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. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

A Feast of Snakes

by Harry Crews

      Ophiophobic readers beware. Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes is not for you, or at least not if you plan on sleeping anytime soon. Herpetologists probably won’t get much out of this either because there is nothing scientific going on in this novel. If you love snakes, this one probably isn’t for you either since most snakes in the book come to a bitter end. But if you’re into grit lit, transgressive fiction, or Southern Gothic, this short and dark novel might have something going for it. This book is permeated with rattlesnakes who slide into every plot line, every characters, and even into people’s stomachs in a scene where the slithery critters get deep fried and eaten for dinner.

As the novel begins, the remote town of Mystic, Georgia is gearing up for their annual rattlesnake hunt, a night of festivities at the high school followed by a day when the snakes are forced out of their underground hiding places and captured. It is an event that draws people from all over the region.

Joe Lon is the central character. He once was the star of the high school football team, but his life went nowhere after that. His girlfriend Berenice goes off to college while Joe Lon stays behind with a wife and two kids he doesn’t want. He beats her and verbally abuses her, leaving her with the kids while he runs around with his best friend, the thoroughly unlikable Willard who has replaced him as the star of the football team. The two of them drink gallons of whiskey and have a series of misadventures that later include Deeter Duffy, a lawyer from Florida who has nothing but bad intentions. Joe Lon also works in a shack that sells liquor. The night before the festival, Joe Lon visits his father who is training a pit bull for a dog fight on the eve of the rattlesnake hunt. Joe Lon’s sister lives with the father, but she is insane, refusing to leave her room and does nothing but stay in bed watching TV with the volume turned up to maximum. It is a bleak and unhappy life.

Joe Lon’s living situation is so similar to that of Harry Angstrom’s in Rabbit Run by John Updike that it is hard to imagine that Joe Lon isn’t based on Updike’s most famous character. Both were star athletes in high school who ended up in miserable jobs and living in an unhappy marriage with the unwanted responsibility of raising children. Both are looking for a means of escape and make all the wrong choices up until the end.

A major turning point comes when Berenice returns to Mystic to introduce Joe Lon to her fiance. Joe Lon’s friends agree to get his wife out of their home so he can have a tryst with Berenice. But the seduction is less than romantic; in fact it is downright gross and degrading and from there, all the events of the novel continue on a downward trajectory, getting darker and more destructive as the pages go on until the big blowout during the rattlesnake hunt.

A subplot involving the town’s sheriff, Buddy Matlow, is possibly the most interesting part of the story. Buddy is a Vietnam vet with a wooden leg and a few screws loose in his head. He imprisons a young African American girl and gives her a choice between sleeping with him or being bit by a rattlesnake he keeps in a bucket near her cell. Out of fear, she gives in to him and then he releases her from jail. Even though Buddy is a rapist, he has some strange delusion that she loves him and they are in a relationship together. Later he picks her up in his car, takes her to a place in the woods and Lottie Mae gets her revenge by killing his snake with a razor blade. Go read the book to find our what I mean. What Buddy does with his snake afterwards is one of the most hilarious episodes of gallows humor I have read in a very long time.

Overall the presence of snakes in this narrative is unique and effectively done. The rattlesnake is the high school mascot. They are playthings for the backwoods hicks in Mystic. They show up in people’s dreams. They get eaten for dinner. They serves as artistic inspiration. The snakes figure literally as elements in the plot and metaphorically as symbols of anxiety, pride, masculinity, immorality, sleaziness, and evil. This is a novel packed with unique ideas and the presence of snakes is one that really ties everything together.

The least satisfying part of the novel is with the character of Joe Lon himself. He is a wounded and miserable young man with no direction in life and no idea what to do about it. He drinks liquor compulsively and does little more than cause trouble. He isn’t entirely unsympathetic though. We learn that his mother’s death is the source of his problems and, although he is a racist, he does stand up for the African American characters when no one else will. That much makes him a somewhat well-rounded character. Where he falls short in his development is that he is so unemotional. The narrative and his actions tell us that he is not happy, but he never expresses the kind of despair we are supposed to attach to him. If Crews had delved deeper into his inner emotional turmoil, he would have been stronger as an unsympathetic protagonist with some sympathetic character traits.

A Feast of Snakes is a mean and ugly book about mean and ugly people. This is disturbing literature on a number of levels. The characters are unforgettable and that may not necessarily be a good thing depending on your tolerance for the darker side of humanity. But their unforgettable nature is one of the greatest things about the writing of Harry Crews. They don’t just stick in your head because they are so terrible; they stay there because Harry Crews is such a talented writer. If this work of fiction doesn’t bother you enough, just remember that there are places off the beaten path in rural America that aren’t so different from what we have in this novel. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: Black and White and Blue by Dave Thompson

 

Black and White and Blue:

Adult Cinema From the Victorian Age To the VCR

by Dave Thompson

      People these days take pornography for granted. Anybody with an internet connection and enough literary prowess to type the word “porn” into a browser can find more of the stuff than they could ever hope or want to see. And it’s all free of charge. But looking back at the development of this lowest of lowbrow art forms will show that it hasn’t always been that easy. Rock biographer Dave Thompson’s Black and White and Blue traces the origins of pornographic film back to the end of the 18^th century up until the 1970s when its legalization in America pushed it out of the underground and into the mainstream.

Pornography certainly didn’t begin in the era of the Industrial Revolution as some might think. Anybody who has studied art history will know very well that the ancients had a fascination for sexually explicit imagery in their visual arts. It wasn’t limited to Western countries either. Plenty of medieval Japanese art leaves nothing to the imagination as far as bodily pleasures go. Hindu art has a long tradition of erotic imagery. Even some prehistoric cave paintings have been found that portray female genitalia in ways that might bring to mind the kinds of things you see on men’s public restroom stalls. If you’ve ever wondered who draws that variety of graffiti while sitting on a restaurant shitter, just find the most cavemannish looking dude in the diner and draw your own conclusions. Then the invention of the printing press brought a flood of erotic literature with it as literacy rates grew rapidly. In fact, one response to major technological changes tends to be sexual in nature. The invention of the daguerreotype was no exception.

The difference with the advent of film is that, for the first time in history, real humans instead of artistically rendered representations could be used as subjects for erotic art. The controversy over the exploitation of human subjects has been with us ever since the first nude photographs were produced. But film and sex have been engaged in a figurative type of intercourse from the start. Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, and the Lumiere brothers all used nudes and burlesque dancers in their earliest experiments with the medium of the moving image. Flip card films in nickelodeon arcades showing dancing women and strippers began appearing around the turn of the 20^th century. As the silent film era revved up and camera equipment became more readily available to those with enough money, the cultural phenomenon of ten minute stag films displaying people indulging in the pleasures of the human reproductive system emerged.

A large portion of this book is about the actual films, primarily in the stag film era that lasted roughly up until the 1960s, while the main side issues explored are the technological changes that influenced pornography production and the culture and business practices that surrounded the viewing of these films. The subject of still photography is left almost untouched.

Antique technology buffs who are interested in the history of film making equipment might find this book interesting simply because it says so much about the progression of movie cameras, darkroom development, and how those changes influenced the techniques of movie making in general. Today we take things like zoom lenses or film splicing for granted, but when these changes were introduced, they profoundly altered the way things are done. The introduction of 35mm film and remote film processing laboratories were significant too. Thompson doesn’t get too technical about these matters, but he does show how important film making gadgetry is in the medium’s history. A lot of these changes applied to non-erotic films just as much as they did to the stags, with the exception of color film and sound. Stag films got stuck in the black and white silent film era, complete with inter-title cards for dialogue, until the time of the sexual revolution, mostly due to budget restraints, but also because patrons of the underground cinema were solely interested in the visual portrayal of physical intimacy more than how it sounded.

There is another reason why the sound might not matter. Stag movies were shown to groups of men in secretive locations. Usually they were drunk, raucous, and constantly shouting and whistling at the screen. They smoked a lot too, so much that a slang term for stag films was “smokies”. This gets into the culture surrounding the exhibition of these films. One of the ways they were shown was by traveling salesmen who brought them into town, quietly announced to patrons of bars that they had stag films to show, and then led their customers to some place like a field outside city limits or a remote parking lot. There they set up a tent and played their reels. Other times, stags were rented and shown in the halls of fraternal orders like the Elks, Odd Fellows, or Moose Lodges. If you’ve ever wondered what secret the Freemasons are guarding so carefully, you might have found your answer here. There is no telling what these brothers were doing while watching these films and maybe it’s best left to the imagination. But seriously folks, a lot of these men watched the stags because there was no such thing as sex education in those days. They simply didn’t know much about how to do it. It was a time when condoms were illegal and oral sex was not a part of anybody’s marriage. Even the vice squads that chased after pornographers were in the dark when it came to stag cinema; one officer issued an arrest warrant for Dick Hard and Lotta Cum because those were the performers’ names listed in the credits of a movie they seized. Forensic science was still in its infancy then, I guess.

The author has spent far more time watching and analyzing stag films than I would ever care to. Porno movies aren’t exactly high concept works of art and there is only so much you can do with the ins and outs of the subject matter. Large portions of this book describe the contents of stag films and Thompson comes close to over-indulging in it, but at least he had the decency to alter his critical evaluations with other peripheral information like anecdotes about the performers and viewers, the technology, and the cultural context. The forays into rarer forms of stag films break up the monotony too; while most stag films showed ordinary vanilla sex, a small number catered to fetishes like BDSM, lesbianism, group sex, and interracial love making. Although Mexican or Cuban produced bestiality films showed up on occasion, other subjects that are illegal now were rare and violet porn almost non-existent. In fact, riots sometimes broke out at screenings when the men in the audience though the female performers were being treated too disrespectfully. Gay stag films were almost non-existent until the 1950s.

The final chapters dealing with the Sexual Revolution shows how the booming post war economy and rapid technological development contributed to changes in the viewing of pornography. Peep shows came back and privately viewed 8mm film loops became popular as well as super 8 movie projectors that made home viewing possible. Handheld cameras came on the market for private film making too. The combination of changing attitudes towards sex and the legalization of porn in the 1960s resulted in everybody letting it all hang out for the world to see. For the first time, talk of a porn industry became common as it virtually exploded, first in Europe, mostly in Scandinavia, and then in New York City and San Francisco, both epicenters of the hippy counter culture scene. Then along came Deep Throat and that is about where Dave Thompson’s story ends.

What the author gets right is in the blending of the production and content of stag films with the culture surrounding them. He shows how the wider society influenced stag films and they reflected the progressive changes in society along the way. The style and content of these movies marked cultural and technological shifts in ways that other mediums do not. This really is not a sociological study though. It is a work of film history put into a sociological context so that we don’t get bored to death with endless descriptions of people doing the horizontal hokey pokey in front of a camera thereby allowing us to draw conclusions about the nature of human societies during the 20^th century.

In conclusion, Black and White and Blue is a good book providing you are interested in the subject matter. It has always been a curiosity to me that so many people like watching others having sex on film, and yet porn is universally popular and the industry never ceases to thrive. The social and psychological reasons for that deserve to be taken up in other studies, but I do have a theory that relates directly to medium itself. Film was invented for the visual depiction of motion. The two most important forms of motion for human survival, sex and violence, are probably the most common and fascinating selements in film. Violence is exciting to us because of our fight or flight instincts that we are genetically programmed with to save our lives, while sex is important for the continuation of the species. As mammals, sex is also a way of forming communal bonds and fulfilling needs for acceptance. When these activities are portrayed in film, it arouses emotions associated with our deepest, most fundamental primal instincts. As Sigmund Freud would say, we need to repress these instincts in order to function in a civilized society which leads to them being sublimated or disconnected from ourselves. With the advancement of technology and the changes it has brought about, it is probably impossible to return all the contents to Pandora’s Box. Reverse orgasms are impossible. Once that ejaculatory spasm has happened, the sperm can not go back to its origin. Like it or not, despite what Andrea Dworkin thought, pornography is here to stay.

Book Review & Analysis: The Almighty Black P Stone Nation by Natalie Y. Moore & Lance Williams

The Almighty Black P Stone Nation:

The Rise, Fall, and Resurgence Of an American Gang

      By the 1990s, hip hop had grown to be one of the most prominent musical genres, if not the MOST prominent genre in America. Possibly it became the most prominent musical style in the world. I’ve never been to a country where you didn’t hear it playing in stores, on the radio, in restaurants, or blasting out of car windows. This is true even in Luxembourg which I would consider to be the least hip hop-like place I’ve ever been. A lot of journalistic writing has been dedicated to uncovering the roots of hip hop in the likes of James Brown, The Last Poets, and various other obscure funk, jazz, and soul bands from the 1960s and 1970s. I’ve encountered less journalism or historical studies that have examined the social origins and influences that fed into later hip hop culture. There is one group of African-Americans who may not have directly influenced the genre in the beginning, but they certainly embodied a lot of the themes that had become prominent in the music by the 1990s. Natalie Y. Moore and Lance Williams’ The Almighty Black P Stone Nation does not examine this cultural connection, but it does lay a groundwork for a cultural historian to see how the hip hop movement and some of what it stands for did not emerge out of a void.

This history begins in the south side of Chicago with its heavy concentration of African-American people, many of which were there because they or their ancestors migrated from the South to escape the racism and poverty, to the booming city of Chicago where the steel industry and others needed manual, unskilled laborers. That is where two young teenagers, Jeff Fort and Eugene “Bull” Hairston dropped out of school at a young age and formed a gang called the Blackstone Rangers. Part of their motivation was strength in numbers when facing off against their rivals, the Disciples, who preyed on kids from other neighborhoods who had to pass through their turf to get to school. The Blackstone Rangers soon got involved in all the crime that gang membership entailed including drug dealing, prostitution, gambling, extortion, protection rackets, and street violence. But the Rangers took a slightly different turn from the Disciples and other gangs.

Fort and Hairston established a strange alliance when the ministers at a Presbyterian church took them under their wing and allowed the teenagers to use their property as headquarters. It was a symbiotic relationship since the church received federal aid money for a job creation program because they worked directly with troubled teenagers who had some social capital in their neighborhood. The Blackstone Rangers also benefited because they had a legitimate looking place to go, keeping themselves off the streets and out of the eyes of the police. They also participated in the job creation program, directing unemployed youth towards occupations that benefited them and their families. But the Rangers also stole money from the church and some critics even say the ministers allowed this to happen in order to stay on the good side of the gang. Whatever the case may be, the Blackstone Rangers grew in stature and reputation all over Chicago. They chartered other gangs from all over the city, renamed the organization the Almighty Black P Stone Nation, and Fort and Hairston set up a ruling council of twenty one leaders to oversee the whole corporation. They got even bigger when they began doing business with La Cosa Nostra. When Bull Hairston got sent up the river for a very long paid vacation in the penitentiary, Fort took over the leadership position and ruled the Nation until he died. Even when he himself got sent to prison, he commanded the gang from behind bars.

But something else happened to Jeff Fort while he did his time. Like so many African-American people who end up in jail, he found religion and like so many of those others, the religion he found was Islam. Fort had joined up with Noble Drew Ali’s cult the Moorish Science Temple and when released, he announced that he was changing the Black P Stone Nation into an unorthodox Muslim sect he called El Rukn based on Noble Drew Ali’s teachings. This temple was run out of a building called The Fort. But El Rukn was not entirely pure and holy; while there was an element of sincerity in Fort’s newly designed religion, it was also used as a cover for the same old gangbanging that the Black P Stone Nation had been involved in all along. El Rukn also began embracing militant Black Nationalism and started stockpiling heavy artillery including machine guns and explosives. One member even got busted in a sting operation when buying a rocket launcher from undercover FBI agents. The feds also wiretapped El Rukn when they sent a delegation to Libya to meet with Moammar Gaddafi.

The writers of this book are not upfront about how they feel in regards to this gang. They point out some of the positive things they were responsible for like helping teenagers find jobs, working with Martin Luther King when he visited Chicago, embracing Black Power, embracing Islam as a means of community building, running youth groups through El Rukn, and sometimes preventing inter-gang violence rather than promoting it. Yet they also point out how their gangster stance was detrimental to the African-American community. By selling heroin and crack on inner city street corners, by running prostitution rings that pimped out young black girls, and extorting money from Black business owners they were hypocritically harming the community they claimed to be supporting. The strange irony is that Jeff Fort and his followers couldn’t see the schizophrenic nature of what they were doing and in fact appeared to genuinely believe in all its contradictory facets both good and evil. The authors do point out the gang’s strange ideological orientation to society, but they are also strangely dismissive of their later stances regarding revolutionary violence. They write about their potential for terrorist activities as if it is just an eccentricity, downplaying it as a threat. Their unwillingness to thoroughly engage with the potential for destruction that the Black P Stone Nation had in their collection of weaponry is a weakness in the writing.

The other huge flaw in this book is the writing itself. The subject matter is examined from a distance without any insiders’ points of view. It reads like a listing of events as if the gang was never really made up of individual people. It is the type of bird’s eye view prose you get when reading a 20^th century author’s accounts of ancient Roman history. You just can’t see the world through the eyes of the people being written about. The writing is also stiff and stilted, lacking in flow due to there being too many short sentences that make it an uphill battle to read. This book is a good example of how amateurish writing can make a fascinating subject matter look bland and uninspired.

The Almighty Black P Stone Nation is not a great piece of writing, but it does serve as a good introduction to this contradictory and influential African-American social organization. It covers the territories of gang culture, street culture, youth culture, prison, social conditions, political ideology, revolution, outlawry, Black theology and religion, inner city violence, and it even touches on fashion. All these themes show up in rap lyrics and the Black P Stone Nation had an unusual way of bringing all these elements together as if the whole gang where the atom that split and exploded into the subculture we now know as hip hop. All of this happened under the tutelage of the visionary Jeff Fort. But his vision was distorted and he might have been just a little more crazy than not. He certainly could see farther than he could reach. This book is marred by too much reporting and not enough analysis. That analysis will hopefully come later because there is a lot to unpack here. The ability the Black P Stone Nation has for holding together over such a long period of time despite all its contortions and contradictions may say something important about the nature of human societies. Those secret forces may be malignant or they may be benign, but we won’t know what they are until this subject matter gets taken up by a more analytical scholar.

 

Book Review: Micronations by Mohammad Bahareth

Micronations 

by Mohammad Bahareth

      It’s not widely known that Ernest Hemingway’s brother Les once built a bamboo raft off the coast of Jamaica and declared it a nation called New Atlantis. Actually only half the raft was New Atlantis because the other half, he believed, was a territory of the United States, Under the raft was a sandbar which Les Hemingway thought to have bat guano on it. Based on an obscure American law from the 19^th century, any uninhabited island in international waters with bat guano could be claimed as American property. If that law isn’t batshit crazy than Les Hemingway certainly was for coming up with this scheme in the first place. It’s a good thing he didn’t try to liberate the American half in a war of independence because I don’t think that would have gone in his favor. He didn’t need to do that anyways because his raft and the nation of New Atalntis got blown away in a hurricane and ceased to exist.

Now if Les Hemingway was anything like his more famous brother, he might have been a lush. This is significant because I’ve nursed enough pints of Guiness in to know that if you hang around enough bars over the years, you will inevitably meet dozens of drunks on benders who will tell you what could be done to fix the country if only the right people would listen to them. Stoners aren’t any different only they’re more likely to lay around listening to Grateful Dead tapes while watching nature shows on TV with the sound turned down while they tell you what they’d do differently if they had their own country to run. Usually the legalization of drugs is the first and only idea they have If you’re getting doing bong hits with them, you probably aren’t listening anyway. What I’m really getting around to saying here is that every so often one of these guys gets up enough gumption to literally try to start their own micronation. Sometimes they succeed. Most of them fail. These days they mostly just end up on the internet. Mohammed Bahareth’s Micronations chronicles some of these attempts.

Like any good book of this sort, the author starts out by defining the concept of a micronation. There are people who declare themselves to be the king or leader of their own mini-state. Up until recently, many of them have laid claim to small pieces of land, empty islands, abandoned military towers, or boats anchored in international waters. Some of them don’t exist anywhere except in people’s heads or on websites. Some issue currencies, stamps, or passports and even go so far as composing their own national anthems, writing constitutions, and inventing their own languages. Most of them seek international recognition from other countries or the United Nations. It’s probably safe to say that most, if not all of them, are run by people who are completely nuts. The author would likely not agree with that last charge since he appears to be interested in founding his own micronation, although he doesn’t give any specific details in this book,

After Bahareth explains what micronations are, he explains what micronations are. Again. Nobody would argue that he isn’t an amateurish author. Then he proceeds to list and describe real micronations. Reading this is a trial at first since some of the entries at the beginning have nothing but geographical facts which were probably copied from Wikipedia. But the book gets more engaging in later chapters when he gives information about the history and ideologies that some micronations were founded on. The organization of the chapters is a little weird. One is about the strangest micronations and the following chapter is about the most famous micronations. But the two most famous micronations, The Principality of Sealand and The Republic of Minerva, are in the former chapter and I’ve never heard of the ones listed in the latter chapter so maybe the titles are out of order. I’ll give credit where it’s due though, because my favorite micronation of all, The Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland, gets one paragraph. Those guys claim their country exists in your mind and you enter their kingdom every time you fall asleep and dream. Now that’s some real psychedelia for you. I’d love to see how their parliament works.

While the beginning of the book is all about the shrimp sized sovereignties that exist, did exist, or tried to exist usually somewhere in the three dimensions of our physical universes, the ending of the book covers the tiny countries, bringing new meaning to the term “petit bourgeoisie”, that own no land and exist only as ideas or internet pages. This is where the meat of the matter really enters your mouth. I have no idea what that last sentence is supposed to mean, but I thought I’d throw it in there anyways. You see, a lot of these new micronations want to become officially recognized states. Some have claimed territories on Mars or distant comets, a few have laid claim to territories on Antarctica. Some want to build massive platforms on the ocean surfaces for seasteading ventures. Some wish to inhabit places where nobody in their right mind would want to live like New Jersey for instance. Also somebody has put together a United Nations for micronations and many of them seek recognition there as a first step to petitioning the real UN for acceptance. They even send mini-diplomats to micronation conventions. The next one is being held in 2025. For some of these people, this is all a big joke or an art project (same thing), but some take it quite seriously. At least, I think they take it as seriously as an internet role playing game can be taken and that’s what I think this latter grouping of tiny intentional communities mostly is. It seems like a hobby for those at the geekiest end of the nerd spectrum. On a more down to earth level, even if none of these people ever succeed in starting their own countries, I can see how this type of role playing game might inspire a political science scholar to come up with a plan or theory for improving the practice of governance in the real world. They say that when young children play house or cops and robbers they are actually preparing themselves for roles they might play when they get older (the kids who pretended to be robbers will probably go on to be businessmen and the kids who played doctor probably became perverts) and this micronation trip might just be a more sophisticated version of that.

This is not a well-written book. It’s published by a vanity press which is usually a good enough excuse to avoid reading something, but I am an aficionado of all things odd and obscure so I thought I’d give it a chance. The writing can be redundant to say the least. Sometimes one paragraph is repeated word for word following its first iteration. The layout is confusing and the organization of information doesn’t always make sense. It’s full of typos, misspellings, and bad grammar. But the author’s first language isn’t English and, according to his online biography, he is also dyslexic so I’ll cut him as much slack here as I possibly can. Besides he obviously has a passion for his subject matter and that enthusiasm shines through. If this isn’t a great book, at least it is unique and interesting. It may be best as a work of bathroom literature, but many people have to admit that they have some of their most philosophical inner dialogues while sitting solitary, taking a dump in the porcelain Republican party cranium (otherwise known as the toilet).

Mohammed Bahareth’s Micronations isn’t a widely read book and it isn’t destined to be. That’s why I’m happy to have read it and why it has a prominent place on my bookshelf which gets more crowded by the week. And to all you barflies, boozehounds, lounge lizards, saloon swillers, and barroom political scientists whose livers are pickled in gin and tonics who have had a few and start spilling out over the sides to whatever schmuck in unlucky enough to be occupying the stool next to you, if your topic of conversation is how great it would be if you could run your own country, or even just be king for a day, I propose a toast in your honor. Let’s all do a shot of hooch and a round of rotgut for everyone chased with a bottle of mad dog. You’re all invited when I take the oath of office as the first president of The People’s Republic of Mike Hunt, population of one.