Jim Ellis: Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations (2009)

Best known as an iconoclastic, wildly inventive filmmaker, Derek Jarman was also an accomplished author, painter, and landscape artist. In Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations, Jim Ellis considers Jarman’s wide-ranging oeuvre to present a broad perspective on the career and life of one of the most provocative, engaged, and important artists of the twentieth century.

Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations analyzes Jarman’s work—including his famous films Caravaggio, Jubilee, Edward II, Blue, and Sebastiane—in relation to his critiques of the government and his activism in the gay community, from the liberationist movement to the AIDS epidemic. While others have frequently focused on Jarman’s biography, Ellis looks at how his politics and aesthetics are intertwined to comprehend his most radical aspects, particularly in films such as War Requiem and The Last of England.

Here Jarman is revealed as an artist who keenly understood the role of history and mythology in creating a personal and national identity: as an activist, he sought to challenge old histories while producing new ones to carve out a space for alternative communities in Britain late in the twentieth century.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2009
ISBN 0816653135, 9780816653133
312 pages

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Simon Reynolds: Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (2006)

Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length exploration of the wildly adventurous music created in the years after punk. Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with the video-savvy synth-pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell, whose success coincided with the rise of MTV. Full of insight and anecdotes and populated by charismatic characters, Rip It Up and Start Again re-creates the idealism, urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and challenging periods in the history of popular music.

Publisher Penguin Books, 2006
ISBN 0143036726, 9780143036722
416 pages

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Zack Furness (ed.): Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower (2012)

In the thirty years since Dick Hebdige published Subculture: The Meaning of Style, the seemingly antithetical worlds of punk rock and academia have converged in some rather interesting, if not peculiar, ways. A once marginal subculture documented in homemade ‘zines and three chord songs has become fodder for dozens of scholarly articles, books, PhD dissertations, and conversations amongst well-mannered conference panelists. At the same time, the academic ranks have been increasingly infiltrated by professors and graduate students whose educations began not in the classroom, but in the lyric sheets of 7” records and the cramped confines of all-ages shows.

Punkademics explores these varied intersections by giving voice to some of the people who arguably best understand the odd bedfellows of punk and academia. In addition to being one of the first edited collections of scholarly work on punk, it is a timely book that features original essays, interviews, and select reprints from notable writers, musicians, visual artists, and emerging talents who actively cut & paste the boundaries between punk culture, politics, and higher education.

Contributors: Milo J. Aukerman, Maria Elena Buszek, Zack Furness, Alastair Gordon, Ross Haenfler, Curry Malott, Dylan AT Miner, Ryan Moore, Tavia Nyong’o, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Alan O’Connor, Waleed Rashidi, Helen L. Reddington, Stevphen Shukaitis, Michael Siciliano, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Estrella Torrez, Daniel S. Traber, and Brian Tucker.

Publisher Minor Compositions, an imprint of Autonomedia, 9 May 2012
ISBN 978-1-57027-229-5
232 pages

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