Jon Savage - Teenage

The English journalist and writer Jon Savage is best known for his book England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond, both an history of the bands of late-70s punk rock and the social history of the punk movement of the time. Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture is a broader social history, dealing with the concept of adolescence prior to the emergence of the 'teenager' as a specific, commercial demographic in the 1950s. As such, Teenage focuses on a variety of movements, conflicts and problems which involved the youth of Europe and America from the last quarter of the nineteenth century up until the end of the Second World War.

The book's introduction traces its development from an early investigation into "the history of youth subcultures" of the post-war era to a realisation that "punk's historical collage... marked the moment when the linear forward motion of the sixties was replaced by a loop. Suddenly, all pop culture time was accessible, on the same plane, available at once." This realisation broadened into a wider interest in the development of youth and adolescence, not only in America but in western Europe; and the history of "the quest, pursued over two different continents and over half a century, to conceptualize, define, and control adolescence."

I haven't yet read England's Dreaming, so I can't comment on the strengths of that book: whether it is, as I have seen it reviewed elsewhere, a good documentary history of the bands of the era but "on slightly more dodgy ground" with regards to social and political context. Certainly Teenage is far more associated with the latter, but I think that is what gives it such strength as a work of popular history. It takes the idea of youth in a cultural and social context, and expands on it through documenting a wide variety of groups and movements. Moreover, it is vigorous in its pursuit of what really was revolutionary about the various youth subcultures - in reference to the discussion of adolescence at the end of the introduction, Savage states:

"There is a dialectic within the book, therefore, between the extraordinary and the ordinary. However, if I have to make the choice, it is to find the extraordinary within the ordinary."

Teenage does this by taking key groups from across the time period and geographical locations, and siting each in the broader social movements of its time. So there are decadents in late nineteenth-century Paris, and boy scouts in Edwardian Britain, juvenile delinquents and gangsters in American industrial cities, right up to the movements for and against Fascism in Nazi Germany. Some subcultures were a reaction to social progress, some were consequences of it, while others were impositions of the adult world on the youth it derived its power from.

To take an obvious example, the Hitler Youth in Germany grew from being one of many youth associations to the predominant, and eventually only, official one, deriving from the political and social ideology of Nazism; whereas around it dwindled a vibrant alternative culture stemming from the Wandervogel of the nineteenth century to a tiny minority of dissident groups. As the Guardian review of the books states, "Yet even the Nazis were unable to mould teenagers exactly as they wanted. Perhaps the strongest, most revelatory part of the book is a detailed account of how delinquent gangs and youthful tastes for forbidden British and American fashions and music survived throughout the Nazi era despite ever more violent state attempts to repress them."

While the most well known of these is the White Rose resistant movement of the late period of Nazi Germany and the war, it was preceded by and - by virtue of the isolation of totalitarian society - separated from earlier movements of looser rebellion by the German 'Swing Kids'. They form - along with the French Zazous - but one chapter of Savage's book, yet I'll discuss them below as both an example of the aim and arc of youth history in the rest of Teenage, and as a subculture of particular interest to my other area of writing.

Swing or 'hot' jazz spread from America into Britain and Europe during the 1930s, the latter form having already been established in Britain and France during the 1920s. In the 1930s, however, jazz came into conflict with the totalitarian and moral ideology of the Nazi state; the regime's attitude towards the genre of music is documented in Michael H. Kater's Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany from which Savage takes a quote from a Hitler Youth leader:

"The Nigger has a very pronounced feeling for rhythm, and his 'art' is perhaps indigenous but nonetheless offensive to our sentiments. Surely such stuff belongs among the Hottentots and not in a German dance hall. The Jew, on the other hand, has cooked these aberrations up on purpose"

With jazz as both a creation of an inferior Negro race and a Jewish conspiracy, censorship and repression soon followed. Savage describes how the divisions of Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry control and repressed the playing of jazz: the Reichsrundfunkkammer restricted radio play to ideologically controlled German jazz (having to recognise at least jazz's popularity as a form of light entertainment); while the Reichsmusikkammer policed the playing of jazz in public places and some musical venues. The " gaps in the totalitarian state" were exploited for as long as possible, allowing for small groups of jazz fans to form clubs for adolescents apart from the demands of the Hitler Youth, while following a mode of physical and cultural expression - swing - which stood in defiance of Nazi ideology. The largest of these groups was the Hamburg Swing Youth, formed in 1937.

In the 1940s, and in wartime Germany and occupied Europe in general, the Swing Youth was both under increased totalitarian pressure and availing of the confusion of war in both physical and social terms: they "instinctively responded to the freedom that they heard in their forbidden records", even if such

"passions were dangerous in wartime Europe, as the Nazis sought complete compliance from their subjects and their own people. At the same time, youth was destablized by the demands of total war: the chaos of mobilization, the disruption of family life, and the deranged psychology of war itsefl conspired to double the figures for juvenile delinquency in Nazi Germany during 1940 and 1941. At the time when confidence in the regime was at its height, there were over 17,000 recorded youth crimes, of which two-thirds were committed by members of the Hitler Youth."

While most of this youth rebellion was inner-city, working class gangs, the Swing Kids represent for history an extreme (and middle-class) manifestation of non-conformity. This dialectic of exceptionalism in Savage's book sits uneasily here with the class dynamics of Nazi Germany, as the significant Swing Kids had the effective protection of wealthy parents and the economic freedom to collect the consumer goods of the Swing lifestyle - clothes, records - which contrasts with the baser freedoms that working-class youths were able to hold on to. Yet the Swing Youth still represented a true cultural defiance; and many of its leaders, particularly from the Hamburg club, suffered true retribution at the hands of the state police.

This retribution was not, and needed not to be, as severe as that handed out to later and more explicit dissidents, but was still indicative of what we see today as the prime mechanisms of fascist repression. As Savage explains:

"The Gestapo's campaign [against Hamburg Swing clubs which had moved undergound] was extremely effective against a group of young people unprepared for such brutality. They used stool pigeons, pressurising vulnerable swings to inform on their friends. The Hitler Youth informed on swing pupils in local schools and acted with directors to expel the rebels. However, the subculture persisted to the extent that, in the summer of 1941, an appeal for help was made to the head of the Central Security Agency, Reinhardt Heydrich. In January 1942, the net was drawn even tighter with a new decree that banned dancing in semiprivate locations like sports clubs.

That same month, Himmler intervened. He was determined that there would be no "mere half-measures" against this contagion: "All the ringleaders, and I mean ringleaders both male and female, and all teachers with enemy views who are encouraging the swing youth, are to be assigned to a concentration camp..."

Outside Germany, in France the situation was more isolated from the direct actions of the Nazi state, but complicated by the political reshapings of the occupied and divided French state. In the south of the country, in the Southern Zone, power was vested in the Vichy regime. Under the leadership of the World War I her Marshal Petain, Fascism was created anew as a French ideology: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité was replaced by Travaille, Famille, Patrie. Vigorous morality and a subservience of youth to the "spirit of sacrifice" and the community defined this new Vichy culture. Though this represented existing strains of French conservatism, it was also opposed by the country's intellectuals and liberals, themselves under Nazi control:

"To Simone de Beauvoir, observing from Paris, the marshal's phrases about the family, God, and the "reign of virtue" was the "same violent prejudice and stupidity that had darkened my childhood - only now it extended over the whole country, an official and repressive blanket." In comparison to the Vichy's return to a nonexistent religious agrarian past, conditions in the Occupied Zone were both more modern and more serious. Although Vichy was the capital of the new France, Paris was the seat of power and under the direct rule of the Nazis."

In this culture of repression, resistance was both extremely dangerous and morally required. Sartre remarked, "Everything we did was equivocal; we never quite knew whether we were doing right or wrong; a subtle poison corrupted even our best actions." The rebellion of jazz was an implicit one, an affected attitude found "in the mannered sarcasm first rehearsed by Baudelaire" and a provocative dandyism, which Camus described in L'homme révolté as

"The dandy can only play a part by setting himself up in opposition. He can only be sure of his own existence by finding it in the expression of others' faces. Other people are his mirror."

With the increasing repression and censorship of the regime, in winter 1941 the Zazous emerged from the "petits Swings" and "Ultra Swings" of American influence. They were dandys set apart from the collabos (collaborators) by their dress, a blend of American, British and continental fashions. The jazz slang Zazou originated, in one version, from Cab Calloway "whose watch chains and checked jackets were highly influential on the style" and who "recorded 'Zah Zuh Zah' in 1933, and embellished it with the chant "zazouzazou - hey!", while scat singers "developed this clanging surrealism" further (Savage draws most of his documentation from Les Zazous, by Jean-Claude Loiseau.)

The Zazous continued as an underground movement, subverting the Fascist culture of France and its Fascist youth magazine Le Jeunesse, until by summer and autumn 1942 the state opposition - combined with the violent actions of collabo youth groups - essentially eradicated the "principally middle- or upper-middle-class" movement. In the final period of flux, some of the most interesting cultural statements of the group manifested themselves - from the adoption by a deliberately outcast few of the Jewish yellow star "to show their sympathy for the Jews... exactly like the official one, except for one detail: at the centre, there was a word of five letters: Swing" (or Zazou) to the emergence of a subgroup of 'zazou triste' ('sad zazou'), "wearing somber clothes and steel-rimmed glasses". (Sound familiar?)

"The Zazous appeared on the French stage and then disappeared, as if in a puff of smoke. Although they cultivated a blank facade, they left the authorities in no doubt about their total contempt for "The National Revolution." They also reveled in their bad press to the point of delerious abjection. Turning adolescent obnoxiousness into street theater, they offered a symbolic resistance to the occupation's "ambient, abstract horror" that also mirrored its ultimate vacancy. However, they learned that in Nazi states everything was politicized, and that defiance was punishable by violence, imprisonment and death."

Alan W. Watts - The Way of Zen

Zen Buddhism

"has directness, verve and humour, and a sense of both beauty and nonsense at once exasperating and delightful. But above all it has a way of being able to turn one’s mind inside out, and dissolving what seemed to be the most oppressive human problems into questions like ‘Why is a mouse when it spins’."

(Preface, p. 10)

This wonderful old book is another of my finds in the Secret Book and Record Store here in Dublin (for a mention of a few others, see here). Well, when I say old I mean 1957. That's not exactly from-back-before-the-automobile antiquity, but it's a nice aged Penguin paperpack - Pelican, actually, since it's non-fiction.

Now, this blog is mostly about fiction, specifically novels; however, the last post was about a combination of a recent film and an illustrated Zen poem, so I do like to mix it up a bit. This particular post is not only linked to the theme of that piece, but also to a general thread which has been running through the blog as a whole, right through the write-ups of Kerouac and Pirsig; there is a whole vein of American sub-culture, or counter-culture, which takes from Zen as its inspiration and influence.(For more Zen, see this post on Hardcore for Nerds)

This is, most of all, a very useful text. What The Way of Zen does as a book is, chiefly, provide a "'account of an esoteric doctrine', as the blurb describes. A quote from the New Statesman calls it

"Certainly the most explicit and orderly of it [Zen] that has yet appeared in English."

At the top of the blurb, in italics, is the prophetic (or rather anti-prophetic) quote

Those who know do not speak;

Those who speak do not know

Watts makes a great deal out of the non-verbal, not-literary nature of Zen: it is not something - at least not in itself something - to be learned out of a book. The traditional Zen way of indicating this is, roughly, to say that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself - as illustrated in this Yoshitoshi print:

"The night clouds dissolve

Hotei pointing at the moon

holds no opinion"

('Moon of Enlightenment', from Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's One Hundred Views of the Moon, via monkeybuddha.blogspot.com)

Watts does a good job of finding the balance between accuracy and authenticity, on the one hand, and on the other, presenting Zen in an attractive, accessible manner. The style of the book is somewhat academic, and slightly dated by this stage, but it's still an easy read. It is split into two sections, 'Background and History', and 'Principles and Practices'. The first traces the evolution of Zen thought through the history and culture of Buddhist and pre-Buddhist thought. The second deals with both the central philosophical ideas of Zen and the traditional images we have of its practices - particularly za-zen, or sitting meditation, and koans, or metaphysical riddles, which separate the two major schools of Zen itself. There is a rich discussion on these issues in the book, and some of the more incidental sections on Zen in the Arts (the tea ceremony, formal gardens) are fascinating. It's a very sympathetic text, but also quite scholarly; it travels an interesting path between objectivity and subjectivity, some of which is explained in the extract below.

The Way of Zen is more than a worthwhile, comprehensive introduction to Zen Buddhism: it is to a degree a cultural text of itself, a book 'of its time'. Watts, the author, is mentioned by pseudonym in at least one Kerouac novel. The 1950s was a boom period for Buddhism in the US, particularly in California and San Francisco city. What exactly Watts made of Kerouac's idiosyncratic take on Buddhism would be interesting to find out, because whatever about hedonism, Zen is all about idiosyncracy - at least when it's not about strict discipline, that is, but I digress - and thus is more than just a spiritual tradition, but an artistic and cultural medium. As Watt mentions below, there is a 'parallelism' between advanced Western science and the Eastern metaphysical tradition; a subject later much covered by Fritjof Capra's best-selling The Tao of Physics.

While, as the blurb says, "it is unfortunately still easier to say what Zen Buddhism is not that what it is", there is a lot to be said for what Zen can be linked to outside of itself. So this book is best thought not of as a spiritual guide, but as a work of discovery for those who want to know about the culture, philosophy and life of Zen. I may return to this book and discuss some of the substantive aspects of it, but for now I'll leave you with an extract. This is exactly the first couple of pages from the author's preface:

"During the past twenty years there has been an extraordinary growth of interest in Zen Buddhism. Since the Second World War this interest has increased so much that it seems to be becoming a considerable force in the intellectual and artistic world of the West. It is connected, no doubt, with the prevalent enthusiasm for Japanese culture which is one of the constructive results of the late war, but which may amount to no more than a passing fashion. The deeper reason for this interest is that the viewpoint of Zen lies so close to the ‘growing edge’ of Western thought.

The more alarming and destructive aspects of Western civilization should not blind us to the fact that at this very time it is also in one of its most creative periods. Ideas and insights of the greatest fascination are appearing in some of the newer fields of Western science – in psychology and psychotherapy, in logic and the philosophy of science, in semantics and communications theory. Some of these developments might be due to suggestive influences from Asian philosophy, but on the whole I am inclined to feel that there is more of a parallelism than a direct influence. We are, however, becoming aware of the parallelism, and it promises an exchange of views which should be extremely stimulating.

Western thought has changed so rapidly in this century that we are in a state of considerable confusion. Not only are there serious difficulties of communication between the intellectual and the general public, but the course of our thinking and of our very history has seriously undermined the common-sense assumptions which lie at the roots of our social conventions and institutions. Familiar concepts of space, time, and motion, of nature and natural law, of history and social change, and of human personality itself have dissolved, and we find ourselves adrift without landmarks in a universe which more and more resembles the Buddhist principle of the ‘Great Void’. The various wisdoms of the West, religious, philosophical, and scientific, do not offer much guidance to the art of living in such a universe, and we find the prospects of making our way in so trackless an ocean of relativity rather frightening. For we are used to absolutes, to firm principles and laws to which we can cling for spiritual and psychological security.

This is why, I think, there is so much interest in a culturally productive way of life which, for some fifteen hundred years, has felt thoroughly at home in ‘the Void’, and which not only feels no terror for it but rather a positive delight. To use its own words, the situation of Zen has always been -

Above, not a tile to cover the head;

Below, not an inch of ground for the foot.

Such language should not actually be so unfamiliar to us, were we truly prepared to accept the meaning of ‘the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head’.

I am not in favour of importing Zen from the Far East, because it has become deeply involved with cultural institutions which are quite foreign to us. But there is no doubt that there are things which we can learn, or unlearn, from it and apply in or own way. It has the special merit of a mode of expressing itself which is as intelligible – or perhaps as baffling – to the intellectual as to the illiterate, offering possibilities of communication which we have not explored. It has directness, verve and humour, and a sense of both beauty and nonsense at once exasperating and delightful. But above all it has a way of being able to turn one’s mind inside out, and dissolving what seemed to be the most oppressive human problems into questions like ‘Why is a mouse when it spins’. At its heart there is a strong but completely unsentimental compassion for human beings suffering and perishing from their very attempts to save themselves."

(Preface, p. 9-10)

Into the Wild/10 Bulls

I

Last weekend I went to see this film, Sean Penn's Into the Wild, and I think it might be a masterpiece. Or at least, there are reasons for saying that it's really, really good. You can read a very good review of it by some random Aussie blogger here at typingisnotactivism.wordpress.com, and from which I've pulled a couple of particulary good quotes.

The basic plot is (based on a true story) that Christian McCandless, straight-A college student, abandons his middle-class lifestyle in the early 1990s to journey across America - "rather than the road so obvious, he embarks on a road rarely so sincerely travelled – donating his entire college fund to OxFam, destroying all his i.d., and disappearing into the still wild frontiers that live in the midst of, and beyond, American civilization." It seems like the film could be rather preachy or sentimental, but thankfully it doesn't take itself too seriously. There are plenty of gentle laughs in the story of the reinvention of Emile Hirsch as 'Alexander Supertramp' - it's not a comedy though, despite the appearance of Vince Vaughn in a small but key role - as well as a lot of real pathos and despair in his eventual journey to the Alaskan wilderness.

Into the Wild is a long feature - I reckon about two and half hours - but I never really felt boredom encroaching. The film is a study of character ambiguity much more than it is a simple story of self-discovery; the people McCandless meets, befriends and proselytizes to, and the places he travels as the determined, eager Supertramp sketch a multitude of American society and culture. Not to mention landscape, of which the towering Alaskan peaks are only the most dramatic. Accompanying this lush visual and literary experience is the soundtrack by Eddie Vedder. I'm on a big Lungfish (and Pupils, the same band minus the rhythm section) kick at the moment, and while it might be a bit of a stretch to connect their various bands, there is something of the same spacious, weighty alternative-grunge, or folk atmosphere about it. There's definitely something very liberating and American about big/loud guitars, and not just (necessarily) in the Springsteen sense.

"The soundtrack... plays no small part in helping this film work its seemingly easygoing magic. Hard Sun has to be the song of the year but more importantly the musical feel is organic, subtle, and happy to be taken or left. There is no sonic cheapening of the moment with obvious emotional or responsive cues. The story is so beautifully told that Vedder only has to add to what is already a great accomplishment, rather than accomplish what hasn’t been done. Similarly the cinematography is subtly stunning but never overbearing. While the camera captures and conveys zen-like moments of motion and stillness, its ultimate achievement is delivering an almost objective truth that allows the viewer to respond in their own personal way."

Why I am writing about this on Steady Diet of Books is for a variety of reasons. Like I say, this is a literary film. Not just in its scope, but in part quite specifically so; McCandless is an avid reader of Russian literature (Tolstoy, Gogol) as well as American authors such as, unsurpisingly Jack London. What is a bit of a surprise is the lack of mention of Kerouac; more of surprise to me, of course, as anyone who has been following this blog might have noticed, I'm a big fan. Into the Wild sounded on at least the one level like a great Kerouackian adventure, and that was how I would have and did sell the film.

McCandless's hyperliterary tendencies are really quite central to the psychological and philosophical lines of the story; as the achingly real modern-day idealist who uses the timeless, to him, emotions of the nineteenth century authors to redefine his world. As his sister, whose character acts as the outside, objective narrative of the film, remarks, he had a quote for every occasion. His ability to intone chunks of literature with intense fervour is something I envy somewhat, my own memory not extending to verbatim absorption of even the greatest works - those around me may instead be quite thankful of that. And while if I was to trek out of organised society, it would be based at least in part on The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels, the completely different references of this film only reaffirm the variety and expanse of Western or near-Western literature.

In any case, McCandless's journey completed lacked the on-again-off-again hedonism of Kerouac's, and its sincerity was social and physical as well as spiritual. Which brings me, rather lengthily, to the second reason why I'm posting about this film. For better or worse, environmentalism is about the only ideology to which I really subscribe anymore. Part of it is about being politically and socially conscious, but part of it is that truly transfiguring artistic view of the world which I first found in Kerouac. Pirsig, too, rekindled in his physical and philosophical American journeys that appreciation for worldly nature which is, probably, latent in our childhood sense of wonder. In music, as well; I got a little sidetracked already into the earthy, folksy and Taoistic guitar sounds of Lungfish - but on my other blog I've already posted some more lyrically evident pieces on environmentalism.

Finally, the last thing I'll say about Into the Wild is to briefly mention the character's anti-materialist stance. By some reviewers this has been portrayed as selfish and arrogant; while by others as noble, pure ideal. The truth is that it's somewhere in between; hence the film being a study in ambiguity. Actually, it's like an update of Rebel Without a Cause to the modern versions of idealism and rebellion.

In political science today, and I guess this is kind of sociological as well, the attitude referred to is that of 'postmaterialism'. A nod to the constructed complexities of postmodernism, the postmaterialist generation care less about material social issues (jobs, welfare, health) than they do about less tangible subjects such as the environment or quality of life. (The implication being, of course, that they are provided already with substantial if not excessive material benefits, and regard issues concerning their distribution as inconsequential). Against this kind of idea, environmentalism is meant to look hypocritical, and we lose that authentic Kerouackian artistic stance which, at least implicitly, Into the Wild portrays.

II

While doing some reading for an essay, I came across this passage in a book called ‘Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985’, by Samuel P. Hays. In my opinion at least it forms a really eloquent, if academic, defence of 'postmaterialism':

“All this seems rather complex and contrived; public interest in environmental affairs is far simpler. It stems from a desire to improve personal, family and community life. The desires are neither ephemeral or erratic; they are evident in many nations, first in the advanced industrial and consumer societies and then in more recent years in those of middle and even earlier stages of development. They express human wants and needs as surely as demands for better housing, more satisfying leisure and recreation… We customarily associate these with human ‘progress’, which normally is accepted as a fundamental concern unnecessary to explain away in other terms. An interest in the environmental quality of life is to be understood simply as an integral part of the drive inherent in persistent human aspirations and achievement.”

III

10 Bulls, a 12th-century illustrated Zen (Chan) Buddhist poem, symbolizing the different stages on the journey to enlightenment. From the Zen Flesh, Zen Bones anthology, with modern woodcuts by Tomikichiro Tokuriki:

1. The Search for the Bull

2. Discovering the Footprints

3. Perceiving the Bull

4. Catching the Bull

5. Taming the Bull

6. Riding the Bull Home

7. The Bull Transcended

8. Both Bull and Self Transcended

9. Reaching the Source

10. In the World

"In the pastures of this world, I endlessly push aside the tall grasses in search of the bull.

Following unnamed rivers, lost upon the interpenetrating paths of distant mountains,

My strength failing and my vitality exhausted, I cannot find the bull.

I only hear the locusts chirring through the forest at night.

Along the riverbank under the trees, I discover footprints!

Even under the fragrant grass I see his prints.

Deep in remote mountains they are found.

These traces no more can be hidden than one’s nose, looking heavenward.

I hear the song of the nightingale.

The sun is warm, the wind is mild, willows are green along the shore,

Here no bull can hide!

What artist can draw that massive head, those majestic horns?

I seize him with a terrific struggle.

His great will and power are inexhaustible.

He charges to the high platueau far above the cloud-mists,

Or in an impenetrable ravine he stands.

The whip and rope are necessary,

Else he might stray off down some dusty road.

Being well trained, he becomes naturally gentle.

Then, unfettered, he obeys his master.

Mounting the bull, slowly I return homeward.

The voice of my flute intones through the evening.

Measuring with hand-beats the pulsating harmony, I direct the endless rhythm.

Whoever hears this melody will join me.

Astride the bull, I reach home.

I am serene. The bull too can rest.

The dawn has come. In blissful repose,

Within my thatched dwelling I have abandoned the whip and rope.

Whip, rope, person and bull – all merge in No-thing,

This heaven is so vast no message can stain it.

How may a snowflake exists in a raging fire?

Here are the footprints of the patriarchs.

Too many steps have been taken returning to the root and the source.

Better to have been blind and deaf from the beginning!

Dwelling in one’s true abode, unconcerned with that without -

The river flows tranquilly on and the flowers are red.

Barefooted and naked of breast, I mingle with the people of the world.

My clothes are ragged and dust-laden and I am ever blissful.

I use no magic to extend my life;

Now, before me, the trees become alive."