Back
to School Reading for Fake Urban Guerillas
By Brian Joseph Davis
In Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le
fou, Anna Karina tells Jean Paul Belmondo, "Let’s play ‘Vietnam’!"
A jump cut then has the two enacting the Vietnam War in vignettes for
tourists at a beach. In the same way, the Symbionese Liberation Army,
most well known for the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, played the parts of
urban guerillas. In lieu of struggling through Das Kaptial, they
watched movies. They pretended their San Francisco apartment was a Latin
American jungle and ran through maneuvers like children over and around
furniture. Whether or not the SLA’s performance art was self aware,
they make more sense as literary beings than as freedom fighters. In my
novel I, Tania (ECW, 2007) history is rewritten with the
hopelessly inept SLA turning to fiction and writing workshops instead of
violence. I like to think of the following as an extra credit-reading
list.
Televisionaries
by Tom Vague
Televisionaries
collects the history of West Germany’s Red Army Faction into snarky
timelines by Tom Vague, the editor of the great 1980s British zine Vague.
Stylish, smart and—most important for urban guerillas—popular, the
RAF were embraced by the young of late 1960s Germany as the only answer
for the previous generation, who had by then settled into postwar power
and memory lapses. The Velvet Underground of Marxist insurgents, its
leaders died in prison, which ensured a permanent folk hero status. A
neat hat trick that was—smoothing out their extremism and ambiguous
morality.
The
Tunnels of Cu Chi
by Tom Mangold and John Penycate
The first rule of war, which everyone
but the U.S. military seems to know, is "location, location,
location." The Vietcong knew their country and land and within
months of troop escalation in the early 1960s also knew everything there
was to know about their junk food eating, loud and stupid invaders. The
U.S., in turn, never learned anything about them. As relayed by the
journalist authors, it was during the first part of the war (before it
was fought with large offensives) when the farmers and students who made
up the Vietcong went underground to the tunnels they had previously used
to repel the Chinese and the French. In the earth, the Vietcong had
workshops where recovered bombs were carefully rebuilt, and hospitals
where blood from wounds was run through coffee filters then transfused
back into the dying. There were even theatre productions by traveling
companies who worked the tunnel circuit. Aboveground, hollowed-out trees
became sniping posts, hornet’s nests were rigged on snap line traps
and all the forces of modernism—for a few years at least—were
stopped by the landscape itself.
Snow
White
by Donald Barthelme
A fairy tale updated to an early 1970s
commune (which makes it a dated updating)—the dwarves are emotionally
stunted men and Snow White is an obscure object of desire. Pleasure is
delayed and lost in word games about relationships, power, and pajamas.
Love
is Colder Than Death: the Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
by Robert Katz
"I don’t throw bombs. I make
movies," the late Fassbinder liked to say and his life and death is
a perfect road map for the conflict between art’s decadence and
politics’ demands for the impossible. He ceaselessly made the rarest
art—that which rewards the viewer with both intellectual rigor and
swooning, three-hanky emotion. At his most cynical, Fassbinder
simplified the world to three places: the brothel, the slaughterhouse,
and the concentration camp. At his most human, his films show those
places as escapable. Nowhere is this more apparent than during the scene
in In a Year With 13 Moons where Elvira, the heartbroken
transsexual, wanders through a very bloody slaughterhouse while reciting
Goethe. It seems like a recipe for bad art but we realize we flinch more
from the sound of her raw emotion than the visual carnage and Fassbinder
has taken us through hell to show us something tender and real.
Libra
by Don Delillo
Delillo’s best is seemingly his most
straightforward and spare. By working logically, Lee Harvey Oswald is
made one of the most bewildering literary characters of the last century—full
of rancor, stuttering pathos, and the yearning to commit acts twisted
and beyond his abilities. Delillo’s secret is that he wrote Oswald as
having the same neuroses common to writers. Writers, like assassins,
want to enter history, not knowing the devastating debt that journey
always collects on.
The
Books 1978-1998
by Raymond Pettibon
I was living in a near condemned house
set in the middle of a used tire yard when I was in the process of being
thrown out of school. Across the street was a SRO hotel full of recent
ex cons from Detroit. My roommate—the one on the couch who liked to
set himself on fire when he was bored—would hang out at the hotel and
bring strange old men back for conversation after they all ran out of
money for dollar half pints. These men wore impeccably maintained suits,
but smelled like pencil shavings and carried plastic bags full of their
conspiracy notes and "research." These men at the edge of
existence, where the bus service blows, were gathering evidence about a
truth shadowy and subjective that permeated all of American life with
its conspiratorial tentacles and was only glimpsed in clues gleaned from
billboards and flickering TV sets with Jiffy Pop foil antennas. But the
madman is always only half right—there is that truth but there is no
organizing principle to it other than his own imagination.
Somewhere between being the cover
artist for Black Flag and an art world superstar, Raymond Pettibon could
have been one of those men, with his photocopied collections of drawings
and text fragments taken from film stills, 1970s cults, forgotten
novels, and his own poetic and scarily lucid mind.
Bend
Sinister
by Vladimir Nabokov
Neither as devastating as Lolita
nor as dense as his later novels, Bend Sinister is a bizarre,
personal, and alienating work. And for those reasons I love it. Nabokov
created his first English language novel around a fictionalized
revolution in an eastern European country where Paduk, a dictator,
imposes stupidity and crassness as national virtues and systematically
destroys the life and sanity of his old school mate, Professor Krug.
Reality bends and Nabokov joyfully geeks on his new written language.
Having lived through the terrors of Lenin, and later twice fleeing from
the Nazis, Nabokov is a more than a qualified tour guide to the black
holes of the human condition and its double speak. My copy is set in
Jenson and has one of those Time Life edition plastic covers.
Interrogation
Machine: Laibach and the NSK
by Alexei Monroe
Why overthrow a government when you can
just make one up? Now into their third decade of activity, the Slovene
art collective, best known for their music released under the aegis of
Laibach, live and work in an imaginary "perfect state."
Passports, television stations, fake embassies and even "official
folk culture," NSK is art that directly confronts the visual
symbols and structures that impact the most, yet remain the most unknown—those
of government and economics.
Brian Joseph Davis is
the author of I, Tania (ECW, 2007) and Portable Altamont
(Coach House, 2005).
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