Justin E. H. Smith

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Works consulted for this essay:

Robert Bernasconi (Ed.), Race (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2001).

Emmanuel Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997).

Eldridge Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492-1729 (Austin, Texas, 1967).

Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: the American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

William Poole, “Seventeenth-century Preadamism, and an Anonymous English Preadamist,” The Seventeenth Century 19 (2004), pp. 1-35.

Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676): His Life, Work, and Influence (Leiden: Brill, 1987).

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We tend to imagine that our racial classifications map onto natural kinds in the world, that in carving humanity up into ‘Caucasoid’, ‘Negroid’, etc., we are, so to speak, carving nature at its joints. In fact, these categories are recent inventions.

In an important sense it is the 17th-century French writer François Bernier who may be considered the founder of the modern science of race.  He is the first to use the term ‘race’ to designate different groups of humans with shared, distinguishing traits.  He describes his innovation in the Journal des Sçavans of 1684 as follows: “So far, Geographers did not use any other criterion when mapping out the earth but that of the different countries or regions to be found on it.  What I noticed in men in the course of my long and frequent travels gave me the idea to divide the Earth otherwise.” 

Bernier identifies “four or five Species or Races of men.”  The first, he says, “includes France and generally all of Europe, except a part of Russia.  A small part of Africa, from the Kingdoms of Fez and Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, to the Nile; as well as an important part of Asia, namely the Empire of the ‘Grand Turk’ with the three Arabias, all of Persia, the States of the Great Mogul… may be included in the first Species.”  In contrast, Bernier identifies sub-Saharan Africa as inhabited by a different race or species: “I regard the whole African continent except the North African coast as previously described as the second Species.”  Significantly, he does not see Native Americans, in contrast with Africans, as sufficiently different to warrant placing them in a distinct race: “As for Americans, in fact most of them have an olive complexion and their features differ from ours, but not enough to justify their belonging in a different species.”

The third ‘species’ for Bernier are ‘Asians’, which includes for him the inhabitants of “part of the kingdoms of Aracan and Siam, Sumatra and Borneo, the Philippines, Japan, China, Georgia and Muscovy, the Usbek, Turkistan, Zaquetay, a small part of Muscovy”; and finally the fourth species are the Saami or Lapps, about whom he writes they are “very ugly and partaking much of the bear.”  He acknowledges: “I have only seen two of them at Dantzic; but, judging from the pictures I have seen, and the account which I have received of them from many persons who have been in the country, they are wretched animals.”  The ranking of Lapps at the bottom of the scale of humanity would remain a commonplace throughout the 18th century, in Buffon, Maupertuis, Kant, and others. 

What, though, did Bernier mean by ‘species’?  Surely he could not have intended the meaning commonly attached to this term today, namely, that each race is an isolated reproductive group, for he was as aware of the possibility of ‘miscegenation’ as his contemporaries.  Though Bernier himself was not a defender of the doctrine, some of his contemporaries would come to hold the view that different races constitute different ‘species’ in the sense that, while capable of yielding offspring, they nonetheless had separate creations and, therefore, arose from separate lines of descent. 

While it was, for theological reasons, imperative to deny that there could be shared lineage between humans and apes, it was equally imperative for the same reasons to insist upon the shared lineage of all humans.  But just as new evidence, resulting from increased exposure to the world beyond Europe forced European science to contend with the possibility that humans are in fact but another species of primate, it also inspired many thinkers to reconsider the biblical account of all humanity as traceable back to the same shared ancestors.  Both the global extremities at which human beings were found, as well, likely, as the immense cultural and physical difference between the various groups, stimulated a reconsideration of the old Augustinian commitment to a monogenetic account of human ancestry.

If one is an evolutionist, and accepts that there have been hundreds of thousands of years for different ethnic groups to emerge and to spread about the globe, the monogenetic hypothesis is not hard to maintain.  The same is true if, conversely, one believes that the world is only a few thousand years old, but is operating with a geographical scope that does not extend much beyond one’s own region.  But for creationists in the 17th century, monogenesis effectively required that the new anthropological data from around the globe be somehow rendered compatible with the view that all human beings are descended from two ancestors, presumed to have lived somewhere in the Near East roughly six thousand years before the era of the scientific revolution.

Fortunately, there were rich conceptual resources that far predated the modern period available to those who sought to argue that all humans descend from the ancestors identified in the Hebrew bible.  Some in the 17th century continued to be influenced by the tradition of prisca theologia, a vestige of Renaissance humanism according to which all wisdom must flow from the same source, namely, the prophets of the Old Testament, who eventually passed it on to the Greek philosophers.  Because the events of the Gospels were prefigured or intimated by way of typologies in the Old Testament, moreover, it was often thought that the Hebrew prophets were able to share in the good news of the New Testament, and in this way Judaism was effectively elided with Christianity.  As an apologetic project, this tradition effectively baptized any would-be pagan or infidel one might wish to admire or emulate by positing a hidden connection to revealed truth. Many in the 17th century who did not subscribe explicitly to this doctrine nonetheless believed that in some way or other different intellectual traditions are all, in the end, informed by the same truth.

Separate origins for different human groups, in contrast, would threaten both the moral and the intellectual status of the group that is presumed to have a separate creation.  Because it is the man of the bible who is created in the image of God, if men on the other side of the world had a separate creation, then they could not but be seen as unequal, in terms of relative likeness to God, to those in the Christian world.  And thus monogenesis ensures both the appropriateness of missionary work at all corners of the globe, as well, at least from the point of view of the missionaries, as the full equality –again, in terms of relative proximity to God– of all ethnic groups.  In the 17th century, to deny the shared origins of all ethnic groups was to deny the universality of scripture, and was thus heretical.  Thus, for example, in 1616 Lucilio Vanini denounces the “atheists” who believe that Ethiopians, unlike other ethnic groups, are descended from monkeys.

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If there were some suggestions of separate origins for human beings, this is not necessarily because Native Americans or Africans were perceived to be sub-human (which, for the most part, in the 17th century they were not, in so far as they were all seen as equally worthy of salvation), but also because accumulating evidence made it increasingly difficult to account for (i) the dispersion of people so far from the Near Eastern region presumed to have hosted the original Garden of Eden; (ii) the evident fact that a number of pagan civilizations –notably, the Egyptians, the Chaldaeans, and now the Aztecs– had records extending back well before the 6000 years presumed to have elapsed since the creation; and (iii) finally, the tremendous differences in physical traits of human beings from different parts of the world.  If one did not believe—as many did not—that environments could transform organisms, then it was difficult to see why people in all parts of the world did not look like those in the Near East.  And if one did believe that environments could transform organisms, then it still seemed implausible that the tremendous diversity of human types could have emerged so quickly following the dispersion of people to different parts of the globe– a dispersion that would have come some time after the original creation. 

The evident difficulty of accounting for the emergence of such tremendous differences between various human groups in the very short amount of time thought to have elapsed since Adam and Eve caused some to argue that human beings had in fact existed before the first parents, and that some current humans are descended from these ‘pre-Adamites’.  Isaac La Peyrère argued for this position in his Prae-Adamitae of 1655, though within a year of publication he was forced to recant.  In this work, La Peyrère cites Romans (5:12-14) as support for the Pre-Adamite hypothesis, which holds that until “the time of Law sin was in the world,” i.e., that there were sinful people until, with Adam, law came into the world.  The author was pressured into retracting the views exposited in this work, but not soon enough to prevent his argument from making a profound impact.  William Poole notes that there were at least a dozen important treatises in the latter half of the 17th century seeking to refute La Peyrère’s thesis.   Matthew Hale, in his 1677 work The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature, treats La Peyrère’s hypothesis critically, yet far from dismissively.  Still another important refutation is Edward Stillingfleet’s Origines sacrae of 1661.

Richard Popkin writes that “[p]ractically nobody in the seventeenth century was willing, publicly, to accept the pre-Adamite theory or any form of polygenesis.  The irreligious implications were too great for the theory to be given much credence prior to the Enlightenment… The explanatory value of a polygenetic theory was great, but the danger of holding to it was, perhaps, greater.”   The circles in which the theory came up in the 17th century indicate just how marginal it remained: either it was picked up by a very radical religious sect, such as the Levellers, the Ranters, and the Diggers; or it was propagated in anonymous, semi-anonymous, or pseudonymous literature. Poole, in contrast with Popkin, identifies a number of different sources of 17th-century pre-Adamism, not all of which were anonymous.  Paracelsus is sometimes cited as the first to propose that Native Americans could not have descended from Adam.  He observes that “we are all descended from Adam.  And I cannot refrain from making a brief mention of those who have been found in hidden Islands and are still little known.  To believe they have descended from Adam is difficult to conceive– that Adam’s children have gone to the hidden islands.  But one should well consider, that these people are from a different Adam.  It will be difficult to maintain, that they are related on the basis of flesh and blood.”   It is thus credible that they “were born there after the Deluge,” and also that “they have no souls.”  Giordano Bruno too suggests that denying that Native Americans have souls would be one way of accommodating new evidence (e.g., from the Aztec calendar, from Chaldaean and Egyptian astrology) for the great length of time people had been in the New World, while at the same time adhering to the biblical chronology of descent from Adam. 

Thomas Herbert writes in 1638 of the problematic antiquity of Chinese history: “They say the World is aboue a hundred thousand yeares old after their Chronologies, and accordingly deriue a Pedigree and tell of wonders done ninetie thousand yeares before Adams creation.”  As Poole notes, it was the Jesuit Martino Martini’s Sinicae Historiae Decas Prima of 1658 that called attention to Chinese chronology’s incompatibility with that of the Old Testament,  and on this basis explicitly to question Biblical universality.  Martini asserts: “I hold it as certain that the extremity of Asia was populated before the flood.”  Francis Lodwick, to cite just one more example, in his essay on the “Originall of Mankind,” also provides reasons for the pre-Adamite thesis based in anthropological and linguistic, as opposed to historical and scriptural evidence: namely, what he takes to be the fundamental difference between Africans and Europeans, and the improbability of migration of one ethnic group into a habitat to which it is not suited.  He also speculates that if all groups were descended from the same two parents, their languages would have some common features, which he does not take to be the case.

What has not been emphasized in most discussions of pre-Adamism is evidence of the sort that Lodwick adduces– from the observation of different human groups, rather than the much more common evidence from biblical hermeneutics and from the encounter with non-European chronologies.   But the more evidence that was adduced that would seem to militate in favor of it, the more environmental adaptation, and rapid adaptation at that, needed to be adduced in order to account for the emergence of human variety within the short period of time that had elapsed since Adam.  In order for the case for separate creations to be effectively laid to rest, the possibility of rapid mutation as a result of migration into new environments had to be defended.

*

Of course, environmental influence on moral and physical character is not entirely new in the modern period.  As early as Hippocrates ideas about the environment’s role in human variation. He gives, for example, a lengthy account of differences in skin pigmentation and moral temperament in different parts of the world, describing the differences between Asians and Europeans in a manner favorable to the former.  Asians are gentle, Europeans bellicose (the exact opposite of the early modern stereotype), and this because of the way each group is influenced by climate and wind. 

Nicolas Malebranche, writing in the 1670s, thinks that the different qualities of air in different places bring about differences in natural character.  He notes that “it is certain that the most refined air particles we breathe enter our hearts,” and believes that this process is corroborated empirically from our daily observation of the “various humors and mental characteristics of persons of different countries.  The Gascons, for example, have a much more lively imagination than the Normans.  The people of Rouen, Dieppe, and Picardy, are all different from each other: and they all differ even more from the Low Normans, although they are all quite similar to one another.  But if we consider the people of more remote lands, we shall encounter even stranger differences, as between an Italian and a Fleming or a Dutchman.” 

But what happens when human beings begin, in massive numbers, to abandon the places to which they are ‘assigned’ for other climes?  In ancient accounts of racial difference, when this difference is conceived as having a history it is generally one of mythological character, involving a curse or a cataclysm that brought about the difference. Thus the scorching of Africans –a one-time event, generally associated with a curse or misfortune, as in the Old Testament myth of the curse of Ham,  or the Greek myth of Phaeton, who rode his burning chariot too close to the surface of the earth– is communicated to future generations, perhaps by some physically comprehensible channel, but what is emphasized is the miasmic and dynastic character of the differentiating traits.  If similitude for the ancients is accounted for in terms of intelligent design, difference within a species is generally written off to cataclysm or curse. This view, we should note, is very different from full-fledged modern scientific racism, which takes it that differences between ethnic groups are, somehow, rooted in essential differences that are not susceptible to environmental influence. Joseph Chamberlain gives a very pure statement of the view in the 19th century: “I believe in this race, the greatest governing race the world has ever seen; in this Anglo-Saxon race, so proud, so tenacious, self-confident and determined, this race which neither climate nor change can degenerate, which will infallibly be the predominant force of future history and universal civilisation.”

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While this short outline of some of the developments in early modern ethnography is too preliminary to draw any general conclusions about intellectual trends in thinking about human difference in the period, we may nonetheless draw some tentative conclusions.  The reflections of thinkers as diverse as Edward Tyson, John Wallis, John Locke, and Malebranche suggest that a view of the relationship of the influence of the environment on human variation is beginning to emerge in the late 17th century that emphasizes: (i) The demise of cataclysmic accounts of diversification.  Environmental influence would begin to be seen as ongoing; it would be widely believed that human beings –and, most relevantly, Europeans– could be transformed through transplantation into new environments.  In the 17th century, the cataclysmic account begins to give way to a more naturalized picture of similitude and variation within a species. With the shift from a conception of cataclysmic change to one of ongoing change, we also observe a shift, broadly speaking, from a mythical conception of origins to a truly historical one.  (ii) A conception of the different traits of different ethnic groups as truly adaptive rather than degenerative, that is, as serving some genuine purpose under particular environmental circumstances, rather than resulting from the harmful effects of a ‘savage’ lifestyle, e.g., exposing one’s flesh to the elements rather than wearing clothes.   

At the same time, of course, there was the trend in thinking about human variation that may be seen as extending from Bernier through Chamberlain that emphasizes the fundamental or essential difference between different human groups and that, while certainly not denying the possibility of cross-group reproduction (and thus not denying that Europeans and Africans belong to the same ‘species’ in today’s sense), nonetheless would see this as somehow against nature’s grain, since nature has humanity carved up into real and neatly bounded races.  One of the great ironies of early modern ethnography is that it was the religious and creationist world-view that spoke in favor of common origins for all humanity, while the abandonment of the need to interpret human diversity in scriptural terms easily led to polygenesis. 

Polygenesis, and the corollary belief in the essential difference between different groups, would enjoy its most widespread success in the context of 19th century slavery and the hardening of a global institution that relied on racism for its legitimacy, and would present itself as the account of human origins most in keeping with the best scientific evidence.  The fact that this account of human diversity remains controversial in the 17th century may be traced in part to the enduring imperative in the period to stay faithful in speaking of origins to the inherited scriptural account.

There has likely always been some conception of the way in which organisms fit their environment, whether this fit is seen as one fixed from time immemorial by God for each organism in the place ‘appropriate’ to it, or whether this is conceived as a gradual change in the organism to better accommodate the vicissitudes of its habitat.  For the most part, the latter view prevails prior to the early modern period.  Nowhere does Hippocrates say that the people who are now Europeans arrived in Europe and became bellicose as a result of environmental conditions; he only says that Europeans are bellicose.  It would not be unreasonable to suppose that the new concern with change over time as a result of change of habitat, whether this is conceived as adaptation or as generation, was a response to the increasing dispersion of Europeans throughout the globe in the early modern period, and to the increasing concern about the long term effects on European populations of this dispersion.  Racial essentialism may, in turn, be seen as a way of securing the stability of the population through change in habitat by positing traits that are, somehow, resistant to any environmental influence.   

The claim that there are separate lines of descent for different human groups was perceived as heretical and atheistic in the 17th century, while a shared line of descent for different but related species was likewise perceived as heretical and atheistic.  In both cases, moreover, the denunciation of these views serves as a clear indication of their growing importance in the 17th century.  As with atheism itself, there are vastly more denouncers than defenders, and we have to wait until the following century to find the ideas being defended for the first time as serious hypotheses.  One might almost conclude that denunciations of ideas function in history as anticipations of these ideas’ ascendancy.

The view the denouncers were looking to secure was precisely that all and only human beings are related to other human beings.  Corollaries of this view are that all and only human beings are the earthly likeness of God, are capable of salvation and damnation, and are capable of higher cognition and moral agency.  But scientific evidence appeared to be mounting against this exclusive position of human beings in nature.  By the 18th century, ironically, at the same time as species boundaries were becoming more fluid with the rise of pre-Darwinian evolutionary thought, ‘racial’ boundaries were becoming more rigid.  Mainstream 17th-century thought, while largely failing or refusing to acknowledge the kinship of humans and apes, was certainly more clear-sighted about the kinship of humans to one another than much purportedly scientific thought of the following two and a half centuries would be. 

—

Los Angeles, May 23, 2008

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Elatia Harris

Ever since she married and divorced four times within six months and entered into a state-sanctioned civil union with a woman in Hungary – all of it for art’s sake, but all of it legal and binding – Alix Lambert has had my attention. In the photo below by Dan Monick, we see her in finest film noir fettle — as she should be, apropos her newest book, Crime (FUEL Publishing, 2008) — but in her weddings photos, she can look awfully sweet and unsuspecting. And, recently on David Milch’s Deadwood, for which she also wrote a filmed script, she appeared as a prostitute both imperious and wistful.

While Alix Lambert may not be the most often-married artist one can name, she is the one who got me thinking what a work of art a marriage was anyway, and what kind of marriage might best be understood as a work of art. That was back in the early 90’s — her ex-wife has had two babies meanwhile — and a number of artists have since staged weddings as culturally freighted yet instant artifacts. When they do this it does tend to make a point — but it’s not the same, is it?  Susan Sontag remarked that, of the things wrong with marriage, only one was that, without necessarily knowing or questioning it, we tended to think of a marriage as existing quite apart from ourselves, the people who were in it. Alix may have entered her marriages knowing that very well, and not questioning the idea as much as sounding it. When I learned that Crime had just been published by FUEL — the London-based design group that last year brought out the BibliOdyssey book, whose author I interviewed in this space — I thought it was time for a look at both the genre-crossing artist and her publishers, themselves no strangers to managing parallel careers that, convention suggests, do not particularly reconcile.

If you don’t already know all about Alix Lambert, then you might know her best from her 73-minute Russian language, English-subtitled film of 2000, The Mark of Cain, about prisoners in Russia, prisoners whose elaborate, full body tattoos tell of their rank and history in the prison system in a pictorial code not understood by their guards. Research for Eastern Promises, his 2007 film, brought Viggo Mortensen to The Mark of Cain, and showed him how he should look in the scene where he strips to reveal tattoos just about everywhere. (Stars tattooed on the knee-caps mean, incidentally, that you will never kneel down before authority.)

It was Russia — Russian prison tattoos in particular, about which Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell, the principals of FUEL, have published two acclaimed books — that brought Alix Lambert and FUEL together for Crime. “Russia is the new Wild West,” Damon Murray told me. Even so, Crime brings something new to exploring that Wild West within — the criminal imagination, and how it is accessed by writers, actors, directors, the police, private investigators, victims of crime and criminals. There’s crime, there’s representation of crime, and then there’s Crime — the book that sets up a conversation about it all, amply illustrated by Alix’s own photos ranging from luscious to perfectly horrifying. In preparing for the book, Alix was cautioned by David Mamet, “You won’t get answers.” And that was okay — she wasn’t looking for them. What she got was questions — many questions — and a sense of possibilities. The cumulative effect of Crime is best experienced by reading it through. But only if you want to think thoughts you shall not have had before.

For Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell, to the left as painted by Gordon Murray, the route to Crime and to Russian tattoos may have started with a four-letter word: USSR. In 1992, they were design students at the Royal College of Art in London, and already partners in publishing. FUEL magazine was then themed around four-letter words, and they thought in light of recent events that “USSR” would do nicely. And, that a trip was in order.  “Boris Yeltsin had just declared, ‘Everything, everywhere is for sale,’ ” Damon told me, “and it was fascinating to experience at first hand Russia’s initial interpretation of capitalism. There was an aesthetic of deep melancholy and integrity that we sensed then, and found an affinity for. It’s resonated with us ever since.”

In focusing on prison tattoos — far afield from the avant-garde graphics influencing designers since the Russian Revolution — was FUEL doing a form of visual anthropology?  Damon said there was indeed urgency to document social traditions that were rapidly falling by the wayside, post-Soviet tendencies throughout the 90’s having been to forget the past and mimic Western culture. “The tattoo has been devalued to mere fashion in the West, and our aim with the tattoo books was to show that this wasn’t always so, that they once had so much value that they were a matter of life or death.”

Is there a type of book that can be called a FUEL book?  Damon almost hopes not, but supposes there is. He and Stephen Sorrell are not only the publishers but also the designers of every book.  Six FUEL covers are below, and a full list of titles at the end of this post.  “The interesting thing for us,” Damon says, “is applying our aesthetic to subjects that people might not consider ‘right’ – such as Crime. It’s actually difficult to say what would make us reject an idea.”

The bibliography on Alix Lambert is already extensive. Like Damon and Stephen, she first went to Russia in the early 90’s — to exhibit her photography. “I was hooked,” she told me. To film The Mark of Cain some years later, she reports starting off for Russia a bit underfunded — with $1.67 — an instance of the “do it anyway” spirit that she has long relied on to get her where she needs to go. She and I have been in recent contact mainly about Crime, but there was time also to revisit the marriages. I’ve obtained permission to use four photos from Crime, throughout the interview below.  I thought, however that I’d start with the marriages. Mastering the Melon, a book about her various art projects, shows one of the weddings photos.

Elatia Harris: You’re the only one I know who has gone through with multiple, legally real marriages as art. I’d love to hear how you framed the project — and how you survived it.

Alix Lambert: I felt like it was important to actually legally get married. In part because I was interested in showing the paper work. These pieces of paper mark places in our lives and shape how we think of ourselves and how others relate to us. Also I feel that the process I chose shows in the photographs — there are inevitably details that you might not think of when staging something. The drive-thru wedding chapel in Vegas — especially Charlotte the Wedding Queen of The West — is something that I might not have made up, like the same guy at City Hall who married me twice in the span of a couple of months and of course didn’t recognize me…

EH:  Did you — kind of — know what would happen?

AL: I don’t think I have ever done a project that was particularly mapped out from the start. With the wedding project I was in Vegas and I noticed that the place to start divorce proceedings was right next to a wedding chapel.  I wondered how many times you could run back and forth in one day getting married and divorced.  As I learned more, I wanted to address the historical, social, political, and formal aspects of the institution of marriage. As far as surviving it – my work is very much intertwined with my life. Eventually I will not survive it.

EH: What was the most surprising thing about working with FUEL?

AL: That they care so much about the book as visual artifact was why I was interested in working with them — that, and that their interests were so aligned with mine. The process of making this book was extremely collaborative. Damon and Stephen were involved from the very beginning. They are incredible talents.

Undercover Police Detective, and Family, below. Photo by  Alix Lambert

EH: If one of the jobs of the artist is to transgress, then art can’t be just lovely, can it? It must take the viewer aback a bit — do you agree?  There are artists who are not shy about entering the dark, not knowing what will happen. Who’s one who has come back with something we need to see?

AL: I think art can just be lovely – but not all art, all the time. I do try to “enter the dark” as you put it and tend to be attracted to the work of people who do as well. I was introduced to the work of Chris Burden when I was 14 and it opened up my entire understanding of what art could be.
 
EH: To a conservative reading, Crime might seem to posit a two-way street between crimes that are performed by criminals and how criminals are portrayed in art, especially film. Is this portrayal merely commentary, or do you think that, in a society where everything is mediated, portrayal ever feeds into crime?  As it may into vigilantism, for instance — assuming that’s not also crime.

AL: I definitely think that portrayal feeds into real life crime, and many of the real life criminals I talked with supported that.  Bank robbers acknowledged posturing coming from films. I think the “overlap” that we refer to in the press for the book was of more interest to me than the “gap.”

EH: As well as criminals and survivors of crime, to prepare for writing, you talked with writers and filmmakers – David Mamet, Samantha Morton, Mark Salzman, Nick Flynn, David Cronenberg, to cite a few. Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, told you of contemplating crime as a very young child. “I knew I shouldn’t do it until I was ready,” he said to you.  Well, that’s forthcoming.  Lots of people really spoke from the heart for Crime, didn’t they?

AL: I think they did. I am pleased if they did. Many of these people are people I had some sort of connection to, so perhaps they felt more open.

EH: But it was almost as if they couldn’t wait to talk about it.  Even with some of the people you didn’t know, it was as if you’d found them in a confiding mood and asked them to talk to you about high school… 

Samantha Morton, below. Photo by Alix Lambert

AL: I think the people I didn’t know did open up just as much – sometimes more. For the most part people want to be heard and listened to. I only wanted to include in the book, and in my documentary — and in any subsequent projects — people who truly wanted to talk with me. Some were extremely enthusiastic and said it was something they thought about all the time in their life or in their work.  Others were less so, but still interested enough to engage in a conversation. I like what you say about high school – with some of the interviews it was quite like that.

EH: Your own childhood brought you very close to victims of crime. Maybe everyone’s did.  In the late 1950’s, my mother’s oldest friend hired the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald to look after his children for about a year — who knew?  But your experiences came closer than that. How did this help to make it your material?

AL: As I talked to people I found that everyone has a tangential relationship to crime. If not a direct one. And that was part of my interest in making the book. Those experiences shape us and how we think and who we become, and I was interested in exploring that.  Of course, many non-crime related things in our lives shape us as well – but you start with one thread that you notice and keep going.

EH: You open Crime with an interview with Joe Loya, a man who writes in a very undefended, regular guy tone who’s done time for bank robbery and is now an author and playwright. You close with a letter from Jimmy Wu, who will in a few years be released from lock-up after doing 15 years for home invasion. He was in Mark Salzman’s workshop for juvenile criminals, and one has to hope he keeps writing.

AL: I wanted to open with Joe because aside from being a good friend of mine he is also someone who is able to speak to many points of view of this subject – as a criminal, as an artist. He has an amazing story to tell and is articulate in telling it. I closed the book with Jimmy — and I want to credit Damon and Stephen for being very involved in the order we ended up placing the interviews in — because Jimmy’s story has hope in it.  For me, this book is very emotional if read straight through, and I wanted to end on a story that one felt empathy toward. 

EH: Joe and Jimmy both recall scenes of brutal humiliation as a child, and, actually, so do many artists and writers.  Throughout reading Crime, I kept thinking of Graham Greene’s famous remark that you needed a sliver of ice in your heart to be a writer. I always thought that meant, among other things, that a writer was by nature someone who stood a little apart. Can that same sliver of ice get you — first — to crime?

Tom Kalin, screenwriter, director, producer and gay rights activist. Photo by Alix Lambert

AL:I don’t know about that sliver of ice – but I do think that artists in general are in the curious position of being set apart from society and also being able to communicate universal ideas to society.

EH: The actor Matthew Maher, who has often been cast as a criminal, told you a woman he was seeing had been looking at an old passport photo, and said to him, “You look like someone who does bad things to children.” He all but likened acting and crime as resulting from a need to be someone you can’t be and do things that aren’t done. Is he onto something?

AL: I talked to a number of people who felt acting allowed them to be someone they otherwise weren’t or to act in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t.  Role playing is at the root of much of my work, too – and I have always been fascinated by the experiments where they make one group of people “prisoners” and the others “guards” and within days the guards are committing horrible abuses and the prisoners are having nervous breakdowns. Joe Loya and other prisoners I have talked to who have spent extended periods of time in solitary talk about hallucinating.  In Joe’s case a boy would come and talk to him.

EH: Apropos Do With Me What You Will, her sixth fiction that was part legal novel, part romantic triangle, Joyce Carol Oates said she’d like to write about love and the Law as it affected every single citizen. Could she take a look at your weddings, coming more than twenty years later, and find in you a kindred spirit — of fascination with the Law?  Maybe there was a spirit of nolo contendere in the marriage project…  Or were you more in control than that?

AL: Oh dear, I am never in control. I certainly would be happy to believe that I was a kindred spirit with Joyce Carol Oates – I think she is wonderful and am looking at a copy of On Boxing, another shared interest between us, that I have been reading for a completely separate project.

EH: What’s next for you, Alix? Can you talk about it?

Steve Hodel, below, author of The Black Dahlia Avenger (2003). Photo by Alix Lambert

AL: I always have about 18 balls in the air with the hope that I might catch just one of them. Yesterday I spent the day talking with a wonderful artist named Harrison Haynes about a project we want to collaborate on that deals with surveillance. And tomorrow I will work on details for a round-table in Moscow around my book, The Silencing, that will be held in September. There is always something going on, but I never know what will rise to the surface.

EH: An artist! Do you have a strong favorite from the film noir era?

AL: No. I have lots of favorites – I was thinking about Scarlet Street the other day, with Edward G. Robinson, that’s a great one. I LOVE depictions of artists in films.

EH: I’ll be trite now and ask you about the crow tattoo…

AL: That I have on my back? As far as what it means to me – I have to keep some things private, no?

On the 13th of June, Alix Lambert will sign 25 copies of Crime at The Mysterious Bookshop. 58 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007

SELECTED LINKS for ALIX LAMBERT

Her film, The Mark of Cain: http//www.markofcainfilm.com/

Her site: http://www.pinkghettoproductions.com/

The site of Perceval Press, owned by Viggo Mortensen:  http://www.percevalpress.com/

SELECTED LINKS for FUEL DESIGN

http://www.fuel-design.com/

http://www.designmuseum.org/design/fuel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUEL_Design

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/030690.html

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1933181,00.html

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1933598,00.html

BOOKS published by FUEL PUBLISHING include:

Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, Danzig Baldaev and Sergei Vasiliev (London: Steidl/FUEL, 2004)

Fleur. Plant Portraits by Fleur Olby (London: FUEL, 2005)

The Music Library, Jonny Trunk (London: FUEL, 2005)

Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volume II, Danzig Baldaev and Sergei Vasiliev (London: FUEL, 2006)

Home-Made. Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts, Vladimir Arkhipov (London: FUEL, 2006)

Ideas Have Legs, Ian McMillan and Andy Martin (London: FUEL, 2006)

Match Day, Bob Stanley and Paul Kelly (London: FUEL, 2006)

BibliOdyssey, P.K. (London: FUEL, 2007)

Notes from Russia, Alexei Plutser-Sarno (London: FUEL, 2007)

Crime, Alix Lambert (London: FUEL, 2008)

///
A Weekend in the Garden of My Sixties
Jim Culleny

Two days behind a roto-tiller panting like a spent mutt
you get to meditating on poor Yorick’s skull.

Barely holding back the stallions of a Briggs and Stratton
you smell the nearness of becoming void and null.

You wonder how’s my ticker doing
and will I soon me caving in a final bow?

You consider, I could suddenly be toodle-looing
I could be tumbling headlong into dirt right now.

You wonder then if the world will matter
You wonder, how deep’s this mine?

You wonder how far your dust might scatter.
You wonder how much longer the juice will crackle
up and down your spine.

///

Edward B. Rackley

The final scene of the 1968 Planet of the Apes (Rod Serling script, starring Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowall) is worth enduring the tortuous acting. It’s a very different ending from the 2001 remake with Mark Wahlberg, and distinguishes the original Apes as true science fiction. Marky Mark’s version is a generic action film.

Briefly: After his escape as a prisoner in an ape society on a distant planet, Heston discovers a damaged Statue of Liberty half-buried on a remote beach. He realizes that his inter-planetary voyage had in fact kept him on Earth all along. Humanity had destroyed its own civilization, paving the way for a Planet of the Apes.

I had a more mundane version of this vision recently: a post-petrol world where combustion engines were a memory and pedal-power had reclaimed the Earth. I like apes, but they didn’t play a role in this particular fantasy.

Embrace your inner redneck

Sound advice, perhaps. Not for me though, at least in this lifetime. My inner redneck will have to wait—I’m still recovering from my past life as Pavlov’s dog. But last weekend I had the opportunity to embrace that inner redneck in my first close encounter with the apotheosis of modern redneckdom–NASCAR. This was the Southside Speedway in Richmond Virginia, one of the sport’s earliest professional tracks, in use since 1959. NASCAR fans hail Southside as ‘the toughest short track in the south’, and I quickly learned why.

Thing is, I wasn’t there for the roaring engines or burning rubber. I came for a day of bicycle racing. These were track bikes primarily but a couple of road bike races were also scheduled. I arrived late and over-caffeinated to find the speedway grounds completely empty except for a hundred or so cyclists in the circle inside the track. Most were either preparing to race or recovering. I had not missed my start time, and ran over to get registered.

Under a gray sky and spots of rain, the place had the mournful feel of a fair ground or circus site after the festivities had ended, the cheers and laughter now gone, the animals and rides long departed. Here too, on the ground were crushed candy wrappers, gluey traces of melted sno-cones, tufts of cotton candy stuck to matted patches of grass where crowds had stood and cheered.

But absent any NASCAR fans and the roar of the spectacle itself, the quiet speedway also had the distinct feel of anachronism, of future-past. I gazed out at the empty bleachers and imagined the speedway as a relic of an extinct civilization, a NASCAR ruin in a post-petrol world.

‘I can’t control my fingers, I can’t control my brain’

Founded by a band of track bike racers without a local velodrome, the Sprint Club (think ‘Fight Club’) created its own race series called Go Fast Turn Left, in deference to Richmond’s long history of stock car racing at Southside, where many GFTL races are  organized.

The Sprint Club ethos is a direct descendant of old school punk rock’s DIY spirit. That means, in no particular order: (1) Appropriating a found environment, making it one’s own, at the expense of appropriate norms and behavior that belong to that environment; (2) In spectacle or performance, participation trumps consumption. Passive, polite observation is replaced by direct participation, eliminating the distance between spirit and seer, artist and viewer; 3) The ‘do it yourself’ mentality is self-explanatory–there are no experts, only students and practitioners, and all are welcome.

After getting my race number and quickly inhaling assorted carbs and sugars, I steered out onto the ragged tarmac to warm up with the other racers. A banked, tight oval track, Southside is only a third of a mile long. My group would race for 25 laps. From the previous night’s NASCAR event, there were fist-sized chunks of black rubber from exploded car tires, random nuts, bolts and metal fragments scattered everywhere. The racing surface itself was gritty, pock-marked and scarred from crashes and the elements.

Ass on fire

I didn’t win the race or even come close, but I learned a few things. First, cycling is a cruel muse. Glorious bouts of smoking and drinking never got in the way of my marathon running, years back. Marathons permitted me the dubious luxury of being a hedonist and a masochist at the same time–usually such joys cannot coexist. But competitive cycling is different than long distance running. Marathons require stamina and effort sustained over hours, as does cycling. Unlike marathons, however, cycling involves regular spikes of acceleration, troughs of radical energy depletion and periods of recovery within the course of a single race.

My fantasy of riding on a post-petrol, futuristic ruin of a NASCAR track was shared, I learned, with other riders, some of whom complemented me on my ‘sweet ride‘ before the race (have a look, it really is an amazing bike). These were the same guys who slammed into me as the peloton whistled forward at a bruising 31 mph. ‘Keeping the rubber side down’ was more challenging than I thought. At one point, I heard a crash behind me, but rubbernecking was not an option. 

Competitive cycling is a contact sport, I also discovered, with lots of intimidating banter between riders. Kind of like a mosh pit, I thought and smiled, as I managed to keep pace with the breakaway pack for much of the race. Surely I would finish in the top five, I thought. But with two laps to go, my legs turned to lead and a handful of leading riders pulled away from me. I hadn’t the strength to stay with them, or even maintain a spot in their slipstream. I crossed the finish line and thought, ‘Time to kill my inner Marlboro Man’. Alas, it appears my inseparable companions hedonism and masochism will finally be parting ways.

by Beth-Ann Bovino

A walk through the lower east side in New York can feel like Spring-cleaning at mom’s house. Back then mom would have a “Tag Sale, and everything, including my favorite childhood dreams, was priced to sell. Each item would have a tag on it. A stuffed animal from my crib priced at 25 cents. Barbie dolls, 50 cents, not to mention all the items I collected over time to make my plans to become a famous (fill in blank) come true. The U.S. is also cleaning house, again with everything priced to sell. .

Before, with the dollar a strong reserve currency and an interest rate differential that supported U.S. assets, the U.S. could easily cover its trade deficit with a capital surplus. The capital account surplus was attracted by the high returns and low risk in the U.S. financial markets. Even signs of the housing weakness in the U.S. didn’t slow inflows until the last few months. The financial tides have shifted. Now with oil prices at record levels, housing weak and home prices continuing down, the U.S. is in a recession.

This recession will likely be shallower but longer than previously anticipated. Like 2001, there might not be the usual two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. But it will still be a recession. It probably will be officially pronounced one by the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research some time later, and certainly feel like one in the minds of most Americans.

Other things we used to take as given are no longer true. The relative bias in favor of U.S. assets has been reduced sharply, because of shrinking relative returns and increased credit risk. The financial shock that erupted in August 2007, when the U.S. subprime mortgage market was derailed by the reversal of the housing boom, has spread quickly and unpredictably, inflicting damage on world financial markets. Despite Fed action to calm markets, lending dried up. The resulting slowdown in capital inflows has pushed borrowing costs higher for both households and businesses, and brought the dollar down.

The U.S. has the largest and most liquid financial market, with about one-third of the global capitalization, and is not expected to give up this status anytime soon. However, as financial globalization continues to develop, other regions will gain prominence in world markets. Higher European interest bond yields, lower U.S. yields, and the weaker dollar have improved returns for European bonds relative to U.S. bonds, with less money coming in. Inflows into the U.S. over the last few years were dominated by fixed income private bonds. It has slowed. Flows are now shifting towards treasury bonds and equities. Real assets are cheaper because of the weak dollar. Foreign money will continue to buy up U.S. investments once investors believe the decline is nearing an end, but they will be buying more real assets and fewer fixed-income securities.

A Safe Bet?

In 2006, U.S. long-term interest rates were a percentage point above equivalent European bond yields. Money looking for the highest possible return on a safe investment thus flowed into the U.S. The surge was not pushed more by low interest rates abroad than by high U.S. interest rates. The U.S. interest rates were low by historical standards, but still higher than what foreign investors could get at home. In 2006, over 85% of the net inflow into the United States came from private sources, and increasingly went into the buying of private rather than government debt. (Only 13% of the inflow went into equities.)

The inflow of funds to the United States had made markets very complacent about risk. Investors’ struggle for yields meant that yield spreads above treasuries hit record lows. The spread of corporate speculative-grade bond yields over U.S. treasuries hit a record low in May 2007 as investors chased higher returns and ignored risk. Markets now aren’t as complacent about risk; they’ve been reminded by the subprime problems that risk is still a four-letter word. Yield spreads have widened well above normal levels corporate bonds (both investment-grade and speculative-grade), well above the historical average and over twice what we saw just over a year ago. The sharp swing from risk also hit household borrowing costs. They have climbed higher, if households can get a loan at all.

Climbing from 45-year lows, U.S. interest rates has now dropped back as problems increased. After raising rates 17 times, the Federal Reserve’s main concern has now abruptly turned to recession risk and the turmoil in financial markets. The liquidity squeeze that began last August, brought about by the U.S. subprime mortgage problems, forced the Fed and other central banks to change direction quickly. The financial shock spread far beyond the subprime mortgage market to a general crisis of confidence. Since then, the Fed has cut rates by 3.25 percentage points to 2%. The Fed cuts helped some borrowers with adjustable rate loans coming up for a reset on their loan. The Fed has also helped reduce corporate costs, but creating various term lending facilities, coordinated with other major central banks. Corporate yield spreads are, however, still wide by historical standards.

The decline in Fed-controlled short-term interest rates has not, however, been echoed in long-term bond yields. That’s because interest rates are determined by global markets. The globalization of bond markets means that a central bank has less influence on long-term interest rates than in the past. The U.S. financial markets have illustrated that in the last few years, as a Fed tightening by 4.25% was met by indifference in the bond market. The Fed has now cut rate by 3.25%, which was also met with similar indifference. European rates are now above U.S. rates, making U.S. securities less attractive and reducing foreign inflows. This has prevented U.S. bond yields from dropping in line with short-term rates.

Foreign net buying of long-term U.S. assets slipped in 2007, to $1.00 trillion from its $1.14 trillion peak in 2006. While stocks saw a record annual inflow in 2007, inflows into fixed income dropped sharply. Risk aversion was the dominant theme in the first quarter of 2008. The March report continues to show weaker foreign inflows, suggesting the decline in the dollar isn’t over. Long-term inflows that did come in, came from official sources (central banks, trying to stabilize markets) and less from private money—not a healthy sign. Foreign buying was dominated by money going into safe-haven government bonds, while private accounts sold off sharply. Foreign purchases of U.S. financial assets will likely remain weak through yearend. But, if investors outside the U.S. continue to worry about the risk of a dollar decline, the result could be both a sharp drop in the dollar and a sharp rise in U.S. interest rates, extending the recession at home.

At Bargain Prices

Recent financial market stress has had an impact on foreign exchange markets. The real effective exchange rate for the U.S. dollar has declined sharply since mid-2007, with the dollar down 8% over last year. Foreign investment in U.S. bonds and equities has been dampened by reduced confidence in both the liquidity of and the returns on such assets, as well as by the weakening of U.S. growth prospects and the Fed’s interest rate cuts. Weaker foreign inflows pushed the dollar lower. Now foreign investors have lost confidence in U.S. securities and the U.S. dollar, and money is not so easy to come by, and only at higher interest rates.

The silver lining is improving U.S. sales to foreign bargain hunters. The decline in the value of the U.S. dollar has helped boost net exports, bringing the U.S. current account deficit down to 4.9% of GDP by the fourth quarter of 2007. This is well below its 6.6% peak in the third quarter 2006. But, while improving, the current gap is still-high, and financing from abroad will now require higher bond yields.

The weak dollar will continue to attract money into some U.S. assets; at least once investors believe the dollar decline is nearing an end. Although yield spreads make U.S. bonds less attractive, the weak dollar makes real assets cheaper. U.S. firms are becoming targets for foreign buyers, who see current pricing, especially in euros, yen, pounds, or Canadian dollars, as a bargain.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, foreign direct investment into the U.S. was $199.3 billion in 2007, after $175.4 billion in 2006.and $101.0 billion in 2005. Outlays in 2007 were the fourth largest recorded and the highest since 2000. Foreign money bought a substantial amount of our real estate (this was already indicated, anecdotally). Outlays also increased sharply in manufacturing and wholesale trade.

Not Going Out Of Business

The massive inflow of funds to the U.S. once helped the U.S. easily cover its trade deficit. But things have changed. Now the relative bias in favor of U.S. assets has been cut, because of shrinking relative returns and increased credit risk. Fed action has helped reduce interest rate spreads somewhat, though they are still high. The resulting slowdown in capital inflows has brought the dollar down.

Foreign purchases of U.S. assets will likely remain weak through 2008. Higher European interest bond yields, relative to U.S. yields, and the weaker dollar have made investing in European bonds more attractive than investing here. As a result, the inflows into U.S. financial assets, once dominated by fixed income private bonds, are now smaller. What money that comes in has shifted towards safe-haven treasury bonds and real assets. Real assets are cheaper because of the weak dollar. We expect foreign money to continue to buy up U.S. investments once investors believe the decline is nearing an end, but they will be buying more real assets and fewer private fixed-income securities.

While we expect inflows to slow, but not stop, things could go wrong. We’re worried that with the increased credit risk and the falling dollar the U.S. investments will become even less attractive to foreign investors. That could push bond yields up higher and the dollar down even more than we had already anticipated. The ‘Tag Sale’ would feel more like a ‘Going Out Of Business’ Sale. This scenario is not likely, but neither were $130 oil prices a few years ago.