Given this, I spent most of time in the book looking for the places where the wool was being drawn over my eyes. When Irving mentioned that the records of a gallery which allegedly purchased some of de Hory’s fakes are no longer extant, it rang the same alarm bells in my head as the clumsy conman trying to derail suspicion by airing first. When a car rolled down a hill and burst into flame, I was tempted to cry aloud, “Aha! Fiction!”

Unfortunately, the meta-textual aspects of the book were perhaps its most consistently compelling. Elmyr de Hory’s story might’ve made a great long article for The New Yorker or Harper’s, but there’s not quite enough there there to sustain a whole book. The catalogue of de Hory arriving in some city, peddling his wares, wearing his welcome out, and moving on is too repetitive, and Irving’s approach — working hard to convince us that this is fact, not fiction — is too flat, too reportorial.

Irving only flirts with concepts that could have given his book weight beyond de Hory’s personal tragedy. He never suggests complicity on the part of any of the gallery owners who bought de Hory’s forgeries — he only provides circumstantial evidence, alleged queries as to whether the “small, private collection” which de Hory is allegedly liquidating might “happen to have” a work matching the interest of a specific potential buyer. And Irving observes but doesn’t analyze (or even judge) the strange climate that briefly allows de Hory to prosper: new money trying to legitimize itself by purchasing works of art it knows nothing about.

Irving doesn’t even go so far as to shoehorn de Hory into one of the classic plot arcs: de Hory rises, but not very far, and falls, but not very far. Irving brings the curtain down on his book before (but not much before) de Hory brings his own curtain down, after several previous botched attempts. Perhaps Irving even has some slight complicity in that, as the notoriety accompanying Irving’s book must have destroyed the only livelihood de Hory had ever known.

I learned about de Hory and Irving watching Orson Welles’ odd, fascinating/infuriating pseudo-documentary F for Fake, and I wonder if Welles’ interest might have been sparkled by this phrase in the book:

One must imagine swift cuts between shots, rapid pans of the camera and certain herky-jerky quality in the movements of the two heroes

Ironically, if sadly predictably, there is now enough interest in de Hory’s forgeries that they themselves are forged.

needs more demons? a bit.

Joe Pernice, if you don’t know the name, has one of the most honeyed voices in all of indie rock and a heaping helping of songwriting skill, displayed for the past several years/records in his band Pernice Brothers. Joyce Linehan is Pernice’s partner in Ashmont Records. This book is literally culled from Joyce Linehan’s twitter stream, mostly focusing on communication to and from Joe, about the business of being in a touring/recording band (although Massachusetts residents might note a few poignant moments not directly related to Ashmont Records).

I read Pernice to Me compulsively in a single sitting — not hard to do, it’s short — and while it certainly entertained me, it left me a little sad.

Pernice to Me has a mean side in more than one sense of the word. I couldn’t help but be reminded of seeing excerpts of Johan Sebastian Bach’s correspondence with the great composer whinging about shillings and farthings. And if you’d have a mental image of Pernice as a “gentle, fragile sad sack”, that you want to keep intact, you should avoid Pernice to Me, because that’s the perception that Linehan explicitly sets out to destroy. She presents Pernice as epically grumpy, a quintessentially high-maintenance and self-involved artist.

But the format of Pernice to Me dramatically reinforces its artificiality. It may be generally acknowledged that reality show editors can paint any cast member as either the villain or the long-suffering hero, but when the stuff from which a work is assembled is exclusively 140-character-or-less soundbites, it really hammers home how very much the selection of exactly which tweets to include or exclude affects the shape of the work as a whole. I was also keenly aware how much I was lacking anything that might put the tweets in context: how long Pernice had been on the road, how much sleep Linehan had, what tone of voice the words were spoken in (many of the tweets are transcribed telephone exchanges).

It also implicitly makes the point that the music industry wasn’t wrong back in the days of Napster: the sky really is falling. Something is wrong with the picture if an artist with all of Pernice’s gifts finds it difficult to eke out a living. And if releasing one of the first books based on a Twitter stream helps Ashmont get some media attention and helps Pernice sell a few more records, more power to them.

needs more demons? not exactly.

• half-page half-tone snapshots
• a purported multi-page e-mail* thread between Handler and her siblings
• a purported multi-page letter of complaint from a tenant of her father’s rental property
• whining (in multiple chapters) about the need to write another “stupid book.”

Otherwise it was sometimes amusing and often offensive. And of course it’s been solidly lodged in the bestseller lists since its release.

* I live in Boston.

needs more demons? here’s what’s needed: if I show signs of reading another one of these, I need somebody to stage an intervention.

I liked My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands much better than the other one, partly because it’s raunchier, but mostly there’s something approaching character development. I also thought it was funnier.

needs more demons? I do find it kind of amusing to imagine a smallish demon horde materializing at one of Chelsea’s parties and giving her more significant challenges to overcome than a shortage of Ketel One vodka*. And you know what? I think she might think it was funny, too. That is, if it happened to somebody else.

Hopefully she got some free cases for all the product placement.

Klausner also seems to feel compelled to imbue I Don’t Care About Your Band with some sort of social relevance. Sometimes I think she hits on a genuine insight, but scattered throughout are cringe-inducing bits of armchair sociology derived from from observing a small population with an intrinsic selection bias. Few things get my dander up like sweeping generalizations about gender and sex role behavior, e.g., the “only women can be bisexual, men can only be in the process of turning gay” trope, which gets aired here.

* some versions of this pull-quote substitute Cat Power, which would have made me somewhat less likely to read the book.

needs more demons? just a few

And he delivers at least a few that stick for me. I learned things about the amygdala and the fear response that will be helpful when I’m allowed to ride a bike again; since I don’t remember the accident itself, I can expect not to be particularly afraid. And now I understand why for the past several years I’ve reacted so strongly to the sight of a car door opening ahead of me, even ones I can easily avoid and that pose no signficant threat.

I was also especially fascinated by Johnson’s chapter on laughter and tickling. After discussing compelling research that illustrates that laughter has very little to do with humor — maybe this is one of the hallmarks of the long-decay idea; it sounds counter-intuitive at first blush, but makes increasing sense as you think about it — Johnson stops just short of suggesting that laughter may have been a precursor to language. He argues that it’s a form of communication, and I’m inclined to think that what it communicates is largely “I’m going to interact with you in a non-threatening way.” (Even though we sometimes use it now to communicate the reverse.)

I didn’t find Johnson’s insight all equally affecting (and I’d bumped into some of them before, blunting their impact a bit) but they were all certainly interesting. As with The Ghost Map I found Johnson an exceptionally lucid writer.

But my naval-gazing response to his fear response chapter was no accident. Throughout Mind Wide Open, Johnson draws parallels between his personal anecdotal experience and the research he is writing about. The Ghost Map was so good that it earned Johnson a lot of leeway with me, and I’m glad I started with it instead, because otherwise I think I might have found passages like this irksome:

As I write these words, my attention is divided roughly between tw primary actions: thinking about the words as they are geneated in my head and materialize on the computer screen, and half listening to familiar songs playing in the background…I also have a vague background sense of mood — a bright midmorning working alertness, slightly caffeine enhanced.

Fortunately, that’s about the peak of the book’s self-involvement, but I can really recommend it strongly only to those who don’t mind a good bit of Steven Johnson the writer/husband/father mixed in with their brain science.

Perhaps predictably, I also became interested in the things Johnson might be saying without intending to say. He lives in New York and the book was written (judging from the interview dates) during 2001-2003 — and even so it was startling to me just how much of a shadow the events of 11 September 2001 cast over this book. (Speaking, for what it’s worth, as a resident at the time of the other city in which an airplane was flown into a building.)

needs more demons? perhaps just a touch fewer personal demons, actually

In her acknowledgments Crystal Zevon writes,

Over the three years [of writing the book] I … fell in and out of love hundreds of times. There were weeks when I was sure I’d hate him forever; nights when I’d cry myself to sleep missing the sound of his voice; and many moments when I wondered how I could expose what he’d asked me to expose … I’d made a promise to tell the whole truth — “even the awful, ugly parts.”

I suspect that many readers will have an experience similar in character, if less intense and personal. I’m glad I read Miles Davis’ autobiography Miles first; that was a formative experience for me in resolving conflict between enormous respect for a musical talent, and repugnance at the man behind that talent sometimes being a real shit. There were many points in Zevon’s story before he got sober where it was hard to have any sympathy for him at all. Even the sober Warren Zevon was hell on anyone he was romantically with, and often hard to deal with for most who knew him. It seems unlikely, for instance, that the world would have had any of his “comeback” records from the mid-80’s on, if not for the perseverance of Andy Slater:

..when [the record company executives] got to Warren, somebody said…”We’re going to terminate him.”
I stood up and said, “Terminate him? He’s the best artist we have.”
There’s all this harrumphing and one of the principles said, Slater, he’s 180,000 dollars in debt [to the I.R.S.], he doesn’t live her anymore, he has no record deal, and he doesn’t want to work.” I said, “Yeah, but he’s a great artist. And he’s the best writer here.” This guy says, “Then you manage him.”

After weeks of coaxing, Slater gets Zevon started on the road that led to his album Sentimental Hygeine, and his first substantive experiences with sobriety. Throughout their association, Zevon continues to use Slater hard:

I got a call from Warren. He said, “I’m in big trouble, Andy. You’ve got to help me. This girl is pregnant. I’m not in love with her, and I don’t want to be with her, and she’s going to have the kid. You’ve got to come here and explain my life to her.” I said, “Okay.”

but ultimately, even Slater gets fed up:

When I went to rehab, Warren was finally in good financial shape, sober, had a healthy touring base, and was about to release a new record. I called him from treatment… I said “What’s going on? How’s the record? blah blah blah.” He said, “Yeah, it’s going fine. I’ve got to talk to you about something.” He says, “Look, Andy, I just got off the phone with Irving [Azoff]. He said that if I fire you … he’ll really work my record and I’ll get better promotion and marketing… I think I’m going to do it.”
I hung the phone up, and thank God I was in treatment…It was devastating to me because here was somebody I had been friends with for almost ten years. I had … made it my mission to get him back in the record business when he was drunk and living in Philadelphia. I had taken him to rehab three times…Then, when I had a problem, he wasn’t there.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is subtitled “The Dirty Live and Times of Warren Zevon.” Like all of the chapter titles, it’s a phrase drawn from one of Zevon’s song titles. Crystal Zevon admits to drawing a veil over the most baldly pornographic of Zevon’s reminisces, but there are racy bits a-plenty:

I invited Jeanette over and we made love, wonderful. Feel great. Went to the tanning place. Sure enough, there was Susan & before I knew it we were fucking on the carpet, then on the tanning bed.

But in addition to the typical trashy rock star excesses of sex, booze, and tax woes, and the less typical excesses of Calvin Klein gray shirts, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead offers more than the usual share of insight into Zevon’s artistic process. And that’s ultimately what makes it a compelling and moving read.

Needs More Demons? Ye gods, no.

Matlock’s musical contributions to the band also fascinate me. I’m convinced that the strange alchemy between Matlock and Steve Jones is at least as important to the band’s enduring success as Lydon’s characteristic sonic sneers and McLaren’s image-mongering. Matlock wrote lovely pop songs and Jones stripped away the fiddly bits and reduced them to their elemental essence. (The fantastic EMI documentary Never Mind the Bollocks has many examples of this process in action).

Matlock (with help from co-author Pete Silverton) proves a breezy and entertaining narrator unburdened by false modesty. He’s got about as little patience for the myth that the Pistols couldn’t play as I do. He portrays McLaren as more of an opportunist than a master manipulator, and since he worked in McLaren’s shop even before it was renamed Sex, his is presumably a well-informed opinion. His account of the infamous Anarchy tour is markedly different than the others I’ve read; he was insulated from the press furor and mostly remembers being dead bored in hotel rooms.

A brief quote will give you a feel for the book’s flavor, and also show why Matlock didn’t ultimately fit well with the band:

…What they were interested in was prostitutes. It was all, let’s go and get Glen a tart. It may sound like I was a party-pooper but I wasn’t interested. One, I had my eye on a girl at the Paridiso [the club where the band was booked]. Two, I had a couple of songs to work on and one of the songs I wrote there turned out to be “Rich Kids” which sold 100,000 copies, thank you very much. So sod going off after a tart.

I read the original 1990 edition, but glenmatlock.com indicates that Matlock has revised the book with new material covering the recent reunion tours. Dang. I might have to read it again.

Needs More Demons? Not really.

But Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be is by no means only for aspiring record-deal-signers, or obsessive students of music culture. In fact, one of the awesome things about the book is how thoroughly outside-the-industry Trynin’s vantage point is. She found herself the object of an archetypical major label bidding war without having much prior knowledge of how such things work, and she doesn’t expect the reader to bring that knowledge either, nor does she get bogged down with business specifics. Although I think this memoir works well as a cautionary tale, it’s also a highly entertaining rags-to-riches-to-rags story, and Trynin brings the same sort of not-quite-what-you-expect sly wit and acuity to her prose that she once brought to her songs.

Needs More Demons? No. The only thing I want to change about this book is to tack on a feel-good happy ending where Trynin had a long, productive, if perhaps niche-y career as an independent artist. Unfortunately, although she played guitar with Loveless for a while, that hasn’t exactly come to pass so far.

While I don’t want to change the book, I do hope somebody assembles a glossary of all the names-changed-to-protect used in it, and I’m not steeped enough in Boston-ania to get very far. “Flint Raft” would seem to be Gravel Pit. “The Front Load” seems to be The Middle East. And…? Please feel free to help in comments.

Gray also attempts to force events into his personal view of punk, in which the Clash (for example) are a force of positivity, and Nirvana (very explicitly) is a negative force. That’s fine. Gray is in good company, as far as I’m concerned, with many who fundamentally misunderstand Cobain’s art, and I prefer to view the punk subculture through rosy glasses sometimes myself. But in his quest to whitewash punk, Gray suggests that Sid Vicious might have been the lone bad egg in the early punk scene, and single-handedly tainted the whole movement with violence. That strikes me as not only absurd, but also as exactly the sort of revisionism for which Gray is quick to take The Clash to task.

I was also a little frustrated that something like half of the book goes by before the Clash record their first album. There was rich detail about proto-Clash London SS and the 101ers, but like many punk documents, Last Gang in Town devotes much of its length to the first flowering of punk, at the expense of everything after those first few months, which have already been minutely analyzed elsewhere.

Even though I often disagreed with Gray in particulars (I’m afraid my friends may have found me tiresome on the subject in the weeks I spent with this book) I found him thought-provoking throughout, and often both informative and insightful. Somewhat to my surprise, when I found myself facing a copy of Gray’s similarly-sized It Crawled from the South: An R.E.M. Companion, the lizard brain shrill of “buy this, buy this!” quickly won out over my top brain’s sombre muttering of “this guys annoys us.”

Needs More Demons? Maybe. But The Clash had plenty of their own.