Book Review: Bob Mehr's Trouble Boys

The Replacements are an odd band. I feel that they're both over and under rated. They created some powerfully melodic rock n' roll that, underpinned by Paul Westerberg’s clever word play, provided a template for many to express sensitivity disguised by loud distortion and bluster. On the other hand, they were sloppy and in desperate need of editing – some of their music and lyrics sound tossed together at the last minute.

Trouble Boys explores this dynamic and much more. Bob Mehr spins a comprehensive (and well documented) look at the band, painting a vivid picture of early 80s Minneapolis, and the often heartbreaking background of the ‘mats – especially Bob Stinton, who had a truly horrific childhood. It’s almost enough to excuse how often the band sabotaged their career by falling (drunk) on the wrong side of the fine line between good ol’ rock n’ roll rebellion and plain old assholery. I knew they behaved badly, but I wasn’t expecting them to be as horrible and offensive as they come off here.

All this lead me to read Trouble Boys as an addiction book. The drinking and drugging stories – and there are a LOT of them – can be amusing, but the more they pile up, the more difficult it is to observe so much self-destruction. They were fucked up drunk addicts and I left the book pondering what their lives would have been like if the band could have coped – even just a little bit! – with their talent and success.

But their myth is all about that they couldn’t: that they felt too much, drowned it in booze, and paid a heavy price. Poor Bob died, Tommy grew up to be a professional musician (and member of Guns n' Roses!), Chris (a strangely vacant presence in the book) faded away into visual art, and Paul never found that illusive balance of improvisation and polish that could endear him to the masses. While Bob’s story is interesting, Paul’s story is riveting, from watching him struggle to come up with his moments of musical genius to the story of him clean and sober (the tale of him coaching little league with a SpongeBob hat is priceless).  I also appreciated Mehr’s insights into the music, which let me hear their albums – especially Tim and their requiem All Shook Down – in a newly revelatory light.

Book Review: China Mieville's Kracken

China Mieville’s Kracken is an odd duck of a book. Quickly summarized, when a giant squid disappears from London’s Natural History museum, curator Billy becomes entrapped into a wild labyrinth of magical forces trying to bring about – or to prevent – the end of the world. Billy takes a classic hero’s journey, but Kracken’s real hero is the world Mieville builds up: a complex web of mythologies, all striving for the mystical powers of the giant squid. It was all very interesting, but I found the novel falling short of excellence. Mieville is too erudite for his own good, with wordplay so obscure that it overshadows the story. And while plotted like a thriller – entertaining and fast-paced – the book felt surprisingly lightweight, with thin characters who never resonated with me. Take Collinsworth – a snappy, punkish cop who I pictured as Amy Winehouse (a perfect comparison I read somewhere). She’s everything that I should like in a character, but she never really fell into place for me.  Likewise Goss and Subby – malevolent agents of mayhem that just seemed silly to me.

So why did I stick with all 529 pages? Because of sections like Chapter 25, where we’re introduced to shabtis - small figures placed inscribed with a task they need to perform for the famous Egyptian mummies with whom they are buried. Mieville’s shabtis decide to strike and demand compensation for their labor, led by "Wati" who changes his inscription to read "I shall NOT do it.” His journey backwards out of the underworld to become a magical organizer in "the new Unionism" is a brilliant and moving mash-up of mythologies. This why you read Mieville, and I longed for more of it. What is the capitalism of this union of magical familiars? What are their politics? Unfortunately, we never get past Wati’s amazing origin story as he becomes just another player in Billy’s journey.

It’s obvious that Mieville had high hopes for this book; he strives to build up a complex London mythology as he combines cultural myths and pulp fiction plotting. But in the end the characters and rapid-fire plotting didn’t speak to me. Regardless, I’m glad I read it - for while this wasn’t Mieville’s best work, I continue to admire how high he aims. Even when he falls short, he still ends up with a high mark.

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Quick Review: Prometheus

Let me join the chorus of people proclaiming that Ridley Scott's Prometheus is a hot mess of a movie. In a pithy phrase, it's visually stunning but logically incoherent.

I'm not going to go into details here, but even acknowledging that blockbuster movies make money by displaying stunning images together in the most dramatic way possible, don't you think that you'd want to string together these images in a way that makes sense? After all, it can be done - just look at Christopher Nolan's movies, or even The Avengers. But no, Scott's movie lurches from scene to scene with little to no rhyme nor reason, and features characters whose development consists of lines like "i'm a geologist, okay! I love fucking rocks!" Ugh. If the writers had spent three minutes refining the dialog and characters in this movie, then it might have given the flick the credibility it so desperately needed in support of the big questions it was so obviously trying to address. However, having someone occasionally say something like "Wouldn't you want to meet your maker?" does not make your movie deep.

Another problem is that the effect of the aliens themselves have been weakened by continuted exposure to the Alien franchise. Honestly, nothing's really going to match the first time you see the alien pop out of someone's chest, so why even try? It would have been nice to see a twist on the typical themes, but instead we were fed a warmed-over version of what had come before. Dissapointing.

Murakami's Boundaries

I’ve often read that a good deal of Haruki Murakami’s writing is powerful because it evokes many unconscious trends of Japanese society. Without knowing much about Japan, it’s hard for me to speak to that, although it might explain away the strange underpinnings of his more abstract books. Personally, I find the subtle dark undertones of his writing to be mesmerizingly suggestive, but find that it's powerful because of this lack of specificity, not in spite of it. It's with this in mind that I ponder his obsession with boundaries. Boundaries between the real and the imaginary, boundaries between good and evil, boundaries between the certain and the uncertain.

His most famous boundary is the doorway that exists between the bottom of a dried up well and the mysterious hotel room in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, but it doesn’t take a lot of deep reading to find equivalencies in his other books. The most obvious one is spelled out in the title of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World in that most of the novel is about the journey between those two realities. I won’t bore you with more examples but pick up any one of his books and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

His 2007 novel After Dark is no exception. In fact, this short novel almost explicitly deals with the barriers between two states of being. These include:

• The city before and after trains: “Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it’s not the same as in daytime.” (p. 55)
• Eri’s journey out of the “sleep coma” that she’s been in for the last few months
• Takihashi’s speech about criminals vs. non-criminals: “[The criminals] live in a different world, they think different thoughts, and their actions are nothing like mine. Between the world they live in and the world I live in there’s this thick, high wall.” (p. 91)
• One side of the mirror vs. another: Both Mari (p.63) and Shirakawa (p.127) occasionally have reflections that stay in the mirror after they have left the room – and Shirakawa’s reflection even does things that he does not!
• Takahashi’s music: “You send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of a physical shift, and simultaneously the listener’s body also undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It's giving birth to that shared state.” (p. 88)
• Night vs. Day “The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend. Takahashi is unable to tell for sure which side – which world – contains his center of gravity.” (p. 173P

I could go on and on. The entire book is almost a meditation on complimentary opposites, ying and yang swimming both with and against each other. He even writes very evocatively of what it might take to truly be transported from one side to the other (a description of Eri’s journey through the TV screen that starts on page 102). All of these musings come to a head during this remarkable passage:

“What we see now is a gigantic metropolis waking up. Commuter trains of many colors move in all directions, transporting people from place to place. Each of those under transport is a human being with a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective entity. Each is simultaneously a self-contained whole and a mere part. Handling this dualism of theirs skillfully and advantageously, they perform their morning rituals with deftness and precision: brushing teeth, shaving, tying neckties, applying lipstick. They check the morning news on TV, exchange words with their families, eat, and defecate.

With daylight, the crows flock in, scavenging for food. Their oily black wings shine in the morning sun. Dualism is not as important an issue for the crows as for the human beings."

So what is it about Japanese society that fuels this obsession with boundaries? Again, I don’t feel qualified to speak: I’m on the far side of yet another boundary in that Murakami’s message is coming to me not only across cultures but also through the filter of a translator. It's a fascinating obsession, and I'm in awe not only that so much of his message gets through, but at how powerful it remains after repeated readings.

Cross-posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox.

Graphical Reviews of Novels

I've seen reviews like this before. Interesting, but for whatever reason, it doesn't do a whole lot for me. And I like comix! I'm probably just too attached to my textual book reviews, but it may also be that I think that there's too little space devoted to book discussion as it is, and presenting reviews graphically takes away from the textual discussion of the book.

Donno. I'll need to ponder this more.

An Index of Metals - shudder

Reading reviews of "art" - be it music, a movie, or "fine art" like painting or sculptures - can be frustrating. Many times, I read the review, and then watch or listen to the show and think "are they seeing/hearing the same thing that I am?" I wrote about this experience here, and recently experienced it again when reading this Pitchfork review of the re-release of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno's Evening Star album.

Now, I have Evening Star, and most of it is really good. The first four tracks are quite calm and assured: it's Eno's ambient music but with energy contributed by Fripp's guitar. Fripp does a lot of interesting things here - apparently the guitar-nerds call it "frippertronics" - that involve looping guitar tracks back upon themselves and then playing over it. Regardless of how it's done, the first two songs on the album ("Wind on Water" and "Evening Star") are essentially one song with a slow ambient introduction followed by a mood poem that makes me feel like i'm watching the sun set over a distant island on the Pacific Ocean (see the apt cover and you'll know what i'm talking about). In mood, it reminds me a bit of Debussy's "nature" songs.

However, the last song on the album - the 28 minute (!) "An Index of Metals" - is truly awful. While some music majors may find it brilliant, to me it just sounds to me like annoying random noise. And i'm a fan of random noise! I love Sonic Youth, and was one of the few to throw down a few bucks to pick up Neil Young's Arc (the all-feedback coda to his excellent double-live LP Weld). But "An Index of Metals" is brutal. It's dissonance for the sake of it; a bloated, self-indulgent "song" that is simply unlistenable. I can't imagine the person that would listen to it more than once.

But according to the Pitchfork critic, it's "a six-track sequence" (whatever that means). There's no mention about its length or unaccessability. Despite this, he provides the album a 8.6 (out of 10), a score I might agree with if it wasn't for the last track.

This is why I like blog reviews. The agenda of the writer is usually up front, so you can judge if the blogger's taste is your own instead of having to read through the lines of the regular media's "objective" prose. In addition, being online, they aren't limited by space so they include everything that they feel is relevant to the situation. The best example of this is an excellent music review site I found written by George Starostin. He doesn't update it any more, but it contains extensive, knowledgeable, and irreverently opinionated reviews of most of the major rock and post-rock bands from 1960-2000.

George doesn't pull any punches when it comes to "An Index of Metals". His notes about the track include: "Darn it, why did these guys want to piss us off so much? ... Suffice it to say that some stretches of this track just consist of one note prolonged for what seems like ages."

So is there a lesson to be learned here? To me, the trick to finding a review that will let you know if you will like a work or art or not, is all about finding a reviewer that has your general taste. This can be tricky, but the internet's a big place, so you're bound to find something sooner or later.