“War on the car” rhetoric has been common in Toronto over the past few years. Such a phrase comes from the deployment of a particular form of rhetorical combat which positioning the car as the battered victim of mean-spirited bullies who call for alternatives to the one-driver-one-car commuter model simply because they hate the freedom that cars represent. The kind of hyperbole represented by terms like “war on the car” presumes that the car is the de-facto centerpiece of urban living and any encroachment, no matter how minor, on its dominance of the city streets, is an abhorrent assault on decency and the traditional lifeways of post-industrial mankind. Thus calls for bike lanes in Toronto and critical recognition of how much noise and pollution and stress and congestion is added to the city by the flow of car traffic is ‘the war on the car.’
Zack Furness’ book, One Less Car(borrowing his title from the popular pro-bike sticker seen on frames and racks)
investigates the dominant discourse surrounding cycling, particularly in the context of American cities wherein cycling is primarily a form of recreation. Zack Furness is an assistant professor of cultural studies at Columbia College in Chicago. He has gauged ears and tattoos, by the way, and after seeing his photo it occurred to me to check on whether or not he appears in a new (2012) Autonomedia book titled Punkademics, about punk university professors (including a contribution from my Trent University comrade, Alan O’Connor), and as it turns out, Furness edited that particular volume.
One Less Car presents a dual approach to an investigation of contemporary cycling and politics. The first is to look critically at the history of representations of the bicycle in popular culture and interrogate the discourse on the subject. So, for example, according to Furness, the bicycle has been portrayed as a children’s toy with a primary function of preparing the young to become drivers. Connected to that then, is the representation of adult cyclists in specific forms of American popular culture as stunted in maturity (Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and The 40 Year Old Virgin).
Otherwise, cycling is for the impoverished or for people who shirk a social responsibility to purchase a car. These kinds of images produce a normative understanding of cycling as fodder for humour, but an absurd choice of transportation for a real-life American adult.
The second phase of critiquing the popular discourse is for Furness to cite all of the pundits who denounce urban cycling for whatever reason. So many of the arguments Furness quotes are basically by people simply appalled that the road they use as auto-drivers should have to be shared with anyone else. The arguments are typically of a “know your place” variety that presumes that an existing order of privilege is also fundamentally correct, and that the vulnerable who are threatening to put a minor strain on that privilege are, in essence, selfish. For example, Furness cites one pundit who claims that a hypothetical (child) cyclist crushed under the wheels of an SUV is a threat to the driver’s safety and not the other way around. This sort of argument emerges in a cultural environment where driving is always presumed as safe and cycling always presumed as dangerous, even though the invention and popularization of the automobile has unleashed a holocaust of death and injury, and the one major threat to the safety of cyclists is the exact same thing that threatens that of drivers - that is other reckless and inconsiderate motorists. The other side to the analysis of the dominant discourse is the culture of radical cyclists: critical mass participants, bike co-ops, and things like that. Modes of bike usage that revel in the ‘other’ status of the urban cyclist. Much of Furness’ book is about explaining critical mass and he quotes frequently from Critical Mass inventor and chief theorist, Chris Carlsson, as well as other cycling intellectuals such as Microcosm Publishing founder/Bipedal, By Pedal zinester Joe Biel. The section on critical mass subjects the monthly ride to the same rigorous critique as other aspects of the broader cycling discourse, although Furness is clearly sympathetic to the event and its underlying sentiments.
Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour is a historical survey of ‘black power’, an umbrella term applicable to social movements dedicated to empowering black communities in 20th century United States. The book charts a path from figures such as the pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey to the millenarian Nation of Islam, through to the American Civil Rights movement (and the specific organizations that constituted it) up to the Black Panthers. Author Peniel E. Joseph (a professor of history working at Tufts University in Massachusetts) is as thorough as possible with his material charting the splintered path each leader and organization takes to their conclusion. His narrative peters out as it moves into the 80s when it focused mostly on mainstream political figures such as Jesse Jackson (who was, himself, a civil rights activist as a young man), as a kind of apotheosis to the far more radical past that allowed figures such as him to move closer to the moderate centre.
Of course, the narrative is dominated by all of the figures that would be expected: Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr, Stokely Charmical, and finally the Black Panther leadership (Cleaver, Seale, Newton, etc). There are, of course, a large number of other important figures but these are the names that drive Joseph’s (and possibly any) narrative of American black activism. There are also a number of binaries at play in Joseph’s narrative: Marxist vs protestant influence, separatist vs integrationist, non-violent civil disobedieance vs armed resistance/violent struggle. One thing that I hadn’t quite noticed until after completing the book is that it is primarily focused on the radical edge of black social movements. Figures such as W.E.B. DuBois and organizations like his NAACP are discussed, of course, but are given far less attention than groups like the SNCC or the Black Panthers. Also, the book has a detailed bibliography subdivided into publication type and the index is structured so that subtopics of major topics are indexed.
Like the two PhoneLosers of America books, The Book of Cao is a print publication containing material that was produced by a group txt-file writers belonging to what can be broadly referred to as the ‘computer underground’. In the case of Cao, these text files were written over a six year period beginning in 1984, by a group of writers who called themselves the Cult of the Dead Cow (acronym: cDc) a small group of hacker weirdies that distributed their texts through the international BBS scene. The cDc txt files were ubiquitous on the BBSs of the mid-1990s (when I used to call them), and they were probably one of the overall best known series of txt .files of the entire library produced by that scene.
The original Cult of the Dead Cow text files covered a variety of content, ranging from computer game instructions to lyrics from punk and metal albums. What they are best remembered for are their absurd and disturbing literary txts that included scenes of graphic violence, sexuality, and assorted high weirdness. The texts collected into The Book of Cao are those that come closest to underscoring the name the group gave to themselves, as they mostly focus on the cow as a creature of devotion, and of a harbinger of apocalypse. Titles such as The History of the Bovinomicon, and The Nameless Pasture, evoke a bizarre cow-focused pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft’s already weird writing, while probably the most entertaining of the texts is the “issue” of “Cowbeater” magazine, which is a mock Tiger Beat for the hopelessly strange people who made up the BBS scene.
Again, like the PLA books, the material contained here is already available for free elsewhere, and has been for decades. Unlike the PLA books, this book from the computer underground contains no hack/phreak content outside of some minor references, and instead puts the odd humour and deranged interests of the cDc members (who influenced large numbers of other txt writers) on display. It should be noted then that the cDc are, in essence, a group of hackers who also had strong poetic/literary interests, and information pertaining to their hacktivist endeavours, while not mentioned in this book, can be found elsewhere. They are a predecessor to Anonymous in their fight against Scientology, (cDc begain criticizing the church in 1995) for example, and also in their development of hacking tools (such as the infamous Back Orifice application).
Dada, the group of WWI-era anarchistic anti-artists was, in essence, an international art movement when so many other modernist movements were based in a specific country (and often a particular city/region), and it was the shock of the first world war that induced the waves of migration that led to the coalescence of the Dada movement in a neutral European centre.
Many of the original members of the Dada movement in Zurich were from Romania, including the Janco brothers (Marcel, Georges, and Jules) Arthur Segal, and Tristan Tzara (one of the movement's core members). These individuals were highly involved in the formation of Dada (Marcel Janco constructed masks for the group’s performances), Tzara made numerous innovations on performance, bringing a sense of chaos and absurd humor to the performance events he led. These artists that Sandqvist (a professor of art history at the University College of Arts, Crafts, and Design in Stockholm Sweden) takes as his focus.
Many of the great Romanian artists of the modernist period, such as Constantin Brancusi, are known to us because they made their career in Western Europe, and this includes the Romanians of the Dada movement. The relevance of Sandqvist’s book is not simply that he focuses on some of the members of the movement that have largely been pushed to the margins by history (such as the Janco’s) but also that he investigates the cultural influences that played upon the Dadaists before they ever left their home. An already vibrant Romanian avant-garde scene had a heavy influence upon the young artists, as did the culture of the Jewish communities these artists grew up in. Sandqvist’s text includes lots of information about this overlooked aspect of the Dada movement, and lots of images of Urban Romania circa 1910s.
The Black Panther Party for Self Defense was founded in late 1966 in Oakland California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale as a means of providing protection to that city’s impoverished black population from police abuse and harassment. The Oakland Panthers, including Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, quickly became celebrities of the American radical left, and their Aantics formed the image of the BPP that lived in the national imagination. The Black Panther Party were not strictly local to Oakland, however, and charters in numerous large and midsized cities across the US were founded by black radicals in similar social settings. It’s these other BPP chapters that Judson L. Jeffries’ book Comrades focuses on.
Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party is a collection of seven essays, each detailing the history of a different, non-Oakland, chapter of the Black Panthers. Cities include Baltimore, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Winston-Salem N.C. These chapters are contributed by a number of different scholars from a variety of institutions, although the editor dominates the book as one chapter is wholly written by Jeffries and he co-wrote three others. These essays are quite detailed in their discussions although they combine to describe an overall pattern of external harassment that contributed heavily to the fall of each the individual Black Panther Party chapters. That is the pattern of stems from something Jefferies reveals in the introduction, that the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had named the Black Panthers the most significant threat to the well being of the United States despite the fact that there were likely less than 400 members nationwide. Each chapter discusses a specific Black Panthers chapter forming out of a need to organize for the black communities in those cities in the face of unchecked and rampant poverty. In each city, the Panthers organize breakfast programs for children, testing programs for sickle-cell anemia and other forms of illness, and other community oriented programs. Then, the local police department and judicial apparatus harasses the chapter out of existence, sometimes in a hail of gunfire (as occured in Los Angeles), sometimes simply through repeated raids and arrests on minor charges, as in Winston-Salem, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.
Comrades shows the Black Panthers, not as the purveyors of armed black power theatre they were often represented as (discussed in detail in Jane Rhodes excellent book Framing the Black Panthers), but as a radical group that showed a genuine concern for their local communities. The histories of the various local chapters of the Black Panther Party as presented in Comrades display a side to the Party’s story that is, in fact, often washed away by a riptide of stories about police shootouts. Converse to that, Comrades also investigates how those dramatic episodes at the heart of the BPP were used as justification by local police for the neutralization of the peripheral chapters (which were also prone to their own episodes of violence, albiet often in the face of relentless harassment by law enforcement). Comrades tells the stories of these other, peripheral, chapters and in so doing, returns the organization’s image as one with the needs of its immediate community back to the centre of how the Panther’s representation.
