Protect And Survive

I was never very impressed with Cabaret Voltaire when I listened to them during my early teens. By the mid-eighties their grainy, early stuff sounded outdated and cheap, and by the time they'd upgraded their synths for their entryist phase, they just sounded a bit bland. That said, I've recently come to appreciate what they were philosophically pointing to.

What I hear in them now is the connection between the Cold War and institutionalised child abuse, that connection being one of pathological secrecy. The Cabs intuited the bond between the redbrick public toilet and the nuclear bunker, between the North Wales cares homes and Porton Down. Compulsive habits reinforced and looped through rationalised institutions, veils being drawn over what the public didn't need to know. Gagging orders and D-notices reining in a torrent of psychic effluent. Power digging deeper and more byzantine channels through which it could enact domination.

And yet, toxic fumes were continually emitted and settling over the landscape. Like News from Nowhere, the culture of silence meant nobody could quite intuit where they were coming from. As with shortwave radio signals from a foreign propaganda station they crackled in and out of consciousness, leaving a distant trace of menace that was impossible to pin down to a physical location.

You could hear the screams, but you couldn't see the victims.

30th Century Boys

As you may or may not know, Scott Walker and David Bowie (roughly) shared a birthday this weekend. Unsurprising, as they have quite a lot in common. David (Jones) was admittedly deeply influenced by Scott (Engel), not least in their respective capacity for reinvention, image modification, and (at their best) a lyrical yearning to step outside themselves. Both played with teenybop-friendly images to make their first splash; and had a far better grasp of using TV in the service of pop; unlike most of their peers, for whom it was the other way round. Both had an uncanny knack for appealing to very diverse audiences. They also built a mystique around conflicted sexual ambiguity, "that tearing ache of limitless desire" as William Burroughs would have it (note how many of Walker's own songs are crooned to boys). Bowie's would retract eventually, as he became fully embedded into the mainstream and a publicly happy marriage. Walker would go in stranger directions; emerging after long intervals with increasingly perplexed, inarticulate, and violently troubled statements. Tilt and The Drift appeared in accordance with an ever more uncertain New World Order, within which Bowie would settle into an incredibly wealthy (and musically conservative) old age. It was as though their eccentricities, and capacity for experimentation, went in opposite directions. 

Both of them are also very much concerned with the idea of 'Europe'; as a much darker, lonelier, uglier, perverse place than its Hegelian ideologues would have us believe. Restless children of the Cold War, the horrors that led to it lurk around their best work. A strangely passionate inertia emerging from empires collapsed, or in stalemate. Exile would become a key word in their biographies. Walker, an American, would hit heart-throb status crooning Tony Hatch arrangements in Britain. Bowie would score his first U.S. number one borrowing from James Brown and Philly Soul. They would both go into highly-publicised meltdowns shortly afterwards, before finding the distinct 'voices' that would make them canonical - as opposed to mere stars - in the ruins of an older world. Without them, British pop could have taken a very different course indeed; remaining transfixed on the other side of the Atlantic, while ignoring the other side of the Channel, and its recent history.

Literary, theatrical and cinematic influences on both would come to the fore; with themes of stunted desire, decay, decadence, alienation, totalitarianism, sexual confusion, and the irresolvable regrets of youth; common to any number of mid-century European writers and artists, from Isherwood to Fassbinder to Bacon to Pasolini to Beckett. The queering of British pop (in performative, rather than sexual, orientation) starts with Walker's bruised and haunted solo albums; before it was repackaged by Bowie with Warholian savvy (the difference between a modernist and a postmodernist, I suppose). It was always present in the business of post-war British pop, but mainly closeted behind an almost caricatured hyper-masculinity; its poses and voices borrowed from the U.S. Behind the carefully-crafted slickness of their sound, Walker and Bowie's lyrics frequently required double takes, or entendres. Walker continued to push that beyond mainstream acceptance; long after Bowie had jumped ship into safer waters. But the series of albums Walker closed the sixties with, and those with which Bowie ended the seventies, stand outside, subvert, and move ahead of the generic rock 'movements' that lazier critics defined those years with. It wasn't all working towards a collective telos of youthful abandon. The European canon was here.

(Note: Post re-edited at a more lucid hour)

Suburban Salvation

"Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves."

Friederich Nieztsche 

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

Umberto Eco

Look Good in Ruins (or: Twenty-five Tangents about Bowie in "Berlin")

1.

By all accounts, he had to get away from L.A. That much is a matter of undisputed public record. Some claim it was little more than a tax dodge, but others argue it was Bowie's attempt at breaking the maeslstrom of drugs and increasing psychosis that was consuming his life -- the obsession with Aleister Crowley, the traffic, escalating paranoia, the $500-per-diem cocaine habit supplemented by a diet of milk and peppers. Or maybe it was all of the above. But it had to start with leaving, getting out and getting away, extricating oneself from certain endangering circles, breaking with destructive habits and everything that fuels or enables them, and hopefully changing course and salvaging what's left of one's creative energies before it's too late. First to Switzerland, then -- eventually -- to Berlin. Leaving Los Angeles and all of its snares and poisonous associations behind. To hell with it all. Looking back, he would later say of Los Angeles, "The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the planet."


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2.

No big surprise, really, that Bowie would inevitably wind up in Berlin. He'd been enthralled with Germany for some time -- fascinated, as some recent recorded comments and reputed gestures suggested, to a worrisome or problematic degree. He was deeply taken with its art and its music, with the decadent cabaret culture of the Weimar era, and -- more alarmingly -- with a certain sordid chapter of its 20th-century history.

But mainly it seemed like a good place to go to detox and collect one's wits. Bleak, depressed, somewhat coldly (and dingily) modern, furtively wrestling with its own history in the most repressed of ways, physically divided, socially and politically adrift in the throes of its Cold War limbo. That was the impression of the place as it existed at the time, anyway – the picture that the word "Berlin" commonly painted in a person's mind. A "come-down" city if ever there was one. You wander down a given city street, only to come to its sudden and abrupt end, the point of stoppage at which you find yourself facing the Wall. Some histories aren't so easily left behind, some histories leave harsh reminders.


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3.

It was Christopher Isherwood who put the idea of moving to Berlin into Bowie's head. Bowie had long been a fan of Isherwood, whose Goodbye to Berlin had undergone a recent revival in popularity from loosely providing the inspiration for the musical Cabaret. Attending the Los Angeles stop of the Station to Station tour in 1976, Isherwood and artist David Hockney had made their way backstage to converse with the singer afterward. The topic of Berlin came up. Isherwood would later claim that he tried to disabuse Bowie of the notion of going there, going so far as to dismiss the city as "boring." No matter, as it prompted Bowie to decide that a lack of distractions and some anonymity were what he needed to clear his head, and it wasn't much later that he started packing his bags.


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4.

Bowie wasn't the only one fascinated by Berlin in the 1970s. Far from it. A quick survey of the American cultural landscape revealed that a certain number of people in the U.S. shared a similar interest. Lou Reed's Berlin LP might've played some small part in the matter, with the way it sketched its setting in the gloomiest and starkest of tones. And there was also the popularity of the Broadway and film productions of Cabaret. Plus, the novels of Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass sold modestly well, with the films of Herzog and Wertmüller and Fassbinder and Wenders drawing crowds at the cinema in New York and reviews from urbane film critics.

As far as how the idea of Berlin was conceived and held in the American public imagination -- it represented something, must've served as some kind of metaphor. But a metaphor for what? Nobody ever said precisely, and perhaps nobody actually knew. Something having to do with trauma and unthinkable sins, with atonement and the weight of history, about rebuilding from the wreckage without looking back, of not being able to speak of the past, of living in a historical limbo. And about modernity. Because Berlin seemed deeply modern, but in a way that was as hard-won and enburdened as any form of modernity could be.


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The Other Vietnam War

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Milk And Honey

"How did Israel benefit the United States? Its advocates point to the PLO-Jordanian faceoff in 1970, during which Israeli threats thwarted a possible Syrian intervention and perhaps saved the throne of Jordan’s King Hussein. They cite the success of American arms deliveries during the October 1973 war, which helped persuade Egypt to abandon its Soviet orientation for an American one and make a separate peace with Israel. They note the decisive victory of Israel’s American-supplied air force over Syria’s Soviet Migs in 1982, which demonstrated to the world the superiority not only of Israeli pilots, but of American technology. They point to the captured Soviet weaponry Israel turned over to the United States for examination. They note Israel’s permission for the U.S. Navy to port in Haifa, Israel’s technological advances in drone warfare, and myriad other matters. Proponents of the alliance make the broader argument that Israel has kept the peace in the region. As Martin Kramer, a former Israeli academic who is now a leading advocate for Israel in the United States, puts it, Israel “underpins the Pax Americana” in the Eastern Mediterranean. When the United States kept Israel at arms length (from 1948 to 1973), there were four wars; with the onset of the special relationship and with universal acknowledgement of Israeli regional military superiority, the wars have been small and easily contained. If only, Kramer concludes, the United States could be so fortunate as to have another Israel to protect its interests in the Gulf, its strategic position would be rosy indeed."

"If these arguments are not airtight, they shouldn’t be dismissed. As Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer — hardly staunch advocates of the special relationship — acknowledge, a strong case can be made that Israel was, on balance, a useful ally for the United States to have during the Cold War. It is not an open and shut case. How and why, one might ask, were the so-called “radical Arabs” whom Israel helped to contain and defeat radicalized to begin with? Would Arab states have sought Soviet support absent their conflict with Israel? Speaking before a private group in 1975, Henry Kissinger said that it is “difficult to claim that a strong Israel serves American interests because it prevents the spread of communism. It does not. It provides for the security of Israel.”

What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?

Many of the greatest boxers of the 1970's and 80's are almost unknown these days, due to the fact that the Cuban government discouraged its athletes away from professionalism. There were none so great as three times Olympic heavyweight champion Teófilo Stevenson, who in 1976 turned down a $5 million offer to fight Muhammed Ali, offered by American sports promoters.



When Stevenson stepped down in the early 80's, his place in Cuban hearts was taken by the equally awesome Félix Savón, who matched his feat of three Olympic titles. The Cuban boxers offer the possibility of a fascinating parallel history, where perhaps the greatest boxers of all could be different from the names we are so familiar with.

Outlaw Detente