Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"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
Review
"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
Review
"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
Review
"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
Review
"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
About the Author
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.
Table of Contents
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 Killers versus 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: 1935-1938 and 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 Story and 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 Slayer and Studies in Classic American Literature
38. Wrecked in El Dorado
Angel
39. Whatever You Desire: Movieland and Pornotopia
From The Big Sleep to Max Hardcore
40. Gold Diggers of 1935
Pennies from Heaven and London Calling
41. Apocrypha Now!
An Imaginary Discography of Thomas Pynchon's Paranoids
Notes
Acknowledgments
Credits
Index