outlaw bikers - 1984 - Streets of Fire

Streets of Fire
Walter Hill
1984
Universal Pictures
93 minutes

Streets of Fire is a pretty okay movie by the director of the greatest street gang film of all time, The Warriors. Many of this film's features are similar its predecessor: the urban setting dominated by criminals, the emphasis on nighttime, travel by subway, dirty buildings, empty concrete spaces, large congregations of gang members. Streets of Fire is fun to watch but it lacks the constant pressure and intensity of The Warriors. Instead the film has this mix of punk and faux-50s noir asthetic of gritty streets and 'Nighthawk' type diners and Marlon Brando style bikers.

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper (1942)

The film is about a nearly famous nightclub singer and her ex-boyfriend returning to the city from somewhere where he got really good at fighting people. They become entangled with an outlaw biker gang called The Bombers, based on the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club from The Wild One. They go back and forth until a big fight scene with sledgehammers at the end of the movie between the boyfriend and Raven, the leader of The Bombers, who dresses like a Nazi officer.

Probably the best feature of the movie is a minor element, the small role played by Lee Fing, frontman of Fear. He does the cheerleading in support of Raven during the final fight scene, shouting out words of encouragement in his Fear voice.

Oh, also the film ends with a soul group performing called The Sorels, who I suspect are named after Georges Sorel.

punk - 2007 - Control

Control

Anton Corbijn

2007

Three Dogs and a Pony

122 min.

Ian Curtis was the mysteriously depressing frontman for the new wave punk proto-goth band, Joy Division. Curtis’ band, in 1977,  helped launched Factory Records, gloom rock, and the Manchester rock scene (later dominated by their polar opposites in sound and attitude, The Happy Mondays). Curtis continues to be an enigma to fans because of his darkly personal lyrics, his freaky dancing that occasionally gave way to epileptic fits, and his 1980 suicide at age 23.

Control is a black and white cinematic representation of Curtis’ backstage life, which is, in essence, a dull story that could hardly interest anyone were it not for the fact that Joy Division was great. Curtis was and is revered for his onstage presence and his songwriting talent and like many talented artists and performers, he was not a particularly interesting person beyond that. Not that that’s not enough, Joy Division was a great band and probably one of the most enigmatic manifestations of punk culture. Certainly Curtis and co, as musicians helped to extend the possibilities for what punk can be but to look at the singer beyond Joy Division is to tell a story of a young man who doesn’t get along with his wife and had an affair. The most interesting aspects of Curtis’ life, his music, are put into the background in order to fill the foreground with the dull gossip of his personal life.

Curtis’ lyrics continue to provide solace to the people who watch this movie and take in this mundane soap opera. The crisis of these biographical dramas is that they provide film studios with an opportunity to retell a story that have been already long-exhausted by the culture industry, simply because they are attached to cultural figures whose work has presence in our lives.

The film is largely focused on Curtis, with very little on the people who helped make him the ghostly embodiment of gloom punk, such as the other members of his band - who went on to become New Order and displayed their own considerable songwriting talents for decades after - or Factory Records founder Tony Wilson. The film does put a fair bit of the focus on Ian’s wife, Deborah, whose biography of Curtis, Touching From a Distance, provided the textual ground for this film. One of the consistent features of these kinds of films, consider also Pollock and Walk the Line, is the strain and anguish of being the wife of an egomaniacal ‘tortured genius’. Pollock, unlike Walk the Line or Control, lets the viewer know that a tortured genius can bring great art into the world and also be a horrible person to those who care the most about him.

Anton Cobijn directed this. He photographed the band back in the day, then began a career directing music videos like Nirvana’s Heart Shaped Box. 

Now he’s a filmmaker directing a film about the people he knew at the start of his career. Michael Winterbottom’s representation of Curtis and Joy Division in his film about Factory Records, 24 Hour Party People, is a far more compelling portrayal precisely because it restricts its representation of Curtis as the intense lead singer of an innovative band. Joy Division had this enigmatic frontman but they were one of those bands where each member had an equal share in creating a unique sound.

transcendentalists - 1987 - Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution

Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution

Paula Blanchard

Addison-Wesley Publishing

1987

371 pages

Paula Blanchard wrote a highly detailed biography of Margaret Fuller, a member of the literary, philosophical, and spiritual Transcendentalist movement of mid-19th century New England. The movement is best remembered as the group which counted America’s best loved philosophers of nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as members. Fuller is a less remembered member of the group probably because her involvement was, according to Blanchard, oriented around conversation rather than writing. Emerson and Thoreau had not only attained a certain status as American philosophers, but also their writings did much to found a uniquely American literature.  Fuller's own writings were often relatively short pieces of social criticism, many of which were revolutionary calls for increased rights for women.

Fuller's output was lighter on textual production than some of the other transcendentalist, although she was editor of one of the major organs of the movement’s thought, The Dial, a periodical where she published much of her own writing. Blanchard's text is a very detailed account of Fuller's life discussing her strict upbringing, oriented around her education, by her politician father, Timothy Fuller. her background directed her into an adult career as a strict schoolteacher who was nevertheless loved by her students.  She then went on to enter the Transcendentalist circle in which she formed non-conformist beliefs and developed a strain of social commentary which blossomed into the fight for equal rights for women in America.  Fuller’s story as told by Blanchard ends with the great woman embarking on a European tour with little money, and ending up with a family - to her death on the shoals the American east coast upon her return to her homeland.

Fuller seems entrenched in the Transcendentalist movement, which led her to the cause of women’s rights and to become a pioneering mind in early American feminism.  I don’t know much about this volume’s author, Paula Blanchard, aside from that she has written biographies of other great women, such as the Canadian painter Emily Carr and American author Sarah Orne Jewett.

cults - 2011 - Martha Marcy May Marlene

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Sean Durkin

2011

Fox Searchlight Pictures

102 minutes

A lot of movies out there seem, upon viewing, that they’re someone's application to the filmmaking profession. So many movies are just dull and display a competent filmic structure without being interesting or insightful or meaningful in any way at all. Martha Marcy May Marlene is such a film. it's about a young woman named Martha who fled a dull and colourless hippie cult that set up its commune somewhere in America. I can only assume that the reason why such a film was produced was to serve as a stepping stone to better things in the industry for all involved with its production.

I'm not clear on how the social group Martha fled is a religious cult. There's no religious element to their beliefs and in place of spirituality they express a selection of mainstream self-help lifestyle cliches about not smoking and realizing one's potential, all emanating from a guy named Patrick who I guess, is their charismatic leader. Patrick really has no interesting ideas of his own and its difficult to understand his appeal to a group of followers. He's a grubby guitar player who evokes Charles Manson, but Manson was purported to be hypnotically charismatic to the people who followed him, and at least had an apocalyptic vision of the future with himself ensconced as its high priest. Here the Manson figure, Patrick, is just a boring man strumming away on an acoustic guitar.

The group invades homes and at one point kills a man. This is their dark side, and its watered down Manson family stuff. The Mansons invaded Bevery Hills mansions and killed as a beginning stage to bringing Manson’s psychotic vision of ‘Helter Skelter’ into reality. Patrick’s group invades homes just to goof around in them for a bit while they’re empty, and they kill a man because he wanted to call the police on the group when they invaded a home that was currently occupied. Of course, it’s not nothing to kill someone, but it’s not exactly a meaningful cult killing either - since this is a movie supposedly about the dangers of cult life, it is completely devoid of the gripping and hallucinatory depravity of the Manson murders.

Marlene flees the 'cult' and calls her sister who comes and gets her. Her sister and husband are yuppies and they don’t seem to understand eachother, a disconnect that doesn’t have to be the result of a consciousness born out of cult conditioning. Regardless, Marlene begins acting strangely around them and they get annoyed with her, mostly because Marlene won’t say anything about her experiences so they don’t know why she’s so weird.

Marlene shows signs of having experienced trauma all through the movie. She doesn't talk about it and her Sister doesn't ask what happened until the end of the movie which is really what propells things forward. The younger sibling can act weird and have outbursts and elicit only anger from her sister and husband rather than sympathy or understanding. Her sister and Marlene drove for apparently three hours to get to their home and without talking about anything.

My understanding is that people who leave cults on their own volition typically want to talk about it, because they had a realization that there's something wrong with their way of life and what to let others know what's going on to the people they've left behind, but also because they left their social situation behind and need to be consoled into believing that they made the right decision. Marlene can flee from her cult but she can't talk about it, right now I'm watching the final scene of the film and its so obvious that the car they're riding in is going to get smashed by a cult's car while they once again film Marlene's expressionless face. Expressionless faces are what tie the disparate scenes of this film together.

What’s unfortunate about this movie is that it doesn’t truly convey what’s so threatening about life within a charismatic cult where psychological and physical abuse is present. The cult members are clearly dangerous, but they aren’t really organized around a set of beliefs that drive them to cause a destructive renewal of the world, nor are they directed towards violence (against the self and others) by a fanatical devotion to their spiritual leader. Instead, they were caught committing a fairly banal (as far as crimes go) street crime, that is breaking and entering a private residence, and then kill to cover it up. The realities of the worst of the world's religious cults are immensely more bizarrely dramatic and shocking portals into the most vicious spaces of the human psyche than are Patrick and his white t-shirt dullards.

surrealism - 2001 - Surrealism: Desire Unbound

Surrealism: Desire Unbound

Jennifer Mundy (ed.)

Princeton University Press

2001

349 pages

Surrealism: Desire Unbound is a collection of essays published to accompany an exhibition held at the Tate Modern London in Fall/Winter 2001 and in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in early 2002. The book and exhibition focuses on how love and the associated sense of desire (the sexual and the emotional) are, to the Surrealist artists and writers, liberatory forces unleashed through their poetry, image-making, and object-building practices.

This book contains twelve essays including some by major figures in the fields of art history and  art criticism such as Hal Foster and Dawn Ades (a major scholar of Surrealism) that focus on various aspects of desire in regard to the work of the Surrealist movement. Foster, just to note one example, discusses fetishism via Freudian theory as it may be read into Hans Bellmer’s bizarrely sexualized dolls.

Much of the book is made up of full-colour images of Surrealist works of art and accompanying straightforward expositions of how different Surrealists tackled this problem of desire.  Hence certain Surrealists are represented more than others, with their overlord, Andre Breton, as the most heavily represented of the group. One essay (Love of Books, Love Books by Vincent Gille), for example, noted how each of his major works of literature (L’Amour Fou, Nadja, Arcane 17) were inspired by a different love affair. Hans Bellmer’s doll sculptures are, of course, featured prominently in Desire Unbound, as are the gender play of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp via the ‘Rose Selavy’ photographic persona (discussed, in particular, in Dawn Ades essay ‘Surrealism, Male-Female’. One section of the book titled Lives and Loves reads as celebrity gossip of the Surrealist avant-garde, detailing all of the love affairs and sexual relationships between different members of the group, and some of the art that came out of these pairings. The catalogue does highlight the contributions of women to the group although a LOT of the book is focused on men and their desires.

anarcho-primitivism - 2006 - Endgame Volume I: The Problem of Civilization

Endgame Volume I: The Problem of Civilization

Derrick Jensen

Seven Stories Press

2006

498 pages

I had written this response to reading Derrick Jensen’s Endgame Vol I: The Problem of Civilization when I first began the blog. I forgot about this post because I wanted to hunt down a reference from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, something else interfered and then I forgot about this entirely until the recent upset about Jensen’s Deep Green Resistance movement’s transphobic organization policies.

Derrick Jensen is an environmental activist, and anarchist, who also teaches creative writing to inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison in northern California.  He has written a number of books containing his reflections on activism, society, the state of the environment, the human imagination, and violence.  The two Endgame books comprise a magnum opus of Jensen’s ideas and they have earned their author a number of accolades. In 2006 the online activist publication, Press Action, has named Jensen the ‘person of the year’(the website also called Endgame as the most important book of the decade).  Also in November 2008, Utne Reader named Jensen one of it’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World.”

Endgame Volume I: The Problem of Civilization is divided up into over thirty chapters, each of which contains Jensen’s musings on the problems contemporary civilization presents to the environment.  Jensen’s text is built upon a series of premises, 20 in total, which he argues the validity of largely through personal reflection and anecdote. Endgame begins by stating, rather flatly, that all writing is propaganda, which is not true, but is probably started as a rhetorical strategic grounding upon which Jensen can issue his other premises and convince a reader to accept his particular brand of poorly formed argumentation. Over the course of 30+ chapters, Jensen argues why civilization is horrible, why its collapse is inevitable, and why his readers should work as agents to hasten its collapse.

Considering the laurels he has received, Jensen is arguably the best known anti-civilization/environmentalist writer of the present scene. The difference in his approach to forming argument from others such as those already discussed on this blog (John Zerzan and Murray Bookchin) is probably significant to his appeal. Zerzan, a genuine anarcho-primitivist, writes essays in which he takes a cultural form (such as ‘numbers’) that is so deeply embedded into how we see our world that it appears natural and then explore the history of that form with regard to how it has contributed to the apparati of control that civilization imposes on its subjects. Bookchin, not a primitivist, but rather a philosopher who brought ecological concerns to the anarchist milieu, shows the history of human subjugation of man in precedent of human subjection of nature through a detailed analysis of political history in the West. Zerzan and Bookchin’s work is based on intellectual rigor and scholarship. Neither Zerzan or Bookchin actually call for the dissolution of civilization in their writing (at least not in the writing that I have read), but rather call upon the historical record to challenge contemporary assumptions held about modern society by the general populace, and other activists.

Jensen, who demonstrates a condescending contempt for intellectuals, argues for the collapse of civilization through a number of flawed approaches. Many of his arguments are targeted at aspects of contemporary civilization that aggravate him, however are not an intrinsic part of civilization. Civilization (which I feel absurd referring to as a unified monolith repeatedly) may reform in a manner that removes everything that Jensen finds so objectionable, without entering a freefall collapse.  Another issue is that Jensen sets up numerous strawman arguments, often even using himself as the strawman.  An example is his lamentation of the fact that he knows so many details about the life of boring celebrities such as Angelina Jolie. While he considers this to be something done to him, and attempts to figure out what it means, he also projects this conundrum onto civilized humanity at large, assuming that we all have an equally high investment in the lives of celebrities, which of course, is not true.

Furthermore, many of Jensen’s arguments are based on personal anecdotes and feelings.  Almost all of Jensen’s stories revolve around him getting into an argument with someone that pertains to his anti-civilization ideas in some way. These stories usually end with Jensen getting the better of his adversary in a verbal argument. Much of Endgame are these transcriptions of arguments Jensen had with friends where he won and his friend acknowledged that he won.  This particularly obnoxious form of presenting ideas may create the effect that Jensen is adept at proving his point and asserting the rightness of his ideas because they have been tested against the rhetorical skills of another.

I hate making Hitler comparisons and everything but really Jensen’s text of musings and feelings about the end of civilization put his work into contact with another, Mein Kampf.  He offers his book as propaganda, rather than philosophy, as though an idea as extreme as the destruction of civilization does not need good ideas behind it, merely the right kind of feelings.  He describes the collapse of civilization as a holocaust that will inevitably result in innumerable deaths, yet he also calls for acts of violence to hasten its fall.  Jensen’s assertion that the collapse is a natural, inevitable event, is similar to the assumptions and assertions made by totalitarian governments of the past. In her 1951 text The Origins of Totalitarianism, German political philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that one of the premises of the Third Reich was that humanity was naturally progressing towards the formation of a master race, and the NSDAP was simply accelerating that process. Similarly, under Stalin, the violent purges were merely the acceleration of the natural progress of history towards a classless society. Jensen’s call for violence in order to advance the cause of an inevitable end to civilization is ideologically similar, as well as philosophically blank.

Endgame’s chapters are grouped into sections, the first of which is titled ‘Apocalypse.’  Endgame may be interpreted as a text in the tradition of apocalyptic prophecy that always find new ground upon which to be renewed. The last major apocalyptic prophecy pertained to Y2K, (2012?) which was rooted in fears about the potential consequences of computerization. Desire to escape civilization is not new, in fact John Zerzan has edited a volume titled Against Civilization, a reader of anti-civilization writings that includes Jensen was well as Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, and many others.  Endgame follows from a decade of public debate about climate change, and a sense that our acceleration of technology has resulted in such a strain on earth’s resources that the limit is just about met.  

Sixties - 2012 - West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

Elissa Auther & Adam Lerner (eds.)

Lucy Lippard (foreword)

University of Minnesota Press

2012

388 pages

Considering that Sixties America is supposed to have been a special time of swift and turbulent change, the canon of American art history of that period reflects very little of that milieu.  Where it does, for example, make a critical statement of the times: in Andy Warhol’s disaster series, for example, it says something that had already been stated more artfully by some media guru or another.  Editors Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner have compiled this volume of twenty chapters, each on a separate art movement or artist of the 1960s/70s counterculture, as a companion to an exhibition of the same title, shown from November 2011 - February 2012 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and from September 29, 2012 to January 6, 2013 at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

Johnny, by Roger Anderson - 1972

The book is varied in its approach to its subject matter, with chapters on topics such as Drop City (and later, Libre) two dome-based communes that update some of the 19th century utopian society ethos, a-la Brook Farm, with modern technology and the creative ethos of the 1960s at its centre, and Crossroads Community, a farm set up on the land under a highway interchange in San Francisco (recalling a greened and livable version of JG Ballard’s Concrete Island). The book has a number of different sections but the art movements and practices discussed in West of Centre can be broken down into discussions of creative communities that, in a sense, lived their art, including discussions of the above communities, and also Drag Collectives and various art-making workshops and retreats.  

The second overarching type of art discussed in the chapters of West of Center are the more traditional graphic arts movements of the 1960s counterculture. These mostly focused on those artists who illustrated the radical publications of various liberation movements, most notably Emory Douglas, the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party and the premiere illustrator of that organization’s weekly newspaper. Another, lesser known, graphic artist for a radical cultural newspaper was Yolanda Lopez, who contributed drawings and collages to La Basta newspaper, a radical Spanish newspaper for California’s various Chicano communities. Additionally, this book includes chapters on feminist and Gay liberation artists as well as subversive ‘detourned’ advertisements that address political issues of the time.  In brief, psychedelia and the accompanying 60s tradition of rock posters are also investigated with some awesome reproductions of posters by the great psychedelic artist, Rick Griffith, featured in full colour.

It should be noted, even though it may be obvious from the title, that West of Centre only focuses on countercultural art and communities from the Western United States. Nothing from the eastern hippie Mecca of New York City that provided the setting, for example, for the great Hippie musical and film, Hair, is included. Nothing focusing on the imagery produced on the periphery of the many hardcore radical movements like The White Panthers or The Motherfuckers that operated out of eastern or midwestern northern cities like Detroit or Chicago. Then again, the San Francisco Diggers weren’t mentioned either.... Anyways, the book offers plenty of information and full colour images of countercultural creative groups that have held little presence in the numerous texts of 60s nostalgia, and helps to broaden the retrospective image of 1960s art beyond the set boundaries of tie-dye clothing, Abbie Hoffman’s TV antics, and the San Francisco Oracle.

by Emory Douglas