Disgraced Monuments
Thursday, 28 March 2024 09:06

Disgraced Monuments

Published in Visual Arts

Adam Stoneman discusses how public monuments and statues mask the arbitrariness of power. Above: the Edward Colston Statue (photo: Bristol City Council)

“Great monuments are erected like dams, opposing the logic and majesty of authority to all disturbing element; it is in the form of cathedral or palace that Church or State speaks to the multitudes and imposes silence upon them.” George Bataille

Over 55 statues have been toppled, removed or slated for removal in the United States and 12 in the UK since the protests over the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis began in May. Pedestals are still littered with protest signs and covered in graffiti: Portland stone, cooling from the heat of battle.

Upon these empty plinths there are proposals to erect new monuments to figures worthy of commemoration such as Charles Hamilton Houston, Paul Stephenson,or even Missy Elliott. But before the bronze is cast, it is worth reflecting not only on what we want to memorialise as a society, but how.

There is reason to be wary of repeating the anachronistic aesthetics of the ‘heroic figurative statuary’, as David Olusoga terms it, with a new cast of historical characters. Monuments signify majesty and authority, casting subjects into the canon of History, beyond contestation or reproach. They disavow history, and bestow a sense of permanence — carved into the rock to appear as a natural feature, Mount Rushmore, Trump recently declared, ‘will stand forever as an eternal tribute’. As Henri Lefebvre wrote, monuments ‘mask the will to power and the arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and collective thought.’

Upon its plinth, the statue of Edward Colston claimed its place immemorial in British History. Residing now in Bristol Museum, after a brief spell at the bottom of Bristol docks, it can be properly understood as a historical object — with a relatively recent and controversial history, erected as it was a century and a half after Colston’s death.

Laura Mulvey and Mark Lewis’s film Disgraced Monuments, made for Channel 4 Television in 1994, examines the fall of the USSR through the toppling of Soviet monuments. The aesthetic of monumentalism deployed by the Tsar was reappropriated by Stalin as a ready-made language that could promote loyalty for the Soviet state, with statues and busts in every town square and public building. ‘The cult of the Tsar returns’, notes Mulvey, with Stalin’s cult of personality embodied in monuments; ‘He was a Gorgon Medusa, everything in sight immortalised in stone’. But by leaving the aesthetic regime of monumentality intact, the statues, which represented the authority of the state, eventually fell victim to the forces of popular revolt. In a park above the Kremlin, a statue of Lenin is replaced by a monument to Alexander II, returning to the very spot from which it had been displaced 70 years before.

There is a memorable interview in the film with a sculptor who works in a small Moscow factory, which until recently had made busts of Stalin, Lenin and Marx. Since perestroika the public contracts have dried up and now he produces kitsch figurines of classical sculptures — “whatever people will buy”. Resnais and Marker’s film Statues Also Die also explores this move to commodified production of tourist statuettes in an African context.

To find an alternative vocabulary of commemoration, one that is adequate for dealing with Britain’s legacy of empire, slavery and racism, we must look instead at the practice of memorialisation in the global south and formerly colonised nations, to reconsider memorials to empire from those who suffered under it.

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Cradock Four Memorial, Eastern Cape, South Africa

In a remembrance garden in the town of Cradock in South Africa, four vertical slabs of concrete bear witness to four anti-apartheid activists murdered by secret police in 1985. Conventions of Western monumentalism are shunned in the use of plain and everyday material; these were four ordinary people, two school teachers, a railway worker and a childhood friend who was with the group by chance, shot down in cold blood. The monument is stark and insistent, it does not demand reverence or veneration but stands upright in indignant rage at a brutal injustice.

At the foot of Croagh Patrick, in Mayo, Ireland, lies The ‘National Famine Memorial. A bronze ‘coffin ship’ rigged with skeletal figures, it commemorates the Great Famine of the 1840s, ‘and the victims of all famines’. In representing the horror of the famine through symbolic and expressionistic elements, the sculpture does not make a simple indictment but opens up a space for a more complex process of collective mourning and loss.

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The National Famine Memorial, County Mayo, Ireland

On 22nd May in Martinique, Emancipation Day, two statues of the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher were pulled down and smashed in the capital of Fort-de-France. “Schoelcher is not our saviour’’ sang the crowds. Though Schoelcher negotiated the bill that abolished slavery in the Caribbean in the 19th Century, he also decreed that slave owners be financially compensated to the sum of over one and a half million francs for the loss of their human captives.

Away from the fray, in a quiet field on the south west coast of Martinique a triangular arrangement of fifteen hunched figures look out onto the sea, at the spot where in 1830 a slave ship sank with 40 slaves shackled on board. The very site of Anse Cafard Slave Memorial encourages contemplation — this is not the municipal site of power of the town square; visitors are encouraged to walk among the eight foot statues. The sculpture focusses on the dignity of the lives who were enslaved by traders like Colston and ‘freed’ by men like Schoelcher.

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Anse Cafard Slave Memorial, Le Diamant, Martinique

The examples above provide an alternative vocabulary to memorialise the incommensurable violence and suffering caused by colonialism and empire. They emphasise the collective over the individual, contemplation over veneration, human loss over heroic triumph.

Occupying the symbolic realm, statues help us frame and interpret the material world we live in. Over time they tell us which stories and which lives matter. The appropriate aesthetics for this historic moment are not those of triumphalism and heroism, based on historic delusion, but memorials which encourage reflection and confrontation with Britain’s imperial past.

Black Lives Matter, slavery, the Beerage and beer in 2020
Thursday, 28 March 2024 09:06

Black Lives Matter, slavery, the Beerage and beer in 2020

Published in Eating & Drinking

Keith Flett considers Black Lives Matter, slavery, the history of the ‘Beerage’ and beer in 2020

Following the police killing of George Floyd the Black Lives Matter movement has exploded across the globe. It is nothing to do with beer, but that doesn’t mean that beer isn’t involved.

Take an immediate example. Lots of individuals and large companies have shown support for BLM. Some large companies have half-decent policies on racism, but a lot of statements from this area of corporate capitalism are more about reputational promotion.

I looked at a few Twitter accounts of some of the better-known craft brewers. A handful had said something. Quite a few had not. Perhaps if they knew about the strong associations of the history brewing in the UK between both slavery and abolitionism they might have spoken up.

On beer social media there was strong support for BLM but very little reference to the links between brewing and the history of slavery, and hardly any ideas about what it might and indeed should mean for the future of brewing and drinking beer.

The subject was discussed by two veteran beer writers however – Martyn Cornell and Roger Protz. Both drew attention to aspects of the brewing industry and slavery that have been in the public domain for a long time, but not previously thought worthy of further discussion in the present day.

The ‘Beerage’, a term used to describe brewery owners who sat in Parliament, is usually seen as being part of the Tory Party. This is because the Liberals were in the main the party of temperance and often strongly anti-drink. Yet matters were more complex than that, because not just politics but religion was also important here.

Cornell draws on the Dictionary of National Biography entry for the Greene family, a central part of what is still Greene King, albeit owned by a Hong Kong Property Company. He looks at the difference between the Greene’s religious beliefs and their business practices.

Perhaps the key paragraph in the DNB entry for the Greene Family is this one:

Benjamin Greene had thrown himself with enormous vigour into representing the interests of the West Indian slave proprietors at a critical juncture of their affairs. To effect this he acquired the Bury and Suffolk Herald in 1828. For six years he ran this ultra-Tory provincial newspaper during the heady period surrounding the Reform Act and the abolition of slavery amid mounting controversy, involving himself in no fewer than three libel cases. Utter reaction to these key pieces of legislation was a strange position for a one-time prominent Dissenter to occupy and the third case heaped such obloquy upon him that he left Bury in 1836 to found a sugar importing and shipowning firm at 11 Mincing Lane, London. He died at Russell Square on 26 November 1860, was buried in Highgate cemetery, and left an estate sworn under £80,000.

Cornell’s piece and perhaps other publicity got Greene King to act in mid-June. They acknowledged that the brewery had been involved in the slave trade. The BBC reported:

Nick Mackenzie, Greene King's chief executive officer, said:

It is inexcusable that one of our founders profited from slavery and argued against its abolition in the 1800s. While that is a part of our history, we are now focused on the present and the future. (We will)…….make a substantial investment to benefit the BAME community and support our race diversity in the business.

Its own website now states after changes were made:

Benjamin Greene handed over the Greene’s Brewery to his son Edward in 1836. After founding the brewery, Benjamin went on to own cane sugar plantations in the West Indies where he was a slave owner. Even in the 1800s, his views on slavery were extremely unpopular and in the brewery’s home of Bury St Edmunds he wrote columns in his own newspaper that were critical of those campaigning for the abolition of slavery.

Given that all the details have been in the public domain for a very long time it is surely appropriate to ask what took them so long? Perhaps it was only concern about possible protests and reputational damage from people avoiding their beers that got them to do something.

A bit of a better bitter from the Beerage

Other leading parts of the Beerage, notably Whitbreads and Truman, Hanbury and Buxton had a rather better record.

Samuel Whitbread was an MP for Bedford from 1768 to 1790. His DNB entry notes that he spoke mainly on brewing matters but also was a supporter of the abolition of the slave trade. That of course is not the same as the abolition of slavery in Britain’s colonies but that didn’t become a central issue until after Whitbread’s death.

The history of Hanbury, Buxton and Truman take the matter further. Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786-1845) became an MP and worked with William Wilberforce to end the institution of slavery in the British colonies. He was for doing so gradually and no doubt criticism can be made, but there was certainly not any benefit being gained from slavery.

This history is important, and worth knowing and reflecting on. It begs the question of what is to be done now?

A statement by the Chief Executive of the Campaign for Real Ale, Nik Antona on 10th June set a welcome benchmark. It makes it clear that the experience of drinking beer should be an inclusive one and urges attention to beer and pub names that hold objectionable associations with the past as a first step.

Calling for action beyond fine words is important here. The statement attracted some criticism including comment by some racists but also a good deal of support. Even in making it, CAMRA revealed the scale of the challenge in addressing racism and racist attitudes in beer.

One concrete example of action is that of a Wetherspoon’s pub name in Wrexham - the Elihu Yale. Yale’s connection with Yale University is well known and had lived in North Wales from 1699 until his death in 1721. He made his money from the slave trade with the East India Company. In response to a local campaign to change the name, Wetherspoon’s have agreed to review the matter.

Another US initiative by Weathered Souls brewing is to ask breweries to produce a stout based on a common recipe:

We took a stout recipe and decided to call on our peers in the brewing industry to collaborate in unison for equality and inclusion amongst people of colour. All proceeds from the purchase of these releases will be donated to local funds that support police brutality reform and legal defences.

Most of the breweries participating are US based but there are some in the UK including Brewdog, Cloudwater and Crafty Devil.

The Black Lives Matter movement continues to spark protest and change worldwide. When it comes to beer and brewing I’d suggest three things:

1. Understand the history of the links between slavery and brewing, and which present-day companies bear some responsibility for reparation.

2. Breweries and pub companies should embrace the positions of Black Lives Matters, particularly in terms of equality of employment and encouraging an inclusive culture in their pubs.

3. Actions speak louder than words. CAMRA’s focus on pub and beer names and associations is a good start.

 

Ravers 4 Justice
Thursday, 28 March 2024 09:06

From Seoul to Detroit: Techno Amidst Protest and Pandemic

Published in Music

John R. Eperjesi outlines the connections between techno, COVID-19, and Black Lives Matter. The article is in memory of Mike Huckaby

 So we make music. We make music about who we are and where we’re from. - Jeff Mills

We need images of tomorrow; and our people need them more than most. - Samuel Delany

Techno music is global music. Every city around the world, big or small, has a techno scene, and there are more than a few countryside techno crews out there. Seoul’s vibrant underground techno culture was recently on display, literally, with the online streaming event “VFV Club” (www.vfvclub.live/about), which brought together 22 DJs from the city’s three underground techno clubs, Vurt, Faust, and Volnost, giving people who tuned in from around the world some much-needed machine music to help them get through the coronavirus pandemic, while donations helped struggling artists and venue owners earn some desperately-needed income.

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Club Directors: Yoojun (Vurt), Marcus L (Faust), Jungtak Moon (Volnost)

But while techno is now global, this music first emerged in the early 1980s in local African American communities in and around Detroit, Michigan. Detroit is a predominantly black post-industrial city that is still recovering from the flight of well-paying auto industry jobs, first to the white suburbs starting in the 1950s, and then overseas. Population and job loss, combined with racist segregation and job discrimination, has resulted in racialized patterns of inequality in which black people experience significantly higher rates of poverty and unemployment. Economic inequality, combined with underfunded public schools, health and other social services, has made cities like Detroit especially vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic.

And yet despite all of this, African Americans from Detroit created one of the most exciting and important genres of music to emerge in the past 40 years. A recent viral YouTube video (above) shows a motley crew of Black Lives Matter protesters in Detroit marching and chanting through the streets while techno beats blast from a stereo, similar to the way that Korean pro-democracy protests are energized by the singing, dancing, and percussion of pungmul. A handmade sign declares, “Techno is Black! Police are Wack! Ravers 4 Racial Justice!” Black Techno Matters is a local community organization that works to remind people that, “the very roots of techno were planted by black artists in Detroit”. So who are some of these artists?

History

There is some debate over which African American artists from Detroit created the first techno song, “Sharevari” by A Number of Names, or “Alleys of Your Mind” by Cybotron, both of which came out in 1981. The title of the former refers to an upscale clothing shop and party club (spelled Charevari), and captures the Europhile fantasies of upward mobility and conspicuous consumption – fine wine, Vogue, Porsche – that characterized the African American high school party scene in late 1970s and early 1980s Detroit. The latter takes dystopian tropes of science fiction, paranoia and government mind control, and unleashes them on the dance floor.

In contrast to Motown, the pop soul music institution that grew up in Detroit and left a cultural void in the city when it departed for Los Angeles in 1972, these two songs offered a new style of post-soul electronic music which drew inspiration from the robot pop of Kraftwerk, the synthesizer-driven Eurodisco of Giorgio Moroder, and the futuristic funk of hometown heroes Parliament-Funkadelic.

Also in 1981, a DJ collective, Deep Space Soundworks, began to play an eclectic mix of dance records at parties around Detroit. Three members of this collective, Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, are routinely venerated as the founders of Detroit techno, often referred to as the “Belleville Three,” a reference to the high school outside of Detroit where they met. But any narrative about the origins of Detroit techno that excludes Eddie Fowlkes, who was also a member of Deep Space Soundworks along with Art Payne and Keith Martin, is incomplete.

Juan Atkins had already been producing electronic music as a member of Cybotron, along with Vietnam War veteran Richard “Rik” Davis. Deciding to go solo, Atkins renamed himself Model 500 and quickly created his first solo hit, “No UFOs” (1983). This track was a hit on dance floors both in Detroit and in Chicago, where a new genre of dance music, acid house, was also incubating. After gaining attention in Chicago, the electronic music produced by Atkins, May, Saunderson, and Fowlkes began to travel across the Atlantic to dance floors in the UK and Europe. Fowlkes’s banging “Goodbye Kiss” (1986), May’s euphoric “Strings of Life” (1987), and Saunderson’s soulful hits “Big Fun” and “Good Life” (1988), all became anthems in the new rave culture that began to emerge across the Atlantic during the late 1980s.

Inspired by the immense popularity of the music coming out of the Motor City, a compilation for 10 Records in the UK was initially going to be called The New House Sound of Detroit, but when Juan Atkins’ delivered his contribution, “Techno Music,” the title of the compilation was changed to Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit (1988). For music critics, this new dance sound contributed to an older tradition of Afrofuturism which connected Detroit techno to the free jazz explorations of John Coltrane and Sun Ra, to the space rock of Jimi Hendrix, to black science fiction writers like Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler, and to films like John Sayles’s Brother from Another Planet (1984). On the question of why black science fiction, and by extension Afrofuturism, is important, Samuel Delany explains, “We need images of tomorrow; and our people need them more than most.”

Underground Resistance

Often described as the Public Enemy of techno, the Underground Resistance music collective and record label was started by Jeff Mills, Mike Banks, and Robert Hood in the late 1980s. Underground Resistance wanted artists to have complete artistic independence and to be protected from exploitation by record companies, and their music is wide-ranging, including everything from the gritty dystopian loops of Revolution for Change (1992), to the jazzy outer space utopianism of Galaxy 2 Galaxy (1992).

JE3 Underground Resistance Logo

Techno DJs, producers, and fans around the world are inspired by the militancy and authenticity of Underground Resistance, and the UR symbol has become rebel chic, a Che Guevara for techno heads. The militant style of UR has been linked to the Black Panthers, an association confirmed by Jeff Mills in a 2006 interview:

All the black men you see in America today are the direct result of those actions: all the freedoms we have, as well as the restrictions, refer back to the government and the Black Panthers in the '70s . . . So we make music. We make music about who we are and where we’re from. - (Daily Yomiuri)

The title of Riot EP (UR 1991) alludes to the 1967 Detroit Uprising, also known as the Detroit Rebellion or 12th Street Riot, when the histories of racism and economic inequality erupted into clashes between black communities and the police that lasted for five days. Ideological conflicts over the naming of this event, whether it was an uprising, a rebellion, or a riot, is something that the people of Jeju and Gwangju can definitely relate to. With Black Lives Matter protests emerging all across the United States, Riot EP is once again in heavy rotation.

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Mike Banks often appears in public wearing a mask, as does UR artist DJ Stingray. The mask is a symbol of resistance to the promotion of egotism and narcissism in commercial dance music culture, and visually alludes to the Mexican insurgent and former Zapatista and Indian resistance leader, Subcomandante Marcos. Mike Banks has two legacies of oppression and resistance in his family background, as his mother is Blackfoot Indian and his father is black, a biographical detail that can be heard in a song like “Ghostdancer” (1995), which refers to a resistance movement first practiced by Nevada Northern Pauite Indians in 1889 and quickly spread across the Western United States. Underground Resistance proves that you can be anti-racist and anti-imperialist and still rock a dance floor.

Protests and Pandemic

On April 24, 2020, the Detroit techno community lost one of its most beloved figures, the DJ, producer, and educator, Mike Huckaby, to complications resulting from a stroke and COVID-19. He was only 54 years old. The pandemic has devastated African American communities around the United States. Black people account for 13% of the U.S. population, yet 24% of COVID-19 deaths, nearly twice their proportion of the population.

While African American communities are fighting to survive this novel virus, a very old disease, the extrajudicial murder of black people by the police, has once again surfaced, this time in the form of an 8 minute and 46 second video of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin methodically choking the life out of George Floyd, confident that he can calmly execute a black man in public and not be punished. The murder of Mr. Floyd has triggered one of the largest protest movements in the history of the United States, led by the movement Black Lives Matter.

Thousands of people gather for a peaceful demonstration in support of George Floyd and Regis Korchinski-Paquet and protest against racism, injustice and police brutality, in Vancouver, on Sunday, May 31, 2020. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP)

With historic Black Lives Matter demonstrations gathering in streets and parks across the United States, and around the world, people who care about techno music, whether at home or at the club, as a critic or dancer, as a producer or DJ, should take some time to understand both this movement to end systemic racism and this history of techno, because it is all connected. The roots of techno were planted by black artists in Detroit, but those artists have often been aggressively utopian in working to imagine racially and economically egalitarian futures.

From Detroit to Seoul

Local music scenes matter too. Underground, independent, non-commercial music, from folk to techno, and from jazz to house, is the heartbeat of every community. People often go to underground dance music clubs to escape their everyday lives for a brief period of time. As the soulful disco group Sparque sang in their 1981 hit for West End Records, “Let’s Go Dancin’:”

Working hard just ain’t no good

Do something else if we only could

The only chance we get to come alive is after our nine-to-five.

As Ernst Bloch taught us, fantasies of escape are serious business, as they often contain utopian dreams of a better future. But while some people go to clubs to escape work, for others the club is a place of work. From musicians and DJs who often live gig to gig, to sound and lighting engineers, cleaning staff, door people, security, bar staff, managers, interior and graphic designers, promoters, a massive amount of labor – physical, emotional, artistic – goes into the functioning of a club.

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DJ Stingray at Contra in Seoul. Photo: John Eperjesi

With clubs in Seoul and other cities around the world shut down due to the COVID-19 crisis, venue owners who have devoted their lives and pocketbooks to their passion for underground music are really hurting. But there are some signs of hope. Earlier this month, the German government announced 12-month “Restart Culture” funding initiative which will provide the coronavirus-affected creative sector as a whole with €1 billion in assistance. $56m of that total will go towards grassroots venues. Hopefully the South Korean government, which has shown remarkable compassion and leadership during this difficult time, will find a way to devote some resources toward keeping the heart of the local, underground music scene beating. 

Mike H

i. m. Mike Huckaby, Detroit techno legend

The global drug pandemic, police supremacism and the corruption of film-makers
Thursday, 28 March 2024 09:06

The global drug pandemic, police supremacism and the corruption of film-makers

Dennis Broe focuses on the global drug pandemic, dealt with in different ways in three new series     

Three new series deal variously with the drug pandemic, that byproduct of the despair that has grown in the wake of neoliberal capitalism. As opportunities shrink because of a global upward redistribution of wealth away from both the working and middle classes and the socially responsible agencies of the state, more people turn to the powerful opioid fentanyl, the old reliable cocaine in both its middle-class (sniffed) and working-class and underclass (heated) form as crack, and to new imagined drugs to remove that pain.

These are the drugs du jour of three series, Hightown, Amo and Homecoming which deal in various ways with the culture, lifestyle and repressive mechanisms which surround their intake. However, because drugs are useful palliatives in societies that do not welcome change, for the most part the series, while offering detailed descriptions of the problem of drugs, do not offer constructive solutions on how to eradicate them.

Drug Dealers in Corporate Suits: Homecoming

 First and foremost is Amazon Prime’s Homecoming, whose second season stars Harriet, the film about the black abolitionist, Harriet Tubman. The first season had Julia Roberts – in this second season still exec producing – playing an at first compliant psychotherapist fronting for a drug and biochemical company, the Geist Group, which used veterans as guinea pigs to test a memory-erasing drug. Her mind was wiped also and she slowly started to wake to the callousness of the drug company’s exploitation of humans, who were already casualties of the corporate war machine.

The series’ first iteration was as a 20-minute podcast and it is exceptionally tightly structured, cramming more storytelling into a half hour than more series manage in an hour.

The second season begins with Tubman, also having lost her memory, waking in a rowboat and desperately attempting to piece together who she is and what has happened to her. There is a fractured storyline, as in the film Memento, that when ironed out is actually quite simple. The strength of the second season though is its laying bare of the ambition of the Geist Group which amplifies its first season program of expunging the memories of ex-soldiers to expand and join with the military to weaponize its memory-erasing drug to use on the battlefield and on the homefront. The effort is led by Joan Cusack’s Pentagon official whose utter lack of morality or responsibility, couched in corporate-military jargon, is striking.

As the series unfolds, we watch a grab for power by Hong Chou’s put-upon underling who quickly grasps that to get ahead in the biological and pharmaceutical corporate world what is required is an innate ruthlessness and a disregard for how the drugs being developed actually affect the users. She also imbibes a milder form of the drug which the company manufactures, a red roll-on – a “take the red pill and chill” – that allows her to live with the anxiety produced by her lack of conscience.

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Stephan James’ dogged war veteran pursuing the truth

Fittingly, it is If Beale Street Could Talk’s Stephan James as a war veteran who doggedly pursues the truth who enacts a karmic revenge on the company that is unfortunately more wish-fulfillment that fact, but welcome just the same. A second strong season from one of the few shows to deal with the drug epidemic caused by the seldom discussed corporate and capitalist pharmaceutical industry.

High Times in Hightown

More problematic by far, but a reliable guilty pleasure, is Starz’s and Amazon Prime’s Hightown which describes its locale as Provincetown or P-town, as utterly riddled with drugs to the point that only users, sellers, cops and informers inhabit the space. The series focuses on the struggle of a lesbian Latina working-class addict, Jackie Quinones, who barely holds down his duties on Cape Cod patrolling the coastal waters for illegal catches. Her job is described mockingly by the macho cop she wants to impress as a “fish detective.”

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Fish Detective Turned Real Detective in Hightown

She hits bottom in her addiction early in the series, and we watch her in her twin attempts to get and stay clean and to become an actual detective, a job for which she shows an aptitude. Jackie is constantly late on the rent for her dishevelled apartment, uses relationships to secure a next high, and sees nothing wrong with her oversexed life in P-town which she describes to a councillor as a “lesbian Shangri-La.” She finds the body of a young fellow addict and is the first to realize that another young female addict witnessed the murder and is in danger.

The plot cleverly intermixes her struggle to move up in her career with the detritus of her addict life, so that, in tracking a lead on where the witness might be she has to lie to a former lover to borrow her car and then drive carefully, since her licence has been suspended. Jackie’s struggle is intermixed with that of the macho cop she is trying to impress, who begins a relationship with the stripper-girlfriend of the drug dealer he is pursing, and an older-brother type fisherman caught also in dealing and using.

It’s an addictive mix, and the series well illustrates how drugs and drug culture have seeped into every aspect of life in the US, and how their use and pursuit propels the young adults in this series, informing every aspect of their existence.

Now the problems. The series is exec-produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, responsible for C.S.I, one of the most conservative of all series on television, where supposedly unerring but actually highly suspect forensic science negated any use for juries or trials and like Dragnet in the 1950s meant the cops were always right.

This is the new, updated Jerry Bruckheimer but some basic premises remain. The first is that, although treatment centres are a feature of the series, they are largely seen as useless, overruled by the need for drug use to be policed.

The second is the nature of the villains. The series takes the “daring” tack of having black and Latino dealers as its heavies. Daring because Hollywood will usually throw Caucasian dealers in the mix so as not to draw flak, but here we have simply unadulterated racism. The series can point to the prominence of drugs distributed by impoverished communities as an alternative source of income as a rationale for its characterization, but the problem is that the focus stays on the street dealers without any attempt to portray the wider socio-economic environment of a global and highly profitable drug trafficking economy which is sanctioned if not encouraged by many governments.

Recently, because of the Black Lives Matter protests against the police, Cops was cancelled. It was one of the television monuments to racism, a series that launched Murdoch’s Fox network and which viewed poor and minority communities entirely from the front seat of a squad car. Hightown has a lot going for it, most especially the engaging struggle of its Latina lead, but it would be better if it told some larger truths about why drug culture exists and why it is perpetuated, instead of sometimes falling back into C.S.I. police supremacist mode.

Drugs and the Duterte Death Squads

One of the Philippines’ better directors, a global darling of the film festival circuit, is Brillante Mendoza who of late has taken as his major subject the drug crisis fueled by President Rodrigo Duterte. Like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte has used the omnipresence of drugs in the slums of Manila as a pretext to wage war against its inhabitants.  

Two of Mendoza’s films on the subject present wildly different points of view, and both are in evidence in Amo, his series for the independent TV5 in the Philippines, distributed globally by Netflix. Ma’ Rosa, a nod to Pasolini’s Ma Roma, details the mom and pop desperation of an elderly couple who must sell drugs in order for their shop to survive and whose family is then brutally beset by the police.

Alpha, The Right to Kill, on the other hand, is told almost entirely from the police perspective as we follow a “daring” raid on the heart of the Manila slums that goes wrong. The right of the police to terrorize the populace is affirmed, while one lone cop is chastised for corruption. It is most likely that with the success of Alpha Mendoza was commissioned to undertake Amo, a series about a teen drug dealer and his uncle, a corrupt cop.

Why was Mendoza, whose own perspective seems to mesh with Duterte’s, chosen to fashion a series on this topic? Instead of (for example) the other most well-known Philippine filmmaker Lav Diaz, whose filmmaking style is more oblique but who has proved himself in films like The Halt and The Woman Who Left to be a far more strident and nuanced critic of the contemporary regime? The answer lies probably in commercial reasons, and government censorship.

Nevertheless, Mendoza is an extraordinary filmmaker incorporating in his series aspects of Italian neorealism, in his gritty portrayal of the slums, and European modernism. For example, in a reflexive joke where raps about the desperate situation of the populace appear on the soundtrack and then feature the band themselves as the teenage protagonist walks by them on the street.

Showrunners frequently describe their series as “like a long movie”, but that is seldom the case since they are mostly broken into plot-heavy smaller pieces. The style though that Mendoza employs, using an immediate and intimate hand-held camera and disdaining any kind of explanation, easy identification, or judgement of his characters does make this more like a movie than a series.

The 13-episodes are mostly in Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines, and follow first the high school student Amo, or Joseph, as he falls further into the amoral lifestyle of a dealer. He begins by skipping school and employing a young girl as a drug runner to escape a police barricade, and then moves to distributing all kinds of exotic party drugs at a club where when the drug turns lethal the English-speaking owners disavow him. He ends alone and on the run. It is in this first half of the series that the Duterte line rules, because we watch Amo’s casual corruption turn deadly and contaminate everything he does. This half of the series functions almost as a rationale for tough and lethal police action.

DBC

Corrupt Cops and the Drug Trade in Amo 

The second half of the series follows Amo’s uncle, a cop himself, as he and his squad carry out a brutal kidnapping of a Japanese drug dealer, coordinated by their superior, the most ruthless of them all. This half functions much more as a criticism of the police and their invovement in the overall corruption that drugs and money generate. And here it is not a lone wolf cop but an entire squad on the force, connected ironically with the anti-kidnapping unit, that plans the kidnapping and subsequent executions.

This is a very mixed series by an extraordinary filmmaker who has brought both his creative talents and his political baggage to television. What the series indicates in actuality is that Philippine filmmakers themselves are not above being corrupted – in this case not by drugs but by the general manipulation of drug culture by those who are not interested in solving the problem, but in profiting from it.

Statues also die
Thursday, 28 March 2024 09:06

Statues also die

Published in Visual Arts

Dennis Broe reflects on the recent attacks on European colonialism and support shown to Black Lives Matter, through the defacement and removal of statues

The first week of European and particularly French and Francophone protests in the wake of the US Black Lives Matter movement concerned parallel police actions against French minorities. This included the death on his birthday of Adama Traoré, held down by three French cops in a hold similar to that executed on George Floyd. Traoré was pronounced dead on arrival at the police station. The official verdict claimed that asphyxiation was caused by the presence in his blood of marijuana. But the family medical examiners reached the conclusion that he died as a result of the chokehold.

Last weekend protestors memorializing Traoré swarmed the streets, despite the Covid prohibition forbidding gatherings of more than 10 people. In the wake of the protests, the Interior Minister announced the chokehold was now banned. The protests were peaceful and most of the marchers wore masks and maintained social distancing. One effect though was that they broke the embargo on street demonstrations which were in full force before the confinement, opposing President Macron’s underfunding of hospitals and his attempt to reduce worker pensions.

This week the protestors widened their approach and took aim at the legacy of European colonialism, most prominently by scrawling “I Can’t Breathe,” George Floyd’s last words, on the Belgium statue in Ghent of Leopold II who presided over the genocidal exploitation of the Congo, referred to at the time erroneously as The Belgian Congo. Across the continent memorials fell, including the statue of Edward Colston, a Bristol slave merchant at the time when the British empire amassed a good deal of its wealth by transporting slaves from Africa to the Americas.

In Bordeaux, the city removed plaques on David Gradis Street which proudly proclaimed that between 1718 and 1789 Gradis’ company had powered 221 boats carrying African slaves to the Americas. Nantes, the center of embarkation of slave boats in France, was already ahead of this movement, having created a memorial to the cruelty of the slave trade. It’s an impressive monument – but so is the at times ostentatious wealth of the city, built on the slave trade, the legacy of which may outlast the memorial. All of which brings up the question not just of memorials but of reparations, a question that has so far not been raised here.

French president Macron was quick to take advantage of the situation having already proclaimed his African soft power policy of redressing colonialism by promising to restore some of the art the French looted from West Africa over the years which resides in prominent museums like the Louvre. The French policy in Africa though includes the carrot and the stick because the French army is still in Mali, Mauretania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

This tearful history was also recounted in Statues Also Die, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker's 1950s film about the theft of this art and its repositioning as colonial booty in French museums. In the film the statues, wrenched out of their cultural context, appear to tear up, wither and die in the asphyxiation of colonialism.

The colonial tradition endures, however. Laurent Joffrin, the editor of the supposedly left French paper Liberation, which published Sartre’s salvos against French terrorism in Algeria, turned his back on that legacy in decrying the tearing down of colonial statues as partaking in the dangerous work of erasing history. Joffrin wished instead that the statues remain as markers of the colonial legacy. But most are not mere markers – they are celebrations.

Joffrin needn’t worry. France’s colonial history is very deeply rooted and will unfortunately endure beyond the statues. But this week a first salvo was fired across the bow against that legacy, both in France, in other cities in Europe, and across the globe.

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