Coming of age.
The best and worst of times, though only in hindsight. Pure Id: everything is the happiest or saddest or most fun or most boring thing ever. Carbonated glands and nowhere to go with them, in my case, at least.
Though some might question my level of maturity--puckishness, my dears, and an irrepressible boyish charm!--I’m fairly certain I came of age years ago. Years and years ago. So why am I still reading about it? Is there a point when I’ll be too old to read and relate to coming of age novels? Is it a timeless genre or is it telling the same story over and over AND OVER again, in different hands with a slightly different perspective? Holden and Huck, Scout and Siddartha. The eventual outcome--isn’t it the same? Losing the child for the adult. The lifelong look back. Loneliness, lewdness (if you’re lucky), liberty.
To wit, two books--one fiction, one non-- that have me thinking about all this. Neither is great, but both are pretty good.
First, Cardboard G-ds: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards by Josh Wilker. Snapshot: small urban 70's family, artsy Mom, ineffectual Dad, beloved older brother. Mom takes on a boyfriend who moves in with the family. Family moves to Vermont to get 'back to the land' and then finds it neither easy nor very rewarding. Big brother tries to grow up, parents and boyfriend fall apart, kid clings to his baseball cards as the only constant in his life.
This is a very sentimental memoir and had I not grown up at the same time collecting the very same cards, I would never have gotten through the book but there was something I could appreciate despite the fact that my own circumstances were nothing like his. My family never divorced, my mother never took on a boyfriend, etc. At the time, I did find a certain sanctity in baseball cards. I traded and flipped with friends. We lusted after cards we needed to complete our teams and speculated how our teams would do and we memorized stats and recited them as we shagged fly balls and played catch for hours in the side yard.
Then something happened. Cards were less important and were replaced by music. Baseball, which had been our social currency, took a backseat to rock, especially punk rock. The Grand Old Game versus Young, Loud and Snotty.
Which brings us to Joe Meno’s Hairstyles of the Damned. I was just crazy about Meno’s novel, The Boy Detective Fails about which I gushed in a horrible run-on sentence of a post (http://reednext.blogspot.com/2007/01/boy-detective-fails-by-joe-meno.html). Hairstyles is actually the book before Boy Detective. Truth is, it's a pretty stock coming-of-age tale: Brian, an unremarkable adolescent boy, 'in love' with his best friend, a punk chick who fistfights other girls and parents whose marriage is falling apart around him. Punk rock becomes his life preserver.
However, it succeeds because Meno has a tremendous sense of what, in Yiddish, is called rachmones. (It’s pronounced rachMOness. It doesn’t rhyme with Ramones.) While it defies a literal definition, I’ve always thought of it as where empathy and sympathy meet. Meno gets the sadness inside his characters, the scars they have and their inability to verbalize them despite wanting to scream, “help me! I hurt!” For that alone, I love his work.
I graduated from baseball cards to punk rock, too, so these works struck me between the ears.
This has got to be the dumbest, lamest thing I've ever seen. I'm sure I've said that before about any number of things (George W. as president, techno-sushi, sitcoms starring Jim Belushi) but, geez, I think I really mean it this time.
I didn't really want the book; I wanted to meet co-author and Dictators lead singer Handsome Dick Manitoba and, like so many others before me, say out loud, "Look at that Handsome Dick!" but the guys at the publishers booth said it was a mistake. He was never really scheduled to come to LA and, in fact, co-author Amy Wallace wasn't coming either because she just had back surgery. They gave me a copy/booby prize. I figured it might be fun in a sort of bathroom book kind of way. WRONG.
Many of the lists are the authors own creation and are either common knowledge (13 punks who OD'd, 7 punks who whipped it out or got naked), or are so stupid, I couldn't even believe it. I'm way too old to try to be punker-than-thou but seriously--108 Punk sub-genres? 'spaz punk'? 'bandana thrash'? 'Swedish enema punk'? C'mon! Or this little gem--Gilby Clark's 10 best punk rock solos! The dude from GnR? Go buy some Aqua-Net, Gilby. By the way, how's the new record coming? The only slightly cool thing about this hunk o' crap are the illustrations by Cliff Mott.
Spare yourself and go spend the 17 bucks on a Dictators record.
Legend has it that Nick Kent is about as big a prick as you'll find among rock journalists and that is a dubious distinction indeed. Still he can write. The rub is that he reminds you constantly how "he was there", that he ended up a junkie for a while and a lot of other rock star poses that he got caught up in over the years (but you're a journalist, dork! Just write.). However, he does get good interviews that often bring out more than you might expect. Covering a range of folks from Brian Wilson to Roy Orbison to Shane McGowan to the Stones, if nothing else, it'll make you want to listen to the music. (from '05 list)
I’m always a sucker for yet another history of punk rock but at 800+ pages, this is both exhaustive and exhausting. Written in the oral history style that made Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me so entertaining and effective, Heylin can definitely tell the story in great detail. That’s also the problem--I found myself reading (and reading and reading) about bands he gives far too much credit and about whom I could care less. Once I allowed myself to skip the many, many passages about lesser bands like The Only Ones, The Prefects and Throbbing Gristle (honestly!), I was finally able to finish the damn thing. An ambitious and often informative book but perhaps the story has been told to death at this point.
A few years back, McDonald wrote the brilliant All Souls, a painful memoir of growing up in the Old Colony housing projects in the Irish-mob controlled, white slums of South Boston and the many tragedies that befell his large Irish-Catholic family because of drugs, guns and the insulating ignorance of the community. This sort of picks up where he left off-- his family is struggling and he’s depressed so he finds the nascent Boston punk rock scene, fits in a little, grows up a little and then he goes to Ireland and everything is all wild Irish roses. (The Ireland trips reminded me of the tacked on “Communism-will-solve-all-your-problems” ending from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and was just as unsatisfying.) MacDonald certainly writes well enough but Easter Rising just isn’t All Souls. I’ve said it before—I’m suspect of people who write their memoirs before the age of forty and even moreso of those who then write a second or third, especially if you aren’t some notable public figure or have gone on to do remarkable things between books. As much as I admire the author, his story, and his skills, it just didn't involve me as I had hoped.
Oh goody. Another Elvis Costello biography that is assembled from old newspaper and magazine pieces and interviews with everyone but the man himself. I've been down this road before how many times only to be left horribly unsatisfied by the books and turning to the back catalogue of CDs to let the music do the talking. Surprisingly, this one doesn't suck. (Take that Tony Clayton-Lea! And that! David Gouldstone, you moping, misogynistic hack!) It was informative (well, it is a biography), fairly insightful, and well-paced. I suppose I'll never be fully satisfied until we hear the whole story from Elvoid's own lips, but this is perhaps the best of the many clip jobs published over the years.
