The Rise, The Fall and the Rise - Brix Smith-Start (2016)

I started listening to Turned Out a Punk, Damien Abraham's podcast, sometime this fall.  An entire post should be written about the podcast but suffice to say, Brix Smith was one of the first guests that I wanted to hear.  Her episode probably made me want to read this book.  I'm very glad that I did.  While it is not a perfect book and will not make the Best Books list, parts of it are so incredible that make it worthwhile.  I could not agree with Abraham that it was the best book I had read that year.  It was however, extremely entertaining and highly readable, at times.  As a huge fan of the Fall going back about 14 years, it was a totally amazing experience. On both the podcast, and in this book, Brix references being classmates with Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis at Bennington College in the early 80's.  She does not aim for the heights of The Goldfinch, but sometimes lapses into Ellis-styled prose.  That is, her life could be one of his novels, particularly with the ending in the fashion industry.  What she ends up doing is completely her own.  It may not generally be as artful, but I personally found that I could identify with Brix very closely.  We are all Brix Smith, or Brix Smith is all of us.

I re-listened to the episode today, and forgot the two other Bennington classmates she mentioned--Jonathan Lethem and Jill Eisenstadt.  Apart from that there is not much else to mention--you can listen to the podcast yourself.  I will note that Brix has one of most unique accents I have heard--British valley girl.  She was born in L.A. and spent her childhood there, and splitting time between there and Chicago in her teen years.  She now lives in England.

The stuff about Chicago is fantastic.  On the podcast, Brix mentions that her first concert was at this outdoor venue outside of Chicago, where people have picnics, Rav-en-ia, where she saw the Carpenters and Neil Sedaka on a double bill.  Having recently seen Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons with my family at Ravinia, I found it touching.

Most notably, there is the story of where and when she met Mark E. Smith:

"On Saturday 23 April 1983, Lisa and I paid the $6 ticket price and entered through the front doors of Cabaret Metro, 3730 North Clark Street." (144)

This was within a week of my birth, not very far away, so I have one more reason to feel connected to the band and this book.

Brix writes compelling stories through the first 75% of the book.  In truth I lost some interest after she left the Fall, and it was briefly exciting when she rejoined for a couple years in the mid-90's.  The opening of the book confused me--it's an account of her grandmother seemingly losing it behind the wheel and driving from the Disneyland parking lot through the main gates and into the park before plunging into the lagoon at the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride.  I thought it was real, but Brix later reveals it to be a dream.  I wonder how many other people have that reaction.  It seems like it could have happened, because so much of the rest of her life has been crazy that anything seems possible.  Her stories about her father are both hilarious and horrifying.  There are so many things I would excerpt from this book it's not even funny.  On that note, I should perhaps vault it into Best Books territory, but I think it is instructive to compare it to the other recent female rock musician memoirs that I've read.

If pressed, I have to say that it is better than both Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band and Carrie Brownstein's Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl.  Both are excellent books.  All three of these books are fantastic and totally worth reading, but Brix's is the heaviest.  To be sure, Kim Gordon's account of the dissolution of her relationship with her husband and bandmate, Thurston Moore, is the most powerful piece of writing in the bunch.  This is not to say that Carrie Brownstein's account of the dissolution of her romantic relationship with bandmate Corin Tucker is weak.  In fact, Brix's account of the dissolution of her relationship with husband and bandmate, Mark E. Smith, is the least evocative, in part due to the inscrutability of the man it involves.  Now I love Mark E. Smith but this book definitely sheds some light on him in an unflattering fashion.  It feels fair, though, because there are also moments of extreme vulnerability, humanity, and cuteness.

There are some parts of this book that are tough to read.  Yet even during the most atrocious moment, Brix offers some levity and resists victimization.  As I said, there are many quotable excerpts in this book, so I have to include one about Mark E. Smith that almost made me want to start crying:

"One night, a few months later, there was a knock at the front door of my apartment.  I opened the door to find Mark E. Smith standing there.  He was drunk and held a half-empty bottle of whiskey.  He begged me to let him in, and was in a state.  He told me he had made a mistake leaving me.  I let him in and tried to calm him down.  He asked if he could sleep over.  He was emotional.  I was torn.  Part of me was happy he'd come to his senses and realised what he'd lost in leaving me.  The other part of me was cold and shut down.  After having experienced the attentions and kindness of other men, I was no longer attracted to him.
But still, I felt connected to him.  That would never go away.  He had been my soulmate.  The songs we wrote together would forever be a testament to that.  I allowed him to sleep over, in my bed.  I made it patently clear he was not to touch me.  As he lay next to me, I felt sad.  The next morning, it would be years before I ever saw him again." (267-268)

The stories of the songs were surprising.  It always seems like the Fall are singing about conspiracies or manifestos but in truth are just slices of life.  For example, Brix writes about her sleeping problems and reliance on pills in "US 80s-90s":

"My mother's pills came in the prescription bottle with her name on it.  When we landed in Boston, immigration singled us out to be searched --this happened often, being in a rock group; when we came through carrying guitars and music gear we set off internal klaxons inside officials' heads; we practically had stickers on our foreheads saying 'Search me' -- and the customs officials were aggressively questioning us about the prescription pills not in our name.  This experience led us to write our version of a hip-hop track, 'US 80s-90s': 'Had a run-in with Boston immigration/to my name they had an aversion/Nervous droplets due to sleeping tablets....'  In the airport the signs would read, 'Welcome to the United States of America', but we would always get tormented by security and feel like we were entering a police state.  In the song Mark proclaims, 'I am the original white (big shot) rapper', and it's not hyperbole." (222)

She writes often about "Hotel Bloedel" and "LA."  She seems to consider these her best songs.  She wrote a lot of great songs with the band and I think most people consider the "Brix era" to be the second-greatest period in the Fall's catalog (behind the Hex Enduction Hour era).  Certainly she brought the band in a more accessible direction.  Other noteworthy song inspirations include "Carry Bag Man" (about how Mark E. Smith likes to carry around his stuff in plastic bags).  Actually, her causal dismissal of The Frenz Experiment (the last album she would record before re-joining the band as his ex-wife) is worth capture:

"'Carry Bag Man' is fine, and chugs along, but is a phoned-in effort from Mark, a song about how he likes to carry plastic bags.  'Get a Hotel' is just annoying.  'The Steak Place' is boring and conjures images of gross food, the kind of restaurant that might have photos of the food on their menu.  The most annoying song I ever had to play on was 'Oswald Defence Lawyer.'  I think it was the worst song we'd done since I'd joined the band.  It was interminable, and when we played it live I watched the audience switch off.  It makes me cringe today, just thinking about it.  I was expected to really belt it out, but it just sounds irritating and grating: 'Oswald Defense Lawyer embraces the scruffed corpse of Mark Twain.'  It was cool to name-check Twain, though." (238-239)

Brix writes a fair amount about her post-Fall band, Adult Net, and I was dismayed not to be able to find anything on Spotify or Amazon Music.  I would definitely have listened to The Honey Tangle if I could.  Maybe Brix realizes that streaming services will net her approximately zero and that her fans will seek out old copies of the album.  Or likely it's the record label's fault.

I don't want to give away too many details about the book but can say briefly that Brix's parents divorced when she was young and her mother moved to Chicago and she moved around in fairly fancy places with her father in L.A.  There is more than a fair share of celebrity name-dropping in this book.  It's not always totally necessary, but if I was writing my memoir, I would totally do the same thing.  It's the tangents that usually end up being memorable, such as the story of her professional soccer player friend who soils himself on the field and fakes an injury, or the friend at her bachelorette party with a crazy party trick. 

She goes back from her father in L.A. to her mother in Chicago multiple times through her teen years.  She does not have kind things to say about Chicago, but her account of working at Marshall Field's in the Loop was especially charming (sometimes I like to reflect on the significance of being in the same place as another person in recorded history).  She meets Mark E. Smith at Smart Bar after seeing the Fall in concert at the Metro.  What happens is the definition of a whirlwind romance and is completely insane and showcases the true spontaneity of Brix.  She quickly decides to move to England, move in with Mark, and get married.  She becomes a member of the Fall and stays with them for another four years.  This will be the highlight for the majority of readers.  However, Brix's life outside the Fall is arguably more interesting.  For example, her section about being an aspiring-actress-waitress in L.A after being left by Mark and effectively kicked out of the band is especially compelling.  She meets Nigel, a classical violinist, who is apparently quite a sensation, and is led into a different world, seemingly a little more refined but no less debaucherous.  In fact, I'm sorry, but I have to give a snippet of her encounter with Courtney Love, who invites her to audition for Hole:

"....But as I went to sleep, I had a sixth sense that something was wrong.  A bad feeling.  Something was burning.  I got up, out of bed and rushed to Courtney's room and pushed open the door to the master bedroom.  In her room, she had a selection of candles and incense burning.  Two sticks of incense had fallen over and caught fire.  The carpet was aflame and I caught it just in time.  Had I been five minutes later I dread to think what would have happened.  I put out the fire by smothering it with a blanket and stamping on it.  Courtney was in bed, slumped over her computer.  I fleetingly clocked that she had been mid-conversation with Billy Corgan, of The Smashing Pumpkins.
She said, 'Get into bed, sleep on Kurt's side.'  So I did.  It was really weird, but I felt honoured to be asked to sleep there, in her bed, on his side.  Courtney was warm and kind.  I feel she's often misunderstood.  She is a complex person, as we all are.  At times she has been her own worst enemy, but when you get down to it there is kindness and warmth to her, that is not often talked about." (362)

She then proceeds to talk about how Courtney turned her onto Rohypnol, in one of the more outrageous habits detailed in the book.  Later on, she rejoins the Fall briefly, and then meets her current husband, who then opens a fashion store with her in London.  She also co-stars briefly in a reality series, Gok's Fashion Fix, which sounds like it would be amazing to see.  She has an amazing kitchen and is in love with her pugs.

That is pretty much the whole story, but Brix's mysticism is also worth noting.  She seems to have some sort of otherworldly presence.  One could easily write off her ramblings as hippie-ish, vaguely drugged out, but the realities she has known are so insane that I am inclined to believe her if she says she believes in ghosts.  The precognitive powers of Mark E. Smith are also referenced poignantly, in a story I had read before, about the origins of the song, "Disney's Dream Debased."  The story is that she had taken Mark E. Smith with her to Disneyland and they got in line for the Matterhorn and while waiting he said he didn't like the ride, that it was evil, and that he didn't want to go on it.  They rode it anyways and left.  A few minutes later, there was a commotion in the area, and Disneyland employees came out from hidden elevators and Disney characters tried to distract parkgoers' attention from the Matterhorn.  It came out that a woman was killed when she fell out of her car at the unloading zone onto the track, and the next car could not be stopped from dismembering her.  It's a horrifying story and it would be interesting to know what became of the incident legally, whether Disney has publicly acknowledged that it occurred.

There is another truly insane story about Disneyworld (Brix always goes to Disneyland, but goes to Disneyworld for the first time in her late 20's or early 30's) and how Mickey Mouse may or may not be trying to ask her on a date or hook up with her.  This story appears to be in there solely to detail the breakdown of Brix's mind at the time (it is a weirdly hallucinogenic chapter), but she later brings it full circle when she becomes one of the very few to get Mickey Mouse to appear at an event for her fashion store.  Her comment on the usual gender of the person wearing the Mickey Mouse costume is poignant. 

I could go on a lot longer and pick out more passages, but I think I've said pretty much everything I wanted to say about this.  It's a great book, but it occasionally feels like Brix is going through the motions, telling the story because she has to and not necessarily because she wants to.  The grammar is correct and proper, but the writing is not especially complex and definitely devolves into purple prose at times.  However, I would want any friend of mine to read it, regardless of whether they liked the Fall or not.  I think it would make a great movie--"Scenes from Brix" or something, like Moonlight and three different periods in her life.  Not everyone wants to sell the movie rights to their life, but really, you would do it if you could, wouldn't you?

The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt (2013)

Back on June 11, 2014, I was working a document review project in the Willis Tower.  I sat next to a guy named Frederick who went by Eric.  He liked to read, too, and I mentioned how I had posted this article on my Facebook page.  I said I hadn't read The Goldfinch, but no book had a bigger buzz attached to it at that moment.  The next day he picked it up and started reading it and told me it was good.

It took me another two years to get up the nerve to tackle it, and I can say that, while I didn't get into it immediately, after about 150-200 pages, I got into it, and I thought it was very good.  Having said that, I am curious to revisit the article.

Basically, the article posits Tartt as a stellar storyteller, but a weak wordsmith--at least, in the opinions of Francine Prose and James Wood.  And to a certain extent that is true.  This does have a pretty good story and it is not surprising that it is being made into a movie.  As for the poetry of the words, I desist.  All I want to say, for starters, is that The Goldfinch bears striking similarities to my second novel S/M (as well as DST), but couched in a much more compelling story.  If you don't already know, this is a pretty big book--about 770 pages--but it goes down pretty fast.  I mean, I did not really get into this book at first, but once I did, I finished it in just a few weeks.  One night I must have read 50-70 pages before falling asleep, and that is rare for me.  That may have happened with City on Fire, but I would recommend this over that, whether it makes me a philistine or not.

Quick plot summary: Theodore Decker, 13, has gotten in trouble at school, and his mother has taken a day off work to go with him to a conference.  For some reason the conference doesn't start right at the beginning of the day, or the end, and they decide to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to check out the new Dutch exhibit.  Then, a massive bomb goes off inside the museum, and there is a great deal of confusion, and an injured old man convinces Theo to take the famous painting of The Goldfinch to protect it, or something.  I think I need to consult the text for this:

"'No! They mustn't see it.' He was frantic, gripping my arm now, trying to pull himself up.  'They've stolen the rugs, they'll take it to the customs shed--'" (37)

The man seems half-delusional, but perhaps there is a threat of it being damaged or stolen.  So Theo takes it, and gets out and goes home and waits for his mother to return.  When she doesn't, he starts to worry, and makes a number of phone calls.  The events during these tense hours seem realistic.  Ultimately Theo ends up going to his friend Andy's house and lives with him and his family, the Barbours.  His mother's life was lost in the bombing, and his father had walked out on them a year earlier.

Then, his father comes to New York with his new girlfriend, and they take Theo back with them to Las Vegas, where he meets his best friend, Boris.  I would say that this was the turning point in the novel for me.  Even though the bombing seems like it makes for an exciting opening, I didn't get into this book until Theo's father shows up.  I also think I will stop there with the specifics and try to avoid spoilers.  Let's just say Theo ends up going back to New York to live with Hobie, who was the old man's business partner in an antique shop in the west village.  There was also a younger girl with the old man at the museum, Pippa, and she also visits Hobie from time-to-time.  Pippa is the object of Theo's affection throughout the novel.  Then, the novel skips ahead a few years to when Theo is in his early 20's, and has become Hobie's partner in the business.

Many people die in this novel and sometimes it feels like a plot device, but it is really one of the major themes of the novel.  Antiques are another.  The meaning of art is another.  Drugs are another.  When I say that it reminds me of my second novel, I am talking primarily about the Las Vegas section (Part 2, starting at Chapter 5, which is at page 211) and the friendship between Theo and Boris.  There is even a passage that comes straight out of it:

"And yet (this was the murky part, this was what bothered me) there had also been other, way more confusing and fucked-up nights, grappling around half-dressed, weak light sliding in from the bathroom and everything haloed and unstable without my glasses: hands on each other, rough and fast, kicked-over beers foaming on the carpet--fun and not that big of a deal when it was actually happening, more than worth it for the sharp gasp when my eyes rolled back  and I forgot about everything; but when we woke the next morning stomach-down and groaning on opposite sides of the bed it receded into an incoherence of backlit flickers, choppy and poorly lit like some experimental film, the unfamiliar twist of Boris's features fading from memory already and none of it with any more bearing on our actual lives than a dream.  We never spoke of it; it wasn't quite real; getting ready for school we threw shoes, splashed water at each other, chewed aspirin for our hangovers, laughed and joked around all the way to the bus stop.  I knew people would think the wrong thing if they knew, I didn't want anyone to find out and I knew Boris didn't either, but all the same he seemed so completely untroubled by it that I was fairly sure it was just a laugh, nothing to take seriously or get worked up about.  And yet, more than once, I had wondered if I should step up my nerve and say something: draw some kind of line, make things clear, just to make absolutely sure he didn't have the wrong idea.  But the moment had never come.  Now there was no point in speaking up and being awkward about the whole thing, though I scarcely took comfort in that fact." (300-301)

And then there is also the ending, where Theo languishes in a hotel room in Amsterdam, contemplating that no move is a right move, and that the only thing left to do is leave this world.  There are great moments of suicidal depression, sexual confusion and substance abuse/addiction, so of course I liked this book.  But yes, even though it won the Pulitzer Prize for 2014, I can't quite put it on the Best Books list because a lot of it just seems random and crazy.  Most especially, I found the whole "action sequence" in Amsterdam more confusing and tedious than not.  There is a lot of dialogue in this book, and much of the explanation in this situation comes from Boris, and I didn't fully understand what kind of scheme they were carrying out--but perhaps that thin layer of confusion was intentional on Tartt's part.

So I just read the original James Wood review in the New Yorker, and it's not the worst review in the world.  It does make the book sound like "children's literature for adults," but he also says a few nice things.  We actually agree that the writing in the Las Vegas section of the book is probably the strongest.  He also imagines whether the book would have been much better if the whole trope and theme of the "The Goldfinch" was excised, and focused instead on the emotional development of the main character.  And I think this is why it touched me, because that is essentially what I was trying to do with S/M.  But nothing really happens to that character that he doesn't bring on himself--nothing that traumatic, at least, compared to what Theo goes through.  There are a lot of similarities though, and it made me feel like, if we were writing about similar things, I was at least on the right track with a book as popular as this.  However, if there wasn't the trope of "The Goldfinch," then this book would be noticeably slimmer, and a completely different genre.  It would only be published because Donna Tartt seems like a total badass.  Put it this way: it made me want to read her other two novels.  I can't help but feel a huge soft spot for any book that has passages such as this:

"But depression wasn't the word.  This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time.  The writhing loathesomeness of the biological order.  Old age, sickness, death.  No escape for anyone.  Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil.  And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game.  Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms.  Oh, isn't he cute?  Awww.  Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital.  Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent.  People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were.  But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it.  It was rotten top to bottom.  Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home.  It was better never to have been born--never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything." (476-477)

Occasionally, The Goldfinch is great.  There is a kind of Catcher in the Rye feel to it, only on a much bigger scale, with a kind of noir edge.  It's a pretty original story, ridiculous and absurd though it may be.  I've never been very interested in antiques, nor did I want to read about antiques, which is maybe why I thought the book started slow.  But eventually, Tartt made it compelling enough to me that I could tolerate it.  Perhaps the writing seems clunky at times, and it could probably be a lot shorter if there was more of an economy of language, but one cannot deny the way it pulses forward, pushing the reader with it.

The general consensus seems to be that the ending is "overwrought."  That is, not the action that closes the story, but what comes after--and the endless philosophizing of Theo about the nature of art.  I think it's a section that's designed to be quoted on mediums like Flying Houses.  So I'll try to pick something out, and maybe it'll be a nice way to end the review.

Is there anything else that needs to be said?  I think most of the controversial debate about this book took place two years ago, but maybe a brief conversation I had with a friend puts it into perspective.  I hadn't spoken or seen this friend in almost five years, but he told me about how he read Moby Dick and was completely blown away by it and how I had to read it--so it will go on "the list."  But I also mentioned this book to him and he said, "What, is that by Donna Tartt?" It's not fair to say that this book could be mentioned in the same breath as Moby Dick, but a person appreciative of that classic tome is at least aware of the author of this one.  I'm sure this is a much easier book to get through than Melville's.  So maybe so-called millenials and other similarly-situated future individuals with warped attention spans will consider The Goldfinch their Moby Dick.  I can't say if this book will last down through the ages or not, but I would venture a guess that the movie (if it manages to come to fruition) will have a huge influence on that result.  It will make for a difficult adaptation, to be sure, but I would humbly volunteer myself to be part of the "crack team of writers" (if Tartt was not interested herself) to do it.  One cannot doubt that it will at least make for a "fun" movie, despite the extremely depressing subject matter.

And here is a representative sample of the last 20 pages:

"And as terrible as this is, I get it.  We can't choose what we want and don't want and that's the hard lonely truth.  Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it's going to kill us.  We can't escape who we are.  (One thing I'll have to say for my dad: at least he tried to want the sensible thing--my mother, the briefcase, me--before he completely went berserk and ran away from it.)
And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion.  Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic." (770)

I don't want to analyze this passage too deeply; suffice to say, it speaks to me as a writer.  After this, I trust that Donna Tartt's other two books are worth reading, and I look forward to checking them out one day.