punk - 1993 - Hard Core Logo

Hard Core Logo

Michael Turner

Arsenal Pulp Press

1993

197 pages

This book attained legendary status for me. I knew it was out there, somewhere, like a cryptid, but library catalog searches turned up nothing or pointed towards Bruce MacDonald’s 1996 film or its related literature: including a graphic novel adaptation, and a 2011 film studies book. For years I’ve been checking whatever libraries I’ve had access to for this book and finally found that York University’s Scott Library has a copy, so, thank you for that.

Bruce MacDonald’s film adaptation of Hard Core Logo is great. His documentary-style drama of an aging, reunited Canadian punk band disintegrating into complete annihilation during a very short tour of the western provinces is possibly the best punk rock movie and one of the best Canadian films ever. I’ve watched Hard Core Logo many times. I love the film and while I recognize that the film represents sad and anxious grown men caught in the disappointing trap of the expectation of punk authenticity where their meager success is based on the requirement to project teenage angst, nihilism, and willful failure at all times, I also recognize that they’re a great band with great songs. Now I see where the songs come from.

It’s difficult, impossible rather, for me at least, to first see a film without it affecting my experience of later reading the text it’s based on. I began reading Cormac McCarthy novels because I loved the Coen Bros adaptation of No Country for Old Men, but it was a disappointment to read that novel with the screen images of its characters in my head. I experienced something similar with reading Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo, but Hard Core Logo isn’t a novel in the typical way. Rather than narrating the story of the band’s short tour, author Michael Turner structured his novel as a series of notes and ephemera generated by the band during the tour, beginning with a letter requesting that Hard Core Logo play a benefit show, and ending with a want ad written by lead singer Joe Dick seeking bandmates after they broke up in Edmonton. Each page is a different text, one page is a contract to perform, the next are the lyrics to one of their songs, the next page is a page of bassist John’s tour journal or an interview with Billy Talent.

These documents come together to tell the story of Hard Core Logo’s reunion and rapid fragmentation over a period of a few days. The thing that stands out the most for me are the lyrics to the songs, they’re complete, the're the songs that are performed in the film, and they’re good. I love the versions of them that are performed in the film, and I love the DOA rendition “Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?”, because they’re great punk songs. Who is Michael Turner who wrote all these great lyrics for a band that doesn’t exist? I don’t know of him beyond Hard Core Logo but apparently he’s a poet and he was in a band called Hard Rock Miners that was probably pretty good if he was involved in the songwriting.

underground railroad - 2009 - A Desperate Road to Freedom: The Underground Railroad Diary of Julia May Jackson

A Desperate Road to Freedom: The Underground Railroad Diary of Julia May Jackson

Kathleen Bradford

Scholastic Canada

2009

224 pages

A Desperate Road to Freedom is a work of fiction written in the style of a young girl's personal journal as she tells the story of her escape, with her family, from a slave farm in Virginia to a homestead in Ontario. Julia May Jackson, with her parents and siblings, flee slavery through the underground railroad to settle into the Owen Sound region. The book is a part of an interesting series, titled 'Dear Canada', put out by Scholastic Canada, of fictional journals written by girls who lived through times of historical trauma in the Canadian and (sometimes) American contexts. Other books in the series are written from the perspective of girls who lived through the internment of Japanese Canadian’s for example, or through the War of 1812. I intend to read the books on the Upper Canada rebellion of 1837 and the Red River Metis rebellion too.

I don’t know about other books in the series but what I admire about this particular entry is that it does not idealize Canadian society or sanitize it of its own racism. The history of slavery and the underground railroad in North America provides an opportunity for Canadians to compare our history with that of the (still) deeply racist US, with the potential for us to view ourselves historically as a nation as having more enlightened attitudes towards race. The diary of Julia May Jackson tells the story of racist brutality and murder in the US, but also of racial prejudice experienced after her family’s escape, in Ontario, where even the friendly folks of the area express their prejudices in subtle but no less upsetting terms.

punk - 2005 - Fury's Hour: A (Sort-of) Punk Manifesto

Fury's Hour: A (Sort-of) Punk Manifesto
Warren Kinsella
Random House
2005
296 pages

Counterculture has its pantheon of heroes, individuals whose rebellious actions have made them iconic in countercultural history. Because of the nature of counterculture and the adherents of all its forms, there's iconoclasts working to smash those idols of rebellion. Sometimes this means you read a screed that leaves you convinced that Nirvana selling out damaged the underground culture of the northwest, as members of Bikini Kill (who are iconic themselves) argued one time, but mostly its dumbs who think they're going to make Noam Chomsky look stupid or youtubers calling Sea Shepherd Captain Paul Watson a coward. Ludicrous statements. Warren Kinsella begins his punk book, Fury's Hour, by being one of the guys who rants about Johnny Rotten not being enough of a punk.

Kinsella is relevant to this blog for two things. Thing one, he wrote THE book about the Canadian racist right, Web of Hate. Thing two, he was in one of the first Canadian punk bands, the Hot Nasties, whose story of can be found in the book Perfect Youth by Sam Sutherland, which tells the story of early Canadian punk. Most of Kinsella's career has been in politics, he worked as a strategist for the Liberal Party of Canada, which is irrelevant to a blog about counterculture and to punk culture because the Liberal Part of Canada is not only not punk but is also very uncool. Still, he was there near the beginning, being a punk out in Calgary in the late 70s where I bet being even a little weird took guts, so that's not nothing.

Anyways, I don't actually have a lot to say about this book. Fury's Hour is a book about whether or not punk is politically relevant. Turns out punk is indeed relevant but there's so many other books like this and all the bands referenced are like, the most famous bands of punk history. I figure that the book was written to be read by unpunk people who follow Kinsella's political commentary, since punks don't need the Ramones explained to them. I didn't get much out of reading this book but it is interesting that a well known Canadian political figure has written a book about punk for mainstream readers that doesn't just treat punk imagery as coffee table reading, and really, he mentions Craig O'Hara's book The Philosophy of Punk which doesn't seem to come up much in the punk literature, so it was cool to read a Canadian mainstream politician discussing an anarchist publication put out by AK Press.

Occupy Wall Street - 2013 - The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement

The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement
David Graeber
Spiegel & Grau
2013
326 pages

David Graeber is the former Yale assistant professor of anthropology who was let go from that institution, possibly for his anarchist political views. He currently teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. His anthropological work has been highly praised by others in the field, and as a far-left spokesman, he appears congenial and nonthreatening while expressing his thoughts in accessible language. He probably best known as an author for his excellent book Debt: The First 5000 Years, which investigates the history of debt across time and cultures and provided part of the intellectual grounding for Occupy Wall Street.

In addition to Graeber's career as educator and author, he is also an activist and was a principle organizer for the Occupy Wall Street movement. This book, The Democracy Project, is Graeber's report on the initial stages of Occupy's formation, his own role in the movement, and his perspective on what occured in Liberty park during the fall of 2011. Much like he had in his earlier work, Direct Action: An Ethnography, Graeber combines his two roles in in this book, scholar and activist, to describe what worked about Occupy.

The purpose of Graeber's book is to report on Occupy at a time when everyone believes the movement to have died out. He repeats through his book that social movements take years, decades even, to achieve the changes they seek, leaving the reader with the thought that perhaps the Occupy movement that appears moribund at the time of reading was a dramatic phase of a longer-lasting movement. Besides describing the Occupy movement, Graeber also describes in this book a set of institutions: media, police, financial organizations, government, and outlines how they constitute power in American society and how Occupy constituted a response to that power. At a deeper level of analysis, Graeber discusses how these institutions prevent the practice of real democracy in American society and how the Occupy movement pointed towards such a practice. One chapter, How Change happens, is almost entirely dedicated to a description of how the kind of real democracy envisioned by the Occupy movement was practiced in real life when all of the institutions that make up the existing power structure were doing whatever they could to destroy it.

beats, jack kerouac - 1989 - Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey

Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey
Herménégilde Chiasson
1989
National Film Board of Canada
55 min.

The National Film Board is one of Canada's most important cultural institutions. Important, as far as I'm concerned, because the film board has produced numerous films of relevance to this blog. Several of those films, such as Acts of Defiance and l'Acadie l'Acadie !?! have already been profiled on this blog. Canada as a site of colonial domination and inter-colonial struggle has produced many of the kinds of socio-cultural fractures that countercultures grow from. Herménégilde Chiasson's film about Jack Kerouac's life and family history follows one of those lines of fracture from Quebec into Lowell Massachusetts, an industrial town where many French Canadian's immigrated to in the late 19th century, and it was also the birthplace of seminal Beat author Jack Kerouac, a descendant of those immigrants. The mother of this unabashedly American iconoclast were, in fact, Quebecois.

Chiasson's film is an investigation into the life of Kerouac and his roots in this immigrant Quebecois-American culture, and it is also a look at this community itself. The documentary is a typical mix of interviews with members of the Quebecois community in Lowell and read quotations or old television interview segments from the famous author. Visually, the film shows old photographs juxtaposed against contemporary footage of the city of Lowell during the winter, and this winter aesthetic immediately conjures up ideas of Canadian towns despite the fact that its an American city on display.

This film also goes over many of the known details of Kerouac's life, such as his football scholarship to Columbia, his becoming a writer, and Allen Ginsberg appears to discuss their first meeting. The documentary's main focus however is the connections between its implied subjects, Canadian and American, mother and child, alien and native. Some of the interview subjects talk about growing up in Lowell and developing from their families an intimate knowledge of Canadian/Quebecois politics and society. Many of the Kerouac quotations referred to in the film refer to his mother, and in the context of this film the implication is that to refer to his mother is to refer to Quebec as well.