| Louisiana Half-Face - Review | Review by John Michael McCloughlin |
| Goodbye, Homunculus! - Review | Review by John Michael McCloughlin |
| Lilith Before Eve - Review | Review by John Michael McCloughlin |
| A Ballet of Wasps - Review | Review by John Michael McCloughlin |
| Al-Qa'eda Moth - Review | Review by John Michael McCloughlin |
| Fanatical Pursuit or Purity - Review | Review by John Michael McCloughlin |
| Kratos - Review | Review by John Michael McCloughlin |
| Straight As An Arrow | Review by Alex Kurtagic |
| A Polyp devours its feed... | Review by Alex Kurtagic |
| Why I write | Review by Alex Kurtagic |
| The Art of Bowden Vol. 2 - Review | Review by Alex Kurtagic |
| The Art of Bowden Vol. 1 - Review | Review by Alex Kurtagic |
| Grand Guignol - Film Review | Review by Troy Southgate |
| H.P. Lovecraft: aryan mystic | Homo Lupus Hominem; Man is a wolf to his kindred |
| Kratos - Review | Another fine dissection by Troy Southgate |
| Apocalypse TV - Review | An informed review by Troy Southgate |
| Hans-Jurgen Syberberg | An analysis of the German director |
| Tradition & Revolution | The collected writings of Troy Southgate |
| Revolutionary Conservative | An interview with Jonathan Bowden |
| Opening Pandora's Box | An elitist defence of modernism |
| Homo Americanus | The latest work from Dr. Tomislav Sunic |
| Psychopathia Sexualis | Response to Alisdair Clarke's homosexualism in NI |
| Betjeman's Monday Club | Review of Raymond Tong's Necessary Words |
| Theseus' Minotaur | An examination of Friedrich Nietzsche's thought |
| A Hymn To H.E.R.R. | A review of H.E.R.R.'s The Winter of Constantinople |
| An interview with Jonathan Bowden | An interview by the New Right |
LOUISIANA HALF-FACE
Review by John Michael McCloughlin
Louisiana Half-Face was published in the first half of this year (2010). It continues a projected literary cycle which began with The Fanatical Pursuit of Purity–at least thematically. This novel fits into the horror genre most explicitly and draws on various icons from this set. These include Mummies, Skeleton-Men (the figure of Dramabu in Haitian Voodoo), a da[e]mon called Cranium Biter Dye, and a split-face or schizoid character which gives the book its title. But this has less to do with a right-wing version of Burroughs than one might suspect.
My estimation is that Bowden configures contemporary horror writing to be de-intellectualised tragedy. If, for example, Stephen King, Anne Rice, or Graham Masterton began to philosophise about motivation then they would lose about eight per cent of their audience without comment. Indeed, as a literary side-line, the crudity of current Gothic prose signals its "proletarianisation"–to use an image from the conservative essayist Professor Gwyn Williams in The Trousered Ape. Just on a literary level: there is little comparison between Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Walter de la Mere, and contemporary purveyors of "slasher" items or gore.
Yet this remains a side-line to the author's main concerns. Much of contemporary artistic life (although very interesting) is without any reliable meaning. A genuine semi-nihilism–of a Bret Easton Ellis type–hangs over Western culture like a pall. How did the Ancients and the restorationists of early Modernity, the Renaissance, impute an engagement with life...with Heidegger's Being? Well, it was primarily through a tragic or ennobling sense of life. If one computes tragedy as literary horror, under-pinned by philosophical acuity, then you begin to realise that this author believes in re-integration.
One of the reasons he concentrates on slightly cruder or "lower" forms, like Horror, is their presence beneath the literary radar. No ideas or concepts of culture are ever destroyed–they are merely displaced. Where did the belletrism of identity and the heroic–even a threnody of the cruel or violent–really go? The answer is that it went down into mass culture–essentially despised by the New Criticism (F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards) of the mid twentieth century.
Even more acutely: where did fascistic literature of an ultra-masculine cast go...why, at the level of Wyndham Lewis' The Apes of God, Guy de Montherlant's The Bachelors, and Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility, it disappeared altogether....But many of these themes, stripped of poetry and intellect, re-emerge as actions in mass culture. The extreme left, as exemplified by the post-structurist school, is deeply aware of this conundrum as well as the dangerous "essentialisms" lurking down there in the depths. One interesting side-light on contemporary travails is seen by the fate of Professor Paul de Man at Yale university.
He headed the school of deconstruction there. This is the detailed, linguistic and hermeneutical examination of mass culture. Amongst its ideological beliefs are the ideas that authors have nothing to do with their texts, empirical facts in historical writing (for example) have no validity, and everything is relative. Well, it turned out that Professor de Man had fellow-travelled with the Rexist movement in Belgium during the Second World War. He had also contributed mildly nationalist articles to a review like Michael Walker's The Scorpion, for instance. (For those not in the know, Operation Skorpion was the Europeanisation of the Waffen SS' ideology–as Alan Clark revealed in his history Barbarossa.) Nonetheless, de Man's crime was such that the late post-structural or deconstructive school has been fatally crippled by this brief flirtation with the other. By which I mean those forces in the European sub-conscious which a present-day English literati called Ian McEwan describe as the "black dogs."
I leave it to your imagination what tendency of opinion these wolves represent. Yet, suffice it to say, that in the cast-list of James Herbert's The Spear (based on Trevor Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destiny) the extreme right is the villain. One could argue–from this perspective–that this trail is exemplified perfectly by Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil (for example).
Yet if radical elitism, in its customary guise, is always the enemy...then what about an example of horror fiction which also contains a strong dose of European cultural fundamentalism? Surely that would be the worse thing in the world–in a doubled up or Inglorious Basterds sort of way. What could be more "Situationist," more transgressive than "Right wing" horror...at least on another level of reality?
On a rival plane altogether, the New Left Marxist Theodore Adorno, in a text called Minima Moralia, said that all poetry was redundant after Auschwitz-Birkenau. Everything! Well, imagine if even that implacable and post-modern logic was contradicted by the tragic idolatry of a form which worships a Nature that is neither good nor bad. What begins with the sinister Baroque of H. P. Lovecraft can become over time the attitudinising of Savitri Dev–albeit filtered through multiple levels of estrangement, denial, advance, and projected awe.
Interestingly, this volume is dedicated to Savitri Devi with a brief poem on the copyright retro–a page in most books which is customarily ignored by readers. It befits a daughter of the black sun, as its anonymous bard describes it.
GOODBYE, HOMUNCULUS!
Review by John Michael McCloughlin
This volume consists of four stories of approximately equal length. Their titles are "Goodbye, Homunculus!," "Iron Breath," "Armageddon's Village," and "Noughts are Crosses." Each one of them deals with extreme takes on the imagination, and the entire book teeters on the edge of various genres. These are Horror, the Gothic, science fiction or romanticism, fantasy, chillers, crime (yes and no), the ghost story, and noir. Yet, in all honesty, a serious undertone or classic element lurks throughout, and this has to do with Greek tragedy.
Why has the author composed them? Well, on clear inspection, several discrete pathways or strands become discernible.
The first is a change in moral temperature throughout these tales. At first, this can be rather disconcerting to a half-attentive reader. For it is relatively difficult to tease apart the good from the bad characters. Usually, in tales of this sort, there is a clear distinction. Let's take, for example, the Gothic or noir stories of William F. Harvey. Despite his "harm none" or Quakerish views, his astounding or graveyard riffs were "nasty," fierce, clammy, vaguely unwholesome, and ghoulish. The two viewpoints probably went with each other—on reflection. Even Harvey admitted that good attracts evil, so the inner paradox of his compendia becomes clear. He is a classic dualist—irrespective of his literary quality and sepulchral imagination. Essentially Harvey is a Manichean, an either/or man, who posits the notion that God and Satan are coeval.
Bowden, on the other hand, manifests a different approach, since all his varied personae seem to be quite clearly a mixture of light and dark, positive and negative, benign or malignant. They wax lyrical as "raptors who feed on blood only to be disappointed," as well as exhibiting the odd tender moment. Most certainly, they are objects or puppets up to a point, and this lends an element of satire to these proceedings. But we have to be careful here: they don't lack reality and even retain a capacity for suffering. For instance, of the two brothers Gregory Fawcett Greensleeve in "Goodbye, Homunculus!" one is quite clearly more Luciferian than the other...but the more well-rounded character proves to be multifaceted. Again, in "Iron Breath" both the robot who would replace Mankind—personified by the lonely Lighthouse man—and his "victim" wax Beyond Good and Evil. There has to be a medley or interplay of forces. Perhaps, as in Walter Allen's early review of Tarr by Wyndham Lewis, humans want to have their cake and eat it. What does this lead to? Are we in a situation where these stories prove to be transgressive or amoral? That is, do they manifest the architecture of anti-heroes or heroines, as perceived? Such a trajectory would bring them quite close to Aleister Crowley's novels The Moonchild and The Diary of a Drug Fiend. We might also be treading on Ayn Rand's territory here—if we examine works like We the Living (an anti-Soviet piece) or The Fountainhead. (Rand is qualitatively different, since her fictional creations live out some libertarian-individualist axioms. But the point still holds.)
Nonetheless, Jonathan Bowden seems to be attempting something quite distinct. To my mind, he is positing a hierarchical or aristocratic morality of high and low. It involves the substitution of one system of ethics (Judaeo-Christian) with another (Byronic, Classical, Pagan, or power-moral). Yet it is not a replacement of the better by the worse. Nor can we exempt from our schema the fact that liberal humanism can be considered as secularised Christianity.
Does this mean that he is advocating anti-ethics as traditionally perceived? No, not really...for such varied systems preach dog-eat-dog, to the victor the spoils, morality amounts to little more than the laughter of the strongest man, et cetera. Such nostrums can be associated with Hobbes' social theories, the black opal-like philosophies of the Marquis de Sade, or Antinominianism. (The last comes across as either heresy or a dissenting note within Calvinism. It derived from alternative ideas about Predestination and election inside puritanism as a whole. Many of these views subtly influenced various subcultures in the early United States. By far the clearest explication of them is in James Hogg's classic of Scotch literature, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner. A text that Andre Gide, a self-confessed existential or immoralist, revived in the early twentieth century.)
To recap: I don't believe that Bowden is advocating moral inversion, "Satanism," or pseudo-satanism at all. No, he happens to be promoting aristocratic radicalism and its attendant mores. Put more earnestly, it amounts to the ethical attitudes of the Vikings or Odinists. This means that infighting (even within an individual) is moral, honour proves to be the linchpin of behaviour, and that everything ramifies with Nature. Each and every person has his natural place within a hierarchy, biology over-masters life, striving is moral, strength welcomes morality, and the weak should be punished—but they can become stronger. This is by virtue of the fact that all valuable forms of life open out and grow towards the sun. By dint of this lexicon, immorality—theft, lying, drug-addiction, false manipulation of others, perversion—stands out as weak and vice versa. Such a prognosis occurs most nakedly in "Noughts Are Crosses"—a critique of materialism at one level, and the third story "Armageddon's Village."
In "Armageddon's Village" the paraplegic husband and recluse, Spider Absinthe Marmaduke, may be helpless in relation to the brewing conspiracy against his life. Yet he is determined to enact the prospect of vengeance—even beforehand. So it proves to be the intensity of his gaze (his desire to live) which puts off his assailant long enough to lead to a cataclysmic deux ex machina. These are pagan tales tout court: in them justice is revenge. Needless to say, even the disabled or afflicted can be eugenic if they crawl towards the sun with a knife between their teeth.
And at the end... everything goes back into Nature so as to start over.
LILITH BEFORE EVE
Review by John Michael McCloughlin
This book contains four plays which are more likely to be read than played in the theatre. They were called Lilith Before Eve, Glock's Abattoir, We Are Wrath's Children!, and Evolution X.
This tradition of literary theatre is quite well-known in Britain, but something else needs to be pointed out to make sense of it. This has to do with the "take over" of the theatrical space in the 1970s and '80s–throughout the British isles–by the revolutionary Left. A whole raft of authors who were strongly influenced by Brecht and the Berlin Ensemble (in East Germany) gathered the reins of state-subsidised theatre into their hands. They were a veritable hydra whose names included Edward Bond, Arnold Wesker, Howard Brenton, Trevor Griffiths, Jim Allen, Margaret D'Arcy, John Arden, David Edgar and Caryl Churchill (say). For example, Brenton describes himself as a "practical communist," Allen was formally linked with the Workers' Revolutionary Party (a tiny Marxist-Leninist sect), and Griffiths wrote the screenplay for Warren Beatty's Reds. He never joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), but actively fellow-travelled. In many respects, these four plays by Jonathan Bowden are a response to the above, in that they proved to be Right-wing, elitist, non-humanist, inegalitarian and Nietzschean. A fifth dream play, Stinging Beetles, occurred in another volume, A Ballet of Wasps, which takes it outside our remit.
Superficially speaking, Lilith Before Eve concerns a ventriloquist who loses control of his dummy, Glock's Abattoir deals with a caretaker at a cemetery who cries wolf too often, We Are Wrath's Children! involves a battle over a Will, and Evolution X is an attack on communist brainwashing.
The last play of the four is the most explicitly anti-Leftist, in that it considers the reality which Francis Pollini dealt with in his novel Night, published in the early 'sixties. This text–at once highly demotic and experimental in form–couldn't find an American publisher. A fact which was probably due to its unheroic ethos and its depiction of G.I. degradation, or brainwashing, at the hands of Maoist interrogators.
Bowden's play Evolution X, on the other hand, deals with a quiet, isolated, Stoic and provincial hermit who is tortured into conformity by Red Guards–or possibly the secret police. He was then turned into a spy behind enemy lines, but survives in order to wreak a terrible revenge. For the spirit of Sophocles' Theban Plays always lurks behind these particular pieces.
Despite their meta-political intent, all of these works manifest the author's concern with various examples of Anglo-Saxon folk culture. Take, by way of illustration, the Padworth hobby-horse from the English west country - its dark, Dominican head-gear; black colouration, spherical body, tassels, and celebration of a victory over the French, morphs in the United States. It is widely held (by many English cultural historians) to be one of the origins of the trick-or-treating, comedic, and yet slightly "threatening" sub-culture that fuels the early Ku Klux Klan. This is before the organisation re-emerges as an underground army in the South, post defeat, to thwart Carpet-Bagger attempts at Reconstruction. For, in many an English ear, the American accent itself is a radicalisation or extension of a Wessex or West Country diction.
In any event, Jonathan Bowden looks at two major forms of English folk art, in extenso, during these plays. The first was the Mummers' dramaturgy and the second is Punch & Judy. This playwright quite clearly adores Circus, ventriloquism, music hall, vaudeville, animal taming, Grand Guignol, contortionists, side-show barkers, mountebanks, Mystery Plays, strong men tearing apart directories, fair grounds, old-fashioned wrestling, ghost trains, escapology, and mesmerism. The Mummers' plays were often without sound, involved blacking-up and Top Hats, as well as a ubiquitous female figure: the Bessy. They are a very ancient village tradition that often featured sacrifice–by burning like a Guy–at their summation.
Punch and Judy, by contrast, has lasted in one form or another for centuries, but the modern tradition harks back two hundred years to the late eighteenth century. It is an Italian import which involves glove puppets who are controlled, in the booth, by a manipulator known as the Professor. Punch is a cardinal nightmare or Prince of Folly (possibly the first Tarot card) who beats his wife, throws the baby out of the window, attempts to murder his benign familiar, Clown Joey, and ends up eaten by a Crocodile. This saurian is a synonym for a Dragon who also stands for the Devil. Punch often beats the Devil and jumps up and down on him, in a reverse Gnostic or transgressive touch. Doctor Johnson commented on this extensively in the eighteenth century. He once snapped "the first Whig (liberal) was the Devil." One notion which is never commented on, however, is that Punch and Judy is a purely Aryan or Gentile form. No Ashkenazic can be a Professor. The reason being that pork sausages actually have to be handled (traditionally) during the performance, hence all the tom-foolery about porkers involving Punch, Clown Joey, the Crocodile, the Doctor, and the Policeman.
It is quite clear that Jonathan Bowden believes that the antidote to cultural Marxism is folkish (at least in part). This is accompanied by an insight which was borne by the violence of these Popular forms. For in modern art–power is beauty.
A BALLET OF WASPS
Review by John Michael McCloughlin
A Ballet of Wasps is a collection of four short stories and a play. The stories (including two which are very short) were "A Ballet of Wasps," "Golgotha's Centurion," "Wilderness' Ape," and "Sixty-Foot Dolls." The play in question is called "Stinging Beetles" and very much relates to the book which follows it in the sequence, Lilith Before Eve. The entire volume appeared towards the end of 2008.
Like all of Jonathan Bowden's works, this volume supports radical inequality and the courage which is necessary to view life tragically. The entire point of this corpus of stories is to raise courage and instill qualities of Stoicism, anti-defeatism, non-resignation, arrogance, and defeat's absence. One is reminded of the anti-humanist intellectual Bill Hopkins here, who, in writing in the journal Abraxas commented that "the purpose of literature is to produce new Titans." This demarcates Bowden's efforts from a lot of contemporary material-much of which oscillates between entertainment and a reconfirmation of liberal values. There is an important point here-since Bowden's work avoids a great deal of the scatological, vegetative, or crepuscular horror of the area which he has made his own. If one compares his work to the eye-ball removing machine in Edward Bond's Lear, for instance, then his fiction is positively genteel.
Nonetheless, in these particular stories, I believe that Bowden is attempting to go beyond mood music in order to impinge upon the reader beneath the conscious mind. Can authors really influence their readers in this way? It remains a moot point. Yet many people act as if there can be uncontrollable impacts (at whatever level) from work they find disagreeable. A large number of conservatives would be made deeply uncomfortable if they had to read through Bertold Brecht's The Threepeeny Opera (replete with an Otto Dix painting on the Penguin jacket). Likewise, a fragmentary and volcanic narrative by Louis-Ferdinand Céline would make many a liberal humanist shudder. Imagine quite a few callow PC types having to wade through Castle to Castle or North-never mind Guignol's Band (set in London) or the even more 'transgressive' works like Bagatelle or Celine's account of his trip to the Soviet Union.
In any event, the very fact of this tremulousness may lead to the idea of deep immersion-particularly in relation to highly imaginative material. I think Bowden's work is an attempt, fictionally speaking, to re-engineer elements of the semi-conscious mind. Hence we see a certain aggression or voltaic energy which is redolent of many "conservative" creators like Belloc, Lewis, or Mencken, but that certainly alienates a conventional or middle-brow perspective.
Similarly, quite a few authors in the Gothic area-one thinks of Lovecraft or Poe-deliberately engage in mesmerism or a phenomenon similar to a seance. This ramps up the level of abstraction, illusion, dream-material, oneiric wonder or phantasy via more and more baroque language. Yet is this more than dark poetry? Well, it depends upon how you wish to gaze upon it.
Mister Bowden's "religious" ideas are not immediately discernible from his work, but certain items do stand out over time. One is the notion that every type of mysticism exists at this level-even if it doesn't. Another viewpoint suggests that art is the praxis of religion. One has the idea with this creator that, passim. Goebbels, if asked whether human sacrifice was wrong he would answer: it depends how aesthetically it's done. The British "conceptual" artist Damien Hirst got into very hot water indeed for expatiating on the Twin Towers (September the 11th, 2001) and referring to the aesthetic pleasure they gave him. This is the dandy's position, if you will. Although my own view is that this author attempts to do more.
My suspicion is that he configures his work as a drug, a transmission mechanism, an occultism, and an estranging mystique. I dispute that he wishes to adopt a mood-rather, in my view, I think that he sees his artistic work as a magical act. This would explain its extreme conservatism-metaphysically speaking-when combined with certain modernist and gruesome aesthetics that many philistines can't stomach. The old conundrum where ideologues who talk much about Western culture are not able to sit through Aeschylus' Agamemnon raises its head here.
One is also reminded of the fact that the entire post-modern vista is the 'Sixties creation, and that Timothy Leary's adoption of a drug addict's lifestyle lay at its heart. Narcotics are about many things; over-coming boredom, the tediousness of a liberal society, a desire to escape, personal weakness, et cetera. Yet, in an artistic sense, I think something crucial is happening here. Bowden as an individual is probably quite puritanical or ascetic, but he believes in the sheer power of the imagination. I believe that if the unsuspecting voyeur opens up to what Michael Moorcock once described as fantasy's implicit fascism then Bowden has seized a device with which to hook, de-programme, turn around, and re-orient a generation. It must be said that your average liberal academic would regard this as preposterous and meaningless. And yet...why insist on an anti-essentialist or "politically correct" method for reading literature in every college if this weren't so? To finish, "A Ballet of Wasps" concerns a Woodsman's discomfiture about boasting in front of a vampire. It is set in White Russia. "Golgotha's Centurion" is a Sicilian revenge tragedy which owes something to the sweat off John Webster's brow. "Wilderness' Ape" deals with Haitian Voodoo and is quite clearly influenced by Spenser St. John, Revilo P. Oliver, and Lothrop Stoddard in doing so. "Sixty Foot Dolls" explores evolution, degeneration theory, and some of David Icke's more fanciful conundrums. Whilst the play, "Stinging Beetles," turns around the necessity for courage and involves a dilemma or choice at Life's cross-roads. It is less William Styron's exemplification of Sophie's Choice than a man's desire to rescue a beautiful blonde girl from a magicians' village. In magical lore, such a hamlet only materialises on a windswept and torrential night.
Perhaps those who believe in the natural goodness of Man and liberal equity should bear in mind the poem at the volume's start. It exists tucked away on the copyright page.
Study for Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion by Francis Bacon (1947)
Out they stand in orange
Screaming like blinded bats
Wrapped around in lintel
A mother's angel sings:
Better were it, indeed, not to be born!
AL QA'EDA MOTH
Review by John Michael McCloughlin
This picaresque novel was published in August 2008 by the Spinning Top Club in England. The novel is a slightly unusual departure for Bowden in that it is a Western-albeit of a spectral or ghoulish sort. It could be best described as a supernatural western crossed with an intellectual treatise.
It is interesting to note that the literary Western is customarily despised, and, unlike its film variant, there is very little 'serious' criticism devoted to it. Although some of the most famous practitioners of this area - Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour, and Elmore Leonard-are obviously well-known (Grey's total sales exceed 250 million copies) the area as a whole receives scant respect. Whether or not this is because Francis Parker Yockey's the hero of the Second World War's favourite author was Zane Grey in translation is a moot point.
To date, Bowden has only written one Western, and the title itself is intriguing. From what I can work out having read the book several times it appears to mean exploding moths or insects-it definitely has nothing to do with Islamism whatsoever. On reflection, the title may relate to his old friend the anti-humanist intellectual Bill Hopkins. In an interview between them in the late 'nineties, Hopkins confirmed that he was writing a play called Phosphorescent Insects about animal liberation. I think it was to be the sine qua non of misanthropy-the insects in question, entropically, being Mankind-but Hopkins never finished it to his satisfaction after three drafts. My belief is that Bowden has always specialised in insects-A Ballet of Wasps, et cetera-and he wanted to use the idea of Lepidoptera speeding rapidly around their extinguishment, in fire, as his motif. The book itself involves three distinct story-lines which overlap with each other in a way that takes the Western into undeveloped territory. Bowden's thesis is why not use a form some consider hackneyed to analyse the West, the Occident, or the remains of the civilisation we could be said to be living in. To this end, and in a manner that's confirmed by the book's blurb, volumes like Lawrence R. Brown's The Might of the West and William Gayley Simpson's Which Way Western Man? are used as templates or sounding-boards for the narrative. Bowden wants to discuss whether Western culture has a future, and he does so by assessing five centuries of Western painting since the Renaissance. This happens amid the dream-landscape of the main characters who populate this narrative. The fable (with this exception) is otherwise representational and narrative-driven in its scope. I think that Mister Bowden has chosen the West in an idealised European sense having never been there himself. California has doubtless changed out of all recognition, but, way back at the beginning of the last century in Robinson Jeffers' poetry, this pellucid West is crying out for tragedy. This happens to be one of the reasons, doubtless, why Jeffers saw the harsh and at that time literally unspoilt wilderness of these great tracks of American land as a vestibule for Tragedy-above all, Greek tragedy. A reason why Jeffers himself went on to conclude a blood-soaked version of Euripides' Medea set amidst the immense glare of California's vastness.
In any event, all of the usual Bowden tropes are here-including two parallel narratives involving the same characters or dramatis personae. One series of incidents is set in the Old West of the nineteenth century; the other occurs in the twentieth century. The link between the two plot devices is provided by the same personnel in both cases. Bowden also allows himself two violent climaxes-in both story-lines-and there is a greater degree of normative good and evil here than usual with him, perhaps influenced by the genre. The criminal gang (fronted up by Old Man Smithers and his delinquent son Blackbird Leys Dingo) is particularly well-drawn in their baseness. It is a belletristic exercise in insect classification drawn from Jim Dewey's Deliverance (from which the famous film was derived) and maybe even the yokel brigands in Straw Dogs. Certainly, the analysis here is Lombrosian. Extreme criminality is biological, somatic, genetic, and prior ordained; it can only be faced down by the morality of punishment. There is no hint of Obama's penology here. For, like Robinson Jeffers, the harsh Western sun beats down upon all with a maximal glare and in a fully Pagan transport.
This is the nearest that Jonathan Bowden has ever come to writing a straight adventure story, or series of same, and yet he under-cuts this by a dreamy debate about Kultur. The West's, that is, and whether the unfulfilled promise of Wyndham Lewis' The Human Age trilogy can lead it forwards into aught better. It is interesting to note that much of the European New Right detests American life so much that they have lost sight of certain verities, but Bowden seeks to reclaim the dissident voices of Mencken, London, Pound, Eliot, Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, the Southern Agrarians, Jeffers and Revilo P. Oliver. He sees in a dissident, post-Puritan, Apocalyptian, marshal-lawed, bleaker, sun-drenched, and full-on Ameri[k]a seeds of a new beginning. It is as if some of the rhetoric of Cotton Mather has displaced itself in time so as to elide with Andrew Macdonald's Hunter (the progeny of Doctor Pierce) in order to flower in a violent Walden: a parody and Dystopia on the negation of Ellis' American Psycho. In any event, the anti-communist, free, wise, and open art of the post-war firmament was abstract expressionism, encoded by Jackson Pollack from small-town Wyoming, and secretly financed by the Central Intelligence Agency. One wonders what they really thought about it all! Nonetheless, isn't it time to put something on the canvas-and yet still remain expressive? Perhaps a skeletal arm, in imagination, reaches out all aflame and surrounded by white sheets...in a scenario where Death-on-horseback rides and twists, and where Philip Guston retreats in alarm to from where his later self-portraits originated in Griffith's Birth of a Nation.
For those who have ears to hear-let them hear!
THE FANATICAL PURSUIT OF PURITY
Review by John Michael McCloughlin
This book was published in 2008 by the Spinning Top Club in London. It is a Gothic or picaresque novel of 178 pages. This book can be considered in two basic ways. The first revolves around purely literary considerations. These have to do with an external or diachronic quality which Wyndham Lewis first explicated in the 'twenties or before. His aesthetic-very much influenced by his career as a painter-views mankind from the outside. A strategy that is intimately related, in turn, to the portrait painter's desire to get closer and closer to the sitter-almost in a manner which portends a threatening encounter. To wit: in this regard, one remembers Graham Sutherland's portrait of Churchill after the war. It was destroyed by Clementine and the Churchill family-thereby setting back the British tax payer £80,000 (quite a sizeable amount in the 'fifties). Churchill hated the painting. He declared grandly: "It makes me look thick-and I ain't!" Always the joker, eh? Nonetheless, the revisionist biography of Churchill by Professor Charmley from Cambridge University features this portrait on the cover.
The point of this digression is that a "Rightwing" view of letters often leads to an exteriorisation of Style. This tends to concentrate on a grotesque or Baroque build-up of language which both Lewis and Céline accessed in their fiction. In no matter how crude or dialectical a way (in cultural politics) this was contrasted to the interior monologue or consciousness stream in James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, for example. Perhaps the most gargantuan and gross attempt to do this was Wyndham Lewis' satire, The Apes of God. This gigantic tome anatomised English culture in the late 'twenties with a painter's or an externalist's eye.
Bowden's novel, on the other hand, deals with a retinue of puppets in a marionette show who are marshalled by the late Eric Brammall. (Note: he was a very famous puppeteer from North Wales who wrote extensively about this folk art in the British 'fifties). Like superheroes in graphic novels, the purity of puppets means that you can be as extreme, heroic, or trans-rational with them as you like. This gives free rein to violent, illiberal fantasy or the need for escape!
An important point was made by the British militant and nationalist Joe Owens in a recent post about a Batman film review on this site...he regarded undue immersion in fantasy as negative, counter-propositional, even set up by one's enemies. This is an important point and was well expressed by him. Yet I believe that Bowden would disagree. Liberal humanist societies-as currently perceived by those who live in them-are incredibly boring. Most citizens, subjects of the Crown (or whatever), seek escape from the above brown fugg. Nor is this only marked in adolescence or childhood-although it may be most obvious then. I think that the real point is the nature of the fantasy engaged in and heroic, violent, semi-conscious, militantly engendered (i.e., radically male or female), and elitist material of this sort worries critical establishmentarianism. Hence we see the fact that most Western arts faculties have a methodology (post-structuralism) through which to view it so as to always end up with the "correct" interpretation. War literature-for example-is regarded as qualitatively dangerous in many a Cultural Studies department.
Nonetheless, the use of a heroic puppet called Phosphorous Cool in Bowden's narrative (with legions of minor or supporting characters) in two basic plot-lines, leads to variously transgressive outcomes. All of these relate, en passant, to Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty which relates very much to cinema directors like Alfred Hitchcock. For Hitchcock, as Camille Paglia has observed, the real point is to paint on screen with the actors available. This is another exterior vision-one which does little to ameliorate the imagination's authoritarian bias.
The other of the two points about Bowden's fiction, in my opinion, is the anti-dualism of the main antagonists. There are few heroes or villains in his work but combinations of the two instead. If you were to take this Superhuman or In-humanist notion out of fiction altogether...you might end up with some interesting ideas. Almost everyone grows up with the idea that Wilhelmian Germany (Prussianism and so on) was "bad"; the Allied powers are correspondingly benign. The same idolatry or Aunt Sally tactics are used again and again. What if these things were more grey, indeterminate, powerful, non-Christian and Pagan in specificity (á la Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil). Isn't it at least a fact, if only provisionally, that if you approached Second War historicism from a different prism one might understand today's world better? Mightn't the truth lie dynamically between two texts at either end of a metaphoric book-shelf-perhaps Martin Gilbert's Churchill biography and David Irving's The Mare's Nest?
If one begins to view the heroic urge in this way then one foregrounds the screenplay writing of John Milius, for instance, but one can also proceed beyond it to Ernst Jünger or Guy de Montherlant. For, if one takes these artistic notions of reprisement on board, then might Bowden be described as doing artistically what certain revisionists are attempting in more factual or non-fictional ways over time. Who knows? Anyway, when Professor George Steiner wrote his play, The Portage of A. H. to San Cristobal, over thirty years ago he implicitly recognised that criticism wasn't enough.
For those who have ears to hear-let them hear!
KRATOS
Review by John Michael McCloughlin
The book Kratos was published by the Spinning Top Club in very early 2008. It extends over 157 pages. It consists of four independent stories of around the same length.
The first ("Kratos") deals with a Lombrosian tale aboutcriminality and psychopathia. It delineates a Yorkshire axe-man called Billy-O or Dung Beetle whose intentions are fundamentally misread by an upper-class fop, Basildon Lancaster.
One might characterise it as an exercise in Degeneration theory from the late nineteenth century brought up to date-hence its debt to Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man from 1876, I believe. A highly filmic colouration befits this piece-almost in a lucid or paranormal light and this lends it a dream-like or magical intention. Bowden's pieces tend to be extremely visual, oneiric, outsider drawn or filmic in compass-he is definitely what could be called a Visualiser. There also, to this particular critic, seems to be a correlation between all of these fictions and the comics or graphic novels that he produced as a child. All of them have a violent, immediate and aleatory dimension, to be sure, yet I infer something more.
What I mean is that just like a film which is planned on a story-board, for example, these literary tales move simultaneously on many levels and with a visual candour. It is almost as if Mister Bowden split his creative sensibility in moving from boy to man: the verbal bubbles or lettering (as they are called) in the graphic novels split off to become fictions; while the images morphed into fine art-works. They became stand alone paintings in their own right.
Kratos deals with insanity but on distinct levels, some of which fast forward and back-while parallel dimensions, parts of the mind, stray visual eddies or prisms, and telescoped refractions all recur. This filmic quality proceeds throughout the piece akin to Hitchcock or Blatty, but a strong narrative impulse bestrides this magic realism. It lends the excoriation at the tale's end something akin to the reverberation of Greek tragedy.
From a Right-wing or elitist perspective, I think that Bowden's fictional trajectory works in the following manner. From the very beginning there is an exoteric dimension (much like the political trappings of a reasonably notorious political movement from early in the twentieth century). This deals with the artistry, story, structure, prism effect in terms of H. T. Flint's Physical Optics, as well as the narratives dealt with above.
But, in my view, there is another hidden, buried, esoteric, occultistic, and numinous aspect. It is slightly and from a liberal perspective rather scandalously linked to a thesis in the book Nietzsche, Prophet of Nazism by a Lebanese and Maronite intellectual; together with the Occultistic text The Morning of the Magicians. This inner urge or poetic trope is an attempt to create the Superman via a manipulation of consciousness. Most Western cultural standards, menhirs, sacred stones, or objects on the ground have been devastated or destroyed-even though the odd echo can be heard. (This might be said to be a small Classics department at a provincial university, for instance.) Nonetheless, Bowden preaches re-integration-beginning within oneself-and ending up with the maximalisation of strength. One should remember or factor in that almost every other literary tendency is contrary or reverse-wise. Characters are chaotic, broken, stunted, uncertain, apolitical, non-religious, without any metaphysic whatsoever, chronically afraid, sexually and emotionally neurotic, tremulous about death, et cetera... While Bowden's Oeuvre intimates the re-ordination of the Colossus-both gradually and over time.
Hence we begin to perceive a glacial imprimatur in his work; in that characterisation is non-Dual, beyond good and evil, semi-Gnostic, Power oriented in the manner of Thrasymachus, "demented," furious, even non-Christian. It ennobles the prospect of Odin without the overlay of Marvel Comics and as a Trickster God...i.e., it's the moral equivalent of Batman's Joker as reviewed, via The Dark Knight, elsewhere on this site. It also ramifies with the words of the anti-humanist intellectual, Bill Hopkins, who, in a cultural magazine close to the polymath Colin Wilson known as Abraxas, once remarked: "The purpose of literature is to create New Titans."
One other cultural idea suffices here...this has to do with Joseph Goebbels' answer to a question about his interpretation of the Divine. This should be seen as part of the frontispiece of his expressionist novel Michael, a third positionist work from the 'twenties. He described "God" as a multi-proportioned or eight-limbed idol, replete with heavy jambs and rubiate eyes, and possibly constructed from orange sandstone. Such an effigy was associated with the following: flaming tapers or torches, brands, naked female dancers, and human sacrifice. To which the Herr Doktor's interlocutor remarked: "It doesn't sound very Christian to me!" The propaganda minister's response came back as quick as a shot: "You're mistaken; THAT IS CHRIST!"
I think that Jonathan Bowden believes much the same about the meta-ethic of his own literary output. The other stories in this volume were "Origami Bluebeard" (a marriage, a murder, a threnody, a Ragman, a take on Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus); "Grimaldi's Leo" (a lighter variant on Animal Liberation), and "Napalm Blonde." This was an attempt at Greek Tragedy, configures a Tiresius who maybe alone but not in a wasteland, and happens to be radically heterosexualist after Anthony Ludovici's analysis.
For those who have ears to hear-let them hear.
STRAIGHT AS AN ARROW
A play for film by Jonathan Bowden
This piece is heavily Nietzschean in character and consists of a leaden dirge. It is set on the Yorkshire moors and often makes use of Northern patois a la Ted Hughes or Stan Barstow. A few corses or bodies hit the earth (metaphorically) during the course of the action.
It involves a Power Moral treatment of mental illness and these dramatis personae have the ability to overlap or intertwine. They are all chameleons. Its elitism comes from its view of crime: in that Basildon Lancaster fundamentally misunderstands Billy-O's misanthropy. The Play's thesis is that Criminals are born and not made...should Man qua Man be punished for just being alive?
Its plot is too difficult to summarise - read it here in order to be subjected to Masculine wrath.
A POLYP DEVOURS ITS FEED: Paracelsus Unzipped
An analysis of F. W. Murnau's film Nosferatu
Max Schreck's movie Nosferatu (1922) begins with bourgeois sentimentality or its tableau. Yet this comfortable familiarity can be vitiated by intrusion, even obtrusion. Darkness occurs amid light, there is a hint of delirium, as well as madness and despair. All of this has to be presaged by Knock - a villainous, if expressive, land agent. (Note: he doesn't figure in Bram Stoker's Dracula, from which the screenplay comes, and has more to do with Hans Prinzhorn's The Art of the Insane). A sweep of the Carpathian hills follows on - and it indicates simple pleasures, often obscured. A negation (this is) that takes a wolf's form; and possibly it's a lynx, a wolverine, coyote or minx. Certainly, it happens to be a wild cat who brings cold air; the latter forcing old peasants to cross themselves. Whilst the young Jonathan Hutter, the land agent's assistant, settles down to some reading. Has it taken root in his hand? One doesn't know; but what becomes clear is its involvement with vampirism, a hidden necropolis, and even Satanism.
Dawn's freshness brings relief, however, and it clusters around light or its foreknowledge. It is more than enough to illuminate one's toilet or wash. He (Hutter or Harker) hastens to a trap or brig, and the camera snatches away so as to glimpse a dark mountain. It - a sinister Carpathian pile - gives purchase to a glinting storm. At last the coach driver refuses to go any further, and he cites as his reason that: "The land of Phantoms begins here..."
We gain our first glimpse of Castle Dracula or Orloc; and this involves a speeded up approach by a coach. It was seen - like a racing car - through a reverse periscope. For, as Stoker declares in his horror novel, "the dead travel fast". Now we discern the first vision of Orloc in an abandoned Castle Dracula, and he comes across as a wizened old man. In all honesty, 'it' looks like a Giacometti sculpture, a signification of the outsider or a Kafkaesque bogle. Similarly, a distinct resemblance to the Khazar or Eugene Sue's The Wandering Jew is unfurled - especially in relation to the Weimar lore into which this film was dropped.
Orloc, ceteris paribus, exists in a grieving age or time. He senses his guest's fear of midnight: the former resounding from a clock with skeletal figures. Needless to say, a cut at the dining-room table, inflicted using a knife, leads to a denouement or its non-reconciliation. It also unleashes a miasma in a world of lucid dreaming. "Let us stay up till midnight", mimes the feaster, and no-one doubts the healing power of the sun. Castle Dracula finds itself relieved, yet none can deny their subdued intimacy over a bite... even though a meal awaits. Renfield's agent makes a joyful repast (thereupon). He later approaches a bell-tower or keep, so as to examine the Carpathians at his leisure... but disconcertingly, the very spot is haunted by flies or mosquitoes. They suck the blood (you see). Nonetheless, a Gypsy who passes by was given a letter to send, and this occurred under a hebetude of storm. Whilst Orloc (during the next night) is entranced by his guest's beloved. "Your wife possesses a beautiful neck...", are the only words he can utter. In a strange way, Jonathan Hutter finds himself perturbed by this incident involving a miniature portrait. It is now past midnight tout court... and this draws attention to a book on Vampires in a Gothic script. Thereafter, he attempts to bolt a door that's deep within the castle, as the noise of midnight reverberates around. Then, in an Expressionist masterpiece or mesmerism, Nosferatu emerges from behind an unbolted door. He appears to be silent within an all-encompassing greed. Likewise, and in a shift back home, his wife Ellen (Mina) seems to be sleep-walking over a ledge. Can anyone really come to her rescue? Eventually, two hands cling to the raiment of these claws, and they exhibit sympathetic magic - even amid its expiration.
Back at Castle Dracula, per se, Nosferatu waxes triumphant, Stoic, bizarrely stayed, expectant and bat-like. He refuses to give up - even when the door is shaped like a coffin-lid. It doubles as a pall and closes on its victim with crisp finality.
A while later Hutter is wide awake - albeit with a residual pain in his neck. He manages to force open the tomb or mausoleum which is outside the Castle's doorway, and he creeps down into a silent crypt. In such a grotto, he prises up a coffin-lid and spies the master of the house. At last our visitant understands WHY, rests for a period, and then sees labourers down below who work at double-time. Could it be a gloomy premonition? Resultantly then, he scales the tower using some sheets and falls to the ground precipitously... whether asleep or torpid!
Various raftsmen carry Orloc (Dracula) down-river towards Hutter's tower [thereafter]. He revives, distraught, in a hospital bed - while barge-men hurry these coffers to their destination. They are beset or imperilled by rats. Meanwhile, a mysterious Professor Bulwer - a mystic or Paracelsian - sets the scene. He uses a Venus Fly-Trap to metaphoricise Dracula. Whilst Knock, the former land-agent, is out of his mind in a padded cell. He catches flies in his hands and crams them into his mouth... so as to absorb their 'power' inside. The maniac has transformed himself into a cannibal or an autophagous; and he's a man-eater (you see), if only of drosophilae. To whit: a wag in an 'O'-level lesson can call him a lord of the blue-bottles, albeit using a porcine head on a stick!
Still, Professor Bulwer addresses his students over polyp life and he examines it microscopically... as Dracula's boat gets nearer. Touche! For the madcap or example of Gaius Cibber's Raving Melancholy (outside the Imperial War Museum) writhes in his cell. He exhibits both the Agony and the Ecstasy in Irving Stone's words, while a dark lord promises developments from afar. Likewise, a letter was delivered to Ellen (Mina) on the sea's very edge, and it tells of her fiances's recovery from his malaise. Already now, the land-agent's assistant makes ready to leave a Catholic hospice. Won't he make the decision to travel by boat?
Further on, Knock's lunacy grows apace within a sensory deprivation chamber; while newspapers shout and blare. They are heralding 'a new plague that baffles science'. Our Bedlamite understands this by snatching a tabloid from one of his warders. Resultantly, a vessel on the high seas approaches its port, and already the sailors or crew were dropping like skittles. It's the many coffers or sarcophagi behind a flitting Nosferatu which focuses anxiety, and Orloc flutters around a camera. This is transparently so... and, as time goes by, each new Jack Tar was committed to the waves. Finally, a redeemer seeks out the bacillus' source or 'eye' - as with a boil's apex - and he's armed avec a halberd. Slowly, oh so slowly - the vampire emerges perpendicularly out of his coffin; and he comes straight up as death's visitation. At one level, it combines the character of Barlow in Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot with Emily Dickinson's morbidity. To be sure: our vessel of a thousand fools (even in plague) has a new captain, Nosferatu. Whereupon this lemur or toy-boat docks in a Baltic cove... why, it carries Beowulf from the North with its facsimile of a long prow. Likewise, we find Mina (Ellen) all alone and waiting via some erotic filigree. Such a mysterious clarion must come to her from across the waves. Doesn't the ocean swell within a periscope's compass or cross-hairs... at least in terms of a magic 'scope? Anyway, she asseverates the following - even oneirically. It's all a dream after Dali's fancy - don't you see a Ouija board moving so?
"I must go to him", she remarks sleepily, "the master is approaching us all!" Surely, to paraphrase John Cowper Powys, we sense a medley of Oxtiern, Isabella of Bavaria, A Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man; plus The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. It can only be seen at the depths of Remenham's caves vis-a-vis the Hell Fire club. Let it pass, metaphorically so---.
Now then, the trees roundabout are given to swirling, (expectantly), and a four-sail rig floats in. It berths in a coastal town. Already a lycanthrope (Knock) twirls, gibbers or capers with glee. "Our Rex Vivant is coming. He invades this space", chunters our roadster in his cell. A schooner finally docks as a sleek craft, by the by, and Count Orloc emerges silently from its hold. In the mean-time, however, a loon makes off over the roofs and escapes his cage.
By a Tarot card's turn, a text-book explains the misadventures of Science, a la Paracelsus. Whilst - simultaneously with the previous - Orloc carries coffers into the Berg. He positions them amid the pink raiment of so many rats... rather like a nineteenth century photogravure avec Sir Henry Irving. (An image which captures the spice of a wizened Scotch earl; at once resourceful, wry, eldritch or Mephisto'd). Yet again, 'he' flits through the shadows as a lucid dream or a participant in Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty - perhaps it speaks to Paul Nash or Leonara Carrington. Pursuant to any twist, Hutter travels home on a salient brig. Will he be in time? For Orloc, a cadaverous imp of envy, reaches a neighbouring courtyard in relation to chez Hutter. He's arrived in order to reclaim a history - even from itself. Soon the house opposite or its ruined hulk is alive, and strange lights flit aslant its windows. They mismatch the even-tide of these droplets (all black) by crossing ebon glass. Surely now, Dracula approaches it by transmigration - in that he moves hither and thither in a pall of grey.
Back at the docks, the pilot of the ruined vessel is found dead or otherwise lashed to the wheel. Various officials then go below so as to inspect the hold. While the ship's captain was laid out and his log-book confiscated. This will be examined at a later date by urban worthies gathered to do so. Presently, these mugwumps raise the gang-plank and go ashore.
Yet what's Professor Bulwer, the metaphysician, been up to during this advent? Why, our worthy boffin examines the log - but not blog. And it reveals that the plague or Black Death stalks abroad. A proclamation is then delivered by town criers who broadcast it across this imaginary Gotham... speaking of which, the comic-strips of Bob Kane illuminate Murnau's mound, in that they feast on a poster-paint medley. These graphic novels indicate a palsy or cinematic bite - after Muybridge's sequential photography. Also, the colours are garish in their brightness - at once a lurid yellow, red, sapphire, orange, tangerine, gorse or puce. They surge forwards - dealing with a Bat-man rather than a Man-bat - and yet Nosferatu's symmetry with the Joker is complete. For both are living corpses or blanched idols that adopt a violent disregard o'er the future... Might the one's green hair, purple suit and clown's face (frozen) merge into the other's longitudinal shadow? It testifies to a cadaverous slide; plus red-eyes, long nails, a nineteenth century waist-coat, and a glabrous skull whose skin's calcified in milk. Does its X-rated certificate surprise you?
By any account, the windows in all dwellings are to remain shut - irrespective of any mephitic vapours inside. A municipal official goes around and secures each door, as, amid flickering torches or brands, the dead are carried out in their boxes. Meanwhile, Ellen (Mina) looks at a bibliographical rarity - The Book of Vampires - which her husband has smuggled back from the Carpathians. Whilst the manse opposite 'feeds' on her every night and it exists like a cannibal, or an Animist freak-show. Its happenstance delivers a blow at many distinct levels. Since Hutter moves slowly away from this aperture, or open window, in order to splurge upon a divan. Moreover, an 'unanswered' bed cannot save him from a hypnotic pull over the way, and a dark mesmerism emanates from this Marsten House. It catapults Nosferatu's persecution of his victims into stone and mortar, in other words. Likewise, Ellen contracts a fever which goes abroad - it denotes a miasma, a tincture of ochre or sand, and even a Giant's exhalation. By day, a procession of coffins marches through the town... and they adopt a concert of snakes without the ladders. Do you remember a children's game of yore? It was played on a chequer board. Irrespective of this, Ellen (Mina) reads that a woman must sacrifice her blood, willingly, in order to assuage a vampire. She comes across this advice in her Gothic tome - and might it have been a secret script, or lexicon, her husband brought back from Translyvania? For a moment (just) one imagines him carving a message into the clay of his cell - albeit with dirtied nails. On other fronts, the people seek out a scapegoat and they pursue Knock, the mad-cap.
They want to lynch him or apply tar-and-feathers, as in a Mark Twain short story. He makes off like a ruined Vaudeville turn; at once hobbled and hawking. While - simultaneously with the above - Ellen (Mina) waxes neuasthenic in a nineteenth century way. She suffers from the erotic delirium of Vampiredom, you see... even as Knock's pursued avaunt a stump. All of an instant (and peeping out from behind a frond) our jester gibbers unceasingly, as the canaille seize a scarecrow... They wish to tear 'it' to pieces without respite. At this veriest instant, Mina (Ellen) finds herself 'seduced' by Dracula beyond the glass, and no Plexiglas can prevent her from shedding blood.
As her husband slumbers, she attempts to open sultry veins to a Man-bat over the way. Let it fall sheer - since his intimation is to ride out towards an unseen bite. Yet Jonathan Hutter (Harker) wakes so as to foil the schema which would see her descend into those Hell-fire caves. These once belonged to an eighteenth century club that recalled Robert Louis Stevenson's Suicide Club. In any event, a nubile figure lies on a stone crypt deep underground... and a hermaphrodite Beast-god gazes down. Metaphorically speaking, the tapers are out or find themselves gripped by an eldritch glow. All remains still - and Jonathan Harker's unquestioned answer is to call for Professor Bulwer! We have the power now... quod a window lies open afore the breeze, and Mina [Ellen] starts her vampiric egress once more. A shadow stands out against a startled emptiness - albeit in the manner of a silent cinema's shimmer. It subsists along the following hurdy-gurdy rides, in terms of the Western symphony's origin. Do you reconnoitre such black-and-white classics as Rio Grande, He Who Gets Slapped, Faust, Stagecoach, Dick Tracy in Gruesome, The Three Musketeers (with John Wayne) Parts 1 & 2, A Woman in Green and The Man Who Knew Too Much? Anyway, Count Orloc beckons to her from across the way, involuntarily, and his spindly fingers intimate a presentiment. Could this be a blood-sport, necessarily? Might Max Schreck's Nosferatu throw a penumbra upon the stair-well... i.e., one that's elongated, decisive, pinioned, ascending and yet lice-ridden? It lets out a sarcophagus' expiration - despite its revolutionary selfishness. Does the director (F.W. Murnau) want it to pant at a meaty retrieval?
Over the way, though, Professor Bulwer has been rescued from his study by Jonathan Hutter. They rush back towards his wife as a cock begins to crow. While - within the asylum's walls - a recaptured Knock squeals at the advent of day. "Beware, Master!", he admonishes. The attendants within the madhouse strive to subdue a kook at a signal of time's nemesis. May such a sand-storm (inside an hour-glass) have failed to depart? Already, the Vampire finds hinself trapped by the morn, and it rushes upon him like a vinegary sponge. Almost immediately, he becomes transfixed or glued to the light - this subdues him a la a photograph's negative or converse. It distils or decanters his essence - possibly its negation. And finally we recognise that a female sacrifice has worked, the town is saved, or an Undead parasite's been forever stilled. The maniac or Tom O' Bedlam breathes his last, however, and this occurs inside Horst Bienek's cells. Not even its bars may chisel at Knock's Parthian shot, though. "Our Dark Lord has died under the incense of a golden lotus", he lisps prior to collapse. Might this axiom concur with Phil Baker's biography of Dennis Wheatley, The Devil is a Gentleman?
Ellen then expires herself - in an orgasmic rapture or auto-da-fe - once count Orloc has been sent eastwards. He shrivels after a drying mummy in the wind... what with Sickert's morbid entombment of demi-mondes. These were ripped out of place vis-a-vis the Ripper murders - but without Stephen Knight's reductions. Nor can a conspiratorial logic quell the pain in one's chest, even though her spouse, Jonathan Hutter, and the benign occultist do their best. The good Professor has at last arrived - isn't he named after Bulwer Lytton, the author of Zanoni? In any event, no Bowie knife severs a mummified head, girt in lintel a la Boris Karloff, and portending to the azure. It labours the point of Stoker's finale, in terms of the physicality of John Cowper Powys' Wood and Stone.
Finally, Count Orloc's castle collapses into dust akin to an explosion on one of Gerry Anderson's miniature sets. Doesn't it convince us that the truth proves to be ashen, mimetic, non-providential and ill-foretold? To re-adapt Dion Fortune, even a psychic vampire requires a host to batten upon a la Eugene Sue.
Why I write
By Jonathan Bowden
This is always difficult to assess, but from this distance three different spear-points become discernible through the mist.
The first is an obvious desire for self-expression–yet, as always, the nihilism of Samuel Beckett needs to be avoided, where, during one part of the Trilogy, such as Molloy, he declares: nothing to express, no need to express, a blinding desire to stain the silence. I think that the aporia whereby post-modernism eats itself needs to be avoided.
Nonetheless, I believe that fantasy or the phantasia of the semi-conscious mind is the most important vector, aesthetically speaking. All of my fictional work comes out of the anima or that part of consciousness just beneath rationality. All of my texts–like Kratos or The Fanatical Pursuit of Purity, for example–are dreams.
But dreaming to what end? Well, the essential starting point is a desire to overcome dualism in the ethical sense. This imputes the following: that all of my characters, in a short story like Origami Bluebeard, are neither good or evil. They are–more fundamentally–a mixture of both and they feed upon each other like raptors within a world of the uncouth.
Nor is this a purely misanthropic vision either, in that heroic vigour is just the flip-side of negativism. Character, at least as posited in these stories, is biological, prior ordained, morphic, and predestined–it is primarily Augustinean in theological terms, in other words. But contrary to most Judaeo-Christian estimations of Kultur, this is not observed in a woe-begotten or morbid state. Instead of these dark threnodies, the heathen logic of Robert E. Howard is more applicable. The current estimation is very much that civilisation and barbarism are mutually exclusive, but I believe that you cannot have the one without the other.
In these stories, plays, novellas and novels–even the non-fiction dialogue, Apocalypse TV–I have attempted to overcome dualism within a non-humanist motif. This means that the characters are dolls or puppets in terms of Artaud's The Theatre of Cruelty, at one level, but they are also much more alive at another. In most contemporary liberal novels–Iris Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil by illustration–only the villainous, macabre or negative specimens have life. Whereas in my efforts–such as a tragic story like Napalm Blonde–all of the characters bite and rage; love is voltaic, unpronounced and beyond the remit of good and evil.
Why is this done? Merely to provide a template whereby the battle occurs betwixt the super-human and the sub-human, per se, and it exists across or between individuals. My view is that immersion in dream-like or solipsistic material that has a different rhythm or vibration will turn Caucasian wimps into cultured neanderthals. For what is required is an attitude to life which goes forward towards the great noontide, open-armed, in the manner of the sun-worship at the end of Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.
I am not preaching anti-intellectuality, but extolling the licentiousness and chthonian violence of re-integration. The affliction which Indo-Europeans suffer from is entirely mental and subjective; they are chronically afraid of their own shadow in Jungian terms. If the civilisation which their ancestors created has any future at all then they must overcome their resistance to barbarism; they must o'erleap it on the altar of high culture. They must dispel the cloud and lay out a future where Arthur Butz's credo doesn't have to be true (or not).
Truthfully, in this age those with intellect have no courage and those with some modicum of physical courage have no intellect. If things are to alter during the next fifty years then we must re-embrace Byron's ideal: the cultured thug.
The Art of Jonathan Bowden Vol. 2 - Review
Review by Alex Kurtagic
Last time I saw Jonathan Bowden, I asked him how he was. His answer, delivered with bared teeth and so typical of him, elicited peals of laughter from Bowden himself, "I am always superb and getting stronger!" Bowden, you see, loves an audience, but he is quite able to entertain himself without one, as the second volume of his art eloquently shows.
The present volume differs substantially from the first, which I reviewed last November: where the latter compiled the artist's adult work, the former compiles his juvenilia, covering his childhood through to his majority. And what is it that we find between its covers? Anybody who has met Jonathan Bowden and spoken to him for any length of time will easily guess the answer: comic strips, of course! What we have here is a 200-page coffee table book bulging with comic strips, or graphic novels, drawn by a fervid, truculent little boy, obsessed with power and violence, with a brain the size of a planet balanced on a toothpick... review continues here
The Art of Jonathan Bowden - Review
Review by Alex Kurtagic
The first time my wife saw Jonathan Bowden's art she thought he was insane. I had some days before attended a meeting where he spoke about the German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and his epic, 7-hour production Hitler: A Film from Germany. Due to engineering work on the railway network, I arrived late, in the midst of Lady Michele Renouf's talk about freedom of speech, the Lisbon Treaty, and the European Constitution. At this time Bowden, who was due to speak next, was leaning on a windowsill, facing the audience. Clad in suit and tie, sporting a wooden pendant carved with a rune, and a pair of small, bottle-bottom spectacles, he stood there with a head of curly hair, arms crossed, and eyes closed, deep in thought. The room was hot, pre-Victorian, crammed to capacity with angry middle-aged men, compressed into tightly packed rows of hard coccyx-crunching chairs-stewing in their fury against the modern world... review continues here
Grand Guignol - Film Review
Review by Troy Southgate
'Grand Guignol' (2009)
Directed by Andrea Lioy
Screenplay by Andrea Lioy & Jonathan Bowden
TWO and a half years in the making, Jonathan Bowden's second foray into the world of cinematic production is now finally available. I had previously reviewed and enjoyed Bowden's film debut, Venus Flytrap (2005), so was therefore very eager to see this latest offering. The real Grand Guignol was a Parisian theatre specialising in dramatic presentations of various horror stories, among them Un Crime dans une Maison de Fous, Le Laboratoire des Hallucinations and L'Horrible Passion. These gruesome tales of primeval revulsion, brutal murder and raving insanity were first introduced to French audiences by Oscar Metenier in 1897, with the theatre finally closing its doors no less than sixty-five years later in 1962. Bowden's unusual film has been carved from the same demonic substance and the theatre's macabre tradition lives on in this more contemporary tale. The beginning of the film is shot in black and white and in the opening scene we see a woman (Penthouse model, Lucy Zara) glancing warily from side to side, the sound of her stiletto heels colliding with the floor is fused with the tortured growls and loud chimes of the soundtrack. There is a sense of fear and trepidation. The camera pans away from her face and we notice for the first time that she is completely naked. The music adopts a more exotic tone and we see that her surroundings, a room with a tall stairway occupying the centre, is full of clutter. Assorted bicycle parts, boxes, bags and various other rubbish conveys the impression that the woman finds herself in a basement storeroom of some kind. She makes her way past wooden doorframes and 'no smoking' signs until the camera settles upon a ball of glowing light. She is then shown kicking a pot full of money across the floor, which may indicate that whilst she is naked and vulnerable she cannot be bought like a cheap whore. The real reason, of course, given the subject matter, is that she represents what is commonly known as 'the Bottler', the person responsible for collecting the earnings of the Punch & Judy man.
Various other camera angles are brought into play and we see more rubbish strewn throughout the large room, with two rows of white columns adding to the Eastern mysticism being conjured up by the music. Her initial fear turns into joyful abandonment, as she struts boldly across the room with her long blonde hair, white skin and generous breasts united in a perfect flow of carefree motion. She then enters another section of the building and we see large glass windows and various liquid containers and paint pots arranged across row upon row of shelving. The music stops, the scene changes and everything is plunged into colour. Pretty Polly (Kate Willow) is heard complaining about being in pain and then Bowden appears dressed in everyday apparel, an unsympathetic grimace spread across his features. He refers to her as a 'wooden puppet' and her masochistic response - made significantly more obvious by the use of the term 'master' - is tinged with a slightly unrepentant insolence, which is both seductive and innocent at the same time. The pair are situated behind a concrete pillar, which adds to the mystery. It is clear that Pretty Polly has recently been created and one wonders whether Bowden - whose character at this time is still not entirely clear - has created a lover for himself in the same way that Doctor Frankenstein created one for his monster. Pretty Polly emerges from the rubbish, clothed in a white blouse. A light comes on and Bowden is shown cringing in the cold, a sudden reversal from his earlier role as the dominant master. Now he, too, it seems, is just a wooden figurine glad to be free of 'the puppet's graveyard' from which they have each recently withdrawn themselves. Death into life. Formlessness into being. Bowden - as Punch - embarks upon a delightful monologue which details his past association with fairs and sideshows, at which he spent his time 'beating, and being beaten'. The words and sentences, often dismantled and reassembled across different scenes in quick-fire succession by the director, revel in the character's love of the primeval and Punch's cold heart shivers with the loneliness and desolation suffered back in the wilderness of the graveyard. This may well be a metaphor for the womb and conjures up poetic images of Yeats' 'rough beast, its hour come round at last' as it 'slouches towards Bethlehem to be born'. Pretty Polly, meanwhile, still coming to terms with being able to walk, stumbles erratically across the room like a newborn antelope. With a little coaxing, however, Punch invites her to recite 'the ventriloquist's mantra' and using a selection of props - fire extinguisher, child's hoop, hard hat, bicycle, mask and stick - goes on to describe his own role in the marvellously brutal drama that is the Punch & Judy show itself. But beyond his 'multiplicity of selves' and all 'the administered beatings', Punch is alone. Or is he? Cue a 70s disco beat and the appearance of a sultry brunette in various photo-shoot guises. It's Judy (Nicola Henry), of course, and she is portrayed here as a jet-setting celebrity who is eventually interviewed by a star-struck Michael Woodbridge.
Judy relates how she first came across Punch at a theatre in Guildford, before Bowden - hidden behind the figure of Pretty Polly - suggests that her fascinating with him was sheer 'adoration'. Woodbridge infers that she was obviously in love, but Judy is unable to explain how she felt and the viewer is left wondering whether Punch himself managed to bring her under his spell. It then becomes clear that Pretty Polly is Punch's latest object of desire, just like in the real Punch & Judy story, and Punch tells her that ever since the beginning of civilisation love has gone on to lose its authenticity and that both he and Judy now find themselves 'estranged'. The dialogue will strike a chord with anyone who has found themselves in a broken relationship of this kind and Punch speaks of 'distance', 'a forgetting' and an 'absence of love'. Judy is shown immersed in her own vanity and Pretty Polly asks Punch whether, despite everything, he can still love her. This is followed by the words 'Who are you, master?' and the scene changes and Woodbridge returns to interview both Punch and Judy together. This appeals to Punch's inherent narcissism, but Judy seems disinterested in his show of arrogance and conceit. Pretty Polly, on the other hand, is apparently impressed with his know-it-all attitude. Punch launches into a sneering tirade about the primordial instincts of the puppet world, something which finds itself mirrored in the world of human affairs: 'Don't talk to me about sentimentality, or about pity, but only about desire and fury which goes on forever until the curtain comes down'. Beat or be beaten. Kill or be killed. Victory or defeat. Love and hate. All are valid, all have their place in the general scheme of things. The couple are then shown standing, about to kiss, but Punch can't resist the urge to canter off on another outburst and a cultured reference slips off the tongue as easy as a torso off Beachy Head and Sir Harrison Birtwistle's 1967 opera, 'Punch and Judy', receives a mention. This is the style adopted in many of Bowden's surreal novels, in which his characters tend to plunge into a series of literary and philosophical comments in the most unlikely circumstances. Rather than accept a kiss from his wife, the proudly contemptuous Mr. Punch obviously considers it beneath him to concern himself with such matters. Pretty Polly is shown falling to the floor and Punch and Judy appear at the windows of a garden shed, perfect for a makeshift booth, at which they bicker over marital infidelities and throw insults at one another. At one point Judy even calls her spouse a 'BBC newsreader', but surely even the obnoxious Punch doesn't deserve that?! The latter responds with terms like 'liberal' and 'dishwasher', whacking Judy a few times in the process, but she eventually kicks him in the balls and walks away. This act sends Punch into a raging fury and he brings his stick down on the back of her head and she plunges to the ground. She retaliates, but Punch is too strong for her and so throws his jacket over her head to disorientate her and proceeds to kick her mercilessly. The joys of domestic bliss. He finally stops and seems taken aback when Judy is lying prostate on the floor: 'Come on girl, it's just a bit of old slap.' And then we're back in the studio again, where Judy explains how she took her revenge by smashing up Punch's personal belongings.
This 'prospect of resolution', as she describes it, seems to relate to the tit-for-tat nature of their fragile relationship. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Surely Punch, after all, would appreciate that nothing is entirely sacred in the great and often turbulent game of life? He calls it 'the cannibalism of desire'. Pretty Polly, on the other hand, climbs up from the floor and feels herself changing from wood into flesh and now resolves to find him. And then we find ourselves outside for the first time, Punch and Judy are heard talking - although their lips do not move - about the inevitability of conflict. They climb a metal stairway and Judy tries to seduce Punch in the doorway of a tenement, but he resists and sends her away. This is followed by an optical exchange between Judy and Pretty Polly, and then a scene on the steps in which Punch and Pretty Polly exchange bizarre references about Greek literature, anti-Semitism and procuring a blue rope from Jewsons with which to string up the audience. Punch then appears before a plain backdrop and tells a mother-in-law joke that goes unappreciated. His guffaws fade away and both he and Pretty Polly are back on the steps. She explains that her identity is only secured by her love for Punch and that love itself 'foreshortens those days of turmoil prior to death'. Substance applied to meaninglessness. Existentialism with a romantic ending, perhaps, although that was something Sartre and de Beauvoir - a Punch and Judy of a different kind - never experienced! Pretty Polly continues to wax lyrical about the innumerable pleasures of love, but Punch seems determined to engage in further conflict with Judy and reappears at the studio where Woodbridge, the interviewer, tells him to sort out the matter for himself before wheeling away on a child's scooter. Pretty Polly, disturbed by Punch's disappearance, begins to search for him, knowing that her lover has a dark side and that 'evil is a stray latitude given to boredom'. Is Punch bored of their safe compatibility? Does he find it impossible to live without the violence and aggression of his relationship with Judy? A brief spat between the couple causes Judy to think seriously about the deeper meaning behind their tempestuous relationship. She still loves him and can even tolerate the brutality, but decides that 'confrontation is not the way'. However, it soon transpires that Judy harbours aggressive tendencies of her own, comparing herself to a female spider that devours the male with a single 'crunch'. But it's little more than a feminist fantasy. Then Pretty Polly appears in their dressing room and Punch laments the modern portrayal of their dying art - 'they say that it's too violent for children, what tosh that is, and they say that it's politically-incorrect, nonsense, blather and nonsense' - and begins to stress the difference between his 'immemorial' role as Punch and the comparatively more ordinary existence of the common wife-beater: 'I release the primal urges. when I say throw the baby out of the booth, every father in sight smiles inside his own heart'. This, of course, is the darker - and necessary - side of human nature that the liberal establishment wants hidden, simply because it doesn't accord with their blinkered, utopian humanism. And this is the penultimate scene in the film.
Bowden's acting is superb here, because essentially he's being himself: 'My life is the audience, they're the other side of me, they're the other character. When I'm beating you I'm beating them. The world needs Punch. The world needs a man who represents cardinal force and glory...' Punch falls to the floor in total exhaustion, as Judy and Pretty Polly look on. In the final scene, Punch emerges from beside a green curtain and introduces himself, speaking for the first time in that unmistakably shrill voice and proceeding to act out the entire performance single-handedly. Leaping from side to side like a demented lunatic, actions and voices combine in a macabre display of tradition, sarcasm, wickedness and cruelty. Punch is doing what he does best and, after an exhilarating twenty minutes, takes his bow. The finale is a brief discourse about the nature of evil, something which has occupied the minds of thinkers and philosophers for centuries. Bowden's view, on the other hand, is that demonic energy should be 'beaten out' and that these primal forces can become a moral good. And lest you disagree with this analysis, even the sensuous dancer at the end is there to evoke man's deepest desires and only a eunuch would fail to be moved. To conclude, then, this is a fabulous film and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It has a strong cast, a good director and, ultimately, a very powerful message.
For more information about the film, please follow this link: Grand Guignol
H.P. Lovecraft: aryan mystic
Homo Lupus Hominem; Man is a wolf to his kindred
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence on Rhode Island in 1890. His father died in 1898 in Butler hospital, Providence, from allegedly nervous exhaustion due to over-work, but, in actuality, it was occasioned by general paresis or insanity brought on by tertiary syphilis.
Lovecraft was then raised by his mother and two aunts, Lilian and Annie Emeline Phillips. A cosseted and molly-coddled youth, he developed psychosomatic illnesses of varied kinds - most of which disappeared the further he travelled from his aunts. Did his mother go insane from what might be described as a syphilitic complication, the latter aided and abetted by arsenic tincture as a 'preventative'? She also died in Butler hospital on May the 21st , 1921.
Lovecraft's stories are divided by some into three categories: namely, the macabre, the dreamy and the mythological. His tales all incarnate the premise of some genetic inheritance or other --- usually in a morbid manner. They often illustrate notions of a guilty precognition - the former nearly always of a morphic or physiological kind. Other leitmotifs - which are almost Wagnerian in import - prove to be non-human influences, usually of a cosmic indent, that impact on mankind in a detrimental way. Indeed, Lovecraft's view of a mechanistic and amoral universe goes well beyond Augustinian pessimism - the usual basis for Christian conservatism. It essentially looks to a benumbing terror at civilisation's heart; and it also speaks of Pascal's nausea at those cold, interstellar depths. Fate plays a large role here as well, and under such a dispensation progressive notions of free will or evolution fall sheer. Lovecraft felt that Western society was labouring under an implicit or immediate threat. This took - somewhat inevitably - a racial form. A convinced Anglophile, Lovecraft saw miscegenation and ethnic kaos everywhere in contemporary America - not least in New York city during his brief marriage. His discourse tends to intuit hierarchy, to wish to manage or reify it, and then to string it uppermost like a mobile by Angus Calder. He attempts here - morphically - to create hierarchies of an exclusive or traditional kind, so as to provide Nietzsche's pathos of difference. All of this is undertaken - without any notion of paradox - in order to make life more three-dimensional or tragic. Truly, a pessimist and an ultra-conservative who's on a par with Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, Lovecraft even sees science as grist to his mill. Usually positive enquiry - or evidentialism - is thought of as liberalism's hand-maiden, but, in Lovecraft's oeuvre, it can serve as a basis for over-throwing 'Enlightenment' nostrums.
Let us take, by way of illustration, the relatively lengthy tale which is known as The Dunwich Horror... It first appeared in the fantasy magazine Weird Tales in 1929. This story involves the idea of transformation or radical change - i.e., of a man into a beast and a beast-man into nothingness. At one remove from the present, a decayed family of backwoodsmen merges in with entities from the beyond. They do so on Sabbat eve up on those stones in dense undergrowth and pursuant to bringing down what exists without. Two spawn are bequeathed to their witch-mother, Lavinia, one of whom is visible - the other less so. Initially, her father extends the homestead in order to accommodate new borders. An extension is added so as to conceal beneath its wood the threat of what grows within it. A sharp hammering was heard at night, as Old Man Whateley sought to extend his Imperium. Gradually the more presentable of the two sons, Wilbur, begins to seek out forbidden knowledge and secrets. These tomes happen to be stored at Miskatonic university - a creation of Lovecraft's. Wilbur's deformed torso and trunk - not to mention his devil's foot - as well as his searching out of unhallowed lore, leads to suspicion. One eminent professor, Doctor Armitage, becomes disturbed by Whateley's desire to access arcane texts. Many of these are in Latin and feature the scribblings of the Elisabethan astrologer, John Dee. Bemused by Dr. Armitage's refusal, Wilbur determines to break into the library at a later date. In a Hammer horror denouement, young Whateley dies trying to extract unhallowed arcana from this 'Bodelian'. Doctor Armitage - concerned at the presence of satyrs in New England - decides to investigate up country. He gathers a posse around him. Meanwhile, Wilbur's brother has burst out of the house - after the deaths of his mother and grand-father. He (Doctor Armitage) then proceeds to investigate this decayed hermitage. In a dramatic crescendo - punctuated by Lovecraft's love of Yankee patois - a final blaze takes place. It involves the other Whateley who's observed by some New England peasants floating into the ether. (In this scene, the man's senses are blasted out of all expectation!) The first thing to note is the beast's categorisation: this involves anthropomorphism. For it consists of a writhing and insensate 'mass' of snakes, pipes, vessels or tubular instruments. (These can't help resembling a cancer). It also floats abroad without any discernible support - and yet above its tendrils, suckers and mouths (or living stoves) we see a remarkable sight. It happens to be a face - or, more accurately, a half-face which hovers above Whateley's jelly. It looks like a revolving disc. You see, this creation of inbreeding, miscegenation, Galton's dysgenics and lower occultism is leaving the planet. He/'it' proves to be searching out the Old Ones beyond the stars - he's going back. For Lovecraft's tale seems to be a rite of passage; in that it's a cautionary wedding of an albino's litter with the occult's left-hand. Could it be thought of as a celebration (albeit in reverse) of a Comus rout? It ticks off the absolute in order to cry out against the cosmos, somewhat pessimistically. Does it resurrect Evola's example here? Certainly, all of this causes the pot to boil over. After all, it's a medley of the albino, racial kaos, a search for 'elementals', satanism, unsacrosanct lore and nineteenth century degeneration theory a la Nordau... An effluvium which contrives to alter our perspective of a New England dreamer; a man who once produced a journal called The Conservative. A 'zine which was mimeographed in form and truly reactionary in spirit... At this distance we can see Howard Phillips Lovecraft more clearly: and he floats, free of clutter, like a mystic, a visionary or a mystagogue. His imagination is on fire and he exists amid a transport of energy. Truly, he has seen the Black Sun - to use imagery from the New Zealand writer, Kerry Bolton. This former resident of Rhode Island can now be considered as an Aryan fakir - or a mage who dreams of purple in obsidian (implacably so). These nightmares exist amidst blocks of granite - whether tinted red or green - and in subdued light. He (Lovecraft) preaches the end of the discernible; even the beginning of a cosmic kaos - sometimes called cosmicism. Moreover, these processes portend a notion of order; i.e., they move towards it before doubling-back or switch-blading. Most definitely, Lovecraft has drawn the Tarot card known as the Tower in either Waite's or Crowley's deck. He succeeds in preaching Apollyon (thereby). Indeed, no other fantasist reckons on such Revelations as these - in the manner of the Apocalypse or the New Testament's last reading. (A discourse which never repudiates the scientific enquiry that this astronomer believed in). Hail to thee, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and your dark visions of yore. They are bound to end up in either autophagy or a triptych by Memling. Isn't it an example of a Western gothic or baroque sensibility? Or might it be seen in terms of George Steiner's shoah drama, The Portage to San Christobal of A.H.? In this respect, could his lexicon haunt mass consciousness as Grendel's latest trip?
Kratos - Review by Troy Southgate
A fine dissection of words and themes contained herein
THE cover of this remarkable new publication from The Spinning Top Club is host to 'Kratos I', one of Bowden's most gruesomely endearing paintings. Two mismatched eyes confront the reader with a sense of optical incompatibility, as a demonic bust with blackened snout, wide skull and brush-slashed features greets the world with a vacuous yellow smile. In total, there are four stories in this collection: 'Kratos', 'Origami Bluebeard', 'Grimaldi's Leo' and 'Napalm Blonde'. Throughout the book, and within each of the chapters, the text is broken up into a persistent litany of convenient extracts that resemble the little aphorisms that one might find in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Bowden, whom I know to be favourably predisposed to the writings of the famous German philosopher, will no doubt savour the comparison. The sections themselves also come with a series of bizarre one-liners, often rather amusing, which may or may not relate to the short paragraph which follows. But is this a random stream of consciousness or a calculated grammatical onslaught? You'll certainly have fun weighing up the possibilities, I know I did.
The first tale in this quartet, 'Kratos', contains three characters, all of whom are said to 'battle in an ascendancy or non-gulf': Basildon Lancaster, Fervent Dominique and Odd Billy-o. Incidentally, perhaps I should mention at this point that the real Kratos is a figure from Greek mythology who is born with a slave-like mentality and throughout his life willingly obeys whatever Zeus instructs him to do. This led to Kratos developing no independent belief-system of his own and he became a creature without friendship or pity. The present adventure, on the other hand, begins with a dream-like figure walking through the thick, London fog. It is Lancaster, a man who narrates his story with a cacophonic blend of strange anecdotes, ethereal fantasy, twisted surrealism, wild conjecture, philosophical musing, blatant speculation, a hefty sprinkling of adjectives and all mixed in with a generous dose of descriptive cynicism. After spending a night at a seedy hotel room, Lancaster lumbers back to his cottage and is confronted with the sound of his wife - Fervent Dominique - screaming. At this point the narrative sways from side to side like a drink-addled zombie trying to negotiate his way down a cobbled street or perhaps like one of those blurred and oscillating dream-sequences you find in a Hannah-Barbera cartoon. And a dream, or perhaps even a nightmare, is precisely the setting in which the reader finds himself. Lancaster suddenly gets caught up in a sexual fantasy and it seems to take an eternity for the story to pick up where it left off, the words entangling themselves in an orgy of masturbatory innuendo and literary name-tagging. Then, in another twist, the married couple arrive by car at what seems to be another cottage (this time for sale) and are there confronted by the ramshackle character of Odd Billy-o (AKA Dung Beetle). The author continues to add to the general air of textual disorientation and its effect on the reader by causing them to question precisely who is doing what and when. In this extract, for example, is Lancaster knocking at somebody else's door or knocking at his own: "After what seemed to be an interminable delay, perchance, a shabby man came to the wooden door. I rapped on its rough surface with a knocker, at once graven to a lion's tooth.' [p. 12] Or perhaps Bowden is simply working backwards for a moment, the door having been answered before the summoning knock had even been delivered? This is lucid story-telling at its best. Lancaster conceals his distaste at Billy-o's appearance and comes straight to the point: 'I dispensed with such vagaries and turned up business' flame.' [Ibid.] It transpires that Lancaster and Dominique are interested in buying the property and the author's depiction of class-based mannerisms in uncomfortable situations is wonderful: 'I extended a gloved or manicured hand, only to withdraw it speedily from his mallet. Was it really an entreaty? I noticed its curvature into felt or matted hair.' [p. 13] Note, too, the hilarious juxtaposition between Billy-o - a Northern caretaker said to have been 'aborted from a maternal cervix like Piltdown man' [Ibid.] - and the way Lancaster enjoys his 'rare Kensington & Chelsea cigarette' [p.14]. Somehow, amid all the clandestine snobbery, a deal is finally struck. Before long, however, Lancaster appears to be transported back to his London hotel room, although, in reality, he is confined to a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane and was apparently referring to a past existence that he finds difficult to think about. The landscape flits from imaginary pillar to illusory post. At one point Lancaster is a masked killer back in the cottage, his wife the victim of a frenzied attack. But soon afterwards he is back in the asylum and his wife is alive and well. In and out of the psychopathic portals we go, dragged along the weaving avenues of a deranged memory like prepubescent meat on the way to a pederast's abattoir. Lancaster's self-questioning testament - the thoughts of a 'moon-staring gibberer' [p. 27] - gives Bowden an opportunity to elaborate upon guilt and sympathy, to make a broad allusion to the master-servant relationship as outlined by Nietzsche and to consider the ills and shortcomings of the mental health industry. Not least the sounds and sights which characterise the environs of your average nuthouse, let alone the idiosyncrasies and ultimately irredeemable qualities of the inmates themselves. And, like Erik Skjoldbjærg's 1997 film, Insomnia (remade in America), sleep - against which Lancaster fights tooth and nail, despite the fact that a severe dearth of it leads to yet more delusion - is portrayed here as a dangerous enemy. Hunger performs a similar role in Knut Hamsun's 1890 novel of the same name. We reach Page 28 and the author suddenly decides to return us to the little cottage, where Dominique is being attacked by the hideous form of Odd Billy-o. Meanwhile, Bowden makes no attempt to mince his words when it comes to the nature of the psychologically-impaired: 'A maniacal stare beams from the caretaker's visage - truly, criminals are born and not made: they are the products of licence and genetics. Each profound buffoon - in consequence - represents a recrudescence of impure blood. You see, Lombroso was right: moral inferiority results from a physical defect and the low are bound to exhibit the swinishness of how they look. The malefactor, therefore, is bred by virtue of an absence of oxygen to the brain at crucial moments. Can't you tell Criminal Man from the placement of his eyes together in the skull; or those brown stains beneath either orb? Insanity has to be physiological; but evil and human ugliness are deeply interlinked at every level.' [Ibid.] Consequently, like a cunning theatrical device the wobbly Crossroadsesque backdrop is hurriedly changed once again and Billy-o is seen to receive 'electric shocks in a sensory deprivation chamber.' [p. 29] But then a struggle ensues back at the cottage, where Lancaster - trapped in some kind of bizarre out-of-body experience - is thrown across the room by the caretaker. This appears to be a subtle analogy that very cleverly denotes how Lancaster himself becomes incorporated within the actual form of Billy-o. But the distinctions are soon blurred by the fact that our narrator begins to experience the caretaker's dreams ... As if his own weren't really enough! Billy-o tries to dodge a cascading steel blade and Dominique makes a second appearance within the sterile hospital walls and 'stands alone and barefoot on hygienic floors'. Even Billy-o returns to try and murder her, amid a frenetic and incessant 'tapping' [p. 36]. But Lancaster's disjointed imagination is running wild and he switches erratically between the vision of Dominique in an adjacent cell to the events now taking place back at the cottage, where, to his immense horror, he discovers his own corpse and begins intoning in a Northern accent not dissimilar to Billy-o. In reality, of course, Lancaster has turned into the revolting creature he so despised and has returned to murder his wife. A perfectly ironic ending to a visual odyssey.
The second tale in this volume is 'Origami Bluebeard', a fifty-part offering set in a decrepit suburban house in which the furniture is moth-eaten and garish and even the potted plants are wilting in sympathy. Trevelyan Bostock - a toy boy for whom an initial attraction to older women is fast losing its gloss - and his wife, the appropriately-named Candice Leper, are having marital difficulties and the husband is shown trying 'to avoid her toilet-plunger lips' [p. 49] as Bowden compares the basic human 'desire for love [to] a pullulating jelly-fish'. [Ibid.] Bostock, then, resists her feminine wiles and has no intention of 'mounting those steps to a spider's webbing' [p. 50] because to engage with his wife would surely verge upon necrophilia. But he does respond when she begs him not to leave her. There is eventually a knock at the door and we are introduced to Man-Cloth, a tatterdemalion cum rag-and-bone man who used to buy old clothes from Mrs. Bostock. Trevelyan then questions the sense behind purchasing the pile of 'mildewed parchment' being offered to Man-Cloth by his wife, but the latter pacifies their visitor and tells him later on that nothing has been damaged apart from their 'sense of bourgeois respectability' [p.62]. Bostock is left alone and goes up into the attic, but he hears a noise from below and emerges to discover that Candice has returned with 'a large bag of swag'. Man-Cloth arrives once again to examine the contents, before Trevelyan decides to try to unearth his wife's hidden fortune and is subsequently discovered. At this point the conversation is brimming with intellectual allusions that make the dialogue between this incompatibly married couple seem deliberately sarcastic, insincere and surreal. The pair have decided to 'engage in dialectic' [p. 70] and the Catch 22 exchange becomes a winless game of draughts. At least for Bostock. I like the suggestion that Candice is disappearing nightly to procure rag-dolls for her ragamuffin accomplice, but Trevelyan himself has his own daily routine as he continues to search for her hidden fortune. But when his wife mocks him for his fruitless quest, he tells her that he is digging her grave and ends up plunging a pick-axe into her spine whilst resembling 'a fervent Punch who was murdering Judy in darksome splendour.' [p. 78] Then, right in the middle of this homicidal episode - described at some length - Bowden even includes a plug for his new film ... now that takes some doing! Inevitably, the next morning Man-Cloth reappears for his collection of rags and Bostock tries to palm him off with a few old towels and eventually dismisses him completely with strict orders never to return. He does, however, and after discovering Candice Leper's grave in the cellar Bostock fires several shots into his body from an old blunderbuss. But neither that nor his trusty axe can kill the tatterdemalion and the two end up locked in deadly combat on the floor. It transpires, however, that Man-Cloth's body is made up of 'pellets or shavings of canvas, dye, used curtain, tarpaulin, rug, bear-skin, fillet, combustible resin, fox-glove, stole, dyed blue-skins and Persian carpets.' [p. 86] So Man-Cloth, therefore, as his name suggests, is 'animate clothing' [Ibid.] and in a flurry of gory imagery he kills Bostock with ease. The author describes his story as 'anti-feminist', but I don't find an enormous amount of that to be evident in the text and the ancient Heiress, despite her violent demise, is often seen to give as good as she gets. But then 'anti-feminism', of course, need not imply that Bowden is anti-woman per se.
The third story in the book is 'Grimaldi's Leo' - described by the author as a 'John Aspinall 'passion'' [p. 88] - and it is set around a travelling circus. Joseph Grimaldi (1778-1837), of course, was the so-called 'King of Clowns' who is still fondly celebrated and remembered by a legion of red-nosed admirers today. Bowden's tale revolves around the story of an escaped lion, who also happens to be called Leonine Half or King Leo. And the image of the empty cage relates to Bowden's examination of animal liberation, or at least according to philosopher-activists such as Peter Singer, who have turned what began originally as a worthy cause - certainly in terms of preventing vivisection and deliberate mistreatment, although the utopian notion of animal 'rights' leaves a lot to be desired - into yet another form of liberal victimology that echoes talk of 'racism', 'fattism', 'ageism' and all the other nonsense. Again, Bowden's characters use intellectual terminology in order to engage in conversation, a philosophical method which allows the author to get his message across more effectively. After all, that's precisely what this book represents; Bowden's own thoughts are put into the mouths and expressed through the actions of the characters themselves. Winged Rhea, a trapeze artist, becomes a 'Second Mrs. Kong' [p. 91] as she defends the 'right' of the lion to be left alone and unfettered. Meanwhile, a debate ensues between Clown Joey (or Scaramouch) and the Lion's tamer, the curiously-named Agent Naxos (I wonder if he likes Classical music?). The latter is convinced that his Beast would never even consider tasting human flesh, whilst Winged Rhea's mood turns to anger and she attacks the Clown for daring to reduce the Lion to something wholly governed by the natural penchant for raw meat that such creatures are often renowned for. The debate rages on, this time about the 'theoretical halitosis' [p. 98] that is political-correctness. Joey Clown continues to warn of the dangers presented by the escaped Beast, sounding more and more like an Apollonian archetype outlining the innumerable evils of the Chthonic realm and the threat they pose to civilisation. The rant is cut short by Sol Rasputin, the ring-master, who seeks to assert his authority. But the Clown continues, highlighting the flaws in Singer's reasoning: 'If sentience happens to be the key to Professor Singer's route-master then animals and men will forever wander unequally. Mental self-consciousness betrays a resilience under fire ... Singer then resultantly slips into speciesism or non-human prejudice, basically because he has no other choice.' [p. 102] Winged Rhea, says the Clown, 'addresses that killer cat as if it were a free-born Englishman.' [p. 103] The Beast, by this time, is firmly under lock and key. Sol Rasputin exerts his authority once again and Agent Naxos assures him that from now on the Lion will be confined to his cage. A week later, however, the big cat escapes again and as the Lion Tamer is about to shoot his furry exhibit he is prevented from doing so by the 'perfumed sleeve' [p. 108] of the Trapeze Artist. She, instead, instructs the Lion to return to its cage amid 'a ganja-laced atmosphere' [p. 112]. The Lion does as it is asked and the implication - at least in the opinion of Winged Rhea, who now swaggers before Agent Naxos with a drug-infused arrogance - is that a more gentle and compassionate approach is preferable to more forceful or coercive means. But she saves much of her vitriol for Peter Singer, who would - presumably 'to avoid suffering' [p. 117] - gladly see the demise of all non-sentient beings, including circus freaks of all shapes and sizes. A while later, Winged Rhea falls from the high-wire and is miraculously saved by the Lion, who, by this time, has escaped yet again and now finishes the tale as a great hero.
Unlike its predecessors, the book's final story, 'Napalm Blonde', billed as a tragedy of Greek proportions, offers no introductory dramatis personæ. The central figure in this narrative, Scaramouch Ruby (or Lupin) is having an affair with her husband's manager, Abel Cummings. Ruby makes no attempt to conceal her predatory and seductive nature: 'All that concerns a femme fatale like me, Abel, are the muscles, tendons and appended glands of a He-man.' [p. 123] The betrayed husband, the brutishly-named Runter Bog, discovers his wife's infidelity and Cummings makes his excuses through one of Bowden's intellectually exaggerated conversation pieces: 'Dear me, my man, you have aggressively grasped the wrong end of a damaging stick with main force. It looks bad admittedly, but none can really arrange for an auction to be enacted using their own souls. Rely on me, Strong-Man, not to sully your family's escutcheon with salt-petre.' [p. 129] Bog spits out a series of descriptively lurid threats, as Cummings takes his leave in a fit of wild terror that suddenly gets metamorphosed into a dream. But the jealous husband is perfectly adamant that 'Adultery will be punishable by death' [p. 133] and 'Armageddon chunters through Runter's veins' [p. 134] as both colours and surroundings change constantly and our tale begins to writhe around like a snake caught in the nightmarish throes of a bad acid trip. By this time Ruby has taken hold of a bread-knife and the couple seem to be encased within some kind of labyrinthine chamber. Bog becomes the Minotaur of Greek tragedy, at least momentarily, and the perceived sanctuary of the hidden corridors resemble a Bosch landscape and are then penetrated by the ever-advancing Runter Bog. Ruby and Abel find yet more corridors in their ever-changing maze of underground tunnels and make an attempt to enter one final chamber. The room, however, is a cell in a mental asylum and whilst Ruby is seen to be 'trussed up' [p. 145], Abel Cummings 'continued to tap away in a manner which proved to be beholden to a vegetoid moment.' [p. 146] The repetitious tapping and references to mental illness appear in 'Kratos', too, so the psychopathic quartet has now brought us full circle. But not before the pair try desperately to leave this latest room with Bog still hot on their heels, although when he reaches out to catch them Ruby finally silences him with a plank of wood. But the scenery shifts around yet again and Ruby Scaramouch changes into a vampire before her lover's very eyes: 'All I wish to do is suck your BLOOD - we children of the night and daughters of Lilith must swallow such ichor in order to live! Demise can only be celebrated as a capturing of existence, you see?' [p. 155] The seconds tick away and Cummings is hopelessly trapped between Death portrayed in two forms: first, as Beauty (Ruby) and, second, as Beast (Bog). For some, this book will prove rather difficult and in order to reap the full benefits prospective readers will need to concentrate and keep their wits about them. Bowden's work is undoubtedly on an even keel with various other examples of high intellectual culture upon which the New Right looks favourably - including that produced by figures such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Gabriele D'Annunzio and even T.S. Eliot - and, despite the stiflingly unappreciative epoch in which we currently find ourselves, it is vitally important that it is both viewed and appreciated in that vein.
Apocalypse TV - Review by Troy Southgate
An informed review of this superb work
AND so we move on to a work produced by our very own Jonathan Bowden, a man well known to the New Right for his forceful opinions on Art, Philosophy and far more besides. 'Apocalypse TV' is a dialogue written in the classic Platonic style, with the two characters - Friedrich and Thomas - designed to represent Nietzsche and Aquinas alike. But only very loosely, because the pair are really only shown defending the respective values of these philosophers and they are permitted to exist in the contemporary world. The dialogue itself is compelling, but despite the fact that it is essentially an intellectual joust between the decidedly amoral and the traditionally Christian, at no time does it descend into insulting or disrespectful behaviour. It reminds me of a famous quote by G.K. Chesterton in relation to his late brother, Cecil: 'We debated constantly, but we never argued'. But although the characters do address one another as 'Friedrich' and 'Thomas' within the book itself, they are rather curiously initialled as 'J' and 'S'. I can only surmise, therefore, that the more philosophical names were adopted originally but then never incorporated within the final draft. Judging by some of the political references, too, 'Apocalypse TV' was clearly written in the early-1990s, but the overall message is just as relevant now as it was back then.
The work is comprised of six chapters, or conversations. Each of these takes place at a precise location, something which often adds to the atmosphere. The first of these, 'Sex, Death, Fred and Rose', debates how murder and violence in modern-day Western society are viewed by the liberal establishment. Thomas, as you'd expect, believes that criminals of this kind are endowed with original sin, whilst Friedrich makes it clear that there will always be a darker side to human nature and that it often has a crucial role to play in the wider scheme of things. The chapter also examines the way in which crime is punished by the law.
The next debate, 'Hitler Was A Federalist!', looks at the issue of imperialism and the way political structures have been imposed by the liberal intelligentsia. It also concerns morals, something Nietzsche discussed in several of his own works, but although Thomas often has the ability to identify a certain problem, it is usually Friedrich who manages to put things into the correct perspective without allowing the former to embroil him in yet another debate about religion.
'Room 101, Downing Street' is possibly the most political chapter in the book, concentrating on the hypocrisy of party politics and the often contradictory labelling and colour-coding of the various parties and movements themselves. Elsewhere, Friedrich and Thomas discuss the issue of censorship, the Jewish 'Holocaust' and the ambiguous manner in which genocide is treated in both the media and by those who inhabit the realms of academia. Each of these subjects is looked at in relation to the manner in which certain controversial issues are greeted - and consequently dealt with - by the Orwellian establishment.
'Alien Nation' deals with conspiracies, among them UFOs, satanic abuse and those allegedly cataclysmic diseases said by an hysterical media to herald the end of civilisation as we know it. The tone is very tongue-in-cheek, to say the least, but there is a more serious dimension to these matters because - as Bowden points out admirably - such tales are often used to scare the life out of the masses and thus help to consolidate the liberal regime and its grip on power. The role and consequences of drug-use is also discussed, with the author pointing out that, contrary to popular belief, it is detrimental to human creativity.
The subsequent chapter, 'Art Attack', deals with a subject close to the author's heart. Bowden has discussed some of his views about Modern Art and the Turner Prize in the pages of this very magazine, and here he elaborates further on the contrived nature of contemporary Art forms which, effectively, have each been influenced by Art produced in the twentieth century. The pair are heard discussing their visit to a recent exhibition in which some of the participants were bourgeois favourites like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. The author makes a good point about the inability of Modern Art to actually shock people, as the media likes to claim, as well as the fact that the more realistic - and, thus, unimaginative - exhibits are invariably given the most pretentious-sounding names. Bowden also mentions the transience of Modern Art and the fact that Hirst's work, in particular, is already in an advanced state of decay. I certainly found myself agreeing strongly with one particular exchange:
S: For man is but dust, and until dust he will return.
J: No, no, old man, I'm not with you there. Man thrusts forward, moves on to new planes of creativity. The individual dies, but his creations live on. [pp.191-2]
Bowden is convinced that as Modern Art continues to fall into decline, Art itself will have gone full cycle, or at least that it will eventually return to the age of Futurism where it all began and for which the author clearly longs:
S: But what you're saying is that we may go forward to the past.
J: Or back to the future. [p.201]
The final debate, 'Speak Now Or Forever Hold Your PC', briefly summarises many of the issues discussed in the book. This time the dynamic duo find themselves aboard a coach, going to Edinburgh, and the conversation turns to Marxism, anti-Semitism and the usage, origins, selectivity and crass hypocrisy of political correctness and its attempts to contain and nullify ideological dissent.
What I like most about this book - apart from the fact that I tend to agree with Friedrich 99% of the time - is the wry humour that rears its head occasionally and keeps the feet of our intellectual adventurers firmly on the ground:
J: Could one even imagine the existence of Shakespeare's writings without tragedy and pain? If everything were reduced to the blandness of the music we're being forced to listen to in this hotel -
S: And the biscuits -
J: I quite enjoyed them, actually. [pp.55-6]
But Hale and Pace it most definitely ain't and Friedrich - or 'J' as he appears in the book - can be quite 'merciless' when he wants to:
S: Well, I'm interested in people's disabilities, and believe people should be helped if they need it, but I don't want other people's handicaps thrust in my face.
J: Absolutely. Particularly if they haven't had a wash for a couple of days. The fact is, I do not go all gooey-eyed when the Elephant Man turns up on my doorstep.
S: Does that happen often?
J: Fortunately not! If it did, I'd say to him: 'Just wear a sheet, you suppurating bastard!' [p.209]
'Apocalypse TV' is like spending several hours sitting in a room with Jonathan Bowden and his Christian alter-ego, which, depending on your opinion of Jonathan Bowden, could be pleasant and stimulating - which is my view - or monstrously obnoxious, which I'm happy to say is the view of the establishment!
Hans-Jurgen Syberberg - Leni Riefenstahl's heir
An analysis of the German director
Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, the enfant terrible of modern or post-war German cinema, was born in 1935 of vaguely upper class stock. His father owned landed estates in Eastern Germany before the war and his son lived in Rostock until 1945. Syberberg's doctoral thesis - very much in the Germanic tradition - concerned the notion of existentialism or the absurd in Durrenmatt's drama. He himself seems to have been influenced by two vast and yet 'monstrous' paradigms: these were Brecht's notion of epic theatre and Wagner's idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk - the total art-work. Without doubt, his seminal achievement has to be Hitler: a Film from Germany which appeared in 1978. Although Syberberg was to later furnish a retrospective and documentary feel to his ideas in a non-fiction treatment, The Ister, in 2004. It comes across as a companion piece or dialectical counter-point to the previous work. It's definitely not a mea culpa.
Hitler: ein film aus Deutschland ran to 442 minutes and happened to be co-produced by the BBC (somewhat paradoxically). It starred Heinz Schubert and had no definite plot other than an intriguing series of tableaux. In a different set of circumstances (or primarily dealing with variegated meats) many would have found it avant-garde or occult. Its matter proved to be episodic, mannerist, arcane and dream-like. Syberberg, its director, made extensive use of rear projection amid an orgy of declamation, dramaturgical feel and topical onrush. Tropes are introduced, not like Natalie Sarraute, but after the fashion of a flickering magic camera or F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu in 1924. (A film which came to be suppressed by the German authorities owing to copyright tiffs). The first part deals with the issue of Hitler's personality cult; it's dark, deliberately baroque and romantic in its aesthetic. It is quite clear that Syberberg wishes to plunge headlong into the thicket of what George L. Mosse called Nazi Culture; that's to say, the volkish underpinnings of German 'irrationalism' in the nineteenth century. National Socialism emerged out of this heady stew, but contemporary Germany has repudiated it or deliberately buried this memory. It allows itself the backward glance of Elias Canetti's auto-da-fe when spliced with Henze's agit-prop. The second part of this monumental piece of cinema (which is almost as long as Gance's silent Napoleon from the 'twenties) explores Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century in every sense. The film's third section deals with the Shoah and Himmler's various attitudes towards it - the latter very much seen in vignette. Whereas the epic's fourth quartet - sign-posted as We Children of Hell - consists of a personal appearance by Syberberg as the director. This is by no means either solipsist or Hitchcock-like, merely a desire to intrude an authorial and personal insistence. Having done so, he strides around with a large Hitler puppet (ventriloquism originated in Germany) and enters into debates over the bitter harvest of German romanticism and the plight of artists in the federal republic.
What does Hans Jurgen Syberberg hope to achieve by means of this activity? Well! his enormous filmic canvas sets up a challenge to every known rule of Hollywood cinema. Whereupon the work's visual Weltanschuaang also happens to be partly French, being strongly influenced by Henry Langois' set designs. Likewise, the fact that the work's stasis or static vortex involves one location --- one set --- brings it very close to Derek Jarman's Caravaggio in Latin. Influential critics pontificated about its significance upon arrival, but neither Susan Sontag or Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe could hammer out definite conclusions. Most of them miss the fact that the clue to this piece lies in its visualisation: its medium is truly the message in terms of Marshall McLuhan's hectoring. For the film's visual language exemplifies its deeply romantic, roseate, ethereal, Germanic race soul, anti-modernist, dream-like, oneiric and Wagnerian climacteric. It happens to be deeply fascistic but purely on an auric or eye-sensitive level; at once happening to be lit up by a post-modern mantra. The film comes across as heroic in its anti-heroic indeterminacy. Superficially - and with the objective part of the mind - Syberberg appears to be opposed to what Moeller van den Bruck called The Third Empire. But not really... since, if we enter into back-brain subjectivity, then we are dealing with a fantasy or phantasmagoria which mourns the fact of Germany's defeat. What Syberberg is doing literally confuses the rational, practical and political mind (perforce). For, by virtue of adopting an apodictic structure, he can remain aesthetically entranced while preserving a strict ideological neutrality. Like the Australian effort Romper Stomper, this film is ultimately neutral and neither for or against --- at the level of the journalist's page. In reality, such a transgression proves to be deeply blasphemous under Bonn's republic...if we conceive of Adenauer's construction as a second Weimar.
Moreover, the inner methodology of Syberberg's attitude can be seen in various articles - one in particular, "Spiritual Reactionaries after German Reunification" by Diederichsen and Cametzky, springs to mind. Likewise, Syberberg sought to clear up any confusion with his own polemic - On the Misfortune and Fortune of Art in Germany after the last War, (1990). This contained a strong attack on Bonn's philo-semitism. Michael Walker, the editor of Scorpion magazine and by then a German citizen, warned that Syberberg faced 'un-person' status as a result. For his filmography has little real appeal either on behalf of NDP supporters or contemporary liberals. In this overall regard, his visualisation might be considered to be a splicing of Caspar David Friedrich and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. It's not a tabernacle of the ruins, a la Wolfgang Borchert's stories about the "year zero" of 1945, but an aesthetic Germanicism which remains cool, cynical, acidic, upper class and even 'subversive'. Hitler: ein filme aus Deutschland appears to be "anti" on the surface of its discontinuous images; themselves a kaleidoscope of Cranach, Pacher and Kraceur's over-flowing Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Yet the inner or sub-conscious mind that directs this movie proves to be spiritually, not factually, revisionist in character.
His earlier cinema history testifies to this. For example, his first effort - Romy, Anatomy of a Face (1965) - deliberates on a classic German actress' profile. It is an exercise in phrenology which concentrates on Romy Schneider. Whereas his second example in 1966 deals with the aged actor Fritz Kortner - a star of German theatre earlier in the twentieth century who specialised in one event: Shylock's eternal scream of vengeance. Syberberg described the rushes for such an epiphany as 'superhuman'.
You can view Hitler: ein film aus Deutschland for free online at www.syberberg.de
Click here for Jonathan's talk on Syberberg
Tradition & Revolution
The collected writings of Troy Southgate.
Troy Southgate, formerly a leading member of the National Revolutionary Movement and currently one of the main exponents of the European New Right, has over the last two decades produced a large number of articles, essays and poems. This book is a selection of the best of these. It presents revolutionary ideas which, while transcending the conventional left-right dichotomy, propagate the abandonment of modern society and its all-pervasive decadence to set up autonomous, anti-establishment communities; it discusses metaphysical and spiritual issues from a Traditionalist and Wodenist perspective; it gives practical advice on the benefits of home schooling; it deals with everything from the struggle of the Revolutionary Conservative movement in WWII Germany to the Islamic Revolution in Iran; and contains a critique of modern life in the form of excellent, and at times humorous, poetry.
Tradition & Revolution also contains Troy Southgate's famous essay, Militant Imperium: A Chapter-by-Chapter Summary of Julius Evola's 'Men Among the Ruins'. All in all, this book will have something of interest to every man of a revolutionary disposition.
"This man is an artist, a poet and a musician, a father and a relentless idealist ... Troy Southgate's work as presented speaks for itself here, but what is extraordinary about it is that it is as complex as it is clear and transparent ... As a driving force within the English New Right, Troy Southgate has clearly shown that he is indeed interested in broader alliances between leading men, ... not within a purely conservative and outdated Right of yesteryear ..., but of the Right understood as the real and contemporary opposition with alternatives to the egalitarian ideas that pervade the current dominating political systems of the world."
Tord Morsund
Available to buy at
Revolutionary Conservative
An interview with Jonathan Bowden.
This interview was conducted in the summer of 2007 by Troy Southgate - the Organising Secretary of the New Right. This interview also appears in issue 4 of the New Imperium metapolitical journal, of which Troy Southgate is the editor.
Opening Pandora's Box
An elitist defence of modernism.
I would like to take this opportunity to respond to various postings which have been placed on the website 'Stormfront' in recent weeks. I would like to thank those people who have been supportive of my efforts - including 'glasgow bnp', 'fraser' and 'Dux90', who was kind enough to describe the work as "excellent".
Other correspondents have been less charitable however. These include 'Son Of Britain', 'Byzantium Endures' (probably named after a novel by Michael Moorcock) and 'brummie76' among others. Now I'm not responding to their comments directly - primarily because most of them are semi-literate and scatological in tone. These persons are also hiding under false names. Their identities are known to me though by virtue of my status and links with the American owners of the Stormfront website. (Byzantium Endures, for example, is an Irish Republican and National Socialist who has been on the site for many years).
But amidst all of the silliness and abuse these people are contriving to make a serious point, and this is: the status of modern or modernist art.
This happens to be a completely legitimate debate and one which I will respond to now. What large numbers of western individuals have missed is that a seismic shock went through the art world at the end of the nineteenth century. This was completely adjacent to the creation of photography as both an art and a science. Once a classic early photographer like Edward Muybridge produced an interconnected series of images featuring Greco-Roman wrestlers and running horses, the world was forever changed. Fine art now had a choice - it either replicated photography badly or in a stylised way which was loyal to a tradition running from Rembrandt to Orpen or it contrived to do something else. What it did was to go inside the mind and tap all sorts of semi-conscious and unconscious ideas, fantasies, desires and imaginative forays. All these relate to iconic art, religious painting and the art of the occult, spiritualism, pornography and even the images of the insane or the marginally so. It also relates to religious art as exemplified by Pacher, Giotto, Cimabue, Bosch, Brueghel, Grunewald and various modern masters of a similar sort. The point about this art is that it is highly personal and powerful because it comes from inside. This means that people often of a highly rigid and morally defensive character find this work heretical, blasphemous, evil and even degenerate. (Indeed the theory of degenerate art originates from the 1880's when this change of direction took place). A large number of modern masters like Bacon, Buffet, Ernst, Paolozzi, Balthus, Dali and Labisse have all dealt with these themes. What has happened to art in other directions is that representational, classical, traditional and academic work has been taken over by cinema. The moving image and the tens of thousands of individual films produced for well over a century now are a testament to this. Great filmmakers like Lang, Hitchcock, Stroheim, Gance, Truffaut, Renoir, Syberberg and Tarkovsky are all examples of this. They inherit the tradition of representation which has gone elsewhere. In the end you either love or loathe this. Two regimes in the twentieth century tried to prevent painters and sculptors producing modernist work. These were Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Both failed. The reasons for this are the dynamism of the modern current - even though German sculptors like Arno Breker and Gustav Thorak were excellent artists but they were also copyists who were returning to the Greeks and Praxiteles. The dilemma which painters and sculptors have faced is either to create purely imaginatively or just to make films in another medium.
Turning to my own work various currents are discernable. These are the demonic, strength and a concern with pure power, ugliness and fury as well as erotica and shape, or purely imaginative formulations. In my own mind the softer material balances the harsher, more violent and aggressive work. Nonetheless, I have also done a large number of relatively traditional pieces which hark back to classic art by Bosch, Rops and Caravaggio. Some are also based on Hellenistic form. Obviously a subjective element intrudes into art but I believe that modernistic fury is the correct vehicle for elitist and hierarchical values.
I always sign everything I produce - whether in writing, on film or as an image - with my own name.
Jonathan Bowden
Homo Americanus
In his new book, Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, published by BookSurge (ISBN 1419659847), Dr. Tomislav Sunic provides a well-informed and brilliant examination of the American national character.
This important new book, Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, provides a well-informed and brilliant examination of the American national character. The author, a former US professor and former Croatian diplomat, reviews the country's founding myths and its legacy of Calvinist Puritanism, boundless economic progress, and self-choseness, and their role in shaping the messianic impulse in US domestic and foreign policy.
In modern America, contends Dr. Tomislav Sunic, notions of "democracy," "multiculturalism, " "political correctness" and hyper-individualistic "freedom" now threaten the country's European heritage, and the cultural-ethnic heritage of all peoples. With a foreword by Prof. Kevin MacDonald.
Tomislav (Tom) Sunic is a former US professor, author, translator and a former Croat diplomat. He did his undergraduate work in literature and languages in Europe. He obtained his doctoral degree in political science at the University of California. Mr. Sunic has published books and articles in French, German, English and Croatian on subjects of cultural pessimism, the psychology of communism and liberalism, and the use and abuse of modern languages in modern political discourse.
This remarkable work is now available from www.amazon.com
Psychopathia Sexualis
A response to Alisdair Clarke's homosexualism in New Imperium's second issue. New Imperium magazine is the official journal of the New Right. For more information, please visit the New Right website via the 'Links' page.
I have to respond to Alisdair Clarke's homosexualism in New Imperium's second issue. The truth of the matter is that Uranian discourse remains fey and counter-propositional. For, contrary to Weininger's doxa in Sex and Character, orientation comes from physiology - hence its division into male and female. The notion, anthropologically, that Indo-European development consists of male-bonded warriorship vis-a-vis the Family is fanciful. More accurately, a primal sexuality always embodies Heterosexuality. It alone relates to blood, genetics, racial causation and gender's polarity. All culture springs from a child's birth - it's in accordance with Nature. A factor which necessitates the weakness of all alternatives: whether these are same-sex, infantilistic or paedophile, bi-polar, necrophile, coprophiliac, trans-gender or hermaphroditic, et cetera...
Another stream in this particular argument involves a defence of women. All sexual beauty has to be female given the divinity of the woman's body. Without it there's nothing - in terms of Erotica's stream of consciousness... When one considers three-dimensional art - Rodin's The Muse, Cybele or Aristide Malliol's study for Action in Chains - one recognises the Anima at work. For representation of the female corpus is cardinal to mental creativity in many fields. In Hellenistic art, the Aphrodite of Melos - more commonly known as the Venus of Milo - glistens in its marble splendour in the Louvre. But even this doesn't do justice to the subliminal eroticism given off by this work. For, in refutation of Edward Carpenter's notion of The Third Sex, there were only two of them! Whereas all forms of Zoophytic, inverted or 'alternative' sexuality are biological in origin; they result from a female hypothalmus in inverse males and its reverse in Gluck's kindred. Given this, culturalised sexual discourse falls sheer - whether or not it happens to be championed by the New Left. This also gives the lie to the idea that Judaeo-Christianity is uniquely anti-homosexual. Paganism, being polyvalent, can appear more adaptive but its primitivism would tear most epicene forms to pieces. For instance, Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian happens to furnish heterosexuality with an attractive front... whether or not Frank Frazetta's water-colours depict it.
Another fallacy needs to be confronted: and this must be the notion that family life, male-female bonding, the nuclear enclave, children, et cetera... are somehow negative, restrictive, reactionary, unalternative, 'square' or Bourgeois. Au contraire, the First Sexuality remains primal, chthonic, volcanic, and biologically productive. It erupts, like one of Norman Lowell's abstracts, from fundamental fissures. In terms of flesh, without a penis in the vagina nought else exists - even inversion. Perhaps the best analysis has to be the masterwork which convened modern sexology. This was Count Richard von Krafft-Ebing's work, Psychopathia Sexualis, that appeared in the eighteen seventies. It posited the notion that the Heterosexual or Straight world's all that exists, and, by definition, every other tendency happens to be its penumbra, shadow, affectation or deliquescence. By this lexicon, Basquiat's doodles represent less under-class graffiti than a form of advanced immune deficiency syndrome within art. Wouldn't Baumler, Gunther and Rosenberg have christened it Degenerate Art?
This, inter alia, leads on to a further rightist deconstruction of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality. For Ancient Greece's upper-class poetics, a la Theognis, may have incorporated homo-eroticism... yet one has to ask what it means if half of Sappho's surviving staves concern men and family life. Like Enoch Powell's own chronicle and Oeuvre; does a disaknowledged or inactive bisexuality really matter if one's married with children? Perhaps one can take a leaf out of Dr. William Pierce's book here. Given that the National Alliance's former leader forced all of its members to marry, on pain of expulsion, lest Kramer's postlapsarian snake intrude.
Finally let's provide a critique of Mister Clarke's exemplum for Manism: namely the collected works of William S. Burroughs (these were his Last Words; so to speak). Nonetheless, one shouldn't shy away from the fact that Burroughs' carnival embodies a paedophile aesthetic - in the case of a text like Wild Boys explicitly so. But in all of his effusions, from Queer to Cities of the Red Night, the abiding themes are non-masculine, anti-heroic, separatist, anti-heterosexual and heroin induced. They recall Pasolini's Salo as an attack on Mussolini's post-dated Republic. Truly, one inscribes the Latin tag: video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor (put literally: I see the better and approve it, yet pursue the worse).
John Betjeman's 'Monday Club'
A review of Raymond Tong's volume of poems, Necessary Words, published by Athelney (ISBN 1903313058), a colophon of Anglo-Saxon books.
With this poetical work, Necessary Words, Tong joins a number of relatively unknown Nationalist poets like Dick Cardmore (possibly a pseudonym for Right Now's Derek Turner), Michael Cope and Steven Taylor. All in all, these verses are a poeticisation of various articles in Voice of Freedom. For example, Necessary Words, the title refrain, deals with the unassailable nature of English identity. Whereas the next scald in, Feeding the Pigeons, laments the universalism of a charity which forgets everything happening here. Does it take reference from the fact that Mayor Ken Livingstone banned feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square but Hizb ut-Tahrir regularly meets there? Where In a Strange Land and My Home both analyse the disorientation and alienation of the English as their country becomes 14% non-White. Poems as diverse as The Arbiters, Observing the English, To a Hostel Warden and A Commonwealth Conference Photograph, all appear to dissect media distortion and lies, moral laziness, hypocrisy and a sort of Middle English blindness. Mister Tong's essential point, in these stanzas, seems to be an attack on the milksop ethics of the philosopher G.E. Moore, and the liberal platitudes they evince.
Poems like St. John and St. Anselm, Triolet for St. John's and an Anglican Bishop appear in the book's middle section. They confer an obviously Christian and Anglican identity on the poet, but definitely of a militant and rather Evangelical hue. In these works our bard's adopting a muscular Christian tone, redolent of Victorian and Imperial divines, yet alienated from documents like "Faith in the City".
Verses towards the book's second half, such as Televised Protest, Other Eden, In Another's Place and Stamp Issues rehearse and extend original themes. They choose to look at Japanese cultural imperialism, Anglo-Saxon aimlessness and the 'Right to Shop', together with the luxury of Animal rights at a time when one's society is in free fall. Four other staves - Great Storm, Bosworth 1485, On the Statue of Oliver Cromwell at Westminster and Milton 1660 - adopt a new tone. They are more historical, rooted, vanguardist and cross-referenced than before. While the references to the Commonwealth's Minister of Latin (i.e. foreign secretary) and Lord Protector give an English Protestant and heroic demeanour to Tong's efforts. Alternatively, Gulls and The Pond embody a more pastoral and evergreen temperature - a rallying cry to the fact that our poet is an English version of R.S. Thomas' aboriginal cymric. Figures on a Desolate Landscape and After the Explosion, however, seem rather more restless. Could our versifier be a New Apocalyptian without knowing it?
Finally we need to end this review by concentrating on two bardic offerings. They carry the titles an English Prayer and I Let it Happen respectively. The first is a 'politically incorrect' liturgy reminiscent of the Reverend Robert West's delivery. The second reads like a moderate cri de coeur towards the author's lack of nationalist action.
Raymond Tong's Necessary Words (ISBN 1-903313-05-8) is available from most booksellers.
Theseus' Minotaur
An examination of Friedrich Nietzsche's thought.
Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most remarkable philosophers of all time, irrespective or whether he happened to have written in the nineteenth century. In fact, he has more in common with pre-Socratic thinkers like Heraclitus, born two and a half thousand years ago on Ephesos in the Aegean. Did not Aristotle gloss his great work, On Nature, in order to inform us that seething beneath all agency is the reality of Fire ... or pure energy? Yet another example of the fact that ancient theory and modern physics seem to run on parallel lines.
Nietzsche - to speak of his own life - came from a long line of Lutheran pastors, and there remains a decidedly Protestant cast to his thought. Born in 1844, he specialised in classical philology, wrote his thesis on Theognis, an aristocratic radical, and found himself offered a professorship at the tender age of 24! Enoch Powell happened to be granted a similar academic posting, in Australia, at the same age. Nor need it surprise us that Powell was heavily influenced by Nietzsche, before a decisive turn back to Anglicanism a la T.S. Eliot.
Nietzsche's first act involved blowing his own discipline wide open. This resulted from issuing The Birth of Tragedy from the press. It effectively sought to kill off his own specialism with one sword thrust to the heart. In it, he posited the dialectic of Apollonian vis-a-vis Dionysian in Greek theatre, placed Aeschylus above the other tragedians, and sought in the shambles of the House of Atreus a solution to Western decadence. Like a mortician, he dissected contemporary mores, found them wanting, and offered Wagnerian opera as a lance to an ever-present boil. He soon dispensed with this, given the perennial Christian stance in Parsival. His Grail lay elsewhere.
How to sum up his thinking? When we recall that the Karl Schlechta edition, in its pomp, runs to eighteen volumes, including poetry and letters. He even composed music, although, rather like Anthony Burgess, it has never been performed. Perhaps, reminiscent of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, he could always hear the threnody welling up in his own ears?
First up, he declared that God is dead in men's minds, and that mortal life must be totally visualised at our level. Second, he asserted the non-normative or spendthrift quality of truth, but denied relativism through the epistemology of a Strong Man's hammer. Rather like the circus, did not life beat out its meaning on a purposive anvil? Next, or third in our trajectory, he uttered the prophecy of the Superman; the one who exists beyond Good and Evil, and who will recreate intention by utilizing the masses as putty. Contrary to democratic licence, he sees life as quintessentially divided into masters and slaves. Which group do you identify with, or, in the words of the Kentucky miners' anthem from the nineteen-forties, 'whose side are you on, boy, whose side are you on?' To follow: he notates Will to Power, or desire to control energy within a form, as a relocation of teleology or future perfect. If we might adapt the Tofflers, it is not a future shock - merely a shocking future. Again, and to close, he requires all of this to be foregrounded by the Endless Return, so as to cheat death by a karmic insistence not on reincarnation but on Renaissance.
To him, existence was a bullet passing through screens, life is death, all circumstances recur, ethical insight remains pagan, aesthetics constitutes a new master class, pity can be characterised as the sentimentality of worms, and Spencer's natural fallacy isn't one. In other words, Might constitutes right, the world is as it should be, heroic struggle mitigates stoicism, and suffering must be lightly borne with aristocratic sang-froid. It might even be schadenfreunde ... For him, Christianity as a mass faith will perish, but the little people deeply require it as a socialist opiate, held aloft with feminine compassion, and beholden to one Hippy's auto-da-fe.
All of these ideas were put forward in a series of books, from Untimely Meditations to Ecce Homo, the autobiography at life's end. An existence whose closure, almost scripted by Theodore Dreiser and Jack London, ended in madness due to tertiary syphilis. Contrary to the thesis of My Sister and I, a forgery, this was probably contracted from a brothel during his student days. Try to imagine the thesis of Ibsen's Ghosts, when crossed with the anti-metaphysics of Epstein's Rock-drill.
For Nietzsche, unlike Evola in his revolt against modernity, preaches a type of modernism which is subtly different. One that revolves around an illiberal and elitist rendition of modern life - its acceptance, its merging in, its energisation, its over-coming. Finally, accompanied by the eagle who evinces courage and the pet snake who beguiles wisdom, Zarathustra, Nietzsche's Aryan sage, wanders out into the mountains to face Life.
A signification of death ... or is it the coming of a great Noon-time?
A Hymn To H.E.R.R.
A review of H.E.R.R.'s album The Winter of Constantinople, released by Cold Spring Records. Please visit their website via the 'Links' page.
H.E.R.R.'s compact disc represents what might be called Francis Parker Yockey's absent musicology. In the first track, The Fall of Constantinople, there are the following ingredients: a classical threnody, the rhythms of poetry and a skald or ecstatic stave. (The latter feature embodies bardic composition, after the fashion of those who extemporised Beowulf.) It is, if you will, a variant on Laibach's themes without irony. Similarly, a reversal of Shostakovitch's Leningrad Symphony seems to occur - albeit at one remove, and by making use of Carl Orff as a medium. A tincture of Gregorian or High Catholic music shimmers, together with piano and synthesiser arabesques. Might it recall a politicised version of Rheinberger, with overlain proems - after the fashion of a post-modern Kipling? Green is definitely not the colour here; nor are the Satanic Verses a correct response by way of Sufi dissent. All in all, Constantinople's Fall relates to G.K. Chesterton's novel about an Islamic conquest of Britain, with a beer barrel rolled around the country by dissenters. The second track deals with football fanaticism and Ultra culture. It essays Stewart Home's Prolecult from a telescope's other end, in a way which appends a reverse semiotic to past New Waves. A Blue Tuesday rather than a Blue Monday, one might say... Also, this mixture brings about a medley of Joe Pearce's British Bulldog, Attila the Stockbroker, Skrewdriver and a garrotted Public Image Limited. A militarist drumming supervenes throughout, primarily so as to combine the marching bands of the Royal Marines with Shostakovitch's Eighth Symphony. Is it a social Reich or merely a parallax view?
The third stratum, Hagia Sophia, begins with militarised Bach. A situation where organ music fuses with electronic swoon. Jet engines cut across the Brandenburg Concertos, themselves morphing into synthesised constellations. Could it be Gary Numan's architectural nemesis? Furthermore, Bulgaria's Sophia is envisaged as a new Constantinople, turned around, or conceived as a New Rome pointing Eastwards. Musically, Elgar's Pomp & Circumstance meets Eric Coates' RAF sound-world. But, early on, can Eastern Orthodox laments be heard, or may these dictums be a somersaulted Umma? Whereby mangy Grey Wolves are overwhelmed by Westernisation. Our fourth departure introduces piano music unadorned by silence. 'Constantinople's Dance' is an orchestral piece which boosts or gives muscle to Chopin and Erik Satie. An accompanying cello bequeaths relaxing social action without words. Surely it introduces a new genre: neo-classical dance music? Will it indicate a renewed ballet's implicit authoritarianism, as yet unwritten? One thinks, en passant, of Arthur Bliss' Red King in Checkmate at Sadler's Wells.
The fifth fiat, Requiem, announces its presence with a gentle piano playing, betokening a peaceful luxuriance. Colin Ireland springs to mind, as does a Beethoven purged of emotional dissonance. Yet a John Cage-like interruption, or atonal spasm, introduces a girl's voice to these proceedings. A sounding which susurrates into relaxing synthesiser music, or the custodianship of bells. Does it hint at Plainsong's observance, or a Gregorian chant without bent votaries? Certainly it drifts into a melodic minimalism. A mellifluous quality, this, which recalls both Steve Reich and John Adams (the latter increasingly viewed as an 'anti-Semite'). One's sixth demarche, A New Rome, sees a fusion of advanced Pop, electronic and classical music... with a cut-off point prior to Modernism, as witnessed by Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. It reveals Michiel Spape as a classical composer in Arnold's and Bax's footsteps. Whereas No. 7, Fruhlings Erwachen, denotes a paramilitary resurgence. Significant drumming reverberates in forest clearings, within which Miklos Hoffer's voice makes poetic readings. There's a similarity to war-film music, much condensed, or the full orchestration to Eisenstein's second part of Ivan the Terrible. A work left unfinished; Ogpu proving the ultimate censor. Likewise, the piece brings back Mozart as a Spartan fanfare, occasionally punctuated by ritual chant or call. Number Eight, however, introduces a Folk element. Guitars figure prominently, serenading us with examples drawn from Julian Bream's or John Williams' craft.
A Germanic interlude eventuates, spoken by Frederick van Eden (1860-1932). Should it intoxicate Orff's lost semantics; thereby cadencing Revisionism? After all, a certain Viennese architectural painter's favourite line in Goethe's Faust remains: "In the beginning there was an action..." Mephistopheles uttered it. Surely, this music involves Rahn meeting Butz - all of it hollowing out Wolfgang Borchert's temple, in prose, to those post-war ruins? Mightn't this band's secret be that they're producing High Bourgeois music, with an undertow or skinhead menace amid classical revival? The ninth cutaway, Arise, emboldens a lyrical skein. It exalts Grieg, Chopin, Liszt, Poulenc et al... Words filter throughout it, resembling records of Ezra Pound giving Imagism vent. A threnody or Legionary anthem also reverberates that recalls a dissident source, namely Ayn Rand's The Romantic Manifesto. Wouldn't such a poultice mix Snorri Sturluson's Edda, Robinson Jeffer's verse and Lucien Rebatet's History of French Opera together? Oral humming continues during such anti-Hollywood music... a case of Bernard Herman meeting VMO, so to speak. In closing, John Tyndall wouldn't have liked this CD but he'd be pushed to describe why. Can H.E.R.R. really be seen as an underground musical accompaniment to a Fourth World War between the West and Islam?
The Jonathan Bowden Interview
An interview by the New Right.
This interview was conducted in 2009 by fifteen members of the New Right and originally appeared on the Black Gnosis website. This three hour interview was conducted immediately after Jonathan Bowden's epic New Right lecture "The Real Meaning of Punch & Judy".
Read the interview and watch the video here