Visions

By John Scanlan

Forthcoming from Reaktion Books, May 2022.

In the fifties, when rock-n-roll first burst into life the shockwaves reverberated around the world, aided by images of untamed youth brought to life on screen. But for rock's performers showbusiness remained in control, contriving a series of cash-in movies to exploit the new musical fad. That world was blown apart by the events of the sixties and the decades that followed. Artists and documentarists merged music and image, rock stars used film to mythologise themselves, movie directors plotted stories inspired by rock, while low-budget auteurs and video enthusiasts pursued new possibilities.

A riveting cultural history, Rock-n-Roll Plays Itself plunges into an ocean of images produced over seven decades to explore why it was that inventing the means through which rock was able to play itself would help to ensure it existed into old age and well beyond the seemingly disposable impulses that first gave it life.

From Bo Diddley and Elvis Presley to David Bowie, Patti Smith, Nico and the video stars of the 80s, and from Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising to the films of Scorsese, Pennebaker and DIY documentarists like Amos Poe, Don Letts and Target Video, this is a unique retelling of the story of rock – from birth to old age – through its onscreen life.

Chapters

Prologue: Look Out

1965
Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and D.A. Pennebaker make a scopitone short in a London alleyway. The significance of birth moments in rock ‘n’ roll mythology and the role of screen culture in their making.

1: Exploding Tomorrow

1955-1963
Bo Diddley meets Ed Sullivan and TV launches rock into the American mainstream. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley. The birth of ‘rocksploitation’ movies. Presley conquers America on TV and suffers death on the big screen. Alan Freed’s jukebox musicals. The end of the fifties and retrospective tales of rock's first era. Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising.

2: Untamed Youth

1959-1966
Expresso Bongo and the grubby reality of rock ‘n’ roll stardom. The Beatles take America in fact and fiction in the Maysles’ What's Happening! and Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gales’s I Wanna Hold Your Hand and play themselves in A Hard Day’s Night. Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert try to make a rock movie but end up managing The Who. Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones and Peter Whitehead makes Charlie Is My Darling.

3: Altered States

1960-1967
Pennebaker, Leacock and the Maysles’ brothers. Don’t Look Back. Andy Warhol deploys the Velvet Underground to promote his films. The Yardbirds in Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Peter Whitehead’s Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London and emerging psychedelia. The Who blow themselves up on TV. The Beatles’ global broadcast with ‘All You Need is Love’. The Human Be-In and the San Francisco scene. Hendrix in Monterey Pop.

4: Making Movies

1967-76
John Milius scripts a ‘rock’n’roll war movie’ while listening to the Doors. The Doors and UCLA film school. Coppola’s realisation of Apocalypse Now. Jean-Luc Godard, the Rolling Stones and One-Plus-One. Martin Scorsese, Michael Wadleigh and Woodstock’s triumph. Scorsese’s use of rock in film. Simon and Garfunkel inspire Mike Nicholls’ The Graduate, Robert Altman constructs McCabe and Mrs Miller around the songs of Leonard Cohen. Easy Rider. The Band in Scorsese’s The Last Waltz.

5: The Aftermath

1969-1973
Barbet’s Schroeder’s More, the Maysles’ Gimme Shelter and Simon and Garfunkel’s Songs of America and the end of the sixties. Message to Love, the last great hippie era gathering and audience chaos. Nic Roeg’s Glastonbury Fayre. Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, the London Rock and Roll Show and Let The Good Times Roll signal changing times. Eat the Document, Stardust and American Graffiti look back, while David Chase’s Not Fade Away shifts backwards and forwards in time.

6: The new people

1973-1979
David Bowie and Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The Man Who Fell to Earth. Derek Jarman films the Sex Pistols and television fires them to instant notoriety. Don Letts’ Punk Rock Movie. New York’s No Wave scene feeds on the promiscuous interplay of film and music. Debbie Harry, Amos Poe and Jim Jarmusch. Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. Punk’s movie stars and The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle. Wim Wenders inspires Chris Petit’s Radio On.

7: Video Vortex

1979-1990
Blondie’s video album Eat to the Beat. Todd Rundgren’s early attempts to combine music and video technology. San Francisco’s Target Video documents the underground scene. Bruce Conner’s ‘Breakaway’ and other forerunners of music video. Devo, The Cramps and The Residents. MTV’s AOR origins and the battle for black music artists. Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. David Byrne and Prince become screen stars. Lou Reed hits the dance floor and turns up in a TV ad. The films of Nic Roeg merge with the music of Big Audio Dynamite in ‘E=MC2’.

8: Do it again

1970-2017
Let It Be and the prematurely aged Beatles. The decadent Mick Jagger in Performance. The Rolling Stones discover the secret to eternal youth. Paul Simon’s One Trick Pony and rock as the preserve of the young. Metal fatigue in This is Spinal Tap, Metallica’s Some Kind of Monster, Anvil: The Story of Anvil. A surprising reversal of the ageing process in Last Days Here. Ozzy Osbourne and family become TV stars. Age, experience and rock longevity in Nico 1988, Patti Smith: Dream of Life. Inside the mind of Nick Cave in 20,000 Days on Earth.

Epilogue: look back

Fact and fiction in Rolling Thunder Review: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. Rock film and rock mythologising in an age of screen saturation.

afterword: fans

Rock fan obsessions in Yesterday, Groupies, Almost Famous, High Fidelity, School of Rock and others. The fan as detective in The Ballad of A.J. Weberman, Velvet Goldmine, Searching for Sugar Man. Stella Street and Yacht Rock as rock fan creative vehicles.

Aesthetic Fatigue

This text is from the Introduction to Aesthetic Fatigue: Modernity and the Language of Waste, which is a volume that has its origins in a 2006 conference that I chaired at the University of St Andrews as part of the work of the AHRC Centre for Environmental History. Notes on the contributors can be found at the end of this text.

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George Kubler in his book The Shape of Time elaborates an idea of “aesthetic fatigue” that might server to encapsulate much of what, in this volume, seems to be characteristic of waste — its relation to time, to energy, to modernity’s desire for evermore perfect designs and forms of living — and to why we discard the past and the stuff that once adorned our world.  Overfamiliarity, he suggests, makes us tired of the way the world looks; it makes the world itself look tired. “Waste,” as this book aims to show, is a multifaceted phenomenon — a by-product of technological progress, of efforts at landscape improvement and rational efficiency, of self-consciousness and of a jaded familiarity with the way things are. But it is also simply a by-product of living, which is essentially the expenditure of energy that is fed by the use we make of our environment. 

What Aesthetic Fatigue therefore aims to do is look at how waste has been represented, imagined, narrated, analysed, and how, in its various manifestations — as material stuff, moral lack, or other spectral presence — it has transformed the nature of everyday life in modernity. While the essays that are presented in this volume represent a variety of academic traditions and disciplinary specialisms, they have in common shared themes, conceptual unities, and a concern with the very language of waste. Aesthetic Fatigue begins with considerations of early modern ideas of waste in the understanding of landscape, and works through literary, artistic, philosophical, social and economic considerations of waste as a key to understanding modern life. 

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson’s essay on eighteenth-century wasteland “improvement” in the Scottish Highlands focuses on the role of marginal lands as the medium through which a hybrid modernity of agricultural productivity and traditional political loyalties was developed, and in which the socially redemptive powers of peat moss and a “wasteland mania” acted as a critique of the industrialism and revolutionary radicalism that was gripping societies elsewhere at the time. Jill Payne’s essay moves the discussion of the Highland “wasteland” as an under-used resource into the twentieth century when the economic and geographic potential for large-scale development in the Scottish Highlands was arguably at its greatest. But, as she argues, the twentieth-century veneration of the region’s outstanding natural beauty is the product of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stress on the importance of seeing in such natural environments an alternative to industrialization, and a world that seemed to exist beyond the utilitarian emphasis on “progress.” This examination of hydroelectric development explores how the potential for improvement contradicted and threatened visions of the Highland landscape that had taken root in the aftermath of the rise of Romantic idealism, laying bare competing twentieth-century ideas about the “best use” of non-urban space, and the associated language of “waste” and “wasteland.”

Publication Details

Cambridge Scholars
335 pages, October 2013

ISBN 978-1-4438-4912-8

Available from:
Cambridge Scholars 
Amazon (UK)

My own essay looks at the example of the Mojave Desert as, variously, a space of liminal encounters, military research, and play, in order to explore how cultural and phenomenological dimensions of forget-ting can inform a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which “waste” and “wastelands” are manifested in contemporary life, yet at the same time obscured in their real dimensions and serious consequences. Steven Connor’s consideration of air pollution focuses on how the very idea of air has changed as a result of an awareness that the atmosphere itself had, in modernity, become the target of waste dumping in the form of a variety of aerial rejectamenta. 

The next three essays have as a focus ideas about waste that drove ideas about political economy and sanitation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Piers Hale’s essay looks at the relationship between waste, nature and social justice by focusing on the emergent “green politics” of the nineteenth-century English writer William Morris — who saw the wasteful organization of labour in society as a means through which socialist ideas about the inequities of capitalism could be revealed and addressed — and the contrasting ideas of political economy popular at that time (in, for example, the writings of Herbert Spencer), which were under-pinned by a belief in a form of social Darwinism that rested significantly on an association between human nature and the natural environment. William Kupinse’s essay examines the widespread use of waste as rhetorical device in the writing of H. G. Wells, and argues that closer examination reveals that two related issues inform the body of Wells’s oeuvre: the utopian impulse that manifests itself in Wells’s various programs of political and social reform, and Wells’s concept of “waste” as a negative motive force driving his utopianism. It is a reading that reveals Wells’s systematic exploration of the cultural construction of value, and aims to sketch the epistemological underpinnings of waste in the early twentieth century.

Alberto Duman’s “The Future as a Virus in the Midst of our Waste” is concerned with the management of waste matter and hygienic practices in utopian projections of nineteenth century British urban planning, which he ties into concerns about the future of waste management and urban development through a description of his own 2006 artistic project — the “Lamby Way Time Capsule” — which proposed the burial of a time capsule within the imminently closing landfill facilities at Lamby Way in Cardiff. The purpose of the time capsule, Duman explains, was to function as a reversed viral presence, keeping alive a particular discourse of the landfill, and thus waste, in the face of the planned aestheticization of the site which, of course, would continue a modern trend of obscuring the reality of waste.

The following three essays by William Viney, Maura Coughlin and Jaimey Hamilton examine how artists have made use of a variety of wastes to comment upon aspects of modernity. Viney’s essay looks at the figure of the ruin in modern culture and as represented in the work of Hubert Robert, Joseph Gandy and other artists. It is the vision of ruin, he suggests, that has often allowed us to imagine the future as something that might have a different temporal shape than the past and present. In contrast to the ruins of architecture, Maura Coughlin’s essay draws our attention to modern ruins of another kind — in the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cézanne whose paintings of quarries dwell on what she terms “the feral remains of capitalist exploitation of natural resources.” As she illustrates, theirs was not an entirely escapist construction of nature (considered, for instance, as the pristine, prelapsarian other to urban modernity) but rather an engagement with the awkward, ugly remains of modern exploitation. Jaimey Hamilton’s study of French Nouveau Réaliste artist Arman looks at works such as 1973’s La Grande Bouffe (The Big Feast) — a Plexiglas box filled with Seven-Up bottles, milk cartons, canned tomato tins, and detergent boxes embedded in clear polyester — as an example of how art reflected the activity of “wasting” in contemporary consumer culture. And, following Georges Bataille analysis of the role that the “accursed share” plays in culture, for Hamilton, Arman’s spectacles of waste (glass vitrines, like a shop window, that transform something as abject as trash into image, and then image into a luxury art object) are seen as useful allegories for the paradoxical relationship between commodities and waste.

What we might term the affective dimensions of “waste” occupy the authors of the next three essays. Edward Gitre looks at how the Second World War opened a new chapter on the history of boredom, a social malaise that he suggests became a common feature of an American culture and society overly acquainted with the nervous exhaustion and overstimulation occasioned by modern warfare, as the “retreads” of war (returning soldiers struggling to adjust to normality) illustrate some of the unintended consequences of war’s destructive acceleration of human experience. Next to the suburban unease of ex-servicemen that Gitre identifies, Rex Ferguson’s essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby explores how that novel’s grand settings of East and West Egg, as well as the debonair personality of Jay Gatsby and the phantasmagoric imagery of his extravagant parties, provides the context for one of the most telling depictions of the relationship between modernity and waste in literature. He suggests that the major themes of the novel — such as purity, transience and idealism — are all, in fact, underpinned by the spectre of waste. Finally, Harvie Ferguson returns to the question of boredom with a more philosophical probing of the experiential conditions of modernity. His essay plots the ways in which lethargy, a lack of interest in life, and an engulfing sense of indifference to the world are bound together in a peculiar unity that is distinctive of modern society. He further suggests that while repulsion, defilement, and fear of contagion are possible experiences in any society, for modern society, they constitute the peculiar aesthetic-moral unity of disgust. In the case of both boredom and disgust, he argues, the significance of the peculiarity of their modern dimensions has to be seen through a phenomenology of waste.

The final three essays develop approaches to understanding material wastes and how we dispose of them. Tim Cooper’s essay observes that while capitalist modernity may depend upon waste, it nonetheless claims to be able to reabsorb its own leftovers, and to reincorporate its own excretions. In a survey of the idea and application of recycling in twentieth century Britain, and its relationship to modern conceptions of waste, he ponders its role in the reinforcement of capitalist ideology. Jennifer Gabrys’s essay examines the consequences of the explosion in electronics and products such as personal computers (including their components) to reveal the often invisible nature of its wastes and contaminants, and also how these particular wastes spread into distant “spaces of remainder” that extend the waste ecologies of western societies. By investigating these spaces of electronic waste, she argues, we can begin to re-map technology through its remainders. In the final essay, Ray Stokes and Stephen Sambrook take a rather different approach to understanding how modernity has dealt with the unwanted stuff of everyday life by identifying trends in the developing business and economy of waste management — that is, through the ways that waste, at the level of local level, is collected, processed and disposed of — by focusing on the British public sector governance of the waste business with specific reference to the city of Glasgow in Scotland, which saw itself as a pioneer in waste management.

It is hoped that these essays and the issues they raise not only enliven the reader’s fascination with those parts of life, those spaces and behaviours we ordinarily consider to be negligible, but that through the diversity of its approaches it can stimulate further intellectual engagement about the lessons to be learned from modernity in relation to issues of environmental consciousness, time-awareness, and how we might live in less wasteful and more sustainable ways. 

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CONTENTS

‘Preface'
John Scanlan & John F.M. Clark

‘Introduction: Aesthetic Fatigue, Modernity and Waste'
John Scanlan

‘Wasteland Mania: The Alternative Modernity of Peat Moss'
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

‘Landscape and Waste: Hydroelectric Development in the Highlands of Scotland'
Jill Payne

‘Scenes from a Desert Wasteland'
John Scanlan

‘Exhaust: On Aerial Rejectamenta'
Steven Connor

‘Debating Waste, Nature and Justice: Spencer, Huxley and Morris'
Piers J. Hale

'H. G. Wells’s Taxonomy of Waste'
William Kupinse

‘The Future as a Virus in the Midst of our Waste'
Alberto Duman

‘The Future of Ruins'
William Viney

‘Cézanne and Van Gogh’s Quarries: Wasted Landscapes as Modern Art'
Maura Coughlin

‘Arman’s Spectacles of Waste'
Jaimey Hamilton

‘Retread America: Postwar Re-Adjustment, boredom, and Life in the “Lonely Crowd”'
Edward J.K. Gitre

‘Garbage and Gatsby'
Rex Ferguson

‘Exteriority: Boredom, Disgust and the Margins of Humanity'
Harvie Ferguson

‘The “Litter Nuisance” in Twentieth-century Britain'
Timothy Cooper

‘Shipping and Receiving: the Social Death of Electronics'
Jennifer Gabrys

‘Managing Household Refuse: Towards a History of the Municipal Waste-Handling Business'
Ray Stokes and Stephen Sambrook

EDITORS

John Scanlan is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. He was Project Officer at the AHRC Centre for Environmental History at the University of St Andrews between 2004-07. His books include On Garbage (Reaktion, 2005) and Memory: Encounters with the Strange and the Familiar (Reaktion, 2013). 

John F. M. Clark is Director of the Institute for Environmental History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Bugs and the Victorians (Yale University Press, 2009), as well as numerous papers on the history of the environment, science, and medicine. 

CONTRIBUTORS

Maura Coughlin, Bryant University
John Scanlan, Manchester Metropolitan University
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, University of Chicago
Piers J. Hale, University of Oklahoma
William Viney, Durham University
Jennifer Gabrys, Goldsmiths, University of London
Steven Connor, University of Cambridge
Jill Payne, University of Bristol
Rex Ferguson, University of Birmingham
Harvie Ferguson, University of Glasgow
Timothy Cooper, University of Exeter
Jaimey Hamilton, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Stephen Sambrook, University of Glasgow
Ray Stokes, University of Glasgow
Alberto Duman, Middlesex University
John F. M. Clark, University of St Andrews
Edward J.K. Gitre, Virginia Tech
William Kupinse, University of Puget Sound

Text © John Scanlan, 2013