Now You Have No Excuse

In case you've been putting off starting that masterpiece hidden way up in your brain, you should probably be aware that Slash wrote a book.

Blog Post of Justice!

Our Blogmistress, good citizen that she is, got up bright and early today to head down to the courthouse for jury duty. Most people I know approach the prospect of sitting on a jury with the kind of dread that is usually reserved for watching movies starring Mariah Carey, but not Our Heroine, who has seen 12 Angry Men more times than is probably healthy.

This got me thinking about novels about trials, and I thought I'd do a quick post of "Five Great Novels About Trials" or something. However, all I could come up with was Crime and Punishment (which isn't really about the trial), The Stranger (ditto), Milan Kundera's The Joke (kind of a stretch), In Cold Blood (not really a novel, not really about the trial) and of course To Kill a Mockingbird.*

So in lieu of that, I'll just quote this excellent passage from Ms. Lee's excellent novel and ask for suggestions of trial novels. Thoughts?

"The state has not produced one iota of medical evidence that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place. It has relied instead upon the testimony of two witnesses whose evidence has not only been called into serious question on cross-examination, but has been flatly contradicted by the defendant. The defendant is not guilty, but somebody in this courtroom is."

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* John Grisham novels do not count. I said "Great" novels, and the Grish's books have always struck me as lawyer-porn for guys who took the bar instead of getting their P.I. license or becoming a biker or a shrimp boat captain or some such. Guys who spend a lot of time sitting on their back deck, drink in hand, wondering if and when they got soft, and where it all went wrong.**
** Lest my lawyer friends and relations take this amiss, I should point out the same midlife-crisis fantasy subgenre exists for academics: instead of getting involved with shadowy conspiracies and seedy Lower Alabama underworlds, the protagonists get involved with a grad student or a local pottery artist, or maybe the Dean's wife. Being the people in charge of such things, these books get to count as "literature" while Grish & Co. do not. It's what we get to make up for not making the big bucks.

Mommas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Groupies: Let's Spend the Night Together by Pamela Des Barres

Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies by Pamela Des Barres

Throughout Let's Spend the Night Together, there's a tone of sadness and nostalgia for a lost time. The groupies, past and present, that Des Barres interviews for the book lament that there are no longer "famous" groupies, that rock stars date models and movie stars, not fans, and that perhaps, the golden age of the groupie is over.

Between Des Barres previous memoirs and Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, there's a case to be made that the groupies of the 60s and 70s were not garden variety skanks, so much as rock courtesans, vulnerable to a great deal of heartbreak and abuse, but also not utterly disposable.

The book is organized semi-chronologically, beginning with interviews with groupie greats like Cherry Vanilla, Catherine James, and Cynthia Plaster Caster. Then Des Barres moves into the considerably darker 70s, populated by the underage set like Lori Maddix and Sable Starr, and the aging groupies who fell into drug addiction and domestic abuse. After reading Maddix's chapter, you will never look at David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Jimmy Page the same way again -- they should all be in jail.

As the book goes on, things get even less romantic and more depressing, and it becomes very apparent how far the groupie has fallen. Whatever one may think of the choices these women made, it's understandable how one could take some sort of pride in being able to say, "I slept with Jimi Hendrix," or "I slept with Keith Moon." It is, in any case, more impressive than saying, "I slept with the drummer from Slipknot."

Some of the women interviewed are very sympathetic, and some have great stories to tell. Tura Satana, Cynthia Plaster Caster, and Cassandra Peterson (better known as Elvira) are particularly interesting. Also fun are the interviews with the women who got out relatively unscathed and relate their groupie pasts with a shrug and a smile. These tend to be the ones who always had something creative or meaningful going on the side, and are now quite successful in their careers and personal lives.

But even the most well-adjusted among them has a horror story or two to tell. Pat Travers is a jerk, Tom Jones is a monster, and Led Zeppelin were full-out evil. Surprisingly, Gene Simmons comes out rather the gentleman.

However, one of the most train wreck draws of the book is the narration of Des Barres herself. Obviously an intelligent, funny, and sweet woman, she is also clueless, and happily unaware of exactly how clueless she is. Gail Zappa, a woman who essentially stayed married to Frank by playing perpetual hostess, taking care of the house, and waiting on him hand and foot, is set forth as the lucky woman who "became what we all wanted to be."

And Des Barres interviews the decidedly unglamorous Connie Hamzy (immortalized in Grand Funk Railroad's "We're an American Band" and in the Spin article "Oldest Living Confederate Groupie Tells All") with a scarcely veiled contempt. Despite the fact that Hamzy shared a great many of Des Barres's conquests, Miss Pamela is anxious to distance herself from Sweet Connie's Arkansas drawl and willingness to service everyone from rock stars to roadies. When it serves her purposes, Des Barres sells herself as a wild child, but when it doesn't, she emphasizes her long-term relationships with rockers, and characterizes herself as a young girl who had her heart broken. Maybe both sides of the story are true, but geez, to be able to turn it on and off like a tap....

In any case, the anecdotal evidence this book offers about the groupie's decline heartens me, and I say, let the groupies of the 60s and 70s have their wacky stories and write memoirs about them, and let the misogynist nu metal bands have their girls gone wild.

And let the rest of us go about our business, periodically stopping to gawk at them.

A Baseball Story

In The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America, O'Neil posits that the reason there are so many fathers and sons playing in the Major Leagues is because baseball is a game that fathers teach to their sons, that the very specific way a person swings a bat or fields a ball is passed down. On the road, Buck frequently asks people if they remember the first baseball game their fathers ever took them to -- everybody does.

Reading all those stories made me remember mine, which is a story about how baseball is about mothers and daughters, too.

It was the summer of 1988, and early on, the Pirates were locked in a pretty tight race for the NL Eastern Division pennant with the much-hated New York Mets. Or at least they were much-hated in western Pennsylvania.

I went to Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh with my parents, my sister, and our friends, Jason and Ben, although I have no idea who the Pirates were playing that day. That wasn't the important thing.

I followed the standings every day in the paper, and I watched games on television with my dad, and talked with Jason about the Pirates and how they were doing and whether they'd beat the Mets (duh, yes... although as it turned out, duh, no).

Our heroes were Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, Andy Van Slyke, and Sid Bream, and the important thing about going to the game was meeting them. We got our baseballs, we planned how we would get their autographs, and speculated about whose would be best to get (toss-up between Bonds and Van Slyke).

We got to the stadium, and settled into our seats by the first base line. And then, an awful man with the world's foulest cigars sat down directly behind me. And proceeded to smoke the world's foulest cigars throughout the entire game.

By the seventh inning, I was woozy. By the ninth, I was nauseous. And when the game was over, I was sitting on a curb outside the stadium with my head between my legs as my sister and our friends went off to get autographs while Dad chaperoned.

Then, my mother came up to me and asked for my baseball. I handed it to her, and she said, "I'll see what I can do."

Now, it is fair to say that Mom had not been following the 1988 Pirates season as avidly as I had, didn't know Bobby Bonilla from Andy Van Slyke, and had never sought out a celebrity autograph in her life. But she was determined to get one for her kid.

She walked up to the throng of fans, and was immediately bewildered. She didn't want to push up on or bother anyone, and some of the players certainly looked bothered. Then, she saw a guy in a Pirates jacket standing off to the side by himself. He didn't look bothered or busy, so she walked up to him, stuck out my baseball, and said:

"Are you somebody?"

This is probably a terrible thing to say to a person you're asking for an autograph, but I know my mother, and can practically hear the tone in her voice as she asked. I'm sure she managed to say this in a kind voice that admitted her cluelessness, yet was somehow unwilling to take no for an answer.

The man was not offended. In fact, he laughed at her.

"I'm nobody," he said. "You don't want me."

And Mom said, "I don't care. Would you sign my daughter's baseball?"

And that is how I came to have a baseball autographed by Lanny Frattare, announcer for the Pittsburgh Pirates since 1976. Bonds and Van Slyke moved on, but Lanny is still there, and there's nobody whose autograph I'd rather have.

To this day, I still love the Pirates, I still can't hate Barry Bonds, and I still sit on the first base line any time I go to a baseball game.

So, thanks Mom.

Mordor or Los Angeles?

"Far away now rising towards the South the sun, piercing the smokes and haze, burned ominous, a dull bleared disc of red. . ."

Okay, clearly, it's Mordor, but due to the haze and smoke caused by the massive wildfires, I've been half expecting Smaug or a Nazgul or something to go flying by the window. It's looked like about 30 minutes before sunset all day, and now that it gets closer to evening it's starting to look like Caprica City, if you know what I mean.

And if you do: Greetings, fellow dork! Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go flush out my sinuses. Ack.

The 'Signature' Story

I'm currently reading Joe Posnanski's The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America, where the author recounts a year he spent traveling around the country with baseball legend Buck O'Neil.

Now, anyone who saw O'Neil in Ken Burns's Baseball, or read interviews with him knows that the man had a gift for storytelling as prodigious as his gift for baseball. And an entire book devoted to a combination of the two is beyond wonderful.

Many of the stories that appear in the book were new to me, but I'd heard a lot of them before: the story of getting out of Sarasota, the Easter Sunday he hit for the cycle, then met his wife, and his signature story -- why Satchel Paige always called him 'Nancy', which is told or referred to in one way or another at least five times.

But I'm loving these well-worn, well-loved stories, the kind that hold up to repeated tellings. And I love how the telling changes, depending on what kind of mood O'Neil's in and how he feels about the person he's telling it to.

Everybody has a story like that, the one that all your friends know, and the one that you look forward to unrolling whenever you meet someone who isn't a friend yet, but probably will be.

You can tell Brady likes you if he tells you the story about the time his old band, The Dillingers, went to Chicago, or about the time he met Paul Westerberg. And if you know me long enough, I will inevitably tell the story about my parents and the donkey basketball team.

So, I'm curious. Does anyone else out there have a "signature" story to tell? Gwen, I know you've got a million of them, but if you had to pick just one...

Poetry Noir: Black Maria by Kevin Young

Black Maria: Poems by Kevin Young

Like Jessica Seinfeld sneaking spinach into her kids' brownies, Kevin Young has tricked me into reading contemporary American poetry with the kind of page-turning delight I usually reserve for my sleazy crime novels.

As any Tom Waits fan can tell you, Black Maria ("rhymes with 'pariah'") is slang for either a hearse or the paddywagon. Young's collection is a film noir in five "reels" of verse, featuring the misadventures and near-misses of a private eye named AKA Jones and Delilah Redbone, his femme fatale, a struggling actress who's fallen in with bad company.

One of my favorite writers, Megan Abbott, has said some interesting things about the problem of writing noir today when all the tropes of the genre approach parody, kitsch, or cliche. Through his collection, Young provides an interesting solution to the problem. The language of noir has been trodden into a soft-boiled mush, but by placing that language into verse, it once again reverberates with the melodramatic heft that makes classic noir work so well.

The couplet form that Young prefers is particularly well-suited to a genre that milks one-liners and terse, staccato dialogue for all they're worth. And like most of my favorite noir films, the caper itself is less important than individual scenes, or in this case, lines.

A few of my favorites:

I've given, like gin
Her up, again

And,

If despair had a sound
it would be: DO NOT DISTURB

If despair has a sound
it's the muffled, raised

Voices of the pair next door
who've lived here

In One-Star Manor forever
yet still pay by the week

--Love's an iffy lease--

And,

He'd taught me how

to fall, to cry
on cue, & now

that's all I do.

It's a smoldering, badass read, and really, when was the last time someone said that about a collection of poetry?