Ken Bruen's "Green Hell": Book Review

As a loyal reader of the Jack Taylor series, I feared that he would not survive the batterings and beatings meted out to him in Galway's alleys or penthouses. But Ken Bruen keeps his protagonist going. Like the later installments, a young person of Goth tendencies surfaces, This time it's Emerald--she's a welcome presence to keep the plot moving as hard-bitten but tender prose.

Bruen is in fine form even if Jack is beaten down. Some of his allies have not survived the past few books, and this one makes our anti-hero feel more isolated in his home city, as it changes along with the economic boom not gone bust--but not for everyone. The critique of Irish society in more materialistic, secularized, and rueful times cuts as always, and is leavened by Bruen-as-Taylor's nods to real songs. And books, by his crime writing comrades, whom he praises through Jack's choice of entertainment.

Also we find an American student, abandoning his thesis on Beckett to tell Jack's story. This I like. For the first time in these books, we get a substantial portion of the narrative conveyed from another point-of-view. This enables audiences to see Jack as seen through the newcomer's fascinated eyes, and it's very entertaining. It runs more smoothly than a few of the recent installments, too.

Visits to bars, to charity shops, to Charlie Byrne's (real) bookshop where Ken Bruen's books are sold (always a nice touch) reoccur. The Church as usual via Fr. Maurice comes in for some harsh repartee, and the ex-colleagues on the Garda as usual regard their former colleague with delightful disdain. Academia at the local university comes in for its own depiction, and drives the plot here.

The summation provided on Amazon's site sets up the background efficiently. It's difficult to review these books in depth, as much depends on the rush of the action, the rueful reflections of Jack, and the intricate wrongs done by those often higher up in the corrupt port city. It's fun to imagine Jack taking out baddies across from the Claddagh and the chapel on Galway's docks, isn't it? (6/22/15)

Destruction Unit's "Deep Trip": Music Review

Brooklyn label Sacred Bones keeps releasing powerful psychedelic albums from groups reared on classic, indie, and hard rock. Songs opt for brevity. Vocals roar and whine, but without the deeper registers associated with metal today. Guitars, bass, drums thump and thud in a maelstrom.

That description applies to colleagues signed to this innovative label, one of the best small enterprises thriving. That's not to disparage the band, but to encourage you: this is co-produced by Ben Greenberg of label standouts The Men. As with tour mates Milk Music and Merchandise, Destruction Unit crashes off the louder college rock tunefulness of thirty years ago, mixed with a grittier preference for distortion, pedals, muck--if fewer anthems. But (unlike a band such as Wooden Shijps, which while I listen to them seem to lately stay stuck on songs that remain the same), neo-psychedelic bands, in their more compact versions, need to freshen repetition and drones to avoid a short shelf life. This style risks turning stale fast.

This band, a loose amalgamation, originated a decade ago with Jay Reatard, Alicja Trout, and Ryan Rousseau. Evolving from synthesizers into a lo-fi squall and recently a tighter, less ramshackle precision, what distinguishes these five fiery musicians out of Arizona's enigmatic Ascetic House collective, on their first proper full-length? Coming out soon after Void, this shares that record's wider distribution on Sacred Bones, but compresses its heady attack into a consistent claustrophobia. Allow quiet time to turn this up. Play it repeatedly, and what initially rushes past reveals care and craft.

Each song on this firm, abrupt plunge into a cauldron leaves a burn, an acidic tinge, and viscera. Each song's title conveys the sense of it exactly. Brutal, detached, unsettling, it's all bracing jolts as the vehicle careens through the barren soundscape, from its desert origins as dry, hostile, and primal.

Beginning with echoed scrapes, "The World on Drugs" forces the listener downward. Spiraling, this song refuses to take off. Until a hardcore riff slams in. Rousseau's chants overlay melody. Beneath the feedback, Destruction Unit, like its 1980s forebears, sticks in enough hooks. Vocals come closer to downbeat stoner rock than indie rock, a bit of a surprise, but a wise choice. This feels a relief after so many Brooklyn bands aping their British or New York predecessors.

Picking up the same pace, "Slow Death Songs" keeps this well-sequenced album gloomy. More primordial voices, but the early Misfits-like mood turns this peppy as well as poisonous to fit its title.

Slower, "Bumpy Road" waits for the delay of the drums against the guitar; vocals march along in a funereal pattern, evoking ahead a sinister fate for the wayfarer. It's not easy to discern the vocals on an MP3 file provided for review, but I suppose this effect adds to the thicker texture the band prefers.

You may wonder what fellow Arizonans the Meat Puppets might have evolved into if the drugs hadn't taken their toll."God Trip" channels the force of the three guitarists, Rousseau, Jesco Aurelius, and Nick Nappa. They lift this off into a tuneful, if still very messy, excursion glancing around upwards.

Staying aloft, "Final Flight" locks into a Hawkwind groove with Andrew Flores' usually thundering drums fading and Rusty Rousseau's bass far below. Ryan Rousseau's tone insists on taking this journey seriously. Unlike the Meat Puppets, there's no levity to break the tension as this album tightens its hold, and this tightens its grip. It shoves you into its constriction and then, breaking free for a song or two, hints at the transcendent. But Deep Trip refuses to let go of the sludge even as it takes you higher.

Fittingly, "The Holy Ghost" hovers in attenuated manifestation. Guitars wait to transmit feeble pulses. Ryan Rousseau talks as if to himself in his vocal phrasing, until the instruments shake off the fealty to the force. They resist its pull, and as if a rebellious angel or determined demon, Rousseau speaks for those refusing the lull of the faithful departed. Or so I imagine, in my own storyline as I listen. Destruction Unit allows spiritual space within sonic thrust, for you to create your own inner visions.

Punchier beneath the constant whirlwind, "Control the Light" reminds me of Dave Vanian from the Damned, or Peter Murphy of Bauhaus, with commanding vocals nearer those proto-Goth singers' barks. I realize this approach might discourage some; it may muffle this album's power. Rousseau favors a slightly reverbed, slightly British accent, but within this genre, vocal mannerisms may work--as with predecessor Jay Reatard. "Night Loner" stretches out. It adds screechy guitar that points to a Farflung-friendly space rock, if a moment before the crash landing on an alien sphere.

Deep Trip lives up to its name, just as each song does. Form matches content. Whether by the boost of certain chemicals or by the grace of living near a bleak terrain, Destruction Unit means it. They play from the abyss, and reach out to pull you in beside their queasy, addled, bleary, fuzzy selves. (Amazon US 7-20-13 in shorter form; PopMatters as above same date)

Band's website

Disappears' "Era": Music Review

Disappears sustains its somber phase on the sparse Era. As for a timeframe, this updates sounds from three decades ago--postpunk, Goth, hardcore, noise. It harshens an edgy, brutal tone. Gradually growing less accessible in its discography (which can be its own recommendation), Disappears favors aggression overlaying melody, if submerged in distortion and reverberation.

The cover of their first album Lux resembled the minimalist logo for Neu! That German band's Krautrock and the second album, Guider, suggesting a My Bloody Valentine e.p., Glider, plot neatly two starting points for this Chicago band. Brian Case is joined by stalwarts guitarist Jonathan Van Herik and bassist Damon Carruesco. For this third full-length, Noah Leger replaces Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley on drums.

"Girl" begins the seven-track album. Full of shouts, as if "my god" might be shouted as much as "my girl", it conjures up chaos. "Power" reminds me of industrial proto-punk Chrome, exaggerating the menace of Case's vocals, which mannered and drawn out may appeal to fans of this crepuscular  approach. However, the song does not depart from a measured beat until halfway, when the guitars start to jiggle. Variety's needed to offset sameness of such a dismal track. Intentionally dreary, it could still benefit from a spark in the dark.

That may betray my preference for propulsion. "Ultra" nods to the band's earlier work, more beholden to whooshes and whirls, over loops barely discernible as groans or squeals. Suddenly, a filtered mechanical voice breaks into the murky grind. It could be German, it could be English. While this does not depart much from the slow tempo of "Power", the difference matters: the pace gradually increases as textures incrementally build into nightmares, and the chanted, disdainfully muttered lyrics circle back on themselves into an hex. Simple, and kept so by the rhythm section and basic fills on guitar. Good mood music for a cranky mood, as often on this venerable label, Kranky.

The title track evokes a cinematic atmosphere. Again, the gloomy, echoed vocals prove an affectation; for me, this twilit trend threatens cliché, as in pale predecessors when I heard them in the early 1980s. The guitars manage to rise above this with a ringing, repetitive ambiance at the end.

Continuing in this style, "Weird House" plays off the vocals with a call and response burst, and guitars which rouse themselves off the drums for a harder impact. Joy Division's rhythms in their first years can be heard, and this ratty grumble in the instrumentals makes for a slightly perkier result, emphasizing a riff to better effect. Disappears preferred this muffled energy in the best of their previous recordings, and I prefer it too.

The contemporary feel of the metronomic instrumentation opening "Elite Typical" shows promise: vocals remain the same, but the band appears willing to push the song along rather than get lost in a miasma. The guitar spins under and once in a while above a percussive trot, and while the song rarely reaches for sonic clarity on an intentionally over-processed production, the beat works: when Disappears lets itself stretch out into longer passages, it applies its talents best.

Speaking of metronomes, the clicks and hums of "New House"carry the listener into midnight. As expected by now, vocals threaten: "do you remember" becomes an ominous inquiry. Bass plucks and guitars chime over a tapped drum until a hiss emerges and more groans. "It's all around you now. A forest of light won't protect your shroud." Heard at the right, and dark moment, as much in this genre, this conjures up effective menace. "A new house in a new town" suggests less than a bargain hunter's reward for whomever hears this lyrical declamation. The song ends with the suggestion of clicks, again, as footsteps cut off without warning.

More obscure than what Disappears has offered in the past few years, this shift into the grim reveals its decision to turn away from reviving shoegazing or Krautrock. Instead, the band enters a subterranean portal rather than embarks on an interstellar voyage. In this new Era, not a dawn but a descent awaits anyone who starts down this black corridor. (8-26-13 Amazon US; PopMatters 9-4-13)

Band's website

Ken Bruen's "Headstone": Book Review

For the ninth in the series, Jack Taylor pursues a cabal of murderous Goths bent on putting a bent version of social Darwinism into action in Galway. Their victim dies poignantly, and it's hard to take. I listened to John Lee's audiobook and that heightened the emotion: his voice is well-suited for Taylor despite a few words a bit off in his pronunciation of the Irish language that speckles a bit of the story, as Ken Bruen does in each installment. Lee and Bruen suit each other for a clipped, hard-bitten, and ironic take on Irish cruelty and endemic hypocrisy.

The plot did not keep me in suspense as much as usual for Taylor. I wondered about Laura's continued off-stage presence. I suppose Bruen knows what he's doing for the long run in the series as to dramatic effect, but her suspension puzzled me. Taylor burns her London letter: the ashes float, "desperate despair of a dying dream."

Desperation builds. Ireland's debt puts her under; this seems set around the end of 2010 when ice crippled the island for three months. Greed, however, still flourishes, same as in the boom years. Stewart's past stint in prison earns a standout flashback chapter that fills us in on his personality better than we'd seen before, easing a bit Jack's summation of him as "a personification of the new Irish: sleek, smug, and self-absorbed."

This time around, the plot did not draw me in much. The atmosphere did. Adroitly, Bruen conveys in tough guy (lots of Americanism filter into the speech of more and more Irish, tellingly raised on crime shows and pop culture) Taylor a respect for decency and an aversion to cruelty, even as Jack metes it out in measure for measure inflicted on the innocent.

Ridge reliably returns, Kosta hovers again, and Clancy's sidekick O'Brien in a late appearance interrupts Jack's reverie of his father at a part of the historic and once lovely city, eager to tear out its heart for luxury flats, hotels, and multinational chain stores. It's a Galway not peddled to tourists, but it remains one of Bruen's best "characters." (8-11-13 to Amazon US)

Peter Murphy's "The River and Enoch O'Reilly": Book Review

Steeped in Southern Gothic as much as boggy Ireland, Peter Murphy's debut novel, John the Revelator, introduced Ballo, a harbor beset with rain. Nearby, the town of Murn finds nine of its inhabitants drowned after a massive deluge. It seems that Enoch O'Reilly's conjurations may be to blame. What possesses him to lash out, as a preacher turned Elvis impersonator, lurks within this tale.

A music journalist (no connection with this reviewer or the singer from Bauhaus), Murphy's immersion in Nick Cave and Cormac McCarthy shows as he burrows into rural muck. The graveyard lingers. "Your parents might deny you the facts of life, but never the facts of death. They teach you by example and suddenly they disappear off the face of the earth or they rot away in hospital wards tended by sad-eyed country nurses. Yes, our parents die and teach us to die in return." (15) 

Murphy's prickly, haunted protagonist, akin to Hazel Motes in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, preaches a church without Christ. Expelled (understandably) from a seminary--where he'd been driven to proclaim his disbelief after hearing as a child a fearsome message emanating from his father's radio, claiming to be an apocalyptic voice from the Holy Ghost counting down the days until "giants on the earth and rivers of blood"--Enoch meets Alice. On the banks of the River Rua, they recall the legend of Fionn MacCumhaill and the Salmon of Knowledge. Again, "his mind crackles as if picking up transmission from some cosmic source," myth again (55).

The novel shifts past Enoch. Wounded in the Korean war, Enoch's father, radio operator Frank, had a terrifying revelation of nine men descending as if into a diving bell, a cave, a river. Now, bits of their stories, elliptically and suggestively, gain retelling by the omniscient narrator. Psychiatrist Charles Stafford, Alice's father and Frank's friend, enters soon this charged atmosphere of Murn, full of premonitions, as does a vignette from at least one victim who will be drowned there years later.

In 1983, Enoch returns to Murn 'to manifest his destiny." (96) He tells of how he got tattooed with D-E-V-I-L on his left and E-L-V-I-S on his right hand the night he learned in Tennessee of the King's death. He vows to dress in black as a mourner, although his claims to an American sojourn linger as suspect. Freed of the "pesky domesticities that eat away at a great man's sanity," (93) he stays in the Rua Hotel and lands an revival hour of the oldies to air on Murn's station.

This intersects with Marconi's concept of "eternal soundwaves" which impels both O'Reillys to brave radio's portal into monitoring every "aural emission" from the past. The Rua had flooded when Enoch was born; he predicts another flood in late 1984. This foreshadowing brings notoriety in the form of Enoch's fulminations against fornication. His breakthrough broadcast the "Revival Hour Abortion Special is subsequently described by a doesn't-half-fancy reporter from Hot Press magazine as 'an act of Situationist art terrorism'." (134)  Various local misfits, among them Enoch, skulk.

As the recurring flood threatens, in Enoch's warning, to rise as it may have since Paleolithic times, Stafford muses it may be our "planet attempting to abort us." (174)  Before he vanished years before. Frank heard "riverish" as the Rua tried to speak to him; Enoch thunders to villagers that evangelism carries its own tidings, as by broadcasting he "plays God's trumpet." Meanwhile, in that tense autumn of 1984, Enoch's mother dies. She had told her son that the earth has its own bubbles, same as its waters. Alice goes crazy and vanishes too. Her father wanders the highways bereft. Tales broadcast as the floodtime nears grow fevered.

"Little children, keep yourselves from idols" is all Enoch tells Murn, from John's gospel, as the flood looms. On the fated Halloween, "the river is coming into her time" issues as a meteorologic forecast. We learn of the nine and their names, in the foredrawn conclusion. Samhain and salmon, Celtic river gods and eerie fragments of a legacy of riparian revenge or repetition may peep about and peer back.

Little suspense survives, from a narrative circling back to its start, outside of this memorial stone's list. It's a chronicle of deaths foretold, and so as myth repeated may succeed more than as fiction you lose yourself in. Predetermined and more symbolic than realistic in its severe style for all its hints at forlorn lyricism, Peter Murphy's novel rather than delve into character too deeply or plot too widely prefers to channel, as he had in his first novel, a path into fecund and fearsome ground, beneath the deceptively firm ground of his fragile creatures. (Titled "Shall We Gather at the River" in Britain. Amazon US 9-10-13)

My interview / review: Elf Power

I had the chance last autumn, on the release of their eponymously titled tenth record, to interview by e-mail Andrew Rieger, singer-songwriter from Elf Power. From R.E.M.'s hometown of Athens, Georgia, where Carolina native Rieger was inspired to attend college so as to be nearer that band. Along with R.E.M., Elf Power (I hear a lot of early Eno crossed with psychedelic textures and folk-rock, a winning combination) remains one of my favorite bands since I heard their eclectic, medievally tinged, feedback-laden, distorted pastoral, Southern gothic drone. Enough adjectives?

Find out more below, and via the links herein. Wandering Through: My Interview with Elf Power
(Featured at PopMatters, 4-7-11)

I also reviewed their newest "Elf Power" album at Amazon US when it appeared...a reprise:

This grows on you. Insects, dirt, bones, ghosts haunt this disc, dedicated to the late Vic Chestnutt. Elf Power, by self-titling their tenth (!) album, appear to let the churning, restless sounds backing wistful, literary, and yearning lyrics sum up their ambitions. The modesty of this homemade album, full of whirring keyboards, efficient percussion, chiming guitars, and processed snippets, continues their recent direction.

That is, progressing from the medieval instrumentation of such as "When the Red King Comes," this shifts away from the dense, early-Eno feel of their work towards a more pastoral approach, from "Walking with the Beggar Boys" onward. While I favor their earlier albums for their daring swirl, they have matured gracefully into a more direct manner of delivering stories as sung and played. With no lyric sheet, you have to pay attention; the graceful thoughts come slowly through the speakers.

There are still hints of their more experimental period, as on the psychedelic riff of "Boots of Lead," or the hints of a waltz on "Little Black Holes." For a band that's been around Athens, Georgia so long, they still stock their songs with textures, even if not as immediately "out of time" as their earlier work showed. Part of the Elephant 6 collective, five members are backed by as many backing musicians. I'm not sure who plays what, as the album credits are sparse, but repeated listenings open up depth in what feels at first a pared-down delivery.

Early R.E.M.'s recalled on "Like a Cannonball," with its echoes and distortions, but most songs sway with a more straightforward musical backing of, as the album progresses, increasingly literary narratives in a few minutes each. "Spidereggs," "Ghost of John," and "The Concrete and the Walls" form a trilogy exploring the underside of life; "Tiny Insects" marvelously conjures up the mystery and oddity of their half-glimpsed realm as it intersects with ours. This sort of Southern Gothic's not macabre, but somehow life-affirming, perhaps part of the message of this audio response to the passing of Chestnutt, a collaborator.

Andrew Rieger sings these short songs, and his pleasant, but not carefree, tone recalls the Southern college-rock ambiance of twenty-five or more years ago in the mixture of a more popular style with a faintly British invasion, prog-psych, folk-rock, and art rock mixed influence. These blend well on this unassuming, but accomplished, album. Give this a chance to play a few times, and the tales tucked inside will begin to unfold. Good accompaniment for a restless night.

Band's website.

Clive Bloom's "Gothic Histories": Book Review

Drawn to the hallucinatory, enchanted by the morbid, the gothic sensibility mixes incarceration with necromancy, technology with architecture, vampires with séances. The bizarre and wild, Professor Bloom explains in this spirited survey, emerged with the European fear of modernity. Beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764, authors disturbed by the loss of control presented by democracy, rebellion, and technology reacted. They revived antiquarian settings, scientific subversion, and macabre predicaments.

How could a style of ecclesiastical architecture claim the same adjective as erotic and violent tales? Medievalism and a return to Catholic caricatures compete with God-denying, sexual, and sadistic torment. Bloom accounts for their common ambiguity. Gothic set the “mind in relationship to the supernatural, the universal and the divine.” (4) Gothic tropes preceded psychology by a century and a half as they revealed hidden, repressed, and alienated fears. The dead return as if alive, the imprisoned claw towards release, and the restrained writhe against their bonds.

This introduction moves rapidly through the two-hundred-and-fifty years of this genre. English and German writers sparked the movement. Female sensibilities imbued early British stories, while Teutonic terror tended toward brooding Byronic anti-heroes, the occult, the metaphysical, and the irrational. “Gothic horror,” Bloom elaborates, “is about that which should not be.” (64) Its characters face the abyss and the end of sanity. Their moment of awful recognition allows the spectator to enjoy a frisson of annihilation while the distance between action and witness toys with the safety of the viewer. A reader glimpses the “otherness of cosmic indifference” which lies at the core of the gothic encounter.

The Romantic era rushed into emotional, despairing, destructive tendencies that revolution and industrialization hastened. Frankenstein's “monster’s self-questioning is the first real expression during the nineteenth century of the existential crisis of those who felt they were abandoned by God and who sought revenge for this abandonment.” (71) Mary Shelley’s story roams a ruined landscape, articulating the bewilderment of the stranger, wandering where salvation eludes those who never asked to be created. Her predecessors toyed with humanist progress as an answer, but Shelley and later gothic authors began to stand for refusal. Denial of transcendence and a rejection of liberation darkened tales.

The French Revolution tinted this gothic tone. Social collapse, feared by the aristocracy, gave way to psychic decay. Penetration and violation flooded the vulnerable self. The body turned into a prison. Tales told “the language of ruin.” Bloom defines this mode: “Gothic is the map of a border, a mapping of the edge always illuminated by the shadow of night and the rays of the moon.” (79) The gothic forays into that unknown territory within the self, he adds, predicted what psychoanalysis would later confirm. Instead of goodness and creativity, violent will and self-destructive tendencies lurked.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, these themes turned clichés. Thomas Love Peacock and Jane Austen satirized sinister storylines soon after Shelley’s success. Poe, Dickens, the Bronte sisters sketched upon the templates of such imaginative novels as Charles Maturin’s nihilistic Melmoth. Both wordsmiths and hacks -- encouraged by a demand among the newly literate for pulp fiction and melodramatic theater -- broadened gothic conventions into detective novels, romances, thrillers, and mysteries. Such remain the patterns for today’s diverse and gloomy entertainments. Theosophy, mesmerism, spiritualism, Marxism, and the rise of soulless corporations that live on forever: these Victorian innovations also furthered in surprising ways the cultural and ideological rule of the gothic.

Although the gothic mood domesticated as it infiltrated the city and the household to inflict its terrors, vaudeville emerged as another stage for its shudders of delight. In turn, film inherited the dramaturgical patterns familiar to those who attended séances or sideshows. Early cinema spread the appeal of the uncanny. Vampires, automatons, and undead filled the screens of Europe with a visual language that illuminated the literary and theatrical applications of an elongated, ectoplasmic, distorted conflict.

Bloom conjures up its cinematic captivation: “This is a weird world of shadow and light, theatrical make up and the stagy rhetorical gestures of silent film, but it is also a powerful world of floating images and of monsters who combine stillness with spastic urgency, their spectral gliding and glances to camera the basis of dreamlike fear.” (174)

Movies channel today’s dissimulations. Our printed stories, Bloom avers, rely upon vampires far more than monsters. He suggests in passing why this may appeal to their largely female readership. Vampires combine “male domination with female empowerment.” Also, they can blend in better than ghouls or zombies into everyday haunts. Their “protean nature allows them to appear in bars or nightclubs as well as high schools.” (187) This book’s short scope hurries its final chapter. Bloom hastens over the persistence of the gothic essence in gaming, cyberspace, music (if he errs in my opinion in crediting the very few bands he does as primarily Goth), sexuality, and fashion.

He addresses gothic transformation. Horror has moved from the external force taking away a body, or coming back from the dead. Instead of the gothic itself, a new kind of “soft-machinic body horror” permeates the contemporary body. It fears submission to a force that impels it by “torture and extreme violence” as the body “is split open and anatomized.” De Sade delineated vast labyrinthine dungeons where victims were immured; today’s gothic interiors make bodies themselves “the new architectural spaces of fear.” (182)

Currently, Bloom finds the gothic energy less in bestselling spin-offs than a corollary culture that horror films and television have spawned. Video games enable fans to enter spaces of fear. “So vivid can these games become that some of their creators try to build in the sort of mental confusion to their players that might be expected in real life encounters with monsters in order to enhance the imaginative and dream-like quality of play.” (189) Rather than escaping reality, Bloom argues that those dressing up, filling dance floors, or losing themselves in role-playing continue a venerable tradition of excess, artifice, and safe play that frustrates the mundane and opens up the inexplicable.

This is a brisk primer, with generous excerpts from primary sources, free of jargon or academic posturing. Selected reading lists guide inquirers, while Professor Bloom spans a lot in a little book. It is recommended to anyone curious about why the gothic craze began, why it has lasted so long, and how it continues to translate its shape-shifting spells.

(Featured 6-15-10 on New York Journal of Books; brief summation not quoting from the above review posted 6-15 to Amazon US.)

"Goth: Undead Subculture": Book Review

"Ironic indifference" sums up a dark pose. Both artifice and aesthetic, this style's flamboyant and macabre, mindfully traditional and socially liberating. For those who dress up in an ascetic eroticism, the lush, spare, baroque music echoes fascination with literary influences from over two centuries ago.

Unlike punk, which took itself usually too seriously, Goth grins at itself while mocking the celebratory, relentlessly conforming and spirit-quenching nature of a society bent on getting and spending. Co-editor Lauren Goodlad defines the movement as a "bricolage of the hyperromantic," (92) taking elements of glam rock's theater and punk's iconoclasm, but extending its view back into darker tales and taboo fetishes. While often mocked even by its participants, it upends gender roles. Males dress up in dresses, makeup, jewels, and coiffures; females share their attire with men. What contemporary narratives often create combines feminine attributes of "forbidden depth, antirationality, and sensitivity" within a masculine character who feels and cries: "a postmodern evocation of aesthete, dandy, and tragedian."

Goodlad's perspective's typical. The contributors to this Duke UP anthology often present their studies in dutifully jargon-laden ethnographic treatises, but the best ones-- often by participant-observers who feel less of a need to back up every utterance with a reference to anthropology, sociology and/or the French-- transcend the academy. I'll give a quick listing of the entries, which range widely in style.

The co-editors provide a solid, if theoretical, introduction. Joshua Gunn's similarly dense "ironic indifference" and comparison of ambivalence within "misogyny and resistance" by gender ambiguity finds energy by his interviews. Kristen Schilt compares women's participation in L.A. and Austin scenes. Trevor Holmes contrasts his role as a club dancer with his scholarly perspective. Goodlad delves into "The Crow" and "Fight Club" as narratives and films to explore androgyny and ethics.

Next, Rebecca Schraffenberger tells a story others share: of her own immersion as a teen into this subculture, and then her academic direction through it. David Shumway & Heather Arnet examine David Bowie's impact on what would become glam's roots for goth. Catherine Spooner wonders if (as of the late 90s) the "return" of Goth was imminent or hyped; Michael du Plessis roams through gay and bisexual identities, "fixated melancholia," and works such as "The Hunger."

I liked Mark Nowek's panoramic chronicle of a local Buffalo band Nullstadt, and that gritty city's brief Goth efflorescence 1982-84, when the music seemed to break out of its confines amidst the post-punk indie rock community. Jason Friedman looks at Southern Gothic writing, and Ken Gelder shows us Australia's cultural responses.

Co-editor Michael Bibby gives a standout essay on Joy Division and the Factory Records invention of and marketing of a sound that inverted guitars and voices to distance them, while foregrounding bass and drums with Martin Hannett's studio experimentation. Bibby explains the creation of this dislocated ambiance, and how the marketing with the label's distinctive graphics of this influential post-punk, proto-Goth music took on disturbing neo-fascist elements. Some may disagree with his placement of the racist imagery within "a gothic spectacle of absences, an exhibition of the spectral self, a funeral for identity," (253) but as a critical consumer of this music during its original era, I accept his argument as plausible.

Jessica Burstein enlivens this collection with what I wish a few of her professorial peers had done more often: include interviews. Valerie Steele tells her how "asceticism as denial, and the eroticization of that aestheticism" (265) gave a guiltily Catholic response for goths who memorialized the breaking of taboos rather than their absence, as the back-to-nature hippies had done (and I may add, away from which the punks veered). Fashion bared part of the body, but covered up in skirts and boots other parts. Steele believes that this heightened the effect of restraint.

Robert Markley investigates "Edward Scissorhands" and Nancy Gagnier views different versions of "Dracula." "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" gets Lauren Stasiak's attention, while Angel Butts briefly takes us into the NYC club scene. A leading authority as an insider turned professor, Paul Hodkinson (see my review of his own "Goth") wonders about individualism's presence when "we've all got the same boots on."

Finally, Carol Siegel (see my review of her "Goth's Dark Empire") discusses cult author Poppy Z. Brite. Anna Powell brings a much-needed chapter on religion and "parareligion," which takes on the trappings of faith but not the supernatural scope, and she finds many goths prefer reticence about their personal beliefs regarding religion or its lack as opposed to philosophical or moral inquiries. Jeffrey Weinstock speaks as a fetishist, and David Lenson wonders post-Columbine about the moral panic and media backlash over Goth and goths.

All in all, this accompanies Hodkinson's and Siegel's studies from the past decade. There's not as much attention devoted to the music, but this appears a common shortcoming of academic studies that accentuate the style and fashion and cultural relationships with other media. Sexuality earns somewhat greater scrutiny due to participants' reports, even if these are often filtered through theoretical recitals. Still, the inclusion of participants schooled in scholarship makes this a useful compendium. (Posted to Amazon US 8-2-10 & Lunch.com 8-4-10)

Carol Siegel's "Goth's Dark Empire": Book Review.

Gloom shrouded me by sentence three of this academic treatise. "And just as [Linda] Williams set out to examine the Foucauldian 'knowledge-pleasure' produced as 'the frenzy of the visible' through the convergence of 'a variety of discourses of sexuality' within pornography (36), I set out to examine the Deleuzoguattarian becomings [1] that are produced within the discourses of sexuality that converge within Goth." (1) Siegel, a professor of English, studies Goth culture within fiction, music, film, and sexual mores. This is an admirable goal, but I wonder if those who'd benefit most from these contextual chapters can even decipher much of this prose.

I started this hoping that Siegel, given her "sex radical" hippie-era formation and her interviews with Goths in the Northwest U.S., would incorporate a wide-ranging survey of how sexuality and fashion, music and aesthetics, morals and subversion all intertwine in the American manifestations of this often caricatured subculture. Glimpses of this persist, but much of her 2005 academic work, three of its six topical chapters published previously (often a sign that a book's cobbled together from past research rather than conceived as an organic project), struggles to arrive at the goal that her introduction promises.

Professor Siegel tends to wander around her subject. Digressions about our destructive automotive reliance, abstinence programs in schools, and Chandra Levy (remember her pre-9/11?) may distract readers wishing for a focused analysis. Her insights reminded me of a passionate lecturer, eager to pursue tangents, and then bringing the discussion back a few minutes later to the main point. This may please some of her audience but may annoy others.

The audience needs lots of background in critical theory. I found two of my grad school classmates cited in the text, and while I admit less patience for extended forays into jargon than they indeed possessed, the theoretical tone of much of this work does distance itself from those readers likely to take it off the shelf for information. I found in teaching students needing reference works on Goth culture (the reason I sought Siegel's book out), that undergrads lacked solid, thoughtful explanations. Siegel does bring sympathy to her project, but her reading level's elevated so high that few outside of-- yes, grad school seminars in post-modern cultural criticism-- will be able to understand her own analyses.

That being said, patient readers will come away with some value. Within the text, phrases pop up that sum up her perspective well. "In place of the denial of the future that characterizes mainstream American life, Goth offers a very special kind of masochistic delight in knowing the worst." (25) Chapter One tries to contrast Goth culture with "abstinence programs." It veers all over the place in doing so.

Chapter Two takes on Angela Carter's fiction. Siegel spends much of this section lamenting the passing of 1960s celebrations of free love but while she advocates similar freedom for today's teens, she seems to gloss over the American reality that has followed this shift. She decries sexual restraint, while she blames the dearth of "useful information about sex" that results in an "appalling rate of unwanted pregnancies and venereal diseases." She then states how "young people form radical countercultures around their musical tastes," to resist a custodial, infantilizing social schooling routine. (25) Siegel packs so much into so small a space that this left me puzzled as to how sexual rebellion could bring freedom-- given the dismal track record (pregnancies, STDs, sexting) of radical alterations in how sex was brought into teenaged American culture by the late 20th century.

And how does Goth relate? Siegel promotes casual sex and feminist-positive play. She wants to resurrect sexual expression from those who demonize it among the young. But within the "Dark Empire" of Goth, how these aberrant revolutionaries will manage sex better than their cowed if somewhat perkier peers appears uncertain. Siegel left me befuddled as to how this transformation will occur.

Chapter Three dives into Poppy Z. Brite's novels, which celebrate male masochism and female dominance. Yet, given the cannibalism of Exquisite Corpse, even Siegel appears to shrink back at the extremes of such liberties. She's on surer ground when navigating the gender fluidity and male self-discovery and female empowerment within such fiction. "In Brite's fiction, as in much of Goth, the gendering of classic Gothic iconography may seem reversed, for she presents her female readers with breaking and broken male bodies that fill the spaces of her prose as if it were the last act of Hamlet." (84)

Comparing a documentary on Brandon Teena vs. the Boys Don't Cry film treatment of his fate, Siegel favors the former portrayal, for it does not "erase" the boys and their brutalization of Teena. (Brandon, as she notes if gingerly, was no icon.) She earlier, if tangentially given her convoluted approach, juxtaposes Punk with Goth. Punk's "destructive fury" followed the loving hippies. After punk's rage subsided, youth faced scorched, haunted landscapes. Punks posed in bondage gear but twisted free of its signifiers; Goths "express their rejection through a defiantly eroticized passive resistance." (97) They wrench punishment into victory.

Chapter Five surveys "male femme homosexualities" in film, but without a thorough knowledge of her examples (as with the literature earlier discussed), readers will be challenged to grasp theoretical formulations. The sixth chapter winds up her pursuit of masculinity with Asian American Goths. She settles on a satisfying take on Keanu Reeves as Neo in the Matrix series. "Man enough to save humanity, gentle and nonmacho enough to be himself and saved by a woman, and easily sexually attractive enough to inspire her devotion, Neo models the new masculinity" that these new models engender. (151-2)

One ends this work with little of a broader appreciation of the sexual subcultures as lived by Goths today; one does learn more about how Goths are dramatized in films, literature, and music. Siegel strives to expand Paul Hodgkinson's Goth thesis (see my review and also that for Jillian Venters' Gothic Charm School) farther from fashion into sexual behavior. Still, you get little sense of how actual Goths, as opposed to aestheticized ones, express such devotion to the alternative models she so longs to see replace those of the typical high school campus. Musically, as with Hodkinson's monograph, Siegel leaves us without the depth this aspect merits, but Don Anderson's appended discography's very helpful.

She concludes spiritedly. "Goths escape the willed stupidity of the American dream to find in the nightmare of fallen knowledge a becoming that is also a coming to knowledge with no goal beyond intimacy with life's dark side. They refuse end goals, remaining, instead, fascinated with natural decay and the falling apart of all things that current mainstream values formed. By valorizing perversion and artifice for its own sake, they express their desire for a regime of endless desire." (166)

Again, I'm unsure how this manifesto plays out given this decade's downturn in Goth's fanbase. I also wondered how Goth may endure among older devotees. Those readers who could gain the most will find this work far too dense to unpack its meanings easily. (As an aside, from my observation, Siegel overlooks a delayed generational identification of some Latino and inner-city youths with a Goth-rave-darkwave-death metal assortment of styles.) Still, she tries to extend the direction of cultural studies towards Goth, and while the background's foreshortened and the examples as digressive as often as targeted, Siegel's empathy assists her and her sympathizers. (Posted to Amazon US 6-11-10)

Paul Hodkinson's "Goth: Identity, Style & Subculture": Book Review

Coming out of (post-)punk, Goth combined music with an aesthetic that stretched back to the Romantic era two centuries before. Even if Greil Marcus tried to link John Lydon to Levellers, Ranters to reggae, I remained unconvinced. Theoretical labor expended over punk for its overtly politicized, commodified contradictions. Coming of age along with the music I liked, I read Dick Hebdige's "Subculture: The Meaning of Style" when it came out, bright pink mohawked gal on yellow cover when it came out in '79. I tried to match my own inquiries to its theoretical template, yet I was discouraged by Birmingham School ("of Business School" as Mark E. Smith sang-- not to mention "Mod Mock Goth") jargon.

Hebdige argued that a subculture's only viable as long as it appropriates and subverts everyday goods. Think of the cut-up art of the punk era. This 2002 study challenges this widespread theoretical assumption, that for sale means selling out. Hodkinson deftly deflates Hebdige with a reminder of Malcolm McLaren & Vivienne Westwood. Without their "Sex" shop on Kings Road, Chelsea, how would punk have been peddled, and where would John Lydon have been "discovered"? As a participant-turned-observer, sociologist Hodkinson adapts his Ph.D. thesis (at Birmingham) into the first mass-market study (at least that I know of) of this off-shoot of the (post-)punk era.

The result dutifully follows the conventions of the genre, and plenty of social scientific references sometimes document what commonsense already proves. The book as true to its origins is meant for a seminar rather than a settee. But, as an insider, Hodkinson enriches this dense, sober, academic treatise with valuable insight into a misunderstood, stereotyped, and feared lifestyle. For, as he finds, the visually prominent identification of Goths makes them hard to hide. They share their communal identity as their primary bond. Politics, beliefs, gender, race, class: these as the author argues mean little compared to the key affiliation. Not an outward style that can be donned and discarded, but a mutual support system forms for Goths. Although I suppose this could be said for any visually apparent faction in our society, as its members find camaraderie and sustenance among those they choose to bond with and mate with and stay with.

Ideals form "cultural substance." Hodkinson breaks this down into identity, commitment, consistent distinctiveness, and autonomy as four "indicative criteria" for Goth subculture. (29) In passing, he notes a crucial factor. Hostility by outsiders towards Goths reinforces "Gother than thou" reactions towards who's in and who's out, within the subculture according to its arbiters and gatekeepers, as well as in a more black-white fashion (as it were) between the hip and the square.

"Subcultural capital" accrues. Selflessness in supporting bands, making products, selling records, providing services may add up to dividends not tallied up financially so much as in terms of status within the Goth world. He examines clubs, conventions, shops, mail-order, online discussion lists, and fan sites to explain how contrary to previous critics of subculture, the "capital" is not diminished as it spreads but it is enriched, as fans use the media to enhance participation, widen contacts, and expand the impact locally and globally that Goths, as with any wired subculture, tap into and make their own.

He notes sensibly that "the likelihood of an individual without an initial interest subscribing to a mailing list with 'goth' in its title was surely only slightly higher than that of the same person deciding to spend the evening in a goth pub as the result of having coincidentally having walked past it." (179) That being said, in a hipster neighborhood near me, there's now a "Goth pizzeria" that attracts celebrities. Perhaps the past decade (this book's research stops about 2000) has found the term-- as with purveyors of its accoutrements and couture for teens at malls worldwide-- more loosely applied than before?

Although relatively underground, Goths rely on the wider world for materials, distribution, technology, and transportation. I would have liked attention paid to how Goths make a living if they cannot do so in the subculture, and how appeals to femininity & gender ambiguity in fashion translate into sexual and personal behavior. Did Goths share any values, any beliefs, any philosophy? The answers are not part of the questions asked for the dissertation, I guess.

The music gains attention, if often secondarily to what is after all an installment in a "Dress, Body, Culture" series. Yet this overlap appears often elided in Goth studies, and merits coverage. Similarly, the heritage Goth inherits from aesthetic and literary Romantic, Victorian, and Edwardian periods in Britain deserved much more context alongside fashion trends and social theory.

Still, any thesis able to sneak in a passage like this earns my nod:

"Slimness of body and face, were, on the whole, also valued for females-- consistent with more dominant fashion-- although the ability to show off an ample chest with the help of a basque or other suitable low-cut top often seemed to more than compensate for those with larger general proportions." (54)

P.S. The author's made his career out of his passion, and for that I admire him. He's now at the University of Surrey. I hope he follows this up with a look at the past decade of the Goth scene. A slightly more updated, if textually slighter, but tonally lighter read can be found via "Gothic Charm School" by Jillian Venters. See my review. (Posted 5-15-10 to Amazon US.) Paul Hodkinson's website.

P.P.S. Since this, I've reviewed Carole Siegel's "Goth's Dark Empire," and "Goth: Undead Subculture" eds. Lauren Goodlad & Michael Bibby. Hodkinson contributes to the latter. Both books are from profs, so earnest theory drags down moments of participant-observer clarity. Still, one essay in Goodlad-Bibby tries to answer my question of what Goths believe-- politically not so much as spiritually.

Jillian Venters' "Gothic Charm School": Book Review

"Nice costume! Halloween is over, freak!" How should a black-clad denizen respond? "The Lady of the Manners" explains Goths to the rest of us-- and "mundanes" to Goths. Once you wear black, do should you ever talk back? Can Goths age gracefully, under umbrellas and sunscreen? How do you get makeup stains off the sink? What one-liners have Goths heard far too many times from the likes of gawkers like you?

Expanding her Gothic-Charm-School.com "gothy advice column," Venters in this spirited primer encourages: "Good manners for Goths, why you shouldn't dress like the Crow, or how, if you're going to wear whiteface, you should make sure you apply it on your damn ears and neck." (5) She emphasizes how "Goth is a subculture and (for some) a way of life, not an emotional template." (19)

This underlies her whole approach. She denies any "secret Goth cabal." She patiently relates the historical background, pop cultural contexts, snarkiness and cattiness, gossip, accoutrements, sartorial fripperies, sounds, and sights that Goths gravitate towards. She explores her subculture wittily.

She advises how Goths should act among themselves, online, at jobs, and in public. "You chose to dress that way, which means you don't get to complain about the attention your appearance garners." (186) Politeness rules, which appears to be a tricky point among an assemblage so devoted to gatekeeping, backstabbing, and mopes. A sub-heading is telling: "Why no one has an 'original' Goth look, so get over yourselves already." (199)

Her later chapters address her cohort, with plenty of detail on couture, cosmetics, and wardrobe-- not costume. Aware of how rumors about doom, depression, death, and decadence dog her trenchcoated, booted peers, she also reminds "Snarklings" that the way Goths respond to both taunts and inquiries represents for "norms" the way that those leaning towards the dark side will be perceived. "The Goths who express themselves through their wardrobe aren't doing it to draw attention to themselves; they're applying their preferred aesthetic and bringing the world around them closer to what they want it to be." (45)

Speaking from decades of experience, she relates to worried parents, co-workers, friends, and possibly romantic partners (I wondered if Goths ever date exogamously?) how to behave around crushed velvet and heavily mascaraed companions. She admits her own predilection to dress everyday as if the evil twin of Mary Poppins. But she warns neophytes: "Think long and hard whether you have the physique to wear the costume; it is a sad, harsh fact that nothing becomes an object of ridicule faster than a heavier-set person dressed up as a character previously portrayed by Brandon Lee." (98)

Taking on a persona that one must dress the part for takes courage. Yet this also leads one into conformity. Venters directs her Goth audience towards lightening up. She twists what people inside and outside her charmed circle expect. "Not only does the Lady of the Manners now derive quite a bit of amusement from her over-the-top moments of gothness, but she tries to hone and refine the more clichéd aspects of herself in order to make them the more perfect examples of those clichés." (113)

This reminded me of Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex keening, so early in the punk movement that paralleled my own coming of age, "I Am a Cliché." Commodification with Hot Topic (and Emily's Strange, strangely unmentioned) signals "mainstream acceptance" rather than prolonged denigration. Venters navigates deftly between the two perils of giving in to what the subculture pressures a "Goth cabal" (or should it be "cabbalist"?) initiate to imitate-- and the stronger current that pulls one outside into making a living. She spends considerable time on socializing, rumor-peddling, and gossip, as these, reinforced by clubbing and costume balls, strengthen the subcultural bonds Goths, as with any such group (say, sports fans) thrive among.

Paul Hodkinson's Goth: Identity, Style, and Subculture (2002; see my review) studies this phenomenon as a participant-observer sociological thesis; Nancy Kilpatrick's The Goth Bible: A Compendium for the Darkly Inclined (2004) intersperses comments from Goth respondents with her own topical entries. As with Gavin Baddeley's Goth Chic: A Connoisseur's Guide to Dark Culture (2006), defining Goth reveals its widespread (post-)Romantic aesthetic within past and present Western society. Whereas many Goth surveys tend towards the encyclopedic, Venters as "Lady of the Manners" adopts a personal, chatty persona.

This makes her "Essential Guide for Goths and Those Who Love Them" a welcome, brisk introduction. As with some of her predecessors, however, there's minimal attention to sexuality (as opposed to flirting) or music (as opposed to brief discographies) given their role in the scene. Music's treated only in her penultimate chapter.

For me as a preternaturally pale, (post-)punk veteran, "Goth-friendly" by her classification but admittedly on the outside looking in, I wished she'd covered music much more. But she carefully expounds on club etiquette and proper conduct. I note how often decent behavior goes unmentioned in any coverage of this subculture (or any such, for that matter). Many Goth overviews downplay its sounds and dampen its erotic sensations. Perhaps these elude explication. The visual appears more readily transmitted. Venter's enchanted by signifiers: the dress, the looks, the ambiance-- as signs by which Goths identify each other, congregate for safety and camaraderie, and reinforce their own codes and defense mechanisms.

That defense must be established seems a circular action. Goths have set themselves apart, so they may bristle and snarl back when outsiders edge too close, touch their finery, taunt their stance. Venters steps into this standoff. She reminds her fellow creatures of the night how etiquette confers dignity. The more stereotypes are diminished, the greater the hopes for Goth's acceptance and sustainability.

What of Goth's future? She speculates on a Steampunk-Goth evolution. I share her hopes that "Eldergoths" may age gracefully into "subcultural migration" and cross-fertilization. Concluding, she predicts that her fellow revelers need not "grow out of" this embrace of the macabre, the haunted, the morbid underside of what's relentlessly peddled to all of us as a sunny, cheerful, bright-- and forced-- demeanor. Morbid but not moribund-- now there's a forecast any blanched, parasoled Goth might smile up at.

(Posted Amazon US & "Not the L.A. Times Book Review" 5-14-10-- and featured 5-25-10 on Pop Matters.)

Sarah Waters' "Fingersmith": Book Review

Recommended to me, I enjoyed this. Gothic conventions: madhouse, double-crossing, inheritance, thievery, a gentleman's claims-- provide a solid foundation for an engrossing plot and convincing characters in 1862 London and environs.

This not being my usual genre, I lack familiarity with Waters' other fiction. But if this is any indication, she merits her awards. There's marvelous twinned descriptions of a scene that writers often overlook: how Victorian London gradually must have grown and how one coming from a rural destination would first espy its smoke and steeples who'd never seen it before from this prospect. The amount of description employed by Waters tends to be integrated well; there aren't the set-pieces many writers might have shown off with, but you see only what the two first-person narrators do, as they encounter it. This adds immediacy and the pace does not drag. The depictions of sex, albeit limited to one key night, from two points of view, and one view of death are delineated with skill; they remain vividly in your mind. The historical details are woven into the narrative deftly and the novel does not betray the "researched" quality that (much as I liked it) felt more prominent in Michel Faber's "The Crimson Petal and the White."

It's not possible to tell hardly anything about the story without divulging secrets. So, a few passages of Waters' prose will suffice to bring you into the mindset of her mid-Victorian two young women who tell their paired stories. Metaphors work subtly, and the women's words are chosen carefully. "I should never put her down as the motherly sort, myself; but servants grow sentimental over the swells they work for, like dogs grow fond of bullies. You take my word for it." (61)

"And yet, even wax limbs must yield at last, to the heat of the hands that lift and place them. There comes a night when, finally, I yield to hers." (260) Much later: "There are pictures behind his head, pinned to the wall in wax-paper wrappers: a girl on a swing, showing her legs; a girl in a boat, about to slip; a girl falling, falling from the breaking branch of a tree. . .I close my eyes." (351)

These excerpts capture the eerie, yet patiently detailed, tone of the novel. I do concur with a discussion on Amazon marked "Spoiler Alert," however. The motivation of that character was understated in that revelatory scene so that it could be perceived as too reticent. The motivations can be drawn out in context but as the critique at the discussion suggests this may escape a reader not keenly observant on reading between the lines. Likewise, there's a haunting mood for the concluding pages that resolves it all while leaving a subtle ambiguity, that suited the tone of the entire novel elegantly start to finish. Yet, this may remain elusive for those eager to account for every nuance.

One character, in a rare moment, makes this metafiction. "Terrible plots? Laughing villains? Stolen fortunes and girls made out to be mad? The stuff of lurid fiction! We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature, and have inflamed your organs of fancy." (394) This is a fine place to inflame your own fancy organs, in these pages. (Posted to Amazon US 12-1-09)