Born in Flames : : Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses / / Howard Hampton.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter HUP eBook Package Archive 1893-1999
• VerfasserIn: Hampton, Howard,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2008]; ©2008
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (496 p.)

Twenty years as an outsider scouring the underbelly of American culture has made Howard Hampton a uniquely hard-nosed 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- I. The Glamour of Extremity -- 1. fairy tales from strangers -- 2. Chinese radiation -- 3. Venus, armed -- 4. American maniacs -- 5. jungle boogie -- 6. Metal-liad -- 7. Smells like . . . -- 8. Vamp -- 9. Screaming target -- 10. Blood poet -- 11. Sympathy for the devils -- 12.“Nebraska” -- 13. Everybody knows this is nowhere -- II. Shoot the Guitar Player -- 14. Let us now kill white elephants -- 15. Bring me the head of Gordon Sumner -- 16. Dueling cadavers -- 17. Aftermath -- 18. Build me an L.A. woman -- 19. Do the clam -- 20. Reification blues -- 21. Moles on the beach / down in flames -- 22. Mouse trap replica -- 23. Eyewitness news -- 24. Imaginary cities / holiday for strings -- 25. Book of exodus -- 26. Prophecy girls -- 27. Money jungle music -- III. Waterloo Sunset Boulevard -- 28. Such sweet thunder -- 29. Anatomies of melancholy -- 30. My own private Benjamin -- 31. Blur as genre -- 32. Nice Gesamtkunstwerk if you can get it -- 33. JLG/SS -- 34. Lynch mob -- 35. Flattering the audience -- 36. Savant-idiot, or pull the last train to Dogville -- 37. American daemons -- 38. Wrecked in El Dorado -- 39. Whatever you desire: Movieland and Pornotopia -- 40. Gold diggers of 1935 -- 41. Apocrypha now! -- Sources -- Acknowledgments -- Credits -- Index