Twenty years as an outsider scouring the underbelly of American culture has made Howard Hampton a uniquely hardnosed guide to the heart of pop darkness. Bridging the fatalistic, intensely charged space between Apocalypse Now Redux and Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, his writing breaks down barriers of ignorance and arrogance that have segregated art forms from each other and often from the world at large.

In the freewheeling spirit of Pauline Kael, Lester Bangs, and Manny Farber, Hampton calls up the extremist, underground tendencies and archaic forces simmering beneath the surface of popular forms. Ranging from the kinetic poetry of Hong Kong cinema and the neo-New Wave energy of Irma Vep, to the punk heroines of Sleater-Kinney and Ghost World, Born in Flames plays odd couples off one another: pitting Natural Born Killers against Forrest Gump, contrasting Jean-Luc Godard with Steven Spielberg, defending David Lynch against aesthetic ideologues, invoking The Curse of the Mekons against Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, and introducing D. H. Lawrence to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "We are born in flames," sang the incandescent Lora Logic, and here those flames are a source of illumination as well as destruction, warmth as well as consumption.

From the scorched-earth works of action-movie provocateurs Seijun Suzuki and Sam Peckinpah to the cargo cult soundscapes of Pere Ubu and the Czech dissidents Plastic People of the Universe, Born in Flames is a headlong plunge into the passions and disruptive power of art.

"It's fitting to find a tribute to Lester Bangs halfway through this collection of film and music reviews, as Hampton appears to be a qualified successor to Bangs in the realm of pop cultural criticism. In these essays, written for alternative newspapers and art magazines, Hampton charts a freewheeling path through Hong Kong cinema, riot grrl albums and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That last show is something of a touchstone for Hampton: in one essay, he links it to Nirvana as part of the same cultural moment; in another, he views the series through the prism of D.H. Lawrence. The book is filled with similarly unlikely pairings that wind up making perfect sense, from the connections between Dennis Potter and punk rock to a revelatory description of Meat Loaf as a B-movie version of Bruce Springsteen. And when something offends Hampton's sensibilities, watch out. Pans of Forrest Gump and the 'perfumed gunk' of Sting cut with a scathing fury. For the most part, though, Hampton chooses to devote his energies to music and movies he loves — and no matter how eclectic your tastes, there's bound to be at least one artist in this collection he'll make you want to track down. (Jan.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright © Reed Business Information)

"It's fitting to find a tribute to Lester Bangs halfway through this collection of film and music reviews, as Hampton appears to be a qualified successor to Bangs in the realm of pop cultural criticism. In these essays, written for alternative newspapers and art magazines, Hampton charts a freewheeling path through Hong Kong cinema, riot grrl albums and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That last show is something of a touchstone for Hampton: in one essay, he links it to Nirvana as part of the same cultural moment; in another, he views the series through the prism of D.H. Lawrence. The book is filled with similarly unlikely pairings that wind up making perfect sense, from the connections between Dennis Potter and punk rock to a revelatory description of Meat Loaf as a B-movie version of Bruce Springsteen. And when something offends Hampton's sensibilities, watch out. Pans of Forrest Gump and the 'perfumed gunk' of Sting cut with a scathing fury. For the most part, though, Hampton chooses to devote his energies to music and movies he loves — and no matter how eclectic your tastes, there's bound to be at least one artist in this collection he'll make you want to track down." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Knee-jerk intellectuals may find it easy to lampoon someone who takes pop this seriously, but Hampton is a writer — possibly the only one — who can analyze Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the context of D.H. Lawrence and make it work." Keir Graff, Booklist

"Who is Howard Hampton? Who the hell isn't he? A tragicomic master of doom and glee, of seething and serenity, analysis and outbursts, horror and hope, he's the fun kind of unsettling. Somehow, this closest of close-ups inside his own trickster head ends up also being an accurate wide shot of American art and life." Sarah Vowell, author of Assassination Vacation

"For the better part of twenty years Howard Hampton has been one of the three or four greatest American writers about popular culture, and it seems the more unhinged the culture gets, the more he's up to the job. If Hampton were a movie, he would be Melville's Le Samoura?: cool hair-trigger instincts, two-steps-ahead-of-everyone savvy, and an outlaw heart expressed with white-fedora elegance." Steve Erickson

"We live in an age of barely-concealed hysterias, and what is the reason for this terrible reality? It is a mystery. Howard Hampton's great achievement as a critic is to see this reality, and to reveal it to the rest of us. Reading him makes me pop-eyed with fear. Reading him a little more makes me realize that I have been pop-eyed with fear all along — the sign of a first-rate cultural critic." Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism and Power and the Idealists

"Best of all, he's fun to read...An aesthetic of pleasure runs through Hampton's writing...The best criticism forms an unconscious self-portrait of the critic." Charles Taylor, Los Angeles Times

Howard Hampton has written for Film Comment, Artforum, The Believer, the Village Voice, L.A. Weekly, Black Clock, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times, among other publications.

Introduction: Meet The Furies/Pop Goes the Apocalypse

I. The Glamour of Extremity

1. Fairy Tales from Strangers
Cat Power--Ghost World--Lora Logic--Phoebe Gloeckner

2. Chinese Radiation
Tiananmen Square--Liberation Music Orchestra--Cloudland

3. Venus, Armed
Brigitte Lin

4. American Maniacs
Natural Born Killersversus Forrest Gump

5. Jungle Boogie
Apocalypse Now Redux

6. Metal-liad
Metallica--Guns 'N Roses--Nirvana

7. Smells Like...
Sonic Youth--Kurt Cobain

8. Vamp
Irma Vep--Olivier Assayas

9. Screaming Target
Seijun Suzuki

10. Blood Poet
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

11. Sympathy for the Devils
Assassination Movies

12. "Nebraska"

13. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
The Uneasy Ride of Rock and the New Hollywood

II. Shoot the Guitar Player

14. Let Us Now Kill White Elephants
Lester Bangs

15. Bring Me the Head of Gordon Sumner
Sting--Hasil Adkins

16. Dueling Cadavers
The Mekons contra Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

17. Aftermath
Eleventh Dream Day's El Moodio

18. Build Me an L.A. Woman
Los Angeles in Music and Memory

19. Do the Clam
Elvis Cinema via Viva Las Vegas

20. Reification Blues
The Persistence of the '70s

21. Moles on the Beach/Down in Flames
Ray-Gun Suitcase/The Day the Earth Met Rocket from the Tombs

22. Mouse Trap Replica
Anthony Braxton

23. Eyewitness News
Wire

24. Imaginary Cities/Holiday for Strings
William Parker

25. Book of Exodus
Plastic People of the Universe

26. Prophecy Girls
Sleater-Kinney/Cadallaca--Sarah Dougher--Sally Timms

27. Money Jungle Music
Matthew Shipp

III. Waterloo Sunset Boulevard

28. Such Sweet Thunder
Pauline Kael, 1919-2001

29. Anatomies of Melancholy
Chris Marker

30. My Own Private Benjamin
Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938and Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship

31. Blur as Genre
Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express

32. Nice Gesamtkunstwerk If You Can Get It
Tsui Hark/Ching Sui-tung

33. JLG/SS
Godard-Spielberg, Inc.

34. Lynch Mob
The Straight Storyand Critical Myopia

35. Flattering the Audience
American Splendor

36. Savant-Idiot, or Pull the Last Train to Dogville
Lars von Trier

37. American Daemons
Buffy the Vampire Slayerand Studies in Classic American Literature

38. Wrecked in El Dorado
Angel

39. Whatever You Desire: Movieland and Pornotopia
From The Big Sleepto Max Hardcore

40. Gold Diggers of 1935
Pennies from Heavenand London Calling

41. Apocrypha Now!
An Imaginary Discography of Thomas Pynchon's Paranoids

Notes

Acknowledgments

Credits

Index