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.

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 - 1993 - Hard Core Logo

Hard Core Logo

Michael Turner

Arsenal Pulp Press

1993

197 pages

This book attained legendary status for me. I knew it was out there, somewhere, like a cryptid, but library catalog searches turned up nothing or pointed towards Bruce MacDonald’s 1996 film or its related literature: including a graphic novel adaptation, and a 2011 film studies book. For years I’ve been checking whatever libraries I’ve had access to for this book and finally found that York University’s Scott Library has a copy, so, thank you for that.

Bruce MacDonald’s film adaptation of Hard Core Logo is great. His documentary-style drama of an aging, reunited Canadian punk band disintegrating into complete annihilation during a very short tour of the western provinces is possibly the best punk rock movie and one of the best Canadian films ever. I’ve watched Hard Core Logo many times. I love the film and while I recognize that the film represents sad and anxious grown men caught in the disappointing trap of the expectation of punk authenticity where their meager success is based on the requirement to project teenage angst, nihilism, and willful failure at all times, I also recognize that they’re a great band with great songs. Now I see where the songs come from.

It’s difficult, impossible rather, for me at least, to first see a film without it affecting my experience of later reading the text it’s based on. I began reading Cormac McCarthy novels because I loved the Coen Bros adaptation of No Country for Old Men, but it was a disappointment to read that novel with the screen images of its characters in my head. I experienced something similar with reading Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo, but Hard Core Logo isn’t a novel in the typical way. Rather than narrating the story of the band’s short tour, author Michael Turner structured his novel as a series of notes and ephemera generated by the band during the tour, beginning with a letter requesting that Hard Core Logo play a benefit show, and ending with a want ad written by lead singer Joe Dick seeking bandmates after they broke up in Edmonton. Each page is a different text, one page is a contract to perform, the next are the lyrics to one of their songs, the next page is a page of bassist John’s tour journal or an interview with Billy Talent.

These documents come together to tell the story of Hard Core Logo’s reunion and rapid fragmentation over a period of a few days. The thing that stands out the most for me are the lyrics to the songs, they’re complete, the're the songs that are performed in the film, and they’re good. I love the versions of them that are performed in the film, and I love the DOA rendition “Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?”, because they’re great punk songs. Who is Michael Turner who wrote all these great lyrics for a band that doesn’t exist? I don’t know of him beyond Hard Core Logo but apparently he’s a poet and he was in a band called Hard Rock Miners that was probably pretty good if he was involved in the songwriting.

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.

Irish Republican Army - 1997 - IRA Man: Talking With the Rebels

IRA Man: Talking With the Rebels
Douglass McFerran
1997
Praeger
178 pages

This is a weird book for the simple fact that its written as though it is the story of researching a book about the Irish Republican Army circa mid-90s when the Troubles of Northern Ireland were winding towards a peace of sorts. McFerren, a former Jesuit, a teacher at a college in San Francisco, and an author of books, wanted to understand the conflict between Republicans and Loyalists in Northern Ireland, so he took several trips to the six counties to interact with the Irish and listen to their points of view. The book is essentially its author reporting on these trips, discussing the little details he's noticed about walking around Ireland, little things his wife said, things that surprised him and challenged the ideas he arrived with. He is also just throwing into his that he's read something that said something, and the whole thing reads like a personal notebook rather than an investigation into a serious and violent conflict.

He very definitely speaks from the position of someone who understands Northern Ireland through the window of television reports of violence and repression, as he reports his surprise that he's not always witnessing violence, bigotry, and police brutality, when he's in Northern Ireland. The thing that seemed to surprise him most, and the thing that he has trouble letting go of even though its something virtually every decent book on this subject makes clear, is that the Troubles were not simply a matter of religious sects hating one another over religious differences. McFerren was a Jesuit, and was perhaps hoping to look more closely at the religious aspect of this conflict, which resulted in him speaking strangely about certain components of the IRA. When he discussed The Green Book, an IRA operations manual, parts of which journalist Ed Moloney published in his book, A Secret History of the IRA, McFerren noted it downplayed religion when, given the text's purpose, had no need to make mention of it.

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.

radical right - 1996 - The Siege at Ruby Ridge

The Siege at Ruby Ridge
Roger Young
1996
Victor Television Production
192 min.

The Siege at Ruby Ridge is a 1996 television mini-series dramatizing the events of the 1992 armed stand-off between the apocalyptic/survivalist Weaver family and multiple federal agencies at the northern Idaho Weaver homestead situated on a mountain hilltop called Ruby Ridge. The stand-off resulted in the deaths of Weaver matriarch Vicki Weaver, her son Sammy, their dog Striker, and a U.S. Marshal. The event was a catalyst for the anti-government far right movements of the 1990s and an episode in the excessive authoritarian force the U.S. government is willing to use to suppress nonconformist citizens. The story of the siege was, in brief, that an illegal firearms sale set off a sequence of events that escalated to an armed stand-off with three dead. For the Weavers, the stand-off was the apocalypse, and it confirmed all of their anti-government ideas and attitudes to be valid.

Something that interests me about the representations of the far right in America is that there is mainstream media willing to portray its figures positively. Probably the most extreme example is the heroic representation of the Neo-Nazi Daniel Vinyard in American History X. Whether as a Nazi or as an anti-racist, Vinyard always lives his ideals, and he suffers for them. Here too, in The Seige at Ruby Ridge, survivalist and Aryan Nations hangaround Randy Weaver, along with his wife Vicki, are represented as intense, unwavering, acolytes of their anti-government worldview who stand rocksteady when the FBI and US Marshals come for them. Randy falters for a moment, considering whether or not he should turn himself in over the charges stemming from an illegal firearms sale, but Vicki encourages him to stand strong against ZOG (ZOG is a white power consipiracy acronym referring to the 'zionist occupied government'). What really interests me is that this work is one of a small number of examples of American mainstream media that positively represents the far right, I am not aware of any such films, television shows, mini-series, etc that represent figures of the American left in a positive manner.

There are films of other countries representing leftists positively, such as the German films The Baader-Meinhof Complex, and The Edukators. There are the Stephen Soderberg Che films about the great Marxist guerrilla leader, a positive portrayal but of an international figure most strongly associated with the Cuban revolution. The 1999 TV movie The 60s portrays its leftist as dangerously ignorant youth who just need to grow up and learn how the world works. There are films about the Chicago 8 and the Black Panthers, for example, which portray their subjects positively but they're produced outside of media systems that draw mass audiences. The Siege at Ruby Ridge was a network TV movie shown on CBS. As far as I know there are no leftist counterparts to this.

The event of Ruby Ridge and the preservation of its memory as a historical example of a dramatic tragedy involving the government repressing non-conformist ideological minorities has its leftist counterparts. The story of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Haymarket Affair are two examples that have been represented in PBS documentaries and independent films. Right wing radicals are more likely to be be commemorated by mainstream American media with a sympathetic portrayal, presumably because their values more closely correspond with those that are dominant in America. I wonder if there will ever be a film like this, shown on network television, that represents the Michael Brown murder, for example, and the subsequent protests in a manner that is sympathetic to the protesters. Given the existing patterns demonstrated in media history, of the choices made in subject matter and ideologies represented in mainstream media, we're far more likely to see a TV movie positively representing the Bundy Ranch affair. A Ferguson film would likely focus on the anguish of the MI governor and other public officials, who have to make the tough decisions to return order.

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.

outlaw bikers - book - 2006 - Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers Global Crime Empire

Angels of Death: Inside the Biker’s Global Crime Empire

Julian Sher and William Marsden

Alfred A. Knopf

2006

464 pages

Angels of Death is a survey of recent, to the time of publication, violent crimes committed by various bikers around the world. The title is a dramatic misnomer, as the inclusion of the word ‘angels’ strongly suggests that the book is exclusively about the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, which it isn’t.  Furthermore, the authors, two Montreal journalists turned true-crime writers, claim that there’s a worldwide biker syndicate but they never ground that assertion in facts. What they do, instead, is show that the outlaw biker subculture is global and that everywhere bikers live bad things, sometimes truly atrocious things, happen. Angels of Death is primarily a series of lurid true-crime murder stories connected by the mode of transportation the killers chose.

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?

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.

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.

mohawk warriors - film - 1992 - Acts of Defiance

Acts of Defiance
Alec G. MacLeod
National Film Board of Canada
1992
104 Minutes

Acts of Defiance is just one of a small number of NFB documentaries that recorded the events of the 1990 Oka Crisis that took place in the Western Quebec communities of Oka and Kanetesake. The crisis erupted when the municipal government of the Oka permitted the expansion of a golf course and luxury housing development on land long used by the Mohawk people of Kanetesake for things like the burial of their dead. The Mohawk Warrior society mounted a campaign of armed resistance against this expansion which ultimately failed although the crises led to a renewal of First Nations activism in Canada and the rise of warrior societies in many First Nations communities.

Defiance, directed by Alec MacLeod, opens with the scene of an illegal bingo game at a Kanetesake community hall during which it is announced that the first prize (a lawnmower) was donated by the Warriors, demonstrating how the Warrior Society was already woven into community life in the area.  MacLeod’s film includes voices from all of the involved communities in his treatment of this crisis however it is the voices of the Mohawks and their Warriors that are represented most sympathetically by the director. Members of the Warriors (essentially those Mohawks who defended the disputed lands from construction crews and law enforcement) were the primary source of verbal information pertaining to the events and were shown admired and celebrated by their community.  Conversely, the police and military (Canadian Forces were called into Oka) appear absurd at best and heavy handed at worst, while politicians (such as the mayor of Oka, Jean Oulette) appear mean spirited, corrupt, and arrogant.  This privileging of the Mohawk voices challenges the representation of the events appearing in much of the press coverage of the crisis at the time, most of which consisted of statements issued by law enforcement, military, and governmental personnel who had an interest in resolving the dispute to the favour of land developers.  

The film shows the decision to develop land long used by Mohawks as a contemporary form of colonial dispossession of First Nations sovereignty. A striking fact stated early in the film is that more Mohawk land had been taken legally for development since 1950 than in the entire previous era of Mohawk-European contact. The disputed land was originally used by Mohawks for grazing their animals, then European settlers began playing golf there (thus scaring Mohawk animals) and eventually a legal apparatus organized to privilege white interests could only recognize the space as a golf course. The film, through its many Native voices, expresses a more recent history of Mohawk anger at Canadian politics and society: their exclusion from the Meech Lake negotiations, and the shooting of a man named David Cross during a dispute with police. Such events, in addition to the continual encroachment of First Nations land, led to the development of an intense resentment towards a dominant society that appeared to only show them disrespect and demand obedience.
Much of Acts of Defiance is about the inability (or refusal) of outsiders to understand Mohawk resentment and opposition to them. The Mohawk Warriors fought in infrequent gun battles with police and military during the summer of 1990, but MacLeod’s film also shows unarmed Kanehtesake villagers standing up to armed personnel (who are also empowered by governmental authority) as well.  Furthermore, it is clear from watching the film that the heavy handed actions of police (who are shown seizing cases of soft drinks during searches of all vehicles entering or leaving the Mohawk community) steeled the resolve of the entire Mohawk population against government forces. While the Quebec police produced the local First Nations community in its entirety as adversary, the military largely seemed present for the purpose of producing a particular representation of the events that advance a long-standing Euro/Native colonial discourse.  

Famous photo of Canadian Forces private Paul Cloutier in staring contest with Mohawk Warrior Brad  Larocque.  Here is Vancouver punk band DOA's appropriation of of the image for the cover of their 1993 album, Loggerheads.

Brief end notes: The film ends with a celebration of the Warriors society members who spent time in jail.  The celebrated members, both men and women, were named in the film and the list included the sculptor Joe David who was later paralyzed in a violent dispute with reserve police.  The film also borrows heavily from CBC’s coverage of the events, much of which can be found on the CBC digital archives.  Finally, Warren Kinsella’s Web of Hate, a history of organized racist activity in Canada includes accounts of pogroms, anti-Mohawk rallies, by the good people of Oka.