working at Tufts University in Massachusetts) is as thorough as possible with his material charting the splintered path each leader and organization takes to their conclusion. His narrative peters out as it moves into the 80s when it focused mostly on mainstream political figures such as Jesse Jackson (who was, himself, a civil rights activist as a young man), as a kind of apotheosis to the far more radical past that allowed figures such as him to move closer to the moderate centre.
Of course, the narrative is dominated by all of the figures that would be expected: Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr, Stokely Charmical, and finally the Black Panther leadership (Cleaver, Seale, Newton, etc). There are, of course, a large number of other important figures but these are the names that drive Joseph’s (and possibly any) narrative of American black activism. There are also a number of binaries at play in Joseph’s narrative: Marxist vs protestant influence, separatist vs integrationist, non-violent civil disobedieance vs armed resistance/violent struggle. One thing that I hadn’t quite noticed until after completing the book is that it is primarily focused on the radical edge of black social movements. Figures such as W.E.B. DuBois and organizations like his NAACP are discussed, of course, but are given far less attention than groups like the SNCC or the Black Panthers. Also, the book has a detailed bibliography subdivided into publication type and the index is structured so that subtopics of major topics are indexed.
The Book of Cao: Enlightenment Through a Poke in the Eye
Cult of the Dead Cow
cDc Communications
Grandmaster Ratte’ & Myles Long (eds.)
2006
155 pages
Like the two Phone Losers of America books, The Book of Cao is a print publication containing material that was produced by a group txt-file writers belonging to what can be broadly referred to as the ‘computer underground’. In the case of Cao, these text files were written over a six year period beginning in 1984, by a group of writers who called themselves the Cult of the Dead Cow (acronym: cDc) a small group of hacker weirdies that distributed their texts through the international BBS scene. The cDc txt files were ubiquitous on the BBSs of the mid-1990s (when I used to call them), and they were probably one of the overall best known series of txt .files of the entire library produced by that scene.
The original Cult of the Dead Cow text files covered a variety of content, ranging from computer game instructions to lyrics from punk and metal albums. What they are best remembered for are their absurd and disturbing literary txts that included scenes of graphic violence, sexuality, and assorted high weirdness. The texts collected into The Book of Cao are those that come closest to underscoring the name the group gave to themselves, as they mostly focus on the cow as a creature of devotion, and of a harbinger of apocalypse. Titles such as The History of the Bovinomicon, and The Nameless Pasture, evoke a bizarre cow-focused pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft’s already weird writing, while probably the most entertaining of the texts is the “issue” of “Cowbeater” magazine, which is a mock Tiger Beat for the hopelessly strange people who made up the BBS scene.
Again, like the PLA books, the material contained here is already available for free elsewhere, and has been for decades. Unlike the PLA books, this book from the computer underground contains no hack/phreak content outside of some minor references, and instead puts the odd humour and deranged interests of the cDc members (who influenced large numbers of other txt writers) on display. It should be noted then that the cDc are, in essence, a group of hackers who also had strong poetic/literary interests, and information pertaining to their hacktivist endeavours, while not mentioned in this book, can be found elsewhere. They are a predecessor to Anonymous in their fight against Scientology, (cDc begain criticizing the church in 1995) for example, and also in their development of hacking tools (such as the infamous Back Orifice application).
Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire
Tom Sandqvist
The MIT Press
2006
434 pages
Dada, the group of WWI-era anarchistic anti-artists was, in essence, an international art movement when so many other modernist movements were based in a specific country (and often a particular city/region), and it was the shock of the first world war that induced the waves of migration that led to the coalescence of the Dada movement in a neutral European centre.
Many of the original members of the Dada movement in Zurich were from Romania, including the Janco brothers (Marcel, Georges, and Jules) Arthur Segal, and Tristan Tzara (one of the movement's core members). These individuals were highly involved in the formation of Dada (Marcel Janco constructed masks for the group’s performances), Tzara made numerous innovations on performance, bringing a sense of chaos and absurd humor to the performance events he led. These artists that Sandqvist (a professor of art history at the University College of Arts, Crafts, and Design in Stockholm Sweden) takes as his focus.
Many of the great Romanian artists of the modernist period, such as Constantin Brancusi, are known to us because they made their career in Western Europe, and this includes the Romanians of the Dada movement. The relevance of Sandqvist’s book is not simply that he focuses on some of the members of the movement that have largely been pushed to the margins by history (such as the Janco’s) but also that he investigates the cultural influences that played upon the Dadaists before they ever left their home. An already vibrant Romanian avant-garde scene had a heavy influence upon the young artists, as did the culture of the Jewish communities these artists grew up in. Sandqvist’s text includes lots of information about this overlooked aspect of the Dada movement, and lots of images of Urban Romania circa 1910s.
Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party
Judson L. Jeffries (ed.)
Indiana University Press
2007
310 pages
The Black Panther Party for Self Defense was founded in late 1966 in Oakland California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale as a means of providing protection to that city’s impoverished black population from police abuse and harassment. The Oakland Panthers, including Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, quickly became celebrities of the American radical left, and their Aantics formed the image of the BPP that lived in the national imagination. The Black Panther Party were not strictly local to Oakland, however, and charters in numerous large and midsized cities across the US were founded by black radicals in similar social settings. It’s these other BPP chapters that Judson L. Jeffries’ book Comrades focuses on.
Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party is a collection of seven essays, each detailing the history of a different, non-Oakland, chapter of the Black Panthers. Cities include Baltimore, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Winston-Salem N.C. These chapters are contributed by a number of different scholars from a variety of institutions, although the editor dominates the book as one chapter is wholly written by Jeffries and he co-wrote three others. These essays are quite detailed in their discussions although they combine to describe an overall pattern of external harassment that contributed heavily to the fall of each the individual Black Panther Party chapters. That is the pattern of stems from something Jefferies reveals in the introduction, that the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had named the Black Panthers the most significant threat to the well being of the United States despite the fact that there were likely less than 400 members nationwide. Each chapter discusses a specific Black Panthers chapter forming out of a need to organize for the black communities in those cities in the face of unchecked and rampant poverty. In each city, the Panthers organize breakfast programs for children, testing programs for sickle-cell anemia and other forms of illness, and other community oriented programs. Then, the local police department and judicial apparatus harasses the chapter out of existence, sometimes in a hail of gunfire (as occured in Los Angeles), sometimes simply through repeated raids and arrests on minor charges, as in Winston-Salem, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.
Comrades shows the Black Panthers, not as the purveyors of armed black power theatre they were often represented as (discussed in detail in Jane Rhodes excellent book Framing the Black Panthers), but as a radical group that showed a genuine concern for their local communities. The histories of the various local chapters of the Black Panther Party as presented in Comrades display a side to the Party’s story that is, in fact, often washed away by a riptide of stories about police shootouts. Converse to that, Comrades also investigates how those dramatic episodes at the heart of the BPP were used as justification by local police for the neutralization of the peripheral chapters (which were also prone to their own episodes of violence, albiet often in the face of relentless harassment by law enforcement). Comrades tells the stories of these other, peripheral, chapters and in so doing, returns the organization’s image as one with the needs of its immediate community back to the centre of how the Panther’s representation.
On the Edge of Utopia: Performance and Ritual at Burning Man
Rachel Bowditch
Seagull Books
2010
365 pages
Before reading theatre director Rachel Bowditch’s book On The Edge of Utopia, a pseudo-critical look at the Burning Man event held in the Nevada desert every August, I believed that the Juggalos (fans of The Insane Clown Posse and Psychopathic Records) were the only subculture to orient themselves around the consumption of a specific brand. Now I know that there’s another out there, Burners (a slang term for repeat Burning Man attendees), wholly devoted to consuming the product of the Black Rock City LLC, (the for-profit organization that organizes and manages Burning Man), idealizing that product and obnoxiously prostheletizing about it to people back home.
Before discussing On the Edge of Utopia, a bit of discussion about the Burning Man event itself. The event began spontaneously on a beach in San Francisco in 1987 by Larry Harvey and John Law, then members of a countercultural post-hippie outfit called the Cacophony Society (a group that inspired Project Mayhem of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club). The event was a small gathering of strange people who converged there to burn a wooden anthropomorphic figure in effigy. The event became a yearly occurrence, which grew in the size of its attendance with progressively more aggressive promotion, to the degree that for the 2011 burn, 50,000 "participants" showed up. The event also changed locations from its Bay area origin to the Black Rock desert in Nevada, and became a week long carnival for post-1960s hippies.
It is tempting to place the event in a tradition with the original Woodstock Arts Fair held in July 1969, although such a comparison would be fundamentally flawed. Woodstock began as a heavily planned, for-profit arts festival (60s slang for ‘rock concert’) that spontaneously broke down into a free concert that became a generation-defining cultural touchstone (even though the concert occurred at the decade’s end). The original Woodstock arts fair in Bethel NY was a real Temporary Autonomous Zone, Hakim Bey’s term for a spontaneously occurring social space where traditional authorities and hierarchies break down for a period of time. Burning Man began as a spontaneous social gathering that has become, over time, a heavily zoned and coded space with its own authorities and social hierarchies. It is a simulation of a temporary autonomous zone that can more properly be described as an expensive and temporary Las Vegas or Disneyworld for new age yuppies.
Rachel Bowditch is a professor of performance studies at Arizona State University. She has directed a number of plays and, according to her bio, she has been to a number of different countries. She states several times in On The Edge of Utopia that she has attended Burning Man a few times and it is very clear from reading the text that she has no interest in maintaining a critical distance from her subject matter. Out of the Burning Man media I have been exposed to, this is, without question, the worst of the books. The best of the books has been Adrian Robert’s Piss Clear, published by Re/Search, an anthology of a Burning Man ‘alternative’newspaper (alternative to the official Burning Man newspaper Black Rock City Gazette) published from (1995 - 2007). Piss Clear, which Borditch cites several times, is good because its content both critiques and celebrates the yearly event. On The Edge of Utopia merely celebrates the event with brief interludes where criticisms are raised as questions rather than statements, or raised as the statements of others.
The first striking problem with On The Edge of Utopia is Bowdritch’s gratuitous use of cultural theory, which the author deploys to show that she understands difficult post-modern texts rather than to articulate anything substantial about Burning Man. For example, she brings up Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flaneur (a modernist idea) and also Michel De Certau’s concept of individuals walking through the city as the creation of the text of everyday life. Bowdritch suggests that we can use these ideas to help us understand the experience of walking through Burning Man’s Black Rock City (the name of the temporary urban formation built every year). De Certau’s ideas about walking are intended to articulate a certain point of view on everyday life and the interaction between the individual and their regular urban environment, his idea was intended to conceptualize a component of everyday life, and it offers nothing uniquely suited for an analysis of Burning Man. Of course it can be applied to Black Rock City too, as it can to anywhere people live, but what does a reader get out of that bit of Bowdritch’s text aside from the pleasures of understanding cultural theory? Virtually every major cultural theorist is mentioned by Bowdritch, to equally superficial ends.
The second striking issue with Bowdritch’s text is that she repeats the rhetoric of Burning Man officials without accompanning critique. So, for example, David Harvey has had to face the challenge that his event looks like a theme park or a Las Vegas but for self-righteously “enlightened” pretentious people. David Harvey’s response is that, while his event may look like a theme park, the difference is that Disney, for example, is a commodified experience, unlike Burning Man. Bowdritch presents this statement by merely affirming Harvey’s words... so what if a reader is left with a sense that, otherwise, what Bowdritch describes sounds most definitely like a commodified experience as well? By Bowdritch's own telling, despite her text being an echo of official rhetoric, Burning Man sounds like the commodified ‘countercultural’ experience, the commodified ‘gift economy’ - with tickets ranging in price from $240 to $420 dollars, and with the offer of experiences that can only truly be meaningful in everyday life, how can Burning Man not be a commodification of those things? Furthermore, if mainstream consumer capitalism promises the consumer that he or she may already indulge every desire and fantasy, satisfy every whim (wherein every day is Carnival in the Bakhtinian sense) how does Burning Man actually challenge that system?
While Bowdritch clearly admires Burning Man, it is not difficult for the reader (i.e. ME) to discern from her text that Burning Man is a ridiculous thing. Not only is it a safe place for the white middle class yuppies to play at cultural rebels for a week and get their angst out of their system (which is fine), it is also essentially a corporate-industrial product, and an example of the cultural industry’s most profound insertion into the countercultural sphere. To give an example, Bowdritch quotes some guy who managed Harvey’s image, to suggest that he should always be seen wearing the same hat. This repetition of a particular image essentially produces Harvey as little more than a living sign, essentially the Colonel Sanders of pseudo-counterculture. Furthermore, Bowditch devotes a large section of one of the final chapters to a discussion of the meaning of the man. As can be easily predicted, the man means nothing - or in the terms of the new age culture of isolation and self-indulgence posing as personal enlightenment, “each person has their own meaning.” Virtually every existing countercultural group develops its own set of symbols with very specific meanings that are shared between their adherents, recent examples include, the troll face or the Guy Fawkes mask of Anonymous, or the %99/%1 binary of the Occupy Movement (and certainly subtle deviations on those meanings might exist for different segments of a larger group, or for individual members). The fact that the man means nothing is a testament to the emptiness of this temporary culture, so that each ‘Burner’ can, in isolation, decide that the man means “hope”, or “creativity” or some other lame platitude, what is unstated by Bowdritch is that the decision to officially state that the man, the symbol around which the entire event is organized, is meaningless, is almost certainly a buisness decision so as to not alienate any potential paying Burners with meanings that make them uncomfortable.
I don’t really have much to comment on the art of burning man, it’s probably fun to watch or look at in person. One of perhaps the most obnoxious aspects of Bowdritch’s use of theory is that there is a GLARING lack of Guy Debord, whose absence is conspicuous in that his work so obviously supplies a critique of Burning Man, and also in that Bowdritch would evoke the name of pretty well every other cultural theorist just for the sake of bringing them up. Debord’s critique of commodity consumerism in The Society of the Spectacle, given what has already been argued (by me, not by Bowdritch) about the Burning Man event as one large expensive spectacle. Furthermore, some artists have complained to Bowdritch about not being compensated for the labour they invested in making the event worth attending, stating that the company refused to provide free tickets (which were promised) to an acrobatic troupe.
The most amusing part of the book, for me, is near the end where Bowditch discusses the Burners going out into the world to change it for the better. To take their experience of Burning Man and use it as a model for a better place. I’ve met Burners and people who go to similar events (such as the Om Festival that occurs every year outside of Toronto), and they’re generally unapologetically ignorant, condescending, self-righteous, and just rediculous people. Their rhetoric is often a mixture of new age cliches and self-serving hyperbole and its difficult, as a listener, to not imagine that their talk is conditioned and affirmed by these brief events they attend every year that so much of their identity is staked on.
Here’s an isolated example from a Craigslist 'Men Seeking Woman' filled with the kind of New Age rhetoric that Burners use to discuss themselves and their worldview:
My priority is to help raise the vibration and frequency, to assist Gaia in her and our current shift to New Earth. I follow some of tibetan buddhist believes, medical wheel, shamanism, spiritual, but not religious. I will never conform to any religion or get married. I am much more concerned with happiness and well-being versus a career with a position of power or large paycheque. I'm very accepting and open-minded but at the same time, selective of those with whom I consider spending my time with and sharing my aura. I live life outside the mainstream thinking and possessing higher consciousness. I'm passionate about changing the world. I would truly love to be with someone who not only "gets me", but has some of the tendencies and interests as I do. I'm a unique human being. Aries, and cusp of taurus. I'm an individual and not part of collective. Nothing is more dangerous to the far left than a liberated thinking and independent individual. Some people call me shaman, I feed homeless people because bother me to see someone go hungry, into past life regression, intuitive, sensitive, self-aware, psychic, indigo, starseed, empath, healer, old soul, hard worker, bohemian, artist, sexual, free spirit, energetic, kindhearted, eccentric, street-smart and passionate.
I rarely drink coffee, caffeine free tea for me, casual drinker, never touch soda or drink any fake juice. I drink 100 lters of spring water, fresh juice, take about 6000 IU of D3 daily, vitamins and minerals. I use chemical free products in my home and body. My diet mix with 80/10/10, organic foods, eating foods according to your zodiac sign, vegan, raw vegan and fruitarian foods. I do a lot of cleanses every year to reboot my body. I'm fascinated by health and the human body.
I don't care if you are not vegan and vegetarian, but that would be a big bonus for me. Please be health conscious, care about what you're putting in your body and how it's going to affect you in the near future. If your body is out of shape, eat unhealthy foods, fast foods, live unconscious lifestyle, and have no interested in using your common sense. Please move to the next ad.
I dress mod, little goth, H&M, black market, alternative, new age, funky, jeans, t-shirts, khaki pants, dress pants, dress shirts, aldo shoes, dress shoes, converse, boots, and doc martin.
YOU COULD BE: Burlesque dancer, trapeze, circus performer, pole dancer, princess, belly dancer, ballet dancer, dance teacher, do gymnastics, work in theatre, acrobat, figure skater, roller derby girl, into hula hooping, yoga teacher, kensington market girl, writer, indigo, intuitive, vegan, vegetarian, eat healthy, herbalist, into knitting, mod, goth, emo, into paganism, fire spitter, wicca, buddhist, sex therapist, art therapist, princess, tantra and reiki practitioner, massage therapist, photographer, designer, costume designer, fashion designer, makeup artist, body painter, pottery, making jewelry sculpture, singer, play music, musician, creative, connected to the universe, pineal glands and tantra. Alternatively, you are open to new experiences and have open-mind.
You are open-minded keeping active with yoga, walking, running, cycling, eating healthy, meditation or do some kind of fitness.
Sometimes, you are equally comfortable in yoga pants, lululemon, hiking clothes, t-shirt, tight jeans, short sexy tight dress, boots, high heels and stilettos. You are into fishnet, pantyhose, thigh highs and tights. Maybe, design your own clothing, love fashion, girly, you like to dress funky, artsy, alternative, stylish, colorful, sexy, erotic and bohemian. You like to put on a wig and corset for fun sometimes or open to trying it out? You enjoy putting on nail polish, thick black eyeliner and lipstick sometimes. You are open to trying cruelty-free makeup? I am not attracted to women who wears hippie sandals, dress like a slob, hipsters or grandmother.
The above text are excerpts from a MUCH LONGER personal ad, and I think that they reveal that underneath the “I’m a confident spiritual but not religious man, etc” reveals person alienated from others by this very ethos he expresses. An individual who conceives of life outside the system as a life of proper consumer choices, and what's more all of his demands for a woman of alternative tastes amounts to a passion for consumerism that extends even to his efforts to make contact with another person. The above quotation is a microcosm of the extreme essence of the effects of the culture industry that so concerned Theodor Adorno, that even so called alternative living, once (and still is in some spheres) concieved of in real forms like the Transcendentalist commune called Brook Farm, is now the consumption of forms of resistance as commodities. Burning Man is the culture industry in a very sophisticated form, wherein it includes a philosophy that perpetual self-indulgence and amusement can be a challenge to mainstream culture, while being simply another form of a mainstream mass culture that is built on the promise of perpetual self-indulgence and amusement. This is the absent critique of the event that can be found in the contours of Rachel Bowdritch's text.
The Devil’s Own
Alan J. Pakula (dir.)
Columbia Pictures
1997
107 minutes
This is one of the many mediocre films found in the body of work produced by late director Alan J. Pakula. Essentially, this film is about a New York City cop unwittingly housing a criminal from abroad. For some reason that criminal is an expert assassin from the Irish Republican Army named Frankie McGuire, or ‘Frankie Angel’. While this film represents members of a real paramilitary organization it has virtually nothing to do with the conflict in Northern Ireland, and presumably only imported an IRA man into the film to give it a sense of realism.
The Devil’s Own opens with a scene of murder, where Frankie as a young boy witnesses his father’s assassination in their family home. Cut to the present and Frankie is one of the IRA’s most proficient operatives. His urban warfare abilities are almost immediately put on display In a shootout scene between Provos and police where Frankie manages to shoot a lot of law enforcement personnel before escaping through some neighborhood yards. Frankie’s organization then facilitates his relocation to the United States, where he lives under an alias with the family of an Irish NYC police officer named Tom O’Meara. The trip to the US was dual-purpose, hide from British authorities, and oversee a shipment of weapons back to Ireland. Much of the film is about the friendship that develops between O’Meara and Frankie (known to the cop as Rory Devaney), and some New York gangsters that want to interfere with the arms deal (Frankie, being the gun expert he is, kills a whole lot of tough guys single-handedly in the scene where they try to rip him off). Over time, Frankie’s true identity is uncovered and while the IRA operative tries to escape, by boat, back to Ireland with the weapons, Frankie badly wounds O’Meara and O’Meara fatally wounds Frankie. It's not a great movie and while the film at first appears to be about cycles of violence that cross generations, in the end the IRA aspect seems like a means of adding novelty to a boring police drama.
Apparently the film was very different in its development stages, it had a much deeper focus on the IRA, but the film was changed by Hollywood experts and production geniuses, and so what anyways? What I described above was the film and apocyrphal tales of alternative possibilities no longer matter.
Here’s a little funfact: apparently Brad Pitt, who plays Frankie McGuire, was attacked in West Belfast when he was hanging around with some real North Ireland tough-guys to prepare for his role in this film, so there you go. I guess some people still don't take it as a compliment to have their culture and lifestyles emulated by a Hollywood mediocrity for the pleasure of a distant audience.
