Book Review & Analysis: Don't Call Me Brother by Austin Miles

Don't Call Me Brother:

A Ringmaster Escapes From the Pentecostal Church

by Austin Miles

      Pentecostal Christianity is just over one hundred years old. It originated in the post-Confederate South and emphasized the “presence of the Holy Spirit” as its followers would say. This includes music and singing, faith healing, and glossolalia or speaking in tongues, an altered state of consciousness in which a church-goer gets possessed by the Holy Spirit and vocalizes nonsensical sounds. Speaking in tongues is rooted in West African culture and is something that was brought over by slave communities then appropriated by white Christian Revivalists. All this is directed by the pastor of the church, a fiery speaker who brings the emotional pitch of the congregation up to an extreme. The circus, of course, is an entertainment tradition that dates back at least to the Roman Empire. The show is conducted by the ringmaster in tuxedo and stovepipe hat. So when a ringmaster becomes the preacher at a Pentecostal church, the lines between religion and entertainment get blurred. This is what happens in Austin Miles’ autobiography Don’t Call Me Brother.

Austin Miles had a miserable childhood. He came from a broken family in Indiana and ran away to join the circus when he was a teenager. As a clown, he took to the carny life with ease, being impressed with the showmanship and spectacle of the performances and the colorful characters who lived the transient circus life offstage. It was a traveling village of multi-ethnic misfits with talent. Miles moved on to become a ringmaster as he matured and again, he had a natural talent for it.

He met his wife Rose Marie in New York City. After marriage, they traveled to Switzerland to meet her aristocratic family who didn’t readily approve of him. These details of the marriage are interesting up to a point, but Miles dwells on his time in Switzerland with the family for far too long to serve the purposes of this story.

When they settle back in New York, Miles’ daughter from a previous marriage comes to live with them and everything is great, at least for a little while. Behind the scenes of the circus, a creepy German trapeze artist named Bobby Yerkes begins proselytizing Christianity to Austin Miles. Then something strange happens at a circus performance in the Bible Belt state of Tennessee. When the show is about to begin, a man in the audience has a heart attack. Being the good ringmaster he is, he asks the audience to pray for the victim’s recovery. Being a leader in such a venue means keeping the audience’s mind alert at down times like this so they don’t fret and ruin the whole show with a soured attitude. The next day, Miles learns the man recovered from his heat attack. The ringmaster attributes this to the prayer and then decides to convert to Christianity. Of course, not everybody who has a heart attack dies. But this is proof enough so Austin Miles approaches Bobby Yerkes and throws himself headfirst into the world of fundamentalist Christianity. He later learns that Yerkes is a pervert.

When the Assemblies of God ministries learn that a circus ringmaster has converted to Christianity, they see green and ask him to become a pastor. Enticed by the lure of the religious spotlight, Miles can’t resist. He meets with high level officials, let’s call them businessmen, and begins touring the country to give church services. Finally he meets up with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and becomes regular guest on their fledgling PTL Club TV show, helping to usher in the age of televangelists. The transition from circus performer to Christian evangelist is an easy one to see. In comparison to the dour and dust-dry congregations of the Protestant denominations and the solemn, downbeat masses of Catholicism, Charismatic Christianity offers an emotionally charged performance with audience participation, histrionic sermons, stimulating music, and intense visual displays of faith healing and glossolalia. The draw is that it is more of spectacle than traditional religions. Christian theology is never discussed. In a media and entertainment saturated culture like the United States of America, Pentecostalism has an advantage. The PTL Club becomes just one choice of TV shows out of a handful of others in the days when cable TV was beginning. Channel surfing rubes might pause as they run through their options when they see the showmanship of a faith healing, a band playing, or, an exorcism complete with demonic voices and foaming mouths straight out of The Exorcist.

Life starts going south for Austin Miles quickly. His wife Rose Marie rejects the Pentecostal church and eventually this drives a wedge between them that results in a nasty and humiliating divorce. His daughter converts to the church, but they later convince her that her father is satanic so she refuses to have anything to do with him.

Aside from the destruction of his family, Miles gets a behind-the-scenes view of what goes on in the shadows of Assemblies of God. The organization is little more than a Reagan era corporation complete with a board of directors and tax-free status because they are registered as a religious organization. The higher ups live lavishly in mansions, own private airplanes, and fleets of Mercedes Benzes. Miles’ work as a circus performer is cut out for him when they open Heritage U.S.A., a Disneyworld like theme park for born again Christians. By the end of the 1980s, financial scandals are tearing Assemblies of God apart; charges of tax evasion, fraud, and financial mishandling are rampant. Sexual scandals of all kinds are revealed too, including adultery, pedophilia, prostitution, wife swapping, and gay sex. Jim Bakker’s involvement in gay sex orgies and his affair with Jessica Hahn ruin his career.

Austin Miles has his own personal misgivings too. Tithing, or the donation of money to the church, is prioritized over all other religious practices. He learns that people being healed in faith healings are often shills. He also learns that ordinary stage magic is being used by some pastors to demonstrate their gift for performing miracles. With hindsight he knew all this is happening, but he doesn’t listen to his conscience because he feels he is doing something to help his congregations.

The darkest, and possibly the least credible, part of Miles’ story is that he thinks there is a conspiracy against him. For reasons he can’t understand, the Assemblies of God churches start to shun him. Vicious rumors about his immoral conduct spread and his engagements at preaching gigs are canceled one after the other. He believes he is being persecuted and blames the FBI. He claims his first wife, who he otherwise says nothing about, gave him a diary that proves the government assassinated Marilyn Monroe. That diary has since disappeared. Therefore the FBI is pulling strings with the Pentecostals to ruin his career as a pastor. This whole story sounds suspicious to me as if he is peddling a conspiracy theory to cover up some dirt he has in his past. This makes me wonder how much of his story is actually true. I suppose a lot of it is, considering the accusations he makes against Assemblies of God are easily corroborated in other sources, but I wonder if he isn’t being sufficiently forthright about other things he might have done. Anyhow, Austin Miles quits the church and successfully resumes his career as a ringmaster. If the FBI really wanted to ruin him, why didn’t they interfere with his circuses? Or true to form, why didn’t they just disappear him like you wold expect?

Aside from the conspiracy theory, possibly relayed in bad faith, the worst part of this book is its tendency to give long lists of bad things being done by the Pentecostals. Miles keeps repeating stories of scandals in different branches of the ministries, but it reads like the same story over and over again, just happening in different places with different people. Austin Miles also spends too much time on his private life outside the church. While his relations with his wife and family are relevant, the excessive detail he gives on these matters is overdone to the point where I just wish he would get on with the story and tell us about something more exciting.

The better side of this book is that it brings you close to the people caught in this Christian cult. It is an insider’s view of a lifestyle I can only see from an outsider’s view and. to be frank, I wouldn’t want to see this from the inside anyways. It is easy to dismiss Christian fundamentalists as a bunch of lunatics, but Miles shows us how even the worst of these grifters have a human side. They worry about their children’s future, they struggle with their marriages, they have health problems, a lot of them are having a hard time being comfortable with their sexual orientation. They care for each other and offer emotional support I times of distress. It shows how sad it is that so many gullible people get caught up in this religion-for-profit ponzi scheme. Some of them are born and raised with Evangelical Christianity. Some fall into it because the harsh circumstances of an uncertain world drive them to a place of comfort. Once inside that comfort zone, they are trapped by indoctrination, social conditioning, and the magical belief that giving all their money away will come back to them in the form of spiritual grace and healing. If they ever speak out against the wrong doings of the church, they get chewed up and spat out without mercy.

Assemblies of God and the PTL Club are a corporate den of thieves and the domain of narcissists and con men. It is an overblown version of the Southern revival tents which are only one step away from the carnival midway. The marks are unable or unwilling to admit that the pastor in the thousand dollar suit is a money grubbing charlatan just as much as the bearded lady in the circus sideshow is nothing more than a bearded man wearing make up and a dress.

The psychological profile we get of Austin Miles is interesting too. On one hand, he presents himself as a true believer in the gospel and someone who genuinely believes he is the only real person in a religion full of fakes. But having said that, you have to question why he played the game for so long. He is also quite an egomaniac who never shrinks from an opportunity to be in the spotlight whether that means preaching, being a ringmaster in the big top, doing radio interviews, or making television appearances with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. In one passage, it is the first Christmas Eve he spends alone because his wife Rose Marie has left him. To cheer himself up, he wraps Bibles in wrapping paper and walks around Times Square handing them out to needy looking people. One woman is shivering because her coat is too thin for the winter, but all Miles can think of is how grateful she and the other recipients are because he gave them a Bible. It’s little more than a big ego trip for him to show how generous he is for proselytizing his religion. I’m sure the woman would have been a lot more grateful if he had given her a coat that was heavy enough to keep her warm, but that thought probably never crossed his mind. He is the typical kind of person who seeks out fame and popularity because he didn’t feel loved when he was a child. Still, he isn’t an unsympathetic character. He certainly isn’t a bad person. He is more like a lost soul who thought he found himself and then suffered terribly when the illusion wore off. That could happen to any of us considering we can never know for sure if we are ultimately doing the right thing or not.

Don’t Call Me Brother is good for what it is. The story is predictable and Austin Miles is an amateurish writer. But the meaning of it rings true. In the year 2025 when Prosperity Gospel megachurches are fleecing people all around and the Pentecostals are in the White House whispering into the ear of the worst president in American history, it is a message that needs to be heard more than ever.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind by Chuck Barris

Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind:

  

An Unauthorized Autobiography

by Chuck Barris

      If you were around in the 1970s, you might remember a television program called The Gong Show. Maybe you remember it even if you don’t want to. It was a variety show and a talent contest for people with no talent and often no taste either. They had a celebrity panel of three judges who had to endure an entire performance. If the people on stage were intolerably bad, one of the judges would bang a gong to end it. The performers were immediately disqualified. There were very few contestants who ever made it through a whole set. But it was all in tne name of fun and it WAS fun at least for certain people. In my eight year old brain it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. My mother didn’t agree, but then again she never liked The Three Stooges either. That made it all the more exciting. The producer and host of the show was an awkward little guy who wore a hat with its brim pulled down over his eyes. His name was Chuck Barris and after The Gong Show got canceled after three years, he wrote an autobiography in which he claimed to secretly be a hitman for the CIA. It was called Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind: An Unauthorized Autobiography. Yes, that’s right, this autobiography is unauthorized. You’ve heard of an unauthorized biography, but an unauthorized autobiography? That title itself should be a recognizable indication that something is a little off about this book.

In the opening chapter, Barris is going off on an assignment to rub someone out in New York City. He puts on a fake beard and moustache to hide his identity. As he sits in a coffee shop eating breakfast, a woman recognizes him as a celebrity and strikes up a conversation. She easily sees through his disguise and offers him a blowjob, free of charge no less. This scene sets the tone for the rest of the story and I’m not talking about the blowjob part. Barris, as an author, intends to deceive his audience, but he also sets the audience up to see through his deception the same way the fan in the restaurant does.

And there is deception all the way through the book. If you’re prone to playing drinking games I have one to propose. Read this book and every time Barris gets himself out of a tight fix through deception or outright lies, take a shot of your favorite venom. You probably won’t make it through 20 or 30 pages before the room is spinning like a tilt-a-whirl amusement park ride or you are lying on the bathroom floor because it’s convenient to be next to the toilet so you don’t have to stumble too far the next time you hurl your hamburger dinner. Next time you’ll remember to go easy on the hot sauce. A case in point is where Barris has a problem with guests on a game show using less than acceptable language during live filming. He hires an actor to pretend he’s a government agent from the FCC and to lecture the guests before each show about the legal consequences of broadcasting obscenity on TV. Problem solved. The contestants clean up their act and almost everything else goes right. Well, maybe not everything.

Chuck Barris says very little about his childhood as a Jewish kid in Philadelphia, an interesting omission for an autobiography. He does write about how he failed with the female students he chased after during college If he’s luckless in love, he’s luckier in his career. He doesn’t have a smooth ride there either, but eventually he pitches the idea for a game show to a television producer and things begin to fall into place. Some people might remember The Dating Game, where a single woman would interview three male contestants hidden from her view and then choose the one who best suits her desire for a date. Barris would go on to produce another hit game show called The Newlywed Game in which newly married couples would be quizzed on how well they knew their partners. Of course it was the 70s so a lot of the questions were loaded with sexual innuendos. More importantly, the contestants often had IQ’s that were lower than the average yearly temperature of Boston. It is lowbrow entertainment in its finest form. These shows were popular because Barris had his finger on the pulse of American pop culture in the 1970s. And that wasn’t such a good thing.

But no matter how successful Barris’s career as a TV producer is, something always goes wrong. For example, on an early set of The Dating Game, he tries to change up the show’s formula by having three chimpanzees sitting in the chairs reserved for the bachelor contestants. Off stage actors would answer the questions asked by the bachelorette with the joke being the expected shock on her face when she gets introduced to the three representatives of the hominid taxonomic family. The filming is a bit of a disaster because one of the apes plays with his genitals while the one next to him begins dismantling the chair he is sitting in and throwing its pieces into the audience. The passages about Barris’s TV shows are full of hilarious anecdotes like this.

Another side of his autobiography is the perpetual flux of his failing love life. There is no shortage of groupies, but none of them are appealing as people. When he meets women he is attracted to, the relationships always fail. There are two women who float in and out of the narrative. One is Penny Pacino, a redhead who spends a lot of her life pursuing him as a husband. The other is Patricia Watson, a commanding officer in the CIA.

Barris gets tapped to work undercover as an assassin by the world’s most notorious intelligence agency. He gets assigned to work under Jim Byrd, his senior officer, mentor, and friend. Together they spend time drinking, talking about life in the agency, planning assassinations, and carrying them out. Barris goes on assignment in Mexico City, London, Paris, and New York all for the purpose of permanently ending the careers of rival spies. Later he gets tracked down for a revenge killing by a KGB agent and the whole story climaxes when they learn there is a mole in the upper ranks of the CIA, one who is responsible for the death of Jim Byrd. An interesting piece of foreshadowing occurs when Barris accidentally tells someone where Jim Byrd will be during a sabbatical. Loose lips sink ships as the World War II navy propaganda posters used to say, warning sailors not to give details to friendly strangers while on shore leave. What Barris says about Jim Byrd has deadly consequences.

So how should you interpret this unauthorized autobiography? Start by accepting that almost everything in it is fiction. While Barris’s career as a businessman and game show producer are verifiable, most of the rest of it isn’t. There are obvious clues that his employment in the CIA is fake. He does things that an effective intelligence agency would never allow like having meetings with other operatives in bars and restaurants where company planning is discussed openly or assassinating people in crowded public areas like the plaza in front of a museum in Mexico City or a busy shopping street in Paris. The idea of sending a recognizable public figure on these missions is absurd as well. Other clues are more subtle, like how he meets with the man who assassinated Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende by gunshot. Only, in reality, Allende died after falling out a window. Was he pushed or was it an accident? It doesn’t matter here. What matters is that he didn’t die of a bullet wound. When it comes to the CIA story, Barris is just spinning a yarn to see what he can get away with. He seems to be dropping hints, winking at you, and elbowing you in the ribs throughout the whole book to see if you are in on the joke. Like the fake facial hair he wears in the opening chapter, he expects you to be perceptive enough to see through his disguise. If you don’t, that’s your problem.

A quick biographical check on Chuck Barris reveals something else. During the two decades this book takes place, spanning 1960 to 1980, he was married twice, something which is never mentioned in this autobiography. He did marry a redhead but her name wasn’t Penny Pacino, as stated in the story, and he didn’t marry her until ten years after this book was published. So the story of his frustrated love life and eventual marriage to Penny can’t be taken any more seriously than the CIA story.

Despite all his trickery, Barris does confront us with an ironic truth that can be found in his personality. Throughout the book, he privately struggles with depression, issues of self-worth, and a low self esteem. Despite his success in television, he is haunted by a dark shadow since nothing ever goes as planned even when things are working out for the best. The entertainment establishment isn’t accepting of him either, thinking of him as a troublemaker and an annoyance. His game shows work on the premise that people are happy to make fools of themselves in public if it means they get a chance to be on TV. Barris has an enormous contempt for his game show contestants and for a lot of his audience as well. The Gong Show, in all its trashiness, can be seen as a middle finger in the face of the industry that tolerated him as long as he made money for them, but scathingly put him down behind his back. This book reveals Barris as being pummeled into depression by the negativity that goes with fame and being hailed as the King of Schlock. He is like a successful CEO who looks in the mirror and sees Charlie Brown staring back. In the midst of all the fiction, Barris reveals a candid portrayal of the most sensitive parts of his mind, an irony that goes far in making this project work on a literary level. You get a sense of how a man riddled with anxiety reacts to others by being cranky, condescending, and snarky. The story about being a CIA assassin can thereby be read as a compensation fantasy where he gets lauded by the agency for being successful and in control of his assignments. Besides, the other agents are suave, courageous, intelligent, and urbane. They aren’t like the nitwits Barris has to work with in television or the fans of his game shows, the kinds of people who laugh at jokes about people farting while 69ing. While he wanted to be proud of his life, he had some misgivings. After all, his legacy is that he initiated a long string of TV shows where ordinary people act like idiots for entertainment stretching from The Morton Downey Show, Geraldo, The Jerry Springer Show, and Fear Factor onwards into the abysmal slime pit of reality shows that amount to little more than junk food for the mind.

When read as a straight up work of fiction, Confessions Of a Dangerous Mind is worth your time. It’s a combination of autobiographical realism and a traditional spy thriller complete with plot hooks, plot twists, and a surprise ending. Then it’s held together with the psychological insights of a quality character study with Chuck Barris playing the protagonist’s role as Chuck Barris. And if you’re not convinced that it’s all fiction, keep in mind that in 1982, the year of publication, the author is on record saying that this book is fiction when he appeared on TV talk shows to promote it. Some people believe that Barris really was a CIA assassin. Some have accused him of being mentally ill and delusional. Still others have claimed this book is a hoax. I think they are all wrong. This book is more like a prank and it’s a pretty enjoyable one if you approach it from the right angle.

 

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: Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 1 by Jerry A. Lang

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 1

by Jerry A. Lang

      This review is dedicated to the memory of D.H., the biggest Poison Idea fan I’ve ever known. I miss you, brother.

By the late 1980s, hardcore punk was starting to run out of steam. People were bored with three cord thrash so both bands and audiences began branching out into other styles that were punk adjacent. Punk/metal crossover was growing in popularity especially because thrash metal was making inroads into the mainstream. Around that time Poison Idea released their first full length lp Kings of Punk. The cover had a picture of lead singer Jerry A. after carving the band’s name into his chest with a razor. Poison Idea weren’t a crossover band, but they had a definite metal tinge to their sound that was harder, more brutal, and distinctive due to the better than average musicianship and outright sincerity in their expression of rage. While typical hardcore punk was falling out of favor, Poison Idea took the style to a whole new level. It had enough power to propel the band through more than a decade of touring and recording. The music was an overload of anger and some punks wondered just where exactly these guys were coming from. Now Jerry A. Lang has published a three volume autobiography called Bacl Heart Fades Blue and of course the first volume is all about his childhood.

Jerry A.’s parents were a couple of rednecks who had him when they were seventeen years old. Soon after, they had two more kids, one daughter and a younger brother. Then they split up. Jerry A. was bounced back and forth between the two parents, each taking care of him for about a year at a time. His father lived in Eugene, Oregon and his mother lived in West Bumfuck Montana. Though he had a deep love for the natural surroundings there, especially the rivers and forests, his mother was an alcoholic who went through a long string of loser boyfriends and the local cowboys bullied Jerry A. to no end. Eugene was a little nicer even though his father was a complete asshole. In Eugene Jerry A. discovered rock music, looked up to the local hippies, and started using drugs and alcohol before the age of ten. Back in Montana, he was also involved in troublemaking and that is where he learned how to fight. Rock music had always been an important part of his life, but when he discovered the Ramones and Sex Pistols, he knew he had found a key part of his identity, a part that would stay with him until the end. Throughout his childhood, he suffered from any kind of abuse or neglect imaginable. And yet he had an undying curiosity about the world and a touch of intellectualism that kept him going.

At the start of his teenage years, Jerry A. moved to Portland and got involved with the underground music scene. He sometimes played with the avant gardist noise band Smegma. This was in the transition period between first and second wave punk which combined political anger with nihilism in its lyrics and attitude. Darby Crash had died of a heroin overdose and the music was getting stripped down, more basic, and faster. Bikers like to chop their Harleys, removing all the unnecessary pieces to make them lighter for the sake of going faster; punks did the same thing with rock and roll, eliminating all the extras to emphasize the most basic elements that were played at maximum speed and volume. Portland, at that time, was a shithole of a city, nothing like the gentrified hipster haven it is now. So Jerry A. put together his own hardcore punk combo that took on the guitarist from another band called The Imperialist Pigs. That morbidly obese, record collecting, cocaine dealing guitarist was Tom “Pig Champion” Roberts, a man who later proved himself to be the premier genius guitarist of second wave punk rock. Some would say his style and ability surpassed other hardcore legends like East Bay Ray and Greg Ginn. Poison Idea was born and their music was simultaneously rough and smooth, chaotic and neat, and its anger was infectious to any punk who felt like they were being screwed over in life. With their growing popularity, Jerry A. drank heavily, did drugs like speed and cocaine, had lots of sex, and got involved in a lot of street fights. It was just the typical trajectory of an up and coming rock star. But despite his thuggish ways, he always had a taste for Leftist politics and social justice causes. As the band evolved, Jerry A. sank into a whirlwind of self-destruction and it was all so much fun.

This first volume ends around the time that Poison Idea’s classic album Kings of Punk came out. Like the music of punk, the writing is fast paced, direct, and to the point. It isn’t overly descriptive, but it is descriptive enough for the reader to see everything that is going on. Jerry A. tells his story with a clarity of self-perception that is unique. This is the kind of insight you gain when you are older and have looked back over your life with analytical eyes, trying to make sense of it all. Part of what is interesting is how he tells his story with the detached objectivity of a journalist. Despite how rotten his childhood was, he doesn’t indulge in self-pity and he doesn’t even express much anger at the unfairness of the life he was born into. This kind of calm self-reporting is what you get from a mature man who has made peace with that infuriating part of himself. Judging by what happens in the second volume of these memoirs, you can tell he really struggled to make sense of his life. Jerry A. doesn’t sound like he’s full of himself either; he doesn’t brag about being a survivor of a rotten childhood. If it had been up to him he obviously would have chosen a better upbringing, but he had the wits to stay alive and sometimes even benefit from his situation. He just doesn’t stand around shouting about how great he is for not ending up dead or in jail. He saves the shouting for his music.

If there is anything to criticize here, it is that some potentially interesting things were left out. Jerry A. doesn’t say much about how he actually met Tom Roberts and the other band members. He doesn’t say much about his siblings either, but to be fair, he does explain that he doesn’t want to tell other people’s stories for them, especially when they don’t have the opportunity or the desire to share their side of it all with the public. Most significantly, Jerry A. doesn’t say much about Poison Idea’s earlier records. He does talk about the Pick Your Kings ep and says a little about Kings of Punk, but he doesn’t even mention the Record Collectors Are Pretentious Assholes ep. It would have been interesting to hear what it was like to work with Pushead, the artist who did album covers for The Misfits and Metallica and put out Kings of Punk on his own Pusmort record label.

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 1 is a good, solid start to the autobiography of Jerry A. Lang. It makes Poison Idea less enigmatic and gives good insight into the source of the author’s anger as well as his impish sense of humor. If you think volume one is fascinating enough, you might as well get ready to read volume two. Beware though. What comes next in this series is a nasty and soul crushing story that might leave you with a touch of PTSD if you aren’t ready for it.

 

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

20th Century Boy:

Notebooks Of the Seventies

by Duncan Hannah

I don’t ordinarily dumpster dive for reading materials, but when I looked into a recycling bin outside a grocery store and saw a bunch of copies of this one, I thought I’d better check it out. Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy is a memoir from the 1970s art and music scene, mostly taking place in New York City. That much alone was enough to pique my interest and after opening it and leafing through a few pages, I saw it had photographs of Debbie Harry, Richard Hell, the Talking Heads, Andy Warhol, and a few other notables of the underground scene. I knew I was in territory that was both familiar and interesting.

Artist and sometimes actor Duncan Hannah kept journals from his high school years and through his twenties. He extracted the most interesting bits and put them together for this collection which captures the feel of aimless bohemian living at the margins of the art world. The first thing that caught my attention is his writing style. Hannah writes in short, no-frills sentences that recall the simplistic prose of Hemingway. I find Hemingway to be a bore though. Hannah largely succeeds in writing this way. He writes with a flow and consistency that I always found absent that other writer’s style. Reading Hemingway is like trying to drive a car with the emergency brake on; reading Duncan Hannah is like zipping in and out of fast-moving traffic on a finely tuned motorcycle.

Then the content is something else. The author starts this book as a teenager in Minneapolis just when the sexual revolution begins to blossom. He sleeps around with a lot of girls, does a lot of drugs and alcohol, plays in a band, and has ambitions to become an artist, all while his parents fret over the possibility of him becoming a permanent screw-up. He becomes an art student at Bard college located in downstate New York, continuing on a similar course until he finally winds up in Greenwich Village where he continues his studies.

One night at a concert, he catches the attention of Danny Fields, the rock band manager who signed The Doors, MC5, and The Stooges to Elektra records. Hannah is a good-looking boy with a sense of fashion and the two hit it off immediately. Danny Fields introduces him to a lot of rock stars and artists and Hannah easily adapts to the in-crowd at Max’s Kansas City among other places.

One of the exciting things about this book is all the rock concerts and related parties the author goes to. Most of this involves the proto-punk and glam scene of the early 1970s. He sees some of the earliest performances of Patti Smith and Television. He probably also sees more New York Dolls shows than anybody else in history. He even gets to meet Iggy Pop backstage and then watches him come on stage with The Stooges too loaded to stand up, let along sing. Iggy falls on the drum set then falls off the stage before they carry him out on a stretcher, leaving the band to play an all-instrumental set to the audience’s disappointment.

Then there is the sex, the drugs, and the parties. Hannah snorts up what must be most of the cocaine in Peru and a huge cargo of whatever came out of Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia too then tempers his highs with gallons of liquor so that, aside from being popular, he also earns a reputation for being a hardcore lush. This never stops him from getting laid though. Despite going through life being alcoholically challenged, he still manages to get it up with women and maintain long-term relationships. Duncan Hannah gets more ass than a toilet seat. And then there are the men. You see, Hannah is a cute, androgynous prick-tease so he gets hit on by every gay man who can’t keep his hands to himself, but since he is straight, he always disappoints them and one even gets violent when rejected. Overall, it’s a wild and exciting life, one that most people never get to live let along survive. In the latter half of the book, he is much more engaged with his art.

A typical day for Duncan Hannah goes like this. “I woke up at 11:30 AM with a poisonous hangover, not sure if I slept through one night or two. I went down to the corner where I saw Patti Smith hanging out so we got some breakfast. I did some coke, spent a couple hours painting then went to visit a gallery uptown. I took my girlfriend out to dinner where Tom Verlaine and three members of Blondie were sitting at nearby tables. We all got drunk then I had sex with my girlfriend in the bathroom. I went off to watch a French movie starring Alain Delon, headed uptown to a Roxy Music show, said hi to Johnny Thunders in the concert hall, and got invited to party where I tried to talk to David Bowie and Andy Warhol. I smoked a joint with Jim Jarmusch, did a few lines of coke and a hit of acid and ended up in bed with some girl who smelled bad but had a nice body. Anita Pallenberg came in and told us to get out of her bed and Mick Jagger stepped on my toes as I made my way out the door. I hope I can sell some paintings tomorrow.”

This is the kind of book that could suffer from redundancy, but it moves along at such a fast pace that it never slows down or gets dull. The copious amounts of name-dropping can be a little annoying at first; it’s like listening to some nobody trying to impress others by talking about all the important people they know, but Hannah’s encounters with this legendary crowd are persistently interesting and he does have some good conversations and experiences with them. Besides, he fits in with them and never sounds fake or pretentious.

While I am not a huge fan of Duncan Hannah’s paintings, I find 20th Century Boy to be a fascinating chronicle of New York’s downtown scene in the 1970s, probably the best decade the city has ever seen for its exploding music scene and dynamic social life. It was a time when New York was still affordable, fun, and stylish, a time when the greatest social asset one could have was simply to be an interesting person. New York, and America in general, just aren’t like that anymore. As a document of glam, punk, the drug culture, the Sexual Revolution, old New York, and the lives of starving artists, this book can’t be beat.

 

Vintage Book Covers

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

 

Book Review

Autobiography

by Benvenuto Cellini

     Benvenuto Cellini was a man of mercurial temper. Get on his wrong side and you should expect to be humiliated or killed in any way he saw fit. He was also a passionate artist, one of the best goldsmiths and sculptors of his time. Cellini’s Autobiography gives his side of his life story and early on in the book, the reader is alerted that Cellini’s version may be a twisted portrayal of the truth.

Benvenuto Cellini was born in Florence, Italy during the time of the Medicis. During his childhood, he saw a mythical salamander in his family’s hearth fire, a sign that the narrator would sometimes slip into a world of exaggeration or fantasy. He was a bit younger than Michelangelo, growing up in that master’s shadow, occasionally seeking his approval, and later in life trying to surpass his accomplishments. Cellini’s early adulthood was rowdy; he solved disputes with either fistfights or knives. Although his family was humble, he had connections in high places and as long as he continued to make great art, whatever pope, king, or duke that paid his commission would see to it that he got away with any crime he committed which often was murder.

While one facet of his life story portrayed his unapologetic indulgence in violence and his hair-trigger temper that led him into bickering matches with his employers, another facet is examined in his flair for creation. Whether working with gold, silver, wax, wood, or bronze, Cellini always strove to be the best at what he did and often he succeeded. His talent, along with his narcissism and egomania rubbed a lot of people the wrong the way. Out of petty jealousy, envy, or ignorance, there were a lot of people who tried to sabotage his endeavors in life. Some of them were associates of the powerful elite in the Catholic church, others were wives or advisers of the aristocracy, and still others were the mediocre artists, competitors, and laborers who wanted as much renown and repute as Cellini. In his dealings with these enemies, Cellini always insisted on being fair and honest; most often this worked out in his favor.

As the story progresses into Cellini’s middle age, he tells less stories about fighting and indulges more in describing his artistic techniques. A good portion of the second half of the book is dedicated to describing the process of making molds for casting bronze statues with some odd little details along the way. He allowed a young woman to sleep inside a hollow bronze bust he had perched on the roof of his house and the neighbors thought they saw a ghost in there whenever she stirred in her sleep. Is this anecdote truth or fantasy? It is probably better for the reader not to care one way or the other.

So what can be made of Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography? It’s like a less raunchy version of Don Juan. Cellini’s balls-out willingness to tell the reader whatever it is he thinks while damning the consequences predates the transgressive writings of Henry Miller by about 500 years. All this is done with a personal candor that is modern in its sensibilities, while upholding the robust passion for living and knowledge that characterized the Renaissance. But not all of it is exciting; Cellini has a tendency to whine and squabble with the men he works for, usually over time spent working or money. The more interesting side of this is how the irresponsible nobility often try to cheat him out of what they promise to pay him. And if you want to dislike Cellini, then reasons won’t be hard to find. What is interesting is that, even as unappealing as he can be, his enthusiasm for telling his own story makes this a fascinating read. It succeeds even though it shouldn’t. And if there is any big complaint to be made, it is that while Cellini leaves out no details, there isn’t much room for interpretation. When so little is left to the imagination, placing the deeper layers of thinking on the surface, the reader doesn’t have to work too hard to think about what it all means. For those with a philosophical mindset, there isn’t a lot to theorize about in these pages.

Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography is obviously a blend of fact and fiction. Some readers may want to sort out what parts are what, but taking that approach doesn’t do the text justice. It’s best to just dive in and read it as it is, getting the most out of it that you can.