Feburary
2nd, and I'm STILL working on my Best Of lists for last year?! What
the hell is my problem, anyway?! Guess life is too busy being lived
to think about it. Plus most of my stuff is still sitting in a pal's
garage in Denver, waiting for me to work up the scratch to have it
shipped back to me. (And THAT will take awhile, as I found the
solution to What I Will Do To Replace The Temporary Holiday Job At
The Book Store is Getting A Two-Day-Per-Week Retail Gig And Finding
Myself Inadvertantly Becoming A Full-Time Freelance Rock Journalist
again. Which means I'm busy as hell and not going to see much in the
way in cash until maybe a month from now. But it's all good, as
certain annoying sorts like to say....)
So,
since I've now got my brain properly hyper-caffeinated and Johnny
Throttle's excellent
England's-Finally-Got-Its-Answer-To-The-Devil-Dogs debut
LP for the wonderful Dirty
Water Records imprint damaging my hearing further, all I can do
is search my fevered brain and attempt piecing together what books I
read last year, keeping in mind I read on average a book per week. And
not all of those I read are new. And I couldn't afford a lot of new
books last year. Nor could I always find what new ones I wanted to
read at the public library nor in my friends' private collections.
Nor that I really want to keep digressing into the ozone like I
appear to be at the moment.
 |
| No, this isn't a fucking book, you silly twit! |
Among the new
books I remember liking was certainly Johnny Ramone's posthumous
memoir, Commando.
A fast read, mostly due to its intended form (Johnny's brief
reminiscence accompanied by others' voices), it neither misses the
intended other voices nor needs them, nor feels skimpy. In many ways,
Commando reads like
both Johnny's right-ward politics and highly influential guitar
style: Loud, fast, brutal, fun, funny, terse and economical. It also
gains bonus points for its unusual packaging, which is reminiscent of
a grown-up punk rock version of a Little Golden Book.
Then there's the
literary debut of my long-time pal, the Rev.
Norb. Besides becoming my favorite podcast DJ with his “Bubblegum
Fuzz” show and a professional Trivia Night host in his native
Green Bay, WI, the former Sick Teen/Sic Teen editor
and MRR columnist and
bandleader/frontman (Suburban Mutilation, Depo Provera, Boris The
Sprinkler), Norbie became an author last year. It apparently was the
best way for him to cope with being snowed in during a typical Green
Bay winter. He decided to simultaneously tell the tale of Boris'
history and explicate his hilariously dense lyrics for the band.
What The Annotated Boris
ended up being was as hysterical and smart as you'd expect Norb to be
if you have even the thinnest familiarity with his work. It's also
the most hilariously-overannotated book ever written! Seriously: The
footnotes are as equally weighted as the text! It also reveals Norbie
to be the seriously great lyricist I never really thought about him
being (and unfairly so, I'll admit): Over-the-top funny and intelligent as you expect him to be,
densely-packed with cultural references and in-jokes, and
surprisingly angst-filled. I never thought I'd be saying this of my
friend, as much as I admire him. But with The Annotated
Boris, Norb could stake a claim
to being a spastic American answer to John Cooper Clarke!
Then
there's Punk
Rock: An Oral History, from
my boss at the Louder Than War
punk site, John
Robb. John's kind of my English cousin: A long-time punk rock
musician in The Membranes and Goldblade and a respected rock
journalist with Sounds
and other publications. And this is not really a new book, but the
long overdue American publication of a 2006 book of his. It takes the
form of other punk histories like Please Kill Me and
We Got The Neutron Bomb
in allowing the participants' voices tell the tale, and yes, this is
strictly focused on the UK. But unlike nearly every other book on the
subject, Punk Rock: An Oral History
DOES NOT presume punk died with Sid Vicious' last breath and the
story there. Robb takes in UK punk's 2nd/3rd/4th
waves without sneering (another thing these sorts of books never
do), and also takes in post-punk and offshoots like 2-Tone. Voices
that frequently get drowned out in these books by John Lydon and the
usual suspects also get their volume knobs boosted dramatically, such
as Charlie Harper, most of The Damned's membership, TV Smith and Gaye
Advert, Penny Rimbaud, etc. It's a truly worthy, fine, necessary
addition to the punk rock bookshelf, very welcome.
And
that's all about all I can stand of this exercise, for now. Now I
have to wrack my brains and try to think of what movies I liked last
year. 'Til then....
