Journal articles on the topic 'Gun Club (Musical group)'

In Shuilin Township, Yunlin County, Taiwan a group of older people have a small, well-established, active musical club called ‘Can’t Read the Words’ where they learn and play the ukulele together. This research explored the impact of their ukulele playing experiences and paid special attention to song preferences (songs they have chosen to play or sing). Data collection involved 11 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with individual healthy adults. All participants drew from their experiences in regional community music organizations to explore how music effects their daily lives. Thematic analysis of the data unveiled valuable insights. The study concluded that participants believed that their musical club provided opportunities for individuals to practice and perform before audiences, resulting in a sense of achievement and satisfaction. The aged community should view the ‘Can’t Read the Words’ musical club as an example of the positive effects playing the ukulele can have on their lives.

This research discusses about the construction of self and social identity of music fans community, Study on Community of Koes Fans Club-Jiwa Nusantara, intended to understand self-identity, and social identity, that develops inside the music fans community. The objective of this research is to find how member of musical group fans construct self-identity and social identity in the community. The research method is a qualitative with phenomenology tradition. As for the subjects of this study are the member of Koes Music Fans Club- Jiwa Nusantara that are domiciled in several cities, including Medan, Jakarta, Bogor, Bekasi, Karawang, Tangerang, Cimahi, Padalarang, Tegal, Banyumas, and Surabaya. The research results found that members of music fans community are constructing self-identity and social identity inseparable from the existence and activity of the community as well as the figure of their favorite musical group. Communication behavior that develops between individuals who are members of music fans community takes places in the context of togetherness as members of the community by developing typical symbols which only understood by fellow members of the community and leads to the preservation of musical group creations that became their idol.

AbstractThe purpose of this study was to compare the serve speed and motor coordination of elite and club level junior tennis players aged 11-14 years. Participants (n=35) were assigned to one of the two groups according to their experience, weekly training volume and competition level. Serve speed was assessed with a sports radar gun. Motor coordination was evaluated by means of the Körperkoordinationstest für Kinder. The main results revealed that serve speed and motor coordination performance levels of the elite group were significantly higher than those of the club group. This study emphasized the importance of early participation and training intensity, which can play an important role in enhancement of serve speed and motor coordination.

BACKGROUND: The Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club is a world-renowned group of Cuban musicians accomplished in a variety of musical styles. The musicians of the Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club and supporting musicians of their orchestras represent a cohort of musicians throughout Cuba who continue to play traditional genres and perform into their older ages. PURPOSE: The purpose of the study was to (1) identify musculoskeletal conditions that occurred over the previous 12 months among the members of the Orquesta and supporting musicians and (2) to discover if these conditions, in part, were caused by or in some way affected musical performance. METHODS: The study was a convenience sample of musicians within the Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club and supporting musical groups. Thirty-six musicians completed a self-administered survey. RESULTS: Sixty-seven percent (24/36) of the total sample of musicians and 89% (16/18) of those over age 60 years had at least one musculoskeletal condition over the previous 12 months. Forty-four percent (16/36) of the total sample of musicians and 61% (11/18) of those older than 60 years of age reported that a musculoskeletal complaint was either, in part, caused by or affected their performance. CONCLUSION: Musculoskeletal conditions were prevalent among the Cuban musicians, especially in those over 60 years of age. Collaboration of medical professionals, managers, and musicians may help to generate ideas on how to prevent injuries as well as to evaluate what treatments for playing-related conditions, including both conventional and complementary and alternative therapies, are most effective.

This article addresses the construction of a singing culture at New York City Football Club (NYCFC) over the course of its inaugural season in Major League Soccer (MLS). Although being a supporter can provide many of the feelings associated with the term “community,” in order to capture the fluid reality of twenty-first-century group formation, this article rejects that label, preferring to understand NYCFC fandom as an emerging “social identity.” Such an approach enables us to recognize the many layers of identification that form people’s self-concepts. I argue that NYCFC fandom, and perhaps social identities more broadly, are realized through ritual interaction in the form of normative group behavior. In this case, song is the meeting point of the converging worlds of soccer fandom and New York City, negotiating a shared musical culture that gives meaning to a new social identity.

In the modern world, cultural and leisure activities are more developed than ever. One of the sides of its manifestation is the growing popularity of concerts of various musical groups. The article sets and solves the problem of mathematical modeling of the relationship between the management of a music group and the management of a club that provides a rental venue for performances. We use a static two-level hierarchically organized model that describes the interaction of managers of a music club (supervisor) and a music group (agent). The top – level subject is the supervisor, and the bottom-level subject is the agent. The agent generates their winnings by changing the cost of concert tickets in response to the supervisor’s announced strategy. The supervisor’s winnings vary depending on the price they set for renting the venue for the group’s performance. Target functions of both participants are constructed. The incentive method is used as a method of hierarchical management. The algorithm for constructing the Stackelberg equilibrium for a two-level hierarchical game is specified. An analytical study was conducted for a particular type of input functions. Examples of analytical finding of equilibrium are given. An analysis of the results obtained is given, on the basis of which conclusions are made about the type of optimal management of the supervisor and agent.

Patricio Manns (b. 1937) is a Chilean singer, songwriter, writer, poet, novelist and journalist. He was one of the group of singers who came together in the Peña de los Parra, the club founded by Angel and Isabel Parra in Santiago in 1965 which became the crucible where neo-folklore metamorphised into nueva cancíon (‘New Song’). Manns' relationship with nueva cancíon has been a fundamental, although at times an ambivalent one. Unlike many of the other musicians he has constantly involved himself in non-musical and political activity. Recently he has been the European spokesperson for the Chilean resistance movement, the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, which claimed responsibility for the assassination attempt in October 1986 on President Pinochet.

Competitive composition in rhythmic gymnastics is a small performance that has its own plot. However, the modern system of training in rhythmic gymnastics involves the implementation of a large amount of complex and super-complex elements, which must be mastered by very young athletes, and almost no methods of forming artistry, expressiveness, musicality. Problems related to the study of sports aesthetics are the subject of research by scientists: Viner-Usmanova I.O., M.E. Plekhanova, L.P. Morozova, V.V. Sydorova, L.A. Karpenko, Kabaieva A.M., Biletska I.H. etc.. Aim: to scientifically substantiate and develop a program of musical and rhythmic training for 6-7 years old gymnasts. Research methods: analysis and generalization of literature sources; pedagogical observation and experiment; testing; expert evaluation of performances of 6-7 years old gymnasts; methods of mathematical statistics. Organization of the research. The research was conducted on the basis of the sports club "Rhythmics Star" in Dnipro within the period from October, 2018 till December, 2019. The study involved two groups of 6-7 years old gymnasts: control and experimental ones of 15 girls in each. Classes in groups were held 5 times a week for 90 minutes. Research results. After conducting the study of the initial level of musical-rhythmic training of gymnasts 6-7 years old, it was determined that the majority (70.6%) of the athletes have an average level of musical-rhythmic training. The largest difference in the results was observed in the test for coordination of movements with the meter, and the smallest one in improvisation to music. As a result of the study, the program of musical and rhythmic training for gymnasts aged 6-7 was developed and experimentally tested. Conclusions. Comparison of indicators of musical-rhythmic preparedness of the studied control and experimental groups at the beginning and end of the pedagogical experiment showed that in the control group the indicators have not changed. Whereas in the experimental group there was a significant statistical increase in the main indicators of musical and motor preparedness. Prospects for further research: development of the program for different age groups using other methods and means of musical-rhythmic training.

The present study investigates how people move and relate to each other – and to the dance music – in a club-like setting created within a motion capture laboratory. Three groups of participants (29 in total) each danced to a 10-minute-long DJ mix consisting of four tracks of electronic dance music (EDM). Two of the EDM tracks had little structural development, while the two others included a typical “break routine” in the middle of the track, consisting of three distinct passages: (a) “breakdown”, (b) “build-up” and (c) “drop”. The motion capture data show similar bodily responses for all three groups in the break routines: a sudden decrease and increase in the general quantity of motion. More specifically, the participants demonstrated an improved level of interpersonal synchronization after the drop, particularly in their vertical movements. Furthermore, the participants’ activity increased and became more pronounced after the drop. This may suggest that the temporal removal and reintroduction of a clear rhythmic framework, as well as the use of intensifying sound features, have a profound effect on a group’s beat synchronization. Our results further suggest that the musical passages of EDM efficiently lead to the entrainment of a whole group, and that a break routine effectively “re-energizes” the dancing.

AbstractA small basement in Manhattan's Greenwich Village neighborhood, an area known for its bohemian values, is home to what is now one of jazz's oldest and most significant venues, the Village Vanguard. Although its very name, geography, and twentieth-century countercultural context define the Village Vanguard, a haven for experiment, its unequaled historical significance and current status as a major landmark within worldwide jazz culture have led to a twenty-first-century reality in which the club not only features but also plays an important role in defining the music that constitutes the most widely accepted subgenre of contemporary jazz, an improvisatory, small-group tradition rooted in the philosophical and musical heritage of bebop. Through an examination of performances both at the Vanguard and in other contexts by pianist Fred Hersch, a performer regularly featured at the club, this article argues that the cultural role of the Village Vanguard, both in spite of and because of the way its longtime owner Lorraine Gordon retained mid-twentieth-century appearances and practices, has shifted from its former purpose as a space for avant-garde experiments to become a powerful force in defining mainstream jazz. Hersch tailors his performances to suit the culture of the Vanguard at multiple levels, including his choice of personnel and ensemble type, the repertoire he does and does not play there, and the musical details of his improvisatory practices. Due to the venue's fame and prevalence as a recording space, choices like these by Hersch and other musicians shape the music widely understood to be at the center of the “jazz tradition,” marking a shift in the nature of the Vanguard that parallels changes in both its local and global context over the past half century as Greenwich Village has undergone substantial gentrification and jazz has gained an ever-stronger foothold as an institutionally recognized art music.

Background: Children with hearing impairments, especially those using hearing devices such as the cochlear implant (CI) or hearing aid (HA), are sometimes not encouraged to attend music classes, as they or their parents and teachers may be unsure whether the child can perform basic musical tasks. Purpose: The objective of the current study was to provide a baseline for the performance of children using CIs and HAs on standardized tests of rhythm and pitch perception as well as an instrument timbre identification task. An additional aim was to determine the effect of structured music training on these measures during the course of a school year. Research Design: The Intermediate Measures of Music Audiation (IMMA) Tonal and Rhythmic subtests were administered four times, with 6 wk between tests. All children in the study were also enrolled in “Music Club” teaching sessions. Measures were compared between groups and across the four testing sessions. Study Sample: Twenty children from a single school in Melbourne, Australia, were recruited. Eleven (four girls) had impaired hearing, including six with a unilateral CI or CI and HA together (two girls) and five with bilateral HAs (two girls). Nine were normally hearing, selected to match the age and gender of the hearing-impaired children. Ages ranged from 9–13 yr. Intervention: All children participated in a weekly Music Club – a 45 min session of musical activities based around vocal play and the integration of aural, visual, and kinesthetic modes of learning. Data Collection and Analysis: Audiological data were collected from clinical files. IMMA scores were converted to percentile ranks using published norms. Between-group differences were tested using repeated-measures analysis of variance, and between-session differences were tested using a linear mixed model. Linear regression was used to model the effect of hearing loss on the test scores. Results: In the first session, normally hearing children had a mean percentile rank of ˜50 in both the Tonal and Rhythmic subtests of the IMMA. Children using CIs showed trends toward lower scores in the Tonal, but not the Rhythmic, subtests. No significant improvements were found between sessions. In the timbre test, children generally made fewer errors within the set of percussive compared to nonpercussive instruments. The hearing loss level partially predicted performance in the Tonal, but not the Rhythmic, task, and predictions were more significant for nonpercussive compared to percussive instruments. Conclusions: The findings highlight the importance of temporal cues in the perception of music, and indicate that temporal cues may be used by children with CIs and HAs in the perception of not only rhythm, but also of some aspects of timbre. We were not able to link participation in the Music Club with increased scores on the Tonal, Rhythmic, and Timbre tests. However, anecdotal evidence from the children and their teachers suggested a wide range of benefits from participation in the Music Club that extended from increased engagement and interest in music classes into the children's social situations.

It is commonly understood that a concept album is ?a studio album where all musical or lyrical ideas contribute to a single overall theme or unified story? (Shuker 2002: 5). In this paper this term will be used to denote an album containing extra-musical themes and not simply collections of compositions defined only by genre or theme. In order for an album to belong to this category, it must have taken a thematic unity realized by the common content (thematically) of its compositions and common musical means. Although the beginnings of such creative trends can be traced from 1940, the 1960s and 1970s brought the most influential releases of this kind, especially The Beatles? album Sgt. Pepper?s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), which has had a great impact on many authors. As far as is known, the topic of concept albums in Yugoslavia has not yet been elaborated, so this article seems to be the first dedicated to this subject. It seems that in Yugoslavia there had been albums with elements of concept released before the appearance of the Kamen na kamen group album in 1973, entitled LP-60993 (Zagreb: Jugoton). The author of the album was Nikola Borota Radovan. After that, a double LP by the same ensemble and songwriter appeared in 1975 entitled OOUR/AVNOJ (RTV Ljubljana), with even more clearly expressed characteristics of concept. The aim of this article is to show that the thematic and conceptual elements of these editions are firmly connected to those of the concept album. These LPs were formed within the following thematic and contextual frames: 1) Borota`s general inclination towards folklore tradition(s) as a permanent source of inspiration, 2) models among the greatest popular music works that influenced his writing projects, primarily The Beatles? concept albums, and 3) social, economic and political circumstances in Yugoslavia at the time when these albums appeared. Even if it is not strictly a concept album in the full sense, the album LP- 60993 might be regarded as the first album with elements of concept published by a Yugoslav author, according to all the criteria and analyzed results. The elements that show a clear connection to the concept are as follows: leading subject(s)/idea(s) that demand(s) the order of compositions, organization of musical elements and motives on macro- and micro-levels (to produce formal and thematic unity), elements of narrative and musical/sound symbols, including elements of musique concr?te.

How do dancers engage with electronic dance music (EDM) when dancing? This paper reports on an empirical study of dancers' pleasurable engagement with three structural properties of EDM: (1) breakdown, (2) build-up, and (3) drop. Sixteen participants danced to a DJ mix in a club-like environment, and the group’s bodily activity was recorded with an infrared, marker-based motion capture system. After they danced, the subjects filled out questionnaires about the pleasure they experienced and their relative desire to move while dancing. Subsequent analyses revealed associations between the group’s quantity of motion and self-reported experiences of pleasure. Associations were also found between certain sonic features and dynamic changes in the dancers' movements. Pronounced changes occurred in the group's quantity of motion during the breakdown, build-up, and drop sections, suggesting a high level of synchronization between the group and the structural properties of the music. The questionnaire confirmed this intersubjective agreement: participants perceived the musical passages consistently and marked the build-up and drop as particularly pleasurable and motivational in terms of dancing. Self-reports demonstrated that the presence and activity of other participants were also important in the shaping of one's own experience, thus supporting the idea of clubbing as an intersubjectively embodied experience

AbstractThe year 1958 witnessed the birth of the institution GRM, nurtured by the French Radio and Television service (RTF). However, the fifty years of the GRM cannot be dissociated from the preceding period, datable from 1942, when Pierre Schaeffer began experiments with radiophonic sound which led him to musique concrète while bringing into existence the institutional infrastructure of the group. We can therefore see the Studio d'Essai (1942–46), the Club d'Essai (1946–60) with its Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC, 1951–58) as forebears of the GRM. The fundamental principle, which lies in working with sonic material directly on the recording media through a precise listening to recorded elements, led Schaeffer to affirm that there is another way to access music other than from notation.He used this powerful idea as the fixed point on the compass for all his research. Linked from its origins to the broadcasting services – RTF until 1964, ORTF up to 1974, then INA ever since – the GRM has constantly adapted its theories and its ideas to successive technological developments: smooth disks (shellac records), magnetic tape, computer memory. A fruitful period at the Service de la Recherche (1960–75) allowed Schaeffer and his team to systematically examine the world of sounds from their own listening experience. The Traité des Objets Musicaux (Treatise of Musical Objects) bears witness to this research. Since 1975 another adventure has been under way: that of the preservation and making available of works and discoveries gathered over the years – an exceptional heritage which continues to grow and interest an ever larger public.

Violence against women is a common and menacing phenomenon in Bangladesh-and domestic violence is the most common form which includes pushing, shaking or throwing of any objects, slapping, punching with fist or something harmful, kicking or dragging, trying of choke or burn, threatening with knife/gun or other weapon, twisting arm or pulling hair. In the study mean age of the respondents were 30.66 (±8.904) and 62.5% respondents lived in Rural areas where higher prevalence of abuse has been observed. The reasons mentioned through out the country for abuse were inconsequential and included failure to perform household work and care of children, economic problems, food crisis, refusal to bring dowry, disobeying husband/elder, unemployment status of husband, suspected case of infidelity etc. Factors influencing domestic violence were lack of education both in respondents or their spouse, lack of exposure to magazine or source of information, current married, large number of children ever born etc. The majority of abused women remained silent about their experience because of the high acceptance of violence within society, only a few shared the matter with neighbor, father/mother or other relatives. A very small proportion of women approached institutional sources for help. Interestingly, violence increased with membership of women in any non government organization or mother club or relating to any income generating process. It is furthermore disgraceful to find that the women with lower body mass index are the higher group of population who are the high-flying victims of violence. In rural or urban Bangladesh, women's physical, mental, social and economic circumstances may influence their risk of domestic violence in multifaceted and paradoxical ways. Therefore findings suggest discussing policy propositions to overcome current realities.

Введение. Современное образование на разных его уровнях направлено на формирование и развитие высокоинтеллектуальной и творческой личности, обладающей значительным профессиональным потенциалом. Для достижения данной цели требуется высокая квалификация преподавателя в области преподаваемых дисциплин и владение современными методами организации образовательного взаимодействия со студентами. Цель – анализ образовательного потенциала предметного КВНа «Государство: экономико-географическое положение, свойства территории, тип экономики» в развитии профессиональных компетенций бакалавров (направление подготовки 05.03.02 География) и магистрантов (направление 05.04.02 География, программа «Цифровые технологии в географии» профиля «География в общем и профессиональном образовании»). Материал и методы. Представлены результаты опыта подготовки и проведения предметного КВНа на кафедре географии Томского государственного университета с 2013 по 2019 г. При изучении курса «Социально-экономическая география» и проведении предметного КВНа использованы интерактивные методы обучения – метод дискуссии, эвристическая беседа, мозговой штурм, практические работы, метод деловой игры. Метод анкетирования бакалавров и магистрантов-педагогов позволил определить образовательный потенциал мероприятия. Результаты и обсуждение. Выделяются этапы мероприятия, направленные на получение образовательного результата: вводный, когда студенты знакомятся с теоретическим материалом курса, выполняют практические работы и готовятся к КВНу; этап проведения предметного КВНа включает в себя представление от каждой группы результатов исследования по описанию государства, проекта создания предприятия, научно-музыкально-театрализованного представления и решение ситуационных задач. Итоговый этап включает анализ образовательных результатов, где предлагается ответить на вопросы рефлексивного характера, проводятся анкетирование студентов и анализ анкет. Заключение. Образовательный и развивающий потенциал предметного КВНа значителен и выражается в формировании профессиональных компетенций бакалавров и магистрантов указанных направлений; интенсификации процесса усвоения, понимания и творческого использования полученных знаний в решении практических задач; вовлеченности участников и их активного взаимодействия между собой в решении проблем и развитии личной рефлексии и навыков самоанализа при групповой работе; усилении мотивации к изучению дисциплины; формировании позитивного отношения к профессиональной деятельности. Достигается высокий уровень профессиональных компетенций у магистрантов как будущих учителей географии, владеющих современными образовательными технологиями и методиками для организации качественного учебно-воспитательного процесса в образовательных учреждениях разного типа. Introduction. Education nowadays is aimed at the establishment and development of a highly intellectual and creative personality with significant professional potential. Achieving this goal requires high qualification of the teacher in the field of the disciplines taught and his mastery of modern methods of organizing educational interaction with students. Aim and objectives. The main aim of the research being done is to analyze the educational potential of the thematic club of the funny and resourceful under the name of «State: economic and geographical position, the properties of a territory, a type of economy» in forming professional competences of students studying in the direction of training Geography 05.03.02 and master students studying in accordance with the master program «Digital technologies in geography», the profile «Geography in general and professional education». Material and methods. This article uses the research data set produced by organizing and holding a thematic KVN at the Department of Geography of NR TSU in the period from 2013 to 2019. We used group discussion, heuristic conversation, brainstorming, practical works and other interactive teaching methods within the course «Social and economic geography» and as part of conducting a thematic KVN. A questioning of bachelors and masters students allowed to determine the educational potential of the event. Results and discussion. Several stages of the event are singled out. During the introductory stage the students are introduced to the theoretical material of the courses, do practical work and prepare for conducting the club of the funy and resourceful when they are given special tasks to fulfill. Holding a thematic KVN includes a presentation of scientific information on characteristics of a state and a project of setting up a company in the territory of the country concerned, which is done by each group of students. The stage also deals with the solution of some situational problems and a scientific, musical and theatrical performance. The final stage of the thematic club is concerned with the analysis of the results obtained where all the participants are offered to answer some questions of a reflexive character. Conclusion. The educational and advanced potential of the thematic club of the funny and resourceful is significant and they are expressed in forming professional competencies in bachelors and masters of the directions concerned. This potential is also characterized by the intensification of the process of acquiring, understanding and creative using of the knowledge obtained to solve practical problems; involvement of all the participants and their active interaction with each other to find solutions to problems; development of personal reflection and self-analysis skills in group work; motivation growth to study a discipline, and formation of a positive attitude to a professional activity. On the basis of the factors mentioned, we can say that a new qualitative level of professional education of master students is achieved. The latter will become geography teachers in the future and will be able to employ modern pedagogical techniques and methods to ensure the quality of an academic and educational process in various educational institutions which is one of the major factors of forming a new generation of teachers and instructors.

Abstract Cricket-bowling performance is known to be influenced by speed of ball release and accuracy. Currently, training sessions typically involve fielding-specific drills and conditioning exercises. Scientific evidence for inclusion of a comprehensive yoga intervention in daily training and exercise sessions remains unexplored. The present study explored the effect of yoga on bowling performance and physical fitness in cricket bowlers. Sports fitness testing and training were conducted among 60 non-elite recreational-club male cricket players aged 13–25 years. Cricket-bowling speed was e valuated using a speed radar gun, accuracy with a test developed by Portus et al., cardiorespiratory endurance using the yo-yo intermittent recovery test, lower-extremity and trunk strength using a back-leg dynamometer, upper-limb power using a medicine ball–throw test, power using a vertical-jump test, and flexibility using a sit-and-reach test. In addition to bowling practice, the yoga intervention group (n = 30) performed pranayama and standing and prone asana, whereas the control group (n = 30) practiced conventional conditioning exercises, for 45 minutes/day, three times a week, for 12 weeks. Improvement in bowling speed, accuracy, cardiorespiratory endurance, muscle strength, and flexibility were comparable between the two groups. Statistically significant improvements in baseline scores in bowling speed, accuracy, cardiorespiratory endurance, muscle flexibility, strength, and power were comparable between the two groups of non-elite male cricket players. Bowling speed improved by 6.52% in the yoga group and by 5.18% in the control group. Bowling accuracy improved by 35.40% in the yoga group and by 31.29% in the control group. Additional research on long-duration intervention in elite players may help to establish the role of yoga in conventional cricket-bowling training.

At the start of the twentieth century, many young Australian artists travelled abroad to expand their art education and to gain exposure to the modern art movements of Europe. Most of these artists were active members of artist associations such as the Victorian Artists Society or the New South Wales Society of Artists. Male artists from Victoria were generally also members of the Melbourne Savage Club, a club with a strong association with the arts.This paper investigates the dual function of the club, as a space where the artists felt “at home” in the familiar environment that the club offered whilst they were abroad and, at the same time, a meeting space where they could engage in a stimulating artistic environment and gain introductions to leading figures in the art world. For those artists who chose England, London’s arts clubs played a large role, for it was in these establishments that they discussed, exhibited, shared, and met with their English counterparts. The club environment in London would have a significant impact on male Australian artists, as it offered a space where they were integrated into the English art world, which enhanced their experience whilst abroad.Artists were seldom members of Australia’s early gentlemen’s clubs, however, in the late nineteenth century Melbourne, artists formed less formal social groupings with exotic names such as the Prehistoric Order of Cannibals, the Buonarotti Club, and the Ishmael Club (Mead). Melbourne artists congregated in these clubs until the Melbourne Savage Club, modelled on the London Savage Club (1857)—a club whose membership was restricted to practitioners in the performing and visual arts—opened its doors in 1894.The Melbourne Savage Club had its origins in the Metropolitan Music Club, established in the late 1880s by a group of professional and amateur musicians and music lovers. The club initially admitted musicians and people from the dramatic professions free-of-charge, however, author Randolph Bedford (1868–1941) and artist Alf Vincent (1874–1915) were not content to be treated on a different basis to the musicians and actors, and two months after Vincent joined the club, at a Special General Meeting, the club resolved to vary Rule 6, “to admit landscape or portrait painters and sculptors without entrance fee” (Melbourne Savage Club). At another Special General Meeting, a year later, the rule was altered to admit “recognised members of the musical, dramatic and artistic professions and sculptors without payment of entrance fee” (Melbourne Savage Club).This resulted in an immediate influx of prominent Victorian male artists (Williams) and the Melbourne Savage Club became their place of choice to gather and enjoy the fellowship the club offered and to share ideas in a convivial atmosphere. When the opportunity arose for them to travel to London in the early twentieth century, they met in London’s famous art clubs. Membership of the Melbourne Savage Club not only conferred rights to visit reciprocal clubs whilst in London, but also facilitated introductions to potential patrons. The London clubs were the venue of choice for visiting artists to meet their fellow artist expatriates and to share experiences and, importantly, to meet with their British counterparts, exhibit their works, and establish valuable contacts.The London Savage Club attracted many Australian expatriates. Not only is it the grandfather of London’s bohemian clubs but also it was the model for arts clubs the world over. Founded in 1857, the qualification for admission was (and still is) to be, “a working man in literature or art, and a good fellow” (Halliday vii). If a candidate met these requirements, he would be cordially received “come whence he may.” This was embodied in the club’s first rules which required applicants for membership to be from a restricted range of pursuits relating to the arts thought to be commensurate with its bohemian ideals, namely art, literature, drama, or music.The second London arts club that attracted expatriate Australian artists was the New English Arts Club, founded in 1886 by young English artists returning from studying art in Paris. Members of The New English Arts Club were influenced by the Impressionist style as opposed to the academic art shown at the Royal Academy. As a meeting place for Australia’s expatriate artists, the New English Arts Club had a particular influence, as it exposed them to significant early Modern artist members such as John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Walter Sickert (1860–1942), William Orpen (1878–1931) and Augustus John (1878–1961) (Corbett and Perry; Thornton; Melbourne Savage Club).The third, and arguably the most popular with the expatriate Australian artists’ club, was the Chelsea Arts Club, a bohemian club formed in 1891 by local working artists looking for a place to go to “meet, talk, eat and drink” (Cross).Apart from the American-born founding member, James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), amongst the biggest Chelsea names at the time of the influx of travelling young Australian artists were modernists Sir William Orpen, Augustus John, and John Sargent. The opportunity to mix with these leading British contemporary artists was irresistible to these antipodean artists (55).When Melbourne artist, Miles Evergood (1871–1939) arrived in London from America in 1910, he had been an active exhibiting member of the Salmagundi Club, a New York artists’ club. Almost immediately he joined the New English Arts Club and the Chelsea Arts Club. Hammer tells of him associating with “writer Israel Zangwill, sculptor Jacob Epstein, and anti-academic artists including Walter Sickert, Augustus John, John Lavery, John Singer Sargent and C.R.W. Nevison, who challenged art values in Britain at the beginning of the century” (Hammer 41).Arthur Streeton (1867–1943) used the Chelsea Arts Club as his postal address, as did many expatriate artists. The Melbourne Savage Club archives contain letters and greetings, with news from abroad, written from artist members back to their “Brother Savages” (Various).In late 1902, Streeton wrote to fellow artist and Savage Club member Tom Roberts (1856–1931) from London:I belong to the Chelsea Arts Club now, & meet the artists – MacKennel says it’s about the most artistic club (speaking in the real sense) in England. … They all seem to be here – McKennal, Longstaff, Mahony, Fullwood, Norman, Minns, Fox, Plataganet Tudor St. George Tucker, Quinn, Coates, Bunny, Alston, K, Sonny Pole, other minor lights and your old friend and admirer Smike – within 100 yards of here – there must be 30 different studios. (Streeton 94)Whilst some of the artists whom Streeton mentioned were studying at either the Royal Academy or the Slade School, it was the clubs like the Chelsea Arts Club where they were most likely to encounter fellow Australian artists. Tom Roberts was obviously attentive to Streeton’s enthusiastic account and, when he returned to London the following year to work on his commission for The Big Picture of the 1901 opening of the first Commonwealth Parliament, he soon joined. Roberts, through his expansive personality, became particularly active in London’s Australian expatriate artistic community and later became Vice-President of the Chelsea Arts Club. Along with Streeton and Roberts, other visiting Melbourne Savage Club artists joined the Chelsea Arts Club. They included, John Longstaff (1861–1941), James Quinn (1869–1951), George Coates (1869–1930), and Will Dyson (1880–1938), along with Sydney artists Henry Fullwood (1863–1930), George Lambert (1873–1930), and Will Ashton (1881–1963) (Croll 95). Smith describes the exodus to London and Paris: “It was the Chelsea Arts Club that the Heidelberg School established its last and least distinguished camp” (Smith, Smith and Heathcote 152).Streeton, who retained his Chelsea Arts Club membership when he returned for a while to Australia, wrote to Roberts in 1907, “I miss Chelsea & the Club-boys” (Streeton 107). In relation to Frederick McCubbin’s pending visit he wrote: “Prof McCubbin left here a week ago by German ‘Prinz Heinrich.’ … You’ll introduce him at the Chelsea Club and I hope they make him an Hon. Member, etc” (Streeton et al. 85). McCubbin wrote, after an evening at the Chelsea Arts Club, following a visit to the Royal Academy: “Tonight, I am dining with Australian artists in Soho, and shall be there to greet my old friends. How glad I am! Longstaff will be there, and Frank Stuart, Roberts, Fullwood, Pontin, Coates, Quinn, and Tucker’s brother, and many others from all around” (MacDonald, McCubbin and McCubbin 75). Impressed by the work of Turner he wrote to his wife Annie, following avisit to the Tate Gallery:I went yesterday with Fullwood and G. Coates and Tom Roberts for a ramble … to the Tate Gallery – a beautiful freestone building facing the river through a portico into the gallery where the lately found turners are exhibited – these are not like the greater number of pictures in the National Gallery – they represent his different periods, but are mostly in his latest style, when he had realised the quality of light (McCubbin).Clearly Turner’s paintings had a profound impression on him. In the same letter he wrote:they are mostly unfinished but they are divine – such dreams of colour – a dozen of them are like pearls … mist and cloud and sea and land, drenched in light … They glow with tender brilliancy that radiates from these canvases – how he loved the dazzling brilliancy of morning or evening – these gems with their opal colour – you feel how he gloried in these tender visions of light and air. He worked from darkness into light.The Chelsea Arts Club also served as a venue for artists to entertain and host distinguished visitors from home. These guests included; Melbourne Savage Club artist member Alf Vincent (Joske 112), National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Trustee and popular patron of the arts, Professor Baldwin Spencer (1860–1929), Professor Frederick S. Delmer (1864–1931) and conductor George Marshall-Hall (1862–1915) (Mulvaney and Calaby 329; Streeton 111).Artist Miles Evergood arrived in London in 1910, and visited the Chelsea Arts Club. He mentions expatriate Australian artists gathering at the Club, including Will Dyson, Fred Leist (1873–1945), David Davies (1864–1939), Will Ashton (1881–1963), and Henry Fullwood (Hammer 41).Most of the Melbourne Savage Club artist members were active in the London Savage Club. On one occasion, in November 1908, Roberts, with fellow artist MacKennal in the Chair, attended the Australian Artists’ Dinner held there. This event attracted twenty-five expatriate Australian artists, all residing in London at the time (McQueen 532).These London arts clubs had a significant influence on the expatriate Australian artists for they became the “glue” that held them together whilst abroad. Although some artists travelled abroad specifically to take up places at the Royal Academy School or the Slade School, only a minority of artists arriving in London from Australia and other British colonies were offered positions at these prestigious schools. Many artists travelled to “try their luck.” The arts clubs of London, whilst similarly discerning in their membership criteria, generally offered a visiting “brother-of-the-brush” a warm welcome as a professional courtesy. They featured the familiar rollicking all-male “Smoke Nights” a feature of the Melbourne Savage Club. With a greater “artist” membership than the clubs in Australia, expatriate artists were not only able to catch up with their friends from Australia, but also they could associate with England’s finest and most progressive artists in a familiar congenial environment. The clubs were a “home away from home” and described by Underhill as, “an artistic Earl’s Court” (Underhill 99). Most importantly, the clubs were a centre for discourse, arguably even more so than were the teaching academies. Britain’s leading modernist artists were members of the Chelsea Arts Club and the New English Arts Club and mixed freely with the visiting Australian artists.Many Australian artists, such as Miles Evergood and George Bell (1878–1966), held anti-academic views similar to English club members and embraced the new artistic trends, which they would bring back to Australia. Streeton had no illusions about the relative worth of the famed institutions and the exhibitions held by clubs such as the New English. Writing to Roberts before he joins him in London, he describes the Royal Academy as having, “an inartistic atmosphere” and claims he “hasn’t the least desire to go again” (Streeton 77). His preference lay with a concurrent “International Exhibition”, which featured works by Rodin, Whistler, Condor, Degas, and others who were setting the pace rather than merely continuing the academic traditions.Architect Hardy Wilson (1881–1955) served as secretary of The Chelsea Arts Club. When he returned to Australia he brought back with him a number of British works by Streeton and Lambert for an exhibition at the Guild Hall Melbourne (Underhill 92). Artists and Bohemians, a history of the Chelsea Arts Club, makes special reference of its world-wide contacts and singles out many of its prominent Australian members for specific mention including; Sir John William (Will) Ashton OBE, later Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Will Dyson, whose illustrious career as an Australian war artist was described in some detail. Dyson’s popularity led to his later appointment as Chairman of the Chelsea Arts Club where he initiated an ambitious rebuilding program, improving staff accommodation, refurbishing the members’ areas, and adding five bedrooms for visiting members (Bross 87-90).Whilst the influence of travel abroad on Australian artists has been noted, the importance of the London Clubs has not been fully explored. These clubs offered artists a space where they felt “at home” and a familiar environment whilst they were abroad. The clubs functioned as a meeting space where they could engage in a stimulating artistic environment and gain introductions to leading figures in the art world. For those artists who chose England, London’s arts clubs played a large role, for it was in these establishments that they discussed, exhibited, shared, and met with their English counterparts. The club environment in London had a significant impact on male Australian artists as it offered a space where they were integrated into the English art world which enhanced their experience whilst abroad and influenced the direction of their art.ReferencesCorbett, David Peters, and Lara Perry, eds. English Art, 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.Croll, Robert Henderson. Tom Roberts: Father of Australian Landscape Painting. Melbourne: Robertson & Mullens, 1935.Cross, Tom. Artists and Bohemians: 100 Years with the Chelsea Arts Club. 1992. 1st ed. London: Quiller Press, 1992.Gray, Anne, and National Gallery of Australia. McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17. 1st ed. Parkes, A.C.T.: National Gallery of Australia, 2009.Halliday, Andrew, ed. The Savage Papers. 1867. 1st ed. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1867.Hammer, Gael. Miles Evergood: No End of Passion. Willoughby, NSW: Phillip Mathews, 2013.Joske, Prue. Debonair Jack: A Biography of Sir John Longstaff. 1st ed. Melbourne: Claremont Publishing, 1994.MacDonald, James S., Frederick McCubbin, and Alexander McCubbin. The Art of F. McCubbin. Melbourne: Lothian Book Publishing, 1916.McCaughy, Patrick. Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters. Ed. Paige Amor. The Miegunyah Press, 2014.McCubbin, Frederick. Papers, Ca. 1900–Ca. 1915. Melbourne.McQueen, Humphrey. Tom Roberts. Sydney: Macmillan, 1996.Mead, Stephen. "Bohemia in Melbourne: An Investigation of the Writer Marcus Clarke and Four Artistic Clubs during the Late 1860s – 1901.” PhD thesis. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2009.Melbourne Savage Club. Secretary. Minute Book: Melbourne Savage Club. Club Minutes (General Committee). Melbourne: Savage Archives.Mulvaney, Derek John, and J.H. Calaby. So Much That Is New: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929, a Biography. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1985.Smith, Bernard, Terry Smith, and Christopher Heathcote. Australian Painting, 1788–2000. 4th ed. South Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford University Press, 2001.Streeton, Arthur, et al. Smike to Bulldog: Letters from Sir Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1946.Streeton, Arthur, ed. Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton, 1890–1943. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989.Thornton, Alfred, and New English Art Club. Fifty Years of the New English Art Club, 1886–1935. London: New English Art Club, Curwen Press 1935.Underhill, Nancy D.H. Making Australian Art 1916–49: Sydney Ure Smith Patron and Publisher. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991.Various. Melbourne Savage Club Correspondence Book: 1902–1916. Melbourne: Melbourne Savage Club.Williams, Graeme Henry. "A Socio-Cultural Reading: The Melbourne Savage Club through Its Collections." Masters of Arts thesis. Melbourne: Deakin University, 2013.

IntroductionMusicians and critics regard Australian jazz as vibrant and creative (Shand; Chessher; Rechniewski). From its tentative beginnings in the early twentieth century (Whiteoak), jazz has become a major aspect of Australia’s music and performance. Due to the large distances separating cities and towns, its development has been influenced by geographical isolation (Nikolsky; Chessher; Clare; Johnson; Stevens; McGuiness). While major cities have been the central hubs, it is increasingly acknowledged that regional centres also provide avenues for jazz performance (Curtis).This article discusses findings relating to transient musical populations shaped by geographical conditions, venue issues that are peculiar to the Northern region, and finally the challenges of cultural and parochial mindsets that North Queensland jazz musicians encounter in performance.Cairns and MackayCairns and Mackay are regional centres on the coast of Queensland, Australia. Cairns – population 156,901 in 2016 (ABS) – is a world famous tourist destination situated on the doorstep of the Great Barrier Reef (Thorp). Mackay – population 114,969 in 2016 (ABS) – is a lesser-known community with an economy largely underpinned by the sugar cane and coal mining industries (Rolfe et al. 138). Both communities lie North of the capital city Brisbane – Mackay in the heart of Central Queensland, and Cairns as the unofficial capital of Far North Queensland. Mackay and Cairns were selected for this study, not on representational grounds, but because they provide an opportunity to learn through case studies. Stake notes that “potential for learning is a different and sometimes superior criterion to representativeness,” adding, “that may mean taking the one most accessible or the one we can spend the most time with (451).”Musically, both regional centres have a number of venues that promote live music, however, only Cairns has a dedicated jazz club, the Cairns Jazz Club (CJC). Each has a community convention centre that brings high-calibre touring musicians to the region, including jazz musicians.Mackay is home to the Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music (CQCM) a part of the Central Queensland University that has offered conservatoire-style degree programs in jazz, contemporary music and theatre for over twenty-five years. Cairns does not have any providers of tertiary jazz qualifications.MethodologySemi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with twenty-two significant individuals associated with the jazz communities in Mackay and Cairns over a twelve-month period from 2015 to 2016. Twelve of the interviewees were living in Cairns at the time, and ten were living in Mackay. The selection of interviewees was influenced by personal knowledge of key individuals, historical records located at the CQCM, and from a study by (Mitchell), who identified important figures in the Cairns jazz scene. The study participants included members of professional jazz ensembles, dedicated jazz audience members and jazz educators. None of the participants who were interviewed relied solely on the performance of jazz as their main occupation. All of the musicians combined teaching duties with music-making in several genres including rock, jazz, Latin and funk, as well as work in the recording and producing of recorded music. Combining the performance of jazz and commercial musical styles is a common and often crucial part of being a musician in a regional centre due to the low demand for any one specific genre (Luckman et al. 630). The interview data that was gathered during the study’s data collection phase was analysed for themes using the grounded theory research method (Charmaz). The following sections will discuss three areas of findings relating to some of the unique North Queensland influences that have impacted the development and sustainability of the two regional jazz communities.Transient Musical PopulationsThe prospect of living in North Queensland is an alluring proposition for many people. According to the participants in this study, the combination of work and a tropical lifestyle attracts people from all over the country to Cairns and Mackay, but this influx is matched by a high population turnover. Many musicians who move into the region soon move away again. High population turnover is a characteristic of several Northern regional centres such as the city of Darwin (Luckman, Gibson and Lea 12). The high growth and high population turnover in Cairns, in particular, was one of the highest in the country between 2006 and 2011 (ABS). The study participants in both regions believed that the transient nature of the local population is detrimental to the development and sustainability of the jazz communities. One participant described the situation in Cairns this way: “The tropics sort of lure them up there, tease them with all of the beauty and nature, and then spit them out when they realise it’s not what they imagined (interviewee 1, 24 Aug. 2016).” Looking more broadly to other coastal regional areas of Australia, there is evidence of the counter-urban flow of professionals and artists seeking out a region’s “natural and cultural environment” (Gibson 339). On the far North coast of New South Wales, Gibson examined how the climate, natural surroundings and cultural charms attracted city dwellers to that region (337). Similarly, most of the participants in this study mentioned lifestyle choices such as raising a family and living in the tropics as reasons to move to Cairns or Mackay. The prospect of working in the tourism and hospitality industry was found to be another common reason for musicians to move to Cairns in particular. In contrast to some studies (Salazar; Conradson and Latham) where it was found that the middle- to upper-classes formed the majority of lifestyle migrants, the migrating musicians identified by this study were mostly low-income earners seeking a combination of music work and other types of employment outside the music industry. There have been studies that have explored and critically reviewed the theoretical frameworks behind lifestyle migration (Benson and Osbaldiston) including the examination of issues and the motivation to ‘lifestyle migrate’. What is interesting in this current study is the focus of discussion on the post-migration effects. Study participants believe that most of the musicians who move into their region leave soon afterwards because of their disillusionment with the local music industry. Despite the lure of musical jobs through the tourism and hospitality industry, local musicians in Cairns tend to believe there is less work than imagined. Pub rock duos and DJs have taken most of the performance opportunities, which makes it hard for new musicians to compete.The study also reveals that Cairns jazz musicians consider it more difficult to find and collaborate with quality newcomers. This may be attributed to the smaller jazz communities’ demand for players of specific instruments. One participant explained, “There’s another bass player that just moved here, but he only plays by ear, so when people want to play charts and new songs, he can’t do it so it's hard finding the right guys up here at times (interviewee 2, 23 Aug. 2016).” Cairns and Mackay participants agreed that the difficulty of finding and retaining quality musicians in the region impacted on the ability of certain groups to be sustainable. One participant added, “It’s such a small pool of musicians, at the moment, I've got a new project ready to go and I've got two percussionists, but I need a bass player, but there is no bass player that I'm willing to work with (interviewee 3, 24 Aug. 2016).” The same participant has been fortunate over the years, performing with a different local group whose members have permanently stayed in the Cairns region, however, forging new musical pathways and new groups seemed challenging due to the lack of musical skills in some of the potential musicians.In Mackay, the study revealed a smaller influx of new musicians to the region, and study participants experienced the same difficulties forming groups and retaining members as their Cairns counterparts. One participant, who found it difficult to run a Big Band as well as a smaller jazz ensemble because of the transient population, claimed that many local musicians were lured to metropolitan centres for university or work.Study participants in both Northern centres appeared to have developed a tolerance and adaptability for their regional challenges. While this article does not aim to suggest a solution to the issues they described, one interesting finding that emerged in both Cairns and Mackay was the musicians’ ability to minimise some of the effects of the transient population. Some musicians found that it was more manageable to sustain a band by forming smaller groups such as duos, trios and quartets. An example was observed in Mackay, where one participant’s Big Band was a standard seventeen-piece group. The loss of players was a constant source of anxiety for the performers. Changing to a smaller ensemble produced a sense of sustainability that satisfied the group. In Cairns, one participant found that if the core musicians in the group (bass, drums and vocals) were permanent local residents, they could manage to use musicians passing through the region, which had minimal impact on the running of the group. For example, the Latin band will have different horn players sit in from time to time. When those performers leave, the impact on the group is minimal because the rhythm section is comprised of long-term Cairns residents.Venue Conditions Heat UpAt the Cape York Hotel in Cairns, musicians and audience members claimed that it was uncomfortable to perform or attend Sunday afternoon jazz gigs during the Cairns summer due to the high temperatures and non air-conditioned venues. This impact of the physical environment on the service process in a venue was first modelled and coined the ‘Servicescape’ by Bitner (57). The framework, which includes physical dimensions like temperature, noise, space/function and signage, has also been further investigated in other literature (Minor et al.; Kubacki; Turley and Fugate). This model is relevant to this study because it clearly affects the musician’s ability to perform music in the Northern climate and attract audiences. One of the regular musicians at the Cape York Hotel commented: So you’re thinking, ‘Well, I’m starting to create something here, people are starting to show up’, but then you see it just dwindling away and then you get two or three weeks of hideously hot weather, and then like last Sunday, by the time I went on in the first set, my shirt was sticking to me like tissue paper… I set up a gig, a three-hour gig with my trio, and if it’s air conditioned you’re likely to get people but if it’s like the Cape York, which is not air conditioned, and you’re out in the beer garden with a tin roof over the top with big fans, it’s hideous‘. (Interviewee 4, 24 Aug. 2016)The availability of venues that offer live jazz is limited in both regions. The issue was twofold: firstly, the limited availability of a larger venue to cater for the ensembles was deemed problematic; and secondly, the venue manager needed to pay for the services of the club, which contributed to its running costs. In Cairns, the Cape York Hotel has provided the local CJC with an outdoor beer garden as a venue for their regular Sunday performances since 2015. The president of the CJC commented on the struggle for the club to find a suitable venue for their musicians and patrons. The club has had residencies in multiple venues over the last thirty years with varying success. It appears that the club has had to endure these conditions in order to provide their musicians and audiences an outlet for jazz performance. This dedication to their art form and sense of resilience appears to be a regular theme for these Northern jazz musicians.Minor et al. (7) recommended that live music organisers needed to consider offering different physical environments for different events (7). For example, a venue that caters for a swing band might include a dance floor for potential dancers or if a venue catered for a sit down jazz show, the venue might like to choose the best acoustic environment to best support the sound of the ensemble. The research showed that customers have different reasons for attending events, and in relation to the Cape York Hotel, the majority of the customers were the CJC members who simply wanted to enjoy their jazz club performances in an air conditioned environment with optimal acoustics as the priority. Although not ideal, the majority of the CJC members still attended during the summer months and endured the high temperatures due to a lack of venue suitability.Parochial MindsetsOne of the challenging issues faced by many of the participants in both regions was the perceived cultural divide between jazz aficionados and general patrons at many venues. While larger centres in Australia have enjoyed an international reputation as creative hubs for jazz such as Melbourne and Sydney (Shand), the majority of participants in this study believed that a significant portion of the general public is quite parochial in their views on various musical styles including jazz. Coined the ‘bogan factor’, one participant explained, “I call it the bogan factor. Do you think that's an academic term? It is now” (interviewee 5, 17 Feb. 2016). They also commented on dominant cultural choices of residents in these regions: “It's North Queensland, it's a sport orientated, 4WD dominated place. Culturally they are the main things that people are attracted to” (interviewee 5, 17 Feb. 2016). These cultural preferences appear to affect the performance opportunities for the participants in Cairns and Mackay.Waitt and Gibson explored how the Wollongong region was chosen as an area for investigation to see if city size mattered for creativity and creativity-led regeneration (1224). With the ‘Creative Class’ framework in mind (Florida), the researchers found that Wollongong’s primarily blue-collar industrial identity was a complex mixture of cultural pursuits including the arts, sport and working class ideals (Waitt and Gibson 1241). This finding is consistent with the comments of study participants from Cairns and Mackay who believed that the identities of their regions were strongly influenced by sport and industries like mining and farming. One Mackay participant added, “I think our culture, in itself, would need to change to turn more people to jazz. I can’t see that happening. That’s Australia. You’re fighting against 200 years of sport” (interviewee 6, 12 Feb. 2016). Performing in Mackay or Cairns in venues that attract various demographics can make it difficult for musicians playing jazz. A Cairns participant added, “As Ingrid James once told me, ‘It's North Queensland, you’ve got an audience of tradesman, they don't get it’. It's silly to think it's going to ever change” (interviewee 7, 26 Aug. 2016). One Mackay participant believed that the lack of appreciation for jazz in regional areas was largely due to a lack of exposure to the art form. Most people grow up listening to other styles of music in their households.Another participant made the point that regardless of the region’s cultural and leisure-time preferences, if a jazz band is playing in a football club, you must expect it to be unpopular. Many of the research participants emphasised that playing in a suitable venue is paramount for developing a consistent and attentive audience. Choosing a venue that values and promotes the style of jazz music that the musicians are performing could help to attract more jazz fans and therefore build a sustainable jazz community.Refreshingly, this study revealed that musicians in both regions showed considerable resilience in dealing with the issue of parochial mindsets, and they have implemented methods to help educate their audiences. The audience plays a significant part in the development and future of a jazz community (Becker; Martin). For the Central Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Mackay, part of the ethos of the institution is to provide music performance and educational opportunities to the region. One of the lecturers who made a significant contribution to the design of the ensemble program had a clear vision to combine jazz and popular music styles in order to connect with a regional audience. He explained, “The popular music strand of the jazz program and what we called the commercial ensembles was very much birthed out of that concept of creating a connection with the community and making us more accessible in the shortest amount of time, which then enabled us to expose people to jazz” (interviewee 8, 20 Mar. 2016).In a similar vein, several Cairns musicians commented on how they engaged with their audiences through education. Some musicians attempted to converse with the patrons on the comparative elements of jazz and non-jazz styles, which helped to instil some appreciation in patrons with little jazz knowledge. One participant cited that although not all patrons were interested in an education at a pub, some became regular attendees and showed greater appreciation for the different jazz styles. These findings align with other studies (Radbourne and Arthurs; Kubacki; Kubacki et al.), who found that audiences tend to return to arts organizations or events more regularly if they feel connected to the experience (Kubacki et al. 409).ConclusionThe Cairns and Mackay jazz musicians who were interviewed in this study revealed some innovative approaches for sustaining their art form in North Queensland. The participants discussed creative solutions for minimising the influence of a transient musician population as well as overcoming some of the parochial mindsets in the community through education. The North Queensland summer months proved to be a struggle for musicians and audience members alike in Cairns in particular, but resilience and commitment to the music and the social network of jazz performers seemed to override this obstacle. Although this article presents just a subset of the findings from a study of the development and sustainability of the jazz communities in Mackay and Cairns, it opens the way for further investigation into the unique issues faced. Deeper understanding of these issues could contribute to the ongoing development and sustainability of jazz communities in regional Australia.ReferencesAustralian Bureau of Statistics. "Mackay (Statistical Area 2), Cairns (R) (Statistical Local Area), Census 2016." Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics.———. "Perspectives on Regional Australia: Population Growth and Turnover in Local Government Areas (Lgas), 2006-2011." Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics.Becker, H. Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982.Benson, Michaela, and Nick Osbaldiston. "Toward a Critical Sociology of Lifestyle Migration: Reconceptualizing Migration and the Search for a Better Way of Life." The Sociological Review 64.3 (2016): 407-23.Bitner, Mary Jo. 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The release of the film Fight Club (Dir. David Fincher, 1999) was met with an outpouring of contradictory reviews. From David Ansen’s [Newsweek] claim that “Fight Club is the most incendiary movie to come out of Hollywood in a long time” (Fight Club DVD insert) to LA Times’s Kenneth Turan who proclaimed Fight Club to be “…a witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophising and bone-crushing violence that actually thinks it’s saying something of significance” (Fight Club DVD insert), everyone, it seemed, needed to weigh in with their views. Whether you think the film is a piece of witless and excessive trash, or believe, as Fight Club novelist Chuck Palahniuk hopes “it would offer more people the idea that they could create their own lives outside the existing blueprint for happiness offered by society,” this is a film that people react strongly to (Fight Club DVD insert). Whether or not the film is successful in the new ‘blueprint’ area is debatable and one focus of this essay. It isn’t difficult to spot the focus of the film Fight Club. The title and the graphic, edgy trailers for the film leave no doubt in the viewer’s mind that this film is about fighting. But fighting what and why are the questions that unveil the deeper edge to the film, an edge that skirts the abyss of deep psychological schism: man’s alienation from man, society and self, and the position of the late twentieth century male whose gendered potentialities have become muted thanks to corporate cookie-cutter culture and the loss of a ‘hunter-gatherer’ role for men. In a nutshell, the film explores the psychic rift of the main character, unnamed for the film, but conventionally referred to as “Jack” (played by Ed Norton). Jack leads a life many late twentieth century males can identify with, a life without real grounding, focus or passion. It is the kind of life that has become a by-product of the “me” generation and corporate/consumer culture. Aside from Jack’s inability to find real satisfaction in his love life, friendships, job, or sense of self, he also suffers from an identity disorder. While there are few people who are unaware of the mind-numbing (and in some cases, audience-alienating) “twist” offered near the end of the film, it bears repeating that the compelling character of Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) who shapes and influences the changes in Jack’s life is actually revealed near the end of the film as a manifestation of Jack’s alter ego. Jack and Tyler are the same person. The two conspire to start ‘Fight Club’, where men hit other men. Hard. The Club becomes an underground sensation, expanding to other communities and cities and eventually spawns the offshoot Project Mayhem whose goal it is to ultimately erase individual debt so everyone (all consumers) can start at zero. In order to manage this affair, several large buildings are slated for destruction by the Mayhem team. Of course no people will be in the buildings at the time, but all the records will be destroyed. This is the core of the film, but there are several other interesting sidelights that will become important to this discussion, including the lone female character Marla who becomes the love interest of Jack/Tyler, and the friend Bob, whom Jack meets during his insomniac foray into the seedy underworld of the self help meeting. The film itself seems to cry out for a psychoanalytic reading. Its thinly veiled references to Freudian concepts and subliminal tricks aside, it also makes the inner world of the protagonist its landscape and backdrop. In a film dominated by a psychological and psychical problem, psychoanalysis seems an excellent tool for delving more deeply into the symbols and attitudes of the piece. I have chosen both Kleinian object relations and Julia Kristeva’s understanding of abjection to help illuminate some issues in the film. Object relations helps to make clear both the divergence of personality and the emergence of a ‘repaired’ protagonist at the end of the film as Jack first creates and then destroys his alter ego. Kristeva initially explored abjection theory via literature in Powers of Horror (1982), but Barbara Creed’s Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1993) opened wide the door for applications of the theory to film studies. Creed uses abjection to explore issues of gender in the horror film, focusing on the role and depiction of women as abject. Here, I have adapted some of her ideas and intend to explore the role of abjection in the male identification process. In this film fighting operates as both reality and metaphor, on both the physical and psychical levels, encompassing the internal and external fight within the mind and body of the protagonist. Jack’s main problem is a lack of concrete identity and self-realization. Numbed by his willing and eager participation in consumer culture and his tacit compliance with the gritty underworld of his job as an automotive ‘recall coordinator’, his life’s work is estimating the cost effectiveness of saving lives by calculating the cost of death. In Jack’s world, meaning is derived solely through the external—external products he consumes and collects. Jack’s consumer-based emasculation is expressed when he states, “Like so many others I had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct.” In this sentence he clarifies his disempowerment and feminisation in one swoop. Having few, if any, relationships with human beings, meaningful or otherwise, Jack never reaches a level of social maturity. His only solace comes from visiting anonymous help groups for the terminally ill. Although Jack is physically fine (aside from his insomnia) a part of him is clearly dying, as his sense of who he is in a postmodern culture is hopelessly mediated by advertisements that tell him what to be. In the absence of a father, Jack appears to have had no real role models. Made ‘soft’ by his mother, Jack exhibits a not so subtle misogyny that is illustrated through his relationship with fellow ‘tourist’ in the self-help circles, Marla Singer. Jack’s identity issues unfold via various conflicts, each of which is enmeshed in the club he starts that revolves around the physical pain of hand-to-hand, man-on-man combat. Jack’s conflicts with himself, others and society at large are all compressed within the theme and practice of fighting and the fight clubs he institutes. Fighting for Jack (and the others who join) seems the answer to life’s immediate problems. This essay looks deeply into Jack’s identity conflict, viewing it as a moment of psychic crisis in which Jack creates an alternate personality deeply steeped in and connected to the ‘abject’ in almost every way. Thus, Jack forces himself to confront the abject in himself and the world around him, dealing with abjection on several levels all with a view to expelling it to restore the ‘clean and proper’ boundaries necessary in the ‘whole’ self. Viewed though the lens of psychoanalysis, particularly Klein’s work on object relations and Kristeva’s work with abjection, allows a reading in which the film expresses the need for and accomplishment of a self-activated encounter with the abject in order to redraw ‘clean and proper’ boundaries of self. This film’s tag lines, ‘Mischief, Mayhem and Soap’—illustrate both the presence (Mischief, Mayhem) and function (Soap) of the abject—the interaction with the abject will lead to a ‘clean’ subject—a proper subject, a restored subject. Before continuing, a brief discussion of abjection and object relations and the ways in which they are utilized in this essay is essential here. One of Klein’s major propositions is that “the neonate brings into the world two main conflicting impulses: love and hate” (Mitchell 19). Each of these conflicting impulses must be dealt with, usually by either “bringing them together in order to modify the death drive along with the life drive or expelling the death drive into the outside world” (19). Along with this conflict arises the conflict of a primary relationship with the mother, which is seen as both satisfying and frustrating, and then later complicated with the addition of the father. The main conflicting love/hate binary is reflective of a number of ‘sets’ of dualities that surface when looking into the mother/child relationship. Besides love and hate, there is the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother, the mother as symbolic of both life and death, the symbolic (paternal) and semiotic (maternal), total oneness and total autonomy. The curious ‘split’ nature of the infant’s perception of the maternal figure recalls a kind of doppelganger, a doubling of the maternal (in positive and negative incarnations), that can be seen as abject. In the film, this informs the relationship between both Jack and Marla and Jack and Tyler, as I argue Tyler and Marla serve as parental substitutes at one part in the film. This is clarified in Jack’s statements about his relationship with the two of them: “My parents pulled this exact same act for years” and “I am six years old again, passing messages between parents.” This imaginary relationship allows Jack to re-experience some of his early identification processes, while effectively trading out the gender responsibilities to the point where Tyler symbolically takes the place of the ‘mother’ and Marla the place of the ‘father’. The result of this action is an excess of male gendered experiences in which Jack in crisis (emasculated) is surrounded by phalluses. Kristeva’s work with abjection is also important here. I am especially interested in her understanding of the mother/child relationship as connected with abjection, particularly the threat the mother represents to the child as wanting to return to a state of oneness. The abject functions in Fight Club as a means for the protagonist to re-configure his own autonomy. For Kristeva, the abject is that which is cast out in order that “I” may exist. It exists at the borders of the self and continually draws the subject into it. As the subject revolts and pulls away, its resistance cues the process of defining itself as separate, proper and autonomous. When the narrative of Jack’s life refuses to make sense to him, and his experiences seem like “a copy of a copy of a copy,” Jack turns inward for help. Kristeva says that the abject is “experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within” (5). Thus Jack ‘finds’ Tyler. The abject, [represented by Bob, Tyler and Marla in the film] is that which disturbs “identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4). As the abject is that which blurs boundaries borders and classification, the film itself is steeped in abject images and ideas. The discrete categories of inside/outside, asleep/awake, male/female, and self/other are continually troubled throughout the narrative. The two most confused binaries are male/female and self/other. As the film is about Jack’s own experience of emasculation it is not until the male/female gender issues are resolved that his self/other issues can be resolved. Through the re-ordering of gender he is able to take his place in society alongside Marla, finally viewed as not his mother or friend but lover. Jack Versus Himself: A Cult Of One Jack is able to re-vamp his personality through exposure to the abject and the replaying of certain key object relations moments in his childhood. He engages with this ‘inner child’ to reconnect with psychically difficult moments in which his ‘self’ emerged. Jack, however, twists the typical plot of maternal and paternal bonding in ways that speak to the underlying misogyny of the film and of late twentieth century society as well. While the story begins with both male and female characters in unnatural roles with unnatural and abject body parts, by the end of the film, these ‘abnormalities’ or abject objects are erased, ejected from the text so Jack is restored to the ‘safety’ of a compulsory heterosexuality. Bob, Tyler and Marla’s characters are three examples of gender twisting expressed in the film. In psychoanalytic literature, the child bonds first to the mother (via feeding from the breast and in-utero existence) and experiences a feeling of total oneness impossible to duplicate. Eventually the child seeks autonomy and breaks from the mother and her clinging ways with the help of the father and the phallus. So in basic terms, the female is abject, representing infantile regression and oneness, and the male represents taking the proper place in the symbolic order. When the female (mother) is denied, the male accepts his natural place in culture and society. However, in this film, Tyler (the male) is the abject presence in the text, that which threatens to consume and subsume the narrator’s personality. It is Marla, the phallic woman, who interposes herself in this dyad and becomes the correct choice for Jack, allowing him to proceed into ‘normal relations.’ Early in the film, Jack is unable to envision a female partner with whom he can open up and share, instead substituting Bob—and his doubly signified ‘bitch-tits’—as a locus of comfort. In Bob’s ample bosom, Jack finds the release he is looking for, though it is unnatural in more ways than one. The feminised Bob [testicular cancer patient] comforts and coddles Jack so much that he feels the same idyllic bliss experienced by the infant at the mother’s breast; Jack feels “lost in oblivion, dark and silent and complete.” That night he is able for the first time in months to sleep: “Babies don’t sleep this well.” This illustrates Jack’s longing for the safety and security of the mother, complicated by his inability to bond with a female, replaced with his deep need for identification with a male. Continuing the twist, it is Marla who foils Jack’s moment of infantile bliss: “She ruined everything” with her presence, Jack sneers. Jack’s regression to this infantile bliss with either man or woman would be perceived as abject, (disrupting system and order) but this particular regression is at least doubly abject because of Bob’s unnatural breasts and lack of testicles. Both Bob, and to some degree Tyler, offer abjection to Jack as a way of dealing with this complexities of autonomous living. While my argument is that Tyler takes the traditional ‘female’ role in the drama, as a figure (like Bob) who lures Jack into an unnatural oneness that must ultimately be rejected, it is true that even in his position as abject ‘female’ (mother), Tyler is overwhelmingly phallic. His ‘jobs’ consist of splicing shots of penises into films, urinating and masturbating into restaurant food and engaging in acrobatic sex with Marla. Since Marla, who occupies the position of father bringing Jack into society away from the influence of Tyler, is also coded phallic, Jack’s world is overwhelmingly symbolically male. This appears to be a response to the overwhelming physical presence of Jack’s mother of which Tyler comments, “We’re a generation of men raised by women. I am wondering if another woman is really the answer we need?” During this same scene, Jack clarifies his regressive dilemma: “I can’t get married, I am a thirty year old boy.” Thus while Tyler campaigns for a world without women, Jack must decide if this is the correct way to go. Immersion in the world of uber-maleness only seems to make his life worse. It is only after he ‘kills’ Tyler and accepts Marla as a partner that he can feel successful. In another help meeting, one of the guided meditations emphasizes his regression by asking him to go to his “cave” and locate his “power animal.” This early in the film, Jack can only envision his power animal as a rather silly penguin, which, although phallic to some extent, is undercut by the fact that it speaks with a child’s voice. In the next visualization of the ‘power animal’, the animal becomes Marla—clarifying her influence over Jack’s subconscious. The threat of Marla’s sexuality is on one level explored with Jack’s counterpart Tyler, the one who dares to go where Jack will not, but their encounters are not shown in a ‘natural’ or fully mature light. They are instead equated with childhood experimentation and regressive fantasies as Marla responds that she “hasn’t been fucked like that since grade school” and Tyler proclaims the relationship is mere “sportfucking.” It is Tyler who discovers Marla’s oversized dildo proudly displayed on a dresser, of which she states “Don’t worry its not a threat to you.” This phallicized Marla refers to herself as “infectious human waste,” clearly abject. Marla’s power must be muted before Jack can truly relate to her. This is illustrated in two separate ‘visions’ of sexual intercourse—one between Marla and Tyler early in the film in which Marla assumes the dominant position, and then later near the end of the film when the same encounter is replayed with Jack taking Tyler’s place, Marla now in the standard missionary position on her back: Proper. Jack’s struggle with self is played out via his relationship with Tyler (and Marla to some degree). Once Jack has been exposed to the various levels of abject behaviour offered by Tyler and Project Mayhem, he chooses to go it alone, no longer needing the double he himself created. After experiencing and rejecting the abject, Jack redraws his boundaries and cleanses his soul. Jack Versus Society—The Personal Is Political Jack’s personal struggle becomes political—and communal. Another attempt at forming identity, Fight Club is bound to fail because it offers not autonomy but a group identity substituted for an individual one. While Jack loathes his ‘single serving life’ before Fight Club, he must come to realize that a group identity brings more problems than solutions in an identity crisis. While the comfort of ‘oneness’ is alluring, it is also abject. As Jack is able to finally refuse the safely and oneness offered by Tyler’s existence, he must also deny the safety in numbers offered by Fight Club itself. The cult he creates swallows members whole, excreting them as the “all singing all dancing crap of the world.” They eat, drink and sleep Fight Club and eventually its ‘evolutionary’ offshoot, Project Mayhem. During his involvement with Fight Club and Project Mayhem, Jack is exposed to three levels of abjection including food loathing, bodily wastes, and the corpse, each of which threaten to draw him to the “place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 2). Jack’s first experience involves Tyler’s (a)vocation as a waiter who urinates and probably masturbates into patrons’ food. This mingling of bodily wastes and nourishment represents the most elementary form of abjection: food loathing. While Jack appears amused at Tyler’s antics in the beginning, by the end of the film, he illustrates his movement closer to self-identification, by calling for “clean food, please” signalling his alliance with the clean and proper. Bodily wastes, the internal made visible, represent the most extended contact Jack has with the abject. These experiences, when what is properly outside ends up inside and vice versa, begin with bloody hand-to-hand combat, including Tyler’s vomiting of blood into the mouth of an unwilling Fight Club participant “Lou”, causing another witness to vomit as well. The physical aversion to abject images (blood, pus, excrement) is part of the redrawing of self—the abject is ejected –via nausea/vomiting. Kristeva explains: “I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit” (3). The images continue to pile up as Jack describes life in the Paper Street house: “What a shit hole.” The house slowly decomposes around them, leaking and mouldy, releasing its own special smell: the rot of a “warm stale refrigerator” mixed with the “fart smell of steam” from a nearby industrial plant. While at Paper Street, Tyler decides to make soap. Soap in itself is an agent of cleanliness, but in this context it is abject and defiled by being composed of human waste. In a deeply abject moment, Jack is accidentally covered in refuse that spills from a ripped bag full of human fat pilfered from a liposuction clinic. Even at this profoundly disturbing moment, Jack is unwilling to give up his associations with Tyler and Project Mayhem. It is only after his encounter with a corpse that he changes his tune. While Fight Club attempted to blur physical boundaries via hand-to-hand combat and exchange of blood and blows, Project Mayhem threatens the psychic boundaries of self, a deeper danger. While a loud speaker drones “we are all part of the same compost heap” and a fellow occupant reminds Jack “In project mayhem we have no names,” Jack realizes he is truly losing himself, not gaining strength. Mayhem’s goal of ‘oneness’, like the maternal and infant experience, is exposed via slogans like “you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.” Tyler finally puts his cards on the table and asks Jack to “stop trying to control everything and just let go.” For Kristeva, “If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything”(3). The corpse of Bob causes Jack to confront the boundaries of life and death, both spiritual and physical, as he opens his eyes to the damaging effects of the cult-like environment into which he has fallen. Jack’s momentary indecision morphs into action after Bob’s death becomes just one more mantra for the zombie-like Project Mayhemers to chant: “His name was Robert Paulson.” Jack’s internal and external struggles are compressed into one moment when he commits homo(sui)cide. Placing a gun in his mouth, he attempts to rid himself of Tyler forever, his final words to Tyler: “My eyes are open now”. At this point, Jack is psychically ready to take charge of his life and confidently eject the abject from the narrative of his life. He wants no more to do with Project Mayhem gang and is reunited with Marla with whom he finally appears ready to have a fully realized relationship. His masculinity and identity restoration are made blindingly apparent by the final splice in the film—the image of Marla and Jack hand in hand overlooking the new view out of the tower, spliced with the shot of a semi-erect penis—back to shot of Marla and Jack. The message is clear: Jack is a man, he has a woman, and he knows who he is because of it. While Fight Club novelist Palahniuk hopes the film offers options for life “outside the existing blueprint offered by society” (Fight Club DVD insert). On the other hand, it’s unclear how well the film pulls this off. On one hand, its lambasting of the numbing effects of blind and excessive consumerism seems well explored, it’s unclear what options really surface by the end of the film. Although many targeted buildings have been destroyed, through which the viewer can assume some or even most records of individual debt were erased, the building in which Marla and Jack stand (initially slated for destruction) remains. Perhaps this is meant to signify the impossibility of true financial equality in American society. But it seems to me that the more pressing issues are not the ones openly addressed in the film (that of money and consumerism) but rather the more internalised issues of self-actualisation, gender identity and contentment. In a postmodern space ripe for the redrawing and redefinition of gender stereotypes, this film carefully reinscribes not only compulsory heterosexuality but also the rigid boundaries of acceptable male and female behaviour. For this film, the safest route to repairing male identity and self-hood threatened by the emasculating practices of a consumer culture is a route back. Back to infantile and childhood fantasy. While it dances provocatively around the edges of accepting a man with ‘bitch tits’ and a woman with a dick, ultimately Bob is killed and Marla reclaimed by Jack in an ‘I’m ok you’re ok’ final scene: “Look at me Marla, I am really OK”. Jack’s immersion in an all male cult(ure) is eschewed for the comfort of real breasts. Works Cited Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993. Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. 1999. Fight Club DVD edition. Dir. David Fincher. 2000. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. New York: Columbia Press: 1982. Mitchell, Juliet. The Selected Melanie Klein. New York: The Free Press, 1986. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Caldwell, Tracy M.. "Identity Making from Soap to Nuts" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/10-identitymaking.php>. APA Style Caldwell, T. M., (2003, Feb 26). Identity Making from Soap to Nuts. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/10-identitymaking.html

The use of the term authenticity in the social science literature can be rather eclectic at best and unscrupulous at worst. (Vanini, 74)We live in an age of authenticity, according to Charles Taylor, an era which prizes the finding of one’s life “against the demands of external conformity” (67–68). Taylor’s argument is that, correctly practiced, authenticity need not result in individualism or tribalism but rather a generation of people “made more self-responsible” (77).Philip Vanini has surveyed the turn toward authenticity in sociology. He has parsed the word authenticity, and argued that it has been used in three ways—factual, original, and sincere. A failure to attend to these distinctives, mixed with a “paucity of systematic empirical research” has resulted in abstract speculation (75). This article responds to Taylor’s analysis and Vanini’s challenge.My argument utilises Vanini’s theoretical frame—authenticity as factual, original, and sincere—to analyse empirical data gathered in the study of recent religious innovation occurring amongst a set of (“alternative worship”) Christian communities in the United Kingdom. I am drawing upon longitudinal research I have conducted, including participant observation in digital forums from 1997 to the present, along with semi-structured interviews conducted in the United Kingdom in 2001 and 2012.A study of “alternative worship” was deemed significant given such communities’s interaction with contemporary culture, including their use of dance music, multi-media, and social media (Baker, Taylor). Such approaches contrast with other contemporary religious approaches to culture, including a fundamentalist retreat from culture or the maintenance of a “high” culture, and thus inherited patterns of religious expression (Roberts).I argue that the discourse of “alternative worship” deploy authenticity-as-originality as essential to their identity creation. This notion of authenticity is used by these communities to locate themselves culturally (as authentically-original in contemporary cultures), and thus simultaneously to define themselves as marginal from mainstream religious expression.Intriguingly, a decade later, “alternative worship” was appropriated by the mainstream. A new organisation—Fresh Expressions—emerged from within the Church of England, and the Methodist Church in Britain that, as it developed, drew on “alternative worship” for legitimation. A focus on authenticity provides a lens by which to pay particular attention to the narratives offered by social organisations in the processes of innovation. How did the discourse deployed by Fresh Expressions in creating innovation engage “alternative worship” as an existing innovation? How did these “alternative worship” groups, who had found generative energy in their location as an alternative—authentically-original—expression, respond to this appropriation by mainstream religious life?A helpful conversation partner in teasing out the complexity of these moves within contemporary religious innovation is Sarah Thornton. She researched trends in dance clubs, and rave music in Britain, during a similar time period. Thornton highlighted the value of authenticity, which she argued was deployed in club cultures to create “subcultural capital” (98-105). She further explored how the discourses around authenticity were appropriated over time through the complex networks within which popular culture flows (Bennett; Collins; Featherstone; McRobbie; Willis).This article will demonstrate that a similar pattern—using authenticity-as-originality to create “subcultural capital”—was at work in “alternative worship.” Further, the notions of authenticity as factual, original, and sincere are helpful in parsing the complex networks that exist within the domains of religious cultures. This analysis will be two-fold, first as the mainstream appropriates, and second as the “alternative” responds.Thornton emerged “post-Birmingham.” She drew on the scholarship associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, glad of their turn toward popular culture. Nevertheless she considered her work to be distinct. Thornton posited the construction of “taste cultures” through distinctions created by those inside a particular set of signs and symbols. She argued for a networked view of society, one that recognised the complex roles of media and commerce in constructing distinctions and sought a more multi-dimensional frame by which to analyse the interplay between mainstream and marginal.In order to structure my investigation, I am suggesting three stages of development capture the priority, yet complexity, of authenticity in contemporary religious innovation: generation, appropriation, complexification.Generation of Authenticity-as-OriginalityThornton (26, italics original) writes:authenticity is arguably the most important value ascribed to popular music … Music is perceived as authentic when it rings true or feels real, when it has credibility and comes across as genuine. In an age of endless representations and global mediation, the experience of musical authenticity is perceived as a cure both for alienation … and dissimulation.Thornton is arguing that in this manifestation of youth culture, authenticity is valued. Further, authenticity is a perception, attached to phrases like “rings true” and “feels real.” Therefore, authenticity is hard to measure. Perhaps this move is deliberate, an attempt by those inside the “taste culture” to preserve their “subcultural capital,”—their particular sets of distinctions.Thornton’s use of authentic slides between authenticity-as-sincerity and authenticity-as-originality. For example, in the above quote, the language of “true” and “real” is a referencing of authenticity-as-sincerity. However, as Thornton analysed the appropriation of club culture by the mainstream, she is drawing, without stating it clearly, on both authenticity-as-sincerity and authenticity-as-originality.At around the time that Thornton was analysing club cultures, a number of Christian religious groups in the United Kingdom began to incorporate features of club culture into their worship services. Churches began to experiment with services beginning at club times (9.00 pm), the playing of dance music, and the use of “video-jockeying.” According to Roberts many of these worshipping communities “had close links to this movement in dance culture” (15).A discourse of authenticity was used to legitimise such innovation. Consider the description of one worship experience, located in Sheffield, England, known as Nine o’Clock Service (Fox 9-10, italics original).We enter a round, darkened room where there are forty-two television sets and twelve large video screens and projections around the walls—projections of dancing DNA, dancing planets and galaxies and atoms … this was a very friendly place for a generation raised on television and images … these people … are doing it themselves and in the center of the city and in the center of their society: at worship itself.This description makes a number of appeals to authenticity. The phrase “a generation raised on television and images” implies another generation not raised in digitally rich environments. A “subcultural” distinction has been created. The phrase “doing it themselves” suggests that this ‘digital generation’ creates something distinct, an authentic expression of their “taste culture.” The celebration of “doing it for themselves” resonates with Charles Taylor’s analysis of an age of authenticity in which self-discovery is connected with artistic creation (62).The Nine o’Clock Service gained nationwide attention, attracting attendances of over 600 young people. Rogerson described it as “a bold and imaginative attempt at contextual theology … people were attracted to it in the first instance for aesthetic and cultural reasons” (51). The priority on the aesthetic and the cultural, in contrast to the doctrinal, suggests a valuing of authenticity-as-originality.Reading Rogerson alongside Taylor teases out a further nuance in regard to the application of authenticity. Rogerson described the Nine o’Clock Service as offering “an alternative way of living in a materialist and acquisitive world” (50). This resonates with Charles Taylor’s argument that authenticity can be practiced in ways that make people “more self-responsible” (77). It suggests that the authenticity-as-originality expressed by the Nine o’Clock Service not only appealed culturally, but also offered an ethic of authenticity. We will return to this later in my argument.Inspired by the Nine o’Clock Service, other groups in the United Kingdom began to offer a similar experience. According to Adrian Riley (6):The Nine O’clock Service … was the first worshipping community to combine elements of club culture with passionate worship … It pioneered what is commonly known as “alternative worship” … Similar groups were established themselves albeit on a smaller scale.The very term “alternative worship” is significant. Sociologist of religion Abby Day argued that “boundary-marking [creates] an identity” (50). Applying Day, the term “alternative” is being used to create an identity in contrast to the existing, mainstream church. The “digitally rich” are indeed “doing it for themselves.” To be “alternative” is to be authentically-original: to be authentically-original means a participant cannot, by definition, be mainstream.Thornton argued that subcultures needed to define themselves against in order to maintain themselves as “hip” (119). This seems to describe the use of the term “alternative.” Ironically, the mainstream is needed, in order to define against, to create identity by being authentically-original (Kelly).Hence the following claim by an “alternative worship” organiser (Interview G, 2001):People were willing to play around and to say, well who knows what will happen if we run this video clip or commercial next to this sixteenth century religious painting and if we play, you know, Black Flag or some weird band underneath it … And what will it feel like? Well let’s try it and see.Note the link with music (Black Flag, an American hard core punk band formed in 1976), so central to Thornton’s understanding of authenticity in popular youth cultures. Note also the similarity between Thornton’s ascribing of value in words like “rings true” and “feels real,” with words like “feel like” and “try and see.” The word “weird” is also significant. It is deployed as a signifier of authenticity, a sign of “subcultural capital.” It positions them as “alternative,” defined in (musical) distinction from the mainstream.In sum, my argument is that authenticity-as-originality is present in “alternative worship”: in the name, in the ethos of “doing it themselves,” and in the deploying of “subcultural capital” in the legitimation of innovation. All of this has been clarified through conversation with Thornton’s empirical research regarding the value of authenticity in club culture. My analysis of “alternative worship” as a religious innovation is consistent with Taylor’s claim that we inhabit an age of authenticity, one that can be practiced by “people who are made more self-responsible” (77).Mainstream AppropriationIn 2004, the Church of England produced Mission Shaped Church (MSC), a report regarding its future. It included a chapter that described recent religious innovation in England, grouped under twelve headings (alternative worship and base ecclesial communities, café, cell, network and seeker church models, multiple and mid week congregations, new forms of traditional churches, school and community-based initiatives, traditional church plants, youth congregations). The first innovation listed is “alternative worship.”The incoming Archbishop, Rowan Williams, drew on MSC to launch a new organisation. Called Fresh Expressions, over five million pounds was provided by the Church of England to fund an organisation to support this religious innovation.Intriguingly, recognition of authenticity in these “alternative” innovations was evident in the institutional discourse being created. When I interviewed Williams, he spoke of his commitment as a Bishop (Interview 6, 2012):I decided to spend a certain amount of quality time with people on the edge. Consequently when I was asked initially what are my priorities [as Archbishop] I said, “Well, this is what I’ve been watching on the edge … I really want to see how that could impact on the Church of England as a whole.In other words, what was marginal, what had until then generated identity by being authentic in contrast to the mainstream, was now being appropriated by the mainstream “to impact on the Church of England as a whole.” MSC was aware of this complexity. “Alternative worship” was described as containing “a strong desire to be different and is most vocal in its repudiation of existing church” (45). Nevertheless, it was appropriated by the mainstream.My argument has been that “alternative worship” drew on a discourse of authenticity-as-originality. Yet when we turn to analyse mainstream appropriation, we find the definitions of authenticity begin to slide. Authenticity-as-originality is affirmed, while authenticity-as-sincerity is introduced. The MSC affirmed the “ways in which the Church of England has sought to engage with the diverse cultures and networks that are part of contemporary life” (80). It made explicit the connection between originality and authenticity. “Some pioneers and leaders have yearned for a more authentic way of living, being, doing church” (80). This can be read as an affirmation of authenticity-as-originality.Yet MSC also introduced authenticity-as-sincerity as a caution to authenticity-as-originality. “Fresh expressions should not be embraced simply because they are popular and new, but because they are a sign of the work of God and of the kingdom” (80). Thus Fresh Expressions introduced authenticity-as-sincerity (sign of the work of God) and placed it alongside authenticity-as-originality. In so doing, in the shift from “alternative worship” to Fresh Expressions, a space is both conflated (twelve expressions of church) and contested (two notions of authenticity). Conflated, because MSC places alternative worship as one innovation alongside eleven others. Contested because of the introduction of authenticity-as-sincerity alongside the affirming of authenticity-as-originality. What is intriguing is to return to Taylor’s argument for the possibility of an ethic of authenticity in which “people are made more self-responsible” (77). Perhaps the response in MSC arises from the concern described by Taylor, the risk in an age of authenticity of a society that is more individualised and tribal (55-6). To put it in distinctly ecclesiological terms, how can the church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic be carried forward if authenticity-as-originality is celebrated at, and by, the margins? Does innovation contribute to more atomised, self-absorbed and fragmented expressions of church?Yet Taylor is adamant that authenticity can be embraced without an inevitable slide in these directions. He argued that humans share a "horizon of significance" in common (52), in which one’s own "identity crucially depends on [one’s] dialogical relations with others" (48). We have already considered Rogerson’s claim that the Nine o’Clock Service offered “an alternative way of living in a materialist and acquisitive world” (50). It embraced a “strong political dimension, and a concern for justice at local and international level” (46). In other words, “alternative worship’s” authenticity-as-originality was surely already an expression of “the kingdom,” one in which “people [were] made more self-responsible” (77) in the sharing of (drawing on Taylor) a "horizon of significance" in the task of identity-formation-in-relationships (52).Yet the placing in MSC of authenticity-as-sincerity alongside authenticity-as-originality could easily have been read by those in “alternative worship” as a failure to recognise their existing practicing of the ethic of authenticity, their embodying of “the kingdom.”Consequent ComplexificationMy research into “alternative worship” is longitudinal. After the launch of Fresh Expressions, I included a new set of interview questions, which sought to clarify how these “alternative worship” communities were impacted upon by the appropriation of “alternative worship” by the mainstream. The responses can be grouped into three categories: minimal impact, a sense of affirmation and a contested complexity.With regard to minimal impact, some “alternative worship” communities perceived the arrival of Fresh Expressions had minimal impact on their shared expression of faith. The following quote was representative: “Has had no impact at all actually. Apart from to be slightly puzzled” (Interview 3, 2012).Others found the advent of Fresh Expressions provided a sense of affirmation. “Fresh expressions is … an enabling concept. It was very powerful” (Focus group 2, 2012). Respondents in this category felt that their innovations within alternative worship had contributed to, or been valued by, the innovation of Fresh Expressions. Interestingly, those whose comments could be grouped in this category had significant “subcultural capital” invested in this mainstream appropriation. Specifically, they now had a vocational role that in some way was connected to Fresh Expressions. In using the term “subcultural capital” I am again drawing on Thornton (98–105), who argued that in the complex networks through which culture flows, certain people, for example DJ’s, have more influence in the ascribing of authenticity. This suggests that “subcultural” capital is also present in religious innovation, with certain individuals finding ways to influence, from the “alternative worship” margin, the narratives of authenticity used in the complex interplay between alternative worship and Fresh Expressions.For others the arrival of Fresh Expressions had resulted in a contested complexity. The following quote was representative: “It’s a crap piece of establishment branding …but then we’re just snobs” (Focus group 3, 2012). This comment returns us to my initial framing of authenticity-as-originality. I would argue that “we’re just snobs” has a similar rhetorical effect as “Black Flag or some weird band.” It is an act of marginal self-location essential in the construction of innovation and identity.This argument is strengthened given the fact that the comment was coming from a community that itself had become perhaps the most recognizable “brand” among “alternative worship.” They have developed their own logo, website, and related online merchandising. This would suggest the concern is not the practice of marketing per se. Rather the concern is that it seems “crap” in relation to authenticity-as-originality, in a loss of aesthetic quality and a blurring of the values of innovation and identity as it related to bold, imaginative, aesthetic, and cultural attempts at contextual theology (Rogerson 51).Returning to Thornton, her research was also longitudinal in that she explored what happened when a song from a club, which had defined itself against the mainstream and as “hip,” suddenly experienced mainstream success (119). What is relevant to this investigation into religious innovation is her argument that in club culture, “selling out” is perceived to have happened only when the marginal community “loses its sense of possession, exclusive ownership and familiar belonging” (124–26).I would suggest that this is what is happening within “alternative worship” in response to the arrival of Fresh Expressions. Both “alternative worship” and Fresh Expressions are religious innovations. But Fresh Expressions defined itself in a way that conflated the space. It meant that the boundary marking so essential to “alternative worship” was lost. Some gained from this. Others struggled with a loss of imaginative and cultural creativity, a softening of authenticity-as-originality.More importantly, the discourse around Fresh Expressions also introduced authenticity-as-sincerity as a value that could be used to contest authenticity-as-originality. Whether intended or not, this also challenged the ethic of authenticity already created by these “alternative worship” communities. Their authenticity-as-originality was already a practicing of an ethic of authenticity. They were already sharing a "horizon of significance" with humanity, entering into “dialogical relations with others" that were a contemporary expression of the church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic (Taylor 52, 48). ConclusionIn this article I have analysed the discourse around authenticity as it is manifest within one strand of contemporary religious innovation. Drawing on Vanini, Taylor, and Thornton, I have explored the generative possibilities as media and culture are utilised in an “alternative worship” that is authentically-original. I have outlined the consequences when authenticity-as-originality is appropriated by the mainstream, specifically in the innovation known as Fresh Expressions and the complexity when authenticity-as-sincerity is introduced as a contested value.The value of authenticity has been found to exist in a complex relationship with the ethics of authenticity within one domain of contemporary religious innovation.ReferencesBaker, Jonny. “Alternative Worship and the Significance of Popular Culture.” Honours paper: U of London, 2000.Bennett, Andy. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity, and Place. New York: Palgrave, 2000.Cronshaw, Darren, and Steve Taylor. “The Congregation in a Pluralist Society: Rereading Newbigin for Missional Churches Today.” Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies 27.2 (2014): 1-24.Day, Abby. Believing in Belonging. Belief and Social Identity in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.Collins, Jim, ed. High-Pop. Making Culture into Popular Entertainment. Oxford: Blackwells, 2002.Cray, Graham. Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Culture, London: Church House Publishing, 2004.Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1991.Fox, Matthew. Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996.Guest, Matthew, and Steve Taylor. “The Post-Evangelical Emerging Church: Innovations in New Zealand and the UK.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 6.1 (2006): 49-64.Howard, Roland. The Rise and Fall of the Nine o’Clock Service. London: Continuum, 1996.Kelly, Gerard. Get a Grip on the Future without Losing Your Hold in the Past. Great Britain: Monarch, 1999.Kelly, Steven. “Book Review. Alt.Culture by Steven Daly and Nathaniel Wice.” 20 Aug. 2003. ‹http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/books/cult.html›.McRobbie, Angela. Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.Riley, Adrian. God in the House: UK Club Culture and Spirituality. 1999. 15 Oct. 2003 ‹http://www.btmc.org.auk/altworship/house/›.Roberts, Paul. Alternative Worship in the Church of England. Cambridge: Grove Books, 1999.Rogerson, J. W. “‘The Lord Is here’: The Nine o’Clock Service.” Why Liberal Churches Are Growing. Eds. Ian Markham and Martyn Percy. London: Bloomsbury T & T, 2006. 45-52.Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.Taylor, Steve. “Baptist Worship and Contemporary Culture: A New Zealand Case Study.” Interfaces: Baptists and Others. Eds. David Bebbington and Martin Sutherland. Carlisle: Paternoster, 2013. 292-307.Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures. Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Hanover: UP New England, 1996.Vanini, Philip. “Authenticity.” Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture. Ed. Dale Southerton. Los Angeles: Sage, 2011. 74-76.Willis, Paul E., et al. Common Culture. Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young. Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1990.

Introduction – Polish GrungeThe main objective of this article is to examine the grunge scene of the 1990s in Poland in the context of acculturation and assimilation processes. Polish grunge was, on the one hand, the expression of trends that were observable in music industry since the late 1980s. On the other hand, it was symptomatic of a rapid systemic transformation. Youth culture was open for the diffusion of cultural patterns and was ready to adopt certain patterns from the West.Thus, we suggest that the local grunge scene was completely modelled on the American one: the flow of cultural practices and subcultural fashion were the manifestations of the assimilation processes in Poland, observable not only in art (i.e. rock music), but also in the domains of politics and economy, as well as in the broader social sphere. We explore how young people were ready to adopt only the surface level of the phenomenon as they were familiar with it through the media coverage it received. Young people in Poland circa the early ‘90s primarily wanted to gain access to an imaginary Western lifestyle rather than learn about real living conditions in capitalist societies, and they could do this through their involvement in grunge culture.Grunge as a Cultural PhenomenonGrunge as a popular music trend arose in the USA during the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the work of bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains. Grunge was initially opposed to consumerism and capitalist values. Nevertheless, A&R scouts recognised the commercial potential of this music: for example, Nirvana’s Nevermind was released by Geffen Company, and Pearl Jam’s Ten by Epic. As Grzegorz Brzozowicz and Filip Łobodziński put it (313),the success of Nirvana was a post-mort triumph of punk rock and, more importantly, it indicated the potential of alternative music, which suddenly stepped outside an aesthetic ghetto and became a hot stuff. This influence was also visible as regards fashion and customs – Dr. Martens’ shoes, flannel shirts, frayed jeans, and wool caps became an outfit common for the young (…). Grunge influenced visual art, film and photography.In Poland, grunge as a subculture and sub-genre of rock music emerged in the early 1990s following the international commercial success of bands such as those listed above, and it entailed the assimilation of the Western cultural patterns. Although assimilation processes were typical primarily for youth culture, they were observed in the wider context of the changes and adaptations that Polish system underwent after the fall of the centrally planned economy and subjugation to the communist party power after the Yalta agreements (1945-1989/1990).In this context, the concept Centre/Periphery (Gopinathan, Saravanan and Altbach; Hannerz; Langholm; Pisciotta) appears as the field for the dissemination of popular culture. Popular culture is a battlefield for creating and negotiating the meanings that are inherent within cultural practices (Barker). Cultural practices play a double role in the dissemination of ideas or objects. Firstly, they come as a result of adaptation in a defined culture, and secondly, they make new cultural patterns stabile, visible, and easy to practice by people as flexible patterns of behaviour. This point is clearly visible in the context of the East European states that underwent rapid acculturation processes in which new patterns of economic and social solutions were established in centre-planned economies: the tensions of the “old” and the “new” patterns dominating in the political and social systems of those countries (e.g. Poland, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.) were visible and affected societies to a considerable degree (Pisciotta). Thus, the practices generated in cultural Centres tend to disseminate easily and to “conquer” other cultural systems, especially in the Periphery.In the case of popular culture, the flow of influences usually takes a one-dimensional form and is disseminated from the Centre to the Periphery. As Marek Jeziński (162-163) argues, both Centre and Periphery are functional systems. These systems have generated their own mythology, which separates one from another. However, as in the case of mythological systems in general, Centre and Periphery tales overlap frequently, and there are evidence that the bands that originated in the Periphery were assimilated by the Centre. For example, Nirvana and Pearl Jam were both successful in market terms and both built their own status based on the Peripheral components that were skilfully overtaken by the Centre narrative. While the Peripheral narratives are concentrated mainly on the undermining of the definition of situation and present dysfunctional character towards cultural system as such, the Centre narratives aim to maintain the definition of situation supporting mainstream values and their prevailing position in a system (Jeziński 164). Grunge is the epitome of such an implementation of cultural patterns. That is, grunge started as a fringe peripheral cultural phenomenon. The major records companies, however, recognised its potential and provided the space in the music market to support the new bands. Most of the groups in the US started as independent local acts related to independent record companies that built their status.In relation to the assimilation of grunge culture in Poland, we can distinguish two key phenomena. The first is concerned with the adaptation of general subcultural components, e.g. fashion and group identification. Here, the acculturation processes run as a primary form of mimicry, as the Polish grunge scene adopted elements typical of the grunge subculture, such as oversize sweaters, flannel shirts, Dr. Martens shoes or Converse trainers, long hair, and beanies. A newly formed subculture was different from the others popular in the 1990s. For example, punk and metal subcultures implied strong group identity, style homogeneity, rigid group limitations, and firm membership rules. Conversely, it seems that the grunge subculture was based more on a level of liquid and fragmented patchwork identity than on very inflexible group values and internal ideology or political attitudes (cf. Muggleton). Such patchwork identity formation was a result of a rapid clash between the adaptation of grunge cultural patterns from the West and the Polish economic transformation of the early 1990s.Poland underwent rapid changes that were also visible in the politics, culture and social domain, joining liberal democracies and liberal free market economies of the West. These changes resulted from a transformation of the system as a whole: from a central planned system to decentralisation of the power at both local and state levels (Sarnecki). Equally important were the changes in the political culture of Poles and their value system: they accepted the democratic changes but simultaneously, the mentality of Poles remained traditionalist (which is visible in surveys— the most important values for them were “family” and “work”), and their attitude towards the processes of cultural and institutional changes was impermanent (Garlicki; Jasińska-Kania).During the transformation, the changes were visible in the everyday lives of Polish citizens: examples include the shortages in the market that were evident after the socialist regime ended, and the easy availability of Western clothes such as jeans, shirts, denim jackets in ordinary stores. Consequently, the economic rates in the 1990s were higher in comparison to the previous decade (Bałtowski and Miszewski). Those changes resulted in a phase shift in the modernisation process, where patterns of economic and cultural development and were faster than the enculturation and socialisation processes.On the one hand, the free market allowed for almost unlimited commodification with unprecedented access to goods and services. On the other hand, the low cultural capital and economic possibilities of the citizens evolved rapidly. The communist-shaped social division fell apart, and the new class designations based of consumption/commodification patterns were established (Jeziński; Wojtkowski). Those factors resulted in high cross-generational mobility, lower entrance barriers, and higher openness indicators (cf. Polska klasa średnia; O ruchliwości społecznej w polsce).Hence, in cultural conditions based on capitalist consumption practices, the grunge subculture evolved with a commodified sense of style rather than with a firm identity. Yet, in the case of grunge style, relatively high costs of subculture commodities (e.g. Dr. Martens shoes, Converse trainers, or band t-shirts) led to DIY practices such as buying cheaper no-name shoes, and sewing badges with the names of bands and albums on jackets or backpacks.The second phenomenon encompasses the adaptation of music patterns. The Polish grunge scene was not as diversified in terms of genre variations as its US counterpart. In the beginning, the Polish grunge scene was more distressed geographically, with no specific Centre-Periphery relations. However, one of the most important bands, Hey, was established in the Northwest. When one looks at Polish grunge evolution as a ‘clash’ of American genre and the specific character of a time and place where Polish bands were recording, she or he will notice multiple similarities with the US scene.Firstly, we could name two approaches to grunge music among Polish performers: ‘intellectual’ and ‘rebel’. The ‘intellectual’ approach encompasses the group Hey. This band was established in Szczecin (the Northwest Poland), but after the success of their first album – Fire (1993), they moved to Warsaw. Hey released 11 studio records, but only the first three could be classified as “grunge” (cf. Sankowski). On the level of musical references, Fire sounds like a mixture of early Pearl Jam combined with Alice in Chains. With English lyrics and song topics that were typical for grunge— e.g., The Choice (“You’ve got a gun/You can use it now”)—similarities with Pearl Jam, in particular, are striking. The band evolved, and on their second album, Ho! (1994), Hey mixed equally Polish and English lyrics with the dynamic and specific Seattle sound (cf. Prato). Hey’s most distinctive feature comparing with other Polish grunge bands is its highly developed melodic approach to music and the poetic, sensual style of its lyrics. The third record, ? (1995), closes the band’s early stage. The next album, Karma (1997), opens the period when the amalgamation of electronics, hard rock and grunge dominated Hey’s music, with the album [sic!] (2001) representing the turning point in the group’s music style. The band suspended their work in 2017 and will probably never reunite.Over time, Hey gained one of the most dedicated audiences in Polish rock music. The music industry and critics have acknowledged Hey as one of the best Polish groups in the post-communist period. Hey has received the most nominations in the history of Fryderyki, the key Polish music awards. The group and Nosowska have won twenty-three times in multiple categories. As the longest-operating grunge-origin band in the country, Hey could be considered as a most important trend setting and scene-forming group.The more “rebellious” approach to grunge encompasses bands such as Illusion (1992-1999, 2014-present) and Houk. The former was based on the grunge and hardcore mixture of influences from Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Rage Against the Machine (especially in terms of rap-oriented lyrics). With the preservation of certain consistency, the band named first three albums: Illusion (1993), Illusion II (1994), and Illusion III (1995). Illusion marks the band’s aggressive style and lyrics simplicity but the studio production flattens the whole and gives an impression of a post-punk DIY venture rather than a coherent composition. The second record, however, is entirely conceptualised and thought out in terms of music and lyrics. Sharp riffs, hard rock tuning of instruments and aggressive lyrics that were focused on Polish life gave the album a needed consistency. The band’s third record is the most varied stylistically and politically engaged in their history. The harder-edged tunes from previous releases are accompanied by more psychedelic compositions (Wrona) that recall Alice in Chains’ slow songs and Layne Staley’s voice.Houk’s music similarly to other Polish grunge bands was the amalgamation of various genres and their style evolved in time. Initially, the band was regarded as an example of alternative rock music. The first album Soul Ammunition (1992) was named by music monthly Tylko Rock as a debut of the year (polskirock.art.pl). The combination of grunge, hardcore, hard rock, reggae and socio-politically engaged lyrics helped the group to establish a strong fan base. The band’s unique style was recognised internationally and Houk supported New Model Army and Bad Brains during the performances in the mid-1990’s (polskirock.art.pl). The band’s second studio release Generation X (1995) was recorded prior the multiple membership reorganizations that finally ended the grunge-orientation period of Houk’s history. One of the songs, Sleep, was dedicated to Kurt Cobain and reflected Nirvana’s approach to songwriting, which can be heard in songs such as “Lithium” (1991). Such a commemoration of Cobain’s figure is characteristic of Polish grunge culture’s establishment of strong ties with the American equivalent. Here and in many similar cases, Cobain serves not only as a grunge hero (or even a martyr) but also as a commodified pop culture figure (cf. Strong). Concerning both spheres - that is, the adaptation of grunge subculture and a development of the music scene -Polish grunge follows a different pattern to the US genre. Grunge was introduced to Poland after it was popularised and commodified by the major labels and media industry in the USA, so the adopted version was the mainstream one rather than the underground movement. Hence, the simplistic dichotomy between “underground” and “mainstream” culture does not function in terms of the Polish grunge culture, and probably is misstated even when it comes to the American phenomenon. Grunge could be perceived in Poland as both the first and the last “true” subcultural trend. At the same time, though, it was an affirmation not of ‘the rebel’ and ‘the underground’ but of capitalism and the cultural values of the West. Indeed, the Polish grunge culture couldn’t be fully aware of what grunge was warning us against while Polish society faced the rapid market and cultural transformation that allowed for its opening to Western trends.Conclusion – Is Grunge Really Dead?Although the popularity of grunge phenomenon in Poland was relatively short, the most important groups of this sub-genre - Illusion, Hey, Ahimsa, Houk, and Kr’shna Brothers - widely contributed to the emergence of the new wave of fashion for rock and hard-rock music in Poland in the mid-1990s. The most successful group of the era, Hey epitomises the transformation of grunge in Poland. Starting as a typical grunge band (modelled heavily on the US groups), they underwent a serious transition, substantially changing their music into more mainstream-oriented rock (that is, as music that was considered acceptable by rock music and AOR-focused radio stations). At the same time, grunge as a rock sub-genre underwent the contrary changes: it broke into the mainstream relatively quickly in the first half of the 1990s, establishing new rock stars of the scene (Illusion, Houk, Ahimsa, Hey), but in the late 1990s it went back to being a rock niche again. It seems that today grunge serves as a point of reference (in fact, it was an important period of rock history) for the new bands that intentionally use this sub-genre as a form of commodified, media-friendly nostalgia.ReferencesBałtowski, Maciej, Miszewski, Maciej. Transformacja gospodarcza w Polsce. Warszawa: PWN, 2006.Biografia Houk. 25 Nov. 2018 <https://www.polskirock.art.pl/houk,z346,biografia.html>.Brzozowicz, Grzegorz, and Filip Łobodziński. Sto płyt, które wstrząsnęły światem: Kronika czasów popkultury. Warszawa: Iskry, 2000.Domański, Henryk. Polska klasa średnia. Wrocław: FNP i W. Wrocławskie, 2002.Domański, Henryk. O ruchliwości społecznej w Polsce. Warszawa: IFiS PAN, 2004.Garlicki, Jan. “Tradycje i dynamika kultury politycznej społeczeństwa polskiego.” Dylematy polskiej transformacji. Ed. Jan Błuszkowski. Warszawa: DW Elipsa, 2007. 155-174.Gopinathan, Saravanan, and Philip G. Altbach. “Rethinking Centre–Periphery.” Asia Pacific Journal of Education 25.2 (2005): 117-123.Hannerz, Ulf. “Culture between Center and Periphery: Toward a Macroanthropology.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 54.3-4 (1989): 200-216.Houk. Soul Ammunition. 23 Nov. 2018 <https://www.polskirock.art.pl/soul-ammunition,houk,3051,plyta.html>.Jasińska-Kania, Aleksandra. “Dynamika zmian wartości Polaków na tle europejskim: EVS 1990-1999-2008.” Polska po 20 latach wolności. Eds. Marta Bucholc, Sławomir Mandes, Tadeusz Szawiel and Joanna Wawrzyniak. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2011. 225-239.Jeziński, Marek. Mitologie muzyki popularnej. Toruń: WN Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2014.Jeziński, Marek, and Łukasz Wojtkowski. “Nostalgia Commodified: Towards the Marketization of the Post-Communist Past through the New Media.” Medien und Zeit 4 (2016): 96–104.Langholm, Sivert. “On the Concepts of Center and Periphery.” Journal of Peace Research 8.3-4 (1971): 273-278.Muggleton, David. Inside Subculture. The Postmodern Meaning of Style. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Pisciotta, Barbara. “The Center-Periphery Cleavage Revisited: East and Central Europe from Postcommunism to Euroscepticism.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 22.2 (2016): 193-219.Sankowski, Robert. “Hey, czyli któtka historia polskiego popu.” Wyborcza.pl, 3 Nov. 2012. 1 Aug. 2018 <http://wyborcza.pl/1,75410,12788097,Hey__czyli_krotka_historia_polskiego_popu.html>. Sarnecki, Paweł. “Od kumulacji do podziału władzy.” Transformacja ustrojowa w Polsce 1989-2009. Eds. Maria Kruk and Jan Wawrzyniak. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2011. 37-58.Strong, Catherine. Grunge and the Memory. London: Routledge, 2016.

Introduction As street protests and clashes between citizens and authorities in places as different as Ferguson, Missouri and Hong Kong in autumn 2014 demonstrate, everyday life in many parts of the world is characterised by conflicting and competing sets of cultural norms, values, and practices. The idea that groups create cultures that stand in contrast to “mainstream” or “dominant culture” is nothing new—sociology’s earliest scholars sought cultural explanations for social “dysfunctions” such as anomie and deviance. Yet our interest in this article is not about the problems that marginalised and non-normative groups face, but rather with the cultures that are created as part of dealing with those problems. Milton Yinger begins his 1982 book, Countercultures: The Promise and Peril of a World Turned Upside Down, by contrasting multiple perspectives on countercultures. Some thinkers have characterised countercultures as not only a mundane feature of social life, but as a necessary one: Countercultures and the many types of intentional communities they commonly create are not social aberrations. For thousands of years there have been attempts to provide alternatives for the existing social order in response to the perennial grounds for dissent: hierarchy and privilege […,] disgust with hedonism and consumerism […, and] a decline in the quality of life. (Yinger, Countercultures 1) Others, however, have discursively delegitimised countercultures by characterising them as something in between naiveté and unschooled arrogance. Speaking specifically about hippies in the 1960s, Bell argued that the so-called counter-culture was a children’s crusade that sought to eliminate the line between fantasy and reality and act out in life its impulses under a banner of liberation. It claimed to mock bourgeois prudishness, when it was only flaunting the closet behavior of its liberal parents. It claimed to be new and daring when it was only repeating in more raucous form […] the youthful japes of a Greenwich Village bohemia of a half century before. It was less a counter-culture than a counterfeit culture. (xxvi-xxvii) If Bell is at all right, then perhaps countercultures may be better understood as subcultures, a term that may not require the idea of opposition (but see Gelder; Williams, Subcultural). To tease this distinction out, we want to consider the value of the counterculture concept for the study of oppositional subcultures. Rather than uncritically assuming what counter means, we take a more analytical view of how “counter,” as similar to other terms such as “resistant” and “oppositional,” has been articulated by social scientists. In doing this, we focus our attention on scholarly works that have dealt explicitly with group cultures “that sharply contradict the dominant norms and values of the society of which that group is a part” (Yinger, Countercultures 3). The Relationship between Counterculture and Subculture Many scholars point to the Chicago School of sociology as developing the first clear articulation of subcultural groups that differed clearly from mainstream society (see for example, Gelder and Thornton; Hannerz, E.; Williams, Youth). Paul G. Cressey, Frederic Thrasher, and later William Foote Whyte each provide exemplary empirical studies of marginal groups that were susceptible to social problems and therefore more likely to develop cultures that were defined as problematic for the mainstream. Robert Merton argued that marginalised groups formed as individuals tried to cope with the strain they experienced by their inability to access the cultural means (such as good education and good jobs) needed to achieve mainstream cultural goals (primarily, material success and social status), but Albert Cohen and others subsequently argued that such groups often reject mainstream culture in favour of a new, alternative culture instead. Within a few years, conceptual distinctions among these alternative cultures were necessary, with counterculture and subculture being disambiguated in American sociology. Yinger originally employed the term contraculture but eventually switched to the more common counterculture. Subculture became most often tied either to the study of religious and ethnic enclaves (Mauss) or to deviance and delinquency (Arnold), while counterculture found its currency in framing the cultures of more explicitly political groups and movements (see for example, Cushman; George and Starr). Perhaps the clearest analytical distinction between the terms suggested that subculture refer to ascribed differences based upon socio-economic status, ethnicity, religion (and so on) in relation to the mainstream, whereas counterculture should refer to groups rooted in an explicit rejection of a dominant culture. This is similar to the distinction that Ken Gelder makes between subcultures based upon marginalisation versus non-normativity. Counterculture became best used wherever the normative system of a group contains, as a primary element, a theme of conflict with the values of the total society, where personality variables are directly involved in the development and maintenance of the group's values, and wherever its norms can be understood only by reference to the relationships of the group to a surrounding dominant culture. (Yinger, Contraculture 629) Even at that time, however, such a neat distinction was problematic. Sociologist Howard S. Becker demonstrated that jazz musicians, for example, experienced a problem shared in many service occupations, namely that their clients did not possess the ability to judge properly the value of the service rendered, yet nevertheless sought to control it. As a consequence, a subculture emerged based on the opposition of “hip” musicians to their “square” employers’ cultural sensibilities. Yet Becker framed their experiences as subcultural rather than countercultural, as deviant rather than political (Becker 79-100). Meanwhile, the political connotations of “counterculture” were solidifying during the 1960s as the term became commonly used to describe aspects of the civil rights movement in the US, hippie culture, and the anti-Vietnam or peace movement. By the end of the 1960s, subculture and counterculture had become analytically distinct terms within sociology. Cultural Studies and the Class-ification of Counterculture The reification of subculture and counterculture as ontologically distinct phenomena was more or less completed in the 1970s through a series of publications on British youth cultures and subcultures (see Hall and Jefferson; Hebdige; Mungham and Pearson). The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in particular expended a great deal of collective mental energy theorising the material base upon which cultures—and in particular spectacular youth subcultures such as mods and punk—exist. As with Marxist analyses of culture more generally, class was considered a key analytic variable. In the definitive theoretical statement on subculture, Clarke, Hall, Jefferson, and Roberts argued that “the most fundamental groups are the social classes, and the major cultural configurations will be […] ‘class cultures’” (13). Subcultures were thus seen as ideological reactions to the material conditions experienced and made meaningful within working class “parent culture.” This is what made youth subcultures sub—a part of the working-class—as well as cultural—the process of expressing their structural position. Given the Marxist orientation, it should go without saying that subcultures, as working-class youth cultures, were seen as naturally in a state of conflict with bourgeois culture. But that approach didn’t account well for counter-currents that emerged from within the middle-class, whose relationship with the means of production was markedly different, and so the concept of counterculture was appropriated to describe a distinctly middle-class phenomenon. The idea that counterculture represented an overtly political response from within the dominant culture itself fitted with work by Theodore Roszak and Frank Musgrove, and later Yinger (Countercultures) and Ulf Hannerz, who each defined counterculture through its political and activist orientations stemming from a crisis within the middle-class. To further differentiate the concepts, the CCCS dismissed the collective aspect of middle-class resistance (see Clarke et al., 58-9, for a list of phenomena they considered exemplary of middle-class counterculture), describing it as more “diffuse, less group-oriented, [and] more individualised” than its working-class counterpart, the latter “clearly articulated [as] ‘near’ or ‘quasi’-gangs” (Clarke et al. 60). And whereas subcultures were centred on leisure-time activities within working-class environments, countercultures were concerned with a blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure. This conceptualisation was problematic at best, not least because it limits counterculture to the middle-class and subculture to the working class. It also gave considerably more agency and consequence to middle-class youths. It seemed that countercultures, with their individualist tendencies, offered individuals and groups choices about what and how to resist, as well as some expectations for social change, while subculturalists, locked within an unfortunate class position, could only resist dominant culture “at the profoundly superficial level of appearances” (Hebdige 17). Beyond the Limits of Class Cultures By 1980 cultural studies scholars had begun disassembling the class-basis of subcultures (see for example, G. Clarke; McRobbie; Griffin). Even though many studies still focused on stylised forms of opposition, subcultural scholarship increasingly emphasised subcultures such as punk as reflecting a more explicitly politicised resistance against the dominant or mainstream culture. Some scholars suggested that “mainstream culture” was used as a contrastive device to exaggerate the distinctiveness of those who self-identity as different (see U. Hannerz; Copes and Williams), while others questioned what subcultures could be seen as existing independently from, or in assumed opposition to (see Blackman; Thornton). In such cases, we can see a move toward reconciling the alleged limits of subculture as a countercultural concept. Instead of seeing subcultures as magical solutions and thus inevitably impotent, more recent research has considered the agency of social actors to overcome social divisions such as race, gender, and class. On the dance floor in particular, youth culture was theorised as breaking free of its class-binding shackles. Along with this break came the rhetorical distancing from CCCS’s definitions of subculture. The attempted development of “post-subculture” studies around the Millennium focused on consumptive behaviours among certain groups of youths and concluded that consumption rather than opposition had become a hallmark of youth culture broadly (see Bennett, Popular; Huq; Muggleton). For these scholars, the rave and club cultures of the 1990s, and others since, represent youth culture as hedonistic and relatively apolitical. “Post-subculture” studies drew in part on Steve Redhead’s postmodern approach to youth culture as found in The Clubcultures Reader and its companion text, From Subcultures to Clubcultures (Redhead). These texts offered a theoretical alternative to the CCCS’s view of oppositional subcultures and recognition that subcultural style could no longer be understood as a representation of ideological strain among working-class youths. Carried forward in volumes by David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl,,among others, “post-subcultural” scholarship criticised prior subcultural research for having objectified/reified mainstream/subcultural boundaries and authenticities, echoing Gary Clarke’s remark that the sharp distinction between us and them “rests upon [subculturalists’] consideration of the rest of society as being straight, incorporated in a consensus, and willing to scream undividedly loud in any moral panic” (71). Instead, the mixtures of punk, mod, skinhead and/or hippy styles among club-goers signalled “entirely new ways of understanding how young people perceive the relationship between music taste and visual style…revealing the infinitely malleable and interchangeable nature of the latter as these are appropriated and realised by individuals as aspects of consumer choice” (Bennett, Subcultures 613). Reincorporating the Counter into Subculture Studies The postmodern focus on cultural fluidity, individuality, and consumption highlights to some extent the agency that individuals have to make choices about the cultures in which they participate. To be sure, the postmodern and post-subculture critiques of class-based subculture studies were quite influential in the development of more recent subcultural scholarship, though not necessarily as they were intended. Much of the theoretical rhetoric of post-subculture scholarship (over-)emphasised heterogeneity, contingency, and play, which drew attention away from the collective identities and practices that continue to characterise many subcultures and groups. Fortunately, other scholars over the last decade have been critical of that approach’s failure to deal with perennial concerns related to participation in alternative cultural groups, including consumption (Buckingham), voice (Bae and Ivashkevich), education (Tuck and Yang), and group affiliation (Pilkington), among others. We want to follow this trajectory by explicitly reiterating the continuing significance of the “counter” aspects of subcultures. Two trends in social theory are exemplary in this reiteration. The first trend is a growing interest in re-theorizing resistance to refer to “a contribution to progressive transformations and radical changes in social and cultural structures” (Johansson and Lalander) rather than to a set of styles and practices through which working-class youth impotently rage against the machine. Resistance is qualitatively different from rebellion, which is often framed in terms of unconscious or irrational behaviour (Raby); resistance is first and foremost intentional. Subcultures articulate resistance to mainstream/dominant culture and may be measured across several continua, including passive to active, micro to macro, covert to overt, individual to collective, and local to global (see Williams, Resistance; E. Hannerz). Participants in countercultures see themselves as being more critically aware of what is happening in the world than the average person, believe that they act on that critical awareness in their thoughts, words, and/or deeds, and electively detach themselves from “involuntary or unconscious commitments” (Leary 253) to mainstream culture, refusing to uncritically follow the rules. The concept of resistance thus gives some momentum to attempts to clarify the extent to which members of alternative cultures intentionally break with the mainstream. The links between resistance and counterculture are explicitly dealt with in recent scholarship on music subcultures. Graham St John’s work on electronic dance music culture (EDMC), for example, offers a complex analysis of resistant practices that he conceptualizes as countercultural. Participation in EDMC is seen as more than simple hedonism. Rather, EDMC provides the scripts necessary for individuals to pursue freedom from various forms of perceived oppression in everyday life. At a more macro level, Madigan Fichter’s study of counterculture in Romania similarly frames resistance and political dissent as key variables in the articulation of a counterculture. Some recent attempts at invoking counterculture seem less convincing. Noting that counterculture is a relatively “unpopular term in social scientific research,” Hjelm, Kahn-Harris, and LeVine nevertheless proceed to theorize heavy metal as countercultural by drawing on the culture’s “transgressive” (14) qualities and “antagonistic […] attempts to shock and provoke [as well as] those occasions when metal, by its very presence, is shocking” (15). Other studies have similarly articulated “countercultures” in terms of behaviours that transgress mainstream sensibilities (see for example, Arthur and Sherman; Kolind). It is debatable at best, however, whether hedonism, transgression, or provocation are sufficient qualities for counterculture without concomitant cultural imperatives for both resistance and social change. This leads into a brief comment on a second trend, which is the growing interconnectedness of social theories that attend to subcultures on the one hand and “new” social movements (NSMs) on the other. “Traditional” social movements, such as the civil rights and labour movements, have been typically organised by and for people excluded in some way from full rights to participate in society, for example the rights to political participation or basic economic protection. NSMs, however, often involve people who already enjoy full rights as members of society, but who reject political and economic processes that injure them or others, such as marginalised groups, animals, or the environment. Some movements are contentious in nature, such as the Occupy-movement, and thus quite clearly antagonistic toward mainstream political-economy. NSM theories (see Pichardo), however, also theorize the roles of culture and collective identity in supporting both opposition to dominant processes and strategies for alternative practices. Other NSMs foster lifestyles that, through the minutiae of everyday practice, promote a ground-up reaction to dominant political-economic practices (see Haenfler, Johnson, and Jones). Both contentious and lifestyle movements are relatively diffuse and as such align with traditional conceptualisations of both subculture and counterculture. NSM theory and subcultural theories are thus coming together in a moment where scholars are seeking distinctly cultural understandings of collective lifestyles of resistance and social change. Conclusion Recent attempts to rephrase subcultural theory have combined ideas of the Birmingham and Chicago Schools with more contemporary approaches such as social constructivism and new social movements theory. Together, they recognise a couple of things. First, culture is not the determining structure it was once theorised to be. The shift in understanding subcultural groups as rooted in ascribed characteristics—being naturally different due to class, ethnicity, age, or to location (Park; Cohen; Clarke et al.)—to one in which subcultures are intentional articulations created by people, highlights the agency of individuals and groups to create culture. The break with realist/objectivist notions of culture offers promising opportunities for understanding resistance and opposition more generally. Second, the “counter” continues to be relevant in the study of subcultures. Subcultural participation these days is characterised as much or more by non-normativity than by marginalisation. As such, subcultures represent intentional protests against something outside themselves. Of course, we do not mean to suggest this is always and everywhere the case. 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augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Blackthorne, Angus. “Robert Johnson Slowed Down.” YouTube.com 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/user/ANGUSBLACKTHORN?feature=watch›. Blesh, Rudi. Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1946. Blischke, Michael. “Slowing Down Robert Johnson.” The Straight Dope 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=461601›. Block, Rory. The Lady and Mrs Johnson. Rykodisc 10872, 2006. Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: De Capo Press, 1959. Collins UK. Collins English Dictionary. Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers, 2010. DiGiacomo, Frank. “A Disputed Robert Johnson Photo Gets the C.S.I. Treatment.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/10/a-disputed-robert-johnson-photo-gets-the-csi-treatment›. DiGiacomo, Frank. “Portrait of a Phantom: Searching for Robert Johnson.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/11/johnson200811›. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Vol 1. London: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Evans, David. Tommy Johnson. London: November Books, 1971. Ford, Charles. “Robert Johnson’s Rhythms.” Popular Music 17.1 (1998): 71-93. Freeland, Tom. “Robert Johnson: Some Witnesses to a Short Life.” Living Blues 150 (2000): 43-49. Gibbens, John. “Steady Rollin’ Man: A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson.” Touched 2004. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html›. Gioia, Ted. Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionised American Music. London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Gioia, Ted. "Robert Johnson: A Century, and Beyond." Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection. Sony Music 88697859072, 2011. Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. London: Pimlico Books, 2002. Graves, Tom. Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Spokane: Demers Books, 2008. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers". London: Plume, 1998. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hammond, John. From Spirituals to Swing (Dedicated to Bessie Smith). New York: The New Masses, 1938. Johnson, Robert. “Hellbound.” Amazon.co.uk 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hellbound/dp/B0063S8Y4C/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376605065&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=robert+johnson+hellbound›. ———. “Contracted to the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2002. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contracted-The-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00006F1L4/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376830351&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Contracted+to+The+Devil›. ———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia Records CL1654, 1961. ———. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Amazon.co.uk 2003. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Devil-Blues-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00008SH7O/ref=sr_1_16?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604807&sr=1-16&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “The High Price of Soul.” Amazon.co.uk 2007. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Price-Soul-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000LC582C/ref=sr_1_39?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604863&sr=1-39&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “Up Jumped the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2005. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Jumped-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000B57SL8/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376829917&sr=1-2&keywords=Up+Jumped+The+Devil›. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. London: Plume, 1997. Morris, Christopher. “Phonograph Blues: Robert Johnson Mastered at Wrong Speed?” Variety 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.varietysoundcheck.com/2010/05/phonograph-blues-robert-johnson-mastered-at-wrong-speed.html›. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD. Universal Pictures, 2000. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “For–the–Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music 26.1 (2007): 65-81. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “Myth and Collective Memory in the Case of Robert Johnson.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 189-205. Schroeder, Patricia. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (Music in American Life). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Segalstad, Eric, and Josh Hunter. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock and Roll. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009. Stewart, Jon. “Rock Climbing: Jon Stewart Concludes His Investigation of the Myths behind Robert Johnson.” Guitarist Magazine 327 (2010): 34. The Search for Robert Johnson. DVD. Sony Pictures, 1991. Talley, Ron. “Robert Johnson, 'Sweet Home Chicago', as It REALLY Sounded...” YouTube.com 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHod3_yEWQ›. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. The Robert Johnson Speed Recording Controversy. Elijah Wald — Writer, Musician 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html›. Wilde, John . “Robert Johnson Revelation Tells Us to Put the Brakes on the Blues: We've Been Listening to the Immortal 'King of the Delta Blues' at the Wrong Speed, But Now We Can Hear Him as He Intended.” The Guardian 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues›. Wolkewitz, M., A. Allignol, N. Graves, and A.G. Barnett. “Is 27 Really a Dangerous Age for Famous Musicians? Retrospective Cohort Study.” British Medical Journal 343 (2011): d7799. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7799›.

Are male porn stars full-fledged citizens? Recent political developments make this question more than rhetorical. The Bush Justice Department, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, has targeted the porn industry, beginning with its prosecution of Extreme Associates. More recently, the President requested an increase in the FBI’s 2005 budget for prosecuting obscenity, one of the few budget increases for the Bureau outside of its anti-terrorism program (Schmitt A1). To be sure, the concept of “citizen” is itself vexed. Citizenship, when obtained or granted, ostensibly legitimates a subject and opens up pathways to privilege: social, political, economic, etc. Yet all citizens do not seem to be created equal. “There is, in the operation of state-defined rules and in common practices an assumption of moral worth in which de facto as opposed to de jure rights of citizenship are defined as open to those who are deserving or who are capable of acting responsibly,” asserts feminist critic Linda McDowell. “The less deserving and the less responsible are defined as unworthy of or unfitted for the privileges of full citizenship” (150). Under this rubric, a citizen must measure up to a standard of “moral worth”—an individual is not a full-fledged citizen merely on the basis of birth or geographical placement. As McDowell concludes, “citizenship is not an inclusive but an exclusive concept” (150). Thus, in figuring out how male porn stars stand in regard to the question of citizenship, we must ask who determines “moral worth,” who distinguishes the less from the more deserving, and how people have come to agree on the “common practices” of citizenship. Many critics writing about citizenship, including McDowell, Michael Warner, Lauren Berlant, Russ Castronovo, Robyn Wiegman, Michael Moon, and Cathy Davidson (to name only a few) have located the nexus of “moral worth” in the body. In particular, the ability to make the body abstract, invisible, and non-identifiable has been the most desirable quality for a citizen to possess. White men seem ideally situated for such acts of “decorporealization,” and the white male body has been installed as the norm for citizenship. Conversely, women, people of color, and the ill and disabled, groups that are frequently defined by their very embodiment, find themselves more often subject to regulation. If the white male body is the standard, however, for “moral worth,” the white male porn star would seem to disrupt such calculations. Clearly, the profession demands that these men put their bodies very much in evidence, and the most famous porn stars, like John C. Holmes and Ron Jeremy, derive much of their popularity from their bodily excess. Jeremy’s struggle for “legitimacy,” and the tenuous position of men in the porn industry in general, demonstrate that even white males, when they cannot or will not aspire to abstraction and invisibility, will lose the privileges of citizenship. The right’s attack on pornography can thus be seen as yet another attempt to regulate and restrict citizenship, an effort that forces Jeremy and the industry that made him famous struggle for strategies of invisibility that will permit some mainstream acceptance. In American Anatomies, Robyn Wiegman points out that the idea of democratic citizenship rested on a distinct sense of the abstract and non-particular. The more “particular” an individual was, however, the less likely s/he could pass into the realm of citizen. “For those trapped by the discipline of the particular (women, slaves, the poor),” Wiegman writes, “the unmarked and universalized particularity of the white masculine prohibited their entrance into the abstraction of personhood that democratic equality supposedly entailed” (49). The norm of the “white masculine” caused others to signify “an incontrovertible difference” (49), so people who were visibly different (or perceived as visibly different) could be tyrannized over and regulated to ensure the purity of the norm. Like Wiegman, Lauren Berlant has written extensively about the ways in which the nation recognizes only one “official” body: “The white, male body is the relay to legitimation, but even more than that, the power to suppress that body, to cover its tracks and its traces, is the sign of real authority, according to constitutional fashion” (113). Berlant notes that “problem citizens”—most notably women of color—struggle with the problem of “surplus embodiment.” They cannot easily suppress their bodies, so they are subjected to the regulatory power of a law that defines them and consequently opens their bodies up to violation. To escape their “surplus embodiment,” those who can seek abstraction and invisibility because “sometimes a person doesn’t want to seek the dignity of an always-already-violated body, and wants to cast hers off, either for nothingness, or in a trade for some other, better model” (114). The question of “surplus embodiment” certainly has resonance for male porn stars. Peter Lehman has argued that hardcore pornography relies on images of large penises as signifiers of strength and virility. “The genre cannot tolerate a small, unerect penis,” Lehman asserts, “because the sight of the organ must convey the symbolic weight of the phallus” (175). The “power” of male porn stars derives from their visibility, from “meat shots” and “money shots.” Far from being abstract, decorporealized “persons,” male porn stars are fully embodied. In fact, the more “surplus embodiment” they possess, the more famous they become. Yet the very display that makes white male porn stars famous also seemingly disqualifies them from the “legitimacy” afforded the white male body. In the industry itself, male stars are losing authority to the “box-cover girls” who sell the product. One’s “surplus embodiment” might be a necessity for working in the industry, but, as Susan Faludi notes, “by choosing an erection as the proof of male utility, the male performer has hung his usefulness, as porn actor Jonathan Morgan observed, on ‘the one muscle on our body we can’t flex’” (547). When that muscle doesn’t work, a male porn star doesn’t become an abstraction—he becomes “other,” a joke, swept aside and deemed useless. Documentary filmmaker Scott J. Gill recognizes the tenuousness of the “citizenship” of male porn stars in his treatment of Ron Jeremy, “America’s most famous porn star.” The film, Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy (2001), opens with a clear acknowledgment of Jeremy’s body, as one voiceover explains how his nickname, “the Hedgehog,” derives from the fact that Jeremy is “small, fat, and very hairy.” Then, Gill intercuts the comments of various Jeremy fans: “An idol to an entire generation,” one young man opines; “One of the greatest men this country has ever seen,” suggests another. This opening scene concludes with an image of Jeremy, smirking and dressed in a warm-up suit with a large dollar sign necklace, standing in front of an American flag (an image repeated at the end of the film). This opening few minutes posit the Hedgehog as super-citizen, embraced as few Americans are. “Everyone wants to be Ron Jeremy,” another young fan proclaims. “They want his life.” Gill also juxtaposes “constitutional” forms of legitimacy that seemingly celebrate Jeremy’s bodily excess with the resultant discrimination that body actually engenders. In one clip, Jeremy exposes himself to comedian Rodney Dangerfield, who then sardonically comments, “All men are created equal—what bullshit!” Later, Gill employs a clip of a film in which Jeremy is dressed like Ben Franklin while in a voiceover porn director/historian Bill Margold notes that the Freeman decision “gave a birth certificate to a bastard industry—it legitimized us.” The juxtaposition thus posits Jeremy as a “founding father” of sorts, the most recognizable participant in an industry now going mainstream. Gill, however, emphasizes the double-edged nature of Jeremy’s fame and the price of his display. Immediately after the plaudits of the opening sequence, Gill includes clips from various Jeremy talk show appearances in which he is denounced as “scum” and told “You should go to jail just for all the things that you’ve helped make worse in this country” and “You should be shot.” Gill also shows a clearly dazed Jeremy in close-up confessing, “I hate myself. I want to find a knife and slit my wrists.” Though Jeremy does not seem serious, this comment comes into better focus as the film unfolds. Jeremy’s efforts to go “legit,” to break into mainstream film and leave his porn life behind, keep going off the tracks. In the meantime, Jeremy must fulfill his obligations to his current profession, including getting a monthly HIV test. “There’ll be one good thing about eventually getting out of the porn business,” he confesses as Gill shows scenes of a clearly nervous Jeremy awaiting results in a clinic waiting room, “to be able to stop taking these things every fucking month.” Gill shows that the life so many others would love to have requires an abuse of the body that fans never see. Jeremy is seeking to cast off that life, “either for nothingness, or in a trade for some other, better model.” Behind this “legend” is unseen pain and longing. Gill emphasizes the dichotomy between Jeremy (illegitimate) and “citizens” in his own designations. Adam Rifkin, director of Detroit Rock City, in which Jeremy has a small part, and Troy Duffy, another Jeremy pal, are referred to as “mainstream film directors.” When Jeremy returns to his home in Queens to visit his father, Arnold Hyatt is designated “physicist.” In fact, Jeremy’s father forbids his son from using the family name in his porn career. “I don’t want any confusion between myself and his line of work,” Hyatt confesses, “because I’m retired.” Denied his patronym, Jeremy is truly “illegitimate.” Despite his father’s understanding and support, Jeremy is on his own in the business he has chosen. Jeremy’s reputation also gets in the way of his mainstream dreams. “Sometimes all this fame can hurt you,” Jeremy himself notes. Rifkin admits that “People recognize Ron as a porn actor and immediately will ask me to remove him from the final cut.” Duffy concurs that Jeremy’s porn career has made him a pariah for some mainstream producers: “Stigma attached to him, and that’s all anybody’s ever gonna see.” Jeremy’s visibility, the “stigma” that people have “seen,” namely, his large penis and fat, hairy body, denies him the abstract personhood he needs to go “legitimate.” Thus, whether through the concerted efforts of the Justice Department or the informal, personal angst of a producer fearing a backlash against a film, Jeremy, as a representative of an immoral industry, finds himself subject to regulation. Indeed, as his “legitimate” filmography indicates, Jeremy has been cut out of more than half the films he has appeared in. The issue of “visibility” as the basis for regulation of hardcore pornography has its clearest articulation in Potter Stewart’s famous proclamation “I know it when I see it.” But as Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong report in The Brethren, Stewart was not the only Justice who used visibility as a standard. Byron White’s personal definition was “no erect penises, no intercourse, no oral or anal sodomy” (193). William Brennan, too, had what his clerks called “the limp dick standard” (194). Erection, what Lehman has identified as the conveyance of the phallus, now became the point of departure for regulation, transferring, once again, the phallus to the “law.” When such governmental regulation failed First Amendment ratification, other forms of societal regulation kicked in. The porn industry has accommodated itself to this regulation, as Faludi observes, in its emphasis on “soft” versions of product for distribution to “legitimate” outlets like cable and hotels. “The version recut for TV would have to be entirely ‘soft,’” Faludi notes, “which meant, among other things, no erect penises and no semen” (547). The work of competent “woodsmen” like Jeremy now had to be made invisible to pass muster. Thus, even the penis could be conveyed to the viewer, a “fantasy penis,” as Katherine Frank has called it, that can be made to correlate to that viewer’s “fantasized identity” of himself (133-4). At the beginning of Porn Star, during the various homages paid to Jeremy, one fan draws a curious comparison: “There’s Elvis, and then there’s Ron.” Elvis’s early career had certainly been plagued by criticism related to his bodily excess. Musicologist Robert Fink has recently compared Presley’s July 2, 1956, recording of “Hound Dog” to music for strip tease, suggesting that Elvis used such subtle variations to challenge the law that was constantly impinging on his performances: “The Gray Lady was sensitive to the presence of quite traditional musical erotics—formal devices that cued the performer and audience to experience their bodies sexually—but not quite hep enough to accept a male performer recycling these musical signifiers of sex back to a female audience” (99). Eventually, though, Elvis stopped rebelling and sought respectability. Writing to President Nixon on December 21, 1970, Presley offered his services to help combat what he perceived to be a growing cultural insurgency. “The drug culture, the hippie elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc., do not consider me as their enemy or as they call it, The Establishment,” Presley confided. “I call it America and I love it” (Carroll 266). In short, Elvis wanted to use his icon status to help reinstate law and order, in the process demonstrating his own patriotism, his value and worth as a citizen. At the end of Porn Star, Jeremy, too, craves legitimacy. Whereas Elvis appealed to Nixon, Jeremy concludes by appealing to Steven Spielberg. Elvis received a badge from Nixon designating him as “special assistant” for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Presumably Jeremy invests his legitimacy in a SAG card. Kenny Dollar, a Jeremy friend, unironically summarizes the final step the Hedgehog must take: “It’s time for Ron to go on and reach his full potential. Let him retire his dick.” That Jeremy must do the latter before having a chance for the former illustrates how “surplus embodiment” and “citizenship” remain inextricably entangled and mutually exclusive. References Berlant, Lauren. “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life.” Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Hortense Spillers. New York: Routledge, 1991: 110-140. Carroll, Andrew, ed. Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. Castronovo, Russ and Nelson, Dana D., eds. Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1999. Fink, Robert. “Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon.” Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture. Eds. Roger Beebe, Denise Fulbrook, and Ben Saunders. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002: 60-109. Frank, Katherine. G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Gill, Scott J., dir. Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy. New Video Group, 2001. Lehman, Peter. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Moon, Michael and Davidson, Cathy N., eds. Subjects and Citizens: From Oroonoko to Anita Hill. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Schmitt, Richard B. “U. S. Plans to Escalate Porn Fight.” The Los Angeles Times 14 February 2004. A1. Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Woodward, Bob and Armstrong, Scott. The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. MLA Style Russell, David. "The Tumescent Citizen: The Legend of Ron Jeremy." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/01_citizen.php>. APA Style Russell, D. (2004 Oct 11). The Tumescent Citizen: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, M/C Journal, 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/01_citizen.php>

Disclaimer: The situation on PixelCanvas is constantly changing due to raids from both sides. The figures in this article represent the state as of April 2020. In the politicized digital environment, the superiority of the alt-right’s weaponization of memes is often taken for granted. As summarized in the buzzword-phrase “the left can’t meme”, the digital engagements of self-identified leftist activists are usually seen as less effective than the ones of the right: their attempts at utilizing Internet culture described as too “politically correct” and “devoid of humour”. This supposedly “immutable law of the Internet” (Dankulous Memeulon) often found confirmation in research.Described by Phillips and Milner, Internet culture – “a highly insular clique”, now seeping into popular culture – is by design rooted in liberalism and fetishized sight. Through its principles of “free speech”, “harmless fun”, and dehumanizing detachment of memes from real-life production and consequence, meme-sharing was enabling deception, “bigoted pollution”, and reinforcing white racial frames, regardless of intentions (Phillips and Milner). From Andersson to Nagle, many come to the conclusion that the left’s presence online is simply not organized, not active, not transgressive enough to appeal to the sensibilities of Internet culture. Meanwhile, the playful, deceptive online engagements of the alt-right are found to be increasingly viral, set to recruit numerous young rebels, hence upholding a cultural hegemony which has already transcended over to the offline world. This online right style is one where a rejection of morality and nihilistic nonconformity reign supreme – all packaged in carnivalesque laughter and identity-bending “trolling” (Nagle 28-39). Even if counterculture and transgression used to be domains of the left, nowadays the nihilistic, fetishizing landscape of online humour is popularized via alt-right aligned message boards like 4chan (Nagle 28-39).Left-wing alternatives, encompassed by Nagle in the term “Tumblr liberalism”, were often described as “fragmented” through identitarianism and call-out-culture, enclosed in echo chambers, “nannying, language policing, and authoritarian” (68-85). This categorization has been rightfully criticized for reductionism that lumps together diverse political strands, focuses on form only, and omits the importance of subcultural logic in its caricature of the censorious left (Davies). However, it would be difficult to deny that this is exactly how the online left is, unfortunately, often perceived by the right and liberals/centrists alike, evidenced by its niche quality.The solutions to the problem of the right’s dominance in the memeosphere – and their Gramscian cultural hegemony – offered by Phillips and Milner could include disavowing fetishized sight while maintaining “slapdash, quippy, and Internet Ugly” qualities to deconstruct meme culture’s whiteness; Davies suggests that “if the left is to have the same degree of success in translating online cultures into political movements then it needs to understand both the online world and its own IRL history”.Nonetheless, some strands of the online left have been rather close in style and form to the ones of the alt-right, despite their clear difference of “stance” (Shifman 367). In this article, I demonstrate an example of a multi-faceted, united, witty, and countercultural meme leftism on PixelCanvas.io (PixelCanvas): a nearly unlimited online canvas, where anyone can place coloured pixels with an obligatory cooldown time after each. Intended for creative expression, PixelCanvas became a site of click-battles between organized dichotomous extremes of the left and the alt-right, and is swarmed with political imagery. The right’s use of this platform has been already examined by Thibault, well-fitting into the consensus about the efficiency of right-wing online activity. My focus is the rebuttal of alt-right imagery that the radical left replaces with their own.With a brief account of PixelCanvas’s affordances and recounting the recent history of its culture wars, I trace the hybrid leftist activity on PixelCanvas to argue that it is comparably grounded in dissimulation and transgression to the alt-right’s. Based on the case study, I explore how certain strands of online left might reappropriate the carnivalesque, deceptive, and countercultural meme culture sensibilities and forms, while simultaneously rejecting its “bigoted pollution” (Phillips and Milner) aspects. While arguably problematic, these new strategies might be necessary to combat the alt-right’s hegemony in the meme environment – and by extension, in popular culture.PixelCanvas as a Metapolitical Platform of Culture WarsPixelCanvas affords a blend of 4chan-style open-access, no-login anonymity and the importance of organized collective effort. As described by Thibault, it is an “online ‘game’ that allows players to colour pixels ..., either collaborating or competing for the control of the shared space” (102). The obligatory cooldown period on PixelCanvas results in most of the works requiring either dedication of long periods of time or collaboration: as such, the majority of canvas art has a “shared authorship” (102). As a space for creative expression, PixelCanvas encourages expressing aspects of genuine personal identity (political views, sexuality, etc.) albeit reduced to symbols and memes that rarely remain personal. Although the primary medium of information transfer on the platform is visual, brief written catchphrases are also utilized. While the canvas is not lacking in free areas, competition for space is prevalent: between political viewpoints, nationalist groups (Bakalım), and other communities (PixelCanvas.io).Given this setup, it might be expected that battling for hegemony took over the game. The affordances of PixelCanvas as accepting anonymous unmoderated expressions of identity/political views encourage dissimulation similarly to boards such as 4chan; its immediate visual/one-liner focus overlaps with the prerequisites of meme culture. Meanwhile, the game’s competition aspect leads to large-scale organization of polarized metapolitical groups and to imagery that is increasingly larger, more taboo-breaking, and playful: meant to catch the eye of a viewer before the opponents do. PixelCanvas, as such, is a platform fitting into transgressive, trolling, fetishizing, and “liberal” affordances of Internet culture: the same affordances that made it, according to Nagle or Phillips and Milner, into a space of desensitized white supremacy and right-wing dominance.Such a setup may seem to work in favour of the 4chan-style raids and against the supposed identitarianism of “Tumblr liberalism”. One could recall the importance of united collective efforts on 4chan: from meme-sharing to Gamergate raids (Beran). Meanwhile, suggested by Citarella, a problem of the online left is its fragmentation, and its “poorly organized and smaller followings” (10). As he observed on Politigram, “DemSocs, Syndicalists, ML’s, AnComs, … and so on, all hated each other. The online right was equally divided but managed to coordinate cultural agitations” (Citarella 10).Indeed, the platform displayed the effects of alt-right virality multiple times, involving creations of self-identified Kekistanis (KnowYourMeme), anarcho-capitalists, 4chan-aligned “bronies” (My Little Pony fans), etc. However, since 2017, the left joined the game, becoming another example of a united, well-organized and strongly participatory group, which continuously resists alt-right attacks and establishes its own raids, often gaining an upper hand.Named “Battle of Pixelgrad”, the influx of leftist activity began to combat the forming Reich Iron Cross posted by “a user on 4chan's /pol/” which has caught the attention of Leftbook/meme groups and subreddits (PLK Wiki) (Wrigley). The groups involved spanned “all beliefs under a unified socialist umbrella” (Pixel Liberation Front) ranging from communism through anarchism subtypes to identity politics: all associating with the “left unity” flag that they replaced the Iron Cross with. Their efforts against alt-right raids were coordinated through Discord servers and a public Facebook group. Soon, a Facebook page for Left Unity Fighting Front (LUFF) was set up, with the PixelCanvas flag in the banner and the description: “We decided to form the new rival of 4chan, LUFF. We are the new united front of the internet. Promoting left unity, trolling Nazis, and taking on sectarianism.”Figure 1: The ’Left Unity’ flag. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1554,3594.The concept of left unity has been criticised before, as one that would lead to “the co-optation of anarchism under a Marxist leadership”, charged with the history of anarchist-Bolshevik clashes in USSR, and marred by a “lack of willingness among some Marxists to actually engage with anarchists in legitimate debate” (Springer). Still, the PixelCanvas left unity is one of the rare instances of Marxist, anarchist, and other leftist online groups working together on rather equal grounds, without cracking down on discourse and historical contexts: which is afforded by a subcultural logic and focus on combating a common enemy. The PixelCanvas leftists support common projects, readily bending their beliefs/ identity to create an efficient community that can resist 4chan: self-identifying as an “allyship” with anonymous “soldiers”/comrades belonging together on the left side of the pixel “war” (Pixel Liberation Front). While the diversity of their beliefs is made clear through the variously aligned flags/thinkers they choose to represent with pixels, the union stands without in-fighting, emulating simplistic versions of history as a dichotomous struggle between left and right (which deliberately rejects centrism): from Nazi/communist battles to Cold War imagery. Although reductionist, this us/them thinking is especially necessary in the visual, time-sensitive, and competitive space of PixelCanvas. No matter how extreme the common projects are, what matters in the pixel war is camaraderie and defeating the enemy in the most striking manner possible. After all, the setup of the platform (and the immediacy of Internet culture) supports attention- grabbing transgression and memes better than nuanced discourse. Figure 2: Representation of the left uniting against Nazism and anarcho-capitalism. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-143,-782.As of April 2020, hardly any Nazi/4chan/ancap imagery on PixelCanvas stands without being challenged by the Left Unity. Although some of the groups involved in Pixelgrad do not exist anymore, Discord servers (e.g. RedPixel) and Pixel Liberation Front (PLF) Facebook group remain, defending the platform from continued raids. These coordinating bodies are easily accessible to anyone willing to contribute (shall one wish for complete anonymity, they are also free to participate without joining the servers). Their efforts could be understood as “clicktivism” (Halupka); however, the involved leftists view it as a “war” (PLF) or “Memeolution” (Wrigley), an important way in which the “virality of right-wing populism” (Thibault) must be resisted. This use of language highlights their serious awareness of the need for combating the right’s digital hegemony, no matter how playful their activity seems.Even if this phenomenon is specific to PixelCanvas, one should acknowledge that the identity-bending unity of the left has been enough to challenge continued raids. Niche practices, as seen through 4chan, might break into the mainstream: according to Hobson and Modi, online spaces “are a rich recruiting ground for previously antithetical/apolitical young people” (345) who find refuge in memes and trolling. The agenda of the PixelCanvas left (counterplatforming activism) in this case differs from 4chan’s. However, the forms they assume to reach their goal are often “pithy, funny, or particularly striking” enough to potentially make one “pause to think, and/or laugh” (Hobson and Modi 345) regardless of political alignment.The Form, Content, and Stance of PixelCanvas Left ActivityDespite the unity in the organization of the PixelCanvas left, the approaches/strategies of its various pixel artworks are far from uniform. At the first sight, the creations of RedPixel members already appear as a multi-faceted (and potentially confusing) mixture of serious real-life agenda and playful Internet culture. Guided by Shifman’s communication-oriented typology of memes, I analyze the different “contents, forms, and stances” (367) that the PixelCanvas left displays in its creations. For analytical clarity, I distinguish three main approaches which overlap and play various roles in contributing to the collective image of RedPixel as simultaneously activist, serious, inclusive, and Internet-culture-savvy, transgressive, deceptive.The first approach of PixelCanvas leftist creations is most serious and least grounded in Internet culture. A portion of RedPixel activity directly reproduces real-life protest chants, posters, flags, murals, movement symbols, and portraits of leftist icons, with little alteration to the form other than pixelating. The contents of such creations vary, however, they remain serious and focused on real-life issues: voicing support for contemporary leftist movements (Black Lives Matter, pro-refugee, Rojava liberation, etc.), celebrating the countercultural, class-centric leftist history (anarchist, communist, socialist victories, thinkers, and revolutionaries), and representing a plethora of identities within hyper-inclusive flag clusters (of various sexualities, genders, and ethnicities). The stance of these images can be plausibly interpreted as charged with serious/genuine “keying” (Shifman 367), and “conative” (imperative) or “emotive” (367) functions. Within those images, the meme culture’s problematic affordances (“fetishization” and “liberalism” (Phillips and Milner)) are disavowed clearly: exemplified by a banner on the site suggesting that “just a meme” mentality created a shield for “meme Nazis” that led to the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting. Although this strand of RedPixel’s works could be criticized as “humourless” and rather detached from the platform’s affordances, its role lies in displaying the connection to the real world with potential suggestions for mobilization, the awareness of meme culture’s problematic nature, and the image of radical left cooperation. Figure 3: The Christchurch memorial. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-2815,3321. Figure 4: Posters and symbols in support of Rojava, Palestine liberation, and Black Lives Matter. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@5340,4121. Figure 5: Early Paris Commune poster reproduced on PixelCanvas. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@7629,2134. Figure 6: Example of a PixelCanvas hyper-inclusive flag cluster. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@2741,-3508.The second approach, while similar in the diversity of content, adopts memetic forms, and the light-hearted “harmless fun” of Internet culture. Through popular meme formats (molded to call for action), slang expressions, pop-cultural references (anime/cartoon/video game characters), to adopting “cutesy” aesthetics, these creations present identity politics, anti-fascism, and anti-capitalism in a light, aestheticized form. Popular characters, colourful art, and repetitive base colour schemes (red, black, rainbow) are likely to attract attention; recognition of the pop-cultural references, and of known meme formats might sustain it, urging one to focus on the only uncertain element: the politics behind it. Being visually and contextually appealing to online youth, this political-memetic imagery is well-adapted to the platform. Simultaneously, the carnivalesque forms contrast with the frequently more transgressive contents this approach employs. As a result, the tone of their work seems lighthearted even in its incitement to “kill the Nazis” and “eat the rich”. Clearly aware of the language of its opposition, RedPixel reacts similarly to how 4chan reacted to Tumblr liberalism: responding to “lightly thrown accusations” (Nagle) by intensifying them to the point where they can be seen as “owning” the labels they have been given – instead of “getting offended”. Through memes and reappropriated posters they present themselves as “Red Menace,” as a direct threat to 4channers, and as a “trigger-warning” club, using the existing criticisms to self-identify as formidable enemies of the right. While the transgression in RedPixel style often remains acceptable by radical left standards, it is certainly not the same as “virtue signalling”, “hypersensitive”, “vulnerable” Tumblr liberalism (Nagle 68–85); and it might be shocking or amoral to some. Much of their imagery is provocative: inciting violence, glorifying deeply problematic parts of communist history, using religious symbols in a potentially blasphemous way, supporting occultism/ Satanism, and explicitly amplifying (queer) sexuality. In the mix of (sometimes) extreme contents and forms that suggest a light-hearted attitude, it might be difficult to determine the keying of their stance. Although it is unlikely that RedPixel would avow politics they do not actually believe (given the activist, anti-fetishizing agenda of their first approach), their political choices are frequently amplified to their full “tankie” form, and even up to Stalin support: raising the question how much of it is serious intent masked with humour, and what could be written off as deliberate identity play, deceptive “trolling” and jokes, similar in style to 4chan’s. Figure 7: Revolution-inciting appropriation of a popular meme format. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1765,3376. Figure 8: Fictional characters Stevonnie (Steven Universe) and Cirno (Touhou) with leftist captions. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-847,-748. Figure 9: Call for fighting fascism referencing a Pacman video game and Karl Marx. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-712,-395. Figure 10: Joseph Stalin reimagined as a My Little Pony character. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1197,966. Figure 11: “A spectre is haunting Kekistan.” Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-2196,3248. Figure 12: “Trigger Warning Gun Club” badge. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@2741,-3508.Figure 13: “Have you heard that Nazis get vored?” anime catgirl. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@1684,928. Figure 14: Rainbow genitals on a former Kekistan flag. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-2513,3221. Figure 15: “Eat the Rich — OK Boomer” wizard ghost. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-4390,-697.The third approach can be read as a subset of the second: however, what distinguishes it is a clearly parodic stance and reappropriating of 4chan’s forms. The PixelCanvas activists, unlike the supposed “anti-free speech” left (Lukianoff and Haidt) do not try to get the alt-right imagery removed by others, and do not fully erase it. Instead, they repurpose 4chan memes and flags, ridiculing them or making them stand for leftist views. An unaware viewer could mistake their parodies of 4chan for parodies of the left made by 4chaners; the true stance sometimes only suggested by their placement within RedPixel-reclaimed areas. Communist and LGBTQ+ Pepes or Ponies, modified Kekistan flags, and even claiming that “the right can’t meme” all point to an interesting trend that instead of banning symbols associated with alt-right groups wants to exploit the malleability of memes: confusing and parodying their original content and stance while maintaining the form and style. This aim is perhaps best exemplified in the image The Greatest Game of Capture the Flag where Pepes in anarcho-communist, communist, and transgender Pride hoodies are escaping from a crying white man while carrying a 4chan flag. Interpreted in context, this image summarizes the new direction that leftists take against 4chan. This is a direction of left unity (with various strands of radical left maintaining their identities but establishing an overarching collective “allyship” identification), of mixing identity politics with classic ideologies, of reconciling Internet culture with IRL socio-political awareness, and finally, of reappropriating proven-effective play, dissimulation, and transgression from 4chan. Figure 16: Pride flag cluster with Pride-coloured Pepes. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1599,3516. Figure 17: Communist/anarchist thinkers and leaders reimagined as Pepes. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1885,3203. Figure 18: “The Right Can’t Meme.” Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1885,3203. Figure 19: The reclaimed Kekistan area. Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-2439,3210. Figure 20: “The Greatest Game of Capture the Flag.” Source: https://pixelcanvas.io/@-1885,3203.ConclusionThe PixelCanvas left can serve as an example of a united stronghold which managed to counterplatform the alt-right: assuming dominance in 2017 to later rebuild and expand their pixel spheres of influence after each 4chan raid. Online culture wars are nowadays recognized as Gramscian in their roots: according to Burton, “the young people confronting this reactionary shift head-on with memes normalizing are … on the front lines of a culture war with global repercussions” (13). By far, this “war” for digital hegemony has been overwhelmingly evaluated as one that the alt-right is simply better at, due to the natural affordances of Internet culture. However, the “united front of the internet” “promoting left unity and trolling Nazis” (LUFF) exemplifies a possible direction which the online radical left could follow to take on 4chan’s digital dominance. This direction is complex and hybrid: with overlapping/combined approaches. The activities of PixelCanvas left include practices that are well-adapted to the immediate meme culture and those based on IRL movements; practices similar to 4chan’s problematic transgression and those that are activist, disavowing fetishized sight; serious practices and deceptive/ironic ones. Their 2017 PixelCanvas victory and later resistance persisting despite continuing raids might suggest that this strategy works, with the key to its coordination laying in the subcultural logic of an “allyship” that privileges fast-paced mobilization and swift comebacks over careful nuance: necessitated by meme culture affordances. Although only time can prove if this new left digital language will become more widespread, it has the potential to become an alternative to “hypersensitive Tumblr liberalism” and to challenge the idea that meme culture is doomed to be right-wing.ReferencesAndersson, Linus. “No Digital ‘Castles in the Air’: Online Non-Participation and the Radical Left.” Media and Communication 4.4 (2016): 53–62.Bakalım, Seyret. “Pixel io Türkiye vs Brezilya [Turkey vs Brazil] Pixel War.” YouTube, 23 June 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsPHVNpB8Hg>.Beran, Dale. “4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.” Medium, 14 Feb. 2017. <https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb>.Burton, Julian. “Look at Us, We Have Anxiety: Youth, Memes, and the Power of Online Cultural Politics.” Journal of Childhood Studies 44.3 (2019): 3–17.Dankulous Memeulon. “The Left Can’t Meme.” UrbanDictionary, 11 May 2018. <https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The%20Left%20can%27t%20Meme>.Davies, Josh. “Tumblr Liberalism’ vs the Serious Authentic Left: On Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies.” Ceasefire Magazine, 8 Sep. 2017. <https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/tumblr-liberalism-authentic-left-review-kill-normies/>.Halupka, Max. “Clicktivism: A Systematic Heuristic.” Policy & Internet 6.2 (2014): 115–32.Hobson, Thomas, and Kaajal Modi. “Socialist Imaginaries and Queer Futures: Memes as Sites of Collective Imagining.” Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production. Eds. Alfie Bown and Dan Bristow. New York: Punctum Books, 2019. 327–52.KnowYourMeme. “Kekistan.” KnowYourMeme, 2017. <https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kekistan>.Left Unity Fighting Front. “About.” Facebook, 6 July 2017. <https://www.facebook.com/pg/LeftUnityFightingFront/about/>.Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt. The Coddling of the American Mind. New York: Penguin Books, 2018.Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Winchester, Washington: Zero Books, 2017.Phillips, Whitney, and Ryan M. Milner. “The Root of All Memes.” You Are Here, 27 Apr. 2020. <https://you-are-here.pubpub.org/pub/wsl350qp/release/1>.PixelCanvas. <https://pixelcanvas.io/>.PixelCanvas.io. “PixelCanvas.io | The Death of Pac-Man - The Void vs SDLG.” YouTube, 19 June 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV70eV38z3A>.Pixel Liberation Front. “About.” Facebook, 8 June 2017. <https://www.facebook.com/groups/1933096136902765/about/>.PLK Wiki. “Battle of Pixelgrad.” PLK Wiki, 2017. <https://plk.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_of_Pixelgrad>.QueenButtrix. “Brocialist.” Urban Dictionary, 18 Sep. 2016. <https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brocialist>.Shifman, Limor. “Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18.3 (2013): 362–377.Springer, Simon. “Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Anarchist? Rejecting Left Unity and Raising Hell in Radical Geography.” Anarchist Studies, 28 Jan. 2018. <https://anarchiststudies.noblogs.org/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-anarchist-rejecting-left-unity-and-raising-hell-in-radical-geography/>.Thibault, Mattia. “A Picture of the Internet: Conflict, Power and Politics on Pixelcanvas.” Virality and Morphogenesis of Right-Wing Internet Populism. Eds. Eva Kimminich and Julius Erdmann. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018. 102–12.TheCissKing. “Tucute.” Urban Dictionary, 17 Jan. 2019. <https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tucute>.Wrigley, Jack. “Battle of Pixelgrad.” YouTube, 24 July 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJa1Hi2j1_E>.

Despite the now-traditional tendency of noir scholarship to call attention to the retrospective and constructed nature of this genre— James Naremore argues that film noir is best regarded as a “mythology”— one feature that has rarely come under question is its association with the city (2). Despite the existence of numerous rural noirs, the depiction of urban space is associated with this genre more consistently than any other element. Even in critical accounts that attempt to deconstruct the solidity of the noir genre, the city is left as an implicit inclusion, and the country, an implict exclusion. Naremore, for example, does not include the urban environment in a list of the central tenets of film noir that he calls into question: “nothing links together all the things described as noir—not the theme of crime, not a cinematographic technique, not even a resistance to Aristotelian narratives or happy endings” (10). Elizabeth Cowie identifies film noir a “fantasy,” whose “tenuous critical status” has been compensated for “by a tenacity of critical use” (121). As part of Cowie’s project, to revise the assumption that noirs are almost exclusively male-centered, she cites character types, visual style, and narrative tendencies, but never urban spaces, as familiar elements of noir that ought to be reconsidered. If the city is rarely tackled as an unnecessary or part-time element of film noir in discursive studies, it is often the first trait identified by critics in the kind of formative, characteristic-compiling studies that Cowie and Naremore work against.Andrew Dickos opens Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir with a list of noir’s key attributes. The first item is “an urban setting or at least an urban influence” (6). Nicholas Christopher maintains that “the city is the seedbed of film noir. […] However one tries to define or explain noir, the common denominator must always be the city. The two are inseparable” (37). Though the tendencies of noir scholars— both constructive and deconstructive— might lead readers to believe otherwise, rural locations figure prominently in a number of noir films. I will show that the noir genre is, indeed, flexible enough to encompass many films set predominantly or partly in rural locations. Steve Neale, who encourages scholars to work with genre terms familiar to original audiences, would point out that the rural noir is an academic discovery not an industry term, or one with much popular currency (166). Still, this does not lessen the critical usefulness of this subgenre, or its implications for noir scholarship.While structuralist and post-structuralist modes of criticism dominated film genre criticism in the 1970s and 80s, as Thomas Schatz has pointed out, these approaches often sacrifice close attention to film texts, for more abstract, high-stakes observations: “while there is certainly a degree to which virtually every mass-mediated cultural artifact can be examined from [a mythical or ideological] perspective, there appears to be a point at which we tend to lose sight of the initial object of inquiry” (100). Though my reading of these films sidesteps attention to social and political concerns, this article performs the no-less-important task of clarifying the textual features of this sub-genre. To this end, I will survey the tendencies of the rural noir more generally, mentioning more than ten films that fit this subgenre, before narrowing my analysis to a reading of Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948), Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949), They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949) and On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952). Robert Mitchum tries to escape his criminal life by settling in a small, mountain-side town in Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947). A foggy marsh provides a dramatic setting for the Bonnie and Clyde-like demise of lovers on the run in Gun Crazy (Joseph Lewis, 1950). In The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950), Sterling Hayden longs to return home after he is forced to abandon his childhood horse farm for a life of organised crime in the city. Rob Ryan plays a cop unable to control his violent impulses in On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952). He is re-assigned from New York City to a rural community up-state in hopes that a less chaotic environment will have a curative effect. The apple orchards of Thieves’ Highway are no refuge from networks of criminal corruption. In They Live By Night, a pair of young lovers, try to leave their criminal lives behind, hiding out in farmhouses, cabins, and other pastoral locations in the American South. Finally, the location of prisons explains a number of sequences set in spare, road-side locations such as those in The Killer is Loose (Budd Boetticher, 1956), The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953), and Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948). What are some common tendencies of the rural noir? First, they usually feature both rural and urban settings, which allows the portrayal of one to be measured against the other. What we see of the city structures the definition of the country, and vice versa. Second, the lead character moves between these two locations by driving. For criminals, the car is more essential for survival in the country than in the city, so nearly all rural noirs are also road movies. Third, nature often figures as a redemptive force for urbanites steeped in lives of crime. Fourth, the curative quality of the country is usually tied to a love interest in this location: the “nurturing woman” as defined by Janey Place, who encourages the protagonist to forsake his criminal life (60). Fifth, the country is never fully crime-free. In The Killer is Loose, for example, an escaped convict’s first victim is a farmer, whom he clubs before stealing his truck. The convict (Wendell Corey), then, easily slips through a motorcade with the farmer’s identification. Here, the sprawling countryside provides an effective cover for the killer. This farmland is not an innocent locale, but the criminal’s safety-net. In films where a well-intentioned lead attempts to put his criminal life behind him by moving to a remote location, urban associates have little trouble tracking him down. While the country often appears, to protagonists like Jeff in Out of the Past or Bowie in They Live By Night, as an ideal place to escape from crime, as these films unfold, violence reaches the countryside. If these are similar points, what are some differences among rural noirs? First, there are many differences by degree among the common elements listed above. For instance, some rural noirs present their location with unabashed romanticism, while others critique the idealisation of these locations; some “nurturing women” are complicit with criminal activity, while others are entirely innocent. Second, while noir films are commonly known for treating similar urban locations, Los Angeles in particular, these films feature a wide variety of locations: Out of the Past and Thieves’ Highway take place in California, the most common setting for rural noirs, but On Dangerous Ground is set in northern New England, They Live by Night takes place in the Depression-era South, Moonrise in Southern swampland, and the most dynamic scene of The Asphalt Jungle is in rural Kentucky. Third, these films also vary considerably in the balance of settings. If the three typical locations of the rural noir are the country, the city, and the road, the distribution of these three locations varies widely across these films. The location of The Asphalt Jungle matches the title until its dramatic conclusion. The Hitch-hiker, arguably a rural noir, is set in travelling cars, with just brief stops in the barren landscape outside. Two of the films I analyse, They Live By Night and Moonrise are set entirely in the country; a remarkable exception to the majority of films in this subgenre. There are only two other critical essays on the rural noir. In “Shadows in the Hinterland: Rural Noir,” Jonathan F. Bell contextualises the rural noir in terms of post-war transformations of the American landscape. He argues that these films express a forlorn faith in the agrarian myth while the U.S. was becoming increasingly developed and suburbanised. That is to say, the rural noir simultaneously reflects anxiety over the loss of rural land, but also the stubborn belief that the countryside will always exist, if the urbanite needs it as a refuge. Garry Morris suggests the following equation as the shortest way to state the thematic interest of this genre: “Noir = industrialisation + (thwarted) spirituality.” He attributes much of the malaise of noir protagonists to the inhospitable urban environment, “far from [society’s] pastoral and romantic and spiritual origins.” Where Bell focuses on nine films— Detour (1945), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Out of the Past (1947), Key Largo (1948), Gun Crazy (1949), On Dangerous Ground (1952), The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Split Second (1953), and Killer’s Kiss (1955)— Morris’s much shorter article includes just The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Gun Crazy. Of the four films I discuss, only On Dangerous Ground has previously been treated as part of this subgenre, though it has never been discussed alongside Nicholas Ray’s other rural noir. To further the development of the project that these authors have started— the formation of a rural noir corpus— I propose the inclusion of three additional films in this subgenre: Moonrise (1948), They Live by Night (1949), and Thieves’ Highway (1949). With both On Dangerous Ground and They Live by Night to his credit, Nicholas Ray has the distinction of being the most prolific director of rural noirs. In They Live by Night, two young lovers, Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), attempt to escape from their established criminal lives. Twenty-three year old Bowie has just been released from juvenile prison and finds rural Texas refreshing: “Out here, the air smells different,” he says. He meets Keechie through her father, a small time criminal organiser who would be happy to keep her secluded for life. When one of Bowie’s accomplices, Chicamaw (Howard DaSilva), shoots a policeman after a robbing a bank with Bowie, the young couple is forced to run. Foster Hirsch calls They Live by Night “a genre rarity, a sentimental noir” (34). The naïve blissfulness of their affection is associated with the primitive settings they navigate. Though Bowie and Keechie are the most sympathetic protagonists of any rural noir, this is no safeguard against an inevitable, characteristically noir demise. Janey Place writes, “the young lovers are doomed, but the possibility of their love transcends and redeems them both, and its failure criticises the urbanised world that will not let them live” (63). As indicated here, the country offers the young lovers refuge for some time, and their bond is depicted as wonderfully strong, but it is doomed by the stronger force of the law.Raymond Williams discusses how different characteristics are associated with urban and rural spaces:On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved center: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. (1) They Live By Night breaks down these dichotomies, showing the persistence of crime rooted in rural areas.Bowie desires to “get squared around” and live a more natural life with Keechie. Williams’ country adjectives— “peace, innocence, and simple virtue”— describe the nature of this relationship perfectly. Yet, criminal activity, usually associated with the city, has an overwhelmingly strong presence in this region and their lives. Bowie, following the doomed logic of many a crime film character, plans to launch a new, more honest life with cash raised in a heist. Keechie recognises the contradictions in this plan: “Fine way to get squared around, teaming with them. Stealing money and robbing banks. You’ll get in so deep trying to get squared, they’ll have enough to keep you in for two life times.” For Bowie, crime and the pursuit of love are inseparably bound, refuting the illusion of the pure and innocent countryside personified by characters like Mary Malden in On Dangerous Ground and Ann Miller in Out of the Past.In Ray’s other rural noir, On Dangerous Ground, a lonely, angry, and otherwise burned out cop, Wilson (Rob Ryan), finds both love and peace in his time away from the city. While on his up-state assignment, Wilson meets Mary Walden (Ida Lupino), a blind woman who lives a secluded life miles away from this already desolate, rural community. Mary has a calming influence on Wilson, and fits well within Janey Place’s notion of the archetypal nurturing woman in film noir: “The redemptive woman often represents or is part of a primal connection with nature and/or with the past, which are safe, static states rather than active, exciting ones, but she can sometimes offer the only transcendence possible in film noir” (63).If, as Colin McArthur observes, Ray’s characters frequently seek redemption in rural locales— “[protagonists] may reject progress and modernity; they may choose to go or are sent into primitive areas. […] The journeys which bring them closer to nature may also offer them hope of salvation” (124) — the conclusions of On Dangerous Ground versus They Live By Night offer two markedly different resolutions to this narrative. Where Bowie and Keechie’s life on the lam cannot be sustained, On Dangerous Ground, against the wishes of its director, portrays a much more romanticised version of pastoral life. According to Andrew Dickos, “Ray wanted to end the film on the ambivalent image of Jim Wilson returning to the bleak city,” after he had restored order up-state (132). The actual ending is more sentimental. Jim rushes back north to be with Mary. They passionately kiss in close-up, cueing an exuberant orchestral score as The End appears over a slow tracking shot of the majestic, snow covered landscape. In this way, On Dangerous Ground overturns the usual temporal associations of rural versus urban spaces. As Raymond Williams identifies, “The common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future” (297). For Wilson, by contrast, city life was no longer sustainable and rurality offers his best means for a future. Leo Marx noted in a variety of American pop culture, from Mark Twain to TV westerns and magazine advertising, a “yearning for a simpler, more harmonious style of life, and existence ‘closer to nature,’ that is the psychic root of all pastoralism— genuine and spurious” (Marx 6). Where most rural noirs expose the agrarian myth as a fantasy and a sham, On Dangerous Ground, exceptionally, perpetuates it as actual and effectual. Here, a bad cop is made good with a few days spent in a sparsely populated area and with a woman shaped by her rural upbringing.As opposed to On Dangerous Ground, where the protagonist’s movement from city to country matches his split identity as a formerly corrupt man wishing to be pure, Frank Borzage’s B-film Moonrise (1948) is located entirely in rural or small-town locations. Set in the fictional Southern town of Woodville, which spans swamps, lushly wooded streets and aging Antebellum mansions, the lead character finds good and bad within the same rural location and himself. Dan (Dane Clark) struggles to escape his legacy as the son of a murderer. This conflict is irreparably heightened when Dan kills a man (who had repeatedly teased and bullied him) in self-defence. The instability of Dan’s moral compass is expressed in the way he treats innocent elements of the natural world: flies, dogs, and, recalling Out of the Past, a local deaf boy. He is alternately cruel and kind. Dan is finally redeemed after seeking the advice of a black hermit, Mose (Rex Ingram), who lives in a ramshackle cabin by the swamp. He counsels Dan with the advice that men turn evil from “being lonesome,” not for having “bad blood.” When Dan, eventually, decides to confess to his crime, the sheriff finds him tenderly holding a search hound against a bucolic, rural backdrop. His complete comfortability with the landscape and its creatures finally allows Dan to reconcile the film’s opening opposition. He is no longer torturously in between good and evil, but openly recognises his wrongs and commits to do good in the future. If I had to select just a single shot to illustrate that noirs are set in rural locations more often than most scholarship would have us believe, it would be the opening sequence of Moonrise. From the first shot, this film associates rural locations with criminal elements. The credit sequence juxtaposes pooling water with an ominous brass score. In this disorienting opening, the camera travels from an image of water, to a group of men framed from the knees down. The camera dollies out and pans left, showing that these men, trudging solemnly, are another’s legal executioners. The frame tilts upward and we see a man hung in silhouette. This dense shot is followed by an image of a baby in a crib, also shadowed, the water again, and finally the execution scene. If this sequence is a thematic montage, it can also be discussed, more simply, as a series of establishing shots: a series of images that, seemingly, could not be more opposed— a baby, a universal symbol of innocence, set against the ominous execution, cruel experience— are paired together by virtue of their common location. The montage continues, showing that the baby is the son of the condemned man. As Dan struggles with the legacy of his father throughout the film, this opening shot continues to inform our reading of this character, split between the potential for good or evil.What a baby is to Moonrise, or, to cite a more familiar reference, what the insurance business is to many a James M. Cain roman noir, produce distribution is to Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949). The apple, often a part of wholesome American myths, is at the centre of this story about corruption. Here, a distribution network that brings Americans this hearty, simple product is connected with criminal activity and violent abuses of power more commonly portrayed in connection with cinematic staples of organised crime such as bootlegging or robbery. This film portrays bad apples in the apple business, showing that no profit driven enterprise— no matter how traditional or rural— is beyond the reach of corruption.Fitting the nature of this subject, numerous scenes in the Dassin film take place in the daylight (in addition to darkness), and in the countryside (in addition to the city) as we move between wine and apple country to the market districts of San Francisco. But if the subject and setting of Thieves’ Highway are unusual for a noir, the behaviour of its characters is not. Spare, bright country landscapes form the backdrop for prototypical noir behaviour: predatory competition for money and power.As one would expect of a film noir, the subject of apple distribution is portrayed with dynamic violence. In the most exciting scene of the film, a truck careens off the road after a long pursuit from rival sellers. Apples scatter across a hillside as the truck bursts into flames. This scene is held in a long-shot, as unscrupulous thugs gather the produce for sale while the unfortunate driver burns to death. Here, the reputedly innocent American apple is subject to cold-blooded, profit-maximizing calculations as much as the more typical topics of noir such as blackmail, fraud, or murder. Passages on desolate roads and at apple orchards qualify Thieves’ Highway as a rural noir; the dark, cynical manner in which capitalist enterprise is treated is resonant with nearly all film noirs. Thieves’ Highway follows a common narrative pattern amongst rural noirs to gradually reveal rural spaces as connected to criminality in urban locations. Typically, this disillusioning fact is narrated from the perspective of a lead character who first has a greater sense of safety in rural settings but learns, over the course of the story, to be more wary in all locations. In Thieves’, Nick’s hope that apple-delivery might earn an honest dollar (he is the only driver to treat the orchard owners fairly) gradually gives way to an awareness of the inevitable corruption that has taken over this enterprise at all levels of production, from farmer, to trucker, to wholesaler, and thus, at all locations, the country, the road, and the city.Between this essay, and the previous work of Morris and Bell on the subject, we are developing a more complete survey of the rural noir. Where Bell’s and Morris’s essays focus more resolutely on rural noirs that relied on the contrast of the city versus the country— which, significantly, was the first tendency of this subgenre that I observed— Moonrise and They Live By Night demonstrate that this genre can work entirely apart from the city. From start to finish, these films take place in small towns and rural locations. As opposed to Out of the Past, On Dangerous Ground, or The Asphalt Jungle, characters are never pulled back to, nor flee from, an urban life of crime. Instead, vices that are commonly associated with the city have a free-standing life in the rural locations that are often thought of as a refuge from these harsh elements. If both Bell and Morris study the way that rural noirs draw differences between the city and country, two of the three films I add to the subgenre constitute more complete rural noirs, films that work wholly outside urban locations, not just in contrast with it. Bell, like me, notes considerable variety in rural noirs locations, “desert landscapes, farms, mountains, and forests all qualify as settings for consideration,” but he also notes that “Diverse as these landscapes are, this set of films uses them in surprisingly like-minded fashion to achieve a counterpoint to the ubiquitous noir city” (219). In Bell’s analysis, all nine films he studies, feature significant urban segments. He is, in fact, so inclusive as to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss as a rural noir even though it does not contain a single frame shot or set outside of New York City. Rurality is evoked only as a possibility, as alienated urbanite Davy (Jamie Smith) receives letters from his horse-farm-running relatives. Reading these letters offers Davy brief moments of respite from drudgerous city spaces such as the subway and his cramped apartment. In its emphasis on the centrality of rural locations, my project is more similar to David Bell’s work on the rural in horror films than to Jonathan F. Bell’s work on the rural noir. David Bell analyses the way that contemporary horror films work against a “long tradition” of the “idyllic rural” in many Western texts (95). As opposed to works “from Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman to contemporary television shows like Northern Exposure and films such as A River Runs Through It or Grand Canyon” in which the rural is positioned as “a restorative to urban anomie,” David Bell analyses films such as Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that depict “a series of anti-idyllic visions of the rural” (95). Moonrise and They Live By Night, like these horror films, portray the crime and the country as coexistent spheres at the same time that the majority of other popular culture, including noirs like Killer’s Kiss or On Dangerous Ground, portray them as mutually exclusive.To use a mode of generic analysis developed by Rick Altman, the rural noir, while preserving the dominant syntax of other noirs, presents a remarkably different semantic element (31). Consider the following description of the genre, from the introduction to Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide: “The darkness that fills the mirror of the past, which lurks in a dark corner or obscures a dark passage out of the oppressively dark city, is not merely the key adjective of so many film noir titles but the obvious metaphor for the condition of the protagonist’s mind” (Silver and Ward, 4). In this instance, the narrative elements, or syntax, of film noir outlined by Silver and Ward do not require revision, but the urban location, a semantic element, does. Moonrise and They Live By Night demonstrate the sustainability of the aforementioned syntactic elements— the dark, psychological experience of the leads and their inescapable criminal past— apart from the familiar semantic element of the city.The rural noir must also cause us to reconsider— beyond rural representations or film noir— more generally pitched genre theories. Consider the importance of place to film genre, the majority of which are defined by a typical setting: for melodramas, it is the family home, for Westerns, the American west, and for musicals, the stage. Thomas Schatz separates American genres according to their setting, between genres which deal with “determinate” versus “indeterminate” space:There is a vital distinction between kinds of generic settings and conflicts. Certain genres […] have conflicts that, indigenous to the environment, reflect the physical and ideological struggle for its control. […] Other genres have conflicts that are not indigenous to the locale but are the results of the conflict between the values, attitudes, and actions of its principal characters and the ‘civilised’ setting they inhabit. (26) Schatz discusses noirs, along with detective films, as films which trade in “determinate” settings, limited to the space of the city. The rural noir slips between Schatz’s dichotomy, moving past the space of the city, but not into the civilised, tame settings of the genres of “indeterminate spaces.” It is only fitting that a genre whose very definition lies in its disruption of Hollywood norms— trading high- for low-key lighting, effectual male protagonists for helpless ones, and a confident, coherent worldview for a more paranoid, unstable one would, finally, be able to accommodate a variation— the rural noir— that would seem to upset one of its central tenets, an urban locale. Considering the long list of Hollywood standards that film noirs violated, according to two of its original explicators, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton— “a logical action, an evident distinction between good and evil, well-defined characters with clear motives, scenes that are more spectacular than brutal, a heroine who is exquisitely feminine and a hero who is honest”— it should, perhaps, not be so surprising that the genre is flexible enough to accommodate the existence of the rural noir after all (14). AcknowledgmentsIn addition to M/C Journal's anonymous readers, the author would like to thank Corey Creekmur, Mike Slowik, Barbara Steinson, and Andrew Gorman-Murray for their helpful suggestions. ReferencesAltman, Rick. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 27-41.The Asphalt Jungle. Dir. John Huston. MGM/UA, 1950.Bell, David. “Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror.” Contested Countryside Cultures. Eds. Paul Cloke and Jo Little. London, Routledge, 1997. 94-108.Bell, Jonathan F. “Shadows in the Hinterland: Rural Noir.” Architecture and Film. Ed. Mark Lamster. New York: Princeton Architectural P, 2000. 217-230.Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton. A Panorama of American Film Noir. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002.Christopher, Nicholas. Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.Cowie, Elizabeth. “Film Noir and Women.” Shades of Noir. Ed. Joan Copjec. New York: Verso, 1993. 121-166.Dickos, Andrew. Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2002.Hirsch, Foster. Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir. New York: Limelight Editions, 1999.Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 1964.McArthur, Colin. Underworld U.S.A. London: BFI, 1972.Moonrise. Dir. Frank Borzage. Republic, 1948.Morris, Gary. “Noir Country: Alien Nation.” Bright Lights Film Journal Nov. 2006. 13. Jun. 2008 http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/54/noircountry.htm Muller, Eddie. Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1998.Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Berkeley, C.A.: U of California P, 2008.Neale, Steve. “Questions of Genre.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 160-184.On Dangerous Ground. Dir. Nicholas Ray. RKO, 1951.Out of the Past. Dir. Jacques Tourneur. RKO, 1947.Place, Janey. “Women in Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: BFI, 1999. 47-68.Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres. New York: Random House, 1981.Schatz, Thomas. “The Structural Influence: New Directions in Film Genre Study.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 92-102.Silver, Alain and Elizabeth Ward. Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide. London: Bloomsbury, 1980.They Live by Night. Dir. Nicholas Ray. RKO, 1949.Thieves’ Highway. Dir. Jules Dassin. Fox, 1949.Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.

"You could think of our kind of scholarship," he said, "as something like 'slow food' in a fast-food culture."— Ivan Kreilkamp, co-editor of Victorian Studies(Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2009) John Hartley’s entertaining and polemical defense of a disappearing art form (the print copy journal designed to be ripped eagerly from its envelope and read from cover to cover like a good book) came my way via the usual slightly disconcerting M/C Journal overture: I believe that your research interests and background make you a potential expert reviewer of the manuscript, "LAMENT FOR A LOST RUNNING ORDER? OBSOLESCENCE AND ACADEMIC JOURNALS," which has been submitted to the '' [sic] issue of M/C Journal. The submission's extract is inserted below, and I hope that you will consider undertaking this important task for us. Automated e-mails like these keep strange company, with reminders about overdue library items and passwords about to expire. Inevitably their tone calls to mind the generic flattery of the internet scam that announces foreign business opportunities or an unexpectedly large windfall from a deceased relative. At face value, this e-mail confirms John Hartley’s suspicions about the personalised craft of journal curation. Journal editing, he implies, is going the way of drywalling and smithying—by the time we realise these ancient and time-intensive skills have been lost, it’ll be too late. The usual culprit is to the fore—the internet—and the risk presented by obsolescence is very significant. At stake is the whole rich and messy infrastructure of academic professional identity: scholarly communication, goodwill, rank, trust, service to peers, collegiality, and knowledge itself. As a time-poor reader of journals both online and in print I warmed to this argument, and enjoyed reading about the particularities of journal editing: the cultivation and refinement of a specialised academic skill set involving typefaces, cover photographs and running order. Journal editors are our creative directors. Authors think selfishly and not always consistently about content, position and opportunity, but it’s the longer term commitment of editors to taking care of their particular shingle in the colourful and crowded bazaar of scholarly publishing, that keeps the market functioning in a way that also works for inspectors and administrators. Thinking of all the print journals I’ve opened and shut and put on shelves (sometimes still in their wrappers) and got down again, and photocopied, and forgotten about, I realised that I do retain a dim sense of their look and shape, and that in practical ways this often helps me remember what was in them. Nevertheless, even having been through the process he describes, whereby “you have to log on to some website and follow prompts in order to contribute both papers and the assessment of papers; interactions with editors are minimal,” I came to the conclusion that he had underestimated the human in the practice of refereeing. I wasn’t sure made me an expert reviewer for this piece, except perhaps that in undertaking the review itself I was practising a kind of expertise that entitled me to reflect on what I was doing. So as a way of wrestling with the self-referentiality of the process of providing an anonymous report on an article whose criticism of blind refereeing I shared, I commented on the corporeality and collegiality of the practice: I knew who I was writing about (and to), and I was conscious of both disagreeing and wondering how to avoid giving offence. I was also cold in my office, and wondering about a coffee. “I suspect the cyborg reviewer is (like most cyborgs) a slightly romantic, or at least rhetorical, fantasy,” I added, a bit defensively. “Indeed, the author admits to practising editorship via a form of human intersubjectivity that involves email, so the mere fact that the communication in some cases is via a website doesn’t seem to render the human obsolete.” The cyborg reviewer wasn’t the only thing bothering me about the underlying assumptions concerning electronic scholarly publishing, however. The idea that the electronic disaggregation of content threatens the obsolescence of the print journal and its editor is a little disingenuous. Keyword searches do grab articles independently of issues, it’s true, but it’s a stretch to claim that this functionality is what’s turning diligent front-to-back readers and library flaneurs into the kinds of online mercenaries we mean when we say “users”. Quite the opposite: journal searches are highly seductive invitations to linger and explore. Setting out from the starting point of a single article, readers can now follow a citation trail, or chase up other articles by the same author or on similar topics, all the while keeping in plain sight the running order that was designed by the editors as an apt framework for the piece when it first appeared. Journal publishers have the keenest investment in nurturing the distinctive brand of each of their titles, and as a result the journal name is never far from view. Even the cover photo and layout is now likely to be there somewhere, and to crop up often as readers retrace their steps and set out again in another direction. So to propose that online access makes the syntactical form of a journal issue irrelevant to readers is to underestimate both the erotics of syntax, and the capacity of online readers to cope with a whole new libidinous economy of searching characterised by multiple syntactical options. And if readers are no longer sequestered within the pages of an individual hard copy journal—there really is a temptation to mention serial monogamy here—their freedom to operate more playfully only draws attention to the structural horizontalities of the academic public sphere, which is surely the basis of our most durable claims to profess expertise. Precisely because we are hyperlinked together across institutions and disciplines, we can justly argue that we are perpetually peer-reviewing each other, in a fairly disinterested fashion, and no longer exclusively in the kinds of locally parochial clusters that have defined (and isolated) the Australian academy. So although disaggregation irritates journal editors, a more credible risk to their craft comes from the disintermediation of scholarly communication that is one of the web’s key affordances. The shift towards user generated content, collaboratively generated, openly accessible and instantly shareable across many platforms, does make traditional scholarly publishing, with its laborious insistence on double blind refereeing, look a bit retro. How can this kind of thing not become obsolete given how long it takes for new ideas to make their way into print, what with all that courtly call and response between referees, editors and authors, and the time consumed in arranging layout and running order and cover photos? Now that the hegemons who propped up the gold standard journals are blogging and podcasting their ideas, sharing their bookmarks, and letting us know what they’re doing by the hour on Twitter, with presumably no loss of quality to their intellectual presence, what kind of premium or scarcity value can we place on the content they used to submit to print and online journals? So it seems to me that the blogging hegemon is at least as much of a problem for the traditional editor as the time challenged browser hoping for a quick hit in a keyword search. But there are much more complicated reasons why the journal format itself is not at risk, even from www.henryjenkins.org. Indeed, new “traditional” journals are being proposed and launched all the time. The mere award of an A* for the International Journal of Cultural Studies in the Australian journal rankings (Australian Research Council) confirms that journals are persistently evaluated in their own right, that the brand of the aggregating instrument still outranks the bits and pieces of disaggregated content, and that the relative standing of different journals depends precisely on the quantification of difficulty in meeting the standards (or matching the celebrity status) of their editors, editorial boards and peer reviewing panels. There’s very little indication in this process that either editors or reviewers are facing obsolescence; too many careers still depend on their continued willingness to stand in the way of the internet’s capacity to let anyone have a go at presenting ideas and research in the public domain. As the many inputs to the ERA exercise endlessly, and perhaps a bit tediously, confirmed, it’s the reputation of editors and their editorial practices that signals the exclusivity of scholarly publishing: in the era of wikis and blogs, an A* journal is one club that’s not open to all. Academia 1.0 is resilient for all these straightforward reasons. Not only in Australia, tenure and promotion depend on it. As a result, since the mid 1990s, editors, publishers, librarians and other stakeholders in scholarly communication have been keeping a wary eye on the pace and direction of change to either its routines or its standards. Their consistent attention has been on the proposition the risk comes from something loosely defined as “digital”. But as King, Tenopir and Clark point out in their study of journal readership in the sciences, the relevance of journal content itself has been extensively disputed and investigated across the disciplines since the 1960s. Despite the predictions of many authors in the 1990s that electronic publishing and pre-publishing would challenge the professional supremacy of the print journal, it seems just as likely that the simple convenience of filesharing has made more vetted academic material available, more easily, to more readers. As they note in a waspish foonote, even the author of one of the most frequently cited predictions that scholarly journals were on the way out had to modify his views, “perhaps due to the fact that his famous 1996 [sic] article "Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals" has had thousands of hits or downloads on his server alone.” (King et al,; see also Odlyzko, " Tragic Loss" and "Rapid Evolution"). In other words, all sides now seem to agree that “digital” has proved to be both opportunity and threat to scholarly publication. Odlyzko’s prediction of the disappearance of the print journal and its complex apparatus of self-perpetuation was certainly premature in 1996. So is John Hartley right that it’s time to ask the question again? Earlier this year, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s article “Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis”, which covered much of the same ground, generated brisk online discussion among journal editors in the humanities (Howard; see also the EDITOR-L listserv archive). The article summarised the views of a number of editors of “traditional” journals, and offset these with the views of a group representing the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, canvassing the possibility that scholarly publishing could catch up to the opportunities that we tend to shorthand as “web 2.0”. The short-lived CELJ blog discussion led by Jo Guldi in February 2009 proposed four principles we might expect to shape the future of scholarly publishing in the humanities: technical interoperability, which is pretty uncontroversial; the expansion of scholarly curation to a role in managing and making sense of “the noise of the web”; diversification of content types and platforms; and a more inclusive approach to the contribution of non-academic experts. (Guldi et al.) Far from ceding the inexorability of their own obsolescence, the four authors of this blog (each of them journal editors) have re-imagined the craft of editing, and have drafted an amibitious but also quite achievable manifesto for the renovation of scholarly communication. This is focused on developing a new and more confident role for the academy in the next phase of the development of the knowledge-building capacity of the web. Rather than confining themselves to being accessed only by their professional peers (and students) via university libraries in hardcopy or via institutional electronic subscription, scholars should be at the forefront of the way knowledge is managed and developed in the online public sphere. This would mean developing metrics that worked as well for delicious and diigo as they do for journal rankings; and it would mean a more upfront contribution to quality assurance and benchmarking of information available on the web, including information generated from outside the academy. This resonates with John Hartley’s endorsement of wiki-style open refereeing, which as an idea contains a substantial backwards nod to Ginsparg’s system of pre-publication of the early 1990s (see Ginsparg). It also suggests a more sophisticated understanding of scholarly collaboration than the current assumption that this consists exclusively of a shift to multiply-authored content, the benefit of which has tended to divide scholars in the humanities (Young). But it was not as a reviewer or an author that this article really engaged me in thinking about the question of human obsolescence. Recently I’ve been studying the fragmentation, outsourcing and automation of work processes in the fast food industry or, as it calls itself, the Quick Service Restaurant trade. I was drawn into this study by thinking about the complex reorganisation of time and communication brought about by the partial technologisation of the McDonalds drive-thru in Australia. Now that drive-thru orders are taken through a driveway speaker, the order window (and its operator) have been rendered obsolete, and this now permanently closed window is usually stacked high with cardboard boxes. Although the QSR industry in the US has experimented with outsourcing ordering to call centres at other locations (“May I take your order?”), in Australia the task itself has simply been added to the demands of customer engagement at the paying window, with the slightly odd result that the highest goal of customer service at this point is to be able to deal simultaneously with two customers at two different stages of the drive-thru process—the one who is ordering three Happy Meals and a coffee via your headset, and the one who is sitting in front of you holding out money—without offending or confusing either. This formal approval of a shift from undivided customer attention to the time-efficiency of multitasking is a small but important reorientation of everyday service culture, making one teenager redundant and doubling the demands placed on the other. The management of quick service restaurant workers and their productivity offers us a new perspective on the pressures we are experiencing in the academic labour market. Like many of my colleagues, I have been watching with a degree of ambivalence the way in which the national drive to quantify excellence in research in Australia has resulted in some shallow-end thinking about how to measure what it is that scholars do, and how to demonstrate that we are doing it competitively. Our productivity is shepherded by the constant recalibration of our workload, conceived as a bundle of discrete and measurable tasks, by anxious institutions trying to stay ahead in the national game of musical chairs, which only offers a limited number of seats at the research table—while still keeping half an eye on their enterprise bargaining obligations. Or, as the Quick Service Restaurant sector puts it: Operational margins are narrowing. While you need to increase the quality, speed and accuracy of service, the reality is that you also need to control labor costs. If you reduce unnecessary labor costs and improve workforce productivity, the likelihood of expanding your margins increases. Noncompliance can cost you. (Kronos) In their haste to increase quality, speed and accuracy of academic work, while lowering labor costs and fending off the economic risk of noncompliance, our institutions have systematically overlooked the need to develop meaningful ways to accommodate the significant scholarly work of reading, an activity that takes real time, and that in its nature is radically incompatible with the kinds of multitasking we are all increasingly using to manage the demands placed on us. Without a measure of reading, we fall back on the exceptionally inadequate proxy of citation. As King et al. point out, citation typically skews towards a small number of articles, and the effect of using this as a measure of reading is to suggest that the majority of articles are never read at all. Their long-term studies of what scientists read, and why, have been driven by the need to challenge this myth, and they have demonstrated that while journals might not be unwrapped and read with quite the Christmas-morning eagerness that John Hartley describes, their content is eventually read more than once, and often more than once by the same person. Both electronic scholarly publishing, and digital redistribution of material original published in print, have greatly assisted traditional journals in acquiring something like the pass-on value of popular magazines in dentists’ waiting rooms. But for all this to work, academics have to be given time to sit and read, and as it would be absurd to try to itemise and remunerate this labour specifically, then this time needs to be built into the normative workload for anyone who is expected to engage in any of the complex tasks involved in the collaborative production of knowledge. With that in mind, I concluded my review on what I hoped was a constructive note of solidarity. “What’s really under pressure here—forms of collegiality, altruism and imaginative contributions to a more outward-facing type of scholarship—is not at risk from search engines, it seems to me. What is being pressured into obsolescence, risking subscriptions to journals as much as purchases of books, is the craft and professional value placed on reading. This pressure is not coming from the internet, but from all the other bureaucratic rationalities described in this paper, that for the time being do still value journals selectively above other kinds of public contribution, but fail to appreciate the labour required to make them appear in any form, and completely overlook the labour required to absorb their contents and respond.” For obvious reasons, my warm thanks are due to John Hartley and to the two editors of this M/C Journal issue for their very unexpected invitation to expand on my original referee’s report.References Australian Research Council. “The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative: Journal Lists.” 2009. 3 July 2009 ‹http://www.arc.gov.au/era/era_journal_list.htm›. Ginsparg, Paul. “Can Peer Review be Better Focused?” 2003. 1 July 2009 ‹http://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/blurb/pg02pr.html›. Guldi, Jo, Michael Widner, Bonnie Wheeler, and Jana Argersinger. The Council of Editors of Learned Journals Blog. 2009. 1 July 2009 ‹http://thecelj.blogspot.com›. Howard, Jennifer. “Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 27 Mar. 2009. 1 July 2009 ‹http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i29/29a00102.htm›. King, Donald, Carol Tenopir, and Michael Clarke. "Measuring Total Reading of Journal Articles." D-Lib Magazine 12.10 (2006). 1 July 2009 ‹http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october06/king/10king.html›. Kronos Incorporated. “How Can You Reduce Your Labor Costs without Sacrificing Speed of Service?” (2009). 1 July 2009 ‹http://www.qsrweb.com/white_paper.php?id=1738&download=1›.“May I Take Your Order? Local McDonald's Outsources to a Call Center.” Billings Gazette, Montana, 5 July 2006. SharedXpertise Forum. 1 July 2009 ‹http://www.sharedxpertise.org/file/3433/mcdonalds-outsourcing-to-call-center.html›.Odlyzko, Andrew. “The Rapid Evolution of Scholarly Publishing.” Learned Publishing 15.1 (2002): 7-19. ———. “Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 42 (1995): 71-122. Young, Jeffrey. “Digital Humanities Scholars Collaborate More on Journal Articles than 'Traditional' Researchers.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 27 April 2009. 1 July 2009 ‹http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3736/digital-humanities-scholars-collaborate-more-on-journal-articles-than-on-traditional-researchers›.

IntroductionThe 2009 American film Trash Humpers, directed by Harmony Korine, was released at a time when the hipster had become a ubiquitous concept, entering into the common vernacular of numerous cultures throughout the world, and gaining significant press, social media and academic attention (see Žižek; Arsel and Thompson; Greif et al.; Stahl; Ouellette; Reeve; Schiermer; Maly and Varis). Trash Humpers emerged soon after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis triggered Occupy movements in numerous cities, aided by social media platforms, reported on by blogs such as Gawker, and stylized by multi-national youth-subculture brands such as Vice, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters and a plethora of localised variants.Korine’s film, which is made to resemble found VHS footage of old-aged vandals, epitomises the ironic, retro stylizations and “counterculture-meets-kitsch” aesthetics so familiar to hipster culture. As a creative stereotype from 1940s and ‘50s jazz and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in the twenty-first century as a negative embodiment of alternative culture in the age of the Internet. As well as plumbing the recent past for things not yet incorporated into contemporary marketing mechanisms, the hipster also signifies the blurring of irony and authenticity. Such “outsiderness as insiderness” postures can be regarded as a continuation of the marginality-from-the-centre logic of cool capitalism that emerged after World War Two. Particularly between 2007 and 2015, the post-postmodern concept of the hipster was a resonant cultural trope in Western and non-Western cultures alike, coinciding with the normalisation of the new digital terrain and the establishment of mobile social media as an integral aspect of many people’s daily lives. While Korine’s 79-minute feature could be thought of as following in the schlocky footsteps of the likes of Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2006), it is decidedly more arthouse, and more attuned to the influence of contemporary alternative media brands and independent film history alike – as if the love child of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Vice Video, the latter having been labelled as “devil-may-care hipsterism” (Carr). Upon release, Trash Humpers was described by Gene McHugh as “a mildly hip take on Jackass”; by Mike D’Angelo as “an empty hipster pose”; and by Aaron Hillis as either “the work of an insincere hipster or an eccentric provocateur”. Lacking any semblance of a conventional plot, Trash Humpers essentially revolves around four elderly-looking protagonists – three men and a woman – who document themselves with a low-quality video camera as they go about behaving badly in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, where Korine still lives. They cackle eerily to themselves as they try to stave off boredom, masturbating frantically on rubbish bins, defecating and drinking alcohol in public, fellating foliage, smashing televisions, playing ten-pin bowling, lighting firecrackers and telling gay “hate” jokes to camera with no punchlines. In one purposefully undramatic scene half-way through the film, the humpers are shown in the aftermath of an attack on a man wearing a French maid’s outfit; he lies dead in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor with a hammer at his feet. The humpers are consummate “bad” performers in every sense of the term, and they are joined by a range of other, apparently lower-class, misfits with whom they stage tap dance routines and repetitively sing nursery-rhyme-styled raps such as: “make it, make it, don’t break it; make it, make it, don’t fake it; make it, make it, don’t take it”, which acts as a surrogate theme song for the film. Korine sometimes depicts his main characters on crutches or in a wheelchair, and a baby doll is never too far away from the action, as a silent and Surrealist witness to their weird, sinister and sometimes very funny exploits. The film cuts from scene to scene as if edited on a video recorder, utilising in-house VHS titling sequences, audio glitches and video static to create the sense that one is engaging voyeuristically with a found video document rather than a scripted movie. Mainstream AlternativesAs a viewer of Trash Humpers, one has to try hard to suspend disbelief if one is to see the humpers as genuine geriatric peeping Toms rather than as hipsters in old-man masks trying to be rebellious. However, as Korine’s earlier films such as Gummo (1997) attest, he clearly delights in blurring the line between failure and transcendence, or, in this case, between pretentious art-school bravado and authentic redneck ennui. As noted in a review by Jeannette Catsoulis, writing for the New York Times: “Much of this is just so much juvenile posturing, but every so often the screen freezes into something approximating beauty: a blurry, spaced-out, yellow-green landscape, as alien as an ancient photograph”. Korine has made a career out of generating this wavering uncertainty in his work, polarising audiences with a mix of critical, cinema-verité styles and cynical exploitations. His work has consistently revelled in ethical ambiguities, creating environments where teenagers take Ritalin for kicks, kill cats, wage war with their families and engage in acts of sexual deviancy – all of which are depicted with a photographer’s eye for the uncanny.The elusive and contradictory aspects of Korine’s work – at once ugly and beautiful, abstract and commercial, pessimistic and nostalgic – are evident not just in films such as Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy (1999) and Mister Lonely (2007) but also in his screenplay for Kids (1995), his performance-like appearances on The Tonight Show with David Letterman (1993-2015) and in publications such as A Crackup at the Race Riots (1998) and Pass the Bitch Chicken (2001). As well as these outputs, Korine is also a painter who is represented by Gagosian Gallery – one of the world’s leading art galleries – and he has directed numerous music videos, documentaries and commercials throughout his career. More than just update of the traditional figure of the auteur, Korine, instead, resembles a contemporary media artist whose avant-garde and grotesque treatments of Americana permeate almost everything he does. Korine wrote the screenplay for Kids when he was just 19, and subsequently built his reputation on the paradoxical mainstreaming of alternative culture in the 1990s. This is exemplified by the establishment of music and film genres such “alternative” and “independent”; the popularity of the slacker ethos attributed to Generation X; the increased visibility of alternative press zines; the birth of grunge in fashion and music; and the coining of “cool hunting” – a bottom-up market research phenomenon that aimed to discover new trends in urban subcultures for the purpose of mass marketing. Key to “alternative culture”, and its related categories such as “indie” and “arthouse”, is the idea of evoking artistic authenticity while covertly maintaining a parasitic relationship with the mainstream. As Holly Kruse notes in her account of the indie music scenes of the 1990s, which gained tremendous popularity in the wake of grunge bands such as Nirvana: without dominant, mainstream musics against which to react, independent music cannot be independent. Its existence depends upon dominant music structures and practices against which to define itself. Indie music has therefore been continually engaged in an economic and ideological struggle in which its ‘outsider’ status is re-examined, re-defined, and re-articulated to sets of musical practices. (Kruse 149)Alternative culture follows a similar, highly contentious, logic, appearing as a nebulous, authentic and artistic “other” whose exponents risk being entirely defined by the mainstream markets they profess to oppose. Kids was directed by the artist cum indie-director Larry Clark, who discovered Korine riding his skateboard with a group of friends in New York’s Washington Square in the early 1990s, before commissioning him to write a script. The then subcultural community of skating – which gained prominence in the 1990s amidst the increased visibility of “alternative sports” – provides an important backdrop to the film, which documents a group of disaffected New York teenagers at a time of the Aids crisis in America. Korine has been active in promoting the DIY ethos, creativity and anti-authoritarian branding of skate culture since this time – an industry that, in its attempts to maintain a non-mainstream profile while also being highly branded, has become emblematic of the category of “alternative culture”. Korine has undertaken commercial projects with an array skate-wear brands, but he is particularly associated with Supreme, a so-called “guerrilla fashion” label originating in 1994 that credits Clark and other 1990s indie darlings, and Korine cohorts, Chloë Sevigny and Terry Richardson, as former models and collaborators (Williams). The company is well known for its designer skateboard decks, its collaborations with prominent contemporary visual artists, its hip-hop branding and “inscrutable” web videos. It is also well known for its limited runs of new clothing lines, which help to stoke demand through one-offs – blending street-wear accessibility with the restricted-market and anti-authoritarian sensibility of avant-garde art.Of course, “alternative culture” poses a notorious conundrum for analysis, involving highly subjective demarcations of “mainstream” from “subversive” culture, not to mention “genuine subversion” from mere “corporate alternatives”. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the roots of alternative culture lie in the Western tradition of the avant-garde and the “aesthetic gaze” that developed in the nineteenth century (Field 36). In analysing the modernist notion of advanced cultural practice – where art is presented as an alternative to bourgeois academic taste and to the common realm of cultural commodities – Bourdieu proposed a distinction between two types of “fields”, or logics of cultural production. Alternative culture follows what Bourdieu called “the field of restricted production”, which adheres to “art for art’s sake” ideals, where audiences are targeted as if like-minded peers (Field 50). In contrast, the “field of large-scale production” reflects the commercial imperatives of mainstream culture, in which goods are produced for the general public at large. The latter field of large-scale production tends to service pre-established markets, operating in response to public demand. Furthermore, whereas success in the field of restricted production is often indirect, and latent – involving artists who create niche markets without making any concessions to those markets – success in the field of large-scale production is typically more immediate and quantifiable (Field 39). Here we can see that central to the branding of “alternative culture” is the perceived refusal to conform to popular taste and the logic of capitalism more generally is. As Supreme founder James Jebbia stated about his brand in a rare interview: “The less known the better” (Williams). On this, Bourdieu states that, in the field of restricted production, the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies are inversed to create a “loser wins” scenario (Field 39). Profit and cultural esteem become detrimental attributes in this context, potentially tainting the integrity and marginalisation on which alternative products depend. As one ironic hipster t-shirt puts it: “Nothing is any good if other people like it” (Diesel Sweeties).Trash HipstersIn abandoning linear narrative for rough assemblages of vignettes – or “moments” – recorded with an unsteady handheld camera, Trash Humpers positions itself in ironic opposition to mainstream filmmaking, refusing the narrative arcs and unwritten rules of Hollywood film, save for its opening and closing credits. Given Korine’s much publicized appreciation of cinema pioneers, we can understand Trash Humpers as paying homage to independent and DIY film history, including Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton (1973), Andy Warhol’s and Paul Morrissey’s Lonesome Cowboys (1967) and Trash (1970), and John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), all of which jubilantly embraced the “bad” aesthetic of home movies. Posed as fantasized substitutions for mainstream movie-making, such works were also underwritten by the legitimacy of camp as a form of counter-culture critique, blurring parody and documentary to give voice to an array of non-mainstream and counter-cultural identities. The employment of camp in postmodern culture became known not merely as an aesthetic subversion of cultural mores but also as “a gesture of self-legitimation” (Derrida 290), its “failed seriousness” regarded as a critical response to the specific historical problem of being a “culturally over-saturated” subject (Sontag 288).The significant difference between Korine’s film and those of his 1970s-era forbears is precisely the attention he pays to the formal aspects of his medium, revelling in analogue editing glitches to the point of fetishism, in some cases lasting as long as the scenes themselves. Consciously working out-of-step with the media of his day, Trash Humpers in imbued with nostalgia from its very beginning. Whereas Smith, Eggleston, Warhol, Morrissey and Waters blurred fantasy and documentary in ways that raised the social and political identities of their subjects, Korine seems much more interested in “trash” as an aesthetic trope. In following this interest, he rightfully pays homage to the tropes of queer cinema, however, he conveniently leaves behind their underlying commentaries about (hetero-) normative culture. A sequence where the trash humpers visit a whorehouse and amuse themselves by smoking cigars and slapping the ample bottoms of prostitutes in G-strings confirms the heterosexual tenor of the film, which is reiterated throughout by numerous deadpan gay jokes and slurs.Trash Humpers can be understood precisely in terms of Korine’s desire to maintain the aesthetic imperatives of alternative culture, where formal experimentation and the subverting of mainstream genres can provide a certain amount of freedom from explicated meaning, and, in particular, from socio-political commentary. Bourdieu rightly points out how the pleasures of the aesthetic gaze often manifest themselves curiously as form of “deferred pleasure” (353) or “pleasure without enjoyment” (495), which corresponds to Immanuel Kant’s notion of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement. Aesthetic dispositions posed in the negative – as in the avant-garde artists who mined primitive and ugly cultural stereotypes – typically use as reference points “facile” or “vulgar” (393) working-class tropes that refer negatively to sensuous pleasure as their major criterion of judgment. For Bourdieu, the pleasures provided by the aesthetic gaze in such instances are not sensual pleasures so much as the pleasures of social distinction – signifying the author’s distance from taste as a form of gratification. Here, it is easy to see how the orgiastic central characters in Trash Humpers might be employed by Korine for a similar end-result. As noted by Jeremiah Kipp in a review of the film: “You don't ‘like’ a movie like Trash Humpers, but I’m very happy such films exist”. Propelled by aesthetic, rather than by social, questions of value, those that “get” the obscure works of alternative culture have a tendency to legitimize them on the basis of the high-degree of formal analysis skills they require. For Bourdieu, this obscures the fact that one’s aesthetic “‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education” – a privileged mode of looking, estranged from those unfamiliar with the internal logic of decoding presupposed by the very notion of “aesthetic enjoyment” (2).The rhetorical priority of alternative culture is, in Bourdieu’s terms, the “autonomous” perfection of the form rather than the “heteronomous” attempt to monopolise on it (Field 40). However, such distinctions are, in actuality, more nuanced than Bourdieu sometimes assumed. This is especially true in the context of global digital culture, which makes explicit how the same cultural signs can have vastly different meanings and motivations across different social contexts. This has arguably resulted in the destabilisation of prescriptive analyses of cultural taste, and has contributed to recent “post-critical” advances, in which academics such as Bruno Latour and Rita Felski advocate for cultural analyses and practices that promote relationality and attachment rather than suspicious (critical) dispositions towards marginal and popular subjects alike. Latour’s call for a move away from the “sledge hammer” of critique applies as much to cultural practice as it does to written analysis. Rather than maintaining hierarchical oppositions between authentic versus inauthentic taste, Latour understands culture – and the material world more generally – as having agency alongside, and with, that of the social world.Hipsters with No AlternativeIf, as Karl Spracklen suggests, alternativism is thought of “as a political project of resistance to capitalism, with communicative oppositionality as its defining feature” (254), it is clear that there has been a progressive waning in relevance of the category of “alternative culture” in the age of the Internet, which coincides with the triumph of so-called “neoliberal individualism” (258). To this end, Korine has lost some of his artistic credibility over the course of the 2000s. If viewed negatively, icons of 1990s alternative culture such as Korine can be seen as merely exploiting Dada-like techniques of mimetic exacerbation and symbolic détournement for the purpose of alternative, “arty” branding rather than pertaining to a counter-hegemonic cultural movement (Foster 31). It is within this context of heightened scepticism surrounding alternative culture that the hipster stereotype emerged in cultures throughout the world, as if a contested symbol of the aesthetic gaze in an era of neoliberal identity politics. Whatever the psychological motivations underpinning one’s use of the term, to call someone a hipster is typically to point out that their distinctive alternative or “arty” status appears overstated; their creative decisions considered as if a type of bathos. For detractors of alternative cultural producers such as Korine, he is trying too hard to be different, using the stylised codes of “alternative” to conceal what is essentially his cultural and political immaturity. The hipster – who is rarely ever self-identified – re-emerged in the 2000s to operate as a scapegoat for inauthentic markers of alternative culture, associated with men and women who appear to embrace Realpolitik, sincerity and authentic expressions of identity while remaining tethered to irony, autonomous aesthetics and self-design. Perhaps the real irony of the hipster is the pervasiveness of irony in contemporary culture. R. J Magill Jnr. has argued that “a certain cultural bitterness legitimated through trenchant disbelief” (xi) has come to define the dominant mode of political engagement in many societies since the early 2000s, in response to mass digital information, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and the climate of suspicion produced by information about terrorism threats. He analyses the prominence of political irony in American TV shows including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Simpsons, South Park, The Chappelle Show and The Colbert Report but he also notes its pervasiveness as a twenty-first-century worldview – a distancing that “paradoxically and secretly preserves the ideals of sincerity, honesty and authenticity by momentarily belying its own appearance” (x). Crucially, then, the utterance “hipster” has come to signify instances when irony and aesthetic distance are perceived to have been taken too far, generating the most disdain from those for whom irony, aesthetic discernment and cultural connoisseurship still provide much-needed moments of disconnection from capitalist cultures drowning in commercial hyperbole and grave news hype. Korine himself has acknowledged that Spring Breakers (2013) – his follow-up feature film to Trash Humpers – was created in response to the notion that “alternative culture”, once a legitimate challenge to mainstream taste, had lost its oppositional power with the decentralization of digital culture. He states that he made Spring Breakers at a moment “when there’s no such thing as high or low, it’s all been exploded. There is no underground or above-ground, there’s nothing that’s alternative. We’re at a point of post-everything, so it’s all about finding the spirit inside, and the logic, and making your own connections” (Hawker). In this context, we can understand Trash Humpers as the last of the Korine films to be branded with the authenticity of alternative culture. In Spring Breakers Korine moved from the gritty low-fi sensibility of his previous films and adopted a more digital, light-filled and pastel-coloured palette. Focussing more conventionally on plot than ever before, Spring Breakers follows four college girls who hold up a restaurant in order to fund their spring break vacation. Critic Michael Chaiken noted that the film marks a shift in Korine’s career, from the alternative stylings of the pre-Internet generation to “the cultural heirs [of] the doomed protagonists of Kids: nineties babies, who grew up with the Internet, whose sensibilities have been shaped by the sweeping technological changes that have taken place in the interval between the Clinton and Obama eras” (33).By the end of the 2000s, an entire generation came of age having not experienced a time when the obscure films, music or art of the past took more effort to track down. Having been a key participant in the branding of alternative culture, Korine is in a good position to recall a different, pre-YouTube time – when cultural discernment was still caught up in the authenticity of artistic identity, and when one’s cultural tastes could still operate with a certain amount of freedom from sociological scrutiny. Such ideas seem a long way away from today’s cultural environments, which have been shaped not only by digital media’s promotion of cultural interconnection and mass information, but also by social media’s emphasis on mobilization and ethical awareness. ConclusionI should reiterate here that is not Korine’s lack of seriousness, or irony, alone that marks Trash Humpers as a response to the scepticism surrounding alternative culture symbolised by the figure of the hipster. It is, rather, that Korine’s mock-documentary about juvenile geriatrics works too hard to obscure its implicit social commentary, appearing driven to condemn contemporary capitalism’s exploitations of youthfulness only to divert such “uncool” critical commentaries through unsubtle formal distractions, visual poetics and “bad boy” avant-garde signifiers of authenticity. Before being bludgeoned to death, the unnamed man in the French maid’s outfit recites a poem on a bridge amidst a barrage of fire crackers let off by a nearby humper in a wheelchair. Although easily overlooked, it could, in fact, be a pivotal scene in the film. Spoken with mock high-art pretentions, the final lines of the poem are: So what? Why, I ask, why? Why castigate these creatures whose angelic features are bumping and grinding on trash? Are they not spawned by our greed? Are they not our true seed? Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash? We’ve created this lot, of the ooze and the rot, deliberately and unabashed. Whose orgiastic elation and one mission in creation is to savagely fornicate TRASH!Here, the character’s warning of capitalist overabundance is drowned out by the (aesthetic) shocks of the fire crackers, just as the stereotypical hipster’s ethical ideals are drowned out by their aesthetic excess. The scene also functions as a metaphor for the humpers themselves, whose elderly masks – embodiments of nostalgia – temporarily suspend their real socio-political identities for the sake of role-play. It is in this sense that Trash Humpers is too enamoured with its own artifices – including its anonymous “boys club” mentality – to suggest anything other than the aesthetic distance that has come to mark the failings of the “alternative culture” category. In such instances, alternative taste appears as a rhetorical posture, with Korine asking us to gawk knowingly at the hedonistic and destructive pleasures pursued by the humpers while factoring in, and accepting, our likely disapproval.ReferencesArsel, Zeynep, and Craig J. Thompson. “Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How Consumers Protect Their Field-Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing Marketplace Myths.” Journal of Consumer Research 37.5 (2011): 791-806.Bourdieu, Pierre. 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