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Transmetropolitan: Volume Five, Lonely City by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson (2001)

September 13, 2010 Book Reviews
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Transmetropolitan: Volume Five, Lonely City by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson (2001)Yes indeed, it is another Transmetropolitan review. It will be the last one for a while, as I had to return the library copies today after renewing them the maximum amount of times. I want to extend the experience of reading this series for as long as possible, I’m all about delayed gratification. Though my compulsion is to speed through the second half of the series, I know that taking my time with Spider and his world will be, ultimately, more rewarding.

Overthinking reading habits aside, Transmetropolitan: Volume Five, Lonely City sees rogue journalist Spider Jerusalem coming to terms with the new political regime in the wake of “The Smiler” Callahan’s landslide victory. The futuristic nightmare of the City seems forever doomed to political corruption, with Jerusalem investigating a pornography scandal involving a city senator. Using his myriad of technological mischief devices and questionable underground contacts, Spider gets to the bottom of the story – but whether he is able to bring justice to those involved is another question.

Hi. I’m Spider Jerusalem. I smoke. I take drugs. I drink. I wash every six weeks. I masturbate constantly and fling my steaming poison semen down from my window into your hair and food. I’m a rich and respected columnist for a major metropolitan newspaper. I live with two beautiful women in the city’s most expensive and select community. Being a bastard works.

The same technological devices that aid Spider in his quest for the truth are also used by gangs in Lonely City to commit heinous crimes. A G-Reader, a device that “reads genomes, hunts down rogue scraps of genetic structure, that sort of thing”, is used on people who have traces of genetic modifications. Spider senses something rotten at the heart of the case, and sets out onto the streets to try and set things straight. Uncovering details of police corruption and their intentional burial of the hate crime, Spider and his assistants are implicated in a police sanctioned riot. In the process of writing his story, the true nature of Callahan’s new regime is revealed. Spider’s column is censored, blacklisted from being published anywhere, by the Callahan administration. It is, as Spider so eloquently puts it, “the start of something fucking disgusting.”

Though Callahan himself is largely absent from this volume, his all too powerful presence is felt in this act of blatant censorship. The fear it inspired in Spider Jerusalem cements the horror of the Callahan administration. It is the beginning of something truly atrocious, and the set up and censorship of our journalistic antiheroes is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. In an imagined future where anything and everything is permissible, surely censorship of the written word is the ultimate revenge on the trouble-making Spider Jerusalem. In its treatment of corruption and censorship, Transmetropolitan continues to prove eerily prescient, and this volume is perhaps necessarily less hopeful and bleaker in outlook.

Previous Transmetropolitan reviews:

The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, Vince Neil, Nikki Sixx with Neil Strauss (2001)

August 27, 2010 Book Reviews
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“Uh, you’ve gotta read this Mötley Crüe book. I swear, you get to the point where Ozzy Osbourne snorts a row of ants and you think, it cannot get any grosser, and then you turn the page and oh, hello, yes it can! It’s excellent!”
Lorelai Gilmore, Gilmore Girls episode 2.18, “Back in the Saddle”

The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, Vince Neal, Nikki Sixx with Neal Strauss (2001)

Quoting Gilmore Girls may be the least rock and roll way to introduce The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Mötley Crüe (with Neil Strauss) which may possibly be the most cliché-ridden, overblown rock and roll biography of all time. Who would open this book expecting anything less? When it comes reading about excessive rock and roll exploits, one doesn’t only expect cliché, but craves it. And the dirt is definitely all here: the alcohol, the drugs, the groupies, the sex, the near-death experiences, the band member feuds, the record company feuds, the replaced lead singer, the fans, the jailtime, the gossip, the marriages, and a little bit of the music.

Unlike other music biographies I have read recently, I can’t claim to be a fan of Mötley Crüe’s music. Sure, I went through a hair metal stage when I was about six (and I still have the cassingles to prove it), but the Crüe never really interested me. Their music still doesn’t interest me, but they have lead some debauched and voyeuristically interesting lives. The Dirt is told through multiple perspectives, each band members voice is given equal time, and other major players also get a look in. It’s difficult to read all the activities both legal, illegal, questionable and unmentionable that they got up to and know that they came out of it alive. And The Dirt shows that maybe, just maybe, they came through it all with some semblance of self-awareness and insight. Or maybe not:

After the insanity of the Girls tour, I think we lost sight of ourselves. Mötley Crüe became a sober band, then we became a band without a lead singer, then we became an alternative band. But what everybody always loved Mötley Crüe for was being a fucking decadent band: for being able to walk in a room and inhale all the alcohol, girls, pills, and trouble in sight. I suppose a happy ending would be to say that we learned our lesson and that it’s wrong. But fuck that. (Vince Neil)

I may have had to suspend some of my usual critical faculties in order to enjoy the book – particularly the attitudes about women: of course marriage break ups are never the fault of boozing, high, cheating men, but always of the wife that doesn’t understand him. I recognize that the problematic mindset was there, but my lack of previous connection to the band meant I wasn’t heavily emotionally invested in them as people. I didn’t expect them to have amazingly progressive approaches to well, anything, and they didn’t. They do paint themselves as clichéd rock and roll caricatures: the drug-addled “creative genius” with the troubled childhood, the tempestuous and egotistical lead singer, the quietly suffering guitarist and the hyperactive bad boy drummer. There are a few genuinely heartfelt moments – through debilitating disease, depression, death – where they begin to appear as human, but these moments are brief and quickly shoved aside in favour of more cartoonish misadventures.

That’s not to say that The Dirt isn’t insanely fun to read, because it really is an ant-snorter of a read. But, it is also enjoyable in a way that allows the reader to look at that rock and roll lifestyle and realize the sheer ridiculousness and scale of it, and to feel immense gratitude for quiet anonymity. The Dirt is the band’s way of self-mythologizing beyond their music, because even non-fans like myself want to read this book, thus cementing themselves in the public imagination as rebellious degenerates, as the “world’s most notorious rock band.” Mötley Crüe’s decadence is seedy yet glamourized with a strong undercurrent of misogyny, male rage and sadism. Many may find something to admire or aspire to in that, and while it does make for riveting reading, it is also faintly distasteful.

Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad (2001)

August 2, 2010 Book Reviews
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Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad (2001)It’s easy to get romantic and nostalgic about independent music, at the same time getting tangled up in messy arguments about authenticity and integrity.  Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 avoids this problem and instead maps out the formation of the American independent music scene with a clear perspective and an evident fondness for the music and the energy such a scene provided.

Azerrad, an American music journalist, sets out to tell the origin stories of thirteen bands that played an important role in the formation and success of the American independent underground scene: Black Flag, The Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr, Fugazi, Mudhoney and Beat Happening. These stories end either when bands break up or, the real death knell, sign to a major label.

They were replaced by a bunch of toughs coming in from outlying suburbs who were only beginning to discover punk’s speed, power and aggression. They didn’t care that punk rock was already being dismissed as a spent force, kid bands playing at being the Ramones a few years too late. Dispensing with all pretension, these kids boled the music down to its essence, then revved up the tempos to the speed of a pencil impatiently tapping on a school desk, and called the result “hardcore.”

What struck me about these stories is how key figures featured across many of the stories, creating the sense that in particular geographical regions and across the nation this really was a scene. An organic, thriving, cultural scene that managed to shape the sound of “alternative” music. This isn’t indie as a sound (you know, those guitar based bands on major labels that are relentlessly described as indie) or an aesthetic, but independent as prerogative. These bands were indie because there was no other option or outlet for the sounds they wanted to make.

I’m a punk/hardcore nerd, so the most interesting chapters for me were those related to Black Flag, Minor Threat, Big Black and Fugazi. However, even the chapters on bands who I’d never really connected with before (Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth), managed to keep my interest. These are not always the stories of righteously independent minded individuals, the bands histories are marked by petty in-fighting, drugs, alcohol, strained relationships, the usual “creative differences” – there is a wealth of great melodrama here that Azerrad is not afraid to explore. A little more about gender inequality would have been interesting as only a handful of women feature in these bands, but I’m sure this topic has been covered in depth elsewhere. As a history of the time, the music, and establishing why and how these bands were so important to a form we take for granted now, Our Band Could Be Your Life is engaging, and dare I say it, even a little inspiring.

Minor Threat epitomized one of hardcore’s major strengths: It was underground music by, for, and about independent minded kids. These kids weren’t on the hipster-bohemian wavelength, either because they weren’t hip or bohemian or because they simply felt the whole trip was needlessly exclusive and elitist. So it figures that hardcore would become popular in a definitively uncool city like Washington D.C. Hardcore wasn’t some druggy pose copped from Rimbaud, it was about things its audience encountered every day, and it certainly wasn’t some lowest common denominator corporate marketing ploy; hardcore kids knew the consequences of the former and grasped the larger implications of participating in the latter. And it had a beat they could dance to.

Our Band Could Be Your Life has me thinking about the possibility or viability of a contemporary underground/independent culture. Much is made in the book of how the lack of communication technology beyond the telephone meant that much of the networking was done through old-school means, namely mail, telephone and zines. With the current saturation of internet technologies aiding communication and social networking, doesn’t that also offer ready-made niche audiences to sounds and ideas that would previously have to either wait for audiences to adapt to new sounds or actively seek out those who would “get it”? Then again, much of the creation of these audiences is due, in part, to the efforts of the bands mentioned here.

Radical Melbourne: A Secret History by Jeff and Jill Sparrow (2001)

January 20, 2010 Book Reviews
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Radical Melbourne by Jeff Sparrow and Jill Sparrow (2001)In Radical Melbourne: A Secret History brother and sister duo Jeff and Jill Sparrow look back over the turbulent political history of inner city Melbourne. Covering a time period of roughly the first century of the city until the mid 1940s, they feature the stories behind 50 prominent inner city Melbourne locations, starting at Flagstaff Gardens and winding through the city before ending up at Trades Hall. This is a history of Melbourne with a focus on the left of the political spectrum, a history that doesn’t get taught in schools.

Each location examined has been the site of significant form of political struggle, from housing dissident political parties, anarchist bookshops and co-ops, to bloody street brawls and protests. These places have become nothing more than banal facades of the city streets, so it is extremely eye-opening to read about the colourful history behind many of them. Radical Melbourne works to uncover the histories that have been lost beneath the ideal image of Australian history, and at the same time, establishing the important message that public space is active, evolving and ever-changing according to the needs of its people, yet also shaped by dominant political ideologies.

However, in a new century, the problem that motivated Chummy Fleming and his comrades to take to the Bank has reasserted itself with a vengeance. In the new Melbourne of casinos and giant outdoor television screens, there are almost no places in which people can congregate. The inadequate space outside the State Library has become the focus for every rally and demonstration, simply because nowhere else exists.

While there is a wealth of truly fascinating stories behind many of the buildings of Melbourne’s cityscape, the “radical” aspect of the book does become tiresome and overly didactic at times. Yes, the struggles of the working class to assert their rights were important and made great headway into establishing what we now accept as basic working rights, and it is increasingly important to highlight their causes in order to maintain them. However, sometimes the writing took on the tone of a student-socialist sneer – especially when commenting on what particular buildings are today.

Luckily, the strength and number of interesting/frightening stories for the most part overrides the sometime disconcerting tone. For instance, did you know that Victoria’s Parliament House still has slits for gun lofts, allowing riflemen to fire upon demonstrators coming up Bourke Street? Or that it houses an underground dungeon, which now functions as a cleaners tearoom? There is enough similarly startling stories in Radical Melbourne to ensure that you will never look at Melbourne the same way again.

Initially written as a walking tour guide through the city streets, Radical Melbourne is perhaps better read chapter by chapter, a book to visit occasionally and to ruminate over rather than read cover to cover as the stories of riots, marches and political struggle do begin to blend together. It gives Melbournians and tourists alike a chance to look at the city in a different light.