New Book Review: Juggalo: Insane Clown Posse and the World They Made by Steve Miller

Juggalo: Insane Clown Posse and the World They Made by Steve Miller. The cover art may be the  best part.

New Book Review:
Juggalo: Insane Clown Posse and the World They Made
 by Steve Miller
Publication date is July 12th, 2016
Da Capo Press
(PURCHASE ON AMAZON)

   The Insane Clown Posse and their fans, called Juggalos, make occasional entrances into the general popular culture.  They are know for their yearly festival, The Gathering, for being designated as a gang by the FBI (and fighting back) and for their horror-clown aesthetic.   They also make music, and run their own record label, :Psychopathic Records, which has spawned it's own universe of Inane Clown Posse fellow-travelers.  Even a neutral observer would have to say that the Juggalo sub-culture spawned by the Insane Clown Posse rates low on any scale of cultural sophistication, and high on the actual constituent elements of what makes a cohesive subculture:  shared values, physical proximity to one another and, most importantly, alienation from the dominant popular culture.

  It's impossible to over-state the importance of that last strand: alienation from the dominant popular culture.  Being a Juggalo, as revealed by the many interviews with the Artists themselves, employees and journalists who have covered the Juggalos in the national print/online media world, is very much an us vs. them mentality.   In this way, Juggalo: Insane Clown Posse and the World They Made made me think of the rise of Donald Trump and his appeal to supporters.  One astonishing difference, or perhaps, not at all astonishing difference, is the utter lack of any political element to the Juggalos and Insane Clown Posse.  You would think from the level of intense scrutiny paid by law enforcement and the demeaning stereotypes foisted upon Juggalos by the mainstream media that they were terrorists, or at least fascists, or at least racists, but the Juggalos seem to be none of these things.

   Miller takes care portraying the many Juggalos who are just plain folks, often with skilled tech service/industry type jobs, and families. Unfortunately, more time is spent detailing the various travails and conflicts between Insane Clown Posse and the world at large, most memorably their tussle, ongoing, with the FBI over their designation as a criminal street game.  A decision that, on it's face, seem incomprehensible to anyone with even a loose knowledge of Juggalo culture and music, seems even  more bizarre after reading the source material for the underlying decision.  Surely, law enforcement in versed in street gang culture would recognize the difference between Juggalos and a criminal street gang?  Sadly, no.

   There are many aspects of the Insane Clown Posse and Juggalo culture that are easy to deem as admirable, regardless of how you feel about the music.  The worth ethic, for one.  The ability to build a DIY label operation, for a second.  And, at some level, the ingenuity that it took for a couple of nowhere nobodies to create an entire eschatology and what is essentially an ideology, or at least a "way of life" for adherents.

 In a tantalizing chapter, Miller, talks to a Juggalo who has actually started a church.  One would think, considering the tax implications, that this is something Violent J and Shaggy Too Dope would at least be contemplating at this point.  I think probably the hang up is that they are both actually practicing Christians, something I gleaned not from this book, which skirts the awkward reality that both Violent J and Shaggy Too Dope are Middle Aged dads, with sons serving in the United States military.

  The downside to this book is the writing style, which is sub-New Yorker prose.  Perhaps the style is calculated to appeal to Juggalos themselves, though, and I say this with all due respect, it's hard to imagine many of the people profiled in this book picking up one themselves to read.

Book Review: The Trees (2016) by Ali Shaw

The Trees by Ali Shaw,  published in paperback on August 2nd, 2016

Book Review:
The Trees (2016)
by Ali Shaw
Paperback edition published on August 2nd, 2016
Published by Bloomsbury USA
(Buy Hardcover version on Amazon)


   Ali Shaw is a young English novelist.  He lives and works in Oxford.  The Trees is his third novel, coming after The Girl With Glass Feet (2011), which was lauded as the top debut novel by the Desmond Elliot Prize.  He followed The Girl With Glass Feet with The Man Who Rained (2013). All three books combine elements of magical realism and fairy tale's with standard Anglo-American characters dealing with difficult emotional issues made worse by circumstance.

  In The Trees, that circumstance is a Day-of-the-Triffids-meets-The-Road style plant uprising.  In a single night, global civilization is utterly annihilated, and the survivors are left to make their way in a world that is fairly benign when compared to say, the nightmarish dystopias of The Road and The Walking Dead, but worse than a world where one can pop down to the Tesco for a rotisserie chicken.  Adrien Young, the married, childless protagonist is very much a pop down to the Tesco for a rotisserie chicken type of guy.  On the night of the tree uprising-apocalypse, he is winding up a year of "searching for himself" at the behest of his to-good-for-him wife, currently on a work trip to Ireland.
 
 He quickly hooks up with a troupe of survivors, a hippie single mom and her tech savvy mom and a young Japanese tourist who happens to be aces with a slingshot. They have episodic adventures of the sort one might expect in a book of this type, and there is also a larger plot concerning Adrien and his destiny.  The most unusual and distinctive aspect of The Trees is the creation of Adrien as not an anti-hero but a non-hero, a literary equivalent of Seinfeld's George Costanza, thrust into the post-apocalypse world.

  At 500 pages in length, The Trees isn't exactly a challenging read, but it's not something you can take down in a weekend.  It is extremely, extremely easy to see this work being adapted either for English or American TV or Film.   It's long enough to warrant a series on television, but compact enough to be turned into a stand alone feature film.  Given the popularity for apocalyptic themes in popular culture, such a move would be expected.

  Shaw successfully skirts the line between adult subject matter and writing something that sophisticated adolescents can enjoy.  There are moments of graphic violence, but nothing more upsetting than anything on television today (and significantly less violent than comparable cross-media properties like Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead.
  

Time: A Vocabulary of the Present edited by Amy Elias and Joel Burges

Book Review
Time: A Vocabulary of the Present
edited by Amy Elias and Joel Burges
Published in August, 2016
by New York University Press

   It's true, I like to dabble in what you might call "critical theory."   I'm not a huge fan of French post-modernist philosophers, but there is no denying that they have swayed the majority of people who talk about cutting edge philosophical/social science type theories in the American University system.  So I went into Time: A Vocabulary of the Present expecting to see many, many, many references to German and French philosophers who wrote in the mid to late 20th century.  I was not disappointed.  Time: A Vocabulary of the Present is an up-to-date anthology of recent academic theorizing about the role of time inside and outside the academy, but heavy on theory that is only of interest to people with academic level interest in the subject ("Time Studies.")

  The introduction, Time Studies Today, by the editors, lays out the contours of the time studies field.  It's part French post-modern philosophy, partly a continuation of the post-post-modern "linguistic" and "spatial" turns in cultural studies and partly a product of cultural studies itself.   Time: A Vocabulary of the Present is divided into three parts.  Part I, Time as History: Periodizing Time has five paired chapter.  Each chapter is a different opposition illustrating an aspect of time.  So,  Past/Future, Extinction/Adaptation, Modern/Altermodern, Obsolescence/Innovation, and Anticipation/Unexpected.   Editor Amy Elias' essay on Past/Future, with an informative discussion of "retro futurism" was a stand out in this portion of the book.

    Elias accurately describes the paradoxical impact of the internet, "in the analogue era, everyday life moved slowly...but the culture as a whole felt like it was surging forward.  In the digital present, everyday life consists of hyper-acceleration and near instantaneity...but on the macro-cultural level things feel static and stalled.  We have this paradoxical combination and standstill.  This combination is what I call "techno duration" and in it, the present spreads like a tsunami wave over the past."

    From there, Elias builds up the concept of "retro-futurism" where we imagine an alternative future from an imaginary past.  Retro futurism is at the heart of many cultural trends of the recent past and present, so possessing a theoretical background on the development of retro futurism, provided by Elias in the course of her essay, is well taken.

   Part II of Time: A Vocabulary of the Past is Time as Calculation: Measuring Time.  Here, Time Studies is on the more familiar ground of horology (the study of time measurement with watches and clocks.)   Here, the pairings consciously acknowledge this theoretical pre-history, Clock/Lived, Synchronic/Anachronic, Human/Planetary, Serial/Simultaneous, Emergency/Everyday, Labor/Leisure,  Real/Quality.   The third and final part of Time is Time as Culture: Mediating Time.   This third part if firmly derived from the field of cultural studies.  References to comic books and modern art abound.

  The footnotes and bibliographical essays are both excellent and this book is worth acquiring simply for the up to date reference notes, if you are interested in the field of time studies in any serious way.

The Man with the Compound Eyes (2014) by Wu Ming-Yi

Book review
The Man with the Compound Eyes (2014)
by Wu Ming-Yi

      What about contemporary literature?  I'm getting there.  A notable absence from the 1001 Books list is anything originally written in Chinese.  The Man with the Compound Eyes was Yi's first work of fiction translated into English, but he's been writing fiction and non-fiction in Chinese for fifteen years.   Yi is from Taiwan, and The Man with the Compound Eyes is memorably set on the East coast of Taiwan, a region little known in the West.  Eastern coastal Taiwan is populated by a mix of Taiwanaiese born Han Chinese and different Taiwanese aboriginal peoples.  Specifically, the Amis and Bunun both figure prominently.

   Located someplace between Latin American style magical realism and futuristic speculative fiction, the plot combines intercultural romance, the disastrous consequences of climate change on coastal communities and the great "trash vortex" in the Pacific ocean.  The translation by Darryl Sterk does an excellent job of maintaining the idiomatic characteristics of Yi's text.

   The heart of The Man with the Compound Eyes, like great many novels, tells the story human emotions in some interesting place.  The eastern coast of Taiwan is interesting as a setting, as are the various speculative/science fiction/magical realism touches.  It all combines in memorable fashion.

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Show Review: Stagecoach 2015 (4/28/15)

Show Review: Way Over Yonder Fest Day 1 (9/27/14)

Museum Review: Country Music Hall of Fame (5/21/14)

Stagecoach 2014:  Of beer, trucks & cut-offs and the sublime (4/28/14)

Book Review Meeting Jimmie Rodgers by Barry Mazor (4/15/14)

Book Review: The Roots of Texas Music edited by Lawrence Clayton and Joe Specht (9/13/11)

Show Review: Willie Nelson's Country Showdown (6/24/11)

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Buck Owens and the Bakersfield Sound (5/23/11)

Movie Review: Earl Scruggs- Bluegrass Legend (7/27/10)

Book Review: That Selling Sound by Diane Pecknold (6/5/10)

Book Review: Screamin' Jay Hawkins All Time Hits by Mark Binelli

Screamin' Jay Hawkins All Time Hitts by Mark Binelli comes out on May 3rd 2016,.

Book Review:
Screamin' Jay Hawkins All Time Hits
by Mark Binelli
Metropolitan Books
Published May 3rd, 2016
(AMAZON BUY LINK)



  Author Mark Binelli writes both fiction and non-fiction.  He published a novel, Sacco and Vincetti Must Die, back in 2002.  In 2006 Detroit City is the Place to Be, a work of non-fiction about his hometown, was published.  In between he's contributed articles to Rolling Stone, where he is a contributing editor, and other publications.

  Screamin' Jay Hawkins All Time Hits treads the line between "creative non-fiction" and regular old literary fiction with a healthy contribution from the well known 33 1/3 series of books about specific albums and musicians.  Binelli has written an account of the life of Screamin' Jay Hawkins, the fifties rocker who is immortal for his hit, I Put a Spell On You.   Hawkins was also in on the ground floor of the mid 50s rock explosion, touring on one of the many package tours put together by radio DJ Alan Freed.

   Anyone with even a passing interest in the 33 1/3 series, early rock history or the idea of "creative non fiction" as a rival to traditional literature is likely to find much to like.  Those more accustomed to a traditional novel may not be as responsive, though it's hard to say that this novel doesn't succeed in exactly what it wants to do.  The only possible complaint might be lack of ambition, but it's not a complaint I would make.

   Screamin' Jay Hawkins All Time Hits is certain to find shelf space in independent book stores all over the country.  Just the title alone should be good for decent sales from people who are browsing at their favorite book store down the street.