Month: April 2007

End of the Century–The Heartbreaking Story of the Ramones

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If you love the Ramones, you really shouldn’t watch the 2003 documentary film End of the Century–it will only break your heart.

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I love the Ramones; I’ve loved the Ramones since I was a kid. I was lucky enough to see them in concert about twelve years ago (even then we were hip to the fact that the Ramones without Dee Dee–the C.J. version of Ramones–was not really the real Ramones). My favorite memory of the show was Joey saying that the venue of the show was built on top of a pet cemetery. Then they played “Pet Cemetery.” Genius.

So well and anyway. End of the Century. This is an excellent music documentary, a standout in a genre which is generally hit or miss. Unlike weaker films that rely on narrators or musicians influenced by the subject*, End of the Century is composed entirely of interviews (both archival and original to the film) with the Ramones themselves (Dee Dee, Tommy, Joey, Johnny, Marky, Richie (Richie wears a conservative suit in his interview, and mostly complains about not getting a taste of “that T-shirt money”) and C.J. (C.J. comes across as naive, energetic, and wholly endearing, making me feel kind of bad about my previous opinions of him). In addition to the Ramones’ first-hand accounts, there are plenty of interviews with managers and friends and family and roadies and so on–eyewitnesses who candidly relate the good, the bad, and the ugly in excruciating detail (there is plenty of ugly). Raw live footage dating back to the early 70s brings to life the sheer volume and bizarre intensity of a Ramones show.

So why so heartbreaking? Well, here’s the deal. We know that the John and Paul didn’t like each other. We know that Mick and Keith bicker. We know that bands have “creative differences” and egos get bruised and so and so on. But with the Ramones, well, I guess I always thought of them, as well, cartoons of themselves. But End of the Century makes it very clear that these guys were very, very serious about themselves and what they did. They were in no way cultivating an image: the Ramones really were what you thought they were. And they hated each other. Like, years-of-not-talking-to-each-other hatred, right up until their retirement. They were bitter–they really wanted to be successful. Now, I always thought of the Ramones as legendary, as huge, as the original punk band. But they wanted to be huge, huge like the Beach Boys or the Beatles. Hits on the radio huge (a quick aside: the accounts of working with Phil Spector on the 1980 album End of the Century, in the hopes of gaining a top 10 hit, are hilarious. Apparently Phil held the band plus entourage at gunpoint, threatening to shoot them if they returned to the hotel. The reason for Phil’s hostage-taking: he wanted them to hang out and watch movies. But I’m sure Spector’s like, totally not guilty of murdering that chick in his house). So a lot of the movie is the Ramones lamenting that they “never made it” (again, to me this was ludicrous). But really it’s the hatred, the meanness of their interviews, their complete dismissal of each other that I found most disconcerting (particularly heartbreaking is hearing Johnny’s non-affected nonchalance over Joey’s relatively recent (to the time of the movie’s shooting) death from lymphoma). Maybe I’m just a foolish fan who wanted my cartoons.

The film ends by noting that Dee Dee died of a heroin overdose two months after the film finished shooting. Johnny Ramone died in 2004. The principal members of the band all died within a few short years of each other, like married folks often do.

To end on a lighter note, check out this footage from the film, featuring Dee Dee’s rap project, Dee Dee King’s “Funky Man” (listen for this embarrassing nugget: “I’m a Negro too!”)

* There are one or two very brief interviews (like one or two sentences) with famous fans, including, of course, Thurston Moore, who is contractually obligated to appear in any film about any musician. Check out his prolific (and incomplete–unless my memory fails me he’s also in the 1995 Brian Wilson documentary I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times) filmography here.

Another Serving of Alphabet Soup

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Dis for Daedalus, kid Icarus’s papa. From Joseph Shipley’s The Origin of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, a book that has given me more joy than is probably normal or healthy :

“del II: cut; carve; harm. GK daidalos: cut with art; Daedalus, the inventor who built the labyrinth for Minos, king of Crete, to confine the Minotaur. This monster—half man, half bull—was conceived by Minos’s wife Pasiphae with Poseidon’s sacred bull, which Minos had refused to return to Poseidon. Imprisoned, Daedalus made wings for himself and his son Icarus; they few away; but the son flew too near the sun, the wax fastening his wings melted, and he fell and drowned in what was thereafter called the Icarian Sea. Hence daedalian: skillful; Icarian: rash and ruinous” (Shipley 58).

D is also for Dedalus, Stephen, James Joyce’s semi-autobiographical stand-in in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Stephen Dedalus also is prominent in the first couple of chapters of Ulysses, before Leopold Bloom’s journey through Dublin becomes the novel’s focus. Despite the heroic help of my college roommate’s Ritalin prescription, I never finished Ulysses, but I’m enrolled in a Joyce seminar commencing this fall (should be good). I did however read Portrait a number of times; I can’t think of a better example of an experimental writing style that evolves and adapts as its main character grows, learns, and rebels.

E is for Ebdus, Dylan, the hero of one of my all-time favorites, Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. Like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Fortress is a bildungsroman, a novel that details the development of its main character from childhood to maturity. To this end, each chapter of the first section of Fortress covers approximately a year in the life of young Dylan as he tries to make meaning out of his strange Brooklyn neighborhood and race-relations in the seventies.

E is also for Essrog, Lionel, the would-be detective who narrates Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn. Lionel Essrog is afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome, and his tics and yelps punctuate the novel with a weird and fascinating rhythm, a play of re-signification that would make Derrida proud. This is one of those Sunday afternoon books, the kind that you sit down to read with a glass (or four) of sangria and pretty much finish. Japanese monks, Brooklyn mobsters, hot dogs and papaya juice, plenty of verbal tics. And orphans. Lots and lots of orphans.

Alphabet Soup–Our Favorite Literary Characters (Part One)

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A is for Antigone, the incestuous product of Oedipus and his mama Jocasta. In Sophocles’ play of the same name, Antigone is punished for burying the body of her exiled brother Polynices. Like her papa Oedipus, Antigone pushes the limits of cultural boundaries and the conflicts that duty to one’s family and the gods present to social order. Good, tragic stuff.

A is also for Alice, the heroine of not one but two Lewis Carroll classics, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Full of logic puzzles, cryptic satire, and good old fashioned nonsense, Alice’s adventures work on a range of levels that appeal to both children and adults. She explores altered states and missing signifiers while flirting with death and madness in a surreal dreamworld. (Fans of Carroll’s twisty logic will surely delight in Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid).

B is for Bartleby the scrivener, the eponymous non-hero of my favorite Herman Melville short story. Bartleby is hired by a wealthy lawyer to copy texts, a job at which he excels. But whenever Bartleby is asked to do something other than copy letters, he always replies “I would prefer not to.” This answer incenses the other employs and bewilders the lawyer. Eventually Bartleby stops doing any task, but somehow always remains around the office, almost like a ghost. Just what exactly Bartleby is meant to symbolize is up for grabs–Melville’s text is rich with possible interpretations. Every time I read this one, I get a new perspective. Read the full text here.

B is also for Billy Budd, yet another Melville character. Maybe you read Billy Budd in high school (it made me scratch my head quite a bit my Junior year). Billy Budd is a foundling who grows into the type of man admired by all. When he joins the crew of a ship, he is lovingly called “Baby Budd” by his fellow sailors. However, when he encounters his embittered superior Claggart, his innocence is put to the test; Claggart accuses young Budd of plotting mutiny. Billy is literally struck dumb by the accusation, and he responds by striking Claggart, inadvertently killing him. For this crime he is put to death and revered as a Christ-like figure by the crew. Like the story of Bartleby, Billy Budd resists easy decoding. Simply put, this is a great novella to come back to more than once.

C is for Chinaski. Henry Chinaski was the alter-ego Charles Bukowski used to represent himself in his books. Chinaski was a macho coward, a drunken gambler who was always chasing ladies and losing jobs. Chinaski was (bizarrely) the ideal imagined self for Bukowski, full of faults and shortcomings and egotistical brutality. I recently watched the documentary Bukowski: Born into This. One memorable scene goes something like this: the filmmaker (this is in the early 70s, when the filmmaker first begins shooting the footage that becomes Born into This) follows Bukowski from L.A. to San Francisco, where he’s giving a poetry reading. Bukowski gets drunk on the plane, makes an ass of himself, is a moron at the reading, is a bumbling idiot, etc, etc. However Bukowski writes up the whole event very differently in his Open City column, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man”–he paints a picture of himself having to help this idiot camera guy out; he says the filmmaker is a lost fool. When the filmmaker runs into Bukowski, he’s upset; he says: “Don’t you realize that I have film of the whole thing? I’ve got you drunk on film, looking like a fool!” Bukowski replies: “Fuck you! When I write, I’m the hero of my shit!” So that’s Chinaski: the hero of Bukowski’s shit.

C is also for Calliope, the protagonist of Jeffrey Eugenides’ 2002 novel Middlesex. To be honest, I thought the second half of the novel was weak (in fact I thought the end was downright awful), and Eugenides’ writing was surprisingly rote, even hackneyed at times (I use the adverb “surprisingly” as I was under the impression that he was something different based on friends’ reviews of The Virgin Suicides, which I never read). Nevertheless, poor cursed Calliope is a complex and at times enthralling character to follow. No one realizes Calliope is a hermaphrodite until she (Cal is raised as a girl) turns fourteen and shit gets weird. The gender study implications are interesting here, but what I found truly fascinating about the novel was the way that Eugenides used Calliope as a muse for genetic history; the character is essentially a complex and conflicting comment on the clashing paradigms of different ages and different spaces. Boys and girls, Turks and Greeks, blacks and whites, rich and poor, hippies and squares–as the name of the novel implies, there is never a definite and simple space where identity can rest.

Berkeley Breathed at the AV Club

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Three things we love at the ‘klept: people dishing on their musical taste, The Onion’s AV Club, and Bloom County creator Berkeley Breathed. Check out this week’s “Random Rules” feature at the AV Club, where Breathed owns up to all his guilty listening pleasures. My favorite line concerns the Moody Blues’ “Knights in White Satin”: “I keep the song like women might keep their baby hair in a locket around their necks, or guys might keep their foreskins in lumps of amber.” Priceless.

(Incidentally, I am the proud owner of the original Billy and the Boingers flexi-disc 7″ that was included in the Bloom County collection Billy and the Boingers Bootleg. So there).

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Cause and Effect

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The Sunday Comics

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I’ve spent hours adoring the first volume of The Complete Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McKay instead of grading my Seniors’ research papers or writing my own final paper for my theory class. And who wouldn’t want to get absorbed and distracted by McKay’s lush and fantastical world? It’s both sad and silly that the comics page nowadays has been compressed into a minute fraction of the massive broadsides that used to grace each Sunday edition of the paper. Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson has lamented the incredible shrinking comics page in the introductions to several of the C & H collections, and Art Spiegelman paid tribute to the glory days of the broadside in In the Shadow of No Towers. Still, even as comics creators draw attention to this downsizing, it seems that the trend in newspapers will be to continue to dwarf creativity, to literally minimize (pop) art. This marks a serious social regression over the past century. But why? If I knew that something on the scale of the broadside below–both in terms of physical size and imagination–was waiting for me each Sunday, I’d be excited to get a subscription to the local rag. For now, enjoy this episode of Little Nemo (image links to a full page, but you still might need to use the magnifying glass!)–

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Placentophagy 101

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About eight years ago, I read an article in Harper’s Magazine detailing, if I recall correctly, the script of an English cooking show where the host and his guests cooked and ate fresh placenta. This has always been intriguing to me for some reason; a little research revealed that almost all mammals, including primates, eat the placenta, which provides all kinds of unique nourishment to a nursing mother.

As I’ve mentioned before, my wife is currently pregnant with our first child, a girl, due in early June. We’ve been attending birthing classes once a week at night, and last night we watched a video of a “real” (i.e. not computer simulated) birth. I had seen video of live birth before; I hadn’t witnessed the discharge of afterbirth. The afterbirth looked to be a big blue and black balloon of goo, twice as big as the baby. My word. One man in our group lost some Dr. Pepper through his nose. I wasn’t shocked or disgusted, but the placenta didn’t really seem very appetizing (I had tentative plans to eat it).

Well, so and anyway, after the video our birthing coach submitted to the class that most animals and some cultures practiced the eating of the placenta. This drew a mixed response from the crowd: incredulous horror, baffled humor, grade-school disgust, and, most interestingly, nationalism. Yes. Nationalism: “Not in America, they don’t!” exclaimed (yes, he exclaimed) one young man in jean shorts, to the information that some people made a stew of the afterbirth. He was immediately backed up: “Maybe they do that in foreign countries, but not in America!” “Maybe in Afghanistan! Maybe in Iraq!” Once these admonitions were voiced, it seemed necessary for the group to repeat, to reinforce these dietary restrictions. Just about everybody grumbled in bemused agreement.

So, at the risk of coming off as un-American, I provide a couple of links to recipes for placentas:

From Twilight Headquarters, a couple of recipes, including a cocktail recipe and a lasgane.  Also contains pictures!

A number of recipes from Mothers 35 Plus. Also includes tips on dehydrating the placenta (mmm…jerky!)

Feel free to write in with your own recipes, serving suggestions, and culinary tips.

Koinonia, Praxis, Heterotopia, and Other Ten Dollar Words

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Lacking the lexicon to describe your aporia? Need the right words to negotiate a particularly difficult text? Try the Dictionary of Postmodern Terms then. Fun for solipsists, sophists, and psychoanalysts of all ages.

A Short History of America Courtesy Of Robert Crumb

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Progress!

From Terry Zwigoff’s fantastic 1994 documentary Crumb.

A Unique Brand of Despondent Leftism?

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In case you need another reason to hate Fox News:

I find it amazing that despite Vonnegut’s lifetime of art and achievement, the schmuck-reporter takes the time to mention that the celebrated writer “failed at suicide 23 years ago” in a two minute segment.

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

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Like many of you I’m sure, I cut my literary teeth on Kurt Vonnegut, who died early this morning. My dad gave me three of Vonnegut’s books–Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse Five, and The Sirens of Titan–when I was about eleven or twelve. It’s a cliché, but these books really did change my life forever. In the next couple of years, I devoured everything Vonnegut wrote. My favorite book of his was and is Cat’s Cradle, which I think surpasses both Mother Night and Slaughterhouse Five as his most important work. As I grew older, I began to reject Vonnegut, to see him as not as serious or profound as the authors I was reading. His later books like Hocus Pocus and the truly-lamentable Timequake didn’t help either. Nevertheless, I read them as soon as they came out in paperback. I had to. I had to read everything he wrote. Celebrate Vonnegut’s life by reading one of his books, and remember what got you into reading in the first place.

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This Is Why

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After my rant the other day, friend of the ‘Klept RP sent me a link to a Village Voice article in which Rob Harvilla dissects Mim’s smash hit “This Is Why I’m Hot.” Harvilla does a great job of deconstructing the (il)logic behind Mim’s inexplicable hit, employing a variety of charts and graphs to this end. Highly recommended.

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A Distinct Line Between Love and Hate

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I occasionally dabble in a little hating, but for the most part I try to keep this blog on the positivity tip, yo. I mean, what’s the point in just grumbling, right? Anyway, I now present some stuff that I’ve been hating on lately, along with some possible solutions.

Hating on: The whole Don Imus controversy. Sure, Imus’s comments were rude, asinine, and perhaps racist. But he’s a morning schlock jock who has traded on such speech in the past. What’s the big deal? How is this any different from the vitriol Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly spew on a daily basis? It seems like we’re heading to a place in American media where people have to apologize and beg forgiveness for every rude or insensitive thing they say. Part of a functioning, healthy democracy is having people publicly say things that you think are awful or disagree with…and having the right to publicly disagree with them. I’m sick of this whole “tour of forgiveness”/rehabilitation culture. It’s OK to be an asshole sometimes. Just let it ride.

Antidote: Indulge in a random act of insensitivity. Tell that special someone how much they irk you, or arbitrarily curse a stranger. Freedom ain’t free–you’ve gotta fight for it! It’s the American way.

Hating on: Bill Willingham’s much lauded comic series Fables. I finally picked up a few of the Fables graphic novels at the library a few weeks ago. These comics are best suited for lining a ferret’s cage. Fables has won plenty of undeserved praise from both the comics and mainstream press. Allusions can enrich a story, but Willingham overtly rips off the plots of numerous books and stories and then seems to say: “See? Get it? I’m referencing X, get it? Clever, huh?” No, it isn’t, but neither was Vertigo’s other big critical hit, The Sandman, a series that is often held up as the pinnacle of the art form. My major concern is that people will read the reviews and honestly believe that this crap is the cream of the crop, when in reality there are thousands of better comics out there.

Antidote: For a major-label all-color comic that trips off of fabulous/mythic tropes in a far more rewarding way, check out Alan Moore’s legendary early 80s run on Swamp Thing. Or just go hardcore indie black-and-white with Charles Burns’s Black Hole.

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Hating on: Drivers. You can’t drive. Get off the road! Seriously, you’re a terrible driver, and that F-350 doesn’t make up for your tiny genitals. Tailgating will not make the traffic in front of me disappear, and racing to every red light will not win you a giant cup (or whatever shiny prize it is they give away at NASCAR).

Antidote: Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA. This is the best beer I’ve ever had. (Note: Biblioklept does not endorse drinking while driving, except on rare and special occasions, such as weddings and weekends).

Hating on: Hip-hop in ’07. Wow. This is really bad. 50 Cent has his own line of bottled water? Ice Cube is doing this shit? Mims new song– “This is why I’m hot…I’m hot cause I’m fly” WTF! That’s basically a tautology, dude. (By the way Mims, you have the same nickname as my friend’s grandma).

Antidote: Journey’s Greatest Hits.

Hating on: “Definately”

Antidote: There is no “a” in the word, my friends. Spell it with me: D-E-F-I-N-I-T-E-L-Y, definitely. That is absolutely, positively, most assuredly the definite spelling of “definitely.” Again, please remember: “no a.”

Hating on: Pitchfork. Okay, I admit it, I go to Pitchfork just about every day, just as I have for years and years now. And I hate it: I hate their awful reviews, their lack of editorial sensibility, their penchant for applauding the most maudlin crap, and their constant attempts to rewrite music history.

Antidote: Soulseek.

Hating on: Undergrads. Jesus Christ kids, you’ve got to show up to class–even when it rains or is cold outside! And, when you do come to class, you need to have done the assigned reading. Also, no one cares about what your friend’s cousin heard on the radio or what your brother’s girlfriend read on the internet–if you must present an opinion, try to keep it rooted in the reading (again, you need to have done the assigned reading). Furthermore, you can text-message after class. Quit wasting your parents money.

Antidote: Trade school.

Hating on: The New Testament. Okay, “hate” is a little extreme. But seriously, I just can’t get into this. JC is kinda cool, but on the whole, this book is awfully preachy.

Antidote: The Old Testament. Now this I get. Yaweh is one bad mama-jama. He’s not fooling around. If you mess with Yaweh, he will wipe-you-out. No joke. He flooded the whole world! Total destruction! Also, he totally messed with this dude Job just to prove a point to Satan. And he kicked Adam and Eve out of his garden for forever, and they had to toil and sweat. And he turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt–salt!–just for looking back at a city full of sodomites. And he sent mad plagues on the Egyptians. Word to God, kid!

Hating on: The Jacksonville Jazz Festival. Come on, you don’t really like jazz, do you? And how do you make jazz worse? How about sitting in the park with thousands of other unwashed “jazz fans”? But who am I to hate on the luminous talents of Al Jarreau and Chuck Mangione…

Antidote: Sitting alone in the dark blissing out to Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders.

Jonathan Lethem, Emo Comic Books, Realism, Meta-textual Quotes, History’s Actors, and Lazy Writing

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There’s a good (and rather long) interview with Jonathan Lethem at the AVClub today. Mr. Lethem is one of our favorite authors here at Biblioklept, Inc. (you may recall our review of his brilliant Fortress of Solitude back in September of 2006 (a mere 1,111 days after the book was initially published)).

In the interview, Lethem references the Talking Heads a number of times, claims to be slowly writing “kind of an emo comic book” for Marvel Comics, goes in-depth on his style and approach to writing, and discusses his new book, You Don’t Love Me, which I have not read yet.

The interview begins with an interesting discussion about realism (specifically, literary realism) which reminded me of an essay I’d read a few days before in the February issue of The Believer by Chris Bachelder (yes, I’m aware that I lazily linked to a Believer article earlier this week).

In “Doctorow’s Brain,” Bachelder ponders on whether such a thing as literary realism can really exist, and if so, what types of books and literature represent that style. I found the essay fascinating–I love all things literary, and I could point plenty of books that could be called “magical realism,” but I would have a really difficult time defining “realism.”  So Bachelder’s inquiry provoked a lot of deep questions about the very nature of writing, communication, memory and history. One of the most fascinating (and scary) pieces of writing he discusses is a quote from one of George W. Bush’s senior advisers, published originally in an October 2004 New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind. From Bachelder’s article:

“[…] Ron Suskind’s “Without a Doubt” introduced the Bush administration’s derision of what it calls the “reality-based community”–those reporters who, according to a senior adviser to Bush, “believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality.” As the adviser explains to Suskind:

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality–judiciously, as you will–we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.””

Yikes!

Seven Great Books About Rock and Roll (In No Particular Order)

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1. Crazy From the Heat by David Lee Roth

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This book is as good as you want it to be and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that David Lee Roth wrote every word of it (no ghostwriters here, pure Roth). I’m not even sure if there was an editor involved, actually. David Lee Roth takes the chronological approach, giving equal time to Van Halen’s earliest days, their 80s success, and his post-Van Halen, big band days. Particularly interesting is David’s illumination of some of the vocal techniques involved in the production of those early Van Halen records (hamburgers and marijuana cigarettes). This book is a treasured gift from a dear friend.

2. Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry.

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I read this in like two days. What a great book. Author John Perry was a young eyewitness to many of Jimi’s London gigs; most of the info here is culled from personal memories and observations, as well as discussions with all the people involved. Perry’s style is simple and always focused on the music. The book is divided into seven sections, including a thorough discussion of the instrumentation involved, a detailed track by track review of the album; even a section about the cover. Perry writes from a musician’s point of view, but the most interesting lines to me are about the initial reaction of the American critical press to Jimi Hendrix:

“Behind a whole raft of complaints about Hendrix’s undignified performance and his irritating failure to fit existing critical categories for black performers, lay the essential point that his songs mysteriously failed to punish the audience for being white. Hendrix didn’t play the wounded, angry black man, or the dignified bearer of oppression; he didn’t provide white critics with a handy receptacle for their guilt. They didn’t know quite what role he fulfilled.”

I got this for fifty cents at the Friends of the Library Sale.

3. Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad.

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Your life is probably nothing like any of the sort-of-famous indie bands covered here, unless you basically live in a van. I’m actually not even really sure if this qualifies as a great book. This book is actually just “okay.” Chances are, if you’re a fan of Sonic Youth, Ian McKaye, Dinosaur Jr, or Hüsker Dü you probably know most of this stuff already, or at least the stuff that’s interesting. And if you’re a fan of Beat Happening, well, there you go. This book has a whole chapter on Beat Happening. Actually, if you’re really interested in the whole indie rock thing, 1991: The Year Punk Broke is a much better document. But here I go comparing apples to oranges. I bought Our Band Could Be Your Life at Barnes & Noble for like three or four dollars.

4. Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan

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It took me a long time to get through this. Let me clarify: I read this in large, fifty page chunks, put it down, picked it up again months later. Dylan’s style is discursive and rambling; he elliptically deconstructs his own myth, picking away at the bits of identity he picked off of other musicians and poets on his way to fame. The book never really gets to that fame–to be clear, it discusses the after-effects of Dylan’s fame in detail: the obsessive fans who showed up at his home unannounced, the bewildering pressure to deliver some kind of messianic answer, the expectations to deliver a specific kind of record–but Chronicles spends most of its pages tracing and retracing Dylan’s youth in Minnesota and his days sleeping on friends’ couches in New York City. Will the second and third volumes ever come out? Who knows with this guy. This book was given to me by my cousin for Christmas a few years ago.

*Also recommended: Anthony Scaduto’s biography Bob Dylan.

5 . Transformer by Victor Bockris

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Lou Reed is a weirdo, and Victor Bockris wants you to know about it. Starting with Reed’s Long Island youth (complete with electro-shock therapy), Bockris’s biography covers pretty much everything right up through the Velvet Underground’s early nineties reunion: Reeds early apprenticeship in the Brill Building, the nascent days of the VU (plenty of Warhol anecdotes, of course), punk rock, several doomed romances, his years living with a transvestite, his karate skills, his yoga skills, and his all-bran diet, and of course, the drugs. Oh the drugs. Also, Reed’s solo career is also examined (including plenty of material from guitar god Bob Quine). Bockris seems to feel Magic and Loss is something of a watershed moment in modern rock (anyone who accidentally bought this album knows otherwise).

Bockris’s book employs a bitchy, dishy tone, rife with catty comments from everyone whoever worked with Reed: apparently Lou was a total asshole. Bockris reprints some painful comments (e.g. Reed on Springsteen, 1975: “Isn’t Springsteen over the hill?”); the most awkward moment comes in the book’s appendix, in a transcript of a meeting Bockris arranged between Reed and William Burroughs. Bad idea (Reed can’t remember the name of “that book you published”–Naked Lunch). I can’t remember, but I think I got this for like three or four bucks at Barnes & Noble.

6. Hammer of the Gods by Stephen Davis

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“Here’s a red snapper for your red snapper!”

Intrigued? You should be! Burroughs makes a cameo here as well.

I don’t own this one. I read the good bits in high school though.

7. Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of Gram Parsons by Ben Fong-Torres

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Some jackass made a movie about Gram Parsons’ life a few years ago; I think Johnny Knoxville played Parsons. I didn’t see it, but I’m sure this book is way better. Rolling Stone alum Ben Fong-Torres clearly appreciates Parsons as not only the influential icon that he’s generally recognized as, but also as a truly gifted songwriter. Parsons’ early days in Winterhaven, Waycross, and Jacksonville (he attended the Bolles School) are scrutinized along with his brief stint at Harvard, his time in the Byrds and his days partying with the Rolling Stones in California hippy mansions. Also, another appearance by William Burroughs, who recommended a treatment to help kick the heroin. Parsons’ infamous death in the California desert is also put under the lens, right down to a time-line if I remember correctly. Good stuff. My uncle lent me this book, and yes, I returned it to him. So there.

From The Believer: Stephen Elliot’s “The Score”

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I have a subscription to The Believer, a magazine I truly love but am consistently unable to finish each month. They just pile up on my coffee table, the site of all sorts of literary flotsam and jetsam. Of course, when I first get each month’s issue, I like to skim through it and read any articles that catch my eye immediately–this is the only way they’ll get read. The tone of the majority of The Believer‘s articles and features tends to be a mix of post-modern pop culture criticism, faux academese, and general smart-assed winking and nodding. Also, they have some pretty great interviews.

Anyway, last month’s issue had a beautifully earnest personal essay by Stephen Elliot called “The Score.” I loved this essay so much that I actually called people to tell them about it. Luckily, The Believer website has the full text of “The Score” for all to read for free. This isn’t the type of essay that will make you smarter or enrich your vocabulary or provide any kind of hipster insights…it’s just a very good personal essay, a genre which I pretty much despise. Elliot discusses his dysfunctional relationship with his ex-girlfriend, drug use, and the Chicago Bulls of the 1990s in an unnerving but oddly affecting manner. Tell me that you don’t love this essay.

Word of the Week

Biblioklept3 Comments

Ignicolist–

From the OED:

“A fire-worshipper.

1816 T. MAURICE Ruins Babylon II. 43 In whatever region of the earth this infatuated race of ignicolists took up their abode, the sacred fire immediately began to burn. 1859 R. F. BURTON Centr. Afr. in Jrnl. Geog. Soc. XXIX. 340 The ancient Persians were ignicolists, adoring etherial fire.”

Famous ignicolists include:

—Moses

—The Human Torch

—Jimi Hendrix

–Serial arsonist John Orr

 

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