#i spent a Lot of time today thinking about what the FUCK representational abstraction and abstract representation mean

[tothechaos]

gonna be showing up to my drawing class on monday with a still life of sex toys and all i can think is "average liberal arts college experience"

[dustedmagazine]

Punk’d History, Vol. VIII: This Machine [blank] Fascists

Photo by Richard Young

It has the appearance of a worrisome pattern: any number of punk rock’s founding figures embraced the symbolics of Nazi Germany. Ron Asheton, an original and indispensable member of the Stooges, played a number of gigs wearing a red swastika armband, and liked to sport Iron Cross medals and a Luftwaffe-style leather jacket. Sid Vicious loved his bright scarlet, swastika-emblazoned tee shirt, and Siouxsie Sioux, during her tenure as the It-Girl of the Bromley Contingent, mixed her breast-baring, black leather bondage gear with a bunch of “Nazi chic.” And how many early Ramones songs (inevitably penned by Dee Dee) referenced Nazi gear, concepts and geography? “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World,” “Commando,” “It’s a Long Way Back to Germany,” “All’s Quiet on the Eastern Front,” and so on—for sure, more than a few.

“Appearance” is the key term. Poor Sid lacked the sobriety and smarts to have much of a grasp of fascism as an ideology. Siouxsie was just taking the piss, and gleefully pissing off the mid-1970s British general public, for much of whom World War II was still a living memory. Asheton and Dee Dee? Both were sons of hyper-masculine military men. Asheton’s father was a collector of WWII artefacts, and the guitarist shared his father’s fascination. When the Stooges adopted an ethos and aesthetic hostile to the late-1960s prevailing Flower Power rock’n’roll subculture, the Nazi accoutrement seemed to him fitting signs of the band’s anger and alienation. Dee Dee hated his father, an abusive Army officer who married a German woman. Dee Dee spent some of his youth in post-war West Germany, in which Nazi symbols were highly charged with anxiety and vituperation. Casual veneration of Nazis was a convenient way to reject the triumphal ennobling of the Good War, and of the military men associated with its traditions. And (as Sid, Siouxsie and Asheton also noticed) it really bothered the squares. 

None of that makes the superficial use of the swastika or phrases like “Nazi schatzi” any less offensive — it simply underscores that in the cases noted above, the offense was the thing. The politics weren’t even an afterthought, because the political itself had been dismissed as corrupt, boring or simply the native territory of the very people the punks were striking out against. If that’s where the relation between punk and fascism ceased, there wouldn’t be much more to write about.

The post-punk moment in England provided opportunities to rethink and restrategize the nascent détournement of Siouxsie’s fashionable provocations. Genesis P-Orridge and the rest of Throbbing Gristle were a brainy bunch, and their play with fascist signifiers was a good deal more complex. The band’s logo and their occasional appearance in gun-metal grey uniforms clearly alluded to Nazism, with its attendant, keen interests in occult symbols and High Modernist representational languages. TG’s visual gestures were also of a piece with an early band slogan: “Industrial music for industrial people.” Clearly “industrial people” can be read as a highly ironized coupling: the oppressed workers marching through the bowels of Metropolis were a sort of industrial people, reduced to the functionality of pure human capital. TG seemed to impose the same analysis on the middle-managers of Britain’s post-industrial economy, and their uncritical complicity in capital’s cruelties. But it’s also possible to argue that industrial people are industrious people; like TG, industrial people (middle managers, MPs) can get a lot of stuff done. They can produce things. They can make the trains run on time. And what sorts of cargo might those trains be carrying? What variety of conveyance delivered the naked “little Jewish girl” of “Zyklon B Zombies” to her fate?  

To be clear: I don’t mean at all to suggest that TG was a fascist band. Like their punky contemporaries, TG traded in fascist iconography in a spirit of transgressive outrage, expressing their hot indignation with equally heated symbols. And other British post-punk acts flirted with fascist themes and images, ranging from ambiguous dalliance (Joy Division’s overt references to Yehiel De-Nur’s House of Dolls and to Rudolph Hess; and just what was the inspiration for Death in June’s band name?) to more assertive satire (see Current 93’s appealingly bonkers Swastikas for Noddy [LAYLAH Antirecords, 1988]). But a more problematic populist undercurrent in British punk persisted through the late 1970s. The dissolution of Sham 69—due in large part to the National Front’s attempts to appropriate the band’s working-class anger as a form of white pride—opened the way for a clutch of clueless, cynical or outright racist Oi! bands to attempt to impose themselves as the face of blue-collar English punk. And literally so: the Strength through Oi! compilation LP (Decca Records, 1981) featured notorious British Movement activist Nicky Crane on its cover. It didn’t help that the record’s title seemed to allude to the Nazis’ “Strength through Joy [Kraft durch Freude]” propaganda initiative.  

Of course, it’s unfair to tar all Oi! bands with an indiscriminate brush. A few bands whose songs were opportunistically stuck onto Strength through Oi! by the dullards at Decca Records — Cock Sparrer and the excellent Infa Riot — tended leftward in their politics, and were anything but racists. But for a lot of the disaffected kids sucking down pints of Bass and singing in the Shed at Stamford Bridge, it wasn’t much of a leap from the punk pathetique of the Toy Dolls to Skrewdriver’s poisonous palaver.  

In the States, a similarly complicated story can be recovered:

In numerous ways, hardcore intensified punk’s confrontational qualities, musically and aesthetically. The New York hardcore scene made a fetish of its inherent violence, which complemented the music’s sharpened impact. So it’s hard to know precisely what to make of the photo on the cover of Victim in Pain (Rat Cage Records, 1984). If inflicting violence was an essential element of belonging in the NYHC scene, with whom to identify: the Nazi with the pistol, or the abject Ukrainian Jewish man, on his knees and about to tumble into the mass grave?  

Agnostic Front seemed to provide a measure of clarity on the record, which included the song “Fascist Attitudes.” The lyric uses “fascist” as a condemnatory term. But the behaviors the song engages as evidence of fascism are intra-scene acts of violence: “Why should you go around bashing one another? […] / Learning how to respect each other is a must / So why start a war of anger, danger among us?” That’s a rhetoric familiar to anyone who participated in early-1980s hardcore; calls for scene unity were ubiquitous, and the theme is obsessively addressed on Victim in Pain. But the signs of inclusivity most visibly celebrated on the NYHC records and show flyers of the period were a skinhead’s white, shaven pate; black leather, steel-toe boots; and heavily muscled biceps. Those signifiers clearly link to the awful cover image of Strength through Oi! The forms of identity recognized and concretized in the songs’ first-person inclusive pronouns have a clear referent. 

Agnostic Front wasn’t the only NYHC band to refer to and engage World War Two-period fascism. Queens natives Dave Rubenstein and Paul Bakija met at Forest Hills High School—the same school at which John Cummings (Johnny) befriended Thomas Erdelyi (Tommy), laying the groundwork for the formation of the Ramones. Rubenstein and Bakija also took stage names (Dave Insurgent and Paul Cripple) and formed Reagan Youth. But unlike the Ramones, there was nothing tentative or ambivalent about Reagan Youth’s politics. Rubenstein’s parents, after all, were Holocaust survivors. The band’s name riffed on “Hitler Youth,” but specifically did so to draw associations between Reagan and Hitler, between American conservatism’s 1980s resurgence and the Nazi’s hateful, genocidal agenda. Songs like “New Aryans” and “I Hate Hate” accommodated no uncertainties.  

Still, it’s interesting that Victim in Pain and Reagan Youth’s Youth Anthems for the New Order (R Radical Records, 1984) were released only months apart, by bands in the same scene, sometimes sharing bills at CBGBs’ famous matinees of the period. And while Reagan Youth toured with Dead Kennedys, it’s Agnostic Front’s “Fascist Attitudes” that’s closer in content to the most famous punk rock putdown of Nazis.

It’s odd what comes back around: Martin Hannett, whom Biafra playfully chides at the track’s very beginning, produced much of Joy Division’s music, moving the band away from its brittle early sound to the fulsome atmospheres of the Factory records, and to a wider listenership. “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” similarly addresses a formerly obscure, tight scene opening to a greater array of participants, some of whom were attracted solely to hardcore’s reputation for violence. Like “Fascist Attitudes,” the Dead Kennedys’ song itemizes fighting at shows as its chief complaint, and as a principal marker for “Nazi” behavior. Biafra’s lyric eventually gets around to somewhat more focused ideological critique: “You still think swastikas look cool / The real Nazis run your schools / They’re coaches, businessmen, and cops / In a real fourth Reich, you’ll be the first to go.” The kiss-off to punk’s vapid romance of the swastika (it “looks cool”) complements the speculative treatment of a “real fourth Reich.” Both operate at the level of abstraction. The casual, superficial relation to the symbol’s aesthetic assumes a sort of safety from the real, material consequences of its application. And the emergence of a fascist political regime is dangled as a possible future event. That speculative futurity undoes the “real” in “real Nazis.” The threat is ultimately a metaphorical construct. The Nazis are metaphorical “Nazis.”  

Still, it’s the song’s chorus that resonates most powerfully. So much so that the song has found its way into other artworks.

Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room (2015) is frequently identified as a horror film on streaming services. We could split hairs over that genre marker. The film gets quite graphically bloody, but there’s no psychotic slasher killer, no supernatural force at work. And cinematically, the film is a lot more interested in anxiety and dramatic tension than it is in inspiring revulsion or disgust. It terrifies, more than it horrifies. What’s especially compelling about the film (aside from Imogen Poots’ excellent performance, and Patrick Stewart’s menacing turn as charismatic fascist Darcy Banks) is its interest in embedding the viewer in a social context in which the Nazis are a lot less metaphorical, a lot more real. In Green Room, the kids in the punk band the Ain’t Rights are warned about the club they have agreed to play: “It’s mostly boots and braces down there.” And they understand the terms. What they can’t quite imagine is a room — a scene, a political Real — in which fascism is dominant. Their recognition of the stakes of the Real comes too late. The violence is already in motion. In that world, the Dead Kennedys song provides a nice slogan, but symbolic action alone is entirely inadequate.  

OK, sure, Green Room is a fiction. Its violence is necessarily aestheticized, distorted and hyperbolized. But perhaps the film’s most urgent source of horror can be located in its plausible connections to the social realities of our material, contemporary conjuncture. You don’t have to dig very deep into the Web to find thousands of records made by white nationalist and neo-fascist-allied bands, many, many of which deploy stylistic chops identified with punk rock and hardcore. You can listen. You can buy. (And yeah, I’m not going to link to any of that miserable shit, because fuck them. If you do your own digging to see what’s what, be careful. It’s scary and upsetting in there.) It feels endless. And the virulent sentiments expressed on those records are echoed in institutional politics in the US and elsewhere: Steve King (and now Marjorie Taylor Greene, effectively angling for her seat in Congress), Nigel Farage, Alternative für Deutschland, elected leadership in Poland and Hungary. Explicit white supremacist music also has somewhat more carefully coded counterparts in much more visible media (the nightly monologuing on Fox News) and in very well-positioned, prominent policy makers (Stephen Miller, who’s on the record touting “great replacement” theory and is a big fan of The Camp of the Saints). It’s a complex, ideologically coherent network, working industriously to impose and install its hateful vision as the dominant political Real. 

Sometimes it feels as if no progress at all has been made. Maybe we’re moving toward the reactionaries. Contrast Skokie in the late 1970s with Charlottesville in 2017. And now if the Neo-Nazis have licenses for their long guns, they can strut through American streets wearing them in the name of “law and order.” It’s even more disturbing that a subculture that wants to clothe itself in “revolution” and “radicalism” is so tightly in league with institutional politics. Say what you will about Siouxsie’s Nazi-fashion antics, no one suspected that her prancing echoed political activity, policy-making or messaging in Westminster.

So what’s a punk to do? It’s certain that a vigorously free society needs to preserve spaces in which unpopular speech can be uttered and exchanged. Punk should pride itself on defending those spaces. But speech that operates in conjunction with an ascendant political power and ideological agenda doesn’t need defense or energetic attempts to preserve its right to existence. In October of 2020, that speech (in this case, speeches being written by Miller, texts by folks who have spent time in Tucker Carlson’s writer’s room and songs by white supremacist hardcore bands) has become synonymous with political right itself.  

So now more than ever, it’s important to be active in the public square, to stand up to the fascists and to say it, often and out loud:

Jonathan Shaw

[titmasjack]

Capturing Reference Footage

As an introductory workshop as I begin to think about my initial plans and ideas to how I could approach the ‘Mystery Box’ project. We spent the time today with Sarah Perry, establishing a range of acting techniques and processes that would help create a foundation for us to build upon when having our characters interact with a box. With the goal of creating a range of reference footage using both myself and peers, we set out to film and capture a variety of interactions to suggest a range of possible narratives. 

Considering the variety of emotions we could pursue, our goal was to break down a range of sequences into key poses. The ability to translate our initial ideas into reference imagery, we would go on to establish the key beats that makeup and tell the narrative in its simplest form. Using visual storytelling alone, to explain the interaction between a character and a prop. 

Taken out of our comfort zone this workshop gave us the opportunity to break out of the traditional workflow, responding and gathering primary resources through the use of live-action. In the hopes of showcasing our variation of experiments, this set a foundation of work that we could develop upon and potentially pursue in our own time. 

This first lesson of our experimental week opened up the possibility to pursue a range of ideas and work in groups to collaborate and feed off of each individual representation of a task. As Sarah emphasised the reliability of working as a team in the industry, she established the importance of communicating our ideas and having the openness to reflect and respond to criticisms given from not only tutors but peers to better our outcomes throughout the lesson and upcoming weeks as we begin to refine and begin producing our final outcomes for the brief.

Establishing Ideas

To gather a range of ideas, Sarah established a range of scenarios around the mystery of the box itself. Having the characters, in turn, interact with the prop, we as actors had to consider the subtext and context behind their actions. Building key moments that builds the physicality of the narrative, the character's subtext is what leads to the clarity of the animation. Giving the audience the opportunity to clearly see the emotional effect the animator was trying to portray. We have to question ourselves, considering who is this person? How can we portray their dynamic energy or lack thereof through our actions? With each character being individual should we question the gravitas of their performance?

In the hopes of portraying a more pantomime esque performance, like that of traditional Disney animation, Sarah explained that we should explore the explosive emotional range of our characters. Highlighting and exaggerating how there is potential for a vast change in shape through the manipulation of body language techniques, such as posture and gesture.

With the need to showcase how our character walks into frame, finds the box and reacts to the box. We could potentially break down our narrative into 3 key poses. Which should provide the audience with enough information that highlights a clear and accurate portrayal of our characters action. With this in mind, taking it in turns, we set out to create a range of individual scenarios that established our initial ideas on how our characters could interact with the prop. 

Character Subtext

I found that to get the most believable performances from myself and peers, taking the opportunity to bring a subtext to my acting, allowed for a wider context and understanding of the characters that I was portraying. With a deeper understanding of their intentions and emotional values, I was able to easily process the reasoning behind their actions to give a more realistic and believable performance throughout my work. 

Following are a series of subtext dialogues that I used throughout the workshop to establish my character's motivation for not only pursuing the box but their initial curiosity and inevitable reaction;

Scenario 1: ‘You don’t belong there’ (referring to Mystery Box) 

‘How on earth did you end up in the lounge?’

‘Something’s not right...’ (As the character leans into the box, realising the vast difference inside)

‘What the fuck!’

‘How deep does this thing go!’

‘Nah if I’ve learnt anything from Mystery Boxes, I’m not going near another one again.’ (Walks away from Mystery Box, thathoming the possibility of its size)

Scenario one establishes a much more curious character, demonstrating that this is something along the lines of normal in this scenario and not a relatively new or exciting revelation in the narrative. Their interaction with the box is quite nuanced and relaxed although the actions would be considered quite abstract. 

Scenario 2: ‘Look at how the sun has come out to say hello!’ (Not phased by the mystery box due to its small scale)

‘Bloody thing..’ (Kicks into mystery box revealing its significant weight)

‘Can’t be dealing with that today, I’ve got enough on my plate!’ (Places the flap of the mystery box back and steps over the box)

Scenario two tries to address a change in scale and weight, with the box being a lot smaller, I want to overplay the characters interaction with the box by having the actor simply walk over the box. This interaction with the box is more aggressive and angry due to its annoyance within the scene. 

Visual Reference Reflection

Reflecting on the work we were able to make throughout the course of the workshop, I found that even though we made a vast array of scenarios, nine out of ten times they didn’t accomplish what I originally intended. As a learning curve for my production, I can take from this that I had to create a wide array of iterations to find the specific nuances that made the narrative effective. Finding the actions that feed into the story by using and incorporating elements from other peoples ideas. 

I found that unlike my own, many of my peer's visual reference was typically a lot more expressive and flamboyant. Using a range of exaggerated gestures and shape language in comparison to my own examples, I conveyed a much more nuanced and subtle approach to visual storytelling. 

Considering how I want to move forward with my ideas, I’m tempted to explore a new range of experiments that embraces this more pantomime style performance that I was able to convey in my representation of other works but not my own. 

Changing my idea to be a lot more expressive, I fear that my challenge came from consciously thinking about the emotions of my character and is something I need to explore and adapt beyond to get a vaster range of ideas that I could use going forward in the upcoming weeks. 

To summarise;

I discussed in detail how we worked in groups to establish a variety of initial ideas based around our ‘Mystery Box’ Brief

Used visual reference to build a portfolio of ideas and characteristics we could include as inspiration in our animations.

Should I consider pushing this further by film more footage as my ideas develop, to get a better understanding of how I want my animation to be timed? 

Break down the key poses of my favourite visual references into a range of storyboards in preparation for Friday's task.