Introduction: Meet The Furies/Pop Goes the Apocalypse

I. The Glamour of Extremity

1. Fairy Tales from Strangers
Cat Power--Ghost World--Lora Logic--Phoebe Gloeckner

2. Chinese Radiation
Tiananmen Square--Liberation Music Orchestra--Cloudland

3. Venus, Armed
Brigitte Lin

4. American Maniacs
Natural Born Killers versus Forrest Gump

5. Jungle Boogie
Apocalypse Now Redux

6. Metal-liad
Metallica--Guns 'N Roses--Nirvana

7. Smells Like...
Sonic Youth--Kurt Cobain

8. Vamp
Irma Vep--Olivier Assayas

9. Screaming Target
Seijun Suzuki

10. Blood Poet
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

11. Sympathy for the Devils
Assassination Movies

12. "Nebraska"

13. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
The Uneasy Ride of Rock and the New Hollywood

II. Shoot the Guitar Player

14. Let Us Now Kill White Elephants
Lester Bangs

15. Bring Me the Head of Gordon Sumner
Sting--Hasil Adkins

16. Dueling Cadavers
The Mekons contra Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

17. Aftermath
Eleventh Dream Day's El Moodio

18. Build Me an L.A. Woman
Los Angeles in Music and Memory

19. Do the Clam
Elvis Cinema via Viva Las Vegas

20. Reification Blues
The Persistence of the '70s

21. Moles on the Beach/Down in Flames
Ray-Gun Suitcase/The Day the Earth Met Rocket from the Tombs

22. Mouse Trap Replica
Anthony Braxton

23. Eyewitness News
Wire

24. Imaginary Cities/Holiday for Strings
William Parker

25. Book of Exodus
Plastic People of the Universe

26. Prophecy Girls
Sleater-Kinney/Cadallaca--Sarah Dougher--Sally Timms

27. Money Jungle Music
Matthew Shipp

III. Waterloo Sunset Boulevard

28. Such Sweet Thunder
Pauline Kael, 1919-2001

29. Anatomies of Melancholy
Chris Marker

30. My Own Private Benjamin
Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938 and Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship

31. Blur as Genre
Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express

32. Nice Gesamtkunstwerk If You Can Get It
Tsui Hark/Ching Sui-tung

33. JLG/SS
Godard-Spielberg, Inc.

34. Lynch Mob
The Straight Story and Critical Myopia

35. Flattering the Audience
American Splendor

36. Savant-Idiot, or Pull the Last Train to Dogville
Lars von Trier

37. American Daemons
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Studies in Classic American Literature

38. Wrecked in El Dorado
Angel

39. Whatever You Desire: Movieland and Pornotopia
From The Big Sleep to Max Hardcore

40. Gold Diggers of 1935
Pennies from Heaven and London Calling

41. Apocrypha Now!
An Imaginary Discography of Thomas Pynchon's Paranoids

Notes

Acknowledgments

Credits

Index

Howard Hampton has written for Film Comment, Artforum, the Believer, the Village Voice, L.A. Weekly, Black Clock, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times, among other publications.