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Review and Blog for Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo
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Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo
Read 4 Nov 2003 to 26 Nov 2003
Where: Seattle, Fremont CA
I can not overstate how much I enjoy reading Richard Russo. I’ve been stunned at how much I’ve enjoyed the books I’ve read by him – all of which are included in these reviews somewhere. His books will certainly survive the tests of time.
Nobody’s Fool is the story of a man with demons that haunt him daily. He is a good guy, people like him – often despite his own best efforts. He often does stupid things. Truly stupid things. But his demons, stemming from his relationship with his now dead father won’t allow him to grow. He assumes these demons died with his father. They didn’t.
Russo is able to paint this picture slowly, calmly and deliberately – with characters that add to the patois in predictable and unexpected ways. And that’s what, for me, makes good fiction, cinema, music, sex, food, etc. All living, to be interesting and exciting, needs to be a healthy mix of predictable and unexpected. Too much of either and you have either boredom or chaos. Too much boredom and you die young and in your sleep. Too much chaos and your aorta explodes. And few people want either of those outcomes.
The town in Nobody’s Fool is a town nobody is particularly excited about living in. Coming from Central Nebraska, I can recognize the desperate eggs-in-one-basket approach that constitute economic development strategies. In my own home town, several beautiful downtown buildings were razed after the city allowed two large shopping malls to be built. The buildings were razed to put in surface parking for the remaining businesses. The city didn’t seem to recognize that the historic buildings were an asset. You would go downtown and look around and there would be no one there. Yet we were razing our historic landmarks to make up for the “parking shortage.”
Later they built a goofball pergola, blocking off a major artery through downtown, because – apparently – people would want to congregate at the pergola. I understand that in my now 20 year absence, they have actually done a lot to revitalize the downtown in my home town. But the Capitol Theatre, a beautiful turn of the century structure, will be lost to the world forever.
The city in Nobody’s Fool is chasing an economic development dream of a theme park. There are investors that come to town. There is land. There are signs that say it’s coming. And the town is focused on the payoff from this economic, temporal, and spiritual investment. The identity of the town is focused primarily on this one development.
This leads, for me, to the best line in the entire book. Which I can’t tell you because it would be a spoiler. Russo is a one liner and sarcasm engine … so the dry wit in this book is refreshing. Suffice it to say that the lead investor has, for me, the most compelling line in the book and, pretty much it’s his only line. But for an urban planner who came from small town America … it spoke volumes.
Review and Blog for Crackpot by John Waters
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A pleasing review of Crackpot by John Waters
Read: 27 October 2003 – 4 November 2003
Where: Seattle, Vancouver
What can one say about John Waters that he hasn’t already said himself?
Or perhaps that is unfair.
Crackpot, the new 2003 extended remix, is a scant 204 pages of articles written by John Waters. John Waters is a man we can all admire. Some people think he is the devil. Indeed many may think so. But the beauty is, they probably all think that for different reasons. Maybe a few of the John Waters despisers in the world can find common ground, set up a support group, have fund raisers … march on Washington….
But what John Waters has done that we all admire, even if we might hate him, is he has been able to live a life where he’s been able to do totally crazy shit that most people would think impossible. Why did he do it? Because that’s what he wanted to do. He woke up one day and said, “Hairspray would be a good idea!”
True, John hasn’t done everything he has wanted to do, but then if that were the case we’d had to discard our admiration because it was … too easy. But, seriously, go rent three John Waters films and ask yourself, “Can I possibly even imagine how someone could get the money, staff, organization, and other elements necessary to make something like this?”
Admittedly, every time I see Jim Carrey on a movie poster I ask the same thing … but, I assure you, in a very different way.
John Waters claims in this book to never have had a job, more or less. The closest he has come was working in the prison system, teaching movie … stuff … to inmates. Usually very violent ones. But, even if this were a job, Waters saw this as an extension of his own fixation with violent criminals.
After “violent criminals” I wanted to type “and what makes them think” or “and how they cope with their crimes” or “how they live with just or unjust accusations….” But it really isn’t that. If I wanted to try to boil down John Waters to his essence (the first thing I’d do is mail his essence to Orrin Hatch in a Christmas Card), I would say that John Waters is fascinated by the marginalized. And his fascination with, for example, the eventually acquitted McMartin preschool molestation defendants or Pia Zadora or white trash are all examples of this.
The hands down best part of this book though is the part where John goes to Hollywood to pitch an idea. The pitch is utterly unsuccessful. John later finds out that one of the criminals he befriended while working with prisoners killed a friend of the gentleman John was pitching to. The gentleman had a copy of John’s book with a picture of John and that prisoner.
While Mr. Waters said he felt awful about that, it seemed apparent that this was the first time that his eccentricities had butted up against life in such an ugly and regrettable way. There isn’t much introspection in Crackpot … indeed this may be your only negligible serving. But, somehow, it is an appropriate amount.
Most of this book is Waters typing to hear himself laugh (which is what I do, so who am I to judge)? I can hear myself and several friends in things he writes about, his style, his snide gay sense of humor.
On the back of this edition is a quote from Burroughs. So he and I share something in common, we’ve both had Burroughs make a comment about something we did. When I started writing in the early 80s, I had two goals. One was to get Bill Burroughs to write something about me. The other was to get Dick Nixon to write something about me. I was only half successful. I’m sure Dick Nixon said something about John waters.
Review and Blog for All My Life for Sale by John D. Freyer
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All My Life for Sale by John D. Freyer
Read from 22 Oct 2003 to 27 Oct 2003
This book was given to my wife and I by Monique Chung as a Christmas present in 2002. It sat in my to-be-read pile for nearly 11 months. It sort of seemed more a coffee table book than anything and I had some meatier stuff to read. One day (probably Oct 21st or so), I moved it to the top of the pile. It was, how else can I put it, a thin book and I had just read several 600+ pagers and wanted something speedy.
So, I was pleasantly shocked when I read this … yes, I read the whole thing. The most important thing to me was how zine-like it is. I had previously thought the most zine-like book I would see was Donna Kossy’s Kooks (a wonderful book that I read long before I started these reviews, click on Donna Kossy and you’ll get more about her and on the title to pick up Kooks for the ultra low price of $5.74).
However, John’s slickly produced dot com fallout project is all Zine all the time. It is laid out in a slightly-better-than-scissors-and-gluestick format which warms my heart. My old zines (BVI Central, etc.) would have looked exactly like this if Kinkos would have allowed. John is also, like Donna and myself, an old zineland graduate. In part of this book he even waxes nostalgic about the days of finding near orgasmic glee in free, borrowed, donated, stolen or otherwise unpaid for photocopy access. The days when we’d all force Mike Gunderloy to sit in New York and read endless pages of our spewings.
But the beauty is the behind all zines, regardless of how disturbing, boring or even just pathetic they were … there was a concept. Usually this concept was utterly uncommercial at the time but in retrospect had some element of genius working beneath the surface. Whether it was the paranoid ramblings the Mr. Rev. Dr. Ultrasensitive, the ability to find one fixation and make it a world view as in Ride Theory, the ability to synthesize bizarre random elements of human thought into one coherent yet disorganized whole as in OVO, or, in this case, taking the idea of e-Bay to the extreme and in a fit of committed consumer based self destruction … sell everything you identify with.
So the concept here, as I see it, is that we become our possessions. John Freyer at some point developed a zine-ish obsession to prove that he really could sell all his possessions and that he, himself, was not possessed by them. In the act of doing so, he became possessed not by his possessions, but by the act of selling them off. Soon, even things that just got near him were sold, like his sister’s copy of Infinite Jest. Which pissed his sister off. He even sold his family’s Christmas presents .. not the ones they gave him, but the still unwrapped ones he was supposed to give them.
Then, in an logically self-defeating move, he went on tour to visit the things he had sold. So, one could argue, that in a move to not be possessed by his possessions, he actually became more possessed by them. By and large, our possessions sit around us in sort of organized piles. But by doing this, Freyer had systematically catalogued all his stuff, provided it permanent places to live, put the pictures on a web site and in this book, kept track of who owned them, and then went to visit them.
When was the last time you drove 1,000 miles to see your own shirt?
There was something that my friend Will Black, mentioned to me… he said that if you’re going to do something, do it completely and something will come out of it. He was talking at the time of my classic video game collection, which trying to be a completist in is like trying to collect all the sand on earth. Check out his Operations Manual for an example of not doing something half-way.
In keeping with this spirit, John Freyer is a very successful person. To be honest, when I started reading this book, I was annoyed. I felt like he was stealing my zine heritage somehow. But the more I read it, especially the parts that I felt could have been better stated, it really grew on me. I now consider this book to be the nearly the capstone on the wall of zinedom.
John Freyer's Web Site | All My Life For Sale Web Site | Mike Gunderloy's Web Site | Donna Kossy's Web Site | Will Black's Web Site |
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