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 - 1994 - Get in the Van: On the Road with Black Flag

Get in the Van: On The Road With Black Flag
Henry Rollins
2.13.61
1994
302 pages


What a great book. I've been reading a lot of punk books lately and so many of them are retelling the story of how The Clash in London, and the Ramones in NYC came to be in the tone of a newspaper concert reviewer working with the punk thesaurus on hand. I never hear the names of bands like New York Dolls or Dead Boys spoken in conversation but they're always in the foreground of punk books. No thanks. Way too many punk books tread the same ground of London and NYC and I'm left thinking about how uninterested I am in most of the music being discussed.

Many of those who were part of that first wave of NYC punk bands ended up with major label deals and I find that reading those histories of early punk gives me the sense that, at the time, punk was just a new trend in rock music, rather than a subversive subculture. Bands like Suicide may have been so transgressive in music and performance that they have nothing to offer a major label, but the rest were on board. The real punk of refusal and DIY sensibilities came after that first wave.

Black Flag, one of the originators of hardcore punk, created some of the most intense music of the late twentieth century. For nine years they played everywhere, every day, with as much soul as any group of musicians in history, and by their frontman Henry Rollins' telling, they did this for audiences that hated them. I had heard of Henry Rollins before I ever really heard Black Flag, first from the Liar video and then when I saw him in the film Johnny Mnemonic. When I first mentioned to older friends that I was listening to the Damaged album they would warn me that Black Flag was better Rollins became their singer and that Henry Rollins just plain sucks. In Rollins' written record of his time in Black Flag, he experienced these sentiments being expressed constantly by his audience who often communicated them with violence.

Get in the Van is Rollins' published journal of the time he was the lead singer of Black Flag, from 1980 until the band broke up in 1986. It's subtitle is 'On the Road with Black Flag' and the stories of criss-crossing the USA on an adventure does evoke Kerouac's novel of joyful discovery, but Rollins' story is dark and mean. Black Flag suffered to carry out their tours, and while they may have had one of the biggest names, nationally and even internationally, in hardcore punk, they often went without eating. One Rollins journal entry will have him laughing at being called a rockstar sellout, the next entry will describe the literally starving band saving the food audience members threw at them. Most of the book is about hardship; coping with cold, hunger, lack of money, and the relentless violence that Rollins experienced at every show. I wonder how many of the people who threw a beer a beer at Rollins or did some other stupid thing while he was on stage read this book out of nostalgia for their punk past and felt a stirring in their hearts when Rollins called them idiots or worse.

A lot of the punk books are written for the reader to submerge themselves in nostalgia or dive into the fantasy of being strung out back at CBGB the first night Television played. Rollins book describes the punk scene, from moment to moment, as encounters with the same dumb cowardice thats present everywhere else in society. No nostalgic idealizing is at play here, Rollins journal captures the brute stupidity of their audiences and the cruel grind of touring non-stop by van. Part of what makes his book so great is not only that its an honest and authentic record of hardcore punk life, but the 2004 second edition includes a lot of photos as well as reproductions of many of the flyers drawn by Raymond Pettibon.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - 2011 - Prodigal Father, Pagan Son: Growing Up Inside the Dangerous World of the Pagan Motorcycle Club

Prodigal Father, Pagan Son: Growing Up Inside the Dangerous World of the Pagan Motorcycle Club

Anthony “LT” Menginie and Kerrie Droban

Thomas Dunne Books

2011

267 pages

Kerrie Droban, who previously wrote Running With the Devil about former ATF agent Jay Dobyns and his infiltration of Arizona Hells Angels in Operation Black Biscuit, teamed up with Pagans MC scion Anthony “LT” Menginie to produce another motorcycle gang book, Prodigal Father, Pagan Son. In essence it’s another biker memoir, one of many published over the last decade. It seems as though every club wants to be represented in print in some form, and this book puts the Pagans MC into library stacks. Prodigal Father does have a crucial difference from most other biker memoirs though, LT was never a full patch Pagan but was rather a club prospect and the son of a powerful but unpopular Pagans chapter president, Anthony “Mangy” Menginie.

So LT grew from birth within the Pagans subculture and lifestyle. His father was in prison for much of his life/the book’s narrative arc and is therefore largely an absent referent throughout the book. LT’s growing up in a lifestyle and social scene where his gone father reigns as a king lends itself to lots of fun amature psychoanalyzing. Ultimately LTs father joined the Hells Angels, the enemy of all other biker clubs, and, in a expectedly classic Freudian turn, LT talks of killing his father. This memoir has most of the elements of many biker books, the discussions of crime and sex and brotherhood are consistently present in all of these books.

Prodigal Father doesn’t really have a lot of motorcycling in it, which is fine from my perspective. What it does have is a particular focus on the disgusting details of every event. LT describes the traumas of his early life, including an overdosing mother and being raped by a prostitute, and in all of these stories, straight through to later tales of direct criminal involvement, LT emphasizes the armpit stains of every characters, the piss stench of every room he enters, the minutia of disgust is laced through every description. So many of these memoirs do the ideological work of constructing the biker as a modern American individualist anti-hero while the true crime biker books counter the memoirs by emphasizing criminality. LT and Droban portray a subculture of the degraded social abject. People whose lives are composed, materially and metaphorically, of filth.

As I read this I wondered if there was such a thing as an outlaw biker without club affiliations. Thus far there doesn’t seem to be a concept of such a subject, and all the biker memoirs that I’ve read are the story of an individual biker and the story of their club.

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 motorcycle clubs - 2004 - Out in Bad Standing: Inside the Bandidos Motorcycle Club The Making of a Worldwide Dynasty

Out in Bad Standing: Inside the Bandidos Motorcycle Club The Making of a Worldwide Dynasty

Edward Winterhalder

Blockhead City Press

2005

432 pages

Edward Winterhalder is another biker who has leveraged his outlaw experience into a career as a media personality. Once a national officer of the Bandidos MC and El Presidente of the Oklahoma Bandidos chapter, he is now an author, television producer, and professional interview subject. Out in Bad Standing is Winterhalder’s first book and his coming out as a pundit on biker topics, it gives the details of Winterhalder’s life as a biker, as a family man, as a musician, and as a businessman.

Blockhead City Press is Out in Bad Standing’s publisher, and from what I can tell, it’s Winterhalder’s own publishing company. In essence, Winterhalder published his own autobiography. The length of this book, at 432 pages, communicates a lack of editing, and to compare, Sonny Barger’s own bio, Hell’s Angel, recalling the career of the man who essentially formed the model of the outlaw motorcycle club in the 1950s, is only 288 pages. Winterhalder’s book is long, and somewhat tedious, but its good to have one out there by a Bandido since all the other major clubs are represented in the bio literature. Still, Winterhalder’s book tells the same stories of riding around, rocking out, getting into trouble, having friends die or jail or succumb to drug addiction, as the other books and its hard not to feel like, as a reader, one outlaw biker autobiography is enough to read to have the lifestyle figured out.

What intrigues me about these biker bios are the balance they try to maintain between presenting themselves as model outlaw bikers and as model citizens, and I’m always left wondering if these bios are for other bikers to read or for cultural outsiders? Outlaw bikers have such a tough time convincing everyday citizens that they’re not criminals, or at least, they’re not criminal organizations, that these books often heavily emphasize both the duller aspects of outlaw biker life, or the ways in which the subject is not a biker. Winterhalder is a good father, he owns a successful construction business, and he’s a musician. Presumably his band plays that beer-belly blues rock with harmonicas blaring that you hear whenever a biker appears on television. He was also a chapter president and a national officer with many duties, and he writes at length of the administrative side, with its numerous headaches, of managing a motorcycle club. So by reading his book he convinced me that he’s not a career criminal, but his book goes down these textual roads where, when he’s talking about problems occurring behind the scenes of the Bandidos, it feels as though he’s not trying to convince me that he’s legit, but rather he’s telling his social scene a side to a story that’s best known to other Bandidos.

The book has a strange structure to it, it begins with his trip to Canada to patch over the Rock Machine in the midst of the Montreal biker war, before it goes into his life story. He tells the story that the Bandidos were only willing to patch them over if the war was over, and its tough to be fully convinced that Bandidos are crime free as an organization, when they’re willing to take on men engaged in such a conflict, especially when hostilities continued for a time after the transition, and Bandidos died. A year after the book’s publication, the Shedden Massacre occurred in Southwestern Ontario, where 8 Ontario Bandidos were murdered. The Bandidos may generally be a large group of guys who are ready for a fight but really just want to have fun riding motorcycles and partying, but even if you believe that that’s what they are as a group they’re obviously accommodating to people with very violent inclinations. Winterhalder comes off as smart and tough but also fun and friendly, in his book, but he’s also a part of an outlaw subcultural group that has been involved with events termed ‘riots’, ‘wars’, and ‘massacres’. I may be wrong but even with their fearsome reputation, the Hells Angels don’t have any ‘massacres’ in their history, the Bandidos have two, Milperra and Shedden.

anarchism - book - 1998 - Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and its Enemies

Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and its Enemies

David Watson

Autonomedia

1998

334 pages

David Watson is one of the ‘lifestyle anarchists’ criticized by Murray Bookchin in his well known text, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism.  He is also one of the major voices for anarchism in the post-Bookchin era and the editor of a long running anarchist periodical titled Fifth Estate.He is also the author of his own book length critique of Bookchin titled Beyond Bookchin.  

Bookchin’s critique of the lifestyle anarchists can be summarized by his attack on was he viewed as Hakim Bey's, John Zerzan's, and David Watson's equation of the individual's pleasure-seeking tendencies with a realization of anarchist principles - and that their use of new-age esotericism or anti-civilization ideas allowed them to sidestep analysis contemporary society and its structures. I understand Bookchin’s arguments as they apply to Bey and Zerzan, however Watson, at least in his essays collected in Against the Megamachine, appears allied with Bookchin.

The overlap of Watson with Bookchin occurs particularly in Watson's his view that human exploitation and the exploitation of nature are interconnected (which was the thesis at the core of Bookchin’s Remaking Society). Watson appears to differ with Bookchin in his views on technology, whereas the elder social-ecologist argued in his text Post-Scarcity Anarchism, that technology may be put towards the labour-saving Utopian vision as it was once offered to the public, Watson repeats the position throughout this collection that technology directs its use and determines the society that uses it to the detriment of the actual people who use it.

Watson is essentially an anti-civilization anarchist, much like John Zerzan. Where Zerzan does tend, in his essays, to lament a loss of freedom to the individual imposed by civilization, Watson emphasizes a loss of connection to nature and, by extension, to one-another, in the social realm. Watson’s essays, rooted in an anarchist environmentalist pathos, give an anti-civilization voice to the ideas of Lewis Mumford (probably the most heavily cited author in Watson’s essays), Jacques Ellul, and to a lesser extent, Romanian scholar of religions, Mircea Eliade. Watson is always returning to these authors and drawing a huge amount of inspiration from them for his own ends. One interesting aspect of the so-called lifestyle anarchists attacked by Bookchin is that they all have very strong influences that, with perhaps the exception of the Situationist International influence on Hakim Bey, come from outside the Marxist/Anarchist cannon of radical political thought.

computer underground - book - 2006 - Commodork: Sordid Takes from a BBS Junkie

Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie
Rob O’Hara
2006

Rob O’Hara’s self-published memoir of his relentless obsession with software piracy is an important contribution to the world of literature on the computer underground.  O’Hara’s book is highly relevant for two reasons, the first is that the BBS (bulletin board system) is a largely forgotten communications medium that has been completely overshadowed by the rise of the internet. I’ve already discussed the forgotten medium of the BBS in my posts about the Phone Losers of America Complete zines book and the Cult of the Dead Cow book, but for a long time, BBSs were the chief mode of communication for the computer underground. The collective users of all the BBSs in the land produced a huge library of literature (mostly in the form of .txt files), engaged in extensive file trading, and developed a number of other practices that were unique to the medium.  

The second reason why O’Hara’s book is interesting is because it focuses on the social practice of software piracy rather than the practice computer hacking which dominates the literature on the computer underground. While elements of computer hacking are featured in this book, the primary focus is on the lengths O’Hara went to to find new software for his Commodore 64 (and later, other computers, of course). Commodork is by no means an authoritative or scholarly look at software piracy, but its a start to a body of literature that should exist yet doesn’t. O’Hara also discusses other lesser aspects of the computer underground, including the demoscene and the lit scene.

This book presents the memories of computer usage of one man who had a strong drive to accumulate software. This book is a self-published work, which permits its author to blend personal anecdotes about attending parties and going to college into his stories about copying files from floppy discs. Like I had written in my previous post about outlaw biker Doug Ford’s Patch Holder, I am strongly in favor of more individuals from various subcultures publishing books about their experiences.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2008 - Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Bandidos, Hells Angels, and Other Criminal Brotherhoods

Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Bandidos, Hells Angels, and Other Criminal Brotherhoods
Alex Caine
Random House
2008
304 pages

Alex Caine is a Canadian veteran of the Vietnam War who lived his life as a martial arts instructor and more importantly, as a confidential informant who infiltrated criminal subcultures for the benefit of police. Caine grew up in Canada’s national capital region on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, also known as Hull (now called Gatineau).  By Caine’s own account, he grew up around, and participated in, street crime in his youth, which made him a convincing informant later in life.

Befriend and Betray is Caine’s memoirs of his experiences as a police informant.  He has worked as a contract informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI in the US, and other law enforcement organizations, infiltrating organized crime syndicates but also the Ku Klux Klan, and most importantly, outlaw motorcycle clubs. Befriend and Betray includes stories of infiltrating the Hells Angels, and the book includes a photo of the author standing with Sonny Barger, however the most important part of the book are the stories of the author riding with the Bandidos Motorcycle Club. At one point in the book, Caine recalls telling a law enforcement officer that pretending to be an outlaw biker was his specialty.

The Bandidos are a Texas born club that has grown into one of the big-four outlaw motorcycle organizations. Caine appears to have spent much of his time working with them, and finding acceptance among them (attaining a full patch) and ultimately providing evidence at trial against the club. Caine’s expertise in the Bandidos is, apparently, such that he wrote another book titled The Fat Mexican about the 2004 Bandidos Massacre that occurred in southern Ontario where seven Toronto Bandidos were murdered on the farm of biker Wayne Kellestein.  In Befriend and Betray, Caine discusses his own life with the club, riding with them on runs and visiting a street in a Texas town that was virtually owned by the Bandidos.

The most interesting aspect of Caine’s book are the points where it is revealed how many of the Bandidos appeared to actually believe in the brotherhood aspect of their club.  He discusses how the vice president of the Bandidos chapter he infiltrated, a karate expert known as Karate Bob, wouldn’t enter into a martial arts business with Caine because he felt that that would corrupt the sanctity of karate. Caine then compared to this same biker’s unwillingness to allow the club to engage in group-wide criminal activity because that would corrupt the club’s sense of camaraderie.  This frustrated Caine’s ability to collect evidence against his friends, and demonstrates that there are bikers, in leadership positions, who genuinely believe in the general ideals of their subculture.  Of course, when it was apparent that Caine was not a true Bandido, there was not much hesitation in sending club members to his apartment to snuff him out.

Caine’s book is unique because it comes from someone positioned between the worlds of law enforcement and the underground. Caine has the experiences of a street criminal to make him appear authentic to the groups he approaches, but he’s opposed to crime, and he’s not police either, and he often voices his frustration with the actions of his law enforcement handlers. Among the kinds of subcultures where its members are routinely sent to prison, the rat is the lowest form of life. Caine appears, in his own writing (the truthfulness of which has been questioned by others), excited to be a part of these subcultures and to take down their criminal members at the same time, and while everyone might harbor some sense of admiration for the freedom exercised by bikers, who is out there who admires those among them who commit violent crimes?

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 .

computer hackers - book - 2010 - Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600

Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600
Emmanuel Goldstein (ed.)
Wiley Publishing Inc.
2010
576 pages

Much of the writing by and for hackers has, since the beginning, been primarily electronic text distributed via networks and BBS systems. Relatively recently, as has been discussed elsewhere on this blog, hack/phreak e-zines such as Cult of the Dead Cow and Phone Losers of America are finding print publication via various self publishing platforms. 2600 Magazine (a name taken from the ‘blue-box’ phreaker technology that played a 2600hz tone into a trunk line to seize telephone operator status for the caller) has, since 1984, been the one consistent print publication for the computer underground.The magazine has always focused on the analysis of telecommunications and computer systems, although it has also always taken a libertarian-tinged leftist political slant as well. In 2009 2600 published an almost 900-page ‘best-of’ anthology of the magazines articles. The single largest component of each issue, however, is the letters section, and this volume anthologized close to 30 years of correspondence with the publication.

Dear Hacker is an enormous collection of the letters that appear in 2600 magazine, introduced by Emmanuel Goldstein, the magazine’s founder and editor-for-life, who notes his own history of writing letters to magazines. Goldstein noted the importance of a reader responding to something they read in print, demonstrating their engagement with the media and participating in the social life brought into being by writing and publishing. Dear Hacker includes the unedited letters of hackers writing about every aspect of hacker culture, with the original editorial responses. Each chapter focuses on a different component of the full range of hacker concerns, such as dealing with law enforcement, hackers in prison, questions about technology, and questions about the magazine itself. These chapters are subdivided according to years, showing similar concerns revolving around changing technologies and environments as time proceeds. The book is not simply a collection of correspondence, it is also a history of a print magazine operating as a medium of active information exchange to a subculture that is based on the use of computers.

Maybe next 2600 will edit a book of Goldstein's editorials that begin each issue.

white power skinheads - book - 2002 - A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America

A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America
Elinor Langer
Metropolitan Books
2003
398 pages

In the fall of 1988, in Portland Oregon, an Ethiopian student and taxi driver named Mulugeta Seraw was murdered by a group of White Power skinheads who called themselves East Side White Pride. Portland has been, since the mid-1980s, one of the centres of youth-driven radical white suprematism, as groups like the Northwest Hammerskins and other skinhead groups have emerged out of Portland’s eclectic underground culture.

The Pacific Northwest has been designated as a Homeland for White Americans by various segments of the White Power scene since The Order  (also known as “The Silent Brotherhood) emerged as a Neo Nazi paramilitary vanguard, operating out of rural Washington, in the early 1980s.  More recently, the former American Nazi Party leader and current founder of the secessionist Northwest Front, Harold Covington, has been pushing this idea of the Northwest as a locale for white settlement which he calls the Northwest American Republic. I’m not sure where this vision leaves the various Indigenous groups who, at the very least, have given the Northwest so many of its place names.  

A seal of the Northwest Front which covers Oregon, Washington, and Idaho states. The now largely inactive Aryan Nations (thanks to a crushing multi-million dollar lawsuit launched by the Southern Poverty Law Center) was based in rural Idaho.

In the 1980s the Neo-Nazi Skins were seen as a new vanguard for the White Power movement.  In the American context, the skinhead emerged from the hardcore punk subculture, and while the skinhead look was adopted by a variety of different ideologies, it became very popular among young white fascists (who would declare that their skin is their uniform) and thus this connection between the skinhead look and contemporary Nazism, also took hold in the popular imagination.  Other kinds of skins, like the SHARPs (an acronym standing for “Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice”) were rarely represented in popular media, which reduced a complex subculture to a single malignant manifestation. Jack Moore’s 1993 text Skinheads Shaved For Battle, for example, acknowledged Anti-Racist skins but merely as street-fighting opponents to his primary topic, the Nazi skins.

At the heart of the over-representation of Skinheads of the Nazi variety were two media forces, the rise of daytime talk shows like Oprah, Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo, and others, which, according to Joshua Gamson’s 1998 book Freaks Talk Back, were significant because provided a forum for voices often marginalized by most other forms of media.  The other force in media was Tom Metzger, a former Grand Dragon of the California KKK and electronics technician and entrepreneur who hosted a monthly public access television program called Race and Reason which was distributed to various audiences via VHS tape.  It should be noted that an appearance of Metzger and his son on Geraldo, where a violent melee resulted in the host’s broken nose in 1989, remains one of the most referenced moments in both studies of White Power subcultures and histories of Talk television.  During the 1980s Metzger was also the figurehead of a white power organization called WAR (or White Aryan Resistance) that recruited Skinheads and encouraged violent confrontation with non-whites as a matter of duty.  

A Hundred Little Hitlers is The Nation journalist Elinor Langer’s account of the story of Seraw’s murder and its aftermath. Her primary achievement with this text is to take the material for what could be an especially lurid true crime book and humanize all of the agents involved. Langer, of course, creates a powerfully sympathetic portrait of the victim of this particular episode of xenophobic rage, but she also adds colour to her renderings of the perpetrators as well.  She does not invite the reader to feel for the members of East Side White Pride, but she does strive to represent them as not strictly hammer-fisted thugs, rather as people who have struggled through fractured lives towards the situation that led them to their doom (Seraw murderer Ken Mieske, or ‘Ken Death’ - a name relating to his status as frontman for a death metal band rather than his willingness to kill - died in prison last summer).  She notes that many of the skinhead neo-nazis were street kids who admired Hitler’s virulent racism and his impoverished adolescence. When Langer discusses the (ultimately successful) civil suit launched by Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Centre against Tom Metzger, she is critical of Metzger’s racist venom AND some of Dees more underhanded legal tactics.

 

Langer is a Portland resident (at the time of her book’s publication) and her text reflects that. The author frequently inserts references to her own situation into her narrative of these events, noting, for example, the proximity of her home to that of the family of one of the Neo-Nazi murderers. Langer’s book is an examination of all of the lines of social force an event such as a hate-murder produces, from the impact upon Seraw’s family at home in Ethiopia, to the multitude of effects at its Portland epicentre including upon the author, a neighbor to the crime.

Mulugeta Seraw

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.