Digital Poetics

Patty Hearst / Patti Smith

Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA)

An urban guerrilla group that, among other things, robbed banks, murdered people, and kidnapped Patty Hearst, media heiress, in February 1974 in Berkeley, California. Her kidnappers demanded many things, including ransom, the release of other SLA members, and food distribution. During her kidnapping, she participated in the Hibernia bank robbery, holding a rifle. Her image—caught on a security camera—is full of meaning. But what is this meaning? She looks like many things in those images, but most of all she looks like someone in a movie playing the part of a female bank robber. Her face is clear and open. She does not disguise herself. Later, she would claim that she was brainwashed, that her actions were coerced. During her trial—she was arrested in September 1975—some of her writings from the time of her captivity were introduced into court:

 

None of us were allowed to go to public schools. The reason given for this decision was straightforward: That kids who went to public schools were not the kind of people we should have close associations with. As a result, I spent twelve years almost totally surrounded by young people who were busily developing ruling class aspirations. Looking back, the schools were, in fact, training grounds for future fascists, capitalistic values, and individualism, competition, classicism and racism. I never got along too well with the faculty or students at these schools, because I was always considered a rebel.

 

Now, there is a critique here, but Hearst disavowed it, telling the prosecutor that 'It is true I did not go to public schools but the rest of it is not true'. But what is 'the rest of it?' The rest of it is a distilled, radicalized version of the Sixties. 'This was a California Girl and she was raised on a history that placed not much emphasis on why', Joan Didion wrote. What happened to Patty Hearst happened because there was a gap. What was the nature of the gap? The gap was the space between the Sixties and what was supposed to come next. But no one knew what was supposed to come next, so by 1974, Mick Farren, writing about San Francisco in the New Musical Express, could say that 'Hippies sat in bars and giggled as TV commentators tried to decide if Patty was a helpless victim or a willing tool'. The gap had opened, and in rushed the SLA and in rushed Patty Hearst. 'Now, the hippie panhandlers are becoming almost indistinguishable from the old-time winos', Farren wrote.

The gap was filled by Patty Hearst, memorialized by Patti Smith in 'Sixty Days', the spoken word segment that prefaced 'Hey Joe': ' . . . and I would do anything and Patty Hearst, you're standing there in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag with your legs spread . . . Patty, you know what your daddy said, Patty, he said, he said, "Well, sixty days ago she was such a lovely little child, now here she is with a gun in her hand"'. And the Weirdos sang, in ‘Fort U.S.A.’: ‘I’m in the Secret Service / and the C.I.A./ I helped annihilate the S.L.A.’ Patty Hearst was not in a girl group: she was not a member of The Runaways, who formed a few months after Hearst was arrested. She was not a member of the Slits, or the Raincoats. She happened before Sleater-Kinney. But the most iconic images of her—with her lean fingers squeezed around that gun in her hand—are really like great album covers, or stills from a forgotten film.  Afterwards, she disavowed everything, further cheapening the already incoherent revolutionary sentiments of the SLA. It was as if the most radical parts of the Sixties had been transformed into dumb violence, a few spitballs thrown in the face of the Man. For a while, nobody knew what to do. And then punk happened. And it gave shape and form to the madness. Punk transformed the whole incoherent mess into something that you could put on stage. Which is to say: in a different version of the story, Patty Hearst holds a guitar, not a gun.

 

Punk Granularity

I'm in the midst of writing a big book, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, 1974-1982, and have been wondering a bit lately about the attraction of punk. There's a lot about it I don't like, and yet I've been writing about it pretty steadily for the past four years.Why not disco? Why not post-punk, or power pop? I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with the fine granularity of punk: it is music subtracted from, as opposed to something like disco, which is music "added to." At its best, it is distinctive for what it reveals when things are taken are taken away, things like over-production, overdubbing, expertise. There is an over-precise distinctiveness to punk, which makes it both absurd and alluring at the same time. Punk organized itself around the denial of excess. In America, especially, this amounted to critique, whether intended or not. Whereas disco was pure sensory overload--the hypnotic lights, the coke, the songs with no breathing spaces--punk was an experiment in subtraction. I think its appeal is primarily one of nostalgia, as our own era is so completely and excessively saturated that there's something cryptic about punk's primitive code.

In 1979, Jim Jarmusch (still at NYU film school and finishing Permanent Vacation) interviewed David Thomas of Cleveland's Pere Ubu for New York Rocker magazine. About Cleveland (Jarmusch was born in Akron) Thomas said: "I mean, this city at night is always real frightening. Not because of any danger or anything like that, but because it represents something so astounding and incredible that people are real scared of it. I mean, just look out at the Flats and it's just, there's no facades, no facades of culture or anything. None of that. It's just midwest, and it's this incredibly immense thing."

Sometimes, that simplicity returns in the most unexpected of places, a reminder of the beauty of small-grained moments. Or, as Roland Barthes would say, "the sound of speech close up."

Do You Wanna Dance?

Strange, the contours of a song like "Do You Wanna Dance," written by Bobby Freeman, and a hit for him in 1958. Slow or fast, the song is like a secret code that, in revealing itself, never reveals itself.

Cliff Richard and the Shadows, 1962:

The Beach Boys, 1965, right on that fine line between restraint and the slouching towards bethlehem that the Kennedy assassination forced:

And Ramones, 1979, when everything was possible again because everything was lost:

 

The song's savagery is in its simplicity: listening to it you think that nothing can be that easy, not forever.

Peter Laughner

Peter Laughner. Cleveland. 1973, 74, 75. In Rocket from the Tombs, the sort of band that was too good to last. In Pere Ubu for a while, but thankfully got out before Art took over and they became something to be admired rather than enjoyed. Friends with Lester Bangs. Wrote occasionally for Creem. Jammed, in fact, with Mr. Bangs on occasion.

A link to "Seventeen," recorded in 1975 or 1976, with Lester Bangs at the offices of Creem, north of Detroit. After chatter and joking around for about 20 seconds, the song begins, and you remember what David Thomas (of Pere Ubu) said about punk, how it was a terrible thing that came along and overwhelmed and destroyed the weirdly experimental rock scene that was developing in places like Cleveland, Detroit, and even New York in 1973, 74. 75.

The song was made. It was recorded, in private, on some kind of cheap analog equipment. Maybe just a regular old K-Mart tape recorder like my sister and I had. We listened to CKLW, too. Peter Laughner died young. And Lester Bangs wrote a touching obituary, beautifully praising and damning what his friend had become. And then Lester Bangs died young too. There was no one left to beautifully praise or damn him.

High Fidelity in the Era Preceding Facebook

The Era Preceding Facebook. During EPF, it wasn't a lot different, but just enough. The difference mainly being you had to work a little harder to publicize your tastes. High Fidelity, the Steven Frears movie released in 2005, based on Nick Hornby's novel, published in 1995. The slow, analog process of narrowing the world into something meaningful by posting your preferences:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The movie exists at a crossroads--in its world, the internet does not yet exist as a massively, more deeply virally method to proclaim taste: in music, in movies, in politics. It's not that this is new, but maybe that there are less hiding places anymore. Because to not partake in this sort of confessionalism is itself a statement of taste. During EPF, I think you could escape with less notice: networks formed more slowly, were less efficient at mine-sweeping through the culture.

Others have written about the sublime Orwellian paradox in all of this; privacy is a luxury that no longer makes much sense. You can see that yearning in High Fidelity, a Facebook page before there was such a thing. A tour through the life of some characters who understood that Lists were not gateways into meaning but meaning itself. And that meaning could only be activated properly through publicity.

In 2000, John Cusack's character struck some as a funny narcissist. Looking at him today, he is nothing less than a prophecy.

The Broken Signal

The signal breaks, or is scrambled, or is cut off. Watching a DVD and it freezes, the image breaks apart into little squares, and the bits of information that make up the movie reveal themselves, symbolically. The code nearly shows its face. In the movie theater, the hisses and pops of an old print, the sudden shift to out-of-focus, moments memorialized in Tarantino's/Rodriguez's Death Proof and Planet Terror. The skipping of the needle on a vinyl album, or the hiss it makes at the end of a side, in that shiny black space where this is only one repeatable groove. A cell phone call dropping, disappearing: silence. The computer running slowly, taking forever to load its pages.

Two other sorts of broken signals, from movies released in 1972 (the beginning of Watergate). The first, from The King of Marvin Gardens (dir. Bob Rafelson), with Jack Nicholson in thick glasses, the gloom of the seventies in full bloom. Arriving to help his brother, he is greeted by Ellen Burstyn: she welcomes him, and us. Everything he will find is broken and wrong: her smile is the warning:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And that same year, Superfly (dir. Gordon Parks, Jr.), as the movie pauses, slows down, nearly stops: a five-minute sequence of still photographs, arranged in different configurations, moving the story forward in an impressionistic way, still figures in a motion picture:

 

 

 

 

 

The split screens of the era, the freeze frames, the direct-to-camera addresses: these were not so much symptoms of postmodern ironic self-awareness as statements of fact about the fragmentation of the post-sixties era. In Philip K. Dick's novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974--the end of Watergate) Jason Taverner, whose identity has been stripped away by the State, is left with nothing but a broken signal, as he tries to play his albums: "Sound of the needle touching plastic surface. Background hiss and the inevitable crackles and clicks. Still no music. The records were blank."

The pleasure of the broken signal is that we know it will return. It is an interruption. A glitch. A lapse. A mistake.

The broken signal must be restored.

But what if...?

 

The New Order is the Same as the Old Order, and J.G. Ballard

Who can explain the allure of music that meant nothing to you when it was first released, but means everything now?

The switch from black and white to color, yes. This means something. The song starts for you at the very beginning of the video, but then in 'starts' again when She puts the needle on the vinyl. That's when the song really starts, properly.

You wonder about time. This impossible lapse between the beginning of the video, and the beginning of her record, for one. But also about the time between the beginning of her record and the digital era, which rendered vinyl nostalgia: the dustbin of nostalgia. A collector's item. The speed of obsolescent objects dizzies you. You fight against nostalgia, you really do. But there is so much.

In his 1975 novel High-Rise, J.G. Ballard said: "Alternatively, their real needs might emerge later. The more arid and affectless life became in the high-rise, the greater the possibilities it offered. By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all."

You love this video because it conspires against efficiency: it lasts too long, its cuts do not come fast enough. It is of the Old Order.

Stagflation / Slumpflation

What goes around . . .

New Year

Hiatus is nearly over. Postings to begin again very soon.

The Tyranny of Context

In his 1980 essay "In the Context of No Context," George W. S. Trow wrote that the "work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it." But over twenty years later, we live under the tyranny of context.

And yet the opposite would seem to be true, wouldn't it? Texts, images, sounds are excised  from their original appearances (pretend for just this once that there is such a thing as an original appearance) and show up in new mediums. If anything, we seem to be living in a fully de-contextualized media world, so saturated with fragments that Donald Barthelme's old saying ("Fragments are the only form I trust") seems in need of revision: "Fragments are the only form."

But the marshalling of old media under the banner of new media confirms every day that there is nothing but context. Watching "Imitation of LIfe" by REM on YouTube is a reminder not only of the year 2001 and "pan-and-scan" but also of the fact that current, live media is also doomed to context. It may be true that Julie Taymor's film Across the Universe has rescued the Beatles for my son and his friends, but it also reminds them that their music—the music being made today that they love—will someday persist in new contexts detached from his childhood.

There is a message: context is so overwhelming today, so powerful that it practically has stripped itself of history. What does this mean? This means that context, which used to mean "yesterday," now means "today." There really is no such thing as context anymore; like ideology, it is invisible. It is the default generator for all media, new and old. This has something to do with speed, as the contexts of new media (movies, music, television and cable shows) proliferate more rapidly that the content of new media.

There is no escape from the past. Forget the anxiety of influence. There is no reason to be ashamed. Everything you create—even your response to these words —is already being understood as the context of this year, this moment.

Trow wrote his essay at the tipping point, when television showed how it was possible, in theory, to entertain by stripping away context. Flipping from channel to channel, there was a thrill in uniformity: everything from real footage of assassinations to fake westerns reduced to the same screen size, the same aspect ratio, interrupted by the same commercials. Who would have guessed that rather than stripping away context, television actually provided the model for the accumulation of context, so that today movies on DVD come packaged in multi-disk sets that cocoon the movie itself in layer after layer of meaning?

The fate of such objects today is that they are doomed to be remembered forever as mere symbols of their era.