Three by Four

Take a Walk on the Dark Side: Rock and Roll Myths, Legends, and Curses by R. Gary Patterson (2004): Breezy, enjoyable tour through some of rock-and-roll's odder moments. It may not necessarily be 100% accurate (or perhaps even 50%), and it's all farmed from books and articles by other people, but it's also an addictive read. At points, the back-stories are a lot more interesting than the stories about the musicians and bands. Aleister Crowley dominates one chapter, while the looming foundational figure of Robert Johnson is there throughout. But when it comes to strange luck, the saga of Buddy Holly and the Crickets dwarfs the other stories in the book. Recommended.

Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead Is Purely Coincidental: written by Josh Alan Friedman and Drew Friedman; illustrated by Drew Friedman (1980-1985; this edition 2013): One of the brightest of all the bright spots of alternative comics in the 1980's, Any Similarity collects the unique pop-cultural cartoons of the Friedman brothers. 

Drew Friedman's art approaches a sort of absolute photo-realism that makes the fantastic goings-on in these one-pagers and short stories completely and utterly ridiculous. Friedman's preferred subjects are show-business B- and C-listers and the characters they played. 

Emblematic, perhaps, are strips devoted entirely to Jimmy Durante cavorting with naked starlets and to the secret life of I Love Lucy's Fred Mertz, slum landlord and thuggish bon vivant. 

The nastiest piece in the book shows what happens when an African-American stops for gas at Goober's service station in Andy Griffith's Mayberry. More benign visions appear of monosyllabic Ed Wood favourite Tor Johnson out and about on New York's subways, or of William Bendix returning from the dead. 

The collection helpfully appends an explanation of who some of these people are. You'll almost certainly need it, but the humour and satire work regardless because show business never seems to change, even if Joe Franklin or Bendix have faded from memory. A vision of a dystopian future in which everyone male or female looks exactly like Ernest Borgnine, though -- that's just wrong. Highly recommended.

Plastic Man: Rubber Bandits written and illustrated by Kyle Baker (2004-2005; collected 2005): Writer-artist Jack Cole's Plastic Man was one of a handful of the greatest comic books of the 1940's and 1950's. It was such a tough act to follow that really no one did until Kyle Baker. Several attempts over 60 years (!) to revive Plastic Man missed the anarchic spirit of Cole's writing and cartooning. Baker got it while remaining his own loopy, anarchic self. 

Baker's Plastic Man works as both a general farce and a specific criticism of superhero comic books as they were in the early oughts (and remain to this day). In a better comic-book world it would have run for as long as Baker wanted to do it. In the American comic-book world of superheroes, its jaunty snarkiness and hilarious cartooning were both soon to be rejected. Highly recommended.

Road Trip

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story by Chuck Klosterman (2005): Klosterman's second full-length non-fiction look at rock and roll sees him travel across America in a Ford Taurus (which he dubs "the Tauntaun") to visit the deathplaces of an assortment of rockers, musing on his own troubled love life all the while. He also gets in a lot of fascinating observations about celebrity culture, rock and roll, and assorted bands major and minor along the way.

The major problems here are two-fold. The relationship material started to wear on me after awhile, as funny and rueful as some of Klosterman's observations may be. Like a lot of writers, Klosterman spends a lot of time inside his own head, but not everything going inside that head works all that well on the printed page. He may be self-puncturing and self-deprecating, but he's also self-obsessed. Self-obsessed, and intensely self-aware that he's self-obsessed.

Klosterman's second problem, his tendency to generalize from personal experience, sometimes runs out of control herein. It can be quite fascinating and thought-provoking, but generalizing that, say, every man in history has at one time or another thought Led Zeppelin was the greatest band doesn't actually ring true. I can think of a lot of men for whom it isn't and never was, and I can think of a lot of women for whom it is or was. Is Klosterman self-fashioning what manhood really is around the question of Led Zep's greatness? I'm not sure. I think he's just making a sweeping generalization. On the other hand, Klosterman passive-aggressively pushes his heterosexual cred throughout, like a teenager worried someone's going to call him gay because he reads and writes too much.

If you're going to enjoy Klosterman, you're going to have to put up with the generalizations. You're also going to have to put up with a relentlessly intelligent writer whose aversion to the 'highbrow' and to 'high culture' often leaves him over-analyzing and over-emphasizing the merits of pop culture. I'd be interested in seeing Klosterman analyze something challenging, but I don't think that's likely to happen anytime soon. He's got a great brain, but all that brain wants to chew on is the popular and the junky. Sometimes this results in fascinating, populist musings about the importance of Kiss; sometimes this results in over-intellectualized wankery about, well, the importance of Kiss. I'm not sure any music critic has ever worked so hard to justify the musical tastes of his youth.

Nonetheless, there are brilliant observations and some very funny stuff here. If you're like me, you'll nod in recognition at the rewriting of critical and popular taste that occurred just after Kurt Cobain's death, as In Utero went from interesting but off-putting semi-failure to signature artistic statement. You may even laugh out loud as Klosterman discusses his deep-seated disappointment at discovering that while he likes blues-based rock, he can't stand the actual blues. Recommended.