Woody Guthrie - Bound for Glory

Bound for Glory
Woody Guthrie
EP Dutton & Co, Inc
1943
430 pp

Woodie Guthrie's autobiography detailing his life from 1912 to 1942. The book is written in his Oklahoma dialect. It describes the life of someone born into a middle-class lifestyle that collapsed into dirt poor poverty as his father failed in business. About half the book describes his childhood when later focuses on his depression-era vagabond life and his emerging songwriting/singing career and political attitudes.

Includes many illustrations by Guthrie himself.

Black Panther Party - The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution

The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution
Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams (eds)
Nation Books
2016
272 pp

The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution features photos of members of the Black Panther Party's rank and file. The subjects are profiled with a biography describing their post-Panthers work, and a brief interview where the subject describes the circumstances of their joining the party and the work they did as Panthers. Many of the former Panthers speak about the party's community work: their food programs and medical services, like the Winston-Salem NC Black Panther ambulance service. Not surprisingly, after the party's collapse, many of the Panthers went into community development, social work, and education.

The book features a couple of higher profile Panthers; Emory Douglas, the primary illustrator of the Black Panther newspaper, and some of the participants in the better known prison and court cases such as the Angola 3 and the Panther 21.

Black Lives Matter - "They Can't Kill Us All": Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

"They Can't Kill Us All": Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement
Wesley Lowery
Little, Brown and Company
2016
248 pp

I moved from Canada to live in a small American town situated within an hour and a half drive of a major northern city. For two years I lived there and almost immediately upon my arrival I was exposed to racism. As a white Canadian I was treated well, even though my neighbors detected the accent of an outsider when I spoke, even though I was there to occupy a professional position that could have been staffed by a US citizen. My exposure to American racism under these circumstances only came in the form of invitations to participate in racial prejudice as townsfolk warned me about the Mexican families on my street or the black gangs that operated in town. Very quickly I realized that the general presumption was that all Mexicans were in the US illegally and all young black men were gang members. Small towns in the area that were only 80-90 percent white according to the most recent census data were spoken of as being overrun, or dominated by racial minorities.

While I witnessed racial prejudice on a daily basis, expressions of explicit racial hatred were rare. When I left the US, I left with an understanding that racial prejudice is very common in American society and systemic racism is a very real component of its structure, but also very few White Americans would consider themselves racist. My assumption is that the friendly Americans I met, with their friendly warnings to be careful with all the gangs (in a town with pretty close to 0 violent crimes but with about %10 black population) wouldn't consider their view of black men as gang members to be racist, its merely cautious realism, because to them real racism is using the 'n' word. Conversely, to many Americans real racism is raising race as an issue in a world where segregation and slavery and the most explicitly racist American systems are ancient history.

Wesley Lowery, a Washington Post correspondent, tells the story of covering the emerging Black Lives Matter movement, right from the day after Mike Brown's murder in Ferguson MO, where Lowery made a name for himself by being the first journalist arrested by Ferguson PD. I remember at the time of the Brown murder, images of Brown scowling at the camera (although some were captioned as Mike Brown but were clearly someone else) were circulating through social media as a way of legitimizing his killing. Lowery's story goes from Feruson to Baltimore post Freddie Gray, and other sites of police killing to note the rise of a new 'Racial Justice Movement'. This is the first book I've read that's clearly about Black Lives Matter, as other BLM media indirectly addresses the movement, such as Lezlie McFadden's (Michael Brown's mother) 2016 memoir and the excellent Netflix Luke Cage series.

The Second Arab Awakening: Revolution, Democracy, and the Islamist Challenge from Tunis to Damascus

The Second Arab Awakening: Revolution, Democracy, and the Islamist Challenge from Tunis to Damascus
Adeed Dawisha
WW Norton and Co
2013
288 pp

The Second Arab Awakening is an overview of the Arab Spring, providing a state-by-state analysis of the popular pro-democracy uprisings that took place in numerous middle-east and North African nations beginning in early 2011.

The first 'awakening' referred to by this book's title were the mid-twentieth century anti-colonial revolts in a number of these countries, revolts that led to the emergence of the dictatorships the 2011 uprisings rose against. Dawisha discussed that history in relation to the recent uprisings.

Many of the Arab Spring books that have been published in English were rushed to publication before January 2012, containing hopeful visions of the near future. Dawisha's book was published in 2013 when the Arab Spring had resulted in a variety of results across the Arab world. By then the most successful-seeming uprisings of 2011 looked, in 2013, as a youth-facilitated transfer of power from secular military dictatorships to Islam-centric political parties. The author discusses countries like Jordan, that introduced democratic reforms without popular uprisings, but by 2013 the less successful Springs were brutally repressed while Syria entered a nation-destroying civil war.

punk - Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth

Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth
David Browne
Da Capo Press
2008
422 pp

Goodbye 20th Centiury is a very detailed band history of Sonic Youth from their 70s No Wave origins through to 2008. Author David Browne has also written books about James Taylor, Grateful Dead, and the Buckley bros. This book is not only highly detailed, but it is evenly detailed, where there author wrote as much about the production of albums like A Thousand Leaves and Rather Ripped as he does about Daydream Nation, the band's most revered album.

This is a book detailing a then still-unfolding story that has since, we all assume, concluded. The end-phase of marital dissolution that ended the band comes after 2008 and is therefore not a part of this story. At the time of publication the band was 30 years old and aside from some drummer changes a long time ago, had the same lineup for that whole time - they seemed permanent.

pirate radio - Pirate Radio

Pirate Radio
Richard Curtis
Universal Pictures
2009

I doubt that there will ever be a better pirate radio film than Pump Up the Volume although the series People Just Do Nothing is a strong offering. Pirate Radio, also called The Boat that Rocked, is leagues below its predecessor (that's a pun for a boat movie). This kind of movie... well, a lot of effort must go into every movie, but who could care about a movie like this? It's the usual colorful cast of randy characters (if they were american I'd call them zany) who have somewhat amusing things happen in their lives. This is a movie, this is the basic movie concept, now fill the picture out with a time (the sixties) and place (England) - and for an extra dose of novelty, it's set on one of the boats that broadcast rock music at England from its coastal waters.

The film has a lot of people who are in funny shows, Roy from The IT Crowd, Rhys Darby, whose really funny, is here, and so is the rotund guy from all the Simon Pegg films. Philip Hoffman is here too, presumably because he played Lester Bangs in another rock movie. I find sixties nostalgia to be obnoxious most of the time, with everyone dressed goofy and their floppy hair and groovy talking and the pretense that all those rock songs that people my age have mostly heard in TV commercials and movies all our lives were so magical and dangerous to the establishment. Now, in 2016, the sound of the electric guitar is a basic signifier of youthful rebellion in TV commercials.

So the film shows scenes from the boat, interspersed by the gray offices of anti-rock members of parliament who want the boats shut down. Through most of the movie, the "pirates" aren't breaking the law, and it seems likely to me that the term 'pirate' was applied retrospectively. So that's it, they're shut down, they keep going for a bit but that is pretty much the end of the floating broadcasters. What's interesting is that while this is supposedly the end of the era, rock radio became pretty dominant afterwards (in real life) while London is just one location that continues to have a pirate radio scene with complicated signaling systems. Really what these boats broadcast was a commercially viable alternative to the BBC.

The film shows the impact of the station by showing different people's reactions at different places. A girl in her bedroom listening, a group of people at some work place, some old guy dancing. This is where the difference is most significant from Pump up the Volume, where the radio of happy hard harry is also shown to pierce the community, but its also woven into it.

punk - Hard-Core: Life of My Own

Hard-Core: Life of My Own
Harley Flanagan
Feral House
2016
444 pages

I read this without really having a lot of knowledge of the NYC Hardcore punk scene. I've never listened to the Cro-Mags and I guess I don't really take NYC punk seriously. To me NYC music is either arty rock or its hip-hop. I remember when I was younger seeing pictures of all these bands like Madball or Agnostic Front, and they all looked like low-level mafia muscle-boy enforcer crews - no fun. I don't doubt that they're tough and can win a fight or whatever, but I like music, and I don't care if a bad band can survive a rumble with the Cobras. I recognize that the realness of an artist can play a role in their audience appeal, but to me that's infantile low-self-esteem stuff, and not only that but I think there's a correlation between how bad ass a particular musician's rep is and how tedious their music can be. Anyways, I know that Harley Flanagan had a lot to do with that muscular, switchbladey, NYCHC scene, so I wasn't expecting much from his memoir.

Flanagan's memoir surprised me in the sense that, while it certainly gave me what I expected: the story of violence, drugs, ego, rivalry, and decline that's typical of musician biographies - the story is laced with enough intelligence, sensitivity, and regret, to give the book enough soul to set it aside from the invitation to hero-worship that these books usually are. Violence is persistent through the book, right up to the end, but Harley almost always, for example, acted violently to defend himself or his friends. Of course, he's the one telling the stories here but he could just as easily be gloating about never losing a fight. He also paints a grim picture of a mean social environment, 1970s lower east side of Manhattan, where violence was a mandatory part of daily life, whether he fought back or not. What would you do?Flanagan turned later in life to Hare Krishna which seemed to make a lot of sense considering his life of chaos.

Hard-Core is reminiscent to Darryl McDaniel's (DMC) recent memoir, 10 Ways not to Commit Suicide, where the rapper opens up about his family background, life of fame, addiction, the pain it's caused, and the deterioration of his relationship with his closest artistic collaborator. While DMC was one of the biggest rappers in the world at one point, Cro-Mags were likely a moderately successful underground band. Flanagan's book represents how life goes on for a figure who was created from a negative environment and who enjoyed limited success that peaked long before the book's publication.

animal liberation - Boston Breakout

The Boston Breakout
Roy MacGregir
Tundra Books
2014
162 pages

Boston Breakout is a kids novel about a hockey team, the Tamarack Screech Owls, who travel from Ontario to Boston to play in a hockey tournament and get mixed up in animal liberation. Hockey's boring so I skipped all the hockey parts of this book to get to the animal liberation parts. One of the Screech Owls, Samantha, gets mixed up with a group of animal rights activists who, unknown to her, are planning to free the penguins and everything else from the Boston aquarium by blowing the thing apart so all of its water, and the animals that live in it, flow into the Boston Harbour. Samantha believes in the animal liberation cause but not the tactics so when she sees the activists she's made friends with interfering with the animal count she goes and tells on them so that their plan is stopped before any good can be done.

The book was pretty good if you skip the hockey and if you ignore the dumb statements about zoo animals preferring the zoo. If I had one little tiny critique, it would have to be about the ending, its all wrong: I would have changed it so the activists successfully pulled off their plan to destroy the acquarium, all of the animals would have flowed out into the habour and thrived there. I would have written the animals as playing a role in obtaining their freedom from the aquarium. Then, in my version, over a period of millennia, the wind would erode the city of Boston down to gritty ruins and the networks of roads and infrastructure would crumble from the growth of plants and trees and the effects of animals, sun, snow, and rain. The city of Boston would become a nameless wild, home to a strange colony of North American penguins. That would have made a much better ending for this book.

punk - 2016 - Disco's Out... Murder's In!: The True Story of Frank the Shank and LA's Deadliest Punk Rock Gang

Disco's Out... Murder's In!: The True Story of Frank the Shank and LA's Deadliest Punk Rock Gang
Heath Mattioli & David Spacone
Feral House
2016
224 pages

I know from Penelopee Spheris' Decline of Western Civilization and Stephen Blush's book American Hardcore that in Los Angeles at least, punks became part of the street gang mix. Disco's Out... Murder's In! is, as far as I know, the first and currently only memoir of an LA punk gang member, recalling the life of Frank the Shank, underboss of LMP, La Mirada Punks. The overall narrative paints a picture of a group of people who weren't great punks, as they didn't contribte anything creative and their constant and extreme violence pretty much drove good people out of the scene, and weren't great gangsters, as they didn't seem to make any money. They mostly seemed to get into fights with the other punk gangs and when they weren't doing that they were killing people for not being punk.

The book is mostly a repetitive story of casual yet extreme violence, with a failed love story twisted into it. The LMP do it all up to murder, and usually they don't have much reason for it except that they thought it was fun, or maybe just because it alleviated boredom. The coldest story in a book of pointless cruelty describes an LMP member named Pineapple Head killing a B-Boy with a homemade bludegeon. Before the final blow, the B-Boy asked, "Why are you doing this?" Anthony Burgess' Alex and the Droogs would have had some poetic response in their nadsat speak, but Pineapple Head's reply was, "because." While participating in such youthful hi-jinks as mindless killing, Frank also fell in love with someone who broke up with him when he confronted her about her maybe cheating... what a surprise. Even in a narrative of his construction he doesn't have proof that she cheated on him but he still goes off on a quick rant about how after 30+ years he hates her and how much he hopes she gets raped. I wonder how she might tell the story of a love so pure with a punk gang bully.

At the end of the story Frank reports that people will tell him that him and his friends ruined the scene, which was probably true, and probably why so often these gangs are a minor detail in narratives about LA Punk if they're mentioned at all. As I was reading this I wondered if any of the killings they discuss were cold cases. When we now look back and see punk as this flare of independent creative energy, who wants to put the spotlight on the participants that cut it all to pieces, literally, with their cheap switchblades? There's some good pictures of LMP and the book cover features a Raymond Pettibon drawing.

casuals - 1996 - The Football Factory

The Football Factories
John King
1996
Vintage
262 pgs

I've watched a number of documentaries about English football casuals where a talking head representing the subculture expresses his resentment about punk getting all the attention back in the 70s and 80s when the casuals were just so much more interesting. Its such a dumb and funny thing to express since the punk subculture gave rise to new fashions, music, attitudes, literatures, ethos, semiotics, philosophies, dance. The Casuals pretty much bashed eachother at and around football matches. When punks were exploring the limits of every cultural form within the framework of their DIY ethos and post-situationist anti-establishment attitudes, the Casuals were becoming even more conformist by dressing in designer sportswear. Sociologically the Casuals are interesting, but they're interesting for the absence of creativity in their culture.

The Football Factories is a dramatic film about casual firms, starring Danny Dyer who went on to host a documentary TV series about the subject, The Real Football Factories. It was first a 1996 novel by John King that's written in the first person consciousness stream from the perspective of a Casual Chelsea supporter named Tommy. The novel reminds me of two other works of transgressive fiction, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, and Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho. A Clockwork Orange because King writes in the heavy cockney slang of Tommy - not the lyrical rhyming slang we sometimes hear about in Canada either - reminiscent of the slang Burgess invented for his novel. I'm well aware that there really are people out there calling the police 'old bill' and whatever, but its foreign enough to me to make me think of the nadsat language.  American Psycho because the sex, intoxication, and violence of Tommy's life becomes a dull pattern that moves around Chelsea's home/away schedule, otherwise the narrator expresses his views about life and such and every single idea he has is a cliche trapped in a painfully constricted worldview.

punk 1996 Touching From a Distance

Touching From a Distance

Deborah Curtis
Faber & Faber
1996
224 pages

Among the most heavily scorned categories of the world's people are the wives and girlfriends of rock music heroes. Photos of the gun Kurt Cobain used to kill himself were released and released along with that was a general geekazoid hate for Courtney Love for allegedly killing an idol. Yoko Ono obviously. I've heard rock-geeks of all ages say horrible things about Nancy Spungen, a teenage girl, for apparently destroying the career and life of the precious and innocent Sid Viscious, probably worst musician to ever have lucked into a major recording contract.

I remember picking up a copy of Substance by New Order from a pawn shop back when I was probably 15 or 16. I was attracted to the names of everything: the band, the album, the songs, and I was attracted to the simple black and white cover. I loved Substance and through learning about the band that made that music, I learned about Joy Division and their own Substance compilation. Aside from their music there's only really two things to know about them: their singer Ian Curtis had epilepsy and his seizures became spectacles, and he died tragically by his own hand.

Ian Curtis died when he was 23. He was a husband and father, his daughter was one year old when he passed. Fifteen years later his widow published Touching From a Distance to speak about her experiences of living with a young and emotionally intense lead singer. Her portrayal of her husband is largely negative and, unfortunately, completely believable. I've read some commentary on her book, mostly written by typical rock dorks who can't stand that a woman, who was once a 22 year old widow with an infant daughter, might be justifiably angry about her husband quitting on her. She portrayed Curtis as controlling, jealous, prone to rages, and egotistical. She mentioned anecdotes I'd rather not have known - Curtis could be racist and he was right-wing in some of his views - which I don't really want to hear in regards to a band I like that associated Nazi imagery with their music. One reviewer of this book stated that Deborah Curtis is just wrong about her portrayal of her husband. I can't imagine knowing someone longer and more intimately than anyone else and then be told that my perceptions of that person are incorrect simply because they conflict with that individual's public image and the fantasy that geeks want to preserve.

Curtis included all of the lyrics for released Joy Division songs as well as many words for incomplete songs.

punk - 2013 - I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

I Dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp
Richard Hell
Ecco
2013
304 pages


Another punk memoir from a member of the NYC punk scene - the scene that the term punk emerged from, and the scene that gave punk its style, but also the scene that had the least lasting influence and had very little to do with punk in 1980.

I love Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine and Alan Vega. I like Talking Heads and Richard Hell - and the Dead Boys were okay. Who else was there? I'm not really a Ramones fan although its not surprising that they had the most immediate influence out of all the early NYC bands since their template was the easiest to work from. NYC punk was where the Beats were rediscovered, and that discovery meant more than fast aggression. It was also where bands started one way and got big another way, Blondie, Talking Heads. The Beastie Boys were the overall most successful of all NYC punk bands.

I'm probably not the best reader of Richard Hell's autobiography. I know he was in Television before Marquee Moon but after reading Hell's book I still don't know if he had much to do with the songs on that album. He wrote parts of I Don't Care. I love the songs Blank Generation and Walking on the Water, and writing two great songs is certainly a significant contribution, but I overall prefer Television and I pretty much love every song on their first album. I pretty much read Hell's book to gain insight into Television and what I mostly learned was that Tom Verlaine was a control freak with regards to writing songs and that their friendship, which began in high school, has been dead since Hell left their band. Hell's sense of style inspired the Sex Pistols look which pretty much launched the style associated with punk, and Hell never really got a lot of credit for that. That's a major contribution though. Hell's career dissolved into heroin addiction. After reading this one I have a feeling I would appreciate Hell more as a writer than as a songwriter.