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 - 2016 - Disco's Out... Murder's In!: The True Story of Frank the Shank and LA's Deadliest Punk Rock Gang

Disco's Out... Murder's In!: The True Story of Frank the Shank and LA's Deadliest Punk Rock Gang
Heath Mattioli & David Spacone
Feral House
2016
224 pages

I know from Penelopee Spheris' Decline of Western Civilization and Stephen Blush's book American Hardcore that in Los Angeles at least, punks became part of the street gang mix. Disco's Out... Murder's In! is, as far as I know, the first and currently only memoir of an LA punk gang member, recalling the life of Frank the Shank, underboss of LMP, La Mirada Punks. The overall narrative paints a picture of a group of people who weren't great punks, as they didn't contribte anything creative and their constant and extreme violence pretty much drove good people out of the scene, and weren't great gangsters, as they didn't seem to make any money. They mostly seemed to get into fights with the other punk gangs and when they weren't doing that they were killing people for not being punk.

The book is mostly a repetitive story of casual yet extreme violence, with a failed love story twisted into it. The LMP do it all up to murder, and usually they don't have much reason for it except that they thought it was fun, or maybe just because it alleviated boredom. The coldest story in a book of pointless cruelty describes an LMP member named Pineapple Head killing a B-Boy with a homemade bludegeon. Before the final blow, the B-Boy asked, "Why are you doing this?" Anthony Burgess' Alex and the Droogs would have had some poetic response in their nadsat speak, but Pineapple Head's reply was, "because." While participating in such youthful hi-jinks as mindless killing, Frank also fell in love with someone who broke up with him when he confronted her about her maybe cheating... what a surprise. Even in a narrative of his construction he doesn't have proof that she cheated on him but he still goes off on a quick rant about how after 30+ years he hates her and how much he hopes she gets raped. I wonder how she might tell the story of a love so pure with a punk gang bully.

At the end of the story Frank reports that people will tell him that him and his friends ruined the scene, which was probably true, and probably why so often these gangs are a minor detail in narratives about LA Punk if they're mentioned at all. As I was reading this I wondered if any of the killings they discuss were cold cases. When we now look back and see punk as this flare of independent creative energy, who wants to put the spotlight on the participants that cut it all to pieces, literally, with their cheap switchblades? There's some good pictures of LMP and the book cover features a Raymond Pettibon drawing.

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 - 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.

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 - 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 - 2005 - Fury's Hour: A (Sort-of) Punk Manifesto

Fury's Hour: A (Sort-of) Punk Manifesto
Warren Kinsella
Random House
2005
296 pages

Counterculture has its pantheon of heroes, individuals whose rebellious actions have made them iconic in countercultural history. Because of the nature of counterculture and the adherents of all its forms, there's iconoclasts working to smash those idols of rebellion. Sometimes this means you read a screed that leaves you convinced that Nirvana selling out damaged the underground culture of the northwest, as members of Bikini Kill (who are iconic themselves) argued one time, but mostly its dumbs who think they're going to make Noam Chomsky look stupid or youtubers calling Sea Shepherd Captain Paul Watson a coward. Ludicrous statements. Warren Kinsella begins his punk book, Fury's Hour, by being one of the guys who rants about Johnny Rotten not being enough of a punk.

Kinsella is relevant to this blog for two things. Thing one, he wrote THE book about the Canadian racist right, Web of Hate. Thing two, he was in one of the first Canadian punk bands, the Hot Nasties, whose story of can be found in the book Perfect Youth by Sam Sutherland, which tells the story of early Canadian punk. Most of Kinsella's career has been in politics, he worked as a strategist for the Liberal Party of Canada, which is irrelevant to a blog about counterculture and to punk culture because the Liberal Part of Canada is not only not punk but is also very uncool. Still, he was there near the beginning, being a punk out in Calgary in the late 70s where I bet being even a little weird took guts, so that's not nothing.

Anyways, I don't actually have a lot to say about this book. Fury's Hour is a book about whether or not punk is politically relevant. Turns out punk is indeed relevant but there's so many other books like this and all the bands referenced are like, the most famous bands of punk history. I figure that the book was written to be read by unpunk people who follow Kinsella's political commentary, since punks don't need the Ramones explained to them. I didn't get much out of reading this book but it is interesting that a well known Canadian political figure has written a book about punk for mainstream readers that doesn't just treat punk imagery as coffee table reading, and really, he mentions Craig O'Hara's book The Philosophy of Punk which doesn't seem to come up much in the punk literature, so it was cool to read a Canadian mainstream politician discussing an anarchist publication put out by AK Press.

punk - 2003 - I, Shithead: A Life in Punk

I, Shithead: A Life in Punk
Joey Keithley
Arsenal Pulp Press
2003
237 pages

Joey Keithley has served his country as the only constant member of the long-lived Vancouver based band, DOA. DOA is notable for being the first truly original Canadian punk band to have an impact on the punk subculture. Keithley's band was a vanguard of the turn to hardcore punk which emphasized shorter songs, intense lead singers, basic song construction, and the DIY ethic. DOA formed in 1978 (after beginning as 'The Skulls') and has been touring and recording ever since, releasing their most recent studio album, We Come in Peace, in 2012. Since their incarnation, the band has released MANY great albums featuring a shifting lineup that always has Keithley (who went by the name Joe Shithead for much of his early career) at the band's centre.

Keithley has also become one of a small number of punk heroes who has written his memoirs of the scene. I, Shithead contains Keithley's memories of emerging into the punk scene during the mid-70s up to the early 1990s, considering the band's been around for an additional ten years past this book's publication, there's lots of band history left unrecorded by its figurehead.

These recollections of the early years of punk are great to read because of how they describe the emergence of an international punk scene becoming a subculture. Keithley's book is full of all sorts of anecdotes about playing to BC bikers, dealing with slimy promoters and owners, drinking beer, getting rowdy, dealing with cops, fighting with jerks in the audience, and so on, everything that makes a great punk story. The book, as a memoir and as a punk history, is at its best when Keithly talks about his touring stories and playing with, and befriending, some other now historically relevant punk band at a legion hall or divey club with 100 people in the audience. DOA and a large number of other bands mentioned as friends of the author, are still talked about, and knowing the origins and music of classic groups like Husker Du and Flipper is part of what makes up the credibility of newcomers to the scene. It made me happy when Keithley said that he dragged Steven Leickie of the Viletones through a pool of his urine in a Toronto club.

I, Shithead is also relevant for explaining how a group of not very responsible men of working-class origins and limited financial means carry out a complicated undertaking such as a multi-date concert tour. This book answers questions like, how does a man make a living as the lead singer of a punk band (he doesn't - so he holds a side job as a taxi-driver). And it explains Keithley's need to keep politics in music. Close to the end of the book Keithley had estimated that he had done over 200 benefit concerts by about 1990. I'm hoping for another book that covers the band's history up to the present day.

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.

punk - communal living - 2005 - Mouth to Mouth

Mouth to Mouth
Alison Murray
2005
M2M Films
101 minutes

Mouth to Mouth is a film about a group of street kids travelling through Europe in a rusty old van, attending festivals, dumpster diving, and smoking and drinking. The group, called Street People Armed with Radical Knowledge, or SPARK, goes from city to city living as crusty punks, forming social bonds and drifting around until they make their way to a vineyard somewhere in southern Europe. At this point the group began living communally and working the land while they also take on the form of the charismatic cult that was hinted at during their earlier travels.

The group has a leader, Harry, who expresses a bland self-help straight-edge philosophy and repeatedly admonishes his followers to "stay strong". At one point, while the group is on the road, their youngest member cuts his throat on a piece of twisted metal and dies after he's flung into a dumpster to look for food. No one really takes responsibility for the death, including the boy's best friend who carelessly tossed him in there, but its Harry's disinterest that is striking as an early clue of his evil. Once they occupy the vineyard, Harry begins exercising authority more cruelly, punishing disobedient followers by putting them in a well. The film ends predictably when one member dies under such punishment and another, Sherry (the film's main character - it doesn't really suit the purpose of my blog to speak about her) rejects Jeff's authority and leaves the group.

The group is a charismatic cult with a complete absence of spirituality, much like the cult in Martha Marcy May Marlene. They are a self-help group with a bad man for a leader. Much like with that other movie, its easier for me to understand how the bizarre and psychotic millenarianism of Charles Manson, for example, could compel followers to invest in him as an authority figure, than it is for me to understand how a bland punk-guru's dull can inspire his friends to obey his every word.

Director Allison Murray also made the documentary Train on the Brain, the greatest of all hobo/train hopping films, so that's good.

The Bug is on the soundtrack, which is also very good.

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.

street art - book - 2008 - Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution

Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution
Cedar Lewisohn
Tate Publishing
2008
160 pages
 

Cedar Lewisohn, a curator at Tate Modern gallery in London, U.K. has written an insightful study of the international phenomena known as graffiti and street art.  Street Art is, by my estimation, far more substantive than such publications as the already profiled Stencil Graffiti or Graffiti NYC.  Lewisohn’s book attempts to theorize the differences between graffiti and the new, emerging forms it inspires, which he refers to as ‘street art’ proper.  Furthermore, Lewisohn’s text comprises an attempt, which has already been seen in Tristan Manco’s Stencil Graffiti, to formulate a canon of street artists.  

This book was released to coincide with a Lewisohn-curated Street Art exhibition held at the Tate Modern from 23 May – 25 August 2008.  I am often skeptical of the relevance of graffiti or street art gallery exhibitions because I believe the loss of the ‘street’ setting empties such works of much of their essence.   Lewisohn’s show was accompanied by a walking tour lead by a number of practicing street artists, thus returning the street to the academic discourse on the cultural form.  In Street Art, the author makes calls for academic and high-art institutions to recognize street art and in particular he requests that museums begin including such works in their collections.  While Lewisohn’s arguments are more nuanced and articulate than the simplistic griping about lack of recognition done by Hugo Martinez in Graffiti NYC, the call for graffiti to appear museums still sounds problematic to me.  The transposition from street to gallery for a work of art creates for it a radical change of status, because graffiti/street art is not simply imagery and its street setting is of critical importance to its value.  

Graffiti and Street art (its questionable whether or not people who are not hip to the scene differentiate between the two the way Lewisohn does) normally exist in a tension between the street artists and the city officials who believe that nothing can improve upon the appearance of an unadorned concrete wall.  Spectators play in the balance, choosing their level of engagement with the art as they move through the city, and making evaluations as they proceed.  Combining a gallery exhibition of street art with a walking tour is perhaps a strategy for attempting to reconcile the transposition of street art into the gallery, with the original experience of viewing such art in the street.

As has already been stated, Lewisohn’s book operates in a manner different from many other street art texts, and this is first evidenced in the images he uses.  While Stencil Graffiti and Graffiti NYC often displayed closely cropped images (with some exceptions) of street art, Street Art often displays a work of graffiti surrounded by a number of other markings, tags, stickers, etc.  The images in the book display the hypergraphic reality that works of street art exist in.  They are seldom discreet graphic objects and are almost always on a surface with a myriad of other ‘works’ of similar art.  

Another aspect to Lewisohn’s text that makes it an interesting book in the graffiti art literature is its construction of a history for the craft.  Lewisohn operates along two lines of history, the first is with regards to the art, which he grounds in NYC graffiti of the 1970s and 1980s as well as practices by the “high-art” artists who used the street as a showplace, including Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Fekner, and some others.  Lewisohn reaches as far back as Brassai, a photographer of mid-20th-century streetlife and his photos of children’s scratchings on the sides of Parisian buildings.  Lewisohn’s history of the art draws on both folk and fine art traditions, radical politics, and desires for illegal thrills, which lead into his descriptions of the most reputable contemporary practitioners of street art.  Street Art, for Lewisohn, is the culmination of the convergence of all of these traditions.  The canon of contemporary street artists includes Blek Le Rat, Banksy, Judith Supine, Lady Pink, Shepard Fairey, and Miss Van.  The author's prehistory of street is varied and comprehensive and it is fitting that Lewisohn's list of currently relevant artists is also varied in terms of location, style, motivations, and materials.  

The other history Lewisohn presents is that of the documentation and theory about graffiti and street art.  Lewisohn includes discussions with Henry Chalfant (author of early books about graffiti and director of the 1984 graffiti documentary film, Style Wars).  He also includes photographs and discussions with Martha Cooper who produced the 1988 book Subway Art a seminal photobook of the era of NYC subway graffiti.  Numerous references are made throughout the book to seminal writings on the art form, including Norman Mailer’s text The Faith of Graffiti, and French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of NYC tagging in Symbolic Exchange and Death.  Interspersed with Lewisohn’s profiles of the most reputable members of the international street artist scene are some notes considering specific cultural influences such as punk culture or the formative art-school environment.  Lewisohn’s text and innovative 2008 exhibition has placed himself as a recent figure in the field of graffiti research, and his book is as much about the history of graffiti history as it is about the emerging street art scene.  It should also go without saying but this Tate publication is filled with full colour images of examples of the art Lewisohn finds to be such a vital form of modern expression.