This was originally featured in Negative Guest List:
WE NEVER LEARN - BOOK REVIEW
I dunno what dopers edited this heap and what yahoos decided to publish it, but when Eric Davidson takes his selectric for a spin its like he has personal vendetta against clarity. The prose in 'We Never Learn' ping pongs from a tangled pileup of half-baked ideas to ponderous sentences stating the obvious, through ugly meanderings, misleading strands that go nowhere, with enough time to inject the entire spectrum of inductive fallacies with horrible attempts at hepcat patter that makes reading it a frustrating, grim slog. Think I'm pulling your leg? Take a look at this 'paragraph' about the Supersuckers:
"The Supersuckers were a quintessential example of the 90’s major-label-machine practice of casually juggling band fortunes before all the pieces end up getting fumbled to the curve. Mind you, I would have never called the ‘Suckers “victims.(a)” By the mid-90’s, the stories of working-class(b) rock dudes getting starry-eyed and ripped off mercilessly at the hands of evil corporate giants© was a tale as old as that of Icarus.(d) So in my opinion, (e) if you were a young band who signed a bad contract or let some manager rip you off, you either hadn’t studied your rock history (which encompasses the PhD-level workload of reading the occasional issue of Rolling Stone and watching a few VH!1 Behind The Music episodes(f)); or you just plain wanted lots more money and/or wanted to be a big star-which is fine, but this is the music biz in America, (g) and even your grandmammy knows the percentages are stacked against that bet." (h)
a.) Why not? Seriously, its like someone saying "oh man, I got a great story - oh nevermind" then walking away.
b.) ED has a pro-midwest, pro 'working class' (and c'mon guys aren't coal miners, they are touring musicians or people with part time jobs at record stores) bias throughout the book that comes off as condescending, intellectually muddled, and silly.
c.) This 'evil corporations' is simplistic childish skunkshit, its a media companies that were selling compact discs then and are on their asses now, not a company trying to privatize rainfall in Bolivia.
d.) Not to nitpick, but the phonograph was invented in the summer of 1887 and Icarus dates to, I dunno, at least 500 years before the birth of Christ.
e.) Well put, its not going to be a 'fact' or something. Why would someone read a non-fiction book for that shit?
f.) Sarcasm or sincerity, not both.
g.) Because record companies in other countries are nothing but fair.
i.) So an editor read that and thought, "yes, that is a fince, lucid sentence that is perfectly clear in what it is trying to convey"?
The book has a huge problem at its very foundation: the, (sigh) 'gunk punk undergut' as ED puts it, is underground for a reason - its just not going to appeal to most of the people who haven't already heard it (not to mention that the majority has aged like a plum left in a toilet), and for those that haven't, the writing is neither evocative nor descriptive enough to turn anyone on to it - ED's hipster patois reads like Jimmy McDonough, age 11, or James Ellroy after a head injury.
Much like ED's band, the new Bomb Turks, the 'We Never Learn' is repetitive, unoriginal, and not especially smart. He introduces a band. There is an interview. There is either a story of the band doing something amusing, or a heap of superlative-laced prose that doesn't actually inform the confused reader what the band sounds like. Then the band breaks up and goes back to their dayjobs.
ED still finds time to shoehorn in tangents like the superiority of socialism (to put it kindly, ED is not a political theorist, his myopic, dimwit interpretation of politics is based on how well competing political systems treat touring bands - "Hey we just played for Ghengis Khan, he gave us some stew, all the wine we can drink, and concubines! Obviously rape, pillage, and genocide are superior political systems - look how how great they treat touring Americans!"), and plenty of ink on the New Bomb Turks, who I find dull both sonically and story-wise.
You want to hear about The New Bomb Turks' banal experience with Epitaph and Gearhead? Two bad labels barely related to the subject at hand? If you're going to read this, you'd better hope you do.
All of this formulaic jibber jabber done poorly is a shame, because the interviews are entertaining, even when the subject is a reactionary, childish crybaby that believes their own bullshit (Billy Childish) or a figure I distinctly remember nobody - including many of the participants in the book - regarding with anything but disdain (something never mentioned in the book, but take a bow, Johan Kugelburg) or if it's a band I couldn't care less about, there tends to be something amusing. Oh, and I forgot how many people died. Lot's.
ED's term gunk-punk is vague, and he doesn't go out of his way to define it. I get the feeling that if he did, it would be such an inarticulate jumble that it wouldn't help. There are some real puzzlers of bands that he chooses to cover, and some of the bands are sitting on a street corner, wondering when the relevance bus is going to arrive (sorry, it left a long time ago, and it ain't comin' back) but, to ED's um "credit" (a strong word) compiling the bands out of the incestual pit of low record sales and difficult-to-prove levels of lasting influence into some kind of consensus would be next to impossible. ED set up a no-win situation, further hampered by his inability to write a fucking sentence.
Here's a few clunkers I marked down in a typical chapter, with a notepad next to me, before it got too frustrating to finish to stop every few sentences to mark something down.
"Extremely irascible and musically regimented bands like Tar, God Bullies, Hammerhead, and Janitor Joe were major daddy-issue destructors who took the heaviest of SST's post-core pound and further jackhammered it into a pulp. In other words, powerful, sometimes scary, often laborious, but not very sexy or fun." (pg. 59) Did Justin Timberlake jump in and finish the last sentence for him?
"[A]nother connection to the garage trash scene that would soon be pumping out singles with the veracity of a Beijing sperm clinic." (pg. 60) A sub-catskills funnyman airball of a metaphor that would make the lowest common denominator hang its head in shame, and I don't know if he meant 'velocity' instead of veracity (which would make marginally more sense) but both are wrong. This ought to give you an idea of the intellectual playing field this book is on (hint: all the participants have to wear football helmets and oven mitts).
"[Rick Sim's] lyrics [are] like spun-out Marc Bolan gulping down boiling Jolt!" (pg. 63) 1. No they aren't. 2. That's impossible. 3. Even if it was possible, they wouldn't sound like that.
"The Didjits hit the stage with mosquito ass-tight rhythms and ruffs that buzzed and squealed around like the guitars were jacked right into said mosquito's sphincter..." (pg. 63) This is the kind of sentence that causes an editor to wince then smack a writer in the back of the head. Is anyone going to read that and think "well, the guitars apparently sound like they were plugged 'right into said mosquito's sphincter' - I better get MY sphincter to the store. Guitars that sound like they were plugged right into said mosquito's rectum is exactly the type of music I find intriguing." ..?
On pg. 65, and at least once after, ED uses the word "asininely" which, while possibly a real word, is such an ungainly example of the English language that it is only suitable for a verbal exercise in a speech impediment therapy class.
Twice in this same shitass chapter, Davidson tries to define punk rock - a fruitless and adolescent enterprise if there ever was one, on pg. 45 "the point of punk rock is anything but reflection," which um, is a totally intangible, unprovable, unqualified sentence that doesn't have anything to do with the paragraph its placed in. Or on pg. 66, "punk rock-given its platelet-shifting thesis that "anyone can do it"-should never be about instrumental proficiency, unless its in the service of confounding expectations or just because you can." So, in other words, it shouldn't be, unless it does. Thanks for clearing that up, numbnuts. Also, you used 'instrumental' wrong.
ED defines his rough end of the era as the 2000 Las Vegas Shakedown at the Gold Coast Hotel, an event I attended. Reading 'We Never Learn' brought it all it all back... The broken glass in the hallways... A drunk sliding down the escalator railing, and his momentum sends him sailing and tumbling across the floor, nearly knocking over the pensioners at the tables... The semi-panicked hush that came over the hotel room party when a too-loud-to-be-anything-but-the-cops authoritative knock hit and everyone wondered what to do with the drugs (turned out to be hotel security, overtaxed that weekend)... Andre Williams telling me how he just "sucked on" chicken fingers, holding up a chicken finger, half of it dissolved of all nutrients, for evidence... Sitting at the bar, the guy next to me ordering the boot special - a glass cowboy boot that could fit three beers, with a three shots of whiskey poured in - I turned to my friend, turned back, and the guy was long gone, replaced by pile of vomit on the bar... Tim Warren in front of the hotel on the blacktop in the morning sun, playing with his dog (Rest In Peace, Bando)... Before I knew it, I felt kinda almost sorta misty, despite not wanting to, getting dragged down a somewhat embarrassing-in-retrospect memory lane by this extended love letter to Tim Warren & the Crypt catalog. It was like looking back at a yearbook you thought you threw away and getting a bit choked up anyway. Too bad the book didn't have a better shepherd.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Real Men Can't Read
Real Men Can't Read: Gustav Hasford's A Gypsy Good Time
"Someday Agent Orange will come to eat me-there are nights when I can hear the darkness coming up the stairs." - Gustav Hasford
Gustav Hasford was born & raised in a shitkicker town in Alabama. At age 18 he went to Vietnam. He was a prodigious reader. He loved books. He love lapsed into illegality. Hasford was living in Morro Bay California when obtained a library card for the local University in San Luis Obispo. He had managed to wrack up 87 overdue books and library fines totaling 3K. The library, understandably concerned, discovered his library card contained a falsified address and social security number. The campus fuzz busted into his storage locker. They found 9,816 books in 396 cardboard boxes. At least twenty percent were stolen from libraries from the United States, England and Australia.
Hasford is the only man in history to be an Oscar Nominee while being under investigation for stealing books from college libraries. He earned a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Full Metal Jacket, which was based on his first, and at the time, only, published novel, The Short-Timers. The best lines from the movie are his. Hasford managed to wrestle writing credit from the grasp of Stanley Kubrick and Michael Herr, which is akin to a dog on a tricycle placing in a Formula One race. There was a talk of a warrant being out for him at the Oscar Ceremony. It didn't matter, he didn't give enough of a shit to put on a tux and show up. He turned himself into the authorities, pleaded no contest and was sentenced to six months. He published two more books and died four years later in Greece.
He published three books in his too-short life. The first two, The Short-Timers and The Phantom Blooper are companion pieces, based partially on his 10 months as a combat correspondent with the 1st Marine Division in Vietnam. In the first book, Hasford's stand-in, Private Joker, goes through basic training before being sent to Vietnam. The book ends with him mercy killing his friend from basic training. Here's a description of the jungle from another Marine combat vet, Karl Marlantes' excellent, but far more straightforward. Matterhorn: A Novel Of The Vietnam War: "Mellas felt a sleight breeze from the mountains rustling across the grass valley below him to the north. He was acutely aware of the natural world. He imagined the jungle, pulsing with life, quickly enveloping Matterhorn, Eiger, and all the other shorn hilltops, covering everything. All around him the mountains and the jungle whispered and moved, as if they were aware of his presence but indifferent to it." Now here's a description of the jungle from Hasford, captured in his bleak, minimalist, funny prose: "Humping [walking] in the rain forest is like climbing a stairway of shit in an enormous green room constructed by ogres for the confinement of monster plants." The whole book is minimalist, oblique, frightening, with streak of black humor a mile wide.
The sequel has Private Joker captured by the NVA and taken to their village. His existence with the Vietnamese as idylic as Hasford ever gets, without cloying sentiment. His prose is precise, poetic, and sparse. He observes his Vietnamese comrades; "Beyond the pagoda fifty teenaged farmers, strong young men and woman, are hard at work, chopping soggy clods of cold mud out of the jungle floor with hoes, then planting the red seeds of the future into rich black soil without saying goodbye." A similar observation amongst the Americans is just as lean, but amps the ugliness: "In two days the flying cranes will carry off the last piece of expensive American machinery and the last of the Marine grunts at Khe Sanh will sky out on gunships. Then, when night falls, the jungle will emerge from out of the darkness and will move like a black glacier across the red clay of No Man's land and will silently consume our trash-strewn fortress." Private Joker lives and sympathizes with the NVA, before he is 'rescued,' and injured by Americans. He returns to the United States, then decides to return to the Vietnam and work with the NVA as a farmer.
Both of his Vietnam books are online at the excellent www.gustavhasford.com curated by Hasford's cousin, Jason Aaron. His final book, however is more difficult to find.
Hasford's experience in Vietnam left his scarred, but his experience in Hollywood left him with a brontosaurs-scale bone to pick, and it comes out in spades in his final, an unjustly forgotten novel, A Gypsy Good Time. The book's protagonist is Dowdy Lewis, and like Hasford he's a combat vet, a book fiend, and a boozer. He works as a rare book dealer in Los Angeles. He meets a woman. Romance ensues. The romance is rapid fire Howard Hawks quips if Howard Hawks liked black humor, misanthropy, and obscenity. The hero tells a women he's trying to woo (and try to picture songbirds carrying around this on a banner held in their beaks) "I will not tolerate endless pageants of coy bullshit from parasitic dingbats." Then everything goes to shit, and the book gets hard-boiled. Its hilarious, you can find a profane howler on each page, and the book jumps in anger and indignation. Hasford has it out for the rich. They are lazy, casually evil, and filled with contempt for everyone else.The only people the are spared Hasford's considerable scorn are his partner, Red, an elderly book dealer that specializes in non-fiction first hand accounts of the old west, a drug dealer, and the homeless Vietnam vets that Lewis knows are the only people outside of the fleeting, doomed romance described with any tenderness and affection. But he really has it out for Hollywood. A woman tells our hero:
"I came to L.A. when I was fifteen. I was a runaway. I like clothes and jewels and I'm not ashamed. I was a hooker until I was sixteen. I spent five years out in Malibu, trying to suck gold out of a rich man's cock. He died of old age. In his will he didn't leave me one red cent. Now I'm in show business"
And she isn't even one of the more unsympathetic characters. Hollywood is painted as outwardly venal, unapologetically corrupt, and murderous. "Hollywood is where hopeful young people come to sell their hearts and minds for emeralds and rubies and work like dogs and get bought off for lifetimes with Gummi Bears and Cracker Jack prizes until they have nothing left in the breadbox but broken promises and end up begging for food stamps and welfare checks just to stay alive… Movie people lie when they talk in their sleep. Movie people swim around Catalina Island with a knife and a fork, hoping to meet a shark. In Hollywood, people walk up and steal the food right off your plate. Movie people will suck the marrow out of your bones for a penny, then they give you a bad check for the penny. Then they dig up your dead grandmother and sell her for a souvenir… After a while you can't even hear the lies anymore, after a while the lies blend in with the automobile noises."
Hasford managed to take Chandler, eat him up, and shit him out, in a black hearted, white hot burst of cynicism, anger, and hilarity that was too unique, and far too acerbic, to ever catch on with the general public. It tweaks the conventions of the detective novel and acts as a platform for a chip on the author's shoulder combined with a bugfucked narrative and a mordant view of Los Angeles that makes Day Of The Locust look like it was put out by the Chamber Of Commerce. Critically, it was a treated as a gross anomaly to be ignored. The sales were dismal. Its been out of print for more than a decade. Used, you can get it for around ten bucks online. I got my copy, a trade paperback with an ugly cover with cheap newsprint that has turned the color of rotten teeth, in 1995 at the bookstore in the shopping mall. It took me fifteen years and three moves to get around to reading it. Never read anything like it. Here's a final quote before my final suggestion that you pony up ten dollars to the noble cause of rescuing a dead man's book from the dusty shelves of obscurity, this little slice of poetry during the climax of the book, as the hero drives off towards his destiny and makes an observation along the way…
"We are locked into a river of Detroit iron flowing down the freeway, a rolling river of rubber, painted metal, and glass, automotive madness, a river of rubies glowing into the black night, flowing in tandem with a river of diamonds. The average American would drive his car into the bathroom if the door were wide enough."
The italics are mine, but you get the picture.
"Someday Agent Orange will come to eat me-there are nights when I can hear the darkness coming up the stairs." - Gustav Hasford
Gustav Hasford was born & raised in a shitkicker town in Alabama. At age 18 he went to Vietnam. He was a prodigious reader. He loved books. He love lapsed into illegality. Hasford was living in Morro Bay California when obtained a library card for the local University in San Luis Obispo. He had managed to wrack up 87 overdue books and library fines totaling 3K. The library, understandably concerned, discovered his library card contained a falsified address and social security number. The campus fuzz busted into his storage locker. They found 9,816 books in 396 cardboard boxes. At least twenty percent were stolen from libraries from the United States, England and Australia.
Hasford is the only man in history to be an Oscar Nominee while being under investigation for stealing books from college libraries. He earned a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Full Metal Jacket, which was based on his first, and at the time, only, published novel, The Short-Timers. The best lines from the movie are his. Hasford managed to wrestle writing credit from the grasp of Stanley Kubrick and Michael Herr, which is akin to a dog on a tricycle placing in a Formula One race. There was a talk of a warrant being out for him at the Oscar Ceremony. It didn't matter, he didn't give enough of a shit to put on a tux and show up. He turned himself into the authorities, pleaded no contest and was sentenced to six months. He published two more books and died four years later in Greece.
He published three books in his too-short life. The first two, The Short-Timers and The Phantom Blooper are companion pieces, based partially on his 10 months as a combat correspondent with the 1st Marine Division in Vietnam. In the first book, Hasford's stand-in, Private Joker, goes through basic training before being sent to Vietnam. The book ends with him mercy killing his friend from basic training. Here's a description of the jungle from another Marine combat vet, Karl Marlantes' excellent, but far more straightforward. Matterhorn: A Novel Of The Vietnam War: "Mellas felt a sleight breeze from the mountains rustling across the grass valley below him to the north. He was acutely aware of the natural world. He imagined the jungle, pulsing with life, quickly enveloping Matterhorn, Eiger, and all the other shorn hilltops, covering everything. All around him the mountains and the jungle whispered and moved, as if they were aware of his presence but indifferent to it." Now here's a description of the jungle from Hasford, captured in his bleak, minimalist, funny prose: "Humping [walking] in the rain forest is like climbing a stairway of shit in an enormous green room constructed by ogres for the confinement of monster plants." The whole book is minimalist, oblique, frightening, with streak of black humor a mile wide.
The sequel has Private Joker captured by the NVA and taken to their village. His existence with the Vietnamese as idylic as Hasford ever gets, without cloying sentiment. His prose is precise, poetic, and sparse. He observes his Vietnamese comrades; "Beyond the pagoda fifty teenaged farmers, strong young men and woman, are hard at work, chopping soggy clods of cold mud out of the jungle floor with hoes, then planting the red seeds of the future into rich black soil without saying goodbye." A similar observation amongst the Americans is just as lean, but amps the ugliness: "In two days the flying cranes will carry off the last piece of expensive American machinery and the last of the Marine grunts at Khe Sanh will sky out on gunships. Then, when night falls, the jungle will emerge from out of the darkness and will move like a black glacier across the red clay of No Man's land and will silently consume our trash-strewn fortress." Private Joker lives and sympathizes with the NVA, before he is 'rescued,' and injured by Americans. He returns to the United States, then decides to return to the Vietnam and work with the NVA as a farmer.
Both of his Vietnam books are online at the excellent www.gustavhasford.com curated by Hasford's cousin, Jason Aaron. His final book, however is more difficult to find.
Hasford's experience in Vietnam left his scarred, but his experience in Hollywood left him with a brontosaurs-scale bone to pick, and it comes out in spades in his final, an unjustly forgotten novel, A Gypsy Good Time. The book's protagonist is Dowdy Lewis, and like Hasford he's a combat vet, a book fiend, and a boozer. He works as a rare book dealer in Los Angeles. He meets a woman. Romance ensues. The romance is rapid fire Howard Hawks quips if Howard Hawks liked black humor, misanthropy, and obscenity. The hero tells a women he's trying to woo (and try to picture songbirds carrying around this on a banner held in their beaks) "I will not tolerate endless pageants of coy bullshit from parasitic dingbats." Then everything goes to shit, and the book gets hard-boiled. Its hilarious, you can find a profane howler on each page, and the book jumps in anger and indignation. Hasford has it out for the rich. They are lazy, casually evil, and filled with contempt for everyone else.The only people the are spared Hasford's considerable scorn are his partner, Red, an elderly book dealer that specializes in non-fiction first hand accounts of the old west, a drug dealer, and the homeless Vietnam vets that Lewis knows are the only people outside of the fleeting, doomed romance described with any tenderness and affection. But he really has it out for Hollywood. A woman tells our hero:
"I came to L.A. when I was fifteen. I was a runaway. I like clothes and jewels and I'm not ashamed. I was a hooker until I was sixteen. I spent five years out in Malibu, trying to suck gold out of a rich man's cock. He died of old age. In his will he didn't leave me one red cent. Now I'm in show business"
And she isn't even one of the more unsympathetic characters. Hollywood is painted as outwardly venal, unapologetically corrupt, and murderous. "Hollywood is where hopeful young people come to sell their hearts and minds for emeralds and rubies and work like dogs and get bought off for lifetimes with Gummi Bears and Cracker Jack prizes until they have nothing left in the breadbox but broken promises and end up begging for food stamps and welfare checks just to stay alive… Movie people lie when they talk in their sleep. Movie people swim around Catalina Island with a knife and a fork, hoping to meet a shark. In Hollywood, people walk up and steal the food right off your plate. Movie people will suck the marrow out of your bones for a penny, then they give you a bad check for the penny. Then they dig up your dead grandmother and sell her for a souvenir… After a while you can't even hear the lies anymore, after a while the lies blend in with the automobile noises."
Hasford managed to take Chandler, eat him up, and shit him out, in a black hearted, white hot burst of cynicism, anger, and hilarity that was too unique, and far too acerbic, to ever catch on with the general public. It tweaks the conventions of the detective novel and acts as a platform for a chip on the author's shoulder combined with a bugfucked narrative and a mordant view of Los Angeles that makes Day Of The Locust look like it was put out by the Chamber Of Commerce. Critically, it was a treated as a gross anomaly to be ignored. The sales were dismal. Its been out of print for more than a decade. Used, you can get it for around ten bucks online. I got my copy, a trade paperback with an ugly cover with cheap newsprint that has turned the color of rotten teeth, in 1995 at the bookstore in the shopping mall. It took me fifteen years and three moves to get around to reading it. Never read anything like it. Here's a final quote before my final suggestion that you pony up ten dollars to the noble cause of rescuing a dead man's book from the dusty shelves of obscurity, this little slice of poetry during the climax of the book, as the hero drives off towards his destiny and makes an observation along the way…
"We are locked into a river of Detroit iron flowing down the freeway, a rolling river of rubber, painted metal, and glass, automotive madness, a river of rubies glowing into the black night, flowing in tandem with a river of diamonds. The average American would drive his car into the bathroom if the door were wide enough."
The italics are mine, but you get the picture.
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