Book Review: Flickering Light: A History of Neon

Flickering Light:

A History of Neon

by Christoph Ribbat

      A century ago, there was nothing that screamed out “modernism” or “high tech” more than neon lights. Even so, there hasn’t been a lot of research done into the way neon impacted culture. A technology that effected urban life, advertising, pop culture, art, and shifts in historical social attitudes deserves some study. The German author and scholar of American society Christoph Ribbat steps into this neglected space in his short work Flickering Light: A History of Neon.

The element neon is one of the noble gases. When charged with electricity it emits a magical glowing blue hue that is both bright in a way that commands attention and soft on the eye. This proprty of the gas was discovered by accident in a laboratory circa the turn of the 20^th century. By trapping it inside a transparent glass tube, it is contained and molded into the any shape desired by the artisan. The name of “neon” got attached to the technology of neon lights even though neon is only one of the gases used in them. Possibly this is because “neon” is rooted in the Greek “neo” which means new, connotating a leap into a futuristic society. Both the name and the appearance of neon lights were mind blowing to a world only just emerging from the 19^th century where electricity was scarce and rarely ever used. Despite the large scale industrialization of the modern world, the manufacturing of neon lights was a craft and an art form. The glass tubes were shaped by individual glass blowers whose hands and mouths were their main instruments. Each neon sign was, therefore, customized and unique with no mass production of any singular design.

Ribbat’s account of the history of neon lighting is mostly social though with less emphasis on its technical aspects. One of the interesting parts of the book is his explanation of the relationship between neon signs and big industrial corporations. Businessmen got a hold of it before anyone else could, therefore its primary purpose was advertising. America’s largest city centers, like New York and Chicago, were transformed into otherworldly atmospheres immersed in the glowing light. Times Square drew even more visitors than usual who came just to see the spectacle. Eventually Las Vegas got the same treatment after World War II and the technology spread overseas as well to major urban sources of power like Berlin, Moscow, and Tokyo. But art critics, sociologists, and architects decried neon for turning American appetites towards cheap, simplistic entertainment that dazzled the eyes rather than purveying meaning or deeper reflection. Mostly they hated it because it was the primary medium of advertising, the cheap commodification and commercialization of modern life.

After underestimating the aesthetic appeal of the neon glow after sunset, it fell out of style as it spread out of city centers and into the ghettos, the working class neighborhoods, roadside billboards, and rural towns. It went from being urban chic to low class advertising for cheap restaurants, dive bars, strip clubs, liquor stores, and adult video arcades. By the time World War II ended, the new generaton had forgotten the downmarket trend of neon lights and it came back into vogue for a stretch then declined again for being tacky and tasteless as it had once before. That is when postmodern artists discovered its value for visual stimulation.

The passages of this book covering the history of neon lights are the best parts. The passages dealing with other peripheral but related topics are less impressive. Ribbat’s concerns are with the downtrodden members of society or the people who live beneath the neon lights rather than the people of higher social standing who live behind or above them, often owning them. This means an examination of the poor, the prostitutes, the petty criminals, the drug addicts, and those living on the rougher side of life. This is an interesting subject to explore, but the problem is that Ribbat barely draws a connection between neon and the unfortunate lives these people have. Even worse, he derives all his information from works of literature rather than citing studies done by the sociologists of those times. Ribbat is obviously preoccupied with the aesthetics of neon, but by using works of fiction as a secondary source of information, however good they might be, makes these passages feel disjointed from the main theme of the book. Other sections of the book suffer in similar ways when Ribbat examines the use of neon as metaphor in poetry and song lyrics as well as props in movies. He gets a little too caught up in attempting to define the meaning of neon rather than treating neon as a medium that means little more than the visual impression it makes. Neon lights do act as signifiers of class status packed with meaning, but Ribbat’s analysis is not rigorous or methodical enough to make this clear. He does, however, include a good chapter on the use of neon lights in the visual arts starting in the 1960s.

Flickering Lights: A History of Neon has some chapters that are fascinating and some that aren’t. The best parts of the book do make it worth reading. As I finished, I was left with two thoughts. One is the sense of nostalgia that makes me wish to go back in time to see Times Square and Las Vegas when they were awash in a sea of flickering, glowing, buzzing neon. Those times when artistic creativity, industry, and advertising met in such a unique fashion are long gone and will never come back, at least not in that form. The other thought was how neon signs predated and predicted the gif files we now see on the internet. Designed to turn on and off, making sequential movements, like a flower blossoming and opening its petals or a race horse jumping over a hurdle, repeated endlessly in repetitive loops until someone cuts the power, the best and most elaborate neon signs had a similar visual impact to gifs which we now see on screens in advertising and social media posts. The biggest difference is the sheer, enormous size of neon signs that sometimes covered entire sides of buildings or extended upwards several stories into the sky. I do think society worked better when we were looking outward and up rather than fixating on a small screen right in front of our faces. The former implies growth and expansion while the latter implies shallowness, alienation, and narrow mindedness. Let’s bring those flickering lights back again.

 

Book Review: The Rajneesh Chronicles by Win McCormack

The Rajneesh Chronicles

by Win McCormack

     The USA had a lot going on in the 1960s and 1970s. Aside from the social changes initiated by the hippy counter culture and the New Left, American political hegemony and newly relaxed immigration restrictions resulted in an influx of exotic ideas, lifestyles, and practices. One result of this was the Cult Scare of the 1970s. Disillusioned with failed utopian dreams and an unfulfilled desire for structure and meaning, a lot of counter culturalists turned to new religious movements like the Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and The Family International. Traditional Christianity had proven to be dull and lifeless and people craved something new to reflect their changing values. But not all was well in cult land. Within one decade there were the Manson Family murders and the mass suicides of the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. Some high profile cults were accused of brainwashing, kidnapping, and dishonestly appropriating people’s money. The big Cult Scare was upon us. Within only a couple years after the Jonestown massacre, a new cult arrived on the scene and red flags were flying all over the place. They were the devotees of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their leader’s intentions were no more noble than the aforementioned scoundrels. Win McCormack’s The Rajneesh Chronicles is a colleciton of magazine articles written contemporaneously to Rajneesh’s invasion and his eventual expulsion from America. 

     This book is somewhat annoying from the start. It begins with a timeline of events in the rise and fall of the cult. Reading lists like this can rarely be fun, especially when you know nothing about the people involved. It just is not an engaging way of telling a story. But it is necessary since the magazine articles that make up the bulk of the book do not run in chronological order. Reading them on their own would be messy and confusing without the timeline to guide you. 

     But anyways, the story starts at a controversial ashram in Pune. India where Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh attracted followers, mostly naive Westerners with lots of money, where he twisted standard Eastern practices like yoga and meditation to his own ends. Sexual orgies and other darker things were a large part of what went on. After having trouble with the Indian government over tax fraud, Rajneesh moved to America where his cult took over the isolated farming town of Antelope, Oregon and began building their own city called Rajneeshpuram. Needless to say, the people of Antelope didn’t take too well to the orange-clad so-called sanyasins, especially since they outnumbered the locals and eventually took over the city council and school board. The passages on the politics of Rajneesh are somewhat muddled and incomplete so if this part of the story is truly interesting to you, you might want to look to a better source for information. 

     Rajneesh himself mostly disappears from the articles after his arrival in America. He decides to take a vow of silence and appoints the sociopath Ma Anand Sheela to run the Rajneeshpuram cult. Narcissistic, machiavellian, and cruel, she runs the commune’s affairs like a true tyrant and eventually gets arrested for attempting to poison a city called The Dalles by putting salmonella in restaurant salad bars and the water reservoirs. 

     The best parts of this book detail the lifestyle and practices of the cult. Characteristics that mark Rajneeshpuram out as a typical cult include sleep deprivation, information control, unpaid and intensive physical labor, use of trances and altered states of consciousness, control over sexual behavior and diet, and, most importantly, infallible leadership. Encounter therapy groups involving physical violence, verbal abuse, sexual assault, and psychological trauma were used to break down members’ egos thereby dismantling their sense of individuality and the ability to think for themselves. Ecstatic trances involving yoga and dancing were used to facilitate an emotional bond with the larger group. Rampantly promiscuous sex was used to prevent individuals from forming intimate friendships or romantic relationships. Long work hours, sleep deprivation, and poor diet were used to make people too weak to think clearly or rebel. The questioning of leadership led to harsh punishments. They even built their own private crematorium to dispose of dead bodies due to the number of people dying from exhaustion or other causes that have never been revealed. Meanwhile, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela lived high on the hog with expensive jewelry, luxurious houses, a massive fleet of Rolls Royces, and frequent steak dinners at expensive restaurants in places nearby. It was an open secret that Bhagwan’s taste in girls was similar to that of Jeffrey Epstein’s. 

     The last section of the book backtracks to 1980 when the Rajneeshees first arrived on the shores of California where they infiltrated and took over a new age church. Considering the millions of dollars Rajneesh had brought over from India, you might wonder why they felt a desire to do such a thing. They had enough money to buy their own land and build their own church without having to dispossess anybody of their own space. But the beach-front chuch had luxurious grounds and beautiful architecture as well as a senile minister who had fallen in with Rajneesh while traveling in India. More importantly, the sanyasins used this as a test run for later taking over the town of Antelope. While this is an important part of the Rajneesh story, the internal affairs of a new age church’s board of directors is not exciting to read about. It is made worse because the author writes as if he can’t wait to finish writing so he can go home and do something more exciting like mowing the lawn or watching TV. 

     In fact, most of the writing in this book is dull. The story of this dangerous cult that fell apart before its leaders got chased out of America is interesting enough on its own to keep a reader engaged. But the writing is dry and lifeless. A fascinating story gets turned into a work of journalistic mediocrity. It’s like listening to somebody making a speech in an unemotional, dead monotone. Aside from that problem, it would have been nice to learn more about the biographies of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela since almost nothing about their lives previous to the cult is mentioned. 

     The Rajneesh Chronciles is one of those books where the story is good enough to stand on its own  while the delivery is subpar enough to make reading it a chore. Anyhow, most reasonable people would consider Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela to be grifters, but maybe they really did understand the Truth with a capital T. That Truth has nothing to do with spiritual enlightenment and everything to do with an understanding of human nature and the world we live in. The Truth is that a vast number of people are suckers and sheep and are easily led around by people who take advantage of them out of pure selfishness. Gurus like Rajneesh are enlightened enough to know that these people will gladly give away their money and their freedom of mind if it means access to unlimited sex and religious experience. When the infallible teacher arrives with a taste of what it is they want, they get trapped and the ones doing the trapping don’t have their best interests in mind. Freedom means being neither predator nor prey. Maybe that is the ultimate form of enlightenment. 

     

 

Book Review: Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational by Michael Shermer

Conspiracy:

Why the Rational Believe the Irrational

by Michael Shermer

      Did you know that the September 11 hijackers were given visas upon arrival by high level CIA agents? And nobody knows where Robert F. Kennedy was on the day John F. Kennedy got shot. Hilary Clinton uses email to send coded messages about trafficking children through a pizzeria in Washington D.C. The moon landing was a hoax. Global warming is a hoax. The Jews are using space lasers to cause global warming to turn the public against the oil companies. Osama bin Laden was not a real person; he was an actor who lives in Miami. The airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11 were a hologram. Bigfoot is a man who escaped from the CIA’s MKUltra mind control program and the authorities are suppressing the truth by telling us he is only a legend. Princess Di was assassinated. Elvis Presley is still alive; people have seen him hitchhiking and if you rearrange the letters of his name it spells “lives”.

Sooner or later we all hear ideas like these and most of us roll our eyes and think ”How could anybody be stupid enough to believe this nonsense? They must be mentally ill.” Suppose somebody tells you that people who believe in conspiracy theories are neighter stupid nor insane and suppose that person is also a scientist and journalist with a background in psychology. The conspiracy theorists would invariably say that he is one of THEM and is trying to conceal the actual truth that the secret cabal that runs the world doesn’t want you to know. The rationalists, however, would would want to hear how he explains the psychology of conspiracy theorists and that is what we get in Michael Shermer’s Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.

There is a difference between conspiracies and conspiracy theories. Conspiracies involve two or more people plotting to use deceit or dishonesty for a specific purpose which mostly involves making money or forcing some kind of political change. Shermer rightly points out that conspiracies are happening all the time and all around us. Two men making plans to rob a bank are conspiracists. It was a conspiracy when Donald Trump’s supporters spread disinformation to convince people that the 2020 election was stolen. A conspiracy theory, on the other hand, is a story told to explain inconsistencies or in real events. People make connections between things that aren’t connected or they fill in information gaps with fantasies. Sometimes contradictory accounts of events cause speculation that the official story as told by the media is a deception meant to suppress what is really going on. To be honest, there really are times when the media does that, sometimes it’s deliberate and sometimes it isn’t.

Michael Shermer doesn’t save the best for last. The most important and interesting part of the book where he examines the reasons why people believe in conspiracy theories is at the front. He draws on social and evolutionary psychology as well as the scientific method to make his case. Conspiracy theories are a form of backwards rationalization. The scientific method demands that we gather evidence and use it to draw a conclusion that explains the evidence. That conclusion is then subject to tests of veracity by other scientists. It isn’t a perfect system but it is the best we’ve got at this time. Conspiracy theorists start with a claim and then seek out or fabricated evidence to prove it. If the evidence doesn’t support the claim or legitimate counter-evidence is provided, the conspiracy theorists don’t abandon the claim or adjust it to fit their evidence as they should. Instead they defend the claim and seek out more evidence to support it. No matter how many times they get disproven they will never abandon the faulty claim.

Shermer points out that the human mind did not evolve to perceive reality and instead evolved for survival in a potentially hostile environment. This means our ability to rationalize is intact, but it is inaccurate and distorted. It is like saying a car with a damaged engine is still a car and it is a car that drives but it doesn’t drive as well as it should. Conspiracy theories are a form of rationality, but they are rational in a way that maximizes our fight or flight response rather than giving us a clear perception of reality. We don’t live in the jungle anymore and we don’t need those survival instincts like we once did. Learning to think scientifically, however, does not guarantee that we won’t draw false conclusions or believe in things that aren’t true, but it does increase our chances of reaching realistic conclusions.

Shermer outlines three main reasons people believe in conspiracy theories in the most interesting section of this book. One has to do with tribalism and group identity. When people think of belonging to a group as more important than individualism or truth, they tend to say they believe in things they don’t really believe. A lot of MAGA supporters don’t actually believe that the election in 2020 was stolen, but they say they do because they fear being ostracized by their group. Likewise, a lot of Nazis in Weimar, Germany did not believe the Jews were part of a plot to conquer the world, but they agreed to it because they valued membership in the Nazi party more than they valued truth. There is an overwhelming amount of sociological data that supports this thesis epecially regarding religious or political affiliation.

Another further problem is proxy conspiracy theories. A person who doesn’t trust the government is more likely to believe that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA, Are 51 is secretly hiding UFOs, or that the Bush administrated orchestrated the September 11 terrorist attacks. The conspiracy theory acts as a localized substitute for the broad belief that the government is deceitful and can’t be trusted. Confirmation bias plays a large role in this error of rationality, especially since a person who believes one conspiracy theory is more likely to believe other conspiracy theories, specifically the ones that pertain to their particular preoccupations. Of course, most people would agree that our government is deceitful and corrupt but most of these same people are not conspiracy theorists. But what this proves is that most people have the potential to fall into the rabbit hole of irrational thinking. In fact even the most rational and logical among us probably already have at some point in their lives. No one is immune from believing in conspiracy theories.

Yet another explanation for conspiracy theories comes from evolutionary psychology in the form of constructive paranoia. During early periods of evolution, the human mind adapted to be overly cautious about encountering danger. It was better to be paranoid by mistakenly thinking a boulder was a grizzly bear than to not be paranoid and think a grizzly bear is a boulder. Running away from a boulder is harmless while running away from a bear can save your life so it better to err on the side of caution. In the modern world, people believe chemtrails are being used to brainwash us, black helicopters are spying on us, vaccines are being used to inject tracking devices into our bodies, and communists are poisoning our drinking water with fluoride. All of these theories are demonstrably false. Besides, why use black helicopters to spy on people when we have the internet that does a more efficient job at a much lower cost? Data mining isn’t even kept secret; tech companies openly admit to surveilling us. But the issue here is that conspiracy theories can acts as a defense against perceived dangers whether those dangers are real or fantasy. We live in a world full of dangers and your average person can’t always tell which ones are true existential threats. That is why people become paranoid over things like immigrants, unfamiliar religions, or new technologies.

Other topics covered in this book are the personality types of conspiracy theorists (usually people who feel alienated from the power structure), the history of conspiracy theories, the history of real conspiracies, and how to tell the difference between conspiracies and conspiracy theories. One thing to remember here is that the more people who are involved in a conspiracy, the less likely it is to be successful and likewise the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is the less likely it is to be true. Occam’s Razor is one of the greatest tools we have for the evaluation of reality. Furthermore, humans are story tellers and we use narratives to make sense of the world. Science and rationality are complex, abstract, and boring for most people so they fall back on the default mentality of story telling to make sense of things. If an explanation sounds like a mythology, a fairy tale, or a Hollywood movie, it is probably a conspiracy theory and not true. I would go as far as to say that conspiracy theories are urban legends, a modern form of mythology or folklore. People once used the invisible world of supernatural creatures to explain the workings of a world they didn’t understand; now people invent stories about the people in power, working secretly behind the scenes, for the same purpose. Religious people may be more susceptible to conspiracy theories than the rest of us. Anomalies get explained, confusions get cleared up, and that is done in a way that obscures reality and truth or ignores it completely.

As stated earlier, the initial chapters are the most interesting and useful. The case studies and histories are also worth reading. My only problem with the early chapters is that if you are familiar with Michael Shermer through his podcasts, columns in Scientific American, his Ted Talks and TV appearances, or his work as editor in chief of Skeptic magazine, there isn’t anything new to be found here. Otherwise the chapter on how to talk to conspiracy theorists is weak. It reads like the kind of advice you find in pop psychology self-help books like How to Win Friends and Influence People and doesn’t actually offer any helpful advice. I tend to avoid talking to conspiracy theorists anyways because it always ends up being a waste of mental energy. And while I can accept Shermer’s claim that conspiracy theorists are sane and rational people, the idea does have its limitations. When I hear from people that believe the world’s events are controlled by the Illuminati, the Zionist Occupied Government, the New World Order, or the Bilderberg Group who are actually shape shifting lizards from outer space or that the deceased John F. Kennedy Jr. will appear on stage at a Rolling Stones concert and announce that Donald Trump has been secretly reinstated as president according to a secret clause in the 25^th amendment to the Constitution, I have to wonder if the limits of sanity and rationality have been crossed. Who would be stupid enough to believe these things? But as a book, it is well laid out and organized. It is clear in its claims and supporting evidence and works as a solid, comprehensive guide to the subject matter. As such, it’s probably better for someone who is new to this field of study since it is so accessible to the general readier.

Conspiracy is a good book and it definitely needs to be more widely read, especially in this day and age when the internet is being used to spread disinformation at an alarming rate. And for those who think that conspiracy theories are harmless, think again. A tradition of anti-Semitism has led to mass murders all throughout Western history. The Great Replacement Theory resulted in the riot in Charlottesville and a mass shooting at a synagogue in New Zealand. Pizza Gate led to a man shooting up a pizzeria in Washington D.C. because he thought there were children imprisoned in the basement. Donald Trump’s Great Lie resulted in an attempted coup in the Capitol to overturn a legitimate election. So many conspiracy theories have resulted in violence and in some cases extreme acts of mass murder such as the Holocaust during World War II. Hannah Arendt has said that conspiracy theories are a necessary condition for totalitarian governments to thrive. You might think it’s harmless to believe that Elvis is till alive or that UFOs are real, but if you get polio because you refused a vaccine on the grounds that vaccines are being used to brainwash and control the population, you might stop and wonder where you went wrong.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Scar Lover by Harry Crews

Scar Lover

by Harry Crews

      It’s better to burn out than to fade away. Or so sang Neil Young in his classic song “My My Hey Hey”, a tribute to Sid Vicious even though the name is changed to Johnny Rotten to fit the rhyme scheme of the lyrics. So when reading the earlier works of Harry Crews, you might be forgiven for thinking the Southern Gothic master of grit lit would be more likely to burn out. He came from a rough town and lived a rough life on a steady diet of whiskey and cocaine. But when reading Scar Lover, one of his last novels, you find that he faded away instead.

This novel is full of scars in a similar way to how his earlier novel A Feast of Snakes use ubiquitous snakes as a literary device. The main character, Pete Butcher, doesn’t have any visible scars. Instead he has a self-inflicted mental scar due to an accident when he hit his younger brother Jon in the forehead with a hammer, leaving a scar there and causing permanent brain damage to the poor kid, kind of like an unintentional lobotomy. Jon got put away in an institution and their parents died in a fire while trying to sell a pig to raise enough money to support Jon. So Pete blames himself for the demise of the family. He becomes sullen and withdrawn, indulging in self-hatred, pushing away anyone who tries to get close to him. An elderly man named Mr. Winekoff who is kindly and friendly, but also nosy and a bit daft tries to bring Pete out of himself and Pete doesn’t react with kindness. But Mr. Winekoff (Is that meant to sound like “wank off”?) serves as a bridge between Pete and the family next door where an attractive young woman learns about Pete from Winekoff’s gossip. Her name is Sarah and she introduces herself to Pete. Later they fall in love and he moves in with her and her parents, a hard working and honest man named Henry Leemer who makes a living by chopping wood and her mother Gertrude Leemer who returns from the hospital after having her breasts amputated because of cancer.

When Henry Leemer dies, Sarah and her mother are faced with the dilemma of what to do with his body and how to use their inheritance money. This is when George and Linga become important to the story. George is Pete’s friend and collegue; together they share a miserable job unloading freight cars. George is Jamaican and has horseshoe scars branded across his back which he believes give him magical powers. His wife Linga is an obeah woman and cult leader with colorful, decorative scars all over her face. I can’t tell if they are actually tattoos or not as Harry Crews doesn’t explain it in much detail. Anyhow, Gertrude Leemer decides to put Linga in charge of the funeral ceremony and the disposal of Harry Leemer’s body. Unfortunately, Linga is a grifter and Gertrude Leemer has also put her in charge of managing the inheritance money. On the good side though, Linga has also agreed to help reunite Pete with his lost brother Jon.

So far so good. The character development is strong. It deals with flawed but realistic people who have realistic dilemmas. Pete is a broken man but he isn’t beyond repair and Sarah has the strength of character to help him with what he needs. Henry and Gertrude are unique and strong in their own ways as are George and Linga.

But the narrative kind of fizzles out when Linga enters the story. Initially Harry’s corpse had been taken to the morgue, but Gertrude decides she wants to cremate him herself. So Linga and her husband George take Pete to the funeral parlor to retrieve Mr. Leemer’s dead body. For some reason I can’t comprehend, Crews stretches this segment out to an unnecessary length. They go on a long car ride to the funeral home, take lots of breaks to smoke weed, and carry the body out to the car. In fact, the narrative stops for their pot smoking breaks so many times it becomes redundant without serving any useful purpose in the story. For all its detail and page count, this stretch of prose doesn’t enhance either the character development or the plot in any way that is necessary. We do learn how domineering Linga can be and how she uses threats and intimidation to get her way, but this could have been said more effectively with less wordage. The same can be said for the funeral ceremony they hold in the swamp. It’s all a bit morbid and macabre, but Crews doesn’t overdo those elements in order to keep the characters’ humanity in the forefront. But again, this passage is extended unnecessarily so much so that it would have had a more powerful impact if it had been shorter.

In the end, all conflicts get confronted and Harry Crews demonstrates how a woman who is ordinary but strong and sincere can work the magic that is needed to bring out the best in a man, namely her future husband Pete Butcher. In contrast, Linga, the exotic obeah woman who practices magic, is nothing but a money grubbing leech and her magic is nothing but a smokescreen to hide her true nature. Crews shows us how the real power of a woman is in the everyday world right in front of our eyes. It doesn’t dazzle the senses, but it is potent and it is there if we look for it. The biggest problem I had with all this was that the story has no real confrontational climax at the end. As the story goes on, it is clear that Pete doesn’t believe in Linga’s magic and sees her for the con artist she is, but he never actually gets into a fight with her over it and the end of the story is weak as a result.

Scar Lover is obviously the work of an aging author. It doesn’t have the manic energy or the shock value of Harry Crews’ earlier novels. But you can tell he has grown as a person by the time he wrote it. While the themes and content are more mature, the actual prose suffers from a lack of energy. It’s still Harry Crews and his fans will probably find something to like here, but it doesn’t live up to his earlier works. It’s best if you read some of those before picking this one up.

 

Book Review & Analysis: History of Abstract Painting by Jean-Luc Daval

History of Abstract Painting

by Jean-Luc Daval

      Everyone has heard it before. Somebody with little or no knowledge of art will look at an abstract painting and say, “How can that be art? Any child can do something like that.” Of course, some people who really are educated in the visual arts, and even some artists, will say the same thing. Considering how much writing over the past century has explained abstract, modern, and postmodern art, it seems odd that anybody who really cares wouldn’t have any obstacles to investigating and learning what abstract art is all about. Of course, people who say that aren’t really interested in understanding anything other than what they already know which usually isn’t much to begin with. What that statement often translates to is, “I’m better than those snooty intellectual types because I do important things with my life like working, driving, and watching football.” Anti-intellectualism is a tragic trait of the American character. But if you want to set yourself apart from the herd of cattle being led around by the nose hooked on advertising and mindless entertainment, one way to do so is to study art. After all, modern art is all about breaking free from established prisons of perception by altering of visual representation and breaking the rules of technique laid down by previous generations or artists. Jean-Luc Daval’s History of Abstract Painting is one source you can go to in your pursuit.

Basically, this is an art history book and an understanding of art history is necessary to grasp the meaning of modern art. Up tuntil the time of the Renaissance, art primarily served the purpose of religious symbolism and allegory. Subsequent to that, artists took on new meanings, diversifying allegory and symbolism to comment on social and ethical concerns. That style of art depended on photographic realism as a visual style. When photography was invented, photo-realism was no longer relevant and artists began experimenting with technique and materials. With early modernists like Cezanne and the Impressionists, the subject matter began fading into the background as color, brushstroke, perspective, material, and line got emphasized. Various modernist art school were established to work within their own unique techniques. Schools like Fauvism and Der Blaue Reiter maintained representation of objects in their paintings, but the emotional state of the artists in regard to such objects took precedence. Cubists oriented their works toward a more rational manipulation of line and geometric form to create depth and movement without the possibility of visual rest within the frame. The Cubists broke the wall separating representation and represented object by placing everyday objects, like scraps of newspaper, onto the canvas so that the distinction between signifier and signified collapsed.

Eventually, some artists did away with the representation of concrete objects, creating art that represented abstract ideas or feelings. Piet Mondrian made canvases with primary colors and basic geometric shapes on flat planes that corresponded to the philosophical ideas he explained in his writing. The Russian Constructivists and Suprematists used geomterical patterns to represent pure emotions similar to the way music does, particularly when it has no lyrics. When listening to Mozart, you don’t understand it by explaining it; you understand it by feeling it and this is the direct experience the Russian abstract artists wished to convey through their visual medium. These methods of expressing purity through non-representative shapes and colors reached its apogee in the most famous proponent of Abstract Expressionism ever, Jackson Pollock.

Abstract artists were then presented with the dilemma of where to turn next. Modern art had superseded the representation of recognizable objects which faded into the background until they disappeared completely, leaving nothing but representation of ideas and emotions. The only thing left to do was to abstract away from those and make paintings that represented absolutely nothing but themselves. From there, postmodernism was born and abstract painting became nothing but an interaction between the artists and their canvasses.

Daval’s presentation of how art progressed from pure representation to pure non-representation is complete but brief. This is not an in-depth study of the subject matter. At some points he simply says too little, especially in his analysis of Cubism and Futurism; he briefly introduces their theories and then blows off to another school of art. On the other hand, other developments in the timeline are given sufficient attention like in his analysis of the early modernists and Jackson Pollock. He also never mentions how these art schools were all avant-garde movements that published manifestos, detailing their political and philosophical intentions of altering life in the 20^th century. The book is entirely about form with little or no examination of substance. His account also falls short when he brings Dada and Surrealism into the discussion as both of these movements contained a wider scope in their realizations than just the techniques of abstraction he describes. His discussion of the Russian Supremtist Malevich is grating too. For some strange reason, art critics fall all over themselves with praise for his overrated White on White. That painting is the last in a series of canvases that use basic colors and shapes in varied combinations to express the emotions in musical composition. White on White is meant to be the last painting in that series and represents the silence experienced after a piece of music ends. Taken in context, it makes a lot of sense, but taken out of context it doesn’t mean anything. And yet the critics want us to see it in isolation as the greatest expression of transcendence ever created. It is nothing but a white square painted on a white background. Art critics can be so dumb sometimes.

In the final analysis, what is the worth of History of Abstract Painting? It doesn’t serve as a solid introduction to modern art simply because Daval doesn’t go into enough depth about most of the art schools he mentions to make them stand out in any memorable way. It certainly won’t enhance any art enthusiast’s understanding of the subject matter either since anyone familiar with modernism will know everything written about here already. It’s not a bad book though and Daval lays out the historical progression of abstract art in a clear and comprehensive way. It probably serves best as a review for any patron who lost interest in modern art and wants to get back into it. And the glossy, full color pages are nice looking too. The question in the end, which Daval never addresses, is where do artists go from here? It looks like modernism and postmodernism have exhausted all possibilities in their never-ending transgression of all rules. It’s probably time to reinvent representational painting. Certainly digital art will have something to do with that.

 

Book Review & Analysis: All We Need of Hell by Harry Crews

All We Need of Hell

by Harry Crews

     If you’ve read Harry Crews’ novel A Feast of Snakes you will be familiar with Duffy Deeter. In that story, he befriends Joe Lon and Willard as they walk around the campground where Deeter’s winnebago is parked. They spot him as he sets up a bench and begins lifting weights. They ask if they can join in and they take turns chugging liters of whiskey between bench presses before embarking on a series of misadventures. Duffy Deeter is there to attend the annual rattlesnake hunt. He leaves his wife behind in Florida and brings a female cocaine sniffing graduate student along for sexual entertainment. That same Duffy Deeter is brought back in All We Need of Hell as the protagonist of the story rather than a supporting character.

In fact, the opening paragraphs in All We Need of Hell are lifted directly, almost word for word, from A Feast of Snakes, the big difference being that the name of the cocaine sniffing coed nymphette has been changed to Marvella. We are immediately transported inside Duffy’s mind as he fantasizes about violence from World War II while having sex with her in his mobile home. This time he isn’t in rural Georgia though, he is right near home in Gainesville, Florida where he works as a lawyer and lives with his wife Tish and their son Felix. Duffy is athletic and obsessed with physical fitness while his son prefers to eat junk food and watch TV. Tish is a woman he just can’t relate to. She can’t relate to him either. He tries to teach them about Zen Buddhism and Taosim by holding meditation sessions in their backyward and then making Felix work out in his private gym. None of this is going well for any of them. Tish is also having an affair with Duffy’s law partner, the chronically irritating Jert McPhester. How could you possibly respect a man with a name like that?

Duffy Deeter knows his life is on the wrong track, but he has no idea how to set things to right. He has a hilarious confrontation with Jert which I won’t describe here. I’ll just ruin it for you if I do, but I will say it involves Duffy crushing Jert’s testicles. Later, in another hilarious scene, Duffy breaks into his own house while Tish and Jert are having sex in his bed. I won’t spoil this one either, but it does involve a paddle and Jert’s ass. An especially clever passage happens afterwards when Tish calls Duffy and begs him to come home because she thinks a burglar had broken into their house. When Duffy arrives, the police are there and Duffy gloats because he knows what really happened and he watches as Tish and Jert, who don’t know the truth, lie to the police. It is one of those times when only the protagonist and the reader know the truth while the others in the room don’t. Harry Crews pulls this literary trick off perfectly; by making the truth a secret that is shared between Duffy and yourself, you get drawn closer to him as a character.

After hitting rock bottom, a new friend appears in Duffy’s life, an African American professional football player named Tump. That name must mean something special to Crews because he also uses it as the name of the football coach in A Feast of Snakes. This is a man who understands how low and confused Duffy is and he goes about helping him solve his problems. Tump’s first approach is to make friends with Duffy’s son Felix. The two of them get along perfectly so Duffy drives them off in his winnebago, they go pick up Marvella, and the four of them go to a football field to run around in the moonlight all night. Tump brings Felix out of his shell and Duffy realizes he doesn’t know how to relate to his son.

There is another clever twist here because Tump embodies what Duffy thinks he believes. Duffy is deeply into Eastern mysticism and spends time meditating and reciting mantras, but he doesn’t understand what any of it means. He uses it to build an armor around himself and he also uses it as a means of controlling his wife and son by trying to teach the philosophy to them. In his mind, he is trying to connect with them, but it all fails. What Duffy fails to understand is that Zen and Taosim are all about letting life happen and not being in control. This is what Tump embodies; he gets through to Felix because he lets their friendship happen rather than forcing it. Tump is so successful at life because he always goes with the flow. As Duffy watches them tossing the football around, he realizes how proud he is of Felix and also sees what he has been doing wrong. There is another poignant moment in this passage when Tump tells Duffy how important mothers are. You can literally see Duffy shrink even though Crews doesn’t specifically write that. Duffy wants to be the head and the leader of his family, but this desire is so overblown that he fails to see the value in his own wife. He shrivels because he knows Tump is right. This humanizes him because he realizes his own weakness and his own mistake at this point. Rather than reacting with the expected bluster, he instead admits to himself that it is time to change.

Since Duffy is having an existential crisis, he begins to look back over his life and think about his relationship with his parents. He visits his widowed, agoraphobic mother who lives in a dark apartment with the curtains permanently draw and fishbowls on the shelves with about half of them being home to dead goldfish floating on the surfaces. She insists on feeding all of them so he wonders about her sanity. More importantly, he revives memories of his father, an air force pilot who lost his sanity after fighting Nazis in World War II. Although his father was loving and quite a lot of fun, Duffy locates the source of all his problems in their relationship.

By the end of the book, Tump has helped Duffy repair his relationships with everybody in his family including Tish. Duffy comes to the realization that he feels a need to be in control because he fears vulnerability. This is rooted in his desire to avoid going insane like his fathe. Both Duffy and Tish admit that they don’t know each other and agree to begin again. They also agree that neither of them are to blame for their failing marriage. Sometimes things don’t work out because that is part of being human. And you know what happens next. You should know from experience that the making out after making up is the sweetest, most delicious love making you can make.

Aside from all the amazing plot twists, narrative tension, and dark humor, this novel succeeds because it does such a great job with character studies. From the start, we are immediately plunged into the strange and terrible mind of Duffy who instantly becomes an unforgettable character. Despite being the kind of person I wouldn’t want to know, he turns out to be admirable for his determination, his passion, and the deviously twisted logic of his complex mind. A writer is great when they can make you see the world from the point of view of someone you wouldn’t ordinarily understand and Harry Crews succeeds brilliantly in this. He is also a great character because he subverts our expectations. Since he is such an alpha male type of guy to the hilt, you would expect him to react to his situation in a less sympathetic way. But instead he is man enough to admit his faults, confront his weaknesses, and attempt to make amends for what he has done wrong. In Duffy Deeter, and in Tump too, Harry Crews has tapped into what it means to be a real man. A large part of that means being responsible as well as tough. There has never been a literary character as unique as Duffy Deeter and there never will be again.

And something has to be said about Tump since he is such a central figure in the plot. He is the deus ex machina that arranges for everything to work out right in the end. Being fun, insightful, big hearted, charismatic, and honest, he is nothing but lovable and in many ways he really steals the show. You feel like you get to know him on an intimate level. He is eternally optimistic, but he isn’t looking at the world through rose colored glasses since all the good he sees in other people is really there. Everybody, that is, except for Jert McPhester. You just can’t admire a guy whose name is Jert McPhester. But I fear that describing Tump in too much detail here would be an injustice. You have to read the book to experience him for yourself.

All We Need Of Hell isn’t as grotesque as Harry Crews’ earlier novels, but it does have its moments where it feels like someone is hammering a nail into your funny bone. It is also the work of a more mature Harry Crews with less shock value and transgression and a lot more humanity. I haven’t read all of his novels, but for now I might gamble and say that this could be his most polished work with all the right elements of character development, plot progression, and its mixture of complexity and accessibility. It is entertaining, but also deep and dark enough to be cathartic. Any writer who can pull off such an optimistic ending that is also believable has a lot going for them. It’s an underrated novel by an underrated writer and I’m surprized it hasn’t been made into a movie. It would be good as the kind of indy, art house American family comedy-dramas that Alexander Payne is known for.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Aesthetics of Degradation by Adrian Nathan West

The Aesthetics of Degradation

by Adrian Nathan West

      Back in the 1980s, a radical feminist extremist and gender separatisr named Andrea Dworkin gained notoriety as a prominent anti-pornography activist. Her writings analyzed pornography, a lot of which was literary in the form of the written word, and her interpretations were full of fallacies of composition, appeal to emotion arguments, ad hominem attacks on men as a collective whole, massive cherry picking, conspiracy theories, misattributions, and an extremist hyperbolic tone that made her difficult to take seriously as the social critic she claimed to be. She argued that male sexuality is inherently violent, that the male orgasm is a form of violence, that pornography was invented to oppress women, and that female porn performers are bigger victims than people who died in the Holocaust because, according to her, Holocaust victims didn’t have to be photographed playing with their genitals before being killed. All of these brilliant ideas can be found in her hate-filled rant Pornography: Men Possessing Women. And while that information can easily be found, if anyone can find empirical evidence that death camps for porn stars are real, than I will concede that argument to the she-demon Ms. Dworkin. Even worse, she used her phallic symbol of a bullhorn to protest horror movies and collaborated with the conservative Christian right wing of the Reagan administration calling for a ban on all pornography. But if there was an ounce of truth in anything Andrea Dworkin said, it was that some people get sexual thrills out of seeing women being tortured and humiliated.

There is a cautionary tale here. Andrea Dworkin took her views to such an extreme that she looked like a loudmouthed buffoon. Having such a prominent voice in the feminist movement possibly set the cause back by at least a decade. By turning the volume up to maximum on her anti-pornography crusade, she wasted a lot of people’s time that could have been used to address more prominent issues affecting gender politics. And by setting the impossible task of banning pornography, she almost guaranteed that the sex industry would continue to grow and flourish. The lesson to be learned for activists of all kinds is that taking the wrong approach to your issue can kill your credibility when a more modest approach can yield more results and possibly even keep your pet issues alive in public discourse.

As time has gone on, the availability of pornography has become more widespread, more mainstream, and in some cases more degrading and extreme. Adrian Nathan West addresses this phenomenon of extreme pornography in his short book The Aesthetics of Degradation. While he didn’t make the same exact mistakes that Andrea Dworkin made, he does wind up in a similar space by constructing an ineffective argument.

This extended essay starts off describing some porn the author has watched. I’ll spare you the stomach-churning details here but I will say that what he describes is gross. For some reason, West feels compelled to explain why it is disgusting and degrading as if the audience couldn’t figure that out for themselves. But in case you couldn’t, he offers a semi-Freudian interpretation of why anal sex makes him feel sick. Then he goes online and finds an interview with a female performer in which she brags about her ability to do extreme sex acts while being filmed. What was he expecting? Besides he doesn’t consider the possibility that what she said in the interview could be part of a marketing strategy. He also doesn’t consider the possibility that her interview could have been written by someone in a porn studio’s advertising department. Porn is a business after all. Is this even important? Well maybe because I feel like West missed some opportunities to further examine his subject matter and the strange space that pornography occupies in the way that it combines performance and authenticity presented through the filters of editing and marketing.

But in any case, this leads the author to ask the ever mystifying question of: why some women choose to do this. He finds his answer in the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. I’ll give West some credit here. He makes a key idea, common to both philosophers, comprehensible which isn’t easy considering the arcane style of writing they both have. West explains that chronological time is the basis for building an individual’s identity since memory is a building block we use to make us into ourselves. Chronological memory is a resource we use to navigate our way through life. In the case of female porn stars, this personal chronology has been disrupted at some point, through trauma like neglect or abuse, that compromises their ability to make effective decisions. This appears to make sense, but my objection to this claim is epistemic, He writes as if this claim is absolutely true and yet I don’t see how he can claim it as such without accessing the subjectivity of a representative sample of all female porn stars. It’s an easy over-generalization. It certainly is plausible, but without enough data I can’t accept it as anything other than speculation. I’m also wary of his concept of decision making; just because a woman doesn’t make the choice he thinks she should make, it doesn’t mean that she made a wrong choice or even an ineffective choice. West never takes the broader picture into consideration here.

A lot of the rest of the book is a mishmash of odds and ends, abruptly switching from one subject to another without any clear transitions. West alternates between descriptions of pornography that get more violent and disgusting as the essay progresses, testimony from female porn stars, philosophical musing, and commentary from the serial killer Ed Kemper who describes his feelings of lust and violence toward his victims. The Ed Kemper quotes are problematic since, not only are they non sequiturs, but it amounts to a false analogy considering West doesn’t include any quotes from male porn stars or directors who express the same sentiments. This is a dirty rhetorical trick because we are supposed to associate the feelings of a serial killer with pornographers and porn consumers without any clear connection between them. As far as I know, there haven’t been any male members of the porn community who have been serial killers and actually the number of them who have murdered people has been too small to be statistically significant. A guilt by association argument is especially bad when there is no grounds for association to begin with. As for porn consumers, articles on the Psychology Today website show only a weak correlation between pornography consumption and acts of violence. An article I found on NPR stated that violent pornography is somewhat popular with women consumers, particularly if they are suffering from PTSD. So again, I don’t feel that West has taken the full range of possibilities into consideration when writing this essay. Even worse, his style of writing is disorganized and disorienting. I can’t tell if this is meant to be some kind of deliberate postmodern derailment or if it’s just bad writing, but it doesn’t work for me.

Then the author goes from bad to worse. He goes from vilifying pornographers for using money to exploit women of lower financial status to vilifying them for exploiting stupid women. He really does classify female porn performers as literally stupid after comparing them to retarded people. He really does use the word retarded too. His argument is that retarded people need to be protected from predatory and exploitative adults and stupid people are only one step above retarded people in intelligence levels. Therefore stupid people need to be protected from those who exploit them too. Stupid people are incapable of making effective choices for themselves and therefore end up allowing pornographers to make choices for them. The solution to this problem is for intelligent people with good intentions to make choices for stupid people so they don’t get exploited. I’ll concede that some female porn stars probably are stupid, but when your defense of them involves their humiliation and degradation with terms like “retarded” and “stupid”, I think you might want to re-evaluate how you go about approaching this problem and what your true intentions really are. Spitting on the people you claim to be defending is kind of a low blow.

The remainder of the book involves the author hanging out with a Catalan performance artists who reenacts scenarios from violent pornographic films as an art project. This guy doesn’t get around to saying much and most of these passages serve no useful purpose in the essay. But what he does do is make an argument of determinism to say that female porn stars do degrading porn because they have no choice; they are only responding to stimuli in the environment and this is a symptom of capitalism. He doesn’t explain this concept beyond merely making the claim. But anyhow, I suppose that means that people producing violent porn also have no choice other than to obey capitalist stimuli and porn consumers have no choice either. I guess nobody anywhere, no matter what they do or who they are, have any choice other than to obey whatever environmental stimuli come into their empirical range and goddamnit if we just got rid of the capitalist system than that could never happen again. Yeah right.

In the end, I wondered why West bothered to write this essay. He doesn’t actually argue for or against anything. What is he trying to prove? That violent, degrading, disgusting pornography is...violent, degrading, and disgusting? Why not argue that the sun is hot or that ice is cold? He makes no demands on the reader or society either. He proposes no solution to what he describes as media created with the intent to humiliate and degrade women. He sounds to me like a guy who spent a lot of time watching this crap until it made him sick to his stomach and he wrote this as therapy, complete with some philosophical concepts and postmodernist name dropping to make it look academically legitimate. (See what Alan Sokal and Noam Chomsky say about that in their criticisms of postmodernist pseudo-intellectualism) I might actually be inclined to agree with West if I could actually pinpoint what it is he is arguing for. He presents no thesis to defend, just a collage of information all related to one subject.

As for extreme pornography, here is what I think is going on. Being the kind of business it is, it is going to attract some unsavory people. Some men want to abuse and humiliate women so they get into the pornography business. With enough money to produce films and hire lawyers, they get female performers to sign legal contracts and forms of consent, some of which are vaguely worded and don’t specifically say what the performers will do. Since the films are made as works of art produced for commercial purposes, these abusers have found a loophole in the First Amendment and their films are protected as freedom of speech.

Pornography involving the use of minors is illegal, as it should be, because the need to protect children overrides the luxuries of the First Amendment. In most cases I am opposed to censorship and pornography won’t, can’t, and shouldn’t be banned. Andrea Dworkin went on a fool’s errand when she tried to have pornography censored. Besides, most pornography is neither violent nor extreme. If you can’t see a difference between depictions of consensual vanilla sex and the things described by West, you might be a bit of an extremist yourself. But I do think more regulation is necessary. People involved in the production of pornography should be held to the same OSHA standards as people working in factories or any other occupation. If sex workers are truly workers, they have the same rights to health and safety standards as anybody else. Part of that means drawing a strict line of demarcation between “consent” and “informed consent” because the two are not the same. Porn producers need to be held legally responsible to prove that their performers know what they are getting into and they need to prove that consent is no given under coercion, intimidation, manipulation, or any other form of duress.

In the end, I might be inclined to agree that the kinds of violent pornography described by Adrian Nathan West is disgusting and is a sign that we live in a sick society. The problem with The Aesthetics of Degradation is that his writing is so poorly executed, depending on appeals to emotion, disorganized writing, and failing to make a definite point about anything, that I don’t feel he sufficiently made his case, whatever that was meant to be. It’s hard to agree with somebody when you aren’t sure as to what you are agreeing on. He makes the Andrea Dworkin mistake of over-emphasizing his case to the point where it becomes trivialized and rendered ineffective. I can’t say this book is of much use unless you just want to read about something that disgusts you. If you are that kind of masochist then there are better places to get what you want.