Friday, April 24, 2015

THE HEDONIST JIVE BOOK REVIEW

This site may be pretty much dead, but I've re-purposed the name for a new digital-only fanzine I've made called THE HEDONIST JIVE BOOK REVIEW.

It's a nearly 30-page fanzine devoted to books, authors and writing. The debut has an interview with the  amazing Jodi Angel, who’s written some of the most moving and transcendent short stories of this or any era. There’s a big piece on the Rick Perlstein trilogy on 1960s-1970s American upheaval and turbulence. I’ve even crafted “The Final Word in Defense of E-Readers”. And over 20 book reviews to round the thing out.

Read it below, and/or come to our new website to download the free PDF or read it online.
 

Monday, February 16, 2015

THANKS FOR READING THE 'JIVE, FOLKS

I probably left The Hedonist Jive on life support for at least a year too long, but after five years, I'm going to shutter this thing. In 2015 it's clear that the "generalist" blog is anachronistic to the point of mockery, and while I don't actually mind being a digital throwback, I do figure that since your attention's probably elsewhere (most Hedonist Jive posts get anywhere from 1-15 readers), there's not much point in me keeping this thing going any longer.

The Hedonist Jive was meant to be my dumping ground for all music, film and book reviews, as well as the occasional political rant or batch of weird collector postcards - and on that front, we did pretty well until roughly early 2014. Then it pretty much puttered out and was solely a place to post my Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio podcasts, which themselves are puttering out. Then we had some sort of weird flare-up with Google and their domain hosting system, and I "lost" www.hedonistjive.com to some domain squatter (good luck with that!), and had to change this one to www.hedonist-jive.com. All told, any readers who were still hanging out were scared away or bored to death.

Meanwhile, I'm focusing most of my energies at the experimental/sub-underground music blog FINAL SOUNDS and the sub-underground rocknroll music blog/podcast/fanzine DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE. Thanks for reading, and feel free to troll our back pages for nearly 500 posts over the past five years.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #54

No time for fancy introductions. Let's kick out the jams. DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #54 is now available for streaming and download - brought to you from a laptop in a bunker somewhere in San Francisco, California. Raw and sub-underground rocknroll from the last five decades. Songs of joy, songs of pain. Songs we wish you were listening to. There's still time.

Download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #54 here.
Stream or download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #54 on Soundcloud here.
Stream the show on Mixcloud here.
Subscribe to the show via iTunes here.

Track listing:

CREME SODA - (I'm) Chewin' Gum
ERASE ERRATA - History of Handclaps
LA DRUGS - Put Your Body on Me
8 EYED SPY - Innocence
THINKING FELLERS UNION LOCAL 282 - Catcher
LIME CRUSH - Honk Tonk
THE FROGS - I've Got Drugs (Out of the Mist)
MORTY SHANN & THE MORTICIANS - Red Headed Woman
THE REVILLOS - Motorbike Beat (demo)
EDDY DETROIT - Mephisto Cigars
MAGIK MARKERS - Taste
THE FIREWORKS - Took It All
SISSY - So What
SUICIDE COMMANDOS - Attacking The Beat
THE MIRRORS - Living Without You
STROKE BAND - Gun Fighting Man
DUST DEVILS - King Woody
FLIPPER - Love Canal
DELTA 5 - Make Up
THE PIN GROUP - The Power
JENNY HVAL & SUSANNA - I Have Walked This Body

Some past shows:
Dynamite Hemorrhage #53    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #52    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #51    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #50    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #49    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #48    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #47    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #46    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #45    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #44    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #43    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #42    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #41    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #40    (playlist)

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #53

After a painful 3-week absence from our studio and mixing desk, by which I mean aging laptop, we've returned with a new hour-long DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO (#53) for you and yours & for the people, too. Loaded with new bangers and ragers from around the rocknroll milieu. Some of the aforementioned: Constant Mongrel, Lime Crush, SROS Lords, Birds of Avalon, Coma in Algiers, Sissy, The Dance Asthmatics and Penny Machine. Whew.

What's more, we didn't stop there. We also added library material from The Meat Puppets (pictured here, back in 1980); The Silver; Coolies; Rotters; Flesh Eaters; Dacios and much, much more. Couldn't believe what an unmitigated delight it was to put it together for you. Sincerely hope it plays as well on your end.

Download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #53 here.
Stream or download it on Soundcloud here.
Stream the thing on Mixcloud here.
Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

Track listing:

CONSTANT MONGREL - The Law
SISSY - Sail and Rail
THE ROTTERS - Sink The Whales (Buy Japanese Goods)
THE MAD - Mask
THE SILVER - No More Grease
MEAT PUPPETS - Out in the Gardener
THE MOTARDS - The Fast Song
THE DACIOS - Monkey's Blood
SIC ALPS - Clarence
WHITE FENCE - Destroy Everthing
GROWTH - Blind Voice
LIME CRUSH - Baby
THE COOLIES - Dark Stormy Night
SROS LORDS - Jesse's Girl
FLESH EATERS - Pony Dress
PENNY MACHINE - Ruthies
DANCE ASTHMATICS - Liquid Lunch
COMA IN ALGIERS - Freeland
BIRDS OF AVALON - Disappeance

Some past shows:
Dynamite Hemorrhage #52    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #51    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #50    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #49    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #48    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #47    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #46    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #45    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #44    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #43    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #42    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #41    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #40    (playlist)

Thursday, January 8, 2015

"FORCE MAJUERE" - 2014, directed by Ruben Östlund

From the most simple of precepts comes a dark, and darkly funny, exploration of male emasculation in our modern, purportedly gender-equitable age. It goes like this: a catalog-perfect Swedish family of 4 – pretty mom, handsome dad, two young blonde children – go a luxe ski holiday at a posh resort somewhere unnamed within the French alps. Early in the film, while sitting on a balcony overlooking the slopes while they’re about to lunch, the family and everyone surrounding them witness a controlled, explosion-driven avalanche about to head toward them. Initially they marvel at it before realizing that it’s about to swamp them all, and with that, husband Tomas (painfully played in all his emasculatory glory by Johannes Kuhnke) grabs his iPhone and gloves in sheer terror, and sprints away – leaving his wife and two kids to fend for themselves. Seconds later, disaster averted, people begin returning to their tables, and among them is Tomas. He’s unaware that he’s just caused a fissure in his family that will take the rest of the film to play out.
Now, "FORCE MAJUERE" can be read in multiple ways. It’s an exploration of marital communication, sure, but more than that, it sets up a good post-film think about marital roles, particularly those related to gender. Is it the man that’s supposed to be heroic? Or the woman – who, it could be said, was the heroic one in their instant of panic? A comic foil is introduced in the form of Tomas’ friend Mats, who arrives with his 20-year-old girlfriend and who lends the film much of its emasculatory tone in his brief moments of trying to cope both with Tomas’ struggles with guilt, as well as with his own issues. Some great stereotype reversals take place here as well; it’s Tomas that hysterically cries in public about his marital problems, not his wife Ebba; it’sMats that needs to stay up and “sort through his issues” late at night with his girlfriend, while she begs him to please stop seeking instant therapy and go to sleep. There’s also some jarringly disturbing sound production in this one, in which electric toothbrushes and a remote-controlled flying spaceship take central roles in deepening the tension and drama. 
Östlund directs this and coaxes raw dialogue out of his characters in a very sparse, painful and Scandinavian way, and if it’s too tempting to say “Bergman-esque” - well, I apologize, because it very much is. Without giving away too much in the way of subsequent plot, I will say that the film could have satisfactorily ended in any number of places in its last 30 minutes, but instead flips the narrative in its final scenes a bit so that perhaps it’s less about the cowardice of males, per se, and more about the selfishness of humanity in general when confronted with fight-or-flight situations. Was very pleased to hash this one out in my head afterward and it’s absolutely set to be one of the top films this year.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

"WE ARE THE BEST! (Vi är bäst!)" - 2013, directed by Lukas Moodysson

By turns a feel-good punk rock comedy and a would-be empowering vehicle for teenage girls everywhere, "WE ARE THE BEST!" didn’t really do much to make me laugh or drive me to start the feminist revolution – but it’s harmless and moderately entertaining fun nonetheless. Set in early 1980s Stockholm – and entirely filmed during the frozen winter, giving that gorgeous city an undeserved bleak and depressing feel – it centers on two bored 13-year-old outcasts and punk fans, Klara and Bobo. Klara’s the domineering, pretty, somewhat reckless one (I recognize many punk rock women from my teens and 20s in her); Bobo’s the more introspective, sullen, cautious and altogether Swedish of the two.
They’re already full-on into their rebellious teenage years, and their wacky homemade haircuts and jarring music are contrasted with the staid ordinariness of their peers and families. They’re sweet girls, to be fair, and they recognize a third misfit outcast – a talented classically-trained musician named Hedvig who just happens to be a full-on Christian – as a potential member of their made-up band.
How do they get into a band? They’re simply called “ugly” by a group of cheeseball heavy metal dorks called Iron Fist, and on the spot, they form a dissonant punk band despite not possessing even having a shred of musical knowledge. No worries, Hedvig does, and once we get through a few comic scenes of Klara and Bobo awkwardly trying to integrate her and her long, pretty hair and Christian values into their worldview, they’re off and running with rad songs like the anti-sports “Hate the Sport” (“Hate the sport / Hate the sport / Hate hate hate hate the sport.”) . Hedvig becomes the unifier of three different teenage rebel streaks, and is a nice token to show how punk rock was such a great leveler in so many ways.
Speaking of great songs, they encounter a punk band made up of two guys who perform a song called “Brezhnev Reagan” for them - (“Brezhnev and Reagan – fuck off! Brezhnev and Reagan – fuck off!). Lukas Moodysson knows just enough about this era to finely thread the line between silly comedy and truthful depictions of early punk. The three girls have a series of John Hughes-esque moments in their struggles to find themselves and establish their band, and it’s fairly predictable how things will go from there.
While the movie’s received a great deal of praise simply be being fun and joyful – and believe me, it’s eminently watchable and even a delight in parts – I’d perhaps hoped for something a little more cutting. It might have a tad more depth than "Rock and Roll High School" or "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains", but it’s much closer in spirit and approach to ‘sploitation films than it is urgent indie drama. Whether that’s enough to get you on the Celluloid Couch to watch it is entirely up to you.

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

"TRAP STREET"- 2013, directed by Vivian Qu

A harrowing film of surveillance and state repression that somehow was made within China about China, and is now languishing without any real distribution outside of it. I saw "TRAP STREET" at the 2014 San Francisco International film fest and won’t soon forget it. It’s a love story gone terribly awry, in which the protagonist Li Qiuming works with his fussy road crew partner doing map-making surveying all over the major Chinese city of Nanjing. On the side, Quiming helps to install hidden cameras in various places like bars and health spas – setting up one of the film’s most delicious (while obvious) ironies. He spots an attractive businesswoman, Guan Lifen, through the lens of his surveying equipment, and ratchets up his obsession with her in a hurry – following her to her workplace, staking her out when she leaves and ultimately tracking her down and wooing her to begin a tentative, if quite genuine-seeming romance.
Her place of employment within a plain-looking building is impossible to get into, though Qiuming tries, up to and including throwing rocks at the windows. Strangely enough,  the small street she works on doesn’t show up on the map crew’s GPS-assisted data. Early on we learn it’s a “trap street”, meaning it’s deliberately left off of maps for reasons best known to the Chinese authorities. “Trap streets” have a less nefarious reason for existing as well; they’re sometimes false streets that are deliberately entered onto maps by surveying companies and their publishers in order to “trap” any rival publishers who might try and sell copies of maps featuring it, while passing it off as their own surveying work. The film, obviously, inverts this meaning and makes it something far more sinister.
Just as we’re getting to really enjoy the cutesy amusement-park-and-zoo courtship of Quiming and Lifen, he’s suddenly abducted, beaten and placed into confinement within an urban village. Turns out his visits to the trap street to look for Lifen weren’t exactly welcomed by her mysterious place of employment, and it then stands to reason that her delayed gratification at his courtship of her isn’t particularly real, either. Did he do anything to merit his treatment? Not in the least – he’s an exceptionally sympathetic, if naïve, character – but the film turns ominous and foreboding, as the sense of injustice and the all-seeing eye of the state hangs heavy over the film. It ends ambiguously, as well – which makes it all the more delightfully creepy. At our showing, the filmmaker Vivian Qu did a Q&A afterward, and was asked about getting approval for the film to play in her native country. While she tried to put her best face on it, it was clear she wasn’t holding her breath. An excellent gander at the modern Chinese ecosystem of money-making capitalism, 21st-century technology and 20th-century state dominance over personal and private affairs.

Friday, January 2, 2015

BOOK REVIEW: "THERE ONCE LIVED A MOTHER WHO LOVED HER CHILDREN, UNTIL THEY MOVED BACK IN" by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Sub-heading: "Three novellas about family", and that's precisely what we get from Russia's foremost modern chronicler of the burdensome human condition. These are stories that were suppressed by Soviet and post-Soviet authorities in their time, presumably for being too "real", as they contain zero explicit anti-government samizdat. I loved the other Petrushevskaya collection I read last year, "There Once Lived A Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, And He Hanged Himself", and this one's nearly in that league, albeit in overall abbreviated form, making for an exceptionally quick read. It's really just one long short story called "The Time Is Night", along with two short stories - each a haunting overview of a middle-aged Russian woman in a degraded and pitiful state. I certainly mean pitiful as in "have pity", which you will need to find plenty of in exploring the harrowing inner lives of women struggling with familial, state and communal oppression. Yet Petrushevskaya's also a wonderful black humorist, and she limns her litanies of domestic horrors with absurdities that, if they don't make one laugh out loud, at least lessen the crushing existential burden somewhat.

"The Time Is Night" is truly the centerpiece of this one, and is by far the best of the three stories. A 50-year-old would-be poet, Anna, recounts in "writings that were left behind" how she tried to keep life from unraveling while trying to care for her grandchild, whom her daughter Alena had abandoned at her doorstep while being herself abandoned by two husbands. Her son also comes and goes into her life after getting out of prison, all the while pursued by thugs who are looking to administer some serious post-lockup beatdowns for god knows what. Anna moves from soaring, poetic calls to her higher nature to the day-to-day mundane and drab realities of Russian life, with a dying mother, a bare refrigerator and not a whole lot of money. She's an invisible woman - a common complaint of the middle-aged in any society - but even more acute in a society teeming with alcoholic, misogynist men and chronically unemployed children who hate you. 

Petrushevskaya gets her digs into societal absurdities where she can, such as when Anna picks up some journalistic work for an acquaintance: "I urgently covered her back when she needed a piece on the bicentennial of the Minsk Tractor Plant" (a plant, which, suffice to say, had not been in existence for 200 years). Anna, who barely has anything to cling to in life, suffers a series of emotional indignities that culminate with the removal of even the last bits of joy in her fragile life. There's a lot of societal guilt-by-association implied by these tales. It's clear that Petrushevskaya was chafing in a big way, and still is, even after the glorious transition from Communism to Putinism.

The other two stories are good, but are slightly lesser works. The best of the two is "Among Friends", which details the incestuous inner workings of an adopted "family" of sorts, a collection of codependent adults who get together once a week to drink and talk. These apartment gatherings were as close to "civil society" as individuals within the Soviet Union ever came, but when our narrator finds circumstances spinning out of control and that threaten to ruin the life of her son, she engages in an absurd bit of violent self-sacrifice that, through this catalog of emotional horrors, Petrushevskaya almost makes sound banal, normal and wise. I'll never be a lonely and overburdened middle-aged Russian woman, but I think I've got a pretty decent sense of what it might be like to be one via this author's unsettling and highly textured writing.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #52

What did you do on the first day of 2015? Me, I made you Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #52 and had a real "gas" doing so. This one's larded up with new material from Penny Machine (pictured), Lime Crush, White Fence, SROS Lords, Parkay Quarts, The Dacios, The Coneheads and, that's right, Buck Biloxi and The Fucks. Sub-underground? Oh my yes.

In between all that there are many sound eruptions from the likes of Tyvek, Mike Rep & The Quotas, Supercharger, Animals and Men, The Klitz, Gas, The Clean, Loli and The Chones and many more. The whole thing clocks in at a compact 1:03, so put aside an hour if you can and see what sort of racket we cooked up for you.

Download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #52 here.
Stream or download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #52 on Soundcloud.
Subscribe to the show on iTunes here.

Playlist:

LIME CRUSH - Graveyard
SROS LORDS - Cleaner Love
PENNY MACHINE - Not Wrong
ANIMALS AND MEN - Headphones
TYVEK - Frustration Rock
SUPERCHARGER - Don't Mess Me Up
DOW JONES & THE INDUSTRIALS - Ladies With Appliances
THE DACIOS - Liberty Lovers
WHITE FENCE - Arrow Man
GAS - League of the Golden Maidens
MIKE REP & THE QUOTAS - Heroes and Idols
THE CLEAN - Odditty
THE CONEHEADS - Nasal Load
X - Hate City
LOLI AND THE CHONES - Summer of Love
BUCK BILOXI AND THE FUCKS - Rock and Roll Sucks
ED GEIN'S CAR - Go Down On My Dog
THE 1-4-5's - Volvo Hatchback
SHOCK - This Generation's On Vacation
THE KLITZ - Couldn't Be Bothered
THE BANGS - Getting Out of Hand
THE DONSHIRES - Sad and Blue
PARKAY QUARTS - Content Nausea

Some past shows:
Dynamite Hemorrhage #51    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #50    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #49    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #48    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #47    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #46    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #45    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #44    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #43    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #42    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #41    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #40    (playlist)

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

BOOK REVIEW: "IS IT MY BODY? SELECTED TEXTS" by Kim Gordon

It's hard to find much fault with Saint Kim, a renaissance woman who's been a constant in my underground music and culture-obsessed life for over thirty years during her time with Sonic Youth, multiple side bands and a wide variety of fashion, art, filmmaking and other endeavors. Everyone loves Kim, right? But hey, can she sling together a group of sentences in an edifying and entertaining manner? I wasn't actually sure, so I bought this German-pressed collection of some of her writings from the 1980s up to just a year or two ago in hopes of finding out. She's got an autobiography due out soon as well, so I reckoned I'd get a jump on that by poring through the tour diaries, art theorizing, semiotics and cultural criticisms that are speckled throughout this small volume.

Let it be said that while Ms. Gordon loses no overall cultural luster from this collection of her writings, I wouldn't recommend that you actually spend any more than a few minutes browsing it in a bookstore. Actually reading it? It's not easy, let me tell ya. See, Kim Gordon comes from the art world. She often, but not always, writes like people from the art world - insular, impenetrable, overblown and for fellow travelers only. She doesn't come off as pompous, not really; she merely confirms what a blowhard world that of high art and even mid-brow art is. So you might see it as guilt by association; I instead choose to see her mimicry of the art/academic written aesthetic something that just comes with the territory when you're jawboning to a closed circle. Heaven forbid that someone try and penetrate the purple prose of the elite. Why even bother talking down to those who'd deign to try?

That said, I liked her piece on Raymond Pettibon, as well as a 1985 Artforum piece in which she works over Southern California hardcore punk like a real pro. There's a late 80s Sonic Youth tour diary as well, and then a series of pieces and interviews that over-intellectualizes that which should be relatively straightforward: Glenn Branca, Harry Crews and Mike Kelley, for instance. I assure you, I'm no philistine, but I'm easily fed up with the needlessly pompous and/or "transgressive", and this book gets me no closer to resolving my antipathy to that world. Here's hoping her next book's more in keeping with the as-yet-untoppled mental alter I've built for her.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #51

My 51st show and my fact-checking is still riddled with errors, my show's full of modulation mix-ups and my on-mic "persona" is about as pleasing to the ear as a friggin' sack of cats. At least the music totally smokes. Notwithstanding my error on Brian Eno's first album - it's called "Here Come The Warm Jets", no der! - and the fact that some songs are mixed too low and some voices too high (that's why Thomas Edison invented the volume knob for you), I'm excited to share with you some of the finest in raw, sub-underground rock and roll music from the past five decades.

There's new archival stuff from The Klitz (turn it up) and The Bangs nee The Bangles; there's new 2014 songs from Pampers, White Fence, Men Oh Pause, Coneheads, Germ House and Parkay Quarts; and a bunch of library stuff from many corners of our world: The Birthday Party, Bill Direen & The Bilders, Razar, The Coolies, Long Blondes, Modern Lovers and so on and so forth. Take a look at the playlist and I think you'll wanna give it a go.

Download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #51.
Stream or download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #51 on Soundcloud here.
Subscribe to the show via iTunes.

Playlist:

THE KLITZ - Hard Up
BILL DIREEN & THE BILDERS - Alien
THE COOLIES - Salute
CHAPTER 24 - You Said
2x4s - Another Day
LONG BLONDES - Separated By Motorways
PARKAY QUARTS - Psycho Structures
WHITE FENCE - Anger! Who Keeps You Under
GERM HOUSE - A Matter of Call
THE BANGS - Outside Chance
THE PRETTY THINGS - Midnight To Six Man
MODERN LOVERS - Old World 
MEN OH PAUSE - Sapphire and Steel
THE FALL - Middle Mass
BRIAN ENO - Blank Frank
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY - Jennifer's Veil
THE POP GROUP - 3:38
THE EXPRESSIONS - Return To Innocence
THE CONEHEADS - 1982
RED CROSS - Tatum O'Tot and the Fried Vegetables
RAZAR - Task Force (Undercover Cops)
PAMPERS - Suicide

Some past shows:
Dynamite Hemorrhage #50    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #49    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #48    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #47    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #46    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #45    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #44    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #43    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #42    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #41    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #40    (playlist)

Monday, December 8, 2014

BOOK REVIEW: "LORD OF GARBAGE" by Kim Fowley

Producer, svengali and Los Angeles rocknroll gadfly Kim Fowley is such a deranged and purportedly "colorful" cult figure that I heeded the promotional buzz around his autobiography and succumbed to purchase. Fowley, did in fact, steal the show in the 2003 Rodney Bigenheimer documentary "The Mayor of the Sunset Strip" through "look at ME" force of personality, and his own solo albums and general unhinged persona long made me think he'd probably be a ripe target for documentation, even if most of his own music and productions don't do a blamed thing for me. He's on his deathbed at this writing now, poor fella, dealing with bladder cancer and slipping in and out of terminal diagnoses. The plan is that this book, "LORD OF GARBAGE", is only the first of three autobiographical volumes, if he can just stave off the reaper and finish them all in time. I wish him luck, but I won't be reading the next two.

"LORD OF GARBAGE"
fouls up a sure thing right off the bat, and I really should have seen it coming. Turns out Fowley's blustering, posturing, overblown personality is exactly what gets thrown down on the page as well. Rather than a collection of war stories, one has to not only get knee-deep in excruciatingly poor sentence construction but in out-and-out fabrications as well. These render everything in the book highly suspect. Fowley's creative imagination knows few limits. He claims to remember his birth; he attributes sober, wildly precocious decision-making and verbal skills to himself during his diaper years; and puts a surreal conversational gloss on his entire tragic childhood that's so patently and obviously untrue that I had a difficult time keeping myself from getting angry. I imagine that the cracked, blowhard persona that makes me laugh when I see it on film would probably make me want to flee the room if I ever found myself in actual mano-a-mano with the guy – such is the hostility that his phony and unfunny story engendered in me.

The ham-handed goofball poetry that intersperses each story on every third or fourth page doesn't do him any favors, either. Funny that Kicks Books, his publisher, didn't deign to mention that part in their glory-filled promotional blurbs on the book. I haven't been so let down by an anticipated book since the release of the DSM-IV.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO #50

The purported theme of our podcast, magazine and blog is "raw and sub-underground rocknroll from the last five decades". This new edition of DYNAMITE HEMORRHAGE RADIO, #50, goes heavy on the first and most recent of those decades. Two blazing new tracks from the just-released 60s punk comp "Back From The Grave, Volume 9" make their 21st century online debuts here - and if that's not reason enough to download or stream this thing, there's new material from the likes of Parkay Quarts, The Coneheads, Le Skeleton, Germ House, Leggy, Honey Radar, Rakta, Sauna Youth, Bent, The Blind Shake and Pampers. Pampers!

There's a blown-out bootleg recording from the Velvet Underground, a little punk rock tomfoolery and all sorts of needless verbal blather from the host. In all, it's 74 minutes you won't ever get back - unless you play it a second time.

Download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #50 here.
Stream or download Dynamite Hemorrhage Radio #50 over on Soundcloud.
Subscribe to the show via iTunes.

Playlist:

THE FOUR – 69
PARKAY QUARTS – Pretty Machines
HONEY RADAR – Drink Your Magazine (live)
REALLY RED – No More Art
SACCHARINE TRUST –Mad at the Company
CONEHEADS – Violence
SHITKICKERS – Debaucher
BENT – Space is Bent
RAKTA – Tudo que e Solido
LUCRATE MILK – Dritte Blinde Meusse
LE SKELETON – Cut Your Finger
SILVER APPLES – Ruby
MUSIC MACHINE – Point of No Return
THE BLIND SHAKE – Old Lake
PAMPERS – Right Tonight
LAZY COWGIRLS – Meat Shop
NEVERMORES – The Way It Is
SAUNA YOUTH – Transmitters
LEGGY – Sweet Teeth
CHRIS KNOX – Meat
GERM HOUSE – Best Laid Plans
VELVET UNDERGROUND – What Goes On (live; from “The Legendary Guitar Amp Tape” bootleg)
KNOLL ALLEN AND THE NOBLE SAVAGES – Animal


Some past shows:
Dynamite Hemorrhage #49    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #48    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #47    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #46    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #45    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #44    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #43    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #42    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #41    (playlist)
Dynamite Hemorrhage #40    (playlist)

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

BOOK REVIEW: "MY STRUGGLE, BOOK TWO" by Karl Ove Knausgaard

When I last left off with the roundly and deservedly celebrated Mr. Knausgaard as he documented his existential struggles with himself, his life and with the world around him, I was picking my jaw up off the floor. I was also attempting to grapple with why the 600-page memoir/autobiography/exegesis I'd just finished – the first of six such 600-page books in a series – was so phenomenally thrilling to read. You can read my review of that one here. Not much time was squandered before I leapt into Book Two. While I'll admit to a nearly imperceptible (and somewhat unexplainable) drop-off in my engagement with this one (I went from rabid and frothing page addiction to merely rabid page addiction), I'll also recommend "My Struggle, Book Two" unequivocally and with much gusto. Knausgaard is actually redefining literary form and function in the course of the "My Stuggle" ("Min Kamp" in his native Norwegian) series, and while I really haven't read everything yet, I've certainly never read anything like this before.

If the first book was his plunge into a life defined, in no small measure, by his overbearing father, and that father's death, "My Struggle, Book Two" attempts to pick apart in detail things that are much closer to the here and now. Chief among these are what it's like to be a father of three in an egalitarian, liberal Scandinavian country (Sweden) in which the individual ego is sublimated and the collective good is celebrated in ways both good and ugly. Knausgaard is not one for having his individuality sublimated, let me tell ya. He's very honest - painfully honest at times - about how important his personal "freedom" is, and he defines that freedom as his love of being alone and able to do nothing but write, or read, or shop for and hoard many dozens of books. This sense of self, as you might imagine, rubs up against his reality as a parent, partner and professional author quite often. While he's got some very close and highly intelligent friends with whom he treasures his time, such as fellow Norwegian-in-Stockholm Geir, Knausgaard finds the mechanisms of daily family life both dreary and depressing while they also fill him with deep, emotional love – especially for his vulnerable children. He grapples with guilt, pride and shame throughout the book.

His relationship with his second wife, Linda – the mother of Vanya, Heidi and John, their children – is as complex, emotionally difficult and emotionally rewarding as any marriage can be. Theirs in particular seems to have been forged with a mutual understanding of each other's deficiencies. Knaussgard relates a horrible tale of cutting up his face at a writer's retreat when he was a young man because he thought he'd been rejected by Linda, whom he'd fallen head over heels for. Linda, before they reconnected years later and started dating, tried to kill herself. These are people who feel, and it seems as though there's a reinforcement mechanism in place that ensures that neither of them disappears too far down the mental rabbit hole. Having children – which was clearly Linda's raison d'être and Karl Ove's ambivalent concession – has helped to cement their bond while also preventing them from deepening it due to the daily grind of child-rearing.

There's an especially funny scene in which Knausgaard takes his toddler daughter to an emasculating "baby sing-along" class. He's profoundly shameful at his stereotypical "stay-at-home dad" status, and mentally lashes out at the other dumpy dads who arrive at the class, makes fun of their clothes and (lack of) hair,  lusts after the beautiful 20-something Swede who leads the class, then tries to rationalize and explain his many feelings to himself and the reader. Knausgaard is either working this stuff out in real time on the page, or writes so well that it only seems like he is.

Some readers may find some of his esoteric intellectual diversions – which interrupt the narrative frequently yet always elegantly – jarring and impenetrable. Certainly I haven't heard of any of the Scandinavian writers whom he dissects from time to time, but this is his world, not mine. Knausgaard will jump off into several pages of exploration of Dante or Dostoyevsky before returning to diapers; he'll also meditate for pages on nature and its awesomeness. Norway and Sweden, where I've spent considerable time, will do that to a person. He also has much to say about family, a big theme in Book One. In this edition he discovers that his (much loved and admired) mother-in-law is furtively drinking alcohol while taking care of their young daughter, and has to confront her on it; he also struggles with managing his wife's relationship with his own mother as well as where an introverted, admittedly self-centered man such as himself places family obligations in relation to personal desires.

Lots to chew on, as before. Knausgaard has done something remarkable in drawing so many readers into his insular, multi-book world, and of course it'll only be a matter of weeks before I start in on "My Struggle, Book Three". There are three more to follow that one, not translated into English yet. Heldigvis, jeg snakker litt norsk.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

WE HAVE A NEW MAGAZINE AVAILABLE

The Hedonist Jive used to be my "main" blog. All the quote-unquote good stuff was published here. The problem with a generalist blog is there really aren't a lot of generalists out there any longer who'll read it. We culture hounds love our micro-focused niches; I know this because I organize everything digitally according to topic: I've got my music stuff, my film stuff, my literary stuff, my sports stuff and so on.

So if you're here, you've probably noticed that The Hedonist Jive's mainly been a dumping ground my music podcast, Dynamite Hemorrhage radio. Sorry about that. Can't believe you've hung on this long and kept this thing in your RSS feed. Well, the whole Dynamite Hemorrhage project's been my main focus the past couple years. It's just culminated - for now, in an 84-page print music fanzine called Dynamite Hemorrhage #2. You can order it here.

Now that I'm done with the magazine, I reckon the 'Jive might heat up a little bit more, beyond the dumped podcasts. Book reviews are crackling and seething within me, for starters. Maybe some other stuff too. Stick around, and it might get somewhat interesting around here again.

In the meantime, here's what's in our new magazine:

  • An interview and career-spanning retrospective with BILL DIREEN, the New Zealand-based musical iconoclast and creator of some of the most weird and wonderful underground pop music of the last 35 years. Great old photos of Vacuum, Six Impossible Things and more - with Direen’s take on his many recordings, bands and general outlook on creation & creativity. 
  • Tim Warren from Crypt Records, on the eve of two new volumes of the mind-destroying "BACK FROM THE GRAVE" 60s punk compilations, takes us through in profanity-strewn detail how he’s been putting these comps together since 1983, and the pain the man has endured to make sure you and I get to hear some of the most raw and rare rocknroll chaos of all time…! 
  • Interview with bedroom lo-fi pop savants HONEY RADAR, currently making many short, abrasive and lovely mini-masterpieces out of Philadelphia 
  • Interview with NOTS, raw and slashing earworm punk band from Memphis 
  • KING TEARS MORTUARY, Sydney, Australia’s answer to the question "What would a mix of C86, KBD punk and The Gories sound like?" 
  • Erika Elizabeth's overview of lost and neglected female-fronted punk and post-punk bands and records you've never heard of 
  • The Layman’s Guide to 1970s Jamaican DUB - an overview of wild, weird and wacked dub reggae created during its peak era, along with ten essential dub recordings, explored 
  • Interviews with Jon Savage and Stuart Baker on the new PUNK 45 series of archival 70s punk reissues 
  • 87 record reviews  
  • 15 book reviews  
  • Advertisements from today’s top hitmaking labels
 Order yours here!