Tom Jennings

Zero Sum Game, by Tom Jennings.
Music review published in Freedom magazine, Vol. 67, No. 22, November 2006
Zero Sum Game  by Tom Jennings 
 
[music review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 22, November 2006]
 
 
A slew of new Dead Prez releases deepen and diversify revolutionary US hip-hop
 
A two-year hiatus following the landmark RBG: Revolutionary But Gangsta (reviewed in Freedom, 15th May, 2004) ends with several projects from far-left hip-hop duo Dead Prez. Despite RBG’s success, and endorsement from rap mogul Jay-Z, Sony dropped them after swallowing Loud Records. Independent moves now yield M1’s debut, two mixtapes with the Outlawz, Stic.man’s The Art of Emcee-ing how-to book+CD and his forthcoming album. Their trajectory reinforces the cross-pollination of post-Panther rebellion with street-level music and class-based ‘reality’ rap. So M1 has produced for other artists (including Mississippi’s David Banner), established publishing company ‘War of Art’ (punning on Sun-Tzu), toured with Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface, and signed with jazz guitarist/producer Fabrizio Sotti for Confidential.
The resulting melange of R&B melodies and hooks (satisfyingly rendered by the legendary Cassandra Wilson and newcomer Raye) mixes current NY, West coast, and dirty South club hip-hop beats in a succesful lyrical-musical synthesis thanks to guest MCs like Styles P (ex-The Lox) on ‘Comrade’s Call’, ATCQ’s Q-Tip on the sexual politics tip (‘Love You Can’t Borrow’), and rising star Somalian refugee K’naan (soulful lead single ‘Til We Get There’) – as well as M1’s own mother (fresh from 12 years inside for drugs offences) on the thoughtfully downbeat ‘Land, Bread & Housing’. These strategies dovetail with thematic subterfuge, thinly-veiling revolutionary rhetoric in everyday stories – a sonic populism ‘making sense’ rather than ‘intellectualising’. The title track links  repression in the present and the 70s while celebrating contemporary resistance:
“If you’re looking for Assata Shakur, she’s right here /
It’s her, me and 2-Pac over here, having a beer /
Cheers – a toast to a lovely revolution!”
And if the Dead Prez tactics recall 2-Pac’s stillborn ‘conscious thug’ project, ‘Don’t Put Down Your Flag’ explicitly preaches gang unity in the wider struggle, whereas ‘Til We Get There’ captures the overall thrust of anger combined with hopefulness:
[M1] “That’s what’s called solidarity /
When we struggle it’s therapy, after chaos we get clarity /
My enemy’s enemy is my man, remember? /
I ain’t tryin’ to be endin’ up in this man’s dilemma /
We only here for a minute – it’s what you make it, so live it /
See, I’m a ryder and I’m gonna be remembered /
For those of you not born, to those of you not here /
I wish you the best and that’s real” …
[K’naan]
“This ain’t ya average, when they portray us they say ‘all savages’ /
‘Cause we have it, blast it, won’t stash it /
‘Cause we fight to the death and manage /
To makes songs of struggle and to habits /
And damn it, if I don’t get even /
It’s chant down Babylon season /
Die for New Orleans to Cleveland /
‘Til we even, we not believin’.”
 
With M1 positioning himself as a remotely radio-friendly quasi-mainstream rapper, Stic.man and California’s Outlawz explore inner-city Black youth career options in two mixtapes: Soldier 2 Soldier fruitfully deploys military themes, tropes and metaphors to powerful effect, but Can’t Sell Dope Forever is more fully accomplished in dissecting the deadly fascination with the drugs game. The subject has intimate resonance with all concerned – several of the Outlawz are former dealers, including Young Noble whose mother and brother were both addicts. Also involved are Stormey, Kastro and Edi Don (ex-members include Napoleon and Fatal, with 2-Pac and Khadafi both murdered), the group being most famous for Still I Rise (1999). They have a long-standing collaborative ethic, though usually stressing the ‘gangsta’ side of the equation – but with Stic, they’re serious.
Can’t Sell’s opener, ‘1Nation’, straightforwardly frames the problem as gang versus class war:
“Listen up, all these guns we got between us /
We can point ‘em the right way and come the fuck up /
Dope money and turf ain’t worth your life /
Doing it for the struggle, that’s how you earn your stripes”.
The title track sympathetically fleshes out the cold-hearted reality:
[Young Noble] “It ain’t too many dope dealers retiring /
It ain’t too many old prostitutes vacationing on the islands /
Instead of knock ‘em down, my focus is to inspire ‘em …
… But he ain’t got no job, and she on welfare /
All he do is go rob, she do the blowjobs /
For ‘06 Bonnie and Clyde, life is so hard …
… We need some motivation, we need some inspiration /
We need to be more creative in our ways to get paper /
The block will have your ass in a box for your duration …
… “Homie, I ain’t tryin’ to preach to you, I’m just sayin’ /
The government the bigger gang, and they ain’t playin’ …
Later, ‘Like a Window’ has Stic.man agonising over his junkie brother, musing on the interests ultimately served:
“It’s a war even though they don’t call it a war /
It’s chemical war unleashed on the Black and the poor /
And who benefits? The police, lawyers and judges /
The private-owned prison industry with federal budgets /
All them products in the commissary /
Tell me who profits – it’s obvious /
And it’s going too good for them to stop it”.
Finally, ‘Believe’ succinctly critiques consumerism and decisively reconnects the political-economic analysis to daily life:
“You ain’t gotta smoke crack to be a fiend /
A fiend is just somebody who’s addicted, it could be anything /
Too many of us addicted to the American Dream /
We’re high from the lies on the TV screen /
We’re drunk from the poison that they’re teachin’ in school /
And we’re junkies from the chemicals they put in the food”.
 
With Dead Prez proving the potency of political street-cred over banging beats, veteran G-Funk raptivist Paris also steps up alongside an astonishing array of old- and new-school, hardcore and conscious artists on Hard Truth Soldiers, Vol I; and, somewhat bizarrely, produced and wrote the lyrics for Public Enemy’s misfiring Rebirth Of A Nation (check www.guerillafunk.com). So, suburban white middle-class subcultures may be abandoning hip-hop, and all manner of self-righteous haters delight in pronouncing it dead. Meanwhile, the momentum grows of an unholy lowlife alliance of bling-obsessed narcissists, psychotic nihilists, and prophets of organised revolt. I know who I’m listening to …
 
Confidential by M1 (CD/DVD) is out now on Koch Records. Can’t Sell Dope Forever (Affluent Records) and Soldier 2 Soldier (Real Talk Entertainment) by Dead Prez & Outlawz are available on import.

 
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A Midautumn Night’s Dream, by Tom Jennings.
Film review published in Freedom magazine, Vol. 68, No. 2, January 2007
A Midautumn Night’s Dream  by Tom Jennings 
 
[film review published in Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 2, January 2007]
 
 
Mischief Night, dir. Penny Woolcock, UK, 2006
 
 
Its writer/director wanted Mischief Night to be ‘a very silly film about very serious issues’. Tom Jennings judges it spot on.
 
Penny Woolcock’s Channel 4 stories set in Leeds (Tina Goes Shopping, 1999; Tina Takes A Break, 2001) located their Cutting Edge credentials in characters and events being fictionalised from the laboriously recorded experiences of estate residents, who also provided the casts. However, an equally radical departure was to carefully depict the everyday life of the UK urban deprived, rather than merely their reactions to the crises and traumas which social realist melodrama normally agonises about. Instead emphasising the resourcefulness, humour and inventiveness of a contemporary underclass struggling to stay materially and emotionally afloat, the films reportedly inspired Paul Abbott to embellish his biographical reminiscences into Shameless – with the latter’s success prompting its production company to commission the cinematic completion of the Tina trilogy in Mischief Night.
 
The film’s 2005 shoot coincided with the London bombings and subsequent police activity in Beeston (where three of the perpetrators came from and who some of the street-cast actors knew), adding immediacy to the intention to understand and undermine through comedy the increasing spatial and educational segregation of British Asians from their neighbours. The drama develops from the legacies of far closer interaction a few years ago, centering on the redoubtable Tina Crabtree (Kelli Hollis) striving for a secure home set-up for her three kids (by different fathers: “all wankers”). Their various preoccupations yield multiple storylines and diverse connections with the equally embattled, fractious and conflicted Khan family from across Crossflats Park in the days leading up to November 4th – the annual Mischief Night sanctioning relatively benign juvenile delinquency (egged cars, soaped windows, flaming dogshit) to complement the more mundane pervasive disrespect and darker anti-sociability of drugs, racism, crime and violence.
With design and cinematography magnifying social warmth and vitality in the area despite its divisions, the bhangra and new beats soundtrack similarly militates against grey grim cliché as the wit and mayhem accelerate and resolve into a generational contrast of multiracial hope. Ex-con waiter Immie (Ramon Tikaram) and Tina rekindle their adolescent romance to escape unhappy situations, requiring decisive breaks with backward-looking traditions – him leaving his family and her escaping the cycle of community despair presided over by her dad, crime boss Don (Gwynne Hollis). Meanwhile, young teenagers Kimberley and Asif (Holly Kenny and Qasim Akhtar) pursue their own quests, which converge on Immie’s old mate, druglord Qassim (Christopher Simpson). They succeed only by forging a more open friendship based on mutual generosity, a desire for autonomy, and an awareness of the limitations of parental choices – working-through rather than wishing-away the toxic power relations of the past in serving the needs of the future.
 
Looking for deterministic narrative arcs rather misses the point, however – an urge itself obliquely lampooned in the Big Men’s hot air ballooning fetish. This deft condensation of joyriding, lifestyle aspiration, and the Northern kitchen sink ritual of climbing the hill and looking down on the town, leaves Don and his lieutenants flailing out of control of their territory. The flight ends impaled on the mosque tower, thus crudely counterposing failed Western secular dreams of mastery to the comparable impotence of the Muslim hierarchy in dealing with today’s complexities. Here the elders enlist Qassim’s criminal muscle to repel takeover by fundamentalists  (whose imam’s ridiculous sermonising is taken verbatim from Abu Hamza speeches). Throughout the film such plot absurdities likewise signal the humility of the film-maker in relinquishing authorial omnipotence – instead bravely weaving the weft and warp of meticulously collected grass-roots anecdotes, banter and repartee to demolish pretension, free up energy and facilitate agency.
                Fittingly, the children’s exploration of Mischief Night’s mysterious adult world provides most of the bite, blithely juggling real danger and heartache with naïve sass and insight. Macauley (Tina’s youngest) and friends grapple with the insanities of respectability (“My mam’s a smackhead”. “Mine’s a dinner-lady”), attracted to the relatively well-off ‘Death Row’ whose denizens – paedophiles, gangsters, lesbians – mythically link poshness with perversion. While joyrider Asif views Osama bin Laden screensavers and jihad videos as comic relief from being pressganged into drug-dealing, Tyler’s apprenticeship to grandad Don entails blundering around junkie mums and courier grans. And whereas Kimberley eventually shoots her newly-found Pakistani father, Immie’s younger sister Sarina articulates her transcendence of patriarchy in the local urban music nightclub – a temporary autonomous zone where lower-class youth of all races enjoy their own hybrid culture in relative peace away from the vexing intransigence elsewhere.
 
Cross-matching and cross-fertilising the corrosive fissures and prejudices of white and Asian communities, the film’s hilarity consistently erodes stereotypes by remaining rooted in working-class neighbourhoods. Here, despite intense material pressures, upward mobility’s false promises are just as destructive as the baleful allure of the law of the criminal jungle in crystallising vicious circles of isolation. The desperate rearguard defence of ancestral families provides no inoculation, merely locking the generations into perpetual misery and the submission to oppression which carnival has always had the function of momentarily overturning. In fact, though now celebrated only in Yorkshire, the druidic origins of Mischief Night – a time when fairies walk the earth – predate Hallowe’en and Guy Fawkes by many centuries. While hardly supernatural, the outcomes of this highly unusual urban fairytale, “with its head in the clouds and its feet on the ground” (Woolcock), might also seem somewhat improbable. Nevertheless, its ambitious alchemy – of pragmatic irreverence for authority, laughing-off of adversity, and imaginative empathy and engagement – updates age-old formulae for survival, solidarity and resistance which are still applicable throughout the land.
 
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Exchanged and Marked, by Tom Jennings. Book review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 3, February 2006
Exchanged and Marked  by Tom Jennings  [published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 3, February 2006]  
BOOKS 
Class, Self, Culture, by Beverley Skeggs, Routledge, 2004, price £21.99
 
This thought-provoking book examines the historical development of representations of the working-class, and the contemporary variations on age-old themes that currently beset us. Although dense and theory-based for sociology and cultural studies audiences, it crystallises many concepts of considerable interest to anarchists while decisively arguing for the central organising roles of the middle- and working-classes in Western societies – despite the great and the good (as well as many radicals) somehow believing that class has become irrelevant while poverty and destitution spiral. Crucially, identity politics and the privileging of oppressions are thoroughly trashed by an author demonstrating throughout how prejudicial characterisations and definitions of the working-classes have always overlapped and traded those based on race, gender and sexuality – though without (spurious) biological essence lurking behind the difference.
And, rather than focusing as marxists would on the ‘objective’ struggle between ‘capital’ and ‘labour’, attention is shifted to how the fields of language and ideas shape lives and determine history. But this is no bourgeois idealism, because these fields are simultaneously produced by and make possible both the deployment of money and material resources, and the government of bodies. The latter is achieved via what modern social theory variously terms the ‘symbolic economy’ or ‘order of discourse’. So systems of naming, classification and evaluation are physically made material in sets of ‘facts’ and prescriptions based on their truth and legitimacy, translated into disciplines guiding action in the world and institutions exerting power. The state, as well as what counts as the ‘economic’, co-determine and co-constitute each other’s effects – and to critique one and excuse the other would be fatal.
However, for several centuries the effort to persuade people to govern themselves rather than using force has trickled down the social hierarchy. Neoliberal globalisation recasts definitions of who counts as a valuable citizen – in brief a separate individual who ‘rationally’ calculates and exploits personal characteristics and abilities in an objectively neutral and increasingly informational market. And those failing to so define themselves and act accordingly are conceived of as moral, social and political problems to be devalued, punished, and kept regimented in place with more precarious lives. Working class people, of course, are especially likely to be unwilling and/or unable to be as obligingly mobile and flexible as employers and governments demand, given our different cultural values and social dispositions – not to mention the small matter of being systematically denied the resources and opportunity to cultivate the requisite social, aesthetic and knowledge distinctions so jealously guarded by the middle-classes. And we’re supposed to ‘respect’ them? I think not – and neither, in this respect, does Skeggs.
 
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Random Signage and Secret Acts of Beauty, by Tom Jennings. Art / book review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 23, November 2005.

Random Signage and Secret Acts of Beauty  by Tom Jennings
 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 23, November 2005]
 
 
ART / BOOKS
 
Wall and Piece, by Banksy, Century, 2005
 
Renowned stencil graffiti exponent and all-round public art prankster Banksy continues his long march into the (anti-) establishment with the publication this month of the glossy coffee-table volume Wall and Piece – a compendium of three previously self-published efforts, Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall, Existencilism and Cut It Out, plus more recent material from forays into official and unofficial gallery exhibitions in London, New York and Paris and defacing the apartheid wall in Palestine. He’s presented painted farm animals in a warehouse in the fashionable yBa East End, remixed and updated classical and modernist painting and sculpture (for example with 200 live rats as attendants in a posh gallery in the West End), snuck fake artefacts into Tate Britain and other museums, and generally thumbed his nose at the great and the good.
Despite the necessity of anonymity given media hype, moral panic and police attention to such ‘vandalism’, his prolific, exuberant and subversive street output in Bristol and London for over a decade has generated increasing media celebrity – which has encouraged the entrepreneurial turn. His work now commands respectably high prices when offered for sale as contemporary ‘high-concept’ commodities, such that his proclamations against both the mainstream art market and the ‘brandalism’ of corporate advertising are starting to look somewhat threadbare. But he’s a lot less precious than many adbusting types whose moral superiority about the ‘unfairness’ of capitalism leads them to sneer at the proletarian vulgarity of direct expressions such as tagging (like Dr.D, who nevertheless unfailingly adds her ‘signature’). Whereas Bansky hints far beyond such liberal queasiness in critiquing the control of material, spatial and symbolic resources – plus, being more of an ordinary bloke, he’s not coy about needing to get by.
 
Fortunately the substance of Banksy’s project retains its integrity, largely through the wit and warmth of its commonsense anti-authoritarian sensibility and the intelligence of his deconstructions of governmental complacency and corresponding public passivity. Whether images of hip-hop rats and sinister chimps symbolise the lowly masses intimating their impending takeover of urban areas; or when fun is poked at the evil, stupidity, duplicity and arrogance of the police and state violence; or official signage is travestied to encourage other graffitists, harangue touristic attitudes, or highlight the general creeping fascism of the times – the question of who is allowed to occupy, mark their presence and preoccupations upon, and take self-determined action in our shared space remains central.
“Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a living breathing thing which belonged to everybody, not just the estate agents and barons of big business.
Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall – it’s wet”.*
Most of all, Banksy wants more people – many more – to take up his call. And they are. For this generous spirit and humility I’d forgive a lot – and if he wants to sell his soul for Damien Hirst’s dollars … well, that’s his spiritual funeral.**
 
Wall and Piece was published by Century on November 3rd, price £20.
 
* text with Rats: see www.banksy.co.uk
** Hirst is rumoured to be investing in Banksy ‘originals’ at around £25k each.
 
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The Art of Brill O’Pads, by Tom Jennings. Art review published in Freedom magazine, Vol. 66, No. 5, February 2005.
The Art of Brill O’Pads  by Tom Jennings
 
 
[published in Freedom magazine, Vol. 66, No. 5, February 2005]
 
 
ART 
Bob & Roberta Smith’s Help Build the Ruins of Democracy (Baltic, Gateshead, November 2004 – April 2005) surrounds a copse of birch trees adorned in sketchpad pages with jumbled banners, plaques and furniture. ‘Degraded’ materials, found objects and amateurish typefaces refuse conventions of beauty or the sublime, and the personal identity of Patrick Brill is effaced by the multiply-gendered open-ended fictional Smiths – an identity supporters are encouraged to inhabit like a “cultural virus”* spreading worldwide.
Various conceptual art strategies mobilise DIY aesthetics into creative expression as part of everyday life rather than the preserve of elites and genuises, and viewers add their sketches and sayings to the artist’s own texts. The latter – cast in cement or painted on plywood lining walls and sofas – combine the absurd and irrational with bile towards New Labour, the media, celebrities and art heroes. Alongside, a video replays a performance event staged in the parliament of Bremen, Germany, with actresses improvising histrionic debate among Jesus Christ, Mozart, Jacques Tati, Churchill, etc. All of this is mildly amusing, while Eileen – a new commission – clads a shed’s exterior with concretised fragments of a North of Ireland biography beset by communal cleavage, false ethnicity and “the stupidity of prejudice”.
 
Unfortunately, history is reduced throughout to mere accumulations of individual attitudes and attributes. The satirical offensiveness and Little England eccentricity therefore resolve the fascination with fame and leadership (in both politics and art) into timid liberal whingeing about today’s “flaws in democracy” – guaranteeing the artist safe passage into globetrotting art stardom and lecturing at fashionable Goldsmiths. No more profound than public opinion surveys sampling the momentary whims of passive publics, the “participation” of viewers amounts to a few hastily-scribbled cartoons and slogans chosen by gallery staff (using criteria of political correctness) – but if punters attempt to remove any they are frogmarched out. Brill will then cannibalise the archive of used and unused contributions for future projects – mirroring his recuperation of utopian Dada, Lettrism and Fluxus desires. Touted as ‘oppositional’ – even “anarchic” – this whole sordid deception is lent populist gloss with mantras like Make Your Own Damn Art (book accompanying the exhibition) and “Create Your Own Reality”. Ultimately, Bob & Roberta Smith practise neither –  instead inoculating a largely contemptuous contemporary art scene against the “catalyst for change” that radical artists hope their germs will mutate into.
 
*quotes from exhibition blurb and catalogue.
 
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V Signs and Simulations, by Tom Jennings. Short review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 7, April 2006.‘V’ Signs and Simulations by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 7, April 2006]
 
 
V for Vendetta, dir. James McTeigue
 
This hopelessly incoherent mish-mash of random elements from comic book superhero back catalogues – combined with various soundbites from and random references to recent and contemporary political fiction and real-world circumstances – is stitched together with the most superficial philosophical musings about freedom and justice. Writers Larry and Andy Wachowski were also responsible for the trivial pursuits of The Matrix, with similarly absurd pretensions of reflecting on media-saturated culture, but at least faithfully following its computer-game logic. Whereas in V for Vendetta the narrative demands of blockbuster oversimplification are met by making complete nonsense of history. So freedom fighter Guy Fawkes rounds off his four centuries-old project in blowing up the Old Bailey and Houses of Parliament  (now redundant symbols in a near-future police state) and assassinating a sample of political figureheads and functionaries – justified with a jumble of pompous platitudes wrenched from literary sources and thrown together to resemble sophistication.
 
On one level an enjoyably daft and meaningless cartoon mess, the film nevertheless purports to smuggle salient social questions – of violence, terrorism, and the passivity of populations cowering in complicity with fascism – into the consciousnesses of millions of multiplex punters. And that doesn’t happen every day, even if these filmmakers lost the plot in mistaking an avalanche of disconnected details for complexity. Such hysterical postmodern pastiche can be a strength, if the ensuing indecisive open-endedness prompts exploratory interpretation among viewers. Unfortunately Vendetta’s recuperation of its chaotic impulses reproduces, rather than subverts, the authoritarian strategies supposedly subject to critique. A graphic novel’s fractured format forces readers to elaborate its story in a manner film rarely matches (an honourable exception being Robert Rodriguez’ uncanny translation of Frank Miller’s noir nightmare, Sin City). Here, the seamless cinematic flow merely encourages submission to lazy, careless, dishonest (dis)simulation in celebrating the superiority of cynical quietism.
Most disgracefully, the glossy fantasy aesthetic obliterates material and economic degradation or struggle, leaving for motivation only a tawdry bourgeois Oedipal Stockholm Syndrome between aristocratic (anti)hero and nubile middle class disciple. Although an amusingly gratuitous insult to leninist vanguard vanity, this corresponds to the depressing representation of a passive (and strangely lilywhite) multitude of couch potatoes confronting the military in the finale. With no grievances beyond dissatisfaction with spin, the zombies march in uniform desire for better media and ringside seats at the spectacle. Given the volume of explosives trundling towards Whitehall along the disused underground, all that awaits them is ecstatic annihilation along with most of central London. Any remaining quibbles about the nobility of revolutionary idealism are therefore ultimately superfluous in V for Vendetta’s utter contempt for its audience. After all, the mischievous potential of trash lies in travestying – not reinforcing – the delusions of grandeur of power.
 
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The Empire’s New Clothes, by Tom Jennings. Review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 5, March 2006.

The Empire’s New Clothes by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 5, March 2006]
 
 
Hollywood’s New Radicalism, by Ben Dickenson (published by I.B. Tauris, January 2006)
 
 
Hollywood’s New Radicalism is a fascinating account of attempts to subvert the film industry from within, according to Tom Jennings
 
The old-fashioned vertically-integrated movie business, where studio moguls reigned supreme and rigidly controlled all aspects of film production, broke down in the 1960s in the face of the commercial deregulation and restructuring needed to cater to changing cultural and technological landscapes and patterns of consumption. Those inspired by the countercultural and grass-roots energy of the era took advantage, extending the range of material reaching the public in films that were profoundly innovative, politically challenging and often extremely popular. Hollywood’s New Radicalism intelligently documents the subsequent interplay of commercial agendas and American political retrenchment, focusing on the efforts of liberals and leftists involved in film production to reflect their social awareness in their work – eventually culminating in today’s explicitly political mainstream cinema.
Sixties directors harnessed avant-garde art and European film styles and  philosophies, taking advantage of the liberal atmosphere to realise freedom of cinematic expression, and their appeal to newly-affluent rebellious youth audiences massively expanded the cultural production sector. Impressive box-office business attracted venture capital throughout the 1970s, which rationalised the industry’s chaotic structure and narrowed content to the most predictably profitable. Previously buccaneering individualist outsiders were absorbed into Hollywood by the 1980s when the enterprise revolution tightened corporate grips and abandoned social commitments. Aristocrats like Oliver Stone screamed betrayal, but younger, more pragmatic independents continued exploring narrative and style on the margins. Many signed with newly consolidating 1990s studios – themselves desperately seeking niche markets – only to encounter the triple whammy of Clinton’s duplicity, Seattle’s protest revival, and the Old Testament logic of 9/11 and its aftermath.
 
The discomfort of film industry professionals concerning the inability to articulate progressive political change is best conceived in terms of the general disillusionment among the middle classes with social democracy, given their failure to predict or comprehend the unravelling liberal consensus. 1980s and 90s neo-noir, postmodern and ‘slacker’ stories then symbolise thoroughgoing refusals of traditional fallacies (not paranoid detachment or self-indulgence as Dickenson seems to assume) by those growing up without the benefits of 1960s naiveté, making possible new forms of collective mobilisation such as anti-globalization. However, the current Hollywood activism is unfortunately translated onto the screen using largely retrograde narrative conventions, without the stylistic and technical experimentation previously employed to reflect underlying malaises in Western society. The most obvious symptoms of war and  corporate excess are thus mistaken for ultimate causes – whereas, ironically, the deeper colonisation of intimate life by the instrumental logic of commodification has Hollywood at its vanguard.
The book’s argument that commercial studio pressures are decisive constraints on the degree of social consciousness allowed into films makes intuitive sense. However, the implication that suitably nimble strategies among liberal filmmakers guarantees progressive content does justice neither to contemporary political circumstances – where the intentions and interests of the intelligentsia are so widely, thoroughly and understandably distrusted – nor to a media culture in which superficial appearance is seductively fetishised to mask the depressing difficulties of real life. It also downplays independent cinema’s diverse and troubled ambivalence. Negotiating prevailing tastes and engaging deeper desires while also offering genuine critique is much trickier than the voluntaristic idealism of celebrities suggests. So radical directors often skilfully portray middle class protagonists striving to maintain their positions entangled in complex local hierarchies and histories, with very mixed consequences for those with less room to manouevre. Regrettably, the latter’s rich social dynamic is often simultaneously homogenised into frozen victimised masses thawed by individual heroics.
Therefore judgements of films like Cradle Will Rock (1999), Erin Brockovitch (2000), or Dogville (2003) as ‘radical’ is highly problematic given their respective nostalgia for elite ‘proletarian art’ when ‘people knew their place’; sanctimonious self-marketing by the diligently aspirational underclass; and patronising contempt for resentful victims of history struggling to maintain humanity. Conversely, Bulworth (1998) transcends charges of cynical fatalism with its respect for ghetto philosophy and disavowal of hope in professional careerism; and Fight Club (1999) is dismissed as reactionary nihilism despite demystifying middle class ‘consumer politics’ – specifically the fascistic appeal of cult violence viscerally countering the sterile slow death offered by corporate and therapeutic lifestyles. In short, political implications surely depend on the responses and subsequent actions of viewers, not simplistic readings of film narratives as realist manifestoes or their makers’ complacencies as gospel.
 
Hollywood’s New Radicalism is certainly justified in identifying a fresh wave of liberal content – as last year’s I Heart Huckabees, Crash, Lord of War and The Constant Gardener show, and to which a slew of forthcoming films will further testify. The resurgence of cinema documentary also shows the dissatisfaction of sizeable audiences with both blockbuster entertainment and corresponding current affairs spin. But while corruption and malpractice by government and business, environmental damage, and the effects of corporate imperialism on the poor at home and abroad are now gratifyingly familiar on screen, merely updating clichéd cinematic formulae reproduces traditional resolutions revolving around heroes and leaders. As Dickenson emphasizes, prominent figures like Tim Robbins and Sean Penn belatedly realised that mainstream party politics is constitutionally incapable of keeping progressive promises. But then many moviegoers saw through that façade years ago, yet elections are still won by media stars (e.g. Governors Schwarznegger of California and Jesse Ventura of Minnesota) and presidential circuses still distract activists.
Hollywood liberals now initiate and support grass-roots campaigns rather than just cosying up to Democrat stooges. But, as the Live 8 debacle again proved, any ‘anticapitalism’ advocating stronger states, fairer trade and global institutional charity scarcely dents the status quo. Neither will we hold our breaths waiting for serious revolutionary politics from such a notoriously dictatorial and capricious system as the cinema, whose ‘talent’ cherish charisma over depth or substance. Nonetheless, its global output seeps into billions of psyches, spectacularising the obsessions and fantasies of the powerful. Along with this book’s clarity in dissecting the recent history of the entertainment sector, it is most useful for understanding how the more well-meaning creative denizens of tinseltown wrestle with their consciences in Hollywood’s new recuperation. Complementary analysis of how their efforts influence the lives of viewers can then illuminate cultural industry strategies for profiting from 21st century dissent, along with suggesting tactics for resistance for ordinary producers of cultural meaning (on screen and off) which do not depend on enlightenment courtesy of the stars in their firmament.
 
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The Hard Labour of Love, by Tom Jennings. Review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 11, June 2006.The Hard Labour of Love by Tom Jennings  
[published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 11, June 2006]
 
 
Tom Jennings glimpses seeds of hope in Lower City’s vividly lurid portrayal of the seamier side of lowlife. 
An impressive first feature by director Sérgio Machado, Lower City strives to express the predicament of the modern Brazilian underclass adrift without social, family or government support, but somehow mustering the motivation to persevere. With its love triangle inspired by Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, the film’s naturalism (spoiled by hamfisted subtitling) avoids ‘state of the nation’ polemics, explicit political commentary and objectifying social realism, with a superb fusion of form and content benefiting from half a century of independent filmmaking alternatives to Hollywood spectacle. Its very rare achievement is to effectively condense the desperation of entire strata into three marginal lives without pathologising, psychologising, moralising, sentimentalising or heroising. Instead, in crystallising self-destructive inadequacy, the energy generated from the collision of passionate affinities is presented as a precious source of shared courage and potential.
The restless, claustrophobic, handheld camerawork, intense colours and low lighting are characteristic of the ghettocentric Latin American new wave (Amores Perros, City of God, etc). The raw immediacy and urgency of lived experience is conveyed by staying close to the actors’ physicality: telephoto lens narrowing perspective; soundtrack accommodating audible breathing; patterns of camera movement matching emotional states; editing synchronised with heartbeats to suit prevailing moods. Very short scenes express realms of subjective meaning: fast and furiously emphasising the pressure of necessity; rarer slow episodes and fleeting static long shots hinting at space for reflection spoiled by the brooding aftermath of biographies full of hassle. The growth of love then symbolises something powerful to hold onto amidst unpredictable flux.
 
Fiercely loyal childhood friends Deco (Lázaro Ramos) and Naldinho (Wagner Moura) ply a cargo trade along the northeastern coast. Karina (Alice Braga) hitches a lift to Salvador, the provincial capital, paying by having sex with them both. When Naldinho is stabbed protecting Deco from racist attack, her altruism and care adds mutual loving recognition to ecstatic release. The negotiation of this shift means re-evaluating priorities and perspectives on life, and they orient differently to the shared dynamic of yearning. Naldinho is impulsive and reckless, with love representing self-control to be achieved by proxy in looking after Karina. Deco is less patriarchal, seeking reciprocal caring and containment. Karina, meanwhile, insists on autonomy – demanding friendship, sexual satisfaction and sufficient security to relinquish control. Openly acknowledging for the men their and her vulnerability, her refusal to abandon either of them holds the story together while seemingly preventing resolution.
The dilemma is accentuated by untenable economics, which Deco and Naldinho displace onto their relationship with Karina. They consider selling their boat, which like their ‘brotherhood’ no longer sustains them outside of lucrative illegalities. Deco boxes for a local agent, but has to throw prize bouts against lesser talents with better social contacts. Naldinho embarks on small-scale hold-ups, but the risks far outweigh paltry rewards, especially when ripped off by the local godfather. Karina works as a stripper and prostitute, with the most developed sense of community shown among her co-workers in the nightclub. Then, when she becomes pregnant, both men flatter themselves as individual ‘saviours’. Violence ensues as neither can modulate their envious ‘marriage’ fantasies. Deco’s fighting career is an expedient outlet for his frustration at the elusiveness of equilibrium, allowing him to offer Karina tenderness without strings: a heartfelt offer of shared childrearing; the sexual gift of cunnilingus; and consistent concern for her welfare as much as his. Naldinho’s paternalistic bravura, however, crumbles into infantile rage with the collapse of his delusions of criminal grandeur.
The wider social structures enclosing the trio are efficiently sketched in their illicit drudges earning a crust. Karina’s situation is most complex, and the tricky intersection of erotic display, prostitution and sexual romance is cleverly handled without moral judgement. The advising Bahia Association of Sex Workers surely helped sidestep stereotypes of exploitation and abuse, with the prostitutes forging some agency in their work and in the ways it overflows into personal life. As practical economics, any personal degradation is contextualised by the available options – familiar to women everywhere whose only remaining resources reside in their sexualised bodies. Conversely, the clients are pathetically at the mercy of lust covered up, for example, with macho bluff and bluster. Explicitly marked as defensive reactions to vulnerability and neediness, this is alternately tolerated, impatiently dismissed, or reversed in  manipulative hustling (most enjoyably in the simulated drug overdose scam). Better-off customers are inadequates to be pandered to, with the hypocrisy of bourgeois mores typified in one client’s impotence and suicide after showing Karina family snapshots.
 
This episode exemplifies institutional complicity with sexual commerce when the nightclub madam bails Karina out after the local police threaten her with trial for drugs offences. She realises that she is caught in a trap arising from servicing the needs of others. Her ambivalent desires to do this while being looked after as well as valued romantically and sexually – which all seemed conceivable with Deco and Naldinho – are under attack from the diversely intransigent pressures of legal dictate, economic survival, biological reality and social complexity. Her immediate impulse is to flee ‘up north’ to the Amazon – a mythical land of riches (‘gold nuggets for blowjobs’) free from official rule and the law of the father – with colleagues providing solidarity (e.g. abortifacient pills) and companionship, leaving behind men’s fatal inability to relinquish childish self-absorption.
Ultimately, though, this wish-fulfilment dissolves, along with her hard-nosed facade of self-sufficiency, into uncontrollable tears as she tends the wounds from Deco and Naldinho’s mutual battering – they too being unwilling to surrender intimate caring to perpetual paranoia and predation in the war of all against all. By extension, the film also highlights what political philosophy has long ignored or downplayed – the critical role of women in social and cultural (as well as sexual and economic) reproduction – and hence in the prospects for political advance at all levels. The exchanges of sidelong glances in Lower City’s final extreme close-ups then imply a dawning shared understanding that the trio can only move forward together. But rather than the destructively vicious circles of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, or the comfortably pretentious superficiality of Jules et Jim, the social engagement of suffering bodies, minds, hearts and souls might yet generate the synergy necessary for a better life to be wrought from the hard labour of love.
 
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Likely Lads in the Global Gulag, by Tom Jennings. Short review published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 8, April 2006.Likely Lads in the Global Gulag by Tom Jennings 
 
[published in Freedom, Vol. 67, No. 8, April 2006]
  
The Road to Guantanamo, dirs. Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, Channel 4, 9th March 2006.
 
This dramatised documentary speaks for itself as the testimony of the ‘Tipton Three’ – a bunch of Brummie scallies who travelled to Pakistan in 2001 for Asif Iqbal’s wedding. After taking an ill-judged detour to Afghanistan, they lost one of their number (Munir Ali, presumed dead) as the war there intensified, and were hoovered up for three years of abuse, humiliation and torture as ‘enemy combatants’ by the US-funded Northern Alliance and subsequently in Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before release without charge in 2004. Dubbed by Dubya as among ‘the worst of the worst’ of global terrorists, the Three come over as completely apolitical, scarcely religious, even clueless fools (to start with), who emerged stronger and wiser thanks to steadfast friendship and the inspirational integrity of fellow Muslim prisoners.
As in other Michael Winterbottom films the visual design, cinematography and editing mesh seamlessly in narrating the characters’ point of view. The juxtaposition of contemporaneous news footage with to-camera commentary by the Three and staged reconstructions of their experiences effectively demonstrates the arrogance, stupidity and dishonesty of the ‘War on Terror’, as well as highlighting the media poodles’ parroting of government propaganda. So despite videotape ‘evidence’ purporting to show them training with Osama bin Laden in 2000, Shafiq Rasul was working in Currys in Birmingham all that year and Rhuhel Ahmed also had cast-iron alibis. Lawyers privy to the evidence against them confirm that the ‘intelligence’ agencies had nothing to dent their story – as with hundreds of other anonymous detainees eventually released from Guantanamo with no media attention. Meanwhile 500 remain there – many with equally strong evidence of innocence.
 
British nationality led Jack Straw to request our lucky heroes’ release. Ironically, ‘Britishness’ may have contributed to their ordeal, in the form of that particular postcolonial complacency about blundering into other people’s misery (whether for solidarity, charity and/or mundane tourism). Family links with the Subcontinent obviously occasioned this journey, but the narrative tone is equally suggestive of stereotypical Brits abroad – and once the intense anxiety in Karachi for the Afghan people aroused their sympathy, macho overconfidence prompted the pointless jaunt even further out of their depth into the war zone. But in the present intensifying politicisation of space, the wrong body in the wrong place is presumed guilty. At home or abroad, the new world order hysterically redefines the transgression of borders (more generally, failing to fit official requirements) as criminal – and making waves in media space is suspect too. Returning from the Berlin Film Festival (where Road to Guantanamo won an award for direction), Rasul and Ahmed, along with the actors playing them, were detained at Luton Airport and questioned about their politics. Like the ageing heckler at the New Labour Conference arrested under the same anti-terror legislation, you couldn’t make it up …
 
www.variant.org.uk
 
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AeroSoul, by Tom Jennings. Art review published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 4, February 2005
AeroSoul  by Tom Jennings  
[published in Freedom, Vol. 66, No. 4, February 2005]  
ART 
Stencil graffiti by Arofish often succeeds in transcending formula and cliché, according to Tom Jennings Arofish is a London-based stencil graffiti artist whose output ranges from slogans and cartoons to more abstract and opaque designs and imagery.1 Diverse traditions of political art are referenced – from satire, surrealism and the modern tweaking of mainstream or commercial discourse and iconography (Adbusters, Banksy) – whereas more tentative, existential subject matter (akin to the Paris work of Blek le Rat) is reminiscent of the Situationist critique of everyday life. Throughout, the limits are tested of the political and visual subtlety which can be achieved using this artform, given the constraints on its clandestine, unofficial decoration of public space.The London graffiti includes anti-war and Palestine solidarity graphics, plus ‘Alien Contact’ – masquerading as a cashpoint machine (i.e. of the Fortress Europe people-bank) with instructions to asylum seekers highlighting the intrusive surveillance spreading through our carceral society (the “liberty zone”). ‘Waves of Terror’ retreats from literal clarity to evoke the menace of colonial adventure, and various other examples are even more indirect and suggestive.  Impressionistic flashes of mournful figures appear in limbo, enduring the meaninglessness of life waiting to happen. Some of the website texts echo these themes, but far more angrily – denouncing the drudgery and misery visited on so many (insult seen as added to injury by, for example, crap TV and pop music). Rage thus provides creative energy, but the painstaking stencil process and precarious realisation seem to drain the excess. Vaguely sinister, ghostly renderings remain, bleeding out of the solemn surfaces and rough edges of city landscapes. The specificity of place imbues each scene with a sense of the weight that has to be borne – both by the dead physical infrastructure of mass society, and by the living souls of those flattened into conformity with it. The ephemeral nature of the original brick and concrete canvases (more so than their reproductions in gallery shows or on the website) only intensifies the pathos. 
The device of portraying single or small groups of figures in subdued intimate relationships with neighbourhoods  proved especially fruitful in the winter of 2003/4 when the artist joined International Solidarity Movement direct action activities in Palestine and Baghdad. The straightforward agitprop images mobilising elements of local customs (and their Western connotations) would work equally well as posters or cartoons, with punchlines stressing the venality of Israeli/US imperialism. So ‘Ali Baba’ (Iraqi slang for thief) deploys enjoyable irony in the Arabic caption, “Hey American, take your oil!” (in the story the oil was used to kill the forty thieves and save Ali). All well and good. But there are much more moving pieces combining personal empathy (concerning the calculated horror and madness of military occupation) with a precision of location – each effectively conveying the predicament of that place, and the anguished experience of being in it.
Arofish starts from his own responses to particular sites and situations. If the images awaken their curiosity, passersby may then connect with the more or less submerged concepts underpinning them – without experiencing this as posing, preaching or stating the obvious.2 The evocative poignancy of the Middle East figurative work is especially powerful in this regard – manifesting creative engagement during the otherwise brutal routine of conflict, and prompting direct and immediate feedback from local viewers. Perhaps overwhelmingly obvious oppression provides a clearer backdrop for focusing on the human condition via the interaction between sympathetic outsiders and those bearing the brunt. I look forward to the artist developing further this dimension to his palette at home, where the postmodern apparatuses of power magnify the rootlessness of existence in our fragmented communities. Here, questions of agency, domination and creativity easily dissolve in hubris, hysteria, narcissism and psychosis; the positions of artists, viewers, producers and consumers being so difficult to disentangle. In this context, shunning the stifling seduction of institutions – while spraying onto their external surfaces shared emotional contours of suffering, despair, hope and solidarity – seems a highly promising endeavour.
 
Notes
 
1. collected at www.arofish.org.uk.
2. from an email conversation, January 2005.
 
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