What I'm Reading

year in review, part II

Additions, remarks, and odd things I learned this year:

Harvey Milk was essentially an old-style ethnic politician, just with sexual orientation as his organizing principle. Loved the film, but what Milk skimps on is how much hardball Harvey could and did play--there were a lot of gay dollars around SF in the 70s, and he knew what to do with them to win political representation, union jobs, and a seat or two at the table. He also was a Goldwater Republican who in some ways never really changed his political colors. (Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street)

Max Allan Collins gets to write too many novels for Hard Case Crime. I like pulp as much as the next person, I really believe that, but he writes the same damn thing every time. Almost exactly. I think this is taking the whole verisimilitude bit too far.

Gloria Steinem took CIA money as a student activist in the 50s, as did Richard Wright and Nina Simone. A bunch of former Communists put on the payroll, though, were pretty unsatisfactory employees, as they took the agency's money and continued on a campaign of factionalism and plunder of anyone who did not share their exact strain of beliefs. (Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer)

being a 19th-century criminal was really not fun: talk about nasty, brutish, and short. And once you talked to the cops, you were pretty much dead meat on the street. And the prisons were even worse. (Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket's Tale) Also, running a gang is hard, particularly as regards the question of punishment and deterrence--how hard do you discipline people? when do you need to lay down the law, and when can you outsource? when do you just let things go? (Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day)

Jacob Riis pretty much invented the multimedia presentation, touring with his photos of NYC slums in the 1890s, and made a pretty good career of it as well (Yochelson and Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis)

Thomas Jefferson was attacked as a dangerous atheist, and John Adams as a religious fundamentalist who would turn the US into a theocracy in the election of 1800 (Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe)

you can tell how hard farm people in the 30s worked by their recipes, which all seem to call for massive amounts of soaking and cooking in cream. Either that, or they were all really fat and this has been excised from photos (Kalish, Little Heathens)

intellectual stunt-journalism books are harder to pull off than it looks: Jacobs' The Know-It-All, where he reads the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, is funny most of the way through, but can someone with a Brown BA really be as ignorant as Jacobs sometimes shows himself to be?or is that part of the shtick? Shea's Reading the OED, where he, well, reads the entire OED, is basically a bunch of odd words with a few pages of OK rumination dressing them up. He sounds like a nice guy, but it's a thin book. Honestly, Ken Jennings' autobiography/apologia/trivia-nerd defense, Brainiac, which is far better than it has any right to be, remains the cream of the crop for me.

you can draw some interesting homologies between dominant modes of social experience and sports--football, with all of its regimentation and military lingo, was of particular cultural centrality in the 60s and 70s, when those experiences had formed a central part of the lives of many Americans (Mandelbaum, The Meaning of Sports)

people were making waterboarding jokes, in a satirical context, 100 years ago, given that the tactic was being used in the Philippines--and thus it must have resided at least somewhere in the collective consciousness. What happened in the interim? (Crosby, Captain Jinks, Hero: from the NYT review, Aug. 30, 1902: "A good American sitting among his broken idols and ruefully rubbing the welts and bruises his patriotism receives from the bastinado which Mr. Ernest Crosby wields in Captain Jinks, Hero, may, nevertheless, find balm in the thought that he wrote it in six weeks -- as his publisher announces.")

the Inquisition pretty much invented every tactic of spy agencies and tribunals, including agents provocateurs, going after financial assets, forcing accused people to denounce others to survive, and using secret evidence (Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual)

someone could make a great movie about Venice Beach around 1980-81, when steroids were making their way into bodybuilding culture with what can only be called great bursts of energy. The whole revolution of everyone and everything around Arnold, and the shady dudes prescribing everywhere the informed eye knew to look, would be one of the cooler and mostly unexplored subcultures to put on the screen (Assael, Steroid Nation; see also the excellent documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster*)

Abraham Lincoln came into office with no knowledge of military affairs, so, in order to prevent his generals from steamrolling him, he gave himself a crash course in military history. George McClellan, who had graduated from West Point at 20 ranked #2 in the class (the famous class of '46 that also included Stonewall Jackson, Pickett, and 20 other Civil War generals), had had so many experiences of early success that all he would do was sit around and whine about how Lincoln never gave him enough troops. Reason #50 why Lincoln rocks. (McPherson, Tried by War) When McClellan ran as a Peace Democrat in 1864, he was actually more pro-war than some in his party, who were openly rooting for a Confederate victory; there were significant disturbances and attacks on military recruiters in places like Ohio (home of exiled congressman Clement Vallandingham), which does at least make me both defend and worry about the kinds of civil-liberties measures Lincoln chose to win the war (Weber, Copperheads)

it's far too easy to buy your way into college. When I read about, say, the Olsen twins or whoever going to NYU, I thought, well, maybe they're actually smart. Or maybe not, since there are all sorts of loopholes to let dumb children of the rich and powerful, or famous people with no particular academic distinction, into prestigious schools, no matter how horrid their academic records. This has been going on overtly for most of the century, and semi-covertly for the past 15 years. Duke has more or less leaped two levels in reputation over the past 30 years on the backs of such development admits (Golden, The Price of Admission; Karabel, The Chosen)

it is not so dangerous to attend soccer matches in England now, partly because you can't buy tickets to matches unless you have a previous history of ticket-buying. Also, there are lots of police stationed everywhere, and a lot of the louts have been priced out. (Culpepper, Bloody Confused!)

city of the century

There's probably a great cultural history to be written about the role of Seattle, 1988-2004 or so. Consider: Microsoft, Starbucks, grunge, Amazon.com--the tech frontier, the cultural frontier, and then their containment/assimilation into the suburbanization of the nation. Taylor Clark's dumb-ass Starbucked (maybe 50 pages of good material, drowning in bad jokes, repeated tropes about 4-dollar coffee, and restatements of his main thesis: much like a famous chain's big lattes, come to think of it) doesn't get there. Michael Azerrad's Come As You Are covers the rock scene there adeptly, and I would bet his indie-band survey does too. So those are some starting points. And of course all the computer-world histories, though I don't recall much from those I had to read that one summer at the Smithsonian that explained why Seattle, of all places. Maybe it was just where people happened to be from, since the early companies were all over the country.

Anyway, the posturing has to start with the title. It just needs to. You could call your Seattle history...I dunno, Even Flow or use some unfamous Nirvana lyric, or, to be properly indie, some obscure lyric from a Mother Love Bone song, so people in the know could get that whole warm feeling of being hip once more. (Knowing the hipster-cred grading scale, I get like a C+: I know of MLB and know their lead singer OD'd before they got big and some of the other guys then formed Pearl Jam, but don't know any MLB songs, much less lyrics.)

But conscious hipness is not at all James Marcus's problem. Written more in sorrow than in anger, Amazonia zooms him from edge-of-poverty desperation (multiple credit cards maxed out, ratty car) to I-coyly-won't-say-how-much money from being employee 8 at Amazon (but less than you think, apparently: reminds me of a friend who worked at AskJeeves after grad school and was a millionaire for 10 minutes when it went public). He really thinks Amazon can be a force for good in the lit world (keeps quoting Emerson to suggest how) and keeps pushing to promote good stuff, but commercial exigencies shove that to the side, and then automatized reviews and recommendations take over, and the poor guy ends up with not much of a job. Amazon creator Jeff Bezos comes off as a pretty decent guy, and there aren't too many absurdist tales; in fact, he's not too good at it--the one composite character whose villainy we're supposed to boo comes off as a fairly typical managerial type. (Also, cameo by the younger version of one of the Moms of my son's classmate in preschool, which is somehow slightly reassuring. Don't really know her, but she seems nice enough. Wonder if she knows any Mother Love Bone lyrics?
...Damn. Looked her up, and her husband used to be the CEO of a major internet travel site. They can probably afford private school just fine.)

As a story of grotesque dotcom excess, Marcus's book is pretty restrained, which is perhaps, on reflection a kind of testimony to Jeff Bezos, among others. There are a few over-the-top, or near-the-top, retreats, but no $6000 shower curtains, which always strike me as THE anecdote to retail in re: dotcom excess, much like Diamond Jim Brady eating his stomach four inches to the table in the Gilded Age. (OK, who DID write the definitive dot-com excess book? Maybe one of the Enron studies?) But as a serious-minded tale of the literary/commercial life now, it's useful, and not as scary as I might have feared.

year in review 2007

OK, been a while, but I've been working and stuff. Four classes=more than twice as much work as two.

My apologies. Will get back on the horse in the new year. Didn't make any resolutions on 12/31, but writing some more is a good one. Other than that: be a good dad and husband and son and brother, love people, take care of things, like that. My sister-in-law is vowing to run another marathon, which would make 2 for her, and one of my friends from college did so, too. She said it was mostly a matter of mental discipline. Those always sound exciting--well, not exciting, but improving, and nice to be done with--in the abstract, but you can't read while running a marathon, which sucks. Someone should change that. In the interim, will probably stick with the gym.

So:

minutes exercised: 22,845. I have reached and passed the compulsive goal of an hour a day. This works out to 62.6 minutes per day, which does show a nicely insane level of self-improvement, or compulsiveness, or both, which I suppose I already knew. Dunno if I can go for 24,000 this year, which would require an additional 1115 minutes over the course of the year, a piddling 3 min./day, give or take. Hmm.

books read: 222. Disappointing. Down 2.3% from last year, and down a distressing 14% from two years ago. On the other hand, Isaac is doing a lot more than he was 2 years ago and is more fun to hang around, so not a huge loss. Should probably read more short mysteries if I just want to get the numbers up for the sake of...nothing, really. Did re-subscribe to the extremely excellent Hard Case neo-pulp novels, which I reviewed (fairly decent in retrospect; not the best job ever, but a review that got at what was good and limited about the endeavor) a while ago and which are great fun.

So, favorite fiction:

Spiotta, Eat the Document
Mengestu, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears
Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Fforde, The Fourth Bear
Shapiro, The Cross and Other Jewish Stories
Horn, In the Image
Bolano, The Savage Detectives; Distant Star
Diaz, Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Ferris, Then We Came to the End
Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Non-fiction:

Millard, The River of Doubt
Stewart, The Places in Between
Trynin, Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be
Packer, The Assassins' Gate
Holland, Persian Fire
Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire
Roberts & Klibanoff, The Race Beat
Mackintosh-Smith, The Hall of a Thousand Columns
Bissell, The Father of All Things
Hafner, Defying Hitler
Cohn, Tricksta
Weiner, Legacy of Ashes
Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road
Roberts, A Sense of the World
Jenkins, The Real All-Americans
Sheffield, Love is a Mix Tape
Saviano, Gomorrah

More comments and thoughts to come.

Some questions and remarks from the year:

1. We had a long, looong flight back here from NY. Plane delayed 3.5 hours at JFK. We were in the international terminal, but even there the cultural options are sadly limited. And their papaya, the existence of which at an airport terminal is awe-inspiring, is sadly just not as good as it is at the original on 86th. (The lower west side one--dunno what the 'hood is called at 14th/7th--is about the same.) Attempting, mostly unsuccessfully, to induce Isaac to sleep, watched a lot of TV. Reality shows all over the place, including one where they were competing to be made into models. Made me wonder if the pervasiveness of reality programs has made people somehow more interesting, in that many of us now conceive of ourselves as characters and need to have a storehouse of remarks for, not any situation, but the limited number in which reality TV deals. Or has it made people more narcissistic, since they now conceive of the self as a product competing for mental and visual shelf space in the marketplace of people? Discuss.

2. Was conversing with Dan about how ESPN didn't do a lot of journalism and how they were trying to make their interviews more interesting. Then watched some footage of this enlightening exchange with Clinton Portis:

interviewer: Clinton, four weeks ago, this team was down and out. Now you're in the playoffs. What happened in between?
Portis: The team came together, man. We came together as a team.

Dan agreed that this was excellent interviewing. While you're here, read his piece about why the Red Sox victory this year was sort of unsatisfying, or not unsatisfying, but not particularly satisfying. OK, stupid website doesn't seem to let you search by name. When it does, you get 28,400 results. D'oh. Will check with him and get some pieces linked.

3. I was thinking about Being John Malkovich. Literally, the idea came to me: I wouldn't want to be inside his head, or rather I have no particular interest in being there as opposed to in my own, which most days is a sufficiently weird place to be. I would rather operate someone's body for a while, or maybe just sort of take it out for a spin, since I assume I couldn't steer something that fast or powerful for that long. So let's assume that you can operate said body as well as its possessor. On that assumption, I would happily spend my 10 minutes being LeBron James. Maybe it's a common white-guy fantasy, to want to dunk and jump that high, but so be it. Will ask my students their thoughts. Yours?

4. Lawrence Weschler (read some of the entries from the convergences contest) came to talk at UHS. Pretty much satisfied my entire purpose in getting the public-programs job. Wrote a nice inscription in my old North Point edition of Boggs' Bills, Shapinsky's Karma. And he was friendly and hung around to talk with kids and autograph copies of his book, plus a napkin for the Canters' mom when I sold out of copies. Peter Cole also was in town and came by. Student turnout disappointing. But got him to autograph a copy of his book for my parents, and he read the poems (his translations of Jewish poetry from Muslim Spain) wonderfully. Jason Roberts came. Kid turnout horrendous. He was super-nice about it, which was exceedingly generous of him. Have worked on the promo angle since then, but bribes seem to work best, which is a little sad.

5.  I spent far too much time watching  YouTube, egged on by several current or former students. You know who you are. Some of my faves: the psychic caterpillar Thai tea ad; the Syndicate of Sound lip-syncing "Hey Little Girl"; a BBC hoax about the Swiss spaghetti harvest--really the only useful thing gleaned from a dumb book on This is Spinal Tap; an excellent Franco song--though you can see his stage show here; Beny More performing; far too many ultimate-frisbee videos, including the so-called "greatest," a play that is, admittedly, hella impressive (here and here), and this whole sequence of original, parody, and then reference to the original (there's probably a boring cult-studies journal article to be made from this, though not by me); Flight of the Conchords doing "Business Time" (or here, live in concert) and their, um, rap song. (Must be the only rap ever containing the word "perchance," which is the point and is alone a signal of genius.) What bugs me is reading the comments on so many posts: sent a student a link to Triumph of the Will so she could understand fascism, and fully half the comments are Holocaust deniers. Ecch. Search 9/11 and you get pages of nutty nuts explaining their nuttiness, nuttily. With indisputable video evidence, naturally. I wonder what the consequences of this will be for future students, though mine assure me that, due to the combination of mass audiences and anonymity, "everyone knows" YouTube comments are insane, or the work of sociopathic twelve-year-olds, or both.

6. I taught a class on Jewish history through literature. Major point of the class for the students, or at least a vocal segment of them, was that Jews should have guns. More Jews should have guns. And more of them. Not sure how I feel about that as the outcome, though I suppose I should have expected it, given the way I designed things. Also decided Isaac Babel and Primo Levi really are that good; thanks to Ben Z. for expanding my brain with his paper on Levi.

7. My cable provider lets you watch music on demand. Watched far too many metal videos while making the bed. Man, they really work those double-bass pedals. Not enough videos where people dress as monsters, since they have the same two GWAR vids and none by Lordi. Are there other monster bands out there? Also watched some Led Zeppelin shows. In the 1969 show, Jimmy Page is wearing Levis and an argyle sweater-vest. There are at least two guys in the front row wearing jackets and ties. In 1969. At a Led Zeppelin show. The mind reels. (Speaking of which, in this one from '69 there are two moms with babies visible in the audience!) By the 1973 show, the universe is righted again: there's a groin-cam focused on Robert Plant's lemon, which looks ready to let its juice run down his leg, and Page is wearing an open shirt and his Mystical Wizard pants. Had me worried for a second there.

On Unpacking My Library

Brownie points for catching the reference, grandiose as it is. I was bored and ego-surfing, or, which I think is a much better term, "mesearching," and found that SF Weekly had digitized a bunch of old material, some of which included a bunch of record reviews I'd written more than a decade ago. It was a weird point in my life: just finishing up grad school and trying to guess where my life would go, and in the middle of about a decade of doing some light freelancing for local and national pubs. (I also wrote for the Bay Guardian, though their digitized articles are only from 2001 on, and I did it well before then.) I couldn't handle freelancing temperamentally and was even worse at the whole use-me-I'm-great tactic freelancers have to perfect (oddly, in retrospect, similar to the tactic that prospective professors also have to master to convince their hypothetical colleagues that they will contribute a lot to the department--but not too much, since then you'd outshine others--and, more importantly, won't be a coffee-break schemer or faculty-meeting agitator whose hire you could suffer and regret for thirty years), so that was never a real career path. But I did a lot of this for a while--dug through some ridiculously old "files" the other month, including the bankbook I'd closed out to start grad school, with the $2000 I'd stashed from four years of my library job in high school, and found some index cards listing 20-30 pieces per year for a while, mostly short CD reviews.

Reading your old stuff can be hard. Haven't looked at the dissertation in a while and have no reason to, though my expectation is that it'd be dutiful, stiff, and with luck occasionally smart-sounding. But it feels to me like something composed from a theoretical attitude to life, most of all, which weakened the power and quality I could bring to the prose; it didn't read like the work of someone who really knew how life might connect to the stuff in a history book, or at least who could convincingly simulate that connection. The worst thing out there is some horrible, confused Tom Carson/Bob Christgau/J. Hoberman travesty I perpetrated on the world in the name of...getting my name out there, which was seen as a big accomplishment for and by all of us wannabe profs. Susan said at the time, "this is not very good."

"Oh, no," I replied, "it's thoughtful and complicated. And maybe terrible, but in an interestingly pretentious way."

Well, one of us was right. I have absolutely no clue what it's meant to say at this point. And due to the timelessness, etc. of the Web, it will be with me unto eternity. (Though I do have to point out its use as an example in some Russian ethnographic journal's submission guidelines, which is about the broadest fame it deserves.)

Anyhow, I read my reviews of albums by MC Ren, Rage Against the Machine, Tupac (pretty prescient, that one), and a longer piece about books on rap, all of which I'd read at that point, which isn't bad. Final verdict? Not terrible. Not embarrassing. I still often come off as the far less adept younger brother of friends of mine who were worlds of magnitude better as rock critics than I was, and of course the best moments still basically come off as outtakes from Christgau's Unreleased Reviews or something.

But still: not horrendous. More than anything, that's a relief.

Davis, Led Zeppelin IV

I used to read Erik Davis in the Village Voice, back before the reign of evil, and thought, boy, he's brilliant. Had him come to school and speak with Michael Rauner about their book, and continued to think so. Decided I should get into some of these 33 1/3 (referred to by one student who saw me reading it as "33 1/2," and how's that for old age?) series books, and what better place to start? I don't think I'm going to be reading about Neutral Milk Hotel, Pink Floyd, or some of the other albums, but...Paul's Boutique? Replacements' Let It Be? My Bloody Valentine? Live at the Apollo? Sign me up.

Dipped into the Ramones book and eyyh, but this is more genius. Davis knows everything about mystical religions, weird Celtic ruins, and odd traditions, and he's absolutely great at translating it into crit-speak about the music; you get a palpable sense here of the world Zep inhabited, or made up, complete with the bluesy, boozy self-satisfactions and self-inventions and Plant v Page. (Plus, he says that when you play live or recorded versions of "Stairway" backward, you hear the same sound that could be "My sweet Satan" or "miii shweee Saat." Gotta love that kind of ingenuity and devotion to the investigation of secrets.) Not sure if I want to sit down for a listen to follow the whole mythological journey of Percy, the album's protagonist, but boy, did it make me remember how great it was to read someone who can merge mystical, musical, historical, cultural, and critical registers so effortlessly--the exact intellectual counterpart of the various kinds of non-standard, or "peculiar," as he calls them, forms of knowledge and sprituality that his work explores so thoughtfully.

Lapham, With the Beatles

Not a highlight of new journalism, but a solid piece of vicinity reporting (the genre invented, I think, by Gay Talese's piece "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," about not getting the story). The Beatles are taking up residence with the Maharishi in 1968 India, and they're surrounded by vacuous exploiters, gurus, and variously stoned-sounding Americans. Lapham gets to talk to some of the boys, briefly, and I suppose the good part is that they come off well--John casually cynical and unwilling to be hoodwinked; Ringo genially ready to let George pursue his muse; Paul fair-minded about what he does and doesn't get. Worth the half-hour it takes to read, though hardly much of a revelation or lost classic.

Metal: A Headbanger's Journey

I was actually trying to rent Heavy Metal Parking Lot on Netflix, which apparently doesn't carry it. (Though I can watch the whole thing on YouTube in parts, which isn't too hard.) Found this instead. Sam Dunn is a longhaired Canadian cultural anthropologist who was and remains a serious metalhead, and his film considers the culture qua culture, so he interviews all the relevant academics (Donna Gaines, Deena Weinstein, who Jewish-motherly disses his puny musculature, Robert Walser) and some of the musicians, plus Malcolm Dunn, also in the VH1 metal series, who looks like a goblin. (I also discovered, alarmingly, from this series that I kind of like Iron Maiden. Ugh.) Not a bad history/sociology, even if Dunn is a little too quick to gloss over the weird he-man/girly-man gender politics, as well as the will-to-power moves much of the music indulges in. But at least he raises them, and he looks at the subculture as a sympathetic participant-observer (am kinda hoping he writes something, too), which gets some of these people to open up to him. He also drags in some late-medieval pictures of death in the house of life, then segues to Cannibal Corpse, whose album covers all show badly-rendered corpses and skeletons erupting from people. Argument is that HM focuses on stuff we want to forget about or erase, which makes it honest and healthy--in life we are still in the presence of death, etc. Not sure that the health conditions obtaining in medieval life as compared to those today is the best argument for that proposition (though some death-metal songs about aging would be weirdly apposite and counter-intuitive), nor a defense of a worldview composed solely of corpses and autopsies. (At least Carcass is vegan, so presumably their world really IS composed of ceaseless violence perpetrated by us meat-eaters and living-thing-eaters.)

Funniest bit is an interview with these two goofs from Norwegian black-metal band Mayhem (whose endless backstory is so far beyond cliche as to be basically unbelievable; their second, I think, lead singer, Dead, shot himself in the early 90s, and his bandmates headed out to buy cameras and take pictures before calling the police) named Necrobutcher and Blasphemer. Norwegian black-metal bands are really serious about their paganism and Satanism, whatever exactly that means, though Susan observes that Necrobutcher is a redundant name, since you gotta kill to butcher, but presumably "Butcher" didn't sound scary enough. Anyway, poor Sam asks them if they have a comment about/response to the question of whether black metal is losing touch with its audience and Necro says, "who are they? who are you talking to? Fuck them. Do I have a comment? Yeah. Fuck you." Cut to poor Sam looking abashed and vowing that beer and interviews don't always mix well.

Ahhh. Someone else agreed that this was hilarious: watch it on YouTube.

The extended disc features include a really detailed genealogy, so I tried listening to some of these bands on YouTube.

Venom: really silly, and can't play that well. But, um, scary, I guess.
Arch Enemy: only female vocalist to do the growling vocal style. I like it when people sing, it turns out. But the guy behind Arch Enemy also formed Spiritual Beggars, a 70s-style hard-rock band, that I quite liked.
Cannibal Corpse: hugest lead singer since Glenn Danzig. Music goes buddabuddabuddabuddabudda. Incomprehensible roared vocals.

I did kind of dig Celtic Frost, though. Awesomely, lead Frosteur Tom G. Warrior has his own blog.

I kinda still prefer 80s hair metal, which makes me a pussy or something, I'm sure. Oh well. I tried.

Addendum: so I kept on listening and sort of could get into the growling death-metal vocal thing. (In black metal, you scream. In death, you growl.) I kinda liked the extremely wanky Finns Children of Bodom (lead singer also lead guitarist, and guess who gets 2 of every 3 camera shots in the videos?) and sometimes the Vikingy Swedes Amon Amarth, though they have only one song that they're written 40-50 times, about dying heroically like a manly warrior. Good at the hair-fling thing, though, esp. when all guitar players AND lead singer do it at once. There's also the hilarious Finns Immortal, whose guitarist blew out his tendons with too much practice. They play mega-fast and sing remarkably pretentious lyrics about death and carnage--I think black metal is the boy equivalent of being into Sylvia Plath and writing endless exquite poetry about how nobody appreciates you. Celtic Frost is still kind of cool (there's this interview on YouTube where they discuss sexism and satanism in metal [from what I can tell] in Swiss-German quite articulately, then play), but their sound is so intentionally ugly that it's hard for me to listen for very long.

Also watched Heavy Metal Parking Lot on YouTube. What a great service they are. I found it kinda snotty, actually--the kind of thing that snide indie-rockers bootlegged in the 80s to sneer at metalheads over. Not that they didn't deserve it, but it's not like the crowd of mopey sensitive boys outside a Smiths show would have been intrinsically better. It's just that it's uncool to make fun of them, since this already happens in school. But I was there, and being sensitive is in and of itself no guarantee of depth. And I say this despite the fact that everyone in the film looks and dresses like the kids who beat me up, or mostly said clever stuff like "I'm gonna kill you!" in high school. Maybe I have Stockholm Syndrome.

Heavy: The Story of Metal

Ludicrously addictive. Four hours. Sabbath to Dee Snider putting on the wig and makeup (and doing 20 pushups so his saggy chest doesn't disappoint the fans) these days. An entire hour on hair metal. The story of air guitar, which apparently had an entire Brit club in the 70s where guys brought in "hardboard" guitars to mime the solos, one of whom is shown as an homage in Judas Priest's "Breaking the Law" vid. Dee Snider is hilarious. Sebastian Bach is hilarious. David Coverdale looks like an alligator who went to the spa. Everybody does Ozzy imitations, including Penelope Spheeris. Dave Mustaine tells a joke(!). Former wrestler Chris Jericho is hilarious. Nikki Sixx explains why the only thing the Crue could have done to ruin their reps was be seen drinking glasses of milk. Ronnie James Dio explains the origin of the devil horns, which are the old Italian mal'occhio. Not a 666. (Which, by the way, bible scholar Marcus Borg says is just gematria code for Emperor Nero, whose imminent end John of Patmos was prophesying in the Book of Revelations.)

Shortcomings: not enough mockery of gratuitous umlauts. Rob Halford's sexuality as the root of the leather craze in 70s Brit metal undiscussed, even by Rob Halford, except for one mention by Scott Ian. Silliness and pomposity of Iron Maiden not sufficiently attested to or mocked.

So, inspired, or something, I watched The Decline of Western Civilization Part II, which remains excellent. And then I YouTubed Motley Crue's "Too Young to Fall in Love," which I remembered as having bad kung-fu (yes) and the Crue shooting lasers out of their fingers (sadly, no). I kinda preferred "Looks that Kill," especially the part where the stripper/spider-goddess shoots some sort of beam at Mick Mars' guitar right before the solo (at about 2:16 into the song), giving him special soloing powers. I also watched Dokken's "Into the Fire," which I really, really liked when I was 18.

I am no longer 18. I did, however, find this awe-inspiring Bollywood vid, which Isaac liked as well. Turned out I already owned the song ("Chaiyya Chaiyya"), though I think you'll agree that it's much cooler when illustrated with about 40 people dancing atop a train as it wanders the countryside.

Eccentric Soul: The Capsoul Label

Not actually a book, it's true. Though the stories inside each of these albums are worth almost as much as the music. This is my favorite so far from the excellent Numero Group, though the selection of funk from Belize is pretty amazing, too. Capsoul was a Columbus, Ohio ("Capital City Soul") label in the early 70s, an essentially one-man creation with a small-town roster of talent that sometimes sounded like Stax/Volt, sometimes like Motown, and sometimes like its own thing. "Number One," by label head honcho Bill Moss, is an instant keeper, as is his power-of-positive-thinking "Sock It to 'em Soul Brother," which has shout-outs to Willie Mays and OJ Simpson, who I've never heard of as anyone's race man before this. Liner notes are worth the price of admission, none more so than the psychodrama of the Bandit label, whose head guy was running more or less a sex cult. Also, just listened to the extremely bathetic "Go On Fool," by Marion Black, which sounds like he had a lot of fights with his wife, left her, then wrote it all down at the height of his anger: he comes home, she's watching the soaps in bed and doesn't have dinner ready; he married her, then realized she had three kids out of wedlock; he loved them as his own but she still treated him bad. It's scary how direct the whole thing is--all that pain poured straight out of his heart.

Neate, Where You're At

A really interesting take on hip-hop from a British journalist. His scope is worldwide, so NYC isn't much more important to him than Rio, Jo-burg, or Tokyo; or let's say that he's as interested in what people make of it outside of its home territory as he did in 1980s England.  He's refreshingly undoctrinaire, too, though the bizarro racial fetishizations he sees in Tokyo do kind of freak him out.  But he gets lots of people to talk about how liberating it sounded and felt to hear this kind of music and think it might represent you, too, if you nudged it in the right directions.  There are also some great anecdotes about Dead Prez going to Africa and just messing everything up with the locals.  I also read
Quinn's Nuthing But a G Thang, which got me oh-so-many notices from kids.  I read Tricia Rose's book and reviewed it way back when it came out but have missed a lot of the big ones since.  This, too, is by a Brit, and though there's a lot of cult-studs stuff that I suppose has to be there, she does a pretty solid job of making a case for gangsta rap as both product of and reaction to Reaganism, postindustrial decline, and postsoul cultural politics.  What troubles me, though, is that same thing that was troubling as far back as, say, Paul Willis' Learning to Labor, the idea that apparently aesthetic judgment has to get tossed out the window when you locate these art forms, or responses, in their fullest context.  I mean, does it bother her to listen to the 300th gangsta song about banging hos? I hope so, but her theory won't let her have the human reaction. So the pick of the litter for me among recent hip-hop books is Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop, which is to my mind the best book on the breadth of the subject.  Chang's biggest insight is to write the book as essentially art history rather than musical history or popcult history; that way he can place the music (and the moves, styles, and idea[l]s that created and accompanied it) in broad ways that remind me of, say, Marshall Berman's classic All That Is Solid Melts Into Air.  He treats it as music, style, cultural politics, politicized culture, but most of all art, which also allows room for aesthetic judgments that Quinn can't make.  He's very, perhaps overly, generous to PE (though, on the other hand, his empathy with their college-radio roots is entirely clear, as well his conveying of the probably incomprehensible-to-them suddenness of their elevation to spokesmen for 250 years of anger), and barely mentions Run-DMC, which makes me sad on a personal level. But the chapter where he discusses the The Source's giving itself over to commerce in the late 90s strikes me as the sharpest, fairest-minded discussion of these issues I've seen.
So, y'know, do him a favor and buy a copy.