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.

student uprising - 2015 - In Defiance

In Defiance

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois

BTS

2015

In 2012 a broad coalition of Quebec University and Cegep students went on strike to challenge a tuition hike proposed by the province’s liberal government. The strike grew out of a student’s general assembly vote at Valleyfield Cegep, southwest of Montreal, to include over 150,000 students and protests that involved over 200,000 people. Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois was one of the spokespersons for CLASSE,  Coalition large de l’ASSÉ, an organization formed out of the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, one of the largest student unions, specifically for the purpose of challenging the proposed hike. As a figurehead of a successful social movement he was the target of a ton of criticism issued by the press, professional politicians, and other sources. In Defiance is the English translation of Nadeau-Dubois’ these events as he saw them, and his response to some of the criticism he received during the events of spring/summer 2012.

In In Defiance, Nadeau-Dubois is telling the story of the student strike from his perspective, which was often situated in a meeting room or some other nerve centre of decision or communication, rather than out on the street. His book tells the story of the student strikes but it also subverts the standard modes of representations of the dominant institutions of Quebec society, and it subverts the myth of the younger generations as apolitical. Nadeau-Dubois book, and the events of 2012, reveal his supposedly apolitical generation rather as deeply engaged in politics and social justice, while it was the dominant political establishment that cynically sought to prevent his generation’s participation in politics through undemocratic authoritarian means and dismissively shallow and trite communication practices. Secondly, if one sees the government as protectors of democracy, the media as a source of enlightenment, the courts and police as sources of order and justice, then Nadeau-Dubois reveals all of these institutions to function in opposition to how they represent themselves. The Government is undemocratic, the media is a source of confusion and disinformation, the courts produce injustice and the police create violence and chaos. The overarching message of Nadeau-Dubois book seems to be that while these institutions champion democratic liberties and social progress in practice they seek to constrain society into a shape formed by a very specific neo-liberal worldview, but in spite of that change is possible.