My mom, a lifelong artist and crafter, chronically has unfinished projects in various places around her house: a painting on an easel, a pattern pinned to some odd-shaped fabric, quilt squares pieced but apart, a half-repainted hobby horse. Once she can visualize the finished product, she all but loses interest in finishing it. I can relate to that feeling with my writing. I often approach with a question I want to answer or a curiosity that hasn’t found its end. Once I have an answer, my interest wanes.
Kubrick and his camera.
Master filmmaker Stanley Kubrick once said, “You start something because you are interested in it, but you actually do it to find out about it.”1 Once you find out about it, there’s usually still work to do. Creation is its own reward, but you could discover the best thing in a category or a new category altogether. If no one knows, it won’t matter. Follow through and spread the word or you’re depriving the world of your work.2 Sometimes we don’t even know what we’ve created until we share it. Kubrick added at another time, “The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not the think of it.”
Screenwriter Joseph Mankiewicz used to say that a well-written script had already been directed. That is, if it’s put on the page properly, there isn’t much for actors or directors to improve upon. According his Eyes Wide Shut cowriter Frederic Raphael, that’s not the kind of script Kubrick ever wanted. And actor Malcolm McDowell, who played Alex the droog in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), said that Kubrick never knew what he wanted, but he knew what he didn’t.
“To restrain man is not to redeem him.” — Stanley Kubrick
He knew it when he saw it though. I am fond of saying that as long as one keeps their options open, options is all one will have. It’s okay to let them breathe though. Raphael wrote of Kubrick, “Kubrick was not indecisive; he was postponing a decision, which is by no means the same thing.”3 Postponing a decision can be action in itself, but a decision must be made. As the song goes, “if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”4
In his book, Strangelove Country: Science Fiction, Filmosophy, and the Kubrickian Consciousness (Stalking Horse Press, 2025), D. Harlan Wilson deploys several critical constructs in order to investigate Kubrick’s forays into science fiction. Never a fan of the genre, Kubrick nonetheless made four films that are either squarely science fiction or more sci-fi than they are anything else: Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and the posthumous A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). At least one of them—2001—outright redefined the genre, which was kid’s stuff prior to his sprawling opus.
“In all things mysterious—never explain.” — H.P. Lovecraft
And redefining science fiction is more and more difficult since, given the increasingly sci-fi reality we live in. Wilson writes,
Our media encourages us to view ourselves as characters to be viewed by other characters in a filmic realm whose social networks remake the self, identity, reality, and community. A manifestation of weaponized desire, cinematic thinking allows us to exist in our own highly mediatized diegesis.
We’ve been living as if—as if there’s an audience watching—for so long now that it’s difficult to imagine otherwise. Try it though. Post less. Save more for yourself. As Raphael wrote of Kubrick, “He is morbidly afraid of giving away his secrets, the best of which may be that he has none.” You don’t have to have a secret to act like you do. That’s a secret unto itself. Mystery loves company.
One election day when I lived in Chicago, I walked over to the school by my house to vote. On my way to the converted classroom that served as the polls, I was stunned stupid by a hallway-long Keith Haring mural. The vibrant colors and simple characters are impossible to mistake for anyone else’s work. Haring is one of my all-time favorite artists, and I had no idea that one of his last murals was only a few blocks from my house. During my undergraduate studies, my last big paper in English Composition 102 was a biography of Haring. He passed away as I was writing it.
Keith Haring mural at the William H. Wells Community Academy High School in Chicago, completed in November 1989. Panoramic photo by me.
As an advocate and an artist, Haring occupied a unique place in the world. He skirted the aesthetics of typical graffiti by drawing thick-lined stick-figure characters and animals dancing and moving, the lines as flexible as their fancies. “Haring demonstrated that one could create art on the street that differed from the more pervasive lettering-based graffiti,” writes my friend and Obey Giant artist Shepard Fairey in the Foreword to Haring’s Journals. “He also showed me that the same artists could not only affect people on the streets, they could also put their art on T-shirts and record covers, as well as have their work respected, displayed, and sold as fine art.” Whereas most graffiti looks like graffiti—that is, it embodies its own aesthetic, much in the way tattoos do—Haring’s was more whimsical, like children’s hieroglyphs, if the children understood the many facets of line, its limits, and its capacity to communicate.
“Your line is your personality.” — Keith Haring
We love to hear the story about how artists live and worry. Graffiti proper, in the modern sense of the term, started in the late 1960s in New York City when a kid from the Washington Heights section of Manhattan known as Taki 183 (“Taki” being his tag name and “183” being the street he lived on) emblazoned his tag all over NYC. He worked as a messenger and traveled all five boroughs via the subways. As such, he was the first “All-City” tagger. Impressed by his ubiquity and subsequent notoriety, many kids followed and graffiti eventually became a widespread renegade art form. Aerosol artists embellished their names with colors, arrows, 3-D effects and wild lettering styles.
By the mid-to-late 1970s, New York—especially its subway system—was covered with brightly colored murals with not only tag names, but holiday messages, anti establishment slogans and full-on art works known as “pieces” (short for “masterpieces”). The world of graffiti preceded the rest of hip-hop culture, but became an integral part during hip hop’s early-1980s boom, joining breakdancing, emceeing and DJing as hip-hop’s four elements.
After filling fifty bags with garbage, cleaning up the three-foot-high garbage piles obscuring an abandoned handball wall on the corner of East Houston Street and the Bowery in the East Village, Haring and his partner, Juan Dubose, painted a giant mural of his signature figures breakdancing, running, and spinning in bold, fluorescent colors. Like many other graffiti artists replacing the drab city walls and boring metal subway trains with greetings and flashy colors, Haring saw himself as doing a service to the city. City officials and stuffy citizens hardly agreed. Massive anti-graffiti campaigns grew right along with the art form itself and are still in effect today in most major metropolitan areas. These specialized anti-graffiti forces only added to the art form’s already outlawed status. The ability to pull off a hype piece under such increasing pressure only made great writers more revered for their skills.
Haring started his public-art practice using chalk on empty ad panels in the New York subway stations. In spaces usually reserved for advertising, Haring drew alien abductions, mushroom clouds, radiant babies, barking dogs, televisions, and people, people, people. Between 1980 and 1985, he sometimes produced upward of forty drawings a day. This practice eventually gave way to murals and other more colorful paintings. His simple designs, characters, and animals caught on, even with a graffiti-weary public, leading to gallery shows and commercial work.
“Keith in the subway” (CC BY-NC 2.0) Ken Lig / JUST SHOOT IT! Photography
In spite of criticisms about the latter, his art never lacked bite. His images pushed back against everything from apartheid in South Africa and the threat of nuclear weapons, to the epidemics of crack and AIDS. These works appeared not only in chalk on black paper ad blocks but printed on posters, wheat-pasted on poles, and buttons on the lapels of friends and strangers. So prolific was his artistic protest and promotion that he drew the envy of no less a contemporary than Andy Warhol. “He was jealous of how Keith was like an advertising agency unto himself,” said the photographer Christopher Makos. “That was the cleverest thing any artist at the moment was doing.”
Companies develop—or hire other companies to develop—brand identities and campaigns. Logos, slogans, and thematic series of ads combine to sell products, brand recognition, and brand loyalty. Like the best branding, graffiti tags have to be catchy, and they have to have good letters or great characters. Graffiti and its corporate sanctioned sister art, advertising, are our modern day cave paintings. As Marshall McLuhan put it, “ads are not intended to be seen but to produce an effect. The cave paintings were carefully hidden. They were a magic form, intended to affect events at a distance.”
The artist Yasiin Bey once called hip-hop a folk art. It’s art by the people, for the people, and provides some use outside of mere decoration. “Art is nothing if you don’t reach every segment of the people,” Haring once said. “The performative nature of drawing for him was very important,” said his dealer Tony Shafrazi, describing a scene where Haring had run into a group of young people at a coffeeshop and drew pictures and gave them away. “That form of producing and giving was beyond any form of management. He had to let it flow. He couldn’t limit it.” Haring wrote the following in his journal on March 18, 1982:
My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people for as long as I can. Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.
Keith Haring passed away on February 16, 1990 due to complications from AIDS, yet his work is more widespread now and as recognizable as ever, still celebrating simple, innocent notions like spontaneity, generosity, and a love of humanity. As I mentioned above, I was writing an English Composition paper about him when he died, but I currently have a pair of socks with his drawings on them. His work is timeless.
And traditional graffiti still thrives in cities and along major train lines. It has survived as what the punk-intellectual Jello Biafra once called “the last bastion of free speech,” and the yippie Abbie Hoffman called it “one of the best forms of free communication.” Anyone can grab a can of spray paint, a fat marker, or some chalk and make their thoughts known to the passing population. You can buff graffiti, you can paint over it and you can arrest its practitioners, but as long as someone feels that their voice isn’t being heard, you can’t make it go away.
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.
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.
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.
Jane Bennett “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture ‘7, no. 3 (2005).
See chapter 2 of David E. Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
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.
These quotations are from Jonathan Abrams’ The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop, New York: Crown, 2022.
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.
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.
[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.
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 TheTexas 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.
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.”
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).
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.”
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.
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.
My friend Dave Allen passed away the other day. Like most people who knew him, Dave was not only a friend but also a mentor to me. Through his music and his thinking, it’s difficult to take measure of the influence he’s had on us. I last saw Dave in 2022 when I spent a week at his and Paddy’s house in Portland, collaborating with them on a book idea.
Me and Dave goofing and laughing in Portland in 2022.
In tribute, I’m sharing a piece I wrote about Dave and Gang of Four a few years ago and an interview I did with him in 2008. There’s really no way to do his influence justice, but this is all I have.
Rest in peace, Dave. You’re already sorely missed.
Return the Gift: Gang of Four
To create a spike of novelty high enough to be seen by history depends on a lot of things aligning: an open-armed zeitgeist, an interested public, a little bit of chaos, and a lot of charisma. Sometimes they become folklore, affecting only those who were there, like Woodstock, Altamont, or the June 4, 1976 Sex Pistols show in Manchester: Supposedly everyone there left that show dead-set on starting a band. There’s even a book about it. Other times these events are recorded, as great performances, works of art, books, or records.
Once the smoke cleared after the detonation of punk, there was still so much work to be done. Gang of Four’s original line-up tapped into a tectonic shift in the times. As Mark Fisher writes in The Ghosts of My Life, “It has become increasingly clear that 1979-80… was a threshold moment—the time when a whole world (social democratic, Fordist, industrial) became obsolete, and the contours of a new world (neoliberal, consumerist, informatic) began to show themselves.” It was also the dawn of post-punk. In tangents like tentacles, Joy Division, Wire, The Fall, PiL, Talking Heads, Television, and Gang of Four, among others, were stretching punk in ever new directions.
Gang of Four Entertainment! (Warner Bros, 1979)
One of the more significant of these, Gang of Four combined the lean muscle of punk with the bare bones of funk. Lyrically social and political, their lanky limbs swung hard and wide against the “middle-class malaise” of the 1970s. The first time I heard Gang of Four’s Entertainment!, suddenly much of what I was already listening to made much more sense. Fugazi had a lineage. Naked Raygun had context. Wire had contemporaries. During the post-Lollapalooza package tour phase, I finally saw them live in 1991. It was a woefully crippled line-up that only included Andy Gill from the original Four, sharing the stage at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre with a motley mess of bands: Young Black Teenagers, Warrior Soul, Public Enemy, and The Sisters of Mercy. The fact that Gang of Four was considered viable in that line-up ten years past their prime is significant though.
Woven as an influence and wielded as an instrument, Entertainment! remains a relevant strand of modern music. Frank Ocean sampled “Anthrax” for the song “Futura Free” on his 2016 record, Blond, and El-P sampled “Ether” for “The Ground Below” from Run the Jewels’ 2020 record, RTJ4. It was #81 on Rolling Stone magazine’s 2013 “100 Best Debut Albums of All Time” list, and in 2012, when they updated their 2003 list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” Entertainment! moved up from 490 to 483, a seven-spot jump in a decade, over 40 years after the record was released. It stands at number 8 on Pitchfork’s “Top 100 Albums of the 1970s” list for 2004.
So, when the original four reformed in 2004, as if to prove how strident those early records were, they rerecorded those classic songs. The result was Return the Gift, which features predominantly tracks from Entertainment! And its follow-up, Solid Gold, performed live on a soundstage. Even 2021’s retrospective boxset represents their earliest era: Gang of Four 77-81.
The Gang of Four box set (Matador Records, 2021)
By the time they released Return the Gift in 2005, there were bands that had drawn direct influences from the original Gang of Four. People were comparing Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party to them. “Those bands helped us get back into the limelight with a whole new generation of music fans,” says Dave Allen, “who came along thinking they were going hear Bloc Party or Franz Ferdinand and then got their minds shattered.” Though they are often considered overtly political, Dave bristles at the connotation. “People would say, ‘Rage Against the Machine is just like Gang of Four.’ As much as I respect those guys and what they do, our aims were very different. We weren’t revolutionaries. We were dissecting everyday life.”
After touring with the original line-up, Jon King and Andy Gill had set their sights on a new record, but Hugo Burnham and Dave didn’t think the world needed a new Gang of Four album. Dave, having spent many intervening years consulting bands on negotiating the music industry’s new digital landscape, wanted to do something new, something different. He told me at the time, “If we don’t own the idea, there’s no point in doing it.” He continues,
What I’d wanted to do instead was set up cameras in our rehearsal room in London and do what Radiohead did. This would have been a perfect Gang of Four moment: You can check in on our working methods, you can check in on the arguments that take place. You’d get the chemistry of the band, and then I just felt like, let the crowd decide: What do you think is worth following up on? We’d still never make an album, just complete these songs and leave them up on YouTube so millions of people could stream them forever, and you don’t have to pay a thing. Meanwhile, our cachet goes up in the world for touring, and we can go out again. That’s what the Web’s for. In music, I think the Web gives you this massive distribution system out of the hands of radio, out of the hands of distributors, out of the hands of record labels. What could be better for rock ‘n’ roll than that?
This sense of independence, the lingering influence of punk, runs through Dave’s many endeavors. The novelist Rick Moody writes of him,
In calling Dave Allen an Internet strategist, or a pundit of the digital realm, or a high-tech agit-prop genius, you would be leaving out the job he had before that, when he was Dave Allen the bass player, first in Gang of Four (on their first two albums, and then for a couple of years during their reunion victory lap), and later in Shriekback. As such, he has experienced all of the vagaries of the music business as a player, producer, label owner, and now as a copyright owner of a great number of great songs from the seventies and eighties that are routinely streamed online. Few people of my acquaintance are better situated to talk about distribution and the difficulties thereof without romanticizing the story.
Dave in a Willamette Week cover story, “Pentium Punk“ by Zach Dundas, 2001.
If you know Dave Allen, you probably know him from his time in Gang of Four, but from post-punk and the music business to the post-internet, Dave has been ahead of every curve. A life and lessons from over four decades traversing the interstices of not just music and technology but also art and culture, Dave Allen is one of our most outspoken innovators and advocates.
Every Force Evolves a Form An Interview with Dave Allen, 2008
I can’t remember the first time I heard Gang of Four, but I do distinctly remember a lot of things making sense once I did. Their jagged and angular bursts of guitar, funky rhythms, deadpan vocals, and overtly personal-as-political lyrics predated so many other bands I’d been listening to. Dave Allen was the man behind the bass, and now he’s the man behind Pampelmoose, a Portland-based music and media blog.
I sat down with Dave in May 2008 for a lengthy beer-soaked session over Mexican food, and I managed to glean the following dialogue from it. We talked about Gang of Four, Dave’s personal history from forming that band to running Pampelmoose, the questionable state of the music industry, and why Portland is the place to be.
An update was planned, but now that Dave has parted ways with Gang of Four (along with drummer Hugo Burnham) again, I figured I’d go ahead and run this interview as-is. Dave’s ideas about the state of the record industry (about which he’s written extensively on Pampelmoose) and how Gang of Four should release their music clash with the band’s more traditional leanings. The seeds of his departure can be seen germinating in the talk below.
Dave Allen portrait by Laura Persat.
Roy Christopher: Seeing all of the sound-alike bands around, you guys originally got back together and did your old material.
Dave Allen: Yeah, the point that that was really validated was when we played in the West of England at the All Tomorrow’s Parties “Nightmare Before Christmas” show, curated by Thurston Moore, and we were the co-headliners. We’d already played with them the previous summer at the Prima Vera festival in Barcelona. We actually followed them that night, and I was really concerned, but what I realized was, although that band puts out new albums every now and again — Nurse, Rather Ripped… They make great records. They never stopped. Now, you might argue that nothing changes with Sonic Youth, so their style is the same: You just get a new batch of songs from Sonic Youth. And there’s something remarkably comforting about that, but at the same time, the moment when they launch into something from Daydream Nation, and they expand on it because they’re a jam-band at times, but the most interesting jam-band ever to be seen live. They are such a superb band. Forget everyone else. But it dawned on me, we and they are legacy bands. People don’t necessarily come to hear the new material. So, you better be sure to pack your set with a lot of old material. They’ve got twenty albums to draw on, right? We’ve only got two. Really. It limits the amount of time we can be on stage, but at the same time, we’re not ones to overstay our welcome. Live, those songs are more intense than ever before. They have a new vibe that I really like.
Anyway, point being, once you realize that people are coming to see you to hear the old songs — including the new crowd that turns up, by the way — then you’re okay.
If we do record twelve new songs, six of which are really good, then how do we put that out? My argument would be that we’re Gang of Four, and we’re supposed to do things a bit differently. So, do we do it through a cell-phone provider? Something different. Or should we give it away digitally and just press some heavy-gram vinyl to sell at shows? The days of doing a CD are over. That’s my argument. Now, I don’t know if Jon and Andy would agree, but the point being that the material can be used in many different ways. One idea that we’ve been kicking around with this new song that I really like. Jon’s got this thing about caffeine culture and it’s a really cool direction we’re going in, and it’s good, old-fashioned Gang of Four. I’m really enjoying it. Now, what if we perversely actually went to Red Bull or whoever and see if they want to release it? It’s not available anywhere else except in their ad. Then make it viral online where you can download the Red Bull/Gang of Four video, and so on. That way it gets spread around the globe in different ways. And the point being not to sell anything, but Red Bull would pay us for the campaign, and we get back on the road, which is where we do best. We play live, we get paid well, we can sell t-shirts and vinyl, so the concept of signing to a label, putting something out, and touring on it is so ridiculous to me. If we don’t own the idea, there’s no point in doing it.
RC:Right, it’s just like the legacy idea. You used the Rolling Stones as an example. The new records are just an excuse to get out on the road and play the old songs live.
DA: That’s all it is.
RC:Do they really realize that? You say they do, but I think it’s that you realize that. I don’t think the Rolling Stones think of themselves as a legacy band. I think they’re still trying to make another “great” Rolling Stones record.
DA: I think you’re right. That’s the counterpoint, right? They may not have realized it and I think all bands want to keep creating, and what I’m saying is—
RC: “We’ve done our good stuff. Let’s just keep doing it.”
DA: Right. There are other ways to be creative, so I would argue that doing my label, trying to find new bands is creative, and now I’ve got my heavily trafficked blog.
RC:Right. You have an outlet, and you get to play live.
DA: Yeah, why would we kill ourselves to do a new record when no one wants to buy it anyway?
RC:There’s no good way to say it.
DA: It’s all downhill. It’s retreat.
RC:Yeah, when you first mentioned the legacy band idea, it really resonated with me, but I finally got around to watching the Metallica documentary, and wow. Those guys are just so obviously past their prime and just killing themselves trying to make a new record. It just ends up being a parody of what they once were, and I think that really speaks to your idea of being a legacy band –- and realizing it.
DA: I would argue that who’s to blame here are the labels. The labels are to blame. It’s like when Coldplay decided not to make an album because Apple was about to be born, and Chris couldn’t write songs or whatever, EMI’s shares dropped 15%, because it was all about the biggest band on the label. Well, Metallica are huge, so it’s the same thing. All the heads of Warner Brothers will be pushing them, “Look at the share price! We need an album from you guys!”
RC:It was totally like that in the film! When James left for rehab, the label freaked, like “Oh my god, our cash cow is falling apart!”
DA: Well, didn’t Geffen pretty much go away after Kurt killed himself? Nirvana was Geffen’s cash cow.
RC: Not like they lost any when he died… In 1995, Sub-Pop’s second biggest seller was Sebadoh’s Bakesale. Their first? Nirvana’s Bleach! In 1995, Sub-Pop could’ve not released anything, just kept Bleach on the market, and made money.
DA: So, my point about these legacy bands making records is, the Rolling Stones will be given a million dollars every time they want to make a record. The label can recoup that money. They’re not going to get rich off of the record, but it revitalizes the back catalog, and puts the band on the road. Otherwise, why would they bother to get out of bed to record? They’re past their prime as songwriters. I’m sorry, there’s not anything redeeming about it.
I think it’s interesting that Sting got The Police back together but didn’t bother to make a record with those guys. And Sting is the consummate songwriter. Meanwhile, the cheapest ticket on the Police tour is a hundred dollars.
RC:You know how much the good ones are? Nine-hundred…
DA: Are they?! Let’s go back to that one-hundred dollars: There goes the music industry! The live side of it is growing, but there goes the recording industry. The back catalog is the only money to be made.
RC:What about Mötley Crüe? They had to prop Mick Marrs up, and Vince Neil is huffing and puffing and barely making it through one of those tours. They made millions of dollars and didn’t even do a new record!
DA: You don’t need to.
RC:Kiss did what, three reunion tours? And all three of those years, those were the biggest tours of the year.
DA: People don’t want to hear the new material.
RC:They want to hear “Rock and Roll All Nite.”
DA: It’s a reminder of your youth.
RC:It’s nostalgia marketing.
DA: Absolutely.
RC:It’s one of the strongest things out there.
DA: It’s what we did on our holidays, twenty years ago.
RC:Right.
Dave playing bass at a Weiden + Kennedy party in 2002.
RC:So, why Portland?
DA: In late 1999, I was living in Lookout Mountain with my kids, all computer kids, and I went to a friend of mine Nigel Phelps who’s one of the top art directors in the movies, he did Titanic and all sorts of big movies, English guy, — his eldest daughter, I saw that she was on the computer, on AOL, and she was talking to herself saying, “You’re on dial-up, you’re not on broadband,” and I asked her if she was arguing with someone about who was on dial-up and who was on broadband. She said, “No.” On Napster, when you selected a song it tells you the bandwidth availability. So, when it was really slow, she would IM the person and say, “You liar. You’re on a 28K dial-up. You’re not on broadband.” That was my first exposure to Napster, and I was like “What the heck is this?” I look and she’s got all of this free music. Now, I was at eMusic, where we charged 99 cents per song, and the next morning, I went into the office and emailed the head guys and said, “Guys, you’re done. Everybody is getting free music from Napster.” Their attitude was that it was illegal and that they’d soon be put out of business. And I was saying, “Not before we go out of business.” And that’s exactly what happened.
Then around 2000, when the market sank and the whole dotcom thing fell in the toilet, I got the call that they were closing the LA office. I got a call from a headhunter that some guys in Portland wanted to fly me up and talk to me and would like to hire me for a similar position. I liked Portland, I’d been here a lot, I had friends here already, but I wasn’t ready to leave the big city just yet. Anyway, it turned out to be Intel, and on the campus here right outside Portland, they had this thing called New Business Investments, or NBI, and I was asked to join the Consumer Digital Audio Services or something like that. It sounded interesting, so I joined up. They were looking at internet connected devices, an MP3 player—pre-iPod—and different ways to get your music, Home Entertainment servers, and the thing we were building that you see now was this bridging system that transmitted music files from your computer to your legacy Hi-Fi. 802.11b had just arrived, so we were working to get the music from there to there, wirelessly. My job was to go to Yahoo music and these other content providers and license them for our service. It was a great idea. The problem was, Intel is known for developing amazing stuff and then getting cold feet at the last minute and not bringing it to market. At home I’ve got five MP3 players that are better than the iPod. There’s a soundcard in them, engineered to perfection. They’re amazing. The only problem was it’s just a flash device, it only had a 128Kb flash card for memory, and no one had thought of a adding slot where you could upgrade the memory. Never came to market. That was that.
They’d paid for me and my family to move up, I’d bought a great house, and I think it’s a great city. I don’t feel the urge to move back. I’m a booster for this town. I love it.
RC:I’ve only been here for two months, but every other day there’s someone else here that I didn’t know was here, or some event that I didn’t realize happened here. I never thought about moving here because Seattle has been my adopted home for so many years, so I never thought about dropping down here, but since I did… It’s an amazing town.
DA: Anthony Keidis just moved here.
RC:Really?
DA: Ironic, huh? Now I can ask him about my royalties. [Laughter] “You can come to my barbecue. Please bring blank check.” [Laughter] Everyone’s here. The Shins, Johnny Marr…
RC:His being in Modest Mouse…
DA: You can say it, Roy.
RC:Okay, I hate Modest Mouse. [Laughter] I love Johnny Marr, but I hate Modest Mouse. It’s funny that the Mouse House is right over there.
DA: Yeah, I ran into Isaac Brock’s girlfriend, and he came by the office to get some stuff, and he said I should come over, that there’s someone there I’d probably like to meet. So, I went over there and I walk upstairs and there’s Johnny Marr. He sees me walk in and he’s like, “What the fucking hell are you doing in Portland?” And I said, “Well, what the fucking hell are you doing in Portland?” [Laughter]
They’re an interesting band to watch because they were a multi-platinum band, and now they’re not. You have to make money on the road.
RC:That’s another area that hip-hop is missing out on. Hip-hop is not known for big live shows – and it should be. The lyrical element of hip-hop is one of the most exciting things to see live, but the acts that excel at that part of it are not the acts that are selling the records and doing those tours.
DA: The underground aspect is interesting, like The Roots do well touring, Blackalicious… But the bigger it gets, the more it slows down. I mean, is T.I. going to do a big arena tour?
RC:No, but T.I. is one of the guys who’s still selling records.
DA: Yeah, he’s fine, but the minute it drops off, what can he fall back on?
RC:Right. Then he can go be Jay-Z.
DA: That may be one of the things that hurt live hip-hop: It was so easy to sell records, it was like why bother going on the road?
RC:Well, for a long time hip-hop had a hard time getting security for shows because it had been tainted with this “violence” tag.
DA: And it was never as bad really as your average big rock show. It’s just racism.
RC:Yeah, it’s a race thing and something the press loves to play up, and it’s completely untrue, but it keeps you from getting insurance for a hip-hop show. The reality is, the insurance company is like, “Ice Cube? Oh, hell no!”
DA: Right. Every black person is packing, and there are 50,000 of them in an arena, we’re not covering that. And then Guns N’ Roses comes to town and there are two stabbing deaths—
RC:And all of the seats in the arena are ripped out and thrown on stage.
DA: Yeah, but those are all white guys from the suburbs.
Me and Dave clowning in Chicago in 2017.
RC:So, what are your goals with Pampelmoose?
DA: It started it off like it did with my label World Domination, maybe a little too starry-eyed. I feel I’ve done really well in music, and I’m generally a very positive person.
RC:That’s one of the things I love about you, Dave.
DA: Aw, thanks [Laughs]. I look at bands and at the scene, and I feel like I’ve gotta give back. I volunteer a lot and I try and help, probably to my detriment, too much sometimes. So, I worry that I start off with great ambitions and sometimes let people down, because you get over-burdened and everybody wants a piece of it. You back up and think, “I can’t do everyone, so I shouldn’t do anyone.”
RC:It’s hard to find a balance there.
DA: It is. It’s so difficult, but I think we’ve found some kind of balance with Pampelmoose, and a group of friends and I were able to apply ourselves to a website that became a company that can help artists to sell some of their stuff, come on by anytime for free advice, bring their contracts -– I have a lawyer friend who charges very little to look over that stuff. Pampelmoose is also an extension of my social life. I’m very active socially. I can’t be at home. I’ve got to be out. I like being with people, and that’s no offense to my family. I like being with them, too. So, Pampelmoose has become an extension of my personality. I’ve tried things like this in the past with fanzines and writing, but it’s so difficult. You have to get them printed, get them out there.
RC:It wasn’t a fanzine, Dave. It was an art project. [Laughter]
DA: That’s true, and that’s my problem too, I get too deep into the project and it gets too ambitious and takes on a life of its own, then after the fall, I realize I over did it again. With Pampelmoose, the safety net was the blog. Because once the blog took off, and I believe it was January 2006 was the first post, and I have no idea where it’s going to go, but I did have the idea that I could open the doors to a community. That’s the thing I love about blogging, with the comments, people can call bullshit on me. The interesting thing for me was, six months go by, and no one’s calling bullshit, and then you get confident. And it wasn’t a lot at first, I think in the early days if we got a thousand visitors in a month, that was a lot, but it did pick up and start attracting visitors. Then I began to take it as seriously as everything else I was doing. I’m the editor. I’m the public voice. I’m the journalist. I’m the copy editor. I’m the layout guy. And at first, I thought I might be building something that I couldn’t maintain, so I hired a bit of a support team. Then I learned to fly. I learned some basic HTML code, I learned to crop photos… Every post has an image, any image. It doesn’t have to go with the rest of the story. So, it has a little art aspect to it, if you will. In the past eighteen months it’s morphed totally into this blog. Pampelmoose is the blog, and as a side note, we still sell CDs, T-shirts, and give advice to local bands. So, getting up every day and having an opinion and having people comment on it drives the whole thing, and now that the traffic is up, it’s like, “Oh, shit.”
RC:Yeah, but it validates everything you’re doing there.
DA: Right, but just having explained it, it’s still weird. It’s not like we’re Wal-Mart, and we do this.
RC:Right, but with Wal-Mart, there’s a precedent. “Remember K-Mart? Like that, but better.” When you’re doing something like this, it’s more ambiguous. People ask me what my book is about, and I say it’s a collection of interviews. “Well, what’s the theme?” You have to read it. So, it’s frustrating, but if you read it, you get it. Even if you only read one interview per section, a theme emerges. I think Pampelmoose is the same way. If you go there and dig around, read, and become a part of it, it fits, but there’s no one-line explanation for what’s going on there.
DA: It is intriguing. It’s not Pitchfork, where they get a million hits a month, and it’s like, “What’s the point?” At the same time, I can’t deny their success. They’ve done it well, but now you’ve got this unfettered fan-boy day out where you can kill something before it even has a chance.
Dave’s old iPod.
These are excerpts from two upcoming books that Dave had a hefty hand in. The first bit is from The Medium Picture, a book heavily influenced by Dave and his thinking. That one comes out October 15th from the University of Georgia Press. The second is an interview I managed to record in 2008, when we both worked at Nemo Design in Portland. That one is in my second interview anthology, Follow for Now, Vol. 2.
I’ve been teaching college off and on since 2002. Every semester in every class, I open with the same joke: “Hi, my name is Roy Christopher, but you can call me Roy, or if you’re slightly more daring, ‘Oh Captain, My Captain’.” This is an adaptation of the opening lines of Mr. Keating, played famously by Robin Williams, in his English class at Wellton Academy in the 1989 Peter Weir movie Dead Poets Society. Over the years I have noticed how differently this line has landed. Some semesters the movie would be replaying on some cable channel, and I’d get a bigger laugh. Other semesters, not so much. Getting the joke requires connecting the line to the movie. It requires a familiarity with the film or at least the scene. What’s more, Keating’s borrowed joke is an allusion itself! It’s a line from a poem by Walt Whitman. Though it has happened a few times, I am not actually asking my students to call me Captain. What we have here is a failure to communicate.
There’s an odd Star Wars allusion in Frank Herbert’s Heretics of Dune, the fifth book of his Dune series of novels:
“He’s a three P-O,” they said, meaning that such a person surrounded himself with cheap copies made from déclassé substances. Even when the supremely rich were forced to employ one of the distressful three P-Os, they disguised it where possible.”
Heretics of Dune was released in 1984, well after the original Star Wars trilogy had taken over the imaginations of everyone in the galaxy. “Three P-O” is a not-so-subtle dig at George Lucas’s C-3PO, the golden if persnickety protocol droid who serves the main characters of Star Wars. Herbert goes quite a distance to set up the gag, clumsily describing a rare and expensive wood used exclusively by the “supremely rich,” whereas lower-class families use the synthetic materials “polastine, polaz, and pormabat.” “Three P-O” was the pejorative reserved for such people.
While Star Wars predates Heretics of Dune, the original Dune novel and two of its sequels were released before the first Star Wars movie. The original novel came out over a decade prior, and the similarities are undeniable. Dune’s hero, Paul Atreides, comes to power on Arrakis, a desert planet also known as “Dune.” There’s a barren area of the wasteland on Tatooine called “the Dune Sea,” a vast desert that was once a large inland sea. This inhospitable area suffers from extreme temperature variations and a lack of water, like the southern hemisphere of Arrakis. The hero of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker, is from the desert planet Tatooine. Paul has a very close spiritual relationship with his sister, Princess Alia. Luke’s sister, with whom he also quite close, is Princess Leia. Paul battles the Imperium. Luke battles the Empire. Paul finds out his sworn enemy, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, is his grandfather. Luke finds out his enemy, Darth Vader, is his father. The Bene Gesserit Sisterhood of Dune use the Voice of the Weirding Way to manipulate others. The Jedi use the Force to do the same. And what is the eel-like, saber-toothed Sarlacc in the Great Pit of Carkoon on Tatooine if not a giant, buried sandworm?
The Daily News, Port Townsend, Washington, August 19,1977.
Not long after the release of the first Star Wars movie in 1977, in a newspaper article from his hometown of Port Townsend, Washington, titled “Is ‘Star Wars’ a ‘Dune’ spin-off?” Herbert said he’d “try very hard not to sue.” Though he has never been shy about his liberal borrowing from existing stories, Lucas claims the only similarity that Star Wars shares with Dune is that “they both have deserts.” Speaking of stories that have deserts, some have compared Dune to 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia, which tells the story of the British Army officer T. E. Lawrence, who helped lead the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the first World War. So, even Herbert may have borrowed a bit.
As the film historian Peter Biskind puts it, “We are the children of Lucas, not Coppola.” Or Herbert, for that matter.
