Reason Magazine - Topics > Counterculture

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

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

The New York Times profiles the weird world of steampunk,

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

Whole thing here.

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

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

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

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

From the NY Times obit:

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

More here.

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

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

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

Belated Hat tip: Pig Mannix.

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Maura Flynn for the tip.

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

"Our Flag is Hip Hop"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kerry Howley is a senior editor of reason.

The Anti-Emo Pogroms

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

Mexican subcultures go to war:

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

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

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

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

The Traditionalist Counterculture

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

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

Read all about it here.

AT&T Works In More Places....

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

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

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

Hippies in Space: Some '70s Flashbacks

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

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

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

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, RIP

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

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

What Our Public Schools Need: More Rotting Piles of Books

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

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

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

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

A whole bunch of education-related stories from reason.

Friday Mini Book Review: Perfect From Now On

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

Past mini book reviews.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trimming the Presidential Fringes

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

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

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

Friday Mini Book Review: I Have America Surrounded

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

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

A tasty panoply of past mini book reviews.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Always on Trial for Just Being Born

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

France's Clandestine Culture War

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

Secret societies in the news:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Via Infocult.]

The Rave Museum

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

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

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

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

Get a Loder This...

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 11:45:00 EST

On Friday, October 26, reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie interviewed Kurt Loder for the conference Reason in DC.

A legend for his work in Rolling Stone and at MTV, Loder is an outspoken libertarian--and a harsh critic of the nanny state in all its manifestations. In a wide-ranging and provocative conversation, Loder discussed technology, freedom, the coming collapse of traditional news media (and why that's a good thing), the misguided (and ultimately ineffective) attempt to shut down free expression, and much more.

Click here to watch the interview at reason.tv.

Revisiting the Fate of the West Memphis 3

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:51:00 EDT

Just in time for Halloween comes new developments in a 1994 Arkansas murder case whose prosecution was remarkable for its satanic-tinged hysteria and virtually complete implausibility. It's sobering to think that the case of the "West Memphis 3" took place in the late 20th century. From the NY Times account of breaking news:

In 1994, three teenagers in the small city of West Memphis, Ark., were convicted of killing three 8-year-old boys in what prosecutors portrayed as a satanic sacrifice involving sexual abuse and genital mutilation. So shocking were the crimes that when the teenagers were led from the courthouse after their arrest, they were met by 200 local residents yelling, "Burn in hell."
But according to long-awaited new evidence filed by the defense in federal court on Monday, there was no DNA from the three defendants found at the scene, the mutilation was actually the work of animals and at least one person other than the defendants may have been present at the crime scene.
Supporters of the defendants hope the legal filing will provide the defense with a breakthrough. Two of the men, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, are serving life in prison, while one, Damien W. Echols, is on death row. There was no physical evidence linking the teenagers, now known as the West Memphis 3, to the crime.

Whole story here.

Damon Root, who has a terrific piece in the new issue of reason (to a newsstand--go! or subscribe already!), wrote about the West Memphis 3 in 2003. A snippet:

Ultimately, black clothes, heavy metal music, and weird beliefs outweighed improper procedures, false testimony, and reasonable doubt. "I have personally observed people wearing black fingernails, having their hair painted black, wearing black T-shirts, black dungarees," testified Dale Griffis, the prosecution's "occult expert." Although the defense argued that Griffis' mail-order Ph.D. from "Columbia Pacific University" did not qualify him as an expert, Burnett disagreed. The prosecution also introduced the cover of Metallica's Master of Puppets album, the fact that Echols practiced Wicca and enjoyed books by Stephen King and Anne Rice, and testimony "that eleven black T-shirts had been found in Jason's home."

Whole depressing thing here.

For Ben Franklin's deconstruction of prejudice and hysteria masquerading as due process, "A Witch Trial at Mount Holly" (1730), go here and scroll down.

Hat tip: former reason intern Jon Blanks.

Interview With a Vampire Expert

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:32:00 EDT

Like most people who find themselves wrestling with vampires—Jonathan Harker, Robert Neville, Buffy—Eric Nuzum was leading a perfectly normal life until the monsters came along. He was an audiophile and pop culture journalist with an expertise in how the state and cultural watchdogs try and trammel creativity. In 2001 he published Public Advisory: Music Censorship in America, a civil libertarian's history of musical nannyism from the Beatles' "butcher baby" cover to the Gore family's war on the heavy metal band W.A.S.P. Nuzum's next project was going to be a history of the American burlesque show.

But vampires got in the way. As Nuzum crunched Count Chocula one morning in his Washington, D.C. home, he flipped on his TV and caught President Bush warning against the soft fascism of plugging in too many appliances and becoming an "energy vampire." Flipping through a magazine, Nuzum saw a model with fangs and a cape enticing him to buy some vodka and "drink in the night." He had his project. "If the vampire is ubiquitous," he wondered, "how did this happen? Why did this happen? I wanted insight."

The result was The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula. Nuzum encountered neither of those fiends, but his reporting ping-ponged him around the Western world, to a vampire bar tour in San Francisco, to a fetish night in New York, to Bram "Dracula" Stoker's old stomping grounds in the English town of Whitby. He accompanied sickly vegetarians and Munsters star Butch Patrick on a fact-challenged tour of Vlad the Impaler's Transylvania. He Netflixed more than 200 vampire movies, hating most of them. (Nuzum argues that the John Malkovich-Willem Defoe thesp-fest Shadow of the Vampire is the best the genre has to offer, and that 1994's Interview with the Vampire was the last to impact the culture in a real way.)

Two years and 240 pages later, what did Nuzum learn about the secret world of the vampyr? It was both weirder and less shocking than you'd imagine. The vampire myth itself is ancient, indelible, and didn't come out of Transylvania. Most civilizations actually have a fantasy creature who sucks blood, and Christendom's version started with Greek churches telling parisheners that their dead relatives would rise up and start drinking the red stuff if they misbehaved. And followers of that myth, the people who call themselves vampires, are generally sort of nice. Some are reclusive, some are younger than they say they are in chat rooms, and none of them will prove to a journalist that they actually drink blood. (Nuzum drank some of his own and got very sick.)

"All of the vampire folks I met," Nuzum writes, "are all at least marginally aware of the darkness in their own lives. The only difference between them and us is that they've styled their physical world to match their inner one."

reason spoke with Nuzum in a bar not far from his NPR office in Washington, D.C.

reason: This seems like a strange follow-up to your first book. What's the connectivity between music censorship and vampires?

Eric Nuzum: There's much more than you'd think, if you buy into my central premise. Vampires are the perfect metaphor. You use them to express things you fear, things you find exciting. Music plays the same role in some people's lives. When you look at some of the issues around music censorship, you're controlling what someone can and can't listen to, or what they can and can't say.

reason: And you write about some of the frenzy from parents who think vampire mythos are turning their kids weird.

Nuzum: It's the same situation that comes up with music—people will say "Ozzy Osbourne is responsible for my kid shooting his head off," or overdosing, or killing himself. Ozzy must be the problem! But the reality's that Ozzy is a symptom, not a cause. People who are of extreme emotions, who hold extreme views of the world, pick extreme music to represent that. I write in the book about "Vampire: The Masquerade," this full-on role-playing game that has been blamed for driving kids to violence. Well, no. That game did not turn otherwise good kids into bad kids. It was just another example of many things that were wrong with their lives.

reason: It doesn't change their behavior?

Nuzum: No. That argument is just like how Marilyn Manson is responsible for Columbine. It's silly. If you look back to Tipper Gore and the PMRC, everybody remembers three of their four areas of concern. They remember drugs, they remember violence, and they remember extreme sexuality. And there was a fourth category—the occult. Nobody remembers that, but at the time it was a commonly held belief that musicians were devil worshippers. If we look back now it seems unbelievably silly. So we've decided that one of those pillars was complete nonsense. What's that mean? Probably that all of those pillars were nonsense.

reason: You visited a fetish club called the Court of Lazarus, this darkly lit place that serves blood-colored cocktails, where people watch murder simulated onstage. Is their obsession is making those people more dangerous?

Nuzum: If it wasn't vampires it would be something else. They'd be running around in diapers whipping each other with a cat o' nine tails. Nefarious Wrath, the main guy in Court of Lazarus, kept saying over and over to me that "this is an archetype for us." And I totally believe that. Many of people who I spoke with really couldn't answer deep questions about why they liked to play this way. They'd say: I look at this, and it makes sense to me.

reason: But as you point out, there are surges in the amount of vampire literature or films when people are worried about disease. The last big spike was during the height of the American AIDS scare. Why would people choose this as their fantasy?

Nuzum: Because it's taboo. The ability to toy with something that can kill you isn't new: it's like playing Russian roulette in a much more safe way. And this is perfect because it's a very powerful taboo, but people can get involved in it without really doing anything.

reason: The lifestyle vampires don't seem to be drawing inspiration from the original Dracula. What's inspiring them? Are they Anne Rice fans?

Nuzum: My guess is that Lazarus people probably don't know about Stoker. Actually, I was shocked at how little all of these people knew about Stoker. The people who went on the Romania trip all sat and nodded their heads as our tour guide spouted off crazy talk. Like: Stoker was gay and wrote this gay book about Dracula's brother Radu, who was a gay character, but Radu wasn't a scary name so he never finished it. Total bullshit. But nobody on that trip questioned it at all. Several people knew things they were hearing weren't true, but people didn't care.

reason: Why not?

Nuzum: They were on vacation.

reason: Were they illustrative of vampire fans in general? How much do today's fans care about Bram Stoker's version of the monster?

Nuzum: Bram Stoker would never recognize Count Dracula the way we portray him, not even in the clichéd Bela Lugosi version, because it's so dramatically different. That suave, sophisticated count wasn't in Stoker's novel. His social skills weren't very good. All the sorts of little inventions, like vamps being sensitive to light, that started when other people took their own spins on this. The light thing started in Nosferatu. In some of the early novels vampires got their power from moon but could still walk around during the day. Biting on neck was a new invention, because the traditional vampires drink from the arm or the chest.

reason: So people—authors, adults who call themselves vampires—don't have a fealty to the original vampire stories?

Nuzum: Very few creators of vampire stories, including Bram Stoker, realize the power of what they're creating, especially in their time. Stoker was clueless about many things in his life, and the power of that book was one of them. It was only after he died that it became a commodity. I think that if you look at for examples, go to one of the worst vampire movies I saw, Club Vampire, about a strip club of vampires who continue to do their strip tease for anyone who sticks around after the club closes. And then, you know, they drink their blood and kill them. There was a price to be paid for this kind of sexual freedom. For that movie to come out in the early 90s when AIDS was an hourly conversation tells you how deeply this stuff is ingrained. This was a terrible movie and the filmmakers had no idea what they were doing. They figured out the metaphor completely unintentionally.

reason: Would you say vampires are sort of a monomyth, that people understand them and their metaphorical importance from culture to culture without being told?

Nuzum: They're just like folk tales. Folk tales don't come about when a guy says "I'm gonna capture the zeitgeist of this moment in little story about a rabbit and little girl." The stories with the most resonance survive. Someone didn't say "we don't understand the effects of disease so let's create a monster that sucks blood." It just kind of happened, and it stayed because it works for people.

reason: The first European vampire myths started as a way of keeping people in line and obeying their church, an opium-of-the-masses sort of thing. People would defy dogma and die and come back to suck the blood of the living.

Nuzum: Yeah: "Your uncle Phil, he's the one who's making you sick because he was excommunicated."

reason: Is it strange that completely secular people in an increasingly secular culture cling to a myth that was spread that way?

Nuzum: Some people use religion to teach morals and control people, and some use it to make sense of the world. In that sense a story about vampires or a story about talking pumpkins has the same effect.

reason: I have to say, you seem awfully cold and equivocal about Vlad the Impaler's career. You say "our view of looking at the world is just too different to pass clear judgment."

Nuzum: It's same type of argument that you have about Thomas Jefferson owning slaves. That's always a hot debate after the second beer. And Vlad was working in a very similar context. He liked to position himself as the champion of people, and he had two problems. One was the political system he was in, which could bring down the leader if he was unpopular. I mean, imagine if we had presidential elections whenever the people got mad at the president. His other problem was that he was caught, physically and intellectually, between the Christian world and the Ottoman Empire. He quickly learned that the way to keep his country safe was by being fucking crazy.

reason: You'd defend that?

Nuzum: Obviously it didn't seem like such a good system if you were the family of one of his victims. But there was very little crime. He'd have his men leave money in cups in public places just to prove that no one would touch them for fear of his secret police. It's difficult to look at that say "you are absolutely wrong." It totally worked! The Communists actually thought he was a hero until Communism fell and they met these Westerners who wanted to buy Dracula merchandise.

reason: And you encountered vampire obsessives or self-identified vampires who didn't meet your expectations at all. When you started this book, what were you expecting?

Nuzum: I was expecting to talk to somebody sitting in an apartment with velvet curtains behind him, who'd say crazy shit like "If you pull that curtain back I will turn into dust." Not once have I met somebody who really defined themselves like that and claims that they if they walk outside they'll burn. Lots of people who've said they'll get dizzy if they face the sun. Nobody who died in 1866 and returned to feed on the living. What I found is lots of people who say this lifestyle just kind of works for them.

reason: Are you glad that we live in a country that can produce somebody like Jonathon the Impaler, the Minnesota fringe politician who claims to be a "sanguinary vampire?" Is that generally good or bad for society?

Nuzum: I don't think I'd say it's one or the other. Nobody took Jonathan or any of his ideas seriously, not that he had many ideas to be taken seriously. While it's easy to dismiss that—hey, the guy thinks impalement is a good way to curb crime!—it's not much of a step from saying "that guy believes in vampires" to saying "that guy believes in Allah! That's weird." If you create a culture that just mocks those ideas or mocks the people who believe them then you're in dangerous territory.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Rothbard on How the Right Went Wrong

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 19:09:00 EDT

Murray Rothbard's early 1970s book The Betrayal of the American Right (which, had it been published as scheduled by Ramparts Press, would have made one more irony in the career of David Horowitz, an editor at the lefty magazine Ramparts from which the publishing concern derived, who has since turned from leftist anti-Vietnam Warrior to right-wing war cheerleader) has finally been issued by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

They are putting it online piece-by-piece, and Anthony Gregory is liveblogging his reading of it.

Rothbard's summation of the book's message:

The book was a cry in the wilderness against what I saw as the betrayal of what I here call the "Old Right." Or, to allay confusion about various "olds" and "news," we call it the Original Right. The Old Right arose during the 1930s as a reaction against the Great Leap Forward (or Backward) into collectivism that characterized the New Deal. That Old Right continued and flourished through the 1940s and down to about the mid-1950s. The Old Right was staunchly opposed to Big Government and the New Deal at home and abroad: that is, to both facets of the welfare-warfare state. It combated U.S. intervention in foreign affairs and foreign wars as fervently as it opposed intervention at home.
At the present time, many conservatives have come to realize that the old feisty, antigovernment spirit of conservatives has been abraded and somehow been transformed into its statist opposite. It is tempting, and, so far as it goes, certainly correct, to put the blame on the Right’s embrace in the 1970s of Truman-Humphrey Cold War liberals calling themselves "neoconservatives," and to allow these ex-Trotskyites and ex-Mensheviks not only into the tent but also to take over the show. But the thesis of the book is that those who wonder what happened to the good old cause must not stop with the neocons: that the rot started long before, with the founding in 1955 of National Review and its rapid rise to dominance of the conservative movement. It was National Review that, consciously and cleverly, transformed the content of the Old Right into something very like its opposite, while preserving the old forms and rituals, such as lip service to the free market and to the Constitution of the United States.

Rothbard's story, among many others, is related in my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.

The Glories of Quasi-Capitalist Modernity, Dumpster Diving Division

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 13:58:00 EDT

It allows people to live simply, while others simply throw stuff away. The LA Times profiles the "freegan" movement of mostly middle-class, or formerly so, white progressive types who choose to eat largely from the dumpsters of D'Agostino's, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods. Some excerpts:

[Madeline] Nelson, 51, once earned a six-figure income as director of communications at Barnes and Noble. Tired of representing a multimillion dollar company, she quit in 2005 and became a "freegan" -- the word combining "vegan" and "free" -- a growing subculture of people who have reduced their spending habits and live off consumer waste. Though many of its pioneers are vegans, people who neither eat nor use any animal-based products, the concept has caught on with Nelson and other meat-eaters who do not want to depend on businesses that they believe waste resources, harm the environment or allow unfair labor practices.
..................

She garnishes her salad with tangy weeds picked from neighbors' yards. She freezes bagels and soup from the trash to make them last longer. She sold her co-op and bought a one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, about an hour from Manhattan by bike. Her annual expenditures now total about $25,000.
...............
Freeganism was born out of environmental justice and anti-globalization movements dating to the 1980s. The concept was inspired in part by groups like "Food Not Bombs," an international organization that feeds the homeless with surplus food that's often donated by businesses.

Freegans are often college-educated people from middle-class families.

Adam Weissman, whose New York group Freegan.info has been around for about four years, lives with his father, a pediatrician, and mother, a teacher. The 29-year-old is unemployed by choice, taking care of his elderly grandparents daily and working odd jobs when he needs to. The rest of his time is spent furthering the freegan cause, he said, which is "about opting out of capitalism in any way that we can."

It's nice of capitalism to provide such an overflowing cornucopia that the Weissmans of the world can opt out. Wouldn't it be gracious of them to show some love to the system that manages to keep them alive and thriving without even trying?

Kevin Roderick at LA Observed notes the LAT was about three months behind the New York Times on using the same character to tell the same story.

Bonus: Here is a brilliant freegan parody from a '90s humor zine Nothing Doing by Gregg Turkington and Brendan Kearney, in which they describe breathlessly all the ways one could thrive FOR FREE!!! via various time-consuming machinations that would eat up 12 hours or more a day (including doing the rounds of every vending machine within miles looking for dropped nickles, and learning all your pals daily peregrinations so you could dragoon them into delivering your packages and parcels for you, when convenient). My favorite line: " **If you mow a lawn for the crazy old lady down the street, or get a paper route, you’ll receive money for your services…FREE!"

No Safe Words in Federal Court

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 12:41:00 EDT

Glenn Marcus, a Brooklyn man who insists that the BDSM activities for which he was convicted were consensual at the time and only regretted by his partner later, gets nine years (and the absurd codicil that he is legally forbidden to look at porn on the Internet). He plans to appeal.

A Brooklyn Daily Eagle account (complete with a very opinionated headline) of sentencing day in court. My earlier blog entry on his conviction, with links for context, and an interesting comments thread.

Generation Dobler

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 12:10:00 EDT

Seven years ago, I wrote a cover story for reason called “Burning Man Grows Up.” I remained fascinated enough in that peculiar art festival/experimental community that I expanded the article into a book, This is Burning Man.

This month, the tech business mag Business 2.0 cops the title of my original reason article to tell a different story about Burning Man’s evolution.

Both are indeed about Burning Man growing up. My story was about Burning Man growing from its origins as a mostly anarchistic intentional community of artist/boho buddies gathering in the distant, eerie, and empty Black Rock Desert in Nevada (where the celebration had occurred every Labor Day since 1990, after it outgrew its 1986 birthplace on a San Francisco beach). I chronicled how Burning Man was growing into a more complicated set of entanglements with and responsibilities to government entities, and making tentative steps toward imposing order and rules on fiery chaos.

The story in the July issue of Business 2.0 is instead about Burning Man shifting into collaboration with corporate forces in the service of modern progressive eco-politics, while trying to maintain its identity—one could even say its “brand identification”—as an “anti-commodification” social movement.

Event co-founder Larry Harvey is smart enough to have told me “try to live without commerce…..you’ll be dead in a week.” But he argues a distinction between the commerce and division of labor that keeps us all alive and what he sees as a corrupt modernity in which too many human relations are reduced to the impersonal trading of commodities.

Burning Man has heretofore, as stated in its “10 principles,” strived to keep anything to do with commerce and advertising (except sales of ice and coffee at stations it operates, already a topic of some derision in “Burner” circles) out of its sacred space.

As Burning Man’s “principle three” states: “In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.”

But things are changing. The Business 2.0 article explains that something very different will be happening at Burning Man this year:

The fact that the organization sells coffee and ice is controversial enough. Imagine the reaction, then, when Burning Man makes the riskiest business move in its history: It's going to allow companies to exhibit products at the 2007 event.
Each Burning Man has a different theme, chosen by Harvey. This year's theme is "The Green Man." Burning Man, an extravaganza characterized by the consumption of huge quantities of fossil fuel, has discovered environmentalism. It is attempting to offset the 28,000 tons of carbon it estimates the event generates. Most controversially, the organization wants to bring as many green-energy companies as possible into what Harvey calls a world's fair of clean tech. Google is going to help produce an online 3-D search service called Burning Man Earth.

Burning Man officials stress that no money changed hands for the companies to have their place in this alt-energy pavilion. I was also assured that the strictures Burning Man placed on preventing the companies from doing any actual branding or direct marketing were so severe that 80 percent of companies that showed initial interest eventually backed out, figuring there was nothing in it for them.

Still, many Burning Man fans are not mollified, thinking that even without branding or explicit marketing it’s still an influx of what they consider commercial commodities in the heart of their sacred space. See, for example, this 300-plus message Tribe.net thread, or these threads on Burning Man’s own web site message board, "Eplaya."

One sample from the Eplaya: “This is one of the most disheartening things I've ever read about Burning Man….Talk about going into the temple and turning over the tables of the money changers....It’s not going to be a trade show, but….there is going to be a pavilion where unbranded products are going to be shown by unbranded reps. Bullshit.”

Another aspect of the story pissing off the cognoscenti is Burning Man bigwig Marian Goodell’s perhaps injudicious use of a certain sort of language in referring to her…. constituents? People? Customers? (That identifying the right word can be a struggle exhibits the strange, confusing edge that Burning Man the business/festival/social movement teeters on.) From the Business 2.0 article:

“This community is a dream for anyone looking at demographics….We have kids who work in coffee shops and we have billionaires. To ignore the value of our brand, the buying power it has, is silly. But it's a ritual for these people, which is why it's going to be hard for them seeing businesses out there."

People suspicious of markets and marketing bristle at the word “demographics,” but it can mean something as innocent as “people who are into the same things.”

Emotionally, I don't understand why so many people get so upset at being marketed to, or at gleefully acknowledging the good that comes from crafting a social world that is dominated by people willingly exchanging skills, services, and goods. These types could be called Generation Dobler, after the famous quote from the sad sensitive man-child character, Lloyd Dobler, played by John Cusack in the 1989 film Say Anything.

Dobler certified his soulfulness by announcing that “I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.”

Which is lovely in its way, I guess, but the reason many people can indeed survive doing none of those things is because of the unprecedented wealth created by those who do. Most moderns, at least when pressed, recognize that commerce makes our lives richer in certain ways. What the Burning Man devotee wants is an opportunity to create temporary zones without it, for the entertainment value and for the (very real) additional (temporary) richness of social reality it creates.

But Burning Man is rife with the products of corporations, and always has been. And has always had to be. The prepared food items and bottled water we live on out there; the portajohns our wastes go in after eating that food and drinking that water; the tents we sleep in, the pipe and metal domes we lounge under, the clothes we wear, either exotic or normal—all sold to us not for fellow-feeling but by monied interests, usually corporate, who just want our cash. For Burning Man to be truly free of the products of corporate commerce, it would be a zone we could survive in for at most a few hours, and grimly at that.

Why corporate commodity's omnipresence bothers certain people in the first place is an interesting question. I got some insights into the ways to think about this common intellectual/emotional prejudice against dominant aspects of markets, commerce, and property from a presentation at last week’s FreedomFest in Las Vegas.

Some of the brains behind the organization FLOW spoke at the event—Michael Strong, Jeff Klein, and John Mackey (a FLOW co-founder who in his day job is CEO of Whole Foods). FLOW’s mission is to “articulate and animate an inspiring vision of a world with sustainable peace, prosperity, and happiness for all, catalyzed and sustained by entrepreneurial initiative and conscious capitalism.”

In pursuing that mission, they stress that private property is often a means to developing virtues, character traits, and preferences that make people happy. They tell stories and spread information about how markets can and do solve problems and spread wealth. But they are aware that lots of people don’t care about results as long as they see the means as corrupt, and thus also try to push an “entrepreneurship of meaning” to sell fresh ways for people to envision and react to the world around them, to develop and inculcate new “generative myths” about markets and culture and how they interact.

As this recent Burning Man brouhaha shows, such work, however difficult, is sorely needed. A popular progressive myth of markets, property, and commerce as largely tools of exploitation, despoliation, greed, and frequently impoverishment is still far too dominant in certain influential circles of American life. Burning Man is trying to do this year for its audience what FLOW tries to do—recast corporations and their products as not villains and despoilers, but as providers of tools and methods to solve problems.

The folks at FLOW might have been able to warn Burning Man that their many years of disparaging money, markets, and corporations constituted practicing an “entrepreneurship of meaning” that guaranteed that their actions this year were going to rile up part of their audience.

To use an analogy that could offend all concerned, what’s happening with Burning Man could be seen as if Burger King, after years of assuring its customers that flame-broiling burgers was the proper thing to do and one of its special distinctions, decided to start frying them after all. Sure, many might not even notice or care. Some might decide, well, I’ve learned to like Burger King for lots of other reasons—the fries or the pies or the cool “King” icon. But some will feel betrayed.

What’s so infuriating about market capitalism to those who want to hate it? We inevitably swim in it, and any attack on it threatens to involve us in a performative contradiction. We create, we trade, we buy, we sell—it is essential in the nature of any culture that wants to survive beyond the grimmest self-sufficiency.

What Burning Man is doing this year is an experiment, and possibly a dangerous one. As a long-term customer of the event, I confess I’ve been wary from the instant years ago when they began hyping “principles” beyond “come to an interesting place and do whatever you want. Lots of courageous, very active creative types will be out there too, most likely, and you maybe should try to be one yourself.”

I doubt I’ll be spending much time in their pavilion of green technologies this year, but an important message can be found in what they are doing: that the free play of creative action, even in a corporate market context, can be interesting and important, create win-win situations, and be engines of innovative and exciting new ways to act, to accomplish, and to live. Anyone lucky enough to live in America in the 21^st century knows this in their bones, even if they are loathe to admit it out loud.

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

reason vs. Rolling Stone

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 12:18:00 EDT

Rolling Stone continues its four-part celebration of its 40th anniversary year with a special issue dedicated to exploring every facet of 1967, its birth year.

It features an article by progressive-hero historian Sean Wilentz that is eerily similar in many ways to Brink Lindsey's July reason cover story (which is an excerpt from his fab new book, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture.)

Both examine '67 as the year in which both the counterculture and what might be called modern religious right conservatism began to take flight. Brink took a more nuanced and sanguine view about what that culture clash has meant for America, seeing that elements of both have helped create an America that is richer, stronger, and freer in many respects than the world that those movements changed.

Wilentz is more predictably a partisan for the counterculture and sees only a necessary war between the two tendencies that ought to continue until the hippies celebratorily drape themselves in the bloody suits of the Reaganites and Falwellians. Brink himself assesses the similarities and differences between his and Wilentz's take on the legacy of '67 over at his blog,