Letterism (in French, Lettrisme) is one of the forgotten avant-gardes of the 20th century, having been overshadowed by its predecessors, Dada and Surrealism, and its successor, the Situationist International led by Letterist defector, Guy Debord. The Letterists were originally formed in 1942 with the writing of the Letterist Manifesto by Isidore Isou, a young Romanian poet who, like Tristan Tzara and Constantin Brancusi before him, left his home to make a name for himself in western Europe. Isou was originally focused on creating letter poetry in the tradition of the Dadaist, Raoul Hausmann, who wrote fsmbw (a title which also makes up the bulk of the poem’s content) in 1920. Isou, in his manifesto, put things under headings such as “The destruction of words for letters” and “the order of letters” revealing an interest in reducing language to its basic form, and creating a poetry that is necessarily typographical. The original Letterist movement did produce letterist poetry (were they mentioned in a novel I’ve read? I have a vague memory of them being referenced in a scene of a Canadian novelist, either by Mordecai Richler or Robertson Davies). They also became an anarchistic movement that pulled off pranks such as the Easter morning address at Notre Dame in Paris in 1950 where it was declared by Lettrist Michael Mourre that God is dead. And they produced abstract films. They were, in essence, a belated Dadaist unit operating during wartime and then the post-war period. In addition to these films and letter poems produced by Isou, he also developed what he called ‘hypergraphics’, a mode of writing that freely mixes words with images, or even small symbols or signs set into a sequence to convey some kind of meaning. Letterism and Hypergraphics is a kind of small catalog to an exhibition, currated by Jean-Paul Curtay (who wrote the bulk of the text for this small volume), held in 1985, that features a number of hypergraphic works by Isou and his Letterist allies. This catalog is significant for being one of the few (very few) English texts to discuss the Letterist movement in a sustained fashion. Elsewhere, the Letterists are referenced largely as a lead-in to a more deeply focused discussion on Guy Debord and the Situationists. Debord is certainly mentioned in Curtay’s catalog, but only as part of the timeline of Letterist activity, as much of the text focuses on Isou, his work AFTER the split with Debord, and the influence Isou has had elsewhere (one of the pieces in this book is called Hypergraphics and America). In addition to Curtay’s writing about the Letterist’s, their history and their work, the book contains numerous reproductions of hypergraphic drawings as well as still-shots from some of the experimental films produced by these artists. The text and all the images are printed in some kind of violet. Because this is an exhibition catalog, it focuses pretty closely on the art of the movement, and it does not actually discuss things like the above mentioned Notre Dame fiasco.
A Radical History of Britain is, like the title promises, a historical survey of politically radical activity occurring in England. The book begins in the year 878 with a chapter on King Alfred the Great, who in that year was hiding out during an invasion of vikings into his kingdom. Vallance referred to Alfred as “the first British radical” due to his deep ability to sympathize with his people and eventually send a conquering force back to Denmark. A Radical History then follows through the centuries, noting successive waves of radical activity at every historical turn, right up until the 2000s with various anti-globalization and anti-war activities. A Radical History of Britain is a lengthy historical survey that stands as an English equivalent to Howard Zinn’sA People’s History of the United States in its purpose and scope. Edward Vallance is, according to the website biography he wrote of himself, a historian of early modern Britain. He has also written a book about the English revolution of 1688. Unlike Zinn, he makes no particular claim towards focusing his career as a historian on radical history although he has appeared as an expert commentator in British media on aspects of contemporary and historical radicalism.
A Radical History of Britain is a straightforward, comprehensive, historical survey of British radicalism with virtually all of the great peasant uprisings and industrial worker strikes, as well as chapters on the important 17th century radical movements such as the Diggers and Ranters, and the later 19th century Luddites and Chartists, all of whom are still frequently referred to by their modern-day equivalents. The book is exhaustive in its study of these movements. Where the book falters is in its treatment of the post-WWII period, where Vallance mostly focuses on the rise of the Labour party as a mainstream political force. England has been home to some of the fiercest anti-corporate, environmental, and animal rights protest movements in the world, and there’s no mention of, for example, the McLibel trial or anti-genetic modification protests that have even involved Prince Charles. Other missing features of England’s recent radical history include Reclaim the Streets and the revitalization of anarchism in the late 70s by certain punk bands (especially with groups like Crass, one of the most intensely serious political bands in music history). Anyone who is interested in these subjects will have to look elsewhere (like Naomi Klein’s No Logo), for the older forms of radical activity.......however, this is a good book.
The Process Church of the Final Judgment was a religious movement that emerged out of England during the 1960s. The church was founded by Mary Anne and Robert deGrimstone. They were highly influenced by The Church of Scientology and adopted some of the features of that organization, including the use of the e-meter (a device Scientologists use to measure the reactions of individuals to interview questions during ‘auditing’) and the idea to publish a cultural magazine. Otherwise, according to Wylie et. al., the church was big on animal rights (every member had its own dog, for example) and the use of charismatic cult-style tactics to break down traditional family structures, and the personality of the individual, such as assigning names, and of removing children from their parents, arranging marriages and designating times when couples could be together. Author Timothy Wylie was once a high level member of the Process Church. He contributes the bulk of the textual material of Love, Sex, Fear, Death, which is, in essence, an expose of the church’s functioning. Founder Robert DeGrimstone left the church after a while, leaving his ex-wife Mary Anne as the unchallenged leader who, according to Wylie, took to her position of authority with great enthusiasm. Mary Anne exercised her control of her religious subjects to the extent that Wylie’s text exhibits his continued deference to her power. His writing about his former spiritual guiding light shows a gleefulness at the freedom to speak about her at the same time, much like how Daniel Domscheit-Berg spoke about Julian Assange in his Wikileaks expose. Anyways, the Process Church was very much a product of its time: there was a rock band made up of church members, and also its members, in full church vestments, sold a pop-culture magazine inspired by underground press publications on the streets of various cities, including Toronto’s once ‘hip’ (and currently very lame) neighborhood of Yorkville. Otherwise, Mary Ann had a Nazi infatuation and appeared, by Wylie’s telling, to be more concerned with magazine sales rather than spiritual exploration. Much of the book is Wylie’s account of living within the church although contains a number of other short pieces written by former members or, in the case of Genesis P-Orridge, by friends of Feral House editor-in-chief Adam Parfrey. After Wiley’s written piece, the largest section of the book are the images, as almost one hundred glossy pages are devoted to photographic reproductions of the Process members, and most importantly to the art of their promotional materials and their magazine, which fully embraced the psychedelic style of the underground press of the period. The magazine covers show the preoccupations of the church as they take on concerns such as sex and death alongside features about celebrities like Mick Jagger.
Feral House has more recently published another book about The Process church, this time an anthology of their written work. Love, Sex, Fear, Death ends with excerpts of some of Robert De Grimstone’s esoteric writing and the subsequent volume explores such writings more fully.
This is the second book by retired Canadian contract informant Alex Caine, so I guess he has a multi-book publishing deal going. In his previous book Befriend and Betray, Caine discusses his undercover life with a chapter of the Bandidos, one of the “big four” outlaw motorcycle clubs. Presumably those experiences has given Caine the sufficient expertise to write this book about the history of the Bandidos Motorcycle Clubin Canada, with a particular focus on the “Shedden Massacre”, the 2006 murder of 8 Toronto Bandidos on a farm in Southern Ontario.
The Fat Mexican is another contribution to the enormous body of true crime literature on the Outlaw Biker subculture. The book is not particularly good although it is one of the few biker books that is not entirely focused on the Hells Angels or one of its members. Instead its focus is one of the HA rivals, the Bandidos, who use a beer bellied Mexican bandit as their patch symbol and once challenged OMC traditions by explicitly claiming ‘gang’ rather than ‘club’ status. The Bandidos are Texas centered but have chapters through the United States and, in the 1990s to the present, in Canada as well. Caine discusses the history of the Bandidos push into Canada; first in Quebec as part of a strategy by the Rock Machine (perhaps the only international MC to originate in Canada) to reinvigorate their fight against the Hells Angels during the Quebec Biker Wars by patching over to a larger club. The Quebec Bandidos failed and reclaimed their Rock Machine patch, but the Bandidos moved west across Canada to compete with the Angels patching over of small Canadian clubs. Caine describes the push from the Bandidos into Canada as somewhat incompetent, with little support and no oversight provided by the American Bandidos network. The Quebec Bandidos reformed the Rock Machine after a couple of years, and then in 2006, the Shedden Massacre occurred. According to Caine, the massacre happened due to a biker-world scandal over a Toronto Bandido member who just chanced upon a Cocaine shipment in Toronto’s Rexdale neighborhood that coincidentally belonged to the Angels (rather than one of a zillion other Toronto based gangs). Through a chain of connections, the Winnipeg Bandidos traveled to Southern Ontario farm of Wayne Kellestine, one of those Nazi fanatics (see also Lemmy Kilmeister), where they lured the Toronto Bandidos for their execution. That, in effect, was the Shedden Massacre, a gruesome event that saw Bandidos killing bikers from their own club.
There’s not much else to say about this book, like all true crime texts, The Fat Mexican dwells on any details that might heighten the reader’s sense of pleasure at the cruelty of others while maintaining a strong sense of moral indignation. Little details like the banter between killings are emphasized (and almost certainly invented) by Caine. Caine repeatedly calls Kellestein a Neo-Nazi on the grounds that he owned a large collection of Nazi paraphernalia. Like many people, I consider the accumulation of Nazi junk to be distasteful but as someone who studies the nuances of subcultures, I know that it is possible to be 1) a collector of Nazi garbage 2) bigoted 3) not a Neo-Nazi - a designation which involves a particular kind of political commitment. Many countercultural groups adopt the use of Nazi symbols because it establishes them as ‘the adversary’ using symbolic forms of recent history. Furthermore, Nazi symbolism can also be fetishized to suggest a fascination (a fetishistic fascination) with violence and cruelty. All of that is only to offer a critical counterpoint to Caine’s accusations of Kellestine as a Neo-Nazi-Biker. Kellestine was obviously an awful person and, Neo-Nazi or not he is still guilty of 8 murders and of rupturing the notion of MC club membership as being intrinsically tied to concepts of brotherhood. Furthermore it wasn’t difficult to find evidence of Kellestine bigotry as a simple google image search brought up photos of him taunting gay pride marchers with a confederate flag in London Ontario.
A Cavalier History of Surrealism is not so much a history, as it is a critique of the Surrealist movement. While it does move through discussions of the different phases that the Surrealist movement had taken in its thirty years, Vaneigem criticizes the movement as being inferior to its immediate historical predecessor, Dada. Vaneigem is especially critical of the Surrealist turn towards Communism which went as far as involving an official affiliation with the Communist Party that attempted to mandate Surrealist activities, and also a later turn towards mysticism/occultism. Surrealism is so often identified by artists, critics, and art historians as Dada all grown up that it is exciting for someone like me (who’s far more enthusiastic about the Dada movement) to see a well known revolutionary theorist praise the earlier art movement above the latter.
I should note that Vaneigem's SI Comrade Guy Debord was critical of both Surrealism and Dada. Debord saw both groups as characterized by a failure to give their artistic revolutions any relevance to life as it was actually lived by people. (available to read online here)
