1879: Doctor Benway is addressing a crowd of cowboys in the arid deserts of Nevada.

‘“Now, boys, lissen-up, I have two things for sale today. One a book by some fella named Burroughs, but that won’t really innarest you. The other, the most important thing, is a Quantum Vibrating Egg, which I have especially devised for you lonesome cowboys out on the plains.”
“Whatsitdo?”
“What does it do? You may very well ask. Now this here Quantum Vibrating Egg will lead you to undreamed of pleasures. Sensual delights unimaginable. Each egg when carefully inserted into the anus will begin to vibrate. The device is at zero degrees and will slowly rise to the body temperature of 37 degrees c. As the Egg’s temperature increases so does its vibrating motion, if you’ll pardon the pun, which renders the victim…I mean the er..indulger in fits of unrelenting erotic ecstasy. This here Egg will provide multiple hands-free orgasms. No hands, no wood, what I like to call sissygasms, wave-upon-wave, literally hundreds of them until the individual expires in orgasmic bliss…”
“...Tell us about the book.”
“...What…?”
“Shove yer egg and tell us about the book.”
“The book…? Why does this always happen…Well, okay then…”
 

 
William S. Burroughs was an avid reader of low-rent pulp fiction. These kinda books stimulated his imagination. The poet W. H. Auden had a similar interest. He indulged in a passion for cosy murder mysteries written by the likes of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh. He even wrote several damned decent essays on the subject including “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict.” Now, I expect at this juncture some bright bod will notice a pattern and supply a graph showing the correlation between a liking for low-brow fiction and high intellect. It could be true, as anyone who’s read Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs can attest, Old Bull Hubbard liked his pulpy tales of gangsters and the Mafia.

Sometime around 1974, just after Burroughs had quit London and moved into “the Bunker” a converted YMCA building in lower Manhattan, Burroughs got his long slender fingers on a copy of a science-fiction novel called The Bladerunner by Alan E. Nourse. It was a speculative tale of a future where the only way to receive medical treatment was to be sterilized to stop any further progeny polluting the world. This draconian bargain led to a blackmarket of doctors operating on patients who refused to be sterilized. The book’s main character was one Billy Gimp. He was known as the “bladerunner” because he supplied the tools of the doctor’s trade in this dark and dangerous world.
 

 
Nourse had been a medical man who turned to writing sci-fi shorts for pulp magazines like Weird Tales, Astounding Stories and alike. His biggest hit before Bladerunner was his “shock-u-rama” expose of the realities of working in a hospital called Intern which he wrote under the alias of Doctor X.

Burroughs liked the ideas in Nourse’s book but thought he could do something better. He had his amanuensis-cum-editor James Grauerholz write to his agent stating he wanted to adapt Nourse’s novel into a movie and could he sort it out for him?

Burroughs wrote a script or rather he wrote a treatment for a movie. In part, he wrote a prequel to Nourse’s story, examining the events that led to the “medical emergency” which caused doctors to demand sterilization of patients. The culprits were capitalism and big business. But Burroughs then developed his own storyline where medicine or medical aid was limited to only the rich and powerful elite. Thus eradicating the so-called “unfit” or “undesirable” from America. In other words, killing-off ethnic minorities, homosexuals, and those considered as politically transgressive.

He also turned Nourse’s characters of Billy Gimp into a gay revolutionary who indulges in some full-on sex; and made Doc into an aggressive and vituperative medical man—not too far from Naked Lunch‘s Doctor Benway. In Burroughs’ tale the stories of Billy and the Doc run parallel like two separate movies being projected at the same time. Burroughs thought this as a possibility for screening—two separate screens, two separate stories, which merged when the characters of Billy and Doc met. The scripts technical difficulties were nothing compared to the violent, excessively sexual explicit content, which made Blade Runner: A Movie unfilmable. Burroughs supposedly quipped that New York would have to be leveled if anyone ever wanted to make his script into a movie.
 

The original hardback cover for Burroughs’ ‘Blade Runner: A Movie,’ 1979.
 
Burroughs’ Blade Runner: A Movie was published in a limited signed edition of 100 hardbacks by Blue Wind Press in 1979. It was then issued in paperback format the same year.

Tangerine Press are set to release three different 40th anniversary editions of Burroughs’ Blade Runner: A Movie in November. The books will come in a paperback edition; 100 numbered copies; and 26 lettered editions. The book will have an introduction by Oliver Harris. Gerard Malanga has been commissioned to supply the artwork for the covers of the paperback and the numbered editions. While Peter Blegvad will supply the artwork for the lettered edition. This is certainly something to get your hands on. Details here.
 

 
With thanks to Cherrybomb.
 

‘Doppelte Portion.’
 
At his graduation exhibition, German artist Jan Pötter was asked by one of his fellow students if this was the kind of work he produced? His contemporaries seemed surprised by Pötter’s striking, naive, colorful, kind of Jean Dubuffet almost meets Jean-Michel Basquiat artworks. Pötter took this as a compliment because “at a certain level” he wants his work “to surprise and unsettle people.”

His mixed media paintings are powerful, raw, original, and challenging. The viewer is left to question what they are looking at and see the painting’s meaning within a larger cultural, personal, and political context.

Pötter says he makes “unexpected pieces” that “deliberately break with my own and with the audience’s expectations” which is what all great art is supposed to do.

Born in Nordhorn in 1988, Pötter graduated in Fine Art, Painting and Drawing from AKI Enschede, Holland in 2012. He was nominated for a YoungBlood and an ArtOlive Young Talent awards the same year and thereafter exhibited his work in group and solo shows across Holland and Germany. Now based in Berlin, Pötter takes his inspiration from the image saturated multimedia world of news, television, music, film, and his own personal experience.

Though not all of his work is political, some of his most iconic paintings like “Crusie” was inspired by a friend remarking they were taking a cruise ship holiday oblivious to the struggles of refugees families many of whom have drowned at sea trying to reach the safety and security of mainland Europe. Others, like “Great White” suggest the troubling and aggressive predatory behavior of white nations in history. While “Worms and Bird” suggests not so much that the early bird catches the worm but rather all good intentions inevitably come to nought—or food for the worms. Follow Pötter on Instagram.
 

‘The Birth of Joy.’
 

‘Der Schrei des Tauchers’ (‘The Scream of the Divers’)
 
See more of Jan Pötter’s powerful and original work, after the jump…
 

 
Karl Marx always looked like he had birds nesting in his beard or maybe a smorgasbord of food debris clogging up his grizzled follicles from the last few meals he’d scoffed. He never looked quite healthy. He wasn’t. He drank too much, smoked too much (noxious cheap cigars), and was almost driven demented by a rash of painful boils on his butt that meant he did a lot of his writing standing up. More importantly, he hardly looked like the guy who is regularly blamed for the state oppression and the genocide of millions of people under communism or socialism or whateverism. If Marx knew the atrocities supposedly carried out in his name he’d probably swing fists or hurl chunks. The gulf between Marx’s ideas and the practice of so-called communism and socialism as has all-too often been carried out in his name is like the difference between those dour gritty portraits of a bad Santa and what the real Karl Marx was like as a person.

He was a complex fucker was our Karl.

Photographic portraits of Marx don’t suggest a guy who wrote poetry, loved his wife with a passion, doted on his kids, and was once a hellraiser of a student—getting drunk, causing mayhem, and being chased by the police after one too many for the road. He was also scarred in a duel and exiled from Germany, Belgium, and France over his barbed and satiric attacks on these countries often despotic rulers. Marx was a man of action always willing to lead the fight who eventually settled for a life of sedentary toil to produce works that changed the world.

He was also a voracious reader who loved the works of Shakespeare and could quote entire plays by the Bard—just as his children could—and generally took an interest in everything. “Art,” he said, “is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.” No idea or philosophy or culture was foreign to him, and there was nothing that didn’t keen his interest.

Yet, he could also be bad tempered and foul to those who went against him. And on occasion was anti-semitic and racist—he described one poor frenemy (Ferdinand Lassalle) as a Jewish n-word. No saint, but all human.

Karl also enjoyed playing parlor games like Confessions, which is now probably better known as the set of questions devised by Marcel Proust. In April 1865, Marx was staying with relatives when he as asked by his daughters to answer a set of confessions. Marx’s responses give an interesting (and at times humorous) insight into the great political and economic philosopher, journalist and writer.

Your favourite virtue: Simplicity

Your favourite virtue in man: Strength

Your favourite virtue in woman: Weakness

Your chief characteristic: Singleness of purpose

Your idea of happiness: To fight

Your idea of misery: To submit

The vice you excuse most: Gullibility

The vice you detest most: Servility

Your aversion: Martin Tupper [popular Victorian author]

Your favourite occupation: Glancing at Netchen [“Netchen, or Nannette, was Antoinette Philips, aged 28 at the time, Marx’s cousin and a member of the Dutch section of the International”]

Your favourite poet: Aeschylus, Shakespeare

Your favourite prose-writer: Diderot

Your hero: Spartacus, Kepler

Your heroine: Gretchen

Your favourite flower: Daphne

Your favourite dish: Fish

Your favourite colour: Red

Your maxim: Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]

Your favourite motto: De omnibus dubitandum [Doubt everything]

 
H/T Marx/Engels Archive.
 

 
BLAM!!!

Fifty years ago, the rules of engagement changed. On Thursday May 15th 1969, police opened fire with shotguns on mostly peaceful, unarmed student demonstrators who were protesting the seizure of the People’s Park in Berkeley, CA.

The cops were given the green light to do whatever the fuck they wanted or in PR parlance use whatever force was necessary to remove the demonstrators. The word had come down from California’s Governor Ronald Reagan who thought Berkeley was “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants.” Some of the cops agreed. These were mostly hyped-up ex-Vietnam vets who thought hippie draft-dodging commie student bastards were the nearest thing to the VC they’d ever get a chance to blast on home turf. The cops were just pawns in a game but their actions were bloody, unnecessary, fatal, and ultimately futile.

BLAM!!!

In the mid-1950s, the University of Berkeley wanted to buy a stretch of land to redevelop as student residences, a parking lot, and some campus offices. Student numbers were growing and there was a lack of good affordable student housing. The university bods eyed up a 2.8 acre plot of land just east of Telegraph Hill and about a block from one of Berkeley’s other student dormitories. As there wasn’t enough cash to buy the land and pay for its redevelopment, the plans were put on hold until 1967 when the university bought the plot by eminent domain (or compulsory purchase) for $1.3m. The land had about 25 various low-rent working class dwellings which were soon bulldozed to make way for the bright shiny brand new future.

But fuck all happened.

After almost two years, the land had become nothing more than a dumping ground for garbage and wrecked automobiles. Word soon went round campus, with an earnestness only the young can afford, that the land grab, the bulldozing of the houses, and the promise of a bright new shiny future had just been a clever ruse to rid Berkeley from the influence of the radical left-wing dropouts who lived in the plot’s low rent dwellings. Word was the cops and some university officials saw these people as the main instigators of Berkeley’s anti-Vietnam and anti-capitalist agitation. Get rid of them, the story went, and the university and the city and the state were getting rid of a goddam irritant.

There was some substance to this theory, which was in no small part aided by Governor Reagan’s vehemence against Berkeley, but it wholly overlooked a bigger issue which was universities like most academic institutions are run by well-meaning ditherers whose business acumen is hamstrung by their good intentions. Left untended, the site was bringing the neighborhood down and damaging local businesses.

In April 1969, concerned residents, business owners, merchants, students and alike got together to decide what they could do to change the site. The best suggestion came from student Wendy Schlesinger and anti-war activist Michael Delacour who offered up a plan to turn the area into a people’s park and free speech area. This suggestion was unanimously agreed upon by those who attended the meeting. Unfortunately, they never presented their idea for possible consideration to the university land owners. But fuck them. They’d never taken an interest in the site, they’d just bulldozed a shitload of houses and let it to go wild.

The People’s Park brought together around a thousand volunteers who helped clear out this abandoned ground for wrecked cars and dumped trash and start to landscape and plant trees and flowers. By mid-May, the People’s Park was open to all. But back on campus, trouble was brewing.
 

 
More on the battle of People’s Park, after the jump…
 

DEVO.

“Everybody writes about the same things in their songs—sex and death—and we just present it with a different viewpoint.”

—Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO

Here’s yet another reminder to anyone still clinging to the disinformation that the 80s were a terrible decade for music: in 1980, DEVO unleashed their third record, Freedom of Choice which yielded the monster hit (and their only gold-certified single) “Whip It.” Along with the positive reception of the first single from the album “Girl U Want,” and the title track, “Freedom of Choice,” the album put DEVO and their energy dome hats on the mainstream map. DEVO would make numerous television appearances following the May release of Freedom of Choice and the video for “Whip It” was wildly popular, though it did generate some controversy due to its content. According to DEVO bassist Gerald Casale, the band lost a booking for what Casale recalls was on the Midnight Special in 1981 due to the video for “Whip It.” Apparently, host Lily Tomlin saw the video which, as you may recall, features a woman having her clothing “whipped” off by whip-wielding Mark Mothersbaugh. Tomlin allegedly told producers to “Get rid of those guys!” which they did. So, yeah, not everybody “got” DEVO or “Whip It” (Mark Mothersbaugh has gone on the record saying the song was a kind of “pep talk” for Jimmy Carter who was running for President against Ronald Reagan in 1980 as well as a knock at Reagan being an actor).

But this didn’t stop the band from trying to enlighten the public and their fans about what made them tick. This brings us to the point of this post—a fantastic interview with both Mark Mothersbaugh and drummer Alan Myers published in Record Review magazine in December of 1980.

The interview, conducted by long-running journalist and author Jeff Tamarkin, occurred prior to Carter’s defeat in the November 1980 presidential race, and both Mothersbaugh and Myers weighed in about their thoughts on politics—and many other things, including demystifying their songs. Here are some of the highlights from the four-page interview, which does not disappoint:

On the political climate in 1980:

Tamarkin: Is there political significance behind the title of (the album) Freedom of Choice?

Alan Myers: Yes, there is. The significance is that people are being asked to use their freedom of choice in the presidential election. But it’s really ludicrous. It’s like a non-choice.

Tamarkin: Will you be voting in November?

Mark Mothersbaugh: We might be voting for Ronald McDonald. We’re going to put on blindfolds and just walk in, waving our arms.

Tamarkin: Do you find that your concepts keep proving themselves?

Mark Mothersbaugh: Yeah, look at the Republican Convention.

Alan Myers: It’s really true, though. Every time we come to New York, it’s filthier than the last time we were here.

Tamarkin: On the subject of nuclear power, if you were asked to do a benefit like the MUSE (the Musicians United for Safe Energy formed in 1979) shows which were filmed for No Nukes, would you do it?

Mark Mothersbaugh: I would do a pro-everybody that has anything to do with the nuclear power plant, as far as corporate structure and the people that govern it, being made to live within one mile of the nuclear site benefit. If they can get all those smart missiles together and they can’t even make nuclear power plants…that’s the worst end of capitalistic values. It’s perverse.

On Groupies (yes, DEVO had groupies):

Tamarkin: Does DEVO have groupies?

Mark Mothersbaugh: I don’t think you can call them groupies. If you mean do we have fans…

Tamarkin: No, regular groupies.

Mark Mothersbaugh: The kind of girls that are interested in DEVO and that we are interested in, are not your typical girls who take drugs and get as much out of you as they can and trade it in for a suck.

On why nobody seems to understand “their potato”:

Alan Myers: A few people do, though.

Mark Mothersbaugh: We’re misunderstood, that’s true. But we’re holding on, and we keep restarting the case.

Alan Myers: We keep trying to say things in more common terms. We always thought we spoke in common terms, but people think…

Mark Mothersbaugh: that we’re too bizarre and oblique.

Alan Myers: In their private conversations and things, people are capable of applying irony and interpreting things. But once you become a mass object of investigation, then people don’t take things past the first level of comprehension. So we’re learning how to communicate exactly what we want to say.

 

A photo of the legendary Spud/Spudocaster guitar.
 

On the future of Booji Boy:

Mark Mothersbaugh: Probably future mutations.

Alan Myers: Marriage, family. Nine-to-five job.

Following the release of Freedom of Choice DEVO hit the road in a big way and embarked on a tour with 77 stops across the world—recording two shows which were released as a DVD in 2005, DEVO Live in 1980. The back cover of the double-disc includes a quote from Gerald Casale who accurately sums up the impact DEVO made 39 years ago:

“This lone artifact offers indisputable evidence that in 1980 Devo had reached a turning point. We were no longer just art monsters, we were mainstream performers too.”

Footage of DEVO broadcast on the French comedy television show ‘The Collaro Show’ (air date June 18th, 1980) performing “Girl U Want” somewhere on the streets of Paris while Mark Mothersbaugh licks an ice-cream cone.

Photo by Ciril Jazbec
 
The Sound of Music ends with the von Trapp family’s escape from the Nazis through the Alps, crossing from annexed Austria into neutral Switzerland. Or that’s how the stage version ends; the closing shot of the 1965 film is ambiguous. In it, the von Trapps appear to be going in the wrong direction, fleeing into the Bavarian, rather than the Swiss, Alps.

In fact, the mountain at which Robert Wise chose to film the last shot of The Sound of Music was the Obersalzberg, the site of Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. Once you recognize the location, the end of the movie takes on a horrible significance: as they hike up the Obersalzberg, singing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain (Reprise),” Georg and Maria von Trapp are leading their brood on a death march to the Nazis’ second headquarters. We can easily imagine these Hollywood von Trapps wandering too close to the Berghof after the last notes of the song have died in the chill air, and the camera, like the guilty eyes of Buñuel’s Christ in L’Age d’Or, has averted its gaze from earthly things.

Laibach’s new film “So Long, Farewell” begins with this cinematic wrong turn into horror. The group has been interpreting The Sound of Music since 2015, when, as the first Western (?) band ever to perform in North Korea, Laibach included a number of songs from the musical in their set. In this, the latest video from Laibach’s Sound of Music album, the singing family has not escaped the Nazis—note the swastika-shaped Christmas tree from John Heartfield’s “O Tannenbaum in deutschen Raum, wie krumm sind deine Äste!“ ripped from its parodic context, as a fir is cut from the earth—but, because it is a special time of year, the children are permitted to leave the basement for a few minutes to sing for the adults.

Speaking with a single voice, Laibach answered my questions about “So Long, Farewell” by email. The film follows our conversation below.
 

 
Please remind us why Laibach chose The Sound of Music for the performances in North Korea.

Laibach: Throughout our career we’ve been looking for an opportunity to sink our teeth into The Sound of Music. When we received an invitation to perform in Pyongyang, we knew the moment had finally arrived. The Sound of Music is probably the only piece of American pop culture that is not only allowed, but also actively promoted by North Korean authorities. For years now the musical has been part of their school curricula. It seemed only natural that we address the people of North Korea with something as universal as The Sound of Music, therefore we decided to create the concert program around our interpretations of the songs from this musical. The Sound of Music story really fits well into the North Korean situation and can be understood affirmatively, but also subversively – very much depending on the point of view.

It looks to me as if, in Laibach’s telling of The Sound of Music, the von Trapp family does not escape capture by the Nazis, and a sinister patriarch played by Ivan Novak takes the place of Baron von Trapp. The appearance of Milan Fras as the Reverend Mother further complicates the picture: does the abbess sanction this ghastly ménage by her presence? What is the scenario of the “So Long” video?

“So Long” is in fact more a short film than the music video. The original film is, of course, the first of all the apotheosis of Hollywood entertaining industry standards and clichés, but there are many – not even very well hidden – perverse twists in it, full of sexual and psychoanalytical connotations. Slavoj Žižek has a very thorough (and very Laibachian) observation, claiming that officially the film is in principle showing Austrian resistance to Hitler and the Nazis, but if you look at it closely, you see that the “Nazis are presented as an abstract cosmopolitan occupying power, and the Austrians are the good small fascists, so the implicit message is almost the opposite of the explicit message.” No wonder that Austrians officially don’t like this film much, or maybe they are only denying it on the surface and watching it secretly in their cellars. This “hidden reverse” may also be the reason why the movie was so extremely popular, Žižek argues, because it “addresses our secret fascist dreams.” (Which is an interesting assertion, considering most of the people who created the original musical were Jewish.) Catholicism, of course, plays a key role in The Sound of Music film, therefore it represents an important stance in the “So Long, Farewell” miniature as well. On the surface, Catholicism portrays itself as being all about harsh moral discipline and strict rules. But, under the surface, it provides opportunities for great license, including sexual license. You can have your cake (feeling righteous morally, identifying with this “morally strict” organization) and eat it too (providing opportunities to have fun and play around). According to Žižek the power of the film resides in its obscenely-direct staging of embarrassing intimate fantasies. The film’s narrative turns around resolving the problem stated by the nuns’ chorus in the introductory scene: “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” The proposed solution is the one mentioned by Freud in an anecdote: Penis normalis, zwei mal taeglich… Recall what is arguably the most powerful scene of The Sound of Music: after Maria escapes from the von Trapp family back to the monastery, unable to deal with her sexual attraction towards Baron von Trapp, she cannot find peace there, since she is still longing for the Baron; in a memorable scene, the Mother Superior summons her and advises her to return to the von Trapp family and try to sort out her relationship with the Baron. She delivers this message in a weird song “Climb Ev’ry Mountain!” whose surprising motif is: Do it! Take the risk and try everything your heart wants! Do not allow petty considerations to stand in your way! The uncanny power of this scene resides in its unexpected display of the spectacle of desire, an eros energumens which renders the scene literally embarrassing: the very person whom one would expect to preach abstinence and renunciation turns out to be the agent of the fidelity to one’s desire. In other words, Mother Superior effectively is a superego figure, but in Lacan’s sense, for whom the true superego injunction is “Enjoy!” But the real Maria and the real Baron didn’t marry because they loved each other; according to her autobiography they married only for the love of children.
 

 
Red is everywhere in this video: the mistletoe berries, the Reverend Mother’s rosary, the children’s Trumpian neckties, and the hot red light throughout. Instead of climbing to freedom in the snowy Alps at the end, it looks like the family descends into the fires of Hell. Does Laibach’s Sound of Music end in captivity and death?

Yes, in “So Long, Farewell,” the von Trapp family never escaped from the Hollywood Austria, annexed by Nazis. They were “trapped” and they just went a bit “underground.” Same in North Korea, people are trapped within the Pleasure Dome of North Korean controlled society (not that Western society is not controlled…). The Sound of Music certainly ends in captivity and death, like we all do.

When you first saw The Sound of Music, was the film censored or altered in any way? If Laibach were to censor the movie, what would you change?

We could in fact change the ending, that would give a different perspective to the whole film, but the scenario did loosely follow the real story of the von Trump family. We don’t recall that the film was censored anyhow when we saw it first time, but Žižek claims that the three minutes of the “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” song, with Mother Superior singing was in fact censored back then in Yugoslavia, as this is the most obscene moment in the movie.

“The von Trump family” is a wonderful parapraxis. When making this film, did Laibach draw inspiration from Mrs. Trump’s Christmas decorations at the White House?

Quite possible, especially if decorations in White House would be created as a classic Trumpian slip.

As far as I know, the few swastikas that appear in Laibach’s work come from the photomontages of the anti-fascist artist John Heartfield. In this case, it’s the swastika-shaped tree from Heartfield’s parodic poster announcing the Third Reich’s new “standard fir” for the holidays, a festive addition to the hearth of the von Trapp/Trump home. I wonder if, in the film, the proclamation of Heartfield’s poster has become a historical reality. In other words, is it mandatory for the family to display the “crooked” tree?

Using a straightforward reference to the classic Heartfield Christmas tree today would merely present the aesthetization of the subject, while the direct swastika-shaped tree becomes a mandatory festive background of historical reality, the aesthetization of a society that does not find it (very) problematic anymore.
 

 
Writing for Die Welt on the eve of Laibach’s first trip to North Korea, Slavoj Žižek discerned the image of the Josef Fritzl household in The Sound of Music. He argues that warmth, good cheer and sentimentality are not only compatible with brutal crimes, but hospitable to them; when Fritzl imprisoned his children in the basement and raped them, Žižek suggests, he did so with a merry song in his heart. Is there a place for bad conscience in kitsch?

Only if it is a bad kitsch. A good reference to this problem is also possible to detect in the Sharp Objects TV series, especially in its final episode.

Žižek also imagines the children attending an “upstairs reception in the Fritzl villa” where they sing “So Long, Farewell” before departing for bed, one by one. Is that where the idea for the film originated?

There are several different inspirations for the “So Long, Farewell” film miniature; there’s definitely The Sound of Music itself – a film full of latent sexuality within the patriarchal (and matriarchal) musical family with structural elements of fascism, then there’s an ultimate model of utopian, communist/religious (very musical) state, nominally led by the supreme Kim Dynasty, and finally there is a reference to the extreme case of Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl’s family from Austria – a raw model to the similar families around the world, potentially including some famous ones within political and entertainment/musical spheres as well.

Laibach’s The Sound of Music is out on Mute Records, and Morten Traavik’s documentary Liberation Day follows the band’s travels in North Korea. (Also of note, Laibach fans: MIT Press’ excellent book NSK from Kapital to Capital includes a contribution from Alexei Yurchak, the scholar who coined the term “hypernormalisation.”)
 

Mark Stewart and the Maffia live in Kentish Town, 1986 (Photo by Beezer)

Last month, when Mute brought out a double-LP reissue of Mark Stewart’s solo debut from 1983, Learning to Cope with Cowardice, we interviewed the man about the record and its historical, political, and musical context. Now we have a new short film by Charlie Marbles about the making of the album to show you.

If you’ve never heard Learning to Cope with Cowardice, it is a collection of sounds that wraps your nervous system around the spools of a cassette deck, then uses your brain to degauss the tape head and your cerebrospinal fluid to lubricate the capstan: a variegated cut-up of genres, styles, media, times, places, and identities. In the film below, Stewart and producer Adrian Sherwood describe the mixing and editing techniques they used to make this mental work of art, some imported from New York hip-hop and other audio collage forms—Stewart, in particular, credits Teo Macero’s work on On the Corner and William S. Burroughs’ tape experiments as inspiration—and some invented on the spot and probably never yet repeated, such as “scratching” multitrack tapes.

The singer and producer describe Stewart’s desires for unconventional sounds (Sherwood remembers a snare so trebly “it was actually cutting your eyeball off”) and his struggles to get them through the technocracy of the mastering process onto the finished record. Stewart:

I was constantly fighting with engineers about buzzes and hisses and noises, and trying to make helicopter sounds, and then they’d try and change it, they’d try and normalize you. I’m not gonna be fuckin’ normalized!

Learning to Cope with Cowardice plus The Lost Tapes is available on double vinyl (benefiting Mercy Ships) and double CD. Check out Mark Stewart’s new political resistance playlist, too.
 

Test Dept’s new album, ‘Disturbance’

Next week, the London-based activist industrial group Test Dept, forgers of the “Stakhanovite sound,” will release their first new album in over 20 years: a merciless piece of work called Disturbance.

Though Test Dept’s first records included collaborations with Cabaret Voltaire, FM Einheit and Genesis P-Orridge, in that milieu, their left politics stuck out like red flannel underwear. Their second album, Shoulder to Shoulder, was a split release with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir on which the two groups combined to perform a track called “Comrades.” I have a hard time picturing this moving gesture of solidarity coming from, say, Blixa Bargeld or Adi Newton.

We’ve got the premiere of the brand new Test Dept video “Landlord” below, and founding members Paul Jamrozy and Graham Cunnington were kind enough to answer a few questions by email.
 

Courtesy One Little Indian

There’s a very funny contribution from Laibach in [the excellent Test Dept book] Total State Machine enumerating the industrial groups active in 1984 and dismissing all but one: “only Test Dept were somehow made of (industrial) flesh and blood, only they were actively involved within concrete political and social space.” What is Test Dept’s political orientation? Is it true that Test Dept was the only industrial group of the left?

Paul Jamrozy: I am not entirely sure of that but certainly many groups that were linked to industrial music flirted with right wing iconography or were overtly apolitical, some with a snooty attitude as if politics were something beneath them. There came a point where that kind of trendy indifference became untenable, or you could say part of the unacceptable face of freedom.

Graham Cunnington: Orientation? Left. Socialist with somewhat anarchist tendencies.

Are there any plans to reissue the Test Dept catalog? Are there any plans to tour?

Graham: We are looking to release the back catalogue with One Little Indian in the near future. We have the album launch live show in London on 26th April with Manchester on 18th and Portsmouth on 25th. There are plans to tour UK and mainland Europe later in the year.

From my perspective, Test Dept’s return helps me make out the continuity of historical developments in the UK and US over the last four decades. For instance, Brexit and Grenfell appear on the news as illustrations of our strange, uncertain times, in which shocking events come out of nowhere and nothing is connected to anything else; but if I put on The Unacceptable Face of Freedom or Disturbance, a very clear story about the neoliberal period emerges. How does it look from your point of view?

Graham: The material on Disturbance has as its DNA our earlier work. The Unacceptable Face of Freedom was about the days of the Thatcher-Reagan axis driving forward the inception of the neoliberal period and the effects that had on society at the time; and Disturbance is about the effect that the development of that is having now. We are in the end-game of that whole arc and the system, quite obviously unsustainable, is collapsing, shored up by those with vested interests in its ongoing implementation who continue to tighten their grip; leading to austerity, the fragmentation of the welfare state, a return to Victorian levels of inequality and the rise of darker forces, as profit is extracted in ever more inventive ways and surveillance capitalism attempts to hook every aspect of our lives into the raw material for further gain and control.
 

Courtesy One Little Indian
 
I wish I could have attended the Assembly of Disturbance festival marking the centenary of the October Revolution. Please tell me about it. Was it the debut of the new material on Disturbance?

Graham: Assembly of Disturbance incorporated a platform for discussion and artistic expression, with live music, film, sound-art, installation, performance, DJs and talks on various forms of artistic, political and philosophical thinking. In its early days, the October Revolution gave rise to a huge explosion of creativity and radical new forms of art that expressed the visionary possibility of a new age and a different path for society, even though the society that spawned it was soon crushed by the dictates of Stalin’s despotic regime. That kind of visionary thinking, not for a communist state but for a radical systematic change with a global perspective, is something that the world is crying out for now – a disturbance in the present order. That’s what we were marking with the event.

The new material on Disturbance had been developing in a live format over a few years, from electronic remix work to a full live presentation, but it was certainly a coming together of many of the ideas we had been working on.

Collaboration with dancers, visual artists, and performance artists has long been part of your practice. How did you hook up with Kris Canavan for the “Landlord” video?

Graham: We met Kris while working with Rebecca Shatwell and the AV Festival in Newcastle (the DS30 installation/film and An Unprecedented Campaign live film soundtrack). We were looking towards doing a large-scale show for the AV Festival in 2018 and Kris was a possible collaborator on that. Unfortunately, in that year, the AV’s funding was cut and their final iteration had to be scaled back.

The video is a recording of Canavan performing his piece “Yes, it’s Fucking Political”, against a wall to wall video installation by our visual director David Altweger, which displays a stream of chopped up and manipulated broadcasts including the events around Grenfell – a tapestry of media fragments and surveillance footage that encompasses Kanavan’s body from all sides.

“Yes, it’s Fucking Political” was conceived in 2010 & originally designed to be a rallying cry or call for direct action against the betrayal of the electorate by the Liberal Democrats and a forthcoming Conservative agenda of austerity, which would predictably see the poorest suffer and shoulder the burden of responsibility.

One Little Indian will release Test Dept’s new album, Disturbance, on March 1. Below, Kris Canavan performs in the video for the new song “Landlord.” 
 

 
At one point, Ken Russell was the favored director for a movie version of A Clockwork Orange supposedly starring the Rolling Stones. What Russell would have made of Anthony Burgess’s novel is a moot point. However, it is more than conceivable that Russell would have cast Oliver Reed as Alex, the sociopathic gang leader who together with his “droogs” unleash acts of opportunistic “ultra-violence,” rather than Mick Jagger. Reed would have been an interesting fit though a bit too old for the role of teenager Alex.

Reed had played such a brooding, nasty, thuggish type before. Two years prior to the publication of Burgess’s novel, Reed played King, a psychopathic prototype-Alex in Joseph Losey’s These are the Damned (aka The Damned). Dressed in a tweed jacket, collar, tie, silk scarf, black leather gloves, and carrying an umbrella with an eight-inch blade hidden in its handle, Reed could easily have been auditioning for the role of Alex. His gang leader King terrorises tourists at a small seaside town, using his sister Joan (Shirley Anne Field) to ensnare unwitting victims for a bit of the “old ultra-violence” or as the film’s trailer puts it:

Black leather, black leather,
Smash, smash, smash.
Black leather, black leather,
Crash, crash, crash.

 

Reed ready for a bit of the ‘old ultraviolence.’
 
Director Joe Dante has described These are the Damned as “an undeservedly obscure British science-fiction picture…unjustly neglected…[which] is really…one of the key films of the 1960s.” High praise for a low budget feature shot quickly over a few weeks in May 1961. Produced by Hammer Films, the company best known for their hugely successful series of horror films starring Peter Cushing and Christopher starting in 1956 with The Curse of Frankenstein and then Dracula (1958) and the big screen adaptations of TV’s sci-fi classic Quatermass. These are the Damned was an odd fit for the company’s roster with its strange mix of gang violence and disturbing (yet topical) science-fiction plot.

Loosely adapted from the novel The Children of Light by H. L. Lawrence, These are the Damned was directed by blacklisted director Joseph Losey, who’d been kicked out of Hollywood due to his allegiance to the Communist Party, which he’d joined in 1946. Losey considered working in Hollywood as “useless” and his association with the Communist Party made him feel “freer” and “more valuable to society.” Through politics, Losey believed he could make films of substance. What was America’s loss proved to be England’s gain, as Losey directed a string of classic films including a trio in collaboration with Harold Pinter The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971), alongside The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), Brecht’s Galileo (1975), and the opera Don Giovanni (1979).

Losey was never quite happy with These are the Damned. Constrained by studio demands to make a commercial sci-fi flick, Losey “possessed little if any interest in science fiction as a literary mode and consequently threw out pretty much all of the novel, except for the image of the gang of teddy boys, led by King (Oliver Reed).”

He felt the rough framework of the book might act as the vehicle for a commentary upon the proliferation of atomic power and the potential debacle that could lead from its irresponsible use by high-minded technocrats. What more immediately attracted him was the setting he chose for the piece: Weymouth, an out-of-the-way part of England that is bleak, wild and ancient, and associated by the literary with the novels of Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys. Losey envisioned the kinds of contrasts that could be drawn between the isolated seascapes that housed the cordoned-off research laboratory overseen by Bernard (Alexander Knox) and the urban hubbub of the town crisscrossed by the motorcycles of King’s cohorts. In his mind, alien as these individuals and their surroundings seemed to be, they shared a common propensity for violence: “one was paralleling different levels of the same society which in effect were, in their own way, doing the same thing: the politicians and the hoodlums.”

What starts out as a film about gang violence and the sexual relationship between Joan and “an innocent American abroad: Simon (MacDonald Carey)” quickly develops into a dark and disturbing tale of the consequences of nuclear war. Joan and Simon discover hidden among the seaside caves groups of children who are being held captive and have been experimented upon and irradiated as a form of inoculation by a sinister secret military organisation in readiness to repopulate the planet after an imminent nuclear war.

The film was highly prescient, tapping into fears made real by the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. However, Hammer and its distributors didn’t know what to do with the film. It was passed uncut by the British Board of Censors in December 1961, but was only released in an edited form first in the UK in 1963 and then in the US as a support feature with further cuts in 1965.

However, it’s Reed who attracts the most interest and almost steals the film from Carey and Field with his turn as the psychopathic King. For a then relatively unknown and inexperienced actor, Reed showed his prowess in front of the camera and his ability to add depth and considerable menace to his role. It was the start of a series of films which have often, until more recently, been overlooked—films like Paranoiac (1963), The System (1964), and The Party’s Over (1965)—which revealed Reed’s talent as an actor which at its best placed him as the equal of Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, and Richard Burton.

Happy Birthday Oliver Reed.
 

Shirley Anne Field.
 

 

 

 
More production stills, after the jump…
 

 
I remember watching George W. Bush deliver the State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, on the TV of a tiny barroom in the East Bay. No cocktail was strong enough. This was the speech that denounced the “axis of evil,” a coinage of Bush speechwriter David Frum, who has lately been rehabilitated as a true friend of democracy and stalwart defender of the realm. Perhaps when the professional eulogists are finished carving the likenesses of Poppy and W. into Mount Rushmore, they can squeeze in this august son of Canada, who believes the problem with the Iraq War was the people of Iraq.

With every patriot face now awash in tears for these old-fashioned Republicans, the kind who could, when the occasion demanded it, speak in complete sentences, let us remember “Qaeda, Quality, Question, Quickly, Quickly, Quiet,” the artist Lenka Clayton‘s alphabetized cut of the address, which blasted those sentences to rubble and sifted the bits. Marc Campbell posted this vid on DM many moons ago, but it’s worth revisiting now. On one hand, it is a cognition-destroying mindhammer that smashes illusions about the stimulus-response theory of government. On the other, even alphabetically reordered and condensed to 18 minutes, W.‘s oratory sounds like Pericles next to the barnyard squawks and grunts that will comprise the phonemic index of the 2019 State of the Union address, which I understand will be subtitled “A Case Study in Lycanthropy.”
 

Detail from the soundtrack LP cover

If you like the movie, you’ll love the soundtrack LP (side one: “A - My,” side two: “Nation - Zero”) and accompanying flip-book.
 

via Reddit