See a Little Light - Bob Mould (with Michael Azzerad) (2011)

I first became aware of Bob Mould and Husker Du in late 2003.  I forget what spurred me to ask for Our Band Could Be Your Life for Christmas that year, but it had only been out for a couple years, and I tore through it rapidly.  My memory must be off because I recall also getting Mission of Burma's Vs. and Husker Du's New Day Rising on that day.  Whatever, it was basically my junior year of college that I got into them.  I had also been aware of them via the Dennis Cooper novel Try, in which the main character is a real fanboy.

Soon after New Day Rising, I got a burnt copy of Zen Arcade.  About a year later, after college, I picked up Flip Your Wig.  Not long after that, I saw Bob Mould play at the Metro in Chicago, on the Body of Song tour.  Of course during this time I was clamoring for all of the OBCBYL bands to reunite so I could see them live.  Mission of Burma did, and soon after so did Dinosaur Jr.  Husker Du never did, and apparently never will, even though rumors will always continue to swirl, such as last year when they decided to reissue some of their merchandising.  Bob Mould just plays some Husker Du songs live, and that will be as good as it gets.

The chapter from OBCBYL on Husker Du is one of the best.  Most chapters would make me want to listen to the band in question, if I hadn't heard them before.  Their music fit my taste: loud, fast, angry/anguished.  Perhaps more intriguing is that 2 of their 3 members were gay.  They were sort of a mysterious band to me, and I was really into them from about 2003 through 2007 (though I've always listened to their albums), then my ardor sort of faded.  I'd check out the last few Bob Mould albums, but a true reunion was the only thing that would have really excited me.

Enter Mould's latest album, released a little over a month ago in late March 2016.  It was probably the Pitchfork review that did it, reminding me that he had actually released a memoir.  I remember hearing about it when it was released, but I guess I was distracted in law school or whatever in 2011.  Anyways I put a hold on it at the CPL, and voila, it arrives quickly and now continues along our path of indie rock memoirs after Kim Gordon and Carrie Brownstein.   

It's hard to compare the three.  I don't want to say any single one is the best.  The most obvious thing is that Mould's is the biggest.  It's definitely the longest, around 380 pages, and it feels more revealing than the other two, even though one could not call either Gordon's or Brownstein's opaque.  Here is the best way I can differentiate them: theirs are more poetic and impressionistic; Mould's is more intricately detailed and informative.  One might say that Mould's is less edited, but the book is credited "with" Michael Azzerad, who is, of course, the author of OBCBYL.  So yeah, maybe it is a little more bloated, but I found pretty much the whole thing entertaining.  I guess him and Kim Gordon have been active in the music scene for roughly the same amount of time, but the kinds of songs they write are quite different, and that translates to different styles of memoir.  But enough with the comparisons--most people are not going to blindly pick up See a Little Light, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, or Girl in a Band unless they're already familiar with the artists.  All three are great.

If what was previously known about Husker Du was mysterious, then this book changes everything.  Mould is completely open and honest throughout the entire narrative, and he provides very detailed accounts of his entire musical journey, from his early upbringing, through Husker Du, his early solo work, Sugar, his shift to electronica, and back.  Perhaps sensing that he is kind of a unique figure in the larger scheme of gay rights, he writes quite eloquently on the topic.  Obviously, apart from interband tensions (only a small portion of which overlap with such themes), this is the major "drama" of the memoir.  Most of the passages I would like to quote, the most compelling portions of the text, are on this topic.

But also, like OBCBYL, this book made me rediscover some older material.  I had never really heard "Eight Miles High," a cover song that I would probably rank in their top 5.  I had never really explored Candy Apple Grey or Warehouse either--not even Metal Circus to be honest.  I had Land Speed Record but I still haven't really heard Everything Falls Apart.  As for Sugar, the only thing I previously heard was File Under: Easy Listening, which I bought in the summer of 2007 on my road trip through the U.S. from some random record store in the Midwest for a few bucks.  Copper Blue and Beaster seem to be the more definitive releases, and Mould mentions the Beaster track "JC Auto" several times, and yes, it is a really intense and awesome song.  Also interesting is that "Gift" from FU:EL, which I considered that album's best song, features a guitar pedal that Kevin Shields lent to Mould, the same one used on "You Made Me Realise."  Mould was also heavily influenced by Loveless at the time of its release.

Mould also moved around the country a lot.  Off the top of my head, he is born and raised in a small town in upstate New York, then moves to Minneapolis for college, and lives there until Husker Du becomes big enough that he can purchase a home in a rural suburb, where he lives through their end.  After that, he moves to New York City (being something of a pioneer in Williamsburg), then Austin, then back to NYC, then Washington D.C., and finally ends in San Francisco.  I feel like I'm missing a couple places in there, but whatever.

***

Anyways, I've finally returned from a weekend away in which I neglected to bring the book and reflected upon it in absentia.  I went to see my sister graduate from college and I brought way too much stuff for a two night stay as it was.  Here is one of the aforementioned promised quotes.

First, I would quote the whole opening of Chapter 17, but its not necessarily poetic.  It just tells the story of how Dennis Cooper interviewed him for Spin:

"The writer Dennis Cooper was a huge Husker Du fan.  He'd even touched on the band in one or two of his novels.  Now he was trying to build a name for himself as a journalist.  Dennis Cooper is gay.  So in the summer of 1994, Spin magazine asked Ryko, How about we send Dennis Cooper down to Austin to spend some time with Bob?
I knew what was about to happen.  This was to be the "Bob is gay" story, and I could do this the easy way or the hard way.  I wasn't thrilled about it for a number of reasons, beyond personal ones.  My first concerns were that this news would make it tough for my family, and that my fans and peers would recontextualize everything I had done with my work.  I also knew that the press was always going to write whatever they were going to write.  I could try to steer the story the way I wanted it to read, but ultimately, editorial always wins out.  It's the business."  (221)

Okay, I'm having trouble locating the one really poetic passage about how people might start interpreting the meaning of the songs differently after they found out he was gay.  He writes about how the themes of his music are universal and apply regardless of gender and sexuality.  Except for one instance, which comes amidst the description of side two of Zen Arcade:

"A lot of side two is my blind rage and self-hatred, my failed relationships, and my confusing sex with love.  That whole side was a blur while recording.  It sounds like someone is being pounded into a gigantic pile of broken glass.  Some of the words and ideas seem misguided now, but history has proven they're made of a lasting substance.  Gay people have always pegged "The Biggest Lie" as a gay song, and it is, seeing as it was informed by a sexual misadventure with a straight friend.  It was about me hoping an awkward physical tumble would turn into something more, and it not happening." (90)

Later, Mould mentions that the only part of his oeuvre that he will not revisit is this part of Zen Arcade and it is upsetting to think that we will never get to hear "I'll Never Forget You" performed live again.

Mould also tells the surprising story of how he briefly worked for the WCW in the late 90's.  He also fairly casually mentions how he started taking steroids after four weeks on the job.  He doesn't seem to mention stopping them, though one presumes that was the case.  He also tells the fairly insane story of the wrestler Chris Benoit from his perspective.

But it is the stories of his relationships with Michael and Kevin that are ultimately some of the most painful:

"I had been faithful to Mike, faithful to Kevin, and now I was single.  Everything was open and new.  I'd been unhitched for one month in the last twenty-one years.  Now I was learning the ropes of dating and casual sex in D,C.  I had my freedom, but I knew I had to be somewhat cautious.  I said to Rich, keep an eye on me and tell me if I start acting stupid.  I don't think I ever got too crazy." (333)

The ending of the book pretty much tells the story of how he never really embraced the gay community or the gay lifestyle until this period in his life.  The story of how he meets up with another gay blogger is "both comical and sad" and quite endearing, such as his disappointment with the dude being heavier than his pictures looked, but still being intimate despite a few other sketchy details.

Along the way there are some pretty good stories about other indie rock luminaries, and reflections on what it means to be "out" and his life's work (up to age 50).  He ends the book by saying that it has been a pretty good first 50 years and he is excited for what is to come.

Are you jealous?

Sure.  After reading this book, try and tell me that you could have a more interesting and entertaining life.  Not necessarily everyone wants and interesting and entertaining life, and I'm sure many would not want to have the experiences Mould has had.  The book is brimming with trauma, but I suppose that's the sort of material that makes for the best writing.

Take, for example, people who would never smoke:

"I started smoking a pack a day at the beginning of college, and by the end, I was up to three packs a day.  Smoking had become both the centerpiece and timepiece of my life.  Every cigarette was six minutes long, and I could practically mark out the whole day with smoking, like a sundial.  Six minutes on, nine minutes off.  Repeat sixty times a day.  It was like playing Scrabble: when it's your turn, you turn over the egg timer and start thinking.  I have an innate sense of time, but smoking was this additional timekeeper, like a wristwatch." (258)

You see, some people smoke and are just lazy, and other people that smoke are like super successful and amazing.  In short, while I could never say there is any "right" way to smoke, using it as a timekeeper through sporadic bursts of energy sounds nice in theory, but I don't think that's normally the way it is in practice.  Mould quits when he is 37, and also starts to make other changes in his life.  It's the focus on these kind of personal details that make this memoir so well-rounded.

There is not much more to say except that Mould is playing the Metro again, two days from now!  I just found this out a day or two ago.  Though it is sold out, I may try to go.  His newest album is very good, as have been his last few.  I'd imagine he can build a pretty strong setlist with his entire discography.  So, I guess this book came around at the perfect time for me, just in time to remind me that I should go.

City on Fire - Garth Risk Hallberg (2015)

I first heard about City on Fire on NPR.  Usually I listen to NPR when I drive out to courthouses in collar counties, so this must have been in August or later of last year.  (Update: I believe that day was October 20, 2015, a.k.a. the Day Before Back to the Future Day, or the Day Before the Cubs Would Not Win the World Series Day, due to this.) It had just come out, with a huge buzz attached.  I had no immediate interest to read it, because in fact I had just re-read Please Kill Me and the idea of reading about a fictional group in the same milieu struck me as dull: what fun is it when it's populated by characters we don't recognize?  Ragtime and Underworld successfully blended recognizable personas into their narratives--and yeah, even though Hallberg doesn't reference DeLillo in his acknowledgements at the end, this is basically an alternate version of that heavy tome about New York in the 70's (mostly).  Some remark that it owes a debt to The Bonfire of Vanities and other works by Tom Wolfe, an author I have never read but have always been mildly curious about (in fact my sister recommended that very volume to me recently).

Then, the Christmas season rolled around and my parents asked me to send a letter to Santa to them.  I had been requested in the comments to the review of Modern Romance to consider City on Fire or Book of Numbers and I gave Santa the choice.  On Christmas morning I felt a hardcover heavy gift and unwrapped it to find this.  

I started reading it January 9, 2016, and took brief breaks to read and review Why We Write about Ourselves and Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl.  This book lurked in the background.  And I was writing the review of Just Kids as I began City on Fire, and will now be reading M Train as I write the review of City on Fire.  For some reason, this feels a little too close for comfort:

"Two days before the shooting, Samantha dreamed of Patti Smith.  She herself was in a pitch-black room somewhere.  She could not see the walls or reach them--she was unable to move--but the room felt small.  And there was a window nearby, she sensed, a vista of mountains and seas and tiny humans paddling around in canoes and just generally going about their business, if only she could see it.  And then Patti appeared above her in a caul of low blue wattage and informed her that a time was coming when she would have to choose." (739)

So it took me about two months, and I really don't read all that often--just mainly at lunch and on the train ride home and sometimes before bed.  If I'm taking more time out to read something than that, it usually means I really like it.  In this case, I liked it, but I also was pressed to finish it because I don't think I'll be able to renew M Train and need to finish and review that in the next three weeks.  So I was trying to make progress.  

Recently a friend of mine posted on Facebook to ask if he should read Infinite Jest and another friend proposed a 100 page test to determine if a book was worth reading.  It made me think of this.  I couldn't finish IJ and tried twice.  City on Fire is significantly easier reading.  It has relatively broad appeal, but it might fail the 100 page test.  This is mainly because it operates with a cast of characters that doesn't fully coalesce for several hundred more pages.  Still, the writing is engaging, and once one finishes it, somewhat awe-inspiring.  Don't misunderstand--this will not be named to the Best Books of Flying Houses--but it's certainly in the "also ran" category with that Brownstein memoir read concurrently.  Then again, this book is much more entertaining than the Raymond Carver biography.  Basically, Hallberg establishes himself right out of the gate as an Ambitious Writer.  I actually think this would be a much better book if it were about 300 pages shorter, but in spite of some annoying qualities, one must respect the sheer gesture.  This is much much more than a rehash of Please Kill Me.

***

What is the plot of this book?  Well, it opens on William and Mercer, a gay couple, white 33-year-old and black 24-year-old, moving a Christmas tree down a block in a shopping cart.  William is a former heroin addict and Mercer is a high school English teacher at an all-girl's school.  It then shifts to Regan, (William's sister) and her husband Keith, and their two kids, Will and Cate.  Regan and Keith are separated as the novel opens, around Christmas--and here I should mention a unique feature of this book: it shifts around in time a lot.  As in, each new section seems to begin at some point further back in the past.  Or rather, the chapters alternate in time.  Effectively, there is a "present" part of the book, a "past" part, and a "future" part (which really could be one of the best parts about the entire book, but feels oddly underdeveloped, or tacked on).  The "present" encompasses December 1976 through July 1977 (New Year's Eve and the night of the NYC Blackout serve as bookends).  The "past" primarily concerns 1959 - 1976, and the "future" concerns 1980 - 2004.

William and Regan are the children of a corporate scion, heirs to a fortune.  William used to be in a punk band called Ex Post Facto, which was "taken over" by an imitator known as Nicky Chaos.  At certain points, there is reference to a t-shirt that reads "Please Kill Me," but this band does not sound at all like Richard Hell and the Voidoids.  A number of young people have gotten into the punk scene, and one of them is Samantha, who lives on Long Island.  She is the daughter of a "fireworker," which supplies one of the novels primary motifs.  She is also friends with Charlie, who is adopted but raised Jewish by his parents, and later reads the Bible and establishes himself as a "prophet."  Charlie is in love with Samantha, but in practice they are "best friends."  They go to a show on New Year's Eve and meet other band members/groupies D.T. (Delirium Tremens), Solomon Grungy and Sewer Girl.  In a way, these other band members feel oddly cliched or underdeveloped--but I really shouldn't complain about underdeveloped characters in a 900+ page book.

But then, Samantha has to go, and Charlie later plans to meet her at 72nd St just before midnight.  Meanwhile, nearby on the upper west side, Regan is at her family's lavish annual ball, feeling awkward, and runs into Mercer, who is also feeling awkward and crashing the ball as a way of finding William, who has walked out and disappeared after a small fight.  It occurs to me that Mercer spends way too much of this novel trying to find William.

William and Regan's father, also named William, is being held over in Chicago because of "bad weather," so he cannot attend the party.  His first wife passed away, and he remarried Felicia.  Her brother, Amory, is soon invited into William's family business.  Amory is sort of a sinister character and feels more cartoonish than the rest.  Note: I have never seen a character named Amory anywhere else except here, and I'd prefer that future authors do not use the name for villains.

Now something happens this evening in Central Park--there is a shooting.  One of the characters (it's really not a spoiler to say who, but I will keep mum) ends up spending the majority of this novel on life support in Beth Israel Hospital, and one of the most unsatisfying elements of the ending is the ambiguity of their fate.  Perhaps another reader could elucidate the intended effect, or probable truth.

This shooting is so compelling that a journalist begins investigating all of the involved characters.  This journalist later meets up with his neighbor, a Vietnamese-American girl named Jenny, and share nightly whiskey nightcaps.  Jenny works for Bruno, an art gallery owner and dealer, who has been something of a mentor and protector of William.

I think I've covered most of the characters.  At this point I must comment, as I often do, that this also reminded me of my first novel, Daylight Savings Time.  There is a cast of characters with interlocking narratives and coincidences.  It concerns a relatively specific time and place.  One of the characters is heir to a mini-fortune and has no anxieties or insecurities about his lack of a professional life.  There are drug sequences.  And both include a fantasy about being interviewed by The Paris Review.  All comparisons aside, City on Fire is more ambitious and much better.

***

I forgot one more character: the polio-stricken NYPD detective that is friends with the journalist.  It's fair to say that some characters come across more strongly than others, and Pulaski initially interviews Mercer after he discovers the shooting victim.  Then he kind of fades out of the narrative for a while and later gets introduced as one of the characters that get "first personish-third person" treatment.  The novel only breaks into first person when Will narrates.  That feels like a bit of a spoiler, so I'm sorry, but part of the fun of this novel is trying to figure out how everything is going to end, or who that person was in the opening pages talking about their cell phone vibrating.

One reviewer commented that most readers will identify with one character most strongly, if not all of them.  For him, it was Charlie.  And I've got to admit, I found Charlie's chapters oddly tedious at first.  To me, they were the most cliche.  However, as it went on, I grew to like them, and maybe that is just because Charlie is one of the few characters that undergoes something of a transformation in the novel.  Many of the characters change, but he is the only one that transforms.  And I did find one passage from one of his chapters notably beautiful, the kind of writing that I've sometimes endeavored to produce.

But I've just re-read that segment (from pages 576-579), which is basically when he kisses Sam for the first time, under kind of gross circumstances, and none of the passages are especially beautiful.  I guess what I meant was, the whole atmosphere of the scene, as it takes place on July 4, 1976, the bi-centennial, and the setting is just sort of perfect.

Also, I've re-read the last chapter discussing the shooting victim, and it appears that there is something of a definitive resolution.  I'm surprised I missed it the first time, but Hallberg does have his way of obfuscating that can sometimes seem like he is just showing off his vocabulary.  Again the book could be a lot shorter with a fair amount of fluffy stuff taken out, but it doesn't feel that bloated due to its large cast of characters.  Many of the same events get repeated over and over again, and retold from different perspectives.  To some this may seem tedious, and it can be, but on balance remains entertaining.

***

Another one of my friends posted a link to the "50 Most Unacceptable Sentences in City on Fire" and I glanced at it when I was still in the first couple hundred pages.  A couple other links showed up on Facebook beneath it, like one from the NY Post that rips this novel to shreds.  The negative reviews have a point, but the NY Post gets it wrong.  They make fun of Hallberg for listening to Billy Joel instead of the Ramones or Television, but there's nothing wrong with Billy Joel!  "Captain Jack" was pretty much my soundtrack to NYC in late 2001.

Clearly there are flaws in the novel, and there are some really pretentious sentences.  But on the whole, the book is pretty down-to-earth.  It's readable.  It's not a challenge like IJ.  A couple critics have made comparisons to Jonathan Franzen and something about the tone did remind me a lot of The Corrections (read almost a year ago, sad!).  I think the film rights have already been sold and an HBO Series may or may not be in the cards, and another review focused on how Hallberg's writing was "televisual" and influenced by The Wire and seemingly made to be adapted.  I would watch the show, and I think the show would be one of those that has the potential to eclipse its written precursor.

Final point: I think this book grows on you.  It can be a little awkward at the beginning, but by the end, you will probably be invested in the characters and know them better than most people you know in real life.  And if you have lived in NYC, it will probably feature a scene close to your past neighborhood(s).  "You can usually find a cab up on Clinton," (116) rang true to me, at least in 2011.

And with several of the characters as artists, Hallberg uses the novel as something of a mirror to the work created by his characters:

"It was as if William Hamilton-Sweeney, despite to her knowledge never having sold so much as a painting, had been trying to re-create the face of the entire city, right here in this attic.  She couldn't tell if it was good, exactly, but no one could say it wasn't ambitious." (667)

Hallberg is only a few years older than me, so he couldn't have firsthand knowledge of the way the city felt in 1977, but it feels pretty real.  

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: a memoir - Carrie Brownstein (2015)

I first became aware of Carrie Brownstein and Sleater-Kinney when I was a sophomore in college, back when they were touring behind One Beat.  There were a couple girls I met that burned me a copy of Dig Me Out and let me accompany to them to the show they played at Irving Plaza, one of a series of NYU concerts that cost $5 or $10 per ticket.  I would see them several times over the next few years, and collect all of their albums (except their first).  I kind of had a crush on Carrie Brownstein when I saw them, though people seemed to intimate that she wouldn't necessarily appreciate that crush.  I got my hair cut in the spring semester of my sophomore year and a friend remarked that I looked like "that girl from Sleater-Kinney" (that I presumed wasn't Corin Tucker due to our facial features).  I just assumed that Carrie Brownstein was old, because they had been together for so long.  I come to find out that she was younger than I am now when they went on their hiatus in 2006.  She's like, barely older than me (at least to me--and maybe I'm alone, except for Nicki Minaj, when I say that '06 feels like yesterday), may or may not be single, and has one of the greatest and most unique catalogs of any rock band in history under her belt, and what, six seasons of a seminal sketch comedy show?  She's like, perfect.  Whatever she is on, I want to be on.

I'm only not naming this book one of the Best Books of Flying Houses because I didn't bestow that recognition upon Kim Gordon's Girl in a  Band.  Both deserve to be on the list, but in a way they are too easy: they both had such incredible stories to tell that the books must have written themselves, to an extent.  I feel a little dirty saying this, particularly in light of my previous review of an anthology of the genre, but I think memoirs are easier to write than fiction--except for the requisite "bloodletting" that they generally require.  All the source material is there before you; all you need to do is to decide where to start, where to end, and what to leave out.  You don't need to think up names for characters, or build whole mythologies out of imaginary people.  Having said that, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl is probably better written than Girl in a Band, but Kim Gordon has her own separate barometer of authenticity or credibility that renders it more powerful.  Gordon is certainly vulnerable and confessional in hers; Brownstein opens up a lot in hers, but keeps most of her ex-lovers anonymous.  Sonic Youth is a bit more of an institution than Sleater-Kinney--at least, it was, when it broke up, before Sleater-Kinney came back.  Now, who knows, Kim was nearly 60 when Sonic Youth folded, so if Sleater-Kinney goes on another ten or fifteen years, then I would say they're of equal cultural import.  Frankly, though I love Sonic Youth deeply and dearly, so much that they must be included if ever asked to name my top five favorite bands, Sleater-Kinney has a stronger and more consistent catalog, and albums that are generally more solid from top to bottom.  I like them all--except maybe for The Hot Rock--I mean, I like The Hot Rock, I'd prefer the album to music by most other bands, but it's just my least favorite by them.  Maybe the self-titled is my least favorite because I don't have it on my iPod, but I actually don't have No Cities to Love on it (owing mostly to my own cheapness and reliance on Spotify and my unwillingness to load up my precariously aged device), though that album sits comfortably alongside their best work, which, to my estimation, includes The Woods and One Beat.  I love Dig Me Out and Call the Doctor, and All Hands on the Bad One to a slightly lesser degree, and The Hot Rock to a slightly less degree than that--but they're just a band that seems to get better with each new album they release.  I saw them about a year ago in Chicago and they were as good as they've ever been.  I seriously hope they come back every few years or so with new music, but another longer hiatus seems inevitable, particularly after reading about the exhaustion that Brownstein recounts occurring after each album and tour cycle.

So I love the music and I love her work on "Portlandia."  Do you really think I would say this is a bad book?

For a while near the end, I thought she was getting a little bit boring, writing about her pets.  I was like, oh, I wrote about my pets in my memoir, so that's normal.  Regardless, just writing about your pets can sometimes be boring.  However, she writes about her pets, in this segment, to ridiculously powerful effect, to the point that it is one of the most heartbreaking moments of the entire book.  There's a quote on the back from Miranda July, whom I learned was a friend and collaborator of Brownstein's in their earlier days (and more recently if I'm not mistaken)--Brownstein admits at one point that they both wondered if they should be together--as well as a noteworthy artist herself.  Me and You and Everyone We Know is a modern indie classic, and she also has a pretty good book of short stories, from what I've read.  July writes, as the last sentence in her blurb, "I wept."  I wonder if this story about her pets instigated those emotions.

Make no mistake, this is a great book.  It's a must read for Sleater-Kinney fans and musicians everywhere.  But it takes a really incredible memoir (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, for example) to make the Best Books list.  Brownstein is a terrific writer, but I must admit that she doesn't seem to employ the "be harder on myself than anyone else" rule of memoir-writing.  Now she might say, "Come on, I'm pretty hard of myself a lot here!" And truthfully, she is pretty hard on herself a lot of the time.  But she still could have gone harder, more embarrassing, more vulnerable, more revealing.  This is a personal preference for memoir writers, and I totally understand not wanting to give out the most painful, secret, unflattering memories one has of oneself, but it's my personal preference that memoirs are as honest and unflinching as possible.  I would never say this memoir is dishonest in any way, shape or form, but I would have liked to have known more about Brownstein's personal feelings on bisexuality.  I believe she identifies as bi, though in practice mostly sees women, and she keeps a fair number of her exes anonymous and gender neutral.  It would be a generous act, if somewhat unsettling, for a writer to open up about such personally confounding matters.  Brownstein certainly describes her first moments "experimenting," but never really addresses the "choice" that's implicit in identifying as bisexual.  That would be something that I just personally would like to read.

It's also pretty much where my criticism stops, because even in that last paragraph, I had to qualify every blanket statement I made about this book.  It took me about a week to read this book, and I loved most every minute of it.  If you go purely by ease of reading and entertainment and occasional moments of profundity, this book should definitely be on the Best Books list.  It's only out of my snobbishness towards memoirs that it's not.

***

Carrie Brownstein grew up in the suburbs outside of Seattle--mostly Redmond, WA.  At this point I must make another personal statement: Brownstein's childhood memories are primarily set in the 1980's, and as such feel very close to mine.  At least in the sense that, I had three older siblings who were closer in age to her, so we had some Cabbage Patch Dolls in our home.  Our father also went to Australia on business and brought back a few things.  And we were also in the suburbs of a big city and we also had a dog named Buffy.  The similarities pretty much end there, though.  Brownstein had one younger sister.  Her parent's marriage broke up while she was in high school, her mother suffering from anorexia nervosa and her father suffering from repressed homosexual feelings.  These are delicately detailed in the third and fourth chapters "Disappearance" and "No Normal."

These very personal chapters showcase Brownstein's exemplary talent for writing (as if she needed to be talented at one more thing).  Earlier I've accused her of not being hard enough on herself in this book, but I want to say something else to tip the balance: she is extremely modest in this book.  She never once even seems to admit that she is a good musician, guitarist, songwriter, performer--anything.  Sometimes she admits that Sleater-Kinney is a very good band, but she is always laying the praise on Corin and Janet (in truth, Sleater-Kinney is such a good band because all three of them--like, say, Shellac--are ferocious players).  In writing about her mother's disease and her father's guarded lifestyle, she exhibits tenderness, strength, empathy, and realness.  She doesn't pity them for their troubles and she is very level-headed about she handles them.  She laments that her family was not "together" throughout most of her life, but she really seems like one of the best sisters or children anyone could have.  She learned from these troubles and became a stronger person for it.  (There could be more details about exactly what happened with her mother leaving the family--she briefly mentions staying at her house with her 2nd husband during the recording of Dig Me Out, I think--but I'm not going to push that criticism too hard.)

Most of this book, however, is about Sleater-Kinney.  And while the details about their earlier records are interesting (I had no idea they started the band in Australia, and the chapter about that is super weird--I don't know how they survived in the early part of their career, and I would have liked to see a few more paragraphs devoted to their ostensible poverty), it is really the material on the later stuff that is the most compelling.  Because despite their steady growth, they were never "really big" until the end, when they opened for Pearl Jam on the One Beat tour and when they finished up with The Woods.  When they got really big, Brownstein seemed more prone to depression, which seems odd but makes sense in a "Kurt Cobain kind of way" (which she references, and must reference, as this book is also thoroughly a document of the Pacific Northwest scene, K Records, Olympia, Seattle, Portland, grunge and riot grrl).  In fact, the book opens up in a kind of "teaser chapter" (not unlike Girl in a Band) about the shingles she developed on The Woods tour and her increasing frustrations with the band.  It's sort of unbelievable that anyone making what must have been pretty good money, doing what they love, could ever be unhappy with their situation, but Brownstein convincingly portrays the Big Picture and why it wasn't working for them (primarily due, it seems, to Tucker wanting to be a good mother to her children, which Brownstein completely understands).

Here is one example of how Brownstein takes this memoir to another level--her ability to write like a writer:

"The ways that oddity and detachment intersected in the family might best be summed up in the story of the family dog.  Buffy, a forty-pound golden retriever mix we adopted from the pound when I was six and my sister was three, had been smothered with love in her youth.  Buffy, for whom we took a pet first-aid class in order to learn how to be responsible owners, who was the muse for my grade-school poetry exercises ('Buffy is fluffy!'), our sidekick for picnics and outings, on the sidelines for soccer games, and the subject most featured in my first roll of film--posing on my baby blanket and wearing sunglasses--after I was given a camera for my birthday.  Buffy, who followed us around the cul-de-sacs while we engaged in dirt clod fights with the neighbor kids, and trotted after us while we rode Big Wheels and eventually bikes.  Buffy, who suffered the sting of the archaic idea that you could punish a dog by smacking it on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper and whose tail was run over by my mother as she backed the car out of the driveway.  And Buffy, turned back into a stray in her own home on account of the rest of us surrendering to emptiness, drifting away from anything we could call familiar, her skin itching and inflamed, covered with sores and bites, like tattoos, like skywriting, screaming with redness, as if to say Please, please pet me!  But we didn't.  When we decided to put her down, not because she was sick but because she was old and neglected--a remnant of a family we no longer recognized--my father asked my sister to do it.  My sister was sixteen.  She drove the dog to the vent one day after school by herself.  No one else said good-bye." (34-35)

And then beneath that is a hilarious picture of Brownstein as a young girl with Buffy and a Cabbage Patch Doll.  It was moments such as this that reminded me of my earliest memories from the mid-to-late 80's.  The only thing that would have made that paragraph more literary is if the word "the" had been excised before "cul-de-sacs."  Brownstein may as well write a novel whenever Portlandia wraps.

There are great little references to other musicians in this book.  One of my favorites involves Jeremy Enigk, because he's relatively obscure, but not to those that understand what "emo" really means.  I guess I was surprised to read that he was pretty popular.  There is also this shocking anecdote about tour bus listening:

"We smoked cigarettes and weed, when available, ate copious amounts of chocolate and cheese, and fell asleep mostly tipsy if not outright drunk.  On one long drive, in a fit of giddiness and in the spirit of sisterhood and spreading cheer, Corin and I convinced Janet to throw a mixtape out of the van window.  It was a cassette she'd been listening to nonstop, made for her by a friend, a boy she was trying to no longer have a crush on.  That boy was Elliott Smith.  I still think about that tape, flung, and how I urged it to be so.  Gone." (147)

Harsh!  Finally, there is a priceless one about Jack White near the very end.  It's not really worth excerpting, just a funny story.  There is also a funny story about Sleater-Kinney's groupies, or lack thereof.  Brownstein does open up about her personal life here, and it is quite endearing to read about trying to maintain a relationship while on tour.  We will end with another extremely literary passage, this one in the fashionable 2nd person:

"Here's one way not to go about diminishing the distance: Obsessively call your girlfriend, who is eleven years older than you, crying and telling her you hate being on tour.  Rack up more than $1,000 in pre-cellphone calling card fees on various payphones because you are hopelessly in love, willing to ditch everything for this person, and paranoid that she will go back to dating men while you are away.  Get so worried that you walk into a family-run restaurant--perhaps the only restaurant--in the town of Lokev, Slovenia (population: around 1,000), ask to borrow their cordless phone, and call your girlfriend some more (sticking them with an international long-distance bill).  Write lugubrious, handwritten love letters that compare thee to a summer's day.  Drive your bandmates crazy by quoting your older girlfriend all the time and only reading books or listening to music that she has recommended.  Now your bandmates are practically begging you to dump her.  But, guess what, she dumps you.  Of course she does.  This girlfriend, who also plays music but who is not as successful as you in this field, you think she wants to hear how sad you are to have an album that is blowing up?!  She doesn't.  Months later you are still angry and confused and for the first time very, very heartbroken.  You freak out and drive to her house one morning and place a bag containing every letter she ever wrote you on her doorstep.  Then you write songs for what will become The Hot Rock, songs about a love that is so airless, it's suffocating.  Songs about wanting to steal your heart back from someone you never feel deserved it.  And thus begins a cycle, of falling in love and then getting hurt, or hurting someone else by falling out of love with them.  About trying to maintain closeness despite geographical disparities, then finding inspiration from all the ways you feel splintered and separate, hurt and broken.  So, this is one version, and not a pretty one, of being young and in a band and trying to be in a relationship.  This is the version in which being gone and busy eats at you because you are scared of being left even though you are the one who is technically always leaving." (151-152)

You should read this book, even if you've never heard of Sleater-Kinney.  You will not be disappointed.