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<\/p>\nBy Louis Armand.<\/p>\n
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During a 1978 PBS television fundraiser, The Night of the Empty Chairs, organized by Leonard Bernstein in support of Amnesty International, Patti Smith & guitarist Ivan Kr\u00c3\u00a1l performed a modi\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ed version of a statement by the imprisoned Czechoslovak underground rock band Plastic People of the Universe, entitled \u201cOne Hundred Points Revisited.” The original statement was an absurdist, mock-bureaucratic indictment of Prague’s hardline communist r \u00e9gime, but was transformed by Patti Smith’s pumped-up spoken-word delivery into an emotive rallying cry against political oppression in general:<\/p>\n
\u201cThey’re afraid of the old for their memory. They’re afraid of the young for their ideas \u2013 ideals. They’re afraid of funerals \u2013 of \u00ef\u00ac\u201aowers \u2013 of workers \u2013 of churches \u2013 of party members \u2013 of good times. They’re afraid of art \u2013 they’re afraid of art. They’re afraid of language \u2013 communication. They’re afraid of theatre. They’re afraid of \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm \u2013 of Pasolini \u2013 of Godard \u2013 of painters of musicians \u2013 of stones & sculptors. They’re afraid. They’re afraid of radio stations. They’re afraid of technology, free \u00ef\u00ac\u201aoating forms of information. Paris Match \u2013 Telex \u2013 Guttenburg \u2013 Xerox \u2013 IBM \u2013 wavelengths. They’re afraid of telephones. They’re afraid. They’re afraid to let the people in. They’re afraid to let the people out. They’re afraid of the left. They’re afraid of the right. They’re afraid of the sudden departure of Soviet troops \u2013 of change in Moscow \u2013 of facing the strange \u2013 of spies \u2013 of counterspies. They’re afraid. They’re afraid of their own police. They’re afraid of guitar players. They’re afraid of athletes \u2013 of Olympics \u2013 of the Olympic spirit \u2013 of saints \u2013 of the innocence of children. They’re afraid. They’re afraid of political prisoners. They’re afraid of prisoners’ families \u2013 of conscience \u2013 of science. They’re afraid of the future. They’re afraid of tomorrow’s morning. They’re afraid of tomorrow’s evening. They’re afraid of tomorrow. They’re afraid of the future. They’re afraid of Stratocasters \u2013 of Telecasters. They’re afraid of rock\u2018n’roll. What does he mean, even rock bands? Even rock bands? Rock bands more than anybody else su\u00ef\u00ac\u20acer from political repression. They’re afraid. They’re afraid of rock\u2018n’roll of Telecasters \u2013 of Stratocasters \u2013 of old age \u2013 in the streets \u2013 behind locked doors. They’re afraid of what they’ve written \u2013 of what they’ve said \u2013 of \u00ef\u00ac\u0081re of water \u2013 of wind \u2013 of slow \u2013 of snow \u2013 of love excretion. They’re afraid of noise \u2013 of peace \u2013 of silence \u2013 of grief \u2013 of joy \u2013 of language \u2013 of laughter of pornography \u2013 of honest & upright \u2013 they’re uptight. They’re afraid of lone & learn & learned people. They’re afraid of human rights & Karl Marx & raw power. They’re afraid of socialism. They’re afraid of rock\u2018n’roll. They’re afraid of rock\u2018n’roll. They’re afraid of rock\u2018n’roll. They’re afraid of rock\u2018n’roll. AND WHY THE HELL ARE WE AFRAID OF THEM?”<\/p>\n
In the February 1977 edition of the International Socialism newspaper \u201cOne Hundred Points” was described as \u201cone of the toughest statements yet from the popular opposition in Czechoslovakia,” & the Plastics as \u201ca rock band who have consistently refused to toe the line of o\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cial culture & have made enormous sacri\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ces to continue expressing their own views.” Ironically, the \u201cOne Hundred Points” \u2013 according to Archie Patterson’s account in Eurock \u2013 was performed by the Plastics only after this account appeared in the Trotskyite press. \u201cThe \u2018Hundred Points\u2026’ was recorded live at the Third Music Festival of the Second Culture on October 1, 1977, & the piece has an interesting history behind it. When the band was \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst arrested in March 1976, an article appeared in an English left-wing paper quoting some of the Plastic’s lyrics, including a long, heavily political song called the Hundred Points that the Plastics had never done, let alone seen. I was in Prague at the time when I saw the article & I was livid because the communist press had been printing vulgar lyrics the Plastics had never sung to discredit them. Now the left wing press had descended to the same kind of falsehood, though with the best intentions (the ends justify the means), in order to make the Plastics palatable & sympathetic to people who could only hear what the music was saying if the ideology was right. When I showed the article to the band, their reaction astonished me. They said, There is only one thing we can do now, do it! It was a brilliant solution. Rather than going through the rather complicated hassle of denying the Hundred Points, they simply had it translated into Czech & set it to music. Thus, they made the article in the English paper retroactively true.”<\/p>\n
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The Plastic People of the Universe<\/p>\n
Whatever the accuracy of the story, the \u201cOne Hundred Points” remained the Plastics’ one overtly political text, while the band themselves took the view that they were \u201cdissident” by circumstance rather than intent \u2013 those circumstances being the de facto politicisation of the uno\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cial music scene as a result of increasingly heavy-handed (& increasingly irrational) e\u00ef\u00ac\u20acorts by the state at its suppression. Formed in Prague a month after the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968, the Plastics attracted the ire of Czechoslovakia’s new Moscow-backed r \u00e9gime intent upon social re-\u201cnormalisation” after the short-lived experiment in \u201csocialism with a human face” known as the Prague Spring (a seven-month period of liberalisation in which popular culture \u00ef\u00ac\u201aourished), cracking down on anything seemingly pro-Western (like rock music) or merely non-conformist (like males with long hair). At the time, the band performed mostly covers of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, the Velvet Underground & the Fugs \u2013 an attitudinal mix of the eccentric & the fucked-o\u00ef\u00ac\u20ac, that clearly telegraphed the band’s views to the men in grey suits about their e\u00ef\u00ac\u20acorts at bureaucratising humanity to death. If that wasn’t enough, the band’s name itself (drawn from a track on the Mothers of Invention’s 1967 album Absolutely Free) took a broad swipe at the collaborationist culture being foisted upon Czechoslovak society by the Soviet stooges up in the Castle \u2013 where, only 30 years before, Hitler himself had surveyed his most recent conquest. \u201cWe are surrounded by a vast \/ quantity of plastic people,” Zappa’s lyrics went. \u201cTake a day & walk around, \/ watch the Nazis run your town, \/ then go home & check yourself. \/ You think we’re singing \/ ’bout someone else. \/ But you’re plastic people.” More open & extreme forms of protest against the Soviet occupation occurred, too, most famously the self-immolation by philosophy student Jan Palach at the foot of the Natural Sciences Museum steps on Wenceslas Square \u2013 but it was through the uno\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cial music culture that opposition was most widely shared as a communal experience, if not as a programme of political action.<\/p>\n
With an increasing underground following, the Plastics turned from covers in English (described by the authorities as \u201cmorbid” with a \u201cnegative social impact”) to producing original work in Czech even the censors could understand, written mostly by Milan Hlavsa & the former surrealist & banned poet Egon Bondy (who, in a truly Kafkaesque turn, was also a secret police informer) \u2013 recording their \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst album, the psychedelic jazz-rock Egon Bondy’s Lonely Hearts Club Banned, in 1974 (a nod to the Beatles’ longevity as a revolutionising force on the far side of the Iron Curtain). Adding to the fact that only state-sanctioned bands were permitted to actually play in front of an audience (the Plastics’ professional licence had been revoked in January 1970), their performance of a banned writer’s work was bound to attract o\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cial displeasure, as it did when police shut down a Plastics’ concert in \u00c4\u0152esk \u00e9 Bud\u00c4\u203ajovice the same year, beating & arresting members of the largely \u201clong-haired” (m\u00c3\u00a1ni\u00c4\u008dky) student audience (a nod likewise to the continuing in\u00ef\u00ac\u201auence of beat poet Allen Ginsberg, crowned \u201cKing of May” in Prague in 1965: \u201clonghairs” were considered subversives & in 1966 approximately 4,000 of them were assisted in shaving their heads by the secret police, including Fluxus artist Milan Kn\u00c3\u00ad\u00c5\u00be\u00c3\u00a1k). On March 17, 1976, the Plastics themselves were arrested along with members of DG 307 & several other groups while performing at the Second Festival of the Second Culture (organised by art historian Ivan \u201cMagor” Jirous) & put on trial six months later for \u201corganized disturbance of the peace” \u2013 with four musicians (Jirous, the Plastics’ Vratislav Brabenec, Pavel Zaji\u00c4\u008dek from DG 307 & Svatopluk Kar\u00c3\u00a1sek), receiving prison sentences of between 8 & 18 months. Jirous had taken the idea of the \u201csecond culture” or \u201cparallel polis” from V\u00c3\u00a1clav Benda, as a reference to the underground renaissance the Plastics were supposed to be leading. This may have been wishful thinking on Jirous’ part had the trial itself not transformed the Plastics into an international cause c \u00e9l\u00c3\u00a8bre & a catalyst for the opposition movement that eventually went on to ride the \u201cVelvet Revolution” to power & bring about the end of state totalitarianism thirteen years later.<\/p>\n
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Allen Ginsberg with his translator Jan Z\u00c3\u00a1brana in Prague, 1965, StB secret police photograph<\/p>\n
For Benda & others, like Jirous & playwright V\u00c3\u00a1clav Havel, the idea of the parallel polis extended the notion of \u201cunderground culture” as it’d been understood in the West to encompass all manner of civic actions, from organised protest to the establishment of informal economies, information networks, education & research facilities, publishing operations, political structures, & so on: it was, in e\u00ef\u00ac\u20acect, not merely a subculture, but a fully-conceived resistance movement \u2013 a secret \u201cstate” within the State. Its objective, short of actual revolution, was to facilitate an independent society, able to operate outside the oppressive apparatus of the central authorities. In 1977, Jirous \u2013 who in 1989 would become the last political prisoner to be freed in Prague \u2013 published, in samizdat, \u201cA Report on the Third Musical Revival” (1977), in which he wrote: \u201cOne of the highest aims of art has been the creation of unrest. The aim of the underground here in Bohemia is the creation of a second culture, a culture that will not be dependent on the o\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cial channels of communication, social recognition, & the hierarchy of values laid down by the establishment.”<\/p>\n
The parallel polis, however, was never a formal blueprint, but rather a descriptive system of informal \u201ctemporary autonomous zones,” as Hakim Bey called them. Yet, as much as it appealed to an idea of resistance, the parallel polis appealed even more to a kind of opportunistic quietism, of a form that eventually prevailed in wresting power from the Communist Party. In 1976 Havel, who would go on to become Czechoslovakia’s president in December 1989, secretly met with Jirous & became convinced that a showdown between the underground music scene & the authorities was imminent, & that this would provide a suitable opportunity to provoke a political confrontation as well. The occasion was the \u201cSecond Festival of the Second Culture,” & it was in response to the arrest & prosecution of the Plastic People of the Universe that Havel wrote an \u201cOpen Letter” to the general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Gust\u00c3\u00a1v Hus\u00c3\u00a1k, & mobilised support behind what became the major document of the resistance, Charta 77, published locally in samizdat & in the Western media on January 6, 1977, along with the names of 242 signatories. The charter was a bold e\u00ef\u00ac\u20acort that landed Havel & many of his fellow signatories in prison, & resulted in the death of the philosopher Jan Pato\u00c4\u008dka after 11 hours of interrogation by the StB (secret police). The document itself, however, was hardly the rallying cry to political freedom that might’ve been expected, but more like a lecture in political morality, chiding the authorities who’d prosecuted the Plastics for not abiding by the Helsinki Accords on human rights that they’d just signed up to.<\/p>\n
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V\u00c3\u00a1clav Havel, \u201cThe Power of the Powerless,” samizdat, 1978<\/p>\n
By calling the r \u00e9gime on its hypocrisy, rather than denouncing it as such, Havel was playing a subtle game of one-upmanship: in the process, both the Plastics & Charta 77 became focal points of further \u201cresistance” played increasingly to an international audience. In his 1978 essay, \u201cThe Power of the Powerless,” Havel wrote: \u201cEveryone understands that an attack of the Czech musical underground was an attack on the most elementary & important thing, something that bound everyone together\u2026 The freedom to play rock music was understood as a human freedom & thus as essentially the same as the freedom to engage in philosophy & political re\u00ef\u00ac\u201aection, the freedom to write, to express & defend the social & political interests of society.” Written ten months after the implosion of the Sex Pistols following that band’s ruthless vili\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cation in the US & British tabloid press \u2013 Havel’s measured gravitas was a long way from how the \u201cantiestablishment” music scene was being viewed by the leaders of the socalled Free World, where \u201cfreedom of expression” in music, literature & the arts was just as often a bellwether of broader civic freedoms. What di\u00ef\u00ac\u20acerentiated the two amounted, arguably, to little more than a rhetorical divide & a con\u00ef\u00ac\u201aicting attitude towards those opportunities provided by the mass marketing of discontent-turned-to-entertainment. What the West, aided by the likes of Malcolm McLaren, realised in \u00ef\u00ac\u0081ts & starts at the end of the ’70s, which the East apparently didn’t, was that dissent was worth big dollars \u2013 & that dissent channelled into entertainment & lifestyle merch was the most e\u00ef\u00ac\u20acective form of mass mind-control yet devised. The problem for the Prague underground of Jirous & Havel was its inability to di\u00ef\u00ac\u20acerentiate between the aspiration to this kind of free-market capitalist kitsch & the creation of a genuinely alternative social reality. The resulting transformation of Prague, after 1989 & the end of what Ivan Kl\u00c3\u00adma called \u201cthe Empire of Stalinist tyranny,” into a privatised Thatcherite bubble economy, meant that the parallel polis remained a pipe-dream. As the Plastics’ Vr\u00c3\u00a1\u00c5\u00a5a Brabenec stated in an interview twenty years after the \u201cVelvet Revolution” (so called because not a shot was \u00ef\u00ac\u0081red): \u201cI hate it when people talk about that year as a \u2018revolution’ in Czechoslovakia. A revolution is supposed to change things. But what has changed? I don’t consider myself any less subversive now than I was back then. I am no less a dissident in a society of shopping, shopping & shopping than I was in a society of socialism, socialism, socialism. It’s all still shit, only di\u00ef\u00ac\u20acerent shit.”<\/p>\n
Over the next few years, Jirous’ \u201cparallel polis” would come to seem like a more \u00ef\u00ac\u0081tting description of the separations occurring within Prague society on both an economic & cultural level \u2013 the outcome on the one hand of a fantastically corrupt voucher privatisation scheme (widely heralded in the West as a new economic miracle), & on the other by the large-scale return of former Czechoslovak \u00e9migr \u00e9s & the rapid increase in the size of the city’s international community. A New York Times article estimated that by 1993 there were 30,000 Americans alone living in the city. A sizeable number of these had aspirations in the emerging \u201cinternational scene” \u2013 as writers, translators, editors, publishers, artists, \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lmmakers, human rights activists, booksellers, teachers, students, musicians & trust-fund groupies. This loosely-formed community \u2013 the new \u201csecond culture” \u2013 gave rise to a constructed myth of the city which combined a nostalgic Bohemianism, a belated Western hankering after cultural authenticity (the \u201cpoetry of witness”), & a type of Wizard of Oz fantasy set in juxtaposition to the 1980s \u201cculture wars” & political bankruptcy of the Reagan\/Thatcher era in the US & Britain (which the ’90s did little to ameliorate). All of which could now be got without the need, for US passport holders, of so much as a visa. Prague, too, became the momentary picturesque outpost of a Berlin which, for some, had been deprived of its raison d’\u00c3\u00aatre now that the Wall (which had e\u00ef\u00ac\u20acectively sheltered it from all sides) had come down. Bourgeois bohemians & subcultural proctologists descended on the Czechoslovak capital to take the pulse of the Zeitgeist & add another 15 minutes to their overdraft on celebrity, producing forgettable reams of Praguesploitation. Ginsberg duly put in an appearance. So too Malcolm McLaren. Agonising on behalf of those deliriously caught up in the moment, Wired magazine’s Bruce Sterling wrote in 1993, \u201cthis is a very \u201890s city. Even its artistic problems are \u201890s artistic problems: the struggle of a bewildered & put-upon generation to speak authentically in an era whose central directive is to reduce all art & all life to an in\u00ef\u00ac\u0081nitely replicable commodity, to turn Kafka into a T-shirt & Havel into a carny attraction, to shrink-wrap cultures as pasteurised package-tour exotica, to make art a bogus knickknack & heritage the hottest-selling market segment of the Museum Economy.”<\/p>\n
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Luk\u00c3\u00a1\u00c5\u00a1 Tomin at Caf \u00e9 Kandinsky, 1992, by Kevin Blahut<\/p>\n
More signi\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cantly, thirty years of underground cultural resistance found itself \u2013 at the very moment triumph appeared to be at hand \u2013 stuck out in the cold. It didn’t have to wait to be gentri\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ed out of existence, it simply woke up the morning after & found it’d been made irrelevant \u2013 both by a society desperate to embrace materialist amnesia, & a whole new transient demographic of literary dilettantes who for the most part knew nothing about it, convinced that Prague counterculture meant Allen Ginsberg. As has often been observed, it was as if ’89 was ’68 upsidedown. Brabenec summed it up when he said, \u201cFucking tourists. Once it was Russian soldiers, now it’s tourists. I can’t decide which is worse.”<\/p>\n
Cynical pundits like Sterling entirely missed the point that their authenticity anxiety was as much a cultural import as was the hankering after the next Hemingway & Gary Shteyngart’s endless one-upmanship about the failure of the \u201cPrague Novel” to suddenly materialise out of the overnight e\u00ef\u00ac\u20acorts of fugitive Berkeley dropouts. \u201cPrague,” wrote Sterling for his American readership, \u201cis very much like Paris in the \u201820s, but it’s also very much unlike Paris in the \u201820s. One main reason is that there is no Andr \u00e9 Breton here. People do sit & write \u2013 stop by The Globe, the crowded \u00e9migr \u00e9 bookstore on Janovsk \u00e9ho 14 in north Prague, & you’ll see a full third of the cappuccino-sipping black-clad Praguelodyte customers scribbling busily in their notebooks. There are many American wannabe writers here \u2013 even better, they actually manage to publish sometimes \u2013 but there is not a Prague literary movement, no Prague literary-isms. No magisterial literary theorists hold forth here as Breton or Louis Aragon [!?] or Gertrude Stein [?!] did in Paris. There isn’t a Prague technique, or a Prague approach, or a Prague literary philosophy that will set a doubting world a\u00ef\u00ac\u0081re. There are people here sincerely trying to \u00ef\u00ac\u0081nd a voice, but as yet there is no voice. There may well be a new Hemingway here (as The Prague Post once declared there must be). But if Prague writers want to do a kind of writing that is really as new & powerful as Hemingway’s was in Hemingway’s time, then they will have to teach themselves.”<\/p>\n
Presumably Sterling had never heard of Prague Surrealism (Breton himself called Prague \u201cSurrealism’s second city”) or Prague Structuralism (which contemporary -ISM didn’t owe some debt to Jakobson?), not to mention Prague writers like J\u00c3\u00a1chym Topol, Emil Hakl, or the \u00ef\u00ac\u201aeet of older novelists like Bohumil Hrabal & Ludv\u00c3\u00adk Vacul\u00c3\u00adk (both of whom sustain comparisons to Joyce), or even the emerging enfant terrible of the other Prague scene, Luk\u00c3\u00a1\u00c5\u00a1 Tomin, the \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst of whose three novels in English (The Doll<\/em>, Ashtrays<\/em>, Kye<\/em>) was published in 1992 by locally-based Twisted Spoon Press. Tomin, who committed suicide in 1995, is perhaps the best example of why these \u00ef\u00ac\u0081nger-up-the-rectum opinionisers couldn’t steer their way through a subculture if you gave them a periscope. His work represents what underground really means in post-Communist Prague, where \u201csuppression by omission” took the place of state censorship, abetted by Western cultural narcissism (the \u201cdoubting world”) & Czech indi\u00ef\u00ac\u20acerence. Yet despite (or because of) remaining unacknowledged on almost every side, Tomin produced the kind of work that could indeed begin to be measured against a Stein \u2013 or, to be a little less antique, a Pierre Guyotat, a Cabrera Infante, a Hubert Fichte, even a Nick Cave.<\/p>\n When the expatriate American newspaperman Alan Levy two years earlier called Prague \u2013 in an often parroted editorial \u2013 the \u201cLeft Bank of the nineties,” he appealed not to an instant comparison to the milieu of Joyce, Stein, Breton, but to a future history, though mindful of what poet Miroslav Holub wrote about history being \u201calways a failure by de\u00ef\u00ac\u0081nition”: \u201cFor some of us,” Levy proposed, \u201cPrague is Second Chance City; for others, a New Frontier where anything goes, everything goes, &, often enough, nothing works. Yesterday is long gone, today is nebulous, & who knows about tomorrow, but somewhere within each of us here, we all know that we are living in a historic place at a historic time. Future historians will chronicle our course \u2013 & I have reason to believe that they’re already here \u2013 but even they will need to know the nuts & bolts of what it was like & how it felt to live & be in liberated Prague in the last decade of the 20th century.” But the question that remained was what it could mean in such circumstances to live, as Jirous had argued during the volatile ’70s & ’80s, \u201cin truth” \u2013 in the belief that art could expose the r \u00e9gime’s falsi\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cation of social reality & bring about its collapse, including, it was now necessary to add, the r \u00e9gime of neo-liberal amnesia presently occupying this city of otherwise invisible thresholds (Praha, which was its name before momentarily becoming an American satellite, means exactly that). One was minded of Wim Wenders’ famous line from Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road; 1976): \u201cThe Yanks have colonised our subconscious.” It was like the Second Coming of the Marshall Plan. By 1995, when Radio Free Europe moved its headquarters from Munich to Prague’s former Federal Parliament building, a new period of \u201cnormalisation” appeared to be in full swing \u2013 directed by a new occupying force \u2013 which by the turn of the millennium would be solidi\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ed by NATO accession, with the un\u00ef\u00ac\u201ainching approval of ex-dissidents like Jirous who, in later years (notably during the second Bush administration) became a vocal, even hysterical, critic of domestic opponents of American foreign policy.<\/p>\n Soviet tanks enter the city, August 1968, the end of the Prague Spring, Josef Koudelka<\/p>\n Just as in August 1968 when the city celebrated the renewal of its \u201cendless friendship” with the Soviet Union (who’d \u201csaved” it from the forces of \u201ccounterrevolution”), so too in ’89 Prague embarked on an \u201cendless friendship” with Capitalism-with-a-Human-Face. And if Marxism had been \u201cdiscredited” by History, so too the spirit of dissent was subjected to a tacit disillusionment: while Jirous was free to get as pissed as he liked & dance naked on tables, his brand of \u201cliving in truth” descended into a reactionary sentimentalism. As reactionary & sentimental as the gang of self-proclaimed \u201corthodox Surrealists” who drank that comic avatar of puerile self-interest, Hrabal, under his chair every night at U zlat \u00e9ho tygra (\u201cyou have to get your hands dirty in life” \u2013 zamazat se \u00c5\u00beivotem \u2013 as the sometimes-collaborationist used to say). What gets obscured behind all this is the very real volatility that characterised the years immediately after ’89 & continues to shape the political discourse today. One of the features of Jirous’ \u201cparallel polis” had been a relative homogeneity of purpose: state socialism provided the fulcrum upon which the appearance of a movement could lever itself forward. As one of the signatories of Charta 77, Anna \u00c5\u00a0abatov\u00c3\u00a1, recounted, it \u201cbrought the atheists into contact with Christians of all denominations. It united writers & artists with scientists & politicians, as well as labourers & clerks. It also brought together the old & the young. Seventeen-year-old dissidents could rub shoulders with people who had fought against fascist Germany & who served time in Stalinist labour camps.” Yet this \u201cuni\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ed front” of solidarity-by-convenience masked often radically contradicting ideological positions, & it is of no surprise that it fell apart in tandem with the collapse of the Communist r \u00e9gime. While the underground itself was for the most part consigned to sudden irrelevance, a minority of dissident \u00ef\u00ac\u0081gures nevertheless persisted in becoming an ine\u00ef\u00ac\u20acectual governing class under whose brief tenure corruption & organised crime ran rampant, before they, too, found themselves supplanted by political careerists such as V\u00c3\u00a1clav Klaus (Havel’s Thatcherite prime minister from 1992 & successor as president). Klaus, needless to say, wasn’t the kind of man who had any truck with ideas like appointing Frank Zappa honorary trade representative. Moreover, as the veneer of uni\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ed purpose fell away, the dirty reality of xenophobia & domestic fascism came increasingly into view, with brawls between Punks & skinheads occurring regularly on Prague’s streets, along with tacitly police-sanctioned neo-Nazi rallies through the city’s former Jewish quarter, \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rebombings of Roma tenements, & beatings of homosexuals (with few exceptions, the handful of gay & lesbian clubs that operated throughout the ’90s did so behind locked doors).<\/p>\n The \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst skinheads appeared in the city between 1986 & ’87, & until 1989 tended to restrict their attacks to members of the anarchist, anti-Fascist & Punk movements, before branching out into race-baiting & so on. Unlike the dissident rock music scene, which managed to produce a number of important recordings under Communism (& went on to comprise the post-Communist status quo side-by-side with unashamed re-treads like Karel Gott, Michal David & Helena Vondr\u00c3\u00a1\u00c4\u008dkov\u00c3\u00a1 \u2013 all signatories of the \u201cAnticharta”), the Punk scene released a total of three records before ’89 (one 7″ vinyl & two compilation LPs), yet it bore the brunt of the succeeded reactionary militancy from the far right. It was here, arguably, that anything that might properly be called an \u201cunderground” persisted after the repatriation of Soviet tanks (& when the average Joes were queuing around the block to get a bite at the \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst McDonalds to grace Kafkaville). While the \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst & only \u201co\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cial” performance by a Punk band during Communism took place in September 1987 when the West Berlin group Die Toten Hosen surreally played on the same bill with Michal David at a nuclear disarmament \u201cFriendship” festival in Plze\u00c5\u02c6 (& still managed to provoke a riot) \u2013 the indigenous Punk scene (which had emerged on the fringes of underground rock associated with the Plastics, DG 307, & the Prague \u201cJazz Section”) dates much further back, from the late ’70s, with bands like Extempore, Plexis, Michael’s Uncle, Zikkurat, Energie G, Antitma 16 & Ps\u00c3\u00ad voj\u00c3\u00a1ci (Charta 77 signatory Filip Topol’s band), who played a mix of Ramones, Stranglers, Sex Pistols, & The Damned (cribbed from recordings smuggled across the German border).<\/p>\n Throughout the ’80s, Punk out\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ts found themselves on proscribed lists (the \u201cr \u00e9gime chart”), while also being targeted by constant police intimidation & a media-channelled propaganda campaign (launched through magazines like Tribuna, in which they were depicted as Public Enemy #2 \u2013 after \u201cLonghairs,” who remained PE #1). The threat of police violence was real & death-in-custody not uncommon, the last documented case (of dissident Pavel Wonka) occurring in 1988, two years after Gorbachev’s policy of Glasnost. The di\u00ef\u00ac\u0192culty of maintaining any kind of alternative community was compounded by living in a society riddled with informers: few locations in the city could serve as meeting points out of view of the general populace & state security, though places like Kampa & St\u00c5\u2122eleck\u00c3\u00bd Island were safer than most, along with a few pubs like Klamovka & U Zp\u00c4\u203av\u00c3\u00a1\u00c4\u008dk\u00c5\u00af, & sometimes Klub 007 (Sedmi\u00c4\u008dka) at the Strahov dormitories. In addition, for what was predominantly a \u201cyouth culture” (Energie G & Antitma 16 were both made up of high school students), there was the problem of mandatory military service (for men), which was only marginally better than doing time in a Communist prison, if potentially more fatal. The situation was hardly better for early ’80s all-women bands like Plyn (later Dybbuk), whose feminist stance was at odds with a \u201csocialist” ideology that expected women to express their \u201cliberation” at the kitchen sink & was in barefaced denial of the chronic levels of domestic violence that occurred in this Workers’ Paradise. Like the kind of Punk, street art & squatting culture that had developed in places like Berlin, the pursuit of gender equality beyond Party platitudes only became possible in Prague after the end of the r \u00e9gime.<\/p>\n Velvet Revolution, November 1989, Herbert Slav\u00c3\u00adk<\/p>\n 17 November \u2013 the date on which the \u201cVelvet Revolution” began in 1989, eight days after the fall of the Berlin Wall \u2013 was, not uncoincidentally, the date \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst observed in 1941 for International Students’ Day. This event in turn originated with a funeral procession on 15 November 1939 for the murdered Czech medical student Jan Opletal, who’d been shot during an earlier march (in celebration of the anniversary of Czechoslovak Independence, 28 October 1918), which itself had quickly become a protest against Nazi occupation. Among the retaliatory measures taken by the Nazis had been the forced closure of all Czech universities for the duration of the War, the deportation of 1,200 students to Sachsenhausen, & the execution \u2013 on 17 November \u2013 of nine student leaders & professors. It was a date, therefore, almost overburdened with symbolic signi\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cance. When in 1989 the Socialist Union of Youth & a group of independent student leaders organised a mass rally to mark the 50th anniversary of the Nazi executions & to voice their opposition to what, by that time, was already a moribund r \u00e9gime, it was bound to resonate. According to estimations, about 15,000 students took part in the rally which was eventually broken up by riot police on N\u00c3\u00a1rodn\u00c3\u00ad Street, in front of the National Theatre. The brutality of the crackdown provided a catalyst for the \u201cVelvet Revolution” proper, additionally fuelled by one extremely bizarre event which came to assume almost mythic proportions. This was the supposed police murder of one \u201cMilan R\u00c5\u00af\u00c5\u00bei\u00c4\u008dka,” apparently a student at the Mining University in Ostrava, whose body was left lying in the street when security forces withdrew after a baton-charge on protestors. Footage of the incident existed & news of the \u201cdead student” quickly circulated. This \u201cdead student” turned out to be a person whose real name was Ludv\u00c3\u00adk Zif\u00c4\u008d\u00c3\u00a1k, a senior o\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cer in Department 2, Section II of the Prague StB directorate. Zif\u00c4\u008d\u00c3\u00a1k had been commissioned to \u201cdirectly penetrate the \u2018enemy’ environment of the opposition & student movements.”<\/p>\n His role as the \u201cdead student” was eventually exposed in January 1990, although the purpose of the stunt has never been clari\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ed. When the Communist Party abandoned power on 28 November 1989, the Party General Secretary, Gust\u00c3\u00a1v Hus\u00c3\u00a1k (who held on to the presidency until December 10) ended up, in yet another bizarre episode, o\u00ef\u00ac\u0192ciating over the appointment of Havel’s new non-communist government. Hus\u00c3\u00a1k, architect of post-’68 \u201cnormalisation” & \u201cHero of the Soviet Union,” died barely two years later, virtually forgotten. It wouldn’t be until 1991, however, that the Soviet tanks (stationed in the city since ’68) \u00ef\u00ac\u0081nally left. And even then (& moreso following the \u201cAugust Coup” of that same year, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was kidnapped by Party hardliners \u2013 the \u201cGang of Eight”), Prague residents continued to harbour suspicions that Russian tanks would soon be back, leading to an atmosphere in the city of more than usual irreality. Meanwhile, on the night of 23 April 1991, artist David \u00c4\u0152ern\u00c3\u00bd, along with a group of accomplices (the \u201cNeostunners”), launched a guerrilla action against the \u201cMonument to the Soviet Tank Crews” located on Kinsk\u00c3\u00bd Square, painting the tank pink & erected a large middle \u00ef\u00ac\u0081nger on its turret. \u00c4\u0152ern\u00c3\u00bd was subsequently arrested under pre-existing \u201cpublic disturbance” laws & the tank was repainted green.<\/p>\n In response, 15 members of the newly-elected parliament, making use of their immunity from prosecution, took it upon themselves to paint the tank pink again. With the resulting controversy, \u00c4\u0152ern\u00c3\u00bd was released, the monument was stripped of its status &, after being repainted green & then pink several more times by competing groups, the tank was eventually removed to a military museum. When real tanks \u00ef\u00ac\u0081nally did return to the centre of Prague (in 2001), taking up positions at the top of Wenceslas Square almost identical to those occupied by the Soviets in 1968, they weren’t Russian but part of the Czech Republic’s NATO contingent, put there along with a system of concrete barriers in response to the 9\/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. As a new American vassal state, the tanks had been sent to defend Radio Free Europe’s headquarters from imminent \u201cterrorist” attack. A leftover from the Cold War, RFE \u00ef\u00ac\u0081nally relocated out of Prague’s centre only in February 2009, but for the intervening years the tanks & barriers remained in place, as if Prague were once again an occupied city. And in case the comparison had been missed, at 7:30a.m. on the 6th of March 2003, in an echo of the self-immolation of Jan Palach in 1969 near the same spot \u2013 & only metres from the RFE barricades \u2013 19-year-old student Zden\u00c4\u203ak Adamec poured petrol over his clothes & set himself ablaze in protest against the hijacking of democracy by corrupt politicians & corporations, & in opposition to the US-led war in Iraq. Adamec’s action also corresponded with the inauguration of V\u00c3\u00a1clav Klaus as president of the Czech Republic (with the backing of parliamentary members of the unreconstructed Communist Party). The media just called him crazy \u2013 as, indeed, the o\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cial state media once characterized Palach, whose funeral went on to become a highly politicized event & whose death has since gained national signi\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cance. Adamec’s funeral, nobody remembers.<\/p>\n David \u00c4\u0152ern\u00c3\u00bd, \u201cPink Tank,” 1991<\/p>\n When the borders opened after ’89, & with infrastructural chaos reigning in the city, Prague developed a major live music culture, with semi-legal & often short-lived venues appearing on an almost daily basis. While Berlin was embracing techno, Prague became a magnet for post-Punk & Indie rock groups, along with a steady stream of refugees from the war in the Balkans who infused the scene with a radical, post-Cold War impetus. Dozens of squats existed brie\u00ef\u00ac\u201ay in the city’s suburbs & downtown, adjacent to such well-known landmarks as Charles Bridge (including Asylum, a performance space on Betl \u00e9msk\u00c3\u00a1 Street established by the poet Jay Godwin & home to the Electric Circus). Many of the buildings that housed them had been left in legal limbo following the \u201889 revolution & the ensuing restitution laws which sought to return formerly nationalised properties to their pre-1948 owners. Among these was the Art Deco Caf \u00e9 Slavia, located opposite the National Theatre, a centre-piece of Prague’s pre-communist literary culture. Slavia was closed for lengthy periods throughout the early \u201890s, under administration by the Academy of Performing Arts. On 8 November 1993, the \u201cSociety of the Friends of Caf \u00e9 Slavia” (John Bruce Shoemaker, Glen Emery, Marek Gregor, Ladislav Provan) gained access to the building & squatted the caf \u00e9 for two weeks \u2013 attempting to restore the caf \u00e9’s former ethos \u2013 until the authorities had it closed down again on the 20th (it re-opened de\u00ef\u00ac\u0081nitively only in 1997). As the ’90s progressed, an increasing number of bars & clubs opened in neglected buildings across the city. Many of these became well-known, like Roxy (on Dlouh\u00c3\u00a1 Street), Klub Stalin (a.k.a. Pod Stalinem, located under the demolished Stalin Monument in Letn\u00c3\u00a1, a space now adorned with an enormous metronome), Bunkr (in a former Civil Guard bunker & nuclear shelter, along with Radio 1, at Lodeck\u00c3\u00a1 2 in Nov \u00e9 M\u00c4\u203asto), Jo’s Bar & Gar\u00c3\u00a1\u00c5\u00be (opened in 1992 by Canadian Glen Emery a former resident of the \u00c4\u0152SSR in the \u201870s & \u201880s on Malostransk \u00e9 n\u00c3\u00a1m\u00c4\u203ast\u00c3\u00ad), Repre (brie\u00ef\u00ac\u201ay located downstairs in the pre-restoration Obecn\u00c3\u00ad D\u00c5\u00afm \u2013 co-owned by John Bruce Shoemaker, frequent sponsor of Twisted Spoon Press, Trafika, Optimism & Think magazines), Tam Tam (located on the second \u00ef\u00ac\u201aoor in Slovansk\u00c3\u00bd D\u00c5\u00afm, now a boutique mall at Na P\u00c5\u2122\u00c3\u00adkop\u00c4\u203a 22 \u2013 operated by Christoph Brandl), Klub X (\u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst in Pal\u00c3\u00a1c Metro on N\u00c3\u00a1rodn\u00c3\u00ad, then in the basement of D\u00c4\u203atsk\u00c3\u00bd D\u00c5\u00afm, across the street from Tam Tam at Na P\u00c5\u2122\u00c3\u00adkop\u00c4\u203a 15) & Chapeau Rouge (on Jakubsk\u00c3\u00a1). The Thirsty Dog (not to be confused with the present \u00c5\u00bd\u00c3\u00adzniv\u00c3\u00bd Pes), a bar which opened on the western side of Obecn\u00c3\u00ad D\u00c5\u00afm for only 18 months during 1993 & 1994, achieved particular notoriety before being shutdown on 7 June by city health inspectors: Allen Ginsberg read there, Joe Strummer performed there, & Nick Cave wrote a song about it for his album Let Love In.<\/p>\n Through its past connection with the Beats & the Manhattan post-Punk scene (via Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, Ivan Kr\u00c3\u00a1l), Prague in the ’90s \u2013 with its decaying fa\u00c3\u00a7ades under layers of brown coal-soot, its subway gloom, its whores all along N\u00c3\u00a1rodn\u00c3\u00ad & Wenceslas Square, its abandoned Trabbis & half-toned \u00c5\u00a0kodas jacked-up on bricks, its dirt-cheap apartments, Monopoly-money economy & sense of free-for-all \u2013 seemed to represent an extended ri\u00ef\u00ac\u20ac on the theme of ’70s New York via ’80s Berlin. Along with Cave & Strummer, there were Blixa Bargeld, Diamanda Gal\u00c3\u00a1s, Brian Eno, as well as long-term habitu \u00e9s like former Khmer Rouge frontman Phil Shoenfelt. Shoenfelt, who toured Prague in 1994, formed Southern Cross with members of Tich\u00c3\u00a1 Dohoda there in 1996, & later toured Europe with Nikki Sudden (recording Golden Vanity in Berlin in 1998), before joining the Berlin-based out\u00ef\u00ac\u0081t Fatal Shore with Bruno Adams & Chris Hughes (both formerly of Once Upon A Time). Fatal Shore produced four CDs before reforming, after the death of Bruno Adams, as Dim Locator \u2013 named after a Rowland S. Howard song on the Birthday Party’s Junkyard LP. Khmer Rouge (Shoenfelt, Barry \u201cScratchy” Myers (tour DJ for The Clash), Marcia Scho\u00ef\u00ac\u0081eld (later keyboardist with The Fall) & drummer Paul Garisto (Iggy Pop, The Psychedelic Furs)) had been managed in the early ’80s by former-Warhol Factory photographer Nat Finkelstein & produced by Tom Scully, & Shoenfelt brought the ethos of post-Punk, No Wave, Noise & experimental New York music to a scene that was already synthesising Berlin & Balkan in\u00ef\u00ac\u201auences, with bands like The Ecstasy of St Teresa, Colorfactory, R\u00c3\u00a1ny t\u00c4\u203ala, Moimir Papalescu & the Nihilists (later Kill the Dandies!), Liquid Harmony, Ohm Square, Support Lesbiens, Zuby Nehty, & eccentricities like Kollaps, the Pazvuky Noise Project (PNP) & Blaq Mummy (once described as \u201cEinst\u00c3\u00bcrzende Neubauten sideswiping the Cramps on a deathride to Sun Ra”).<\/p>\n Vincent Farnsworth, Blaq Mummy concert, 2012, Robert Carrithers<\/p>\n Going by the name Reverend Feedback, former-PNP & Blaq Mummy frontman Vincent Farnsworth was a poet who Tom Clark had referred to as \u201cbrute sage of destiny” \u2013 & the magazine he managed with Gwendolyn Albert throughout the ’90s, Jejune: america eats its young, was one of dozens of art, lit & otherwise unclassi\u00ef\u00ac\u0081able zines & magazines produced during the \u201cPrague Renaissance” & in the wake of samizdat precursors like Revolver Revue \u2013 including Divus, Yazzyk, X-Ink, Um\u00c4\u203alec, Gristle Floss, [unpronounceable symbol], One Eye Open\/Jedn\u00c3\u00adm Okem, Knee-Deep in Rivers of Rage\u2026 Farnsworth, along with Shoenfelt (whose novel, Junkie Love, appeared from Twisted Spoon in 1997) & writers like Luk\u00c3\u00a1\u00c5\u00a1 Tomin, Katka Pi\u00c5\u02c6osov\u00c3\u00a1, Laura Conway, Thor Garcia, \u00c5\u00a0imon \u00c5\u00a0afr\u00c3\u00a1nek, V\u00c4\u203ara Chase, V\u00c3\u00adt Kremli\u00c4\u008dka, Pierre Daguin, translators like Alex Zucker, artists & photographers like Mark \u00e9ta Othov\u00c3\u00a1, Lucia Nimcov\u00c3\u00a1 & Veronika Bromov\u00c3\u00a1, publishers like Ivan Me\u00c4\u008dl & Howard Sidenberg, musicians like Dan Kenny & Ken Gan\u00ef\u00ac\u0081eld, \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lmmakers like Tally Mulligan, theatre directors like Richard Toth, performers like Curtis Jones & others, comprised a di\u00ef\u00ac\u20acuse experimental scene distributed mostly around the downtown, Letn\u00c3\u00a1 & \u00c5\u00bdi\u00c5\u00bekov neighbourhoods & drawn to the legacies of Czech New Wave cinema, Jan & Eva \u00c5\u00a0vankmajer’s neo-Surrealism, the photomontage of Prague Dadaists like John Heart\u00ef\u00ac\u0081eld, & the general in\u00ef\u00ac\u201aux of ideas from all corners \u2013 a broad cross-over between music, art, writing, \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm & performance, forming a kind of meta-underground to the whole \u201cLeft Bank of the ’90s” phenomenon & the remnants of ex-dissident self-mythologising. In 1997 the radical neo-Duchampian group Pode Bal was founded with the intention of re-politicising the art scene in the face of post-’89 tendencies in many areas of society (including the arts) towards introspection & amnesia, circulating slogans like \u201cPode Bal warns that smoking non-state-owned drugs can damage your freedom” & performing critical interventions like \u201cGEN \u2013 Gallery of Established Nomenclature” aimed at exposing \u201cthe ever-present totalitarian trends in Czech society,” replete with a video of riverside daubers transposing the view of the Castle into easel paintings of swastikas. In 1998, Bil Brown, Jenny Smith & Jenne Magno founded the Pra\u00c5\u00besk\u00c3\u00a1 \u00c5\u00a1kola poetiky (Prague School of Poetics), in collaboration with the Schule f\u00c3\u00bcr Dichtung in Vienna & writers\/performers Anne Waldman, Jerome Rothenberg, Bernadette Mayer & Lydia Lunch. \u201cThere was a feeling at that time,” Magno recounted in a 2010 interview, \u201cthat Prague was the vortex.” And while that sense of moment was soon to pass, it did so by absorbing into itself a deeper sense of history no longer de\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ned by post-Wall euphoria or the opportunism that followed it. As Ide Hintz, co-founder of the Schule f\u00c3\u00bcr Dictung, noted at the time, \u201cCentral Europe has always been & always will be a genuine transmitter & translator between cultures & languages (traditional & utopian)\u2026 The Velvet Revolution \u2013 together with other post-Stalinist revolutions \u2013 was prepared mostly by poets, artists & intellectuals.”<\/p>\n By September 2000, however (after Y2K had failed to bring the about the End of History \u2013 just as liberal democracy had failed to do in 1989 & the Cold War had somehow failed to do during any of the preceding forty-odd years), the crowds in Wenceslas Square would be lobbing Molotov cocktails at Czech riot police in protest against rampant global capitalism, in the form of the World Bank & IMF. Unlike in ’89, cobblestones would be ripped from pavements & hurled from barricades, with bands of protestors smashing every McDonald storefront in town. It was the logical conclusion of a critique that formed a parallel polis within the \u201cparallel polis,” & was perhaps most forcefully articulated in the last decade of communist normalisation in Robert Kalivoda’s Emancipation & Utopia (published in German in 1982). The \u201cformulation of the emancipation ideal,” wrote Kalivoda, \u201cmust pass into a far more concrete, not easily attainable sphere. At this level it is mostly a matter of life & death\u2026 it is no longer just a wish.” During the \u201cDays of Rage” anti-globalisation protests, delegates to the World Bank\/IMF summit held at Prague’s communist-era monstrosity, the so-called Palace of Culture in Vy\u00c5\u00a1ehrad, needed to be evacuated by police, despite e\u00ef\u00ac\u20acorts to cordon o\u00ef\u00ac\u20ac the entire district. While the protests descended into running battles between demonstrators & police throughout the centre of Prague, the city itself seemed to author a kind of parallel universe scenario in time-delay of the protest march of 17 November 1989. These events, however much politicians tried to link them to foreign provocateurs, drew from wellsprings of deep social discontent within Prague’s increasingly ostracised \u201cminority” cultures dissatis\u00ef\u00ac\u0081ed with the \u201cfalse choice” between globalisation or reactionary nationalism.<\/p>\n Anti-Globalisation Protests in Prague, September 2000, Michael McGuerty<\/p>\n Jakub Pol\u00c3\u00a1k, a prominent Czech anarchist & campaigner against racism & for Romani rights, was a cofounder of the 1989 strike committee that contributed to the Velvet Revolution & afterwards founded & edited A-Kontra magazine, the central mouthpiece of the Czech anarchist movement. During the ’90s he was particularly active in the \u00ef\u00ac\u0081ght against the neo-Nazi resurgence in Central Europe & was a founder of Prague’s \u00ef\u00ac\u0081rst post-Revolution squat in 1990 (on Podplukovn\u00c3\u00adka Sochora Street in Hole\u00c5\u00a1ovice, close to Vltavsk\u00c3\u00a1 metro & to Bubny train station \u2013 the central deportation point during WW2 for Prague’s Jewish population, organised into transports by the local collaborationist Council). Unlike in Berlin, the Prague authorities maintained a general hostility to squatters, attracting accusations in the late ’90s of complicity with neo-Nazi groups involved in violent attacks on squats in Prague & elsewhere \u2013 a pattern that has repeated itself more recently at \u201cKlinika” in Prague 3. Some squats, like the one coordinated by artists Igor Tchai in the Vr\u00c5\u00a1ovice district, served as ad hoc artist-run exhibition & performance centres. But though initiatives aimed at promoting public art in neglected \u201cprivate” spaces were supported by the likes of the Soros Foundation, nothing of the character of \u201cKunsthaus” Tacheles was ever permitted to develop in Prague. The closest approximations were Ladronka, Zlat\u00c3\u00a1 Lo\u00c4\u008f, Bu\u00c4\u008f\u00c3\u00a1nka, Sochorka & Villa Milada (a dilapidated pre-war house \u00ef\u00ac\u201aanked by communist-era highrise dormitories across the river from the recently re-designated \u201cFranz Kafka” train station, which soon after its occupation on the 1 May 1998 acquired a reputation as a centre of Prague’s second-wave post-’89 counterculture). By June 2009, Villa Milada was the city’s last remaining squat from the ’90s, when council authorities moved in to evict its inhabitants. Three years later, the building (originally slated for demolition, but still standing) was temporarily reoccupied by a group of some 30 squatters before riot police again intervened.<\/p>\n While no visible squatting or street art scenes existed in Prague before the fall of Communism, oppositional art frequently took the form of in situ \u201cAktionism,” such as the work of Ji\u00c5\u2122\u00c3\u00ad Kovanda, Zorka S\u00c3\u00a1glov\u00c3\u00a1, & Milan Kn\u00c3\u00ad\u00c5\u00be\u00c3\u00a1k (along with Western Fluxus agents like Je\u00ef\u00ac\u20ac Berner, Serge Oldenbourg & Ben Vautier) in the ’60s & ’70s \u2013 & later in the form of semi-legal exhibitions like the \u201cConfrontation” series organised by Ji\u00c5\u2122\u00c3\u00ad David & Stanislav Divi\u00c5\u00a1 from 1984, representing a new wave of young artists situated between the musical underground & Punk scenes, comparable to the Times Square & New York\/New Wave shows of 1980-1 (of which news had slowly \u00ef\u00ac\u0081ltered through). The one major manifestation of \u201cstreet art” prior to 1989 was the \u201cLennon Wall,” at Velkop\u00c5\u2122evorsk \u00e9 n\u00c3\u00a1m\u00c4\u203ast\u00c3\u00ad \u2013 a gra\u00ef\u00ac\u0192ti pilgrimage site in the ’80s for dissident \u201cLennonism” adorned with a frequently-repainted stencil of the face of John Lennon & comparable, in its iconicity, to Keith Haring’s 300-metre Berlin Wall mural (1986) & the \u201cEast Side Gallery” in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. For obvious reasons, street art only began manifesting at the beginning for the ’90s, with artists like Rake, Mascee, Chise, Vladimir 518, & as elsewhere has since become semi-o\u00ef\u00ac\u0192cialised in parts of the city. Unlike Berlin & New York, however, Prague never developed a major commercial art industry into which street art could be readily expropriated, & underground tendencies have continued long after ’89, from expressway \u00ef\u00ac\u201ayovers & underpasses, to hole-in-the-wall galleries like Display (now Tranzitdisplay) & the more recent neo-Dadaist anti-gallery \u201cThe Solution” (run by former Cabaret Voltaire squatter, Mark Divo), alongside the few large-scale semi-commercial venues like David \u00c4\u0152ern\u00c3\u00bd’s Meet Factory & Petr H\u00c3\u00a1jek’s Chemistry Gallery.<\/p>\n Gust\u00c3\u00a1v Hus\u00c3\u00a1k street art, 2006<\/p>\n The forces of capital, being by several orders less expansive (though no less prevalent) in Prague than in Berlin & New York, have accordingly yet to discover a compelling need to disinter the remnants of the city’s \u201csecond culture” from the margins of its Faustian credit economy. Left thus to pursue a troglodyte programme of subsistence-subversion in that savage zone between touristed dreck & institutional inertia, the fate of this \u201cparallel polis” is doubtless more desirable than those outright expropriations by global entertainment & real-estate cartels that have elsewhere so comprehensively asset-stripped Western Culture\u00ef\u00a3\u00aa down to the very last \u201crampart of bad faith, senility & cowardice” as Breton 80 years ago predicted \u2013 such that commodi\u00ef\u00ac\u0081cation itself is made to appear as the only remaining \u201crevolutionary” path available. Beneath a skein of postmodern corporatism, an other Prague indeed still exists, the last underground perhaps: an underground of more fugitive than temporary autonomous zones, of sub-subcultural alienation, of elective a\u00ef\u00ac\u0192nities with a \u201cmovement” whose bastions elsewhere have all but been industrially cleansed-out-of-existence, but whose forms nevertheless persist, whose lingering \u201cpoetic genius” still disturbs the drift of millennial fallout like a wounded vengeful spirit trailing noise across the cosmic TV screen, jamming the signal, desynchronising the image, refusing to be bored into submission by the self-evangelising spectacle of those-who-own & those-who-must-be-obeyed.<\/p>\n References<\/p>\n 1. Archie Patterson, Eurock: European Rock & the Second Culture<\/em> (Fresno: Eurock, 2002). *\u201cReactionary Sentimentalism” is excerpted from the Introduction to City Primeval: New York, Berlin, Prague<\/a><\/em>, an anthology of underground writing, film, photography & art, curated by Robert Carrithers & Louis Armand, published by Litteraria Pragensia this October, with contributions by Bruno Adams, Penny Arcade, Dale Ashmun, J.Jackie Baier, Mark \u00e9ta Ba\u00c5\u02c6kov\u00c3\u00a1, Varhan Orchestrovi\u00c4\u008d Bauer, Lina Bertucci, Gaby B\u00c3\u00adla-G\u00c3\u00bcnther, Mykel Board, Victor Bockris, Christoph Brandl, Gary Ray Bugarcic, David \u00c4\u0152ern\u00c3\u00bd, Roman \u00c4\u0152ern\u00c3\u00bd, Michal Cihl\u00c3\u00a1\u00c5\u2122, Antonio Cossa, William Coupon, Max Dax, Christoph Dreher, Sara Driver, Glen Emery, Vincent Farnsworth, Nat Finkelstein, Roxanne Fontana, Thor Garcia, Susanne Gl\u00c3\u00bcck, Carola Goellner, Anthony Haden Guest, Carl Haber, Jere Harshman, Henry Hills, Nhoah Hoena, Michael Holman, John Hood, Chris Hughes, Jolana Izbick\u00c3\u00a1, Timo Jacobs, Bethany Eden Jacobson, Tobi\u00c3\u00a1\u00c5\u00a1 Jirous, Bettina K\u00c3\u00b6ster, Julius Klein, Hubert Ketzschmar, Jarom\u00c3\u00adr Lelek, Lydia Lunch, Rinat Magsumov, Peter Milne, Steve Morell, Mona Mur, Julia Murakami, Shalom Neuman, Paul Pacey, Puma Perl, Rudolf Piper, Rudi Protrudi, Mark Reeder, Marcia Resnik, Ingrid Rudefors, Ilse Ruppert, \u00c5\u00a0imon \u00c5\u00a0afr\u00c3\u00a1nek, Honza Saka\u00c5\u2122, Oliver Sch\u00c3\u00bctz, Marcia Schofield, Tom Scully, Semra Sevin, Phil Shoenfelt, Peter Smith, Azalea So Sweet, Mark Steiner, Kenton Turk, Andre Werner, Ian Wright, Nick Zedd, Dave Zijlstra, Richard & Winter Zoli, Miron Zownir.<\/p>\n Read Part One here<\/a>. ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong><\/p>\n Louis Armand<\/strong> is the author of eight novels, including The Combinations<\/a><\/em> (2016), Cairo<\/em> (2014), and Breakfast at Midnight<\/a><\/em> (2012). In addition, he has published ten collections of poetry \u2013 most recently, East Broadway Rundown<\/em> (2015) & The Rube Goldberg Variations<\/em> (2015) \u2013 & is the author of Videology<\/em> (2015) & The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde<\/em> (2013). He lives in Prague.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cThey’re afraid of the old for their memory. They’re afraid of the young for their ideas \u2014 ideals. They’re afraid of funerals \u2014 of \u00ef\u00ac\u201aowers \u2014 of workers \u2014 of churches \u2014 of party members \u2014 of good times. They’re afraid of art \u2014 they’re afraid of art. They’re afraid of language \u2014 communication. They’re afraid of theatre. They’re afraid of \u00ef\u00ac\u0081lm \u2014 of Pasolini \u2014 of Godard \u2014 of painters of musicians \u2014 of stones & sculptors. They’re afraid. They’re afraid of radio stations. They’re afraid of technology, free \u00ef\u00ac\u201aoating forms of information. Paris Match \u2014 Telex \u2014 Guttenburg \u2014 Xerox \u2014 IBM \u2014 wavelengths. They’re afraid of telephones. They’re afraid. They’re afraid to let the people in. They’re afraid to let the people out…”<\/p>\n Louis Armand<\/strong> on Underground Prague.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":88584,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88573"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88606,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88573\/revisions\/88606"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/Untitled6.png\")
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\n2. Ivan Kl\u00c3\u00adma, Introduction, Description of a Struggle<\/em> (London: Picador, 1994) xix.
\n3. Ed Vulliamy, \u201c1989 & All That: Plastic People of the Universe & the Velvet Revolution,” Guardian newspaper (6 September 2009).
\n4. \u201cY(oung) A(mericans in) P(rague),” The New York Times (December 12, 1993).
\n5. The height of this phenomenon came with the US cable television pilot for a resident sitcom to be called \u201cPrague 1,” produced by screenwriter Eric Stunzi in May 1993.
\n6. Bruce Sterling, \u201cTriumph of the Plastic People,” Wired 3.01 (1993).
\n7. Alan Levy, Editorial, The Prague Post (1 October, 1991).
\n8. Anna \u00c5\u00a0abatov\u00c3\u00a1, \u201cFrom 1968 to Charter 77 to 1989 & Beyond,” Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty (May 31, 2005).
\n9. Filip Fuchs, \u201cThe History of Czechoslovak Punk,” DIY Conspiracy (January 11, 2016).
\n10. See Michaela Pixov\u00c3\u00a1, \u201cAlternative Culture in a Socialist City: Punkers & Long-haired People in Prague in the 1980s,” \u00c4\u0152esk\u00c3\u00bd Lid 100.3 (2013).
\n11. The Return of Kr\u00c3\u00a1l Maj\u00c3\u00a1les: Prague’s International Literary Renaissance<\/em>, 1990-2010, ed. Louis Armand (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2010).
\n12. See Robert Kalivoda, \u201cEmancipation und Utopie,” Utopieforschung. Interdisziplin\u00c3\u00a4re Studien zur neuzeitliche Utopie (Stuttgart: Vosskamp, 1982) 307.
\n13. See Michaela Pixov\u00c3\u00a1 & Arno\u00c5\u00a1t Nov\u00c3\u00a1k, \u201cPrague Post-1989: Boom, Decline & Renaissance<\/em>,” Baltic Worlds (June 23, 2016).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/CityPrimeval-book-cover-219x300.jpg\")
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\nRead Part Two here<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/Louis-Armand-author-photo-211x300.jpg\")
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