Author Archives for Jay Babcock

“ICE CREAM FOR CROW: In the Shadow of the Valley of the Bomb Pop” by Eddie Dean (Arthur, 2002)

Originally published in Arthur No. 1 (Oct. 2002)

ICE CREAM FOR CROW: In the Shadow of the Valley of the Bomb Pop
Last Notes from the Great Lost Big Lik Expedition
by Eddie Dean, with photography by Dave Brooks

I first discovered the power of a Fudge Bomb when I was surrounded by a family of Blue Ridge Mennonites who hadn’t seen the ice cream truck for a week. All their Fudge Bombs had run out days ago, and their Snow Cones and Chocolate Chump Bars, too. Their sturdy white frame house sat on a hill in Greene County, Virginia, and I was parked before it in my truck, both of us coughing up dust after the long climb up the winding gravel driveway. These people were hurting badly. We were here to help them.

For generations, locals have found this rocky region as poor as a snake. But it’s been a goldmine for interlopers—first the folk-song collectors and then the government men and the social workers and finally the movie stars here for peace of mind and land for their trotting horses. The movie stars didn’t buy ice cream, not off a truck anyway. Just about everybody else did, though. At least, they did back then. This was 20 years ago, before gourmet ice cream and the culture of instant gratification. If you lived in Greene County, the only way you could get a Fudge Bomb was from my truck.

A Fudge Bomb is a brown and yellow “quiescently frozen confection” impaled on a stick and molded in the shape of a Sputnik-era nuclear warhead. It is infused with an equatorial stripe of artificially flavored banana that beads with tropical sweat when unveiled in the July heat by a Mennonite housewife in a gingham dress. At the time I was selling them, a Fudge Bomb cost 60 cents, a crucial dime more than its red-white-and-blue cousin, the Superstar Bomb Pop, but well worth the extra investment. No mere popsicle, a Fudge Bomb is a bona fide meal.

The Mennonites are a strict denomination. For them, every day is a holy day, and they dress and try to behave as such. But there is nothing in their rules that forbids the indulgence of sweets. And no visiting preacher ever inspired more joy than did the driver of the truck with the BIG LIK license plates. I would often linger in the shade as the family members gathered on the green lawn, becalmed by the sacrament of ice cream. The rippling folds of the Blue Ridge mountains stretched to the horizon, as big white clouds drifted by like so many covered wagons. At such a moment of a bright Sunday many summers ago, I understood why their ancestors decided to nestle here instead of pushing west. This perch would do fine until the Battle of Armageddon.

Those were good customers, that family, one of several Mennonite families on the route. They even bought ice cream for their livestock. They had a goat named Curly leashed to a tombstone in the family graveyard, a stone-walled plot near the driveway. His reward for keeping the grass trim was an ice-cream sandwich. The Mennonites were businesspeople themselves. I’d often pass roadside stands where they sold homemade peanut-butter pies to the weekend tourists from Washington D.C. They were better off than most of my customers, who had little in worldly possessions other than the junk accumulated on their ramshackle properties. Yet even the most destitute were no less faithful when that ice-cream bell came ringing. For them, the unbidden arrival of the BIG LIK truck was proof that even if they weren’t among the affluent or the righteous, they would not be denied their just desserts–even if it meant scraping together a fistful of pennies for a 25-cent popsicle.

Behind the wheel of BIG LIK, in the shadow of the hazy, hallucinatory Blue Ridge, I believed I’d found my calling, though at 20 I would have never used such a word. All I knew was that it didn’t seem like work and it beat delivering pizza in a borrowed car. What began as a seasonal job during my time at the University of Virginia held me in Charlottesville well after graduation. It wasn’t driving the truck that hooked me: I fell for the geography. I’d grown up in the lowland Piedmont of Richmond, and there was something about this rugged landscape that moved me. Whatever the reason, the mountains cast a spell that I couldn’t shake.

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“The Turntables Might Wobble But They Won’t Fall Down: A Jam Master Jay Fan Remembers” by Peter “Piper” Relic (Arthur, 2002)

Originally published in Arthur No. 2 (December 2002)

The Turntables Might Wobble But They Won’t Fall Down: A Jam Master Jay Fan Remembers
by Peter “Piper” Relic

A few minutes before four o’clock on Halloween afternoon 2002, I realized I’d better do the crosstown hustle in grandma’s Nissan if I was gonna bumrush rush hour to Beachwood Place Mall. Cooped up in the lab all day, I ran outside—foliage in full flame and wind whipcracking off Lake Erie—Cleveland represent!—and drove east past the granite gryphons lording over Carnegie-Lorain Bridge.

Fiddling the radio dial of the broken cassette deck, I struck immediate jackpot as the “blazin’ hip hop and R&B” station spun Missy Elliot’s new single, giving me my fix of elephant trunk calls, backmask raps, and well, that chubby cheeked happy feeling Missy’s voice always gives me. Thing is, my favorite bit in “Work It” is the part at the end when Missy shouts out “to muh lay-deez!” and Timbaland’s track flips into the beat from Run DMC’s “Peter Piper.” Woomp! Damn if radio plays anything anymore that hits as hard as Jam Master Jay’s cuts—you know that sound, like carpet needles cutting through a bituminous bite plate? Of course, that sheer fierceness may be the reason the ending is usually chopped and faded by some dumbo-eared radio bungler to make way for a Liberty Ford commercial.

Eff ‘em. Hearing that snatch of “Peter Piper” got me hyped. I snapped off the radio and busted the verse embedded in a shell-toed part of my memory bank:

“Doctor Seuss and Mother Goose both did their thing
but Jam Master’s getting loose and DMC’s the King,
Adult entertainer, child educator,
Jam Master Jay king of the cross fader,
He’s the better of the best
Best believe he’s the baddest
Perfect timing when I’m climbing on my rhyming apparatus
When he cuts girls move their butts
His name is Jay, here to play, he must be nuts
On the mix real quick and I’d like to say
He’s not last but he’s fast and his name is Jay!”

Maybe those aren’t the letter-perfect lyrics, but hey. I also doubt that my Run DMC experience was wildly different than that of many other kids lucky enough to tune in during the salad days of Hollis, Queens finest, but here goes:

It was the fall of 1985. I was a freshman at a suburban Connecticut public high school. Out of nowhere one day a way-beyond-me junior girl came up to my locker and without saying anything just handed me a tape. It was not Huey Lewis & the News. This 60 minute Memorex piece of black plastic included Beastie Boys’ “She’s On It,” Original Concept’s “Knowledge Me,” Skinny Boys’ “Jock Box” and Run DMC’s “Sucka MCs”—all songs that crunched. I listened to it on my Walkman while delivering the New Britain Herald (pumped me up to break my fastest time record on my route), on a D-battery powered Tandy tape recorder while playing driveway hockey against my brother (it made my slapshot nastier). I listened to it endlessly, and when Run DMC Raising Hell came out the following year, I bought the cassette at Strawberry’s. It took me forever to get through the entire album because I kept rewinding “It’s Tricky” and “My Adidas.” (I remember the look on my mom’s face when I told her “You be illin’.” The first time was the last.) But finally I made it to the awesome closing track, “Proud To Be Black.” Jam Master Jay’s slashing stab-scratches cut like brass tacks through a whitewashed history text as Run proclaimed “George Washington Carver made the peanut great, showed any man with a mind could create!” I loved peanut butter and I loved funky beats, just like Run DMC! They became the first heroes I ever had who weren’t pro athletes.

Thinking about it now, Jam Master Jay’s beats and cuts were essential for Run DMC to get their message across. Heck, Run and DMC knew it—they shouted Jay out all the time. Run DMC and Jam Master Jay exemplified synergy, syzygy and symbiosis—like Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad, their music hit as hard as their lyrics. It had to. I doubt today’s average teenage hip hop fan can appreciate how awesome Run DMC were, because I don’t hear anything that comes close to their power on commercial rap radio. I mean maybe I’m an ageist kook, but damn…

Back to Halloween ’02. As I pulled into the mall parking lot, an announcement came on the radio: “We will now have 60 seconds of silence for Jam Master Jay who was shot and killed this morning.” The words hit like a brick to the head. I parked and walked dumbstruck into Dillard’s. The first two brothers about my age I saw I went up to and said, “I just heard…Jay Master Jay….” One fellow lowered his eyes while his buddy shook his head slowly and whispered, “I know.” I drifted over to a 70% off reject rack and found a black t-shirt that said I’VE GONE TO FIND MYSELF—IF I GET BACK BEFORE I RETURN KEEP ME HERE.

At the video store, I did what I’d come to do: buy Donnie Darko on DVD. I asked the girl ringing it up, “Are you a hip hop fan?” She looked at me. I went on: “Can you believe…Jam Master Jay?” She gave me a sorrowful, sympathetic smile and said, “He brought a lot to the game.”

He brought a lot to the game.

I drove home, flipped the stereo on and got into the shower. The Chronic 2001 disc I’d left in the player started up and I heard Dr. Dre’s voice: “I moved out of the hood for good, you blame me? Niggas can’t hit niggas they can’t see, I’m out of they sight now I’m out of they dang reach. How would you feel if niggas wanted you killed? You’d probably move to a new house on a new hill and choose a new spot if niggas wanted you shot…I ain’t a thug—how much Tupac in ya you got?”

That’s when I cried. Bad meaning bad not bad meaning good. Jam Master Jay, not being a gangsta, must have felt safe staying in the hood with his wife and kids. When Tupac and Biggie died, it wasn’t a shock like this, and didn’t hurt the same. I guess because with Jam Master Jay, it hurt the fourteen year old inside me. And that 14 year old who fell in love with hip hop (and the girl who gave me that tape; thanks Mary) is still fundamentally me. I feel Run DMC’s records like I feel my younger self: dated but never played out.

Watching Donnie Darko that night, I noticed that at one point in the movie Donnie—a suburban kid living in the mid ‘80s—is rocking shell toes. I can only assume Donnie also agrees with the on-record unison appraisal of Jam Master Jay by Run and DMC: “Goddamn that DJ made my day!”

For my friend Jeff Seifert. Rest In Peace.

A tribute to Eagle Pennell by Paul Cullum (Arthur, 2002)

first published in Arthur No. 1 (October, 2002)

THE EAGLE HAS LANDED
By Paul Cullum

“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Like punk legends, indie film pioneers are going to start dying off soon. And in a microcosm defined by perpetual youth, dissolution and decay don’t have much room to ramp up, making it harder to get used to the idea. I guess it’s never pretty.

Eagle Pennell was politely called a regional filmmaker by those unaccustomed to his kind, and like many in his native Texas, he had an outsized impression of his own identity that ultimately destroyed him. In 1978, when A-list Hollywood was made up of veterans of Roger Corman’s shoestring epics, and everyone else in America with dreams to burn now worked for Corman to replace them, the first inklings of what we now think of as independent film came courtesy of people who were too clueless or inept to follow that simple protocol. One of them was Eagle, whose shaggy dog buddy comedy The Whole Shootin’ Match pioneered that Austin-specific sort of epic underachieverdom that Slacker later turned into an anthropological treatise. But Eagle’s laconic dreamers, drunk as a lord and impossibly balanced on the thin line that separates ambition from nostalgia, were more than just literary conceits. They were Eagle in a nutshell. Like we used to say about him, the man belonged in the Alcohol of Fame; he put pop alcoholics like us to shame.

The Whole Shootin’ Match, based on an earlier 16mm short called Hell of a Note, starred Lou Perry (nee Perryman) and Sonny Carl Davis as a couple of perpetual fuck-ups trying to work as insulation blowers or something equally improbable, and retiring to the comfort of cold beers and fevered dreams once the going gets tough. (In Hell of a Note, they laid asphalt, until they were fired for not realizing you weren’t supposed to pee on it until it had cooled off.) This woozy testament to the comically disenfranchised, made for twenty grand in borrowed money, was also historically significant in that it was the film that Robert Redford was famously watching at the 1978 inauguration of the U.S. Film Festival in Park City, Utah when he had the epiphany that it was strays like this who could best benefit from such a festival, or something like his soon-established Sundance Institute.

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BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 2 (Dec. 2002)

first published in Arthur No. 2 (December, 2002)

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

We open this time with an essay by Thurston Moore entitled, “My Summer Beats My Winter.” If you didn’t catch the Metal Machine reference, look it up.

Touring around the USA, Europe, Japan, Oz etc. is like staying home: same dynamics of same-ism and same familial interaction complex. But there’s one thing that gives it ROCK distinction: seeing old n new chumsters and seeing old n new bands. With fam-man responsibilities these are things not readily available on the homefront scene (which, in case you think you’re groovy, I ain’t jonesing to trade for nut). So fuck this, dig the bands that were kicking my ROCK ass in the summer of 02:

dateline Lyon France 19 June:
MARTEAU ROUGE is a french band featuring legendary free-rock guitarist Jean-FranÁois Pauvros (along with Jean-Marc Foussat, Masahiko Sato and Yuko Kametani). We had Pauvros play once before with us in Paris as a solo artist where he came out and laid flat the room with howling amp buzz. It was not so much noise-violence but a more in-tune and curious new-birth wonder. Pauvros, a tall long-haired 40-something cat has an illustrious history. In the 70s, with formidable avant-garde legend Jac Berrocal, he was a member of Catalogue. And, with Gilbert Artman, he played in Lard Free and Urban Sax. Through the intervening years he has recorded with such disparate freaks as Blurt, Arto Lindsay and Keiji Haino. Marteau Rouge is his newest new-thing. Gone are the spiked edges of youthful blunder. What has evolved is the fascinating sounds of players moving into high-adult dimensions. This evokes a focused creative enterprise sweet to the collective soul of the listening audience. Pauvros and Marteau Rouge reportedly have a CD coming out on HatHut with American saxophonist Joe McPhee which could be excellent. But HatHut is mum on this news.

dateline Bristol, UK 24 June:
LIARS had the potential to annoy. Musical annoyance is one of the finer attitudes in rock, but it either takes a needlepoint intellect (Steve Albini) or a battering ram cementhead (GG Allin) to pull it off with any true swing. If it’s annoyance for the sake of annoyance (a la mid-period Bunnybrains, The Rachels) then it is naught but disingenuous time-death. Liars had one small label 12” available for one minute and then a deal with Blast First. They were part of the HOT new New York rock scene of 2002. They might even be the Stones to the Strokes’ Wildlife-period Wings. The singer cats it with Karen O, the panty-splitting snake charm spitter of Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Wild ass stuff but, like cheese, it’s a stink that can be either dick-thickening or no more fun than a phone call from Nedelkoff. I’ve seen some of the new new new new new new new New York City rockers and I must concur with Deborah Harry: What was once a surreal vision (1975 Johnny Thunders, Richard Hell) is now a MTV/Levis-sponsored giveaway. The songs are OK here and there, but here (in the Berkshire foothills) is as good as there (in the Williamsburg high-res rubble). But, fuck, everyone knows that anyway and the only reason to live and rock in NYC is for kicks–that much has not and will not, I suspect, ever change. LIARS are from California, Nebraska and Australia and maybe some other geogs, but the generally impressive reek they give off is of a fantastic spiced-earth stew. The best thing is they ain’t looking to pop, they’re looking to sizzle. The first hits will make any geek scream “Pop Group!” or “Birthday Party!” (Come to think of it, I remember screaming “Pop Group!” after first hearing Birthday Party(!)), but these buff young nice-niks are employing some fresh diaper liberation. Guitars seek fine slices of feedback sonance whilst the rhythm roots/toots like Nick Cave’s lips on acid nips. Sexy boy romp without the schmoe-pose even when the 10 foot tall Oz dream singer pelves the aghast UK sickheads into blankminded judgement lapse. All atonal skid mark flail and then the whomp and buttock kick of some weirdo Turbo-Rat setting. Pretty nice and wonderfully annoying to the point of cloying–the only B-Party comparison I’d deem to make. Cute as hell and, thankfully, the real deal. (www.liarsliarsliars.com)

dateline Turino, Italy 06 July:
MY CAT IS AN ALIEN do not jibe with the indie-rock establishment in Italy. At least that’s the impression I get when the twin brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio confront booking agents and gig promoters with the knowledge that My Cat Is An Alien exist to promote “alien love.” Maybe I’m missing something in the translation, but the professionals ain’t buying it; the only time these displaced wizards seem to get a decent gig is when we or Blonde Redhead blow through the boot. Which is a shame because MCIAA let loose a chance bafflement of free-rock ideas always set on upsetting conscious rock-realization. The first time I heard them was when they sent us CDRs entangled in wired cages. We saw they were from Italy, we were heading there soon enough, we loaded the CDR in and were caught off-guard by the voidoid cosmo pleasures in emittance. So we asked them to play. They rocked in the most non-rock way: guitars tuned to God-knows-what pubic tensity, drums possibly interacting with crashed electronic skittle and vocals calling all alien pets to keep watching the skies. Next time around the lads knelt with guitars raised to the electric maximus and delivered a mass of heatball fuzz. This evening they soundchecked for two hours in front of the incoming audience (outdoor gig), pissing off the already uptight promoters and crew with super-indeterminant blasts of synthi-shards and drum smacks to awaken the behemoth god Prometheus. It sounded nutso and awesome–“this should be their gig” we’d mutter every 15 minutes or so. Then they stopped and got ready to play. They returned to the stage and played one 12 minute rock n drop and then split. Huh? Go fig–when something like this happens I know the wannabe controllers of rock n roll surprise have a continuing uphill nightmare to contend with. Which of course makes it all a stone gas. I released a double-LP of MCIAA earlier this yr on Ecstatic Peace called Landscapes Of An Electric City/Hypnotic Spaces–available through our own mill outlet in Florence, Mass. if yr wanting to dig. (www.mycatisanalien.com; http://www.yod.com)

dateline Dresden, Germany 08 July:
COBRA KILLER are from Berlin. Two women: WILDEST GINA V. D’ORIO and KWIKEST ANNIKA TROST. They come out of the Digital Hardcore camp. And they come out swinging! Wine bottles, high heels, long leather pimp coats, glitter dust flaking off eyelashes to adhere to tear streaked cheeks. This ain’t no let’s destroy the scene vibe, this is destruction in all its celebrated collapse. Try pushing the right button on yr machine whilst yr red wine-in-paper-cup topples, maybe use yr nose or yr stockinged toe or yr ass which just happens to be slipping peekaboo out of yr ballet warmup–the one you wear anytime and all the time. Who created this noise hump? We were nailed by Cobra Killer. This is performance that only the full-blooded German lustlords n ladies can exhibit. Semi-drunken loop dancing and singing/chanting and hula-hoop mastery by a rather bountiful busted goddess of peace and deliverance. This is a right on band and they rock like absolutely no other. They have ingested the finest elements of Elvis, James Brown, Ari Up, Lydia Lunch, Sly Stone and Whitehouse and spend an amazing 35 minutes unleashing it in a personalized ritual of possession and exorcism. Theatrical concepts are utilized to keep it all on stage and within some sane atmosphere for the highly amused, if not aroused, audience. Any band that bids adieu to their audience by attempting to kiss them all and hold them to their sweet maiden breast is already better than the Beatles or Nirvana any day of the millennium. Dresden was flooded a week later to extraordinary levels. (www.cobra-killer.org)

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BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 1 (Oct. 2002)

first published in Arthur No. 1 (October, 2002)

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

The concept of this column is simple: to cast light on scenes, music, words and images that are ignored by the handmaidens of capitalist culture. Living people seem to be tired of gagging on the brackish pablum of the known. We would like to offer them access to new nooks. That is all. To start this first installment, here is some bottled screed tossed from the Sonic Youth tour bus.

The 1970s punk rock scene in NYC never paid heed to L.A. And London did not have a clue. There was one record store in 1978/79 NYC on 1st Avenue around 3rd Street that actually had copies of the first West Coast punk rock 7”s. I remember seeing the Dangerhouse 7″‘s of X and Black Randy and wondering why they were even there. They seemed to be from a distant world as opposed to the spotlight punk scenes of NYC and London. I was curious about their weirdness and I bought the X one. I had read how they were the main L.A. punk group who played in a graffiti-drenched dungeon in Hollywood called the Masque. And I bought the Black Randy one cuz the cover was so completely inane, w/ comic book panels referencing a bizarro Hollywood sex-joke juvenilia. It was a repartee I have only just gleaned. And that gleaning is thanks to We Got the Neutron Bomb (Three River Press/Random House) an oral history of the early L.A. punk scene, edited by noted L.A. punk impresario/historian Brendan Mullen. Brendan, a founder of the Masque, also helped Germs drummer Don Bolles edit and prepare Lexicon Devil (Feral House Press ) an oral history of Darby Crash and the Germs. We Got The Neutron Bomb, gaping holes and all, acts as an almost necessary precursive read to Lexicon Devil.

The X single struck me as interesting if only because it was so different than the Ramones/Heartbreakers crunge I heard in the NYC clubs. Its obvious “poetic” sploo was also quite odd in comparison to the St. Marks Church visions of Patti Smith, Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine. And it certainly wasn’t the sex bop of Blondie or the artschool geekage of Talking Heads. And it didn’t have the ground zero allure of primo London punk–Sex Pistols, X Ray Spex et al. The Black Randy 7″ made no sense whatsoever, ‘though the barking retardo chorus of “trouble at the cup! trouble at the cup!” had a genuine other planet punk rock sensibility.

That other planet was L.A. and the only images available of L.A. punk in NYC were from imported issues of Slash and Flipside, magazines found only at Sohozat on West Broadway between Canal and Grand St. (or sometimes at Revenge on 3rd Avenue just south of St. Marks Place) (or at Manic Panic right on St. Marks Place just west of 2nd Avenue). I suppose Bleeker Bob’s, then on Macdougal Street just south of 8th Street, would carry them as well. Bleeker Bob was dependable for carrying any 7″ from the nascent punk rock scene upon its initial availability and had a large collection of ‘zines. Unfortunately, all of these items were behind the counter and you had to brave a request to check any of them out, which would invariably mean that Bob himself would humiliate you w/ assholistic douchebaggery. Plus, there were usually repellant Who-collector clientele farting about the place. These dups would be aggressively collecting “anything on Stiff Records” and wearing Gen X and Joe Jackson badges while still secretly believing that Steely Dan were valid. Bluggh.

The images in the punk ‘zines of L.A. showed bands and fans, all dressed up in ‘77-era leather, bondage and PUNK regalia. This was a style identified w/ the U.K. and no one in NYC bought into it, knowing that it was an extreme and manipulated reaction to Richard Hell, the Ramones, Blondie, Wayne County, Mink Deville et al. To see an American city like L.A., and to a slightly more obscure (yet more typically urban) extent S.F., adopt this identity seemed dopey. At this time, downtown NYC had a developing post-punk community of artists and musicians exhibiting a new radical style of nihilism and producing sex/danger noise/vision. This was “no wave” and it was committed to destroying any strain of rock n roll still alive in punk. To the no wave, the new wave of punk rock was corny. Seeing, hearing and playing atonal guitar monotony in a Broome Street gallery was formidable and it was a formulative experience for my 18-year-old psyche. I’m glad to have been there, all the while thinking that L.A. was nothing but a sea of goofy punk hairdos that weren’t even of their own creation.

I’d see Sid and Stiv Bators skinking around St. Marks and would follow them at a careful distance, wondering how to tell them I was the guitar player Sid should be playing with. The fact that Sid was a heroin dog never really registered to me at the nefarious level it should have. Even though I had near proximity to his thereabouts at the time (as he was always at the same CBGB gigs etc.), the reality of me ever hooking up or communicating w/ him was completely farfetched. Plus, I was conflicted by an incident involving him slashing Patti Smith’s brother’s face w/ a broken beer bottle. But when Sid died it was a landmark event for all of us, and punk CHANGED right then and there. The ideals went into transition: Patti moved to Detroit and married/disappeared. Richard Hell went even more subterranean. The Ramones began to be taken for granted in their perfection. Johnny Rotten made the genius move of experimenting w/ dub-radics and Sid Vicious remained dead. London went dipshit w/ new wave, new romantic and some kind of pirate bullshit, but also had an onslaught of cool Rough Trade inspired art-school punk (Raincoats, Pop Group). NYC went beyond no wave into Bush Tetras/ESG/Eight Eyed Spy grey-scale rhythm music and serious noise composition (Glen Branca, UT, Rhys Chatham, Information). And California continued being punk (but also w/ its own buy-in to dipshit new wave, the examples of which are too wretched to list here). But L.A., by documented proof, particularly The Germs’ (G.I.) LP, X’s Los Angeles LP, the first SST and Dangerhouse label 7″s, the Circle Jerks Group Sex LP and the wild issues of Slash magazine, was also evincing an exciting creative energy identity, unlike the intellectual toe-sniffing of NYC. L.A. was punk rock. But punk rock was over, wasn’t it? The new hardcore kids, romping around Avenue A w/ the Black Flag bars and the Germs’ blue circle on their leather jackets, certainly did not agree. Nor did they care if anyone thought otherwise.

L.A. punk in 1978 was not an affront to a culture-clashed society in a Thatcher-strangled depression. It was a reaction to a mellow Eagles/Jackson Brown “L.A. Sound” and the suburban mom n dad nowhere zone of SoCal. And it was decidedly anti-hippie. Hippie had been the dominant youth culture vanguard for too long. Glam/glitter-rock had never threatened hippie hegemony. If it was seen as anything, it was as a somewhat sex-wild cultural adjunct to hippiedom. But PUNK ROCK, which spun obliquely out of glam/glitter, was hardly foreseen by the potted royalty of the hippie elite. Punk set itself on a crash course to puncture the self-satisfied bloat of the longhair paunches. The punk rock revolution destroyed hippie. From its smoking ruins emerged the sentient force of real rock and roll fun.

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“Thus Sprach Peatzches”: Ian Svenonius interviews Peaches (Arthur, 2002)

Originally published in Arthur No. 1 (October 2002)

Thus Sprach Peatzches
Live from a Berlin beergarden: it’s the crotchtastic techno-dynamo Peaches, on the phone with the intrepid Ian Svenonius.

She rescues rock ‘n’ roll from its doldrums and self referential morass; she lassoes in the lost tribes and constructs for them a common language. She builds an Ark for escape from the downpour of vengeful judgment on a rock world damned for its irrelevance—but unlike Noah, she doesn’t discriminate against homosexuals. She straddles paradox with legs stretched across the sea of contradiction; legs which emanate from the crotch emblazoned totemistically on her breakthrough underground hit punk rock disco album Teaches of Peaches. She is the ferocious rockin’ techno dynamo Peaches.

For those poor souls living under a rock, Peaches has led the way for the most exciting underground Rock N Roll trend going; the feminist hip-hop/techno/ Punk Rock melange which has captured the imagination of artists everywhere. Her album, pulsing at better discos everywhere, was composed and played entirely by her with the help of a Roland MC 505 Groovebox which she calls her ‘MC5.’

Peaches originates from Canada, a country stuck halfway between US commercial vulgarity and old world conservatism. While providing refuge for expatriate artists Rick James and Funkadelic during Vietnam, Toronto was too comfortable to spawn the insatiable rock n roll animals which haunted the desolate southern shores of Michigan. Why and how then was Peaches chosen to be the innovating vessel for ‘electro-clash,’ the marriage of forms which is being hailed as a rock n roll revolution?

Stan Lee theorizes: “Perhaps, in a freakish confluence of college radio signals, the music of the Stooges and DJ Assault were combined in a piece of crystalline mist which floated from Detroit across the frozen waste of Lake Erie. Maybe this bit of matter entered Peaches’ brain through her earhole and transformed her into the inspired, Frankenstein synthesis of the two encapsulated artists who would meld the primal urge of rock ’n’ roll with the new technology of software and itty bitty circuitry…”

Whatever the case, Peaches would soon boast autonomy through the fusion and mastery of these formerly opposed forms, but like a hybrid mutant, she would be stronger than either. Peaches wouldn’t work in the derivative manner of the usual rocker but neither would she be condemned to the computer coldness which would dog so many of her electro-enabled peers. Live, with her dynamism and assuredness, she came to resemble a young Tom Jones.

Peaches makes her home in Berlin. Appropriately, the city is a symbol for liberation and conquest. It stood for western decadence within Stalinist sparta; for metropolitan menshevism against Hitler’s bucolic Bavaria, for Spartacists and Dadaists in the midst of Prussian autocratic militancy. The gateway either to western decadence or to Slavic exoticism. The Berlinese tradition of resistance and conflict is woven within Peaches’ music but is now aimed against the repression and hypocrite morality of her bourgeois nemesis.

Rock and Techno. America and Europe. East and West. Past and Future. Peaches straddles these worlds and contradictions with ease and grace; a template for artistry, even a candidate for cloning; but woe/whoa to the scientist who attempts a scraping, for Peaches is a wildcat dynamo live, like perhaps nothing you’ve seen. I talked to Peaches from a biergarten in Berlin as she enjoyed a summer Wheat Beer with a bit of lemon. She sat with her proteges Electrocute enjoying a brief vacation from her fairy tale life of constant touring and festival performances.

I was concerned that she wasn’t capitalizing on her pioneer status within the “electro” movement which she’s done so much to instigate into being…With her killer debut Teaches already two years old, the attention deficit will forget their debt to her….remarkably, she doesn’t care.

Continue reading →

“Regarding Crop Circles” by Daniel Pinchbeck (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 12 (Sept. 2004)

Illustration by Arik Roper

“Here and Now” column by Daniel Pinchbeck

“Regarding Crop Circles…”

By the time you read this, the 2004 crop circle season will be over. Harvesters will have scooped up the fallen wheat and canola, as it lay swirled into inscrutable patterns. The symbols that attracted thousands to the verdant countryside of Wessex, in Southern England, will only exist as a set of astonishing images (to see this year’s patterns, visit http://www.cropcircleconnector.com, http://www.temporarytemples.co.uk and http://www.cropcircleresearch.com). The pictures will go into the archives and databases kept by the “croppies,” those devoted students of a phenomenon that has been resoundingly ridiculed by journalists and ignored by the masses. After all, the prevailing judgment offered by the media and the public is that the crop circles are a hoax, made by drunken farmers, bored teenagers, or unemployed artists. If this is the prevailing belief, then surely it must be the case. When is the mainstream media or mass popular opinion ever wrong?

Crop circles have appeared annually, in the UK and around the world, since the late 1970s. The patterns began as simple circles, but quickly started to complexify into formations such as “quintuplets,” four smaller circles arrayed around a single larger one. In the early 1990s, the crop circles moved to a new level, as hundreds of designs appeared each summer. One type of formation seemed to display a kind of abstract sign system unscrolling across hundreds of yards. In 1991, crop circles started to depict recognizable symbols from alchemy, fractal geometry, and various mystical traditions. Beginning at that time, hoaxers stepped forward declaring that they were the perpetrators of the phenomenon. Some of these groups—such as http://www.circlemakers.com—continue to claim responsibility, parlaying their skills in simulating formations into lucrative contracts with corporations and music video producers.

Through the rest of the 1990s and until today, the crop circles continued to evolve—and this took place in relative quiet. Much of the media coverage and popular attention dispersed after the phenomenon was officially labeled a con job. However, those who continued to follow the patterns were treated to ever-more elaborate and extraordinary configurations, using increasingly complex geometry. Averaging perhaps 100 configurations a year, the formations branched into Moebius Strips, toroids, DNA spirals, sunflower bursts, astronomical configurations indicating certain dates in the future, “Trees of Life,” futuristic iterations of the Yin-Yang symbol, various complex fractals, and “strange attractors.” The execution of these patterns—except for the obvious human-made attempts—has been persistently virtuosic.

The intellectual profile of the circlemakers was raised considerably by Gerald Hawkins, former chair of the astronomy department at Boston University and author of the influential book, Stonehenge Decoded. Hawkins began to study the geometry of the crop circles in 1990. He found that even seemingly simple formations contained hidden layers of intention and geometrical complexity. He analyzed a triplet of circles, in a pyramid shape, discovered on June 4, 1988, at Cheesefoot Head. He was able to draw three tangent lines that touched all three circles. These three lines formed an equilateral triangle. He drew a circle at the center of this triangle, and found that the ratio of the diameter of this central circle to the diameter of the three original circles was 4:3. He tested this out with circles of different sizes that allowed tangent lines to be drawn in the same way, and he found that the ratio remained constant. The formation had yielded a geometrical paradigm. Since Hawkins was well-schooled in Euclidean geometry, he went looking for this theorem in the pages of Euclid, and other later texts. It did not exist. The formation was displaying a new Euclidean paradigm that no other geometer had found.

Hawkins found three other original Euclidean paradigms in different crop circle patterns. From these four paradigms, he was able to generate a fifth Euclidean theorem that Euclid, and all later authors, had missed. This theorem involved concentric circles placed inside different types of triangles. Circles drawn within three isosceles triangles generated one typical formation; circles drawn within equilateral triangles generated the other. In one science journal and one magazine for math teachers, Hawkins offered a contest to see if anyone could derive the fifth general theorem from the four earlier ones. Nobody could. “One has to admire this sort of mind, let alone how it’s done or why it’s done,” remarked Hawkins, who also found diatonic ratios in many formations, suggesting the circlemakers take an interest in the musical scale.

Biophysicists have studied the biochemical effects on plants within the formations, discovering that the bent “nodes” on stalks of wheat and canola are elongated towards the center of a crop circle, as if by heat. Many observers have seen “balls of light” hovering over fields in which crop circles have appeared; some have witnessed the extraordinarily fast creation of patterns—within a few seconds—seemingly orchestrated by these “balls of light.” Eltjo Haselhoff, a Dutch physicist and laser engineer, collated data supporting the hypothesis that crop circles are created by single-point sources of electromagnetic radiation. He published the results of his investigations in Physiologia Plantarum, a peer-reviewed scientific journal on plant physiology and biophysics. In his excellent and levelheaded book The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles, Haselhoff writes:

This publication has an important consequence. It means that the hypothesis that “balls of light” are directly involved in the creation of (at least some of the) crop formations is no longer a hypothesis, but a scientifically proven and accepted fact. Moreover, it will remain such a fact until someone comes forward with an alternative explanation for the circularly symmetric node lengthening, or proofs that the analysis was erroneous. However, such a proof will not be an article in some daily newspaper or on the Internet. The discussions about node-lengthening effects in crop circles have clearly outgrown the level of the tabloids and entered the era of scientific communication by means of scientific literature. Consequently, the only comment that can be taken seriously at this point will have to be another publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

The Wessex area of Southern England is the epicenter of the crop circle phenomenon. It has attracted a group of thinkers and researchers over the last decades, who have studied the formations and contemplated them over a considerable period of time. Their perspective is that the phenomenon may be intentional, orchestrated by levels of nonterrestrial consciousness considerably more advanced than our own.

John Martineau is the Glastonbury-based publisher of Wooden Books, a wonderful series of slim volumes on astronomy, physics, Neolithic monuments, and other subjects. Martineau’s A Little Book of Coincidence illustrates the beautifully harmonic set of relations between planets orbiting our solar system—Earth and Venus, for instance, create perfect pentagonal geometry. Martineau became fascinated with cosmology and Neolithic stone circles while researching the crop formations in the early 1990s. He describes the crop circles as a “coincidence nexus.” He considers the crop formations to be great works of art: “If they are made by people, I want to study under them.”

Michael Glickman, a retired architect and industrial designer, is one of the most entertaining and articulate of the crop circle researchers. Glickman considers the glyphs to be “a series of profound, diverse, and complex communications of a substantial lightness and subtlety. They are using shape and geometry, number and form, to access fundamental parts of our being which have become culturally deactivated over centuries.”

The crop circle symbols point towards the possibility of reconciling modern scientific knowledge with esoteric wisdom traditions. In recent decades, a bridge has been built between these two modes of understanding—reflected in popular books such as The Tao of Physics, The Dancing Wu-Lei Masters, The Cosmic Serpent, Godel Escher Bach, Earth Ascending and so forth. Quantum physics seems to be a continuation of mysticism by other means. The crop circles repeatedly focus attention on astonishing correspondences between the fractals of modern chaos science and hermetic symbolism. To take one example, variations on the “Koch fractal” have appeared several times. The Koch fractal is the Star of David, with an endless series of triangles added on to each edge to create mini-stars in a self-recursive pattern with an infinitely expansive perimeter, resembling a snowflake. Although the perimeter of the Koch Fractal is infinite, the icon can be contained within a circle, demonstrating the esoteric principle that the infinite is contained within the finite. An extremely beautiful series of crop patterns have presented previously unknown variations on the yin-yang symbol, as a self-recursive shape in which negative and positive are held in dynamic balance.

I began to study the crop circles a few years ago, spending the last two summers in the region of England where most of them appear, tromping around fields and talking to farmers, croppie philosophers, and self-proclaimed hoaxers. My perspective on the crop circles is that they are a teaching on the nature of reality, geared specifically for the Western mind. This teaching is multi-levelled. Some of the formations are made by human hoaxers—although probably considerably fewer than one would think. However, you can never be certain – and this seems to be an intentional part of the teaching. If you take them seriously, the crop circles force you to confront indeterminacy and paradox, without rushing to make some deterministic judgement. In this way, they undermine the dualistic habits of the modern mind, which wants something to be “real” or “fake,” “true” or “false,” right away. Overcoming dualism is essential to the teaching of the Dzogchen tradition from Tibet. Chogyai Namkai Norbu writes in Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State:

Duality is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limits we have to try to overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political, or social conviction may condition us. We have to abandon such concepts as “enlightenment,” “the nature of the mind,” and so on, until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence.

It may be that the circlemakers are guiding us, gently but persistently, to achieve a new understanding of our world—if we could only be bothered to pay attention.

* * *

“Here and Now” columnist Daniel Pinchbeck is a founding editor of Open City Magazine and author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (Broadway Books). http://www.breakingopenthehead.com

Arik Moonhawk Roper lives in New York City with his cat and two roommates. He’s currently producing a book of graven images and psychonautical roadmaps designed to create true hallucinations through visual stimulation. http://www.arikroper.com

Scores For the City

Social Choreography and Imagination For Southern California

The Llano Del Rio working group’s “Scores For the City” is  available now, free!

This two sided guide maps locations that have supported oddball behavior in LA, including freeway puppet shows, civic dance pageants, riots, and the gatherings of witches. The front of the map is an archive of documents relating to four events. The backside is an exploration of the way non-conformist behavior in LA has helped shape collective consciousness.

There are two ways to get the guide for free if you live in LA County:

1) For county residents simply email us your postal address and we’ll drop one in the mail for you free (till postage $ runs out) 
Contact llanodelrio(at)gmail.com

2) Maps will be dropped of at the following and ever-expanding distribution nodes. Pick up a copy at these locations:
Pieter – Lincoln Heights
Experimental Meditation Station – Lincoln Heights
Machine Project – Echo Park
Materials and Applications – Silverlake
The Bicycle Kitchen – East Hollywood
Dance Garden LA – Atwater Village
Wombleton Records – Highland Park
Southern California Library – South LA
Sweat Womb- Downtown
The Public School – Chinatown
Chucos Justice Center – Inglewood
Mandrake Bar – Culver City
LAXART – Culver City
Highways Performance Space – Santa Monica
Curves – North Hollywood

“The Gelded Age” by Paul Cullum (Arthur, 2005)

Originally published in Arthur No. 14 (January 2005)

The Gelded Age
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

CAMERA OBSCURA is a regular column examining the world and its lesser trafficked tributaries, recesses and psychic fallout through the filters of film, video and DVD.

***

Discussed herein:

Bill Hicks Live
(featuring One Night Stand, Relentless and Revelations)
(Rykodisc DVD)

Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines
By Bill Hicks
(Soft Skull Press)

Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story
Directed by Woody Allen
(unreleased, 1972; available at UCLA Film Archives as part of a preserved PBS special, The Politics of Woody Allen)

* * *

“So that’s what this is about—a fucking robbery?”
—Bruce Willis in Die Hard

I know all the stages of Kuebler-Ross. I know that denial precedes anger, followed by bargaining, depression and acceptance. I know that conspiracy is a word applied by those in consensus to marginalize attempts to find solace in patterns.

But as I write this 100 hours after a collective pole-ax to the expectations of half this country and the whole world beyond, I’m wracked with the queasy suspicion that the bloodless coup dreaded by Sinclair Lewis in It Can’t Happen Here, Nathanael West in A Cool Million, George Orwell in 1984, Philip K. Dick in The Man in the High Castle or even John Milius in Red Dawn has happened on our watch, with our complicit ambivalence.

Already, blood is starting to seep through the hairline fractures in the body politic. Greg Palast estimates 110,000 spoiled votes in overwhelmingly Democratic precincts in Ohio, one of the last punch-card voting states, hobbled once again by hanging or pregnant chads. Heavily Hispanic areas of New Mexico, favored 2-to-1 for Kerry, are reporting a Bush landslide of as much as 68 percent. Exit polls in all the swing states are at variance with the final tally, in ways that uniformly favor the incumbent. Counties using Diebold’s optical scanners in Florida went overwhelmingly for Bush, regardless of party affiliation. In fact, Diebold and ES&S control 80 percent of the electronic voting machines in use, and their technical porousness and capacity for manipulation is legion; ES&S was established with crypto-right-wing Ahmanson family money, and the two brothers who founded it now sit atop both companies.

This doesn’t include the 155,000 provisional ballots in Ohio, which are overwhelmingly Democratic, since no one was challenging Republican voters, nor those driven away by all-day lines, bottle-necked by a lack of available voting machines. Reports are trickling in of door-to-door campaigns in black neighborhoods in Pennsylvania steering voters to the wrong polling stations, spreading disinformation, lying and intimidating. It’s only the 3 million-vote point spread which makes this seem inconceivable (1.5 million of it from Florida, province of the next Republican president). But this is Karl Rove in a nutshell: “The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack.” (To quote him quoting Napoleon.) In time, we may recognize this as the most massive electoral fraud in the history of the republic. In a month, we may be calf-birthing deep into Constitutional crisis.

Which means that all the gushing liberal guilt you read—the thumb-sucking, head-holding, hand-wringing, soul-searching—is wrong. It’s working backwards from a conclusion, which is what journalism does. It’s re-legislating the ’60s. It is Rove’s bandwagon theory taken macro: In the final moments of a race, people fall in line behind the most likely winner. Two or three more elections like this, and rationalists will begin rethinking the Enlightenment.

Except that there may not be any more election—at least not ones that will matter. Because the House is controlled by Tom DeLay, who is on record as saying that “Democrats are irrelevant”—shut out of committee meetings, starved out of floor time, ignored and forgotten. Because Bill Frist controls the Senate—put there in the White House-engineered putsch that sidelined Trent Lott as a racist and reactionary. Already, they’re floating the idea of “streamlining” Senate procedure: Striking down the cloture rule, which mandates a two-thirds vote to end a filibuster, or bypassing the seniority “tradition” in naming committee chairmanships. What happened to Arlen Specter after he counseled against trying to get anti-abortion judges through the Senate Judiciary Committee is just the opening salvo in the battle they’re fighting now: Near right vs. far. And without the filibuster, you won’t see a Democrat on C-Span for the next four years.

Republicans are up two seats in the House because of redistricting in Texas, a move they will roll out to all 50 state legislatures—particularly Democratic strongholds with Republican governors, like New York or California. Legislative districts reshaped as fingerprint whorls means they won’t even have to steal elections anymore. Suddenly, aberrations in the political landscape that seemed inexplicable at the time—the California recall, Patriot Act II, Rehnquist’s mysterious illness—seem strategically prescient in retrospect. “Look who they wanted to run against,” says Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. Howard Dean taps the progressive youth motherlode, and he’s impaled on his own scream. Dan Rather turns his folksy paranoia on his co-Texan demagogues, and he’s sandbagged by a reliable source. Tom Daschle publishes a book telling how they make the sausage, and they hunt him down to the ends of the earth, like Stalin did Trotsky.

Rove, the bastard son of a Mormon bounder, has spent his entire 57 years wanting to be Mark Hanna, the strategic visionary who insured Republican Party rule (with the exception of Wilson during WWI) from 1898 to the Depression 30 years later. Barbara Bush, far more the genetic cauldron of her son than his pusillanimous father, is the only public figure I know of to call Roosevelt a traitor to his class. Repealing the ’60s is just warming up for this crowd: They want to dismantle the New Deal—privatize Medicare, Social Security and public education; shift the tax burden downward; loot the treasury; strip the common from the wealth. Think Pottersville with carcinogens and gated communities.

And just as the Pentagon screened The Battle of Algiers as a training film for tracking insurgents, someone has broken down 1984 as a how-to manual, a mere two decades late. This finally explains the war: Why they jettisoned contingency plans, failed to quell looting, laid off the Baathist army, left arms caches unattended, ostracized Sunni clerics. The goal is not to win the war or the peace. The goal is to perpetuate conflict, a misdirection to mask the great gravy train robbery here at home. Already, the election is off the front pages, replaced by Tallulah. Deep Throat said that too: “Follow the money.”

Conservative enforcer Grover Norquist, in typically gracious fashion, said of the Democrats as the new permanent minority: “Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’re fixed then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don’t go around peeing on the furniture and such.” (This is the man who gave us “Bipartisanship is date rape.”)

Welcome to the Gelded Age.

Laff Riot

“You have a sense of humor. I’m in favor of jokes. They have a political value. They are a release for the cowardly and the impotent.”
—Graham Greene, The Comedians

The Gilded Age—the first one—was coined by Mark Twain and incubated the likes of Will Rogers, muckraking, Yellow Journalism and the Progressive Movement to begin with. Laughing in the maw of disconsolate fear is an American institution, albeit a lonely one. Lenny Bruce comes to mind, delivered to the cool respite of bathroom tile. Mort Sahl, finally barking himself inside-out. Garry Trudeau, whose Tanner ’88 (currently revived and updated on the Sundance Channel) has much improved with time, and whose script Zoo Plane, on the Washington press corps, is once again relevant. You won’t find them on stamps, and a quarter-century of Saturday Night Live’s loutish corporate apologia would indicate otherwise, but there are comedy heroes and martyrs out there. And at the top of the list is Bill Hicks.

Raised a strict fundamentalist in Houston and then Austin, Texas, Hicks was the architect of the angry liberal persona eventually inherited by Dennis Leary, Dennis Miller (briefly), Bill Maher and, most notably, Chris Rock. (“It’s weird, those are the guys I really miss,” Rock told me once in an interview, remembering their days together at Catch a Rising Star in New York.) Until his death in 1992 of pancreatic cancer, Hicks remained resolutely apoplectic over flag-wavers, Bible-thumpers, ad weasels, marketeers, television, government malfeasance and the first Gulf War (“There never was a war. A war is where two armies are fighting.”). This DVD collects his half-hour standup from HBO’s One-Night Stand, his breakout 1991 performance at the Montreal Comedy Festival (Relentless) and Revelations, his crowning performance at London’s Dominion Theater, plus an excellent Channel 4 documentary titled It’s Just a Ride. In addition, Soft Skull Press has published Love All the People, a collection of interviews, performance transcripts (many of them available as bootlegs), the John Lahr New Yorker profile which chronicled his expulsion from the David Letterman show (and Hicks’s 31-page cri de coeur to Lahr detailing the specifics) and Lahr’s extended foreword. They’re both great. Buy them. Tell others.

Here’s Hicks on the value of drugs, and how he closed his Montreal show:

“How about a positive LSD story, just once. That would be newsworthy, don’t you think? ‘Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively; there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”

Another rarefied example of political humor is the little-seen Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story, written and directed by Woody Allen, Hicks’s acknowledged main influence. A parody of the CBS series Men of Crisis (as well as possibly the 1972 Richard Leacock Cuban Missile Crisis documentary Crisis), this half-hour short, shot in 1972 in four days for WNET in New York, mixes the documentary format of Take the Money and Run with the newsreel gags of Zelig to profile a Nixon advisor—a Kissinger wolf by way of John Dean nebbish—given to goofy rationalizations (“We decided to bomb Laos for a very strategic reason—we were not happy with the way it was spelled.”). Louise Lasser is on hand as his first wife, as is a painfully fresh-faced Diane Keaton to ridicule his sexual prowess. In the wraparound WNET studio interview, broadcast under the ironic title The Politics of Woody Allen, Allen rejects the mantle of activist comic. “My personal feelings don’t enter into this, they’re so hostile,” he says. But that’s not to say he is without valid political instincts:

“The good cartoons,” he says, “are where mice beat the hell out of cats. I like that.”

* * *

DVDs/videos courtesy of Cinefile, the official video store of Arthur. Contact Cinefile at (310) 312-8836 or http://www.cinefilevideo.com.

“The Concrete Wilderness” by Paul Cullum (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 13 (November 2004)

The Concrete Wilderness
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

CAMERA OBSCURA is a regular column examining the world and its lesser trafficked tributaries, recesses and psychic fallout through the filters of film, video and DVD.

* * *
Discussed herein:

Medium Cool (1969)
Directed by Haskell Wexler
(Paramount Home Video)

Look Out, Haskell, It’s Real (2001)
Directed by Paul Cronin
(www.thestickingplace.com)

Tell Them Who You Are (2004)
Directed by Mark Wexler
(currently awaiting distribution)

Soldiers Pay (2004)
Directed by David O. Russell, Tricia Regan and Juan Carlos Zaldivar
(DVD extra with Uncovered: The War on Iraq, directed by Robert Greenwald, available through http://www.cinemalibrestudio.com).

* * *

“This is a potential throw of the dice that could bring the media on our heads and cut the Democratic Party in half; my view is that we would have by far the larger half.” —Speechwriter Pat Buchanan in an internal 1972 White House memo advocating confrontation as policy

In these last dark days before November, as we count down to occupation or deliverance, rage or terror, the mind reclaimed or compulsory reeducation from the soles of the feet up, one film lights our way clear. In 1968, John Wayne directed The Green Berets, which famously ends on the beach at Da Nang with the sun setting in the east—a special effect of such audacity that it rivals the scripted ways we’ve choreographed combat ever since. Superman could sooner circle the earth and turn back time.

But that’s not the film I’m thinking of. I am thinking of its polar opposite.

In 1968, Haskell Wexler took his reputation as A-list cinematographer, respected documentarian, verité pathfinder, his Oscar for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and his good-faith line of credit at the studios and rolled them all on one admitted act of madness. Hired to direct a film version of the novel The Concrete Wilderness by the inmates running the institution at Paramount—Peter Bart, Robert Evans and Charlie Bluhdorn—Wexler wrote a script, drew up a budget, hired a cast and then, without telling anybody, junked it all to make the movie he wanted. So instead of a young boy cultivating pigeons in Central Park, we have Robert Forster playing a news cameraman oblivious to his role in the news around him, documenting the pigeons drawn to Lincoln Park in Chicago in August, 1968—the ones who would justify the police state being advocated inside the Democratic Convention hall to clamp down the era. In the process, Wexler managed to capture the one battle royale at the crest of the culture war on 35mm film. With the Clinton brain trust (Carville, Begala) now steering Kerry to port, highlighting the war hero-turned-agitator, and with the Reagan brain trust (Peggy Noonan, Michael Deaver, possibly Lyn Nofziger) reportedly guiding Bush to starboard, with its “Swift Boat Veterans” and “Hanoi Jane” alarmism, that war is still being fought today.

What paralyzes film as a medium of topicality is that it is automatically at least three years past its sell-by date by the time you see it—the time it takes a script to gestate and gel, executives to deliberate, actors to commit, the big trucks to roll, months of editorial synthesis and the media to be alerted. You’d have to look to Soderbergh and Erin Brockovich or Traffic, or before that David O. Russell’s still underrated Three Kings, nominally about the first Gulf War, to find studio directors willing to engage the topical issues of the day. If conflict is the crux of character, and the world today stoked with conflict to burn, no wonder so many four-wheel-drive studio vehicles wind up rusted and abandoned, axle-deep in mud.

Medium Cool remains the one narrative feature which proves the exception: Conceived in January during the Tet Offensive, it was constantly deflecting off the times throughout production. As such, it marks a kind of travelogue of the ‘60s: Lyndon Johnson declined the nomination in March, throwing the August convention into free-for-all. Martin Luther King is shot in April, the ghettoes burn and Forster and soundman Peter Bonerz (later of The Bob Newhart Show) are sent to “Resurrection City,” the tent city on the Washington Mall housing the remnants of King’s Poor People’s March, or to debrief black activists in their Chicago apartment. Campaign workers are interviewed outside Kennedy headquarters; when Robert Kennedy is assassinated a month later, the film recreates the interior of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen where he was shot (off the line, “So it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there”) and sends its fake news crew to the actual funeral. We get probably the first discussion of the Kennedy assassination (the first one) in a Hollywood film, and certainly the first mention of the dangers of artificial sweeteners.

Much of this context is to be found in a fine companion piece inexplicably left off the DVD—Paul Cronin’s Look Out Haskell, It’s Real: The Making of ‘Medium Cool’, a 55-minute documentary currently screening on the Sundance Channel. Cronin has contributed to books on Cassavetes and Herzog and made films on Alexander Mackendrick, the director of The Sweet Smell of Success, and Amos Vogel, founder of New York’s Cinema 16. Here, a cavalcade of ’60s action figures sit for interviews—Studs Terkel (listed in Medium Cool’s credits as “Our Man in Chicago”), SDS activist-turned-author Todd Gitlin, Chicago 7 lawyer Leonard Weinglass—or are visible in outtakes: Allen Ginsberg wanders through the frame in Lincoln Park; Jesse Jackson stands atop a car in D.C., fist raised.

Buried beneath Medium Cool’s breakneck speed and ruthless experimentalism are any number of lean-to set pieces that could have been—and sometimes were—movies in themselves Buried beneath Medium Cool’s breakneck speed and ruthless experimentalism are any number of lean-to set pieces that could have been—and sometimes were—movies in themselves (last-minute floor passes to the convention hall were arranged by Warren Beatty, and similar shots found their way into The Parallax View; a subplot of a TV station forwarding demonstration footage to the police and FBI is basically the dramatic engine of Under Fire, relocated to El Salvador).

But it was the Chicago riots that earn the film its purple heart. In the face of Mayor Daley’s mandate to police to “Clear the fuckers out of the city,” and armed with hipster recon from producer Jonathan Haze (Seymour in the original Little Shop of Horrors), who was partying with the future Chicago 7 every night, Wexler put his first-time actress, Verna Bloom (Dean Wormer’s wife in Animal House), literally in harm’s way—in a manner that makes Herzog seem restrained. At the very moment that Russian tanks were rolling through Prague, we can experience U.S. armored personnel carriers and Jeeps mounted with fully-loaded 50-caliber machine guns subjugating the Windy City and hippies in football helmets piling up park benches, medics at the ready. Chants of “Pigs eat shit” and “Pigs are whores” are intercut with a cop clubbing a protester, shouting, “You stinking commie!” (giving a whole new cluster of meanings to Carl Sandburg’s “hog butcher of the world”). And through it all snakes Bloom in a bright yellow dress, as incongruous in her surroundings as the little girl in red in the otherwise black-and-white Schindler’s List. In the aftermath, we see the carnage in real time, while a disembodied woman’s voice wails on the soundtrack, “You motherfuckers!” Among the victims are Wexler himself, his eyes being flushed out with water, debilitated by a tear gas canister fired point blank at the camera.

Yet for all its celebrated verité, the film is awash in Godard. A poster of Belmondo from Breathless hangs over Forster’s fireplace; the bookended car crashes are airlifted straight out of Weekend; and the final shot is Wexler himself, who turns the camera on the audience—the tracking shot that closes Contempt, superimposed over the old Paramount newsreels—to a chant of “The whole world is watching.” Forster’s character is named John Cassolaris as a concession to John Cassavetes, who was originally slated to play the part under his own name, and Bloom’s character can be glimpsed in the opening cocktail party scene, an hour before she is introduced (she precedes the line “beaten to death by a mob”). And a death is foretold on the radio minutes before it occurs.

This extends to the line that gives the documentary its title—“Look out, Haskell—it’s real!”—which appears before the CS canister goes off in their face. It was, by Wexler’s own admission, added in post-production, since war zone conditions prevented them from shooting synch sound. And the speaker of that line? Haskell’s son Mark Wexler, who has just directed a reportedly irascible portrait of his father called Tell Them Who You Are, in the fashion of Aiyana Elliott’s The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack, so new that it has only shown twice at the Toronto Film Festival (where Roger Ebert raved about it). This is the Haskell Wexler who was fired from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Conversation, who famously clashed with Michael Moore on Canadian Bacon and who risked industry condemnation by interviewing the Weathermen in Underground, which was subpoenaed by the FBI, and following Jane Fonda to North Vietnam to shoot Introduction to the Enemy (he also joined her for both Coming Home and Klute, for which he won his second Oscar). Can’t wait to see it.

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And where are the cinematic rabblerousers of our own day? Well, on the verge of releasing I Heart Huckabee’s, his first film in five years, Three Kings director David O. Russell has taken the occasion of Warner’s planned re-release of his 1999 film to make a half-hour documentary on Iraq, The Sequel.

Soldiers Pay (declarative, not possessive), co-directed with Tricia Regan and Juan Carlos Zaldivar, catches up with Three Kings bit players, real-life Kelly’s Heroes, armchair Ottomans and fruit-salad generals who somehow got sucked into Operation Desert Nam. Between the water-rationed Marines describing Haliburton mercenaries who pull down $300K, or supply sergeants out “requisitioning” computers to play videogames on, we get the occasional 1,000-word picture, like a khaki-clad warrior squatting next to graffiti that reads: “Ha Ha—Our God’s Better Than Your God.”

When Warner’s caved to political pressure and scrapped the whole thing, microdistributor Cinema Libre stepped in and offered to piggyback the featurette onto Part 3 of Robert Greenwald’s Anti-Bush Tetralogy, Uncovered: The War in Iraq (Unprecedented and Outfoxed are on DVD; next up is Unconstitutional, on the Patriot Act). Meanwhile, as a land bridge linking the two (films and wars), consider this scene from a New York Times profile that ran September 12, 1999, two years before you know what:

“After listening to Mr. Bush’s remarks to the Hollywood crowd, Mr. Russell decided to tell him that Three Kings would be coming out just before the primaries and did not reflect favorably on his father’s leadership in the Gulf War. ‘You could see this look of uncomprehending concern and panic wash over his face,’ Mr. Russell recalls. Mr. Bush again seemed to be studying Mr. Russell’s clothes. ‘And then he immediately snapped into Presidential mode, and said, ‘Well, am I going to have to go finish the job?’”

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DVDs/videos courtesy of Cinefile, the official video store of Arthur. Contact Cinefile at (310) 312-8836 or http://www.cinefilevideo.com.