Bob Black’s “Friendly Fire” is best ordered online or from your favorite local new Denver bookseller, though it may be located at Denver’s used stores (at one of which I found mine!). Black spent years writing for an anarchist publication in the Bay Area during that scene’s heyday in the ‘80s and spends most of this book alternating between recounting personal history and indulging in the sort of infigthing that has traditionally spelled doom for radical causes. The narrative is high on passion all throughout, but occasionally its author gives the impression of an angry teenager low on substance. He even makes the proposal, recently made (in)famous by Gingrich, that children who like to play in dirt can be conscripted to clean toilets (despite seeming to this reporter more genuinely in search of a solution to our lopsided social structure).
A lot of people think Bob Black should go away. His confrontational ideology reminds me of an article on veganism I read this morning: “Over the past six months, I’ve come to believe that strict dogma is a drag . . . . Processed food is processed food, even if it is ‘vegan.’” Black’s book at times feels dogma-heavy in the same way “Evasion” by the Crimethinc Collective, whose protagonist lives free—routinely shoplifting, hitchhiking and sleeping on strip mall rooftops—but never freews himself of proudly dogmatic rigidity, did at times. As Rasta shorthand has it: “isms are schisms,” or ideological distinction leads inevitably to conflict. Black is nevertheless to be credited for acknowledging Guy Debord’s Situationist International (SI) as a prior example and giving plugs to such (post)modern incarnations of Situationism as The Church of SubGenius or David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.
From Friendly Fire: “I don’t use lasers, or dry ice, or messy creams and greasy lotions. As a Saint, my mission is to articulate the unfathomable to the unspeakable and that means you, kindred. I’m here to drive the money changers out from BETWEEN your temples.”
Comments