BOOK REVIEWS
By Ben Allen

GOODBYE 20TH CENTURY: A BIOGRAPHY OF SONIC YOUTH; By David Browne
At one point in David Browne’s new biography of Sonic Youth, band co-founder Thurston Moore is quoted, joking, “The only way we’re going to sell records is if we break up…or, if one of us dies.” And nearly thirty years after the release of their first EP, neither has happened, making the increasingly-ironic named Sonic Youth a sort of anomaly in pop rock: a group whose longevity is rivaled only by glory day revelers like the Rolling Stones, but whose popularity has plateaued without them ever really reaching a mass audience.

Of course, no one is going to deny the musical influence of Sonic Youth – presently it’s very much en vogue for critics to throw the 1988 album Daydream Nation on “greatest” lists. But, are they biography worthy? In many regards, they’re not the ideal rock subject. The drugs, booze, sex, death, and drama that plague so many groups – and dominate rock bios – have just never existed in the Sonic Youth world. And as Browne is quick to point out, the personal lives of members Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley, and Moore couldn’t be more modest and traditional, a fact that’s odd mainly because the band was once considered too weird and “out there” for the early ‘80s New York punk scene. With the temptation to delve into tabloid gossip out of the way, Browne is able to focus instead on things that are actually interesting, like the band’s experimental ethos, enthusiasm, and uncompromising independence. Things that ultimately make Sonic Youth so attention worthy.

In doing so, Browne proves to be an excellent biographer. Compiling decades of interviews, not only with the members but with the countless scores of collaborators, producers, and friends who surrounded them, he’s built a thorough and compelling story of these strange, like-minded kids who through sheer perseverance and ingenuity became figureheads of independent music. In the nearly five-hundred page chronicle, it seems as though nothing is left out, but it also never feels tiring or repetitive as it moves from era to era, album to album. Browne is especially adept at tying the work of Sonic Youth to the culture at large, explicating how the way they operated and the personal relationships they made affected music, art, and fashion in the underground and beyond. While he sometimes gives them too much credit for the success of others (for instance, some band called Nirvana), Browne’s point is well-taken: the rock world would be a very different place without the lasting presence of Sonic Youth. [Da Capo Press]

THE CONSTANT RIDER OMNIBUS: TALES FROM THE TRANSPORTATION FRONT; By Kate Lopresti
Ah, public transportation – overcrowded, unreliable, full of strange odors, it can be a real hassle. But, hey, so can owning a car. That’s what Kate Lopresti was thinking in 1997 when she gave up driving for good in favor of the more economical and ecologically-friendly transit provided by her local Portland, Oregon bus system. Since that time, she’s been writing about her daily journeys in a little ‘zine called The Constant Rider, the complete run of which is collected (for the second time, actually) in this fittingly titled Omnibus.

While it’s clear from the get go that Lopresti has made a moral decision of sorts to take to public transit, she is more quirky and self-effacing than self-righteous in her writing. Instead of preaching about the evils of the automobile, she delights in the oddball characters and scenes that make up her bus-riding world, and her articles come across as mostly good-natured and enjoyable. Her topics range from the personal (a chronicle of a cross-country train trek) to the practical (how to safely deal with drunks on buses), but her wide-eyed enthusiasm for simply being an observer ties together this brief collection.

And, really, it’s her personality that gives life to her stories. Sure, the larger, ostensible bus-riding subject is an interesting one, but the more compelling subject is her fascination with the mundane – with everything and everyone around her. Aside from the occasional potshot at those who lack proper “riding etiquette,” she is constantly amused by and compassionate towards her fellow riders, no matter how strange, or potentially dangerous, they may be. After all, she is one of them. Seeing a love story unfold or simply running into a familiar bus driver in a store make her day, and in the end, her fascination is contagious. Clearly, there’s plenty to see and enjoy in this world, even in the most compact and slowest moving of places. [Microcosm Publishing]

KEEP LOVING, KEEP FIGHTING #7/ I HATE THIS PART OF TEXAS #7; By Hope and John
In an experiment in ‘zine “splicing,” friends John (I Hate This Part of Texas) and Hope (Keep Loving, Keep Fighting) have put together an episodic narrative of life in their post-Katrina New Orleans home that is full of sadness, beauty, anger, and love blended together into a somber pastiche that is nothing short of amazing. Written with exceptional honesty and elegance, theirs is highly personal story of living and maintaining amidst great calamity.

While an expected overtone of grief drips from every page, what’s remarkable about this collection is how concisely and gracefully the authors depict the conflicting feelings that stem from losing so much. As their stories fade in and out with each other, we see a hopefulness that the ruined city can be rebuilt, but also a despair in knowing that things can never be the same. We see shock after the death of loved ones, but also a simple joy in sharing a beer with a neighbor or finding some old records that are still playable. Never do they take their situation lightly, but never do they seem to want pity either. In a way, the two have distinctly different styles – John, imaginative and contemplative, and Hope, direct and stoic – but melded together, their voices become one and the same. They share a sadness, confusion, and love not just with each other, but with an entire city displaced from itself.

But the question both keep coming back to is, Why return? Why stay in New Orleans? Like for everything else they face, there is no straight answer. It’s a place that is their home, but with all that’s happened, it’s not the same home anymore. For both, returning just had to be done – almost without thinking – but there’s no visible regret from either side. Besides, as John points out, there’s too much work to be done to think about leaving, and in a way, their return attests above all that there is hope and joy in their embattled New Orleans home. [Microcosm Publishing]

IF I COULD SLEEP, I WOULD DREAM ABOUT JOEY RAMONE
By Ben Tanzer

“On my first visit to New York, I remember going to the New York Public Library listening room and putting the Buzzcocks album “A Different Kind of Tension” on the turntable. Great title. Greater cover art. But what was really amazing was the sound. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” I remember mouthing under the headphones, going on like that that for so long that I started to get odd looks from the homeless guy sacked out next to me.” - Steven Lee Beeber

I am a Jew who knows little of the history of Jewish culture. I am a former denizen of New York City who didn’t listen to much music while I lived there. I am a lover of punk who didn’t get into it until my thirties and well after I stopped feeling quite so disaffected, left out and other.

I am also a reformed insomniac who still remembers what it is like to staring at the ceiling, the clock and window shades as I slowly got tangled up in my bed sheets, impossibly awake for hours, night after night, regardless of what I tried to do to temper my anxieties – listen to music, masturbate, change beds, eat cookies, pray to all that is holy for one moment of peace – before ultimately settling on reading, anything and everything and over and over again.

Does this make me unique? No, it’s not like I don’t know people who get parts of this, the Jewish thing or the love of punk, insomnia or New York City as not just a melting pot, but as a place people go when nowhere else will take them, appreciate their weirdness or give them a chance to become who they think they might be if just given the chance. It’s just that I don’t meet many people who get all of it, and that somehow, just maybe, believe that all of these things, the anxiety, anger, feeling like and outsider, music and sleeplessness, are somehow connected.

Steven Lee Beeber gets it though, all of it, and I know this because sitting before me are his books The Heebie-Jeebie at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk (Chicago Review Press, 2006), which he authored and will hereafter be referred to as 'The Heebie-Jeebies'; and Awake: A Reader for the Sleepless (Soft Skull Press, 2008), the anthology he recently edited, which will is chock-full of wonderful writers including Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Messinger, Steve Almond and Aimee Bender hereafter be referred to as AWAKE.

The Heebies-Jeebies is a terribly entertaining and muscular read which more than credibly argues that punk is the outgrowth or outright manifestation of not just being Jewish and the anger that becomes with being the other, but part of the longer lineage of Jewish entertainers, especially, but not limited to Lenny Bruce the oft-arrested, junkie saint of socially conscious comedians.

As Beeber says, “Lenny Bruce epitomized a certain strain of ironic Jewish comedy that was especially punk. Even more specifically, though, he epitomized this humor in its post-war, post-Holocaust mode. Perhaps more than anything, punk was a reaction to the Holocaust by the first generation to come of age as the subject was finally being openly addressed. These punks were the literal heirs of the Holocaust, and Lenny Bruce (as usual, ahead of his time) was something of their leader in spirit. Among the taboo subjects that Lenny took on in concert was the thin line between oppressor and victim as it relates to this tragic historical moment.”

Beeber also illuminates and argues for a fascinating chronology of Jewish New York’s role in the birth of punk, starting with Bruce, but then winding through the stories of Long Island bred Lou Reed, the “Zelig”-like Danny Fields – look there he is with Iggy Stooge, no wait Fred “Sonic” Smith, and Edie Sedgwick; Lenny Kaye the writer of the Ten Punk Commandments, Hilly Cristal the founder of CBGB, The Ramones, leather-jacketed and straight out of Queens, Chris Stein, co-founder of Blondie; John Zorn of the Radical Jewish Culture movement and the post-punk Beastie Boys.

Why is New York City so important to the story though? As Beeber says, “It’s not a coincidence that the Velvet Underground were loved in New York and Boston, yet hated on the hippy dippy west coast because of their so-called “dark vibes.” Just as it was no coincidence that punk was, and in rock terms, still is the only musical form to come out of the city. New York is a tough, humorous, cynical/romantic town that has seen the best and worst of human behavior. And it’s a place where high and low culture meet to create new hybrid art forms, art forms that are a synthesis of assimilation and negation. The same could be said of Jewish culture, especially as it was manifested in New York. So, there, in a perhaps far too big nutshell, is why I think New York was the original center of punk.”

Beyond this chronology, however, are the vast nuances Beeber draws on to further demonstrate just how rich Jew Punk history is. We learn about John Holstrom and the creation of PUNK magazine as influenced by his love of comic books and their Jewish creators like Will Eisner; the first punk women, and not just Debbie Harry, the ultimate “shiksa” goddess, but Genya Ravan and Helen Wheels; Joey Ramone as the living, breathing personification of Kafka’s metamorphical cockroach, and  the endless fascination among Punk’s founders with the Nazi’s and the accompanying Jewish revulsion, disappointment and horror with the fact that the Jews could have ever allowed the Holocaust to happen in the first place.

Beeber comments, “Embarrassment – or at least unease – with Jewish victimization during the Holocaust, was definitely part of a lot of punk music, even if only implicitly in that it was part of the make-up of the musicians who created it. Chris Stein, for instance, collected Nazi memorabilia in part to show that the Jews has eventually outlasted the Nazis, and Handsome Dick Manitoba of The Dictators sang mockingly of “Master Race Rock” and “knocking [the audience] dead in Dallas” because “they didn’t know we were Jews.” And yet, most important of all in terms of punk is to remember that it emerged almost immediately after another war-related event that had an equally powerful, yet opposite, effect on the children of the Holocaust; that being Israel’s victory in the so-called Six Day War of 1967. As Andy Shernoff of The Dictators said, it made you proud to see that Jews could fight back and defend themselves.

Some might ask whether any oppressed group of angry others could fit the model of punk that Beeber sketches in The Heebies-Jeebies. Does it have to be Jews?

Beeber responds, “I’ve actually heard this before as a criticism of the book…First, let me say that of course other groups have been oppressed and that, in fact, some of these groups made great contributions to punk. The working class kids in England most definitely brought their class system and rebellion against it to the fore in their music. And the same could be said of proto-punks like the working class Stooges in Ann Arbor…Yet, when we’re talking about early, original punk, the Jewish element is the strongest, even if it is also tempered by an Italian one (the second largest group to be represented in the music then) and those of an assortment of others (oppressed women, exiled Slavs, working class kids, etc). This is not to say that Jews have a monopoly on oppression; or that they were the only ones to help develop punk. Still, I would say that in that particular moment in time, they had a definite premium on awareness of oppression if not of the actual, day-to-day experience of it.”

In the end, The Heebie-Jeebies is rife with anxiety and rage, history and pride. It’s a great ride, and even if you know some or all of it, you’ve never seen it quite like this.

In a similar fashion comes AWAKE a free-wheeling trip through all things sleep and anxiety provoking. And yet like The Heebie-Jeebies it’s so rich it can’t be boiled down to a concept as simple as something like writers can’t sleep and like to write about it. Beeber is too smart for that and his selections reflect this. These aren’t just stories, poems, illustrations, photos or commix about the inability to sleep alone, but the endless confusion, compulsions and complexes that prevent us from ever falling asleep in the first place.

So sure you get Jonathan Ames writing of masturbation and it is endless ability to induce sleep or Neil Pollack riffing on how writers have no reason to suffer because they have no reason to go to sleep in the first place. But you also have Jonathan Messinger writing of a winged child who wants nothing more than to fly off and see her father and Steve Almond musings on the relationship between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and the conflicting yet supportive friendship they just might have had in the nether world between the conscious and unconscious, the world that all those who count ceiling tiles late at night know all too well.

“What really interested me was the relationship between insomnia and creativity,” says Beeber. “While the book was promoted as an entertaining read to enjoy when you couldn’t sleep, I’d originally and primarily seen it as an exploration of this link that would also be entertaining. That’s why it is focused on the experience of insomnia rather than objective examinations of it. And that’s why I had picked contributions from almost every artistic genre, including art, literature, commix and memoir. Whether it was the found objects of Davy Rothbart (editors of FOUND magazine), the self-portrait photo-series by Cricket Suicide (of The Suicide Girls) or the various blogs and ramblings on the Internet, I wanted to show how the sleepless are often sleepless because they’re creating – and I wanted to explore how they’re creating because they’re gaining access to their dream states. You see, neurologists have increasingly found that we must dream even if we can’t sleep. That’s why when you go without rest for too long you can start to hallucinate or hear voices. These are literally elements of your dreams breaking through into your consciousness. On some level, I think that all art is about breaking through to the unconscious, so art created by staying awake (or as a result of it) is all the more in keeping with this effort.”

AWAKE isn’t just a random series of rants and freak-outs though. The book is divided into seven sections, one for each day of the week, and the message is clear – for those who can’t sleep, this is an everyday state of being.

As Beeber says, “The idea was to loosely reflect what it might feel like to experience insomnia over the period of a week. If you look, you’ll see that the collection gradually builds toward the more poetic and abstract forms of art, while also occasionally coming down to earth, so to speak – much as the mind will when suffering from sleeplessness. Not only are the days often more focused than the nights, even when you’ve gone for long periods without sleep, there are also those times when you gain a sort of super-clarity that feels like inspiration and wisdom – though, for all we know, these may merely be the result of adrenaline kicking in to keep us going. In other words, someone suffering from long-term insomnia is also a little like someone riding on a crystal methedrine high.”