Book Review: Corn Is Our Blood by Alan R. Sandstrom

Corn Is Our Blood:

Culture and Ethnic Identity In a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village

by Alan R. Sandstrom

      “That’s a weird name for a book,” said the bookstore cashier where I purchased Corn Is Out Blood by Alan R. Sandstrom. Of course, things that are unfamiliar are thought of as weird by default. And there is nothing more unfamiliar than a culture you know nothing about. Besides, the title is an idiom and, linguistically speaking, an idiom is a metaphorical phrases that makes no sense when translated into another language. Only those fluent in the language and culture will understand what it means. That is the value of the social sciences and, in this case specifically, anthropology. The author of this book did fieldwork in Mexico for the purpose of being able to explain a foreign culture to those from outside that culture. His intention is to prove that, contrary to what outsiders say, the people he studied are making effective rational choices in the maintenance of their ethnic identity given the living conditions they are faced with.

Sandstrom spent several years off and on over two decades with Nahua Indians in Mexico located in the Amatlan region of Veracruz state. The Nahuas are contemporary descendants of the pre-colonial Aztecs and speak Nahuatl as their language. Very few of them are fluent in Spanish. They mostly survive by subsistence farming, largely maize and beans, although they sometimes take surplus produce to market. Through language, religion, and clothing, they maintain a fiercely independent ethnic identity that is remote from the dominant mestizo identity of most Mexican citizens. Loyalty to their traditions and identity has caused many mestizos to call them irrational, especially because they live so precariously, being marginalized socially and economically, when they could join modern society and live more comfortably with greater wealth. Sandstrom therefore desires to prove that their supposedly irratoinal clinging to tradition is actually a strategy for survival in a host culture that is hostile to them.

The book starts out with a brief history of the Indian people in Mexico beginning with the pre-Conquest Aztec empire up to contemporary post-Mexican Revolution times. The Nahuas have suffered persecution and marginalization all along the way from the conquistadors, the Catholic church, and the modern mestizo state. They are therefore relegated to remote ejidos, or communally owned farmlands, and have little contact with the outside world. But they aren’t hostile people at all. Sandstrom describes them as gentle, quiet, good natured, and avoidant of conflict. The opening chapters are useful, interesting, and informative. The biggest problem is that some of the personal testimonies are dry and a little difficult to follow. However, they do illustrate the types of problems the Indians have with government officials and law enforcement that is corrupt, violent, and exploitative.

The book progresses into chapters on daily life for the Nahua people. Since they are subsistence farmers, agriculture plays a central role in their lives. Their milpas, or farming territories, are arranged according to ownership and, after a chapter describing those ancestral categorizations of geneologies and familial structures that anthropologists love so much, we learn that the Nahuas are patrilocal with groupings of brothers being the central building block of social organization in their society. The distribution of milpas is based on this form of social organization. They also use slash and burn techniques of agriculture and crop rotations that are loosely related to their sometimes unpredictable rainy seasons. All of these horticultural realities have a direct influence over the Nahua’s world view and religious practices. When they say that “corn is our blood” they literally mean that without corn they would die. As a source of food, health, income, and meaning it is the most important thing to them. In America we might think of money in a similar way since, like it or not, we can’t live without it within the context of our culture.

At one point, Sandstrom argues his case that Nahua people are highly rational even though mestizos insist they aren’t and just blindly follow traditions even though it would make more sense to modernize and join the market economy. One claim they make against the Nahuas is that they inist on making maize their staple crop even though beans fetch higher prices at the market. Sandstrom points out that maize is more cost effective, less labor intensive, and easier to grow in high quantities on a regular schedule. Beans on the other hand require higher monetary investments, grow irregularly, and are more likely to get eaten or contaminated by vermin. Beans are also more difficult to harvest and transport to the market. Maize is simply more efficient and more reliable. The mestizos could always ask the Nahuas why they prefer it, but they are human and that means it is better to live in the certainty of their own illusions than to find out the truth.

After describing the material culture of the Nahuas, Sandstrom goes on to examine their religious practices, most of which revolve around their horticultural cycle. They believe in a type of animism or pantheism that is similar to what Hindus and Buddhists believe. There is one unifying spirit permeating the entire world and we only see it in fragments because of our own natural limitations. Like other Aztec derived cultures, they believe in wind spirits that cause illness, accidents, and death. During ceremonies, they attract and then banish them through the use of figures made out of colored paper. Their religious rituals are performed to maintain a balance in the interaction between the material and the spiritual world. Shamans are the religious authorities of the Nahuas and aside from performing rituals, they also act as doctors, fortune tellers, and politicians in the ejido.

By the time Sandstrom returns to Amatlan in the 1980s, the Nahuas have begun to change. The government has built roads into Amatlan along with sturdy houses. They are in the process of bringing in electric power. More Nahuas are learning Spanish and going into the cities to work. American missionaries have also discovered them and done some damage too. A rift in the community happens as Protestant converts refuse to interact with the other Nahuas and the missionaries insist that vaccines are evil so a portion of the converts die from an outbreak of measles that could easily have been prevented.

The end of the book is a thorough examination of how the Nahuas benefit from having a strong ethnic identity that sets them apart from the mestizos in the surrounding areas of Veracruz.

Alan Sandstrom has written a fascinating book about the Nahua people. He advocates for them by making and defending the claim that Nahuas are rational despite what others think. There is one point where he drops the ball in his argument. He addresses the reason why Nahuas keep farm animals even though they don’t eat meat, don’t use them for farm labor, and don’t see them as status symbols. They are economically inefficient because they cost a lot to feed, but he claims the Nahuas keep them so they have something to use their unusable milpas for. But if those milpas are unusable, why have them in the first place? Despite this one weak point, the other arguments he gives are sufficiently strong enough to support his claim. Even without the theoretical argument he makes, this book would still be interesting as it gives such a clear impression of what it is like to live in this culture. And it seems like the ultimate work on anthropology since it is so accessible to lay people without losing its value for professional anthropologists. It isn’t bogged down or made confusing with abstract theories and endless references to other scholars in the field the way a lot of anthropology books tend to be. Better still, the author doesn’t glorify the Nahua people by making them look quaint or by turning them into noble savages of the 20^th century. He makes them out to be ordinary people living ordinary lives in a way that is outside the ordinary for most of us.

I’m no expert in the social sciences, but if anybody ever asked me to recommend books from that field Corn Is Our Blood would be one of the first suggestions I would make. Humanizing people in other cultures isn’t a task that should have to be done, but unfortunately it is and this book does a good job of it. It also adds another dimension to whatever it is you know about Mexican society and culture. Like anybody else, I love Mexican food, but there is so much more to this fascinating country and its richly layered culture that should be learned about. You might as well start by letting Alan Sandstrom point you in the right direction.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Attachments by Judith Rossner

Attachments

by Judith Rossner

      What kind of a woman would marry a conjoined twin? Nadine, the main character of Judith Rossner’s Attachments would and she’ll one up your expectations too by convincing her best friend Dianne to marry the other conjoined twin. The refrain of “it’s complicated” when asked about a person’s love life is taken to a whole other level here. The author’s intentions are complicated too, so much so that it is not entirely clear what she strives to accomplish in writing this story.

Nadine is a naive young woman whose parents are connected to each other through the institution of marriage and yet they are emotionally distant and spend little time together. They live in a big house in California by standards that would be considered luxurious by today’s standards though the family is described as middle class in the context of this novel from the early 1980s. Nadine travels to New York to attend college and be near her friend Dianne. From her experiences there, especially regarding sex, she learns that men don’t really care about women’s feelings. It is a massive over-generalization and her conclusion is largely her own fault due to her promiscuity and the types of men she chooses to be with. Never mind the fact that she doesn’t care about men’s feelings either. This attitude carries over into her relationship with the conjoined twins and results in her being unable to cope with her marriage, but that all comes later.

When she learns about a pair of conjoined twins, Amos and Eddie, who live nearby, Nadine stalks them and seduces them. She is out for a unique sexual experience and that is what she gets. When Dianne comes out to visit her in California, Nadine proposes, without too much thought, that the four of them get married. Nadine takes Amos and Dianne takes Eddie. They all agree and end up living on a remote plot of land in New Hampshire.

By this point we learn that Nadine is the central character of the novel. She is also self-centered and barely aware of the other people in this unusual family arrangement. She becomes the mother hen of the house, especially after Dianne has a daughter with Eddie who they name Carly. Dianne leaves her with Nadine to raise her as a surrogate mother since Dianne gets employed at an enviable job in a law firm. Here we get a contrast between the two sides of the modern woman: the family woman who dedicates her life to raising children and the career woman who leaves her child behind to climb the ladder of her profession. The twins, on the other hand, have almost no personalities. They work as auto mechanics and handymen, but barely ever speak and do little more than go swimming. It is hard to tell what Rossner’s intentions are here. Are the twins really as bland as the novel makes them out to be? Or maybe Nadine is just so self-absorbed that she cannot see them for who they really are. Or maybe they are just underdeveloped as literary characters. In any case, if the author’s intentions were more clearly defined it would make it easier to situate the twins in the narrative.

Nadine also gets pregnant twice by Amos and then she has three kids to raise, mostly on her own. Her son, daughter, and surrogate daughter are also underdeveloped as characters. Throughout most of the early phase of the marriage, the story is all about how the four of them manage their lives as two couple bound together via the conjoined twins. The turning point comes when a film maker shows up in town with a band of hippy assistants and they take interest in the family of four parents and three children. A documentary film about them is proposed and as they are filmed telling their stories on camera, something changes. Nadine, for the first time in the novel, begins to think about her life and evaluate her situation. It is the first time she shows any sense of self-awareness since previously she acted solely on impulse and intuition. Her life up until then was all about seizing the moment and avoiding any calculations about future consequences. Again, it is hard to tell what the author’s intentions are here. Nadine could be deliberately portrayed as being shallow and egocentric or it could be that Rossner just failed to develop her character to completion. It might even be a little of both. But when Nadine becomes more self-conscious, she doesn’t change much as a person so her development as a literary character has to be taken as a weakness in Rossner’s writing.

The film project is never completed. A major movie studio hears about it and buys it out to make a big budget movie based on the lives of Amos and Eddie. In addition, the contract that the twins sign stipulates that they undergo surgery to separate them so that the movie’s end will depend on the outcome of the operation. The surgery is successful, the family becomes rich, and a few things change. Amos and Eddie remain just as psychologically close as they have been all their lives, but they also feel the predictable sense of liberation you would expect them to feel.

One way that the families become liberated is in the ways that they detach from each other. Nadine and Amos take their children to live in a house across the street while Dianne and Eddie stay put with Carly who is traumatized by the break up since she sees less and less of Nadine. Amos also rediscovers his passion for Nadine, but being the kind of selfish woman she is, she becomes less enamored with him as his love grows. She has always treated him as an object before, and now that he is more realized as an individual human being, she loses interest in him in part because he is no longer a novelty to her.

Then a family crisis brings out the better side of Nadine. Twelve year old Carly begins smoking pot and runs away from home to tag along with a bunch of drifters and drop outs. Nadine leads the family on a search and rescue mission to find Carly and she emerges as a more sympathetic character for a few days while she spends sleepless nights trying to locate where Dianne and Eddie’s daughter has gone. The crisis brings the two families together, but the newfound unity crumbles as soon as Carly returns. They are faced with the same old situation as Nadine continues to despise Amos while his love for her stays constant. Dianne and Nadine eventually reveal the truth of their lives to each other too as both of them admit to being miserable. Nadine wishes she were a career woman and Dianne wishes she were a housewife.

Once again, it is difficult to tell what Judith Rossner intends to say with this novel. It clearly is an examination of the individual and what responsibilities they take on in the institution of marriage and family. But in the novel’s scope, responsibility does not lead to happiness. Rossner appears to be saying that there is no way to win. We are hopelessly doomed to disappointment and misery no matter what path we choose. The reader is left with a sense of petty nihilism.

Stronger characters would have helped this book a lot. Amos and Eddie are so under-developed that you almost have to feel sorry for them. The same is true for the children. In the non-fiction world, neglect is considered child abuse; in Rossner’s fictional world, the children are so under-developed as characters that you almost want to call the fictional police to have them removed by the Child Protective Services, saving them them from Nadine’s nest. Carly is a good case in point. Her motivations for running away from home are never explored or explained and the incident ends up being more of an ego trip for Nadine to show how hard she tries to care for the children under her domain. And that comes after she decides not to intervene when she knows the twelve year old girl is doing drugs.

Nadine is the most developed character in the entire book, but in contrast to the others she is too developed for her own good. The others are more like props and less like people. But compared to other literary characters, Nadine is half formed. Putting a 2.5 dimensional character into a milieu of 1.5 dimensional characters makes the novel’s elements clash in a haphazard way. In a novel that is character driven, it doesn’t really work. Finally, it should be said that a story with conjoined twins at the center should have the twins more developed as characters too. A novel based around such an oddity should be more odd in its execution. The conjoined twins are obviously used as a metaphor and a vehicle for exploring human relationships, but as a metaphor it doesn’t hold up due to the fact that living people aren’t metaphors. This might have worked better if they had been written with more personality and depth, or at least as much personality as Nadine and Dianne. But people without character in a character driven novel just don’t hold it all together well.

Judith Rossner has great raw materials to work with here. A story about two women who marry a pair of conjoined twins is unique enough to capture anyone’s attention, but your attention might be easily deflated due to the disproportionate elements of the writing. Nadine is over-drawn in some ways and under-drawn in others, and the others characters are under-drawn in totality. Otherwise the book is an existentialist melodrama with a gimmick thrown into the middle of it. But this novel does have unrealized potential and I’d say that Rossner is a better writer than what she creates here. My speculation is that some jerks at her publishing house gave her bad advice on how to make the book more commercially palatable and took it for the sake of sending the book to print. Attachments has enough going for it to make it worth reading once. Just don’t expect too much from it.

 

Book Review: The Life and Times of Pancho Villa by Friedrich Katz

The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

by Friedrich Katz

      The Mexican Revolution is a difficult subject to approach. It was a loosely organized aeries of uprisings that lasted a little more than a decade. Some of the key figures, especially military commanders were obscure people with obscure motivations. Alliances shifted constantly, sometimes inexplicably. Historical records of events in Mexico at that time were not meticulously kept. A lot of what people know about the revolution is apocryphal and based in folklore, legend, and sometimes propaganda and yellow journalism. It’s no wonder that historians who tackle this field of knowledge often contradict each other in their accounts. It’s hard to tell the truth when the truth is so uncertain. One way of reducing the amount of murkiness and confusion surrounding the Mexican Revolution is to write about it from a biographical standpoint so that one historical figure can act as an anchor, making it easier to organize and analyze the confusing mass of information. That is what the Austrian historian Friedrich Karz does in The Life and Times of Pancho Villa.

The whole story starts out in the northern state of Chihuahua where military veterans of the Mexico-Apache wars were given land as reward for their fighting. As the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz grew in power, the increasingly unpopular oligarchs Luis Terrazas and Enrique Creel were encroaching on people’s land, establishing haciendas, and instituting a system of debt peonage. Francisco Madero started a pro-democracy uprising to unseat Diaz and one of his military commanders was a former bandit named Pancho Villa. This ex-bandit had a natural talent for military leadership and quickly rose in the ranks. His army unit was composed of mostly peasant agriculturalists and Indians and their agitation for land reform and redistribution came into the revolution along with them.

Understanding the mind and personality of Pancho Villa is not an easy task. A lot is known about what he did, but personal accounts of what he was like as a man are on the sketchy side. He is known for being compassionate and cruel in equal measures, he moved easily among the poorest and richest members of society, his educational level was low but he had a natural intelligence and a curiosity for learning, and he was a bigamist who married several women and had a large brood of children. None of this tells you much about the inner workings of his mind. But I also suspect that Katz is not the kind of author who has an aptitude for that kind of writing.

Nevertheless, Pancho Villa’s story is amazing. After helping Madero overthrow the dictatorship, Villa was imprisoned for some unclear reason. After Villa escaped, the military commander Huerta overthrew Madero and reestablished the dictatorship. Villa called up his armies again and the next phase of civil war began. After the revolutionaries called the Conference of Aguascalientes, Villa formed a loose alliance with Emiliano Zapata since both caudillos stood for the cause of land reform. Villa seized power in Chihuaua as acting governor for a while, then eventually returned to fighting in the war, this time against the faction of the revolution lead by Venustiano Carranza, the man who ratified the new Mexican constitution. Just like in the French Revolution, and so many other revolutions in the past, the revolutionary soldiers entered into combat against each other. By the end of the decade, Villa was losing favor with his followers but he kept fighting, probably because he didn’t know what else to do with himself. During this period before his assassination, he led an attack north of the American border on the town of Columbus, New Mexico. This led to a brief invasion into Mexico by the American army that resulted in nothing but more chaos.

There is so much more to this story and most of it is written here in minute details. It is an understatement to say that Friedrich Katz is anal retentive. Ultimately, though, he is on the tolerable side of detail oriented writing, thereby making it just possible to digest. If he had given any more details this book would have been impossible to read. But the details are the best and the worst thing about this biography. By giving such long, drawn out explanations, Katz runs the risk of boring his readers to death and drowning them in information. But at least the information is relevant and, actually, it works to his benefit. Since the Mexican Revolution can be such a swamp of muck to unpack, something goes to be said for the excessive details. Writing it all out this way separates the different strands of the history, bringing them into sharper focus, and making it easy to examine each part of the story in clarity. A quality microscope can make a splotch of biological matter easier to see in its complexity by expanding and exaggerating its appearance so its disorganization looks more organized for our perception. That is what Katz accomplishes in this book. Even though this work is so thorough that it can induce migraines for the reader, it is worth the torment of reading it because it ends up being the most comprehensible and clearly written book on the Mexican Revolution I have encountered so far.

Another impressive aspect of this biography is Katz’s unwillingness to take sides in an argument when he feels there is not enough evidence to draw a strong conclusion. A case in point is the issue of why American president Woodrow Wilson supported the Villista forces at first and then switched sides to support the Constitutionalist Carrancistas. Katz gives multiple perspectives on the issue, but doesn’t come to a definite conclusion because there isn’t any documented records directly explaining Wilson’s stances. Other issues treated in this similar way are Madero’s reasoning for imprisoning Villa, Villa’s continued support for Madero after being imprisoned, Villa’s reasoning for fighting against Carranza and his troops, whether Villa was persuaded by a German agent to attack Columbus as part of a conspiracy to keep America out of World War I, and who was behind the assassination of Villa. He even contemplates the unanswered question of why Villa continued his campaigns of guerilla warfare for so long after the Revolution had lost meaning for him. While it is useful to speculate on unanswerable historical problems, it is even more commendable when a scholar is humble enough to admit that he doesn’t know what the right answers are.

To be blunt, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa is a pain in the ass to read because of its length, excessive detail, and Germanic writing style that could very well make your hemorrhoids act up. But if there is only one book you ever read about the Mexican Revolution, this one is worth the trouble. That’s not to say it exhausts the subject matter because it doesn’t. But it does clarify a lot of the confusion surrounding this hotly debated topic of Mexican history. And by the end, it makes it easy to see why Pancho Villa remains a hero of the poor and the working classes in Mexico, along with Leftists in other countries, and such a villain to heartless conservatives who think the world should only belong to them. And Villa is even a saint to some devotees of Santa Muerte.

 

Book Review: Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and The Germs by Brendan Mullen

Lexicon Devil:

The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and The Germs

by Brendan Mullen with Don Bolles and Adam Parfrey

      Punk rock took longer to catch on in Los Angeles than it did in the movement’s other major epicenters of New York and London. It’s not that Los Angeles wasn’t primed for it; glam rock was big there in the early 1970s and records from the east cost and the U.K. had found their way out West . For whatever reason, it just took a while to catch hold. But when it did, it exploded. The Runaways could be credited for being the first major band to catalyze the LA scene, but one band moved the whole thing forward by acting as a transition point from early punk to the hardcore punk of the 1980s. That band was the Germs with their singer Darby Crash. Brendan Mullen’s Lexicon Devil tells the story of the brief but seminal career of the band that took punk excess and degeneracy to a whole new level.

Like so many other books out there on the history of punk, Lexicon Devil is an oral history wherein quotes from interviews and articles are carefully pieced together to make a multi-voiced narrative about its subject matter. Scottish immigrant Brendan Mullen was a promoter and early club manager in Los Angeles and helped to get the scene moving. He works well as the compiler and editor of the story since he both observed and participated in the scene. Some of this information, and even some exactly matching quotes, appear in his other collaborative project on the Los Angeles punk movement We Got the Neutron Bomb. Some nitpickers might complain about that, but it works well especially when the re-used quotes fill in missing information, making the whole narrative hang together. If it works, you might as well do it.

Jan Paul Beahm was born into a broken family. His father was absent soon after the early years of his childhood and his mother was overbearing, manic, and histrionic. He went to an alternative high school based on the practices of Scientology and est. Only in California, right? Beahm considered L. Ron Hubbard to be a major influence on his thinking for the few short years he had left to live. It was at that high school where he made friends with George Ruthenberg, the kid who later became Pat Smear, the guitarist for the Germs (and Nirvana and Foo Fighters after that). (Damn, Pat Smear played in two legendary bands whose lead singers both killed themselves. How’s that for rotten luck?)

Beahm, who took the stage name Bobby Pyn, threw together a band of no-talent musicians and called themselves the Germs. Their concerts were little more than pranks where the band made noise and Bobby Pyn did Iggy Pop impressions, cutting his chest with broken glass and throwing food into the audience. They got a well-deserved reputation for being the worst band in L.A. But they weren’t taking themselves seriously and other people weren’t either. They developed a following, especially because Bobby Pyn, who changed his stage name again to Darby Crash, had a strange kind of charisma. He wasn’t a good looking kid, but he had an interesting face and a look of menace about him that was attractive to other punks. He was especially attractive with women and he always had a clique of female groupies around. He actually aspired to be a cult leader and Germs fans began wearing black armbands with blue circles on them. They also burned their wrists with cigarettes to mark themselves out as different from those who weren’t followers. But naive teenager with a philosophy cobbled together from the ideas of other cult leaders could only be limited in scope.

The overall context is not ignored. The growth of the West Hollywood punk scene is well-documented including a wide cast of people like The Go Gos, Rodney Bingenheimer, Joan Jett, the publishers of Slash fanzine, members of X, and all kinds of other people who participated in the scene. Stories about the legendary underground nightclub The Masque are told and the early punk lifestyle, heavy on the drugs and alcohol, is well detailed. Also of important detail is the rise of hardcore punk in the late 1970s and early 1980s after the Germs released their only album GI. The hardcore scene grew rapidly and attracted a lot of kids who didn’t fit in with the early punk scene. The new punks were more violent, more macho, and attracted a lot of negative attention from the police and local rednecks who became notorious for their violence against punks.

The narrative makes it look as though the transition of punk from a fun, ironic nihilism infused with gallows humor to slam dancing, gang fights, and hyper-aggresive adrenaline binges contributed to the downfall of Darby Crash. The singer just couldn’t adapt to the punk movement’s growth that he instigated with his band. The scene appeared to be leaving him behind. Darby Crash struggled with other issues too. He had gotten hooked on heroin and felt as though he had to keep his identity as a gay man secret, especially because the second wave of punk was decidedly more masculine in its presentation. He had also been talking about 86ing himself long before he put the Germs together.

The tragic ending and eulogizing isn’t overdone. Darby Crash’s suicide was ugly and depressing; it probably angered people more than it surprised them. The narrative says what it has to say and then ends. But the last paragraph is a quote from Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Temple ov Psychick Youth fame. You can agree or disagree with what Genesis says about the meaning of Darby Crash’s life, one that hit the LA punk scene like a lightning bolt, but you can’t deny that the quote packs a powerful punch to finish this biography off.

There isn’t much to criticize in Lexicon Devil. It’s a thoroughly researched and detailed portrait of a young man, a time, a place, and a counter-cultural music scene. In the end, your appreciation will simply rest on how you feel about Darby Crash and punk in general. If this music and lifestyle are too abrasive for you, you will probably hate this book no matter how perfectly executed Brendan Mullen’s project is. And if you really must know what the inner life of Darby Crash felt like, and the reason so many punks were drawn to the Germs, I recommend you get a copy of their album GI and play the song “We Must Blled”. Play it at high volume. Play it over and over and over again. It’s an absolute nightmare and when Darby Crash, with his raspy snarling voice, sings over and over again “I want out now” you’ll know what kind of pain he was feeling.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Car by Harry Crews

Car

by Harry Crews

      What would you be willing to do for fame? What if you want to be famous but have no talent? If popular culture in America has proven anything, it is that some people will do anything, no matter how degrading or humiliating, just as long as they have a camera pointed in their direction. In the 1970s, there was The Gong Show. It was a talent show for people who had no talent. They would get on stage and make fools of themselves and if the celebrity panel hated them enough they would bang a gong and whoever was on stage lost. There were rarely ever any winners. I do have to say, however, that the recurrent guest Gene Gene the Dancing Machine was an all around cool contestant. I’d share a six pack with him any day of the week.

Fascination for this kind of junk entertainment isn’t limited to America or any one time and place. Previous times gave us carny freak shows and circus side shows with geeks who bit the heads off live chickens. There might be an artistic side to boxing, but in the end all the audience wants to see is somebody being beaten to a bloody pulp. Entertainment in the Roman Empire made a spectacle out of gladiators fighting to the death. Medieval times made bear baiting a sport. Even Shakespeare satirized a talentless theater troupe in the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In more recent times we’ve had TV shows like Fear Factor and The Jerry Springer Show. Jackass was all about people who intentionally hurt themselves for the sake of comedy. In the 1980s, a man from India made it into The Guiness Book of World Records for growing the longest fingernails; he said he did that simply because his life’s goal was to be famous. The contemporary porn industry is partially about people voluntarily subjecting themselves to sexual degradation and humiliation in exchange for large sums of money. In the middle of all this, we’ve got the short novel Car by the master of grit lit himself, Harry Crews.

The lead character of the book is Herman. He grew up in the presence of wrecked cars. His father came up with the idea of making an auto graveyard in Jacksonville, Florida. Open to the public, people can spend a few quiet moments with a car they had crashed or one in which a loved one has died. His sister Junell’s job is to collect the wrecks in her tow truck and stack them up in the yard. His twin brother, strangely named Mister, puts the cars through compactors so they can be sold as scrap metal. The auto graveyard didn’t turn out to be lucrative enough so the family had to start selling the junked vehicles to make money. Herman grew up in this atmosphere, surrounded by auto wrecks at a business that didn’t live up to the vision his father had conceived. The theme of deferred dreams runs throughout the novel and sets us up for what comes later. Speaking of conception, Herman also wonders how many babies are conceived in the back seats of cars. In American culture, the automobile is all pervasive. It is alpha and omega and everything in between. Automobiles are fetishized for sexuality and status, and in Herman’s case, automobiles are food.

Herman is a dreamer. His dream is to become famous. How does a man whose talents extend no further than running a junkyard become famous? He captures the attention of the world by announcing that he will eat a car in public, piece by piece, over the course of several years. The news spreads all over America and even gets as far as Japan. When the time comes, he appears on stage in a hotel ballroom in front of a packed audience twice a day. For the morning show, he eats little pieces of the car and for the late show, he poops the pieces out after passing through his digestive system. The pieces are then sold for outrageous amounts of money and some are made into model replicas of the car he is eating. This is broadcast live on television and Herman’s fame keeps growing.

Herman is narratively paired up with a prostitute named Margo. She works at the hotel where Herman’s car consumption takes place. As the two bond with each other, she offers to have sex with him for free. She has a bit of a car fetish and sleeping with him will be the closest she ever comes to having sex with a car. As the saying goes, you are what you eat. The two becomes friends rather than lovers since they connect at a human level. Both of them attempt to consume something that can’t be entirely consumed. Herman wants to consume a car and Margo wants to consume sexuality itself by sleeping with as many men as possibly. Both of them attempt to fill a void resulting from past experience. Herman is haunted by a childhood trauma that happened in the auto graveyard and Margo was disappointed with her first sexual experience in the back of a sports car with a complete stranger. These are their interpersonal connections. The wider social circumstances link them together too because both are victims of financial exploitation.

Mr. Edge is a businessman who owns the hotel where Herman is eating the car. He is the promoter of the show and also the one who hired Margo to sell her body there to draw customers. Crews uses Mr. Edge to attack the dehumanizing institution of show business. His sole motivation is money and making it through the exploitation of Herman and Margo is his means. He cares nothing about their physical or psychological safety just as long as the money keeps rolling in. In the tradition of P.T. Barnum, he gets rich by making a spectacle out of degradation. If Herman and Margo are paired as objects of exploitation for profit, albeit willing ones, Mr. Edge is equally paired with Herman’s twin brother Mister in the way they both capitalize off Herman’s stunt. Mister sees the potential for getting rich off Herman, elects himself to be his business manager, and bullies Mr. Edge into signing a contract giving him a large percentage of the earnings drawn from the performances. But poetic justice is served when Herman is in too much pain to continue eating the car. Mister, being his identical twin, is forced by Mr. Edge to take Herman’s place on stage without the audience knowing the difference. The results are not pleasant for Mister and you can’t feel sympathy for him because he places money making before family. His wealth derives from using his brother for entertainment, not caring how that might be effecting Herman.

As for the audience, the only reason this kind of entertainment is possible is because millions of people eagerly pay money to watch it. There is something in humanity that is amused by watching people make fools of themselves. It allows us to point our fingers at them and say,”I may not be anything special but at least I’m not the one doing that.” It appeals to our sense of superiority. And as a reading audience we are just as guilty of this as the ones in the ballroom watching Herman eat the car and shit out the pieces. After all, the reason you read this is because you want to watch a guy eat a car. This book confronts you with your own morbid sense of curiosity.

Harry Crews successfully critiques the sleaziness and dehumanization of the entertainment industry. He also critiques the way that cars have become an all consuming fetish in American culture in the way that people celebrate the beauty of the automobiles’ appearance and use, the sentimental attachments people form with their cars, and the fascination with destruction in the form of car crashes and junkyards. But Harry Crews is a humanist and underneath the steely surface of this novel, he finds humanity in the forsaken dreams and past traumas of some of the characters. The world in this book is a rotten world and people like Margo, Herman, and his father are caught up in it. They may have made bad choices, but that is what happens to most people at some time so you can’t fault them for that.

There are two parts of the story that don’t quite work. One is the reason Herman gives for wanting to eat the car. I don’t mean the desire to be famous; I do mean the connection between his childhood trauma and his strange fascination with wanting to devour a motor vehicle. The trauma did involve cars, but I can’t see why he would think that his publicity stunt would compensate for that. The other part is Margo’s self-disclosures. Her explanation of her trade is hard to buy as most prostitutes don’t enter their profession because they love promiscuity. It’s also hard to swallow her explanation for why some prostitutes don’t have gag reflexes (pun intended). It looks like Crews felt he needed to have Margo explain herself, but didn’t have a solid idea of what he wants her to say.

Still, Car is a great book to read. The writing is rough around the edges, but Harry Crews does here what he does best. He lures you in by tempting you with something so sick and absurd that you don’t want to turn away. In the process, he confronts you with observations about human nature you might not have considered otherwise. This novel might comfort you or it might disturb you. It depends on who you are. But never will it bore you. Otherwise, it’s a whole new way of looking at consumer culture.

 

Book Review: Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables: The Early Years by Alex Ogg

Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables:

The Early Years

by Alex Ogg

      “I can’t believe they’d let them name their band something like that.” This was a common parental reaction the first time kids in the 1980s brought home a Dead Kennedys record. I’m not sure who “they” are supposed to be. Is there some committee that decides what band names should be allowed? If there isn’t, I’m sure someone in the Reagan administration tried to set one up in those days of the Moral Majority and the Religious Right pulling the president’s strings. In any case, that aforementioned Dead Kennedys record would either end up on the turntable or in the trash depending on how cool your parents were. Lucky for me, my copy of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables went straight to the stereo and found its way back there thousands of times since then although I’m sure it was annoying enough to my parents, and my neighbors, that they must have considered tossing it in the garbage quite a few times. This is one band whose music was meant to tear up the world and as rock journalist Lester Bangs said, and I paraphrase, “If it doesn’t bother people, I don’t want to listen to it.” Alex Ogg’s Dead Kennedys Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables: The Early Years tells the story of how the band got together and what went into their first LP.

It starts off as a band biography. The scheme and layout are predictable. The original band members, Jello Biafra, East Bay Ray, Klaus Flouride, and Ted, the drummer later replaced by D.H. Pelligro in later years, get introduced; they mostly didn’t come directly from a punk rock background, but then again in 1978 there wasn’t too much punk around anyways. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that surf music is a huge influence on the DK sound, but it might be more surprising how influential Buddy Holly was in the beginning.

Most of the book is told through interviews with band members and associates so at least a couple points should be obvious from the start. One is that lead singer Jello Biafra is a guy who likes to talk a lot and the other is that conflicting accounts of their history are inevitable. Due to disputes both personal and legal, the band members aren’t talking to each other anymore although East Bay Ray and Klaus Flouride appear to have buddied up in opposition to Jello. Klaus Flouride, by the way, is a great stage name because the guy really does look like a dentist. By the end of the book, you get the sense that Jello Biafra and East Bay Ray are two guys who would be difficult to work with so we’re lucky they got anything accomplished at all.

Maybe it was the friction of the band members that brought out the genius level of punk rockmanship they created. After all, no other punk band in 1978 was creating anything so abrasive, angry, confrontational, fast, loud, aggressive, and calculated for maximum controversy as the Dead Kennedys with the exception maybe of the Germs and Bad Brains. The creative process is a central theme throughout the whole story. While the band members differ in their accounts, it does sound like they did their best work when each members was bringing their own unique style into whatever songs they were working on. That creative, democratic process extended through all aspects of the band including stage performance, artwork, management, and naming the band. And you might be surprised to know that they were not the first band to use the name Dead Kennedys.

The lyrical and artistic themes of DK get a good examination here too. With songs titles like “Kill the Poor”, “California Uber Alles”, and “Holiday in Cambodia” you will easily conclude that this is no ordinary rock band. Jello Biafra’s lyrics are works of satire that prod at the hypocrisy and psychosis of American politics, the pathological greed of capitalism, the bullshit of religion, and the hollowness of American culture. The band members give explanations and analyses of what each song on Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is about. This is probably the most useful part of this book for those unfamiliar with the world view and wicked humor of the band.

The anti-commercial stance of the band is looked at also. With the band name, the musical style, and the offensive lyrics, they were almost guaranteed to get no airplay. Dead Kennedys were a calculated attack on the music industry. In the 1970s, DJ’s and record executives were forcing soft rock, over produced riff rock, and disco down the throats of the listening public. Punk rock rose up in defiance of it all, but the record companies couldn’t effectively market it. Even worse, the bands and their audiences were out of control so when Sid Vicious allegedly murdered Nancy Spungen and the Sex Pistols broke up, they gave up and moved on to other genres. This left a huge gap in the music business because the kids wanted something authentic and stimulating. So in starting the music label of Alternative Tentacles, the Dead Kennedys broke ground once again by allowing bands complete artistic freedom, giving them a chance to be heard without being promoted by the commercial music industry. So we got not only the Dead Kennedys and the first two Butthole Surfers releases, but also works of anti-establishment musicianship from bands like The Fartz, Part Time Christians, and The Crucifucks. If you really want something irritating, check out the five song, 12 inch EP by Teddy and The Frat Girls called I Wanna Be a Man. Dead Kennedys would later attack the music industry more in songs like “MTV Get Off the Air”. The suits in the corporate boardrooms have never forgiven Jello Biafra and I’m sure that’s how he wants it.

On a less exciting note, there is a long section of the book that goes into minute details about the recording of DK’s monumental debut album and early singles. The descriptions of studio equipment and techniques is too much to bear. If you don’t know or care about what goes on in the recording studio, this section is a waste of time. A luddite like me can’t understand any of it and in the end, as long as the vinyl sounds good when I play it, I don’t worry about how it was made. But at least you learn the secret of the producer’s identity; he was listed as Norm in the credits of the album. Don’t expect him to produce your album.

Along with the excessive writing about studio techniques, there is a lot of filler in this book. It has a few band photos that vary in quality. There is some collage artwork by Jello Biafra and Winston Smith that also varies in quality. The black and white format and smallish page size detracts from the quality at times. There are also a few too many photos of the sleeves and vinyl pressings of every edition of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables and other early singles. Again, they are all in black and white so you can’t really get a feel for how they actually look considering some variants only differ in terms of the colors used. In the end, this project is a little short in content. I don’t know why the author didn’t just make this a full band biography following DK until the time they broke up and a little beyond. The full career of the Dead Kennedys, as well as the artistic output of Jello Biafra and the explosion of the hardcore punk movement didn’t end when Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables was released. That was actually the starting point.

A Jungian psychologist might cast the Dead Kennedys as the shadow side of the human psyche. Actually, they fit the trickster archetype a little more closely. The trickster is the mythological figure that brings chaos into the world, only the trickster doesn’t just rip everything up without a purpose. The trickster functions by causing societies to step outside of their conventions in order to re-evaluate their values. The trickster induces a crisis in order to test a society’s ability to sustain itself during times of stress and challenge. Overcoming the trickster’s madness forces a society to progress. In their artistic critique of America, that is exactly what the Dead Kennedys, and other counter culturalists, have done. Look at the legal troubles they had with the PMRC and the inclusion of H.R. Giger’s Penis Landscape poster in their Frankenchrist album. And all of this was set to great music, provocative enough to initiate a turning point and expansion of punk rock as it entered into its second wave, the hardcore years. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables may not be the best punk album ever made, but it is one of the most unique and influential. Alex Ogg captures the spirit of its production along wth the rise of the Dead Kennedys. It probably won’t appeal to people outside the DK fan base, hardcore punk nostalgia junkies and collectors, or music historians. It’s not a great book either, but it does have value as a document of an important LP coming from an important time and place. 

 

Book Review: We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk by Marc Spitz & Brendan Mullen

We Got the Neutron Bomb:

The Untold Story of L.A. Punk

by Marc Spitz & Brendan Mullen

      One thing to understand about the punk counter culture is that it was a scene just as much as a musical movement. The shows and the records weren’t all there was; punk broke through the theatrical fourth wall so that the audience and the people you associated with were as much a part of the movement as anything else. Being in a scene meant being part of a community and punk communities were localized even though they tended to expand and merge with other scenes as bands toured and punks traveled from city to city in order to see whoever wasn’t passing through their hometowns. The self publication of zines and cassette mixtapes were an effective way of holding punk scenes together and communicating with punks farther afield. None of this would have happened if punk didn’t have epicenters to radiate outwards from. New York City and London were the original epicenters, but cities like Washington, Boston, San Francisco, and, most importantly, Los Angeles became secondary epicenters to smaller satellite scenes revolving around them. This isn’t meant to diminish the importance or the quality of those latter scenes; it is just to point out that punk had a timeline and in a pre-internet culture, information didn’t travel so quickly and it took time to build something like a punk community. The advantage is that if it takes more than a decade to establish a new musical style and movement, it takes on its own local flavors and idiosyncrasies and that results in diversity which makes the counter cultural movement richer and deeper than it would have been if everybody else were just imitating each other. We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen gives a broad overview of the development of the SoCal scene and gives indications of how it related to the punk movement as a whole.

The story of Los Angeles punk is told using the oral history technique popularized by Legs McNeil in his monumental Please Kill Me about the growth of punk in New York and The Other Hollywood which chronicles the rise of the porn industry from the 1960s on. It’s a roughly edited montage of wordage from interviews and articles, pasted together to make a coherent story about everything that took place. Some people might criticize this editorial system for being sloppy and rough, but those people don’t realize how it reflects the spirit of punk as a whole. Punk was never about technical perfection and it emphasized raw emotion over production values. People who want perfection can listen to crappy commercial rock like Styx, Rush, or Phil Collins. In fact this book makes it clear that the original L.A. punks were under-stimulated by the wimp rock of the early 1970s. They were hungry for something more real and exciting than Jackson Browne or James Taylor. They wanted a rock and roll experienced that reflected their indulgences in wild sex, alcohol, and amphetamines. So they turned to Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and British glitter rock in general. The writing style of this book reflects the rough and out of control lifestyle that made punk so alluring in its first two phases. Besides, punk scenes tended towards egalitarianism which meant everybody had a voice in some way and what they contributed to the scene was how they chose to express themselves be it through music or otherwise. That is why the oral history method works so well for a book on this subject since so many people give their own side of the story.

If I jump ahead here to the middle, it becomes clear that there is a hinge that joins L.A.’s first and second waves of punk. The hinge is the Germs sole lp GI, produced by Joan Jett no less, who was barely out of her teens at the time. This was the record that transitioned the style of first wave punk into the second wave of hardcore and thrash. Without the Germs and Darby Crash, it is possible that punk rock would have faded away into obscurity. But then again, maybe not since Bad Brains and the Dead Kenndys were going in a similar musical direction at almost the same time.

Having said that, there were really three people who catalyzed the whole L.A. scene. One was the band promoter Kim Fowley who put together The Runaways with Joan Jett and Lita Ford in 1975. Another was nightclub owner and KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer. The third was Iggy Pop who carried Jim Morrison’s bad attitude over into the proto punk and glam rock movements. David Bowie might have been more popular, but Iggy Pop had a more direct influence on the earliest of L.A. punk pioneers. You can say what you want about these three men in your self-righteous 21^st century virtue signalling; after all they were creeps who preyed on underage girls just like everybody else in the entertainment industry at that time. But they were really the ones who got the whole thing moving. The 1970s were the peak of the Sexual Revolution and moral codes of conduct were loosening so much that that kind of predation was an unfortunate consequence. But if you know anything about groupies, you can’t say those girls were entirely innocent. Groupies lived their lives to seek out sexual experiences with rock stars and that is what they got. That doesn’t justify it but it does contextualize it so understand the difference before you go proclaiming yourself better than everybody else.

Anyhow, after some fights and small riots at music venues, punks in Hollywood took control and opened their own clubs. The Masque was one of the most prominent ones. Along with that came squatting, low life living in cheap apartment blocks, and the rise of punk houses. Hard drugs and alcohol were a big part of all this. So was sexual promiscuity and the aggressively intimidating clothing and hair styles of punk. Misfits and bohemians of all kinds were admitted as were artists, ethnic minorities, homeless people, runaways, the mentally ill, and LGBTQ people. Bands like the Screamers, the Weirdos, X, and the Germs grew in stature. Zines like Slash began circulating. Violence was not uncommon, especially in encounters with people outside the scene and the police. One punk female from Hollywood even got murdered by the Hillside Stranglers. From personal experience, I’d say you might not realize how unified a scene is until you attend a punk’s funeral, some of which can attract the same sized crowds as you would see at a show. It is times like that when you realize how extensive a social network a counter cultural scene can be and how valued every member of that scene is. Hell, I’ve been to funerals where some of the attendees didn’t even like the guy who died but they showed up to lend emotional support to the punk community in their time of emotional distress.

And the music industry wanted nothing to do with L.A. punk. Major record labels tried to market punk from New York and London. When the Sex Pistols broke up, Sid Vicoous and Nancy Spungen died, and very few records aside from the Ramones and The Clash ever sold, the record companies wrote punk off as just another passing fad. They did sign an L.A. band called The Dickies but they weren’t taken seriously in the punk community. In all honesty, for some poseurs punk was nothing but a fad, but the real punks with dedication soldiered on and kept the scenes going despite the snooty attitudes of the businessmen running the music industry. Independent record labels like Slash and SST came along to fill the void and release music that people wanted to hear, free from the rotten commercial values and bad production values that came along with major label contracts. A true musical underground scene was born.

Then the Germs released GI and their singer Darby Crash committed suicide. GI was a pivotal album because it took punk in a new, faster, angrier, dirtier direction that was more aggressive, more self-destructive, and more anti-establishment. The hyperactive crash and burn violence of hardcore and thrash were a middle finger stuck in the face of the mainstream music industry and mainstream American society as a whole.

Something else began happening in L.A. too. Los Angeles is a giant sprawling megalopolis with suburbs and sub-districts with sub-districts inside the sub-districts. There was a lot more to it than the Hollywood Boulevard punk house death trip. Rather than traveling long distances to see shows, punks played gigs in their local areas and developed colloquial styles that reflected those respective scenes. Eventually there were subgroups of surf punks, skateboarders, racist and anti-racist skinheads, straight edge and positive punks, anarchist punks, gangbanger punks, and whatever else you can imagine. Different styles emerged too like roots rock, rockabilly, synth punk, crossover/thrash metal, goth, horror rock, and Chicano punk. Punks flocked in to East L.A. when an art gallery began hosting shows for rent parties, crossing even more social boundaries and building more bridges than had ever been crossed or built before.

The end of this book was a little disappointing though. Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks complained because punk bands didn’t break into the mainstream with bigger crowds in bigger venues. I thought that was what was great about punk. Smaller shows in smaller clubs and halls meant more intimacy between the band and the audience. I got to see the Circle Jerks in a bar that probably held less than 1000 people. It wouldn’t have worked in an arena with 20,0000. Besides, if you wanted to see cock rock like Van Halen or Motley Crue back then there was plenty of it around. There was no social scene for that type of music though. Besides, being in an underground music scene meant anybody with the guts to get up on stage with an instrument was at least given a fair chance. You can’t say that about the corporate MTV rock that produced shitty bands like Pearl Jam or the Stone Temple Pilots.

But the thing that bothered me most about the later chapters, the ones about hardcore punk and punk adjacent styles, was that it goes so wide but not so deep. Those chapters are interesting and informative, but the authors were more concerned with covering and including the whole scope of the L.A. underground scene and not so concerned with giving extensive details about it. They could have extended the book by a hundred pages and taken a deeper dive into everything that was going on.

Overall, We Got the Neutron Bomb is a good, if incomplete, account of its subject matter. If you’re interested in the punk counter culture, rock music history, or even just the culture of Los Angeles, there is enough here to give you a good idea of what it was all about. For those of us who lived through punk in the 1980s, this is a reminder of how great a subculture can be when enough people who care get together and make an effort to make it work. For younger people who feel bored, alienated, lonely, or on the margins of society, maybe take a look at what the punks did and get the whole youth counter culture thing rolling again. It’s time for a new generation to rise and shake uo the world all over again. American culture has been stagnant and dead for the last thirty years. A new, viable counter culture is badly needed to renew the spirit of our society.