The 1980s Homegrown, Canadian Subgenre Known as Trenchcoat Rock or Warehouse Rock

 Canada's Answer to Yacht Rock?

by James Albert Barr

Okay, I think I retroactively found Canada's answer to Yacht Rock. I'm calling it "Trenchcoat Rock" (or maybe "Warehouse Rock"). This subgenre of "distinctly Canadian rock music" was prevalent during the years 1984-1990. It featured mostly bands, but a few solo artists as well, who were predominantly male, whose lead-singer sported long, big 80s new-wavey hair, and/or mullet-style hair, sometimes receding (or at least one member of the band who had a receding hairline), and wore a trenchcoat/longcoat in at least one music video, which was filmed in an abandoned warehouse, where they would characteristically over-emote their performances in said video(s), seemingly "willing" success and attention, as if they knew their material wasn't all that great.

These bands/artists' music would display a very similar, default-setting, clean, pristine, thinly produced, overtly commercial sound and style, featuring albums that were predictably marred with substantial "filler" aside from the focal-point singles, with little to no deviation in their sound from album to album. Their melodies and hooks, while sometimes genuinely catchy, were fairly simplistic and unsophisticated. Most enjoyed relatively short-term success, almost exclusively in Canada, though several of said acts managed a moderate/minor hit in the U.S. (making the Hot 100 chart, but not necessarily scoring a Top 40 hit). I'm also not trying to necessarily denigrate these bands unduly. I happen to have genuinely enjoyed many of their singles, despite never having been a flat-out "fan" of their stuff and style.

Here's a list of what I believe to be the consummate "Trenchcoat/Warehouse Rock" bands operating mostly in Canada during the years 1984-1990 (their peak period of popularity would have been 1986-1988). I'll also add their best known hit song:

Boulevard/Blvd - "Never Give Up"
The Arrows - "Meet Me in the Middle"
The Box - "Closer Together"
Kim Mitchell - "Go for a Soda"
Cats Can Fly - "Flippin' to the A-Side"
Eight Seconds - "Kiss You (When It's Dangerous)"
Honeymoon Suite - "Feel It Again"
Eye Eye - "Out on a Limb"
Frozen Ghost - "Should I See"
Haywire - "Dance Desire"
Paul Janz - "I Go to Pieces"
Rock and Hyde - "Dirty Water"
Paradox - "Waterline"
Partland Brothers - "Soul City"
One to One - "Angel in My Pocket"

A few tangential examples: Glass Tiger, Platinum Blonde, Chalk Circle, MIchael Breen, mid-to-late 80s Gino Vanelli, Tom Cochrane/Red Rider, Alta Moda, The Northern Pikes, Belinda Metz

And a couple more tangential examples outside of Canada: Mr. Mister, The Outfield, Thinkman

Those are the ones that I remembered/retrieved. Have I missed anyone for those of my fellow music geeks that are familiar with THIS fascinating, retroactive subgenre of rock music?

The Electric Ghosts of 1983: the Year That Forever Altered Our Reality

 

by James Albert Barr

"A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinking about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one either. It's all part of a cosmic unconscious." - Miller from the film Repo Man (1984 - filmed in 1983) 

"All that is visible must grow beyond itself, and extend into the realm of the invisible." - Dumont, from the 1982 film, Tron 

It was the year the 80s officially became "The 80s", with no more overlap from the 70s. In the opinion of this writer, and a few others as well, the year 1983 profoundly changed, altered or broke the fundamental normalcy of our world, our consensus reality, and was a ground-zero year for what would ultimately become "the Digital Age" of our now Hypermodern, internet-dominated, technocratic reality. Without knowing it consciously, this truly seismic year has haunted me since I turned 15 years old during the spring of '83. And only relatively recently, say in the past several years or so, likely since I discovered Vaporwave music, watched the first season of Stranger Things, and Panos Cosmatos' two darkly revealing films, 2010's Beyond the Black Rainbow and 2018's Mandy (both set in the year 1983), has this stark realization finally surfaced in my conscious mind.

One of the others that has been experiencing what I've been going through as well is author and blogger for The Secret Sun, and fellow Gen-Xer, Chris Knowles, whose published books include, "Our Gods Wear Spandex", "The Secret History of Rock 'n' Roll", "The Complete X-Files: Behind the Series, the Myths, and the Movies", and his recent, outstanding collection of Secret Sun blogs, dating from the late-2000s to 2021, "The Endless American Midnight". One of those blog articles in said book first appeared last year and is titled, "1983: the Year That Broke Reality". He began his article in immediate fashion:

"Nineteen eighty-three hovers like a wraith over all my work and I've never been quite sure why. All I know is that I sensed something definitively change in the spring and summer of that year, even if those changes have only become apparent in the past few years. But all I can say for sure is that something somehow seemed to have entered our world from somewhere else. I've never been able to define it and I can only try to track it by what you might call a process of elimination. It's harder than it sounds."

I couldn't agree more with Chris's last sentence, it is very difficult to explain, describe and articulate the elusive essence and nature, or rather mysterious "denature", of that certain "something" from "somewhere" that "somehow entered our world" completely in 1983, reaching peak frequency between May and November, after its seemingly conjuring process began in late 1982 and ultimately spilled over into the early months of 1984. 

So, as close to its tenuous proximity as I can access, regarding what it was exactly that happened in the zeitgeist, hyper-morphing pole shift that was 1983, thus forever altering our collective reality en masse going forward, whether one was conscious, semi-conscious or totally oblivious of it, I will simply start with a few immensely significant, world-changing technological innovations that appeared in 1983. 

Well, for starters, and quite literally, on January 1st, 1983, the frickin' Internet was born! They referred to it as "Flag Day" when the migration of the ARPANET, that is, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, to TCP/IP, the Internet protocol suite (i.e. Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol), was offically completed, permanently activating these new protocols. After several years of further TCP/IP development and experimental use, with major tech companies like IBM, AT & T and DEC, along with smaller ones such as FTPSoftware and Wollongong Group, all participating in trial 'n' error demonstrations between each other, the ultimate spread of TCP/IP computer technology finally reached the public domain in June of 1989 as the World Wide Web. And then it became commercially available to all consumers during the summer of 1995 as Windows 95 with the major ad campaign slogan, "Start Me Up" via The Rolling Stones' classic rock song.

The first mobile cellular phones, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, or as they were cheekily referred to, unwieldy "brick phones", appeared in 1983; we would soon be seeing these phones appearing in movies and TV shows, usually in the privileged hands of government agents, officials and Wall Street yuppies; and even music videos, such as The Fixx's video for their 1984 hit song, aptly titled, "Are We Ourselves?". Their slightly irksome size would be considerably diminished over the next several years and then suddenly appear in ubiquitous, trendy fashion by the mid-90s, upgraded, dramatically, to what we now know as the all-purpose, conveniently portable, "smart phones", like the ever-popular Apple iPhone line of models. 

In 1983, we were only at the first generation (1G) of wireless cellular technology, which was of the analog mobile telecommunications standard for the time. It was superseded by 2G in 1991, crucially transitioning from analog to digital capability. We now have arrived at a 5G level technology standard of broadband cellular networks. What generation will eventually deliver a Matrix-like technology standard digital capability? 6G? 7G? Is this the ultimate goal for tech moguls, and for humanity in general?  

Also making the technological scene for the first time, in 1983, was the Microsoft Word program, which would eventually be included with Windows 95's computer software. And the two Steve's, Jobs and Wozniak of Apple Computer Inc., would announce the arrival of their electronic baby, the Macintosh 128K PC computer, in October of '83. It would be officially released for purchase in January of 1984, during Super Bowl XVIII, with a very expensive, over-the-top, Orwellian-themed commercial, of course entitled "1984", directed by Ridley Scott, the man who directed the beloved, moody, postmodern noir, cult classic sci-fi film, Blade Runner, in 1982. 

In late 1982 and throughout most of 1983, particularly during May through November, the 1982-83 El Nino event, a rare ocean-atmosphere phenomenon, occurred. At the time, it was considered one of the strongest El Nino events since records were kept. Many hurricanes and tropical storms, including Tropical Storm Octave and Hurricanes Gil, Ismael, Iwa, Tico and Raymond, developed and raged, reaching lands located in the southern regions of the U.S., Hawaii, and in Mexico, causing considerable damage, and between 100-200 lives lost. Eastern U.S. and Canada experienced a very mild 1982-83 winter. This extreme climate event caught most scientists off-guard, having not initially noticed the early signs developing in 1982.

Another fascinating phenomenon took place in upstate New York's Hudson Valley subregion beginning in 1982, escalating in 1983, and continuing fairly frequently until around 1985. Allegedly, there were many reported UFO sightings of boomerang-shaped vessels, during the day and at night, for the duration of that time-period. American author, Whitley Strieber, who wrote the popular novels, The Wolfen and The Hunger (which was adapted into the Tony Scott-directed vampire film, starring David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve; a film that had, and continues to have, great influence on the goth sub-culture), claimed that he was abducted by aliens, whom he dubbed "the visitors", from his upstate New York cabin in late 1985. These incredible, other-worldly experiences were chronicled in his 1987 best selling "nonfiction" book, Communion. Two years later, in 1989, it was made into a feature film, starring Christopher Walken, and bombed at the box-office, but has since gained cult film status. 

To emphasize the high-weirdness, atmospheric eerieness, mounting anxiety, cognitive displacements and postmodern conjunctions that characterized 1983, there were several strange and atypical movies that were released that "upside-down rendering" year (alluding to the Netflix blockbuster, Stranger Things, of course, which debuted 33 years later and set, appropriately in 1983), both in theatres and on television. 

For starters, V: The Original Miniseries, first aired on NBC on May 1st and 2nd. An anti-fascist allegory disguised as a sci-fi adventure romp, V was initially inspired by Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here. The two-parter was about a seemingly friendly alien race who "looked like humans", which Earthlings referred to as "the Visitors", who arrived with a fleet of some 50 giant saucer-shaped motherships looking for much-needed chemicals and minerals to remedy their ailing world. In return for Earth's universal hospitality, the Visitors promise to share their amazing, "advanced technology". Relatively soon, however, after the scientific community is curiously subjected to media and public scrutiny and hostility after attempting to examine the Visitors, which leads to restrictions on their activities and movements, resulting in being discredited or suddenly disappearing altogether (hmm...), it's horrifyingly discovered that the Visitors are, in fact, mice-eating reptile humanoid invaders! 

The miniseries proved to be a big ratings winner and was only topped by The Day After later that year in November. A major event TV movie, The Day After was a film that dealt with the, at the time, all-too possible scenario of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Collective anxiety was at a fever-pitch in 1983, and for good reason, as we came to the brink of nuclear annihilation a couple of times that year, especially culminating on November 7th when several Soviet officials misinterpreted the NATO exercise called Able Archer 83 as a nuclear first strike, basically forcing a DEFCON 2 level scenario - DEFCON 2 is colour-coded as Red. The colour red was a dominant colour in 1983, in all its psychological and literal associations. Not the least of which, as being associated with the U.S.S.R., the colour red was also featured prominently in V and many other films (such as, aptly enough, WarGames), art, fashion, advertising and music, such as Nena's 1983 international smash-hit, "99 Luftballons", which is translated in english as "99 Red Balloons", an anti-nuclear war song.

Several of the stranger films released in theatres in 1983 - and one particularly significant one "filmed in '83", and literally radiating that year's high-frequency weirdness, but released in early 1984, Repo Man - became box-office failures, only to eventually become beloved cult favorites and semiotics-filled treasures for obsessed, cinematic detectives like me, were the following: Rumble Fish, Strange Invaders, the aforementioned The Hunger, Wavelength, Brainstorm, The Osterman Weekend, Liquid Sky, Christine, Videodrome, Valley Girl, Twilight Zone: The Movie, and The Dead Zone.    

Most of these "bitchin'" and rather "rad" films featured off-beat, hallucinogenic, haunting, disorienting, other-worldly, highly-sexualized, weird and eerie settings and atmospheres. And thanks to George Lucas' and Steven Spielberg's special effects influence, as well as great advances in computer technology and graphics, which were really starting to be rolled-out around this time, with PCs, upgraded arcade games and home video games becoming super-popular with consumers, and accelerating consumer-culture in general, the 1983 zeitgiest was a colossally-shimmering mega-glow of electricity, buzzing and bouncing from an ever-expanding electrical grid from ground-level to what I would call "the Electric Ether" of our all-encompassing, denatured, atmospheric density constant membrane that theoretically opened up a possibly forbidden conduit of mind-energy emanating from the collective (un)conscious of a mentally and emotionally barraged populace. 

These kinds of critical mass irruptions of human consciousness have happened before in the form of what contemporary philosopher/social critic, John David Ebert, calls a "Maximal Stress Event", most notably in the 20th century with the two World Wars, the Trinity nuclear test of July 16, 1945 in New Mexico, the October/Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and the subsequent assassination of John F. Kennedy; and there is always a stressfully-precipitous, psychical fallout that irrepressibly ensues. One of the more recent Maximal Stress Events was, of course, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Certain members of the intelligentsia, as well as artists, poets, film-makers, musicians and sensitives in general, represent the comparative few who are able to interpret and express the signs, warnings and wonders of said events, sometimes consciously, but mostly subconsciosly.

In his 2013 book, The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian Tradition of Magic, author, Peter Levenda, describes such a person in the esoteric writer, and ceremonial magician, Kenneth Grant, who, when confronting said psychical phenomena, concluded that somekind of "invasion" was entering our world:

"Grant clearly believed that the world was undergoing an invasion from some other dimension or from somewhere Beyond. This invasion was being experienced as the UFO phenomenon, among other things. The eruption of interest in occultism, horror films, alternative religions, etc. indicated to Grant that something was already working its way into our world and that the only ones who could interpret this event were the sensitives. Not limited to magicians or occultists, sensitives include artists, writers, and other people who deal extensively with imagination and creativity."     

I also feel that the late Mark Fisher, in his final published book, 2017's The Weird and the Eerie, described a corresponding, if indirect, effect of the Electric Ether on the sensitives via "the weird and eerie":

"The folding of the weird and the eerie into the unheimlich (Freud's term for the uncanny, the strange, and the 'unhomely' - that which is not familiar and comfortable; much like the Overlook Hotel setting and atmosphere in Stanley Kubrick's evermore relevant 1980 horror masterpiece, The Shining) is symptomatic of a secular retreat from the outside. The wider predilection for the unheimlich is commensurate with a compulsion towards a certain kind of critique, which operates by always processing the outside through the gaps and impasses of the inside. The weird and the eerie make the opposite move: they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside."

  

A few examples of pop-rock music from 1983 that perfectly encapsulates the sound, tone, vibe and atmosphere of that bewitching year are Men at Work's hit single, "Overkill" ("Ghosts appear and fade away/ Come back another day."); Australian Crawl's "Reckless (Don't Be So)" (this fantastic song's hauntingly dark and moody music is crucially enhanced by its unforgettable, Lynchian-like video, which effectively captures on film the very essence of 1983, as blinking red light emits from an unoccupied Ford Thunderbird, while lead-singer, James Reyne, sings about "Russian subs beneath the arctic" in the chiaroscuro shadows); SSQ's "Synthicide" and "Anonymous" (both appearing on their lone album, Playback, prior to their surprising 2020 comeback album; each song expresses the inescapable feeling of disorientation and disjointed sense of self and identity while immersed in the new technological world; "Anonymous" also plays during the closing credits to Beyond the Black Rainbow). 

And last but certainly not least, perhaps the most definitive exponent of 1983 displacement and unseen foreboding, The Police's ironically blockbuster, smash-hit album, Synchronicity, an album absolutely replete with "time out of joint" tracks and hit-singles; perhaps no better summed up than in "Synchronicity II" with these cryptic, closing lyrics: "Many miles away there's a shadow on the door of a cottage on the shore of a dark Scottish lake."

Finally, and most curiously, 1983 seems to have, vicariously, captured the imagination and beleaguered attention of a certain cross-section of Millennials and even Gen-Zers. Vaporwave music has not only expressed a hypermodern critique of capitalism and consumer culture at large, but has unwittingly tapped into the residual, spectral electric-echo of 1983 (and the 80s in general). Panos Cosmotos' two "1983 films", the aforementioned Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) and Mandy (2018) have gained a fervent cult following of Millennial and Gen-Z fans. And, of course, there's the massive success of Netflix's Stranger Things that so impressively channelled '83 in its first, and best, season. Finally, just recently in 2022, the relatively popular goth/industrial metal band, In This Moment, released the first track from their upcoming EP, titled Blood 1983. The song is a re-recording of 2012's, "Whore" and is given the title, "Whore 1983", which features instantly recognizable '83 synths and visual aesthetics. 

However the more discerning wants to interpret/explain it, the fact of the matter is 1983 continues to haunt the 21st century with a ghostly vengeance, as if it's unwaveringly determined to communicate something to us that we, collectively, young and old, have yet to grasp, admit and/or come to terms with.           

 

 

   

   

 

 

Put Another Damn in the Jukebox, Baby!

 Getting Your Rock 'n' Roll Whilst Immersed in Listlessly Stagnant Commercial Environments 

by James Albert Barr

"Try to run. Try to hide. Break on through to the other side!" - The Doors

Just this afternoon I was visiting my local Goodwill store, perusing their DVD selection looking for wonderfully cheap, great finds - I was not disappointed. For a mere two dollars, I found a two-disc special edition copy of the 1985 cult classic, H.P. Lovecraft's Re-Animator, which was directed by Stuart Gordon and starring Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton.

The irony of finding that very film on DVD, while I was immersed in said store's borderline moribund atmosphere, was both amusing to me and quite telling, given what I observed while exercising my right as a consumer to purchase "second-hand goods". It was not so much the case of witnessing a store accommodating a couple dozen apparent, lower-end customers (myself, notwithstanding) with typically non-descript visages atop of their uniformly sloped shoulders, but the utterly mouse-like, under-their-breath, defeatingly-subservient tones in their voices, customers and workers alike, that sounded so sad and insufferable. 

We weren't in a church or at a funeral or in a library, for crissakes; we were all in a frickin' store! An all too common, run-of-the-mill, goods 'n' services store... with a "security guard" posted at the store's front entrance, interestingly enough. What exactly is the point of this security guard being there now, after the COVID restrictions were lifted this past February? I mean, wasn't that the main reason for deploying security guards at establishments like Goodwill or Value Village in the first place; to uphold the pandemic mandates and restrictions?

I don't remember ever noticing any security guards at these particular businesses in the pre-COVID era. So, why are they still there now? The answer of course is: "the new normal". And there's the undoubted understanding that, by this late-summer/early fall, the COVID restrictions will almost definitely be returning, as the "Great Reseters" continue to whittle away at the collective spirit and will of the common population until we finally surrender our constitutional and chartered freedoms, reasoned and informed voice, and confidence in actual democracy.

Anyway, while scanning said DVD selection, I was a few feet away from the changing rooms. I noticed one of Goodwill's worker-bees shut a changing room door with her foot, because she was holding a couple of garments in her arms - I wasn't at all taken aback by her actions, and didn't really see a problem here, but that's just me. She was then approached by what I would hazard a guess to be a female store manager. This manager, who was only a few feet away from worker-bee, gingerly approached her and whispered in her ear asking if she'd like to keep her job, with a very "Karen-like" tone in her voice.

The worker, in my estimation, reluctantly proffered an affirmative, so said manager "warned her" not to do such a thing again. This kind of demoralizing behaviour, both giving and taking, is becoming a more and more prevalent, default-setting disposition in people; especially people without any firm consciousness and critical acumen in terms of how they perceive themselves, others, culture, and the world in general. That renders them more easily docile, compliable and malleable; they'll represent little to no trouble at all to their HR-educated superiors in our "equity and diversity-strong PC culture".

All the while, observing the patheticness of the socially stagnant environment around me, I could hear several rock 'n' roll classics sequentially blasting from the store's P.A. system with its attendant irony screaming beyond my ear drums and into my very internal constitution. There were songs like Trooper's "Raise a Little Hell", Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'n' Roll", and even The Doors' "Break On Through" emitting, with unbridled, pre-millennial spirit, from the ceiling speakers for all to hear! The disheartened sense I irrepressibly felt, mentally juggling these glaringly incongruous phenomena, was indeed palpable.   

The truly harrowing irony of course is the blunt realization that rock 'n roll itself - thanks in great part to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 being signed into legislation by Bill Clinton, which enabled a few corporations to buy up all radio and T.V. stations and deliberately kill program quality - has long since been captured, de-clawed, appropriated, absorbed and fed back into the system, the Matrix, the now de-cloaking authoritarian state, accelerationist capitalism, the coming Great Reset, the potential Singularity, ergo, the "post-human age". I do seem to be noticing some push-back in response to all the oligarchical/totalitarian nefariousness being so obviously imposed by most western leaders, and the heartless, power-mongering globalists those "leaders" ultimately answer to. But a far more concerted, power-of-the-people effort is needed in order to pacify or "reset" their minds and attitudes toward their far less-privileged fellow human beings.

        

Canadian Truckers Assemble!!

 Trucker Convoy to Ottawa Represents Fight for Freedom Against Globalist Tyranny 

by James Albert Barr

Literally thousands of Canadian truck drivers have trekked across wintry Canada to assemble outside of the Parliament building, in the nation's capital of Ottawa, to collectively, and peacefully, protest, along with many more thousands of fed-up fellow Canadian citizens (and over a million of which have appeared in the streets all across Canada to show rousing support), against not only the vaccine mandates being imposed on all truckers crossing the borders to enter back into Canada, but rallying against the COVID-19 restrictions and draconian measures denying Canadians (or at least those Canadians who actually care about them) their basic, democratically established freedoms. 

The mainstream media in Canada, namely the CBC, have mostly ignored the convoy protests outright, or deliberately misrepresented and demonized it, and all those who are supporting it, as fascists, bigots, hooligans, etc. So-called Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau publicly decried and characterized the political movement as "a small, fringe minority", who hold "unacceptable views" that "don't represent Canadians". Small, fringe minority? Unacceptable views? Not five years ago, Trudeau, commenting on athletes' rights to express themselves said, "Under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada - Canadians, whether they are professional athletes or not, are allowed to express themselves. That is a right we will always defend as Canadians. We believe in free expression." 

Yet now he appears to be back-tracking on that sentiment because a vast number (and not just a "small, fringe minority", as it turned out) of regular, working Canadians happen to disagree with him, and his supporters, on a very important, nuance-laden national health issue, and its more and more troubling and suspicious implications that have had wide-sweeping, mostly negative affects on all Canadian citizens over the course of the past two years, since the beginning of the, um, "pandemic". 

A considerable cross-section of Canada's population are mentally and emotionally exhausted and fed-up with the constant lockdowns and restrictions on their basic rights and freedoms under the so-called guise of "public health and safety" over a virus which has a better than 99% survival rate. Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that, regardless of vaccinations and wearing a mask, you will likely contract COVID-19, and spread it. That is "the science" on the issue - full-stop. So, what is the point of the vaccinations and boosters? And wearing a mask in public? And all the restrictions? And all the political, leftist-driven rhetoric and blatant propaganda? In a word, with many variations: Authoritarianism. Or totalitarianism. Or oligarchy. Or technocracy. Or the Great Reset. Or the Singularity. Or the post-human age. Take your pick, it doesn't matter to the corporate elitists/globalists/technocrats (who basically placed and control our so-called governments and institutions), as long as you and I submit to their not-so-surreptitious tyranny and meglomanical thirst for world domination and ultimate power!

I firmly speculate that the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown measures were never really about "public health and safety" and the "best interests of the citizens, young and old". We have been mostly unwitting participants in the world's most spectacularly elaborate and insidious EXPERIMENT ever executed in human history! Like John B. Calhoun's "Mouse Utopia Experiment" during the late-50s/early-60s, we too have been unknowingly imposed by life-altering conditions, via social-engineering, predictive-programming and mainstream media gaslighting/propaganda for the purposes of studying the results of the effects on large swathes of people and on individual humans of varying economic backgrounds, creeds, races, orientations and genders. 

Mr. Calhoun had been quoted as saying, regarding the "human element" theorized in his experiments with mice, that "Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Their most complex behaviours will become fragmented. Acquisition, creation, and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial, cultural-conceptual-technological society will have been blocked." Does this strikingly unsettling description not bring to mind a certain, "easily triggered", socially-inept, anxiety-riddled, politically-impressionable, gender dysphorically-inclined faction of the current population, likely born after 1980?    

There is ample reason to assume, to suspect that there's a direct correlation between the Woke-addled politics, and its extreme reactionary behaviour, suffusing through all of culture and its institutions right now (along with its attending cancel-culture and growing censorship), the COVID-19 pandemic, accelerationist capitalism, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution's baby, the Great Reset. To preserve our already severely damaged and compromised democracy and chartered rights and freedoms, we ALL have to unite together (here in Canada and abroad) to restore this once held consensus-reality and save our long-held human rights and values! The trucker convoy presently occupying Ottawa's parliamentary sector perhaps represents our "last line of defence" against the soulless and nefarious oligarchical/technocratic elite who have planned this diabolical coup d'etat for decades, I truly believe. LET US ALL UNITE FOR FREEDOM, THE DIGNITY AND RIGHTS OF ALL PEOPLES AND GENUINE DEMOCRACY!!  

Top Gunned: Behind the Persistent Pushing of the Envelope in 90s and 2000s Pop Culture

 Where Did That Proverbial "Envelope" Go Anyway? And What Was its Ultimate Purpose?

by James Albert Barr

"The world is a business, Mr. Beale!" - Network (1976)

Where did the phrase, "pushing the envelope" originate? Apparently, it was in 1944 during the late stages of World War II, and was associated with the American Air Force pertaining to aircraft, particularly test-flights, where a plane's designated altitude and speed limits are potentially pushed to the max where it becomes dangerous and possibly fatal for the pilot. The term "envelope" was actually first used in mathematics in a technical and engineering context, before being applied to aeronautics directly. 

It wasn't until famed author, Tom Wolfe, incorporated "pushing the envelope" in his 1979 novel, The Right Stuff, that the phrase started to gain traction in popular culture. One film, featuring the air-force and fighter planes as its main setting, the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun, which literally launched Tom Cruise's career as a bona fide movie star into the proverbial stratosphere, references "the envelope" in an early scene where Tom Skerritt's character, flight instructor, Mike "Viper" Metcalf, addresses "the top 1% of naval aviators - the elite", and says: "We're gonna teach you to fly the F-14 right to the edge of the envelope - faster than you've ever flown before,...but more dangerous." - "Highway toooo the danger zone!/ I'll take you riiiight intooo the danger zone!"

I find it very interesting that during this scene from Top Gun, when "Viper" Metcalf is talking about "the envelope" and the danger involved in riding its edge or beyond, the camera is off of Tom Skerritt and is instead focused on Tom "Maverick" Cruise, who is distracted by Val "Iceman" Kilmer - whom himself is not paying attention to his instructor - attempting to psych Maverick out by clumsily flipping a pen between his fingers. We, as the audience, are too having our attention directed towards Maverick and Iceman, thus likely not hearing what Viper is saying about "the envelope". It was clearly a deliberate editing choice to distract the audience from the dialogue being spoken and instead direct our collective attention onto Maverick and Iceman goofing off. Why was that?

It's no secret that Top Gun was essentially a glorified, nearly two-hour ad for air-force recruitment, and was likely funded, at least partially, by the American military-industrial complex. Well, the blockbuster "commercial" worked perfectly, because air-force recruitment "skyrocketed" by some 400% or so, shortly after the film's screen-run. This could very well be a text-book example of "predictive programming" onto the unsuspecting, and relatively "predictable" masses/sheep/specific demographic. It'll be very interesting to read the new semiotics and subtext infused into the upcoming Top Gun sequel, the post-9/11, Trump-era Top Gun: Maverick (or at least filmed during the Trump-era), which is supposedly getting released in July. 

I remember, while living through the 1990s, and much of the 2000s, an often asserted phrase was uttered regarding what was generally opined as "risque and provocative pop culture". Of course that phrase was this: "It's pushing the envelope" or "They're pushing the envelope". The phrase had transcended its original definition. It wasn't yet as bandied about in 1980s popular vernacular as it would the following decade, if memory serves, being a teenager myself in the 80s. A certain movie (The Silence of the Lambs, Pulp Fiction, Se7en, etc) or TV show (Seinfeld, Twin Peaks, The Larry Sanders Show, etc) or song ("Smells Like Teen Spirit", "Cop Killer", "Smack My Bitch Up", etc) or album (Ritual de lo habitual, Ready to Die, Mechanical Animals, Let Them Eat Pussy, etc) or book (American Psycho, Daddy's Roommate, Infinite Jest, etc) or piece of art, what-have-you, predominantly aimed at the 18-35 demographic, would sometimes court enough controversy and negative reaction that it would enter the public discourse and even get national exposure in newspaper columns, editorials and mainstream news programs, as well as sensationalist, afternoon talk shows (Ricky Lake, Jerry Springer, Montel Williams, etc), which, by the 90s, were all the rage.

In fact, the notion of "pushing the envelope" got so pervasive by the mid-2000s, as entertainment got more and more boundary-pushing risque, edgy and controversial, I was actually compelled to write down these three questions in one of my several miscellaneous notebooks, where I collected quotes, citations, lyrics, poems and general thoughts and ideas that suddenly came to me, and jotted them down:

1. What does it really mean to push the figurative "envelope"?
2. Is it not the case that, right now, a permissive, illusory pushing of "the envelope" is actually in effect?
3. Can "the envelope", conversely, be pushed too far unto irreparable excess and damage?

What did I mean exactly by "a permissive, illusory pushing of 'the envelope'"? I really wasn't quite sure when I originally wrote down that question over a dozen years ago. And what was I driving at asking if the so-called "envelope" can be pushed too far, potentially creating "excess" and causing subsequent "damage". Well, given what has transpired over the last decade, in particular, in our culture, our society, our very world, I'm now left with another loaded question:

Could it possibly be the case that the act(s) of "pushing the envelope" helped, if not unwittingly (or maybe even wittingly? - from an outside/inside source engineering it, surreptitiously, that is) provoked and gave rise to what we now know as Woke and Cancel Culture? Not necessarily as a singular agent that gradually engendered (or rather ungendered, to be punnily more precise) political division among the masses, particularly emanating from coming-of-age millennials (especially those with wide-spreading gender dysphoria and hyper-sensitve dispositions/social anxiety issues, "conveniently enough") and aging, leftist Gen-Xers with a longstanding "axe to grind", but as a no-less significant symptom/aspect of the over-arching "slow march through the institutions" to ultimately gain cultural power, political power, state power, municipal power, technological power, economic power, familial power, ethical power and philosophical power, ultimately for its own sake, and not for the reasons that most SJWs and identity intersectionalists are being led to believe.

Of course, one of, if not the X-factor behind the utterly implacable, easily "triggered" and rigid self-righteousness of the "cult of woke" clique, who are mostly wielding their collective power in the "digital world" on-line on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, is none other than civilization's age-old nemesis of cultural and systemic dysfunction: narcissism!

[from Google Trends]

We've seen article after article, book after book, TV segment after TV segment, YouTube video after YouTube video lamenting on the astronomical rise of narcissism in contemporary culture. This is not exactly a societal secret. Whatever side of the cultural, political, philosophical, racial or spiritual divide one falls into, you can rest assured that that societal faction has to deal with narcissism, be they extroverted or even introverted (I personally know of several introverts that can tenably be diagnosed as full-blown narcissists).

It's a universal constant, spanning centuries of human history, especially in situations that have involved a "power dynamic", either publicly or not. Although the "public examples" of narcissistic power-mongering can be far more damaging for everyone within its megalomaniacal vicinity, physically or technologically, or, dare I say, even "magically", if from what I've been gathering, relatively of late, from certain "peripheral sources" harbors any merit at all, that is. Who knows for sure, right? Has Jean Gebser's notion of the magical consciousness structure somehow resurfaced in the cultural (un)consciousness of the early 21st century human psyche? Perhaps it's no coincidence that magic, sorcery and spell-casting has become all the rage (casually or seriously via fandoms and/or proliferating (oc)cult activity) in pop culture since shortly after the millennium a la post-Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings phenomenon. It gives the discerning (and open-minded) pause, does it not?

This all sounds crazy and tin-foil-y doesn't it? Of course it does. And there-in lies its ironic, counter-tactic power. Just remember, the touchy nomenclature, "conspiracy theory" was purportedly manufactured and disseminated by the C.I.A., initially in the 60s - shortly after Jim Garrison's JFK assassination investigation -  for the very purpose of pre-emptively grooming conspiracy theories in the collective conscious/imagination via entertainment and the culture industry a la the 70s fascination with them in film, for instance (All the President's Men, The Conversation, The Parallax View, The Odessa File, 3 Days of the Condor, Marathon Man, The Boys from Brazil, etc.).

Propaganda, and predictive programming (individually and on a mass scale), despite popular opinion, is not just the so-called diabolical game of the typical enemies of North America and its allies, particularly over the course of the past hundred years or so. In actual fact (and I know "facts" are remarkably unpopular for a certain cross-section of the population nowadays, insanely enough), the concept, and utilization, of propaganda was greatly improved upon by an allied European named Edward Bernays (and, significantly, the ambitious nephew of Sigmund Freud!)  in the 1920s. He actually wrote a book pointedly titled, Propaganda, that was published in 1928! The word and very concept, funnily enough, given its, um, tarnished reputation since the Second World War, did not have a negative connotation associated with it when Bernays wrote his book. 

However, after World War II, and thanks predominantly to the Nazis and Josef Stalin's propaganda machine in his Soviet Union dictatorship, the word and concept from that point on took on a very negative connotation. So, Bernays had to come up with another word to describe his means of business, which would go on to ever greater heights of success and effectiveness: "Public Relations". That's right, he was "the father of public relations", and its practice would be disseminated all through North American and European culture to the point that it is now the very air we all breathe - like fish in water, unconscious - within the all-pervasive ether that is, what the late Mark Fisher referred to as, Capitalist Realism.

I'll leave you to mentally and emotionally digest the opening two paragraphs of Edward Bernays' monumentally influential 1928 book, Propaganda, which has literally been an instruction manual for the globalists, the corporatists, the market handlers, the tech moguls, the real slave-drivers that own and run Earth Incorporated:

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is the logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society."

How's that for "pushing the envelope", huh?

   

   

  

    

 

  

The Hauntology of the 16th Century "Bifurcation of Human Consciousness" and Rise of a new Vanishing Mediator

The Ghosts of the Past Continue to Haunt our Futures while Transitioning into the Digital Age 

 

by James Albert Barr

"It is the task of the philosopher to restore, by representation, the primacy of the symbolic character of the word, in which the idea is given self-consciousness, and that is the opposite of all outwardly-directed communication. Since philosophy may not presume to speak in the tones of revelation, this can only be achieved by recalling in the memory the primordial form of perception." - Walter Benjamin: The Origin of German Tragic Drama 

"What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career." - T.S. Eliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent

"Just when I think I'm winning
 When I've broken every door
 The ghosts of my life blow wilder than before
 Just when I thought I could not be stopped
 When my chance came to be king
 The ghosts of my life blew wilder than the wind." - Ghosts by David Sylvian of new wave band, Japan

"Cannot the time be rejointed?... O cursed, aeon,
 That ever we were born to its anon and on." - variation on Shakespeare's Hamlet upon confronting his father's ghost



According to Fredric Jameson (following Max Weber's initial conclusions), in his 1988 essay, The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller, Protestantism enabled the Western historical conditions that unwittingly created capitalism, as opposed to the Marxist theory of "class struggle" through historical materialism. Protestantism was, allegedly, the "vanishing mediator" between medieval feudalism and modern capitalism. Consequently, via Hegel's concept of "negation of the negation", Protestantism, which negated feudalism, was, itself, negated by capitalism, thus becoming a privatised activity of personal worship after having taken on, through the initial Lutheran advent and then the teachings and example of Calvinism, an ascetic-acquisitive stance prior to capitalism's emergence. Jameson had come to this conclusion via his study of Max Weber's monumental, sociological study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which was published shortly after the turn of the 20th century, that is, in 1905.

Slavoj Zizek borrowed Jameson's "vanishing mediator" concept, and has used it in his own work, such as For They Know Not What They Do. And it was actually Zizek that first noticed a "negation of the negation" in the vanishing mediator. So, what actually provoked the "bifurcation of human consciousness" and the "dissociation of sensibility" that Frank Kermode and T.S. Eliot, respectively, issued forth? Keith Alldritt, in his 1968 study of George Orwell, The Making of George Orwell: an Essay in Literary History, summed up Kermode's claims thusly:

"As Frank Kermode has reminded us in his Romantic Image (a study of William Butler Yeats), a fundamental tenet of symbolism is that at some point in the history of western civilisation there occurred a 'bifurcation of human consciousness' which resulted in a degeneration in the quality of art, culture and life itself. This is the assumption that lies behind Yeats' question: 'had not Europe shared one mind and heart until both mind and heart began to break in to fragments a little before Shakespeare's birth?' And it is the same assumption which is present in T.S. Eliot's concept of 'the dissociation of sensibility'. Yeats and Eliot [both identify]... a moment in history at which both the unity of the individual mind and the unity of society become broken, and which heralds a subsequent impoverishment of life, that very impoverishment which stands as the prime donnee of symbolist thought and art."

And in Eliot's 1921 essay, The Metaphysical Poets, he states, by implication, after the initial "bifurcation of human consciousness" in the 16th century, shortly after the Reformation began, and Henry VIII's converting the Church of England from Catholicism to Protestantism:

"In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden. Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on and in some respects improved; the best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country Churchyard (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the Coy Mistress. 

The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed from the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation. The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt in fits, unbalanced; they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley's Triumph of Life, in the second Hyperion there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated."

Eliot never mentioned anything regarding capitalism, or the "bifurcation of human consciousness", at least directly, in his brief description of his "dissociation of sensibility" concept in his essay, and, to my knowledge, Kermode didn't mention capitalism either in his Romantic Image. If I conjoin the ramifications of Eliot's and Kermode's respective theories with Walter Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama, and all it entails pertaining to late-16th and early-17th century conditions that engendered its particular idiom, tone and attitude - not just in Germany, of course, but all of Europe during that critical time-span - then certainly a connection with the advent of capitalism is tenable, because that's precisely what Benjamin is concluding in his indispensible 1928 book. And not only that capitalism emerged, gradually (like a "rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouching towards [modern man] to be born!"), as Weber concluded, from the ascetic-acquisitivity of Protestantism, but that it also, by consequence, inaugurated modernity! through the crucial alteration of time itself, hence Hamlet's famous, and implication-filled declaration: "The time is out of joint!"

Interestingly, Benjamin felt that Weber had not been radical enough in his critical study of capitalism's emergence. Benjamin saw Protestantism as not just the condition that stirred the early iterations of capitalism, but that it, unwittingly, acted as host to capitalism's parasitic nature, which itself, again according to Benjamin, became a "religion" of sorts: "Capitalism is an unprecedented religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction."

Benjamin differentiated between Greek tragedy and the German trauerspiel, or "mourning play" in general (of which Benjamin declares Hamlet the greatest of all mourning plays, despite its English derivation), by describing the former as one which used "symbol", and a linear, resolvable form of time to depict the action, where as the latter used the Baroque sense of "allegory", via much ostentation and dramatic excess, and revealed a non-linear, fractured, unresolvable sense of time in the action, which was chock-full of ambiguity, disunity, delay and catastrophe creating an ontologically new experience which was, ultimately, modern. In Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama, he says:

"Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. That which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a dual insight. On the one hand it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and reestablishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete."...Hence, Jameson's notion of the "vanishing mediator" and Derrida's, and later Mark Fisher's, idea of hauntology, half a century or more after Benjamin's seminal book was published.

And, so, what exactly was it that was being "mourned", and ultimately "haunting", in these trauerspiel/mourning plays during the first half of the 17th century? Simply put, man's sense of agency, which was "denied any spiritual effect to human action", because, as Martin Luther proclaimed, man's only path to salvation depended on grace through faith alone, thus closing the book, so to speak, on any competing theologies, thus bringing about Divine Right monarchs, and absolutist states, and of course ever-expanding commercial markets. But what was really being mourned off-stage, from a collective unknowingness on the surface, was the coming, inexorable transition into "capitalist modernity". 

The plays of German playwrights such as Daniel Caspers von Lohenstein (1635-83) and Andreas Gryphius (1616-64), as well as the Spaniard, Pedro Calderon de la Barca (particularly in his 1635 play, Life is a Dream), exemplified the characteristics of these mournful times, arguably initiated in Shakespeare's tragedies, namely Hamlet. The world had become drained of all substantial meaning ("What a piece of work is man!") with only Luther's stark notion of faith in scripture alone to fortify oneself from the pervasive meaninglessness and absurdity of the zeitgeist, but also the Calvinist propensity to collect wealth through the Protestant Ethic to at least better your chances to get into Heaven when your hard-working existence was finally "spent". 

The Wikipedia entry on Hauntology says, "The term refers to a situation of temporal, historical, and ontological disjunction in which the apparent presence of being is replaced by a deferred non-origin, represented by 'the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive.' The concept is derived from Derrida's deconstructive method, in which any attempt to locate the origin of identity or history must inevitably find itself dependent on an always-already existing set of linguistic conditions - thus making 'haunting the state proper to being as such'. In the 2000s, the term was taken up by critics in reference to paradoxes found in postmodernity, particularly contemporary culture's persistent recycling of retro aesthetics and incapacity to escape old social forms. Critics like Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds have used the term to describe art preoccupied with this temporal disjunction and defined by a 'nostalgia for lost futures.'"

Jacques Derrida's initial use of hauntology as a concept was incorporated into his 1993 book, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Some musical examples of hauntology can be heard on albums by such artists as: Broadcast, Pram, Boards of Canada, Burial and The Caretaker. In the case of The Caretaker, and his 2011 album, An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, for example, he very aptly references Stanley Kubrick's classic horror film, The Shining, which is rife with hauntological aspects. 

As it likely was around four hundred years ago, we, in the early part of the 21st century, are also experiencing and wallowing through a very palpable "mourning period" (hence all the confusion, depression, anxiety and mental illness abounding in society, presently) of a collective loss of a future, and sense of meaning, we were foolishly promised in the 20th century, but have now been utterly denied, despite its continuing to haunt us (like William Gibson's notion of the "semiotic ghost"), and instead have been mercilessly imposed upon with a seemingly soulless, post-culture, transgendered, transhumanist, coldly antiseptic (thus compromising immune systems, and strategically so), accelerationist, digitised, robotic, automated and possibly post-human altogether, "future".

The vanishing mediator that will signal the transition of our world and our human existence and experience, collectively, into the so-called "Great Reset", the Fourth Industrial Revolution (according to globalist and technocrat, Klaus Schwab, who's been planning this since the 70s!) unto quite possibly the Singularity itself, seems likely to be our very nature, our democratic freedom, our human identity, our mortal and immortal mind/s (as a collective spirit and as an individual), and our very heart and soul.   

 

Available Now - Such Late Fugitives (A Collection of 21st Century Poetry) by James Albert Barr

My poetry collection, Such Late Fugitives (A Collection of 21st Century Poetry), was recently made available for purchase on Amazon.com in both paperback (for $8.99 US) and Kindle Ebook (for $3.70 US) versions. Here's the book's description as posted on Amazon:

"From poet, cultural analyst, and blogger, James Albert Barr, comes this provocative collection of contemporary poetry which examines and expresses many of the profound and relevant themes and issues concerning a post-millennium world, mired in the semiotic chaos and excess of a digitalised culture, transitioning, with discernible difficulty, from postmodernism to Hypermodernity. This collection also probes, via intertextuality, literary, as well as philosophical, allusions and citations, the connection(s) with our past, both its social, cultural and literary history, and places them in a contemporary context, as we find ourselves collectively hurling, head-long, into an uncertain future."

Please order your copy today, and feel free to rate the book and leave a comment or even review at Amazon.com and/or right here at my blog, The Culture Fix. Thanks for your acknowledgement and support!