19) Music is My Boyfriend

Book Read: Our Band Could Be Your Life
Author: Michael Azerrad
Pages: 522 (incl. index)
Music to Blog By: Grinderman, "Depth Charge Ethel"

Method of Acquisition: During my honeymoon this past May, my husband and I made a stop in Kingston, Ontario. We both lived here for four years attending undergrad and met during our final year (I know. Awww! Retchhhh!) Like most former Kingstonians, we retain an eternal fondness for the Limestone City and our favorite haunts within.
Along with drinking pints of 50 at the Toucan, Brian's Record Option ranks as one of the most quintessential Kingstonian experiences. Basically, it's like a pack rat's basement vomited all over a tiny shop. You can navigate it yourself, stepping over treacherous piles of records, stickers, posters, cats and assorted detritus, or you can ask the impressively-bearded Brian, who somehow knows where everything is and is happy to jaw your ear off while he searches. (I was amused to discover that the store---and its owner---have been immortalized on Youtube.

OK, so the point of this unnecessarily long and indulgent introduction is that we went there and asked Brian for good music books. He recommended Our Band Could Be Your Life and Last Night A DJ Saved My Life. It's hard to say no to Brian. He once encouraged me to buy the CD version of the Pump Up the Volume (!?) soundtrack because it featured Henry Rollins and Bad Brains doing a cover of "Kick Out the Jams." (Last I heard, my dad now uses it as a coaster, and Christian Slater's sly mug is now buried by a thin, omnipresent coating of cigarette ash.) But this time, that bearded pack rat steered me right.

A lot of books about bands and scenes and music history are dodgy. For every Hammer of the Gods or The Dirt you'll get a This Must Be the Place (where author David Bowman succeeds completely in draining all vitality and wit from the story of the Talking Heads) or Ray Manzarek's blah-tastic book about the Doors (although I did enjoy one bit where he called Oliver Stone a fascist.)

When it comes to music books, dear readers, it would seem you're better off if you stick to a) Cultural critics and historians, who are generally pretty good at situating an artist's place in a particular historical context (and hopefully with a bit of literary flair) b) Nick Hornby, or c) Pure, unadulterated trash. Tell me about the record label tangles, the drugs, the babes, the overdoses, the near-fatal car accident, and the subsequent detox and relapse(s) and resulting incorporation of Ashtangi yoga, Kabbalah and psychotherapy into your Much Better, Arguably Less-Rockin' Life, with an afterword that features you sitting in your mansion with your Playboy Bunny-blonde wife, six absurd toy dogs, and plans for a VH1 series to hire a successor. Hire Neil Strauss to edit it all and you're set.

Our Band Could Be Your Life is a perfect mix of all these things. It's a book that tells the following bands' stories, in about a chapter each: Mission of Burma, Butthole Surfers, The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Big Black, Black Flag, Fugazi, Husker Du, Mudhoney, Minor Threat, Beat Happening, The Replacements and Dinosaur Jr.
And it's amazing how much he's able to pack into a single chapter. I thought I knew most of the important stuff about these bands, but every chapter held at least one revelation. (Literally every hardcore punk band in the book lists Creedence Clearwater Revival as a major influence! Greg Ginn is kind of a prick! Lydia Lunch once propositioned Steve Albini in a newspaper column!) The whole book is wonderfully researched and about as complete as any book on the subjective history of the American underground scene from the mid-to-late '80s could possibly be, ha-ha. He talks to all the surviving members from these bands as well as associates, old friends, parents, ex-girlfriends: You name it, he's spoken to them---and managed to make even the most tight-lipped players spill it. (The Big Black chapter, featuring Steve Albini's trademark I-don't-give-a-shit bluster, was hugely entertaining---and more than a little disturbing.)

Azerrad is also honest with us from the get-go, and I liked that. He admits as much in the introduction: He's not trying to do something comprehensive. (That's why, for example, there's no chapter on Bad Brains or D.O.A., even though many would argue they're equally as important in punk as Black Flag and Minor Threat, or why the Pixies have been left off the list.) He's just focused on a group of interesting bands who had a lot of crossover, supported one another through labels or just word of mouth, and who remain influential and relevant to this day. And without sounding gossipy or salacious, he presents the break-ups, the inter-band conflicts, the sordid road tales (the Butthole Surfers chapter actually made my hair stand on end) and the drugs and drink that, in some cases, led to a tragic downfall (like The Replacements! Well, shit!)

The best thing about reading Our Band Could Be Your Life, though, is that it encourages you to re-listen (or discover) these bands and form your own personal soundtrack alongside the book. Azerrad's writing has an infectious, Lester Bangs-type quality that makes you want to buy these albums and listen to them, right now.
Here's an excerpt from his description of Husker Du's Flip Your Wig:

"Except for two instrumentals tacked on to the end, every song sounds like a hit in some alternate world where the rivers run with an equal mixture of battery acid and honey."

I know, some may scoff. But for those of us who regularly struggle with music writing, trying to make it artful but not pretentious, trying to balance astuteness and wit with YOUR ACTUAL FEELINGS ABOUT THE SONG, that phrase is a fucking beautiful thing. I listened to the album (I had previously not heard any Husker Du except for the brilliant album everyone already knows/owns, Zen Arcade) and he was right. It was amazing. So was reading about the sad and abrupt end of The Minutemen (NO SPOILERS!) while listening to Double Nickels on the Dime. And after reading the Sonic Youth chapter and then listening to this year's release, The Eternal, even though everyone and their mother has written a book or an article or made a movie featuring Sonic Youth, the chapter somehow helped me understand them a little better.

Okay. Most boring review ever. What I'm trying to say is that I enjoyed this book because music is an enormous part of my life. Quite a few of these bands had a huge formative effect on how I feel music should be--sound-wise, business-wise, appearance-wise, all of that. Azerrad's book is not only a useful time capsule for fanboys and girlies. It also hearkens back to a day when DIY was just starting and it wasn't yet feasible to go out on your own, manage your own tours, and press and mail your own records on your own label. But people like Fugazi and Minor Threat and Black Flag did it. The Butthole Surfers, in their early days, toured on their own terms. They were all dirt-poor, but they had control over their destinies in a way that some of their peers didn't. And that's kind of exciting. In a climate where music is more of a commodity than ever, Azerrad's book is an excellent primer on how to find your own way in one of the shittiest businesses of them all.

18) Do You Like Women? Read This Book.

Book Read: Half the Sky
Author(s): Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Pages: 294

For the sake of context, I will precede this review by saying when it comes to aid, I think Westerners should fuck off.
The reason: Two years ago, I spent eight months in Ghana working for a Canadian NGO called Journalists for Human Rights. I lived in Accra, the capital city, which also happens to be the hive for most major local and international NGOs in West Africa. And yes, I had a wonderful time and made some solid friendships, but I also learned that most Western notions of aid are fairly ridiculous. Most Ghanaians I met told me they felt Westerners were on holiday under the guise of volunteerism, living in luxurious conditions while working at orphanages and NGOs and radio stations, doing work that would ultimately not be sustainable because they'd leave after a few months.

With a lot of foreigners I spoke to, volunteering was sort of an ego thing---who doesn't want to be a "hero" roughing it in the big bad African bush? (Accra, like most African cities, is of course much more developed than most media reports would have you believe.) It seemed to be a case of glamour over goodwill. Most Ghanaians were right. And this is a microcosm of what happens when Western forces attempt to intervene in third world countries on a larger scale. At best, it's a short-term solution. At worst, we leave with things in shambles. A few Westerners have managed to create some lasting changes (Stephen Lewis and his work with AIDS, Jimmy Carter and his tireless---and fairly successful---attempts to wipe out guinea worm) but for the most part, I left my time in Ghana feeling like local solutions must be effected by local people.

The authors of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide (who actually know what they're talking about) echo these feelings. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are Pulitzer Prize winning journalists who spent years in China covering human rights abuses. (They're also married.) Kristof in particular has devoted his career as a New York Times Op-Ed columnist to exploring women's issues all over the world. Half the Sky shares stories of women Kristof and WuDunn met during their travels all over the world, with the purpose of sharing their struggle and the importance of female education.

All of the women the two journalists spoke with faced extraordinary challenges, and not all of these stories have happy endings. Some will make you blanch (like the young woman who is forced to abandon her children in a Thai brothel, or a woman who is ostracized from her village in the Congo because she was raped and developed a fistula, which is basically when a woman's vaginal and anal tissues are so torn that urine and feces run nonstop down her legs.) Some are incredible---like the group of women who took mob justice in their own hands and murdered a known rapist, killer and druglord in a public courtroom.

But most of all, many of the stories are purely and wholly inspirational. I hate that word---"inspirational." It brings to mind Richard Simmons, or Dr. Phil. It's used to describe well-to-do celebrities who visit villages ruined by typhoons in smock shirts and Wayfarers.

That's not inspirational, my dear friends. Inspirational is a Burundi woman who went from having no say in her household's income to growing an entire farm's worth of crops, contributing food and wealth to her neighbourhood and giving handouts to her husband. Inspirational is Angeline from Zimbabwe, who grew up not having enough money to buy underwear to wear to school and ended up becoming the executive director of the NGO that funded the remainder of her schooling. Or the soft-spoken Afghan woman who risked death over and over to start a chain of girl's schools at a time when female education was banned by the Taliban. These were the stories that made me sneak into an airplane bathroom and cry silently to myself---the ones of the women who succeeded quietly and humbly to change their surroundings. Inspirational is having nothing and defying the odds, the law, your culture, your religion, and more often than not, your own family, in order to do what you think is right.

That's the best part of Half the Sky---these women did what they did because they had to. They had no interest in being celebrated, or being heroes. They simply could not remain silent and continue living in the situations they were given---and so they changed them. The book will inspire you to do something, anything---and thankfully, WuDunn and Kristof do not lecture, but instead give some options for ways that you can help if you feel inclined.

Off the soapbox now, with one more point: I loved this book, and I hate pretty much everything. Really. I'll lend it to you. Read it.

17) Marisha Pessl's "Literary Pyrotechnics"

Book Read: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Author: Marisha Pessl
Pages: 514
Method of Acquisition: Harrison was over one night. We were pre-drinking some lousy wine left over from my wedding (Vat #7, if I recall correctly.) She passed me Special Topics ("I liked it! I want it back!" she said) and What is the What? ("Blegh. Just keep it," she said.)
As I Write This Hasty Blog, I Am Listening To: The Wind Whistles.

Blue van Meer is a reclusive, brilliant teenager who moves to a mountain town in North Carolina with her eccentric, mysterious literary giant of a dad. She develops a strange and instant connection with her beautiful, mysterious English teacher Hannah Schneider, who invites her to her own personal version of the Algonquin Table with a quirky cabal of kids she quickly dubs "The Bluebloods." The events that follow are rendered in joyfully reference-laden language (every chapter is named after a Great Novel and references to both high and low culture are sprinkled through the narrative like blueberries on cornflakes, and yet the story never feels dated---an impressive achievement in itself.) I found that mentally I needed to be firing on all cylinders in order to unearth the intriguing plot---this is a novel where truly nothing is as it seems. Although the end of the book is a little unsatisfying (MAYBE SPOILER ALERT: After nearly 400 pages of buildup, I was expecting some bigger revelations about two of the book's key characters) the journey is rich and delightful, and you'll linger over some of the book's more humorous and elegant passages for long minutes, wishing you had the same ability to turn a phrase so cleverly.


I've reached my word limit, and I think this was kind of a sucky review in terms of letting you know what you're in for, so I will let a passage from Pessl's tome speak for itself. Here, Blue describes her childhood crush on her dad's gardener, Andreo. Here, you will see an example of the embedded referencing that takes place throughout the novel (using both real and invented books by experts.) You can see how it would be exhausting, but it's also wholly unique and kick-starts the reader into wakefulness.

His name was Andreo Verduga, and he was the most beautiful creature I'd ever seen (see "Panther," Glorious Predators of the Natural World, Goodwin, 1987.) He was tan, with black hair, gypsy eyes, and from what I could deduce from my upstairs bedroom window, a torso smooth as a river rock. He was from Peru. He wore heavy cologne and spoke in the language of an old-fashioned telegram.
HOW DO YOU DO STOP NICE DAY STOP WHERE IS HOSE STOP.


It's cute, right? Special Topics is for all the weirdo, bookish girls who wore the wrong clothes in high school, and the pale boys who made fun of the jocks but still secretly wished they had more friends. This book will make your fine hearts sing.

This Slow Tomato's Gonna KETCHUP!

I realized if I keep writing these long essay-style reviews and boring you to death, I will never get caught up on the hideous backlog that trails me around this apartment like my cats when I forget to feed them. It's a prison of expectations, people, and I'm getting locked in by FAILURE. So I decided it would be best to do bunch of mini-reviews in order to play catchup. I decided I would limit myself to five sentences per book - a bit like Ten Word Reviews, but more long-winded, completely unedited, and emphatically BLARGH-y. I hope to have them all posted by Thursday. There will be an update about where I'm at, reading-wise, at the end of the last mini-review, because I know you're hanging on tenterhooks in WAIT. OKAY. LET'S DO THIS.

16) Life Is A...Highway?



Book Read: The Road
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Pages: 287
Favorite Line: "You're kind of weirded out, aren't you?"

I won't bore you with a plot summary (you can Google it) but everyone I know who has read this has loved it. I suppose, in regards to The Road, love isn't the right word. As you trudge bleakly through McCarthy's ruined, ashy landscape full of cannibals and people blinded by their own need, his twisting, broken, glittering prose will hypnotize and save you. His similes float up to the surface of this black, gory mess like bits of carrion, and bring you to the surface, fortifying you just as you reach the brink of your own horror and despair as a reader. It doesn't matter if the forthcoming movie adaptation doesn't work, because The Road is one of those very specific reading experiences that will be burnt into my brain forever.

15) The Twentieth Century, I Have Delivered It

Book Read: From Hell

Author/Illustrator: Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell
Pages: 590 (incl. Appendix)

When I was sixteen, my dad got laid off from his job. He and my mom took our family's collective savings and took myself and my three brothers on a trip to Europe: Paris, London and Scotland. It was one of the best trips of my life. To visit such amazing cities at an age where cynicism has not yet clouded the perceptions and everything is still wild and lovely was incredible. The trip was also a little desperate, I think, because of the circumstances surrounding our hasty departure. It was with this mindset that we embarked on a Jack the Ripper tour of Whitechapel in London at about the halfway point of the trip. Our guide was a short, white bearded Beefeater with an encyclopedic knowledge of 19th century London. He would finish each story and beckon us onward with a guttural spitty noise he made with his throat, sort of a "HRRRRCT!" sound. "Let's go down this street, shall we? Hrrrrcht!!" he would say, and the enthralled, disgusted crowd would follow. We finished the tour at the Ten Bells tavern where my brother got a taste of his first-ever English pint.

The bar is immortalized in From Hell, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's amazing graphic novel about the Jack the Ripper murders. Ten years later, as I read the novel and came upon the bar's first appearance, I was struck by how closely it resembled the bar I had had the good fortune to visit on that heady, terrifying, breathtaking trip. The entire novel throbs---sometimes literally---with this vividness. It's a perfect combination of dramatic license and historical fact, showcasing the true breadth of Moore's obsession with metaphysics, the moribund, and his talent for storylines that weave and snake around each other and collide over and over with awful, brilliant power.

Most of us know bits and pieces of the story of Jack the Ripper and some may be familiar with the multiple theories devised by "Ripperologists" about who the killer actually was. Moore has followed the theory raised in Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution that labels Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria's surgeon, as the killer.

Moore's Gull is a hulking, eloquent madman who worships art, nature and the occult (as attested by his alleged ties to the Freemason), a delicate soul who also happens to believe that his bloodlust is dictated by the gods themselves. He is a brute and a misogynistic monster. His lonely death in a madhouse---where his spirit moves through space and time, vaporizing and becoming, he believes, exalted---moved me to tears. He is the perfect Alan Moore villain---a man caught up in the misery of his time, held prostrate and completely helpless by his obsessions.

Of course, the story isn't just about Gull --- it is about the dour police inspector who returns to Whitechapel to attempt to solve the murders, only to resign from the police force in complete disillusionment. It is about the five prostitutes who fall victim to Gull's Liston knife. Moore's characterizations of these women, full of sickness and struggle, give them dignity. But again, as with all of Moore's writing, the story and characters become part of a larger understanding, a foreshadowing of what horrors are yet to come. The denseness of characterization, English history, backstory, the birth of Hitler, war, the soullessness of the future---it is overwhelming. So wisely, Moore and Campbell break the story up with panels of blackness and silence, and it's here that the story simmers with dread:



I don't know much about comic book artists, so I don't really know how to talk about the illustration above. I can say that Eddie Campbell's art is profoundly moving, and deeply disturbing. I have never seen anything like it, and to be honest, I'm not sure that I want to again. Blood has never appeared bloodless, so precise. His rough pen and ink scratches are almost painful to the eye. You feel he is taking you deep into the filth of Whitechapel---into its dirt, its despair, the consumptive, syphilitic heart. Moore usually does these stories that swirl with colour and life (the exploding flora and vitality of Swamp Thing come to mind) but this unusual match serves his style and the subject matter perfectly.

I can understand why From Hell hasn't gotten as much interest as, say, Watchmen or V for Vendetta . Although the subject matter in all three books is equally dense and rich, From Hell is a diseased, bleak and sprawling beast, graphic and unrelenting. It's a long, slogging read at times. But it is brilliant and meticulously researched, and I suspect that in its melancholy, its myth and conjecture, you may find a gleaming kernel of truth, and that is what makes the work rewarding.

14) The White Tiger is...Just Fine

Book Read: The White Tiger

Author:Aravind Adiga

Pages: 276


I really wanted to like The White Tiger. I have enjoyed a lot of work by Indian writers (Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, Hari Kunzru, Anita Rau Badami, Jhumpa Lahiri) and Adiga is of Indian descent, he won a Booker Prize, and lots of Indian writers have won Booker Prizes and other important literary awards, and the people who judge these sort of awards generally seem to know what they're doing, and so I bowed my head and bought the book.

The White Tiger certainly isn't bad. The narrator, Balram, relates his story through a series of letters to the Chinese premier Wen Jiabo, who is expected to visit India to learn about the new entrepreneurial class. Balram grew up in what Adiga calls "The Darkness" - a rural town called Laxmangarh - the son of a rickshaw puller. His father's pitiful death spurs Balram to learn how to drive, and through his ambition and charm, he manages to secure a post in Delhi ("The Light") as the driver of the son of a wealthy landowner from his village. It's here that the novel's sharpness unfolds and we see the bitterness and deceitful behaviour shared by both the upper and lower class characters. We also see Delhi - the new India - through Balram's eyes. He mentions "hospitals with lobbies as clean as five-star hotels" and provides lingering, loving descriptions of newly-built strip malls. Adiga wants us to know that India isn't all back roads, landfills and poverty - the country is growing.

The expanse of the country also matches Balram's rising ambition, and his loyalty to his wealthy but spineless boss begins to quaver beneath his own desire for Money and Power. The novel's conclusion won't be a surprise (it's revealed early on in the book) but the gradual course of Balram's changing personality may be.

I feel like this novel will be taught in classrooms and passed around overeducated, underemployed, middle-class North Americans (of which I include myself) who will be impressed and charmed at this "gritty depiction" of modern India. When The White Tiger is compared to the magical realism by Salman Rushdie or the romantic, damp family tales of Anita Rau Badami, it does come across as a little rawer, a bit more unflinching. But I also agree with the Guardian's first review of the novel, which pointed out that there are so many alternative Indias, uncontacted and unheard. Adiga's viewpoint is a very particular one---it should not be considered the ultimate truth.

A confession here, and a diversion: I found myself praising the book to others even as it became more and more milquetoast and less spectacular than I wanted it to be. With each successive page turn, I read frantically, groping for something better: better writer, a sharper wit and conclusions that were a little more revelatory. Now that I'm done, I feel a bit like a fraud.

Adiga has also been criticized in the press for being an Oxford-educated upper middle-class journalist; what does he know about being a poor, paan-chewing driver in Delhi? I'm of the view that this is irrelevant. The story is convincing. And authenticity isn't really Adiga's problem. For a novel that has been labelled as at least partially satirical, The White Tiger isn't very funny or particularly acerbic---and that is a problem. It was actually a bit tasteless, not in the sense of being uncouth, but rather because mostly it sat bland and dull on my tongue, like uncooked bread. Where's my fucking spice?

With that being said, a few parts work. It's genuninely agonizing to witness Balram's employer become more vulnerable and stupid in his eyes. In the same way, it's sad (but also vaguely interesting) to watch the deterioration of his character (or is it a strengthening?) His dubbing of a sleazy fellow driver "Vitiligo-Lips" is funny the first four or five times it's mentioned, and I also enjoyed every time the drivers brought up their favorite local periodical, Murder Weekly.

Overall, though, I wasn't attached to any character enough to care about their well-being or demise. Even Balram, who at least had the benefit of being interesting, became tedious until the novel's final, decisive act. I actually found myself skipping his repeated proclamations of enterpreneurial skill and ominous foreshadowing to Mr. Jiabo. I found myself wishing there had been more ACTION and less nostalgic blather - more little shocks to rouse the reader out of a bit of a stupor.

I ultimately feel the success of The White Tiger is due in part to the Slumdog Millionaire-ization of popular North American culture at the moment. Any story about downtrodden people in the Third World seems to get our attention, tug our strings, prod that little bruise of white guilt. Such stories are entertaining, certainly---but do they deserve all these accolades? Haven't we already seen these ideas paraded before us, and done better?

Roundup Time

Books read and blogged:

JPod - Douglas Coupland
Running With Scissors - Augsten Burroughs
I'm With the Band - Pamela Des Barres
DaCapo Best Music Writing 2008 - Various
Helpless - Barbara Gowdy
House of Meetings - Martin Amis
Three Day Road - Joseph Boyden
Flight - Sherman Alexie
Twilight - Stephanie Meyer
The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
Heart-Shaped Box - Joe Hill
George Elliot Clarke - I & I
Cintra Wilson - Colors Insulting to Nature

Books read, blog entries pending:

* Michael Azerrad - Our Band Could Be Your Life
* John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
* Chinua Achebe - Anthills of the Savannah
* Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger
* Alan Moore - V for Vendetta
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Danny Sugerman - Wonderland Avenue

Total Books read thus far:

20

Books left to read by January 2010 (to meet goal, ostensibly)

80

Amount of books I need to read per month to make this goal:

13 (roughly)

Amount of books I probably will read per month, realistically:

Depending on the month (and my job status) 0-15


Books I'm super keen on reading in the future:

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
From Hell - Alan Moore
Fool - Christopher Moore
Columbine - Dave Cullen
Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
The Drive-In - Joe R. Landsdale
Starved for Science - Robert Paarlberg
Rashomon - Akutagawa Ryanosuke
Miles: The Autobiography - Miles Davis


Books I am not so hot on reading but feel weirdly obligated to read anyway because I know their long-term effects will be important and I WILL LEARN TO ENJOY THEM:

What is the What - Dave Eggers
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
Look, Homeward Angel - Thomas Mann
New Moon - Stephanie Meyer (yes. I HAVE TO.)
Where Angels Fear to Tread - Joseph Conrad
Too Fat to Fish - Artie Lange
The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell
One of the Obama biographies


Books that I will under no circumstances read this year because they are too large and will make me feel bad about myself (but I would like to try them sometime):

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susanna What's her last name

People who seem to be into the blog despite my infrequent posting:

Around 10. This is actually more than I expected. Thanks guys!

People who seem to be secretly competing with me but are not saying this outright (judging by some sly, friendly but slightly edgy and always persistent lines of questioning)

25

If you're one of these, good on ya. Keep going, and keep telling me what you're reading and how long it took you, in your slightly detached, bored-seeming but still weirdly intense emails. It's funny. I support your efforts.

Keep on keepin' on, you all!!!