John Carroll – The Existential Jesus (2009, Counterpoint)
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You can’t claim to offer an interpretation of the Gospel of Mark that claims to offer up hitherto unseen angles — or title the result The Existential Jesus — without stirring up a few hornet’s nests, and that’s exactly what John Carroll has been doing in his native Australia since this slim 274-page volume was released in the fall. This is all well and good for Carroll, who made his bones on iconoclastic works such as Humanism: The Rebirth and Wreck of Western Culture, but will it help the casual armchair theologian come to a deeper understanding of the West’s most famous woodworking philosopher?

Yes and no. Carroll’s work isn’t the fumbling embarrassment that his detractors claim it is — but it is a scattered, conflicted book, one that attempts to shatter theoretical framework even as it relies upon it to make crucial arguments, and one that’s just as likely to draw upon established dogma (i.e. Judas as cartoon villain) as it is to try and break new ground (the whole “existential Jesus” thing, which really isn’t all that new, but let’s not quibble). To top it all off, Carroll’s writing style is always very dry and occasionally overly analytical; chunks of The Existential Jesus can be a bit of a slog.

It’s also difficult to put down. This is probably due more to the source material — Mark is the shortest Gospel, and for a book in the Bible, moves along at a pretty good clip — than anything Carroll does with it, but it still has the effect of turning The Existential Jesus into something of a page-turner. Hardcore theologians may take issue with Carroll’s interpretation of the book’s central figure; some reviewers have suggested that his Jesus is defined more by his doubt and self-absorption than his mission. But for open-minded religious readers — and anyone interested in gaining a bit of insight into what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, the “historical” Jesus — the book has a fair amount of wheat to go with its chaff. Carroll’s Jesus isn’t the beatific, divinely removed figure you remember from Sunday school, but he is about as bummed out and conflicted as you’d expect a young man with the literal weight of the world on his shoulders to be. It’s undeniably compelling stuff.

Where Carroll really stumbles is on his many interpretive dances — he engages in a recurring, and distractingly tenuous, examination of the psyche and motives of Simon Peter that finds Carroll reaching back to the apostle’s family history to suggest some sort of generational disconnect between heart and spirit. It comes to an undeniably gripping conclusion when Peter is confronted by a servant girl in the courtyard outside Jesus’ trial, but again, that’s the source material talking; although Carroll isn’t without insight, it’s hard not to feel like he could have done a better job of reaching some of his conclusions.

Ultimately, although The Existential Jesus isn’t the paradigm-busting work of genius it hopes to be (like, say, Jack Miles’ God: A Biography), it isn’t without its merits, and anyone with an interest in revisionist theology can safely part with the $12 Amazon’s asking for Counterpoint’s paperback edition to read it for themselves. As a truly existential Jesus might argue, it’s interesting both in spite of and because of its flaws.

Bob Schildgen – Hey Mr. Green: Sierra Magazine’s Answer Guy Tackles Your Toughest Green Living Questions (2008, Sierra Club/Counterpoint)
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Which is worse — paper or plastic? Can an ecologically conscious person eat guilt-free meat or fish? And, God help us, what’s the most eco-friendly brand of gasoline to buy? As anyone who’s devoted more than a few moments of thought to living a greener lifestyle can tell you, it’s no longer as simple as going out and hugging a tree; even the most well-meaning consumer decisions can wind up having unintended effects, and sometimes making a change is worse than doing nothing at all.

Bob Schildgen — otherwise known as Sierra Magazine’s Answer Guy — is here to help. As subscribers already know, Schildgen has spent the last several years answering questions from concerned readers, many of which are collected in the pages of Hey Mr. Green. The best thing about the book, happily, is Schildgen himself — his writing style is nicely down-to-earth, as shown in the book’s introduction, where he jokes about fulfilling a dream of having a book on top of toilet tanks across America. His answers to these questions also tend to be much more pragmatic than you might expect from someone calling himself Mr. Green: More than once, he waves off a reader’s concerns about, say, the amount of energy it takes to transport Alaskan salmon across the country with well-founded cost analysis arguments. Schildgen’s aim is not to make you feel like the world is about to end, but to point you in the right direction for responsible — and easily achievable — living.

At 216 pages, Hey Mr. Green is pleasantly breezy, and what it lacks in encyclopedic depth, it makes up with breadth; it’s also exactly the right size for those toilet tanks Schildgen jokes about in his introduction, and at just over $10 for the paperback, it’s a great gift for the eco-conscious acquaintance in your life or office. But don’t stop there — funny, informative, and never preachy, Hey Mr. Green also makes for an instantly compelling introduction to the green liftestyle, and it’s thin enough to slip under the windshield wiper of that vanity-plated Hummer in your parking lot. Order up a few copies today.

This year there are a lot of good book options for the music lovers in your life. None of the books that appear here cost more than $30 on Amazon, and most are considerably less expensive. There are coffee table books, and interesting biographies. Know someone who is not that interested in music? I’ve provided some good choices for them as well, with a couple of excellent novels, a wise and witty look at the first colonists of this country, and a biography of one of the pre-eminent journalists of the last half-century.

The books are listed in order of genre, not preference. Without further ado, here are my gift choices.

Coffee Table Books

The Complete Quincy Jones: My Journey and Passions – by Quincy Jones

It’s good to have friends, and Q has a lot of them. Before his own recollections even begin, there are introductory valedictories from the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Bono, Clint Eastwood, and Maya Angelou. This beautifully put together volume provides extraordinary access to a man who has been at the forefront of the music business for decades, working with everyone from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson. There are private notebooks, correspondence, and photographs, along with reproductions of report cards, track sheets, and accounting ledgers.

The Clash – by The Clash

It might seem ironic for a punk band to produce a coffee table book, but you’ll get over it as soon as you open this vivid history of the great band. “Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust” indeed. Stirring reminiscences blend with stunning photographs in the must-have rock book of the season, and the perfect celebration of the 30th anniversary of the first Clash album.

Rock Gods: Forty Years of Rock Photography – by Robert M. Knight

Robert M. Knight is one of those guys who was there at many of the most historic moments in the history of rock, recording it for posterity. Beginning in 1968, he documented shows by the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Elton John, Van Halen, and countless others. The emphasis here is on guitar gods, speaking of whom, there’s a lengthy introduction by Slash, and 200 full-color images. This is the book to get for the classic rock fan in your life.

Music Biographies

Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life and Times of Doc Pomus – by Alex Halberstadt

One of the most affecting biographies I have ever read, “Lonely Avenue” is the story of Doc Pomus, one of the greatest songwriters of the pop era. Crippled by polio at an early age, he never let the handicap hold him back, and went on to work with the seminal figures of rock ‘n roll, from the Drifters to Lou Reed. As great as he was as a songwriter, he was even a greater character, and Halberstadt puts you right there for all the joys and heartaches.

Making Records: The Scenes Behind the Music – by Phil Ramone and Charles L. Granata

First published in late 2007, Phil Ramone takes you behind the scenes of his long and glorious career in music. From his early career as a recording engineer (John F. Kennedy asked him to improve the sound at the White House), to work with Billy Joel, Ray Charles, Elton John, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, and countless others. There’s just enough nitty-gritty recording stuff here to satisfy the technically minded, but not enough to scare away the rest of us.

A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties – by Suze Rotolo

A beautifully written memoir of a vanished time in the history of New York City. Rotolo, best known as an early girlfriend of Bob Dylan, and the girl of the cover of the Freewheelin’ album, provides not only an overview of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early ’60s, but an intimate look at her relationship with Dylan. It’s an interesting read for any Dylan fan, but more than that, it’s a picture of an interesting American life lived in an interesting time.

John Lennon: The Life – by Philip Norman

Norman is the author of the authoritative Beatles biography “Shout.” This time out, he’s devoted over 800 pages to the life of John Lennon. It’s a tricky task to be a biographer of a historic figure that most people think they know all about, but Norman’s exhaustive research has yielded dividends. He offers new insights into the complex relationships of the very complex Lennon. He was given unprecedented access to Lennon material, and conducted hundreds of interviews with Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, and Beatles’ producers and roadies. If you’re like me, there are several Beatles fans on your shopping list, and it seems like Apple Corps manages to accommodate us every year with something for them. This is the 2008 gift.

When We Get to Surf City – by Bob Greene

Former Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune columnist Bob Greene writes about his 15 years on the road with surf music legends Jan and Dean. It’s about being on tour with a band that brings the summer everywhere they go, but more than that, it’s a story of love and loyalty, and the freedom of the open road It’s not all limos and Kristal though. There are gigs at state fairs, shopping malls, and corporate parties. But for someone living his dream, it’s all golden.

Non-fiction

Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson – by William McKeen

A great biographer has a knack for putting you right there in the action, and that is the case here. McKeen has written an authoritative book about the fascinating journey of Hunter S. Thompson, from his childhood in Louisville, to his stint in the airforce, his rides with the Hell’s Angels, a rather odd journey to Las Vegas, his coverage of political campaigns, and finally to his suicide in Woody Creek. It was a long strange trip, and it’s captured beautifully here. Inspiring storytelling for any budding or accomplished journalist. The story of a great American life.

The Great Derangement – by Matt Taibbi

To call Matt Taibbi caustic would be something of an understatement. The Rolling Stone political journalist takes on Congress, the U.S. Army in Iraq, the 9/11 Truth Movement, and a mega-church in Texas, and none of them are the better for it. Even while you’re laughing at his sardonic wit, you’re understanding the seriousness of the underlying message.

The Wordy Shipmates – by Sarah Vowell

Sarah Vowell, author of “Assassination Vacation” and public radio regular, has written a wise and witty book about America’s Puritan roots. We meet legendary figures like John Winthrop, founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Roger Williams, who created Rhode Island after being banished from Boston by Winthrop and others. Somewhere amidst your laughter at Vowell’s sarcastic take on history, you realize that you’re learning something, and you don’t even mind. The point of course is that these ancient origins continue to inform our daily lives today.

Novels

City of Refuge – by Tom Piazza

Tom Piazza is angry at what happened to his city. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, he wrote “Why New Orleans Matters.” Now he has written a stunning novel of New Orleans on the brink of the storm, and dealing with the fallout afterward. It’s the story of two families, one black, one white, and their very different experiences in the face of the tragedy that changed America forever. This is my favorite novel of the year..

The Book of Lies – by Brad Meltzer

Meltzer translates his expertise in comic books into a thrilling novel that takes us from Cain’s murder of Abel, to the origins of Superman. The plot revolves around the search for humankind’s seminal murder weapon, and its connection to the shooting death of Jerry Siegel’s father. Siegel reacted by creating a bulletproof superman. It’s all speculation of course, but it’s intensively researched, and all too credible.

Jeff Martin (Editor) – The Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles (2008, Soft Skull)
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I’ve been lucky enough not to have had to wear any paper hats, but like most citizens of the industrialized world, I have stepped behind a couple of retail counters in my day — and although I had those jobs a long time ago, the memories are still fresh, and I read the Jeff Martin-edited anthology The Customer Is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles with great interest, looking for hints of my past in other writers’ experiences. I never really found any, but it’s an enjoyable read nonetheless.

Martin’s compilation is slim (under 200 pages) and lacks the involvement of any “name” writers (slight exceptions: Neal Pollack, who wrote the foreword, and Jim DeRogatis, who is a legendary music critic and therefore probably doesn’t count), both of which are unfortunate, because retail life is one of the few remaining common threads that bind us all together, and I think this could have been a slam dunk of nonfiction humor if it had been put together a little differently. As it is, The Customer Is Always Wrong is a solidly unassuming read, good for a few chuckles here and there, but far from a definitive statement on the wild, wonderful world of ritual pain and humiliation that is waiting on the consumptive masses.

The book consists of 22 brief essays from writers such as Richard Cox, Hollis Gillespie, and Elaine Viets, all of whom tell their stories with the sort of bemused detachment that comes with the relative certainty that you will never again need to experience the things you’re talking about — and also, it bears mentioning that most of the stories included in this volume treat retail work as a positive experience, more or less, which is an opinion clearly not shared by a sizeable percentage of the people working retail at this very moment, and may, in fact, not jibe with your own memories of being a “sales associate.”

Still, even if The Retail Chronicles fails to really stab at the ink-black heart of the retail experience — in fact, some of the writers Martin chose are a little obnoxious — that doesn’t mean it isn’t frequently a lot of fun, or worth following up with a second volume. And at under $10.50 new, it’ll make a pleasant addition to the bathroom book basket, or a nice holiday gift for a friend who doesn’t rate a major purchase. Damning with faint praise? Perhaps, but I’m still looking forward to The Customer Is Still Wrong: The Retail Chronicles II.

Thank goodness, then, for The Mental Floss History of the World – because 1,500 years is a lot of history to skip, and I gave up textbooks for good in 1992. The fine folks at mental_floss magazine, in print and online, have spent the last seven years daring an anti-intellectual, Bush-benumbed populace to embrace the acquisition of knowledge. They’ve done it with bite-size tidbits of trivia and explorations of entire epochs – as well as discussions of science and economics that make those subjects as accessible as they’re ever going to get. And they’ve leavened it all with just enough snarky humor to make their facts taste like Tang instead of, say, Metamucil.

They’ve sliced, diced, condensed and expanded upon such material for eight previous books. But a History of the World? That would seem a rather monumental undertaking – heck, even Mel Brooks couldn’t get past Part I.

The new book’s subtitle, “An Irreverent Romp Through Civilization’s Best Bits,” offers a clue to the magic involved in condensing roughly 62,000 years of human history (or one-tenth that much, if you’re a Creationist) into 400 pages. Rule Number One: Be brief! Why waste more than 700 words on the Black Death when you can move on to more pleasant events of the 14th century – such as the invention of the chastity belt? Rule Number Two: Be silly! If Mrs. Rivers had laced her lectures with discussions of assembly-line-produced porcelain (China, 10th century) or the advent of the prophylactic (England, 17th century) … well, she probably wouldn’t have gotten past the popular practice of between-meal vomiting (Rome, 1st century BC).

With help from “the editors of mental_floss” – which I assume means, “with material we borrowed from back issues of the magazine” – authors Erik Sass and Steve Wiegand “spin the globe” to make sure that the material doesn’t get too Euro-centric (even if ancient Africa gets kinda short shrift – damn their refusal to develop written languages!). Timelines ground each of the 12 epoch-specific chapters in basic big-event history, allowing the authors to drift off into tangential trivia, often through the use of sidebars. Sections also chart the “ups” and “downs” of various civilizations and ethnic groups – for some reason, the Jews are usually “down” (go figure). There are some abrupt transitions between cultures, and perhaps some spots where the authors get too glib for their own good (pirate health care?), but the book makes history flow at a rollicking pace – and, conversely, makes it digestible in five-minute bursts.

If that last bit makes The Mental Floss History of the World sound like great bathroom reading, it is – for those moments when Us Weekly or The Wit and Wisdom of Sarah Palin simply don’t provide enough substance. If you require 300 pages on the impact of the Reformation on confessionalization in Upper Franconia, don’t look for it here – look there. But even if you’re still obsessing over Palin, whose 15 minutes came and went after this book had gone to press, rejoice: Each chapter here concludes with a section of Best and Worst trends of its era, the latter falling under the heading, “Thanks, but no thanks for…” Chapter 7’s entry? Syphilis!

Buy The Mental Floss History of the World at Amazon.

Danny Goldberg – Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business (2008)
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Most rock & roll memoirs are penned either by rock stars themselves (Clapton, Dylan) or by the original titans of the industry (Ertegun, Yetnikoff), and as our pal Pete Lubin discovered when he tried peddling his own account of his life in the biz, there’s a reason for this: The number of people who purchase books filled with rock-geek trivia — shit, the number of people who purchase books period — is woefully small. It’s surprising, then, to see Gotham taking a flier on an autobiography from Danny Goldberg — but as you’ll quickly discover if you pick up a copy, it’s quite a pleasant surprise.

Goldberg, for the non-geeks among us, was one of the biggest seat-hoppers in the game of high-stakes musical chairs played by the major labels in the ’90s — and before that he was, in order of occurrence, a Billboard staffer, Led Zeppelin’s publicist (and eventual label VP), and manager to Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Raitt, and Kurt Cobain. A man with that perfect combination of dumb luck and ears for talent, in other words — and a veritable treasure trove of behind-the-scenes stories.

Sadly for readers who pick up books like this in search of juice and dirt, Bumping Into Geniuses focuses less on who did what to whom and more on how incredibly fucking awesome it is to fall in love with rock & roll, and then fall ass over elbow into one pile of money after another until you’re sitting on top of the Warner Music Group without any real idea of how it happened. I’m oversimplifying things a bit — and surely Goldberg did have a very clear grasp of how he rose so far, so fast — but that’s the basic tone of the book: It’s a gee-whiz account of Goldberg’s many brushes with greatness. (The title, by the way, comes from Ahmet Ertegun’s quip to a teenage Goldberg that the secret to success in the business is to walk around bumping into geniuses.)

Even if you’ve got to believe Goldberg is being at least mildly disingenuous at several (or even most) points, Geniuses is a satisfying, if breezy, read; anyone who’s interested in what he has to say will surely be able to identify with passages like this one:

I could never have gotten anywhere in the business if I had not been a rock and roll fan first….Rock was a way for a nerd like me to connect with regular kids while still maintaining my own identity.

If a stud like Mick Jagger could complain that he could get ‘no satisfaction,’ it meant that it was okay if I didn’t. If John Lennon could sing ‘In My Life,’ it was safe to express emotion. If a genius like Bob Dylan could feel betrayed by a friend as expressed in ‘Positively 4th Street,’ it meant that I was not a loser….To listen to these records was like coming indoors out of the freezing cold and holding my numb fingers near the radiator, feeling at the same time both pain and relief.

Unlike a lot of rock execs — particularly the rapacious band of angry shoe salesmen who roam the boardrooms today — Goldberg was a rabid rock fan first, a power broker second, and that’s what makes his book such a pleasure to read. His obvious love for the music makes it easy to forgive him for giving such short shrift to his time in the boardroom — his whirlwind tour of the upper halls of Atlantic, Warner Bros., and Mercury is over in a blink — and for focusing on the artists he effectively championed (Zeppelin, Nirvana) at the expense of those he failed (Juliana Hatfield, Boston). It feels less like a memoir, per se, than 300 pages of someone saying “Holy shit, did I really do that?”

Where Geniuses ultimately disappoints the most is in its final act, after Goldberg leaves the major-label system and founds the boutique label Artemis. His prestige signing was Warren Zevon, and Zevon is understandably the focus of this portion of the book, but Goldberg not only neglects the rest of his roster, he glosses over the label’s eventual demise, and offers very little perspective on the industry’s 21st century travails. These omissions are disappointing, and they lend a hollow air to the book’s final chapters, but overall, it’s still a very worthwhile read — especially if you love the music as much as its author does.

“… if you’re timid and looking for mercy, stay on the road that leads to a more compassionate world. ‘Cause this one I know will eat you up alive, brother. I mean, alive!”
—recitation by Hank Ballard, from James Brown’s Get on the Good Foot LP, 1972

Growing up in New England, Juliana Hatfield was a fixture of my music diet. While I was living there, I took it for granted that, in between her regular tours, I could catch her playing the odd solo show here or there, testing out new material that would often show up on an album sooner or later. Indeed, it was a Juliana Hatfield show that initiated my regular ritual of patronizing my favorite artists at small rock clubs. Prior to that first club show in early ’94, the only live music environments I really knew were venues with a seating capacity of at least 3,000-ish.

In 2004, I moved to San Francisco, and lucky me РJuliana was playing a show at a charming local venue called Caf̩ du Nord not too long after I touched down. It was an appropriate musical start to my new life in a new city.

But after that ’04 show, one of the two or three best Hatfield performances I had witnessed, she dropped off my radar. It wasn’t for lack of paying attention – she didn’t even make it to San Francisco on her tour in support of 2005’s Made in China, and she was pretty much off the road after that for all I knew, in spite of having released three more records after Made in China. What was up with that?

Well, turns out Juliana was contemplating her future in music, seemingly having had enough of the endless irritations and frustrations that accompany the life of a once-rising-star who’s operating well below most indie-pop loving fans’ radars, and writing what became “When I Grow Up: A Memoir.”

Now, anyone who knows even a little bit of Juliana’s music (or even just her most popular tune, 1993’s iconic alt-rock hit “My Sister”) probably already knows that she can be pretty blunt and personally revealing in her lyrics. Between her well-known bouts with eating disorders and the pitfalls of the music industry, anyone expecting the floodgates to open won’t be disappointed. Well, maybe those still clinging to the notion of Hatfield and the Lemonheads’ Evan Dando ever having been a serious couple will be. But everyone else will find more than enough to chew on here.

And by more than enough, I mean, did we really need to know about the tactics she resorted to when faced with the dilemma of having to pee minutes before show-time when the only bathroom anywhere near the backstage area can’t be accessed without plowing through a crowd of anticipatory fans?

This, my friends, is the pragmatist’s version of the rock n’ roll lifestyle.

The aforementioned lack-of-bathroom episode is part of the book’s main thread – a travelogue of Juliana’s 2003 tour, in which she, drummer Freda Smith and guitarist Heidi Gluck were billed as Some Girls. The book’s chapters roughly alternate between these ’03 road stories and Juliana’s past, stretching back to her early childhood and dysfunctional family life. How dysfunctional, you ask? I point to exhibit A, the story Juliana chose to read aloud to the small but attentive audience present for her first ever book reading, at Book Passage in San Francisco: her journalist mother was in love with another man (original Mountain bassist and Disraeli Gears producer Felix Pappalardi, believe it or not) the entire time she was married to Juliana’s radiologist father. You can imagine what kinds of awkward stories could come out of that situation, but I certainly never would have envisioned the father of this gentle, gifted musician smashing a present he had given to his wife with an axe over a visit she made to the doomed Mountain bassist. Mind you, Juliana saw this happen with her own eyes. For all she knew, it was mom who was about to get axed.

The road stories, meanwhile, are not so harrowing when put into that perspective. No rider at one club? No biggie. Nickled and dimed over drinks at the bar? Whatever, it’s cool. In fact, as Juliana is all too eager to point out, there’s little glamour in traveling from town to town, playing small clubs with scant amenities when you’re already over the thrill of the fight to be heard that passed with your 20s. She comes across as somewhat bitter about the experience, but only slightly so. There are plenty of expressions of gratitude for being able to at least live off of her music without holding a “real” job on the side (and if she needs to be reminded of how good she has it, she can talk to any writer for Popdose – we love this little online home to pieces, but if we didn’t have other jobs, we’d be, like, homeless).

Between the painful personal revelations about her anorexia, depression, and awkward social interactions, and her string of drug addict boyfriends (and again, Evan Dando was not one of them!), the book can feel like a real downer for some stretches – especially when she contemplates walking away from music entirely (hence the title of her latest album, How to Walk Away), which she openly pondered on her blog this year. But in the end, “When I Grow Up” is bundled with more hope than meets the eye. For one, she demonstrates that, if anything, she “grew up” long before any of her ex-boyfriends ever did (if they have), especially when it comes to staying financially solvent on a limited, unpredictable budget, and maintaining a relatively healthy lifestyle (no, I wasn’t kidding when I said she presents a pragmatist’s vision of rock n’ roll – I mean, no excessive drinking and no red meat? For shame!) in the face of endless temptation. Like most artists, she’s very self-critical. Yet she’s still realistically self-aware, and unless she plans on checking out sometime soon, her story is far from over.

Odds are, this book served mostly as a catharsis, rather than a pre-emptive goodbye to the world of music (after all, she is never able to answer the question, “what do I do if I’m not making music?”). I expect to see another album in no less than two years, since everyone knows that a born musician will ultimately come around to the notion that, as Ozzy Osbourne put it, “retirement sucks!”

But seriously, what Hank Ballard said about the music industry eating people alive is all too true. It nearly ate up Juliana Hatfield, and earlier than you might think. You gotta be extremely strong-willed if you’re going to make it in music. She may be small and quiet, but if her will could be translated to physical strength, Juliana Hatfield could easily knock down your block.

And Juliana, if you see this – get Frank Smith back for your next record! There’s nothing better than to hear you so caught up in what you’re doing, and you hadn’t sounded so naturally at ease as you did on the Sittin’ in a Tree EP you recorded with them in ’07.

And thanks for the music.

Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine – Ask a Ninja Presents: The Ninja Handbook (This Book Looks Forward to Killing You Soon)
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I suppose I should begin by saying I’ve never watched the video podcast that inspired this book, mainly because until very recently I was held in the slimy grasp of the most horrible “broadband” ISP that has ever existed, and was subject to a seriously fucked up daily download limit — but also probably because I tend to find ninjas about as funny as pirates, or pictures of kittens with poorly spelled captions, which is to say not very.

(I do, however, find Chuck Norris pretty goddamn hysterical.)

Still, when we were approached about reviewing the new paperback release of The Ninja Handbook, and Jason pussed out couldn’t take the assignment, I volunteered — partly because I wanted to know what all the hubbub was about, but also because, as one of the names behind a webzine that wishes it had publishers begging for the chance to print mass-market printed versions of its content, I wanted to see what it takes to get your site ported onto bookshelves. Also, I was insanely jealous.

And now that I’ve read The Ninja Handbook, I’m even more insanely jealous. I’m also befuddled and a little annoyed, because, to put it as simply as possible, this shit isn’t funny.

I acknowledge this is a minority opinion. Everything I’ve read about Ask a Ninja in general, and this book specifically, has been overwhelmingly positive. But while I certainly found myself chuckling in bewilderment more than once while reading the book, at no point did I ever stop wondering who in the world would spend $14.95 on it — or who would read it more than once. In fact, I strongly suspect that most of the people who find this stuff funny probably don’t spend much time reading.

Here’s one example of what passes for humor in The Ninja Handbook:

Although the basic shape (stick-shaped) remains the same, bo staffs come in many styles, ranging from light to heavy, rigid to flexible, and short to long. The shortest recorded bo staff was a one-centimeter-long mini toothpick wielded by the minja (mini-ninja) War Whack Davis. He killed a giant with it by jumping down his throat and starting a mini tornado in his lungs. The longest recorded bo staff was a 239-foot tree trunk handled by Black Juice. He also started a tornado with his bo staff, but it was a regular-sized one and was used to gather up a coven of banshees who had taken all of the soul out of Motown.

There you go. It’s amusing, but just barely, in the same straining-to-be-clever-but-drowning-in-non-sequitirs way you’d expect if you locked the Family Guy writers in a basement with nothing but shrooms and boxed wine for a week. Nobody expects humor books to serve an actual purpose, but even by the standards of the genre, The Ninja Handbook is pushing it; the only real consolation you can take from its punishing stupidity is its absurd 320-plus page length — at least Nichols and Sarine had to exchange a little bit of elbow grease for their advance.

You, on the other hand, have no reason to exchange any of your hard-earned discretionary income for The Ninja Handbook — just point your browser at almost any humor site on the Web, and you’ll be treated to funnier content for a lot less money. I didn’t even pay for my copy, and I’d still like to Ask a Ninja for a refund.

Or so says Tommy Chong, who may have been stoned when he wrote Cheech & Chong: The Unauthorized Autobiography (which wasn’t printed on hemp paper as far as I can tell). For one thing, he’s forgetting — or choosing to ignore — that another R-rated comedy called National Lampoon’s Animal House came out the same year as Up in Smoke and grossed $120 million compared to Up in Smoke’s $44 million. Grease and Superman also came out in ‘78 and grossed $159 million and $134 million, respectively. Maybe Up in Smoke cost less to produce than any of those blockbusters, but if I quote any more box-office numbers I might get accused of harshing Chong’s buzz. Then again, he doesn’t like how “the Republician [sic] Party with the Axis of Evil — Bush, Cheney, and Rove — has systematically torn the Constitution of the United States of America to shreds in the past seven years they have been in power,” so it seems hypocritical of him to mangle history and facts for his own hagiographical purposes, doesn’t it?

Luckily, The Unauthorized Autobiography isn’t a long rant against the Bush administration. Chong probably got that out of his system for the most part in his previous book, 2006’s The I Chong: Meditations from the Joint, which he wrote while he was in prison for nine months in 2003 and 2004 on drug-paraphernalia distribution charges. But throughout his new book there are so many ridiculous boasts and distortions of the truth that I often found myself saying, “Are you high?!” (During dull spots, I entertained myself by ending each sentence with the word “man” just like Chong’s stock character does in Cheech & Chong’s movies. Try it — it’s fun, man!) For instance, in 1982 the long-forgotten spoof film It Came From Hollywood “was in trouble and needed some star power to put some butts in the seats. Cheech and Chong were the hottest movie stars at the time, so [Paramount Pictures executive] Jeffrey [Katzenberg] flew to Vancouver Island to get my support.” Are you high?! I was only six in 1982, but I still knew enough to know that Cheech & Chong were not the biggest movie stars in America.

Chong writes that the pot-humor duo “have had generations after generations watch and study our movies to learn the culture of the sixties,” but growing up in the ’80s and ’90s I didn’t know a single person who owned a Cheech & Chong album or had seen their movies. Granted, I wasn’t a stoner, but the stoners I knew were firmly under the influence of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, not Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie.

I saw Up in Smoke for the first time recently, after picking up Cheech & Chong: The Unauthorized Autobiography. There were one or two funny moments, but I got the feeling that Cheech & Chong were stoned when they made it, slowing down their own comic timing, with potential laughs going up in smoke in the process. Chong says they improvised most of their dialogue in their films, and it shows. Animal House holds up 30 years later because the screenplay by Doug Kenney, Chris Miller, and Harold Ramis had terrific characters, scenes, and jokes right from the start. Director John Landis and his cast merely had to live up to their end of the bargain during filming by not screwing it up, though they ended up exceeding everyone’s expectations. (It’s Landis’s best film, as well as John Belushi’s.) Animal House was constructed with care and craftsmanship, but Up in Smoke, like the van made of marijuana that Cheech & Chong drive in the film, wasn’t built to last.

A friend of mine who grew up in the ’70s confirmed for me that Cheech & Chong were comedy superstars at that time, with their albums selling millions of copies and their comedy sketches and pop-oriented singles, like the “Love Jones” parody “Basketball Jones,” receiving lots of radio airplay. (Before he became a comedian, Chong was lead guitarist for Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers, who were signed to Motown in 1967. Chong claims that the interracial-romance subject matter of his song “Does Your Mama Know About Me,” a Top 40 hit for the Vancouvers, “changed the way Motown songwriters wrote,” paving the way for “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” and “Love Child.” I repeat: Are you high?!) But my friend also said that the jokes and bits he liked on their albums when he was in eighth grade had already become stale by tenth grade, which gels with Richie Unterberger’s All Music Guide review of the 2002 Cheech & Chong anthology Where There’s Smoke There’s Cheech & Chong: “You do wonder who the core audience of this retrospective is going to be — present-day kids might actually find the junior high-level drug humor that dominates the material tame. That leaves it to the people who, um, grew up on these albums when they were in junior high school in the 1970s. And if there are a whole lot of people that are still into Cheech & Chong as adults, doesn’t that say something rather peculiar about a segment of our culture?”

Dying is easy, comedy is hard. But it’s even harder to make comedy that can sustain itself over multiple generations. Chong came of age listening to Lenny Bruce records and admiring stand-up comics like Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor. But if I listen to Bruce or Pryor today, the timing doesn’t feel quite right when placed next to comedians like Patton Oswalt or David Cross. Comedy, like any other art form, keeps evolving, and as comedians’ rhythms change, so do those of audiences in terms of what they expect from the people who are telling them jokes. I wonder if my kids will think the Bill Hicks and Chris Rock CDs in my collection are hopelessly dated. (They haven’t been born yet, so it’s okay for me to cast doubt on them.)

Since The Unauthorized Autobiography was written without the input of Marin — hence the unauthorized aspect — Chong, a Chinese-Caucasian Canadian, spends a lot of time at the front of the book recounting his early days as a musician in the late ’50s and ’60s. In the era of “free love,” Chong grabbed as much as he could, having three daughters with three different women and moving them around the country several times as he pursued his comedy career in the early ’70s. He wasn’t a deadbeat dad, but when he writes about taking acid with his second wife, Shelby, right before watching Thumbelina with their three-year-old daughter, Precious, you’re not left with the impression that he deserves a “World’s Greatest Dad” coffee mug. But what about a “World’s Greatest Dad” bong? Far out, man …

Marin ended his partnership with Chong in 1986 when he decided to write, direct, and star in the film Born in East L.A., based on their song from the previous year, by himself. (The song, like the film, was made without Chong’s participation.) The book comes to a close with an aborted attempt by the two comedians earlier this year to patch up their differences and mount a reunion tour, after failing to patch things up and tour in 2005. According to Chong, Marin got angry when Chong rejected his tour proposal — the same one Chong proposed to him three years earlier. Their meeting then devolved into angry insults and accusations. “I felt that he had lost his comedy chops,” Chong says of his former partner.” I realized I could no longer work with the guy. He had changed.” Wow … bummer ending, man.

But the light in Cheech & Chong’s roach clip hasn’t completely died out, folks. At the end of July, two weeks before the publication of The Unauthorized Autobiography and one week before the release of the hit stoner comedy Pineapple Express, it was announced that the high Cs were finally reuniting for the “Light Up America” tour, which began September 12 in Philadelphia. The tour’s website says that “Cheech and Chong co-wrote and starred in a total of eight feature films together, all directed by Chong.” For the record, they starred — I’m not counting cameos in movies like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours — in six films together, and Chong was credited as director on four of them. Stoners, you can’t be paranoid that people don’t trust you if you don’t tell the truth to begin with.

Have they finally learned how to get along with each other again? Well, according to Marin in an Associated Press Radio interview, “There’s this veiled hatred.” But, he added, “We’ve kind of resolved that.” In other words, the price was right. On the other hand, “We’ve gotten to the age where we don’t feel like fighting anymore because the end is a lot closer than the beginning.” This is true: Chong turned 70 in May, so maybe I should go easy on his unauthorized version of 1978 box-office figures, his impact on the songwriting of Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield (R.I.P.), his assertion that his wealthy, live-at-home, thirtysomething stoner character in Up in Smoke represented “everyman,” and his portayal of himself as a comedy legend whose brilliant career fell victim to the solo acting ambitions of his ungrateful younger partner in the mid-’80s. After all, memory loss is common in senior citizens, particularly those who’ve been smoking pot every day of their lives for the past 50 years.

One last Chong anecdote: the duo’s record producer, Lou Adler, directed Up in Smoke, but when it came time to make Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie (1980), Chong wanted to see his vision on the screen, not anybody else’s. Still, he doubted his ability to direct a film on his own, and since Terrence Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven) was his favorite director, he called him to see if he’d like to helm Next Movie. The reclusive filmmaker politely declined by saying, “No one can read your mind — if it’s your vision, then you have to see it through yourself.” But I’m pretty sure what he wanted to say was, “Are you high?!”

Cheech & Chong: The Unauthorized Autobiography (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, $23.95) is available at Amazon.com.

Tim Etchells – The Broken World (2008)
purchase this book (Amazon)

The Internet has been, as Chico Escuela would say, very very good to me — but still, as a general rule, I’ve never had much patience for any kind of computer-themed or virtual reality-based entertainment. I maintain that this is because most of it falls somewhere between the 1995 Sandra Bullock train wreck The Net and Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk in terms of quality, but I’m also man enough to admit that there’s a certain amount of geek-fic prejudice in there — so imagine my surprise when I found myself thoroughly engrossed in Tim Etchells’ The Broken World.

On its face, it doesn’t seem to have the makings of a successful book — it has an anonymous, not terribly likable narrator, and consists of blog entries posted as a walkthrough for the vast (fictional) game from which The Broken World takes its title — but Etchells ends up pulling it (mostly) out of the bag anyway. Even though his narrator isn’t terribly bright or motivated about anything other than the game, Etchells has a knack for pacing — the chapters are short and fast-moving, pulling the reader easily into the story, which quickly moves from the game into “real life” and back again. It’ll come as no surprise to anyone that the lines between the two start to blur after a bit — but not in the way you’d probably expect.

Etchells’ other ace in the hole is his terrifically detailed vision for the game — the walkthrough delves into level after wonderfully imaginative level, including a few that made me want to play it, and I haven’t gotten into a game since the N64 version of GoldenEye. His narrator might be a slacker in a dead-end job, but as you get wrapped up in the book, you can understand why he finds it so hard to pull away from the Broken World. For a freeloading pizza shop worker, he shows surprising flashes of insight, and as the book wears on, you can’t help but root for him to win…or whatever it is he’s trying to do.

In the end, that last bit is the book’s Achilles heel — for me, anyway, it was difficult to determine what the point of the whole thing was supposed to be; Etchells nails the first two acts, but he doesn’t stick the landing. Without spoiling any storyline details, The Broken World’s conclusion left me feeling underwhelmed — and then, after further reflection, a little annoyed. Still, the first 90 percent proved to be unexpectedly addictive, and if you’re a more forgiving reader than I am, the ending might not be as much of an issue — and either way, you’re likely to find this a charming and impressively original first-time effort. Now when’s that game coming out?