Recently in Occulture Category

Several weeks ago I noticed new graffiti on street signs in the Melbourne suburb Northcote from an unknown group: the Saracen Soldiers.  A block away from the most prominent graffiti two houses displayed nationalist flags in their front windows.  It could have been coincidence or maybe a signalling game to establish psychological turf.

At the time I thought of the ominous graffiti in Philip K. Dick's posthumously published novel Radio Free Albemuth (1985).  The grafiti also reminded me of the wanna-be teenage mercenaries in Leo Berkeley's film Holidays on the River Yarra (1990), who are recruited by a racialist organisation to engage in graffiti, brawls and other low-level politically motivated violence.

Two nights ago police fatally shot 15-year-old Tyler Cassidy during a confrontation in Northcote's All Nations park.  Earlier that evening, Cassidy left home after a family argument then stole two knives from Northcote's Kmart store.  Four police were called to arrest Cassidy and Victoria Police will now investigate what happened next.  As Rosie X observes, several media outlets speculated about Cassidys membership in the nationalist group Southern Cross Soldiers (SCS) and posed a 'suicide by cop' explanation for Cassidy's death.

There are a couple of interesting things to note about blogosphere and media coverage.

Journalists described Cassidy's online life as "subterreanean" - a mix of Sherry Turkle's theories about online identity fused with cyberterrorist fears - yet did not link to Cassidy's MySpace page or mention the SCS sites above.  In contrast, Richard Metzger observed to me in 1998 that Disinformation had a different strategy: it would link to white supremacist groups such as Aryan Nations so that readers would understand their ideological worldview.  This got Metzger into trouble with several anti-racialist organisations who confused him with Tom Metzger of White Aryan Resistance.

Anarchist and anti-racialist bloggers knew SCS for months before Cassidy's death as a white supremacist gang or youth network. The SCS band has copied Rahowa's white separatist music as a recruitment strategy.  The social network Bebo has pages for SCS recruitment and the SCS band.  Jacques Ellul would be proud: SCS (and perhaps Cassidy unwittingly) use a blend of Australian historical imagery for in-group identity and integration propaganda ("Aussie pride", the Southern Cross flag, conflation of national identity with ethnicity) with agitation propaganda that is aimed at specific out-group enemies (Italians, Lebanese, anyone who does not meet SCS's criteria for being Australian).

Several questions: How many other pages are there?  Who has been monitoring them?  What if any threat assessments were made?  Will anyone get an opportunity to conduct a sociometry analysis of SCS's online social network before the pages are pulled (Marc Sageman established a benchmark with his study of Salafist cells that may have had weak ties to Al Qaeda).

Bloggers and journalists alike noted that police might have de-escalated the incident if they were armed with a Taser electroshock weapon.  The incident captures why there is a tactical role under specific circumstances for law enforcement personnel to use non-lethal or less-lethal weapons that could have saved Cassidy's life.  The four police will likely receive critical incident debriefs and stress counselling.

A few days after Cassidy's death Northcote remains largely subdued apart from occasional police sirens in the distance.  In contrast. Greece has faced a week of riots after the shooting of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos which may spread to Europe.  As a 'paired study' - SCS's street gang violence, the shootings of Grigoropoulos and Cassidy, and the divergent reactions - illustrate the late sociologist Charles Tilly's distinction between individual aggression (Cassidy), brawls (SCS) and scattered attacks (Greece) as different types of collective violence.

Tilly's urban sociology in the 1960s foresaw how today's social network sites may be used to coordinate street violence.  Perhaps police intelligence analysts would benefit from a few hours with Tilly's masterful study The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003) to pre-empt any SCS revenge attacks for Cassidy's death.  SCS might then remain the purveyers of bad hip-hop/rock/metal hybrids (not exactly Australian), poorly designed web sites and street graffiti: the opportunist yet ineffectual extremists that Dick and Berkeley tried to warn us of . . . and that Greece and Europe may face again.

The Graeco-Russian philosopher George Gurdjieff argued in the early 20th century that humanity lives much of its life in a form of waking sleep.  This all sounds very theoretical --- Gurdjieff was the subject of one of my first four dossiers in 1998 for Disinformation and a 2001 undergraduate essay --- but the right circumstances can drive his point home with clarity.

This past weekend provides two examples apart from the Mumbai siege.  In the first, Jdimytai Damour an agency temp was trampled to death at a Wal-Mart sale in Long Island, New York, on Black Friday, 28th November 2008.  Associated Press coverage quotes Kimberly Cribbs that customers acted like "savages".  The New York Times blamed the media for creating unrealistic expectations about Black Friday sale bargains: the catalyst for a mania.  In the second, Sydney's Glebe Coroner's Court has held an inquest into Emma Hansen's death: Hansen was a pedestrian accidentally killed in 2007 by learner driver Rose Deng, who is still permitted to drive by Australian authorities.  Both incidents illustrate on a micro-scale Gurdjieff's Law of Accident or Law of Hazard ("when an event happens without the lines of the events we observe").

For two overviews of Gurdjieff's philosophy see Richard Smoley's introduction to Gnosis Magazine's special issue here and John Shirley's essay The Shadows of Ideas.  I also recommend Shirley's book Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Ideas (Tarcher, San Francisco, 2004) and his DVD commentary as co-scriptwriter for Alex Proyas' dark gothic masterpiece The Crow (1994), infamous for another Law of Accident case: Brandon Lee's accidental death during a film stunt.

A few months ago publisher Ashley Crawford (of 21C and World Art fame) asked me to contribute to a Photofile Magazine roundtable about a mysterious bunny image.  I sent Ash a brief piece with in-joke references to the Discordianism movement, the horror author H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Adams' novel Watership Down, intelligent design, and the 1977 hoax Alternative 3 (in Photofile #84, Summer 2008, p. 60).  It was a lot of fun.  The image turned out to be Polly Borland's Untitled III (2004-04), and private collector David Walsh now curates a billboard version in Melbourne, Australia.

Randy Nails' documentary Dead On: The Life and Cinema of George A. Romero (2008) screened as a 'work in progress' at the 2008 Melbourne International Film Festival.  The documentary charts Romero's evolution as a director and how his films are responsible for a 40-year-old 'zombie economy' worth over US$2 billion.

Three themes are central to Nails' documentary: how psychopolitics such as Cold War nuclear fears and Vietnam War social activism influenced Romero's personal vision, why Romero has fought to retain his independence against Hollywood studios, and how the zombie meme has in turn influenced contemporary 'indie' directors, subcultures, and musucians such as Glen Danzig and Rob Zombie.

The documentary begins with a nuclear fear montage: stark black-and-white footage of the Trinity nuclear test on 16th July 1945, 'duck and cover' safety drills and simulations of the impact on targeted cities.  From this dystopian beginning Nails explores Romero's early work for the Pittsburgh-based company Latent Image which tapped the market for advertising and industrial films in the 'go go' 1960s.  Latent Image would be the nucleus for the team that produced the influential zombie film Night of the Living Dead (1968): Romero used handheld cameras to capture the feeling of newsreels on Vietnam War combat and civil rights protests.  Latent Image cofounders liken their production approach to jamming in jazz and small teams.  However after the follow-up There's Always Vanilla (1971) the Latent Image team fell apart and Romero continued as an auteur to create films where the Cold War's Mutually Assured Destruction is the backdrop to dark and apocalyptic forces which threaten to overwhelm individuals.

Latent Image's DIY ethic was a formative experience for Romero.  He cites Martin (1977) as the film that captures best Romero's work ethic and small team approach, with Diary of the Dead (2007) as a return to this independence.  Its cast believe Knightriders (1981) was his most personal film, which Romero explains is about the extremes and limits of personal ideologies, and that he was able to maintain a strong team despite the production difficulties due to his respectful way of dealing with the cast and crew (which Ed Harris and Dennis Hopper also attest to in Romero's later films for major studios).  Romero and special effects wizard Ted Savini worked quickly on the location shoot in a shopping mall for Dawn of the Dead (1978) due to a 3-4 hour time limit: a precursor to the 'sprints' in agile software development.  Romero's DIY approach and his ability to combine multiple roles (scriptwriter, cinematographer, director, producer, editor) appeals to John Landis, John Carpenter, John Waters, Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez and Danny Boyle, who Nails interviews.

Pigeonholed as a horror director Romero points out why many of his films have a satirical dimension that the Hollywood major studios often choose to ignore or minimise.  Jack's Wife (1972) explored a neo-feminist vision of personal empowerment through Wicca symbolism, although the US distributor retitled the film as Hungry Wives to appeal to the softcore porn market.  The Crazies (1973) satirised military contingency planning to prevent a chemical warfare disaster.  Martin (1977) uses vampirism as a metaphor for industrial decline of Pittsburgh's steel industry: Romero surmises people need vampires as a modern mythology to combat the 'death of magic' caused by downsizing and hypercompetitive globalisation.  Spurred on by giallo director Dario Argento, Romero overcomes his desire not to revisit zombie films by turning Dawn of the Dead (1978) into a satire on consumer lifestyles.  Day of the Dead (1985) and Land of the Dead (2005) respectively target the Reagan Administration's revival of Cold War brinkmanship and nuclear fears, and the second Bush Administration's widening social gap between the haves and have-nots.  Romero's personal vision emerges collectively in this body of work as a concern with personal autonomy and class politics.

Why Romero despises Hollywood studios is illustrated through the many anecdotes about his production battles and mistakes.  Night of the Living Dead relied initially on 10 personal investors who lost their money when the film was released with the copyright symbol on its title credits rather than in the correct position, which immediately made NoTLD public domain.  Despite a successful lawsuit Latent Image lost money and the followup There's Always Vanilla broke up several friendships.  Knightriders, Land of the Dead and Creepshow all had studio distribution problems.  During the preview screenings of Monkey Shines (1988) and The Dark Half (1993) the test audiences demanded the downbeat endings be changed, a Hollywood practice that reviewer Roger Ebert condemns.  The film studio Orion was almost bankrupt during The Dark Half and was unable to finance a score for the film's third act, which led to director-producer tensions.  Bruiser (2000) was a straight to video release which Romero was relieved to complete.  In a lesson on 'decision rights' Romero worked on 8 redrafts over a two-year period for Resident Evil (2002) to ensure the film reflected the first two videogames, before he discovered that the studio executive did not have the decision-making power as he had claimed.  Whilst Romero admits to not being very good at business his criticisms of Hollywood are supported by illusionist Penn Jillette and writer Stephen King.

Despite the wealth of archival footage and interviews Nails' 'work in progress' suffers from a nonlinear narrative.  I had just as much fun sitting just behind Romero and his daughter Tina in the cinema, watching him deal with zombie fans and autograph hunters.  Romero might not have the financial rewards of the 'zombie economy' he inadvertently created but Dead On has plenty of lessons on cultivating a personal vision and the mindlessness of the Hollywood zombies known as mid-level studio executives.