All My Life...Trouble in America

THis morning while getting up, I checked my email and there was a notification from Quora. The question was something like: what assumptions to foreigners abroad make about Americans that are laughably untrue.

I had to think about it. First of all, I think what most foreigners fail to grasp about America is its size. Not only geographically but especially in terms of population. No, it's not the most populous country on Earth--it doesn't even approach China or India. But it might be the third most. I'm not sure. Brazil is big, too.

 On top of that there is the fact that it's made up of lots of immigrants or the sons of immigrants...willing and unwilling. It is by no means homogenous. In fact, I would say that is probably the most common assumption that foreigners make that is the most untrue is that American society is as homogenous as theirs.

When I point this out, it's almost unbelievable at how much resistance there is to this idea. I think it's not due to malice or stupidity; it's just that the concept is really hard for people in a relatively small, relatively homogenous country like the Czech Republic to get their heads around.

(Relatively homogenous: I want to stress the relatively part of that. It's easy to oversimplify things. No country is truly homogenous. Maybe the Vatican is.)

The fact is, (and this is something that people can grasp is that no matter what you say about Americans,) no matter how ridiculously good or bad the extreme stereotype you hold is...IT'S ABSOLUTELY true. You can say anything about Americans and then find literally millions of Americans about whom it's true.

So what I've heard:

all Americans are rich! Not all Americans...but(bearing in mind that 'rich' is a relative term: a Czech's sense  of wealth is different than a West German's or a Thai's) millions and millions of them are.

All Americans are poor! Millions upon millions of them are.

American schools are the best! Some of them are.

American schools are the worst! Some of them are.

Americans are fat and lazy! You can find tons of examples of this.

 Americans are unhealthily obsessed with their health. Tons of those, too. Though presumably less tonnage.

Americans are really friendly! That's true.

 Americans pretend to be friendly but hate you underneath! That's true too.

 Americans are racist! Yeah.

 Americans are open to other kinds of people. True.

 Americans are nationalistic. Well, I've known a lot who are and they scare me, too but not everybody is; in fact, I think being American often means bitching about your government 24/7.

The list goes on and on. The fact that so many examples can be found coupled with the fact that American media permeates most countries in the world means that all our best sides and worst sides are constantly being shown to people. *

When I watch the news about America in the Czech Republic, it's very rare that I watch footage shot by a Czech crew . Nearly always it's footage that's been taken from an American news source, edited and translated and then broadcast here. Nearly always when I read the news in Czech,it's come from an American source. It's quite telling what details they edit out of the story.  They usually serve to make America seem much worse than the story I read in American or British sources. I assume this phenomenon is worldwide or at least EU-wide. I also assume that prior to EU acession(is that the right word? Opoosite of secession) the exact opposite happened: Czech news sources turned a blind eye to the darker side of the USA.)

I try to avoid conversations about America too much. Because the truth is always way more complicated than what the listener wants to hear. the thing is, I don't think that people want America to be complicated. But it is. I get frustrated by it because it's really tiring to try to explain this simple fact all the time.

 A case in point is recently a British teacher, Catherine, that works for me was asking questions about why Americans are so anti-immigrant.(As if the British aren't?) Another teacher who works for me, Peter, who is from Oakland CA, was arguing that you can't believe the media: that Americans don't hate immigrants. I was listening.

 I saw his Peter's point. I feel the same way he does: I honestly have never had a class...or lived in an apartment building...or had a job...which did not have foreigners in it. And not only Mexicans. Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Phillipinos, Irish, English, German, Pacific Islanders from god knows where, Thais, Japanese, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Italians, new Zealanders,Russians, French...I've run into all of them several times in the US. Some of them were there to stay; others were only there for a time.

 I never had a problem with them. Nor did anybody I personally knew. In fact, oddly, I remember saying the same thing to the Catheirne in September. I told her the exact same words: Don't believe everything the media says. I tried to explain to her that the real prejudice in America lies amoung perceived lines of race. Because I think in Europe it's more about ethno-linguistic nationalism(which sometimes overlaps with race but not always). In America it's not. Ethnnic nationalism is kind of a bizarre concept to Americans because the idea of 'nation' is actually very very different to the European idea of nationalism which is more tied to ethnicity and language. I tried to explain that: In America the intolerance is largely about race; in Europe it's about ethno-linguistic nationalism.**

But on the other hand, I read the media too. Obviously there is anti-immigrant sentiment in America. Some of it, a lot of it, in fact, is probably racial prejudice since so many immigrants are Mexican. And those people seem to have no valid arguments about how to solve the problem of illegal immigration. In fact, sometimes it seems to me that they'd be most happy with just rounding up the 12 million or so and putting them in concentration camp and letting them rot. (this alarms me to no end, but it's the subject of another post.) But whatever the base root of it is, it's there.

So when I overheard the conversation I butted in and pointed out that, while maybe most people Oakland Peter knew felt that, in fact, not everybody did. "I'm sure Melinda"(another teacher
 from Arizona who was in on this conversation) "knows people who feel differently." And of course, being that Arizona is a border state, she did. Apparently some border-crossers commit crimes(especially theft) in parts of Arizona and indeed many people regard immigrants(especially 'illegal immigrants') as being a problem. And maybe they are there. who knows. As a leftist I feel it's my duty to say that she's wrong, but that's just the politicization speaking, not my rational mind.

And then I realized the problem. It's not only foreigners who tend to oversimplify America. It's actually Americans themselves.

Media that comes from America is framed in terms of American debate. Which is nearly always over-dramatic and extreme.(Americans are overdramatic: there's a stereotype about Americans that is actually true but which I never hear from foreigners .) I mean, take the health care debate. For Christ's sake to hear the left talk about it, 20 million Americans are dying on the streets. And if you listen to the right you hear horrible horror stories about long waits in hospitals in 'socialist' countries and dying from the wait. Yeah. Well, anybody can google examples of these things happening. But neither of them is the norm.

But sadly, these debates, which are loud and overdramatic(and this fact, by the way, keeps anything from ever changing in any meaningful way) and politicized to the max reach the ears of the rest of the world who take what essentially is high sense of drama as gospel truth. Because it is, after all, easy to grasp.

It's Americans' own oversimplification of America, perhaps that leads(or at least contributes) to the oversimplification of America by non-Americans.

In the end, America is like the fable of the elephant and the five blind men. One blind man feels the elephant's tail and says its a snake, another blind man a leg of the elephant and says it's a tree, another feels the the flank and thinks it's a wall, another the trunk and thinks it's...a really big snake(or something.) None of them are right. It's an elephant. You can't see the forest for the trees; and you can't see America for the Americans.

In fact, most things in the world are like that.

What got me thinking about this is hearing this song on the radio. It's about ten years old but such is the extent of my disconnection with popular culture that I don't remember ever hearing it. It was a huge hit in most of Europe, apparently.
 It's pretty cool and I think says a lot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9NhncU5_CE

(I have no idea how to embed a link. I guess you'll just have to cut and paste it. If you listen to it at all. If you read this at all.)

*There are two stereotypes that I hold about Americans that I honestly think do apply to a great majority of Americans: a) they are ignorant about the rest of the world. and b) they are nearly all incredibly wasteful.

**The idea of last year's secession referendum in Scotland is something I think is alien to most Americans. Some Americans might support it because of Scottish nationalist myths as exemplified in Braveheart, but in reality it's hard to imagine an American state taking something like that serious. Oh, yes, I know that Texas had several thousand people sign a secession petition when Obama won the second time, but in my honest opinion it wasn't serious and was just an example of how overdramatic Americans can be.

Purpose for blog/The Grail WAr

My initial plan was to write a blog entry every other week, on Wednesdays, on my 'not-busy week.'

Let me explain.

I have a busy week and a not-busy week.

My busy weeks are well...busy.
 Monday's not so bad, but I use the time between classes to do administrative work and there's little time to do anything really constructive. Tuesdays on my busy week's are insane. I leave the house at 6 in the morning and get home at about 8.45 at night. During the day, there is literally a total of ten minutes of time where I'm not working:  teaching, planning, checking homework, making copies or driving to the factories where I teach or the town I'm teaching. I spend two hours in the car, and the rest of the time I've got my nose to the EFL grindstone: except from 11.30 to 11.35 when I choke down my  lunch(hastily chopped fruit with fat-free white yogurt--it's' better than you think); and 1135 to 1140 when I take a much-needed, and, by this point, almost orgasmic, break on the toilet.
WEdnesday is a little less hectic; I have time for a leisurely lunch at home and I get home early enough to go for my near-daily 6.5 km fastwalk(I don't call it a power walk due to the fact that, in my opinion, for it to be called a powerwalk one's arms must swing a little more robustly--you gotta get your shoulders into it...--but I do walk pretty fast and I do have a swing in my arms that let's people to know that, yes, I am exercising.).
Thursdays I dont go in until noon for our weekly meeting and work til 8 and, while Friday morning is pretty busy, I am usually finished at about 1.30, barring any meetings with teachers or would-be teachers.

But on my  non-busy weeks, I have plenty more time.
 On Wednesdays, for example, I don't leave for work until two, and I usually leave work for home at 6.30 pm. So I decided to write a blog, because a) I like typing and b) It keeps me away from Facebook, which is marvellously entertaining and a great way to feel 'in touch' with people you really aren't in touch with; but which eats into time like nothing I've ever experienced. I mean, you sit down, click on an article: ('11 Ways Cannibal Puppies Are Awesome', say, or ''Beyonce Took a Dump in a Cancer Ward and It Was Amazing') and the next thing you know, it's time to have lunch, take a shower and go to work.  I needed something productive to do on my rare mornings off...

Maybe I should talk about what I'm going to write about on this blog.
 You see, I'm not going to write about anything. Or, rather, I'm not going to specialize in anything.

I read somewhere that it was advisable to "specialize" in a blog. Apparently that is a strategy for bringing readers in...you know...there are cooking blogs...and travel blogs...and medical blogs and sex blogs, etc.

But...I don't care.

I'm not looking for a big readership. I figure my brothers and sister and a handful of friends and acquaintances will check it out, and I'm cool with that. I'm under no delusion that this is going to somehow be compiled in a best selling book; I'm not going to fuss to much about re-writing and trimming; I'm not going to fret about whether my subject matter is cheery or interesting or appropriate...I don't have the time to be a professional writer, anymore. The days of writing 4 or hours a day because, damn it, I had to! are more than a decade behind me. Now, I'm just writing for the sheer joy of writing and the sheer of joy of not being in Facebook's thrall. Oh, and there will be book reviews, because I read a lot of books.

This week is technically my busy week, but it's 'Spring Break' week in Zlinsky Kraj(the 'district' of the Czech Republic I live in.) Instead of my usual 34 hours of teaching in two towns and 3 factories, I'm only teaching 12 hours--and I'm not working at all on Wednesday and Thursday! In fact, this afternoon, Jana is packing up all three kids and going with her brother to the Jaseniky Mountains for three days, about 120 miles away, for a short, last 'ski holiday' of the season. I don't ski, which means on Thursday, not only do I not have to work; but I also am going to be girlfriend- and children- free...which means...PARTY TIME!!!! For one day And 'party time'  means...well, staying home and reading all day.

So that's why I'm writing my blog on my busy week. Because it's not really busy this week.

 Which is OK because I couldn't write last week, anyway, due to  a long power-point translation from a big client in the medical industry which I had to proofread. It took 4 and a half hours and a good dose of concentration to get through because it was hardly interesting stuff. 

So...I have a number of ideas to write about in my blog that occupy my mind, but first I'm going to clear the cache with book reviews.

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The Grail War by Richard Monaco

A few months ago, I wrote a longish book review on Facebook(and amazon.co.uk) of Parsival, or a Knight's Tale, the vaguely Arthurian novel by Richard Monaco from 1977. I really liked the book and it has acquired meaning and depth for me over time. So recently I ordered all four sequels(two of them out of print, used, from an English bookseller, the other two on Kindle.)

First of all, although it was clear he was setting up for a sequel in a couple of the final chapters, I don't think they was really necessary. The first book was a complete work of art. This isn't a criticism. I'm glad he wrote sequels. I enjoyed this book a lot.

As before, the real star for me here is Monaco's writing, which is relentlessly physical. This is a story told almost purely from the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and physical sensations of the characters as well as their inner thoughts. Occasionally, Monaco breaks the fourth wall to inform the reader of something (an old-fashioned device I usually don't care for, but I think it's old-fashioned-ness is part of the point. More about this later.) I enjoy this physicality so much. It's not like watching a movie: it's better.

I had the impression while reading Parsival that the author was exploring and discovering the story; each page had the whiff of divine inspiration about it. And I accepted it as that, even as the characters(main characters: Broaditch, the earthy, cynical but good-hearted peasant and Parsival, the philosophical super-knight) went on various detours that ended in dead ends, plot-wise. It was all part of the overall tapestry and I liked it. 

THis book, by contrast, seems to be slightly more tightly plotted than Parsival, as Monaco gathers the characters (the two mentioned above and the new character Lohengrin, Parsival's bitter, angry, nearly villainous son) together for a final climactic battle.) 

As before, I don't think the plot is really not that important or complex, but I realized that both books(and the other sequels as well) are actually quite medieval in plot. you know, reading Malory, Tale of Sir Gareth, for example...I mean, he basically just rides his horse and fights people he meets on his knightly quest. These books are similar: a lot of wandering, a lot of fights. They are much more true to the spirit of medieval romances  than other Arthurian retellings, I think. I'm sure this is a self-conscious choice on the author's part. But anyway,. I sort of see these books more as ways for Monaco to hang his philosophical and poetic observations of life than as amazing stories. In fact, I would almost call them prose poems because the writing is intensely poetic...almost to point where it obscures all else. Again, this is a positive thing. (Normally I'd count this as negative, but these books are strange and break all rules for me. He's really writing about every life experience that's relevant to him: birth, death, marriage, sex, love, parents, children, war, spirituality...and writing pretty profoundly about it, I think.)

An interesting thing... the supporting character Gawain(a fine, complex creation) realizes it first, that he is literally unkillable because he has some 'part to play'. Broaditch also forces himself, quite against his nature, to surrender to fate because it's clearly moving him somewhere and he has no control of it; and Parsival, after a suicide attempt, also realizes his essential...unkillibility? Of course in story they are in the hands of fate, or of God's or the Devil's(again, like medieval stories, there really does seem to be both a Christian God and Devil at work--and again, it's a very medieval concept of God and Devil); but of course it's also just that the author himself doesn't want to kill him because he needs him for the plot. I can't think of another story where the characters become aware of their own plot armor.

As for the War in the title itself...well...such is the nature of his writing that I can honestly say I have never read such well-written battle scenes. I mean, they are horrifically violent. (these books are the most violent books I've ever read, by a long shot) but so graphically descriptive...it's just beautiful. 

It's clear that despite wallowing in violence and blood a bit, the author despises war and I suppose I would categorize these books' depictions of war both as 'Post-Vietnam' and 'Post-Holocaust. There are very few heroic deeds taking place  as the war takes on a terrifying life of its own and everyone, villain and hero, is irresistibly swept up in an incredible, bloody climax that has to be read to be believed.

LaSalle Family Thanksgiving/Stephen Gaines's Heroes and Villains: the True Story of the Beach Boys(1985)

LaSalle Family Thanksgiving/Stephen Gaines' Heroes and Villains: the True Story of the Beach Boys

I come from a big family, especially on my father's side. My father grew up on farms in Ohio and finally in the Missouri, Ozarks, outside of Miller, MO. His father was a farmer and his mother was a nurse's aide(at least late in life.) Together they had 10 kids, 6 boys and 4 girls. 

So family reunions in my family get a little crowded. But we have two every year: at Thanksgiving In Mt. Vernon, Missouri and one on a farm near Wauseon, Ohio on the Fourth of July. Usually most of my uncles and aunts come along with their children, great-children(and possibly, because the age spread among the ten siblings is pretty wide) great-grandchildren. A lot of people. Sometimes, depending on how many people make it, over a hundred. WE have to rent a big hall with a kitchen and tables and chairs. The extended family is probably three or four generations now and I probably don't even know half of the people who show up.

 Although I haven't been to a Thanksgiving reunion since 2000, I have fond memories from childhood of  Thanksgivings with the extended fam: memories of building snowmen(with my uncles); playing 'kill the man with the ball' and later trying to play (American) football(which I never got into and didn't really understand how to play); memories of talking vulgarities to my cousins;  playing the final, annual, grand 'hide-and-seek' game in the autumn leaves as evening fell into night with all my cousins. Boys outnumber girls in my family and I have several male cousins all around my age and we had a conspiracy in which we would stick together: if we were 'IT' and we found one of the others, we would overlook him and find one of the little kids instead. In this way, we were seldom it. It was kind of a shitty thing to do when I think of it, and I feel all the worse that it was MY idea; I quarterbacked my cousins in these games just as my other cousins  quarterbacked in the football games(where I was never quarterback, because I didn't understand the rules and I'm not really a physical person anyway. I was really pretty worthless at football and, indeed, most sports.)

And of course I remember the food; all the traditional Thanksgiving dishes along with ones that were unique to various branches of our family. The long prayer uttered by my uncle Terry before each meal. The tables laden with food and plates that we'd line up for. The rented-out kitchens where my aunts labored; the bottles of Coke and Sprite and juice. The leaves on the grey, frost-covered ground, the last furious splashings of orange and red on the trees. The stuffed animals behind glass upstairs(the hall we rented was in the basement of a museum). The late afternoon/evening games of euchre which the family would play where my uncles would talk and laugh and fart and drink beer after beer after beer. 

I guess these are pretty standard memories of an American thanksiving.

But the thing I do remember that might be  slightly unique is the post-lunch football game. After the Thanksgiving lunch proper, the plates would be put away and most of the women would linger at the tables, talking and gossiping about life and kids and the every day;perhaps cleaning (well probably washing dishes, now that I think about it) while the men would trek across the golf course that lay behind the hall to some baseball fields, that, left fallow in late November, were good enough for a football field. My uncles (by blood or marriage) played football along with male cousins once they were old enough (.I don't think I ever reached an age where I was allowed to play. I probably still haven't reached that age. I used to sit on the sidelines and read. )

Anyway, the game begins well enough. It's touch football. The brothers divide themselves and the two captains pick various cousins. The game commences. It's an informal affair. Beer is drunk. Jokes are made, punctuated with flatulence, belches and belly-laughs. But something happens after some time. 

You see, my family is competitive. Really competitive. Unhealthily so, in fact.

 For most of them this is expressed through sport(for the unsporty like minority, i.e., me, this competitiveness is expressed...well, in pretty much every other aspect of my life.)

ANyway,  at some point someone snaps. A foul is made. A bad call. Or just a call that someone doesn't agree with. The first one was usually(but not always) my uncle Terry,  a choleric Southern Baptist preacher who led prayers before meals, but also a bit of a hothead, at least when he was young. He's probably mellowed now.

Anyway, he'd snap. There would be shouts and he'd storm off the field in a huff. My uncles would sort of make excuses for themselves, shrug their shoulders at his hot-headedness in easy-going cameraderie("he's always been that way, since he was  a kid"..."well, he upsets himself"...'chip on his shoulder'...'he's never gotten over...'..."wish he wouldn't do that"..."he'd have a better time if he wasn't so high-strung"...and so on. ). After a break and a beer, the game would resume.

Until the next uncle snapped.  And stormed off the field in a huff. the next break. The next beer. The next resumption of play.

And eventually, the whole  game would collapse as the uncles, pissed off, a little drunk, tired out, made their way back in pairs or groups to the humid warmth of the hall to watch the Rose Bowl on television and slowly nurse their sullen anger over a beer and a second lunch back to brotherly cameraderie. 

I don't think they ever finished a game.

The last Thanksgiving I went to, when I was about thirty, ended the same way. Only this time, it ended with my cousin, Derrick(a biologist in Colorado, I think) screaming at my uncle Jim(a then soon-to-be-retired football coach/history teacher in Miller MO) that he wasn't going to hit him because Jim was about 60 and Derrick might accidentally kill him. My youngest brother Craig, still a teenager, had been hurt by my uncle John, who stood there lamely excusing himself, telling us that that was how he had been trained to play in high school, to hurt the opponent as much as you could get away with. Another family thanksgiving....
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I was reminded of these Thanksgiving fights between my uncles and cousins when I was reading Stephen Gaines' Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys. Because there's something of my family in the Beach Boys family. Something I recognize. A little. But there's also something more...

All great rock bands and musicians have a good story behind them. A narrative arc. Most of them are familiar to us, from tv or cinema biopics. Typically, the RockStarHero, makes his first splash, rising from the rank and file of normal musicians due to some musical quality that sets him apart. As his fame grows, so grows his appetites for life and love as everything he can wish for is set before him on a silver platter. Women, money, fast cars, big houses. Drugs. And then it happens. What begins as a curiosity or a way to cope with enormous pressure or just becomes an increasingly large problem for the musician as he struggles to remain on top and maintain and control his various addictions and his career and lifestyle. Eventually he sinks under the weight of it all. Someone he knows dies. It becomes a nightmare. He loses everything, He goes down as far as he's come up...eventually he grows up and gets out of the hole he's in and continues making his music, older and wiser.

that's one story arc.
Another is the Beatles' arc. It starts with one small success leading to a bigger one and that to a bigger and so on. A friend once told me that the Beatles had the greatest story of all rock bands. He wasn't a big fan, but I was.  I hadn't thought about it, but I immediately realized he was right. The scrappy beginnings, the Hamburg struggles, the mounting super-fame, the pressure of the road and the darker events of 1966 leading to the transformation from rock band to psychedelic studio band, the trip to India and embrace(and subsequent rejection) of Eastern Mysticism, the last 'perfect' album, the sudden disintegration right at the point that the rot started to set in and then the final, unexpected splintering into four distinct artists, leaving behind a body of work almost perfect...After that, it gets messy, with slagging off in the press and suits and counter-suits and nasty rancor, but, hey that's the POST-Beatle story. The Beatle story itself...There's just something so...neat about it. So Beatle-y. Like the almost cheesy final twelve-string guitar lick in "If I Fell."

I mean, it works so well, you almost don't want to like it. 

The Beach Boys' arc is not like that. IN fact, I'm not sure if there is a Beach Boys arc. Or maybe it's that there are so many narrative arcs, each contradicting the other. 

Were they a band whose foundations on Brian Wilson's undoubted genius were sabotaged by the ungrateful, greedy others, causing the leader's artistic, delicate soul to completely shatter? Were they a band of hard-working talented individuals whose careers were sabotaged by Brian Wilson's self-indulgent excesses and flat-out insane behaviour? Is it a story of a group of super-talented brothers, tortured by a physically and psychologically abusive childhood, triumphing in music only to be pulled down and destroyed by the talented but ordinary efforts of the rest of the band, a group too narrow-sighted to give the Wilson's their creative head because it would mean decreasing revenue for their high-flying lifestle?Or is it the story of several talented musicians generously struggling to keep the geniuses in their midst from fatal self-destruction by any means necessary? Is it a story of a hard-working man who made his ungrateful sons and their ungrateful friends stars only to be stabbed in the back by them at the height of their success...or is it the story of an abusive man who attempted and almost succeeded in destroying his own childrens' futures...? Is it a story of artistic triumph or greed? Fun or depression? Sanity or madness?

 The thing is, it's all of these.

 The Beach Boys are probably the most confounding of the 'great bands of the sixties.' I mean, a quarter of their music is absolutely sublime, really, some of the most amazing and complex progressive pop music EVER; and a good 50 percent of it is superior pop-rock, a little on the soft side for some people's tastes, perhaps, but no less brilliant for all that.

And then there's the last quarter. The worst, most crass commercial pap ever released, arguably. Just letting the music tell the story doesn't help because the music itself is as contradictory as the various members and their respective points of view. 
Gaines does a pretty good job of uniting the strands of these various narratives and twining them together into one complex story. But no one could make this story into one as neat as most bands'. Gaines doesn't talk too much about the music,(and when he does, I don't always agree with him) but then, the music speaks for itself, for the most part, good and bad.. Instead he focuses on the personality and actions that they take. And well...

None of the Beach Boys or their various associates come off particularly well, with the possible exceptions of peace-maker Carl Wilson and the loving easy,going mother, Audree Wilson. I mean, it's called Heroes and Villains...but it  could  have just been called 'Villains.'

 Gaines doesn't spend much time on 'lesser egos' of the band,: Alan Jardine, Bruce Johnston; and especially Blondie Chaplin, Ricky Fataar and original guitarist David Marks; all  remain sort of enigmatic and colorless. 

Much light, however, is shed on, Brian Wilson's mad, uninhibited actions and the groups never-ending attempts to tame his mental illness for his(and their) own good.  Mike Love's anger management problems are stressed. The choleric, abusive father/manager Murry Wilson emerges surprisingly well drawn. Some supporting characters, like Brian's long-suffering wife and the violent and perhaps leechy Love brothers,  who worked for the organization in the late seventies, are also fairly prominent.  Youngest Wilson Carl, whose production talents and band-leading skills got them through the seventies is sadly, undemphasized.

But the real triumph of the book is in the well-drawn portrait of Dennis Wilson, the also-ran genius of the band, the slightly less brilliant and slightly less mad(though still incredibly talented and incredibly fucked up) middle brother, whose tender and incredibly sad last days are set down in painful detail. His is a story of substance abuse trumping all else. Unlike addicted icons like Ray Charles or JOhnny Cash, once Dennis Wilson went down, he never hit rock bottom and resurfaced. He stayed down there and died.

Gaines treats his death as a sort of cathartic sacrifice, as he ends the book on positive note for the rest: 1985:The Beach Boys band as one of the top ten American concert draws; Brian Wilson fit and healthy and heading towards productivity again thanks to the eccentric but effective techniques of since-defamed 'doctor' Eugene Landy. It's a tidy, neat ending to a long story of changing fortunes and rock star ego-clashes, drugs, and murder, and even incest...the Beach Boys were indeed, a 'diseased group of motherfuckers' as Lester Bangs put it.

With hindsight, thirty years after it's publication(in 1985, less than two years after Dennis Wilson's death) the optimistic ending seems...well, almost comical. For the story did not end there. It trudged on in the same confounding tradition, through the late-career commercial re-peak in the late 80s(and simultaneous descent into kitsch and cheese); the fitful, faltering solo career of Brian Wilson; the 'divorce' between the Landy/Wilson team, resulting in Landy being prohibited from practicing medicine; the many law suits of Mike Love against various other members; the emerging oldies act for seniors;  the surprising 50th anniversary tour and album of 2012, when the Beach Boys released the best album they had done since the late seventies(some would say the early seventies) and the all-too-predictable disintegration into bitterness of 2013...

The book needs a sequel. 

But for now, it's probably the best, i.e., least syncophantic and complete biography of the Beach Boys as a band we have. (Catch a Wave by Peter Ames Carlin is a great, even revelatory, Brian Wilson biography, though.)
I recommend it for anybody who's a fan of the music or thinks that they could be. But ultimately, as mentioned above, the music tells the story in all it's absurd contradictions just as well...

Book Review

I'm going to write a book review of the last book I read but first I'm going to make and drink some coffee and maybe use the toilet.

First post:

This is my first post. But I'm kind of sleepy so...the end.