Edited by Larry McCaffery
Reviewed by David Cox
The cover of “After Yesterday’s Crash” shows a faded snapshot from the1950s
of a young boy proudly lifting a chrome beachball shaped satellite
in his
hands in what appears to be a typical American surburban back yard.
The image is a
relic from the cold war and the space race. As the book’s cover the
photo
is inverted - upside down. The Great American Dream is not only over,
but has been
literally (as Marx once wrote of raw material becoming a commodity)
‘turned
on its head’. All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy will
be profaned.
America’s post WW2 culture has been completely turned upside down.
Belly
up. Back Asswards.
“After Yesterday’s Crash” represents a comprehensive overview of what
editor Larry McCaffery dubs the “Avant Pop” scene in contemporary American
writing. This is the vanguard of American grunge text, presented from
inside its own
hall of mirrors. Like the fragmented society these writers describe
from
within, there is something of the whole in each broken reflection.
Some works are entirely
text, others a combination of ‘zine syle sequential graphics with text.
One
of them is a play.
There are consistant recurring themes within these collected works -
the
End of the Century - the End of the World - Technology and Culture
interchangable and complementary announcing that the mainstream media
is the primary source
for contemporary US identity. After Yesterday’s Crash” delivers mini
fictions resembling broken holographic shards of the American postmodern
Zietgiest in dazzling
flash frames, jump cuts, crash edits and hyperlinks.
“The Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation
among
people, mediated by images”
Guy Debord “Society of the Spectacle”
Artists and writers are siezing absolutely anything they can from the
sinking ocean liner of economic certainty, and make rafts from the
flotsam
of mainstream culture - television, old films, ads, computer games,
other books, the broken dreams
of its parents and thier parents - anything at all.
I find McCaffery’s “Avant Pop” as a phrase painfully contrived, but
I’m
sure it suits perfectly his aim of sketching a generalist overview
of this
emergent and important American 1990s artistic and literary sensibility.
Like the now
very weary term “Cyberpunk” one suspects “Avant Pop” is trying just
a bit
too hard. It sounds like it is trying to become another catagory like
those which suit
more the marketing/publisher industry’s need for catagories for the
shelves
and inventory lists than anything else. This said, the book will hopefully
become a mainstay of
current and future literature, media and cultural studies education
courses
around the world. If it fails to, the academics are now seriously out
of touch.
“After Yesterday’s Crash” anthologises what I would call a writing of
1990s
Yearning.
The yearning is Millenniarian (the big year 2000 approaches...) -it
is to
some extent almost pre-industrial - nostalgic. It defines and seeks
to
address a cultural bankruptcy in the USA. Its primary driving strategy
is to refract America’s
frenzied media saturated self image back onto itself in a critically
redeemed form. In “After Yesterday’s Crash” short works of fiction,
television shows become
twisted parodies of themselves, the logos and language of Silicon Valley
and Hollywood become the only terms a producer can think of to define
all aspects of life:
“He could shuffle and recombine proven entertainment formulas into
configurations that allowed the muse of Familiarity to appear cross-dressed
as Innovation”
From “Tri Stan” by David Foster
Wallace.
Fragments of B-Grade sci fi movies magically reassemble themselves
into an
utterly convincing documentary expose of US foreign policy (Craig Baldwin’s
“Tribulation 99”).
“This world comes to an end for which we are grateful. The chosen
ones
rejoice at the prospect of the apocalpyse, for it is a sign of our
future
riegn in a millennial kingdom elsewhere in the universe...Freed
from this worldly
realm, the future belongs to us. The rest be damned. Halleluljah!
From “Tribulation 99: Alien
Anomalies Under America” by Craig Baldwin.
Everybody wants out.
“Avant Pop” as a movement represents a form of collective cargo cult.
The
effigies made to invoke the Other are 100% cultural - discarded scraps
of
meaning stripped of thieir original contexts, re-presented anew. This
familiar
strategy is thoroughy Modernist with a big “M”. But as McCafferly outlines
in the book’s brilliant introduction (itself a kind of how-to guide
for aspiring Avant Poppists)
these writers, unlike the precious New York Warholians of the 1960s
soak
themselves in the culture so completely that the result is a kind of
art/mainstream
hybridised duality.The mainstream is not coolly kept at a distance.
The
artist and the commercial media are unified by a kind of fluid co-dependency
unique to the 1990s.
Today you have to ride the HyperCapitalist Beast and hang out with
him, not
simply dress him up for the gallery.
What emerges from this artistic strategy is an overall vibe - a kind
of
bittersweet but progressive sorrow for times just past when things
were
definitely better, or if not better, then more confident, more certain.
Meanings once upon a time
still kept thier boundaries. The enemy was clear, definable. Americans
call
this camp sentimental cynicism ‘funky’. Funky means retro, but self
consciously retro
- bringing symbols of a culture together to celebrate the obsolescence
thier creators could never have foreseen. Like, say, finding a gay/disco
subtext in “Star Wars”.
Why “jam” a culture? If it ain’t broke why fix it? These truths
are held
to be self evident:
a) The US economy is mediated almost entirely by point of sale. The
landscape in many parts of California at least, is a vast shiny homogeneous
theme park of retail. McDisneyland patrolled by armed cops.
b) Massive publishing and media entertainment organisations dominate
psychic boundaries which via digital technology extend into every aspect
of
late 20th Century global life.The world is wired, but wired one way.
Their
junk aimed at us. More news at 11.
c) The Good Life is restricted to a minority, who flaunt it brazenly
before
the angry masses. (You can’t buy what is not on the market.)
The book’s contents demonstrate that cultural inversion and disruption
are
more than a viable and culturally empowering artistic counter
response to
being kept on the margins. To the culturally alienated, reusing, repackaging,
wearing and
embracing junk is a dignified way of understanding one’s own status
as junk.
What McCaffery calls “Avant Pop” is a kind of contemporary variant of
the
1940s and 1950s Beat sensibility... the notion of being “beat”, beat
down by
mainstream culture and its expectations. A beatnik (the ‘nik’ suffix
in the
‘50s applied to anything outside US mainstream culture as suspiciously
Russian influenced - as in “Sputnik”), might seek redemption
from straight society via
‘beatification’ - the pursuit of truth “out there” on the landscape,
on the
road, forever just beyond the grasp of crippling Authority.
To the Beats, writing was a way of finding transcendence via a kind
of
hedonistic survival drive.The pleasure, then as now, comes from studied
and
practised almost ritualised self conscious familiarity with the street,
the cafes, the bars,
the drugs, the lights, the neon. Familiarity with what some French
artists
(Guy Debord key among them) at the time were dubbing the ‘Spectacle’.
Ginsburg, Burroughs
and co. illustrated that culture can be written along, one can
make art
which dances with its cultural devils the better to outsmart them.
It is no accident
that Burroughs celebrated the dadaist montage technique in his writing
and
many authors in “After Yesterday’s Crash” (particularly Kathy Acker
and William Gibson) owe much
to him. Then as now, the aim was to “go native” via self imposed exile.
The
Beats did not hate America by any stretch of the imagination, they
celebrated it and
mourned its lost innocence. They were proto Slackers, looking for Nirvana,
Godhead, beatification.
As the Beats were writing themselves and America away from military
authority which crippled imagination during the immediate post war
years,
the Situationists were busy drifting around the cities of Europe and
like them, finding bliss
in the bottle. They Situationists wanted to ressurect the best bits
of
early European Dada and Surrealism and promote those which ignored
authority and embraced
playfulness and most importantly, life as life lived through art. Wit,
humour, camp were crucial. Detournment was the fancy way of saying
‘fuck with the most
revered symbols of the system’: Reword ads. Add subtitles to films
found in
bins. Cut and paste. Drag and drop. Mark Dery’s pamphlet of the same
name calls it
“Culture Jamming”. Hacking. Chucking a spanner in the works. Monkeywrenching.
Dropping a clanger. Throwing a sabot (clog) into the system. Rewiring.
The army of contemporary culture jammers serving the muse of libertarian
American empowering nihilism is growing. There is a goodly amount of
ironic humour
and pride within this movement. Pop and Beat’s original playfulness
is
still as there - so camp it positively flies, but camp has been dampened
by the cold hard fact
that America is now very seriously going down the tubes. Empires in
decline
are seldom a pretty sight, but the US is, after all, a Revolutionary
Society in every
sense, and the libertarian spirit is always burning somewhere on the
Right
or the Left. The smouldering compost heap of post war culture was bound
to ignite at some
time. and McCaffery’s “Avant Popists” are dancing around their newborn
fire.
This type of pranksterish piss-taking is nothing new. “Mad” magazine
with
its spoofs of advertising in the late 1950s was more radical and certainly
funnier than anything put out in Paris at the time. Ham radio enthiusiasts
between the
wars had literally run the airwaves until the telephone companies (with
government support) took over and made radio one way and safe
for consumerism.
But the 1940s and 1950s were economically healthy times. Today’s America
has let its post war children down. Curt Cobain’s suicide note to the
world
is like a sad footnote to the Bill of Rights, a last will and
testament to the futility
felt by those of his age, and his generation: “I am the product of
a
spoiled America”. Cobainism is also Heroic. Monumental. Very American.
Like the gritty hard boiled heroes of Raymond Chandler and the bitter war
weary cynics of noir America,
today’s writers and artists are well and truly “on the level” in telling
it like it is.
Witness Sam Fuller’s reinvigorated status as a the original generation
X’er
by Post Poppists like Quentin Tarantino - this hard drinking, no bullshit
returned soldier always got the story right - even if the population
didn’t want to hear the
message. Pulp always did the job better than snooty literatchah..The
Avant
Pop are part of a 20th Century modernist American tradition -
rugged individualism in the
face of an indifferent commercial military entertainment complex and
a
pompous art world elite. Rust never sleeps.
This sensibility is a entirely natural extension of that country’s
continued status as a revolutionary republic, where the rights, and
responsibilities of “the individual” are enshrined in the popular
imagination, if not borne out by the realpolitik of its domestic and foreign
policies. The geriatric Industrial America of
post WW2 crew cut, can do ‘Right Stuff’ conservativism is embarrassed
by the irreversable
economic and social casualties linked strongly to its tragic misadventure
in Vietnam. America’s bankrupt war society has now come home to roost
on the streets of
destitution, and lost pride. The so called “counterculture” was little
more
than a mild reformist movement in the end, and many of its staunchest
advocates for change have
long since become some of America’s most dubious pillars of the
Establishment. The others are in hiding, dead, or worse, working in
the publishing, music,
film and television industries. Cobain mocked them all: “Here we are.
Now
entertain us.”
The USSR was merely the first of the superpowers to formally declare
its
inability to keep the tired juggernaut going. Running a superpower
was
always serious business. In the face of America’s altering view
of itself, the writers in
“After Yesterday’s Crash” are opening a much cultural needed release
valve.
The bad air can finally escape.
That Texas Tall Tale Teller Bruce Sterling rings in with an excerpt
from
the marvelously Millenarian yarn of the lemming-like hurricane chasers
who
populate the novel “Heavy Weather” . The Hollywood film “Twister” must
have stolen this
story lock stock and barrel. If ever there was a party at the end of
the
world, this book both predicts and celebrates it. “After Yesterday’s
Crash”s short excerpts
brings us face to face with the views of who offer thier take on how
it got
to be as bad as it got. Hurricanes are presumably a metaphor for life
in America today:
“Buzzard Stood up. “I think they blew it with the League of Nations
in the
Twenties. That was a pretty good idea, an it was strictly pig stupid
isolationism on the part of the U.S.A. that scragged that whole
thing. Also the early days of aviation should have worked a lot better.
Kind of a real wings-over-the-world opportunity. A big
shame that Charles Lindbergh liked fascists so much. I’ve said enough.”
From “Heavy Weather” by Bruce Sterling
“Skinner’s Room” by William Gibson describes surrealistic juxtapositions
of
ordinary second hand shop objects thrown together in profound poetry.
“Skinner’s Room” is basically a list - a list of things thrown together
which combined
become emblematic of their owner’s eclectic life. This is the old strategy
of the montage, handed down from Kurt Schwitters via Duchamp and Burroughs.
The mad mix of happy accidents to be found in any second hand shop,
any unofficial garage
sale bring Gibson immense self confessed pleasure as a writer
and I for one
share this pleasure. Nothing underscores the poetry of life at the
end of
time than seeing the cast off bits of other people’s lives assembled
together as totems of a
lost civilisation - our own. Gibson’s unmistakable cinematic writing
style,
ironic distance, and socialist cautionary sensibility does more than
describe contemporary
America - it offers an empowering worldview with which to handle actual
alienation within it. He is still the finest writer among the
cyberpunk canon, bar none.
Another one of the better yarns in “After Yesterday’s Crash” is “Bonanza”
by Curtis White - a bitter and hilarious spoof rewriting of the famous
1960s TV series:
“The Family Channel is owned by Christian corperate interests. They
believe
that “Bonanza,” the saga of the admirable Carwrights, fosters family
values
in America.” “So its not dead yet? Hoss is dead, I know that. Dan Blocker
died of his
own girth in 1972. And Little Joe is dead of cancer caused by constant
exposure to radioactive tabloids. Ben lives in dog food commercials.
That’s hell ain’t it?”
It this ‘episode’ the down to earth characters dabble with bestiality,
incest and rape as natural behavioural extensions of life on the commercial
TV frontier. The dark secrets of America’s real colonial origins are
laid bare for all to see as
if they were scripted all along.
Film maker and digital artist David Blair’s “Wax - The Discovery of
Television Among the Bees” has many incarnations - on video - it was
once
made available as a film on the internet also (one can only the ponder
the download time of a
feature film, but its the gesture which counts), also on the net as
“Waxweb” a multi user environment, and as here, as good old fashioned
written text. “Wax: Or the
Discovery of Television by the Bees” is a strange tale of a camera
which
can photograph the dead, a world where the cross of the gunsight melds
with that of the
crucifix, where Biblical signs and symbols meld freely with notions
of
interconnectedness, secret communications via television and computers
between bees and humans, the dead and living:
THE SUPERNORMAL PICTURE SOCIETY TAUGHT THAT THE DEAD LIVED NEAR TO US,
IN AN UNKNOWN WORLD.... THIS WORLD COULD BE MADE VISIBLE TO US BY THE CINEMATOGRAPHER
WHO COULD SEE THROUGH THE HAZE OF OUR WORLD TO THE DARKNESS BEYOND
From “Ella’s Special Camera” itself taken from “Waxweb”,
and internet/cd-rom version of the movie “WAX” by David Blair.
A profound sadness has descended upon America. Its once proudly held
space
race and cold war values and accompanying socioeconomic optimism have
been to
a large extent been replaced by a crippling conservatism, and
. As John
Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) put it in the BBC TV
‘rockumentary’ “Dancing in Street”
“...Now the American economy has gone down the toilet, they get it...”
“It” is punk. The Sex Pistol’s tour of the southern states of America
in
the late seventies was a dismal failure, preempting the band’s final
demise and break up. One of
the reasons for the Sex Pistol’s failure was that America in the 1970s,
in
Lydon’s own words was too well off to get the joke.
The playful empowering nihilism which it would seem, emerges when western
economies finally collapse finds its best expression in punk, whose
millinarian overtones could be heard in its “No Future” posturing.
Craig Baldwin’s insane rant
“Tribulation 99” bares its ass at mainstream culture by simply robbing
old
movies of their comfortable origins and presenting them as the illustration
for post
apocalyptic millenarian rave about the UFO borne “Quetzals” whose secret
subterranian plot to overthrow America by taking over the bodies and
minds of its Foreign Policy
makers. Every catastrophe to hit the free world turns out to be the
work of
satanic sinister, hidden, secret cabal of snake bodied reptilian aliens.
The film
on which the book (of which the section in “After Yesterday’s Crash”
is an
excerpt) has won many awards and in my mind out performs even “Society
of the Spectacle” as
a useful commentary on the currency of lies the mediascape surrounds
us
with in the service of power.
Baldwin’s more recent film “Sonic Outlaws” is itself an anthology of
culture jamming artists who work mainly with sound. In fact as a
continuation of “After Yesterday’s Crash”’s project, McCaffery could
well have
included “Sonic Outlaws” compendium of artists, most of whom write
and certainly use text
as a buttress to thier sound and image production. These include The
Emergency Broadcast
Network, the Barbie Liberation Organisation, John Oswald (of “Pluderphonics”
fame), Negativland, the Tape Beatles, The Bureau of Inverse Technology,
Cyberdada and others. It really is a movement we’re talking about here.
A
big one.
In bringing together such a diverse range of writers, film makers, poets
and artists, the book is itself emblematic of the trend it seeks to
chronicle. It is an
anthology so keenly aware of the trends it represents that it will
stand as
a celebration of a time which the postmodern doomsayers got it so totally,
utterly wrong.