by Howard (Author), Hampton (Author), HOWard (Author), Hampton (Author)
Twenty years as an outsider scouring the underbelly of American culture has made Howard Hampton a uniquely hardnosed guide to the heart of pop darkness. Bridging the fatalistic, intensely charged space between Apocalypse Now Redux and Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, his writing breaks down barriers of ignorance and arrogance that have segregated art forms from each other and often from the world at large. In the freewheeling spirit of Pauline Kael, Lester Bangs, and Manny Farber, Hampton calls up the extremist, underground tendencies and archaic forces simmering beneath the surface of popular forms. Ranging from the kinetic poetry of Hong Kong cinema and the neo-New Wave energy of Irma Vep to the punk heroines of Sleater-Kinney and Ghost World, Born in Flames plays odd couples off one another: pitting Natural Born Killers against Forrest Gump, contrasting Jean-Luc Godard with Steven Spielberg, defending David Lynch against aesthetic ideologues, invoking The Curse of the Mekons against Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, and introducing D. H. Lawrence to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We are born in flames, sang the incandescent Lora Logic, and here those flames are a source of illumination as well as destruction, warmth as well as consumption. From the scorched-earth works of action-movie provocateurs Seijun Suzuki and Sam Peckinpah to the cargo cult soundscapes of Pere Ubu and the Czech dissidents Plastic People of the Universe, Born in Flames is a headlong plunge into the passions and disruptive power of art.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 496
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 06 May 2008
ISBN 10: 0674027329
ISBN 13: 9780674027329
Book Overview: In an appropriately explosive writing style, Howard Hampton refreshingly illuminates the freestanding alternative aesthetic in the past half-century. His extremely rigorous critique and electric writing revives the genre of cultural studies for the late twentieth century in the way that the Ramones ripped seventies music out of anaesthetized Osmond disco and sanitized Jackson Browne into the grit of punk. -- Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien, author of Weird English Mr. Hampton's writings form a sort of triangle with those of Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs. Mr. Hampton writes with a fluid, insistent, occasionally delirious sense of linguistic play. The style itself operates as a kind of argument, demonstrating the pleasures of a kind of rapacity and restlessness of intelligence. I find the reasoning, of itself--the modeling of ways to apprehend material culture--deeply useful, and exciting. Even in my disagreements, I come away thinking better and more intensely. -- Joshua Clover, Professor of English, University of California, Davis Born in Flames seems to have sprung from the pen of someone who walked out of the apocalyptic ending of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust. While by no means parochial, his is a vision deeply grounded in Southern California, resting on a worldview shaped by violence, unkept promises, and a cornucopia of images, spectacle, and pop commodities. Hampton is a polymath and cultural omnivore, and what emerges from the pages of this dizzying and dazzling collection is an example of what important criticism is and can be: critical intervention not only into the meanings of individual genres and oeuvres but into our culture generally. -- David Suisman, Assistant Professor of History, University of Delaware Who is Howard Hampton? Who the hell isn't he? A tragicomic master of doom and glee, of seething and serenity, analysis and outbursts, horror and hope, he's the fun kind of unsettling. Somehow, this closest of close-ups inside his own trickster head ends up also being an accurate wide shot of American art and life. -- Sarah Vowell, author of Assassination Vacation You may not know half the things Howard Hampton is talking about as he takes us on a breathtaking roller coaster ride through the high points and low points of pop culture, but you're sure to find a lot to interest you. For me, the highlight was the best essay I've ever read on Joss Whedon's wacky apocalyptic TV drama Angel. Hampton neatly sums up its message: If you ask for water and life gives you gasoline, you better learn how to make Molotov cocktails. Who says TV has nothing to teach us? Howard Hampton is one of the most distinct voices in pop culture commentary today. -- Paul A. Cantor, author of Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization For the better part of twenty years Howard Hampton has been one of the three or four greatest American writers about popular culture, and it seems the more unhinged the culture gets, the more he's up to the job. If Hampton were a movie, he would be Melville's Le Samourai: cool hair-trigger instincts, two-steps-ahead-of-everyone savvy, and an outlaw heart expressed with white-fedora elegance. -- Steve Erickson We live in an age of barely-concealed hysterias, and what is the reason for this terrible reality? It is a mystery. Howard Hampton's great achievement as a critic is to see this reality, and to reveal it to the rest of us. Reading him makes me pop-eyed with fear. Reading him a little more makes me realize that I have been pop-eyed with fear all along--the sign of a first-rate cultural critic. -- Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism and Power and the Idealists Howard Hampton is one of the most original critics at work in the country today, and Born in Flames shows all his sides. Who else can write so well on William Parker and Chris Marker and Tsui Hark? He makes words flow like pinballs in a cyclotron. -- RJ Smith, author of The Great Black Way: LA in the 1940s and the Lost African-American Renaissance.
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