(BFI DVD 2007, RRP £19.99)

“Peter Whitehead and The Sixties” is the first official DVD issue of “Wholly Communion” (1965) and “Benefit of the Doubt” (1967), two documentaries ‘directed’ by an obscure and yet notorious figure. Peter Whitehead was, and is, a chameleon who excels at endlessly reinventing himself. As an undergraduate at Cambridge University he studied natural sciences but soon abandoned these to pursue fine art at The Slade in London. If one believes other versions of Whitehead’s life, then at Cambridge he may have been recruited by British Intelligence who propelled him into the bohemian art world. Regardless, in the mid-sixties Whitehead briefly but successfully refashioned himself as a film-maker (albeit not a particularly competent one). For many years Whitehead was close to Howard Marks, and veterans of the sixties counterculture tend to view his role as an important prosecution witness against this pot celebrity in a major drug smuggling trial as somewhat shameful. With the release of this BFI retrospective DVD, it would seem Whitehead is once more a film-maker….
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You Can’t Win by Jack Black (AK Press/Nabat 2000 £12).

Memoirs Of Vidocq: Master of Crime by Francois Eugene Vidocq translated and edited by Edwin Gile Rich (AK Press/Nabat 2002 £14).

Nabat is an offshoot of AK Press edited by Bruno Ruhland whose avowed intention is ‘reprinting forgotten memoirs by various misfits, outsiders and rebels’. A curious concept especially as one of the books in the series Sister Of The Road is actually a novel, although when it first appeared it did find some readers credulous enough to believe it was the ‘genuine’ autobiography of a female hobo. Sister Of The Road is easily the worst book in the Nabat series, an anarchist fantasy written by one of Emma Goldman’s lovers and boosters Dr Ben Reitman. This absurd tale of one woman’s education in life and politics concludes as follows: “Long after Lowell had gone to sleep that night I lay awake staring into the dark, thinking. In my heart I knew, of course, that I must do what he had told me to - settle down and be a mother to my child. He had said that I had been running away from something and suddenly I realized what it was - I had been trying to escape my own natural need to be responsible for someone, to live for someone else, some special individual person who belonged peculiarly to myself. For years I had told myself that I didn’t want to be tied down, that I wanted to keep myself free to help others, to uplift the vast mass of struggling humanity. And I knew now that I had been rationalizing my need to be a mother, dissipating it over the face of the earth when its primary satisfaction lay within reach of my own arms.”
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by Anselm Jappe translated into English by Donald Nicholson-Smith with assistance from the author (University of California Press 1999)

The situationists declared somewhere that boredom was counter-revolutionary. They forgot to add that it is also wearisome and stupid. Jappe’s squib is both the most boring and by far and away the most stupid book to be written about a situationist to date - and in saying this I’m conscious of the fact that the competition consists largely of art monographs and the throughput of Andrew Murray Scott. Aside from the fact that it is printed on paper of some character - soft, off-white and pleasant to touch - about all that can be said in favour of Jappe’s handbook is that it is not a biography at all. The publishers puff Jappe’s guff as an intellectual biography - but a low-brow, one-sided and woefully inadequate introduction to situationism would be a more accurate description.
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PUNK ROCK AND ANTI-RASCISM - or,
DEATH IN JUNE NOT MYSTERIOUS

The hoary debate about punk rock and politics was recently given a boost by the publication of Punk Rock: So What? edited by Roger Sabin. (1) The editor’s essay ‘I Won’t Let That Dago By: Rethinking Punk and Racism’ is one of several pieces that raises the issue of punk politics directly. Claiming that there is a consensus about British punk rock of the seventies being ‘essentially solid with the anti-racist cause’, Sabin sees a punk alliance with the organisations Rock Against Racism (RAR) and the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) as providing the capstone of this myth. Sabin deflates what he sees as the fable of punk anti-racism by trotting out a few examples of unsavoury lyrics and media sound bites. [Read more →]

The Story of COUM Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle by Simon Ford
(Black Dog Publishing, London 1999, £19.95)

By focusing on a performance art troop that metamorphosed into a rock group, Simon Ford has produced a book that illuminates the political economy of UK cultural production during the 1970’s. This was a time when there was cheap housing plus plentiful arts grants and welfare benefits. Perfect conditions in which cultural experimentation could flourish as well as a lot of art wank that was pushed by those responsible as cutting edge work. Far more than the other members of COUM and TG, motor mouthed front man Genesis P.Orridge exemplifies the commendable excesses of this era. WHile P.Orridge’s collaborators had day jobs and identifiable talents, Genesis lived out his fantasies of bohemian dissolution as a life-style option and non-stop fashion statement. This entailed the proto-slacker presenting himself as a starving artist in order to get grants, as well as making judicious use of that alternative arts funding scheme known as the dole.
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