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New at Reason: Jesse Walker on the Yippies, Chicago '68, and the Power of Political Theater

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

On the fortieth anniversary of the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Managing Editor Jesse Walker looks back at how the media-savvy yippies inadvertently helped the right, and vice versa.

Read all about it here.

The Yippie Show

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Viewing the trial as a theatrical experience, I had great respect for the judge. He was witty, filled with his own sense of drama, and committed to his role with a furious passion....The part did not call for a Solomon because the law stank. It called for a yippie judge who could play in a real-life political version of "The Flintstones." Julie was our man, and together we made it happen.—Chicago Eight defendant Abbie Hoffman on Judge Julius Hoffman, in Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, 1980

Forty years ago this week, the Democratic Party gathered in Chicago to choose a presidential nominee. Protesters—some violent, most not—gathered there too, to denounce the Vietnam War. By the end of the four-day convention, the city's cops had gone berserk on national television, assaulting demonstrators, reporters, and random bystanders while the network cameras rolled. The police, wrote Mike Royko of the Chicago Sun-Times, "beat people beyond the point of subduing them. They chased them down and left them bleeding." Inside the convention hall, Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut accused the mayor of unleashing "Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago."

According to a report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, the week was an extended police riot. According to a federal grand jury, it was a leftist conspiracy. Eight activists were charged with inciting the chaos; the accused included Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the most public faces of a loose coalition of radicalized hippies called the yippies. The yippies had called for a Festival of Life in the streets and parks of Chicago—an alternative, they said, to the Democrats' Festival of Death. They brought a puckish sort of guerilla theater to the city, nominating a hog called Pigasus for president and threatening to add LSD to the city water supply. (The authorities actually stationed National Guardsmen by the reservoir, just in case the pranksters were serious.) Hoffman and Rubin weren't the only important yipsters, but they were the ringleaders of the gang. After the riots, when the news of the indictments came down, some other notable yippies—satirist Paul Krassner, disc jockey Bob Fass, Fugs founder Ed Sanders—formed a conga line on Hoffman's roof and sang, "We're not indicted! We're not indicted!"

After a three-ring trial, the defendants were eventually acquitted on all charges, though some of them had to appeal the initial verdict before they were completely cleared. The convention and its aftermath had been a victory for the yippies.

It was a victory for their enemies, too. The central story of Chicago wasn't just that cameras captured bloody police violence every evening. It was that the great American TV-viewing public overwhelmingly told pollsters afterwards that they sided with the cops. "That was our shortsightedness," says Krassner. "When we started chanting, 'The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching,' we didn't go to the next step, which was, And how are they gonna feel about it?"

The Polarization Artists

In Nixonland, his insightful study of the period, the historian Rick Perlstein points out that Nixon "welcomed conflict that served him politically. A briefing paper came to the president's desk in the middle of March instructing him to expect increased violence on college campuses that spring. 'Good!' he wrote across the face." Jerry Rubin welcomed the polarization as much as Nixon did. "We yippies must reprint [George] Wallace speeches, get him TV time and open up offices for him all over the country," he wrote in his 1970 book Do it! "He's the best Marxist rabble-rouser in Amerika today. He's our best organizer." And: "To build their myth they exaggerate our myth—they create a Yippie Menace. The menace helps create the reality."

Then there's this remarkable passage:

The right wing is the left wing's best ally.

Who was the first person to call the battles at San Francisco State College "a guerilla war—Vietnam at home"?

SDS?

Fuck no.

Ronnie Reagan!

(I can now reveal a secret. The last time I voted in an election, I cast my free Amerikan vote for the only movie star in the race, Ronnie Prettyboy.)

I doubt it's literally accurate that Rubin voted Reagan for governor, but there's a poetic truth lurking behind the sarcasm. The party of anarchy thrived on repression. The party of law and order thrived on disorder.

Krassner never cared for that sort of thinking—as a stand-up comic, he says, he was "always willing to sacrifice a target" when an unjust leader left office—but he understands it, and occasionally he felt flashes of it himself. I mentioned the memo that made Nixon scrawl Good! He replied with a memory of his own:

When Cronkite came on and reported the Kent State shootings, he said, 'Something has happened that many Americans were afraid would happen,' something like that. It was a moment of horror, but I remember saying to myself, 'Good.' I wasn't glad it happened, I had terrible sympathy for the people who were killed and their families and fellow students. But a month or a couple of weeks before that, in some southern college, some black students got killed. And I thought, Now white people will see that it's their own that are getting it. Now maybe they'll get more involved.

That sort of strategizing doesn't always work out as planned. "The right wing believes so intensely in their own bullshit," Rubin wrote, "that they are too stupid to deceive and govern effectively. Unlike the liberals, they don't know how to divide-and-conquer." It turned out that Nixon and Reagan were adept at dividing and conquering after all. In politics, it's a mistake to assume you're the only one who understands how the media work.

Understanding Media

Forty years ago, the yippies seemed unusual because they fused the political radicalism of the New Left with the long-haired, grass-smoking lifestyle of the counterculture. Today that combination is so familiar that many people don't even realize that the protesters and the hippies initially distrusted each other. What seems most curious about the yippies today is the way they mixed hard left politics with a deep appreciation for pop culture. Abbie Hoffman announced that he wanted to combine the styles of Andy Warhol and Fidel Castro. Jerry Rubin dedicated Do it! not just to his girlfriend but to "Dope, Color TV, and Violent Revolution." Even when praising a form of mass culture that had earned some grudging respect from the late-'60s left—rock 'n' roll—Rubin's list of musicians who "gave us the life/beat and set us free" included not just raucous originals like Jerry Lee Lewis and Bo Diddley but Fabian and Frankie Avalon, commercial confections that most lefty rock intellectuals disdained as insufficiently authentic. In one chapter, Rubin complained that if "the white ideological left" took over, "Rock dancing would be taboo, and miniskirts, Hollywood movies and comic books would be illegal." All this from a self-proclaimed communist whose heroes included Castro, Chairman Mao, and Ho Chi Minh.

It's not that the yippies swallowed pop culture uncritically. (Hoffman kept a sign attached to the bottom of his TV that said "bullshit.") It's that they saw the mass media's dream-world as another terrain to fight in. Krassner remembers the yippie circle analyzing virtually everything on the tube, even "watching shows like The Smothers Brothers and comparing that with Laugh-In, that Laugh-In was using easy reference jokes about controversial issues, whereas the comedy in The Smothers Brothers really represented how they felt."

Seven years after Chicago, Jerry Rubin turned up on the second episode of Saturday Night Live, pitching a product called Up Against the Wallpaper. Hoffman attacked the sketch as "a major sellout....He was a caricature of Jerry Rubin making fun of the '60s, but he was not pushing a point, an alternative." If you're plotting Rubin's political trajectory, you can mark 1975 as the year he moved to the right of Tommy Smothers.

Trajectories

To fully comprehend the yippies, you have to look at what they did in the '70s and '80s as much as the '60s. Hoffman got arrested on cocaine charges and subsequently spent six years underground. Rubin plunged into the New Age movement and sampled a series of self-improvement techniques. In his 1976 book Growing (Up) At 37, Rubin wrote about his experiences with everything from primal scream therapy to est; in one bizarre section, the man who once preached the life-changing virtues of LSD now waxed poetic about carrot juice.

Meanwhile, out on the lam, Hoffman wrote this in a letter to his wife:

Drugs have no intrinsic value. All communist countries have correctly outlawed them. There are loads of other exhilarating ways to get high. Communist governments have a cultural revolution to achieve that is national in scope. Our task in the U.S. is to build countercultural institutions that make the raising of children breeding grounds for revolution and rebellion against the wishes of the dominant, decadent culture.

His real views revealed at last? A temporary affectation by a man whose underground life had unleashed an identity crisis? Or maybe just a spasm of guilt in the wake of the coke bust? Who knows for sure? When he surfaced in the '80s, Hoffman crusaded against Reagan's drug war, and his passion for the issue certainly seemed sincere then.

By that time, Rubin had come up from the broader cultural underground, getting a job on Wall Street and later arranging networking parties for young professionals at the Palladium. I saw him debate Hoffman in the mid-'80s, when he and his sparring partner toured together as the Yippie vs. Yuppie show. Hoffman was high on the Sandinistas; Rubin preferred Gary Hart. The majority of the audience seemed to think Rubin was a right-wing sellout. Most of the rest thought Hoffman was a dinosaur who hadn't changed with the times.

Neither view was entirely accurate. Rubin insisted that his new self wasn't so distant from his old self, declaring in 1982 that his networking salons came "out of my 1960s organizing experience." He added, "I really don't think that I've become the person or symbol that I preached against in the '60s. I'm not a warmonger or munitions seller or corporate pig." Hoffman, in his own way, was intensely aware of the differences between the decades. In the last book he published before his death, 1987's Steal This Urine Test, he described a 1983 environmental fight in which "our protest song (as it should be in all environmental battles) was 'America the Beautiful.'...[I]t was very hard to sing it during the sixties as we were being shot, clubbed, jailed, and illegally wiretapped by the government. Especially hard while the mob sang all the patriotic songs. Today it seems appropriate." When Hoffman committed suicide in 1989, the Fifth Estate, an anarchist newspaper in Detroit, complained in an otherwise warm obit that his rhetoric had grown suspiciously patriotic in the last decade of his life.

This is what happens when the counterculture spills out of the '60s and sloshes all over society. It takes new forms, from Rubin's New Age capitalism to Hoffman's all-American socialism. I doubt the yuppie networkers at Rubin's Manhattan salons—young professionals hunting for business partners, bedmates, coke connections—thought of themselves as children of the '60s. But they were, just as surely as Hoffman's Springsteenian patriots were creatures of the Reagan era.

Yippies and CREEPs

The official yippie organization, the Youth International Party, kept chugging away in the '70s and afterwards, putting out a paper filled with conspiracy theories and paeans to pot. More recently, its surviving members have opened an archive and performance space in Greenwich Village, dubbed the Yippie Museum and Cafe. Jerry Rubin's favorite uncle was a vaudeville star; now the movement he helped to start has its very own vaudeville venue.

And that, in a roundabout way, leads us to one more parallel between the yippies and the Nixonites. Both were masters of the media-savvy political prank.

In 1967, for example, Hoffman called a press conference to announce the invention of LACE, a drug that made people have sex. Three couples in his apartment demonstrated the imaginary chemical's alleged effects for the onlooking press corps, who went on to report that the protesters were planning to spray their new weapon at cops and National Guardsmen at a demonstration outside the Pentagon. "The function of this was to manipulate the media," says Krassner. "We said we were going to spray them at the Pentagon. Of course this made the local papers, the newsmagazines, and the wire services—and a lot of people became aware of a demonstration that they hadn't heard of before." The possibility of seeing some cops and hippies getting it on, or perhaps getting sprayed themselves, surely swelled the crowds as well.

There are obvious differences between such antics and the dirty tricks deployed by Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President, but there are structural similarities as well, a common interest in cracking open the media and playing with the narratives being projected. In 1972, when Pete McCloskey challenged Nixon in the Republican primaries, a young conservative named Roger Stone made a donation to the insurgent's campaign in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance. (The original plan was to use the Gay Liberation Front, but Stone felt that would be an affront to his masculinity.) According to the Senate Watergate Report, Stone and his confederate Herbert Porter then "drafted an anonymous letter to the Manchester Union Leader and enclosed a photocopy of the receipt."

I called up Stone and asked him about the yippies. "Classic street theater," he replied, with a hint of professional admiration. "The voters or the consumers are getting too much information. You have to cut through that by being provocative. It's what the yippies figured out."

What does that have to do with the Yippie Cafe? Just that Stone, who shares the cafe proprietors' distaste for New York's draconian drug laws, showed up there last month. He brought along a bunch of College Republicans with short haircuts and ill-fitting suits, and he performed a stand-up comedy act cum political rant. Some of the spectators laughed, some heckled, some clapped, some stared.

"I did OK," says Stone. "They said, 'Who are these short-haired guys with you?' I said, 'This is the national committee of the Hitler Youth.'" When Abraham Ribicoff invoked the Nazis in Chicago, all hell broke loose on the convention floor. Forty years later, Stone was greeted with laughter and beer.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

Bruce Conner, RIP

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:30:00 EDT

The great beatnik filmmaker Bruce Conner has died at age 74. No director has surpassed Conner's ability to assemble found footage into something entirely new; in experimental movies ranging from his Zapruder-meets-Owsley short Television Assassination to his Devo video Mongoloid to his haunting dream-film Valse Triste, he laid the groundwork for the current explosion of remixes and mash-ups.

Other filmmakers have done it before. But mainly in a comic sort of way. I'd seen a Marx Brothers movie in which Groucho said to Harpo, "There's a revolution going on. We need help." Harpo goes out and pins a "Help Wanted" sign on the door. Suddenly you see tanks and airplanes and soldiers and elephants all coming to their aid. After that I started thinking...I became aware that putting in an image from a totally different movie you could make it more complex. Like taking the soundtrack from one film that was made in 1932 and put it on top of images from a movie made in 1948, and inter-cutting other images together with it. I had this tremendous, fantastic movie going in my head made up of all the scenes I'd seen...a three-hour spectacular. --Bruce Conner, 1974

He didn't just do this with film. He created weird, witty, sometimes Ernstian collages (like Bombhead, pictured to the right). And he made grotesque but transfixing assemblages -- sculptures, sort of -- out of stretched stockings, faded photos, beads, hair, and a host of found objects, from a suitcase to a high chair, a crucifix to a bicycle wheel. In some ways these resembled Joseph Cornell's shadow boxes, but they had a messier, more organic quality, as though they had been left in a garage rather than carefully preserved on a shelf.

Not all of Conner's art was assembled from preexisting material. Leafing through 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II, I see drawings, paintings, photograms, and forms I'm not sure I could describe with a single word. He also made some films the old-fashioned way, photographing them himself rather than compiling them from other people's images. (The best of those is probably Looking for Mushrooms, a mesmerizing movie shot in Mexico and California.) He seemed eager to try his hand at every conceivable medium -- he even spent a spell doing light shows for rock bands.

Now that you can pass off a prank as "conceptual art," I should probably mention that Conner was a great prankster as well. (He has his own chapter in the classic Re/Search anthology Pranks!) He loved to play with identity, and once plotted to present an exhibition of new collages that he would inaccurately attribute to Dennis Hopper. (The actor was a friend, and Conner was an informal consultant on Easy Rider. He made the collages, which are stunning, but the larger plan never came off.) In 1967 he ran a jape campaign for San Francisco City Supervisor, at one point giving a speech that consisted entirely of a long list of desserts. And as the San Francisco Chronicle's obituary reports,

Mr. Conner announced his own death erroneously on two occasions, once sending an obituary to a national art magazine, and later writing a self-description for the biographical encyclopedia Who Was Who in America.

I'd like to believe he's still alive this time too, sharing a beer somewhere with Andy Kaufman and chuckling at the gullible media.

Witchblade Creator Dead at 37

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:26:00 EDT

Michael Turner, the former golden boy of Image Comics and Top Cow Comics, and more recently, Marvel Comics and DC Comics, died last month of cancer. Turner's style was as good as it gets by action comic book standards, but he'll be remembered most for successfully challenging the Comics Code Authority (CCA).

The CCA wielded gospel-like influence during the Red Scare, banning visual depictions of and references to drugs, sexuality, and violence. For almost 40 years, publishing houses had to go through the CCA if they wanted their titles to see the light of day. In response to artist complaints, the CCA liberalized its code in 1971 to allow references to drugs, and again in 1989 to allow representations of gays. By the late '80s, the CCA had fewer and fewer topics to go after, but big houses like Marvel Comics and DC Comics still made whatever artistic changes the CCA deemed necessary.

The rise of comic shops in the early 1990s meant that newsstand comics had a smaller market share. Artists and publishing houses who didn't want their work censored by the CCA had a new home. Image Comics was founded in 1992, and its earliest titles—Spawn and Gen¹³, as well as Turner's Witchblade—proved that a comic could draw fans without doing time on a newstand. Inspired by Image, Marvel and DC followed suit a few years later, creating smaller houses that would eventually foster titles popular with adult readers, such as Sin City.

Below are some highlights from the original Comics Code, published in 1954:

If crime is depicted it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity.
In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.
No comic magazine shall use the word horror or terror in its title.
Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly, nor so as to injure the sensibilities of the reader.
Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.

Turner's work violated every nearly every rule in the 1954, 1972, and 1989 codes. Thanks in part to the path blazed by Witchblade, two of the four biggest comic publishing houses in the country—Image and Dark Horse—operate by their own in-house standards, free of the CCA's anti-comic moralizing.

Editor Brian Doherty hates on Image co-founder Rob Liefeld (for artistic reasons) here.

Those Founding Fathers Were Some Far-Out Groovy Cats Who Definitely Passed the Acid Test, Man!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:35:00 EDT

Extend the Fourth of July weekend—and trigger LSD flashbacks galore even if you've never taken the drug—by watching this totally psychedelic 1976 production from the old U.S. Information Agency of all things.

This three-minute film makes Zabriskie Point look like a drug-war episode of Dragnet and is, simply put, beyond description. I mean, how do you successfully describe a red-white-and-blue cornucopia that spits out hamburgers, TV sets, hot dogs, and baseballs to a rocking soundtrack? I just tried and failed. It's as if Fred and Barney were smoking dope rather than Winstons, for god's sake and it's groovy to the max, all thanks to the sharp of eye of Howard "Extreme" Mortman, the Augustus Owsley Stanley of the blogosphere.

So check it out, then take some hard drugs to bring you back down to Earth. It's Monday, fer chrissakes, and the start of a very important week of work.

Update: Here's the MySpace page of the animator, Vince Collins.

'Our Flag Is Hip-Hop'

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

High Comedies

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:30:00 EDT

If the recently concluded HBO series The Wire is arguably the most aesthetically accomplished fictional indictment of the decades-long war on drugs, there is no shortage of contenders for the most absurd bit of prohibitionist agitprop, from the unintentionally hilarious 1936 movie Tell Your Children (better known as Reefer Madness) to the widely parodied 1987 public service announcement in which the role of "your brain on drugs" is played by an egg frying in a skillet to an early 1990s TV ad in which the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles counsel a grammar school kid offered a fistful of joints ("Get a teacher," advise the Turtles, "get a pizza, get real").

Then there's the latest offering sponsored by the Office of National Drug Control Policy's National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, a mockumentary called Stoners in the Mist, featuring a pith-helmet-wearing narrator explaining the strange customs of the slack-jawed, amotivational, Lava lamp-loving inhabitants of "Cannabis Isle." Online at abovetheinfluence.com and featuring squirrely navigation and a rhythmic drum track more stupefying than anything produced by Cheech & Chong, Stoners underscores what most Americans already knew: Real winners don't do anti-drug websites.

Here's a short magical mystery tour, culled from the foggy memories of reason's editors, of decades of advertising and small-screen messages that inadvertently made childhood just a little more bearable. And drugs—even NoDoz—just a little cooler.

"Marijuana...is the Hula Hoop of the Jet Generation!" Produced in the late 1960s by the American Medical Association, this anti-cannabis commercial featured animation groovier than the film Yellow Submarine and a detailed list of just how fun it is to get high. "The human brain," notes the serioso narrator, "is hardly a Tinker Toy." But judging from the spot's graphics, it sure looks like one, especially if you've been smoking dope.

Dragnet's "Blue Boy" Episode. Clocking in at number 85 in TV Guide's 1997 list of the best TV episodes ever, this segment told just the facts about LSD-and a face-painting hippie called Blue Boy, who overdosed on the stuff after being arrested by Sgt. Joe Friday, played by three-pack-a-day smoker Jack Webb, who died in real life of a heart attack at age 62. Honorable mention: the "Big High" episode, in which two cannabis-craving parents get stoned and let their child drown in a bathtub. "After 25 years on the job, it's finally happened," groans Friday's partner, Bill Gannon. "I'm going to be sick."

Sonny Bono's Secret Message. "If you become a pothead," the curiously speech-slurring future congressman warned in this 1970 PSA, "you risk blowing the most important time of your life: Your teen age [sic]." The pitch might have been more effective if Bono's eyes weren't quite so red--or his jumpsuit so golden and shimmery.

Stop the Madness! This star-and-monkey-studded mid-'80s video is the Citizen Cocaine of Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaign. (The First Lady even has a cameo.) Featuring past and future drug users ranging from Arnold Schwarzenegger to David Hasselhoff to Whitney Houston-and a spasticated spider monkey dancing to the strains of a Herb Alpert trumpet solo-"Stop the Madness" didn't just make a case for getting high (anything to stop the "Stop the Madness" video!). The title track previewed the lockdown that has given the U.S. the highest rate of incarceration in the world: "You thought that using dope would be a party/Now you're a prisoner in a cell crying to be free."

Heavy Metal Drug Addicts Destroy Communism. In August 1989, what The New York Times described as "thundering hordes of Western heavy-metal rock" acts, including Motley Crue, Ozzie Osbourne, Skid Row, and Bon Jovi, played at the Soviet-sanctioned Moscow Music Peace Festival as guitar-grinding "ambassadors of peace and temperance." The concert, which was broadcast to the West on MTV, was created by the American impresario Doc McGhee as part of a parole deal stemming from a 1987 conviction for marijuana importation. The Berlin Wall fell a scant 14 weeks later-long before Ozzy or Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx entered rehab.

I'm So Excited by Caffeine Pills! In a 1990 episode of the crypto-kiddie-porn high school sitcom Saved by the Bell, Jessie (played by Elizabeth Berkeley, later to triumph as a bare-it-all-to-get-ahead dancer in Showgirls) gets hooked on caffeine pills while studying for a big math test and rehearsing for a singing audition. Her friends' intervention comes soon enough to save Jessie from the ultimate coffee high but not before the audience hears her espresso-distorted version of the Pointer Sisters' anthem of chemically free overexuberance, "I'm So Excited!"

Pee-Wee Herman Says No to Crack-and Jail Time. "Everyone wants to be cool," the uber-ironic Saturday morning children's show host admits in this ad made as part of a sentencing deal after Pee-Wee's 1991 arrest for masturbating in a Florida movie theater. "But doing it with crack isn't just wrong. It could be dead wrong."

One Frying Pan Can Ruin Your Whole Kitchen. Riffing off the legendary 1987 ad "This Is Your Brain on Drugs," this 1999 spot created by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America features an underweight model personifying heroin chic, who explains the downside of smack (a drug regularly used by less than 0.1 percent of Americans) by smashing up a kitchen with a cast-iron frying pan.

If you're interested in related fare, check out The Best Week Ever's "10 Funniest Anti-Drug Commercials in Advertising History" and 10 Zen Monkey's "Five Druggiest High School Sitcom Scenes."

And if you're still locked in a terminal buzz from watching so many videos online after your coffee break, contribute a little more to the declining productivity of the American economy by watching the infamous episode of Quincy, M.E., that answers the musical question, "Can punk rock kill?"

Nick Gillespie is editor of reason.com and reason.tv. A version of this appeared in the June reason.

The Birth of the Nuppie

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Tue, 20 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

At 31 inches long and 48 inches wide, weighing approximately 300 pounds, Casulo may be the largest, heaviest gadget in the history of gee-whiz technology. And yet for a few days in February, as news of its existence traveled from one trend-spotting blog to the next, the bulky rectangular box captivated the attention of those normally preoccupied by much tinier fare.

Created by two German designers, Casulo is an almost magically compact trunk crammed with enough stylish furniture to outfit a studio apartment. The pieces include a slatted bed frame and a twin mattress, a sizable armoire, a desk with a four-drawer cabinet, a six-shelf bookcase, one height-adjustable stool, and two square seating cubes that moonlight as additional storage space. Its footprint matches that of a standard European pallet, making it easy to ship and store. Its contents can be unpacked and assembled in approximately 10 minutes, no tools required.

Casulo’s streamlined surfaces are devoid of any non-functional ornamentation—the mood the system projects is one of clean, efficient, and fairly institutional playfulness. If there were a high-security prison for criminal Playmobil figures, it would be equipped with this stuff. But if whatever comfort Casulo’s spartan furniture offers the body remains largely untested—so far, only a prototype exists—the comfort it affords restless souls is obvious.

Thanks to an ever-expanding array of wireless technologies, we can now fit our jobs, our record collections, and our five favorite friends into our pockets. But even our most state-of-the-art futons and entertainment centers remain hopelessly immobile, their practical range limited to one side of the room or the other. Products like Casulo attempt to remedy that: Any day now, they promise, our physical property will be just as portable as our intellectual property.

No doubt old Tom Joad would be surprised by our kinetic aspirations. On one hand, mobility in the service of leisure is a hallmark of the richest among us—these days, you can easily spend more than $1 million on a luxury RV, and if you have a spare $100 million, Space Adventures, Ltd. will be more than happy to send you to the moon next year. On the other hand, mobility yoked to domesticity, mobility as an economic strategy, have traditionally been hallmarks of the underclass.

In the last decades of the 19th century and the first of the 20th, what the historian Carlos Schwantes has dubbed a “wageworkers’ frontier” existed in the American West and Canada. Millions of migrant laborers provided temporary manpower for the fisheries, mines, lumber operations, farms, canneries, cattle ranches, and construction companies operating in the new territories, and mobility was the key to their livelihood. As soon as one job ended, they hit the rails or the highways looking for the next. “There are 300,000 hobos in the country, and we want good roads so it will be easier for us to find work,” exclaimed Jeff Davis, the self-proclaimed “King of Hobos,” at a 1913 meeting of automotive industry executives in Detroit.

But however important this just-in-time army of human labor may have been to the region’s economic development, the hobos (whom Davis always took care to distinguish from “tramps” because of their desire to work) weren’t particularly respectable. Without families to support or mortgages to pay, these highly mobile workers, most of whom were young men, spent their money in saloons, gambling dens, and brothels.

In the 1920s, John Grissim explains in The Complete Buyer’s Guide to Manufactured Homes & Land, a nationwide craze for family camping inspired some car owners to build trailers comprised of “little more than folding canvas tents on a wooden platform mounted on a single axle.” Eventually, commercial vendors began producing trailers too; when the Great Depression hit in the 1930s and people started moving west in search of better prospects, they often turned their erstwhile leisure vehicles into home sweet home when they got there. “It wasn’t long before campgrounds that accepted these semi-permanent tenants were dubbed trailer parks,” Grissim writes.

Citizens with more permanent roots dubbed these parks “trailer slums,” and mobile living became the province of the poor—and, to a lesser extent, plucky retirees piloting Winnebagos across the country at a pace that would make even Jack Kerouac weary. But why let the oldsters have all the fun? Why should rock stars and power forwards have a monopoly on traveling from urban playground to urban playground in pursuit of new customers for their services?

In the current bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek, the 29-year-old slackerpreneur and self-improvement guru Tim Ferriss insists that the greatest assets of the “New Rich”—and the keys to creating “luxury lifestyles”—are “time and mobility” rather than huge bank balances. To put it another way: That homeless guy sleeping in his own urine in your building’s doorway? He isn’t as poor as he looks!

Ferriss, a self-described tango champion and online dietary supplement tycoon, disdains the notion of slaving away in white-collar serfdom for the deferred promise of geriatric adventure. Instead, he preaches the virtues of economic autonomy, extended travel, and “mini-retirements” that last months or years instead of weeks. And thus Tom Joad’s nightmare becomes today’s white-collar dream. What is Casulo but the creative class’s version of a homeless guy’s shopping cart? And what are vehicles like the Design Within Reach Airstream Trailer or the GMC Pad but more elaborate and mobile versions of Casulo?

Introduced last year, the $50,000 DWR Trailer updates Airstream’s iconic, aluminum-shelled asphalt dinghy with an interior suitable for a Dwell centerfold. The GMC Pad, so speculative it doesn’t even exist as a prototype, is a concept for something General Motors describes as a “mobile urban loft” for modern city dwellers who’ve been “priced out of Southern California’s escalating housing market.”

Along with side panels decorated with graffiti murals, it includes all of the touches that deliver the “cultural & geographic freedom” that today’s migrant copywriters demand—Thermador kitchen appliances, a personal spa designed in collaboration with Kohler, satellite TV. “Whether located in walking distance from your job @ TBWAChiatDay, spending a couple evenings along PCH, or wintering at Mammoth, with the GMC PAD, home is where you want it,” General Motors advises. “And commuting is what other people do.”

No doubt it’s easy to mock the idea of, say, rebel handbag designers lighting out for the territories in their DWR Airstreams, mad to live, mad to be saved, mad to admire the matte ebony finish of their eco-friendly flooring and burn, burn, burn like recessed halogen lighting tastefully exploding across the laminate doors of the roomy cabin’s overhead lockers.

But it’s a seductive vision too. Ever since Huck Finn decided to go downriver on a raft for no other reason than to escape the bounds of sivilization, hyper-mobility has stood as one of the purest expressions of American liberty. Now, as gas prices and gridlock threaten to constrain us, as Minutemen and TSA officials do their best to keep the flow of human beings in check, it’s no wonder products like Casulo and the GMC Pad are so appealing. Shouldn’t we be able to move around the planet at least as freely as our credit histories and embarrassing party photos do?

And must we really sacrifice comfort and style just because we want to live the itinerant life? In On the Road, Sal and Dean remain so committed to constant movement, one suspects, in part because the accommodations are so squalid whenever they actually arrive anywhere. In 2008 shouldn’t you be able to consort with winos and hookers all day and then, after managing your online dietary supplement business via your on-board WiFi connection, fall asleep on pin-tucked Baltic flax linens?

Today’s merry entrepreneurs and migrant knowledge workers can combine the liberating mobility of the Beats with the liberating autonomy of having a simple, Walden-like shelter even Martha Stewart might envy. The dream doesn’t get any more American than that.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.

"As a subculture, we are not the spawn of Satan"

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:08:00 EDT

The New York Times profiles the weird world of steampunk,

a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines.

Whole thing here.

Though the article does refer to the great William Gibson, whose short story "The Gernsback Continuum" is a bona fide steampunk classic, it somehow fails to mention Bruce Sterling, whose own contributions to the genre are far from negligible. Contributing Editor Mike Godwin sat down with Sterling back in 2004 for a freewheeling interview that touched on everything from "Google blindness" to Islamic terrorism. Read it all here.

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Deap: LSD Inventor Albert Hofmann, RIP

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:50:00 EDT

The creator of LSD, Albert Hofmann, is dead at the ripe old age of 102 (he's pictured at the right by artist Alex Gray). The man who launched a thousand trips first synthesized the drug in 1938 and then learned of its hallucinatory effects five years later, after accidentally ingesting it.

From the NY Times obit:

[Hofmann] then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug's value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity's oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life....
Though Dr. Hofmann called LSD "medicine for the soul," by 2006 his hallucinogenic days were long behind him, he said in the interview that year.
"I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore," he said, adding. "Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley."
But he said LSD had not affected his understanding of death. In death, he said, "I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that's all."

More here.

As someone who has taken LSD, I'd like to say thank you, Dr. Hofmann. As a fan of rock music, I'd like to thank him, too, for indirectly inspiring the greatest couplet set to music ("Things ain't what they used to be/Cary Grant's on LSD").

Far more important, Hofmann's "problem child" (as he wryly dubbed his discovery) has been a major and generally positive influence through many aspects of society, from the obvious (such as mind expansion trips of Timothy Leary and many others) to the less obvious (including the personal computer revolution). Blowing peoples' minds is never an easy thing, and not always a good thing, but Hofmann is an inspiring figure, in large part because he never lost his taste for scientific inquiry and rational analysis while expanding the borderlands of human consciousness.

Update: Spelling of Hofmann's name corrected multiple times.

Belated Hat tip: Pig Mannix.

More Update: Alan Vanneman blogs, "I'd like to thank Dr. Hofman (with irony) for indirectly inspiring the very worst joke I ever heard (courtesy of the unlamented London Lee): 'Did you hear about the hippie who mixed LSD with prune juice? He really took a trip!'"

"Unfortunately, buckos, it's time to pay up!": The (Cartoon) Beatles in "Taxman"

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:17:00 EDT

The Fab Four's animated counterparts declare the pennies on their eyes in their animated series from the 1960s (and yes, they get around to singing "Taxman" by the end):

Thanks to Maura Flynn for the tip.

This looks better at Rough Cut, reason.tv's video blog. Go there now!

"Our Flag is Hip Hop"

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

At the beginning of the documentary Planet B-Boy, as several hip-hop veterans offer a breezy history of breakdance, a not-to-be-messed-with French street dancer describes a transformational filmic experience. “Flashdance,” he says, and pauses to hold back tears, “It’s personally emotional for me.” A Japanese b-boy, recalling his first viewing of the film, is reduced to “wow.” An earnest German promoter confirms that the 1983 film, which includes scenes with the breakdance pioneers Rock Steady Crew, had pan-European influence. In bringing an urban American art form to Seoul, Paris, and Capetown, Flashdance planted the seeds of a subculture all over the map. Jennifer Beals, apparently, is an effective conduit for the culture of the South Bronx.

The term b-boy identifies hip-hop-obsessed dancers who have devoted themselves to breakdancing. Today, that word holds currency in a number of languages, and Benson Lee’s Planet B-Boy follows French, Japanese, Korean and American dance crews from their home countries to a global competition in Braunshweig, Germany. Whereas The Freshest Kids, another recent documentary on b-boy culture, located the history and early evolution of breakdancing in the black and Puerto Rican communities of the South Bronx, Lee is less interested in where that culture came from than where it has gone. New York figures only as a dusty museum for the form’s history.

Instead of New York’s Rock Steady Crew, then, we meet Phase-T, a crew from the working class suburb of Chelles, France. The crew includes nine solid French North Africans and one tiny white kid dubbed “Lil’ Kev,” a freakishly talented dancer whom they toss around like a beach ball. Sitting beside her son, Lil’ Kev’s mother explains what she first thought of his new friends in hip-hop: “noir, noir, noir!” As he cringes beneath a cocked baseball cap, she explains that she’s not as racist anymore, and she no longer fears his friends or his chosen life trajectory. But she and her husband would be “very proud” if he decided to be a fireman instead.

Battle of the Year, the competition that grounds the film, forces a post-national phenomenon into a nationalized framework. Preliminary competitions take place at the country level, so each team bears the responsibility of representing its respective country. Phase-T is a team of chiefly African descent that has mastered an American art form to perform under a French flag. As charming a story of globalization as that might be, there is something profoundly incongruous about performing as anti-authoritarian and expressive an art as breakdancing under any flag at all. That tension emerges throughout the film, as b-boys alternately embrace the competitive playbook handed them and struggle under its weight. “We can’t say the phrase ‘French culture’ really represents us,” says one of Phase-T’s dancers. “Our flag is hip-hop.”

Cho Sung Gook knows something about national pride; his disapproving, working class father works as a flag distributor for the Korean government “to help establish our national identity.” And for Cho's crew, Last for One, the burdens of national identity are something like a ticking clock. Each will have to serve Korea’s required two years of military service, and like any athletes at the top of their form, they won’t be able to simply pick up where they left off. “You lose everything you work for when you go to the army,” explains a crew member, “so we have to take it to the extreme before we go.”

The crew feels dismissed and ignored by mainstream Korea, by parents who think they are “cleaning the floor or something” when they’re handspringing through subways. And given their living conditions—six to a room in Seoul—cleaning floors might seem a safer financial strategy than hoping that Korea suddenly starts paying to watch its breakdancers.

Ambivalent as the dancers are, they’re clearly brimming with national pride as they gear up to compete with Japan. When the film was shot, the Koreans were the reigning world champions, a showy Korean crew called Gamblerz having won the year before. The Gamblerz 2005 show may qualify as the oddest performance in the history of hip-hop. The crew splits into two groups and reenacts “the history of Korea” through six minutes of b-boy battling, one side representing the South and one the North. In the end, the sides are reconciled, and the crew springs into the eerily perfect synchrony that only the Koreans seem able to pull off.

Cho's father is deeply worried about his son’s financial prospects as a dancer; an American crew member’s father, by contrast, simply advises him to “rip that shit.” The locus of American breakdancing has shifted to Las Vegas—arguably where natural born showmen belong—and most of the crew is Hispanic. The Americans, too, feel the pull of national pride, and their relationship to national identity is no less complex. They don’t seem to register any dissonance when one of them argues that “we created this thing” and “it’s time to bring it back to the U.S.” Nor should they: That the descendents of Hispanic immigrants from the Southwest are defending the mantle of a culture developed by blacks in the Bronx of the 70s makes a kind of sense.

Like any great, populist dance film, Planet B-Boy ends with a battle. For nearly two decades, unremarkable Braunschweig has been home to the “battle of the year,” where crews from 20 or so nations fling themselves across a stage in tightly choreographed interpretations of American street battle. All share a superhuman athleticism; they’re as comfortable windmilling around on the palms of their hands as on the soles of their feet, jumping backward onto their forearms and springing forward in synchronized slow motion. The French, in the words of one promoter, have an unmatched sensitivity for music and flow. The Japanese dream up the most innovative, conceptually complex show. The Americans have a knack for individualizing their dancers, shaping characters out of movement. The Koreans dominate the competition with a combination of robot-like synchrony and gymnastic prowess. And the founder of the competition, the guy in charge of the logistics? German.

Clearly, Americans no longer own the dance. Some of the most poignant moments of the film come as Korean crew perform in Germany and the camera lingers on the Vegas crew’s faces. Their eyes are tinged with fear, their mouths slightly open. Afterward, one manages to offer a half-hearted pep talk. Their show is just “different,” he explains, “Hopefully the judges don’t just want to see…some amazing shit.”

The judges do want to see some amazing shit, which is why the Korean team "Last for One" emerges victorious. A first place finish at the competition at last gives Cho's crew some commercial viability, and in the film’s last scenes, the crew is shown flipping its way through shows in front of Korean crowds, at the World Cup, and—improbably—in a commercial for Korean tourism.

Planet B-Boy starts out as a film about the postnational flag of hip-hop, but its avatars are too adaptive to let a tidy narrative of global unity win the day. In the end, they manage to stretch the boundaries of old identities, finding room for a bastardized version of an American ghetto art form in the very definition of contemporary Korean culture. It’s surely possible to argue that a once-defiant art form is really and truly dead when it has been vetted by the Korean tourism board. But as one of breakdancing’s pioneers describes hip hop’s early days, “We were naming moves on the spot, making up the rules as we went along.”

When the old moves go stale, new ones emerge. There will be more b-boys, from more cultures, to dream up new rules in post-national street battles to come.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor of reason.

The Anti-Emo Pogroms

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:06:00 EDT

Mexican subcultures go to war:

In recent weeks, a wave of emo bashings has swept across Mexico, several news agencies have reported, fuelled by punks, rockabillies, goths, metalheads and basically anyone who's not emo.

According to Daniel Hernandez, who's been covering the anti-emo riots on his blog Intersections, the violence began March 7, when an estimated 800 young people poured into the Mexican city of Queretaro's main plaza "hunting" for emo kids to pummel. Then the following weekend similar violence occurred in Mexico City at the Glorieta de Insurgents, a central gathering space for emos. Hernandez also reports that several anti-emo riots have now also spread to various other Mexican cities. Via the Austin American Statesmen, several postings on Mexican social-networking sites, primarily organising spot for these "emo hunts," have been dug up and translated. One states: "I HATE EMOS!!! They are not even people, they are so stupid, they cry over meaningless things... My school is infested with them, I want to kill them all!"...

More recent reports state that the emos have begun to fight back against the other "urban tribes" and organised marches in Guadalajara and Mexico City, escalating the violence and leading to increased police presence.

Hat tip: Charles Oliver, who adds: "This would have made a great movie in the hands of Walter Hill around 1978." It sounds more like a joint project for Todd Haynes and Sam Peckinpah to me.

The Traditionalist Counterculture

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 07:49:00 EST

In the web journal First Principles, reason managing editor Jesse Walker takes a look at "crunchy cons," National Review conservatives, the Summer of Love, and "the libertarian and traditionalist wings of the hippie movement."

Read all about it here.

AT&T Works In More Places....

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:39:00 EST

For some real-world commentary on the recent telecommunications company/FISA brouhaha, see the work of the Billboard Liberation Front on a San Francisco AT & T billboard yesterday.

For more sober and detailed commentary on this matter see, to begin with, Julian Sanchez's "Time for Democrats to Lead on FISA" from December.

Hippies in Space: Some '70s Flashbacks

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:21:00 EST

In the days before camcorders and YouTube, fans of countercultural DIY video put their hopes in Sony Portapaks and cable access television. Howard Rheingold has just posted one artifact from that era, shot in 1976 and starring a young Rheingold as "Howard K. Martian, extraterrestrial anthropologist."

On a related note (sort of), here's an online edition of Space Colonies, a book published in 1977 by the CoEvolution Quarterly. The Quarterly was a spinoff from the Whole Earth Catalog, which wasn't just a bible for the back-to-the-land movement but offered a helping hand to those who wanted to go up-to-the-skies.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, RIP

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:21:00 EST

He inspired a zany American political party and a decent Beatles song, managed to keep the Beach Boys' mercurial Mike Love in some sort of spiritual calm, and was all-around an interesting character in one of the late 20th century's more interesting stories: the increasing number of religious and spiritual options and technologies available in the cornucopian West. Transcendental Meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi finally transcended the physical world.

What Our Public Schools Need: More Rotting Piles of Books

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 11:21:00 EST

Caveat: I have no idea what the full back story behind this link might be. Perhaps some public servant can come in and explain why in fact the city of Detroit's action was perfectly appropriate or necessary. But on its face it seems a fascinating indictment of the public school bureaucratic mentality. [UPDATE: Thanks to highnumber in the comment thread for finding a news story with more. The school district sold the building as is after a fire. Can't tell from the account whether it was the case that sorting through and moving the still usable material would cost more than just giving up and buying new ones, but it's certainly possible. Still, this story from commenter J sub D makes one think that just abandoning things isn't uncommon for Detroit's school system--which still isn't to say that the abandonment might not have ultimately made economic sense.]

It starts as a general discussion of urban exploration (of abandoned buildings) in the Detroit area, then becomes a photo travelogue of a particular one: an abandoned public school book depository. An excerpt of the text:

This is a building where our deeply-troubled public school system once stored its supplies, and then one day apparently walked away from it all, allowing everything to go to waste. The interior has been ravaged by fires and the supplies that haven't burned have been subjected to 20 years of Michigan weather. To walk around this building transcends the sort of typical ruin-fetishism and "sadness" some get from a beautiful abandoned building. This city's school district is so impoverished that students are not allowed to take their textbooks home to do homework, and many of its administrators are so corrupt that every few months the newspapers have a field day with their scandals, sweetheart-deals, and expensive trips made at the expense of a population of children who can no longer rely on a public education to help lift them from the cycle of violence and poverty that has made Detroit the most dangerous city in America. To walk through this ruin, more than any other, I think, is to obliquely experience the real tragedy of this city; not some sentimental tragedy of brick and plaster, but one of people...
Pallet after pallet of mid-1980s Houghton-Mifflin textbooks, still unwrapped in their original packaging, seem more telling of our failures than any vacant edifice. The floor is littered with flash cards, workbooks, art paper, pencils, scissors, maps, deflated footballs and frozen tennis balls, reel-to-reel tapes. Almost anything you can think of used in the education of a child during the 1980s is there, much of it charred or rotted beyond recognition. Mushrooms thrive in the damp ashes of workbooks. Ailanthus altissima, the "ghetto palm" grows in a soil made by thousands of books that have burned, and in the pulp of rotted English Textbooks. Everything of any real value has been looted. All that's left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential. It is almost impossible not to see all this and make some connection between the needless waste of all these educational supplies and the needless loss of so many lives in this city to poverty and violence, though the reality of why these supplies were never used is unclear. In some breathtakingly-beautiful expression of hope, an anonymous graffiti artist has painted a phoenix-like book rising from the ashes of the third floor.

A whole bunch of education-related stories from reason.

Friday Mini Book Review: Perfect From Now On

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:11:00 EST

Past mini book reviews.

Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life by John Sellers. (Simon and Schuster, 2007). It’s unlikely a review of a book like this can be fully fair, balanced, and just. One possibility is that its subject matter—one American male born in 1970’s personal journey through music fandom—will seem inherently impenetrable and uninteresting to the reviewer, and thus all the author’s self-deprecating wit and problems-with-dad material—see, this topic has something universal to say about the human condition, and this writer is just an all-around interesting voice--will be seeds thrown in a barren field.

Another possibility is that the reviewer will himself have a fanatical obsession about popular music and its attendant fandom, thus see the material through his own strongly and often emotionally gripped thoughts on what’s really important about the topic, what sort of relation to this music is most illuminating, and, most dangerously, have dark thoughts about how and why this guy…this self-admitted quasi-poseur (first heard Pavement in ‘93! First heard Guided by Voices in ’02! Bases his book on his insight into and fanaticism for these bands!) got the Simon and Schuster contract for this hardcover original on this topic.

Not to say that, in principle, this couldn’t have been a very interesting book, Sellers’ John-come-lately status notwithstanding. It’s readably affable, and occasionally pleasingly witty. The reader should bear in mind it is firmly of the by now either classic or clichéd mode of self-referential quasi-memoirish modern nonfiction, sensitive-but-not-ickily-so, funny-and-self-deprecating division, lots of irony but still just enough sincerity. It’s the tone common to lots of slight modern nonfiction about topics that aren’t obviously stuffed with emotional depth or excitement, those topics smaller than being abused by your nutty parents or adventuring by choice or circumstance in dangerous foreign lands.

Thus, it’s suburban and loaded with way too many footnotes full of personal asides, instant-critiques of his own writing, and sideline mini-essays. It’s got a cockamamie and neither funny nor enlightening attempt to create a foolproof mathematic formula for musical greatness. While reading it, I was simultaneously reading the huge hit from a few years back Candy Freak, which approaches candy with the same tone and authorial voice (though more actual reporting), which added to how aggravated I was by this one—try to read only one book of average guy quirky topic nonfiction at a time, my friends. Readers of Esquire and GQ will be very, very, very, very familiar with this voice—the attempt to craft an authorially useful, engaging, and showily “honest” voice for modern manhood in a somewhat schlubby world minus sports and war. It’s the Judd Apatow voice for modern non-fiction (and yes, I know it preceded Apatow.)

So, we learn how Sellers is embarrassed by his Michigan-youth love for Huey Lewis and Bryan Adams and Duran Duran--lots of this unlovely status-climbers obsession with being (publicly, at least) embarrassed by his old passions, which is unfair both to him, the objects of the passions, and the reader who should be owed a deeper understanding of how and why their authorial guide relates to the world. He gets lightly hipped to the likes of Morrissey and New Order, and goes on a (dull and uninsightful) pilgrimage to Manchester in honor of his fandom. His love for music, of course, gets mixed up with his love for certain girls, who we never really get to know.

The book has some pleasures, if you can handle the lack of depth in his understanding of his ostensible subject matter. (Yes, I mean both his own life and indie rock.) Halfway through the book, he becomes a fanatical fan of Pavement and Guided By Voices, two of the archetypal public faces of American indie rock of the 1990s. The book wraps up with a way-too-long account of how he actually got personally involved with GBV leader Robert Pollard and then made a mistake that got him cast out from the kingdom.

It’s the kind of gossipy stuff that would be quite gripping if it was happening to your buddy and you were hearing about it daily in grumbles over beers and forwarded emails, but didn’t bear the weight of a quarter of this book’s narrative and almost all of its drama. It ain’t indie-rock if you don’t attitude-drop, and I’ve got my own, even less interesting but blessedly much shorter, story of a quasi-Pollard encounter, involving being blind drunk with pals in Manhattan singing a song called “Where are the Nazis?” we had just made up on the spot, ringled by a former GBV bassist, into Pollard’s answering machine. That’s all I really remember; ask Michael Moynihan, he was there. Actually, I’m not even entirely sure that incident is less interesting than Sellers’.

To those who are interested in the cultural history of indie rock told through a personal narrative, which seems to me promised by the subtitle, Sellers’ coming into it all so late and so lightly is a problem. Because “indie rock,” man, means being involved in at least some degree with the world of zines and scenes, small clubs, and forming your own bands or labels. If not actually D-ing IY, you'll get this subject best if you have at least some awareness and involvement in that world, which was key to the cultural and personal meaning of the music.

Sellers comes in purely as a guy who listened to some records and liked them, which isn’t nearly as interesting. I know it makes me sound like a ridiculously annoying snob to say that merely being a listener isn’t good enough to write a smart and knowing and valuable book about indie rock. I do believe the failures of this book, by a writer who is clearly thoughtful and talented, shows that I’m not wrong.

Trimming the Presidential Fringes

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 15:18:00 EST

In Los Angeles CityBeat, Andrew Gumbel does a quick survey of the truly "fringe" candidates for Our American Presidency. The piece isn't as in-depth (or funny) as this topic ought to summon, and it sure could use more links (but it was designed for print, with the web as an afterthought). But you aren't even apt to come across the names of Jonathon “The Impaler” Sharkey or Frank Moore elsewhere in the media.

So the piece is still worth dipping into for fans of the true heroes of democracy: those who run, run, run, fueled by will and a self-assured desire to save their nation, even though their destination is impossibly far away, and their nation would as soon spit on them as vote for them.

Friday Mini Book Review: I Have America Surrounded

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:59:00 EST

Sometimes the Wednesday Mini Book Review appears on Friday. Why? No one knows.

A tasty panoply of past mini book reviews.

I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary, by John Higgs (Barricade Books, 2006). Timothy Leary is a 20^th century American character who suffered, until 2006, perhaps the most skewed ratio of importance to biographical attention of anyone I can think of. In 2006, he got both the doorstop major publisher slash-and-burn from Robert Greenfield (reviewed by Nick Gillespie in the Washington Post and Jesse Walker in American Conservative) and this thinner, but more sympathetic and idiosyncratic, take, from a more obscure house, which got almost no attention from anyone.

Higgs, a British documentarian, gets the basic story down—a story, as many have rightly noted, that would be unbelievably baroque and absurd for a novelist. Higgs is also better, and more sympathetic, on Leary’s intellectual and cultural significance than was Greenfield, even in about half the wordage.

The Leary that interests Higgs the most is the post-prison break Leary of the early 1970s, living an alternately harrowing and decadent life in exile with Eldridge Cleaver in Morocco and Michel Hauchard in Switzerland, until the Feds kidnapped him in Afghanistan. It takes Higgs only 107 pages to get Leary to the point where he’s over the wall of the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, and the narrative gets much thicker from there. (The book’s main text weighs in at 274 pages.)

Before then Higgs has dutifully, though entertainingly (it’s certainly a hard story to make boring) hit the high points of the life of Leary: the rogue with his troubled West Point and collegiate career; his innovations in, and growing dissatisfactions with, psychological classification and testing methods and his explorations in interpersonal/transactional psych as an on-the-rise star in what could be seen as the Psychological Decade of the 1950s; his troubled first marriage that ended in his wife’s suicide; his dogged pursuit, against the advice of his more prudent co-conspirators, of a gleefully populist approach to the spread and study of psychedelics; the madness of his psychedelic training camp at Millbrook; his self-recasting as religious guru; the arrests and gubernatorial campaign.

It seems inevitable that this reckless scamp is gonna end up in jail; and equally inevitable that he’ll escape. Leary made himself feel better about being in jail by deciding that all truly successful philosophers face state punishment as a common occupational hazard. He’d lie back and think of Socrates.

An interesting interpretive take on Leary, not taken up by Higgs, is how perfectly trendy and emblematic of the classic version of every American decade Leary’s life tended to be, from West Point (he was booted out) and World War II to ex-soldier boy turned egghead college boy in the ‘40s; suburban angst wife-swapping psychological Organization Man-controller in the ‘50s ended up at Harvard; drug guru revolutionary in the ‘60s; ‘60s hangover refugee turned Me Decade jail bird snitch in the ‘70s; coke party Hollywood sub-celeb in the ‘80s; avatar of the computer revolution in the ‘90s. It’s a theory I don’t have time to expound on here myself but I think a fruitful one in Leary Studies.

Higgs is especially taken with Leary’s ‘70s-exile strange intellectual partnership with occult devotee and researcher Brian Barritt, a very interesting figure who Higgs, clearly fascinated with more than most other writers (Barritt gets two whole chapters in this book), makes a grand case for as biography-bait of his own. Higgs makes perhaps too large a case for Barritt as a shaper of Leary’s thought from then on, in his “eight-circuit brain/SMI2LE” days, though further research is certainly warranted. I am glad that this book has more info on Leary’s curious and wonderful collaborative LP with Ash Ra Tempel than I’ve found elsewhere.

Leary was a man whose importance, while subterranean, is vast—and it underlies, in that subterranean way, a lot of what was interesting in American culture in the second half of 20^th century, a historical league in which baseball obsessive Leary could be well considered an MVP, though a controversial and truculent one. I Have America Surrounded is a good book; anyone interested in Leary beyond seeing him traduced will be sure to enjoy it, if not love it.

But I still dream of a biography of Leary by a writer ready and able, and with the space, to dig deep into his work and standing as an important psychologist in the 1950s before that fateful day in Mexico in 1960 that he ate psychedelic mushrooms and the Timothy Leary the rest of the world came to know was born; a writer who is learned in and able to position Leary vis a vis all his influences and all the roles he played, all the figures he interacted with and emulated or needs to be understood in terms of, all the Sullivans and Szaszs, the Huxleys and Hollingsheads, the Hoffmans and Dohrns, the Gurdjieffs and Crowleys, the Wilsons and O’Neills, all the fancies and positions this self-consciously trendy philosophical polemicist (a far better description of his role from 1961 on than scientist or scholar) Leary played with. Leary was also, which both Greenfield and Higgs note but neither makes much of, an advocate of libertarianism—alas, not as successful an advocate as he was of psychedelics.

A random bloggy aside: Dr. Leary and I talk about food.

And Now the Dead Hariris Will Sing "Islamofascist Punks Fatwa Off"

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 09:36:00 EST

The Texas Observer traces the rise of taqwacore, a San Antonio-born movement of Muslim punk rock:

During the trip, the Muslim punks encountered the same issues they have struggled with separately. The Islamic Society of North America invited them to perform at its conference in Toledo, Ohio. For the first 10 minutes, the concert was a success--young Muslims packed the conference, cheering the taqwacore bands from their respective male and female sections. But when a female group, Secret Trial Five, took the stage, conference leaders called the police and had the taqwacore bands kicked out--Muslim women are forbidden to sing in public. The taqwacore groups also had to deal with discrimination. On the road, other drivers flipped them off. One driver held a "Fuck Allah" sign up to his window.

This time, however, rather than bottling up their anger, the Muslim punks responded with humor, mostly dark. The Kominas performed songs with provocative lyrics such as "suicide bomb the Gap" and "Rumi was a homo" (a stab at an anti-gay imam in Brooklyn). The musicians started a joke band named Box Cutter Surprise, after the knives used to hijack planes on September 11th. Marwan Kamel, from a band on tour called Al-Thawra, Arabic for "revolution," said members created the group to shock audiences.

"The sole purpose was to light a fire under people's asses," Kamel said. "We were totally exploiting Americans' fear of terrorism, but maybe that's what everyone needs right now."

Via Andrew Sullivan. Bonus link: Secret Trial Five's account of the aborted concert:

I scream out "ISNA ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?!" and start up with Middle Eastern Zombies. People get scared and start streaming out when they hear my scratchy punk vocals. There is an off-stage argument between the head dude of the something or other and Mike Knight. Omar from Diacritical goes on with Kominas backing him up, sings "Ignorance" and has people in the audience screaming "STOP THE HATE". I see two hijabis give the devil horn hand gestures. Handful of people left are rocking the fuck out. It's brilliant. Kominas come on for their set, say they are going to sing Aisha, which is a song about a hijabi girl being harassed, crowd waits in anticipation, then the police storm the stage. They demand that we stop playing to the protest of the rest of us and the audience. Mike Knight grabs the mic and screams "PIGS ARE HARAM" and storms off.

Always on Trial for Just Being Born

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:21:00 EST

The 1960s remain a volatile mixture of sacred birthplace and hallowed battleground, both Jerusalem and Gettysburg for our national politics and culture. The decade’s reach is long, its grasp immense, alternately a continuing mystery needing unraveling or an ongoing problem requiring a solution.

As music, art, racial and sexual relations, and citizens’ relation to the state all percolated and mutated in that decade, the resulting cultural and political heat weakened certain bridges across cultural divides. Whether the decade’s tumult created those divisions or just illuminated them, they are still often read as defining America in our red/blue era. For one example, the ‘60s legacy led Andrew Sullivan to the mad expediency of declaring that only a Barack Obama presidency can reconcile the dueling meanings of that decade, the era when Baby Boomers’ passions and concerns began their long march through all American’s institutions.

Two 2007 films explore different aspects of that decade. One, I’m Not There, revisits its artistic and cultural tumults through exploring the character of its greatest pop avatar, Bob Dylan—a man who recently told novelist Jonathan Lethem, with some humor and much truth, “you're talking to a person who owns the Sixties. Did I ever want to acquire the Sixties? No. But I own the Sixties... I'll give 'em to you if you want 'em. You can have 'em.”

Another, Chicago 10, revisits ‘60s political tumult through a half-documentary, half-animated telling of the saga and trial of the gang popularly known as the Chicago 7, antiwar leftist radicals tried for, among other things, crossing state lines to the 1968 Chicago Democratic Party convention with “the intent to incite, organize, promote, encourage, participate in, and carry on a riot and to commit acts of violence in furtherance of a riot.” The movie, written and directed by Brett Morgen and produced by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, tips its titular hat to eighth fellow defendant Black Panther Bobby Seale, who was mistreated and removed from the case before its conclusion, and to two lawyers also tossed in the pokey for defying the diktats of Judge Julius Hoffman.

The two movies considered together inadvertently help make the case that what remains most compelling about the '60s was the art and particular human strivings, not the decade’s confusing radical politics that, while fighting brave battles against real tyranny, simultaneously attempted to subsume the personal in the political in its own totalitarian style.

In I’m Not There writer/director Todd Haynes isn’t deliberately mythologizing the 1960s, or attempting to take sides in any culture war, or smooth over any historical problems. He’s trying to understand and represent a man, a body of work, and a series of shifting public images. He does so marvelously. I’ve never been a fan of Haynes’ previous movies—too mannered and insufficiently human, or at least simultaneously tendentious and unsophisticated about its humanity. When I heard the initial scuttlebutt about his approach to a Dylan biopic—casting multiple actors, including a woman and a black child, to play aspects of Dylan—it sounded like a goofy gimmick.

But Haynes correctly saw this casting innovation would capture Dylan as nothing else could. As author of an essay exploring and celebrating Dylan’s essential inauthenticity, I should have realized that any attempt to tell one story about him, to embody him in a single way, would fall short.

Dylan meant so much to so many because he could mean and be more than one thing, be simultaneously a symbol of experiential rebellion or social conscience, or simply a crafter of lovely, haunting, and rousing music and words. The movie ends with a long focus on a Dylan harmonica solo, sounding after all you’ve seen fresher and deeper and more expansive and gorgeous than it ever has before. That delivers most of the meaning the movie and its Dylans embody: trust the sound, the art, not the medium and certainly not the "message."

This idea was Dylan’s strength as an artist and cultural force. It also led to his career’s greatest crisis. That crisis is the center of I’m Not There, if a movie this disjointed, phantasmagoric, and bizarre (yet, every second of the way, gripping and connected) can be said to have a center. Mid-‘60s Dylan, mostly portrayed here by an excellent Cate Blanchett, was on his own perpetual trial from his own early fans, who loved what they saw as the “authentic” values of man-of-the-people folkie Dylan and hated how he betrayed those values—Dylan was famously condemned as “Judas” by a British fan on his first electric tour—for electric rock and amphetamined quasi-Beat word-drunk ramblings.

Both Blanchett’s Dylan and Ben Wishaw’s—known as “Rimbaud” in the movie (none of the films Dylans are named “Bob Dylan,” or even Robert Zimmerman)—are on Kafkaesque trial for unspecified crimes against the people. They are, as Dylan sang, trying their best to be just like they are, while everyone wants them to be just like them.

Haynes’s Dylans live out not just the unique problems of the celebrity artist-prophet whose gravity attracts more attention than his mass can bear, but also, in a personal-not-political manner, hits on other ‘60s culture war signifiers such as the hazards of drugs (nearly killing Blanchett-Dylan) and modern sexual-gender mores (destroying the family of ‘70s Heath Ledger-Dylan) and the spiritual malaise of simply secular politics (with Christian Bale’s combo of early ‘60s folk-Dylan and early ‘80s preacher-Dylan). But throughout, from a young black Dylan riding the rails and self-mythologizing to old outlaw Dylan living the myth of an American West betrayed, the movie casts Dylan and the 1960s as an adventure in art, expression, and the power to choose one’s own identity.

Chicago 10, meanwhile, takes a more standard documentary approach to telling a ‘60s story approximately as iconic as Dylan’s, in some ways the fable of those who stayed on the path that the politicized early ‘60s Dylan might have taken if he’d remained “relevant” to the concerns of the People. This movie has its own artsy stunt—it combines documentary footage of the Chicago 10 and the Chicago riots they were accused of inciting with animated dramatizations of the trial, with dialogue from the court transcripts.

The animation is in the distracting (to someone of my generation, who was already remembering the ‘60s in the ‘70s, man!) computer video game style, and while the director promises a fresh approach to the ‘60s documentary genre, it mostly spooled off like a pretty classic one, including “War Pigs” playing over scenes of cops clearing protestors from Lincoln Park in ominous darkness harshly broken by ugly lights. Roy Scheider’s voicing of Judge Hoffman, meanwhile, comes across as a hideous amalgam of an overfed supercilious Dickens villain, Droopy Dog, and Gollum. Hoffman’s treatment of Bobby Seale—binding and gagging him in court and refusing him his chosen self-representation—was indeed a nightmare of judicial unfairness. These guys were undoubtedly right about one thing: They could not get a fair trial in America.

What the movie does best is remind us, vividly, of how gnarly the U.S. government could get when faced with a serious show of dissent. While it’s about fighting against a war, it starts to feel like a nihilistic war movie itself, one cops vs. kids skirmish after another with any point or reason lost in the tense conflict. Without overbearing omniscient narration, the movie makes you understand subtly why some of the draft-age kids might want to fly the Viet Cong flag. Why shouldn’t they do whatever they can to jab impotent disrespect at the U.S. government, which was, after all, trying to enslave them at gunpoint to fly overseas and become a trained killer?

The Chicago 10 as characters, though, even the "stars" Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, come across as smaller than the Dylan of I’m Not There, lacking universality—they remain politicized to the end. There’s only one role for them—whether human or cartoon, the level of depth and complexity is the same. They have wit, to be sure, and bravery, and a winning ability to not be cowed. And they are facing a trial far more harrowing and less metaphorical than Dylan ever did.

But in their embrace of a communal/communist politics, even as they tapped correctly into a classic American revolutionary tradition to justify their actions, as historical figures they have little to offer other than (justifiable) rage and a revolutionary mission whose ultimate end is no better than the “system” they fought against. The Dylan movie never needs to make a hero out of Dylan; it merely needs to make a human, many humans, from him. Chicago 10 needs heroes for its villains (Judge Hoffman and the orc-like cops), and heroes are always more vulnerable than humans.

As dueling icons of the ‘60s, Dylan and the Hoffman/Rubin gang represented alternate possibilities for how to remember what that decade meant. Hoffman was born, he told the court, in 1960. And in the same metaphorical sense, he and his companions died as the ‘60s died, as the immediate energizing of Vietnam sputtered out, as the death-wish at the heart of their sort of totalist political antinomianism became manifest in bombs and self-destruction, as most Americans realized that while they didn’t want war, they didn’t want the whole country turned into a commune either.

The Chicago 10’s spirit of dissent against tyranny was brave and apt; their championing of a politics that were in key ways more of the same or worse, was neither. Dylan for his part bore the burden of “’60s consciousness” in a way that didn’t require agitating or fighting the world, merely working continuously as a skilled American bard of experience, pleasure, and even occasional wisdom, living out humane values that tend to ensure that bards mean more to more people, and for longer, then off-target dissidents, however brave. Whatever seemed controversial or strange about Dylan in the ‘60s context does not seem so anymore—he’s firmly ensconced in any American pantheon. The Hoffman-Rubin gang’s bravery still seems brave; their own politics seems fortunately antiquated.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty (bdoherty@reason.com) is author of This is Burning Man and Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.

France's Clandestine Culture War

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:33:00 EST

Secret societies in the news:

Mr Kunstmann belongs to les UX, a clandestine network that is on a mission to discover and exploit the city's neglected underworld. The urban explorers put on film shows in underground galleries, restore medieval crypts and break into monuments after dark to organise plays and readings. In the eyes of their supporters, they are the white knights of modern culture, renovating forgotten buildings and staging artistic events beyond the reach of a stifling civil service.

The authorities view them differently: as the dark side of the City of Light -- irresponsible, paranoid subversives whose actions could serve as a model for terrorists. A police unit has been trained to track les UX through the sewers, catacombs and old quarries that are their pathways under Paris. Prosecutors have been instructed to file charges whenever feasible.

The stand-off is symbolic of French society: a rigorous bureaucracy on the surface with a bizarre subculture below.

The following passage needs to be read with skepticism, but also with an appreciation for Kunstmann's Feuillade-worthy vision, whether or not it's entirely true:

Mr Kunstmann said that les UX had 150 or so members divided into about ten branches. One group, which is all-female, specialises in "infiltration" -- getting into museums after hours, finding a way through underground electric or gas networks and shutting down alarms. Another runs an internal message system and a coded, digital radio network accessible only to members.

A third group provides a database, a fourth organises subterranean shows and a fifth takes photographs of them. Mr Kunstmann refused to talk about the other groups.

Before you assume that all of that is romantic mythmaking, consider this:

Last year the Untergunther [one of those branches] spent months hidden in the Panthéon, the Parisian mausoleum that holds France's greatest citizens, where they repaired a clock that had been left to rust. Slipping in at closing time every evening -- French television said that they had their own set of keys -- they set up a workshop hidden behind mock wooden crates at the top of the monument. The security guards never found it. The Untergunther used a professional clockmaker, Jean-Baptiste Viot, to mend the 150-year-old mechanism.

When the clock began working again, officials were horrified. The Centre for National Monuments confirmed that the clock had been repaired but said that the authority had begun legal action against the Untergunther. Under official investigation for breaking and entry, its members face a maximum sentence of one year in prison and a €15,000 (£10,500) fine.

"We could go down in legal history as the first people ever to be prosecuted for repairing a clock," said Mr Kunstmann.

Fortunately for the subterranean people of Paris, the prosecution failed.

[Via Infocult.]

The Rave Museum

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:36:00 EST

God did not give us the Internet for porn, political fundraising, or pissing off the RIAA. (*) He gave it to us so we could assemble amazing archives of beautiful and weird Americana. To that end, the other Jesse Walker (**) has posted a great gallery of rave flyers from Idaho Falls in the early to mid 1990s. It's well worth visiting, even if you don't care for that kind of music.

* Those were Al Gore's contributions. Thank you, Al!

** The other Jesse Walker is a DJ in Salt Lake City. We correspond from time to time, and he seems to be a nice fellow -- certainly much nicer than the other Michael Moynihan.