Apocrypha Now!

[Dave Monroe]

Hampton, Howard.  "Apocrypha Now!  An Imaginary
   Discography of Thomas Pynchon's Paranoids."
   Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical
   Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses.  Cambridge, MA:
   Harvard UP, 2007.  413-26

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. 

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/HAMBOR.html

Contents 

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/HAMBOR.html?show=contents

Introduction

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/pdf/HAMBOR_excerpt.pdf


 
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