Year Of The Monkey - Patti Smith

YEAR OF THE MONKEY – PATTI SMITH

How strange it must be living Patti Smith's life. Just a thought that occurred whilst reading Year Of The Monkey. At the start of the book Patti mentions she's just finished the last of three nights in a row performing at the Filmore, in San Francisco. Can you imagine? Three nights of ecstatic, classic rock'n'roll that for some would probably be as near to a religious experience they will ever get, and that quite possibly includes Patti herself.

Patti, however, just casually mentions it almost as a 'by the way', as though it was no big deal. What is more significant to her is some guy with a greasy ponytail leaning over and puking on her boots on the last night and whether this is a good or a bad sign to end the year on? 'Well, considering the state of the world,' she surmises 'who could tell the difference?'

Patti wanders into a thrift store and buys an old Grateful Dead tie-dye T-shirt with Jerry Garcia's face on it. It's an impulsive buy, she says. She later hitches a ride to San Diego with a couple who ask for eighty-five dollars advance payment for gasoline. At a truck stop she gets out to go to the bathroom and on her return she sees the car speeding off into the distance, leaving her there stranded. Meanwhile, Patti's friend for over forty years, record producer extraordinaire Sandy Pearlman, is lying in a coma in a hospital.

All these things and more are fused together like fragments of a dream to create an encompassing dream-like experience but rather than the fragments it's the dream in totality that Patti is more interested in, and it's this that she writes about.

It's unlikely that Patti's a rich person at all but at the same time she's not going to be poverty-stricken, so if need be she's going to be able to afford new clothes if required. It's interesting then that she would instead buy an old, second-hand tie-dye T-shirt peeled from the body of some old Deadhead. It's interesting that rather than catching a coach or even a taxi, she would instead hitch a ride with a couple of potential psycho killers. Rather than staying at a Hilton hotel she chooses instead to stay at some rickety, old motel called the Dream Inn.

All things, however, are connected and nothing is coincidental so perhaps all things are meant to be? 'I was dreaming in my dreaming', as Patti sings on People Have The Power though that could easily be changed by dropping just one letter to 'I was dreaming in my dreamin' but in the book she fails to make that connection for some reason. Dreamin'? Dream Inn? Dreaming in my Dream Inn? It's like an exercise in Carl Gustav Jung's theory of synchronicity.

Throughout Year Of The Monkey there is a continuous sense of mortality as Patti marks the passing of time and the passing of life as she approaches her seventieth birthday. Her friends and those she admires fall and pass away continuously: Muhammad Ali, Sandy Pearlman, Fidel Castro, Carrie Fisher, Sam Shepherd. 'This is what I know.' she writes 'Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My father is dead. My mother is dead. My husband is dead.'. It's like an echo of Jack Kerouac's lament at the end of The Dharma Bums where he asks: 'Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?'

All is dream. The dream of life. Dream for free because if nothing else we're free to dream. Is there, however, such a thing as the end of dream and if so where might that be? And if there is an end of dream would it not follow that there is also a birth of dream? Subsequently, might there be an afterbirth of dream? Come the end of Year Of The Monkey, Donald Trump is elected as the next President of the United States so yes, perhaps there is an afterbirth of dream and he's the full, dayglo embodiment of it?

'Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen.' Patti writes 'Maybe tomorrow. A tomorrow following a whole succession of tomorrows.' She concludes, however, that 'The trouble with dreaming is that we eventually wake up'...

John Serpico

Rethinking Camelot - Noam Chomsky

RETHINKING CAMELOT – NOAM CHOMSKY

The world is indeed a wonderful place as Louis Armstrong once advised, though made horrible by people, particularly those with a hard-on for power. Of course, that's not how Noam Chomsky would ever describe it but that's the gist of it. According to the economist philosopher Adam Smith, every age of human history reveals the workings of 'the vile maxim of the masters of mankind: All for ourselves, and nothing for other people', which according to Chomsky still stands to this day.

To this Chomsky also adds that throughout history the rabble (meaning you and me) have sought more freedom and justice, and have often won improved conditions of life. The 'men of best quality', however, have been less than delighted with these developments. There has been broad agreement among them that the rabble should not be permitted to interfere in the management of public affairs and should instead be mere spectators, not participants, as modern democratic theory holds. Kept in line with 'necessary illusions' and 'emotionally potent oversimplifications'. And if this fails there is always State violence and State control to fall back on in the form of truncheons and other assorted armoury. This is the Western model designed to protect Western values so as to protect the Western economy designed to favour the rich and the powerful.

As historians recognise, the Cold war began in 1917 not 1945, and in its earlier years Russia was never regarded as a military threat though it was always viewed as a virus that had to be contained if not destroyed. Arguably, Russia's expansionist plans were always a Western construct based on such suggestions as the Russians not having entirely proven they were without such expansionist ambitions. Which leads us directly (or in a roundabout way, at least) to the Vietnam War and Rethinking Camelot by Noam Chomsky.

'What were you doing when Kennedy died?' as the question goes but for Chomsky this is irrelevant. Instead, what is of more concern to him is Kennedy's legacy and how it's been manipulated to suggest that Kennedy was a dove rather than the actual hawk that he was – and which Chomsky sets out to prove.

On taking office in 1961, Kennedy immediately escalated US military support for its client regime in South Vietnam and then soon after escalated it further before then also authorising the use of napalm. The reason given for such concern over Vietnam was that if it fell under the Communist control of Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong, it wouldn't be too long before the whole of Southeast Asia went the same way and this was just a stake too high to afford to lose.

Chomsky points out, however, that it was actually Ho Chi Minh's ultra-nationalism that made him unacceptable, not his services to the 'Kremlin conspiracy' or 'Soviet expansion' – which means everything you have been told about the Vietnam War is a lie. Equally, JFK's deification by liberals, based on his supposed intention before being assassinated of withdrawing from Vietnam without victory is also wrong.

As might be expected, Chomsky is meticulous with his study and when he says there is 'no hint of any intention by JFK to withdraw without victory – quite the contrary', then you'd better believe it. Thousands of of government documents and reports have now been released for the period covering the Vietnam War and Chomsky seems to have trawled through them all.

There are, of course, insights aplenty regarding the political so-called 'planning' of the war, not least the incomprehension as to how the Viet Cong were able to draw their fellow countrymen onto their side but the Americans were not. The Viet Cong 'have an amazing ability to maintain morale' and are able 'continuously to rebuild their units and to make good their losses', exhibiting 'the recuperative powers of the phoenix'. This is 'one of the mysteries of this guerilla war', JFK's specialist on political warfare lamented, adding that 'we still find no plausible explanation for it'.

With this kind of absolute perplexity going on, America's war in Vietnam was doomed to failure, really. So much so that as Chomsky points out, it would be comical if the consequences for the victims were not so disastrous.

Interestingly and rather encouragingly, Chomsky also pulls out some choice insights regarding the effect of the war at home in the USA. Apparently, in considering further troop deployments to Vietnam, the government's chief advisors wanted to ensure that 'sufficient forces would still be available for civil disorder control', fearing that an escalation of the war might lead to 'increased defiance of the draft and growing unrest in the cities', running the risk of 'provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions'.

Rethinking Camelot is yet another valuable book in Noam Chomsky's canon, shedding a light upon a period in America's history that has always previously been obscured by propaganda and diversionary tangents. It's an illuminating exercise that cannot fail to leave the reader wondering how such a war as the one in Vietnam was ever allowed to happen and how any similar war must never be allowed to happen again. I wonder if Trump has ever read Chomsky? Indeed, I wonder if very many people at all have actually read him?

John Serpico

London Noir - Capital Crime Fiction - Edited by Cathi Unsworth

LONDON NOIR – CAPITAL CRIME FICTION 

- EDITED BY CATHI UNSWORTH

I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff. Collections of short stories edited by some writer or other where invariably eight out of ten stories are rubbish or mediocre at best and two are good though not brilliant. I should have learned my lesson by now and know not to waste my time with such books but like a moth drawn to a flame I'm back here again but only because of whom London Noir has been edited by. That being ex-Melody Maker and Sounds music scribe, novelist and officially one of the most beautiful women in the world, Cathi Unsworth. Last seen on a book signing tour with prime mover punkerella icon, Jordan.

So what have we got? Well, first off there's Cathi Unsworth's introduction which is a really good piece of writing in itself, laying down the gauntlet for the standard of writing that needs to be matched. There are seventeen stories in total by seventeen different authors which unwittingly tests how well-read you are by seeing how many of them you know. I know eight of them but that includes Stewart Home who everyone knows, along with Cathi Unsworth herself.

Stewart Home's piece is surprisingly good but that's only because he drops the Richard Allen shtick and delivers instead a straightforward story about corrupt police and dead junkies. Barry Adamson's piece is an exercise in rubbing your face in the dirt but has a very good twist as in who the narrator is. As to be hoped for from being edited by an ex-music journalist there are plenty of music references throughout, most notably in Max Decharne's piece set around the 1977 London punk scene where bodies start turning up with notes pinned to them quoting lyrics from X-Ray Spex songs. Max Decharne for those unaware is the lead vocalist of the Flaming Stars.

So too in Cathi Unsworth's offering where Lola by The Kinks is the key, and in John Williams' offering, New Rose, which is obviously a nod to The Damned. And then there is Sic Transit Gloria Mundi written by Joolz Denby (partner in crime of Justin Sullivan, singer with New Model Army) that stabs a knitting needle into the myth of London being the place to go for a band to 'make it' and pops its fascination. Then for good measure stabs it again, just to make sure.

Seven stories in and it's here we hit the obstacle that all similar books of short stories seem to hit. Park Rites, written by Daniel Bennett, is the tale of a teenager planning to expose himself to a woman jogger in a park. His plan is foiled so he instead stabs a deer, a kind of explanation for all this being given in the fact that the boy in some earlier time had been raped by a man in the same park. No-one would deny that such things happen but art created in the form of a short story from such things does not great art make. It's not exactly Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea, is it?

The worst submission, however, is Love, by Martyn Waites, and this is due to the shockingly awful stereotyping of the white English working class. There's nothing revelatory in his piece at all, nor humour or anything of the slightest interest; just class prejudice on a stick. No matter if he's working class himself or not, it's just an exercise in Daily Mail hate-speak washed through with a splash of middle class liberalism.

On the other hand, the best submission out of all the stories is Penguin Island by Jerry Sykes because the crime (and the violence) he depicts is casual, malevolent, heartless and very real, so is therefore very believable and actually very touching.

What strange influence London exerts. All those names, all those places, all those landmarks embedded and marked indelibly into us. Names of roads we are all familiar with as the names of our friends without even having been down most of them. We all know these places. They're part of our make-up, our imagination and our collective consciousness. But how? Drawn into us like an osmosis process. Photo-synthesised into our very being.

Perhaps London is just too big and diverse for it to be captured successfully through seventeen short stories without the diversity causing a jarring, clanging sense of disparity in the quality of the writing? Or maybe it is simply the case of some writers just being better than others? If the stories were set in Exmouth, for example, would the book as a whole be better? Maybe. But then probably not.

Exmouth Noir. Now there's a thought.

John Serpico