The quintessence of Lux. (Couldn’t find a photo byline for this. Anyone know?)

Oof. Lux Interior, lead singer of The Cramps, died earlier today of a pre-existing heart condition, aged 62. He is survived by his maximumrocknroll wife of almost 40 years, guitarist Poison Ivy.

The Cramps’ genre-defining “psychobilly” sound was unlike anything else to originate from the late 70s NYC punk scene –sharp, savage, sexy, filthy, campy, goofy, sometimes just plain sick— and Lux retained his gritty, untamed edge until the very end. From their publicist’s official press release:

[The Cramps’] distinct take on rockabilly and surf along with their midnight movie imagery reminded us all just how exciting, dangerous, vital and sexy rock and roll should be and has spawned entire subcultures. Lux was a fearless frontman who transformed every stage he stepped on into a place of passion, abandon, and true freedom.

Oh, Lux, we’re gonna miss you so much. A eyeball martini toast to you and your fiery spirit, with loving thoughts for Ivy during this painful time.

An unforgettable clip of Lux Interior in action from URGH! A Music War.

Click below for more photos, blurbs and video footage of The Cramps from over the years.

Kathy Acker, 1986. Photo by Robert Croma.

Some of the most brain-scramblingly brilliant clusterfucks in the English language come to us courtesy of the late novelist Kathy Acker. She was a small and potent leather-clad, post-structuralist prose-styling, sex-positive slip of a woman who, according to loving friends and resentful exes alike, moved through the world with the social delicacy of a class F5 tornado.

I bring her up partly because some retrospectives and conferences celebrating Acker’s work have started cropping up in NYC and London, but mostly because I’m having such a blast revisiting her books lately. Grove Press released Essential Acker a while back, along with some of her previously unpublished early novels: Rip-off Red, The Burning Bombing of America, and Girl Detective. It’s chewy, nourishing stuff, and her tales of rejection and redefinition are hitting me even harder the second time around.

2009 is a fresh, raw, hopeful year… the perfect time for an Acker revival! It’d be lovely to chat about her with anyone else out there familiar with her work. (I suppose I could drive over to UC Berkeley and try to ingratiate myself with a few of those scowling pomo lit profs, but I’m afeared. I’d rather gab with you guys.)

Jonathan Webster: “The most enjoyable thing about having a conversation with the gorgeous, post-punk, post-feminist, pierced and tattooed American novelist Kathy Acker, is that her answers to interview questions take on an elliptical quality. Just as in her novels, you are simultaneously thrown off balance and yet riveted, never quite knowing whether she is going to give you a straight answer or about to go off at a bizarre, but somehow connected, tangent”. (Photo by Kathy Brew.)

She was an obsession of mine as a teenager. Auntie Acker, the mentor I never had, the one who would have bought me beer and beadies and spoken to me candidly about orgasms and revolution when none of the other grown-ups took me seriously. A comics pal of mine insists that Neil Gaiman based his famed Endless character Delirium as much on Acker as he did on Tori. That would make a lot of sense, given her spaced-out, million-places-at-once style, and the giddy arc of her life story…

What a historic day! Big, bonecrushing hugs from all of us here at CH headquarters to everyone else on planet earth who is rejoicing at the departure of the Bush administration. There will never be a better time to post the following human rights essay and interview that our staffer Jeff Wengrofsky (aka Agent Double Oh No) has been working on for months. At Coilhouse, we’re glad to supply subject matter ranging from the utterly frivolous to the deeply involved and intense. This piece goes in the latter category. We’re honored to provide a forum for Jeff’s in-depth, thought-provoking conversation with human rights activists Suzette Brunkhorst and Ronald Eissens. We hope that their story and struggle will move some of you as much as it has moved us. ~Mer

“Human institutions appear to be the obvious and obtrusive causes of
much mischief to mankind; yet in reality, they are light and superficial
…in comparison with those deeper seated causes of impurity
that…render turbid the whole stream of human life.“
– Thomas Malthus  (1798)

As membership is constitutive for a society, its conditions are routinely, if not essentially, contested.  More than any other society, America has wrestled with two competing notions of membership: one based on exclusion (class until 1824, race formally until 1870 and practically until 1965, and gender until 1920) and another based on inclusion and rooted in the Declaration of Independence’s influential clause: “all…are created equal.”  This quarrel over defining principles was apparent even in the drafting of the Declaration. Thomas Jefferson’s original document, later altered in a compromise, called for the abolition of slavery.  Jefferson himself was in love and sired children with Sally Hemings, an African-American who was the half-sister of his wife and his slave. And so, America was born in original sin under a star of some perversion with an ever-present element of redemption. Even today, America blinks like a giant, Masonic hologram, simultaneously symbolizing and embodying our greatest hope and, in the Bush years, our greatest disappointment.

In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois declared “the color line” to be the defining issue of the 20th Century. The election of Barack Hussein Obama Jr. opens up the question as to whether the United States has begun the new century by transcending racial exclusion. Surely the America of 1903 looks little like the America of today: African-Americans are no longer its largest ethnic minority, its citizenry includes significant numbers of people who do not fit into the black-white axis, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts rendered discrimination illegal 43 years ago, Affirmative Action dates back to J.F.K., intermarriage is not unusual, Martin Luther King’s birthday is a national holiday, racial bigotry has long since fallen into disrepute in the sciences and is not tolerated in polite conversation, and even the Bush Administration had African-Americans in its cabinet. On the other hand, police departments are often charged with brutality and “stop and frisk” policies that target black youth, African-Americans continue to be overrepresented among our nation’s most impoverished and undereducated and imprisoned, and African-Americans are the victim of more hate crime than any other group in the United States.

Certainly it is very unusual for the people of any society to select a member of a minority (however understood) to its highest office and, perhaps, this event is even more profound in a country whose entire history can be understood as a long and troubled march toward the fulfillment of its inclusive promise. Can 300 years of racial difference be transcended by legislation or election? Will Americans whose biographies are not like Obama’s accept his leadership in a time of economic and ecological crisis? With the election of Obama, is the United States once again poised to provide moral leadership (as it surely did in 1776)? Is international moral leadership possible? It seems as though history itself has opened and the full range of human potential – the good, the bad, and the ugly – are all equally likely.

What is “racism”? Are all bigotries a form of racism? Is racism conceptually distinct from other forms of ethnic chauvinism? The major genocides of the past century were, aside from the Nazi extermination of the Jews, not understood in racial terms: the Turkish-Armenian genocide (1915-18), the Turkish-Greek genocide (1914-23), Stalin’s liquidation of the Kulaks (1932-33), the Japanese-Chinese genocide in Nanking (1937-38), the Nigerian-Biafran genocide (1966-1970), the Pakistani-Bangladeshi genocide (1971), the Tutsi-Hutu genocide in Burundi (1972), Pol Pot’s Cambodian purges (1975-79), the Hutu-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda (1994), and the Serb-Bosnian genocide (1992-95).

Where do these cleavages, these notions of belonging and otherness, come from? They are found in various forms in every human society.  Sadly, our closest kin in the animal world also share this trait. Wars among chimpanzees and between apes have been noted by biologists since 1970. Are hatreds naturally rooted in “selfish genes”? If so, do we need unrealizable principles to inform our behavior and ground social criticism?

Is cosmopolitanism – the idea that one can be a “citizen of the world” – possible? Aren’t we always already embedded in cultural conversations, genetic inheritances, and political communities? Does anyone have arms long enough to embrace humanity as a whole? What do we do with those who return our embrace with bullets and bombs? Is cosmopolitanism an unrealistic retreat from the world as it actually is? Is cosmopolitanism a rhetorical strategy of the weak to keep the strong from winning?

Suzette Brunkhorst and Ronald Eissens.

On Thanksgiving, an American holiday whose lore bespeaks inclusion and exclusion, I sat down to discuss hate, race, and the limits of freedom in Holland, often considered among the freest places in this world, and on the internet, a transnational network, with Suzette Brunkhorst and Ronald Eissens, the Directors of the Magenta Foundation.  In their own words, “Magenta is a foundation that aims to combat racism and other forms of discrimination primarily on and through the Internet.” They have organized many high profile events in the name of inclusion and understanding, and have presented reports on bigotry before the United Nations and the O.S.C.E. Undeterred in the face of many death threats, they are cosmopolitan heroes. Sadly, just one day after this interview, Suzette was diagnosed with cancer and has since gone into chemotherapy. On this day, full of hope, let’s wish her a fast and painless recovery.

(Jeff’s full interview with Suzette Brunkhorst and Ronald Eissens appears after the jump.)

Bettie Mae Page (April 22, 1923 – December 11, 2008)

In her own gentle, playful way, she was a revolutionary. Maybe she never meant to be when she started modeling, yet there’s no denying Bettie Page’s impact, resonance, or relevance, even half a century later.

In her portraits, we recognize the purity and uncomplicated joy of nudity. We are encouraged by her bearing, her beauty, her humor, her sweetness (yes, even in those Klaw photos… especially in those!) to regard sensuality as one of life’s purest gifts, rather than something immoral or wrong.

It isn’t just her beautiful body or her iconic style that continues to captivate us all these years later. It’s her spirit. When we look into her face, her eyes seem to tell us that it’s going to be all right; we can relinquish our shame.

It is her smile that sets us free.

(Several portraits and quotes from Bettie Page after the jump. Under the circumstances, I really wish I didn’t have to say this, but…NSFW.)

After 9-11, that sick, sinking feeling many weary commuters experienced stepping onto a crowded NYC subway car was magnified by the MTA’s stentorian banner campaign, “If You See Something, Say Something.” Artist  Caroline Woolard has found a delightful way to strip away the defensive layers of suspicion and dread that can accompany a subterranean commute, replacing default anxiety with spontaneous joy by crafting a backpack that transforms easily into a swing! Using 1000 mesh “L-train grey” cordura, webbing, sliders, hooks, velcro, and snaps, Woolard’s “bag swing” is fitted with sturdy straps that hook easily around the handrail of the subway:

Says Woolard: “I hope that the innocent amusement of swinging on the subway eclipses the current atmosphere of insulation and suspicion.”

Much of Woolard’s creative output seems to revolve around the idea that we should all strive to come into the moment, moving actively through the world rather than shuffling absently through it. Her emphasis on exploring pedestrian space and “cultivating everyday magic” in an urban environment encourages viewers (and participants) to reexamine their relationships with the overwhelmingly massive, immovable urban architecture they live in.

What is the relationship between play and revolution? Creating fissures in reality opens up the possibility for change: change in the everyday/monotonous routine, change in assumptions about ‘facts’, change in the world in general. The act of “making strange” allows a new perspective for reassessment and critique. Nothing is fixed and anyone can make the environment around them better.

Adventurous New Yorkers will definitely want to get on her email list.

Recently, presumably to take her site specific explorations a step further and be even more fully in the present, Woolard has stopped updating her art blog. “My projects are lived and may eventually lose any connection to Art…” In other words, she’s just doing it without defining it. “Many things are happening, but you must discover them in real time.” Bravo, Caroline.

Via the lovable guerilla art wunderkind SF Slim, thanks.

“This is a new secret science, to master the emptiness and turn it into something that is filled with sound and visual images.”
– Karlheinz Stockhausen

Stockhausen has died, aged 79. Depending on who you talk to, he was either one of the most revered or reviled composers of the 20th century. A student of Olivier Messiaen with little interest in conventional “classical” modes of composition, Stockhausen’s sonic innovations range from the sublimely understated (Mantra, 1970) to the grandiose (Spiral, 1968) to the bombastic and beautifully absurd (Helikopter-Streichquartett, 1993).

Throughout his life, Stockhausen was obsessed with the concept of flight. As early as the 1950s, he was already discussing his desire to “liberate musicians from the constraints of gravity.” He even consulted with recording technicians to see if there was a way to harness performers in specially rigged chairs that could be swung through the studio on ropes. The aforementioned Helikopter Streichquartett was in many ways a culmination of his lifelong dream to see music truly take flight. Many people have said, will undoubtedly continue to say “I don’t get it.” Indeed, not long ago the entire world shouted in disbelief at the aging iconoclast when he dared to refer to the attacks on the World Trade Center as “the greatest work of art imaginable.”

Regardless, even Stockhausen’s harshest detractors can never argue that he was not a swashbuckling pioneer of sound and vision. A relentless seeker, he never allowed the circumscriptions of others to stand in his way. Somewhere in the expansive aleatory of the cosmos, an echo of Stockhausen’s voice speaks with more conviction than ever: “I no longer limit myself.”