Days of War, Nights of Love: CrimethInc. for Beginners
CrimethInc.
My review of Evasion was less than glowing. It just seemed like the work of a pissed-off kid with lousy social skills. So I didn’t expect anything too amazing from Days of War, Nights of Love, also from the CrimethInc. syndicate.
And so I was very pleasantly surprised. Days of War is intelligent, thoughtful, playful, provocative, and dangerous. It doesn’t preach, it doesn’t condescend, it just points the way to another world, one where corporations don’t serve the role of being moral law-givers, and where individuals don’t compartmentalize themselves away from the feelings and social structures that allow us to be human.
There’s a lot going on in Days of War, but the basic premise is this: What would you most like to be doing in all the world? Think on it, fix it in your mind. Now, ask: why aren’t you doing that thing right now? Is it because of your job? The expectations of your family? Your religion? Your sense of social propriety? Your credit card debt? Your fear that if you finally, finally gave yourself the chance to be what you want, that you’ll fail at it, and there will be nobody there to catch you? And so rather than risk disappointment or failure, we decide instead not to try. If we don’t try, we can’t fail. Instead we try to live risk-free lives, which equate to excitement-free lives. We get bored, we get fat. We buy things to mitigate the boredom, we buy doctors and health clubs to ward off the fat. And we forget how to ask:
What is my true desire?
Will your bank visit you in the hospital when you’re old? Will your boss help you plant your garden? Will your credit card company stay in bed and make love to you late on Sunday morning?
If not, then why are we giving our time, our very lives, away to those entities? Why do we accept in return petty scraps of paid holidays, two weeks vacation a year, social networking web sites that we can use on our lunchbreak to keep track of our hundreds of virtual “friends” who are also on their lunchbreaks?
Days of War is radical not so much in its politics as in its aesthetics. It resonates with a youthful manifesto that I wrote for myself when I was twenty years old, in which I made a vow that my living would be my art. My own art is not yet perfect, but a performance piece in progress, a continual unlearning, and that’s okay, necessary even. Like everyone else, I need people to remind me not to forget to ask:
It seems to me that there are two ways to create passable travel writing. The first is to do an ordinary thing, and write an extraordinary story about it. The second is to do an extraordinary thing, and then do ordinary writing about it. Of course, the ideal is to do an extraordinary thing and write an extraordinary story about it, but I think few writers manage to achieve that. Nonetheless, the other two approaches create perfectly readable travel writing that can’t help but appeal to all of the people who just do ordinary things and don’t write about them at all.
Round Ireland With a Fridge falls into the category of ordinary writing about an extraordinary journey. The premise is as simple as it is absurd: Tony Hawks accepts a bet that he can hitchhike the circumference of Ireland in a month’s time with a mini fridge. It’s no spoiler to say that the trip goes swimmingly. It’s exactly the sort of ridiculous journey that people can rally behind, and the Irish people are good about rallying behind the ridiculous, anyway. Hawks’ trip is, as one would expect, a marvelous sequence of shenanigans and a testament to the kindness of strangers with a sense of adventure.
But this wasn’t what excited me most about the book. What excited me most about the book was that fact that it wasn’t particularly well-written, but sold half a million copies. As many of you know, I’ve been working on my own book during the last few months. Some of it is well-written; most of it isn’t yet. But reading Round Ireland was confidence-boosting. I’m used to reading writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, Dante and Umberto Eco. And reading such master wordsmiths always leaves me feeling pretty inadequate as a storyteller. But Round Ireland is different. The story is great, but the writing is only fine. Not brilliant, but fine. There were plenty of parts where I thought that I would have told it differently, or would have phrased something better. And rather than that being annoying, it was exciting for me. Half a million copies. I could do this. It wasn’t magic, just dedication, discipline, and a good agent.
I’ve got two of the three. I still need to learn how to find the third, but that only after I’ve done a lot more work. For those of you keeping score at home, the current count is 33,290 words. It might be halfway done. Then half of it will end up on the editing floor to get replaced with something better. I have come to this profound conclusion: writing a book is hard. No wonder not everybody does it. In the process, I was also given this equally profound piece of advice: the difference between writers and non-writers is that writers write. Period.
So I’m trying to take that to heart, and keep at it. The problem is always that it’s also true that musicians make music, period, and these days I’m much more that than I am a writer, so it always wins over other things. The good news is that I think the only difference for me between being a writer and a musician is where I invest my time. Either way, it’s time vastly well-spent.
The usual full disclosure: Kwame is a friend of mine, and he gave me a copy of the book as a comp for proofreading some of the galleys for him and hashing through some of the ideas with him during the authorship. So you won’t get an impartial review out of me. Search the Internet if you want that; I’m sure it has plenty to say on the subject.
What I will say is that the book is at its best when Kwame is just storytelling. The theoretical stuff is almost all framed in first-person participant-observation ethnography, which is fancy sociologist speak for saying that Kwame rapped as Mad Squirrel in the San Francisco based Forest Fires Collective and then wrote about it. So, among all of the general and specific postulations about race and class and gender in The Scene are a lot of stories: stories about battles between white and black emcees at house parties, stories about Filipino youth finding a national identity through hip-hop, stories about what happens when a woman tries to participate in a male-dominated open mic. Like the best underground hip-hop itself, it’s the art of storytelling that makes the message shine.
And at least for me, it is the storytelling that draws me to some of my favorite hip-hop. Love or hate Slick Rick, but you can’t deny that he spins a good yarn. Even for acts as popular as Public Enemy, it’s the songs like Black Steel In The Hour of Chaos that people remember. El-P’s Stepfather Factory is by far the most memorable cut from Fantastic Damage. And even in the genre of gangster rap, touchstone songs like Ice-T’s 6 in the Mornin’ and N.W.A.’s Fuck Tha Police are built around narratives. There’s just a lot more to that vein of rapping than there is to some fool shouting rhymed couplets about bitches and ice.
It’s probably not far off the mark to say that we, as a species, are wired for storytelling. I’m sure that a hundred anthropologists have written a book on that very subject. Storytelling seems to be a foundation of culture. Would it be possible to have anything that we could call a “culture” that didn’t include some type of common narrative? I’m not sure. When we say the word “culture”, it’s one of the first things that comes to mind. When we imagine our stereotype of “primitive peoples”, we imagine them sitting around the communal fire, the elders telling stories. Stories about the creation of the world, stories about the origin of humanity, stories about right and wrong and the consequences of each. There’s something fundamentally human about participating in that.
Hip-hop, as a culture, is no exception. It has its creation myths — poor urban kids stealing power from the streetlights to run turntables, switching back and forth between records, making beat breaks for people to dance. It has its pantheon of primal gods — DJ Red Alert, The Sugar Hill Gang, MC Busy Bee, Kool Herc, etc. Like every culture, it has its charlatans who try to claim direct lineage from those gods. And it has its modern-day chroniclers, people like Kwame, who retell (and relive) the old stories and create new ones to keep the culture alive. Hip Hop Underground is a contribution to that storytelling tradition.
There’s a lot to love and a lot to hate in Evasion, and I’m quite certain that the author wouldn’t want it any other way. He squats, shoplifts, train hops, dumpster dives, and scams his way around the country without apology. The main targets of his ire are consumerism and corporate waste, and some of his best methods are using corporate policies against the corporations that make them. Things like pulling receipts from the Barnes & Noble trash can, grabbing the corresponding books from the shelves, and then taking them to the service desk to return them. The clerk knows that he didn’t buy the book, the clerk knows that he should throw the bum out, but Corporate Policy says that they need to honor the return with receipt, and the clerk’s common sense is subservient to Corporate Policy, so they have no choice but to hand over the cash.
So, on the one hand, I find it easy to love the prodding at the weak spots of consumer capitalism, as they so often richly deserve that prodding. On the other hand, there are things to hate. The first is the fundamentalist perspective. We always give the conservative fundamentalists a hard time, but I think the ‘liberal’ fundamentalists get off too easy. Being a free-range anarchist punk is a great thing; looking down your nose at everyone who isn’t is just silly. Every 19 year old thinks they have everything figured out — I certainly did. Not every 19 year old manages to write a book about it, and on that count the author is one-up on most of us. But the attitude that ‘everybody who isn’t like me is ignorant and wrong’ is exactly what the religious fascists peddle, and it’s unfortunately also what the author of Evasion peddles.
It’s that sort of fundamentalism that encourages us to poke about for hypocrisy and revel in it when we find it. If the guy down the block gets busted for some transgression involving drugs or sex, we’re maybe embarrassed for him, maybe even feel bad for him. But when fundamentalist pastor Ted Haggard gets caught doing crystal meth with a gay hooker, then goes through a three week program and emerges “completely heterosexual”, we have a field day with it. It’s because he’s been condemning the rest of us for what he would have us believe are our sins, while cooking up with teenage boys after church. Evasion has me looking for similar falls. Like, if you’re stealing all of this stuff from Barnes and Noble to buy punk records, then what are you doing with the records? Not carrying them around on trains, I know that. Mailing them home to Mom in the suburbs? It’s not crystal meth with hookers, but neither is it the property-free, consumption-free ideal that the book puts forth. As for me, I don’t give a damn if you have a thousand records or seven big-screen televisions. You’re still the guy who owns a bunch of property, and trying to make a big deal of not being that guy makes you look foolish.
But arrogance and hypocrisy aside, Evasion is a hell of a book for a kid to write, and it gets respect for that. It’s about a guy who’s not afraid to live big stories, and not too lazy to write about them and put them out there to inspire other people to live big stories, too. In that sense, it’s a success. It reminds me of every time I passed by a hotel to go sleep in the woods, every time I scored enough food or flowers from the dumpster to eat for a month or decorate my entire house, every time I caught a lift from a stranger instead of shelling out for a bus ticket. Not because any of those things make me morally superior (or maybe they do, but that’s not why they’re interesting), but because they just make for better stories than checking into the Best Western, buying grocery store food under bright fluorescent lights, or sitting on a bus with headphones trying not to make eye contact with anyone. If our life is the stories we make, then the author of Evasion has lived more life than most Americans ever will, and for that he is to be commended.
As a strange aside, I just realized that this book is for sale at Barnes and Noble online. According to the page, “Customers who bought this also bought: Going Rogue by Sarah Palin.” I just… I don’t even know where to begin…
Writing is always to some degree about artifice. Even journalistic narrative is still an exercise in representation — wanting to represent truthfully, usually, but also wanting to represent artfully. Nobody wins a Pulitzer Prize for mere sequential exposition of facts; people win Pulitzers for artful arrangements of facts that show us some greater truth beyond the facts. All writing strives for it; some writing succeeds at it.
And in some writing, the artifice is more important than the story it tells. An Italian sonnet must be a sonnet. You can’t slip an extra line in if there’s something else you remembered that you wanted to say. The greatness of a successful sonnet is that it says what you wanted to say while adhering rigidly to a form that exists independently of the content.
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler works a bit like that. Calvino has a clever form that he’s created for himself. The challenge that he’s created is to try to tell a story within that form, such that the form becomes the story. It’s the sort of experiment upon which Calvino has built his literary reputation. As an experiment, it is clever — a book about a book that is never finished, but becomes a different story every time the reader picks it up. Calvino writes with the second-person pronoun, so ‘you’ are the protagonist, and ‘you’ are reading a book about the book that you’re reading.
While it is clever, I don’t know that it’s actually all that readable. It’s all form and so little story. The problem with the second-person narrative is that it’s impossible to build any empathy or antipathy for the protagonist, because you are the protagonist. It has the unexpected effect of actually making it harder to relate to the character.
Too much cleverness can be a bad thing. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a book that gets wrapped up in itself, in the vanity of being a book about itself, and it ends up missing the sort of base sincerity that would actually draw me in. It’s like the kid who awkwardly uses big words just to show that that he knows big words. Give me a pure heart and plain speech, and I’ll pick that almost every time.
Days of War, Nights of Love: CrimethInc. for Beginners
There’s a lot going on in Days of War, but the basic premise is this: What would you most like to be doing in all the world? Think on it, fix it in your mind. Now, ask: why aren’t you doing that thing right now? Is it because of your job? The expectations of your family? Your religion? Your sense of social propriety? Your credit card debt? Your fear that if you finally, finally gave yourself the chance to be what you want, that you’ll fail at it, and there will be nobody there to catch you? And so rather than risk disappointment or failure, we decide instead not to try. If we don’t try, we can’t fail. Instead we try to live risk-free lives, which equate to excitement-free lives. We get bored, we get fat. We buy things to mitigate the boredom, we buy doctors and health clubs to ward off the fat. And we forget how to ask:
Round Ireland With A Fridge
But this wasn’t what excited me most about the book. What excited me most about the book was that fact that it wasn’t particularly well-written, but sold half a million copies. As many of you know, I’ve been working on my own book during the last few months. Some of it is well-written; most of it isn’t yet. But reading Round Ireland was confidence-boosting. I’m used to reading writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, Dante and Umberto Eco. And reading such master wordsmiths always leaves me feeling pretty inadequate as a storyteller. But Round Ireland is different. The story is great, but the writing is only fine. Not brilliant, but fine. There were plenty of parts where I thought that I would have told it differently, or would have phrased something better. And rather than that being annoying, it was exciting for me. Half a million copies. I could do this. It wasn’t magic, just dedication, discipline, and a good agent.
Hip Hop Underground
Evasion
So, on the one hand, I find it easy to love the prodding at the weak spots of consumer capitalism, as they so often richly deserve that prodding. On the other hand, there are things to hate. The first is the fundamentalist perspective. We always give the conservative fundamentalists a hard time, but I think the ‘liberal’ fundamentalists get off too easy. Being a free-range anarchist punk is a great thing; looking down your nose at everyone who isn’t is just silly. Every 19 year old thinks they have everything figured out — I certainly did. Not every 19 year old manages to write a book about it, and on that count the author is one-up on most of us. But the attitude that ‘everybody who isn’t like me is ignorant and wrong’ is exactly what the religious fascists peddle, and it’s unfortunately also what the author of Evasion peddles.