punk - Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth

Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth
David Browne
Da Capo Press
2008
422 pp

Goodbye 20th Centiury is a very detailed band history of Sonic Youth from their 70s No Wave origins through to 2008. Author David Browne has also written books about James Taylor, Grateful Dead, and the Buckley bros. This book is not only highly detailed, but it is evenly detailed, where there author wrote as much about the production of albums like A Thousand Leaves and Rather Ripped as he does about Daydream Nation, the band's most revered album.

This is a book detailing a then still-unfolding story that has since, we all assume, concluded. The end-phase of marital dissolution that ended the band comes after 2008 and is therefore not a part of this story. At the time of publication the band was 30 years old and aside from some drummer changes a long time ago, had the same lineup for that whole time - they seemed permanent.

punk - Hard-Core: Life of My Own

Hard-Core: Life of My Own
Harley Flanagan
Feral House
2016
444 pages

I read this without really having a lot of knowledge of the NYC Hardcore punk scene. I've never listened to the Cro-Mags and I guess I don't really take NYC punk seriously. To me NYC music is either arty rock or its hip-hop. I remember when I was younger seeing pictures of all these bands like Madball or Agnostic Front, and they all looked like low-level mafia muscle-boy enforcer crews - no fun. I don't doubt that they're tough and can win a fight or whatever, but I like music, and I don't care if a bad band can survive a rumble with the Cobras. I recognize that the realness of an artist can play a role in their audience appeal, but to me that's infantile low-self-esteem stuff, and not only that but I think there's a correlation between how bad ass a particular musician's rep is and how tedious their music can be. Anyways, I know that Harley Flanagan had a lot to do with that muscular, switchbladey, NYCHC scene, so I wasn't expecting much from his memoir.

Flanagan's memoir surprised me in the sense that, while it certainly gave me what I expected: the story of violence, drugs, ego, rivalry, and decline that's typical of musician biographies - the story is laced with enough intelligence, sensitivity, and regret, to give the book enough soul to set it aside from the invitation to hero-worship that these books usually are. Violence is persistent through the book, right up to the end, but Harley almost always, for example, acted violently to defend himself or his friends. Of course, he's the one telling the stories here but he could just as easily be gloating about never losing a fight. He also paints a grim picture of a mean social environment, 1970s lower east side of Manhattan, where violence was a mandatory part of daily life, whether he fought back or not. What would you do?Flanagan turned later in life to Hare Krishna which seemed to make a lot of sense considering his life of chaos.

Hard-Core is reminiscent to Darryl McDaniel's (DMC) recent memoir, 10 Ways not to Commit Suicide, where the rapper opens up about his family background, life of fame, addiction, the pain it's caused, and the deterioration of his relationship with his closest artistic collaborator. While DMC was one of the biggest rappers in the world at one point, Cro-Mags were likely a moderately successful underground band. Flanagan's book represents how life goes on for a figure who was created from a negative environment and who enjoyed limited success that peaked long before the book's publication.

punk 1996 Touching From a Distance

Touching From a Distance

Deborah Curtis
Faber & Faber
1996
224 pages

Among the most heavily scorned categories of the world's people are the wives and girlfriends of rock music heroes. Photos of the gun Kurt Cobain used to kill himself were released and released along with that was a general geekazoid hate for Courtney Love for allegedly killing an idol. Yoko Ono obviously. I've heard rock-geeks of all ages say horrible things about Nancy Spungen, a teenage girl, for apparently destroying the career and life of the precious and innocent Sid Viscious, probably worst musician to ever have lucked into a major recording contract.

I remember picking up a copy of Substance by New Order from a pawn shop back when I was probably 15 or 16. I was attracted to the names of everything: the band, the album, the songs, and I was attracted to the simple black and white cover. I loved Substance and through learning about the band that made that music, I learned about Joy Division and their own Substance compilation. Aside from their music there's only really two things to know about them: their singer Ian Curtis had epilepsy and his seizures became spectacles, and he died tragically by his own hand.

Ian Curtis died when he was 23. He was a husband and father, his daughter was one year old when he passed. Fifteen years later his widow published Touching From a Distance to speak about her experiences of living with a young and emotionally intense lead singer. Her portrayal of her husband is largely negative and, unfortunately, completely believable. I've read some commentary on her book, mostly written by typical rock dorks who can't stand that a woman, who was once a 22 year old widow with an infant daughter, might be justifiably angry about her husband quitting on her. She portrayed Curtis as controlling, jealous, prone to rages, and egotistical. She mentioned anecdotes I'd rather not have known - Curtis could be racist and he was right-wing in some of his views - which I don't really want to hear in regards to a band I like that associated Nazi imagery with their music. One reviewer of this book stated that Deborah Curtis is just wrong about her portrayal of her husband. I can't imagine knowing someone longer and more intimately than anyone else and then be told that my perceptions of that person are incorrect simply because they conflict with that individual's public image and the fantasy that geeks want to preserve.

Curtis included all of the lyrics for released Joy Division songs as well as many words for incomplete songs.

punk - 2013 - I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

I Dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp
Richard Hell
Ecco
2013
304 pages


Another punk memoir from a member of the NYC punk scene - the scene that the term punk emerged from, and the scene that gave punk its style, but also the scene that had the least lasting influence and had very little to do with punk in 1980.

I love Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine and Alan Vega. I like Talking Heads and Richard Hell - and the Dead Boys were okay. Who else was there? I'm not really a Ramones fan although its not surprising that they had the most immediate influence out of all the early NYC bands since their template was the easiest to work from. NYC punk was where the Beats were rediscovered, and that discovery meant more than fast aggression. It was also where bands started one way and got big another way, Blondie, Talking Heads. The Beastie Boys were the overall most successful of all NYC punk bands.

I'm probably not the best reader of Richard Hell's autobiography. I know he was in Television before Marquee Moon but after reading Hell's book I still don't know if he had much to do with the songs on that album. He wrote parts of I Don't Care. I love the songs Blank Generation and Walking on the Water, and writing two great songs is certainly a significant contribution, but I overall prefer Television and I pretty much love every song on their first album. I pretty much read Hell's book to gain insight into Television and what I mostly learned was that Tom Verlaine was a control freak with regards to writing songs and that their friendship, which began in high school, has been dead since Hell left their band. Hell's sense of style inspired the Sex Pistols look which pretty much launched the style associated with punk, and Hell never really got a lot of credit for that. That's a major contribution though. Hell's career dissolved into heroin addiction. After reading this one I have a feeling I would appreciate Hell more as a writer than as a songwriter.

punk - Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Early Years

Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Early Years

Alex Ogg

2014

PM Press

204 pages

With all of the punk literature coming out in recent years and with all of the band histories and bios, there’s been nothing about Dead Kennedys until 2014. Now there are two books about the band’s debut album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables; there's a 2015 book in the 33/3 series and this one that started as liner notes for the album’s 2009 25th anniversary commemorate reissue. I’m happy about this because Dead Kennedys were, and still are, my favorite of the American hardcore punk bands. When I was in my mid to late teens I listened mostly to electronic music when a friend gave me a cassette mix of songs from Dead Kennedy’s Plastic Surgery Disasters and Lard’s Pure Chewing Satisfaction. I didn’t mind Lard, DK singer Jello Biafra’s industrial rock collaboration with Al Jourgensen, but I by far preferred the Dead Kennedys songs. A short time later I purchased Frankenchrist on cassette during the same trip to Spinables (now Vertigo Records, a record store in Ottawa) that I also picked up the Kevin Martin curated compilation Macro Dub Infection II. Not long after that I had most of the DK discography.  Now that I have a particular interest in books about counterculture I find myself reading books about bands and musicians whose work I have no interest in so I find the publication of books about the Dead Kennedys to be a happy occasion.

The book itself has a tight focus on the band’s formation and earliest performances through to the recording and release of their first album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, with a detailed discussion of each individual song. The book’s content is largely derived of interviews conducted with each band member and, as is well known, the majority of the band is in a long war over the band’s legacy with their former lead singer and songwriter, Jello Biafra. They hate each other and the things they disagree over in this book are the things I heard them fighting about when I first heard about their disputes: songwriting credits. Unfortunately these arguments make up a lot of this book’s content. Biafra, of course, has been able to continue his career in music without calling himself the Dead Kennedys, and anything his ex-bandmates say about Biafra’s ability to write a song has to be balanced against that. Like most Punk icons, Biafra’s talent for songwriting has waned over a 30 year period, but some of his collaborations from the early post DK years, the recordings with DOA and NoMeansNo especially, were top-notch. Even though his recent work might not stand with the classics, they can be considered “good”. My point is, the attribution of all those Dead Kennedys songs is contested territory, and this book is a battleground, but at least we can observe Biafra’s career as a songwriter beyond the Dead Kennedys legacy.

There’s more to the book than the arguments between old friends and the history of how they came to be. There’s also a lot of history of the practical business end of investing in, recording, manufacturing, promoting, and distributing the album. Ogg’s book includes some photos of the band that I haven’t seen anywhere else as well as some original artwork by Winston Smith, the great photomontage artist who produced a lot of album artwork for Biafra’s recordings and designed the iconic DK logo. The book ends with a series of statements from rockers and other types about how important Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is to them, confirming the album’s status as a cannonical punk album. The one thing I was looking for but never found was the meaning of the album’s title. Maybe I skimmed over such a discussion but I find that after reading the book I still don’t know what Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables means. Anyways, I hope there are more books about Dead Kennedys are in the works out there. I just found out that DH Peligro, the drummer for the Dead Kennedys for most of their original run, published a book in 2013 so maybe there are more DK related books than I thought.

punk - 2011 - White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race

White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race
eds. Stephen Duncombe & Maxwell Tremblay
2011
Verso
371 pages

Editor Stephen Duncombe is one of those punk academics. In addition to editing White Riot he has written a book about zines and he explains in his intro to White Riot his punk background which included membership in a band called White Noise. Those are his punk credentials, and to prove his current cultural-studies-academic credentials he reflects upon his old band's name to segue into the contents of the book, a vast collection of writings on punk and race.

White Riot is a collection of reflections on race in punk from virtually every available source, from academic authors, including Dick Hebdige, the father of subcultural studies, and their articles, to popular magazine articles, letter exchanges, zine writings, interviews, and song lyrics. The book creates a sense that punk has always had a deeply problematic and fractured relationship to questions of race, from the Sex Pistols wearing swastikas to the presumption among glamour punks that they know what it's like to be of another race because of their weird punk appearance. A reader may recall such singular, uncomfortable, issues as all the supposedly ironic Nazi references in British punk's most famous icons, which are, of course, problematic. The overall view of punk this book creates should compel the reader to recognize a much larger and more profoundly strained scene that appears use its claim to a self-imposed social difference to trivialize the difference of others and reinforce dominant racial values.

Many of the written pieces are actually quite disturbing to read when considering that punk has, to a large extent, constructed itself as the youth culture of radical left politics and social tolerance. Minor Threat vocalist Ian Mackaye, who, even as a 17 year old, was an intellectual leader of the hardcore punk scene, sounds incredibly naive of issues of racism in society in an interview where he is discussing the Minor Threat song 'Guilty of Being White' and lamenting his experience in a Washington DC high-school with an almost entirely black student population. Of course, he was young when he made his statements and perhaps unlikely to repeat them now, but he was also so relevant to the hardcore scene that he was essentially a primary source of punk concepts  One musician-of-colour claims that her white audience gets upset when she shifts from straight punk-rock to picking up an instrument that's traditional to her cultural background, because she's being exclusionary, implying that punks are unwilling to enjoy music that deviates from the conventions they've constructed, and that those conventions transcend any notions of cultural specificity.

Too many punks claim that the experience of being snickered at for their hair-dye gives them the knowledge of the experience of racial prejudice, many subcultures make similar claims, in the documentary film Hells Angels Forever, for example, members of a notoriously racist subculture argue that they, the bikers, "are the real n***ers" because of their outlaw status. Towards the end of White Riot, an argument via a Maximumrockandroll letters section where a black punk, frustrated with the scene and the racism he experienced, is chastised by white punks for giving up on the scene,  meanwhile other black punks relate to the original letter with their own thoughts and experiences, indicating that, within punk, racial divides can emerge as soon as the subject is broached.

PS: Comrade Dr. Alan O'Connor, professor of cultural studies at Trent University, has contributed a piece to this collection about the punk scenes of Toronto and Mexico City.

outlaw bikers - 1971 - Buttons: The Making of a President

Buttons: The Making of a President
Jamie Mandelkau
Sphere Books Limited
1971
157 pages

Buttons was, briefly, the president of the Hells Angels England chapter, and the man who obtained an official charter from the California chapter for the England Hells Angels. Not long after he officially became an Hells Angel, he wrote and published his memoir of his experiences as a biker. Some time after the publication of this book he must of lost his president status as a 1974 BBC documentary of the England Hells Angels shows Mad John as their president and the only mention of Buttons featured in the documentary is a flash of the cover of this book.

I don't know who author Jamie Mandelkau is/was but I suspect that his book was rushed to market to cash in on a late-60s/early-70s craze for biker stuff, and more specifically, Hells Angels stuff. This craze was due in part to the 1967 publication of Hunter S. Thompson's bestselling book Hell's Angels, as well as some high profile criminal incidents stemming from club activity, most notably the death of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Free Concert in late 1969. The content of the book shows that there's not a lot of history to Buttons' life and very little to his life as an Angel, at least by the time of publication. The book seems to break down into two large parts: his life as a Rocker fighting the Mods in the mid-60s, and his trip to California to hang out with the Hells Angels and rape teenage girls. His lurid anecdotes of pointless violence and sexual abuse are the stuff of fantasies for impotent men and the sort of deranged losers who also admire serial killers. Wilhelm Reich describes this books target audience in his Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Mandelkau's transcription of Buttons' dimwitted life story is a dull view into the world of dying masculinity and white supremacism. Getting it on with a bird, doing a blokes head in, etc, in repetition with slight variations, occasional violence and plenty of sexual violence, that's the content of this book. Pornography for people who felt that Hitler's definition of freedom suits them just fine. The book does include a couple of interesting bits about the biker culture in England circa 1971, though: in England bikers all over were wearing Hells Angels patches, and it almost sounds as though bikers who wanted to declare themselves outlaws would do it by putting on their patch. One of Buttons tasks was dealing with unofficial Hells Angels chapters in England. Also, Buttons wore a small deaths head patch, which apparently had some link to the origins of the Hells Angels MC, and only the first four chapters wore that patch until Buttons put it on for England.

The last interesting aspect of the book are with Buttons stories of being a Rocker and fighting Mods in the sixties. I don't know much about these subcultures although I think Dick Hebdige might discuss them to some extent in his Subculture and the Meaning of Style. Rockers are apparently greaser guys into leather jackets and motorcycles and sixties rock. Mods are different although their difference isn't discussed in the book. Still, as far as I know, this is a significant source of information about the Rockers of mid-60s England.

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.

Hunter S Thompson - 2008 - Gonzo: The Life and Works of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Gonzo: The Life and Works of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Alex Gibney

Jigsaw Productions

2008

Gonzo is a predictable look at the life of Hunter S. Thompson, the libidinal and anarchistic journalist best known for the hallucinatory travelog, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. If anyone already knows anything about Thompson’s work (and really, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is, in itself, a summary of pretty much everything he was about) then this documentary brings nothing new to the field. If, for some reason, one decided to skip the ubiquitously available Fear and Loathing... in film or print and decided to watch this documentary instead, then its a decent introduction to the first few years of Thompson’s literary/journalism career, with plenty of interviews with his friends and family in addition to quotations from his works, and images of his literary subjects.  

What interests me about Gonzo is how it operates as another contribution to the maintenance of 1960s America as *the* centre of all countercultural activity. In Gonzo, Thompson’s early life is glossed over and, with some brief references to F. Scott Fitzgerald, so are any mention of literary influences.  His early novels, Prince Jellyfish (never published) and The Rum Diary (finally published in 1998) and the years of literary failure were not mentioned.  Instead, the film moves right into his Hells Angels period and then dwells on the mid-late 1960s and early 1970s for almost the entire film. Once the discussion finally moves on from the 1972 George McGovern presidential campaign (which Thomson covered for Rolling Stone magazine) there is a quick discussion of his contributions to the ‘76 Carter campaign and then nothing is said about anything after that until people start lamenting his 2005 suicide. His post-’72 career, 33 years of living and writing, is hardly discussed. It does not seem like its Hunter S Thompson’s biography being produced here but rather HST is used as another means of recreating the 1960s as an especially turbulent and fascinating time.  

Of course, Gonzo, like almost all documentaries about the 1960s includes a standard montage of 1960s imagery. Vietnam napalm victims, US soldiers in various states of mind, anti-war and civil rights marchers, Nixon, hippies dancing, Timothy Leary doing something, John Lennon doing something. Maybe Gonzo merely has a variation on the images I’ve listed above, but some sequence containing most or all of what I just mentioned almost always appears at some moment where the narrator is talking about how the 1960s were “a different time” or some other cliched phrase used to refer to the era.

An endnote: this documentary isn’t that great (it works on a commemorative level), but its director, Alex Gibney, and his production company, Jigsaw Productions, have created many worthwhile documentaries such as Taxi to the Dark Side, Who Killed the Electric Car?, and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Other films in Gibney’s filmography such as, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, and Magic Trip (about Ken Kesey and the trips he took on his bus Further) will be mandatory viewing for my ContraTexts project.

Black Panther Party - comic - 2011 - Portland's Black Panthers

Portland’s Black Panthers
Sarah Mirk
Khris Soden (illustrator)
The Dill Pickle Club
2011
Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party is a collection of scholarly essays on the histories of a number of Black Panther chapters outside of Oakland. While Comrades features the BPP in a number of mid-sized American cities such as Indianapolis and Winston-Salem, there was no essay on the Black Panthers chapter in Portland Oregon. A small organization devoted to publishing materials about Portland history called The Dill Pickle Club (now called Know Your City) has published a small (quarter-size) comic book titled Portland’s Black Panthers (available on their website and also through Pioneers Press) that gives a brief, illustrated history of that particular, less acknowledged and celebrated, chapter of the party.  

The story of the Portland Panthers follows a similar pattern to the chapters of other cities as discussed in Comrades. Founders Kent Ford, Percy Hampton, and others came together to protect the local black community from police harassment and relentless racism, and struggled to provide a variety of social service (including breakfast programs for children and testing for illnesses) to the poor.  While Portland’s Black Panthers does detail a large degree of conflict with local law enforcement, FBI, and the political establishment of the city, it also more or less portrays the chapter as fairly successful in achieving its goals of improving the conditions of Portland’s black community.

As far as I can tell from their respective websites author Sarah Mirk and illustrator Khris Soden’s interest lies in telling the (forgotten) history of the city of Portland through the comics form. Portland’s Black Panthers is one volume of a set of ten comics about different aspects of Oregon’s history, other topics include the state highways and voting rights for women. Each set is written by Mirk and illustrated by a different artist. Soden’s drawing style for Portland’s Black Panthers is very crisp and linear with little to no use of shading throughout the publication.

new age, Process Church - book - 2009 - Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment

Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment
Timothy Wylie
(ed.) Adam Parfrey
Feral House
2009

The Process Church of the Final Judgment was a religious movement that emerged out of England during the 1960s.  The church was founded by Mary Anne and Robert deGrimstone.  They were highly influenced by The Church of Scientology and adopted some of the features of that organization, including the use of the e-meter (a device Scientologists use to measure the reactions of individuals to interview questions during ‘auditing’) and the idea to publish a cultural magazine.  Otherwise, according to Wylie et. al., the church was big on animal rights (every member had its own dog, for example) and the use of charismatic cult-style tactics to break down traditional family structures, and the personality of the individual, such as assigning names, and of removing children from their parents, arranging marriages and designating times when couples could be together.

Author Timothy Wylie was once a high level member of the Process Church. He contributes the bulk of the textual material of Love, Sex, Fear, Death, which is, in essence, an expose of the church’s functioning. Founder Robert DeGrimstone left the church after a while, leaving his ex-wife Mary Anne as the unchallenged leader who, according to Wylie, took to her position of authority with great enthusiasm. Mary Anne exercised her control of her religious subjects to the extent that Wylie’s text exhibits his continued deference to her power. His writing about his former spiritual guiding light shows a gleefulness at the freedom to speak about her at the same time, much like how Daniel Domscheit-Berg spoke about Julian Assange in his Wikileaks expose. Anyways, the Process Church was very much a product of its time: there was a rock band made up of church members, and also its members, in full church vestments, sold a pop-culture magazine inspired by underground press publications on the streets of various cities, including Toronto’s once ‘hip’ (and currently very lame) neighborhood of Yorkville.  Otherwise, Mary Ann had a Nazi infatuation and appeared, by Wylie’s telling, to be more concerned with magazine sales rather than spiritual exploration.

Much of the book is Wylie’s account of living within the church although contains a number of other short pieces written by former members or, in the case of Genesis P-Orridge, by friends of Feral House editor-in-chief Adam Parfrey. After Wiley’s written piece, the largest section of the book are the images, as almost one hundred glossy pages are devoted to photographic reproductions of the Process members, and most importantly to the art of their promotional materials and their magazine, which fully embraced the psychedelic style of the underground press of the period.  The magazine covers show the preoccupations of the church as they take on concerns such as sex and death alongside features about celebrities like Mick Jagger.  

Feral House has more recently published another book about The Process church, this time an anthology of their written work.  Love, Sex, Fear, Death ends with excerpts of some of Robert De Grimstone’s esoteric writing and the subsequent volume explores such writings more fully.

Irish nationalism - Official IRA - book - 2009 - The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers' Party

The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers' Party
Brian Hanley and Scott Millair
Penguin Books
2009
688 pages

The Lost Revolution is a book that covers a largely neglected aspect of the Republican politics during the period of recent Irish history referred to as ‘the troubles’. That aspect being the activities of the Official IRA, the ideological opponents of the British Crown, the Irish-Protestant paramilitary groups and also the Provisional IRA. The Officials emerged as the IRA split in 1969 at the beginning of the troubles, and occasionally shed the blood of their Provo rivals into that recent period of Northern Irish conflict.

This book serves as a history of a lesser component of the IRA history. The Official IRA was less intensely invested in violence than the Provos were, although they did engage in gun battles when necessary, and fund their movement through violent crime. Also their Marxist analysis of the situation in Ulster held less appeal than the more moderate socialist views of the Provos and their Sinn Fein political associates. Much of this long book is about the maneuverings of the Officials against their Provo rivals to gain an edge in the greater republican movement, and also about the emergence from the Official IRA (who gave up armed struggle long before the Provos had) of the Workers’ Party of Ireland, a political party with strong Marxist leanings and also strong opposition to sectarian violence .

football hooligans - film - 2008 - Cass

Cass
Jon S. Baird
Cass Films
2008
108 minutes

Cass is a biographical film based on the life of Cass Pennant, one of the best known participants in the English “football Hooligan” or ‘casual’ subculture of the 1970s and 80s (which isn’t to say that the subculture is currently dormant) wherein hardcore fans of specific soccer teams would fight each other in the streets when their chosen teams would play. The film is directed by Jon S. Baird who, according to iMDB, has also worked on one of the few other casual films, Green Street Hooligans, and directed a short about the subject earlier in his film career titled It’s a Casual Life.  Most directors of drama have little to do with the subject matter of their films however the recurrence of this subculture as content in Baird’s career suggests he might have direct knowledge of his material. There aren’t many films about the casuals and Baird is involved with two.

The film is largely a positive look at the phenomenon of unorganized Football violence, which puts it in league with Green Street Hooligans and The Football Factory, neither of which really represent the subculture negatively. Cass Pennant was a Jamaican orphan, abandoned by his mother and then adopted by aged pensioners in an all-white neighborhood. He bonded with his elderly adoptive father over football matches and entered the hooligan scene when he fought alongside West Ham United supporters against the Wolverhampton Wolves (also called the Subway Army or the Subway Wolves, they were supporters of the Wolverhampton Wanderers FC).  Following this melee, Pennant joined the Inter City Firm (the Casual club that fought for West Ham), and eventually became a leader to the group. 

From the film, Cass and his crew advancing on their enemies!

The film follows the predictable life of a prominent Football Hooligan, featuring scenes of violence (of course) and prison terms (of course). Baird’s film, however, also creates the sense of an emotional and intellectual life for an individual who, as a celebrity of a subculture known primarily for its brutality, was undoubtedly portrayed as a lizard-brained thug for much of his life. Cass is often shown in the film to be critiquing the misunderstandings of mainstream media (and other observers) of the Casuals, and takes to the writing of his autobiography and his personal views on the subculture as a challenge to outsider perspectives. The real Cass Pennant published his bio in 2002 but has gone on to write a number of books on Football Hooligans, to greatly expand a body of literature that was once made up of only Bill Buford’s gonzo-esque Among The Thugs (which portrays the Hooligans as the mindless attack-drones of Working-class spectatorship).  Cass also shows its subject’s sadness over the death of his father as well as his struggles in maintaining his life as ICF leader while starting a family.  

One interesting aspect of the film is the aspect of the business cards the ICF members carried that said “Congratulations - you have just met a member of the Inter City Firm”.  Outlaw Biker clubs also developed this practice.