Born in Flames

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. 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 EnglishMr. 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, DavisBorn 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 DelawareWho 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 VacationYou 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