Author: Roy Christopher

Posted on

From Blackout to Breakout

Of all the technologies we take for granted, electricity has to be near the top of the list. Though it shouldn’t ever be interrupted, we’re not that suprised when the wifi is down. Streaming services still regularly buffer. Pinwheels, hourglasses, ellipses—an entire semiotics of technology’s foibles, failures, and inconveniences. But when the power goes out, everything stops. Everything. And even though they’re not that uncommon, we’re not prepared. As the former broadcast journalist Ted Koppel puts in his 2015 book Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath, “We tend to come up with funding after disaster strikes.”

The New York Times on July 14, 1977 during a 24-hour blackout in New York City.

With historical contrast, in his 2010 book, When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America, the technologist David E. Nye writes that “by 1965, many New Yorkers regarded a blackout as a violation of the expected order of things. Yet it seemed an anomaly without long-term implications, and the paralysis of that night became the occasion for a liminal moment.” Such liminal moments are hard to come by, as the machinations of the city regularly work against the freedom they afford. Increasingly, the spaces required for dreaming, for creation, and indeed for freedom, are the product of artifice. They have to be intentionally assembled and deployed. Kodwo Eshun writes,

The technological conditions for intervention in the present have to be artificially constructed. They are not spontaneously available. To embark on a project that is set in the present, you have to renounce digital abundance by undergoing a temporal diet or media famine. You have to turn yourself into a castaway marooned on an island of the present separated from the abundance of digital archives and previous musical eras that continually saturate the contemporary.1

The idea of an outside or in-between space of dreaming recalls Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zone (TAZ). That is, the creation of temporary spaces that allow for moments of freedom, acts of creativity, and the availability of otherwise nonexistent autonomy outside the reach of established authority. Though certainly not the same thing, these spaces are similar to William Gibson’s idea of bohemias: subcultural backwaters that allow for new forms to flourish outside the influence of hegemony (Gibson cites Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s and Seattle in the 1990s as examples). Co-opted and all but defanged by the rave culture that followed its inception in 1991, the TAZ deserves a reassessment in our post-globalized world.

Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z: Temporary Autonomous Zone (Autonomedia, 1985) and other incendiary texts.

One can imagine assembling one of Bey’s pirate utopias, but it’s easier to see them happening unintentionally. That is, when the mechanizations of modernism break down, leaving us alone in the moment, in an unintentional TAZ. The unintentional TAZ’s most recognizable form might be the blackout: a sudden inescapable shadow of spontaneity and creation.

Writing about a power blackout that affected 50 million people in North America in 2003, Jane Bennett defines assemblages as follows:

Assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living. throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within. They have uneven topographies, because some of the points at which the various affects and bodies cross paths are more heavily trafficked than others. and so power is not distributed equally across its surface. Assemblages are not governed by any central head: no one materiality or type of material has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory or impact of the group. The effects generated by an assemblage are, rather, emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to make something happen (a newly inflected materialism, a blackout, a hurricane, a war on terror) is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality considered alone.2

Admittedly borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus), as well as Baruch Spinoza (Ethics), Bennett’s assemblage doesn’t lack intention. It lacks human intention. The blackout as monster, overtaking the city in a lumbering lack of light.

“I think bohemians are the subconscious of industrial society. Bohemians are like industrial society, dreaming.” — William Gibson

David E. Nye argues that public space transformed by New York blackouts is not an instance of technological determinism, a topic Nye has explored in depth previously.3 His take seems to flip one of Gibson’s well-worn aphorisms: The street finds its own use for things. If the technological use is culturally determined, then the use finds its own street for things. Nye writes,

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, blackouts were recognized as more than merely latent possibilities. They were unpredictable, but seemed certain to come. Breaks in the continuity of time and space, they opened up contradictory possibilities. From their shadows might emerge a unified communitas or a riot. The blackout shifted its meanings, and achieved new definitions with each repetition. For some, it remained a postmodern form of carnival, where they celebrated an enforced cessation of the city’s vast machinery.4

The Daily News front page on July 14, 1977.

Echoing the massive 1965 blackout, after an 11-day heat wave, on the evening of July 13, 1977, successive lightning strikes strained New York City’s already overtaxed power grid, shutting it down for 24 hours. A blacked-out bohemia pushed the already simmering hip-hop subculture to an overnight boil. Emcee Rahiem of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five says, “The blackout of 1977 is what helped to spawn a multitude of aspiring hip-hop practitioners, because prior to that, the majority of aspiring DJs didn’t have two turntables and a mixer or the speakers. So, when the blackout happened, it just seems that everybody got the same idea at the same time. And when the lights came back on in New York City, everybody had DJ equipment.” Latin Quarter club manager Paradise Gray adds, “Not too many people in the Bronx could afford big sound systems until after the blackout. Then, everybody had sound.” To retrofit an idea, the Boogie Down became an unintentional temporary autonomous zone that night.

“When you get to the blackout, it shifts hip-hop. It’s a pivotal moment, because like a week later, everybody was a DJ. Everybody.” — MC Debbie D

Easy A.D. of the Cold Crush Brothers sums it up nicely: “The Bronx went from being decayed into something beautiful. The vibration of the music and the combination of bringing all those elements together, you had to be in there to feel it, because most of the time people only experience the music. But when you have all those elements in one place together, then you understand the essence of the hip-hop culture.”5 The blackout didn’t spawn the culture, but the autonomy it afforded pushed it toward national prominence.

This post is part of a loose trilogy:

Notes:

  1. Quoted in Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, & Mark Fisher (eds.), Post-Punk: Then and Now, London: Repeater Books, 2016, 20; Iain Chambers writes, “With electronic reproduction offering the spectacle of gestures, images, styles, and cultures in a perpetual collage of disintegration and reintegration, the ‘new’ disappears into a permanent present. And with the end of the ‘new’—a concept connected to linearity, to the serial prospects of ‘progress,’ to ‘modernism’— we move into a perpetual recycling of quotations, styles, and fashions: an uninterrupted montage of the ‘now.’”; Iain Chambers, Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience, New York: Routledge, 1986, 190.
  2. Jane Bennett “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture ‘7, no. 3 (2005).
  3. See chapter 2 of David E. Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
  4. David E. Nye, “Public Space Transformed: New York’s Blackouts,” in Miles Orvell & Jeffrey L. Meikle (eds.), Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture (pp. 367-384), Leiden, NL: Rodopi, 2009, 382.
  5. These quotations are from Jonathan Abrams’ The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop, New York: Crown, 2022.
Posted on

Preorder POST-SELF: 25%-off at B&N

My forthcoming book Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body, which Repeater Books will be publishing in December, is 25%-off at Barnes & Noble from July 8-11 (use code PREORDER25)!

Previously published by punctum books as Escape Philosophy, this new expanded and updated edition includes new additions to each chapter, a new Foreword by Mark Dery, a new Afterword by me, and is now named after an album by its metal muse, Godflesh.

We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.

The physical body has often been seen as a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs, sensory deprivation, alien abduction, Rapture, or even death and extinction. Taking in horror movies from David Cronenberg and UFO encounters, metal bands such as Godflesh, ketamine experiments, AI, and cybernetics, Post-Self is an exploration of the ways that human beings have sought to make this escape, to transcend the limits of the human body, to find a way out.

As the physical world continues to crumble at an ever-accelerating rate, and we are faced with a particularly 21st-century kind of dread and dehumanization in the face of climate collapse and a global pandemic, Post-Self asks what this escape from our bodies might look like, and if it is even possible.

Advance Praise:

“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet

“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch

“In his trademark breezy yet precise style, Christopher discusses everything from stimoceivers to Southland Tales, everyone from Henry Lee Lucas to Brummbear, and all without ever losing sight of his central points of reference: our all too malleable somatic limits and Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. And the combination here could not be more apposite, for however much we stretch and augment the reaches of our physicality, imagining ourselves the theophanies of some as yet speculative deities, we get no closer to getting away from ourselves, becoming Godly it seems only in the sense of becoming increasingly empty.” — Gary J. Shipley, author, Stratagem of the Corpse

“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.” — B.R. Yeager, author, Negative Space

“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.” — Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck

“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room

Preorder yours now!

Thank you!

Posted on

Escape from New York: Hip-Hop 1981

With its burnt-out buildings and broken windows, the South Bronx became an emblem of urban erasure, a wound of highway-bound white flight. It was late-night monologue fodder, a cautionary movie set, and a political pawn piece. Upon visiting the neighborhood on August 5, 1980, then-Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan commented that it looked like it had been hit by an atomic bomb.[1]

When Reagan took office in 1981, conditions were no better, but something was emerging from the area. Controversial on the streets, the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” had brought hip-hop to the airwaves and subsequently the suburbs; Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were touring the country; and those groups and Kurtis Blow had radio hits. “I didn’t see a subculture,” artist and emcee Rammellzee once said, “I saw a culture in development.”[2]

Though I didn’t know what it was called, I first heard hip-hop around this time. Copies of copies of copies, it trickled down from the Big Kids on hissy cassettes, shared via handheld recorder, Walkman, and boombox. My friends and I called it “breakdance music.” We were in middle school, a time of tribe-seeking and experimenting with identity. I’d just chosen skateboarding and BMX. Later those things would lead to DJing and keeping graffiti piece books, but breakdancing had loose ties with flatland—the spinning, gyrating strain of BMX done in empty tennis courts and parking lots. That was my thing and my entry point to hip-hop.

When I first heard it, most of hip-hop culture that existed at the time was yet to be recorded. Coming out of the electro scene in 1981, a group called Positive Messenger did a rap song called “Jam-On’s Revenge.” It was meant as a parody, but when it was re-released in 1983 as “Jam On Revenge (The Wikki-Wikki Song),” after the group changed their name to Newcleus, it was my first favorite rap song.[3] Its wacky, outsized characters and their high-pitched, cartoon voices proved the perfect initiation for my young ears, and the song contains the hallmarks of early hip-hop: catchy hooks and rhymes you could easily learn and rap along to (“Wikki-wikki-wikki-wikki… diggy dang diggy dang da dang dang da diggy diggy diggy dang dang”), lyrics about hip-hop culture itself (“‘Cause when I was a little baby boy, my mama gave me a brand new toy / Two turntables with a mic, and I learned to rock like Dolomite”), and of course, a beat you could pop and lock to. Having been re-released several times since, it’s still the song the group is most widely known for.

Though superproducer Dr. Dre cites seeing Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic in concert in LA as the event that opened his mind to music without limits, he also says, “My first exposure to hip-hop was ‘The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel’. That’s what started me deejaying. I think I was about 15.”[4] Released in 1981, Flash’s “Adventures…” remains the ultimate DJ cut, a cut-and-pasted collage of bits, beats, basslines, and spoken vocal samples from Chic, Queen, Blondie, Michael Viner’s Incredible Bongo Band, the Hellers, Sugarhill Gang, Sequence and Spoonie Gee, and his own Furious Five. This record and Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force’s “Planet Rock,” which combines everything from Kraftwerk to Sergio Leone, provide the cornerstone of hip-hop composition. “To understand the magnificent creativity of the hip-hop DJ and the logical progression of today’s masters is to listen closely to both these cuts,” writes CK Smart.[5]

Long before hip-hop went digital, mixtapes—those floppy discs of the boombox and car stereo—facilitated the spread of hip-hop from the South Bronx in New York to far-flung suburbs and small towns. Hiss and pop were as much a part of the experience of those mixes as the scratching and rapping. Though we didn’t know what to call it, we stayed up late to listen. We copied and traded those tapes until they were barely listenable. As soon as I figured out how, I started making my own. A lot of people all over the world heard those early cassettes and were impacted as well. Having escaped from New York City to parts unknown, hip-hop became a global phenomenon. Every school has aspiring emcees, rapping to beats banged out on lunchroom tables. Every city has kids rhyming on the corner, trying to outdo each other with adept attacks and clever comebacks. The cipher circles the planet. In a lot of other places, hip-hop culture is American culture.

We watched hip-hop go from those scratchy mixtapes to compact discs to shiny-suit videos on MTV, from Fab 5 Freddy to Public Enemy to P. Diddy, from Run-DMC to N.W.A. to Notorious B.I.G. Others lost interest along the way. I never did, and it all started in 1981.

This post is part of a loose trilogy:

The above is an edited excerpt from my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019). In this form, it was originally published in the Winter 2022 issue of Pulp Modern. The year 1981 was the theme of the issue. Many thanks to Alec Cizak for the opportunity to correct a few factual flubs.

Notes:

[1] Parts of this piece were adapted from my book, Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future, London: Repeater Books, 2019. This is a detail I got wrong in there: I said he was already president when he visited the South Bronx in 1980. Shout out to Josh Feit.

[2] Quoted in Rammellzee on the Making of “Beat Bop” (previously unpublished interview, 1999), Egotripland, March 27, 2010.

[3] In my lone TV interview so far, I mistakenly called the song “Joystick,” which was another early jam I liked in middle school. Such are the perils of memory and live television.

[4] Quoted in S. H. Fernando, Jr., The New Beats: Exploring the Music, Culture, and Attitudes of Hip-Hop. New York: Anchor Books, 1994, p. 237-238.

[5] CK Smart, A Turntable Experience: The Sonic World of Hop-Hop Turntablism, SLAP Magazine, pp. 74-75.

Posted on

Friday the 13th, I’m in Love

I was a frightened child. I would be accosted by a clip or a trailer from a horror movie while watching TV and then freaked out for weeks. You’ve already read my reaction to seeing Bambi in the theater. That experience did nothing to encourage my movie watching, much less scary-movie watching. I distinctly remember glimpses of It’s Alive (1974), The Legacy (1978), The Fog (1980), The Children (1980), and Friday the 13th (1980) tormenting my young mind.

The final icon: Ken Kirzinger as Jason Voorhees in Freddy vs Jason (2003).

A decade or so ago, my sister and I were digging through DVDs at a pawn shop and came across six Children of the Corn movies. It was the franchise in its entirety at the time. Those movies are probably not the best place to start as several of them are just a retelling of the original Stephen King short story, but they set me on a path of watching slasher franchises. Soon to follow were A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Halloween, and others, but it was Friday the 13th that I found most compelling, perhaps because the trailer had so terrified me as a child, but maybe there’s more to it than that unshakeable memory.

There are different schools of thought about when the slasher subgenre emerged. Some cite proto-slashers like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). Some say the first true slasher was Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), and others say it was Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), but most people agree that the movie that really launched the subgenre proper was John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). After Michael Myers terrorized the babysitters and children of Haddonfield, Illinois, a flood of holiday-themed slashers emerged: Prom Night (1980), New Year’s Evil (1980), My Bloody Valentine (1981), Graduation Day (1981), Happy Birthday to Me (1981), and Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), among many others all celebrated their respective holidays with bodies, blood, and some slice-happy killer. Non-holiday slashers followed Halloween as well. They included Fred Walton’s When a Stranger Calls (1979), Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer (1979), Bill Lustig’s Maniac (1980), and the future-star-studded The Burning (1981; the movie debut of Holly Hunter, Jason Alexander, and Fisher Stevens).

Even among such a saturated line-up, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th was 1980’s most commercially successful slasher, grossing nearly $60 million worldwide. It was also the first independent horror film to secure distribution by a major studio in the United States.

Friday the 13th posters from the vaults of the Logan Theater in Chicago on display in 2017. Original illustrations by Alex Ebel.

There are better original slashers (Halloween) and better franchises (Scream), but something about watching the first few Fridays find their feet is way more intriguing. In the pantheon of slasher killers, Halloween is built around Michael Myers, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is nothing without Freddy Krueger, and in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre the chainsaw is brandished by no one but Leatherface. But on the Mount Rushmore of these murderers, there was one late arrival.

In Friday the 13th, Jason Voorhees only has a cameo in the first movie, he doesn’t become the machete-wielding killer until the second movie, and he doesn’t don his signature hockey mask until the third. What we talk about when we talk about Friday the 13th took at least three movies to fully form. The 2009 reboot combines elements of the first four movies into a foggy, nihilistic film with an extremely territorial killer, unlike the original lumbering menace in the woods around Camp Crystal Lake. The remake lacks any sense of levity, which I think is a major misstep. Horror and humor are adjacent universes with a very tenuous separation. That separation is even smaller between slashers and slapstick.

Horror and humor: my mashup of Friday the 13th and the Cure.

Another difference between Friday the 13th and most other slasher franchises: The first movie isn’t the best one. Most fans agree that even if a franchise comes back with a decent second and maybe third movie, the original is still superior (Silent Night, Deadly Night doesn’t get really good until deep into the franchise, but that’s for another discussion). Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre all have decent follow-ups, but none can touch the first of the bunch. Not so with Friday the 13th. The second movie is the best, and again, Jason had just become the killer, and he hadn’t even found his iconic hockey mask yet (There is an argument for The Final Chapter and Jason Lives being better and scarier, but that’s also for another discussion).

Aside from the successful and superb Scream and Terrifier franchises, most would say that the slasher era is far in the past. Yet send-ups like The Cabin in the Woods (2011) and The Final Girls (2015) and arty updates like Midsommar (2019) and In a Violent Nature (2024) show that where there are weapon-wielding maniacs hiding in the shadows and brutally innovative ends awaiting adventurous young people, we’re still watching.

Posted on

Preorder THE MEDIUM PICTURE!

My post-punk media-theory book, The Medium Picture, is now available for preorder from all of your favorite places: UGA Press, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and even Amazon! Preorders mean more than you think. They’re very important for the life and success of the book. If you know you’re going to buy it, please consider snagging a copy early.

Preorders serve as an early indicator of a book’s potential success. They signal to publishers and retailers that there is interest in the book, which can lead to increased marketing efforts and larger print runs. For authors, preorders can be crucial in boosting their book’s visibility on platforms like Amazon. This can improve their sales rankings and increase exposure. On Amazon, preorders can affect the sales ranking before release, which might influence the platform’s promotional efforts. If you’re not sure, read on! Thank you!

Of all of my books, this is the one I’ve worked on longest and hardest. It’s the closest to my heart.

Here’s what other people are saying about it:

“Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.” — William Gibson

“Like a skateboarder repurposing the utilitarian textures of the urban terrain for sport, Roy Christopher reclaims the content and technologies of the media environment as a landscape to be navigated and explored. The Medium Picture is both a highly personal yet revelatory chronicle of a decades-long encounter with mediated popular culture.” — Douglas Rushkoff

“A synthesis of theory and thesis, research and personal recollection, The Medium Picture is a work of rangy intelligence and wandering curiosity. Thought-provoking and a pleasure to read.” — Charles Yu

The Medium Picture comes out on October 15th: 10/15/2025!

Get yours now!

Sharable Images!

If you’re so inclined, you can post one these on the social medium of your liking. Link ‘em to your favorite online book outlet or just to http://www.themediumpicture.com

Thank you!

Posted on

3,000 Days

I started drinking coffee in kindergarten. I wanted to be more grown-up, and with enough cream and sugar, I could.

I didn’t realize I was addicted to the stuff in elementary school until I tried to quit many years later. The headaches that follow depriving your brain of caffeine are a special kind of pain. When I made my first effort to quit in my late 20s, I recognized that pain. My head had been through that before.

Blurry big air on the Huffy circa 1981.

I thought back and realized that my first sleepovers with friends were fraught with the same withering withdrawals. I had morning afters as early as first grade. An afternoon of Legos cut short by a trip home with a slamming hangover at six-years old. A matinee viewing of The Last Starfighter cancelled by cranium-crushing throbs. A Saturday at the BMX track not spent carving the tall berms and trying to clear the last doubles but in the backseat of a car with a cold washcloth over my head instead. It took me a long time to connect those dots.

A Lone Star sketched at Big Star in Chicago.

I didn’t start drinking alcohol until I was old enough to do so. Sure, I had a sip here or there, but I usually had to drive, and I usually had to drive far, so I just didn’t drink.

I didn’t become a regular drinker until my 30s. I ditched my last car in my late 20s, so it’s been bikes and buses ever since. Pedaled and public transportation are more conducive to staying out late drinking than steering one-eyed, eluding police. I’ve ridden recklessly, and I’ve walked a bike I couldn’t keep upright, but I’ve always made it home.

I was also never the kind of drinker who felt like I needed it. It’s always been casual. Perhaps too casual. I used to go for lunch alone or with friends and then find myself skipping dinner at a different bar later. I remember telling a friend and quoting another friend at the beginning of one of those days that no one was going to stop me. I wasn’t being as defiant as that sounds, I was simply stating the fact that as far as anyone around me was concerned, my behavior was fine. No one would suggest I reconsider a second free shot during lunchtime. No one would suggest I go home instead of going to another bar to continue drinking. No one would suggest I save my money and save myself the mess I was making of the next morning.

Another angle on my early BMXing. No hangover here.

I decided to take a break a while back. I haven’t had a drink since March 17, 2017—3,000 days ago today. I can comfortably say that there’s nothing bad about it. I sleep better, dream clearer, and do so much more. From the lack of hangovers to the lost belly bloat, from the clear skin to the saved money, it’s been all positive. When you read those internet click-bait headlines about “One Simple Trick,” you never believe them. Well, this one works: Try not drinking for a while. If you drink like I did, quitting will fix problems you didn’t know you had. No one’s going to stop you. You have to stop you.

As Ian MacKaye once said, “If you want to rebel against society, don’t dull the blade.”

Amen.

Posted on

3,000 Days

I started drinking coffee in kindergarten. I wanted to be more grown-up, and with enough cream and sugar, I could.

I didn’t realize I was addicted to the stuff in elementary school until I tried to quit many years later. The headaches that follow depriving your brain of caffeine are a special kind of pain. When I made my first effort to quit in my late 20s, I recognized that pain. My head had been through that before.

Blurry big air on the Huffy circa 1981.

I thought back and realized that my first sleepovers with friends were fraught with the same withering withdrawals. I had morning afters as early as first grade. An afternoon of Legos cut short by a trip home with a slamming hangover at six-years old. A matinee viewing of The Last Starfighter cancelled by cranium-crushing throbs. A Saturday at the BMX track not spent carving the tall berms and trying to clear the last doubles but in the backseat of a car with a cold washcloth over my head instead. It took me a long time to connect those dots.

A Lone Star sketched at Big Star in Chicago.

I didn’t start drinking alcohol until I was old enough to do so. Sure, I had a sip here or there, but I usually had to drive, and I usually had to drive far, so I just didn’t drink.

I didn’t become a regular drinker until my 30s. I ditched my last car in my late 20s, so it’s been bikes and buses ever since. Pedaled and public transportation are more conducive to staying out late drinking than steering one-eyed, eluding police. I’ve ridden recklessly, and I’ve walked a bike I couldn’t keep upright, but I’ve always made it home.

I was also never the kind of drinker who felt like I needed it. It’s always been casual. Perhaps too casual. I used to go for lunch alone or with friends and then find myself skipping dinner at a different bar later. I remember telling a friend and quoting another friend at the beginning of one of those days that no one was going to stop me. I wasn’t being as defiant as that sounds, I was simply stating the fact that as far as anyone around me was concerned, my behavior was fine. No one would suggest I reconsider a second free shot during lunchtime. No one would suggest I go home instead of going to another bar to continue drinking. No one would suggest I save my money and save myself the mess I was making of the next morning.

Another angle on my early BMXing. No hangover here.

I decided to take a break a while back. I haven’t had a drink since March 17, 2017—3,000 days ago today. I can comfortably say that there’s nothing bad about it. I sleep better, dream clearer, and do so much more. From the lack of hangovers to the lost belly bloat, from the clear skin to the saved money, it’s been all positive. When you read those internet click-bait headlines about “One Simple Trick,” you never believe them. Well, this one works: Try not drinking for a while. If you drink like I did, quitting will fix problems you didn’t know you had. No one’s going to stop you. You have to stop you.

As Ian MacKaye once said, “If you want to rebel against society, don’t dull the blade.”

Amen.

Posted on

Of Wands and Winds: That Lynchian Sound

Accompanying their stunning, fever-dream visuals, the films of David Lynch roar with sound, what Madison Bloom at Pitchfork calls a “bowel-deep grumble.” From visceral, industrial rumbles to crackling near-silence, sound is an aspect of his movies that he valued as much as the images. “The sound design can be subliminal where you barely hear it, or sometimes you can get hit over the head with it,” said his main composer and collaborator Angelo Badalamenti in Brad Dukes’ Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks (Short/Tall Press, 2014). “He creates a remarkable aural experience.”

David Lynch as the “King of Wands” from the Philly Tarot Deck by James Boyle and Gina Tomaine.

Though I watch his movies and shows regularly, since his passing I’ve been revisiting them anew. Understandably, most of Lynch’s critics and fans focus on the visuals of his work, but there’s been a renewed interest in his attention to sound. “All the way back to Eraserhead,” said Badalamenti, who, starting as Isabella Rosselinni’s vocal coach on 1986’s Blue Velvet, composed music for almost all of Lynch’s projects. “David has loved to play and experiment with music and sound,” he said. Lynch said repeatedly that Badalamenti was the one “who really brought me into the world of music, right into the middle of it.”

Lynch explained the sound of Eraserhead in a 1977 interview:

Alan Splet and I worked together in a little garage studio with a big console and two or three tape recorders, and worked with a couple of different sound libraries for organic effects. Then we fed them through the console. It’s all natural sounds. No Moog synthesizers. Just changes like with a graphic equalizer, reverb, a Little Dipper filter set for peaking certain frequencies and dipping out things or reversing things or cutting things together. We had a machine to vary the pitch but not the speed. We could make the sounds the way we wanted them to be. It took several months to do it and six months to a year to edit it.

In the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, Lynch told the story of how he first conceived of film and sound through painting:

I was painting a painting about four-foot square, and it was mostly black, but it had some green plant leaves coming out of the black. And I was sitting back, probably taking a smoke, looking at it, and from the painting I heard a wind, and the green started moving. And I thought, ‘oh, a moving painting, but with sound.’ And that idea stuck in my head. A moving painting.

Miguel Ferrer, who played the principled and persnickety Special Agent Albert Rosenfield in all three seasons of Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks said, “The music was unlike any music you’d ever heard on television. […] It was so radically different and so evocative. It almost became another character.” Frequent musical collaborator Julee Cruise added, “You could scan the channels and know it was David Lynch, just three seconds in and you knew who it was. He pushes everything to the metal.”

“Oh, just let it float, like the tides of the ocean, make it collect space and time, timeless and endless.” — David Lynch describing a composition to Angelo Badalamenti

In addition to Badalamenti and Cruise, Lynch worked with Toto and Brian Eno (on the Dune soundtrack), Chris Isaak (both as a musician on Wild at Heart and an actor in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson (on Lost Highway), Karen O (sang on Lynch’s “Pinky’s Dream”), Moby (DJed his wedding), Lykke Li (sang on Lynch’s “I’m Waiting Here”) and his own band with Badalamenti, Thought Gang (named after the Tibor Fisher book?). Almost every episode of 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return ended with a different musical act performing at the Roadhouse: everyone from acts he’d worked with before like Rebekah Del Rio (who performed in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and, perhaps as an homage, on the Treer Jenny von Westphalen Megazeppelin in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, easily his most Lynchian film), Cruise (in two episodes), and Reznor and Atticus Ross (as the Nine Inch Nails), to newcomers like the Veils, Lissie, Eddie Vedder (as Edward Louis Severson III), Au Revoir Simone, and the Chromatics (in three episodes).

Beyond the Beyond: Music From the Films of David Lynch (Hat & Beard Press, 2016).

Emerging from an event at the United Artists Theatre in Los Angeles on April 1, 2015, the book, Beyond the Beyond: Music From the Films of David Lynch, edited by J.C. Gabel and Jessica Hundley (Hat & Beard Press, 2016), explores the music Lynch loved and the transcendental meditation he practiced for most of his life. As the above list of artists and collaborators indicates, Lynch was one heck of a curator. Beyond the Beyond includes interviews with many of his musical collaborators, followers, and fans.

“Haunting” is an easy but apt description of Lynch’s own music but also the music he chose from other artists. He used songs by This Mortal Coil, Roy Orbison, and many others, but Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” which appeared in Lynch and Barry Gifford’s Wild at Heart (1990), is perhaps the best example. Somehow both twangy and gothic, with its deep sense of longing and loss, the song was not only a big hit for Isaak but struck the core musical chord for Lynch’s on-screen images. His own “Ghost of Love” echoes a lot of Isaak’s aching darkness, billowing like a cold wind blowing through your bowels.

“I play the guitar upside down and backwards,” Lynch said in Beyond the Beyond. “I’m not a musician. It’s more about sound effects for me. I just love the sound of it.” His pure ear for sound is obviously astute. The etherial vocals of Julee Cruise illustrate the point. She put an otherworldly lilt to several of his most iconic projects.

Cruise sang on a song for Blue Velvet called “Mysteries of Love,” and her song “Falling” from her 1989 debut record Floating Into the Night, which features compositions and production by Badalamenti and Lynch, became the main theme for Twin Peaks. About that record, she told Trey Taylor at Dazed and Confused, “I’m so proud that so many young girls have picked up on it, like Lana Del Rey. And fuck anyone who says anything bad about her, because she always credits me and I think that’s the greatest honor I’ve ever received.” The clip below is from “Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted,” a play directed by Lynch, with music by Badalamenti and Cruise.

So, rest in peace to David Lynch, Angelo Badalamenti, Julee Cruise, Frank Silva, Jack Nance, Frances Bay, Catherine E. Coulson, Pamela Gidley, Peggy Lipton, Lenny Von Dohlen, Miguel Ferrer, Walter Olkewicz, Kenneth Welsh, Tom Sizemore, Piper Laurie, David Bowie, Warren Frost, Michael Parks, Don S. Davis, Robert Forster, Harry Dean Stanton, and all the other passed-away alumni of Lynch Land. As Lynch himself said in a BBC interview upon the passing of Badalamenti, “I believe life is a continuum, and that no one really dies; they just drop their physical body, and we’ll all meet again, like the song says. It’s sad, but it’s not devastating if you think like that […] It’s a continuum, and we’re all going to be fine at the end of the story.”

The joyous noise they must be making…

Posted on

Come Out and Playeeyayy…

When I think of gritty, punk filmmaking, the first few movies that come to mind are Martin Scorcese and Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver (1976), Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984), Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), James Merendino’s SLC Punk! (1998), and, of course, Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979). References to the latter have popped up in everything from Wu-Tang Clan songs and Tarantino movies to Simpsons and Community episodes, but the punk-rock aesthetic and street-light ambiance of the gangland narrative linger as well. The film critic Pauline Kael described the movie as “visual rock.”

New York City gangs and their territories (Daily News, June 15, 1954).

In 1954, long before he was a science-fiction legend, Harlan Ellison set out to write a novel about the street gangs of New York City. As research, he joined the Brooklyn gang The Barons in Red Hook, considered to be one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Web of the City—originally published under the title Rumble—was Ellison’s first novel, and his nonfiction account of that time and the book’s writing was published in 1961 as Memos from Purgatory. We tend to think of the 1950s in this country as quaint and innocent. Ellison’s early work illustrates otherwise.

The gangs of New York were plentiful in the decades leading up to the release of The Warriors in 1979. During its second weekend in theaters, the lines between the screen and the street blurred as lines of gang members came out to play. Two hundred theaters hired extra security and many others pulled the movie for fears of public safety. A lot of those rowdy youths wanted to see this movie.

Purple Fury by Rob Ryder (Ryder, 2023).

In addition to playing a Baseball Fury in The Warriors, Rob Ryder started on the film as a production assistant but was quickly promoted to location scout. As he writes in his book, Purple Fury: Rumbling with the Warriors (Ryder, 2023), “So, the scene where they blow up the car,” came one of his tasks. “You need to find that street.” Ryder’s book is a candid look at the chaos behind the scenes, revealing some of the lesser known tasks of filmmaking, illuminating its dark alleys like a streetlamp.

“The streets were silent. How strange for this early in the evening. As though the being that was the neighborhood—and it was a thing with life and sentience—knew something was about to happen. The silence made the sweat return. It was too quiet.” — Harlan Ellison, Web of the City

It takes a rare filmmaker to build a legacy like Walter Hill’s, but The Warriors wasn’t his first, and he hasn’t stopped bringing similarly unique stories to the big screen. Quentin Tarantino credits Hill’s script for Hard Times (1975) for showing him what a screenplay could be—that it could be more than just the instructions for making a movie, that the script could be an end in itself. In his book, A Walter Hill Film (MZS, 2023), Walter Chaw takes a long look at Hill’s legacy.

A Walter Hill Film (MZS, 2023) by Walter Chaw. Cover illustration by Ganzeer.

Hill produced all of the Alien movies and wrote a couple of them,1 as well as The Long Riders (1980), 48 Hrs (1982), Streets of Fire (1984), and Red Heat (1988), among many others. He’s produced and directed an even longer list. Fellow writer and director Edgar Wright cites Hill’s The Driver (1978) as a major influence on his own movie Baby Driver (2017). Hill even cameos in that movie as a courtroom interpreter, and the numbers on Baby’s prison jumpsuit at the end refer to the release date of The Driver: 28071978. Walter Hill is one of our great filmmakers—a filmmaker’s filmmaker—and Walter Chaw has written a comprehensive account of his work.

Chaw also wrote a great little book about Steve de Jarnatt’s 1988 movie, Miracle Mile (Lulu, 2012), a movie he rented and watched so often that the lady at his local video store eventually just gave him the VHS tape. Little did she know, she helped saved his life.

Steve de Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile (1988).

Chaw had a rough 1989, ultimately attempting to kill himself that summer. He gives partial credit to Miracle Mile for keeping him alive and figuring out why as the impetus for this book. He digs deep into every aspect of it, enlisting writer/director de Jarnatt’s participation. It’s a thoughtful meditation on life, death, youth, writing, film in general, and this one in particular.

We’re toast. Landa checks her CliffNotes a.k.a. “The Key.“

I would be remiss not to mention Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) here. Years ago, William Gibson posted a picture of the CliffsNotes for Pynchon’s sprawling novel online with the caption “The Key.” This sent me on a search. I dug in thrift stores, looked in bookstores, asked proprietors. No one seemed to know whether this particular volume of CliffsNotes existed. A couple of years later, I found out that the CliffsNotes volume on Pynchon’s most famous and confounding work was a prop for Miracle Mile. Chaw even reprinted one of Zak Smith’s illustrations (#738) from his book, Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow (2006; archived here), in this book on the movie.

Steve de Jarnatt’s having written and directed Miracle Mile and written a great collection of short stories—Grace After Grace (Acre, 2020)—reminds me of one of my other favorite screenwriters, Hampton Fancher. Fancher wrote the screenplay for both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, and he wrote and directed the wildly underrated film, The Minus Man (1999). Like de Jarnatt, he has a fabulous short story collection out called The Shape of the Final Dog (Blue Rider Press, 2012), as well as a profound and pithy little book about screenwriting called The Wall Will Tell You (Melville House, 2019).

Film is still our most powerful medium for storytelling. Television is more prevalent and novels are deeper, but the movie is easily accessible and quickly consumed, giving us glimpses of gangs in faraway city streets or totally alternate timelines, taking us places other forms, platforms, and formats cannot. At the very least, it decorates our lives, but sometimes it reaches out and saves them.

Posted on

8 Non-Musical Influences on clipping’s Latest Record

In a recent Flood Magazine article, clipping break down the non-musical influences of their new record, Dead Channel Sky. My book Dead Precedents gets a mention:

Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future by Roy Christopher:
We started making Dead Channel Sky because we’d made the song “Run It” for a video game that didn’t end up using it. But it wasn’t until I read Roy’s book about the parallel evolutions of hip-hop and cyberpunk fiction that I could wrap my head around creating a whole cyberpunk project. In the book, he draws connections between the two forms’ repurposing of technology, and making art out of the scraps of industrial capitalism (think: computer hacking and turntablism) as two potential visions for the future. I asked Roy to summarize his argument in the press release for the album, so I’d ask you to read it there, rather than have me stumble through it myself.

Still pinching myself…

Here’s the press release I wrote on the Sub Pop site. Cop your copy!

And pick up Dead Precedents already!