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.

 

Book Review: Emiliano Zapata: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico by Samuel Brunk

Emiliano Zapata:

Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico

by Samuel Brunk

      Here in Los Estados Unidos we don’t hear much about the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20. Most of what we get are Hollywood caricatures of bandits with moustaches on horses wearing sombreros and bandoliers over their serapes, riding around in the desert, shooting rifles and pistols into the air while swearing in broken English. Of course, when people learn about history through movies they are bound to get a few wrongheaded ideas about life in other countries. (Don’t even get me started on how idiotic the movie Braveheart is) But then there are a few academic works of history in print that attempt to untangle the knots of that seminal time period in Mexican history. The quality varies widely. Pancho Villa has emerged as the most discussed leader of the Mexican Revolution, at least in the writings of American authors. Emiliano Zapata has gotten less attention despite his status as a folk hero in Mexico, a symbol of inspiration for the lower classes, and the guy who used to be on the ten peso Mexican banknote. Samuel Brunk’s Emiliano Zapata: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico serves the two purposes of telling the story from the angle of Zapata and dispelling the conventional interpretation that the Zapatista movement was strong because of its socially collective nature.

Initially the Mexican Revolution began as a reaction to the dictator Porfirio Diaz’s refusal to step down at the end of his term. The highly educated ideologue Francisco Madero started a rebellion in the northern state of Chihuahua with the intention of restoring democracy and enacting rule by constitutional law. The revolutionaries were subsequently called the Constitutionalists in opposition to the conservative, authoritarian Federalists or Federales in Spanish. Of course, Madero needed troops to fight the Federalist army, so volunteers from the peasantry were called up and led by Pascual Orozco and Pancho Villa. These troops had a separate agenda from Madero though. They were concerned with land reform since the hacienda system allowed for the stealing and selling of both public and private lands, thereby disinheriting many farmers from their livelihood and forcing them to survive as indentured servants. While Diaz rightfully deserves credit for bringing Mexico into the industrial age, his economic system led to the displacement and downward economic mobility of the lower classes. Through the leadership of Orozco and Villa, they believed that Madero would enact a program of land reform after seizing power in exchange for their support of his revolutionary movement.

The peasantry in the southern states had suffered a similar fate and when news of the rebellion in Chihuahua reached Morelos, a rebellion started independently there too. It was led by Emiliano Zapata, a leader who turned out to be a legitimate man of the people. He drew up his Plan of Ayala, a program for land reform that called for the return of stolen lands and the redistribution of hacienda property to ensure that farmers were allowed to own their own farms and the products of their own labor. The revolution started in the guise of guerilla warfare and the haciendas were seized along with the state of Morelos. Eventually they also seized the city of Puebla and marched on Mexico City to attack the National Palace.

After so much military success, Zapata realized that his revolution was too localized and had its limitations. One was that his army was made up of uneducated laborers and in order to pitch his revolution to people outside his sphere, he needed the attention of the educated classes. The first to be attracted to Zapata was Manuel Palafox, an engineering student who acted as spokesman and advocate for the Zapatistas. Later, a group of urban intellectuals, mainly communist and anarchist in orientation, became allies of the movement and worked to expose the revolutionaries to the wider society, mostly through the media. This is a point where Brunk’s version differs from those previously published. In earlier works on Zapata, the collective and egalitarian nature of the movement were emphasized, but Brunk points out that it was actually a made up of individuals, many with cross purposes to it and their own personal preoccupations. In fact, Brunk’s main argument is that ultimately Zapata’s revolution failed because it was ridden with conflicts. At the heart of all this was the intellectuals who eventually abandoned Zapata. They tried to use him for their own ends and he tried to use them for his own ends and eventually everything fell apart. One problem is that Zapata was actually a capitalist and the intellectuals weren’t. They tried to hijack the Zapatista movement which led to them being unable to coordinate their fighting with the Villistas in the north.

Other identifiable conflicts occurred between Zapata and his generals. Long range communications were difficult in that time and place, so commanders of guerilla bands located far from the center of command were largely on their own, only receiving sporadic communications by courier. There was a lot of competition for promotion in the ranks and conflicts were often solved with brutal violence rather than negotiation. Zapata’s revolution was made up of some rough people and some of them didn’t like taking orders from anybody. The chaotic nature of the organization didn’t help to sustain the revolution. Zapata also had trouble raising funds for weaponry and food for his troops. When they got desperate enough, some of them resorted to banditry, preying on the peasants they had sworn to defend. Eventually all these conflicts caused most supporters to abandon Zapata and the movement died.

Brunk identifies one other big problem. Emiliano Zapata, unlike most other leaders of the Mexican Revolution, was not motivated by personal ambition. He did not seek political office. His goal was to have the Plan of Ayala ratified by the government. After that he wished to return to a quiet life as a farmer. The problem is that the government had no interest in agrarian land reform so Zapata would have needed either to hold political office or work closely with someone who could push his program through congress. Unfortunately, you can’t win a revolution with an idea alone.

Despite giving an interesting counter-narrative to other existing literature on Emiliano Zapata, Brunk’s writing isn’t so great. He writes in long sentences that are loopy and vapid, sometimes being hard to follow. You could also criticize him for not going deeply enough into the life and character of Zapata. But if you want to get hung up on categories, it’s best to think of this as more of a history book than a biography. As far as his thesis goes, he supports his argument about the disharmony of the Zapatistas with abundant evidence so we can say that much of it is good. Really, the best part is the “Epilogue and Conclusion” chapter in which Brunk summarizes his argument and explains it all succinctly and clearly just in case you didn’t draw the right conclusions from the rest of the text. This is possibly one of the best conclusions I have ever read. It makes up for all the messy writing that comes before it.

Samuel Brunk’s account of Emiliano Zapata is interesting for its content even though his ability as a writer isn’t so great. History writers are notoriously bad at writing anyhow, although they are usually not nearly as bad as scientists when it comes to explicatory writing. If you’re interested in this aspect of Mexican history, this one is worth reading once. Otherwise keep in mind why Emiliano Zapata is important. He might have failed in his mission, but he remains a hero because he challenged the government in the name of uplifting the poorest laborers of his country. He brought awareness of the struggles suffered by farm workers into the national dialogue. These are the people who grow our food. Most people, including me, are too dumb to survive from subsistence farming alone. Without the farm workers we would mostly all die. They don’t deserve the contempt they get from the upper classes; they deserve to live good lives just like everybody else. The least you could do is say thanks. And then forget about Marlon Brando wearing brownface in the disappointing biopic Viva Zapata. 

 

Book Review: Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 3 by Jerry A. Lang

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 3

by Jerry A. Lang

      Volume one of Jerry A. Lang’s Black Heart Fades Blue tells the story of his less than ideal childhood and teenage years up to the point where he formed his legendary hardcore punk band Poison Idea. Volume two tells the story of Jerry A.’s rise and fall as the band tours around America and Europe. He plummets into the black hole of alcoholism and heroin addiction in what has to be one of the most depressing accounts of the junky lifestyle ever written. Volume three is a much welcomed new chapter in Jerry A. Lang’s life and the final installment of his autobiography.

This volume starts where volume two left off. Jerry A. spends his time at the home of his friend and bandmate Tom “Pig Champion” Roberts, the genius guitarist of Poison Idea, whose place has turned into a shooting gallery. Their lives are no longer defined by music and they have sunk into an almost vegetative state that involves little more than scoring and shooting junk. Then the worst happens when Tom gets increasingly more ill and dies in bed. I wish he had written his own memoirs considering his encyclopedic knowledge of music, his odd sense of humor, and the war he fought against his own personal demons. His side of the Poison Idea story would have been just as interesting.

While this isn’t the end of Poison Idea, it is the end of Jerry A.’s nightmare lifestyle. He does what any good man would do at this point; he kicks his habit, cleans up his life, and takes control over his self-destructive habits. Personal responsibility is a large part of it all.

The rest of the book is a collection of odds and ends. Jerry A. writes about touring in Japan and his friendship with Adam Parfrey, the publisher of Feral House books and the man who inspired him to write this autobiography. The rest is mostly thoughts, meditations, reminiscences, regrets, hopes, and attempts at making sense of out of the world and his own life. He really puts the previous two volumes into perspective. These are the thoughts of a man who knows he screwed up and wants to change himself for the better while he still has the chance. Finally he says that this autobiography is meant to be an apology to anyone he has hurt. Then he admits it was also meant as a suicide note. But Jerry A. Lang is still alive today so it all ends on a high note and an optimistic view of the future. While I don’t think love can save the world, and I’m not sure anything can at this point, I do know that love can save an individual person. Maybe that’s all we can hope for.

This third volume is really just a coda to the other previous books. It’s mostly just scraps of information more than actual storytelling. It’s not as hard hitting as everything that came previously. But stories of rebirth and redemption rarely ever are. The most exciting book in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is Inferno where the author takes a journey into Hell. Purgatorio is good but less exciting. Paradiso is downright boring. While it is good that Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment redeems himself at the end, it is his senseless crime that is the truly exciting part of the novel. But maybe these comparisons aren’t fair since Jerry A.’s memoirs are not fiction. This shit really happened to him so his renewed passion for life as he gets on in years is all that much more meaningful.

Instead of ending with a final thought on volume three of these memoirs, it makes more sense to end with what I think of Black Heart Fades Blue as a whole. Jerry A. Lang has had a unique life both charmed and cursed. He has taken everything he has done to an extreme and traveled a fine line between ecstatic freedom and hell. He tells his story precisely and this is a work of sharp self-analysis. Most people could not live the life he lived. Most of them would die. I myself know a few too many people who didn’t make it. Of the few who survive, there are few of them who could write such insightful memoirs and then move on to a better life. Even so, a lot of people were attracted to the punk lifestyle because they were maladapted to mainstream society. I’m sure a lot of them will find something to relate to in these books even if they were fortunate enough to avoid the heroin trap. Let’s just hope that Jerry A. puts as much energy into his newfound life as he did into his addictions and his music. If he does he’s got it made. Best of luck to you, Jerry. Poison Idea still reigns as the Kings of Punk. 

 

Book Review: Revolution! Mexico 1910-20 by Ronald Atkin

Revolution!

Mexico 1910-20

by Ronald Atkin

      Mexico exploded right after the turn of the twentieth century. Political change looked impossible and life for the poor was stagnant and increasingly looking more and more hopeless. Ronald Atkin’s Revolution! Mexico 1910-20 gives an account of this most turbulent decade from multiple points of view.

This history starts with an explanation of the social, economic, and political circumstances that made the Mexican Revolution almost inevitable. The president Porfirio Diaz had stayed in power through dictatorial means for several decades. He had close relations with international businessmen and cientificos, educated members of the upper class who played a similar role to what conservative think tanks do in the USA. Diaz centralized his power through influence over the governors of each state in Mexico. Also of importance was the hacienda system of agricultural production. Led by wealthy hacendados, each hacienda was like a medieval kingdom in miniature with a feudal class structure. The haciendas were like villages where the villagers, campesinos and peons of mostly mestizo and indio ethnicity, lived and worked as sharecroppers and subsistence farmers with most of what they produced being taken to market by the hacendados who enriched themselves on it without giving anything back to the farmers. Outside the haciendas, the peons lived in villages with ejidos or communally owned land where they grew their crops. Since the land was not legally owned by anybody, the hacendados were seizing the ejidos and incorporating it into their haciendas, forcing the peons to work for starvation wages on the haciendas to survive.

Atkin begins by addressing the political structure from the top down. He gives a history of Porfirio Diaz’s regime and how he worked through corruption, nepotism, the media, and fake elections to remain in his place. Despite his old age and growing unpopularity with the Mexican masses, he refused to step down. As we should know by now, the most likely way of ending a dictatorship is through political violence or revolution. That is exactly what happened in Mexico.

From another angle, Atkins writes about the Mexican Revolution and how foreign governments and businessmen were either responsible or influential over it. Those businessmen, mostly American and British, though some were also French and German, were extracting natural resources in Mexico and paying little more for them than shipping costs. This was made possible through a loose network of diplomats and journalists who had access to the president, advising him that relations between their countries would remain strong as long as he allowed the businessmen to do as they pleased. This was not popular in a nation struggling to modernize itself at the end of the Industrial Revolution. Many believed that those resources belonged to the Mexican people and not to wealthy foreigners who cared nothing for their country. When the Mexican Revolution started, however, American president Woodrow Wilson took sides with the rebellion because of his commitment to democracy and political stability. Some of the weapons used by the revolutionaries were purchased from the nortenos and the US actually invaded Mexico twice during the revolution, once in Veracruz and once at the border in Ciudad Juarez.

Ronald Atkin also identifies the significant leaders of the Mexican Revolution. Francisco Madero was the ideologue who sparked the upheavals. After some battles in Sonora and Chihuaha, his forces moved on Mexico City and seized the National Palace. Porfirio Diaz fled the country, and Madero got elected president. Unfortunately he was naive and politically inept. His military general Victoriano Huerta overthrew his government, seized the presidential office, had Madero murdered, and returned Mexico to a dictatorship. This caused another round of battles in the northern states and the Constitutionalist Vensutiano Carranza chased Huerta out of the country. Carranza was an hacendado and even though he sided with the Mexican Revolution, he ultimately used it as a vehicle for seizing the presideny and then throwing the lower class revolutionaries under the bus once he took office.

The alliance between the democratic Constitutionalists and the revolutionaries was never that strong. Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were concerned with land reform and economics while the Constitutionalists were more concerned with gaining and maintaining power, mostly for their own benefit. Pancho Villa was the strongest of the agrarian revolutionary leaders. His populist revolt took place in northern Mexico and sometimes it even spilled over the border into the USA. He was the first to see the value of using the newly built railroads to transport troops and war materiels throughout the country. He also saw the value of sabotaging train tracks as a strategy to prevent the movement of the Mexican military.

The other leader of importance was the charismatic Emiliano Zapata. His initial rebellions in Morelia and Puebla started without any imput from the northern revolutionaries. It wasn’t until the Conference in Aguascalientes, in which Zapata’s representatives were in attendance, that the forces agreed to join. Their alliance was not a strong one though. Even though Villa and Zapata eventually did meet once, the two never succeeded in coordinating their military assaults on the government.

Ronald Atkin gives a thorough, fact based account of the Mexican Revolution. He clearly identifies the important people involved, the issues at stake, and the events that impacted the course of the revolution the most. His inclusion of the foreign influences on the Mexican Revolution is also unique in its execution, even if it makes the narrative a little biased towards the American and European point of view. He does capture a lot of nuance though and the minute details are written with clarity despite their complexity. The writing is a little dry though and sometimes lacks the spark it needs to be interesting. It is a history book and historians are not known for being great authors. The biggest disappointment about this book is the overemphasis on the Villistas in the north and the underwhelming account of the Zapatistas in the south. Atkin writes like he has no interest in Zapata’s guerilla warfare campaigns and mentions him only because he feels like he has to. There is so little detail about that aspect of the Mexican Revolution that you have to wonder why Atkin left so much of it out.

If you want a good introduction to the Mexican Revolution, then this is a good place to start. It might be a little dull at times, but it does point you in the right direction if you want to pursue this subject in more depth. It may not be of great interest to experts in Mexican history, but for the general reader it serves its purpose well.

 

Book Review: Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 2 by Jerry A. Lang

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 2

by Jerry A. Lang

      It was the fall of 1990, less than a month after I had caught a Butthole Surfers show at the notorious Lyric Theater on 42^nd St. in Manhattan. (I suppose the Danceteria didn’t invite them back, haha) Poison Idea was playing in a small club with a two foot high stage that was so narrow that the gargantuan band members barely fit on it. These guys were said to collectively weigh over a ton at one point. I stood in the front, two feet away from Tom “Pig Champion” Roberts whose guitar looked tiny in his massive arms. Jerry A. was on his best behavior although his fire breathing act probably singed a few locks off some spiky haired members of the audience. He was giving high fives in the crowd so I reached out and he shook my hand; it was like shaking hands with a grizzly bear. There is no sense in describing the music but a Poison Idea concert was like being in the middle of a cyclone of fire. It was ferocious, nihilistic rage to the extreme and it felt so goddamn good. There is a strand of the punk counter culture that starts with Iggy Pop and The Stooges, connects them to Johnny Thunders and the Dead Boys, The Germs, and GG Allin; Poison Idead sits comfortably in that lineage. I hate to get mystical sounding about it, but there is a transcendental state of ecstasy that can be achieved by abandoning all caution, spinning wildly out of control.

In the first volume of Jerry A. Lang’s autobiography Black Heart Fades Blue he tells us about his troubled childhood and teenage years, the time when he moved to Portland, Oregon and got involved in the punk and underground music scene. He also tells us about his precocious encounters with drugs, alcohol, sex, and violence. Volume two picks up where that left off. As Poison Idea’s popularity grew, so did their good and bad times, and so did their reputation as being a problem child of the music industry. But this book isn’t about the band so much as it about Jerry A. It’s not that he denies the importance of the other people in his life; it’s just that he knows their version of events won’t match his and he doesn’t want to speak for them. So he makes sure that we know that this is how he sees his life as only he can and leaves it at that.

The story isn’t anything unique. Most rock bands follow the same path of putting out records, building a following, partying to an excessive degree, and then going into decline as their drug habits take over. The most unique thing about Jerry A.’s story is how high he got and low he sank. Jerry A.’s intentions were to pick up where Darby Crash, lead singer of The Germs, left off. That meant pushing all limitations in terms of lifestyle and music well beyond what anybody had done previously. One of the songs on Poison Idea’s War All the Time LP was called “Romantic Self Destruction.” The catch here is that Jerry A. was not only physically bigger and stronger than most other rock stars, but he was also made of sturdier material than most other people. On top of that he had a complex personality, a strong mind, and a surprising awareness of morality and social justice that helped him navigate through the scummiest of the scum pits in the world. Those finer aspects of his mind included appreciation for art and literature, a wide ranging taste in music, a love of nature, a curiosity about the world and its variety of cultures, a willingness to defend outsiders and misfits, a respect for women’s rights, and an anti-bigotry stance on issues of race and gender issues. Sounds like one great guy.

Not so fast. As Jerry A.’s life spun out of control, mostly because of drugs, alcohol, and violence, those refined attitudes receded into the background. But they never entirely disappeared and that is the key to understanding where this autobiography is going.

As Poison Idea toured America, Europe, and Japan, the band was having a non-stop party. Jerry A. loved drinking; he could chug a whole quart of whisky without taking a breath. But on top of that he, and other band members too, got hooked on heroin. Drugs and alcohol are fun until they aren’t. They went from being a band that used drugs to drug users who had a band to support their habits. Things took a nasty turn for the worse. The combination of drunkenness, heroin withdrawal, and diabetes resulted in some disgusting injuries and illness and a couple near death experiences resulting from overdoses. Jerry A. tried to clean up with Alcoholics Anonymous and methadone and has some interesting things to say about what a sleazy grift those clinics and therapy groups are. To support himself, he got a job as a professional jizz mopper in a porn store. Then just when you think he had hit rock bottom, he sinks even lower as the methadone doesn’t help and he turns to stealing and ripping off drug dealers to get his fixes. Jerry A., along with Pig Champion, end up homeless at one point. As far as stories about junkies go, there isn’t anything too unique about these events. It’s just that the story is told with the same intensity and power that Jerry A. put into his music. This is the kind of harrowing literature that makes you feel like you’ve been kicked in the balls with a steel toed boot. As far as accounts of heroin addiction go, this autobiography is in league with William S. Burroughs and Jim Carroll. It’s tempting to say it might even surpass the works of those authors in terms of their impact on the reader.

This subject matter may be too much for some to handle. The abrasive details are described in a smooth, easy going writing style though. The writing itself is not challenging although there are some flaws. Jerry A. sometimes repeats information as if he forgot that he has already told us some of his stories before; this is no big deal though because he doesn’t dwell on these details for so long that it ruins the narrative. Some of the sequencing can be a little disordered too. In one chapter he’s homeless, in the next he’s living in an apartment. At the beginning of a chapter he goes to the methadone clinic and then he shoots up heroin a few paragraphs later. It’s like he wrote everything down in the order that he remembered it rather than putting into an organized timeline. Also, his unwillingness to write about people he was close to leaves some huge gaps in the story, but he has his reasons for doing this and as a reader, we have to understand where he’s coming from.

None of those flaws are bad enough to make this unworthy of reading. What Jerry A. does get right is what matters most. This isn’t a work of self-aggrandizement nor is it a work of self-pity. It is neither a work of self-celebration nor is it a work of self-hatred. He obviously regrets a lot of what he did, but he writes in such a calm and detached manner that presents us with nothing but the facts, or at least the facts as he understands them to be. This is a work of self-evaluation, like a surgeon who removed a tumor from his own body and then studies it under a microscope as objectively as he possibly can. This is the kind of book a complete fuck up would write when they decide to turn their life around and make themselves into something better. There is an undercurrent of self-respect here and an attempt to reclaim some sense of dignity after surviving a hurricane of self abuse.

Watching somebody self destruct isn’t pleasant. You shouldn’t expect it to be. You wouldn’t read a book like this for simple entertainment though. Black Heart Fades Blue tell Poison Idea fans a lot of what they need to know if they ever wondered where this band was coming from. Jerry A.’s childhood was nothing to envy. We see how he grew up without parental guidance or restraint, had some intense experiences at a young age, and then spent his life in reckless abandonment, seeking out any experience more intense than the last. Or maybe he was trying to numb the pain with heroin and alcohol then trying to undo the numbness with sex, violence, and music, an eternally repeating cycle that fed addictions of all kinds. You can feel sorry for his bad childhood if you choose, though I don’t think he wants that. One thing is certain: if he hadn’t grown up the way he did we might never have been blessed with one of the greatest hardcore punk bands that ever existed, if not THE best. Poison Idea named their first LP Kings of Punk and they earned their right to that title. And if you think that’s all there is to this story, than remember that hitting rock bottom always offers the opportunity for redemption. Be sure to read volume three of these memoirs for that part of the story if you haven’t already.