All Music and No Books...
The Shining, Panic!, Yoko Ogawa and more
One of the more frustrating aspects of the pandemic has been my here-today-gone-tomorrow focus. While I’ve been able to write every day, my motivation to read books, watch TV series, work on puzzles, exercise, etc., with any kind of consistency has been scattershot at best. I must have a dozen books laying around that I’ve started and stopped.
One of the reasons I launched Message from the Underworld was to replace The Floating Library, my book review column in San Diego CityBeat that was cancelled when the paper folded. I’m happy to report I’ve been on a reading kick lately and have read (or at least looked at all the pages) some very compelling books that represent a cross section of my interests: horror movies, punk music, weird literature.
Kubrick Red by Simon Roy and translated by Jacob Homel
Man this book is dark. Roy’s hybrid work of nonfiction is an examination of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Shining through the lens of his own brutal family history. You know you’ve had an unusual life when you can find parallels in some of the most intense moments of The Shining. For instance, do you remember the Grady sisters, the twin girls in matching blue dresses who appear to Danny Torrance throughout the film? Of course you do.
Well, Roy’s mother was a twin and all kinds of terrible things happened to her and her sister that echo the fate of the Grady girls, which I won’t spoil here. This had a traumatizing effect on her and subsequently the author, which is some very heavy shit.
If you know a lot of trivia about The Shining you might find Kubrick Red less interesting than I did, but I thought the way Roy blends memoir with a deep dive into the film as a way of “domesticating horror, to find in the homicidal script the possibility of a happy ending,” to be fascinating. I mean, how could I not when I’m guilty of pretty much the exact same thing in my obsession with Neon Maniacs, the movie my cousin Mark wrote before he did Pumpkinhead?
That said, Roy’s narrative is somewhat disjointed due to the fact that it’s broken into many short chapters. Nevertheless, I recommend Kubrick Red for readers interested in the intersection of real trauma and make-believe horror.
Here’s a fun fact I learned while reading Kubrick Red: The Shining was released in the United States on Friday May 23, 1980. You know what else happened on that day? Ron Reyes played his last show as the singer of Black Flag, at the Fleetwood in Redondo Beach of all places, which brings us to our next book…
The first time I saw this book I was at Keith Morris’s apartment in Los Feliz. This was after we’d collaborated on My Damage. Maybe we were working on his contribution to More Fun in the New World, but it might have been later. I was stunned to see an actual book about the band that would become Black Flag. After all, Panic! never played any shows, and aside from recording the EP that would become Black Flag’s debut, all Panic! did was rehearse.
But a quick flip through its pages revealed that PANIC! is a photo book, but an extremely fascinating one, especially for Black Flag obsessives. For one thing, no one knows who took the photographs. It wasn’t Edward Colver or Glen Friedman or Gary Leonard or any of the other photographers documenting the early L.A. scene. Most of the photos are from what looks to be a single session before, during, and/or after rehearsal. There are live shots of the band practicing: Keith, Greg Ginn, Chuck Dukowski, and Robo, who replaced Bryan Migdol. That means the photos were taken in the second half of 1978, after Migdol’s departure and before the band changed its name to Black Flag. There also lots of photos of the band goofing off, including Ginn, which is kind of remarkable.
Keith has a Budweiser glued to his hand. Ginn is dressed in this usual thrift store duds. Dukowski’s hair is weirdly long. But the most fascinating figure of the bunch is Robo who wears cut-off jean shorts and nothing else. No shirt. No shoes. He cuts an oddly messianic figure, like something out of a Raymond Pettibon illustration.
At the time, Black Flag had a rehearsal space on Aviation Boulevard in Redondo Beach. This was after they’d been kicked out of the bathhouse on The Strand, aka The Würmhole, and before they moved into The Church. It was an office space in a strip mall that the band had soundproofed with old carpet so they could only practice at night. Sometimes rehearsals would last until three or four in the morning.
Many think the photographs were taken by Medea, Ginn’s girlfriend at the time, who lived in an apartment on Pier Avenue. Her address? #13, which is also the name of a song (“Room 13”) that she co-wrote with Ginn. (She also co-wrote “Thirsty and Miserable.”) Medea was responsible for tagging the Black Flag logo every time the band played in Hollywood. She’s mentioned a few times in Joe Carducci’s Enter Naomi, but it’s not a flattering portrait: gang ties, hardcore drug use, sex work. Keith maintains she died young under dark and mysterious circumstances.
Why were the photos taken? Bomp! was going to release Nervous Breakdown on its record label. Ginn mailed the photos to Shaw along with the signed contract and waited for a response. Apparently, he got tired of waiting because the following year he formed SST Records and the rest, as they say, is history.
The photos sat in a file cabinet at Bomp! Records for almost 40 years before Ryan Richardson of Ryebread Rodeo hit on the idea to release the photos as a collectible book. At $35 it’s a bit pricey, but the book is beautifully made, and there aren’t many photos of Black Flag during the Keith Morris era.
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa and translated by Stephen Snyder
I think Yoko Ogawa is one of the best writers alive. She has a style that’s completely her own, and one I would recognize immediately. (That could be due to the fact that less than 25% of her published work has been translated into English and those books have all been translated by the same person. So there’s that.) Nevertheless, I am a great admirer of her work. When I was in Belfast last summer and saw that not only did she have a new book out but it was a finalist for the Booker Prizes, I snapped it up.
The novel is set on an unnamed island where things keep disappearing, both in the material sense as well as the abstract. For example, when roses disappear not only are they physically removed from the island, but all memories of roses vanish as well. How this happens is never explained but it doesn’t take away from the heaviness of the book because of the trauma inflected by the fuckers who regulate the disappearances: The Memory Police.
As much as I love the premise, I was a little disappointed to learn the book was originally published in 1994, but that didn’t stop reviewers from crowing how “timely” the book is. It’s an engaging but unsettling read and a great place to start if you’re new to her work.
Here’s Yoko Ogawa reading from the book.
For more videos put together by the people at the Booker Prizes, click here.
Do What You Want Updates
Signed Editions: King’s Road, Bad Religion’s merch company and licensed retailer, now has signed editions of Do What You Want available for pre-order. You can also get them from Barnes & Noble, which ships to the U.S. and Canada, and Premiere Editions, which may ship internationally, but I’m not 100% sure about that. What’s more, King’s Road has some new great Bad Religion merch I’m really excited about like the 1,000-piece puzzle of the album cover to Suffer and a face mask stamped with WE’RE ONLY GONNA DIE FROM OUR OWN ARROGANCE.
Flexi Giveaway: Thanks to everyone who has participated in the flexi giveaway. All the winners should have heard from me by now and your flexis are in the mail. One batch went out late last week; another early this week, and some have already arrived. (I know this because I’ve seen your posts on Instagram.) It seems I have more of these flexis than I realized, so if you haven’t gotten one yet but would like to, hit me up with 1) your mailing address and 2) a screenshot of your pre-order of Do What You Want. I’m trying not to spend all my time at the post office so I’ll probably only fulfill orders once a week, but I’m more than happy to send you one.
Taylor Swift
Hey guys, Taylor Swift has a new album out and Pitchfork says… No, no, and fuck no. I don’t care about Taylor Swift’s new album and I don’t care what Pitchfork has to say about it. This isn’t a critique of Taylor Swift or Pitchfork. Artists make new art every day and I don’t like most of it. And guess what? Neither do you. We like what we like and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But I want you to know, especially new subscribers, that I’ll never use this newsletter to write about things I don’t care about. Am I glad that she’s urging her gajillion-strong fanbase to vote out Trump? Hell, yes. Otherwise, I’m not interested in what she has to say or the music she makes.
I’m not a journalist. I do a lot of things that journalists do, but at heart I’m a zinester and that means I write about the things I’m interested in and passionate about and I leave the rest of the stuff to those who care enough to have an opinion. There are a lot of writers out there who have convinced themselves that part of the gig is having to manufacture an opinion about every pop culture artifact that crosses their path. Maybe being an always-online person does that to you but I’m not one of them. I’ve gone years without looking at Pitchfork. If that disqualifies me as a trusted source about the -core du jour, then so be it. Blessings on your way.
Sometimes my favorite music of the moment syncs up with popular opinion, as it did last year for a brief moment in time with Idles, but more often than not it’s a Chilean street punk band or an old album from the ’70s I’d somehow missed or something I haven’t fully processed yet that electrifies my brain, but I want you to know that whatever that might be it’s 100% sincere.
Isn’t that why we fell in love with music in the first place? To savor that strange feeling that something weird and wonderful was made exclusively for us and then wanting to share that feeling with as many people as possible? Let’s strive for more of that, please. More of this.