The dead don't haunt: visiting the Charleston jail

On a recent late August evening I visited the Charleston Old Jail in South Carolina as part of a package tour. The building is of course protected by a builders’ society and whatnot; its upkeep is limited to what will make it safe for tourists. It's billed as being haunted, and forms a cornerstone of the booming "haunted Charleston" tourist biz. Why haunted? Because it's old and creepy and lots of horrible things happened there. You know how it was, long before concepts like "human rights" and the outlawing of torture (although you'd be forgiven if you doubted the actuality of the latter) informed American society.

I don’t believe in the supernatural. In fact, such a thing is a flat contradiction in terms and cannot exist: if something exists, it is real and therefore natural. Nothing can be above or beyond the natural world.

Ultimately the supernatural does a disservice to reality and to the human imagination. Horrible things happened in this South Carolina jail and places like it (the Amityville murders being perhaps the most famous American "haunting"), but the only way to keep us interested in them is to slop on a coat of ghosts and creepies and flying bricks and bleeding doorways. The terrible warden, who tortured for fun and profit, is said to haunt the jail, smoking his pipe and leaving the scent of tobacco wafting about. So--what? Pipes and tobacco can be ghosts, too? (Although this warden went missing one day and was never found. Well done, fate!)

People will always want their ghost stories, but it seems that the exploitation of horror takes precedence over understanding what drove these people to do what they did, or to contemplate the finality and surety of their lives.

If ghosts exist, then one day they will be quantified by science. If they exist they are natural. But as it stands they are all hoaxes and misunderstandings, the results of the human mind’s many failings, its desire to impose structure, to see patterns, to see human faces, in the seeming randomness of nature. It bears repeating: we impose patterns over the terrible chaos that is life; we refocus and refocus so that our POV is of years and bodies and emotions, not of quarks and supernovas and misfiring synapses.

I can’t deny there was a creep factor to the jail, but you can find this in any old structure that drips with age and decay, with rusted iron fixtures and imposing steel doors. Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft, perhaps the two greatest horror writers of the 20^th century, understood this; age and loneliness terrify us. As for me, the only chill I felt was within myself when hearing of the wretched crimes of both those who were imprisoned there, and of those supposedly in charge.

Why in the world would a person’s ghost haunt the place of its gravest and darkest days? It doesn't; I think it’s the psychic toll places like this take on our imaginations now, today, long after the deed is done. We need our ghosts to float these iron stairwells to let us know that once something terrible is done it cannot be undone. Does anyone ever hear of happy lovers haunting a romantic enclave at sunset on a tropical beach? No, because we need nothing there to expunge us of our guilt.

The dead don’t haunt us. We haunt ourselves.

Hero's Been Had: Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973)

Two Friday nights ago I settled in with a nice bottle of Evan Williams, a lady friend and the DVD of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, his 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's famous crime novel. Iconic gumshoe Philip Marlowe, once the purview of tough-guy actors like Bogart and Dick Powell, is here played by nebbishy Elliott Gould as a slovenly cat lover who is more likely to meander down the mean streets than saunter.

While I'd seen the movie once many years ago and liked it all right, watching it this time I found it stunning and captivating. Instantly it vaulted near the top of my favorite '70s movies (hallowed ground for me). It’s damn near a masterpiece. As with most Altman movies, critics love to toss out the word "revisionist," since the movie reimagines the classic noir stylings in daytime and with a "sensitive liberal" type as the no-nonsense Marlowe.

Upon first release it was a bomb, so after a few months United Artists went back and redid the ad campaign, highlighting its absurdist and iconoclastic take on the Chandler hero, best illustrated by this new poster, by MAD magazine's Jack Davis.

What of the plot, you say? Apparently Altman and co. jettisoned a good chunk of the novel and reimagined Marlowe as a "Rip Van Winkle" who falls asleep in the '40s and awakens in the '70s. So the movie begins (after the odd fanfare of "Hooray for Hollywood") with Gould stretched out in bed fully clothed, awakened by his cat, and then goes on the search for cat food. Later Marlowe's friend Terry Lennox pops in at 3 a.m. with bloody knuckles and asks for a ride to Mexico. Marlowe obliges, and this sets off an immediate interest in him from cops and crooks. Did said friend kill his wife? Abscond with a goon's money? Have something to do with the disappearance of a famous writer, a bearded, larger-than-life Sterling Hayden (Capt. MacCluskey in The Godfather, Spielberg's first choice for Quint in Jaws)?

A few of my favorite things: listen for the theme song (music by John Williams, lyric by Johnny Mercer, who of course wrote "Hooray for Hollywood") again and again, replicated throughout the movie as muzak in a supermarket, performed by a mariachi band in Mexico, tinkled in ivory by a desultory pianist in the bar where Marlowe gets his messages ("Why can't I get my messages in a bar?" I exclaimed to the lady watching with me. Forthcoming answer was unsatisfactory.) Watch for deceptively unthreatening gangster Marty Augustine, who wields a mean Coke bottle. Check out the beachfront party scene in which diminutive Henry Gibson (one of the Illinois Nazis from Blue Brothers that Belushi hated so much) terrifies the blustery Jack Daniel's-brandishing Hayden into paying him the $4,000 Hayden owes.

These might be the movie's best scenes, Hayden's character's home (Altman's own). Behind them the ocean beats an endless surf beyond the machinations of men and women. It literally traps Marlowe in it at one point; our mortal problems nothing to the might of the sea. A dog comes running with a cane, a sad postscript to suicide. One of Gould's best scenes is a convincing drunken diatribe against the useless cops that hound him. But this Marlowe is a chump, cut off at every turn, going with the flow ("It's okay with me," he cheerfully mutters over and over). We will come full circle, of course; the film's climax is welcome and satisfying. Hooray for Hollywood indeed!

In one of those nice little coincidences, there's an Elliott Gould film retrospective being held in NYC right now; the New York Times had an interview with him the other day, and he's doing his Q&A after Goodbye. Cool. Too bad many of the movies being shown are not on DVD. Not on DVD?! They still have that?

Trailer here:

Currently listening: David Johansen, David Johansen (1978)

After the breakup of the New York Dolls in the mid-70s, singer David Johansen released his first solo album in 1978. It's been out of print for ages, and I've been waiting for somebody to re-release it, and lo and behold this year that's what happened. Let me tell you what: this is one rockin' album, maybe even better than the Dolls' second, Too Much Too Soon. It's rife with all that smart-ass charm and Noo Yawk attitude Johansen wielded so well, plus some classic '70s production--you know, lead guitars squealing out of your speakers over chugging rhythm tracks, thanks to Johnny Rao and guest appearances from ex-Dolls guitarist Syl Sylvain and Aerosmith's Joe Perry.

The David Johansen Group

But there's also some serious girl-group and '60s soul going on here, from the Stonesy ballad "Donna" to the West Side Story-esque, the rather epic "Lonely Tenement." Vocally, I think the singer's in top form; he's rife with sass and humor and pathos and yearning. Johansen's voice always reminded me of Louis Armstrong, crossed with a Hanna-Barbera cartoon character whose name I can't remember, am I right?

The opening track is perhaps his most famous solo song, "Funky But Chic," and sets the tone and 'tude for the rest of the album in the same way "Personality Crisis" introduced the first Dolls album in '73. "Funky funky but--oh chic!" Hilarious. If you'll recall, chic was a big word in the '70s. So was funky. Great choruses on "Pain in My Heart" and "Not That Much" ("She said, 'I'm in love with you daddy/But not that much'"). "Cool Retro" is good but a bit diminished somehow; Joe Perry's guitar seems mixed down--on purpose?! I'm sure it was a rave-up live, maybe down at Max's Kansas City or the Bottom Line.

Girls, he likes 'em hangin' around

If you're DJing some dingy bar you could throw any track on and skip nary a beat; sitch a track between some vintage Cheap Trick or that solo album from Ace Frehley. Perhaps some Ronettes and Shangri-Las along with old-school Aerosmith, or follow up the Johnny Thunders solo masterpiece "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory" with the equally awesome "Frenchette." Syl Sylvain co-wrote this last song, which starts off as a pretty piano ballad but turns into a tough rocker with a real girl-group vibe. Love the lyrics: "You call that lovin' French but it's just Frenchette/I been to France... It's just like all your leathers baby/They don't scare me, I know it's only leatherette." As a suffix, -ette was big in the '70s too, if you'll recall, and David Jo scores off all of 'em, using the pretenses of a suitor as an excuse to not get serious--"I can't get the kind of love that I want, that I need... so let's just dance." Really. Always good advice.

And here's a gorgeous and blistering "Frenchette" from MTV's 1982 New Year's Eve Party.

Currently listening: Foreign Affairs by Tom Waits (1977)

"Oh half drunk all the time and I'm drunk all the rest..."

The Tom Waits album that completes my collection (pretty much besides some B-sides collections). Foreign Affairs, the fifth from the his late-nightness, occupies the same dingy romantic crossroads that earlier masterpieces like Small Change and Heart of Saturday Night did, a five-alarm pile-up of Raymond Chandler, Jack Kerouac, Louis Armstrong and Bernard Herrmann (I'm not linking to any of those guys; Jesus, people, if you need me to, yr readin the wrong blog). You got your upbeat-beatnik spoken-word hopscotch (titled "Jack & Neal," natch), your film noir track ("Potter's Field," complete with movie soundtrack-style orchestral backup), your melancholy last-call lament ("Foreign Affair"), your nostalgic tearjerker lullabye ("Sight for Sore Eyes"), and the Bukowski bar-narrative "I Never Talk to Strangers," probably the album's best track. Bette Midler (remember, she had some weird street cred in the '70s!?) stops by for a drink in this charming tune, one of my favorites of his songs--in short you get everything that Tom Waits did so well in the '70s.

But in all honesty, there's nothing here as iconic as "The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)," "I Hope I Don't Fall in Love with You," "On the Nickel," "Better Off without a Wife," or "New Coat of Paint", either melodically or lyrically. I'm not surprised he bailed on this style an album or two later; the Hoagy Carmichael-style piano tipplings and drunken-pun couplets were beginning to wear a little thin. There--I said it!

Soon he'd run off and join the circus sideshow band for the rest of his career. Everybody's got their own tastes, but I guess I like drinking to songs about drunks and diners and dives and dames and the vista of an America long gone than the kaleidoscopic dark carnival he's been doing since. Now don't get all huffy; I love Swordfishtrombones as much as the next hipster at the bar... it's just that I'm more likely to stumble out from it into the night singing "Wasted and wounded/It ain't what the moon did/Got what I paid for now..."

Film criticism, sent to die, and an attempt at rescue

It's been said that the message boards at IMDB are where film criticism goes to die—and it’s largely true—but I think this little comment I left for some guy who “didn’t get” The Godfather is not so bad; and maybe, just maybe, this dude who insists that “Star Wars, Die Hard, Fight Club and Rocky are great movies,” will have a change of heart. I dashed it off at about 2 a.m. Sober, even!

"It wasn't until the third time I watched The Godfather that I finally, really and truly, got it. It touches on major themes that Americans love: that lowly immigrants can rise up and become powerful; they can stand up for their families and defend them the way they choose; they revere honor and duty and loyalty. But in the end, it's a complete scam. Oh, bitter irony! It's also about fathers and sons, and the expectations they have of one another--how can one not be touched, watching poor hapless Fredo weep in the gutter next to his father's bullet-riddled body?

"I love the little detailed moments: how upset Brando is when he's home from the hospital and Sonny and Tom are afraid to tell him what happened to Michael; the way the camera imperceptibly moves toward Michael as he tells the guys what his plan is for Barzini and MacLuskie; the tension that builds when he's in the men's room looking for the gun as the train roars outside; the banter between Tom and the producer Woltz ("Let me tell you something, my Kraut-Mick friend"); the way Sonny bites his hand when he finds out Carlo is beating up Connie; Appolonia's gorgeous breasts; the black humor of the assassins: "Leave the gun... take the cannoli." And the entire wedding scene that opens the movie, and how innocent and above it all Michael seems when he's with Kay... and how he too will soon be as rotten as the rest of the family, giving lie to his words: "That's my family, Kay, that's not me."

"I love the stately manner of the burnished color scheme, the browns and yellows, the darkened rooms, hinting at behind-the-scenes machinations; the mournful Godfather theme song that weaves its way throughout the picture; the editing that reveals Don Corleone's visage behind every act of criminality (the slow fade-in to his implacable face as Woltz's screams from his bed fade away). Everything is in its right place, logical, precise, yet not overbearing or obvious.

"No, I didn't get this all on first, or second viewing. I've seen the movie a dozen times and each time something different pops out at me, something that was always there, something rich and true about not just gangsters' lives, but about people, families, lovers, enemies. And that final scene, showing Michael shutting off his heart forever, betraying the man he once was--as Moe Syzlack put it, 'And then Michael closes the door on Annie Hall.'

"But then, that's just my .02 on one of the greatest movies ever made."

Think it'll work? You're right--naaaah.

...and I'll whisper, "No."

While the entire nation seems utterly incapable of doing anything but ejaculating over the new Batman movie (it's #1 on the IMDB Top 250 movies?!) I myself am more taken with the trailer that comes with it: the long-awaited movie version of Watchmen, the seminal 1986-87 miniseries "graphic novel" by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (which is near the top of Amazon's bestseller chart).


According to many reports, director Zack Snyder (he of the not-too-shabby Dawn of the Dead remake and the I-have-no-interest-at-all-in 300) has attempted a faithful adaptation. The trailer looks phenomenal and easily gave me an anticipatory thrill. And it includes my favorite bit of dialogue from the comic: Rorschach (longest-comeback-ever nominee Jackie Earle Haley!) intoning, "The world will look up and shout 'Save us!" and I'll whisper, 'No.'"
To put not too fine a point on it, oh man oh man oh man!

Third time 'round: assumptions about atheists

Atheists can’t prove there is no god
Of course not; negatives are not proven. But the existence of any kind of creator deity is ruled out more and more, made less and less probable, as evidence accrues for natural processes such as evolution, plate tectonics and the big bang. These scientific theories do not disprove the existence of a deity; they are an explanation that does not require one. Yawn-inducing stoner conundrums like "Well, what came before the big bang?" and "If man came from monkeys why are there still monkeys?" are not the atheist's problem; one can easily consult a science book for these answers. Whether one still believes in a god after that—Well, that's the real trick, isn’t it?

Atheists are arrogant
Again, this has no bearing on the existence of a god. But I find it more than a little ironic that theists who believe the entire universe and everything in it was created solely for the outcome of their own existence to then accuse an atheist of being arrogant. Now, this can be true; nobody likes a smartmouth, as I’m sure your mother told you. Sometimes atheists or even believers of another faith can unfairly malign some theists or offer glib criticisms of faith; atheists hold no monopoly on good manners. But anyone who’s actually seen/heard Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins—two critics of faith who are often branded as “arrogant”—take religious beliefs to task knows they are the very picture of civility and polite debate. It just seems that theists just don’t like a flat-out rejection of their beliefs delivered in calm, reasoned, and rational terms.

Atheism leads to nihilism
Again, if atheism leads to nihilism, so be it; atheism is a position about reality, not a prescription on how to live. Personally, I think theists are the nihilists: for them, without a deity, nothing means anything. They cannot imagine how to make sense of a cosmos without some sort of supernatural agent at work. Beyond their god is the great yawning abyss. Take away that god, and they shudder to think... In defiance of that oblivion we should find our common humanity,whether theist or atheist. But if theists can’t figure out that genocide or rape or lying are wrong on their own and need a trans-temporal everywhere-and-nowhere eternal invisible entity (and yet strangely confined to a Middle Eastern locale roughly the size of, what, New Jersey?) to tell them so, well, that says more about their moral compass than the atheist’s.

Assumptions about atheists debunked redux

Atheists say there is no god
As rhetorical shorthand, yes. Technically, atheists don’t like to say “There is no god” because then we are making a positive claim about reality. Some theists like to quote the bible, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no god.’” I like to follow it up with “And the wise man says it to the world.” I didn’t come up with that, but I think it’s clever in a bumper sticker sort of way. The point is, we believe none of what theists say about god or religion. We definitely think each and every religion is absolutely wrong about reality and about human nature and life and the earth and the universe and how it all came to be, and that if there is a deity, it is absolutely nothing like what any religion has ever claimed it was.

Atheists want to take god/religion out of public life
This one is actually true to an extent. Atheists and secularists reject the encroachment upon civic life by religion, outside the church and the home. Say all you want about god(s) in your home or place of worship, but schools, government buildings, the military and such, those are off-limits for theistic beliefs (if propounded by figures of authority). Atheists are secularists and feel civic life must be neutral on religion, neither for nor against--as of course do many theists. One can be both a religious believer and a secularist. That's called being an American.

Atheists have assumptions
No, atheists have conclusions. Some theists accuse atheists of assuming something called “naturalistic materialism” is true, and basing our beliefs on that. “Naturalistic materialism” or “methodological naturalism” is how science goes about figuring out stuff works. It has no need of the “supernatural” to conduct its experiments; indeed assuming there is a supernatural world would gum up the workings of the scientific method that gives us stuff which everybody, including creationists, likes, such as vaccines and airplanes and heart transplants and insulin shots. It is an attempt to understand the natural world. The atheist sees that there is simply no evidence in that natural world that reveals any type of deity, and has come to the conclusion one, or many, or an infinite amount, do not exist.

Atheists have killed more people than the religious
Certainly totalitarian regimes have killed millions in the 20^th century, more than the Inquisition, say. But if Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor had had access to machine guns, gas ovens and the like, you can bet he’d have been using them. Leaders drunk on power and believing themselves invincible can be found throughout history, secular and religious alike. But even besides that, even if atheists killed more people than anyone ever, that would not be one bit of evidence for or against the existence of a god. Atheism isn't necessarily about what's good for society; it's simply a lack of belief in theism.

Some assumptions about atheism... debunked

As a regular reader of atheist blogs and articles, I've come across my share of objections to atheism by theists. These are a few of the most common arguments, with my short rebuttals.

Atheism is a faith/religion
The only time theists like to engage in irony is when they want to damn atheists for having faith. Never mind theists think faith is, like, the best thing ever! It’s funny and bad when atheists have it. No, I get it: they want us to get grumpy when they turn the tables on us. We proclaim we have no faith but then the sneaky theist declares, “But you have the most faith of all!” It misunderstands the meaning of the word faith, which is believing in things for which there is no evidence. Atheists lack faith, lack belief. It’s tiresome and obvious and a weak rhetorical trick.

Atheism has priests/orthodoxy
You know, Darwin, Sagan, Dawkins, Shelley, Rand, Hume, Russell, etc. To varying degrees these people have influenced atheist thought but they in no way define atheism. No one need feel ashamed by disagreeing or arguing with any of these folks. We are not told from birth that we must heed their every word.

Atheists’ morals are personal preference/opinion
Someone whose morals are “personal preference” or “opinion” and do not stem from cooperation and empathy already has a name, and it’s not “atheist.” It's sociopath. Atheists get their morality the same place everyone else does: from deep within our mammalian, and before that, reptilian, brains. We are learning more and more about the origins of morality in which field? That’s right: neuroscience. Not theology. I guess a theist could argue that those “hard-wired” moral impulses are planted there by a god, but that just pushes the question back: where did this god get its morals?

Atheists think humans/reality “merely” atoms and chemicals
We are still atoms and chemicals even if there is a god. Notice the weasel word “merely” (other theist weasel words are “just,” “only,” “but”). Reducing everything to atoms and chemicals means, from what I gather, that there is no intrinsic worth to anything. I fail to see how this follows. Indeed, there could be a god and we could still be worth nothing. One must accept many, many tenets of faith—such as a god created us with a purpose in mind, that we somehow know this because god told us somehow, that we can trust this god when it says it is good, that this purpose is worthwhile—before one can declare that without god, there is no meaning, there are only chemicals and atoms. Well, guess what? There are only chemicals and atoms. Not merely, but wonderfully.

Don't worry, I've got more to come.

Punk Rock Bookshself #2: Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (1996)

Is Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk the best book ever written on punk rock? Sometimes it seems so, as it has the same vibrant energy, adolescent street-smart/smart-ass poses and grit of all those great 1970s American punk (and not-so-punk) albums like Marquee Moon, Fun House, Rocket to Russia, Blank Generation, or Plastic Letters. You won't find this approach in England's Dreaming. The book's basically a how-to for living fast and dying young and leaving behind that beautiful corpse.

Detailing the rise of (mainly) New York’s underground rock scene in the early and mid 1970s, author Legs McNeil knows whereof which he speaks. As a co-founder of Punk magazine in 1976, he was there for everything, and saw it all. Years later he interviewed the wasted and wounded, the survivors and the just barely-still-there, about their recollections of those dangerous days, and collated them all into this burning tome. One’s shelf of music books is incomplete without it; I would even say if one is not a fan of the artists involved. (I mean, I’ve never listened to a Led Zeppelin album on purpose in my life, but even I have a copy of Hammer of the Gods).

And yet virtually none of the artists Please Kill Me celebrates have been within spitting distance of a Billboard Hot 100 chart, or had paparazzi chase them down at an LA or NYC nightclub, or become a national icon. The two that did achieve such heights—Blondie and the Talking Heads—cleaned up the spit and the spray paint of CBGB for mass consumption. Of course now you can get your Ramones with your cell phone commercials, but once upon a time, the single “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” sent radio DJs and record company execs into paroxysms of fear and disgust.

But the fact that these musicians never achieved mass acceptance doesn't mean they didn't live rock'n'roll to its limits. They did it all. And I mean all: these people, almost to a one, are seriously fucked-up misfits who could do nothing but make a singular and passionate music that created an entirely new teenage subculture. It satisfies more than adequately the reader’s desire for impolite behavior like vast drug abuse, inappropriate sexual hijinks, and tiny t-shirts; it has a myriad of folks giving the finger to society, flaunting its rules and codes by being drunk, high, both, or neither but writing lyrics like “I’m a Nazi schatze/I fight for the Fatherland/I’m a Nazi, baby, I’m a Nazi, yes I am” or “I need a fix and a kiss.” You get a cast of characters sleazier and more desperate, and with probably similar hairstyles and clothes, as found in a Dickensian stable of scoundrels and pickpockets.

In the form of an oral history—a style that can be annoying, and isn’t really “written” so much as it is edited—Kill Me is leaps and bounds more exciting than a previous CBGB history, This Ain’t No Disco, from the late 1980s. That book has many of the same stories but here, you can actually feel the grit and the grime. But don't forget, it wasn't all Bowery beasts. Can you imagine the collective shiver that went up and down everyone's spines when Debbie Harry walked into the place?

The famous nightclub Max’s Kansas City (which has its own version of Please Kill Me, 1998’s High on Rebellion) had the New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges and other raucous luminaries grace its stage before the soon-to-be-famous CBGB stole a bit of its thunder. The book starts off detailing the darkness at the heart of the Velvets and their arty, atonal, S&M-besotted approach that virtually single-handed created a new kind of musical attitude. Sometimes I forget that Velvet Underground & Nico was released the same year as Sgt. Pepper and the Doors' first album (Lou Reed might've hated Morrison, but we all know where Iggy worshiped).

More stories come thick and fast, told in the voices of the participants and the guilty. Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone; Johnny Thunders and David Johansen; Richard Hell and Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Wayne Kramer and Lou Reed. Then there is the Warhol contingent, the artistes, transvestites and glamour queens; various band managers like Malcolm McLaren, Linda Stein and Danny Fields (when is that guy writing his book?); photographers and filmmakers; and countless hangers-on and groupies and girlfriends and wanna-bes. Stories criss-cross, get tangled, get contradicted. Perhaps the most harrowing tale in a book filled with close calls is the one in which Dead Boys drummer Johnny Blitz ends up nearly stabbed to death by a street gang. The guy he was trying to protect, Blondie roadie Michael Sticca, ends up in Riker's Island for a night or two. Yikes.

One might want to read this in small doses. The obnoxiousness factor is high, as is the exaggerated sense of self-importance. One can only listen to some sideliner talk about how fabulous it all was, how fabulous and decadent, before you want to say: Okay, now *who* did you fuck again, Iggy Pop or Dee Dee Ramone? Stories about Stiv Bators’ drunkenness or Johnny Thunders’ desperate junkie manipulations begin to get exhausting. Upon my first reading of this I realized that I really wouldn't want to hang out with my heroes. That's a bitter realization. I did, however, like how Steven Tyler turns up at Thunders’ funeral, wailing, "It could have been ME!" Dammit, I thought, why wasn't it?

When this book came out in hardcover from Grove Press (home to punk sympathizers like William Burroughs) in 1996, it was one of the very few widely-published works on punk rock. Bold move. 1996 was years before any of the Ramones had died, before you could hear Blondie in every other TV commercial, before Iggy sold you sea cruises, long before the New York Dolls reformed, before Hot Topic invaded shopping malls, and of course a decade before legendary rock club CBGB made front page news by closing down. Today Ramones t-shirts are de rigueur for stylin' like you're downtown, when you're really from Canada.

What signaled the end? Well, Sid Vicious’s death in Greenwich Village for one. Various characters ripping each other off so they have to leave for Europe. The Ramones in LA filming Rock’n’Roll High School and recording End of the Century with Phil Spector. Dissolution of various "super groups" conceived of while in impossibly altered states of consciousness. Patti Smith marries MC5's Fred “Sonic” Smith to be a housewife. Number-one hits and enormous worldwide success for Blondie.

Please Kill Me, despite, and because of, its excesses is a pleasure pure and simple: hearing about these people talk about the youthful thrill of throwing off the shackles of normal life and embracing the not-yet-clichéd lifestyle of the punk demimonde is charming and inspiring. The freedom to create something almost entirely new is a rare event in pop culture, and Please Kill Me is a celebration of that. Despite the dark shadows of commercial indifference, heroin addiction, sexual perversions, band break-ups, and even death, the spark shines on through, 30 years on.

The Punk Rock Bookshelf #1: England's Dreaming by Jon Savage (1992)

It was 1992. With my good friend Charles—cynical, contemptuous, mocking, fearless, derisive Charles—I was idly checking out the hardcover new releases in the Borders Books 35 minutes from home. And I think we saw the graffiti’d book jacket at the same time: its somewhat unwieldy title, England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond. I picked it up, fairly excited; all the books I had on punk were cheap, small university press paperbacks or glorified photo books from Omnibus Press imported from England, but I’d never seen one so lavish in cloth and from a real publisher. Charles looked over my shoulder as I opened it to read the flap, but what caught Charles’s skeptical eye was nothing more than the book’s price: $27.50. Imagine! I will never forget Charles’s withering, sneering response: “The swindle continues.”

The swindle continues. A perfectly played reference to the ill-fated Sex Pistols 1980 movie The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle. A remark worthy of John Lydon himself, filled with irony and condescension and maybe just a little admiration. Ironic, because punk was supposed to be cheap and disposable, but actually was complex and meaningful; condescending because how stupid were the public to shell out even more money for something so contrived; and admiring because goddammit, why hadn't I thought of that first?!

Author Jon Savage goes deeper than any writer on British punk ever has or ever probably will. First he examines the British pop/youth cultural movements after World War II, like the Mods and the skins and the Teddy Boys, before coming to that shop impresario Malcolm McLaren ran called SEX at 430 King's Road. We get some myth-destroying insights into the origins of McLaren's relationships with the burgeoning soon-to-be-kings the Sex Pistols; he correctly points out that it originally was 18-year-old guitarist Steve Jones' band.

Savage debunks the notion that the Pistols were—as is a popular perception today—the *NSync of their day, a manufactured boy-band with about the same depth and relevance. McLaren was great at hindsight, saying "Oh, I meant that to happen" when really it was all out of control. Quite a bit of the book deals with the utter contempt and frustration with which Johnny Rotten and later Sid Vicious felt towards this Faginesque character.

Prescient enough to have kept his teenage journal , Savage quotes from it to present us with impressionistic, first-hand glimpses of those long-ago days of London in the mid-to-late-70s:

30.10.76: I go see my first proper punk group. I know what it's going to be like: I've been waiting for years, and this year most of all: something to match the explosions in my head. The group are called the Clash; everybody I talk to says they're the best.... Within ten seconds I'm transfixed; within thirty, changed forever.

23.11.76...fascism here won't be like in Germany. It'll be English: ratty, mean, pinched, hand in glove with Thatcher as mother sadist over all her whimpering public schoolboys.

25.12.76: A party... in the kitchen downstairs, members of the Damned, the Clash and the Sex Pistols sit around a large table.... Halfway through the evening, the Heartbreakers arrive, and install themselves in a tight corner near the telephone, which Johnny Thunders uses to make hour-long calls to the US. Not collect.

Savage covers the nascent punk scene in surrounding towns, such as the Buzzcocks in Manchester; the difficulty in getting clubs to book the bands; the sudden liberation (but not quite) young women felt, resulting in "stars" such as Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, and the Slits; the sometimes manufactured, sometimes quite real, competition between the Pistols and their rivals the Clash; the Pistols utterly disastrous tour of Southern America in 1978; the fashion, the art, the impact the movement had on the rigidly structured British class system. His account of the Jubilee summer (1977 was the 25th year of Queen Elizabeth's reign), and the attendant boat ride up the Thames when the Sex Pistols performed the incendiary "God Save the Queen," their inflammatory anti-royalty statement just as the boat passed Parliament, makes you realize that punk rock gave new meaning to "civil disobedience." Or, rather, just made it a hell of a lot more fun. Plus its hair looked fantastic.

And what of the tragedy at the heart of the original explosion of punk, the self-immolation of the notoriously doomed Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, still celebrated today in t-shirts and dolls and homemade Youtube videos? Savage is tender:

What happened next will always be a blur. In an account given by Vicious shortly before his death, he woke up from a Tuinol stupor in the light of the morning to find a trail of blood leading from a soaked bed to the bathroom.... he found Nancy lying under the sink with a hunting knife sticking in her side... Vicious went into complete shock--from which he would barely recover for the rest of his life. As the realization of what had occurred sank in, he panicked totally: the only person had ever cared for him was dead, by his knife, and he couldn't remember a thing.

What really put England's Dreaming on the literary map, and has drawn accusations of pretension and puffery, is how Savage links punk rock and major artistic trends of the 20th century. Sometimes I agree that this comes off as intellectual posing, and yet in my thoughtful moments I think Savage is quite right to link McLaren's chaotic yet half-formed ideas with anti-art art movements Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism.

Tattered, caustic icon Johnny Rotten is compared to the young French poet Arthur Rimbaud; the Clash wore Army fatigues splattered with brightly colored paint à la Jackson Pollock; Subway Sect and other dreary bands created music that seemed defiantly anti-music, almost musique concrète; and one cannot deny the primitive, art brut beauty of Xeroxed 'zines like Snffin' Glue, the flyers for shows and the record sleeves of hundreds of forgotten bands, all ransom-note graphics and ripped-up newspapers. Consider the brilliance of the 45 sleeve for the Sex Pistols' "Holidays in the Sun."

Punk rock might not be the monster it was so long ago, but it remains an oft-misunderstood musical genre, usually seen as one-dimensional, inarticulate, and musically incompetent, made by angry adolescents who have no regard for anyone but themselves. This all may be true, but to dismiss it as such is to miss a vital element of rock'n'roll: that is, that is rock’n’roll defined. Jon Savage’s work still stands as the great book on its subject, and one of the finest books on the sociology of music in general. Of course I didn't shell out $27.50 for it on that long-ago day, certainly not with Charles so willing and able to mock me. The book seemed weighty and deadening, a vampire leaching blood from the living. I didn't read it until the late '90s, when I was once again under the music's sway and decided it was time to see if there was something I could learn that I hadn't from the music itself.



Nothing kills punk rock like sincerity; its raison d'etre is mocking vitriol hurled at both one's enemies and oneself. England's Dreaming doesn't have any of that spitting, rabid energy of the best punk rock. It's not a “rock’n’roll book” in the sense that the other titan of punk literature, Please Kill Me, is, but they certainly belong on the shelf next to one another.

Roy Scheider, 1923-2008

A sad day for movie lovers, and for people with blogs named after Jaws quotes: Oscar-nominated, Jersey-born actor Roy Scheider died February 10th of cancer. Farewell and adieu, good sir; farewell and adieu.



Here's the trailer from probably my second-favorite Scheider movie, the little-seen, Star Wars-slaughtered (it came out at roughly the same time), William Friedkin-remake of Clouzet's Wages of Fear, 1977's Sorcerer.


Other great Scheider movies include Klute, The French Connection, All That Jazz and Naked Lunch. Adjust Netflix queues accordingly!

Here's "Bye Bye Life" from All That Jazz with Ben Vereen. Crazy, man, crazy.

Currently reading: August Derleth's Cthulhu mythos stories

August Derleth, founder of Arkham House Publishers, kept the H.P. Lovecraft legacy alive when it threatened to disappear into pulp obscurity. Now, more than half a century later, Lovecraft's name is venerated the world over. Derleth (along with countless other writers) penned his own tales utilizing the Lovecraft mythos, published as The Mask of Cthulhu (1958) and The Trail of Cthulhu (1962) .

Derleth has been criticized by Lovecraft purists for drastically altering the philosophical underpinning of Lovecraft's original stories into a more balanced, even Christianized, cosmic whole. Lovecraft was a staunch atheist who saw the universe as a bleak, cold, indifferent place in which humanity had no place; his followers, however, adapted the mythos to their own needs and creative visions. Some feel this more humanized viewpoint weakens the impact of Lovecraft's mythos; I tend to that opinion, and have read very few of the Lovecraft followers.

However, August Derleth succeeded where Lovecraft often failed: writing readable prose. In fact, many of the stories here seem almost to be the classic Lovecraft stories re-written in readable prose. Derleth's style is almost hard-boiled, with no affectation of language, no preoccupation with an archaic style, no excessive adjectives. Yet still the stories achieve an atmosphere of cosmic dread, of fear and loathing, of awe at the vastness of space and the littleness of mankind in its void. "The Seal of R'lyeh" is a fantastic story, with a deepening (or perversion, as Lovecraft experts may see it) of the Cthulhu mythos and some really strong, evocative, subtle writing.

It's excellent to see these two works back in print together in Quest for Cthulhu (boo on the Godzilla-esque cover art); however, my moldering copies were published by Ballantine paperbacks in the early 1970's and smell a hundred years old (or is that countless eons?)--I wouldn't part with them for anything, not even my very own shoggoth. While I much prefer the original visions of Lovecraft himself, Derleth's stories are powerfully imagined, clearly told, and come highly recommended from this lifelong Lovecraft fan.