Book Analysis & Review: Keeper Of the Children

Keeper Of the Children

by William H. Hallahan

Quite often, horror writers are sensitive to the currents of anxiety that flow throughout a society. And for good reason: in order to write something unnerving they have to be aware of what makes people anxious. William H. Hallahan’s Keeper Of the Children addresses two concerns that American society had in the late 1970s. One was the cult scare that arose after the 1960s when new religious movements, some being authoritarian in nature and often accused of brainwashing,, swept through American society. Groups like the Moonies, the Hare Krishnas, and the Peoples Temple of Jim Jones were thriving and often cast a menacing shadow on those outside the groups. Another fear at the time was the breakdown of the American nuclear family. Divorce rates were increasing and children were distancing themselves more and more from their families, often seeking surrogate or alternative families in other places, some of which were maladaptive. Conservatives blamed the social changes of the 1960s for this, but in reality the rising cost of living contributed more to this than the counter-cultural impulses of the youth since career minded parents had to spend more time at work and less time at home. So the bases of Hallahan’s now overlooked novel were firmly rooted in the fears of his time.

The story starts when teenager Renni Benson does not come from school. Her mother Susan and little brother Top begin looking for her, eventually to learn that she and her friend Pammy, who comes from an abusive family, have gotten roped into a religious cult led by a Tibetan monk named Kheim. This monk is said to be an expert in brainwashing, mind control, and occultism so of course, Susan is scared for her daughter’s safety.

That’s when the absentee father, Eddie Benson, enters the picture. Eddie works for a film production company which requires him to spend long stretches of time abroad. On this particular trip, after working for a while in Europe, he returns home to find his daughter missing. When he learns why she is not home, he realizes his duty as a father is to rescue her even though his absence might be a contributing factor to her running away. Eddie also worries throughout the story that his wife is losing interest in him, something he again attributes to his absence. When his company demands that he leave for another lucrative filming job in Africa with a flirtatious and attractive camera woman by his side, he knows he must sacrifice his career in order to save his family from disintegrating.

Eddie gets together with a group of parents whose teenagers have also been led away into the cult; their plan is to find a way to get their children back. But then, one by one, the members of the group get killed in unusual circumstances. The first one to die is murdered by a walking scarecrow that comes to life, descends from his perch in the moonlight, and enters the man’s house to snuff him. The cult leader Kheim is a master of astral projection, so he can leave his body, enter into inanimate objects, and commit acts of violence and homicide in this way.

From there on, we learn about the lives of the other parents in the group and why Pammy so desperately wanted to join the cult as a refuge from her abusive parents. As these others get picked off in a series of bizarre murders, Eddie realizes conventional means of fighting Kheim will not work, so he joins an ashram run by an Indian yogi and learns astral projection himself. Having learned this occult technique, he engages in fights with Kheim in some unusual ways.

The unreal aspects of the story are the most interesting part of the book. Fights and murders happen while Eddie and Kheim are using their astral bodies to animate marionettes, a giant ax-wielding teddy bear, and a feral cat. You might be tempted to read some kind of symbolism into these hand-to-hand battles, but there probably isn’t any there. These fights are done, mostly in the guise of toys to ornament the violence, making it more of an entertaining novelty than a metaphor. Since the story is pedestrian, a father-hero goes to the rescue of his captive maiden daughter, and some elements are given too much description while others don’t get enough, Eddie’s course in the ashram drags on for too long and the activities of the cult are barely even touched on, there has to be something to prop up the story and keep it interesting. That is why these toy and cat fights are given so much attention. They really are the best passages in the book and the main reason it might be worth reading once.

As for the meaning of the story, there isn’t much here. The social themes of family breakdown and the menace of sleazy religious movements are issues addressed, but as for commentary on these topics, Hallahan doesn’t have much to say beyond the idea that families are important, even more important than career advancement, and cults are bad. This is unfortunate because the author has enough talent to inject some meaningful commentary into the narrative, taking it to another level. Instead he declines to use this novel as a pulpit and makes it an almost entirely commercial form of entertainment. There is a catch here though; while Hallahan could be accused of racism or xenophobia by portraying Kheim, the evil Asian occultist, as the adversary of the story, he counters this by portraying the Chinese father of a cult member in a sympathetic light and also turning to an Indian yogi for guidance on how to defeat Kheim. Thus he provides a clear indication that his opposition is to cults of coercive indoctrination and not to Asian people or immigrants.

While Keeper Of the Children does touch on some social issues of the 1970s, it ultimately is a work of entertainment. In that regard, Hallahan mostly succeeds, at least when writing about homicidal marionettes and cat battles. Hallahan could have gone deeper, but he didn’t. As such, it’s a fun read even if it is a bit predictable and basic in its methods. It’s amusing in the way a carnival fun house is. Just don’t expect much if you try to look beneath the surface.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Hidden Cities by Moses Gates

Hidden Cities:

Travels To the Secret Corners Of the World's Great Metropolises

A Memoir of Urban Exploration

There is a particular type of human, the kind that, as a child, would lift up big rocks and get a sense of wonder at all the critters that inhabit their own ecosystem hidden from our sight. These types of people get to adolescence and do things like skip school so they can climb through a broken window or a hole in a wall so they can hang out all day with their friends in an abandoned building, smoking cigarettes and telling dirty jokes. Maybe they go on to exploring abandoned tunnels or climbing up scaffolding on construction sites. Motivated by an undying sense of curiosity,
foolhardiness, thrill seeking, and a desire for hidden or forbidden knowledge, these explorers may carry these practices into adulthood, making their urban exploration into an eccentric hobby. Now think about how the introduction of the internet changed the way people socialize. These urban explorers used the worldwide web to reach out to each other, find partners for exploratory travels, exchange tips on safety and locations, and anything else that might be relevant to their lifestyle. This is where Moses Gates comes in; his book Hidden Cities documents the urban excavations he goes on, the cultural scene of urban exploration, and other odds and ends in his world travels.

Moses Gates is an interesting character. He got his post-graduate degree in urban development, something that sparked his interest as he explored the more obscure and remote parts of his adopted hometown of New York City. He approaches the subject matter with a degree of intellectualism. For him, urban exploration is as much an educational experience as it is one of adventure and aesthetic indulgence. Gates usually has some knowledge about the history and architectural designs of the places he visits. This kind of intellectualism might put off some readers who just want to read about the adventure, but for the rest of us it adds another dimension to these excursions, putting these hidden places into context, and detailing how they are living and breathing parts of a functional city-scape. Probably his greatest insight though is that most of these places are blocked off with signs that warn of danger or penalties for entering them illegally. For Gates, these signs are invitations rather than barriers and he extends this thought to say that many people are hemmed in by barriers that do not actually exist. For him, urban exploration is a liberating activity, one that transgresses established rules and frees his mind so that he can always be open to new possibilities. Having said that, Gates does not explore this theme of transgression to any great length in the rest of the book.

Most of the places Gates explores are in New York. There are hidden sections of skyscrapers, abandoned buildings, and subway tunnels, some of which are abandoned and used as galleries for graffiti artists and living spaces for homeless people. His knowledge of New York’s architecture and urban design are interesting as are his appreciation for street art and his friendships with the so-called Mole People, those who use the subway tunnels as their home. His advocacy for the marginalized is well in line with his attitude toward crossing boundaries. He also climbs some of New York’s bridges. His descriptive writing is adequate, but it isn’t great. He gives just enough information to give a sense of what it feels like to stand, illegally, on top of a city bridge evoking giddiness and butterflies in your stomach. But this descriptiveness is limited to the first few places he visits. After describing a couple bridge climbs, he doesn’t go through the bother of writing so much in later chapters, merely mentioning that he did it. This is a big weakness in this book.

Other interesting places he goes are in Paris, Russia, and Ukraine. Paris is especially exciting as he goes on multi-day explorations of the catacombs, sewers, and aqueducts that run under the whole city. He also has an interesting chapter about getting arrested while climbing the bell tower of Notre Dame and being dumb enough to ring the bell in the middle of the night. Underground travels in Moscow and Kiev are similar and interesting for similar reasons. Again, his mixture of historical knowledge and aesthetic awe make these passages good. The other places he visits in Europe, North Africa, and Latin America are less than spectacular in their descriptions.

Another facet of this book that is interesting, but also underdeveloped, is the culture of urban explorers. Gates’s main travel companion is a photographer named Steve who drinks and smokes heavily and is prone to injury. The others are people he meets online, a cast of characters that includes artists, drop outs, permanent globe trekkers, drifters, wanderers, druggies, secretive tour guides who survive by leading urban exploration tours, and those who like to have sex in unusual places like the top of the Brooklyn Bridge. This isn’t a sociological study of this subculture and Gates doesn’t go into much detail about it Doing so might have made the narrative a bit more complete.

The rest of the book is just “stuff” and by that I mean travel experiences that might have been exciting but aren’t described well and sometimes feel irrelevant to what the book is intended to be about. A good case in point is a passage where Gates describes how much he is suffering because he has to take a dump on a very long drive to La Paz, Bolivia. This part isn’t just irrelevant and uninteresting, but it also sticks out in a sad way because he waxes more poetically about this situation than he does about anything else he writes about.

Hidden Cities is the kind of book you only read once. Moses Gates writes in a way that brings everything to the surface so that there is no question about what he intends to say. There isn’t much room for interpretation. It’s got some interesting ideas and Gates does a good job of making urban exploration look appealing, but the weaker parts drag it down overall and neutralize any merits the book might otherwise have. I can’t say Hidden Cities is bad, but like a magazine article, it’s ephemeral and certainly not destined to be a classic.

 

Book Review: Black Cola

Black Cola

by Frank Laric

They say that living a good life is all about the choices you make. You can extend the thought to writing and say that writing a good novel is all about the choices the author makes. A good author knows what to emphasize and what to diminish, what to include and what to exclude, what to put in the forefront of the narrative and what to place in the background. Frank Laric, the virtually unknown author of Black Cola, does not make effective choices in the writing of this oddball novel. But then there is something about his bad decisions that make this somewhat of a uniquely interesting read.

The concept behind Black Cola is that two racist businessmen and a Nazi chemist concoct a soda, sold under the titular name, that sterilizes the people who drink it. The three conspirators market the drink to African-American people although some white people take a liking to it also. Sales are wildly successful, but when the birth rate begins to rapidly decline, people get suspicious. A criminal investigation is made, and the three businessmen end up on trial.

Amiel Gruensvig began his career as a chemist for the Third Reich during the reign of Hitler. After the war, he flees to America and finds work in a cola bottling company. Louie Duval is a Cajun businessman from Louisiana who hates African-American people because when he tried to rape a Black woman, she defended herself by slashing him with a knife. Sam Waters is a Texas businessman who meets Duval in a bar where they begin hatching a plot to ethnically cleanse the African-American population. They launch the Black Cola corporation and that is where they find Gruensvig. Then there is Velma, Sam’s wife who knows all about the conspiracy, but refuses to cooperate with the investigation until she gets called as a witness during the trial. None of these characters have any redeeming qualities.

Strangely enough, Sam Waters’ lawyer, named Bud Winthrope, is made the central character of the plot. Bud and Sam are old friends, but Bud, a married man himself, is having an affair with Sam’s wife Velma. This love triangle is used as the central theme to tie all the plot lines together. In fact, this affair is the most prominent theme in the whole book, so much so that all the other themes take a backseat to it. Considering that the story is supposed to be about an attempted genocide, it appears to be an odd choice for a central plot line. But considering that Velma becomes the key witness in the trial, it functions well at holding the whole narrative together.

Velma is also involved in subplots relating to the other three conspirators. She struggles to keep her marriage with Sam together in one thread. She also gets assaulted by Louie Duval and attempts to help Gruensvig escape to Mexico to avoid prosecution. Why she wants to help the Nazi is never clearly explained.

Otherwise, Sam and Bud are the most well-rounded characters. Sam is unapologetic about his crime and feels he is being betrayed by society for putting him in jail. He also pins his hopes of being found not guilty on laying all blame on his partners, dishonestly trying to convince the jury that he got tricked into doing something he didn’t want to do. Sam also knows that Velma and Bud are sleeping together and he gives Bud permission to carry on as he is. In fact Sam is so enthralled with the idea of Bud and Velma’s adultery that you might wonder if he has some kind of cuckold kink. All of these subplots involving Velma find their way into the courtroom proceedings.

By the end of the trial, it becomes more clear that the lawyer Bud Winthrope is the lead character. He is written about with the most detail, but in the end his motivations remain unclear. His desire to be with Velma is understandable enough, but his loyalty to Sam Waters is highly questionable. Even though he has maintained a long standing friendship with Sam, an outspoken white supremacist, he claims to be against racism and expresses no cognitive dissonance between their mutual admiration and Sam’s repugnant beliefs. To make it worse, Sam is not just a run of the mill ordinary ignoramus, but he was actively involved in a plot to commit genocide. That goes far beyond ordinary rudeness or petty crime. But Bud insists that Sam is just a great guy who made a bad mistake in life and deserves to be forgiven. It is impossible to tell who the real Bud Winthrope really is. You might draw the conclusion that he turns a blind eye to Sam’s rotten character for the sake of getting closer to Velma, making him no more than a piece of human crap. If it is the author’s intention to send that message then he could have made it more obvious because if that is the intended meaning, it is so subtle that it is almost indiscernible.

The trajectory of Bud’s life is a strange one too. Before and after the trial, all the culprits directly associated with the Black Cola company die off one by one until only Velma is left. Finally Bud gets her all to himself, but then he loses her too. He deals with all this by running into the arms of the Catholic church, finding redemption in religion. But Bud is such an unemotional character that he has no real inner struggle to complement the events of the story; he is stoic in a way that does not come off as strength of character, but rather as insufficient character development on the part of the author. All the religious preaching at the end of the book, especially at Sam Waters’ funeral, reaffirms Bud’s belief that the racists, Sam and Velma, were good people who just made some a bad mistake. These religious apologetics in the end sound more like a cop out on the author’s part. The author’s point isn’t entirely clear, but he appears to be saying that racists are people too and God loves all people so therefore we should be forgiving. That’s all fine and good, but it dodges the question of how we should deal with racists in the real world. Supposing we do get forgiven by God and go to Heaven in the end, what are we supposed to do about racists who hurt people here in the meantime? Religious salvation simply defers the problem to the afterlife. This is a bit irresponsible, don’t you think?

So considering this book is supposed to be about an African-American genocide, you might wonder how Black people figure into the narrative. Actually they do, but less you than you might be inclined to think. Charley Yates is the father of a middle-class African-American family in Atlanta. He also belongs to a militant, secretive Black Power activist group. Through them, Charley gets assigned the task of assassinating one of the Black Cola conspirators during the trial. That is Charley’s whole story. He is a two-dimensional character and his act of violence serves a narrative function by altering the defense’s strategy during the trial. Otherwise, the militants are involved in the death that happens at the end, but overall this subplot is subordinate to everything else that happens in the story. The militants are portrayed in a neutral light, being written about as neither benign nor malevolent. Still, it is strange that a book that supposedly addresses the subject of the evils of racism would place its African-American characters in such a minor role. I don’t know who Frank Laric is, but I’m quite convinced he is white.

As an author Frank Laric does not always make the best choices. This novel gives the appearance of addressing racial injustice and yet the core story is about an adulterous relationship and how it plays out in a soap opera courtroom drama. Even worse, the story is primarily about white people, most of which are unapologetic, or at best passe, about their bigotry. The theme of racism is only superficially addressed in some dialogue, testimony during the trial, a funeral eulogy, and the big kumbaya fest at the end. The theme of racism is like an afterthought used as a cloak to dress up an otherwise mediocre story about a love affair between two married people. However, if there is anything admirable about this novel it is the tightly wound plot structure. All the subplots and narrative twists feed directly into the progression of the trial. At a technical level, this is well written. It really just suffers terribly because the author has his thematic priorities all out of order.

Black Cola is not a great novel by any standards that can be thought of. What makes it most interesting is the way in which it inverts common sense logic about what to place in the foreground and background in its structure, making it a slightly challenging read even if it is ultimately a failed work of art. And despite the way in which it leaves no loose threads or plot holes in the end, it can stick in your mind simply because it isn’t obvious what the author intends to say. The meaning of the book is not entirely clear. Black Cola is a very rare paperback so if you happen to come across a copy, it would be worth picking up for its value as a collectible vintage book. It might even be worth reading once just because it is such an oddity, but you probably wouldn’t want to read it a second time.

 

Book Review: Please Kill Me

Please Kill Me:

The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

According to Ed Sanders, lead singer of The Fugs and author of books on the Manson Family murders, a counter-current existed in the hippy subculture of the 1960s. While most hippies were middle or upper class kids who could afford the luxury of turning on, tuning, and dropping out due to the financial security they could return to if they left the scene, there was another growing faction of hippies that came from a blue collar background. Some of these people suffered from abusive parenting or strict religious upbringings. This underbelly of the hippy underclass were more negative and nihilistic in their outlook, being hard drinkers and hard drug users, prone to carrying switchblades or chains, and not afraid to use them. Some of these people drifted into motorcycle clubs like the Hells Angels or other biker gangs of the counter-culture while some began morphing into a hard-edged scene of their own. Those latter people were the seeds of what came to be known as Punks. Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain is an oral history of the proto-punk and first wave of the punk music scene, mostly centered in New York City’s Lower East Side, gradually spreading across America and eventually into Europe.

In the early 1970s, Legs McNeil and some friends saw a cultural trend emerging in the downtown music scene of Manhattan. It was a reclamation of primal rock and roll, a return to three minute songs, fast paced with high energy and high volume, confrontational lyrics, animalistic wildness, and a tough, streetwise attitude that could only have emerged from the scumpits of New York in its most decadent and crime ridden decade. McNeil and company put together a magazine dedicated to this new trend and called it Punk. The magazine caught on, the name stuck, and the rest is history. Maybe it is a history that some cultural critics wish we could forget, but staying true to its defiant nature, it, hasn’t been forgotten and probably won’t be as for a long time, just like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki won’t be forgotten either. This book chronicles those origins and early days of the scene, piecemeal in a collage of quotes from articles and interviews involving people who were clear-headed enough to be able to speak about what they saw.

Obviously the story doesn’t start in 1975 with the first publication of Punk which had a drawing of Lou Reed on its cover. It starts in the 1960s with The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol’s Factory. Amphetamines were the drug of choice in the Factory and the scene started to attract rough trade, the types of people who didn’t, or didn’t want to, fit in with the hippies. Andy Warhol became the manager for The Velvet Underground and they became the band that inspired thousands of others to become musicians despite their unpopularity during their short career.

Then came band manager Danny Fields, the man who signed The Doors to Elektra Records. He discovered MC5 and The Stooges, brought them to New York, and found himself on the wrong side of the record industry’s executives as those bands were a bit untame, too dangerous, unmarketable, and unable to make millions of dollars for the investors. But The Stooges’ front man Iggy Pop caught the attention of David Bowie and his band found a lifeline in the music industry. Meanwhile, while glam grew bigger in England, its glitter rock counterpart in New York took off with the New York Dolls, a band that performed in drag even though they weren’t gay. They weren’t just ordinary transvestites; they looked like the kind of street walkers that would haul you down an alley and stomp your head in with their platform shoes, not even bothering to steal your wallet. Their brand of rock picked up where Chuck Berry left off with Johnny Thunders playing guitar in a way that made you feel like you were standing under a jet airplane as it flew ten feet over your head and a freight train went by five feet off to your side.. Lead singer David Johanson’s advice to young musicians was “don’t worry if you can play well or not. Don’t worry about how good your equipment is. Just get up on stage and play.” This embodies the approach to punk rock. It was never about technical perfection. It prioritized feeling and energy over talent and the feeling conveyed was gritty, violent, mean, dirty, and aggressive. And it was always exhilarating.

By the mid-1970s, the venues of Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s had become the world’s epicenters of punk. Bands like Television, Richard Hell and The Voidoids, Ramones, Dead Boys, The Heartbreakers, The Dictators, and the Patti Smith Group were reaching national stardom. Then Malcolm McLaren arrived in New York and envisioned marketing punk rock in England. He brought some bands over to London and a scene around the Sex Pistols took off. When McLaren brought the Sex Pistols to tour in America, they became a media sensation, punk became a fad and a commodity, and when the Sex Pistols broke up along with most other American punk bands, the first wave of punk was more or less over.

In this narrative, the timeline of punk history is actually pushed into the background so that most of the discussions are about the people and events happening in the scene. Some of the people quoted or interviewed may not carry name recognition for people unfamiliar with the territory. There is an extensive glossary at the back for those who need it. Some of the major stars of punk don’t make any direct contributions to the narrative while their friends, girlfriends, groupies, managers, roadies, and various others do. The effect is like being at a party and hearing all these people reminiscing about those bad old/good old days.

And the kinds of things they talk about could be seriously disturbing to people who aren’t ready for it. The early New York punk scene would have been a goldmine for psychologists who study social dysfunction. The scene was loaded with violence, heroin addiction, alcoholism, promiscuity, prostitution, and all around bad behavior. Some passages might make you feel grimy or nauseous. MC5, the band that played at the Democratic National Convention riots in Chicago 1968, find themselves in a riot when they try to play at the Fillmore East. Iggy Pop gets beat up continuously, loaded on drugs, sometimes falling off the stage, throwing bottles, raw meat and peanut butter at the audience, and going so far as to slice himself up with broken glass. The Ramones find each other because they are a bunch of complete weirdos. Johnny Thunders becomes the most notorious junky in rock history. Wayne County bludgeons Handsome Dick Manitoba with a microphone stand after some misunderstood friendly banter, breaking the Dictators’ lead singer’s collar bone and putting him in a wheel chair. Johnny Blitz of the Dead Boys almost dies after a brutal stabbing. James Chance assaults members of the audience during a concert and then cuts his face with a broken bottle when the bouncers try to throw him out. Stiv Bators one-ups Alice Cooper’s stage show by hanging himself with a noose, no props involved, during a Dead Boys show at CBGB’s. Nancy Spungen gets killed allegedly by Sid Vicious who soon after dies of a heroin overdose. Some luminaries of the scene, namely Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, and Lou Reed don’t appear in such a favorable light by the end of the book either. Punk rock was a musical genre started by and for fuck ups. Like the porn industry, it attracted a lot of unstable people. But we’re still feeling the effects of it now.

Having said that, there is a lot of gallows humor in these pages as well. The Stooges use a picture of Elvis Presley as a target when they feel like shooting holes in the walls of their house. Sid Vicious uses water from a toilet full of vomit to shoot up amphetamines. Iggy Pop gets arrested while wearing a dress and then tells the guy who picks up at jail that it isn’t a woman’s dress, it is a man’s dress while the police laugh at him. Cheetah Chrome gets arrested after throwing an air conditioner out of a hotel room window, hitting a police car, and the police tell him to put his pants on not realizing that his flesh colored leotards actually are pants. A studio engineer gives Johnny Thunders a shirt because he feels sorry for him, thinking his ripped t-shirt means he is too poor to afford nice clothes. Sid Vicious meets a friend on the street outside the Chelsea Hotel; the friend says he is going to pick up a vacuum cleaner at a friend’s apartment and Sid Vicious thinks “vacuum cleaner” is New York slang for a bag of heroin and insists he wants to get a vacuum cleaner too. And so it goes on.

This book only scratches the surface though. McNeil and McCain select the most outrageous stories and elements of early punk. There are a lot of bands that go unmentioned and the second wave of hardcore punk is never brought up, nor is the corporate commercialization of punk in the 1990s, the pretentious and dull grunge scene and crappy MTV punk. Parallel scenes like new wave, no wave, post punk, and underground metal get almost no space here either.

Please Kill Me is a great book and a must read for anyone who is curious about the roots of the most dangerous and influential musical movement in history. I have heard a lot of talk these days about transgressive literature and art, but punks in the beginning were living a transgressive lifestyle, one that put their lives in danger on a daily basis. It was reckless abandonment and rock and roll excess taken to its extreme limits. It shouldn’t be a surprise that most of these people died before the age of thirty, and yet Iggy Pop, the biggest stooge of all Stooges, is still alive and thriving. I guess whatever didn’t kill him really did make hims stronger. And I still think it’s odd that he became a professional golfer. All of the bands mentioned in this book provided the soundtrack to my high school years and reading about the people who made the early punk scene a reality is truly mind-blowing for me. I can’t praise this book enough.

 

Book Review

Where White Men Fear to Tread:

The Autobiography of Russell Means

with Marvin J. Wolf

As a white man, I took the title of this book to be a challenge. Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means is, after all, precisely calculated to draw attention to itself by needling a white person’s conscience. Beyond the title, it doesn’t take long after starting the book to feel as if I passed a simple test. It’s like Russell Means is saying “Here is a line. If you dare to cross it you will be confronted with your own ignorance. If you don’t cross it you are a coward, but if you do and you follow along with me as I tell my story to the end you will benefit immensely even though you will face some tough trials just like I did.” So by the last pages of this autobiography I felt like I had taken a few blows, That is to my benefit. Russell Means, possibly the ultimate American Indian warrior of our time, also leaves himself open to blows. He made a lot of mistakes in his life, but he was man enough to write them into these pages so he and others can evaluate them and learn from his life. Whether you are white or not, that line that Russell Means dares you to cross is well worth the risk.

Like all autobiographies, this one starts at the beginning of Means’ life. His parents grew up in the forced segregation of Indian boarding schools and he was of the first generation to grow up as an urban Indian, attending public schools. That generational shift is an important element in his story. Means was a highly intelligent boy who sometimes excelled academically and sometimes struggled to adjust. He never lost a taste for learning though, even until the end of his life. What he experienced might be typical for a lot of Indian children, meaning broken families, alcoholic parents, trouble fitting in, delinquency, and racism. By his teenage years, he was dealing drugs, drinking a lot, committing petty crimes, and turning into a drifter, moving from city to reservation and back again, mostly in search of work. From a young age, he honed his skills at fighting by getting into barroom brawls and his experiences with the Bureau of Indian Affairs were contentious and disappointing. Again, there is a lot for American Indian people to relate to here.

Russell Means’ political awakening came when he attended an Occupy Alcatraz Island demonstration in the 1960s. A band of native activists gathered on the prison island to declare it a sovereign state for indigenous people. Of course it amounted to no more than a little media publicity, but it sparked a fire, fueled by a high octane grade of testosterone, in Means’ heart that began to rage. Means later found himself in the company of the American Indian Movement (AIM), founding the Cleveland chapter of that activist organization where he took over the job of the BIA by doing the work they were set up to do but weren’t doing.

As AIM turned from being a community services oriented organizations to being a more militant revolutionary one, fighting for the sovereignty and independence of Indian people in America, Means entered the most turbulent period of his life. He organized a cross-country tour called the Trail of Broken Treaties, started the militant occupation of the Wounded Knee battlefield on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, participated in a courtroom riot, helped to destroy the Bureau of Indian Affairs office building in Washington, D.C., and got into a lot of trouble along the way. After several trials, he got exonerated from most of his charges with the help of a team of activist lawyers, though he did end up doing a three year stint in prison. You can criticize Means for embracing violence as his primary tactic and you could possibly say he did more good for his people when AIM was simply providing practical assistance to struggling Indians, but then again, all the violence did draw a lot of attention to the plight of American Indian people and all but started a renaissance in Indian cultural awareness during the 1970s. Besides, the violence goes a long way in illustrating all the pent-up fury that accumulated after so much genocide, broken treaties, stolen land, racial discrimination, and cultural destruction suffered at the hands of the white establishment. The violence is unfortunate, but when looked at in the wider historical context, it isn’t surprising. Part of what makes this book so great is the way Means always tells his story in reference to both history and the contemporary society in which he lived.

After the violent phase of his life, Means became a bit more creative in his approach to activism. He set up a commune to teach people how to live according to traditional Indian ways. He didn’t limit the community to Indians only and in fact allowed people of any race to participate as long as they were there in good faith and willing to contribute something of value to the community. Russel Means had no tolerance for white people who larp as Indians to trick themselves into thinking they are spiritual. He had no tolerance for anthropologists, sociologists, or gawking tourists either. This book makes the point that Indians have a living culture that is neither a museum piece nor entertainment for seekers of novelty.

Also of note is Means’ break with the American progressive Left. While being one of the prominent leaders of the fight for Indian civil rights, he had a contentious relationship with the activists of the post-1960s New Leftt who didn’t approve of his use of violence for political purposes. The big break up came in the 1980s when he visited the Miskito Indians on the est coast of Nicaragua, only to find that the socialist Sandinista party in power were committing genocide against them. After Sandinista militias tried to assassinate Means while conducting bombing campaign against Miskito villages, he returned to America and got shunned by Leftists who refused to believe the Sandinistas would do anything so terrible.

Russell Means turned to the radical American right from then on, making questionable alliances with Larry Flynt, the Unification Church, and the ever-so-flakey Libertarian party who asked him to run in the presidential primary against Ron Paul in 1984. Most Libertarians at that time actually hated Ron Paul and Means lost by only three votes. While Means could sound quite wise and philosophical when discussing the politics of racism and history, he comes off as naive and overly-simplistic when he explains his take on libertarianism. He isn’t any different from other libertarians in that way, but at least in his case it makes sense in the context of an Indian activist who wants freedom from the U.S. government for his people who are sitting on broken treaties that guaranteed them just that.

Unfortunately for everybody, it becomes clear that other Indians were incapable and not motivated enough to keep up with Mean’s never-ending energy and commitment to his cause. He was just one of those people with too much power, moving too fast through life for other people to keep up with.

By the end of the book, Russell Means is living in a treatment facility for people with anger management problems, a place he went to voluntarily. While acknowledging that his anger motivated him to do a lot to uplift his people, he was also courageous enough to admit that his rage also destroyed a lot of relationships in his personal life and led him to commit unnecessary acts of violence that did no one any good. After all he accomplished, he ends his story where he began: with an insatiable desire to learn and improve.

Means didn’t just live the life of a warrior; he also lived the life of an intellectual with a complex mind and a willingness to look at ideas from multiple perspectives. After reading this, it becomes clear that this autobiography is not just about Means telling his story to the world, but it is also a chance to reflect on his own life, searching for what he did right and what he did wrong with the intention of correcting the mistakes he made in the twilight years of his life. Means spent his life attacking American society while trying to rebuild the culture of Indian people and finished by looking in the mirror and confronting the most horrible things he did. Taking that kind of responsibility requires strength of character, a kind of strength that a lot of leaders in America and the world don’t have. I’m certain that Means would say this strength came from his people’s traditions and his connecation to nature.

As a book, there isn’t much here to criticize. Most of it is exciting with non-stop action, running along at a fast and smooth pace. Russell Means is such a polarizing figure though that there may be times when some readers will feel alienated from the story. His machismo might turn some weaklings off; he always did hate pacifists anyways. Otherwise, he says and does a lot of things that will be objectionable to just about anybody. But whether you agree with all of it, some of it, or none of it, he presents his ideas and life story in such a way that it never gets dull and never ceases to make you think.

And yet another great thing about this book is that it gives such a clear picture of what life for Indians, be they urban Indians or reservation Indians, are living through in our times. This is a perspective that will rarely be found in other books. It’s not about the “noble savages” you see depicted in Santa Fe tourist trap art, Walt Disney cartoons, or the junk new age shaman fantasies of Carlos Castaneda. It shows you realistically how real Indians live in the real world in the very real times we are in. This is where many people in our day will fear to tread, be they hippy Indian wannabes or conservatives and businessmen who turn a blind eye to the damage America and other countries have done to indigenous people.

So should white people fear to tread into the pages of this book? I should hope not as long as you are the kind of white person who cares about humanity and can take some constructive criticism without having an existential crisis. Russell Means can be intimidating; he is at times nasty, cruel, violent, impulsive, egotistical, condescending, and a bit of a publicity seeker, but he also has a caring side, a sly sense of humor, an ironic intellect, and an abundant love for his own people, the planet Earth, and, believe it or not, for humanity as a whole. Despite all his rage, he ends up where Malcolm X did after his pilgrimage to Mecca. No, white people and people of any other enthnicity or race, should overcome any fears they have and dive deeply into these pages. That’s what Russell Mean wants. Taking into consideration the things he says will only make you stronger, even if they do hurt. That is the approach of the warrior, even if it means merely being a literary warrior. Go ahead and read this book. I dare you. You’re a coward if you don’t.

 

Book Review

Modern Art and the Object 

by Ellen H. Johnson

Modern art radicalized the way we see and create art. That is a truism by now. By extension, it also radicalized the way we interact with the objective world, or at least it did for people who pay attention to art. Ellen H. Johnson’s Modern Art and the Object is a survey and overview of the way in which modern artists treated objects in their works and as their works, sometimes even making themselves the works of art as well. While Johnson’s writing is descriptive and analytical, it doesn’t break any new ground in terms of art criticism or theory.

Her opening chapter is probably the most useful one in the whole book. As a survey, it traces the development in how objects are related to in art starting with Cezanne and his influence on Impressionism and Cubism which also opened up the doors to Dada and Surrealism. Cubists started the trend of incorporating found objects in their paintings while the latter two, Dada and Surrealism, brought the objects out of the canvases and made them into art objects standing alone as themselves. She then moves on to unexpected territories, examining the use of human actors as objects in performance art and even making the actual artist into a work of art in the case of Andy Warhol. Some of these themes get taken up in later essays while others, particularly the objectification of humans in performance art, never get any further mention. This first chapter at initially seems to be a great introduction to the subject, but unfortunately, it turns out to be the most provocative one in the whole book.

Johnson goes on to examine Cezanne and Picasso. Most specifically, she looks at the way in which both artists related to nature, the ultimate source of objective reality. She sees both artists as using similar techniques to release and draw out the inner essence of the material world. In the case of Cezanne, he shifted his perspective, moving his viewpoint several times while working on one canvas in an attempt to fully paint three-dimensional objects in a two-dimensional surface. Picasso, in his Analytc Cubist phase, operated by fracturing the surfaces of the objects he portrayed, making them incomplete and overlapping to further the sense of open space and depth in his paintings. Both techniques resulted in a visual outpouring of essences that had previously been trapped inside the surfaces of the objects. That is a great observation. The only problem is that if you have studied either artist or their theoretical writings then this nothing new. By the time Ellen Johnson wrote this book in the 1970s, this was common knowledge for anyone who had kept up with modern art. She merely states the obvious.

Those chapters on Cezanne and Picasso may not be original, but they are nicely written. Another nicely written chapter is the one on Jackson Pollock. Johnson explains how his works in Abstract Expressionism are deeply rooted in his relation to the natural world. Where Pollock differs from the two aforementioned artists is that his depiction of the “energies” of nature are shown without the objective surfaces that make them recognizable in everyday life. Cezanne and Picasso released these natural forces by fracturing surface appearances and drawing those energies out while Pollock entirely abandoned the surface appearances and painted the way in which he perceived those pure energies. . This is interesting, but again it is old information.

Another one of the better chapters is on Claes Oldenburg. In his attempt to re-integrate art into the praxis of everyday life, he created art objects representing everyday household items like typewriters, kitchen utensils, and cigarette butts. Only Oldenburg differs from those others because he neither destroys the outer surfaces of them nor does he abandon them in the Jackson Pollock way. What he does is soften those outward surfaces, making those ordinary things look cushy and pillow-like, as if the outward flow of their energy is neutralizing their outward forms, making them less rigid and more approachable. Yet again, this is not a unique observation.

The rest of the chapters are more or less just descriptive. There isn’t much explanation other than what the art objects, or the art depicting object, look like. Johnson continues on with the theme of how the artists related to nature and objectivity, but doesn’t come up with anything insightful or groundbreaking in any way that will enhance your understanding of modern art. Her writing can be awfully dull too and lacking in direction. The author spent her life as a prominent curator and gallery manager and that must have been her true calling in life because her work as an art critic doesn’t really go anywhere.

Modern Art and the Object is not essential reading. It appears to be Ellen Johnson’s attempt at leaving her mark on the world rather than offering some useful theories for the interpretation and understanding of modern art. The critic and Artforum editor Rosalind Krauss did a much better job of this in contrast. Johnson is preoccupied with the inner nature of objects, whereas Krauss wrote extensively about the surfaces of objects in modern art. Modernism was always about style more than substance and postmodern artists mostly sought to do away with substance entirely, making art about surface and nothing else. Rosalind Krauss demonstrates this successfully in her criticism. Ellen Johnson, on the other hand, leaves the reader feeling like she doesn’t have much to say. Perhaps that is because she is looking in the wrong places when she interprets modern art.

 

Book Review

Love Canal:

A Toxic History from Colonial Times To the Present

by Richard S. Newman

In the late 1970s, there were two places in America that evoked a sense of dread anytime they were mentioned. One was Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania that leaked radiation into the atmosphere and could potentially have caused a meltdown. The other was Love Canal, a toxic waste dump in Niagara Falls, New York where an entire neighborhood had been built. Richard S. Newman’s Love Canal tells the story of the latter, covering the business practices of the man who gave the site its name, the chemical company that dumped their waste there, and the grassroots protest movement that grew around the discovery of the deadly deposits under the soil.

Newman begins his account with the American Indians’ reverence for the famous Niagara Falls and the coming of colonialists who saw the potential for using Lake Ontario and the Niagara River for the transport of commercial goods. Later, when the Industrial Revolution kicked in and the falls became important for generating electricity, Niagara Falls became a boom town for manufacturers. Out of this economically expanding community came a man named William T. Love. He had a vision of building a canal running off the Niagara River that could be used for generating power in order to expand the growth of the small city southwards where more factories could be built. Love’s enthusiasm was infectious enough to raise investments and his employees went to work building the canal which they named after him, dubbing it the Love Canal. But William Love was more of a dreamer than a doer; he ran out of funds and he abandoned the canal project after its being only partially built.

Years later, Elon Hooker founded the Hooker Chemical company. It was a successful company, especially in the World War II era when they began manufacturing chemicals to be used in various ways for military equipment. Hooker Chemical also took off because they produced important chemicals used in making plastic. Like any other industrial companies, they produced tons of waste. The city of Niagara Falls allocated the Love Canal as a dumping ground, so Hooker Chemical poured all their toxic sludge into flimsy metal barrels and dropped them into the ground, covering them with a topping made of clay.

A couple decades later, the city government allowed housing developers to build a low-income subdivision with a school and a housing project tower block for African-American renters all on top of the Love Canal toxic waste dump. The houses were cheap and a lot of blue collar workers thought they had bought into the American Dream. But then things started to go wrong. Rates of cancer and other diseases became disproportionately prevalent in the area, the rate of miscarriages skyrocketed, birth defects were common, and everybody in the neighborhood smelled a sickening stench in the air. Strange things were happening too like when children threw rocks they found, the rocks would explode and dogs that played in the grass would lose their hair. As it turned out, the barrels underground that were meant to contain the industrial waste had corroded and toxic chemicals were leaking into the soil and air, depositing in people’s basements, and getting into their drinking water. The locals got together and started a protest movement that got national attention. They added more fuel to the fire of the exploding environmentalist movement of the time. The author goes into all the fine details of what they did, how successful they were, the government’s reaction, and the long range impact of the political movement.

Throughout the telling of the Love Canal story, the author writes in a subtext, giving details about the ecological and environmental attitudes in America going back to the founding of the nation. Really that part of the history is taken up with the Transcendentalism of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. After that there were various movements in favor of conservation and the preservation of nature. It wasn’t until the 1960s though that environmentalism intensified and a Return to Nature and Save the Planet ethic took over. People began seeing the natural world as not just a place to escape to for recreation or relaxation, but something we need to be part of in order to survive. All of this eventually merged with the activism of the Love Canal community and furthered the cause of environmental protection.

There is a lot to admire in this book. The chapters on the industrial and commercial history of Niagara Falls are fascinating, especially for those inclined towards an interest in modern history. The story of the Love Canal neighborhood and the activist movement that grew out of it are well-presented and sufficiently detailed too. The author also rightly make a point of explaining how toxic waste is a problem that can be effectively managed with technology when giving the proper funding and attention. The darker side of the story is the reminder that the Republican party and big corporations are working together to roll back all the progress that environmentalists have made, making future ecological disasters a probability. Sadly, people have short memories and living in a country where history is rarely ever taught, the future doesn’t look too bright.

Love Canal is a good book and especially the kind of thing the younger generations should be reading. Until recently, the environmental movement was growing and people of my generation were expecting to pass that torch onto the next generation. Unfortunately, when they picked uo the cell phone they dropped the torch and now pollution levels are rising exponentially, our water is filled with microplastics that kill wildlife and find their way into our food supply, more fossil fuels are burned then ever before, and global warming is accelerating rather than slowing down. Caring for the planet has become less important than staring at a screen all day watching reels of dogs on skateboards, people eating themselves to death in mukbang videos, and the latest, dumbest dance trends. People became so hypnotized by the internet that they forgot about everything that matters. Pay attention, kids...the next Love Canal disaster could be happening under your feet right now. If your phone is more important than the survival of the planet we depend on for life, then maybe we don’t even deserve to survive.