This essay is a contradictory tale of brilliance and entropy, inspiration and disillusionment. It is a story about a once dazzling rock band I discovered in 1978, a group I formerly thought to be indispensable. My commentary refers to the punk, funk, political, rhythm machine from the UK known as Gang of Four.

Politically speaking, what I loved most about the band was this, their onslaughts were aimed at institutions and systemic failures, never individuals.

During the 70’s and 80’s there was an endless cast of real life brutes and reprobate politicos to be identified, but the band never spoke their names. Instead they targeted the debased social situations we accepted, the ruin we internalized and embraced, and our gullibility as we traversed boundless media landscapes of deception and manipulation. The poetry of their words and rhythms were an attempt to crack open ideological facades; what more can an artist do?

Given the abysmal state of public discourse today, their laudable stance of long ago was really extraordinary, and paralleled my own belief that ideas should be fought rather than people. Yet, the newfangled Gang of Four in 2018 have abandoned their former attitude, and have now disparaged by name a famous American individual using graphics and a musical cudgel. However, before Quietus sacks the Gang of Four, please first allow me to praise the past glories of the British rockers.

I couldn’t help but notice the death of Chairman Mao on Sept. 9, 1976; he died just two days after my 22nd birthday. Mao’s demise threw China into turmoil. The Chinese Communist Party was split between “moderates” who wanted to develop the economy and radicals who wanted to further Mao’s revolution.

The leader of the radicals was Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. In October of 1976 the moderates staged a bloodless coup, arresting Qing and three other party members. Dubbed the “Gang of Four” they were tried and convicted of anti-party activities, receiving life imprisonment or lengthy prison sentences.

Along comes 1977 and four young men in Leeds, England needed a name for the band they just formed. “Despairing Working Class Blokes” might have sufficed but instead they choose Gang of Four. It was unquestionably the perfect name for a coterie of young proles determined to make left-wing political music you could dance to. I was immediately won over by the group’s jagged, distorted sound, and their subversive lyrics that undermined conceptions of leisure activity, mass media, and the limits and excesses of political power.

I can metaphorically describe their sound. It was the imagined noise of the leviathan Factory Machine from Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 silent film Modern Times. That hellish engine drove Chaplin insane with its repetitive cadence; it swallowed him whole and crushed him in its tremendous cogs. The grinding, pulverizing, hammering cacophony of such a dynamo found its equivalency in the steamroller drumming and frangible guitar playing of Gang of Four.

When performing, the four never cracked a smile. Singer Jon King ran about the stage in a state of confusion, stopping only for panicky, exaggerated bouts of spastic dancing. Guitarist Andy Gill blankly stared at the audience while furiously strumming at his guitar, only to pluck a string one out of ten times. Dave Allen turned his bass guitar into a jackhammer, while drummer Hugo Burnham pummeled and clobbered everyone into line with the most disciplined, precision drumming I have ever heard in rock music.

Above all else where the lyrics. Fashioned from imbecilic news headlines, advertising jingles, and bourgeois moral codes, they were Situationist barbs that caused the listener to question the nature of… well, everything about hyper-consumerist society. From the commodification of sex, to favored opinions and even alienation being the result of systemic conditioning.

This may sound frightfully boring except that Gang of Four were not a faction of glassy-eyed Leninists browbeating you with Marxist jargon, they were a dance band—not a funky dance band, but a dance band in a funk. And while they cheerlessly delivered their woebegone, crestfallen messages, their austere but infectious beats made you tap your feet and move your body.

In 1977 I was already deeply involved in the Los Angeles punk scene when I read about the Gang of Four in the English music press. I promptly bought the band’s debut single when it was released in October, 1978. The 7” vinyl record presented three difficult songs that would forewarn of the Gang’s future output; Damaged Goods, Armalite Rifle, and Love Like Anthrax. In fact two of those songs appeared on the band’s premiere 1979 album, ironically titled Entertainment!

The title song Damaged Goods had a double meaning, the obvious one a story of failed romance, but the innuendo was how to extricate oneself from a fruitless political situation. “Damaged goods, send them back. I can’t work, I can’t achieve, send me back. Open the till, give me the change you said would do me good. Refund the cost, you said you’re cheap but you’re too much!”

Armalite Rifle was about the armed conflict between the Irish Republican Army and the British Crown in the 1970s. Specifically the song focuses on the Armalite AR-18, a select-fire rifle that was used by the British police and the IRA. “Armalite rifle, police and IRA. Armalite rifle, use it everyday. A child could carry it, do it no harm. Armalite rifle… and the holy Trinity, used against you… like Irish jokes on the BBC.” The jab at the British Broadcasting Corporation was one of many cutting remarks the band leveled at media over the years. As one might imagine, the song Armalite Rifle had a driving martial quality to it. One could say the song was pacifistic. You might well think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.

Love Like Anthrax was an anti-love song I used to play when I wanted to frighten my hippie friends. A whirlpool of churning feedback and caustic lyrics, most everyone I played it to in 1978 would wrinkle their nose in disapproval. “And I feel like a beetle on its back. And there’s no way for me to get up. Love will get you like a case of anthrax. And that’s something I don’t want to catch.” As singer Jon King intoned the dour ode, guitarist Andy Gill recited a deadpan monologue on the ubiquity of love songs in pop music. “I don’t think we’re saying there’s anything wrong with love, we just don’t think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery.”

In the summer of 1979 I saw the Gang of Four perform at the world famous Whiskey A Go-Go on the Sunset Strip. That may sound romantic, but it wasn’t. Yeah, it was a real warm welcome from the people of Los Angeles; there were only 50 slack-jawed people in the dark shabby club watching the amazing performance. The boys blazed through At Home He’s a Tourist, Armalite Rifle, and the rest of the songs from their just released Entertainment! album, but when a sweaty Hugo Burnham stepped out from behind his drum set to sing the feminist descant It’s Her Factory, the world stopped.

“Item: Daily press, views to suppress. Subject: Story on the front page… suffering from suffrage. Title: Unsung heroine of Britain, position to attain, housewife heroine, addicts to their homes. It’s her factory, it’s a duty.” Dave Allen’s bass line penetrated the thickest of skulls, Jon King’s stark melodica playing gave an etherial bent to the dirge. “Paternalist, journalist… he gives them, sympathy… because they’re not men, scrubbing floors they’re close to the earth, in a man’s world, they’re not men, in a man’s world, because they’re not men.” In the background King wailed, “It’s a factory!”

I was thunderstruck… most of us were; the song ended abruptly with the words, “A little, of a lot, keeps them happy. Avoid the answers, but keep them snappy. That’s all.” While the crowd was inordinately small, that didn’t vex the band, who gave a momentous performance.

I should note that in 1979 the BBC’s music television program Top of the Pops, censored At Home He’s a Tourist for being too risqué. “Down on the disco floor, they make their profit, from the things they sell, to help you cob off, and the rubbers you hide, in your top left pocket.” The BBC wanted the word “rubbers” replaced with the word “rubbish.” The band refused to sing a censored version of their song and so walked out of the performance.

Fast forward to 1981 when Gang of Four released their mirthfully titled second album, Solid Gold, an arresting collection of danceable diatribes. All the songs were imposing, but Paralysed stood out for its disconsolate air and plodding lilt. “Blinkered, paralysed, flat on my back. They say our world is built with endeavor, that every man is for himself, wealth is for the one that wants it, paradise, if you can earn it. History is the reason… I’m washed up.” The song dies, then starts again. “My ambitions come to nothing, what I wanted now just seems a waste of time. I can’t make out what has gone wrong. I was good at what I did. The crows come home to roost, and I’m the dupe.”

That same year the group released the single, To Hell With Poverty!, a song with the energy of an out of control train about to run off the tracks; the compelling lyrics contain a double meaning from the boys. “In my arms, we shall begin, we’re not on the rocks, well there’s no charge. In this land, right now, some are insane… and they’re in charge. To hell with poverty, we’ll get drunk on cheap wine. To hell with poverty. The cheque arrives, it’s in the post again. To hell with poverty. The cheque arrives, it’s in the post again.”

Meaning? The worker declares his resistance, takes his pay, and squanders it on cheap plonk, all the while believing he’s rebelling. This parable of a song got me through rough times in the early 1980s and it continues to resonate. It’s especially applicable for today’s booshwa rebels à la mode.

The flip side to To Hell With Poverty! was the song Capital, It Fails Us Now. I will never forget playing it for a friend of mine, who at the time was the news director of an independent radio station in Los Angeles.

He didn’t think much of punk music; as a jazz aficionado he endlessly regaled me with stories on the majesty of Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, Art Ensemble of Chicago and the like.

My pal knew jazz, a form I fell in love with as a 15-year-old when I first heard John Coltrane play My Favorite Things. But my amigo did listen attentively to the Gang of Four song; he pricked up his ears at the deadpan vocals delivered by Jon King: “The moment I was born, I opened my eyes. I reached out, for my credit card. Oh no, I left it in my other suit! Capital, it fails us now. Comrade let us seize the time. On the first day of my life, I opened my eyes. Guess where, the superstore. Surrounded by luxury goods, I need a freezer, I need a hi-fi. No credit, no goods. Call my bank, I said. They say we’re bankrupt.”

When the song ended my colleague turned to me and said exuberantly, “Vallen, that song is a Marxist critique of society!” Since I loved to playfully rib my friend I befuddled him with: “No, you’re wrong. The band is saying that Capital, the treatise on communism written by Karl Marx, has failed us!” Given the dark sarcasm of the Gang of Four, whose to say my “alternative facts” were wrong?

In 1981 Gang of Four released their song I Love A Man In A Uniform. The next year it was released in the United States. The song took on alienation, sexism, and militarism in one fell swoop: “The good life was so elusive. Handouts, they got me down. I had to regain my self-respect, so I got into camouflage. The girls they love to see you shoot. I love a man in a uniform. I love a man in a uniform.”

In 1982 the BBC banned the song from the airwaves, saying it was inappropriate to broadcast when Britain’s armed forces were fighting Argentina in the Falkland Islands war. In the U.S. the song received considerable radio airplay, even from stations that never played punk music. The song was more upbeat than most Gang of Four numbers, but something about it was amiss. I was perplexed by the public’s reaction; the song was thought to be a sexy dance party song—and a pro-military one at that. Yobs especially fixed on the line The girls they love to see you shoot. I always thought the Gang of Four erred in the making of this song, artists doing political works must always strive for absolute clarity.

In September 1982 I saw the Gang of Four in concert at the Country Club in Reseda, California. It was part of the band’s “Songs of the Free” tour in the U.S. to promote the album of the same name.

The group nearly filled the 1,000 person venue in sunny Southern Cal. Naturally, the evening’s fare would come from the Songs Of The Free album. Call Me Up was served with an extra helping of scornful derision; the irony was so thick you could cut it with a knife: “Children of the pleasure culture, who must be grateful for what we’ve got. Happy smiles in sunny climes. So don’t upset the ice-cream cart. Having fun is my reason for living. Give me a break!”

I had the feeling the songs from that night were written just for us mutant Angelenos packed into that nowheresville club. Life, It’s A Shame said it all: “Talk of corruption is to preach insurrection. Elected to power men suspend self-interest. You and I, we are satellites, it’s a shame. You and I, we are satellites, it’s a shame. Life! Making money is making sense. Making money is making sense. It’s a shame.” Some of us will always remember that concert, it was matchless, the perfect encapsulation of where society stood at the end of the 20th century.

The Country Club, now forgotten, began as a venue for country western music in 1980. However, the owner soon started to book punk bands and the place garnered a reputation as an alternative performance space. During this period I saw the Jamaican dub poet and musician, Mutabaruka; he scorched the place with his fiery political reggae music. But all good things must come to an end; in the late 1990s the Country Club shuttered its doors for good. Reflecting the colossal shift in demographics taking place all over Southern California, the space reopened as a Spanish language Church for newly arrived Latinos.

I must point out that it’s almost useless to look up Gang of Four lyrics online. Popular lyric archives have mangled the group’s lyrics to the extent that one begins to think it’s a conspiracy of some kind. Found everywhere on the internet, including on Youtube, these wildly inaccurate transcriptions radically gut the meaning of the quartet’s songs. A case in point would be the lyrics of the song, Outside The Trains Don’t Run On Time, which addresses authoritarianism.

“He’s become nostalgic, wants to own tomorrow. Discipline, is his passion. Now,  he says there’s none. Outside the trains don’t run on time. He believes it’s no coincidence. He thinks some blood will drag him down. Home, it’s no castle. He wants his wife to run, and fetch. Order, he’s obsessed with order, order.” The incorrect lyrics found all over the internet read: “Keeping up nostalgic, want to own tomorrow. Discipline, is his passion. Now, is enough. Outside the trains don’t run on time. He believes it’s not coincidence. He thinks the blood will run them down. Hold, it’s no castle. It’s once it’s white to run and fetch. Order his obsession, order, order.”

The original song lyric was stripped of its pro-Woman message. The only reliable transcriptions of the group’s lyrics are found printed on the record sleeves of the original vinyl records. Ah, the digital age! And you don’t believe in “fake news”?

Bassist Dave Allen left in 1981, beginning the never ending “musical chairs” of new band members. Drummer Hugo Burnham and lead singer songwriter Jon King left in 1983. I lost interest in the group and totally ignored their sans Allen/Burnham disco sounding fifth album, Hard, save for the ever so slightly redemptive Woman Town. American music journalist Robert Christgau wasted no words, “This record is damn near dead on its feet.”

For me the band’s tenuous last hurrah was their fifth studio album, the 1991 Mall; it was released as President George Herbert Walker Bush unleashed Operation Desert Shield on Iraq that same year. With songs like World Falls Apart, Cadillac, and FMUSA, the band attempted to mix memories of the Vietnam war with missives about the growing conflagration in Iraq. Not being a fancier of saccharine love songs, I found the decidedly non-sugar-coated and ethereal Satellite the most memorable song in the collection. While I leaned towards liking the album, it didn’t hold me spellbound like the band’s previous offerings. After Mall my love affair with the group was on hold.

Many lifetimes later, I heard that guitarist Andy Gill—the last remaining original member of the group, had become the “frontman” for a reconstituted Gang of Four, and that the band had released an album titled What Happens Next.

The new Gang of Four were a little too reconstituted for me, they had become a simulacrum. In fact, What Happens Next was a mud pool of computerized synth doodles enveloping humdrum vocals and lyrics. Despite being mud, when thrown, it would stick to nothing. If Gill had released this recording under his own name that would have been one thing, but he messed around with the legacy of Gang of Four, and that’s quite another matter.

Imagine for a moment that the psychedelic rock band The Doors, in the wake of Jim Morrison’s death, continued to tour and record new albums, and then… oh wait, that actually happened.

After Morrison’s death, band members Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger wanted to tour and record under the Doors name—they also wanted to sell the rights to Doors songs for use in advertising. But drummer John Densmore, understanding Morrison to be the irreplaceable heart and soul of the Doors, fought and won a lengthy court battle preventing use of the name “The Doors.”

As the last original member of the Gang of Four, there’s a lesson for Andy Gill waiting in the “strange days” of The Doors… you too are replaceable, and in a time to come there may very well be a Gang of Four with no original members. Nevertheless, not even the improprieties of Gil can torpedo the legacy of those early works by the real Gang of Four.

Which brings me to the Washington Post, you know, where “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” On April 5, 2018 they published an article titled, “Ivanka Trump is featured on the cover of a punk band’s new ‘Complicit’ album.“ Now guess who that unspecified “punk” band might be. Yup, its Andy Gill’s ersatz Gang of Four, otherwise known as the Gang of One. It’s illuminating that the Washington Post has written so little on the original Gang of Four over the decades. A puny concert review they published in 1979 was not only indicative of mainstream press coverage of the band, it was hilarious in its cluelessness:

“The Gang of Four, the London band that opened the show, had one leaden foot stuck in the punk tradition and the other dangling in concept art. The band tried to fuse disparate musical elements—ominous and militia-like, drums, dissonant and choppy fragments, and toneless chanted vocals—into something new and compelling. At their best, in “At Home He’s a Tourist,” they were riveting. At their worst, they sounded like a Metroliner derailing in Union Station. Mostly they were perplexing.”

Perplexing eh? Ah! But now the Washington Post just loves the Gang of Four, because… you know, the racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamaphobic, orange Cheeto nightmare, warmongering Nazi dotard Trump!

Andy Gill made a curious statement to Pitchfork.com regarding Ivanka (Things You Can’t Have), which is of course the second track on the Complicit EP. It was an atypical comment from Gill about the media:

“When we think of ‘the media’ everyone has lots of ideas about what we mean. It could be social media, where hundreds of memes crisscross the world; informing, misinforming, beginning or reinforcing ideas that may last a lifetime and beyond. Ideas about Jews, Muslims, or, say, the World Trade Center or perhaps, the criminality of certain American politicians. And then there is the receding traditional media with disappearing jobs like ‘journalists’ and ‘fact checkers.’ That’s the media the Trump family despise.”

Gill’s comment can only be read as a frontal attack on President Trump, as well as a full-throated defense of traditional media. That will surely thrill Trump’s detractors (which is obviously the point), but Gill’s remark is inconsistent. The Gang of Four have a history of lyrically zeroing in on the ways media have created unhealthy social-political landscapes, and otherwise adversely bending and shaping public consciousness.

When I saw the Gang of Four at the Country Club in 1983, fifty corporations owned 90% of all media in the United States. By 1993 that number had fallen to twenty. Today, as the Gang of Four inflicts Complicit upon the world, there are only six corporations in control of America’s media. That means just six companies hold sway over 90% of newspapers, magazines, radio, television, movies, and music in the U.S., including distribution outlets. Put another way, a tiny minority has a stranglehold over the news and culture consumed by Americans, but Andy Gill wants you to worry about Trump hating the media.

Gill’s mention of the “journalists” and “fact checkers” of the “traditional media” is a laugh. Is he speaking of how the “newspaper of record,” the New York Times, helped take America—and the world—to war in Iraq in 2003? The paper published repeated headlines and reports about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction and having connections to al-Qaeda. It was all based upon lies and fabrications provided to NYT reporter Judith Miller by Iraqi Ahmed Chalabi, who was heavily funded by the CIA and the US government. So Gill, your “traditional media” was nothing but a mouthpiece for the war mongers. And the “fact checkers,” well… they were simply on an endless vacation.

Or maybe Gill was talking about the traditional media in 2011, when President Obama decided to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi by bombing Libya. The Prez said he didn’t need Congressional approval, because it wasn’t a war, it was a “kinetic military action.” He said the War Powers Act didn’t apply. But the war effort required Cheerleaders, so the traditional media with its journalists and fact checkers stepped in to convince everyone a democratic uprising was underway. The democratic “rebels” turned out to be mostly Islamic fanatics, and after they murdered Gaddafi Libya didn’t become a Jeffersonian Republic, it became a bug light for al-Qaeda and ISIS. The “fact checkers”? They’re duteously counting the Libyan refugees flooding into Europe.

Over the years the Gang of Four cultivated a reputation as radical provocateurs, conceivably for the theatrics of it. Finding an article about the band that doesn’t refer to their “Marxist” “Socialist” or “left-wing” leanings is not an easy task. But at this point, their Complicit publicity stunt points in another direction. In their present Gang of Four 2.0 form they have become political opportunists. Don’t be surprised if you see Andy Gill wearing an “I’m With Her” T-shirt.

In 1988 Noam Chomsky wrote a book tilted Manufacturing Consent. He argued that mainstream media proved to be “effective & powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function.” Wow, that sounds like a Gang of Four lyric! For years leftists accused “corporate media” of being a threat to democracy by actively “manufacturing consent” with broadcasts and articles. In the late 1980s the American left referred to journalists as “stenographers to power.” Left-wing journalist David Barsamian used that phrase to title his 1992 book on “media and propaganda.”

Of course all of this ceased when Mr. Trump invented his own variant of the terms “manufacturing consent” and “stenographers to power.” Vulgarian that he is, Trump just calls it “Fake News.” Now the left is backpedaling, no more criticizing the propaganda functions of the corporate media, no, it’s time to take your place on the barricades because “Trump is deliberately undermining the First Amendment!” You’re liable to find Andy Gill atop one of those barricades, and if you’re nice he might sell you a copy of Complicit.

Even the rebooted Gang of Four are peddling bargain-basement Russophobia these days; the cover art for Complicit displays the Russian translation of the title in parentheses (замешанная). The EP contains four songs, Lucky, Ivanka (Things You Can’t Have), I’m a Liar, and Lucky (10 O’Clock Chemical Remix). I dared a listen to Lucky, released in advance as a slick marketing trick, except, cleverness has nothing to do with it if what you’re selling is subpar. Forgive me but, to the ears of this once hard-core Gang of Four fan, Lucky is unlistenable.

SPIN had an April 4, 2018 review of the Gang’s new effort that is likely the only honest critique you’ll find on the internet. It reads in part:

“Unfortunately, Lucky, the first single, is really not very good at all. With some squelchy bass, brittle fuzz-tone guitar, and a tepid vocal from whatever lead singer Andy Gill is working with these days, it sounds more like dance punk revival also-rans (and recent Gang of Four manifestation) the Faint than any of the Gang’s classic era material. But we’re posting it anyway, just because of that awesome cover art. I guess you could say we’re… Complicit.”

So there’s your standard of criticism when it comes to today’s music. SPIN could not have been more honest had they written: “The song is execrable but we’ll promote it despite our better judgement since it’s against Trump. Oh yes, and we’re Complicit.” True enough, scheming right along with the Washington Post, Newsweek, and the slippery mucky mucks of the DNC.

I have read comments from people who have never heard of Gang of Four, or from those who are marginally familiar with their music but don’t care for it. These types have said they will buy Complicit, not because they have been swept off their feet by the Gang of Four, but because they hate Trump. Congrats boys, I don’t think you’ve ever attracted such a following before. Funny, you used to critique commodification, but now apparently you fully embrace it.

Then there are those open-minded, supposed aficionados of Gang of Four, who insist Andy Gill’s Complicit is not a case of “jumping on the bandwagon to cash in on being anti-Trump.” They’ll also buy Complicit, pointing to Entertainment! and Solid Gold as proof that Andy Gill “has been consistent for over forty years,” as if all the fuss over the decades has been about Mr. Gill. Don’t ignore the fact that the band that created those albums exists in memory only.

It has been reported in certain quarters that Complicit will be released on April 20, 2018. Workers, remember, you can declare YOUR resistance by taking your pay and squandering it on cheap plonk! In the meantime, if you hear the words “Making money is making sense. It’s a shame” rattling around in your head, there may be hope for you yet.

In the dead of night in 1929, a Steam Locomotive roars down the tracks to Berlin from somewhere in Russia. The mysterious train carries hidden cargo, tons of gold and a huge amount of deadly poison phosgene gas. But who are the senders and who are the recipients? Disparate forces and individuals in Berlin—monarchists, mobsters, social democrats, trotskyists and stalinists—all at odds with one another and aware of the secret transport, are absolutely desperate to get their hands on it. Their nefarious plots to capture the train and its payload form just one underpinning of the new German TV series, Babylon Berlin.

Never before have I written a review of a television show, and wouldn’t you know it, my first attempt is almost as long as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. But then, Babylon Berlin is not your typical idiot box entertainment. So please enjoy my first, and possibly last stab at such criticism.

I have always had a passion for the art produced in Germany during the Weimar years (1919-1933), so I was thrilled to discover Babylon Berlin would depict that tumultuous period. This essay gives my view of the show thus far, its strong points and foibles, with a spotlight on the art and politics of the period.

The TV series has multiple characters and plot lines, and a few anachronisms I’ll write off to artistic license. The narrative of this detective noir period piece is engaging enough that you don’t need to know the actual history behind the drama’s backdrop—but it certainly helps. My essay is not a timeline for the show, and though long and detailed, I will not be covering everything presented in the series. However, my article will contain major “spoilers.”

The main character of Babylon Berlin is Inspector Gereon Rath (played by Volker Bruch). A man in his early thirties, Gereon is a well-mannered member of the Cologne police force. A combat veteran of WWI, he quietly suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, and secretly self-medicates when high stress situations cause him to tremble uncontrollably.

For that purpose he is most likely using the cough syrup containing heroin then produced by Bayer, Germany’s chemical and pharmaceutical company. Perfectly legal at the time, heroin based medicinals were widely used as a painkiller throughout the country. Rath is also a man struggling with his Catholic faith, both for the loss of his brother Anno on the battlefield, and for his ongoing affair with his brother’s wife Helga Rath.

Engelbert Rath, a senior official at the Cologne police force, transferred his son Gereon from the Cologne police to the Alexanderplatz police HQ in Berlin, also known as the Rote Burg (Red Castle) for its red walls.

Gereon is partnered with vice squad leader, Bruno Wolter (played by Peter Kurth). A gruff, 44-year-old bear of a man and fellow veteran of the Great War, Bruno is a loyal friend and colleague—provided you’re on his side.

Engelbert has a clandestine mission for his son Gereon: hunt down the underworld pornographers who are blackmailing politicians with surreptitiously shot film of them engaged in sadomasochistic acts. It is suggested that the Lord Mayor of Cologne, Dr. Adenauer, is one of the victims of the extortionists. To preserve the stability of the government, and because Adenauer is a family friend, Engelbert wants Gereon to find and destroy the incriminating film.

Konrad Adenauer was in fact an actual historic figure. A devout Catholic, he was not only the Mayor of Cologne during the Weimar years, but at the close of WWII was a co-founder and leader of the center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU, the same party of Germany’s current Chancellor Angela Merkel).

Adenauer was also the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) from 1949 to 1963.

Before Babylon Berlin was shown on German TV, series producer Stefan Arndt explained the plot to Bild-Zeitung. Despite knowing the actual story, the tabloid published a sensationalist piece around the question, “Is it really necessary to make the father of the Federal Republic a sadomasochist?” It should go without saying that the real Adenauer was never blackmailed for being a sadomasochist. The controversy went nowhere when the TV series eventually showed Mayor Adenauer to be completely innocent.

The characters, events, fashion, political movements, street names, even the buildings in Babylon Berlin are rooted in historical reality. The realistic digital recreation of Berlin’s Alexanderplatz is one such example. It evoked the hustle and bustle of the modern metropolis that was Berlin in 1929; but one has to make exception for the fact that two of the buildings depicted in the scene had not yet been built. The Alexanderhaus would be constructed in 1930 and Jonass & CO erected in 1934. Chalk it up to artistic license.

There is some bending of the truth in Babylon Berlin, the digital Alexanderplatz is a good example. Another is the hijacked train so central to the story, a German DRB Class 52 steam locomotive, which would not be built until 1942. Other examples exist, but I’ll let you find them. This brings to mind the often quoted but horribly misunderstood words of Pablo Picasso, who once quipped, “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth—at least the truth that is given us to understand.”

Much of the outdoor shots in Babylon Berlin were filmed at Studio Babelsberg. Filming took place on Neue Berliner Straße (New Berlin Street) part of the studio’s Metropolitan Backlot. A modular set of four streets with different architectural styles, nearly the entire set is comprised of false front buildings. The Babylon Berlin set included a façade of the Moka Efti nightclub on a broad paved avenue with modernist style buildings. Around the corner was a recreation of the drab slums where working class people would have lived, replete with cobblestone streets. Actor Volker Bruch called the set “a chameleon.”

Viewing Babylon Berlin is like watching German Expressionist paintings come to life; the 1926 watercolor Hausvogteiplatz by artist Rudolf Schlichter is one such work. The title refers to an underground railway station in the central locality of Mitte, Berlin. Schlichter placed a gallows in his cityscape, a prescient statement on the doomed city. In 1937 the Nazis declared him a “degenerate” artist and in 1939 they forbade him from painting.

Jeanne Mammen was involved in the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement so many German artists were a part of at the time. It was a rejection of Expressionist idealism and a turn towards social and political engagement. Mammen was known for drawings in pencil, pen, ink, and watercolor washes that focused on women; in retrospect her drawings of bohemian women in Berlin’s cafes, including lesbian nightclubs, seem most remembered.

Sie Repräsentiert (She represents) was a 1928 drawing of women in a lesbian night spot; published in the pages of the weekly satirical magazine, Simplicissmus, the editors were actually the ones to title the drawing. They attached the following text; “Daddy’s a state prosecutor, Mummy sits in the state parliament, I’m the only one in the whole family with a private life!”

Mammen once said, “I have always wanted to be just a pair of eyes, walking through the world unseen, only to be able to see others. Unfortunately one was seen…” And those who saw her were the Nazis. Reading their scathing denunciations after her last public exhibit in 1933, Mammen made a choice. She entered into self-imposed isolation, what Germans called “internal exile.” She withdrew to her studio and worked there in absolute secrecy, never to exhibit, publish, or speak of her art. Miraculously, the Nazis never came after Mammen. She survived the war, and died in 1976 at the age of 86.

There is some gratuitous sex and violence in Babylon Berlin, which at first had me thinking the show would be just another titillating TV sensation. But the attention paid to costumes, architecture, historic events and other details kept me watching, and it paid off. Aside from being an over the top noir thriller with a labyrinthine plot, the series also serves as a basic primer on the Weimar years.

A modest political understanding of the Weimar Republic years will help you figure out the historic setting of Babylon Berlin, which is why I wrote this essay.

As WWI drew to a close, support for Kaiser Wilhelm II in Germany collapsed; at the time his Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff were in practice running a military dictatorship. In 1918 the anti-monarchist November Revolution broke out, the Kaiser abdicated, and a left-leaning provisional government filled the vacuum.

Then the Spartacist uprising, led by the just founded Communist Party of Germany (KPD), tried to overthrow the government, which in turn unleashed the pro-monarchist army and the right-wing Freikorps (Free Corps) paramilitary to crush the uprising. The Weimar coalition government was founded on Feb. 6, 1919, and on June 23, 1919, it signed the Versailles Treaty, formally ending WWI.

The Versailles Treaty banned armored vehicles, heavy artillery, submarines and military aircraft of any kind being possessed by Germany’s Reichswehr (the armed forces—”Reich” meaning empire or realm, and “wehr” meaning defense). The Reichswehr was limited to 100,000 men and prohibited from manufacturing and stockpiling chemical weapons.

To the monarchists, militarists, and extreme rightists, those in the Weimar government became known as the “November criminals” for “stabbing the German army in the back” and for signing the Versailles Treaty. Yet the Weimar state was reliant upon the pro-monarchist armed forces and their counter-revolutionary Freikorps allies for security.

Confused yet? History isn’t nearly as serpentine and convoluted as Babylon Berlin’s narrative, so stop fidgeting and pay attention, I’m setting the stage for the drama. The TV series traces the tensions between the weak Social Democracy of Weimar and the reactionary generals of the Reichswehr that sought its downfall.

The TV series focuses attention on the little known Schwarze Reichswehr (Black Reichswehr), a shadow military the pro-monarchist generals set up to circumvent the Versailles Treaty and illegally rearm Germany. The Black Reichswehr was allied to multiple paramilitary units like the Freikorps, Der Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet), and Die Organisation Consul (Organization Consul or OC).

By 1919 there were 103 Freikorps formations and by 1923 an estimated 1.5 million men had participated in them. [1] In open violation of the Versailles Treaty, Steel Helmet alone had 500,000 men under arms by 1930. The OC assassinated the Weimar government Minister of Finance Matthias Erzberger in 1921, and the Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in 1922. These types of paramilitaries would eventually join with the fledgling fighting force of the Nazi Party, the SA or Sturmabteilung (Storm Detachment).

In episode 1 of Babylon Berlin a train is hijacked by followers of Leon Trotsky before it reaches Berlin, they want to send its cargo of gold to their exiled leader in Turkey in order to finance the overthrow of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

In a separate plot unbeknownst to the rebel communists, industrialist Alfred Nyssen (played by Lars Eidinger), financed the smuggling of phosgene gas into Germany on the same train in order to rearm his Black Reichswehr accomplices.

Nyssen is a stand-in for the historical figure Fritz Thyssen, who with fellow industrialists Friedrich Flick, Günther Quandt, Gustav and Alfried Krupp, and others, were the billionaires plotting against the Weimar Republic. They would later become the financial backbone of the looming Hitler regime.

The fictional hijacking in Babylon Berlin aside, history shows us that Trotsky (the founder of the Soviet Red Army) was expelled from the Russian Communist Party by Stalin and sent into exile. He ended up living in Turkey on the island of Prinkipoin before traveling to Mexico in 1937 where he and his wife lived for a short time with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Eventually a Stalinist assassin armed with an ice axe attacked Trotsky in his home in Mexico on June 7, 1940; he died from his wounds the next day.

The hijackers in episode 1 are a fictitious secret Trotskyist cell in Berlin called “Red Fortress,” led by Alexei Kardakov (played by Ivan Shvedoff). They run a subversive printshop where they hold meetings and print revolutionary propaganda.

In one scene they are printing flyers that read: “Workers! May 1: Step out and fight for a Fourth International and the World Revolution! ‘Stalin is the gravedigger of the revolution.’ - Leon Trotsky” (anachronism alert: the Trotskyist Fourth International would not be founded until 1938).

In the TV series Kardakov lives above ground as a violinist, and gets word of the gold from his lover Lana Nikoros, a popular Kabarett singer in Berlin (played by Severija Janusauskaite). But things are never as they appear.

Nikoros is the backwards spelling of Sorokina, it is an alias for the mysterious Countess Svetlana Sorokina, seducer and betrayer of communists, monarchists, and social democrats alike. It’s not even known if the enigmatic Sorokina is actually a Countess, the only certainty is that she’s after the gold cargo on the train, the “Sorokin gold,” the untold wealth of the Russian oligarch Sorokin family.

In episode 2 of Babylon Berlin, Nikoros/Svetlana has a self-serving plan to take the “Sorokin gold” from the Trotskyists, she betrays Kardakov to the Soviet diplomat in Berlin, Colonel Trochin (played by Russian actor Denis Burgazliev). Trochin is an official in Stalin’s secret police, members of which he sends to murder the Trotskyists of the “Red Fortress” as they work in their printshop.

Kardakov witnesses the massacre and narrowly escapes to become one of the most abused characters in film history; at various moments in the TV series he’s shot, falls out a window from a great height into a pool of water, dislocates his ankle, is stabbed, and is exposed to poison gas. None of this was meant to be comedic, but sheesh!

History gives us a slightly different picture. The Soviet ambassador to Germany from 1923 to 1930 was Nikolay Krestinsky, a leading communist that ran afoul of Joseph Stalin by being an admirer of Trotsky. In a move most likely to get Krestinsky out of the way, Stalin sent him to Berlin as ambassador. It’s implausible that a man close to Trotsky would see to the murder of his fellow Trotskyists. In the end Krestinsky returned to Moscow where he was arrested, given a sham trial during the Stalinist Great Purge, and executed in 1938.

The opening train scene made me think me of the short 1927 film by Walter Ruttmann, Berlin, Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City). His film showed the approach to Berlin through the window of a fast moving Steam Locomotive—dizzying shots of villages, bridges, transmission towers, factories, blurred by speed and interspersed with shots of the train’s mechanical components at work.

The Futurist spectacle praised modern technology, but when the train pulled into the station, the sights, sounds, and people of the city became the focus. “Symphony” is a visual chronicle of 1927 Berlin, and I’m sure the makers of Babylon Berlin examined the film again and again. Ruttmann was also the cinematographer for German film classics like Fritz Lang’s 1924 Die Nibelungen: Siegfried, and Lang’s Metropolis (1927).

Viewers of Babylon Berlin may think the animated closing credits are current digital studio productions. They look contemporary, but they are in fact excerpts from silent animated films Ruttmann created in the early 1920s.

From his four-part series titled Lichtspiel Opus (Play of Light Opus), segments from his Opus II (1923) and Opus IV (1925) run under the credits while clips of the show’s soundtrack are played. Ruttmann created his works by applying oil paint with a brush directly on a glass pane set up beneath an animation camera. An image was painted, filmed, altered, filmed again—repeating the entire process frame by frame until the film’s completion. Ruttmann was apparently the first to create animation in this manner.

Unlike many of his compatriots in the arts, Ruttmann didn’t leave Germany when the Nazis took power, despite the fact that the film studios he worked for had been taken over by the Nazis. He helped edit Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 The Triumph of the Will, and was put to work directing propaganda films.

While producing one such film on the frontline with Russia in 1944, he was seriously wounded and died in a Berlin hospital from his injuries. His career begs an important question; how does an avant-garde artist come to work with brutal totalitarians? I think this unanswered question, one of many posed in Babylon Berlin, is the reason why Walter Ruttmann’s works were included in the series.

There isn’t a better artwork to illustrate my article on the Babylon Berlin TV series than Weimarer Fasching (Weimar Carnival), a painting created by Horst Naumann (1908-1990). It could have been commissioned by producers of the show, though it was painted between the years 1928 and 1929. It offers a kaleidoscopic view of Weimar Germany, juxtaposing the acceptable with the intolerable. There’s a line of Kabarett dancers in top hats, and the man who was on his way to becoming the heavyweight champion of the world, Max Schmeling. But the painting also contains sinister images.

Paul von Hindenburg is depicted, at the time of the painting he was Reich President, but in 1933 he would appoint Adolf Hitler chancellor. Over Hindenburg’s shoulder there’s a graveyard, under him, the gaping maw of a bank vault, to his right there’s a Zeppelin airship, the type used to drop bombs during the Great War. At top left there’s a fleet of French biplanes, at the bottom of the painting a soldier in a gas mask slogs across a battlefield strewn with tanks. But it’s the central figure that commands our attention; a soldier wearing a red jacket, monocle, and a swastika embellished steel helmet. He’s probably in the Freikorps, who, to identify their units, would paint an identifying symbol on their helmets before entering a street fight. This is one of the earliest German paintings depicting a swastika that I know of.

Naumann was a painter and graphic designer who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden until 1927; Otto Dix was one of his professors. In 1927 Naumann joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and soon after started painting Weimar Carnival. In 1929 he joined the KPD’s Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists. In 1931 he worked at a commercial printing company designing billboards, postcards, brochures, and posters. In 1934 the Nazis arrested him and sent him to a detention center for left-wing political prisoners. In 1939 he was press-ganged into the Nazi army to work in a labor battalion. After the war Horst Naumann became famous for his numerous stamp and poster designs, with his posters for German Zoos being most remembered.

Episode 4 of Babylon Berlin shows scenes right out of a history book as Gereon and Bruno are caught up in violent demonstrations. May 1, 1929, Blutmai (Bloody May) was a real life event in German history where 33 civilians were shot and killed by a security force of up to 13,000 armed police unleashed by the Weimar government. The episode shows Gereon, Bruno, and a squadron of police carrying out a door to door raid on the civilian population to confiscate firearms; it is a prescient scene.

In 1928 the Weimar government passed strict gun control laws for “the maintenance of public security and order.” Citizens were required to register, and or surrender their guns to the police or face jail time. It should go without saying that these laws would have disastrous consequences; when Hitler took power in 1933 the German people were already largely disarmed. [2]

The actual history of Bloody May shows that the Weimar government in 1928 lifted the ban on public speeches given by Adolf Hitler.

Not surprisingly Hitler then gave a speech in Berlin and a riot ensued. The government responded by banning all public political speeches and rallies, including the International Workers Day demonstration planned by the German Communist Party.

Virtually on the eve of May Day, April 29, 1929, Der Abend (The Evening), the late edition of the Social Democratic Party newspaper Vorwärts (Forward), featured a headline that read, “200 dead on May 1? Communists prepare for crimes.” It was of course propaganda designed to discourage people from attending May Day, but it was also a way to slander the KPD.

That very edition of Der Abend appeared in episode 5 of Babylon Berlin during the scene of an emergency meeting between Berlin officials—Police Chief Karl Zörgiebel, Mayor Gustav Böß, and head of the Political Police, August Benda (all of them Social Democrats).

The Chief of police throws the edition of Der Abend on a table and asserts, “Our own party organ says 200 dead!” To which Benda replies, “That is false information.” That the creators of the TV series would use a duplicate copy of the May Day 1929 edition of Der Abend, shows how far they went in recreating the ambience of the Weimar years.

May 1, 1929 proved fatal to the Weimar government. After the mass killing, the injuring of 200, the arrests of more than 1,200 people, and states of emergency declared in the working class districts of Neukölln and Wedding, a deep chasm opened up between the social democrats and the hard left.

The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) resolved to fight the “social fascism” of the Social Democratic Party. Ultimately, disunity on the left gave the fascist right an opportunity to march into power in 1933.

One painting that depicts the divided Germany of the period is the 1932 oil painting Die antifaschistische Jugend (The antifascist Youth) by Carl Lauterbach.

There’s not much information about the painting but it’s likely a portrait of young members of the Roter Frontkämpferbund (Alliance of Red Front-Fighters), a militia founded to fight enemy political rivals of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

Around this time Lauterbach began to paint exclusively in black and white, because in his words the Nazis took away the colors of joy. In Babylon Berlin the type of young men Lauterbach painted would be among the militants shown battling the police during Berlin’s 1929 Bloody May.

Lauterbach was a member of the Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands (Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany), the group of artists who belonged to the KPD. Postwar he claimed the Nazis banned his art and declared him a “degenerate artist.” Lauterbach was celebrated in his home city of Düsseldorf—the City Museum of Düsseldorf awarded an annual “Carl Lauterbach Prize for Social Graphics.” However, history does not take kindly to liars. In 2012 the City Museum of Düsseldorf posted the following:

“Contrary to his later self-portrayal as a dissident and artist of resistance, Lauterbach has been involved in about 40 exhibitions in Germany and the territories occupied by Germany between 1933 and 1943, including at the organized by the Wehrmacht art exhibition for German soldiers in Paris. Lauterbach had no professional ban nor were his pictures considered ‘degenerate.’ Since 1934 he was a member of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts.” [3]

The Reich Chamber of Fine Arts (Reichskulturkammer or RKK) was founded by Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. Its mission was to control the cultural life of Germany. Whatever your creative field, cinema, theater, painting, literature, etc., you had to join the RKK in order to work, but first you had to have an official Ariernachweis, a Nazi certificate proving you were of the “Aryan race.” It appears that Carl Lauterbach successfully hid or denounced his red background to climb aboard the Nazi death machine.

Returning to the narrative of Babylon Berlin; ultimately Gereon Rath and Bruno Wolter report directly to the head of the Political Police, August Benda (played by Matthias Brandt).

Benda is an ardent supporter of the Weimar government. Charitable and kind-hearted with people, he’s a relentless investigator, and suspects certain people are out to overthrow the republic.

Benda is also Jewish, and with Germany rushing headlong towards a dark future, he is a marked man. He believes Bruno might be involved with the Black Reichswehr, and so he has Bruno’s assistant, Stephan Jänicke (played by Anton von Lucke), spy on the vice squad officer.

It’s ironic that the role of Benda is played by actor Matthias Brandt; here again cinema is entwined with real life. Brandt is the youngest son of Cold War politician Willy Brandt, who was the leader of the Social Democratic Party from 1964 to 1987 and served as the Chancellor of West Germany from 1969 to 1974. Willy Brandt was a supporter of the Vietnam war and was as anti-Communist as the fictional character of August Benda.

A historic poster that perfectly illustrates Benda’s political position can be found in a 1930 propaganda street poster for the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The poster was issued for the German federal election of September 1930, it reads: “Clear the Way for List 1 Social Democrats.” The visual message is unmistakable, a muscular working man symbolizing the SPD elbows out Communist and Nazi party cadre, but the election results were somewhat different. The SPD remained the largest party in the Reichstag with 143 seats, but the Communists won 77 seats and the Nazis won 107. Just three years later when Hitler took control, the Nazis would ban the Social Democratic Party. It remained banned and underground until the war ended in 1945.

A 23-year-old woman named Charlotte Ritter (played by Liv Lisa Fries) is also one of the primary characters in Babylon Berlin. She lives with her family in Neukölln, a working class borough in the southeastern part of Berlin.

Between poverty and her dysfunctional family, her life is fairly miserable. Love for her little sister Toni and an irrepressible optimism are her only possessions. In the evenings Charlotte works as an off-the-books prostitute in the infamous Berlin dance club, the fashionable Moka Efti.

Charlotte is hired at Red Castle police HQ to catalog photographs of murder victims for the Criminal Investigation Department, headed by a man named Gennat.

Historically speaking, Ernst Gennat was the director of the Berlin Criminal Investigation Department. A brilliant criminologist, he coined the term Serienmörder (serial killer), introduced the idea of profiling, and was one of the first to insist that a crime scene must not be tampered with. Gennat solved 298 cases during his career.

Called the “Buddha of Alexanderplatz” by fellow officers because he weighed in at 300 pounds, the nickname carried over to the Babylon Berlin Gennat character, who was of slightly less girth. I should also mention that Charlotte Ritter’s job, that of cataloging photographs of murder victims to create a national registry of violent deaths, was an idea developed by Gennat.

History notes that Charlotte’s Neukölln was a stronghold for the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In 1926 Joseph Goebbels, then a regional commander for the growing Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), or Nazi Party (which had only 49,000 members in all of Germany at the time), staged a march into Neukölln that culminated in a bloody skirmish with communist militants. In 1926 there were little more than a few hundred Nazis in Berlin, a city Goebbels called “the reddest city in Europe besides Moscow.”

Charlotte helps her destitute friend Greta Overbeck (played by Leonie Benesch) land a job as a full-time maid with the Benda family. Greta is loyal, apolitical, and very naive. She joins Jänicke and Charlotte at Berlin’s Lake Wannsee for a swim and meets Fritz and Otto, two young communists who like insulting fat cats and bankers. Greta develops romantic feelings for Fritz that will have disastrous consequences.

The scenes of Charlotte, Greta, and friends at Lake Wannsee were obviously modeled after Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) a black and white silent film created in 1930 by Curt and Robert Siodmak. The film was central to the advancement of modern cinema in Germany. Later on in the Babylon Berlin series, Charlotte is seen unaccompanied in a crowded movie house watching Menschen am Sonntag.

Babylon Berlin took artistic license with the Moka Efti nightclub, which was a historic cafe in Berlin named after its Greek-Italian owner Giovanni Eftimiades. It enticed Berliners with strong coffee and an “Egyptian Music Salon” where jazz played and refreshments were taken. Entertainment and perhaps a bit more had crowds flocking to the club. Despite what was shown in the TV series the real Moka Efti did not have a brothel in its basement. But it did have the latest technology, a passenger elevator called a paternoster lift. While you don’t see such a lift in the TV series Moka Efti, one appears in the Red Castle HQ. Charlotte and Gereon meet for the first time when they disembark from a paternoster and bump into one another, spilling their work files.

In the TV series Edgar “the Armenian” (played by Mišel Maticevic ), owns and runs the Moka Efti. A debonair man of few words, the Armenian is a ruthless mobster who has bribed, intimidated, blackmailed, and murdered his way to the top. His corrupt grip is felt in the police force and in the highest levels of government.

Gereon has noticed his footprint in every serious crime he’s investigated, yet, the Armenian is oddly protective of Gereon, a man he could have done away with on numerous occasions—and yes, Edgar is after the “Sorokin gold.”

I noticed something compelling about Edgar’s office in the Moka Efti nightclub, there are pictures of Armenian relatives or friends hanging on the walls. Given that the Armenian Genocide took place during WWI and the Ottoman Turks were wrapping up their butchery in 1923, this speaks volumes about Edgar’s temperament and may account for his being a patient of the mysterious Doctor Schmidt. As a native of Los Angeles, I’ll tell you that the Armenian population in my city is as high as 360,000, and so the issue of the Armenian Genocide is especially poignant. Every April 24th Armenians commemorate the victims with a huge march on the streets of L.A., marking the genocide that began in April of 1915.

In the TV series the unconventional psychologist named Doctor Schmidt (played by Jens Harzer), treats “shell shocked” WWI vets through hypnosis and drug therapy. His work touched the lives of many and as it turns out he healed the Armenian, administers to members of the Black Reichswehr, and has a keen interest in Gereon Rath. The character of Schmidt is woven through the whole of Babylon Berlin, and he plays a major role in the calamitous end of series two. One is left wondering if Schmidt is a saint or a sinner.

One of the highlights of the Babylon Berlin series is when Kabarett performer Nikoros (Svetlana Sorokina’s alter ego), entertains the crowd at the Moka Efti by singing the gloomful song Zu Asche zu Staub (To Ashes, to Dust). She’s in androgynous black leather drag and accompanied on stage by a wild troupe of exotic dancers dressed in banana skirts. The crowd sings along and follows the pantomime, swaying and gyrating in drunken revelry. But it was not the first time that banana skirts had been seen.

In real life the American dancer Josephine Baker made her way from the U.S. to Paris, France in 1925. At 19 she caused a sensation with her exotic dancing when she debuted in the Black American musical revue “La Revue Nègre.”

That same year she become a star at the Folies Bergère performing her “Danse Sauvage,” a dance where she wore little more than “a costume of 16 bananas strung into a skirt.” [4]

In 1926 Baker performed her show in Berlin, and while Babylon Berlin makes no mention of her, the dancers at the Moka Efti are a tribute to her nonetheless. When the Nazis came to power Baker was banned from performing on stage in Germany—she moved back to Paris. When the Nazis invaded Paris she joined the French underground.

Josephine Baker would die in Paris on April 12, 1975 at the age of 68. The story of the legendary Baker would make a heart-stirring movie, if only there were any decent script writers, directors, and producers left in Hollywood.

American jazz swept Germany in the 1920s and set roots there. People listened to Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong on the radio, the Charleston became a dance craze, and Germans formed their own jazz combos and orchestras like the Weintraubs-Syncopators. Artists noticed jazz as well. Otto Dix created two paintings that showed jazz musicians, a 1922 self-portrait titled An die Schönheit (To Beauty), and a 1928 triptych titled Metropolis, which had as its central panel a depiction of elites being entertained by a jazz combo.

Even though the majority of Americans today think jazz is out of vogue, some of us still consider it an indispensable musical form. But how does jazz have political and social implications? The answer in part is found in German history.

In 1933 the Nazis targeted jazz for its links to African-Americans. In 1935, to stop “racial pollution” they banned jazz being played on German radio.

In 1938 they organized the Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) exhibition to denigrate jazz as well as Jewish classical music composers like Gustave Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn.

Many young Germans belonged to the Swingjugend (Swing Youth) counter-culture, where playing jazz in underground clubs was an act of defiance. Eventually the Nazis had enough, and starting in 1941 they began mass arrests of Swing Youth, sending them to concentration camps.

It is amazing how many times Babylon Berlin will send you to the internet to research something viewed in the show, take the following song for example. In the second season’s final episode, Nikoros/Svetlana resurfaces as a Russian performer in a Paris nightclub. She sings a mournful song in Russian as an old paramour enters the club. At the end of the song, in keeping with its grief-stricken lyrics, she pretends to cut her throat using a prop theatrical knife.

The song Nikoros sang was Gloomy Sunday (titled Vaskresenje in Russian). The original Gloomy Sunday however was written and performed by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezso Seress in 1933; in Hungarian the title was Szomorú vasárnap. The song was recorded by Paul Robeson in 1936 and then by Billie Holiday in 1941. Since then Gloomy Sunday has been vocalized by innumerable performers.

Overall the soundtrack for Babylon Berlin is possibly the biggest anachronism in the show—but truthfully, I love it. The ambient incidental music for Babylon Berlin was written by longtime collaborators Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer, one of the show’s directors. The two composed a contemporary score using electronica, strings, and piano, it is entrancing music that sounds both modern and reminiscent of the past. To me its most successful passages fuse techno with 1920s jazz; tracks like Dunkles Babel and Der Prangertag I find particularly striking.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the soundtrack was the participation of the English crooner and songwriter Bryan Ferry, who is remembered by many as the frontman for the 1970s glam art rock band Roxy Music.

Prior to punk rock in 1977, misfits like myself listened to the likes of David Bowie (Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars), and Roxy Music, which at the time included Brian Eno, who was a driving force behind the new electronic, ambient sound—some of which even influenced punk rock.

In 2012 Mr. Ferry formed the Bryan Ferry Orchestra and released The Jazz Age, a brilliant album of 1920s jazz renditions of his past hits. I have listened to this album innumerable times and I’m thrilled the songs Dance Away, Reason or Rhyme, Bitters End, Alphaville, Chance Meeting, and Bitter Sweet appear on the Babylon Berlin soundtrack. Best of all, in episode 10 of the TV show, Ferry makes a guest appearance as a jazz singer performing Reason or Rhyme at the Moka Efti.

While Ferry’s music is not actual jazz from the 1920s, it possesses its form, spirit and vitality, and the musicians of the Bryan Ferry Orchestra are no slouches either. The men of this retro-jazz ensemble have given themselves to the 1920s jazz style, and in my not so humble opinion, their music fits Babylon Berlin hand in glove. Watch the documentary The Making of ‘The Jazz Age’ to understand my enthusiasm for this music.

I have long complained that music in commercial films has become a hackneyed method of audience manipulation—a stupid and cheap one at that.

An example of what I’m talking about would be the music found in the 2001 “medieval adventure” film, A Knight’s Tale. Purportedly about 14th-century Europe, the soundtrack uses music from the likes of Queen (We Will Rock You), and David Bowie (Golden Years).

Yeah, because nothing says Middle Ages like rock n’ roll music. If you want just one example of the incandescent music of the medieval period, then listen to the works of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179). Hollywood directors no doubt wither away when exposed to such divine sounds.

Filming the Moka Efti scenes for the TV series took place in an old silent film theater in Berlin-Weissensee called the Delphi. Opening in 1929, the hall had a stage, an orchestra pit, and a seating capacity of 900. It was closed in 1959 and served as a storage room until the production crew for Babylon Berlin recreated the Moka Efti dance hall in its interior. Since then the hall was renovated and today the Delphi is a performing arts house.

The German satirical writer Kurt Tucholsky, one of the most consequential  journalists of the Weimar Republic, once wrote, “Expect nothing. Today: that is your life.” He could of written those words about any of the characters found in Babylon Berlin or, about us for that matter.

Tucholsky was a Jewish member of the Social Democratic Party prone to intense criticism of its leadership. In 1926 he was temporarily the publisher of the left-leaning journal Die Weltbühne (The World Stage), a journal dedicated to art, literature, and politics. It received a brief mention in Babylon Berlin when the dissident Austrian journalist Samuel Katelbach mentioned it in passing to Gereon Rath.

Of all the characters in the series, Samuel Katelbach (played by Karl Markovics) seems the most cognizant of where society was going. Putting aside his disheveled looks, as an independent reporter he knew the score. I’ve met a few like him in my lifetime, they work outside the mainstream to expose the truth no one wants to hear. A few listened in Germany, but not enough. Despite its historic impact Die Weltbühne had a small readership, but would pay a heavy price. While it’s amazing the series even named the journal, it did not mention its role in exposing a secret Reichswehr airbase in Lipetsk, Soviet Russia.

In episode 11 of Babylon Berlin, August Benda sends Gereon Rath and a police photographer named Gräf on an aerial mission over Lipetsk Russia to gather intelligence on the covert airbase. The info was needed to build a case for the arrest of army Generals suspected of violating the Versailles Treaty, which forbad Germany from having military aircraft. Two pilots fly the men over the base in a Junkers Ju 52 transport plane (anachronism alert: the plane wasn’t produced until 1931). In the hair-raising scene Gräf nearly falls out of the plane while taking photos, and is saved when Gereon grabs his arm as the plane dodges anti-aircraft fire. Action movie antics aside, it is a fact that the Reichswehr did maintain an illegal airbase in Lipetsk, Russia.

Shady Dealings in the Air was the daring 1927 exposé published in Die Weltbühne that revealed the Reichswehr had indeed violated the Treaty of Versailles by operating a massive secret airbase in Soviet Russia.

History has revealed that the Reichswehr contracted with the Soviets to run the base where future German pilots, as well as Soviet pilots, would receive combat training. The Reichswehr wanted to rebuild the Luftwaffe and the Soviets wanted German technical know how.

In 1931 the Weimar government charged the publisher of Die Weltbühne, Carl von Ossietzky, with treason and espionage for revealing the Lipetsk airbase. Convicted, he served 18 months in prison before being released in a 1932 amnesty.

When the Nazis took power in 1933 Ossietzky was rearrested and sent to the Esterwegen concentration camp where he was brutally tortured. As he continued to suffer in the camp he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. On the eve of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, he was transferred to a hospital under the watchful eyes of the Gestapo—soon after he was awarded the Nobel. The Nazis forbade German papers from publishing news of the award. Carl von Ossietzky died in 1938 as a consequence of his torture.

Liberal viewers of Babylon Berlin may think of the characters in the series associated with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) as the “good guys” and their monarchist opponents as stand-ins for today’s populists and nationalists. That viewpoint is ahistorical and ill-advised.

I will simply point out that in 1914 the marginally “socialist” SPD threw aside its principles, sided with Kaiser Wilhelm II, and voted in favor World War I. The horrific consequences are well known—18 million deaths and 23 million wounded. As a result the left-wing of the SPD abandoned the party en masse. But there is something else that may horrify liberals who believe the Weimar years were a liberatory time for women.

This may not mix well with the liberal image of daring young flappers with bob haircuts and the mythos of “new-found freedoms” for women, but an abortion ban was enshrined in paragraph 218 of the “progressive” Weimar constitution. It was primarily left-wing Germans that organized protests against the ban first added to the Criminal Code of the German Empire in 1871; the Weimar government could not, or would not, abolish paragraph 218.

The painter and photomontage artist Alice Lex-Nerlinger was part of Berlin’s left opposition to paragraph 218. In 1928 she became a member of the German Communist Party (KPD) and joined the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists, or “Asso” for short, an arts group open only to members of the KPD.

While a painter she was most well known for her photomontage works à la John Heartfield. In 1931 she painted Paragraph 218, a blasphemous condemnation of the abortion prohibition that treated abortion as a punishable offense.

In 1933 the Nazis banned Lex-Nerlinger from making or exhibiting her art; she destroyed her own works to avoid arrest and persecution. Paragraph 218 is one of the few works by Lex-Nerlinger to have survived the period.

In episode 13 of Babylon Berlin, Greta Overbeck agrees to meet her boyfriend Fritz one evening at a Neukölln side-street meeting hall of the Communist Party. Anxious that Fritz is late, she paces back and forth in front of the hall when Fritz’s friend Otto arrives; they greet and wait together.

Yards away Fritz appears on the darkened street and calls to Greta, immediately he is surrounded by men who identify themselves as police. They grab him, he breaks away and runs towards Greta and Otto—and the police shoot Fritz in the back.

Greta and Otto watch in horror as the police toss the wounded Fritz into a car and speed off. Otto clutches Greta and they run off into the night to find safety.

The same episode reveals Bruno to be a chief planner of the Reichswehr Generals’ plot to overthrow the Weimar government and restore Kaiser Wilhelm to the throne.

Major General Kurt Seegers (played by Ernst Stötzner) and his fellow conspirators are in prison following their arrests for the Lipetsk airbase plot, but the guards are sympathizers and give Bruno easy access to the prisoners. Bruno Wolter gives his cohorts the detailed plans for the imminent “Prangertag” Putsch.

In episode 14 of Babylon Berlin, Otto meets Greta in front of the Benda family home to tell her that Fritz “didn’t make it,” and that the political police headed by her boss August Benda were responsible for his murder. Distraught, Greta said, “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” Walking away Otto said forebodingly “We will keep in touch,” implying the Communist Party would have a plan for retribution.

Meanwhile, Bruno is whistling Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (The Ballad of Mack the Knife) as he helps initiate the planned military coup on Prangertag (the Feast of Corpus Christi). It is almost comic relief that putschist Bruno Wolter would be whistling a tune from Bertolt Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), but it does point out the sway left culture had in Berlin at the time. The fictional coup in Babylon Berlin seems to be modeled after the real life Küstrin Putsch of 1923.

In the TV series Bruno and his monarchist co-conspirators infiltrate a gala celebration at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in the Mitte district of Berlin. Mayor Gustav Böß as well as the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, and German Foreign Minister Gustave Stresemann (who were real life figures) are to be fêted with a command performance of The Threepenny Opera.

Bruno Wolter lies in wait with a scoped sniper rifle, hidden in the theater’s enormous crystal chandelier, but the mission goes awry and the coup is aborted. However… the plotters escape to try again another day.

The Threepenny Opera was actually first performed at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on August 31, 1928. Written by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann with music by Kurt Weill, it was meant as a Marxist critique of capitalism.

The very title expressed Brecht’s dream that theater should only cost a worker three pennies to attend. Brecht’s 1923 play Im Dickicht der Städte (In the Jungle of Cities) was disrupted by Nazis who tossed stink bombs at the actors on stage. The 1930 premiere of his opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was likewise attacked.

When Hitler took power in 1933 the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm fell into decline and was closed in 1944. It was reopened after World War II and in 1949 Brecht and wife Helene Weigel established the Berliner Ensemble theatre company there.

In 1967 when I was 13-years-old, I purchased the first album by the psychedelic rock band, The Doors. It contained a composition that I fell in love with titled, Alabama Song. Someone older and wiser than I told me it was written by Brecht, so naturally I went to the library to find out who the guy was. I found that the song came from Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny—written by Brecht and Hauptmann and set to music by Weill. Even better, the library had a phonograph record that included Lotte Lenya singing the Alabama Song. I checked the record out from the library, took it home to play on my portable record player… and almost lost my mind. This entire experience sent me on a lifetime exploration of the Weimar years and German Expressionism. Hopefully, Babylon Berlin will inspire that same sense of discovery for others.

In episode 15 of Babylon Berlin, Greta seeks revenge for the murder of Fritz and agrees to work with the communists to help assassinate August Benda. She lets KPD member Otto into the Benda family home and helps him install a bomb in a drawer of August’s reading room desk; it will detonate when the drawer is opened. When the deed is done Greta flees for the train station, hoping to disappear into another city. At the station she sees an angry mob demonstrating against Mayor Gustav Böß, who is on the train.

Historic accounts of the real Mayor Böß show that he was embroiled in the “Sklarek scandal,” where he was accused of taking huge bribes from three wealthy Jewish clothing suppliers, the Sklarek brothers, who were charged with defrauding the Berlin City Bank. Nazi activists used the controversy to help push their anti-Semitic politics.

The mob is made of men from the SA (short for Sturmabteilung, Storm Detachment), the original fighting force of the Nazis. This is the first glimpse of uniformed Nazis in the Babylon Berlin series. Examining the disparate social forces and tensions that created the Nazi movement, rather than simply making the Nazis an immediate focus of the series, is what makes Babylon Berlin so noteworthy. As a viewer you sense the approach of fascism, but the writers and directors of the show chose to build up unease over 15 episodes; they kept the thugs with the swastika armbands backstage to great effect.

We know the ultimate fate of the characters in Babylon Berlin, but we still have to ask who will end up being a Nazi, and why. Will it be the typist, the doctor, the maid, club owner, or politician? What makes a Nazi, and how do you recognize fascist culture and politics? Watching the characters in the series you get a sense of their indifference and lassitude, but it’s really no different than our own. Back then, who knew what terrible future awaited Germany? Which one of you crystal ball readers today would like to predict where we’re headed now?

While many characters in the series are warm and approachable, there is still something unsettling about them; I want to like these people but hesitate, not knowing who they really are. They are “normals” in outrageously abnormal times, and they seem as out of order as the Stock Market would be in late 1929; it crashed and destroyed the German economy, sending millions into the arms of the Nazis. A few characters in the TV series already have an aura of malevolence about them; the words “banality of evil” describe them well.

Henrik Handloegten, co-writer and co-director of the TV series put it most succinctly in a recent interview; “One of the main reasons to make Babylon Berlin was to show how all these Nazis did not just fall from the sky. They were human beings who reacted to German society’s changes and made their decisions accordingly.”

Returning to the TV series, Greta is shocked to see Otto in the crowd dressed in the Brownshirt uniform of the SA; she stares at the mob and is horrified to see Fritz, and he’s also wearing the SA uniform. Greta realizes that her lover Fritz and his friend Otto were Nazis masquerading as communists, and they were using her to get at August Benda. Betrayed, she runs back to the Benda home in hopes of reversing her treachery, but just as she reaches the home the bomb she helped to plant goes off, killing Benda and his little girl.

There is much more in Babylon Berlin to write about, the last episode of season two is, shall we say, explosive; however, I’ll leave that for you to discover. The series is far from perfect, but the imperfections are thankfully few. I’ll ignore the brief LaLa Land-like dreamy dance sequence; I’ll let slide Gereon Rath’s infrequent swashbuckling exploits; I’ll even overlook the scene where a central character drowns and minutes after death is brought to life with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—a life saving technique introduced in 1950. I’ll forgive these sins against cinematic realism because Babylon Berlin otherwise examines history with honesty and passion.

The show provides a solid argument that first-rate drama can be had from exploring real life history. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to watch a film that is not crawling with cartoon characters, super-heros, and wiggling femme fatales. Perhaps Babylon Berlin represents a return to conscientious, artful cinema, I’m praying that is the case. I’d be in heaven if a straightforward film about the German Expressionist artists and their showdown with the Nazis were to be made. But then, such a film will never be created, unless of course there’s someone foolish enough to provide me with a budget to produce it.

The 16 episodes of the first two seasons of Babylon Berlin are available to view on Netflix in the United States. It has been verified that the series has received funding for a third season, so the show will eventually have to deal with Hitler and the Nazis taking power in 1933. Based on the 2008 crime novel Der Nasse Fisch (The Wet Fish) by German author Volker Kutscher, the TV series was written and directed by Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, and Henrik Handloegten. The show had a budget of 40 million euros ($49 million U.S.), making it the most expensive TV series ever produced in Germany. By contrast on Feb. 13, 2018, Netflix cut a $300 million deal with American director Ryan Murphy (creator of American Horror Story) to produce films exclusively for Netflix.

I can happily say that one is much better off viewing Babylon Berlin.

————————

ADDENDUM:

[1] More info about the Freikorps: International Encyclopedia of the First World War.

[2] Stephen P. Halbrook: “Nazism, Firearm Registration, and the Night of the Broken Glass.” (PDF file). Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, No. 3. (2009)

[3] Article about the artist Carl Lauterbach - Painter in Twilight: RP Online. Feb. 28, 2012. German language.

[4] Josephine Baker’s official website biography

FURTHER READING:

My review of the 2010 Long Beach Opera production of “The Good Soldier Schweik” holds plenty of information about Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

My 2011 essay “Paul Fuhrmann’s ‘War Profiteer” focuses on the German Expressionist painter Paul Fuhrmann, as well as the Nazi Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition of 1937.

My 2013 “Echoes of Weimar” essay covers the works of two Weimar era artists, Barthel Gilles and Otto Dix. The article holds some surprising information about the two painters.

Excellent article on German Swing Youth and Nazi repression from the German website “20-2-40-Style-Syndicate.”

The Russian website “AirPages” offers an extensive and detailed examination of the Reichswehr secret airbase in Lipetsk, Soviet Russia.

Babylon Berlin is fairly exact in all sorts of background details, including antique firearms. The Internet Movie Firearms Database tells you what weapons appeared in the series.

This essay concerns Revisiting Slash: The Five Best OC Punk Articles From One of LA’s Original Punk Zines, written by reporter Frank John Tristan and published in the OC Weekly on October 3, 2017. The alleged subject of the article was how SLASH Magazine covered the early punk bands of the beachside Southern California community of Orange County.

I happened upon the story quite by accident, and was taken aback to find one of my cover drawings for SLASH featured uncredited as the lead illustration. Be that as it may, when I began to read the piece my blood began to boil since it made the ludicrous accusation that SLASH Magazine published “Nazi rapist bullshit.”

I write my rebuke to Revisiting Slash as an aging punk rocker who worked at SLASH Magazine from 1979 to 1980 as a designer and production artist.

Ultimately I created two cover illustrations for the magazine, a 1979 drawing titled Sue Tissue (a portrait of the vocalist for the Suburban Lawns band) and the aforementioned 1980 cover, Come Back to Haunt You.

I also worked on The Decline of Western Civilization, the original 1981 documentary film by Penelope Spheeris that focused on the initial Los Angeles punk scene.

Much has been said of late regarding the demise of journalism and the rise of “Fake News.” I submit to the reader that Revisiting Slash is a prime example of both. While the minutiae of Los Angeles punk history might seem little more than trivialities to some, those chronicles are noteworthy details in the history of the late 20th century. As CNN, the exemplar of fake news likes to say, “Facts First.”

The OC Weekly has the bona fides of reporter Frank John Tristan posted on its webpage; it says he’s 22-years-old, meaning he was born in 1995, long after the events at SLASH he wrote so authoritatively about had occurred. This is not to say that a writer far removed from historic events cannot write about such things with veracious accuracy… it’s just that Tristan is not that writer.

In the opening paragraph of Revisiting Slash, Tristan states that SLASH “quickly rose from interviews with L.A. bands like The Damned”—with this one colossal faux pas the reporter’s credibility vanished.

The Damned were one of a handful of punk bands to rise from London’s decay in 1976. They were the first U.K. punk band to release a single (1976), an album (1977), and the first to tour the United States (also in ‘77).

Their Los Angeles visit helped detonate the city’s punk movement; in the wake of their visit SLASH emblazoned the cover of its premiere Mayday issue with an eerie photo of the band’s lead vocalist, Dave Vanian. SLASH Magazine co-founder Melanie Nissen took that photo.

The Damned, I might add, are still active and quite well known.

I think the reporter gathered info for his article with the one essential tool every new writer now inordinately relies upon—Google searches. I do not mean to imply that Google-fu could not have resulted in a decent piece of journalism; nevertheless, there is the Google search performed by a wizard and the one conducted by a neophyte.

The reporter, name dropping like a celebrity news gossip columnist, but without any clarity whatsoever, muddled through dumbfounding anecdotes guaranteed to flummox anyone not familiar with the fine points of L.A.’s punk history. Here is one offending passage, followed by my key to parsing its meaning;

“Unfortunately, while Lisa Fancher says the zine put the Middle Class on her radar, she believes that the zine proved non-influential in the OC scene and Ronnie ‘Posh Boy’ Fields agrees with her. Fields even claims Craig Lee tried to get Red Cross not to sign a record deal with his label and calls Slash a ‘(failed) commercial venture masquerading as a fanzine.’”

This is the open door to understanding the mishmash above; Lisa Fancher is the founder of the punk rock label Frontier Records; Middle Class is one of the first hard core punk bands from Orange County; Craig Lee was the guitarist for the Bags (one of L.A.’s original punk bands) and later worked for SLASH; Robbie Fields is founder of the influential Posh Boy Records and a punk rock personality whose name Tristan insultingly couldn’t spell properly (”Ronnie Fields”?), and Red Cross was a punk band on the Posh Boy label. The OC Weekly apparently doesn’t employ editors anymore, or perhaps they were all out skateboarding when the reporter submitted his article for editing.

Ironically Robbie Fields is an associate of mine. When I saw Robbie’s name mutilated in the article, I could not trust that words were not being put in his mouth, so I asked Robbie about the article. The posh one clarified that he had informed the reporter in writing, “SLASH had no influence on MY signing OC bands”, which is substantively different from saying SLASH was “non-influential in the OC scene.” Besides, Robbie told me, “SLASH had stopped publishing before I hit my stride in Orange County.”

Robbie confirmed that he did tell the reporter “SLASH was a (failed) commercial venture masquerading as a fanzine,” a statement I don’t disagree with but one that needs context. The magazine was always a dual entity. One side thought it a money making pursuit and a springboard to becoming an alternative record label; the other side was a bunch of scruffy punks who just wanted to run an iconoclastic punk fanzine. It was a sad day when SLASH Magazine forever closed its doors as a weirdo bohemian zine and fully transmogrified into a commercial record label. Los Angeles lost a truly unique contrarian voice.

However, the actual sum and substance of my authoring this article is to denounce the insinuation made in the pages of the OC Weekly, albeit through the words of none other than The Simpsons creator Matt Groening, that SLASH was guilty of publishing “Nazi rapist bullshit.” I have stood against racism and sexism my entire life, and my works as an artist bear this out. I am greatly offended by this ahistorical scandalmongering by the OC Weekly, and yes, I do take it personally.

Matt Groening sent his poison pen letter to SLASH in 1978 when he was decidedly not famous; he was working at the now defunct Los Angeles Reader alternative newspaper answering phones and delivering papers. He would not grab notoriety until 1980 when the Reader would publish his first cartoon strip, Life in Hell.

The Revisiting Slash article republished an undersized and barely legible archival reproduction of Groening’s letter to SLASH; the reproduction included SLASH’s rebuttal to Groening’s accusations. The OC Weekly retyped Groening’s letter in standard size legible type and featured it so that it could be read without squinting, allowing readers to savor it for its broad-mindedness. SLASH’s rebuttal was afforded no such treatment, disallowing any response to allegations of wrongdoing. Here’s Groening’s letter in its entirety:

“This is a short letter of appreciation for your magazine… your graphics are really hot stuff - my compliments to the chefs. And your snotty tone is perfect - good, clean, pissed-off alienated humor is something we all need more of.

My only criticism is that too often your articles glorify the misogynistic attitudes of young male cretins, and too often SLASH seems to endorse these repugnant attitudes. Sexism pervades our culture, and I applaud your disdain and cynicism, but rapist humor is as traditional and predictable as everything you oppose, and I think you should have brains enough to rise above it.

Your magazine is not particularly guilty of Nazi/rapist bullshit, but it is typically guilty of it, and that kind of normality is especially disappointing.

Sincerely

Matt Groening”

If Groening’s letter had absolutely nothing to do with the subject of early punk bands in Orange County and the coverage SLASH gave them, then why did the OC Weekly mention Groening at all? I’m afraid fawning celebrity worship of the worst kind is the cause; The Simpsons franchise has garnered Groening a net worth of $500 million.

Since the OC Weekly couldn’t be bothered to include a readable version of the SLASH rebuttal in their Revisiting Slash article, I offer one here:

“Okay, hold on. What Nazi rapist bullshit?? In the graphics? The text? Anyway, there are almost as many girls involved with SLASH as guys; not one of them thinks SLASH is misogynistic (how many music papers feature as many girls as boys on their covers??) and not one of them is what you’d call a young female cretin. Bet you see sexism everywhere. You’re probably right, it might be everywhere. In our case, though, what you spotted as sexism or whatever was most likely a little loose chunk of a much bigger piece called contempt for ALL forms of nice proper civilities. We regard women (punks) as totally equal to men (punks) (don’t know about your circles) and therefore equally subjectable to abuse, insults and other forms of communication. —Ms. KickPerson Face”

A charge of misogyny is made by a man, and while unsubstantiated it is given prominence in Revisiting Slash, while the denial of sexism made by a female SLASH staffer is ignored. And the OC Weekly wants to cry about sexism?

Who was this enigmatic “Ms. KickPerson Face” she-devil? Her real name was Philomena Winstanley, and when she declared “there are almost as many girls involved with SLASH as guys” she didn’t mean they were there to serve coffee. Philomena was a mover and shaker, an editor at SLASH, and also the partner in crime and wife to Claude Bessy, editor and chief writer at SLASH. Bessy took his nickname, Kickboy Face, from the title of a song by Jamaican reggae performer Prince Jazzbo; hence Philomena’s moniker.

To be entirely honest Bessy’s sneering impish humor might have lead him to compose the rebuttal and sign it “Ms. KickPerson Face” as a taunting joke. I really don’t know if that’s the case, but it is clear that whichever part of the dynamic duo wrote the comeback, it was truthful and genuine.

The reporter attempted to support Groening’s accusation that SLASH was publishing “Nazi rapist bullshit” by listing SLASH artworks and articles he found in the Circulation Zero online archive. He wrote, “Maybe it was the Gary Panter drawing in Vol. 1 # 2 with the text suggesting a nude tied up woman was being beaten” followed by, “or maybe it was the image of the band Fear playing in a house with a distraught woman tied up with a ball gag in her mouth in Vol. 1 #9.” The reporter implies that “offensive” works of art should not be published, but who rules what’s objectionable, and what happens when censorship gets going?

I wonder how the words “with the text suggesting” would hold up in a court of law? But then this is not a court of law, this is trial by media. I also wonder how cartoonist Gary Panter would react to the charge that he created “Nazi rapist bullshit” for SLASH, especially since he was honored at the Jewish Museum in New York City in 2006. Groening’s accusation was ridiculous in 1978, but to see it repeated in today’s pages of the OC Weekly is even more absurd. Liberals have shamelessly pinned the “Nazi” epithet on so many people that the word is losing its meaning. It is grotesque that the OC Weekly has reached almost forty years into the past to besmirch SLASH Magazine with that ugly epithet.

One of the things that impressed me the most about punk was the number of young women involved; contributing as performers, scenesters, writers, photographers, artists, band managers, and more; they all passed through the doors of SLASH. The women fronting or participating in punk bands were legion; Poly Styrene (X-Ray Spex), Dinah Cancer (45 Grave), Wendy O. Williams (Plasmatics), Eve Libertine and Joy De Vivre (Crass), Poison Ivy (The Cramps), Penelope Houston (The Avengers), Exene Cervenka (X)… too many to list here, and SLASH loved and respected them all. Compared to the Heavy Metal scene and the mainstream rock world in general, punk was a liberated zone for females.

As for the band FEAR, they let loose on everyone under the big black sun; like every good punk band, they served as a tarnished mirror that reflected back upon society all of its odious disgraces. FEAR “entertained” with an ominous brand of punk theatrical shtick; but those who believe stage actors are really the characters they play are little more than simpletons. In the event that you were disgusted and outraged by the antics of FEAR, well… that was the desired effect.

I hate to break it to everyone, but long before the poseurs of Green Day graced the stage of the corporate American Music Awards in 2016 there was a vulgar, impolite noise called punk. Shock, offensiveness, and crassness were its core aesthetics—for pity’s sake there was even a band named Crass. The expression “politically correct” had not yet found its way into the common vernacular, but bourgeois society had rules for social conduct and punk was hell bent on upending them.

I recall the 1980 interview SLASH conducted with a U.K. band called The Pop Group. A favorite of mine at the time, the outfit blurted out a dark ethereal mix of punk, dub reggae, jazz, and funk rhythms, all densely wrapped around ecstatically radical political lyrics.

To illustrate their interview with us they sent a black and white photomontage of a naked then-presidential candidate named Ronald Reagan standing with a WWI soldier wearing a gas mask.

We were a pretty jaded crew at SLASH, so I don’t recall the graphic causing much fuss; we simply laid out the magazine and sent it to the print company for its print run.

The next day there was great consternation in the SLASH office when the print company sent the unprinted pages back to us with a notice that they refused to print the paper as long as the naked Reagan was included. Panic ensued! We worked out a deal… we painted black shorts on Reagan’s likeness. Kickboy hand wrote on the graphic an apology to The Pop Group for altering their art, and the print company completed their job. The eager punk masses received the somewhat late, albeit final edition of SLASH Magazine.

Now I ask you, does that sound like the work of Nazi rapists?

Here’s what’s generally misunderstood about the original Los Angeles punk scene, it wasn’t a politically correct, structured “safe space” for virtuous do gooders; it was a wide-open, no holds barred, chaotic experimental zone for free thought and action—at least in its beginnings. Punk was streaked with nihilism and violence, but it also proffered creativity and a deep humanism. It was not monolithic in nature, but comprised of numerous layers, where adherents had divergent beliefs and styles. What united this congregation of castaways was a sense of community found in our music and antiauthoritarian attitudes. Punks initially hated corporate record labels, misbegotten celebrity, and staid conformity. Kickboy gave a fair description of SLASH when responding to a letter sent to the magazine; “Yea, I know, anarchy ain’t what it should be. But listen, we are not going to take anyone by the hand and tell them what to destroy, what to read, who to hate. We are not a party, a cell or an underground brigade.”

As I’ve grown older, my view of the punk scene has been altered by the light of day. Truth be told, there were things about L.A.’s punk underground that I didn’t care for (including a creeping “group think” expressed in dress and behavior), just as there were individuals in the scene that I disliked—some quite intensely; but then I was not required to like them.

A few characters have unwisely written books purporting to be the definitive overview of punk, and of course the legacy media has lied about punk since its inception. Forget them. If you want to know about the early days of punk, oh heck… if you want the truth about anything, go to multiple primary sources, study, analyze, and then make up your own mind. With this article I have offered a short synopsis of my experiences at SLASH, take them as you will.

The OC Weekly’s intimation that those associated with SLASH Magazine were “Nazi rapists” certainly comes from a place of bottomless ignorance; the best that can be said of their article is that it is a noxious piece of character assassination based upon identity politics. I do not ask for nor expect apologies from the OC Weekly; I have not written this essay as a corrective to the Weekly’s staff. I am writing for those who want to know the realities behind early Los Angeles punk and its bygone standard bearer SLASH, the monthly manifesto of angry refusal.

CAUTION: The following essay contains violent imagery not suitable for the faint-hearted or for children under 13. Welcome to the wonderful world of postmodern art.

A facet of the outlandish chronicles having to do with the U.S. presidential elections of 2016 that remains obscure and largely untold, is the unwitting role of the celebrity art world. This essay is an attempt to bring some much needed clarity to that bizarre collision of postmodern art with mainstream U.S. politics. The U.S. is currently so deeply divided that I loath making myself a target by writing this, yet I feel compelled to do so for the sake of history.

My report revolves around the “world renown” Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović. Conservatives call her a Satanist and Liberals calls her a genius; both sides are altogether wrong. My essay’s subheading, The First Cut Is the Deepest, provides the upshot of my explication; I think what Abramović does is a wound upon art. Dissidents and conformists… please do read on.

Abramović calls herself “the grandmother of performance art.” During her performances she has cut, whipped, burned, and nearly killed herself. In 1974 she performed Rhythm 0, where for six hours she stood passively while her audience was invited to manipulate her body with any of the 72 objects provided them; a rose, honey, scissors… a handgun with one bullet. She ended up with multiple cuts, the clothes cut from her body, and the gun pointed at her head. This escapade became one of her most famous works.

A major turning point in the career of Abramović was her 2010 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where she performed The Artist Is Present. Abramović sat motionless and silent at a table in the museum’s entrance hall for over 30 days and 16 hours as observers were encouraged to sit opposite her, one at a time, to exchange silent glances. After this engagement the elite art world bestowed true superstar status upon Abramović, proclaiming her the very symbol or icon of performance art.

In full disclosure, as a figurative realist painter, I have little regard, affinity, or patience for the works of Marina Abramović. Call my views regarding art passé or sagacious, but I would never allow someone to point a gun at me for the sake of art. While I challenge the importance of Abramović’s works and that of postmodernist art in general, I am dismayed by the lies and fabrications used against her for political reasons; this think piece is not a defense of Abramović, but it is a refutation of the falsehoods that have been directed against her. It is also of course, a critique of postmodernist art.

Perhaps Abramović’s greatest achievement was her 1996 Spirit Cooking project, not for any profundity of the work itself but for its unintended consequences. Spirit Cooking began as a portfolio of eight etchings illustrating 25 letterpress prints of made-up “aphrodisiac” recipes. These were not instructions for preparing actual meals, according to the artist they were “evocative instructions for actions or thoughts.” Having no experience in drawing (which is the postmodern definition of an artist), Abramović’s Spirit Cooking portfolio is a banal plodding mess, at least in my opinion, so naturally it is in MoMA’s permanent collection.

In 1997 Abramović created a multimedia installation version of Spirit Cooking at the Zerynthia gallery in Paliano, Italy, where the recipes in her Spirit Cooking print portfolio were splashily daubed on white walls with copious amounts of coagulated pig’s blood. Unknowingly, she had just helped to launch one of the biggest cultural/political scandals in U.S. history.

During October and November of 2016, just before the U.S. presidential election would pit Donald J. Trump against Hillary Clinton, Wikileaks started publishing a huge cache of emails stolen from the personal Gmail account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. The 20,000 pages of emails showed the inner workings of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Party, as well as revealing the controversial skullduggery of Ms. Clinton. An anonymous hacker had pinched the emails and turned them over to Wikileaks for publication… and the rest is history.

One of those purloined digital messages published by Wikileaks was an email sent by Marina Abramović on June 28, 2015 to Tony Podesta, a collector of her work since the 1990s and the brother of John Podesta.

Knowing John Podesta was a wealthy art collector and one of her biggest supporters, Abramović wanted to honor him with a Spirit Cooking themed dinner as a “thank you” for a large donation. The email was innocuous enough, it simply read: “Dear Tony. I am so looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place. Do you think you will be able to let me know if your brother is joining? All my love, Marina.” As it turned out, John Podesta did not attend the dinner party of ten.

Inquisitive conservatives investigating the cryptic “spirit cooking” reference soon found the following video on YouTube shown directly below:

The video documented preparations for the 1997 multimedia installation of Spirit Cooking at the Zerynthia gallery carried out by Abramović and an assistant; the video showed Abramović using pig’s blood to paint her recipes; “Mix fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk drink on earthquake nights” read one. “With a sharp knife, cut deeply into the middle finger of your left hand. Eat the pain” read the other. Fast forward to 2016, and people sheltered from the harebrained excesses of contemporary art expressed revulsion after viewing this film, while political opponents of John Podesta, the Democrats, and Hillary Clinton moved in for the coup de gras. Gossip about Spirit Cooking spread like wildfire over social media; in a flash it was characterized as an elite cabal of Satan worshipping, cannibalistic pedophiles that lingered around the Clinton campaign.

On Nov 4, 2016, the editor-at-large at Infowars Paul Joseph Watson, conservative YouTuber Mark Dice, and right-wing libertarian philosopher Stefan Molyneux, separately published videos on their respective YouTube channels accusing Abramović, and by extension John Podesta and Hillary Clinton, of having links with Satanism. The YouTube video from Paul Joseph Watson is shown directly below:

Molyneux’s video Spirit Cooking: Evil In Government, included a talkfest with American nationalists Mike Cernovich and Vox Day, purportedly to shed light upon the “disgusting practice of ‘Spirit Cooking.’” But Molyneux’s supposed reliance on empirical evidence soon gave way to the conjectural, the irrational, and quite frankly, the absurd; he stated that “the amount of immorality that seems to be emanating from these practices, these rituals, I don’t think it’s too far to say that they’re downright Satanic.”

In summing up his video talk Molyneux proclaimed; “I hope this is going to shock people into recognizing that there is, you know, if these stories turn out to be true, there is a sort of layer down here of truly deep, conscious, and focused willed evil.” He went on to ask Cernovich where he placed “this level of immorality” in his world view; Cernovich replied:

“These are ritualistic practices, where are they learning… that’s what I always ask as a lawyer, as a detective, as a journalist… where are they learning this stuff, who is teaching it, because clearly they have shared traditions. Clearly they have a shared language, clearly they have shared symbolism. They’re learning it from somewhere, whether that’s from the Devil, from Satan, or from practitioners… I can’t tell you, but I can tell you as a rationalist, and as somebody who maybe doesn’t believe in God necessarily, they’re learning it from somewhere. And we need to ask people, whatever you believe about religion, whatever you believe about good and evil… where the hell are they learning this sh*t from?”

Where are they learning this shared language? Why, in the halls and exhibit rooms of prestigious museums and galleries; in the articles found in haughty and oh so cosmopolitan art magazines; in the positive reviews of trendsetting exhibits found in the legacy press (you know… the “fake” news). Who is teaching it? Have you visited the Department of Art at your local university lately, or perhaps an acclaimed art school? Try spending some time glancing over the endless number of websites and blogs dedicated to covering postmodern art.

I would like to add that none of the hundreds of thousands of people associated with the groups and institutions just mentioned are Satanists, well O.K., maybe one or two are. But political activists on the left and right, not to mention the overwhelming public at large, pay absolutely no attention whatsoever to the pretentious idiocy found in the impenetrable bubble that is the contemporary art world. If they were to pay attention they would be rewarded with dubious art achievements from the likes of Martin Creed, Piero Manzoni, Damien Hirst, and those boorishly despicable beasties the Chapman Brothers. Yeah, take a look… this is art today.

Right after the hysteria that ensued following the discovery of the Zerynthia gallery Spirit Cooking video, another controversial video surfaced. This one showed the annual fundraiser dinner gala held in 2011 by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), then directed by the charlatan Jeffrey Deitch. I must admit, it did look like a satanic ritual, but it was just good clean innocent fun as practiced by well-to-do Hollywood bluebloods who were inebriated and desperately trying to escape their endless state of terminal boredom.

That original unedited video showing the MoCA fundraiser dinner gala is shown directly below:

Marina Abramović was asked to design the look and feel of the gala, attended by roughly 800 glitterati of the Los Angeles art world and entertainment industry. Tickets went for $25,000, $50,000, or $100,000. For those sitting at the round tables reserved for $100,000 ticket holders like California governor Jerry Brown and then LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the centerpieces were rotating platforms; upon each a live nude woman was draped with a life-sized human skeleton, a nod to Abramović’s Nude with Skeleton performance. As centerpieces for the less expensive tables Abramović hired 50 young artists and dancers to sit on rotating platforms placed at intervals beneath the tables, their slowly spinning heads protruding through the table tops.

The spinning head hirelings were paid a paltry sum, resulting in American dancer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer writing an angry letter to Deitch and MoCA on the subject of exploitation. This was a more meaningful controversy than anything offered by Abramović. The letter was signed by 49 other artists— I would have signed it myself if I had been given the chance.

Deborah Harry from the long defunct band Blondie sang for the crowd, after which dessert cakes in the form of life-size nude replicas of Marina Abramović and Deborah Harry were sliced up with large lethal knives and served to the crowd.

The cakes were created by the food artists of Kreëmart, a specialized bakery founded by Raphael Castoriano that creates confections for the worldwide postmodern art crowd. Castoriano helped produce and distribute the video of the MoCA event shown above, which detractors used as further evidence that Abramović, and by extension John Podesta and Hillary Clinton, were involved in a satanic death cult.

In a 2016 editorial written for artsy.net, the au courant aficionado of art Alexxa Gotthardt attempted to make sense of the election time “crazed political conspiracy theories” surrounding Marina Abramović, which Gotthardt unceasingly attributed to the “alt-right community.” I am sorry, but blaming the “alt-right” bogeyman is a fast talker’s glib attempt at avoiding the irrefutable dilemma— art has become repulsive, alienating, meaningless, and unapproachable. Average Americans in the tens of millions did not need soapbox propaganda from the “alt-right” to realize that cryptic words daubed onto a wall in congealed pigs blood was something other than fine art; they consequently believed the worst of anyone associated with Spirit Cooking.

In some ways the histrionics over Abramović and her shock art reminds me of the outrage directed against Alice Cooper by straight-laced critics back in the early 1970s. At the time Cooper and his band were a scandal because of their horror rock stage performances. Cooper would command the stage as a villainous antihero and his stage theatrics included sham knife fights and using an axe to chop off the heads of dolls and mannequins, all with generous amounts of stage blood. Cooper draped himself with live snakes as he crooned to his audience, and he simulated his execution by guillotine, electric chair, and hanging at the gallows; all this and more. No, it was not high art, but it was low-brow rock ‘n roll extravaganza. It should go without saying that Cooper was regularly accused of being a Satanist. As we know today Cooper is a Christian who has quietly voted the Republican ticket.

In the same vein, in 1967 there were the original shock rockers, the psychedelic band The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Founded by the brilliant vocalist Arthur Brown, the outfit became known for their dark, over the top theatrical stage performances. In ‘68 the group released a 45 single of their song Fire, an apocalyptic rock anthem that began with the words, “I am the God of Hellfire, and I bring you— Fire!” Brown wore an actual flaming metal helmet when performing the song, bringing inspiration to Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson, and a host of other rockers. Today, only the most closed minded religionist would call Arthur Brown, Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson, et al., “Devil worshippers.”

Though involved in markedly different modes of expression, I believe Cooper is a more honest artist than Abramović. At Alice Cooper concerts attendees suspend belief and enjoy the over-the-top theatrics, they know it is just a charade; whereas some devotes of Abramović actually seem to believe that she offers “a religious experience” comparable to “the earliest days of Christian mysticism.” In point of fact we are looking at the cult of Marina Abramović. Consider the “Abramović Method,” touted as having been “developed over decades of research on performance and immaterial art.” Created by Abramović, the “Method” is an “exploration of being present in both time and space. It incorporates exercises that focus on breath, motion, stillness, and concentration.”

So if you are seeking phony enlightenment, you may find it in the repackaged synthetic Zen Buddhism of Abramović.

While much of postmodern art revolves around the kitsch and the superficial, Abramović’s “radical” performance art, we are told, is profound. It allegedly delves into the transcendental, the philosophical, and the abstruse aspects of being human; themes of trust, departure, cleansing, and the limits of the mind and body, etc., are supposedly examined in her performances. I don’t buy any of this nonsense. Abramović has all the profundity of a circus sideshow starring Miley Cyrus.

Take the above “glamour” shot for instance. It makes reference to Abramović’s “iconic” 1975 video performance where she sat before a camera and aggressively, painfully combed her long hair with a brush and comb for 50 minutes while continually chanting “art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful.” The words also served as the title of the work.

The performance was widely regarded as feminist. However, the razzle-dazzle ensanguined beauty shot has nothing to do with the original work, rather it is a betrayal of that work. The knives, chunks of fresh meat, and blood-spattered text are simply for shock value and meant to frame the art star’s allure and ascendancy in the art world. Unlike the 1966 Beatles’ album Yesterday And Today with its infamously censored “Butcher cover“— reportedly a mordant comment on the American war in Vietnam, Abramović’s photo lacks even the tiniest inkling of profundity. The photo radiates the type of kitsch associated with low-budget B movie horror films like the cheese fest 1972 Daughters of Satan.

If you find the works of Marina Abramović objectionable, allow me to introduce you to the Austrian performance artist Hermann Nitsch. On Saturday June 17, 2017 he will oversee a performance titled 150.Action, a “major work” that revolves around a newly slaughtered bull and Nitsch’s assistants covering themselves in the entrails, gore, and blood of the unfortunate animal. The performance group will also bathe in 500 liters of fresh blood— for the metrically impaired that is over 132 gallons of blood.

This atrocity masquerading as art takes place at the Dark Mofo festival of music and art held on the Australian island state of Tasmania. If you are familiar with American street slang you will know the grind show is aptly named. The festival was created, and is hosted by, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), which is also presenting Nitsch’s performance. I will address the questionable history of MONA later in this article. The museum describes the performance as “A bloody, sacrificial ritual performed by the patriarch of Viennese Actionism, his devoted disciples and an orchestra.” All of this gore is rather old hat for Nitsch, save for the orchestral accompaniment. I cannot imagine what he will do with an orchestra… he must be getting soft.

Hermann Nitsch is a founder of Viennese Actionism, a performance art that includes the slaughter of animals and the drinking of their blood, the covering of performers with blood, entrails, and excrement, the mock crucifixion of performers, the mockery of Christianity, and the shattering of every imaginable taboo. Nitsch once said of his works; “I’m not a social critic, I just show the divine comedy and the divine tragedy at the same time, and most people are not willing to open themselves up for this consciousness.” He became the most well-known of the actionists and actionism became an influential aesthetic; it ripples and twitches through the tenebrous works of Marina Abramović.

There is no clearer indication of the unhealthy condition of contemporary art and the debauchery of art criticism today than the fact that nary a murmur of criticism or protestation of 150.Action has come from the art world. Not surprisingly, animal rights groups have raised a ruckus, gathering 20,000 signatures to stop the killing of the bull, but from the art world… silence.

Starting in the early 1960s individual Austrian artists in Vienna like Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and Hermann Nitsch began staging “transgressive” public art actions. The performances became known as “actionist,” the school, Viennese Actionism. In 1963 Adolf Frohner, Muehl, and Nitsch staged a three day public actionist performance before a small audience of some 30 people in Muehl’s basement studio. The actionists dressed in white robes, crucified a dead lamb upside down (intentionally mocking the Christian symbol of the Lamb of God), and after disemboweling the animal bathed in its blood.

In 1968 Günter Brus publicly masturbated and covered himself in his own feces while singing Österreichische Bundeshymne, the Austrian National Anthem. Also in ‘68 Oswald Wiener, Peter Weibel, Brus, and Muel staged Art and Revolution, where the four crashed a student lecture at the University of Vienna and flogged themselves, urinated on one another, masturbated, covered themselves in their own excrement, and forced themselves to vomit. In 1969 Otto Muehl and Brus staged Piss Action at the Hamburg Film Festival, where onstage a standing naked Muehl urinated into the open mouth of the nude Brus on bended knees. In its ludicrous description of Viennese Actionism, the Art Story Foundation wrote that Piss Action was “one of the most notorious demonstrations of art merging with life and breaking free of the walls of the art museum.”

Today the Viennese Actionists are acknowledged and celebrated by the art establishment as the wellspring of today’s performance art and one of the most influential art movements of the late 20th century. In this we see the acceptance, sanction, and advocacy of the ugly, transgressive, anti-humanism embraced by the postmodern art world. Which brings us back to The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA).

MONA allegedly cost over $200 million to build, it was founded and financed by multi-millionaire David Walsh, who made his fortune as a professional gambler. The museum is the largest privately funded museum in Australia. It has also become a major tourist attraction, drawing enormous crowds. MONA has been described by Walsh as a “subversive adult Disneyland.” Others have not been so charitable. In his article titled MONA’s Brutal Banality, Michael Connor of the conservative Australian literary and cultural journal Quadrant, wrote:

“MONA is the art of the exhausted, of a decaying civilization. Display lights and taste and stunning effects illuminate moral bankruptcy. What is highlighted melds perfectly with contemporary high fashion, design, architecture, cinema. It is expensive and tense decay. For the uncomprehending, uncritical, unmoved tourists it is meaningless matter superbly showcased—though if you threw out the art and put in a (gay) wedding expo, a psychic convention or a showing of hot rods they probably wouldn’t even notice, or care.”

Walsh’s personal art collection displayed at MONA is said to be worth some $100 million. It includes such bizarre postmodern carny works as Stephen Shanabrook’s On the road to Heaven the Highway to Hell, a gruesome sculpture cast in dark chocolate that depicts the shredded remains of a suicide bomber. Then there is Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca Professional, a machine that is fed meat, vegetables, pastries, water, and enzymes and then excretes the equivalent of human feces. Read A Human Masterpiece, Artnet’s excruciatingly fawning review of Delvoye’s Rube Goldberg excrement device; it tries one’s patience but also demonstrates how literal crap has been embraced in the dominant postmodern art world.

Last but not least let us not forget Greg Taylor’s Cunts… and other conversations, 2008 - 2009, 151 life-size white porcelain “portrait” sculptures of vaginas. I don’t know how a man sculpting women’s genitalia has not escaped angry accusations of misogyny and “cultural appropriation” from the many progressives found in artistic circles, but then the postmodern art world is a confused and contradictory realm. One can only imagine what the pink “Pussy Hat” wearing crowd would make of “Cunts…” All that is missing from MONA is a Fire Eater, a Snake Charmer, and a Sword Swallower.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the German artist Ulay, a long time artistic collaborator with Abramović as well as her former lover. From 1975 to 1988 they jointly created performances dealing with gender roles and identity, sexuality, and the physical limitations of the body. It has been said that their works were the most innovative and trailblazing in the history of performance art. An example of such a “cutting-edge” work would be their 1977 collaboration Relation in Time. In a gallery setting the couple sat back to back, their long hair interwoven like a rope, making them inseparable. They sat immobile like that for 17 hours. Sorry, it’s not even as interesting as it might sound. In 1988 the power couple of performance art even made a work out of their separation; in The Great Wall Walk the two walked over 1,500 miles along The Great Wall of China from two opposite ends, meeting in the middle for one final embrace.

Despite the endless beguilement with Abramović expressed by the art press over the years, truth finally emerged in November of 2015 when Ulay sued Abramović for violating a contract over their collaborative works. After their breakup Ulay sold his archives to Abramović, who not only agreed to their maintenance but arranged to administer saleable materials. Ulay claimed Abramović told galleries to list her as the exclusive creator of their shared works, that she failed to provide him with sales statements, and that in the course of 16 years she only paid him four times. Abramović forcefully denied these charges.

In September of 2016, a court in Amsterdam ruled that Abramović was in breach of contract, and ordered Abramović to pay Ulay significant damages. Furthermore, according to Ulay’s legal team, “The Court has ordered Abramović to respect her obligations under the agreement, ensure that Ulay is properly credited as joint author of these works, and desist from future infringement of his moral and economic rights.” This was the most important part of the court decision, since Abramović was literally erasing Ulay from history. Even her 2010 MOMA performance, The Artist is Present, was an uncredited appropriation from Nightsea Crossing, a 90-day collaborative performance with Ulay in the 1980s where the two sat silently facing each other at a table. Swindling; I think this behavior is the authentic “Abramović Method.”

“Art is anything you can get away with” was a thought first expressed by the Canadian philosopher and writer Marshall McLuhan in his 1967 book The Medium is the Massage. True to form, Andy Warhol plagiarized the catchphrase and made it his own; over time the words became a benediction in the house of postmodern art. There is almost no end to what Marina Abramović has gotten away with; she once said of her performances that deal with mysticism and occult ritual:

“If you are doing the occult magic in the context of art or in a gallery, then it is the art. If you are doing it in different context, in spiritual circles or private house or on TV shows, it is not art. The intention, the context for what is made, and where it is made defines what art is or not.”

I find Abramović’s philosophy as stated above to be fallacious, it is but one of the problems I have with postmodern artists like her. If I create an oil painting, and I place it in a private house or it appears on TV, it is still art. If a critic tosses my painting into a garbage bin then it would be art in a dumpster. My painting need not be in a gallery for it to be art. Conversely, if instead of an art gallery Abramović was on a street corner violently brushing her hair and mumbling to herself, people would think of her as just another colorful, but slightly moonstruck character.

Incautious critics and bourgeois art aficionados have called Abramović the most significant artist of our time, which I find absurd. Voices in today’s art scene celebrate an allegedly unstructured, diffused, egalitarian “pluralism” that has “expanded” the definition of art; altogether scratching out moth-eaten notions of good taste, quality, standards, and beauty. But it is a partisan pluralism that declares painting dead (unless it is a perverted grotesquerie), while it beats the drum for craftless, self-indulgent rubbish. Where today’s art elites see “pluralism” I see only anti-art and the dominance of Conceptual art, Installation art, Lowbrow art, Street art, Performance art, and Appropriation art… the anti-aesthetic tyranny. Into this landscape rushes the artless brutes.

As an aging punk rocker I completely understand the theory and practice of anti-art, a modus operandi I engaged in myself during the late 1970s. Punk artists wanted a new aesthetic to combat the stultifying conformity and somnambulism of the late 20th century, this led to extremely offensive, disturbing, and scandalous means of expression, all of which I believed to be absolutely warranted and necessary at the time. During those days, some of the pop music sacred cows included the Electric Light Orchestra, the Bee Gees, and Captain & Tennille. In that context, I still think the punk explosion was crucial, but the minute it was successfully co-opted and commodified it became dead to me. I obviously have no trouble with upsetting the apple cart, but today, Abramović and those like her, are the apple cart.

I grew up in the early 1960s watching horror films, reading Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, and listening to Rock ‘n Roll. Halloween was (and still is) my favorite celebration— but these things were attacked by the Christian right for being trashy, immoral, and in some instances demonic; at the same time these were guilty pleasures for many conservatives. In the present day, American culture is awash with ghoulish entertainment, from The Walking Dead to American Horror Story, nevertheless many conservatives enjoy these shows. Rightist social libertarians are now saying that “conservatism is the new punk rock” (recall the rightwing Johnny Ramone, co-founder of the 1st American punk band the Ramones). Why then have some conservatives made Abramović a target? Simple, they still speak with the fundamentalist voice of the Christian right they claim to disavow. However, just be forewarned… the new young conservatives are out to sink the GOP of yesteryear.

Because I am an artist, I highly value my right to free expression and speech, rights that I would never deny anyone. I may rebuke Abramović and her cohorts, but my admonishment is not a call for censorship. What I want is actual pluralism in art, where a beautiful painting displaying craft, skill, meaning, and narrative can once again be prized by collectors, art critics, gallery owners, and museum directors; this was already largely lost by the late 1970s. In my opinion, a truly outsider, rebellious position would call for painting’s restoration. When was the last time YOU saw works by a living painter in an art museum? And by the way, wasn’t the “rebellious” postmodern coterie co-opted and commodified long ago? Ask the multi-Billionaire Medici of Los Angeles Eli Broad, he collects postmoderns like they were stamps.

In 1863 the conservative French Academy of Fine Arts was about to present their Paris Salon, the greatest art event in the West at the time. The Salon was dominated by academic artists; in an attempt to preserve their authority they rejected submissions from realist and impressionist artists. The blacklisted undesirables organized a Salon des Refusés (Exhibition of the Refused), and thousands came to jeer and ridicule their paintings, nonetheless the first avant-garde was born, and it eventually overthrew academic art. The anecdote about the Refused is apropos because Marina Abramović and today’s postmodern artists are the new Academic art establishment.

A brand new Salon des Refusés is long overdue!

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UPDATE: 6/19/2017

Hermann Nitsch carried out his bloody “150.Action” performance art on June 17, 2017. Press summations on the atrocity can be found here: The Art Newspaper and the Daily Mail.