This column is dedicated to my long-suffering wife, a brilliant person, well-read and well-rounded, who took up with me no doubt expecting meetings of the minds, intelligent discussions of literature and art and philosophy. Instead she came to realize, alas, too late, that her man was hopelessly mired in cheesy crime novels, monster movies, three-chord garage bands, and a mountain of cheap and juvenile pursuits reeking with the stench of pop-culture effluvia.

It’s been the stated purpose of this column to seek out recent works of esoteric knowledge and literary merit to share with the discerning reader. To that end I won’t generally dwell on bestselling authors (everyone knows James Patterson doesn’t write most of his books but they still sell like crack) or books on politics (Republicans want to eat your babies; Democrats want to turn them into gay atheists—now you’ve read all of them), but rather I try to present books that have either blown me away with their beauty or shown me things I’ve never seen before.

Try as I might, however, I just can’t stay out of the junk pile. It’s just too damn entertaining in there. Here then are some of the other books I’ve read so far this year.

Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks, writing as Ian Fleming (Doubleday, 2008): Everybody knows Ian Fleming’s creation James Bond, so there’s no need to explain who he is. On the centenary of Fleming’s birth, his estate commissioned British novelist Sebastian Faulks to emulate Fleming’s style in this newest Bond adventure, which must have been interesting for Faulks because Fleming’s style was crap. Ian Fleming was a terrible writer, from his weird flavor-neutral prose to his fetishism for brand names and clothing labels, from his rampant racism and sexism to his obsession with games (whenever Bond enters a casino, pack a lunch; you’ll be there a while). But much like Mickey Spillane, Fleming was terrible in a way that was uniquely his own and nigh-impossible to duplicate—try reading John Gardner’s or Raymond Benson’s Bond novels and you’ll see what I mean. From the first page, however, Faulks pulls off the trick. Set during the Cold War, where Bond belongs, the novel puts 007 through all of Fleming’s favorite paces as Bond squares off against a deformed mad scientist with a megaweapon and an axe to grind, and one would swear one was reading something Fleming himself just ripped out between martinis. Bond fans will get this book. Everyone else should go back and watch Daniel Craig in Casino Royale again. It still rocks.

Money Shot by Christa Faust (Dorchester Publishing, 2008): One of the best things to happen to popular fiction in the last couple of years is the Hard Case Crime series of paperback potboilers from Dorchester Publishing, a mix of new and reprinted noir classics that hearkens back to the glory days of junk fiction when lurid covers hawked the beautifully brutal work of masters like Jim Thompson, Donald E. Westlake, and Richard S. Prather. And much like in those days, the Hard Case imprint has been a boys’ club until this year, with the release of Christa Faust’s sexy sledgehammer of a book. How noir is it? The book opens with Faust’s heroine, former porn star Angel Dare, stuffed in the trunk of a car and bleeding to death from multiple gunshot wounds. Unfortunately, all that does is make Angel mad, and we follow her as she cuts a swath through a seamy L.A. underworld of stroke flicks, white slavers, and more trigger-happy goons than you can shake a 9 mil at. This is the kind of stuff Tarantino wishes he had the stones to write—pure turgid goodness.

No Regrets: The Best, Worst, & Most #$%*ing Ridiculous Tattoos Ever by Aviva Yael and P. M. Chen (Grand Central Publishing, 2008): Yael and Chen are two of the minds behind the legendary “Dos and Don’ts” fashion column in Vice magazine, tasteless and viciously funny critiques of street fashion, done as captions under reader-submitted photos. Here they work the same dark magic in a book filled with pictures of some of the worst ideas people have ever had for permanent display on their bodies. Personally I’ve never understood those books filled with suggested tattoo designs—if you don’t already know what you want in a tattoo, then you obviously don’t need to get one—but here is a perfect guide to what not to get. If you’ve been pondering having Rodney Dangerfield or Pee-Wee Herman or a giant phallic rooster or an alien-invasion hellscape permanently etched into your hide, now you can see what it’d actually look like. And stop yourself. For the love of God, stop yourself.

Touch Me, I’m Sick: The 52 Creepiest Love Songs You’ve Ever Heard by Tom Reynolds (Chicago Review Press, 2008): There are only three lines in R.E.M.’s song “The One I Love”—two suggest that the singer is in love, then the third refutes it by calling the other person “a simple prop to occupy my time”. That’s it. Three lines, very simple and pretty clear, and yet couples still sing it to each other without a smidge of irony. “The One I Love” isn’t in Tom Reynolds’s book, but there are plenty of other examples of pop songs that should be creeping us out rather than inspiring us to karaoke. The natural first choice for über-creepy balladry, “Every Breath You Take” by the Police, is here (it’s about Sting stalking his ex—stop playing it at weddings!), as well as Radiohead’s “Creep”, the Beatles’ “Run for Your Life”, Eminem’s “Stan”, and a host of others, some well-known (I always thought 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” was disturbing) and others not so much. Reynolds is a dead-on music critic, well-versed in music history and the nuts and bolts of musicianship, and his insights are frequently profound, but he’s at his best when his critiques go gonzo absurd. Certain chapters have him spelunking inside Alanis Morissette’s head, reproducing Eddie Vedder lyrics phonetically, and type-synching his way through Ashlee Simpson’s “Pieces of Me”. And he hates James Blunt as much as I do. All in all, Reynolds’ creepy love song to creepy love songs is just plain fun. And creepy.

Bigfoot: I Not Dead by Graham Roumieu (Penguin USA, 2008): The long-awaited (well, maybe not) sequel to Bigfoot’s earlier memoirs, In Me Own Words (2003) and Me Write Book (2005), is as heart-wrenching and moving as the first two volumes in Bigfoot’s ongoing saga of cannibalism, the pitfalls of media saturation, and the tragic price of fame. In his frank, confessional style, Bigfoot displays the kind of eloquent pathos Maya Angelou only wishes she could muster. One only wishes the Loch Ness Monster had been this forthcoming in her autobiography. (It’s actually a very funny book, and I’m just kidding about everything but the Maya Angelou part.)

There. Five perfectly good examples of enjoyable, fun, and decidedly uncerebral books with which to kill brain cells and while away the summer hours, and note that not a single one of them is a Jane Austen pastiche or vampire porn. Even when I let my id write the column, I can still perform a public service. I only hope that someday my wife will understand.

Originally published at Flagpole.

—John G. Nettles

… (Or an Incredible Simulation!): I once saw an ad on the back page of this rag for an upcoming show featuring a band that billed itself as “Colorado’s #1 Widespread Panic Tribute Band!” This particular bit of hype caught my eye and continues to haunt me to this day, because it’s a very odd thing for a band to call itself. It implies that A) there are apparently enough Widespread Panic tribute bands in Colorado for there to be a clearly superior one, and B) there are enough Widespread Panic tribute bands nationwide to make a state-by-state distinction. This, in turn, leads to two inevitable questions: just how many Widespread Panic tribute bands are there in the world, and why?

Rock journalist Steven Kurutz examines the tribute band phenomenon close-up in his book Like a Rolling Stone: The Strange Life of a Tribute Band (Broadway Books, 2008). Kurutz spent a couple of years following a pair of Rolling Stones tribute bands, the East Coast’s Sticky Fingers and Canada’s the Blushing Brides, on their travels, from playing half-empty dives and wedding receptions to the occasional glory gig in Las Vegas or Amsterdam. Kurutz recalls the growth of the cottage industry in fake rock from its origins in Broadway’s Beatlemania (“not the Beatles but an incredible simulation!”) to its current state as a vast subculture, a network of barely ground-level bands and players who, week after week, leave their mundane day jobs to crisscross the country in cramped vans in order to pretend to be rock stars.

Along the way, Kurutz poses the burning question that has to be asked: why, if one is skillful and practiced enough to play like Jimmy Page or Jerry Garcia or Keith Richards, would one not direct that talent and drive toward original music which could result in real rock stardom? The answers are telling. As anyone in a band, particularly in this town, can attest, playing original music may be good for the soul, but it’s hard on the spirit (and the wallet). The guys in tribute bands have the opportunity to play the music they love for more people than just the bartender, and if that means aspiring, as the Keith for Sticky Fingers does, to be “the Keithiest Keith around,” so be it.

Kurutz’s book is alternately affectionate and sad as he documents the highs and lows of the would-be rock-star life, including the online sabotage wars between Sticky Fingers and its West Coast archnemesis of the same name, the monumental ego of a Mick Jagger who believes he’s now better than the real thing, and the bizarre remora-like experience of a band following the actual Rolling Stones’ tour schedule for an endless series of warm-up shows in sports bars around the country. (At one point, Sticky Fingers plays a gig a hundred yards from the stadium where the Stones are going on, and watches its audience trickle out, primed for the real thing.) For an unflinching look at lives spent forever on the fringe or as a cautionary tale to everyone out there polishing up Eddie Van Halen hammer-ons, Like a Rolling Stone is a fascinating read.

Originally published at Flagpole

—John G. Nettles

Mmmm… Sociology…: In one episode of The Simpsons, an establishing shot of the Springfield Public Library reveals a desperate sign reading, “We have books about TV.” If not for the potential for cosmological implosion, many of those books would be about The Simpsons, which, after almost two decades on the air, is such a cultural phenomenon that it now informs our sociological experience as much as the other way around. The funny little badly drawn cartoon show has, in many ways, become a barometer of our collective lives, and cultural observers and academics have built a cottage industry from analyzing the show’s impact and deeper meanings.

The latest entry to plumb the rich history of The Simpsons is Tim Delaney’s Simpsonology: There’s a Little Bit of Springfield in All of Us (Prometheus Books, 2008). Delaney, a sociology professor at SUNY Oswego, is a self-described Simpsons fanatic and draws widely and meticulously from the first 400 (!) episodes of the show to illustrate concepts in sociology, a sort of guide for the uninitiated using the microcosm of Matt Groening’s universe to show how we study and understand the collective behavior of human beings. Using exhaustive examples and snatches of dialogue from the show, Delaney demonstrates how the Simpsons and their neighbors relate to each other in the home, the school, the workplace, and the larger communities of religion, sports, politics, friendship, and romance.

At first glance, the book reads rather simply, and one wonders if Delaney is only in it to wax excitedly about what a fan he is, but as the book delves more deeply into larger sociological spheres, the reader will find himself or herself internalizing the concepts without realizing it, like reading a textbook in cartoon camouflage. Delaney’s mission to achieve crystal clarity often comes across as overly simplistic or condescending—in a book written for Simpsons fans, one needn’t explain the jokes—but neither is it dry or laced with academese like other treatments of the subject have been. Chris Turner’s Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation (Perseus Books, 2005) and Mark I. Pinsky’s The Gospel According to The Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of the World’s Most Animated Family (Westminster John Knox Press, 2001) are better, but Delaney’s Simpsonology is a fine volume for anyone intent on an in-depth study of America’s favorite freakish yellow nuclear family.

—John G. Nettles

Jesse Gilmour’s journey through late adolescence may have been an ass-over-teakettle tumble toward the gaping maw of teenage oblivion, but at least he wasn’t a nerd. In our postmodern age of (slowly) growing tolerance for all races, ethnicities, religions, and various orientations, nerds—our catch-all term for the cerebrally gifted but socially awkward, with their furtive cliquishness and retreats into realms of various forms of fantasy—remain a heavily marginalized subset of society, even as we’ve evolved into a global technocracy largely through their efforts. As author Benjamin Nugent puts it, Bill Gates is the wealthiest man on Earth and he’s still considered a loser.

Nugent attempts a hard critical look at nerd culture, its evolution and various permutations, in his new book American Nerd: The Story of My People (Simon & Schuster, 2008). Describing himself as a former nerd who grew out of it, but asserting that his view is non-judgmental, Nugent offers up several examples of the nerd as a character in classic literature—Victor Frankenstein, Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice—the objects of derision because of their willful separation from healthier human passions. He then traces the archetypal chasm between nerds and jocks that occurred with the growth of “Muscular Christianity,” the Teddy Roosevelt-era doctrine that God’s men are athletes and adventurers and empire-builders, not bookish intellectuals with a disdain for direct sunlight.

The rest of the book is a seemingly random series of glimpses into various nerd subcultures. Here is a chapter on the activities of the Society for Creative Anachronism, whose members recreate the structures and artisanship of medieval feudalism (but not the plagues and infant mortality rates). Here is a look at the Church of All Worlds, a philosophical mashup of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein that espouses polyamory. Here is a videogaming convention that demonstrates a stark difference between the communal bonds of Halo 2 players and those who play Super Smash Bros. Melee. Here is a meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, divided between aging old-school sci-fi readers and young otakus too busy gaming to read.

Interspersed with these chapters are Nugent’s sociological observations that parallel nerd culture—with its emphases on bookishness and machinelike behavior—with similar traits in Jewish and Asian cultures, and that posit an overlap between the seeming dysfunctionalism of nerds with that of people with Asperger’s Syndrome (note: as the parent of an autistic-spectrum child I emphasize the word “seeming”). In still another chapter, Nugent examines the assimilation of typical nerd traits (disaffectedness, an obsession with cultural minutiae) into the hipster profile (who bought all those “Vote for Pedro” ringer tees?). And he brings it home with autobiographical peeks into his own childhood and the extremely unhappy homes that drove him and his friends into the relatively safe world of Dungeons & Dragons.

With his scattershot approach Nugent tries to take what is, in fact, an incredibly complex topic (I can think of at least five major nerd subcultures he neglects here) and boil it down to a Unified Field Theory of Geekdom. In this he is largely unsuccessful, but what he does manage is a sort of apologia, an attempt at least to open up this traditionally airtight social ghetto. He may claim to have rejected nerd culture but he clearly still has sympathy and affection for it, and if anyone could use sympathy and affection, it’s nerds.

Originally published at Flagpole.

—Nikki Tranter

Here’s Looking at You, Kid: I came home from work the other day to find my 13-year-old son doing the dishes, voluntarily, to give his mother a break. As I went to him to give him kudos on his act of industry and kindness, I was stunned to notice that the top of his head was no longer at eye level. It’s one of those moments I’ve been having a lot lately, the realization that I no longer have a little boy living in my house but a budding man, with a whole new world of trials ahead for both of us. He’s gotten to an age where he’s vibrating with the need to go and do on his own, but without a clear sense of which of the infinite paths before him to choose. It’s a delicate, dangerous juncture, and as his dad I must be very careful from here on out.

In this place I feel for David Gilmour (the Canadian novelist and film critic, not the overrated British guitarist) as he looked across the dinner table at his 15-year-old son Jesse, flunking out of school and getting into all the worst kinds of teenage trouble. Realizing that the wrong course could well drive his son out the door, Gilmour made him a deal: no school, no work, free rent, in exchange for watching three movies a week of Gilmour’s choosing. It was a risky plan but Gilmour reasoned that if he could not speak to Jesse in Jesse’s language—teen angst, rampaging hormones, depression and self-destruction—then he would use his own, the universal language of film with its capacity to illustrate the wide spectrum of the human condition. This bold experiment is chronicled in Gilmour’s memoir The Film Club (Twelve Books, 2008).

I’m going to drop my usual snarky pseudointellectual pose here and just say it: I loved this book, every word of it, unreservedly. As the weeks roll on and Gilmour shares the richness of the cinematic universe in all its hues with his son, from French New Wave to Kurosawa samurai epics, from spaghetti westerns to goofy pure-Hollywood comedies, the two men begin to form bonds of communication and wisdom that so-called parenting experts can only dream about having. Gilmour writes in unflinching terms about the perils of navigating the treacherous waters of his son’s life—drinking and drugs, his risky foray into white-boy hip-hop, his obsession with a particularly manipulative 16-year-old femme fatale—with patience and firmness and, hardest of all but most importantly, trust in Jesse to do the right thing.

This is not to say that Gilmour makes himself out to be Ward Cleaver with a DVD player. During this period Gilmour struggles with his own demons, out of work and anxious, desperate to save his boy, and always terrified of making that fatal mistake that drives Jesse away. But while Gilmour educates his son, Jesse educates his father in the crucial balancing act between being the child’s friend and being his parent. As so many of us who were raised in the post-Dr. Spock era can attest, that balance is the most difficult stunt to pull off, but the most necessary. The Film Club shows that it can be done, maybe not with a feel-good Hollywood ending, but with something far more substantial.

(Also highly recommended, if you can find it, is Dennis Hensley’s remarkable book Screening Party [Alyson Books, 2002], the story of six diverse friends brought together by their monthly movie gatherings. Poignant, both sad and hopeful, and spank-me funny, it’s worth combing the Internet to find.)

—John G. Nettles

And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a friend of mine. Not that I ever met him, but he was a friend of mine all the same, because he did for me what friends do. He got me through rough patches of my life with his absurd humor and simple decency. When no one else’s words seemed to offer me anything, his were always there. Reading Vonnegut, I could always hear a voice, feel a human presence beyond mere style, beyond glib wordplay. Kurt Vonnegut was my friend, and your friend too.

Armageddon in Retrospect (Penguin USA, 2008) is a new collection of previously unpublished works by Vonnegut on the one-year anniversary of his death, and while it’s not exactly the treasure-trove his fans might have hoped for, this assortment of essays and short stories on the theme of war is still Vonnegut, and even the least of his works contain amazing stuff.

War was always a preoccupation for Vonnegut, its horrors and pointlessness and capacity to make otherwise rational people behave in nonsensical ways, and these elements are doled out in full and equal measure in this collection. Of particular interest to Vonnegut, and a running theme throughout most of his work, is the issue of capitulation—to what degree do we allow ourselves to be parties to war by doing nothing? In one story Vonnegut envisions a future without conflict, a condition so anathemic to the human condition that time-travel technology is used in order to seek it out. In another, an old couple in a Czechoslovakia freed from Communist rule finds themselves equally persecuted by an American occupying force for not having risen up against the last regime. A family man in Norman England has to choose between a cushy berth as his feudal lord’s tax collector and the example he must set for his son, despite his nattering wife’s excitement over better living through the scraps from the Normans’ table.

The defining moment in Vonnegut’s life was witnessing the firebombing of Dresden, Germany as a POW, an experience he attempted to write out through his seminal novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1965), but which provides fodder for several of the stories here. Unlike many posthumous collections, this one doesn’t quite have the feel of the author’s heirs plundering the bottom of a discard trunk, though the absence of any dates assigned to these stories does make one wonder just how long Vonnegut, a shameless anthologizer of his own work, allowed these to gather dust and why. Still, the collection is worth reading for the stories, the inclusion of Vonnegut’s final piece of writing, an address he was about to give at Indiana University when he had the accident that took his life, and son Mark Vonnegut’s eloquent and apt tribute to his father’s life and work. Vonnegut’s best? No. But in a world made the worse for losing Kurt Vonnegut’s voice and spirit, we’ll take what we can get. After all, he was our friend.

Originally published 14 May 2008 at Flagpole.

—John G. Nettles