This weekend (Saturday and Sunday, March 13 and 14) Seattle area comics fans have a big old funny book hootenanny to party at inside the Washington State Convention Center. There are some panels and huge rooms full of comics and toys being sold. Also, dealers of another kind: I found the bootleg soundtrack to the Aussie skinhead flick Romper Stomper there last year! Right before a dark cloud of Suicide Girls turned a long table's corner and crashed into a swarm of Star Wars Storm Troopers. I am not making any of this up. It was freaking awesome-possum.

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When author Tony DuShane was a nervous young man struggling with being a Jehovah's Witness, his extremely religious father lost his mind and punched five holes in the wall above their living room couch. To hide these examples of his dad's breaking point, the already-disfellowshipped teenager plastered an Einsterzende Neubauten poster over the damage.

This is one of the minor scenes in a very funny, but also very mood-rattling novel by DuShane, whose "Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk" came out from Soft Skull Press on February 2nd. It's marketed as fiction, but due to the author's own past and the curiosity those of us outside the cult have about the goings-on of all those extremely well-dressed young men and women who thrust crappy end-of-the-world literature at us downtown, it probably wouldn't hurt to consider it memoir.

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2009 was an excellent year for book lovers, even if publishers became as entrenched about withering economic changes as much as the cowering music industry. And as May '68 prophet of speed Paul Virilio was quoted in a 2002 interview, "If there is one place where you're scared, it's a bunker."

Great literature and thrilling reads (and mixtures of both) still made it into the margins of the marketplace, where the best stuff always sticks. Even a couple of lofty but subversive tomes with hefty price tags bobbled up into the mainstream, the perfect gifts to impress print-stubborn smart uncles and shrewd aunts during the holidays. But if you've been famished yourself for some tasty writing, be it scholarly or humorous or woven through excellent art and design, what follows is a short list of lit I personally endorse. Take it with you to an independent like Elliot Bay Bookstore, Third Place, University Bookstore, or any other fine vendor in the Pacific NW or elsewhere.

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A couple of years ago Domino Records reissued five glorious double-disc treatments of The Triffids' obscure oeuvre, little known jewels from the one band every Australian post-punk music fan has heard of, and most haven't heard. Till then, it was hard to procure the less than a half dozen albums and smattering of EPs the group had painfully crafted for their similarly literate and pub-loving fans. Even Born Sandy Devotional, their most cohesive full-length and the one that gets slid in lists with monumental guitar-driven 80s rock as much as Crazy Rhythms, Porcupine, or Let It Be, languished in unlicensed limbo seemingly forever.

Such was the luck or theodicy-thwarted fate of Dave McComb, astonishing lyricist for and leader of the underground-endeared band, who passed away just over 35 in 1999, after using up two hearts, one given and one planted into him. McComb's voice reminds one of Ian McCulloch, with that handsome wavering tone of eternal Donnie Darko nocturnal rock. McComb often credited countryman Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds for inspiration into Scripture and sad blues songs as well as punk rock squall and drunken chaos, but besides heavy use of bass guitar, the mystery vibes of pre-Goth dance-driven Brit rock infuse immortal pleasures like "Jesus Calling," "Property Is Condemned," and "Bottle Of Love." If you dig your early alternative rock-era grooves moody and roots-mighty, lyrically mysterious but melodically twangy, The Triffids are the brother you never had.

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She's a young woman in the big city writing a column about sex. She learns a lot with her friends, goes through scandalous relationships and ambivalent infatuations, learns to love what she thought she hates and vice versa, and confounds her own presumptions along this path. 

No, it's not Sex in the City, it's sex in the city. 

"Reverend" Jen Miller holds her own in the gnarly Lower East Side, engaged professionally in the competitive art scene in a variety of confrontative performing capacities, and also happened to found ASS Magazine. Oh yeah, she's also the curator at a Troll Museum.

So no prissy ladies and guys named "Big" get written about in her work memoir, Live Nude Elf, just out from Soft Skull Press. It's a collection of scribed "sexperiments" that has all the drama and humor of an adult TV show but involves being tied to a cross in the middle of a crowded orgy and visiting an opium den. Adult babies, Tantric immersion, and regular heartbreak are part of the curriculum, all begun when Miller began as a live nude girl at "Wiggles" (hence the title, but it's not the last time she drops clothes in public in this book).

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This panel was of great interest to me since getting fiction published through McSweeney’s would be a dream come true, so even just hearing this authors, all first-time published fiction writers, talk about the experience of having Eli Horowirtz, McSweeny’s editor, work with them on their novels was a treat.

Bill Cutter, author of “Fever Chart,” claimed that he unflinchingly did pretty much everything Eli told him to. Meanwhile Jessica Anthony said that when editing a particular passage of her book, “The Convalescence,” Eli had her write six different versions and on the seventh she told him that this was her final draft (it was also the original text, before she had changed anything) and he responded that she nailed it. James Hannaham’s book “God Says No,” described the liberating feeling of cutting the first five chapters of his novel before even sending it into the Dave Eggers founded publishing house for consideration.

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Warning: This is an ecstatic early plug for the upcoming fan-dream book, Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label that Got Big and Stayed Small.

As Magnet magazine is quoted, "[Merge] might be responsible for more indie-rock classics than any other label in the past two decades." David Byrne considers their survival "kind of amazing these days." NPR asserts they're "one of the top independent labels in the world." In Our Noise author John Cook shows the letter that Glitterhouse sent to Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance (in Superchunk, of course, and who started the label) originally sent turning down European distribution (it's hilarious, considering what Merge would achieve); to the later days when Mac feels giddy and weird hanging out near Dr. Dre and Springsteen at Coachella.

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You know Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Dan Deacon and other great indie innovators are getting textural and contextual inspiration from somewhere other than what's reviewed in Rolling Stone or Pitchfork, but where? In The Blink Of An Ear, written by Seth Kim-Cohen, subtitled Toward A Non-Cochlear Sound, might put you on their same journey outside the boundaries.

A cochlea is a the snail-shaped inner ear which receives sound, and this book is all about how we receive sound and what we do with it in our minds. The music business is an industry built on sound, but there are many people who build sound from industry for a livelihood and legend. Kim-Cohen is the Director and Assistant Professor of Art and Theory at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, has taught art history at Yale and the Pratt Institute, and has had many art showings in places like Tate Modern and the ICA in London. 

Why is an academic and artist like this of interest to the music fan? Well, alternative rock has its roots in the art school scene -- the Sex Pistols and Talking Heads and Superchunk who have all done songs about the milieu, and bands like Wire and Gang of Four and many others would have never existed without it. That's where they formed (in their physical lives), but it wasn't just a location these young, potentially innovative people obsessed with change and culture came to, it's where a Brian Eno would teach the mutual joys of ambient noise and doo-wop, as recently described in the Wire Pink Flag 33 1/3. It's where ideas met sound, and that's Kim-Cohen's living and playground. 

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A Shi'ite skinhead and his female punk-hippie partner in crime abduct a movie star to threaten Hollywood into making films in which Muslims don't all appear to be bearded, blood-thirsty terrorist meat puppets. "Just one movie where we're not these two-dimensional Al-Qaeda stereotypes," the Amazing Ayyub insists, keeping Matt Damon for ransom. The actor negotiates for reason with the kidnappers, though, trying to convince them they have played into the media and government's hands by using antagonistic force.

Michael Muhammed Knight is the author of this story, titled Osama Van Halen, which is just out from Soft Skull Press. It's Knight's most elegantly provocative book, mixing the surreal elements of his own marginalized life (son of a paranoid schizophrenic and white supremacist, the most prominent literary voice for American Muslim punks) with a newfound venom for the plastic consumer's prison around us.

 

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Encyclopedia broadside of future thought about the present, and prescient thoughts about the future of music and, um, the future.

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