Dave Thompson, London’s Burning: True Adventures on the Frontlines of Punk, 1976-1977 (Book Review)
Dec/090
Dave Thompson, London’s Burning: True Adventures on the Front Lines of Punk, 1976-1977 (2009). $18.95. [Amazon]
The history of UK punk has been told so many times, and so well, that it’s hard to believe that the story can be told again. But it can. Dave Thompson’s London’s Burning is a recollection of his mid to late teenage years, when he saw all of the groups in their earliest gigs: The Sex Pistols, of course, but also those a bit more afield, such as the Adverts, and the ones you haven’t heard of who were in the orbit of punk but didn’t get much attention — such as Masterswitch.
There are a few things that really stand out in this memoir. The first is the radical importance of reggae. English music was in a dead period, and white kids needed their revolution. The music at hand in 1974 and 1975 with the revolutionary message was reggae. Each chapter starts with a list of tunes in “heavy rotation” in the author’s mind, and until we get well into the 1976, it’s dominated by reggae. The lists are very interesting as well, because it is a distinctly “street” collection of reggae tunes. I think you’d have a hard time finding all of these as downloads.
Thompson is always well aware of the circumambient economic situation. Of course, all of the other books talk about how there were no jobs and workers were miserable under Maggie. But Thompson remembers that in the late 70s, no one had a theory; they just had misery:
[F]or anybody looking to draw conclusions from the events which ultimately cause 1976 to shape the landscape of the decades to come, it is only the sweet fortunes of hindsight that sllow even a vague hypothesis to take shape. For the people on the ground, in the frontline, at the sticky end of the pointed stick, 1976 was the same as 1975 was the same as 1974 was the same as 1973 and so on ad infinitum.
There were still no more than three channels on the telly; the programming still ended around midnight with the rousing chords of the national anthem. Some shows were still being broadcast in black and white. The pubs closed at eleven . . . [However, hindsight] might view the mid-1970s through a monochrome lens, but life was not gray, it was not flat, and it was not grim. A lot of people had a lotof fun in the 1970s . . . The big difference between “then” and “now” was that people were making their own fun then, as opposed to waiting for some multimedia conglomerate to package it up and deliver it to their door. (pp. 102-103)
Thompson is also good at pinpointing how 1976 was different from 1982: In 1976, Thompson says, the situation of the miserable economy “was not merely without precedent, it seemed to be without remedy as well” (p. 98). By 1982, punks had a pattern. So . . . 1976 becomes all the more interesting because it was all improvisation and invention.
The last thing I would say about this nifty book is that it’s great on the bands that got lost: Roogalator, the Rumour (who had a great album without Graham Parker), Tom Robinson Band — they’re all here, and will compel you to dust off the old singles and LP’s, if you have them.
Tom Davis, Thirty-Nine years of Short-Term Memory Loss (Book Review)
Dec/091
Tom Davis, Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL from Someone Who was There (2009). $24.00. [Amazon]
I read a fair number of showbiz memories (for reasons I know not), usually with a bit of a rock-and-roll cast, and this is one of the worst. Tom Davis was half of the Franken and Davis comedy team; I would guess that the publication of this book was delayed to come out after the Senate race in Minnesota was confirmed, because there is little here that would reflect very well on Franken, except, I suppose, that he managed to get sober. There are indications that Davis cleaned up, too, but not many. For the most part, he lived his teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, etc., on drugs and listening to the Grateful Dead. I had a hard time finding evidence that he had contributed much actual “funny” to Franken and Davis or to SNL.
I did learn hat Al Franken perfected his trick of drawing the outline of the 48 states long ago. I also found out that Jerry Garcia slept in a chair.
Aside from those tidbits, this is more or less just a list of hijinks and travel stories, punctuated with brief vignettes of the various people Davis knew. At the end of the book there’s a random list of books Davis read while writing his memoir, and an incongruous list of his top 50 movies. Also pathetic is that Davis conceives himself as some kind of thinker: “I had a conscious philosophy that celebrity, money, and power were ephemeral and were important only as they figured into the world of ideas in which I lived” (p. 178). Well, I couldn’t find an idea after 300-odd pages.
Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked (Book Review)
Nov/090
Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked (2009) $25.99. [Amazon]
Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked is about a cult musician, his fans, and his legacy. Tucker Crowe recorded what fanboys seem to think is the greatest break-up album of all time, “Juliet.” Then Crowe dropped out of the music business. One of his biggest fans is a musical trainspotter in a sleepy seaside town in England. When the demos of Crowe’s great album are released as “Juliet, Naked,” the fan writes a celebratory review, motivated largely by the fact that he is one of the first to hear the CD. Then his girlfriend reviews it — and pans it — and, miraculously, the elusive Crowe begins to re-emerge from his obscurity.
All of the musical “notes” in this book are pretty much perfect, from the fake Wikipedia entries to the self-regard of the fanboy. Meanwhile, the musical Crowe is immediately recognizable as something like an early Alex Chilton; after his “retirement” from music, Hornby takes the character a little further into obscurity than most cult figures go.
Where the book is pretty weak is around the relationships. Hornby can lay down a nice streak of almost weepy sentimentality. The book practically ends in a group hug. I liked the book, but, really, the music bits are the best bits. Even a brief appearance by a couple of the last Northern Soul fanatics has more life than some of the romance material.
My New Yorker subscription . . . and the paper it’s printed on
Nov/091
I own a Kindle. After I bought it, I vowed to buy books only on Kindle; and then when not available on the Kindle, buy sparingly in print, or go to the library. The idea is to reduce the amount of waste and clutter I generate. I’ve been very successful. So far.
But now I have to renew my subscription to the New Yorker.
The New Yorker is available on the Kindle, but it’s pretty gross. And I like the reading experience of the printed version.
What to do!?
Lazy web, does anyone have counsel for me?
Michelle Wildgen, But Not For Long (Book Review)
Nov/090
Michelle Wildgen, But Not For Long (2009). $24.99. [Amazon]
I’m a sucker for a good “end times” novel (see my review of World Made by Hand). This book is about three housemates in a funky Madison, Wisconsin co-op dedicated to localism (as in local foods). 30-something Hal leads the house, with the help of 20-something Karen. Meanwhile, 30-something Greta has moved in, trying to escape her alcoholic husband Will. The thing is, though, that gas prices have shot up, and there have been power outages. Part-way through the book, a lengthy power-outage kicks in that seems like it might be the permanent one. Hinted at is a general ecological decline: yield from community farms is low, chicken eggs from a farm have malformed shells. All is not right in the world.
All of these ecological aspects of the novel are soft-pedaled. In fact, no one really knows why the power has been going off. It is noted briefly that there is still a war going on, so perhaps power is expensive because of that. I would guess that Wildgen’s point is that this is the problem with people nowadays: No one really knows why our engagement with the natural world is in such decline; even those of us who try to use fewer resources and think locally, she would seem to claim, can’t really get beyond our personal issues.
Towards the end of the novel, the alcoholic Will emerges as a central character. It would seem that Wildgen is drawing a very broad parallel between society’s drunkenness on taken-for-granted resources, and Will’s grotesquely selfish boozing. (Indeed, if this is a so-so ecological novel, it’s a fine novel of alcoholism.) This makes me think that the novel is something of a parable. Having said that, the parabolic nature of the story is so light that it is hard to really care. There are some characters who have managed to escape: Hal’s father lives in a cabin in northern Wisconsin, and allows that if the power went out up there, nothing much would change. Karin has a lovely episode visiting a boutique cheese maker (chapter 9), but it doesn’t motivate her to get out of Madison. That seems to be the case for all of the characters: They’re too frail to break their own habits, and, like Will, their addiction is strangely what keeps them (barely) alive.
If you must rescue Exception . . .
Oct/090
Sometimes you see Ruby code that rescue an exception at the top of the hierarchy:
rescue Exception => e
If you must do that, how about providing a means to control-C, by putting this in the method with the rescue:
trap("INT") do
puts "Terminating . . . "
return # or maybe exit
end
Good example of antiquity of some Core Ruby classes
Sep/090
A common pattern in Ruby is to call .to_s on an object when you want a String, even if the object itself might be a String. So, e.g., if you are getting NoMethodErrors on nils when you need a String, you might call .to_s to convert that nil into a String (”).
Well, you might want to do the same thing to convert Floats to BigDecimals. But guess what? BigDecimal doesn’t include a .to_d method! Oops. The BigDecimal class must be so old that this idiom hadn’t evolved.
Ruby inherited callback runs before subclass is loaded
Sep/090
Harrumph.
I wanted to call a class method on a subclass when the base class’s inherited callback is triggered.
But it doesn’t work, because the subclass isn’t loaded when this callback is triggered.
So the following doesn’t work (’boo’ prints instead of ‘foo’):
class Base
def self.permalink
'boo'
end
def self.inherited(c)
puts "permalink: #{c.permalink}"
end
end
class C < Base
def self.permalink
'foo'
end
end
You may be able to get what you want by forcing the class to load with Class.new:
class Base
def self.permalink
'boo'
end
def self.inherited(c)
puts "permalink: #{c.permalink}"
end
end
C = Class.new(Base) do
def self.permalink
'foo'
end
end
How to embed JRuby 1.9 into a Java class
Aug/090
It took awhile longer to figure this out than I would have liked, due to no on-line JavaDocs for JRuby (what’s up with that!?).
But here’s how to embed JRuby 1.9 into a Java class:
import org.jruby.Ruby;
import org.jruby.RubyRuntimeAdapter;
import org.jruby.javasupport.JavaEmbedUtils;
import org.jruby.RubyInstanceConfig;
import org.jruby.CompatVersion;
import java.util.ArrayList;
public class JRubyEmbedded {
public static void main(String[] args) {
RubyInstanceConfig ric = new RubyInstanceConfig();
ric.setCompatVersion(CompatVersion.RUBY1_9);
Ruby ruby = JavaEmbedUtils.initialize(new ArrayList(), ric);
RubyRuntimeAdapter rra = JavaEmbedUtils.newRuntimeAdapter();
System.out.println(rra.eval(ruby, "\"Ruby #{RUBY_VERSION}\""));
JavaEmbedUtils.terminate(ruby);
}
}
Evening of Day 4: St. Mary Lodge and Resort, St. Mary, Montana (near Glacier National Park)
Jul/091
After our tour of the Going-to-the-Sun Road on June 30, 2009, we went to the St. Mary Lodge and Resort in St. Mary, Montana. Calling this place a “Lodge and Resort” is a misnomer. It’s really just a multi-room hotel with some cabins, a store, a gas station, a decent restaurant, a gift shop, all surrounded by blacktop parking. (What you can’t see from this picture of their cabins is that these buildings are right on the road, and it’s a pretty busy one.)
We had a decent meal at the lodge’s restaurant. I had whitefish supposedly fished from the nearby St. Mary’s lake, and Julie had elk medallions. The wine was pretty bad, as was the service. And it was damn expensive, but I guess that’s to be expected given how far we were from normal distribution circuits.
In addition, they have teepees (oops, I should be more politically-correct: tipis). There were seven or eight of them. Each one is quite large, perhaps 20 feet tall, and large enough to accommodate two queen-sized beds, a couch, and a table. There is no power in the tipi, so you are issued a battery-powered lantern. You also get a key to a small building next to your tipi that has a shower/hot-tub, toilet, sinks, and power.
Upon being told the number of our tipi (#2), we walked across the street to take a look. On examination of the tipis, they seemed to be made by a company from British Columbia. They were made of very heavy fabric, that was, I think, decoratively painted (from the inside, you could see something like brush-strokes). The poles were sturdily planted into the ground with industrial-strength fittings. Looking closely at this particular tipi, a lot was off. For one thing, the flap on the front had no means to secure it. There was a pole on the ground that was (from looking at the other tipis) supposed to be in place to hold open the top of the tipi. This particular tipi was also right off of the road. People would stop their cars and take a look inside. In general, it seemed kind of lousy, and made me kind of nervous: With that proximity to the road, there would be noise, as well as the possible intrusion from nosy passers-by. So we asked for a tipi change.
The new tipi (#3) had a flap that could be secured, as well as all of its poles in the right place, and it was off the road. Better.
The tipis are not particularly air-tight; there was a noticeable gap at the bottom between the bottom edge of the tipi fabric and the ground. Julie and Caroline are very tasty for mosquitoes (I’m not, for whatever reason), so the whole thing seemed like kind of a bad idea to me. Also, here we are briefly in “civilization,” and . . . no wifi in the tipi? Plus, the cost was by far the most expensive option at the Lodge.
Having said all that, it was pretty neat on the side (see the pictures below). After the pictures, though, I have a bit of a tale to tell.
After getting settled for bed, we fell asleep. At about 1:30 AM, I woke up with a start. Outside I could hear a huge wind bearing down from over the mountain. What’s more, the poles were rattling, and you could sense that the entire tipi was being significantly stressed by the wind. A lot of nightmare scenarios floated through my mind, mostly along the lines of “how could I put my six-year old in a fragile structure in the wilds of Montana?” I stepped outside the tipi, and the night sky was illuminated by a nearly-full moon. Clouds had set in, which was too bad because I had wanted to see the starry sky without the light pollution. I could see that the clouds were being blown rapidly by the wind. I would guess that the gusts were at maybe 35 mph: It really seemed like too much for the tipi. I woke up Julie and we wondered if we should ask to be transferred to the “Lodge.” We talked for awhile, but didn’t come to a decision. Julie fell back asleep. I stayed awake, staring at the top of the tipi, wondering when the whole thing would come crashing down. While I was lying there frozen with fears, I could hear people from the neighboring tipis partying noisily at the outdoor jacuzzi — who were these people? Eventually I, too, fell asleep. Julie tells me that she woke up again at 3:30 AM, and heard the rattling and crazy winds all over again.
Meanwhile, Caroline slept through the whole thing.
The upshot of this is that I wouldn’t recommend the tipis. They are too exposed to the elements (if not to passers-by); when you’ve had a long road trip, I think you need a quiet locked room and the amenities of a real hotel.
