La suciedad y la furia

Thinking about the Sex Pistols in Yucatán

Saludos desde Merida! I’ve enrolled in a one-week Spanish immersion program at Habla Institute for Language and Culture. I’ve been coming to Merida for 15 years and although Nuvia has worked with Habla many times since 2013, both here and in San Diego, this is a first for me.

Merida is the capital of Yucatán and is the state’s largest city with architecture that dates back to the 16th century and Mayan ruins that are, of course, much older. We always seem to be here in July when it is very hot and very humid. It is a place that is at war with the weather. Visitors and residents alike sleepwalk through a crumbling city that is always becoming ruins. No one is in a hurry. People seem as though they are stunned to be moving at all. At night, bats reconnoiter the streets while the jungle waits to reclaim what the city has taken. If the news broke tomorrow that an underground city of actual vampires has been discovered I would not be all all surprised to learn it was here in Merida.

Merida at sunset

There are many things I love about Merida but since I am here to learn I will spend the week at the institute working. Today I translated a poem and wrote a very bad one about the orange tree that grows in the backyard of Nuvia’s family’s home. (This tree is also the subject of my latest column for Razorcake #129, the one with Edward Colver on the cover.)

After my lesson yesterday I snuck into Nuvia’s teacher-training session that was being taught by a local artist. They were making lino cut prints. I made a quick carving of el arbol de naranja y la casa that Nuvia combined with her carvings to make the print you see below:

Conchas y naranjas

Did you know the Sex Pistols played Teatro José Peón Contreras here in Merida back in 1978? No? Well they didn’t. The closest that ever came to happening was forty years later when Public Image Ltd played the Pepsi Center in CDMX in 2018.

Three years before that, in March of 2015, I sent a letter to my agent expressing my desire to work with Steve Jones on his memoir. This was before I’d worked with Keith Morris or Bad Religion on their respective books so there was no reason for Jones to take my request seriously. My letter had a link to a piece I’d written about Pearl Jam for Granta. Fucking Granta!

This is how it went down. Jones’s management team sent word that his client was looking for a collaborator. My agent, knowing about my passion for all things punk, had me draft a letter of interest. This is one of the dirty little secrets of publishing. Opportunities to write these kinds of books don’t always go to the people most qualified to do so. Rather, they go to people connected to the network of agents and managers that make these deals happen.

I’ve written at least a dozen of these letters over the years, and they rarely amount to anything, but sometimes they lead to work. One letter I wrote was a for YouTube star (I know) whose agent wanted me to write a book on a tight deadline for no money and no credit. No thanks.

Both my agent and I thought Jones would be better off working with someone from his part of the world, someone who understood British culture better than I did, and apparently Jones felt the same way because he selected Ben Thompson, a veteran rock critic who has been called “a British Richard Meltzer.”

Thompson collaborated with Jones on his memoir, Lonely Boy, which was adapted into a series called Pistol by Craig Pearce for FX and directed by Danny Boyle. A lot of people have thoughts about Pistol and what it gets wrong, decrying it as tame, lame, and disingenuous.

Rotten Boy 2018

It seems to me that a lot of these people have lost sight of the fact that Pistol is a story about a story about a story about a band. Maybe these critics were there or (more likely) felt cheated they weren’t, but Pistol has less chance of satisfying those fans than I did co-writing Lonely Boy. Sometimes people love things so much that it becomes part of their story and when someone else tells a version that strays from that truth, they freak out.

That’s a shame, because Pistol is a ton of fun—from watching Toby Wallace, who plays Steve Jones, figure out how to play power chords to the leering malevolence of Anson Boone, who plays Johnny Rotten, the show had me in its grip. Of course, it’s a lot more fun to watch than it was to live through, because if the show was as authentically racist, sexist, and ant-semitic as the Sex Pistols and its menagerie of misfits were in real life no one would watch the show.

But that’s what TV is for, right? I mean no one wants to watch a show about a workaholic architect who holes himself up in his office, ignoring his blended family, and slowly goes mad. (Okay, maybe I’d watch that version of Brady Bunch.) No one watches Hogan Heroes, and says, “Well, actually, German POW camps were a tad more dangerous…” The point is, people don’t like it when their heroes get turned into entertainment.

But if you’re one of those people who intensely dislikes Pistol, you can always write a letter. I’m sure it will make a difference.