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All the Power: Revolution Without Illusion
In All the Power: Revolution Without Illusion, Mark Andersen doesn't advocate that would-be revolutionaries throw away the pitchforks and torches. He simply reminds them that there are uses for these tools other than killing and burning. As a die-hard punk rocker, he admits to feeling a certain glee in "throwing a brick" every once in a while, but after two decades fighting against all the bad "-isms," he knows those bricks could be much more effective if they were used to build a community center. Andersen's transformation from Montana farm boy to D.C. radical serves as the backdrop for his comprehensive analysis of the various shortcomings of and possibilities for revolutionary activism. Although he convincingly picks apart anticapitalist dogma and oft-cited stances from some of the "smash the state" crowd's most sacred cows, like Ward Churchill, his memoir cum guidebook is more than just another steaming pile of criticism on the far left shit heap. He uses his experiences as a founding member of the legendary activist group Positive Force and his work with inner-city senior citizens to illustrate the importance of grassroots organizing and small, community-level victories in warding off the nearly inevitable burnout faced by anyone dedicated to "bringing down the system." Despite his candid acknowledgment that "direct actions" since the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle are often viewed with apathy and/or derision by many of the marginalized communities the activists are supposedly trying to "save," Andersen's conclusion is neither cynical nor fatalistic. He hopes these activists will learn to become part of these communities instead of trying to lead them. All the Power is "not about purity or certainty," he states, "but about balance and possibility." This mantra is at the root of Andersen's examination of the fantastic implosions and murky legacies of two of the more high-profile revolutionary groups of recent American history: the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. When the vision becomes more important than the people (as when the W.U. proclaimed, "Fuck the working class,"), it's time to reevaluate the mission. The necessity of striking this balance between ideals and pragmatics became obvious to Andersen upon the heart-wrenching realization that even two of his major inspirations, H.R. from Bad Brains and the Sandanista rebels of Nicaragua, could be guilty of violence and hypocrisy. True to the DIY ethos, he concludes activists can't rely on heroes or wait for a magic solution, but he remains optimistic that change is possible. "While we can all debate just how far the 'perfect world' humans are capable of growing," he writes, "it is undoubtedly true that we can do better than our current mess." (Liam O'Donoghue) Stencil Pirates
"There is no question in my mind that corporations are fighting to control every square inch of public landscape," Josh Macphee writes in his impressive and handsome new book, Stencil Pirates. Equal parts a gallery and a history of stencil art, as well as a public art manifesto, the book is a rich account of "all those who've ever felt like they have no control of their environment" and who use art to make their voices heard. There are hundreds of photos of stencils – many in full color – painted illegally in the streets of cities throughout the world and a straightforward text that chronicles stenciling's rise as an art movement. Macphee follows stencils from the streets of Sandinista-controlled Managua, Nicaragua, to the squatter scene of New York City's Lower East Side in the 1980s to today's worker uprisings in Argentina, with the global public art uprising against George W. Bush and the war in Iraq (there are eight pages on this, from six countries) providing art critique along the way. The joy of Stencil Pirates, however, lies in its vast collection of nonpolitical art, which shows artists pushing the boundaries of what you would think possible with spray paint and forms cut out of cardboard. There are elaborate, multicolored stencil murals of children playing and people kissing or riding bikes. There are pages and pages of stenciled faces of robots, astronauts, guns, gardens – the kind of anonymous art for art's sake you sometimes see popping up everywhere at once in the Mission District when the real estate conditions are right. San Francisco is heavily represented, and local readers are sure to recognize the works of local artists Scott Williams, HEART 101, SHY GIRL, GRACE, Claude Moller, Ivy McClelland, and others. Macphee extends his faith in "free art for the people" to the reader, packing the book with pages of advice on making and painting stencils, as well as including ready-made stencils the reader can cut out and use. Reading Stencil Pirates makes you want to dust off your X-Acto knife and be part of the conversation that is going on all around you on the sidewalks and walls of the city. (Iggy Scam) The Egyptologist
Murder, mystery, mayhem, and a possible mummy – with this concoction of fail-safe comic elements and the same satirical verve as its older sibling, Prague, Arthur Phillips's new novel, The Egyptologist, mostly just wants to have a good time. After a debut success like Prague, which critics rhapsodized as a "so of the moment" fin de siècle novel for the 20th century, Phillips decided to reach deep into the past for The Egyptologist. The novel traces the journal entries and letters of the determined and eccentric Ralph Trilipush; he sets off in 1922 to hunt for the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Atum-Hadu, who reigned circa 1650 BCE. Trilipush bases his search on dubious fragments of pornographic verse apparently written by the pharaoh, featuring such poetic observations as "the rigid scepter of his power." Along the way, Trilipush is tailed by private detective Harold Ferrell, who writes his own version of the journey 32 years later; he was investigating Trilipush as a key suspect in a fraud and probable double murder. Their accounts are aided and abetted, or thwarted outright, by several intervening voices from a varied supporting cast. The novel spoofs everything from 1920s drawing-room culture and American tourist naïveté to the seriousness of archaeological enterprise and the human desire for fame and posterity, in an energetic mix of fact and fiction that is at times truly entertaining. But invention can only take a flimsy story so far. As though it feels itself to be flagging, the novel tries to keep the reader visually amused, zinging back and forth between far too many typefaces in a jumble of journals, letters, telegrams, quotations, and reports, plus site diagrams. These gimmicky touches only detract attention from the story and fail to disguise the book's limp conclusion, which can be predicted midway through the novel – a denouement some may find as unsatisfying as 4,000-year-old porn. (Jeannette Huang) Sleepaway School: Stories from a Boy's Life
Lee Stringer came into national fame in 1999 with his first memoir, Grand Central Winter, which chronicled his former life as a homeless and crack-addicted man living in New York City's subway stations. With his new memoir, Sleepaway School: Stories from a Boy's Life, Stringer mines potentially more mundane material: his childhood. Here you have all the expected firsts: friendships, experiences with death, stirrings of sexual curiosity. But Stringer is fatherless and black in the mostly white world of suburban New York, and his firsts include first encounters with low expectations. "Somewhere in there, not long after I had gotten my kids' legs under me, it was determined that I was what we today would call a 'child at risk.' It had the rude effect of acquainting me far, far too soon with doubt," he writes in a brief preface. By the time he finds himself watching elementary school plays that feature white kids in blackface, cast as slaves, the reader knows why Stringer is so angry. Soon he is shipped off to a home for troubled kids, and fistfights, racial taunts from peers, disciplinarian counselors, and even a straitjacketed trip to a mental ward follow. The device of writing through his childhood eyes serves Stringer well, allowing the reader to feel the sting of institutional racism right along with a mystified Stringer. He plays these scenes with a masterful subtlety, never hitting the reader over the head with a protest message but making them seem part of the pain of the universal childhood experience. At times the subject matter drags – how many surprises, after all, can there really be in a coming-of-age story? – and at times Stringer can't seem to resist the temptation to overwrite ordinary sentences into choppy failed poetry. But he's writing in one of the strongest voices of any American writer working today, and his tough, confident memoirs will stick with you. (Scam) Oblivion
David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, the literary event of 1996, offers perhaps the greatest 300 or so pages of genius prose ever trapped within an exasperating behemoth of nearly 1,100 (that felt more like 2,000) pages. It remains the poster child (its number-one status challenged only by a certain heartbreaking work) for the concern that line editing at major publishing houses has become a lost art. Just who at Little, Brown thought its endless slogs, repetitions, and methamphetamine run-ons were all irreplaceable gold? Who was afraid to point out the vast-conspiracy plot led nowhere? Was there a temporary office red-pen shortage? And yet. Individual scenes – not passages, since at his best Wallace is a literary Eisenstein of complex montage – are burned into my reading memory. Wallace remained brilliant, erratic, and indulgent through subsequent nonfiction collections. A whole lot of breath has been held in anticipation of Oblivion, whose short stories represent his first fiction since Jest. The potential – for amazement, disappointment – seemed, well, infinite. Alas, Oblivion emerges as the kind of just-OK book that confirms an author's weaknesses without consolidating strengths or offering any sign of advancement. Even if the author of Jest didn't appear to like people (let alone narrative) very much, the book still has some piercingly good descriptions of emotional extremis. Wallace's journalistic essays often memorably capture a milieu's cultural complexity, but the new stories are like checklists of observational minutae. Smaller than life, they view invariably hapless protagonists with comic condescension, recoiling from the very notion of intimacy. (It's telling that the closest the entire volume gets to a sex scene is the nightmarish prelude to off-page fumbling between an attracted/repulsed dweeb and a hugely fat woman.) They're lab rats, subjected to increasing situational stress. Yet the experiment's data is never tallied: allergic to denouement, Wallace ends every tale at an arbitrary cutoff point. In description, much here sounds ingenious and appetizing. "The Suffering Channel" has a People-type magazine reporter tracking down an especially grotesque "human interest" story while back at the office, various anorexic interns gossip and backbite, unaware that very soon they, and their World Trade Center offices, will be toast. "Mister Squishy" likewise focuses on the trivial private thoughts in a corporate-product focus group as a mysterious climber scales their skyscraper exterior (for reasons never explained). An insufferably persnickety businessman whose marriage is falling apart faces one of life's harsher questions – Do I really snore, or does she just want to sleep elsewhere? – in the title story. "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" 's multiple framing devices obscure the central event, a grade school teacher's bizarre, fatal in-class meltdown. Wallace's talent hasn't deserted him. It's just that his occasional striking, funny, even insightful observances float alone, adding up to nothing larger. Each story feels like a draft, with every last jotted note incorporated but no overall direction or structure emerging. Even the most imposing talent can only remain "promising" if no discipline enters the picture. Reading Wallace has always been work, but Oblivion represents the first time I've doubted that effort was worth it. (Dennis Harvey) |
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