CAUGHT IN (Y)A MOSH

HEAVY METAL AND ME

It started at recess in 7th grade, when my closest friend would split ear buds with me and play Metallica tapes as we avoided social interaction with our peers. I stared at the skulls he painted on the Walkman and the image of Iron Maiden's Eddie taped into the player window, and thought, THIS IS REBELLION. At first it seemed like a wall of noise, because he usually got the bud channel with the guitar solos. After a few tries, metal started to make sense to me. I requested mix tapes, started pooling my pocket change to buy used tapes at the record store down the street from my house. By high school, I was a metal head at heart, and could talk for hours on end about the nuances of Steve Harris's bass tone or the stylistic shift in Metallica's music after Cliff Burton died, or plead with the more extreme dudes to accept Anthrax into the pantheon of greatness, because they deserve it, dammit. I'm just happy I didn't dress that way, because nothing says "please beat the crap out of me as I walk home through bad neighborhoods" like a Megadeth shirt, black jeans, spike bracelets, and stringy hair adorning your 120-pound gangling frame. I'd rush home every day to blast my favorites on the big stereo in the living room before my sister and her boyfriend came home and kicked me out so they could (shudder) "be together". Gross. 

Metal helped get me through the high school doldrums and long, hot summers. It helped me make friends at my age level and in the adult world when I worked in a restaurant kitchen, blasting Sepultura with the sous chef as we prepped the dinner specials. Hell, it even put me to sleep, as I'd throw in Pantera as I went to sleep, but at a low volume; somehow through his legendary, house-shaking snoring, my dad could hear music through walls that I could barely discern from five feet away. 

I still dig metal, and probably always will. It's been helpful in getting to know students who think they're unreachable because of their interests, and makes for debate material with these boys and girls, which I always win, until they get into the Scandinavian black metal stuff, which I just can't get behind. Sorry, my northern brethren. But hey, let's have some tea and discuss the finer points of Black Sabbath any time. 

These guys warped me, and I gave them lots of my money.

HEAVY METAL AND YOU

A guide to ruining your life

ANYHOO, I read the Heavy Metal & You by Christopher Krovatin, for which I had high hopes. In one sense, Krovatin delivers thoughtful analysis of metal music and translates the scary rage into something outsiders can understand. I have had to slowly introduce many a lady to metal, with mixed results, but I can identify with protagonist Sammy's passion for the genre. HOWEVER, I just can't get with Slayer and Deicide, his two favorite bands. I tried with Slayer, but after about four songs of yelling about blood and Satan and visceral accounts of how you are to be dismembered, I'm ready to move onto something more stimulating, like putting my head in C-clamp. So, the music part is good. My problem with this book? THE ACTUAL STORY.

Argh. It moves so slowly and seems empty. There is some revelation near the end that is deeper than I expected given the setup, and Sammy and Melissa learn a lot about themselves, and relationships. For that, this is a worthy read, but it takes a while to get there. Krovatin cleverly uses the play, pause, rewind, and fast forward button symbols to indicate time at page breaks, which assists in navigation and makes this feel like an audio book or movie, and the chapter titles are all recognizable songs. Sammy has some rage issues, which are explored between bouts of heavy petting, and while he is a stereotypical metalhead on the outside, at least he's well-read and somewhat intelligent, of which we in the metal world are not usually accused. 

Without giving away too much, this book is a mixed bag, but it's a promising first effort, and because he knows his metal so well, he has an authentic voice when rendering ideas about into a fictional context. He has subsequent books out there, which I'll eventually try. If the Goodreads page for this book is any indication, he's gotten through to many people, and that's what it's all about. 

HEAVY COMPLAINTS AND ME

In all, this book is fine, I guess. It just doesn't have the right oomph to make it to the upper echelon. And now for my list of SEVEN DEADLY COMPLAINTS:

1. I don't smoke, but I know enough that quitting smoking is extremely difficult. Yet, this guy Sammy seems to go cold turkey for his love interest without a problem. An angst-riddled metalhead who doesn't have a nicotine craving worth mentioning? As my boy Downtown Clay Davis would say: 

2. Sammy angrily stalks the streets of NYC with Slayer blasting in his ear holes, but somehow gets Anthrax lyrics stuck in his head and equates it to his situation. Me, being an authority on metal, can tell you that it's impossible to have a coherent thought while listening to Slayer. 

3. I know there exist young metal-loving men who go to expensive prep schools in Manhattan, but when you're trying to create a story for the extreme music set, most of whom probably don't have that upbringing, that's a classic case of misplaced setting. 

4. Rookie mistake: the standard classic book plant is executed poorly. The back of the book says Krovatin was an undergrad when he wrote Heavy Metal & You, so it stands to reason that he'd stumble when inserting references to The Catcher in the Rye. Instead of finding some kind of deep connection to Holden Caulfield, Sammy breaks some windows and realizes that he's acting JUST LIKE CAULFIELD. Does this mean I could put this book down and READ A BETTER VERSION OF THIS STORY? I guarantee no one will be clamoring to read Krovatin's sealed stories, decades after his death. 

5. Technology moves fast, and by spending so much time describing the finer points of creating a mix compilation (High Fidelity did it, and did it better*) on CD, Krovatin is already alienating his younger readers, who probably use them for coasters. If he'd checked his email using AOL I'd have chucked this book in the neighbor's burn pile. 

*I could go into the differing theories on creating a killer compilation here, but I'd have to start a new blog titled JB Yells About Your Crappy Mix. 

6. The protagonist's favorite band is Deicide. Deicide sucks. 

7. Krovatin gives such short shrift to Sammy alienating his friends that their eventual conflict and resolution feels forced, shoehorned in to give complete resolution to the boy + new girl = boy's friends are sad trope. This is the second most important part of the story and it receives about four rushed pages of treatment near the very end. 

8. I'm not fond of Sammy being a stereotypical high school metal dude who smokes, drinks, does drugs, and pukes all over his friends. I was a high school metal dude, and didn't do any of those things until college. Just as there are eight items on this promised list of seven, I'm the exception to the rule!

NEXT TIME, I YELL ABOUT

A book advertised as a bike trip murder mystery, but turns out to be a coming of age novel about acknowledging change. Let's just say this book has a great title of double meaning, and HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT!

BORING STUFF

Heavy Metal And You

Christopher Krovatin

2005 PUSH

Running on Empty

HELLO AGAIN

I can't remember the last time I read a book and thought, "You know, I understand why people think burning books is a good idea." Oh, wait, yes I can. What a shame that the first YA book I get the time to read after two months of doctoral coursework (read: voluntary suicide) is such a dud.

Fitting, then, that this book was available for a dime at a library book sale. No, really, a dime, and I just happened to have one. You can't get anything for a dime anymore. A dime can't even buy you two nickels. I tried it at the bank and they said go away. I said I have a right to be here. They said we don't know how long you've been living in our break room, but it stops now. I said fine.

Don't click. Please, don't. I've never been so serious.

This book, by English author Julia Donaldson, is set in Scotland. Right away, there are two problems:
1. I may have Scottish ancestry, but the way their spoken language is written is maddening, and there are enough apostrophes in it to I don't know a good punchline for such a lousy setup.
2. The text on Donaldson's website is all Comic Sans. Therefore, I must attempt to destroy her.

The story itself is about a girl, Leo, who runs away from her aunt and uncle, her primary caretakers after the death of her parents. For some reason, when a kid in Scotland runs away from home, it makes the front page of the paper. Either it was a slow news day or the fine people of Scotland get their world news from around the cracker barrel. Anyway, running factors heavily into this story, for about, oh, two pages. Leo, in typical fashion, hasn't thought far beyond simply running away and is starving; she steals some donuts and is chased by the vendor, a nice young man named Finlay who becomes her best friend and ally. They befriend some invalid woman who somehow is released from an asylum. She yells and screams madcap things, which is supposed to be funny, I think? Yeah, nothing like making fun of the deranged, and then making some political commentary about how her shady drinking buddies only come around when her welfare check arrives. Kids love that stuff. They eat it up and talk about the pitfalls of the socialist model on snapchat and instagram.

As if that weren't enough, Leo is pursued by her uncle, who may just be a pedophile who talks to birds. What?  Oh, and Leo RUNS away from him, so there's your titular significance.

Within this mishmash mix-up of weirdos and pederasts, Leo attempts to find her identity as she attempts to track down her father's side of the family. HOWEVER, the entire story is compromised by several plot holes, flat characters, and the fact that it's her first and only book for people over the age of 7. Somehow, Donaldson won an award for positively portraying people with mental health issues. Did they even read this book? Mary the nut job is played for laughs, and if she isn't, she's just played to be a nut, with no redeeming qualities, over than breezily giving shelter to Leo. The rest of the time she's howling Johnny Cash lyrics and twirling in circles. There isn't anything to Mary, but of course, Leo and Finlay care for her, and her plot point is beleaguered the way it's shoehorned in...and then resolved through exposition. EXPOSITION. Come on. That's like killing Hamlet off-stage, and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern lumber onstage to describe his demise. "Bet you thought we were dead! Nope, we were too stupid die. Now, about the guy who's been whining throughout this entire play..." Not that this is even close to Shakespeare.

So, this was a tough 220 pages to navigate. The format is sort of neat; points to Donaldson for splitting up the sections with headings for the parts that center on Leo and Finlay and the person talking to the birds (I already spoiled that one, boo hoo). It works for a while but becomes tedious, as Leo's sections are in the first person, and the rest in the third.

And what's the deal with Finlay being ridiculed for experimenting with goth style? Why are we doing this to a subgroup of people? As if it's a phase that needs to be overcome. For a novel that's supposed to be about finding like-minded people and acceptance from others, this is a gross misplay.

Skip this one. Not even worth reading it to heckle.

NEXT TIME, I YELL ABOUT

A book for which I have high expectations: the heavy metal romance novel. In high school, I had down the heavy metal part, but the romance was absent and/or catastrophically present. I'm putting all my leftover angst and encyclopedic knowledge of the genre into this one. Let's just say, no matter how disappointing this one is, it can't be worse than the tripe I just reviewed.

  \m/  \m/

BORING STUFF

Running On The Cracks
Julia Donaldson
2009 Henry Holt & Co

we were here - but you'd never know

INVISIBLE KID

My favorite students (to torment) are the ones who want to go unseen. They sit as far away from the instructor as possible, hunker down in their hoodies, and try to sneak the earbuds in and drift off to where they want to be. First, I want to know where that is, because 95% of the time it's a time or place they can never reclaim. There is a story I want to hear and help the boy (it's always a boy) comes to terms or generate a new understanding, using what they know, or want to have. Second, I move in their direction and passive-aggressively engage them. Oh, the joy on my face as I see the anguish on theirs. Sorry, buddy, you won my attention by attempting to avoid it; I'm about to draw you in, make you my go-to guy; You're too young to disappear.

Dark Dude 2: Another light-skinned Mexican boy soul-searches. This time with more swearing.

We Were Here by Matt De La Pena, tells the story of three invisible kids. The story is narrated by Miguel, who enters juvenile detention and immediately instigates conflict with Rondell and Mong, who, like Miguel, carry their own emotional baggage. Mong inexplicably recruits Miguel and Rondell to break out and head to Mexico, to freedom! And, presumably, tacos, as the boys consume dozens on their journey. I say freedom - not just from juvy, but from their personal demons. In true YA novel fashion, the boys are a diverse group from varying backgrounds/ethnicity, who each have their unique personal issues with which readers might identify.

This takes the form of an epic adventure, but quickly derails, as the escapees run into trouble everywhere they go, despite staying off the grid and hiking along the California coast on their way to Mexico. The situations are all believable and grounded in the boys' own desires and pet peeves; anyone who was burned by a crush in high school will identify with Miguel over the Flaca episode. I'm most impressed by their many nights spent on the beaches; Miguel revels in the solitude, and De La Pena ingeniously captures teenage escapism and desirous invisibility at its finest. There are some hidden elements to the plot that I won't reveal here, but they combine with his want of getting away to drive Miguel's actions. 

Caveat: This book is long. Too long. Long like the end of Invictus. The story drags in too many parts for my liking, but not so for the many rave reviews on Amazon. The story is full of wacky slang and salty language that I enjoy, but at the same time it'll turn off the curmudgeons who won't read this book anyway. So, good job, Matt! Write for your target audience. Then get them to read books that aren't yours.

CLASSICS ALERT!

I need to keep a running tally of naked advertisements of "classic" YA books. De La Pena has Miguel read Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple, and Of Mice and Men. This time, the inclusion of the classic novels is quite clever, as the plot of each book echoes the character traits of one of the boys. Miguel is Holden Caulfield, Rondell embodies Lennie, and Mong is Oprah. Ha! Ha! But seriously, Mong does represent the abused Celie (and everyone else) in the Walker novel. I haven't seen this much overt courtship of readers since Dark Dude. I suppose the kids need their classics spoon-fed to them. For me, see the brilliant Book-a-minute Classics website. Ultra-condensed versions of the all-time greats!

UNDERSTANDING THE LATINO PERSPECTIVE

I wrote something in the Dark Dude post about learning more about the culture/perspective of Latino boyhood. Yeah, well, I haven't done much studying other than my own anecdotal conversations with my students and watching Stand and Deliver to get amped for the school week every Sunday night. ((I don't actually do this.) I should.) However, the population of my location and my line of work demands that I read, study, and develop my own approach to these Latino boys. For the most part, the girls take care of themselves and make an honest effort. The boys seem lost in comparison. Reading this fiction is a good start, but I'd appreciate input on journals, scholarly articles, documentaries, or any media related to this issue. I could expand this request to all minority groups, but I feel like the most urgent (and my least-understood, or so I feel) is the Latino perspective. That's right, I'm a Ukranian-American YA genius. (No.)

So that's where I am. I want to know more, always THIRSTING for KNOWLEDGE. And if you're young and demonstrate this trait, it will never go unnoticed.

If Miguel had a camera, and got lost and walked to Seaside, Oregon, it would have looked like this. Flickr photo from Oregon State University special collection. 

NEXT TIME, I YELL ABOUT

I'm sort of trying to read a book I found for a quarter at a library sale. So far, it's terrible, meaning I will put on a brave face and plow through an awful YA book one more damn hell ass time, as my boy Miguel would say. I'll just say that this book might BREAK YOUR MOTHER'S BACK!

BORING STUFF

We Were Here

Matt De La Pena

Delacorte 2009

The Lost Canterbury Tales

Shrek! Shrek! I'm silver, Shrek!

FLASHBACK

If you pursued an English major for more than five minutes, you read Chaucer. I had the (dis)pleasure of reading the whole thing in Middle English; not only did I sound like a brain-damaged pirate, I gained a deeper understanding of Chaucer's rhyme scheme when writing dirty stories about mistaken identity, pranks involving pseudo-rape and the actual kissing of butts. The hallmark of heritage literature. Kids, when your parents tell you that shows like Jackass are mind-rotting, putrid acts of humiliation, they're right, but you have the opportunity to argue that much of the content can be traced as literal interpretations of tales passed down and borrowed in European history, many of which are available for their perusal in The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron. You'll be mowing the lawn in no time, but the smug satisfaction of an academic explanation for your deviant behavior will put you well on the way to winning many an argument while losing many an ally.

I also vaguely remember something the "professor" had written about the Tales, in which we had to place each story on her "homoerotic continuum". At the time I went along with it, but complained to another professor about the silliness of the exercise. He concurred and said something insightful and poignant about the academic system being so out of whack that to get any attention (funding) anymore, one must concoct wild interpretations of established texts. I've forgotten it now, and because I've been out of the intelligentsia for years, in favor of surrounding myself with adolescents and their lack of sophistication, I now refer to that Chaucer class as Pin The Tail On The Gay Line. In honor of Geoffrey, I've penned a mighty limerick:

I once read a man named Chaucer

who fancied himself an author

we've studied his tales

- a class many fail - 

turns out he's a bit of a tosser

This is the first result for a GIS for "homoerotic continuum". I guess you could say it's for the birds. HA! HA!

FLIMSY CONNECTION TO BOOK REVIEW

Sonya Hartnett's The Silver Donkey has a parallel structure to the aforementioned works, but in this instance there is only one storyteller, and he only has tales featuring heroic donkeys. Think of him as a really lazy Aesop. Oh, and instead of telling stories to pass the time on a pilgrimage, the guy does so to entertain some Dudley Do-Right kids who might be his ticket home. 

While the stories serve as a break in the (in)action of the story, they also do a little to raise the esteem of the lowly donkey, who is apparently much maligned in WWI-era France. (Yes, it's another WWI book! But this time the story is away from the trenches, and it has the Jimmy Carter seal of approval, so you know it's about peace and/or building houses.) Our protagonist has run away from the front, but is overcome by blindness that slowly lifts over the course of the story. Is it self-inflicted? A nervous reaction to the horrors he witnessed in battle? Did he stare at the sun too long? He's found in a forest by two young girls who pledge to keep his secret and help him get across "the channel" to his homeland. Never does Hartnett reveal that it's the ENGLISH CHANNEL and that he's going home to ENGLAND. I used the power of context clues to make the connection in, I don't know, six seconds, but these are details I would have liked to actually see, for the sake of the YA reader. Bah, they'd probably get it. But, I know that YA boys are generally big on facts and locations. I know because I still act like one. 

So, the titular silver donkey is the linchpin to the story, and carries a special meaning to the runaway soldier, and to the girls he befriends. This could serve the double purpose of a primer for symbolism and pro-donkey propaganda in the classroom, which will, I'm sure, be misconstrued as some kind of endorsement of the Democratic Party. I can't wait to the Conservapedia version called The Golden Elephant, in which the soldier volunteers to fight, kills a hundred terrorists, and rescues the kidnapped Republican President, whose Secret Service code name is, you guessed it, Golden Elephant. 

Back to donkey symbolism. They're known for:

1. Stubbornness. 
2. Bearing burdens.
3. Jesus rode one into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday 
4. Helping kids get away with saying "ass".

Pretty impressive list. Hartnett covers 1 & 2 in full detail, and dips into Jesus territory when the soldier tells the tale of the donkey who carried Mary for days, all the way to the stables. So, donkeys aren't all bad. I'm seeing the ass at the end of the tunnel here. 

I should add that there can be an intro-to-intro to gender studies lesson within this book, when comparing the reaction to the soldier's stories by the young girls and the young boy, as well as the roles they play in getting the soldier on his way home without incident. The girls provide food, listen patiently to the tales and marvel at the shiny animal figurine, while the boy begs to hear details from the war and does all the actual work to book surreptitious passage back to England. I wonder what the Wife of Bath would make of this tale. 

The Silver Donkey treads where Chaucer rarely does, most likely because there are few easy laughs in altruism and the human predilection/instinct to help others in need. If you doubt we're capable of such behaviors at a young age, watch Alan Alda play with monkeys to get a fuller picture. I suppose, though, that we have our children read about kindness, compassion, and sharing when they're young so that when they read something as lurid as Chaucer, they realize that his complicated morality demonstrates realism at its finest (see the ambivalence of the Wife of Bath's prologue), much of the characters' behaviors are socially irresponsible (and therefore funny), and that fart jokes never go out of style. 

NEXT TIME, I YELL ABOUT

A book which I've wanted to read for quite some time. Teenage boys in Juvy struggle to make sense of their misdeeds and place in society. Let's just say that at one point in time this was our location!

BORING STUFF

The Silver Donkey

Sonya Hartnett

2004 Penguin (Australia) 

NOPE

TESTIFY

Reached #1 on the NY Times List of Books That Will Sicken, Then Somewhat Redeem You

I WANT MY BLANKIE

We all have something special of value that brings us comfort, keeps us grounded. When everything else seems to spiral out of control, it's the special thing we lean on for support. It is familiar, predictable, welcoming, and able to distract us from the outside world. When the outside world intrudes and destroys that special thing, or it loses whatever hold that made it special, we lose hold on our own reality and enter something new and fearful.

Imagine: You are forced to leave your home and flee for your safety. You have to leave now. Sorry, no car. What do you take with you? What one thing do you grab that you want to save? It's probably that special thing. Difficulty: No wireless access.

Mine would probably be my Star Trek books, loaded onto a Kindle. That's my escape, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I used them when I was twelve and I still do now, to get away from stress, tragedy, and otherwise.* I even grabbed the few I owned and hustled them with me to the basement during tornado warnings, imagining that we'd emerge to an apocalyptic scene, or in another dimension, and these books would be my guide to negotiation with strange aliens, or used to pass the time while my dad built us a shack.


*There's a huge spike in my Star Trek consumption when a woman dumps me. By Star Trek, I mean booze. And Star Trek. 


I was lucky to only fantasize a radical change in my life. Ishmael Beah lived it, in the most severe terms.

You're twelve years old, a normal kid. You like rap music and you're part of a dance team. Then, one day, soldiers enter your town and shoot up the place. You flee with your friends, separated from your family. You wander the wilderness, staying away from the main roads, walking by night to make it to the safety of towns unaffected by the brewing civil war, hoping for news of your family. Then, one day, you're stopped at gunpoint by the military, and forced to join the fight against insurgents. They train you to be a killer, hook you on drug cocktails that keep you awake for days at a time. This haze becomes all you live for, and anything else is a bother and a bore. you become a brutal, soulless killing machine.

Then, suddenly, it stops. You're released from the army and sent to the capital city for social rehabilitation. You get to go through the agony of drug withdrawal, fights with many boys going through the same thing, and an existential journey of identity and loss. Boy, am I ready to go fetal and read about Vulcans and warp drive.

Set phasers to fantasyland!

The most gut-wrenching moment in this book comes when Ishmael and his friends are captured, and his rap tapes are confiscated and burned. There is loaded (language arts alert!) symbolism to this moment. When his tapes are burned, Ishmael ceases to be himself and becomes an automaton for the military.  His one comfort is stripped; the last reminder of his previous life. And the monologue in my head goes on like this.

JUST THE BEGINNING

This is a can't-miss book for YA and adult readers. Social Studies teachers especially, read this book and share it with your students. The immediacy of reading about someone their age being forced to fight in a war far beyond him is riveting (and revolting), and the redemption Ishmael achieves leaves us on a positive note. In the big picture, his story brought awareness of and action against the use of child soldiers in African nations, which still happens in massive numbers. Teachers can use this as a supplement, or a springboard, for case studies in African culture, politics, war, and pressure from international powers. Students might further their relationship with Beah, who has remained a public figure.

Set phasers to How you can smile and have hope for Sierra Leone and the rest of the world after what you experienced is beyond me. 

Since moving permanently to the United States and establishing himself as a goodwill ambassador of the United Nations, Ishmael has used all the contemporary elements to spread his story and to reach like-minded people, and those of us (not me!) who had no idea.

Beah Foundation - Actively directed by Beah. Dedicated to treating and re-socializing child soldiers. Sounds familiar.

A Long Way Gone - Official website for the book. Some media that might be useful to teachers.

He was even on The Daily Show:

And naturally, Ishmael is on Twitter:
Tweets by @IshmaelBeah

Holy crap, he watches Breaking Bad! #treadlightly

NEXT TIME, I YELL ABOUT

Surprise! Another book set during the First World War! This time, two young girls encounter an injured soldier in a forest, and that's as much as I know. Let's just say the sequel should be called THE GOLDEN MULE!

BORING STUFF

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Ishmael Beah

2008 Sarah Crichton Books

ARTIFACT: DUKANE Model 28A33 Film Strip Projector

THE LIGHT BRIGADE

I thought AV Club would be all about the babes, man.

Some of you might remember these from your school days, if you are A) over 30; or B) went to a hella poor school.* I found this in a closet at my school, where it's idled in retirement, a "gift" from the elementary school down the street. Gee, thanks. Any other garbage, I mean, media, we can take for you?

I discuss this novelty more in the video below. Or, view on Youtube.





*For reference: I'm A and my school is B.