A couple of years ago, we began the Punk Archaeology project which will culminate in a day-long conference, performance and all-around happening in Fargo this February (see here). The revival of this collaborative (it would be punk sacrilege to call it "community") helps me return to one of the issues raised in the project, namely the relationship between punk and house form. I had pondered on this before, see The House of the Rising Sun, The Clash squatting, Iggy Pop's trailer home in Ypsilanti,. As Barack Obama honors Led Zeppelin in the 2012 Kennedy Center awards today, I am thinking about the contrast between two domestic utopias, between punk's post-industrial arcadia of urban ruins and rock's pre-industrial utopia of the idyllic countryside. During the 1970s, two antithetical bands, The Clash and Led Zeppelin congregated in radically different dwellings. Both were extreme expressions of belonging and both were off the grid -- neither had electricity nor water. Joe Strummer began his musical career in 1974 by forming The 101ers, who took their name from 101 Walterton Road, London, where the band squatted. The row house was part of a bombed out World War II neighborhood that the government eventually demolished in 1975. The band then squatted at 36 N Luke Rd in a West Indian neighborhood, which explains punk's Ska connections. Through The Clash and other bands like them, punk was conceived inside the domestic ruins of 19th-century cities.
At the same time, Led Zeppelin retreated to the British countryside, inhabiting an 18th-century cottage in Wales. Bron-Yr-Aur, made famous by an instrumental track by the same name, belonged to Robert Plant's family, who took used it as a vacation house in the 1950s. Although rooted in the American blues, Led Zeppelin taps into a medieval sense of organicity that is deeply seated in the foundations of the British psyche. This is clearly evident in the band's fin-de-siecle logotype. While Plant and Jimmy Page were writing Zeppelin III at Bron-Yr-Aur, Raymond Williams was historicizing the British myth of the country in a landmark of Marxist historiography, The Country and The City (1973). Williams argued that the British began idealizing the countryside at the very moment that they were destroying it (the enclosure movement, aristocrats turning to capitalist landlords, etc.) Unbeknownst to Williams, Plant and Page were in the process of transforming the myth of rural England into a powerful acoustic aura to be replicated in ordinary homes through high-fidelity record players. The Bron-Yr-Aur house (photo below) represents the specific architectural origins of this transformation. Zeppelin's genius (which is why they are honored by the White House) is to invisibly translate these very stone walls into an aural structure that bears no resemblance to its vernacular origin.
PS. I did the sketch of Zeppelin above Sunday morning, sitting in the kitchen of my sister and brother-in-law (who is spending his sabbatical in Washington, D.C.), waiting for other to wake up, reading The Washington Post. When my niece came down, she was extremely curious why I was drawing people from the newspaper. Then she disappeared to return with a concocted notebook that resembled mine, but made up of cardboard, tape and paper. For the rest of the morning, we learned how to copy cartoons and photos. She's a natural.
All this talk about the North Dakota man camps and readings on trailers, reminded me that back in 2008 I had a most generous invitation to give a lecture at Modern Greek Studies at the University of Michigan. Capitalizing on a paid trip, I made a pilgrimage to Ypsilanti, where Iggy Pop (the godfather of punk) was raised. Although Iggy's family trailer is clearly gone (his biography includes some photos of it).
James Newell Osterberg (Iggy Pop) was born at the town of Ypsilanti in
1947. He grew up at the Coachville trailer park on Carpenter Road (
42°14'20.06"N, 83°40'40.17"W). Believe it or not, Ypsilanti was named
after Demetrios Ypsilantis, the brother of the more famous Alexandros Ypsilantis, both heroes of the Greek War of Independence. Iggy Pop attended Pioneer High School
in Ann Arbor (42°15'46.37"N, 83°45'14.30"W) where he met Ron Asheton,
Scott Asheton and Dave Alexander, who formed the Stooges in 1967. The Coachville trailer park was a very desirable address in the 1950s, an ordinary middle-class community of professionals.
Ypsilanti was an industrial hub in the 1940s fueled by the war effort (best known for its Willow Run B-24 bomber factory). Trailer parks became a respectable solution to house the booming labor working in Ypsilanti's factories. And after the war, the bomber factories transitioned into the production of Kaiser-Frazer automobiles (later bought by Chrysler).
For more Punk Archaeology, see MC5 archaeology in Detroit (here)
I have figured out the meaning of the 45 RPM Spider fragment deposited on Sonic's grave, or at least, I have added another subtext. As it turns out, Rhino Records released an exclusive 45 RPM vinyl (only 6,800 copies) of MC5's "Kick Out the Jams" coupled by Afrika Bambaataa's cover of the song. See details here. Strangely enough, the release of this record occurred on the same day of my visit, April 21, celebrating Record Store Day. The vinyl's promotional literature and cover includes the iconic Spider. Hence it's entirely conceivable that the Spider fragment was deposited by an MC5 fan to celebrate the re-issue of this song. Just a hypothesis
The small offering over Sonic's grave is known as the Spider. It was designed by Thomas Hutchison for RCA in the 1960s. It served as a converter for 45 RPM records, a format invented by RCA in 1949 to replace the cumbersome 78 RPM. Most fittingly, the Spider deposited in Sonic's grave is broken. The original triskelion has lost one of its legs making the object's secret biography even more perplexing. Pervasive in the listening habits of North Americans, the Spider has become iconic of the era of singles. Actually, I didn't appreciate the magnitude of this iconography until I opened today's Intelligencer Journal/Lancaster New Era on p. A12 and saw Walt Handelsman's tribute to Dick Clark, who died last week. Handelsman is a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist. The original tribute was published in Newsday (Apr. 19, 2012).
Like the Spider at Elmwood Cemetery, Handelsman Spider is also funerary in nature. The Spider here becomes iconic of Dick Clark's era of American Bandstand that was syndicated on ABC from 1957 to 1987. Interestingly enough for my readers of Punk Archaeology, American Bandstand began in Philadelphia and was recorded in the studios of WFIL on 46th and Market. Designed in 1947, the original building still stands in all its modern glory with a huge satellite antenna on its roof.
Sonic's MC5 appears at the very til end of the Dick Clarke era. It's rock n' roll at its best but contains the seeds of the demise of rock n' roll's mainstream. Thus, in its truncated form, Sonic's offering becomes difficult to recognize, a fragment that allows entry into melancholy while also asserting a reflexive imbalance. If the Spider is the generational litmus test for 1960s rock n' roll Top 40s mainstream, one must wonder what may have been the pilgrim's intentions by depositing a 45 Spider on Sonic's grave. MC5 was clearly shut out of American Bandstand. Their first album (Kick Out the Jams) was released in 1969 as an LP not a 45. The original record was pulled from the stores because it had the word "Motherfucker" on the album cover. Detroit's major department store refused to sell the record and Elektra dropped the MC5 from their contract as a result.
Last weekend, I was in Detroit for the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, organizing the panel "From Idea to Building: Ancient and Medieval Architectural Process." Another priority in my Detroit visit was to follow up some ideas on the Punk Archaeology project. I wanted to investigate the topographies of memory related to Fred "Sonic" Smith, founder of MC5, godfather of punk and late husband of Patti Smith. Visiting sites of memory is appropriate to Smith and her recent exhibit Camera Solo at the Wadsworth Athenaeum (and soon moving to Detroit). I have already blogged about Smith, Whitman and archaeology here.
Fred Smith died in 1994 from a heart attack at the age of 45. Patti Smith writes about the devastation of this event in her memoir Just Kids and discusses in the documentary Dream of Life. Sonic was buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit, and I wanted to visit the unique funerary monument that marks his grave. It comprises two vertical rock slabs inscribed with "Sonic" and "Frederick D. Smith. Musician XX Century." The monoliths are small and disappear among the grand nineteenth-century monuments. But they are powerful in their sublime physicality.
As I began to sketch for myself the elements of the monument, I detected a scatter of offerings on the ground. Clearly, I was not the first pilgrim at Sonic's tomb. Trying not to disturb the surface, I located six objects: five coins and one blue plastic object, which seemed so familiar but which I couldn't immediately identify. I placed an image on Facebook with a question and my colleague, the philosopher David Merli, immediately identified it as a 45rpm converter. There is much to say about the site of Sonic's tomb. For the time being, I'll post these few documents, including the sketch of the finds.
H. P. Lovecraft is a cult author of “weird fiction” from the 1920-30s. Although I had heard of the name, I didn’t become interested in Lovecraft until Matthew Sweet's interview of novelist China Mieville and journalist Suzi Feay on BBC's Nightwaves (Oct. 20, 2010).
For the last three months, I’ve been feasting on Lovecraft’s short stories. His grotesque apocalyptic visions help us understand modern American anxieties in the light of Gothic fiction and the inheritance of Edgar Alan Poe. What I also find most enlightening is the persistence of archaeology in the form of both archaeological knowledge but also the inclusion of archaeologists as characters. “At the Mountains of Madness” (1931), Lovecraft’s longest story, we read about a fantastical campaign, the Miskatonic University Expedition to Antarctica. Partially written in the form of expedition reports, the explorers discover an unknown species, as well as the civilization of the “Old Ones” that flourished before the Pleistocene geological age.
Lovecraft’s own archaeological scholarship creeps dominantly through the narrative (Eckhardt 1987) and includes reference to late antiquity and its use of spolia. Lovecraft compares the sculptural reliefs of the Old Ones with the decadence of Constantinian art, which he partially acquired from general 1920s art-historical notions but more specifically from Oswald Spengler’s, The Decline of the West translated into English in 1926 and 1928. Along with Joseph Wood Krutch’s, The Modern Temper (1929), Spengler influenced Lovecraft’s transition from classicism to Decadence to a sort of antiquarian regionalism and finally to the science of weird fiction (Joshi 2001, 297-305). The decadence of Byzantine art that Lovecraft cites takes on a positive role in reconstructing the civilization of the Old Ones.
“Art and decoration were pursued, though of course with a certain decadence. The Old Ones seemed to realize this falling off themselves; and in many cases anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by transplanting especially fine blocks of ancient carving from their land city, just as the emperor, in a similar age of decline, stripped Greece and Asia of their finest art to give his new Byzantine capital greater splendours than its own people could create. That the transfer of sculptured blocks had not been more extensive, was doubtless owing to the fact that the land city was not at first wholly abandoned. By the time total abandonment did occur – and it surely must have occurred before the polar Pleistocene was far advanced – the Old Ones had perhaps become satisfied with their decadent art – or had ceased to recognize the superior merit of the older carvings. At any rate, the aeon-silent ruins around us had certainly undergone no wholesale sculptural denundation; though all the best separate statues, like other moveables, had been taken away” (Lovecraft 2005, 555)
Lovecraft has witnessed a revived interest in 2010. News had it that Guilermo del Toro was directing a film version of "Mountains of Madness," produced by James Cameron and starring Tom Cruise. As of early March, unfortunately, Warner Bros. has pulled the plug on this $150 million project. See here and here.
“The Rats in the Walls” (1924) is another Lovecraft stories that involves an archaeological expedition, but I will discuss it in a future posting. I must also warn the reader that during my Spring Break, I’ve been thinking about a strand of New Wave rock from the 1980s that marries the dark vision of the Gothic tradition with a post-punk musical precision. I’ve been thinking about the archaeological layers of The Cure, for example, and trying to weave a thread of archaeological Orientalism that ties Bob Dylan’s “Isis,” David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane,” The Cure’s “Fire in Cairo,” and Peter Murphy’s (of Bauhaus) Muslim conversion and migration to Turkey.
LOVECRAFT CITATIONS:
- Eckhardt, Jason C. 1987. “Behind the Mountains of Madness: Lovecraft and the Antarctic in 1930,” Lovecraft Studies 6 (Spring), pp. 31-38. - Joshi, S. T. 2001. A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in His Time, Liverpool. - Lovecraft, H. P. 2005. Tales, ed. Peter Straub (The Library of America 155), New York.
I'm trying to decide whether to go see Jonathan Richman at the First Unitarian Church on March 1. Browsing the web, I came upon this great little article by Keith Gessen, "The Bostonians", in the The Guardian (May 3, 2008). This is perfect reading for Punk Archaeology, thematizing the tension between Boston and New York and the conflicts of leaving the former for the latter. Keith Gessen is great, a founder of n+1. Gessen does a close readings of Richman classics (like Roadrunner), seeing the journey from provincial Boston to Warhol's factory and the Velvet Underground. For Gessen, everyone leaves Boston for New York, but who really wants New York?. Richman: "I don't want just a girl / to fool around with . . . I don't want a cocaine-sniffing triumph / in the bar."
I must confess, I don't know much about Boston's punk history, but I will never forget the night that the Lyres played in West Philadelphia (Human Barbecue, 1987?). Most recently, the token band of South Boston has been the Dropkick Murphys who are fantastic, of course, but a little overused in commercial contexts. They are definitely new generation, more akin to Green Day and packaging.
Michael Patrick MacDonald's Easter Rising (2006) is the punk memoir of Boston. In an interview by MacDonald when the book came out, I remember him saying how "punk saved his life." MacDonald grew up in the projects of the South Boston, his family was ravaged by Irish gang violence. Punk became his salvation. Although I wouldn't be able to write Boston's punk topography, I'm enjoying the occasional snippets. And I'm indebted to friend Paul Di Mattio for his Massachusetts musical insights (Boston v. Western Mass., etc.)
On July 26-27, 1985, the ancient stadium of Athens hosted an interesting happening organized by the newly formed General Secretariat of Youth (Γενική Γραμματεία Νέας Γενιάς) and the French Ministry of Culture. Rock in Athens 85' was a two day New Wave rock festival, which was quite cutting edge for its time. Although major bands like the Rolling Stones had performed in the ancient stadium before (Apr. 17 1967), Rock in Athens was the first rock festival to ever take place in Greece. A New Wave festival at Kalimarmaro in 1985? How radical is that? But it makes little sense considering the lack of a following for New Wave in Greece at this time. A Heavy Metal festival would make sense, rising naturally from Greece's Hard Rock tradition. I can't be certain about my observations, since I wasn't present, but as a committed follower of New Wave, I was struck by the shortage of punks in the summers that I would visit Greece. My cousins, who followed music closely, would confirm these observations. I was a New Wave Greek-American looking for a scene in Greece. Sure, there was the punk band Panx Romana from 1977, singing "You Greeks! you are worms, and the Acropolis doesn't belong to you/Έλληνα είσαι σκουλίκι και η Ακρόπολη δε σου ανοίκει." And there were also anarchists squatting in Athens (less institutionalized and violent as they are today). And there was the store REMEMBER 77, on Adrianou 77 in Plaka (founded 1978), where I bought my first Creepers in 1991.
What makes Rock in Athens 85' peculiar is its sponsors. The festival was conceived by the Greek and French Ministries of Culture. It was a state event televised on national TV and hence totally different from festivals like Woodstock, Live Aid, Coachella, or the extremely successful Rockwave in Athens. Melina Merkouri, then Minister of Culture, was present. Priceless footage shows the grand Merkouri meeting the wild Nina Hagen (and her clean-cut mother) backstage. The General Secretariat of Youth was formed in 1982, soon after Andreas Papandreou's Socialist government won elections and tried to liberalize cultural policy that had been dominated by the conservative right and its family-tradition-religion priorities. Quoting the current website, the Secretariat's task was (and still is) "shaping, monitoring and coordinating the government policy for youth and its connection with society and social entities. In this way, Greece was harmonised with the european and international practice of high-level, self-sustained and integral government services aiming to public youth policies." We must also remember that, only two weeks earlier in the summer of 1985, Live Aid took place in London and Philadelphia. But this was a private venture, organized for famine relief in Ethiopia by Bob Geldof. Live Aid was the first concert to be televised in a global scale through satellite. As the interview with Boy George reveals, Culture Club did have a fan base already in Greece. But it seems that there was not enough of a fan base for each of the bands to appear individually. The festival garnered each group's small fan base into a guaranteed (and cheap) event. We must also consider that Rock in Athens 85' was not exclusively targeted to Greeks. Hoards of vacationing European and American youth attended. After all, Greeks flee Athens for the countryside in July and August.
Whatever the motivations of the concert may have been, it seems to have taken a great risk. As a result it did begin shaping cultural attitudes at least in so far as New Wave's popularity boomed. Nevertheless, the conflict between audience and performers, the awkwardness of the ancient stadium, the July heat are all evident in the videos. The performers included Culture Club, Depeche Mode, Stranglers, Nina Hagen, the Cure, Talk Talk, Telephone and a surprise guest star, the Clash (or at least the remnants of the Clash--Mick Jones and Nicky Headon had already left, and the Clash disbanded in 1986). According to eye-witness accounts, fights broke out between the police and fans outside the stadium. Italian tourists were somehow involved.
If anyone wants to watch the televised festival (ERT2), you can find it almost in its entirety (minus the Clash performance) on Youtube. Extremely interesting are the backstage interviews below. To see the Melina-Nina encounter, go to Part 3. In the spirit of Punk Archaeology, Youtube allows me to investigate an event that took place in the ancient Panathenaic stadium that was reconstructed for the first Olympics of 1896. The footage is source material for an ephemeral moment. The videos not only transport us to a different era of Greek cultural policy, but they offer evidence for an almost surreal confrontation between a primarily Anglo-American (and German) youth movement and a resisting Mediterranean. Just watch the accumulation of sweat on Boy George's face as the night progresses. Although I haven't studied the videos in great length, they also reveal tensions in a cultural dialogue. Note for example homosexual tensions between Boy George and the audience. I hope that the readers of this posting interested in the history of the Greek 1980s will offer closer reading and insights.
Interviews Part I
Interviews Part II
Interviews Part III
For those that want to watch the concert in its entirety, the following links will direct you to individual band performances:
July 26: Telephone 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Culture Club 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
I thank Johanna for commenting on the Top Hat font and sending me to Fred Astaire's Bojangles in Harlem in Swing Time (RKO Pictures, 1936). The scene is aesthetically rich, if the viewer manages to pass over the highly offensive blackface. At the end of the scene, Astaire dances behind a triple projection of his own silhouette (sketched left). I send readers to my earlier thoughts on 1930s silhouettes here, elicited by the portraits that Georg von Peschke drew while excavating in Corinth. Incidentally, I got a chance to see all 20 of the Peshcke silhouettes in Athens this summer, but I must leave them for a future posting. Astaire's silhouettes elucidate the popular 1930s font, which pitch a thick line against a thin line in each letter. High contrast, thick-and-thin, large-and-small are in some ways the product of illuminated projection and the electricity of film and signage. I will show in a future posting that neon lights contributed to the development of fonts in the 1930s. Neon lighting has a three dimensional quality. The solid letter in the background is illuminated by a neon tube in the foreground that replicates the letter in form a few inches in front of the letter. The neon light does not occupy the same plane as the letter which it illuminates because physical contact would burn the letter from the tube's heat. A physical gap between neon and letter backdrop introduces perspectival variation as the viewer moves around the sign. Perspectival variation is what distinguishes Astaire's three shadows, since they are generated by three lights positioned around a circular platform to the right, center, and left of the real Astaire.
Like the black shadow of Fred Astaire, typography and neon tubes engaged the viewer in a game of projection. The high-contrast of shadows cultivated a minimalist aesthetic on a fertile black-and-white screen. But the dialectic of dancer vs. shadows supersedes simple mechanical replication the moment that Astaire's shadows disengage from Astaire and take on a life of their own. Astaire stops and observes his triple body move without his volition behind him. He stops being the generator of motion, or the object of projection, and he turns into a subject. He watches himself, as we watch him. His triples become his dance partners.
Astaire's black silhouettes are also interesting in light of Robert Longo's 1979 "Men in the Cities" series. Longo's involvement with the post-punk New York scene makes "Men in the Cities" the most iconic artistic expression of 1980s New Wave. It was one of the first images in Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967, a groundbreaking exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2008. Fortunately for me, the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meetings in 2008 were in Chicago and I got a chance to see the show; see catalog, here. As with the staging of Astaire's dance, Longo's dancers were displayed as a triptych (see photo of Dominic Molon, curator, in front of Longo's series here).
Whether intentional or not, I love the visual affinity solicited by Astaire's iconic dance. After all, punk archaeology begins in the 1930s, as Lewis Erenberg has convinced me in "The Crowd Goes Wild: The Youth Culture of Swing," Swinging the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (Chicago, 1998), 35-64.
Ultimately, both Astaire and Longo are the descendants of that famous Nude that Descended the Staircase in 1913 at the Armory Show. Unlike the male-gazing Duchamp, the American artist of the 1930s and 1980s is interested in a dressed male body, a suited figure that does not descend but ascends.
The last couple of postings on punk archaeology have produced some wonderful comments on Facebook that I cannot resist from sharing. Thanks to my supportive friends. You make blogging a satisfying endeavor (one always wonder if anyone is reading out there).
STEPHENNIE MULDER
"Kostis, hard to put into words the emotions this evoked for me, especially since I spent my teenage years running around with a bunch of kids who (thought they were) punk and hanging out in ruins too. Since I grew up in Salt Lake, they were not these nineteenth-century East Coast Gothic-tinged ruins, but, still. I often wonder if the same deep melancholy I got in those spaces, the heavy and intoxicating sense of past lives, ordinary and mundane, their loves, deaths, celebrations and Thursday night dinners, was somehow related to my interest in archaeology. Ruins have the ability to conjure a certain type of melancholy that is like nothing else in human experience, I think. Did you know mourning over ruins is a major theme in Arabic poetry? One of my favorites:
At the way stations stay. Grieve over the ruins. Ask the meadow grounds, now desolate, this question.
Where are those we loved, where have their dark-white camels gone?
-Ibn Arabi
Thanks for this, and I spent a long time looking at the photographs you linked to, as well."
Stephennie is a friend from UPenn Art History. She is professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Texas, Austin and specializes in Syria. We've recently reconnected thanks to the power of Facebook.
OMUR HARMANSAH
Pogue Harrison on the sight of ruins:
"One could say that, in its world-forming capacity, architecture transforms geological time into human time, which is another way of saying it turns matter into meaning. That is why the sight of ruins is such a reflexive and in some cases an unsettling experience. Ruins in an advanced state of ruination represent, or better they literally embody, the dissolution of meaning into matter. By revealing what human building ultimately is up against -natural or geological time- ruins have a way of recalling us to the very ground of our human worlds, namely the earth, whose foundations are so solid and so reliable that they presumably will outlast any edifices that we build on them." Robert Pogue Harrison, The dominion of the dead 2003: p. 3.
Omur is an old friend from UPenn. He is a specialist in the architecture of the ancient Near East and professor of archaeology at Brown University. Among his many specializations, Omur is especially active in archaeological theory. See, his Theoretical Archaeology Group here.
RYAN STANDER
"Hey Kostis. Are you familiar with Jeff Brouws work? As a photographer he follows the in the New Topographic lineage looking toward the landscape as cultural product/artifact. http://www.jeffbrouws.com/series/main_discarded.html
Ryan is an MFA student in photography at the University of North Dakota. His work explore the nature of place/space through artistic and liturgical lenses. Ryan discusses his work and process on a great blog, Axis of Access. Last summer, Ryan was the artist-in-residence at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in Cyprus. His work in Cyprus is currently exhibited in Topos/Chora: Photographs of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project at the Empire Arts Center, Grand Forks. It was an honor to be invited to write an interpretive essay for Ryan's exhibition. I've never met Ryan in person, but the blogosphere has brought us together.
Walt Whitman spent the end of his life in Camden, N.J., not far from where Patti Smith spent her childhood. While growing up at Germantown, Philadelphia and then Deptford, N.J., Smith would visit the Whitman Hotel in Camden and imagine that her poet hero once inhabited the spaces. Whitman's trajectory of American poetry extends to William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, both from Paterson, N.J.; interestingly enough, Williams was Ginsberg's pediatrician and wrote the introduction to "Howl." From Ginsberg, the trajectory continues to Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, an inheritance that neither musician undervalue. The celebration of the every-day, even if it smells of sweat and dirt, is central to Whitman's Amerian tradition. This is what architect Louis Sullivan called the "physiology" rather than the "physiognomy" of American life. Sullivan, who coined the "form follows function" equation was himself not a reductivist; his functionalism was "physiological" not technocratic. If American life has been suffering economic ailments, its physiology is evident not in the great skyscrapers of the spirit but in its ruins of its post-industrial cities.
Patti Smith is not alone to bring us back to Whitman's Camden. Camilo José Vergara, the Chilean-New Yorker photographer has devoted his career in documenting America's fallen urban condition. His American Ruins (1999) was a landmark publication, appearing at the same time that a California school of sociologists (Edward Soja and Mike Davis) turned Marxism's attention from the superstructure to the base, from a functionalist view of the city to a consideration of space. Vergara's photographs have appeared in numerous publications and exhibitions since then. But I would like to highlight one particular project, Invincible Cities, where Vergara turns his attention directly onto Camden. Vergara has been producing what he hopes will culminate into "A Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto." Invincible Cities offers Camden as a case study. An interactive database allows the viewer to navigate through Vergara's photographs across space and time.
Vergara has been photographing the American ghetto since the 1970s. His perseverance matches Jacob Riis, while his methodology combines the sociologist's lens with the documentary rigor of Bernd and Hilla Becker. Invincible Cities takes Vergara one step further. I suspect that Patti Smith would find Vergara's lens a little too literal. Walt Whitman might protest the slickness of the digital colors (he would prefer the texture of male sweat). Even if sensibilities differ, Camden needs revisiting and Vergara has let us perform the very kind of scholarly voyeurism that could lead into action if not the transformation of our civic psyche.
Rebecca Solnit's ruined hospital experience reverberates in Patti Smith's memoir, Just Kids, which, last week climbed to the 7th spot in the New York Times nonfiction best seller list. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were regular visitors to Coney Island at a time when the side shows were still surviving. They saw Snake Princess Wago and a flea circus at Hubert's on 42nd St., which closed in 1965. They also visited a small museum with body parts and human embryos in jars. Robert Mapplethorpe became obsessed by the idea and sought to find some of his own specimen. The search lead them to a ruined hospital. The experience seems straight out of a magic realist novel. Patti Smith writes,
"He [Robert Mapplethorpe] asked around where he might find something of that sort, and a friend told him about the ruins of the Old City Hospital on Welfare (later Roosevelt) Island [picture left]. On a Sunday we traveled there with our friends from Pratt. There were two points on the island that we visited. The first was a sprawling nineteenth-century building that had the aura of a madhouse; it was the Smallpox Hospital, the first place in America to receive victims of contagion. Separated only by barbed wire and broken glass, we imagined dying of leprosy and the plague.
"The other ruins were that left of the Old City Hospital, with its forbidding institutional architecture, finally to be demolished in 1994. When we entered it, we were struck by the silence and an odd medicinal smell. We went from room to room and saw shelves of medical specimens in their glass jars. Many were broken, vandalized by visiting rodents. Robert combed each room until he found what he was looking for, an embryo swimming in formaldehyde within a womb of glass." (p. 68)
On the walk back to their home, "... just as we turned the corner to Hall Street, the glass jar slipped inexplicably from his hands and shattered on the sidewalk, just steps from our door. I saw his face. He was so deflated that neither of us could say anything. The purloined jar had sat on the shelf for decades, undisturbed. It was almost as if he had taken its life. 'Go upstairs,' he said. 'I'll clean it up.' We never mentioned it again. There was something about that jar. The shards of heavy glass seemed to foreshadow the deepening of our days; we didn't speak of it but each of us seemed inflicted with a vague internal restlessness." (p. 69)
Rebecca Solnit helped me articulate some threads of Punk Archaeology in her essay "Abandon," in A Field Guide of Getting Lost (New York, 2005, pp. 87-109). Solnit describes her own discovery of punk at the age of 15, "Punk rock had burst into my life with the force of revelation, though I cannot now call the revelation much more than a tempo and an insurrectionary intensity that matched the explosive pressure in my psyche." Solnit's revelation was more than a musical discovery, it was a shift in incorporating the city within the realms of the natural wilderness. Punk directed Solnit and thousands of other youngsters in the 1980s to connect the surrounding post-industrial decay and the inner self. After all, isn't that one of culture's primarily roles, to negotiate between exterior and interior worlds? In the 1990s, selected neighborhoods went into choreopraphed reinventions. New York got Dinseyfied and hipsters became just marketing demographic. Attention shifted from archaeological realism (a desire to see things as they are and adjust aesthetics accordingly) to historicist melancholy (a desire to relive earlier generations' angst through self-fashioning). Such developments make the 1980s seem like a distinct cultural period, where punk and archaeology united.
Reading through Patti Smith's memoir made me re-read Solnit's essay (read tomorrow's posting). There is one particular detail that unites the two experiences, namely the incorporation of hospital ruins into a search for meaning. Solnit begins her essay with an adventure that, in retrospect, seems like a classic punk pursuit, searching for abandoned buildings and seeking to incorporate them into aesthetic life through photography, music and film.
"The most beautiful thing in the abandoned hospital was the peeling paint. The place had been painted again and again in pastels, and in the years of its abandonment these layers flaked into lozenges and curled scrolls, a different color on each side. The flakes clung to the walls like papery bark and piled up like fallen leaves. I remember walking down one long corridor illuminated only by light from distant doorways. There the paint dangled from ceiling and walls in huge wafers, and my passing stirred the air enough that some came drifting down down in my wake. The movie we made there was was too grainy to show such delicate details, but I remember one passage in it where I was coming down such a corridor and the shafts of light behind me were so strong on either side of my neck that my head seemed at times to detach from my body and hover above it. I had become its haunting wraith.
"That was when I was twenty, half my life ago, and a boy my age made the most politely democratic proposition I ever received: would I like to make a move with him in the ruined hospital near my San Francisco home? I would, we did, and we spent the next six years together in amazing tranquility and stayed close for a few years thereafter... It was the early 1980s, and looking back I can see that it was a sort of golden age of ruins.
"Coming of age in the heyday of punk, it was clear we were living at the end of something--of modernism, of the American dream, of the industrial economy, of a certain kind of urbanism. The evidence was all around us in the ruins of cities. The Bronx was block after block, mile after mile of ruin, as were even some Manhattan neighborhoods, housing projects across the country were in a state of collapse, many of the shipping piers that had been key to San Francisco's and New York's economies were abandoned, as was San Francisco's big Southern Pacific rail yard and its two most visible breweries. Vacant lots like missing teeth gave a rough grin to the streets we haunted. Ruin was everywhere, for cities had been abandoned by the rich, by politics, by a vision of the future. Urban ruins were the emblematic place for this era, the places that gave punk part of its aesthetic, and like most aesthetics this one contained an ethic, a worldview with a mandate on how to act, how to live." (pp. 87-88)
The image at the top is a photo by Camilo Jose Vergara, who will be the subject of a post later this week. The photo, "Henry Horner Homes, 2051 W. Lake St., Chicago, 1995" was featured in Vergara's recent Slate article, "American Ruins: Nature is Taking back These Buildings," (Jan. 15, 2010).
In addition to the memoir (Just Kids) and the Steven Sebring documentary (Dream of Life), Patti Smith has produced another kind of life narrative, articulated through objects (see earlier posting here). An exhibit, Objects of Life at the Robert Miller Gallery features 14 objects that have been significant to Smith and her collaboration with Sebring. They include Smith's childhood dress (left), her Land 250 Polaroid camera and a tambourine made by Robert Mapplethorpe. I hope to catch this show on its closing day (Feb. 6, 2010), when F&M takes its Art History majors to New York.
The exhibit is the first of three that will focus on various themes in Smith's art (see press release). The film Dream of Life shows Smith obsessively engaged with objects. Objects of Life takes the documentary narrative into a different curatorial and archaeological dimension. Unlike traditional archaeological presentation, Sebring/Smith's 14 objects point to inter-subjectivity possibilities and relate to the curatorial themes that Orhan Pamuk raises in the Museum of Innocence.
Over the Christmas holiday, I chanced on the Patti Smith documentary that I had heard about on Studio 360. We had just unloaded the U-Haul, moving to Philadelphia, and the WHYY feature somehow reaffirmed the move to an an urban capital. Patti Smith herself has roots in Philadelphia, a fact that she talked about at length when I saw her perform exactly 8 years ago, at the Keswick Theater, Dec. 27, 2001. That was a special concert for me. I went with my best friend Yorgos and we were both amazed by the number of older people (like us) in the audience who even brought their children. Smith's own mother, who lives nearby, was in the audience and both Smith's sister and son played with her onstage (see a review here).
Soon after Patti Smith lost her husband (Fred Smith of MC5) and her brother (Todd) in 1994, REM's Michael Stipe caller her out of the blue to offer condolences; he also recommended a photographer. Steven Sebring entered Patti Smith's life a that moment, documenting the experiences of an ordinary human being rather than the legendary "godmother of punk." Sebring's filming became the documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life that premiered on Dec. 30, 2009 on PBS's Point of View. Dream of Life is hauntingly beautiful capturing the creases in the artist's life. I also enjoyed Sebring's focus on Smith's children, especially Jackson Smith who is married to Meg Ryan (of the White Stripes). In many ways, Patti Smith's story after her marriage to Fred Smith is a life centered around Detroit (Saint Clair Shores). Documentaries on rock musicians tend to follow generic lines. Dream of Life breaks away from the mold and becomes a creative enterprise in its own right.
Patti Smith has also just published an autobiographical work on her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1969 booth photo, top). Just Kids was released today (Ecco, 2010). Just as Dream of Life takes us to the period after Smith's New York apotheosis, Just Kids takes us to the period before. For a review of the book, see Janet Maslin, "Bohemian Soul Mates in Obscurity," New York Times (Jan. 18, 2010), pp. C1, C8. Maslin points out that Smith's growing up with Mapplethorpe took place before many of the disturbing pictures that earned Mapplethorpe his late notoriety (and censorship by the NEA). I am looking forward to matching the Sebring documentary with Smith's own reflections. After all, Smith is just as much a writer as a rocker. Returning to the home where I spent my own growing up, I'm especially susceptible to such stories. It was in this old/new home that I first admired Patti Smith.
It seems only yesterday that the landmark LP London Calling by the Clash turned 25, an event celebrated by a re-release of the album with new video and footage. On December 13, London Calling is turning 30 this time. And at the ripe age of 30, the Clash turns archaeological. The anniversary will be marked by the auctioning of the Clash's original art work, the classic album cover with Paul Simonon smashing his Fender Precision bass on stage at the New York Palladium. There's lots to say about Simonon's instruments, including a Rickenbacker given to him by Patti Smith, but basically the white Fender Precision was iconic. The 1979 image contains its own archaeology, namely, The Who smashing their instruments in the 1965 performance of My Generation at the Beat Club, as well as, Sid Vicious hitting an audience member with his own Fender Precision bass. The bass that Simonon smashed in the photo had been newly bought in 1979. Simonon regretted destroying this instrument because it proved to be one of his best sounding ones. The very bass has become a relic and it now resides at the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame. You can read the entire history of Simonon's 11 basses (scroll down to Paul Simonon Bass Story 1976-2008 here ).
At any rate, Bonhams auction house is selling the original London Calling art work by Ray Lowry valued at $100,000 (Sale 16905 Lot 26), and two autographed photos valued at $500 and $300 (Sale 16905, Lot 293 & 294). Ray Lowry, unfortunately, passed away in 2008. After the dissolution of the Clash, by the way, Paul Simonon has turned to a career in painting.
In a recent biographical article on Zahi Hawass, we learn that the most powerful man in Egyptian archaeology attended a Grateful Dead concert at the pyramids during the mid-1970s, see Ian Parker, "The Pharaoh," The New Yorker (Nov. 16, 2009), p. 52ff. A couple of months ago, I posted on the Pink Floyd concert in Pompeii (1971), pondering the connections between rock and archaeology. Parker's reference to Hawass' pyramids concert attendance made a nice match to the photo on the left, from a few days ago, when Hawass guided Beyonce at Giza. Beyonce's "I Am..." tour has raised some controversy in the Islamic world, see Art Daily (Nov. 10, 2009). Although I used this news story as a conversation piece in my Islamic class, I will make no comments on the irony of this picture (the Egyptian cowboy archaeologist and the scarfed sex idol). Hawass spent a few years in Philadelphia as a grad student at Penn. His appreciation of American pop culture is not surprising, nor are his own super-star ambitions.
I will simply take a moment to remember the Grateful Dead concert, which took place in September 1978. The performance at the Giza Light and Sound theater was followed by three shows in Cairo. Interestingly enough, highlights of this Egyptian tour were released a year ago, see David Fricke, "The Dead Rock the Pyramids," Rolling Stone (Oct. 16, 2008). The CD title, "Rocking the Cradle/Egypt 1978," presumably refers to Egypt as the cradle of civilization. I am not a fan of the Grateful Dead, but I appreciate the inclusion of oud player Hamza El Din in their line up. El Din had appeared in the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, and in the 1980s/90s he taught ethnomusicology in various American universities. The 1978 Grateful Dead concert must be added to the saga of rock archaeology.
I want to thank Ιφιμέδεια for commenting on my last post Pink Floyd and Pompeii and bringing to my attention a recent controversy involving archaeology and rock. On July 4, 2009, the German heavy metal band Scorpions performed in the medieval castle of Mytilene. See the promotion for the event here. The castle has been used for cultural events, but a rock concert proved to be controversial. The concert was initially canceled by the Central Archaeological Council (KAS) on the ground that it would threaten the archaeological site. After great pressure from the Prefecture of Lesvos and the local community, KAS overturned its decision.
When I started visiting Greece in college, at the height of my punk rock phase, I was struck by the sheer absence of punks. For some interesting sociological reasons, the rock underground of the 1980s was monopolized by hard rock and heavy metal. Bands like Metallica, Iron Maiden and Scorpions are a huge deal in Greece (and also Turkey). A quick walk through Exarcheia makes this clear even today. My friend Yorgos happened to be flying into Istanbul a few years ago with Iron Maiden on the plane. The fans had taken over the entire Istanbul airport; it was quite a scene. The simple explanation for the traction between Eastern Mediterranean youth and heavy metal has to do with the ornamental language of heavy metal guitar and its similarities to traditional Eastern music (rembetiko, etc.) The gendered roles of heavy metal, I think, also relate to the scene's appeal with Greek/Turkish men. The long hair and distinctively male bonds raise some additional issues of a distinct homoeroticism.
For whatever reason, Scorpions are national heroes for a large section of Greece's underground. The concert promotion in Mytilene makes a strong visual juxtaposition between the historicity of rock and medieval architecture: "two grand legends of music and history meet this summer in a concert that will leave an epoch." The legendary rock band performs in a monument of equal age and cultural gravity. Another clip on YouTube (here) fascinated me further and made me laugh (I wondered if it might be a joke). It raises an interesting question, namely what happens to local society when a legendary merchandise giant comes into your small town.
Bill Caraher posted on the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock and the event's implications for landscape archaeology (see here). Thinking about the archaeology of concert locations, I was reminded of a performance that Pink Floyd filmed inside the ancient amphitheater of Pompeii in 1971, which, interestingly enough, was conceived as "an anti-Woodstock film" by director Adrian Maben. The film is not very well known, although it occasionally turns up on PBS fund drives (see YouTube excerpt here). Live at Pompeii includes psychedelic images interspersed in the final editing. One of the most memorable shots, as far as I can remember, involved laying out Pink Floyd's equipment along a straight line. The drums, amplifiers, guitars, speakers, etc. make an interesting line of monumental material culture. It was around this time, that Pink Floyd also collaborated with Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni in Zabriskie Point (1970), filmed in Death Valley National Park, California. One of the most memorable scenes in the movie is the explosion of a middle-class home with Pink Floyd's soundtrack on the background. Pink Floyd also performed a controversial concert in 1989, this time, afloat a barge at Saint Mark's Square in Venice (see YouTube excerpt here, with the Doge's palace flashing in the background).
Archaeological sites have grown to be popular venues for concerts. Only this last month (August 5, 2009), the Greek Ministry of Culture organized "Greece by Moonlight," opening 81 sites to the general public for some romantic moon-watching. Some "Greece by Moonlight" sites featured concerts. Moon-gazing was a typical past-time on the Acropolis through the 1930s. My mother, who grew up in Plaka, once told me that the Acropolis was not only continuously open to the public but also the romantic hot spot. This became the narrative structure in George Seferis novel Six Nights on the Acropolis, published posthumously in 1974. The Athens Festival every summer fills up the Roman theater of Herodes Atticus below the Acropolis. But interestingly enough, rock concerts are rarely hosted on Greek archaeological sites. The outdoor theater of Lycabettus is where those venues are held; the unpreposessing steel structure was designed by a great architect from the 1930s, Takis Zenetos, the only Greek to study at the Bauhaus. In addition to the concert series on Lycabettus, Rock Wave has become the annual Greek Woodstock. Before the 2004 Olympics, the three-day rock festival took place at different venues, like the old velodrome. Since 2004, the festival is held outside of Athens, in Malakasa, on the 37th km of the Athens-Lamia National Highway. Much of the audience camps out in this atypically extra-urban terrain. In the future, I'm sure, it will offer a case study of landscape archaeology.
Finally, some words about Pink Floyd's role in punk archaeology. Many rock listeners would find Pink Floyd to be anti-punk. After Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Pink Floyd became the archetypical example of classic stadium rock that caused the very punk rebellion. Toby Manning discusses this issue, "I Hate Pink Floyd: Pink Floyd and Punk," in Pink Floyd: The Rough Guide (2006), p. 107. Most famously, John Lydon wore a Pink Floyd t-shirt with "I Hate" scrolled across it, when Malcolm McClaren first spotted him on a street in London. McClaren turned Lydon into Johnny Rotten, the lead singer of the Sex Pistols. Despite the apocryphal origins, Pink Floyd was extremely influential to the art-rock strand of punk. And amusingly in 2005, John Lydon declared that his 1975 t-shirt was a joke and that he actually loved Pink Floyd.
The Pyla Koutsopetria Archaeological Project has released Trench Sounds, the first archaeological example of podcast vérité ever released (to my knowledge) on webspace. The experiment sprang from Bill Caraher's interests in punk archaeology, in new technologies and in documentary theory. Trench Sounds is profound in its simplicity, like an Andy Warhol movie (e.g. The Kiss, 1963). Trench Sounds is a 10-minute recording of the sounds produced in an excavation trench this last season at PKAP, Cyprus. We hear the irregular percussion of the scraping trowel, archaeological interpretation, but also the serendipitous small talk that makes up the social space of a trench. It might not mean much to many listeners, and I suspect some may wander "so what" or even be slightly annoyed. What I like about Trench Sounds is that it addresses time. It rescues a mere 10 minutes of archaeological life. It enlightens the non-archaeologist but also raises questions for the archaeologist. Isn't excavation all about the exploration of time, in reverse sequence, in stratified layers and unstratified jumbles?
I know many archaeologists that have been influenced by minimalism. My two mentors, unbeknownst to the reader of their scholarship, have been affected by minimalism, directly or indirectly. Cecil L. Striker's meticulous method, his love for the abstract beauty of dendrochronology and the incisive excavations by hand drill, not to mention his architectural taste is one example. Frederick A. Cooper, a lover of Proust and Le Corbusier, once told me that John Cage inspired his archaeological directions (especially into computers). Both Striker and Cooper are masters of precision, both are craftsmen of a post-war America, a time when the U.S. lead both the realms of technology and the arts. Like their contemporary artists, they turned method into ammunition against the superficialities of American culture, its consumerism and arbitrary values.
But I return to Trench Sounds. Listening to the podcast made me wonder. Why hasn't anyone written an archaeological opera, or an archaeological performance piece? Alternatively, why hasn't anyone written an archaeological report where time as quantity becomes the manipulated medium. Consider the new opera Timberbrit, where composer Jacob Cooper slows down songs by Britney Spear and Justin Timberlake. The technique is called "time-stretching." Consider the production of Hamlet by the Wooster Group, where the 1964 TV version with Richard Burton is re-timed into Shakespearean meter, projected onto a screen and replicated by live actors (see Scott Shepperd's/Hamlet's interview on Studio 360). Consider Bruce Nauman in the Venice Biennale. Consider Bill Viola's deconstruction of Renaissance space with his time-delayed videos, or Gary Hill's fragmented utterings. And finally, consider Jeff Wall's 2003 project Fieldwork (above), which takes up the mysteries of excavation directly. These are only contemporary examples of the minimalist (or post-minimalist) tradition. Such works have not really flavored the archaeological mindset -- as far as I can see.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I would like to read an archaeological field report (not an opera, a play, or a movie) that intentionally speeds up or slows down stratigraphic time. I'm imagining a fictitious collapse of archaeology's double time 1) the time taken for contexts to stratify and 2) the time taken by excavators to peel them off. This would be a biographical, documentary and semi-fictitious genre. And I'm not talking about the overly self-referential methods of post-processusalist archaeology, but a work of postmodern literature. Or maybe I don't really know what I'm talking about. Trench Sounds is a work of imagination, a dream, a reality show, a fragmented experience that brings PKAP's field season into the neighborhood of conceptual art.
