Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses

By Howard Hampton

Book Overview

Twenty years as an outsider scouring the underbelly of American culture has made Howard Hampton a uniquely hardnosed guide to the heart of pop darkness. Bridging the fatalistic, intensely charged space between Apocalypse Now Redux and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," his writing breaks down barriers of ignorance and arrogance that have segregated art forms from each other and often from the world at large.

In the freewheeling spirit of Pauline Kael, Lester Bangs, and Manny Farber, Hampton calls up the extremist, underground tendencies and archaic forces simmering beneath the surface of popular forms. Ranging from the kinetic poetry of Hong Kong cinema and the neo-New Wave energy of Irma Vep to the punk heroines of Sleater-Kinney and Ghost World, Born in Flames plays odd couples off one another: pitting Natural Born Killers against Forrest Gump, contrasting Jean-Luc Godard with Steven Spielberg, defending David Lynch against aesthetic ideologues, invoking The Curse of the Mekons against Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, and introducing D. H. Lawrence to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "We are born in flames," sang the incandescent Lora Logic, and here those flames are a source of illumination as well as destruction, warmth as well as consumption.

From the scorched-earth works of action-movie provocateurs Seijun Suzuki and Sam Peckinpah to the cargo cult soundscapes of Pere Ubu and the Czech dissidents Plastic People of the Universe, Born in Flames is a headlong plunge into the passions and disruptive power of art.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674027329
• ISBN13: 9780674027329
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Screams out against lifelessness and the will to demean...

Howard Hampton's "Born In Flames," is so vividly written, each sentence like a crazed aphorism on some bleak American-gothic apocalypse just this side of redemption-via-imagination, a creatural re-imagining beyond the blood darkness, effluvia, and debris of our times and ordinary lives. One could study how to write essays and to organize cultural collections around wild tropes by such a book. Not sure the introduction gets at what the individual essays are doing alone or in the aggregate, but it is a book that calls out for one to come to terms with it, as a way of reading film and music and US culture as such, as crazed intervention, as a will to create and transform the ordinary in style and cultural-extremity production. He can get from moments in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid to larger shifts in the culture, and from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia to the blood poetry of some US frontier apocalypse, still to come. That book so wrought is probably more crammed with speculation and implication than whole issues of PMLA in their professionalized repetition of approach and language. That cover screams out against lifelessness and routine modes of writing or being. This is a quest for rebirth, life "born in flames" not death or negation or the will to demean...