Max Schaefer – Children of the Sun (Granta, 2010)

I first read about this book the year before last over at Stewart Home’s blog. My interest was piqued as the subject matter was notorious gay neo-nazi skinhead Nicky Crane, who I’d previously written about here when his appearance in a Psychic TV video came to light. There wasn’t that much material available about Crane online (or anywhere) at the time and I’m still slightly concerned to see my site is the third thing that comes up in a google search for him.

I’ve been meaning to review the book for ages – it was my holiday read last year. This is based on my notes from a while back and what I can remember now.

“Children of the Sun” is fictionalised but accurate – Schaefer has certainly put the necessary research into this and there were no cringeworthy bits that usually crop up with depictions of the far right (from posh plays to The Bill). Various aspects of the British fascism are portrayed accurately but without descent into unnecessary trainspotterish detail. Some brushes with anti-fascists are described in similar ways to how they have been told to me as well.

The heart of the story is the interplay between two protagonists – one a contemporary of Crane’s on the far right, another a young researcher who is obsessed with Crane after his death. Although violence and sex are certainly part of the narrative it’s not a football hoolie book which is hagiographic and uncritical.

There is also a good depiction of the paranoia that an obsessive immersion in this material can induce…

The book is not something to read on the train as lurid news clippings and far right agit prop are reproduced throughout. Crane still exerts a morbid fascination on many from beyond the grave – both on the far right and in aspects of gay subculture. I saw him around on a few occasions whilst studying in central London in the early nineties and can confirm he seemed like someone best avoided. The fact that he was living something of a double life doesn’t really detract from this. Clearly a novel about his life will raise more questions than it answers, but it is a good read and I’d definitely recommend it if you have an interest in this sort of subject matter.

Available in print - and online as a free/donation pdf. (and from Amazon)

“We demand that the goth scene be more than a black-clad reflection of mainstream society”

I’ve written about goth on here before and it’s something that still appeals to me in many ways, although you’re unlikely to catch me wearing eyeliner or crimping my hair. Anarchism has also had an influence on my political (and other) thought and activity, although again I wouldn’t call myself an anarchist these days for a whole host of reasons which are probably best left for another time.

Graceless‘ radical/decadent/anarcho approach to goth interests me, recalling the early eigthies London of Alistair Livingstone’s “Subway surfing anarcho goths” and many of the reminiscences over at Kill Your Pet Puppy. I have a fascination with subcultures that are about more than fashion, and the attempt here to either highlight an ideological undercurrent in goth (or to inject one into it?) is intriguing. Certainly most of the books/mags etc on goth that I’ve ever seen have been largely about flogging music or clothes  (or expaning the marketplace within in which that takes place by reinforcing the goth identity?).

Graceless is well written and looks great. At over a hundred pages this debut issue is going to take some time to digest properly. There are some interesting interviews with people like Jarboe and Attrition (as well as acts which were new to me) and some cool features as well. I haven’t read it all yet, and I focus below on articles that made me think, which of course will be the ones that I have disagreements with.

Decadent Politics covers the poetic, visionary and utopian I guess. It posits decadence as being anti-fascist, which is interesting (and certainly believable if you look at Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism on sexual repression etc):

“Today there are those that say fascism is simply fashion, that to strut around in a SS uniform and festoon our lace with the Nazi death-head skulls is meaningless and should cause no concern. Saying this is to ignore what they represent on a symbolic level. We would never wear a McDonald’s golden arches to a goth club because it represents mass conformity. So does the iron cross. The zombies wear business suits, and they are not satiated only with the brains of the living; they also hunger for our hearts and souls.”

A radical’s guide to spooky music is an interesting overview of the bands and artists who the author feels represent “radical goth”, including Coil, KMFDM, Bauhaus and Joy Division. A lot of the lyrics and politics quoted aren’t about things I am especially interested in: animal rights, non-specific rebellion, anti-consumerism, anti-americanism. But it’s probably a bit much to expect the goth subculture (or one aspect of it) to develop identical politics to my own. As manifestos go this is an interesting drawing together of various tendencies in goth that certainly demonstrate that it is far from apolitical.

I am quite wary of political activists who over-identify with subcultures these days. I think “identity politics” is a trap which divides people and can lead to situations where cultural signifiers like music (or even ethnicity and sexuality) are seen as more important than people’s relationships with each other and their experience of capitalism where they work or live.

However, the flipside of this is that a purely political approach in which you only talk to people about, say, the conditions on their housing estate, or cutbacks at their workplace can come across as a bit robotic. So there’s a balance to be struck between the (sub)cultural and the political, which is increasingly difficult to achieve as culture fragments into more and more niches. As Steve Goodman and Kodwo Eshun pointed out, the “long tail” posits a society where there is less and less communal experience and more and more instant individualised consumer gratification.

Subcultures have a role to play in changing the status quo, and goth’s outright promotion of androgyny and gender equality is all for the good (although hardly universal, as the article here about “goth misogyny”  and “pick up culture” at some goth nights makes clear). I guess what is missing is a fully developed critique of how capitalism operates as a set of relationships, of the system rather than some of its manifestations (war, hunger, etc). But it’s not like any other music/fashion based subcultures have that.

There’s a fair bit in Graceless about Goths and their place in the anarchist scene. As someone who has had gothic tendencies and has some sympathy with parts of anarchism this all seems a bit too confining. I find the worlds of info-shops, squats and goth clubs quite alienating these days, despite being interested in them as social phenomena (and in the ideas which circulate in them). I suppose hanging around in places like that helped me develop my ideas and a sense of who I am, but I think people are kidding themselves if they reckon that havens for alternative fashion are going to play a useful role in mass struggles. Indeed there are a few passages in Graceless which abhor mass culture, the mainstream and suit-wearing “zombies” (see quote above). Contributors have mixed feelings about Marilyn Manson, but Lady Gaga (arguably the most visible current example of the gothic aesthetic, albeit not sonically) is conspicuous by her absence.

I suppose this is really getting into similar territory to two articles about anarchopunk I’ve republished on my website:

• Veg Wedge (on anarchopunk’s moralism and failure to prioritise)
• White Punks On Bordiga (on the limits of subculture as mechanism for social change).

That said, I can of course completely understand why retreating into / immersing yourself in subcultures is a good and necessary thing for some people. If you’re one of a handful of freaks in the bible belt then there must be an incredible feeling of solidarity and self-empowerment if you start your own DIY Goth Night (as one contributor did, smack bang in KKK country). The murder of Sophie Lancaster is chilling reminder of the sort of intolerance people who dress a bit different can face out there in small town England in the early 21st Century.

Your Goth Is Dead: The Rise And Fall of Goth In America is a nice overview of the developments of the subculture in the nineties, including goths being seduced by rave and ironic self-mockery which is I suppose the antithesis of the playful po-faced strategies of the eighties.

Some of the most rewarding pieces in this issue stretch the definition of Goth backwards in time – Dressed To Kill: Illegal Dandyism looks at youth cults like the Zazou and Edelweiss Pirates, whose fashion sense shocked the totalitarian regimes they lived under, and provided them with enough reason to take on fascists physically as well as culturally. There are also some intriguing investigations into the Darker Side of Victorian Children’s Tales and German expressionist cinema during the rise of Nazism.

As I said above, I’ve mainly concentrated here on my differences with Graceless. That strikes me as being more interesting thing to write about than saying “it’s great!”, which it most certainly is. It’s made me ruminate on a lot of good stuff and I’m very happy that they’ll be including a contribution from me in the second issue. If you’re interested then you’re probably already reading the magazine itself instead of ploughing though my waffle here.

With 64 pages, this is the biggest issue of Datacide yet!

It also includes a contribution from me. No time for an extensive review, but all of the material here is well up to the usual high standard.

FEATURES

Christoph Fringeli – “Hedonism and Revolution: The Barricade and the Dancefloor”

Stewart Home – “Dope smuggling, LSD manufacture, organized crime & the law in 1960s London”

John Eden – “Shaking the Foundations: Reggae soundsystem meets ‘Big Ben British values’ downtown”

Alexis Wolton – “Tortugan tower blocks? Pirate signals from the margins”

Neil Transpontine – “Dancing before the police come”

Christoph Fringeli – “From Subculture to Hegemony: Transversal Strategies of the New Right in Neofolk and Industrial”

Nemeton – “From Conspiracy Theories to Attempted Assassinations: The American Radical Right and the Rise of the Tea Party Movement”

R. C. – “How to start with the subject. Notes on Burroughs and the ‘combination of all forms of struggle’”

Matthew Fuller and Steve Goodman – “Beat Blasted Planet. An interview with Steve Goodman on ‘Sonic Warfare’”

Terra Audio – “Free Parties”

Gorki Plubakter – “This is the end… the official ending”

FICTION

“Sonic Fictions” by Riccardo Balli
“Digital Disease” by Dan Hekate
“Infra-Noir. 23 Untitled Poems” by Howard Slater
“Office Work” by Matthew Fuller

PLUS

Record Reviews
The Lives and TImes of Bloor Schleppy
Charts

ORDERING

Available now for EUR 4.00 incl. postage – order now by sending this amount via paypal to praxis(at)c8.com, or send EUR 10 for 3 issues (note that currently only issues 5, 7 and 10 are still available, but you can also pre-order future issues.

Also from the Praxis Webshop.

Who Makes the Nazis?: What Ends When the Symbols Shatter? My Time as a Death In June Fan.

An autobiographical post about my time as a neofolk obsessive and how I gradually came to reject it all.

Who Makes The Nazis is a new blog which is “Keeping an eye on the neo-fascists currently burrowing their way into a subculture near you…” off to a good start with yet more on Tony Wakeford, but also some more general ruminations on the neofolk scene which are very well argued. I especially liked the comments in this entry about artists who harp on about exploring extreme material, but seem unable to come to any conclusions or opinions about their favourite subject matter, even after a quarter of a century.

I was also thrilled to see Martin rev up the Beyond The Implode war machine with a piece entitled “10 youthful musical rituals I (sometimes) miss“.

Datacide magazine have started digitising the archival pieces from their predecessor, Alien Underground, which was a great zine covering techno, noise and politics in the mid 1990s. Pieces so far on the Criminal Justice Act, Digital Hardcore Recordings, Sakho, and a lot more. Even the record reviews from back then are a nice reminder times gone by…

Datacide contributor Flint Michigan has a great interview with Arthur McDonald of early Factory Records act The Royal Family And The Poor over at Mute Magazine.

I’m grateful to my old mucker Merrick for dropping by with his thoughts on the election. We’ve argued the toss about politics for well over 15 years now and I’m pleased that it looks like continuing until we are shouty old men.

I’m sure that Merrick is correct that, nationally. people avoided the Greens and Independents in many areas because they were voting tactically against the Conservatives.

But as Matt Sellwood (Green candidate for Hackney North and Stoke Newington) has pointed out, this doesn’t apply in Labour safe seats. Indeed it looks like large numbers of the electorate here were either not persuaded by the Greens, or irrationally voted for Labour because they wanted to send a strong message to the Tories (who stand ZERO chance of being elected here).

Whilst we can all take some comfort about the British National Party’s absence from Barking and Dagenham Council, I’m not at all convinced that this means they will now run off with their tails between their legs. My friend Glyn Rhys has dug into the numbers a little and come up with some rather more troubling conclusions.

Perhaps the most obvious of these is that the BNP now have 563,000 people prepared to vote for them. And that this support is despite an unprecedented campaign pointing out how horrible and “Nazi” the BNP is. Either these voters are fine with voting for alleged Nazis or they simply don’t believe it.

Merrick is correct to compare the current state of play with the National Front’s vote in the 1979 election. He is also right to say that there is probably a “ceiling” which far right (and far left, but that’s another sorry story) groups can reach in UK elections. Indeed, the main threat that far right parties pose is not seizing power and implementing their policies, but by acting as pressure groups on mainstream political parties.

The BNP now have double the votes the NF achieved and seem to be able to successfully spread out into new areas, which the NF failed to do. With electoral reform right at the top of the political agenda for the first time I can remember, those 563,00 votes may count for a great deal more next time around.

Parliament’s main priority in its next term will be to address the massive debt incurred whilst bailing out the banks. This means savage cuts, job losses and even harsher times for those at the sharp end. There are going to be a lot of pissed off people around looking for alternatives to whatever combination of Lib/Con/Lab ends up in charge. Call me cynical but I’m not sure that they’re all going to flock to the Green Party or the remnants of the left…

Previously on uncarved.

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UNITED COLORS OF BLAGGERS ITA – RE-RELEASE – Blaggers ITA’s MySpace Blog

Classic album now available again with bonus tracks.

Blaggers ITA on uncarved.org