Categories
Music Nonfiction

ADDICTED TO NOISE by Michael Goldberg

Cover designed by Todd Alcott is based on original Ace Double art for JUNKIE

“When I was growing up, I never felt like a whole person. I always thought there was something mentally wrong with me. I ran away from home a lot as a kid, looking for something. But I didn’t know what it was. There was something missing inside of me, I felt. I didn’t feel I was 100 percent human….Of course, not having a father had a lot to do with it. Being raised by a mother who had to work two jobs all her life had a lot to do with it. Being Black and born in the ghetto and not thinking that you can get out. That’s what most of us go through. Most Black people born in the United States today have a psychological defect. We’re born into something that’s not what we perceive life to be.

“We’re born in fucking ghettos of poverty, drugs, pimps, gangsters, prostitutes, guns. That is what you call mental illness. So from jump street, Black people are mental patients in the hospital of fucking life. A lot of Blacks don’t understand this. So I’m here to tell them: Look at it like it’s a mental hospital. And like in any hospital, the first thing you have to do is get well. And to get well, we have to say we are somebody, we are relevant to life, we can get out of here, and we don’t have to pick up guns and kill people and pimp our sisters. We don’t have to gangbang. And we can get out.”

—Rick James

Yep, you read that right. That’s Rick James talking, from a new collection of interviews called ADDICTED TO NOISE by former ROLLING STONE Senior Writer Michael Goldberg. (I previously reviewed Goldberg’s biography of James Calvin Wilsey, WICKED GAME.) His forte is the extended profile, with a mixture of quotes from the artist, quotes from others, and commentary from Goldberg. The book also contains variations on the interview form such as barely edited Q&As and monologues, most of them less successful. The Q&As can be muddled and repetitious (the Patti Smith piece particularly needed a harsher edit), and some of the hostile interviews (e.g. with Zappa or Flipper or the Sex Pistols) are embarrassing to sit through, even vicariously.

But when he’s on, Goldberg can come up with a moving and insightful story that changes the way you see an artist. His Stevie Wonder profile is worth the price of the collection all by itself, if only for the moment when Wonder acknowledges his perpetual tardiness.

“People seldom have a real perspective on what it takes. They just go, ‘Damn, he took so long.’ They don’t realize all the many experiences you have to go through.

“People do not understand lots of times. Which is okay. I mean, I’m not saying people have to change their lives for me. But if I’m what they want to be involved with, if this situation means that, as opposed to being 3 o’clock, it’s gonna be 9 o’clock or 10 o’clock, and if during all of that time between when it was supposed to be and the time it’s gonna be, I am honestly dealing with something else, then that’s just what that is. I can’t say that a computer’s going to break down. Basically all you can do is the best you can do.”

Goldberg needs time and space to do his best work. When he has enough column inches and access to an artist for days at a time, he can come up with pieces like the one on Brian Wilson’s first solo album, where the walls come down and you really feel like you’re seeing into people’s hearts. He managed the same feat with Brian’s brother Dennis, even with the disadvantage of writing it after Dennis’s death.

Another highlight of the book is a close comparison of Dylan’s “Desolation Row” with Jack Kerouac’s DESOLATION ANGELS. I knew Dylan was a plagiarist (e.g. “With God on Our Side” swipes the melody from “The Patriot Game”; Dylan famously stole Dave Van Ronk’s arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun”) but this time it was personal. “Desolation Row” is my second-favorite Dylan song (after “Positively 4th Street”), and Goldberg’s case for Dylan’s looting is disappointingly persuasive.

Other highlights include an in-depth report on the death of San Francisco’s KSAN as a progressive free-form music station, and personality pieces on Chris Isaak and Michael Jackson.

I can’t imagine a reader who would enjoy everything in this overlong book. At the same time, I can’t imagine a serious music fan who wouldn’t find at least a few pieces to love, pieces that turn a distant icon into a living, feeling human being.

Categories
Classic Novels Speculative Fiction

THE BIG WIN by Jimmy Miller

In this careening kitchen sink of a novel from 1969, we spend the majority of our time in the head of Gerry—rapist, murderer, sociopath, racist, and desperate player of The Game. The Game, a sort of Pokémon with human targets, is the only upward path for the poor in the far-future year of 2004 where the US and Russia have been devastated by a pandemic unleashed by the Chinese, the Chinese in turn have been nuked by the French, and the French have taken over the world.

Our second protagonist is a member of the new French nobility, 26-year-old Nicole, who is involved in an incestuous triangle with her mother, “a knockout blonde Snow Queen,” and her brother, equally golden and decadent. “The sight of his huge, shockingly beautiful face and coarse blond hair, his blue eyes with their yellow-striped centers and their vertiginous intensity, let her endure the long evening meal with some calm.” He’s waiting to be posted abroad; Nicole doesn’t know what she’s waiting for.

Meanwhile, on Venus, Franky is living a hippie fantasy with a band of exiles from Earth, tripping on Viz-Nez and grooving with the dinosaurs.

Only on page 72 does Miller finally put the engine of the plot in gear as the three protagonists meet up at the Hunt School in Mérida. Each is in pursuit of Suan N.Y., the most notorious of the Chinese war criminals, and that quest will take them the rest of the novel and send them to Venus and finally to the twilight zone of Mercury.

This is the sort of pseudo-SF that drives some fans crazy, convincing them that a mainstream writer has invaded their dancefloor without bothering to learn the steps. Yet there is ample evidence that Miller is having fun with genre conventions rather than acting out of ignorance. For example, she uses the term BEM without defining it (for those of you who don’t know, it’s a fan initialism for “bug-eyed monster”). Dinosaurs on Venus and the twilight zone on Mercury were staples of SF before science deprived us of them.

Who is this Jimmy Miller, anyway? Per the Encyclopedia of SF, she was born Jane Curley, and was married to Warren Miller, the criminally underrated author of THE COOL WORLD and FLUSH TIMES who also wrote the superb SF novels THE SIEGE OF HARLEM and LOOKING FOR THE GENERAL. She clearly expects you to keep up with her erudition, wit, and wordplay—for example, significant passages in French and Spanish are not translated. Her prose is luminous and rhythmic throughout, as in this description of the long voyage to Mercury:

“[T]he hunt…had taken them here, away from their planets, plummeting them out where their senses answered there was no floor to the universe, only blacker blackness. No visit to the Eiffel Tower had prepared Nicole for the acrophobia of the ship, and Viz-Nez had only indicated to Franky where space began.”

At some point I began to suspect that the brutal sex, the incest, the drugs, and the bloodshed were meant not only to épater la bourgeoisie but to camouflage Miller’s own sentimentality. And as the characters move ever closer to the cleansing heat of the sun, Nicole does stand up for herself against Gerry’s sexual assaults, Franky finds enlightenment, and an unexpected character finds a path to redemption.

THE BIG WIN is very much of its time, and your enjoyment of it may depend as much on your willingness to overlook the author’s all-too-frequent insensitivity as it does on your appreciation of love, peace, and idealism.

In the case of Jimmy Miller, count me in.

Categories
Contemporary Novels

CITY OF A THOUSAND GATES by Rebecca Sacks

City of a Thousand Gates

This amazing first novel is blanketed by a cloud of hopelessness that makes it impossible for its huge cast of characters—or for the reader—to take a long view of anything. And that’s as it should be, because this is a realistic novel set in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Israeli settlements in the present moment. Sacks’s ambition is to cram as many sides of the story as she can into 379 pages, and she succeeds spectacularly.

The plot centers on an explosion at the Tunnels Checkpoint outside Bethlehem. A number of our viewpoint characters are there, including: Mai, a young Palestinian woman studying at Bethlehem University; Ori, an Israeli soldier; and Vera, a German freelance photographer. Against her better judgment, Mai pulls a seriously injured Ori from the rubble, helps him to an Israeli ambulance, and then runs away. Unknown to her, Vera has photographed the iconic moment, which immediately goes viral with the caption, “This is what hope looks like.”

Of course the caption proves ironic. Mai immediately regrets her kindness and would take it back if she could (not least because most of her fellow Palestinians would happily murder her for it). Ori derides her, joking about her with his friends. Israel’s occupation of Palestine is not a problem that can be fixed by a futile gesture and a wishful slogan; even if the will to fix it existed.

Mai, Ori, and Vera are three of maybe two dozen viewpoint characters, all of whom we come to know intimately (and sometimes biblically). There’s a lot of sex in this book (most of it, interestingly, viewed in retrospect), tying into recurring themes of possession and the violation of boundaries. Who actually “owns” the West Bank? Why does one of the characters get such an erotic charge when her lover whispers “You’re mine” during sex? Time after time we see people penetrating borders and crossing lines, both cartographic and ethical.

On the first page we meet a vulnerable young Palestinian man in Israel, in the wrong place without the right papers. (Opening line: “Hamid is fucked.”) We see the naïveté of the Jewish-American woman raising her newborn daughter with her Israeli husband in Palestine. The isolation of the only Palestinian on an Israeli professional futbol team. The hopes and struggles of their mothers and fathers and siblings and friends. The texture of their daily lives, rendered in crystalline prose:

They drove down from the hospital campus, through the shuttered shops of the village, down past the Mount of Olives, past the unforgiving settlement block there, past the Israeli flag the size of a dump truck, past the silent graves like teeth in the moonlight.

If the novel is ultimately depressing, it is far from grim. Sacks is wonderful at capturing the many dialects of Jerusalem, and not above having a little fun with them:

He wrote down the antiquated Hebrew phrases he heard the [Holocaust] survivors use, the ones still struggling not to speak Yiddish. They spoke like Moses. “And I spake unto the taxi driver, saying, ‘Lo! Do you take me for a proletariat that you have tithed me thusly?’”

Other than a few instances where the tone strays from compassion into satire, like with the liberal US academic blind to her own racism, or Vera’s descent into self-loathing, the characters feel solid and real and motivated by everyday human concerns. Sacks’s love for them is palpable.

To say there are no easy answers here is an understatement. There are no answers at all, except maybe for this one: the best literature— like CITY OF A THOUSAND GATES—opens our hearts as well as our minds, lets us find our own reflections in those blanketing clouds.