Bum Phillips' Autobiography feels like hanging with the great coach as he tells the story of his life

 

Bum Phillips: Coach, Cowboy, Christian – Bum Phillips, w/ Gabe Semenza (2010)

            In Texas, there are two legendary professional football coaches.  One is Tom Landry, a favorite of mine, who was a long-time coach of the Dallas Cowboys (who are NOT a favorite of mine. Boooooo!).  The other, and my own personal favorite NFL coach ever, is Bum Phillips, who coached professionally with the Houston Oilers and the New Orleans Saints and helped create the phenomenon known worldwide as the Luv Ya Blue era of Houston sports.  A true Texan original through and through, in word, deed, and spirit, Bum Phillips brought an energy and mindset to professional football coaching that went directly against the hard-ass, in-your-face, overly-demanding, workaholic, military-asshole “ideal” for football coaches.  In all my years as a fanatic of Bum Phillips, both as a coach and as an awesome human being, I have yet to hear, see, or read of anyone anywhere who has any type of negative comment about the man, including former opponents!  This is a rarity in the world.  My lovely wife knows of my deep admiration for coach Phillips, and surprised me with this book (a signed copy too!).  What a great gift for a football loving book nerd such as myself!

            I normally approach biographies and autobiographies with trepidation, having been burned before by self-aggrandizing, superfluous, and wildly rote works co-authored with ghost writers.  I was very excited about this book, however, because the co-writer aiding Mr. Phillips, Gabe Semenza, is someone who knew Coach Phillips for years.  I was pleasantly surprised to hear Bum Phillips’ voice in my head as I read this book.  Much like Coach Vince Lombardi, another legend of professional football, Bum Phillips’ voice lives on in my head, so when I read this book, I distinctly hear it in Coach Phillips Texan drawl.  Because of this, reading this book was an immense pleasure.  I immediately lost myself in the pages as I heard Bum’s voice inside my head while I read.  Gabe Semenza did a great job putting this book together, not covering up Coach Phillips’ voice, and allowing his natural cadence to exist on the page and propel the story of his life.

            The byline of this work states that Bum Phillips was a coach, a cowboy, and a christian.  Besides family itself, these are the three pillars upon which Coach Phillips built his life.  Coaching came natural to Bum Phillips, and he rose through the ranks of high school, Jr. College, Universities, and professional teams due to his love of the game itself, his ability to learn and apply wisdom gained while working for legendary college football coaches, and his own particular philosophy about how to lead men.  This personal belief stemmed from his experiences as a Marine in the second world war.  The verbally abusive drill sergeants taught Bum that their way was not the correct way to teach and train a grown man.  Yelling insults, demeaning a human being, essentially abusing them until they act as you want, these things seemed patently ridiculous to Bum Philips, and he swore that, if he ever got the chance to lead men, he would do it differently.  To paraphrase Coach Phillips, if you have to yell and cuss at someone to make them learn they will NOT learn.  They will just appease you until you shut up.  It was this core value that, through his professional life, made Bum Phillips stand out and be appreciated by those who worked for him.  He truly cared and loved about his “kids” as he called them.  He treated each one individually, as a human being, and achieved great things because of it, not the least of them being that nearly every single human that ever worked for or was coached by Bum Phillips feel they gained a father-figure, not just a coach.

            One great example of how Bum fostered a family atmosphere around the Houston Oilers was his policy for Saturdays.  Most NFL games are held on Sunday, and Saturday is usually treated as a dress-rehearsal of sorts.  Bum’s mindset was that, after working hard Tuesday through Friday, installing the gameplan for the upcoming Sunday, there was not much that could be changed or added on Saturday without messing everything up.  He treated these men like men, not like overgrown children.  Respect was given AND earned.  On Saturdays, Bum would tell the team, coaches, and staff to bring in their significant others and family to the Saturday practices.  For those players too young to have families, he encouraged they bring their pets!  The team would do a quick, pad-less run-through of the gameplan, then the rest of the day was spent listening to live music (famous country & western stars would come hang out and jam with the players!), playing dominoes, cards, and goofing around, and feasting on Texas barbeque or delicious Mexican or Tex-Mex food that Bum would have catered in.  The footage of these times seems ridiculous in its looseness and carefree nature.  No other team had such conviviality ingrained into their very essence.  This made the Oilers a family, and the City of Houston immediately understood it, loved it, and latched onto it as their defining trait.  Once Bum Phillips drafted the legendary Earl Campbell from the University of Texas, everything coalesced into the collective dream/fantasy we all know as the Luv Ya Blue era in Houston.

            Coach Philips takes us through his life, his efforts to learn more about football, and the endless job-hopping that is required of a sports coach in Texas.  He details his travels as he sought to always find work in the state of Texas.  He was either a head or an assistant coach at so many places, from West Texas State (Now UTEP), to high schools in Nacogdoches, all the way to an assistant coaching position with my alma mater, the University of Houston, where he was fortunate to coach his own son Wade Phillps, himself eventually becoming a respected and Super Bowl winning NFL defensive and head coach.  He discusses how his work life superseded his family life, and even though his children seem to understand and to accept who their father was, it still manages to draw a lot of regret and pain in Coach Phillips.  He understood the conflict that exists when the passion within you helps you succeed at your chosen profession to the detriment of your family life, and time spent with the very people you are working hard to provide for. 

In the mid-1980’s, Coach Bum Phillips retired from coaching and went back to the original love of his life, ranching and raising cattle.  Houston grew so fast and so big that what used to be a quaint ranch outside the city limits was quickly encroached by civilization.  Bum and his wife found a beautiful ranch property in South Texas and that is where he chose to spend the remaining decades of his life, with his friends, family, and animals.  It was around this time that a fateful phone call from an old Oilers player, Mike Barber, drew coach Phillips to a greater relationship with his spirituality.  Bum Phillips, along with many men of his generation, was a good man who sought to only do good in the world, and who wished no ill on anyone for anything.  However, he was not a “religious” man.  Coach Phillips lived a christian life, a true christian life, and did so because he felt it was right, not because of any religious or dogmatic requirements.  Everything changed when Mike Barber invited him to join him on one of his prison ministry visits.  Mike Barber had ministered to the incarcerated for a long time, and he knew that hearing from someone as respected and loved as Coach Bum Phillips could help start the healing for inmates.  Coach Phillips joined Mike as he visited the maximum security prison in Beeville Texas.  It set the course for the remainder of his life.  Until his dying day, Bum Phillips joined Mike Barber’s ministry and visited countless small and large correctional facilities. 

Coach Phillips truly lived a life of service.  All coaches are teachers, and the very best coaches become family.  Bum Phillips wanted to live life the right way, and through his example he shaped not only countless high school, college, and professional athletes, but also the very essence of Houston Texas, a city much misunderstood by the nation at large.  The City of Houston took on Bum’s persona, and it has never left.  This is still a humongous melting pot, and through good times and bad, the citizens of Houston try to treat each other like human beings.  This state of mind was reinforced by our beloved sports coaches, all of them more concerned with fostering family as a way to win than with winning itself, whether it be Bum Phillips with the legendary Houston Oilers, Rudy Tomjanovich with our beloved Houston Rockets, or DeMeco Ryans with our latest craze, the Houston Texans.  Bum Phillips did more good in the world in his 90-something years trodding the Earth than most people can imagine doing, and his method was human love and honesty.  There is no greater tribute to a man than to say, without any hyperbole, that he was universally loved, admired, and respected.  Sadly, it may seem that there are not many of those men left in our world, but we are out here, seeking to help those we can, support those we can, and attempting to foster brotherhood and community rather than rancor or divisiveness.  There are few true saints in our world, and I am very fortunate to have shared this life with Bum Phillips.  We all are.

(This wonderful book can be purchased used and new here: https://www.abebooks.com/9781935909026/Bum-Phillips-Coach-Cowboy-Christian-1935909029/plp )

A Reformed Thief and Safecracker Shares His Personal Story of Crime and Redemption

 

You Can’t Win – Jack Black (1926)

 

            Books are magic.  Every time I enjoy a new one I am reminded of this fact.  Before humans assigned symbols to the sounds made as they spoke, all knowledge and information was dispersed orally.  For you to learn how to braid rope, for example, you had to live near someone who knew how to braid rope, and have them teach you the technique through spoken words and physical demonstrations.  This allowed knowledge and wisdom to pass along familial and then tribal lines, as humans shared their ever-growing store of knowledge with their offspring and neighbors.  Everything changed once humanity figured out how to use symbols to communicate information.  This was a change infinitely more monumental than the current change from physical media (books, magazines, DVD’s, LP’s) to digital file-storing media. 

            The ability to write down your experiences, have them printed or published, and put them out into the world at large changed us for the better. It removed the old taboos about sharing knowledge with outsiders.  Anyone can pick up a book by Mark Twain and gain a deep understanding of what life was like at the time he wrote his books.  This is time-travel, pure and simple.  A human consciousness reads the symbols on the page, and instantly, they are conversing in a very real manner with a person from the past.  Far too often humans assume that everyone’s lives are the same, that what happens to “me” is bound to happen to “you” as well.  This is a fallacy.  The world is so infinitely complex that no two individuals, even if identical twins, will have the same life and the same experiences.  Reading personal memoirs and accounts helps us realize the infinite variety of human life, and human experience.

            I found this book while scrolling through the Project Gutenberg website (I love Project Gutenberg!!).  Jack Black wrote a memoir about his life and his long-standing years as a Bum and Thief, riding the rails, visiting Hobo encampments, and surviving on the fringes of society.  He travelled multiple times across the US, and into Canada.  He describes his life and its many ups and downs in an honest, heartfelt matter, never bragging about the crimes he committed, or the people he stole from.  Instead, he often discusses reaching crossroads in his life, moments and situations where he could have chosen to go “straight,” and instead went back into the transient criminal life.  He also covers the “mistakes” he made, times when his greed or hunger got the best of him, despite the many warnings given and lessons taught to him by older road-warriors.

As with any and all memoirs, these tales must be taken with a grain of salt.  Our narrator is a self-defined criminal, transient, and ex-convict.  While he does not shy away from bluntness when it comes to himself, it is inescapable that such an author would omit specific details, either to protect himself, or someone close to them.  Even so, Jack Black’s account of his life does not hide away the self-reflection, understanding, and wisdom gained through suffering and hardship, even the self-created kind.  It makes perfect sense that, in reading about this book, I found out it was a seminal piece of writing for many of the Beat poets, William S. Burroughs specifically. Black’s tales of riding the rails, escaping police, finding big scores, losing big scores, and the general ability to live an outlaw life appealed to the counterculture writers of the 40’s and 50’s. 

As with many things, such a life was much easier to achieve in the past.  Small towns did not have the type of bank safes, police, or any other preventative to deter petty crime.  Mr. Black details the many methods he used in acquiring a “bank roll.”  From pickpocketing and petty thievery, to burglary, breaking and entering, and safe-cracking, it appears that not a single moment was spent in leisure activity. Every second was either an attempt to get information on a new mark, casing out a joint to either rob it or help someone else rob it, finding out the best “hop-joints” in town (for 25 years Jack Black nursed an addiction to smoked opium), secreting away stolen material, laying low for days or weeks until the stolen goods can be safely recovered, finding people to buy such stolen goods, etc.  It is a busy life, and Jack Black himself states that if any of his fellow “yeggs” (thieves specializing in safecracking), and hobos would just get a normal square job, they would have had far more free time, leisure, money, and prestige after ten years than what normally happens a decade into that outlaw life.  However, the goal is not safety and societal prestige.  It is complete and total autonomy.  To live in total autonomy in America means becoming an outlaw.  The government does not allow one to live without oversight of a thousand kinds, or so felt Jack and his fellow rail riders.

While Black was definitely a criminal, he details repeatedly the many ways that their subculture would provide and look out for each other.  They were fastidious about paying their debts to one another.  Those that did not were quickly ostracized.  This meant that every time Black scored big, he would first off send money to various people whom he owed, whether it was someone doing time in Folsom prison, or some kind underworld person that had previously lent Black some money or assistance.  As Black put it, an honest hobo would give you his last dollar if you needed it.  He details many occasions were this was true.  He also describes the kindnesses paid to him by his fellow rail-riders.  Once, while serving a long term in an unfamiliar prison, Jack began to receive care packages with food and money.  He did not find out who paid him this kindness until way later, and he busted his ass to repay every cent of it.  When you live on the rails, you own nothing, and your only collateral is your word.  Are you an honest thief?  Do you pay back your debts?  Do you keep your mouth shut?  These traits are far more valuable than a fancy car or a big home when you live life outside of normal society.

Jack Black wrote only one book, this one, after ten-plus years going straight, working as a librarian in a newspaper office owned by and old friend.  It became a giant bestseller, affording him an affluent life he never dreamed of.  The 1920’s saw a rise in the popularity of “true tales” of crime, prisons, and all aspects of the underworld.  It was not to last and the transient life does not provide lessons in saving and frugality.  The Great depression destroyed the last of his wealth and he sadly committed suicide sometime in the late 1930’s.

Reading “You Can’t Win,” it was evident that the author was an intelligent, conscious human being, despite all the obvious flaws of a criminal life.  I believe he owes it to his life-long love of reading and learning.  During an early stay in a Canadian jail, far out in the country, he found the jail to have a tremendous library, containing all of the best English authors.  He devoured these books.  In this jail, a very interesting policy was in effect.  Based on an English method, the entire population of inmates was kept silent.  Any speaking was met with severe punishment.  Ironically, it is this jail that Black describes as the most peaceful, safe, and orderly he ever saw.  There were no beatings, no fights, and no contraband because without the ability to speak to each other the inmates could not plot or set up schemes.  The only options for the prisoners were reading the classics, or silent contemplation of their lives and crimes.  I wish the USA would try this method, but it probably works only in jails or prisons containing 200 or less inmates.  In a world that currently seeks to close libraries, both public and in prisons, and to prevent access to books and ideas, Jack Black’s words of warning are key.  He states that a world that focused on inmates reading, expanding their minds, and creating new dreams, such as the jail in Canada, would do more to stop crime and suffering in the world than a thousand lashes.  At one point, sometime during a different decade-long stay in prison, he discusses reading an entire Encyclopedia Britannica, something I tried to do in Middle School.  Books can help you create yourself anew.

It is nearly one hundred years since this book was published, and I was able to find it as it is now in the public domain, and the wonderful saints at the Project Gutenberg provided all of us with a digital version.  Jack Black is immortal.  He now lives in my head, and in anyone’s head who’s read this great book.  I highly recommend it.

(This book can be downloaded here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69404 )

Rudy Rucker Shares His Life Story

 

Nested Scrolls – Rudy Rucker (2011)

            I feel like I just had a long, thoughtful conversation with one of my favorite authors.  Not only was it engrossing and entertaining, but it made me appreciate the man himself more than ever.  Rudy Rucker has long been someone whose books shape my mind.  He easily describes the most complex of ideas all the while making me crack up.  I find him to be one of the few authors, similar to Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut, who makes the reader laugh as much as he makes them think, sometimes in the same sentence!  This is how my mind works, and reading Rucker’s life story, I can see so many similarities to myself.  Life can be quite tough for people who choose to explore and think about topics normally avoided by the public, especially those who create something for others to absorb, whether it be literature, paintings, or music.

            Rudy Rucker begins his tale with a description of the brain hemorrhage he experienced in the summer of 2008, aged 62, and his brush with mortality. One of the realizations he describes really hit home, as it is a truth that I have come to understand.  Rucker states, “The richest and most interesting parts of my life are the sensations that come in from the outside.”  Our thoughts and ideas are merely reflections of the beauty and grandeur of the world around us, if we only take the time to actually look and listen, without judgement.  We all proceed through our lives as if we are the protagonist in a grandiose and important tale that matters to all.  Our self-importance seems to dictate the world around us.  However, the truth is that we are but reflectors of the world at large, and our self-importance blinds us to how fortunate we are to just breathe, eat, sleep, and love, existing in the amazing and infinite world that surrounds each of us.  This experience drove Rudy Rucker to write his autobiography, but without any of the self-promotional aspects of such writing.

            Reading about Rudy’s childhood and family was a joy.  Rucker’s writing style is so deceptively casual that his story flows smoothly, and I found myself as engrossed in his life as if it was one of his works of fiction.  Many of his childhood experiences mirror my own, and many of the questions he asked about the world around him I asked in my youth.  Rudy Rucker had to wait until he was much older to find people whose curiosity and genius matched his own.  It is a lonely thing to grow up understanding that most around you either do not ask, or simply do not care to know, about difficult ideas and concepts.  Expanding one’s mind, something that comes ridiculously easy to most toddlers and children, is beaten out of us by life, society, parents that do not care, and other such brutalities.  It creates a nation of adults who do not seek to understand, or to explore, but who want safety and certainty above all else.  Certainty is the absolute bane of wisdom.  Throughout Nested Scrolls, Rucker describes the many times he dealt with such inanity, from school to church to workplaces.  A freethinker will always threaten the status quo.  These moments truly resonated with me.

            Apart from learning about Rudy Rucker’s life and experiences, I enjoyed the sections in which he describes his state of mind as he wrote his various literary works.  Writers write.  It is their way of existing.  I have always enjoyed reading about the creative process of the people I admire.  I was reminded that while Rudy Rucker has written some of the most mind-expanding and hilarious science fiction literature I have ever read, he also wrote one of the most beautiful books, a historical fiction novel detailing the life and times of Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder titled As Above, So Below.  It is a triumph.

            One of the themes I found in Nested Scrolls is that of the “fringe” individual, and how to best exist as one.  Rudy Rucker studied and taught mathematics, but was seen as too weird and “out there” to belong with the mathematicians.  He studied computer science, but his metaphysical ideas about computing and the mind were too much for his fellow computer scientists.  Rucker wrote many amazing books, yet was pigeonholed as a science fiction author.  Far too many writers demean science fiction as if it was trash writing, not worthy of the high and mighty term “Literature.”  Not only that, many established science fiction authors isolate and demean writers like Rucker whose work is too transgressive, funny, or caustic for what they have determined is actual, hard science fiction.  The ego on these people!  If only they would see how blind they are, and that they have chosen to blind themselves with their intellectual bigotry. 

I relate to this aspect of Rudy Rucker’s life so much.   The Art Crowd found me too intellectual, too into sports, too into science, and too aware of the lies Art tells itself.  The jock crowd found me to artsy-fartsy, too mocking of the sacred ideas of sport competition, even though I love sports greatly.  The punk/underground music types found me too square, too “normal,” to truly accept me as part of that scene.  The “norms” found me too weird and uncaring about bullshit such as cars, money, or the latest useless status symbol.  It has been this way my whole life, and I feel it is that way for anyone whose mind and interests go too far beyond one or two self-defining characteristics.  The Public wants everyone to be easily defined, the faster the better, but people like Rucker and myself understand that the world does not work that way.  In fact, everything is far too complex for such simple-minded labels.  Much of Rudy Rucker’s work explores this idea.  As he states, and it is something I have myself claimed, there is no such thing as a “normal” person.  If you bother to scratch just below the surface, you will find that every single human you have ever met is a deeply weird individual creation.  The worst thing you could do for yourself is to force your life into the very narrow definitions that the people around you expect you to be.  They are the ignorant ones.  They are the ones whose minds are atrophied and scared of difference. 

Often Rudy Rucker describes how much of a grind it is to promote your work, to seek publishers, and to expand your readership.  Rucker has never had a “best seller” yet his works sell well and he is always able to publish his material.  His books are too weird for Hollywood, and none of them have yet been made into a feature film.  He taught at various Universities to make a living, but it took him over 35 years to get tenure.  All the while, he shared his life with his lovely wife and their three children, and as he describes their lives, I can see how much their love and stability aided him in his dream of writing science fiction.  Perhaps he is the most fortunate of all, experiencing a full life, while living out his childhood dreams.  Too many people consider you a failure if you do not become “the BEST,” or “the RICHEST,” or “the MOST FAMOUS!”  These are all meaningless labels.  Rudy Rucker grew up, married, started a family, taught countless students, created dozens of original works of literature, shared his ideas with readers worldwide, and even took up oil painting at a late age!  He is a success by any true measure, and I am so glad to have read his autobiography.  Rudy Rucker may not know me, but I count him as my lifelong friend.  Thanks for sharing the Gnarl, Rudy!

(This book may be read here: https://www.rudyrucker.com/nestedscrolls/ )

Varlam Shalamov survived the Soviet Gulags, and shares the horror with us readers

Kolyma Stories: Volume One – Varlam Shalamov - Translated by Donald Rayfield (2018)

            A few years ago I read and reviewed the account of one Ferdinand Ossendowski, titled Beasts, Men, And Gods, which dealt with the author’s experiences escaping into the Russian wilderness to avoid the killing of intellectuals fermented by the Bolshevik Revolution.  That first-hand account led me to look for more books written by survivors of Russian pogroms, prison camps, and Siberian death camps.  I read and reviewed A World Apart, by Gustav Herling, an account of his time spent in a Soviet Gulag and the institutionalized insanity that was the Soviet criminal system.  It was an amazing book.  From that I moved on to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich.  Whereas the previous books are biographical accounts, this work is a work of fiction, but it carries every horror and trauma that Solzhenitsyn suffered when he himself was a prisoner at a Soviet Prison Camp.  In doing some research, I found that the book I just read, the Kolyma Stories, by Varlam Shalamov, had recently been published in an English translation. 

            Varlam Shalamov was a Gulag prisoner for 15 years, enduring 6 years as slave labor in the gold mines of Kolyma, one of the coldest and most inhospitable corners of Siberia.  After he was released he began writing poetry and prose, including many of the stories contained in this volume.  The harassment from the KGB never stopped, and because of this he was unable to publish his work in the Soviet Union.  At home his work was stashed away in the Russian State Archives of Literature and Arts, likely never to be seen again.  These stories were leaked/smuggled out and printed in Germany and France under a pseudonym, with Shalamov never receiving any payment.  In the late 1970’s, Shalamov disappeared into the state-run homes for the elderly, the conditions of which were “as bad as the worst institutions in the Gulag”. (Donald Rayfield – 2018).  These stories were finally published in the late 1980’s in Russia, and shared with the world Shalamov’s unvarnished and unflinching look back at his Gulag experiences.  While these are all “stories,” pretty much everything that happens in them was something witnessed or experienced by Shalamov himself.

            Many of the stories are very short.  Some are two pages long.  What they lack in length they make up for in power.  There is little moralizing in these stories.  The horror is described in plain language, much like Vonnegut did when describing the trauma of the Dresden fire bombings.The plain, insane truth of what humans are forced to do when under totalitarian control is enough to scare the shit out of anyone.  Institutional horror is the worst creation of humanity.  But, when it is backed up by a Byzantine and self-negating government structure?  That is when the human mind shrinks to its smallest, only seeking to survive another day, another hour, another minute.  There is no thought for the life of freedom.  Those that dream of freedom are the first to die.  There is no escape from the forced labor.  Those too sick to work were often treated like lame horses, as wastes of food and resources.  These tales serve as a reminder of how ugly our shared humanity can be, how little we actually care about each other when the powers that be decide to erase our humanity.

            In 1961, Shalamov wrote down a list of what he saw and understood in the prison camps.  It is a list of 45 truths.  Here are just a few of them: 

·         The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization.  A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.

·         I realized friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions.  Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not at the mine’s pit face)

·         I realized Stalin’s “victories” were due to his killing the innocent – an organization a tenth the size would have swept Stalin away in two days.

·         I realized the feeling a man preserves longest is anger.  There is only enough flesh on a hungry man for anger: everything else leaves him indifferent.

·         I realized that one can live on anger.

·         I realized that one can live on indifference.

·         I understood why people do not live on hope – there isn’t any hope.  Nor can they survive by means of free will – what free will is there?  They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal.

·         I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards.  Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

·         I understood what power is and what a man with a rifle is.

         The stories within this volume will live on in my head for the rest of my life.  Soon there will be a second volume published.  I cannot wait to read that.  Thank goodness that people are able to share these experiences, no matter how horrible, through the power of the written word.  The written word is humanity’s greatest invention.  What an amazing writer.

(Four short stories from this book can be read here:  KOLYMA STORIES )

Sonic Youth is Dead. Long Live Sonic Youth.

Spirit Desire – Jennifer Benningfield (2018)

            I am a Sonic Youth Lifer.  The skronkalicious foursome has been my favorite musical group for the past 30+ years.  As a part of my fandom, I have been a member of the Sonic Youth Gossip Forum for nearly the entire existence of the interwebs.  In that nebulous cul-de-sac I met and have befriended many a fellow Sonic Youth Lifer.  I have seen them grow up, rock out, and move on with their lives.  I have lost Sonic friends who passed too early (RIP Adam “atsonicpark” Cooley - http://directoradamcooley.angelfire.com/ ).  I was also exposed to some of the most creative, interesting, and downright bizarre people, all of them Sonic Youth nuts to one extent or the other.  One of these bad-asses is Jennifer Benningfield, or as she is known on the SY Gossip Forum, jennthebenn.  In 2009 she published her first book, No Setlist: Pieces of a Sonic Life, detailing her near-obsessive devotion to traveling for Sonic Youth concerts.  My review of that book is here: http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/06/rxtt-flashback-review-story-of-sonic.html .

            It is now 2018, Sonic Youth have broken up, and the individual members have moved on to new musical projects, as varied as one can imagine.  Jennifer Benningfield has released the follow-up to No Setlist.  The development of her writing voice and style are evident throughout, as the book is tighter, funnier, and in many ways more resonant than her debut.  Like before, the book is divided into sections detailing individual Sonic Youth concerts she attended, describes the moment she and her partner in crime, Patrick “pantophobia” Suddath learned of the imminent breakup of our favorite band, and finishes with her treks to various post-Sonic Youth concerts.

            If it was inspiring to me to read Ms. Benningfield’s initial love letter to the Youth, it was even more amazing to read this new book, appreciating the growth and maturity of writing that has allowed Jennifer Benningfield to submit her short stories to various hard-copy and online publications.  While I do not personally know her, having had little interaction with her besides the Sonic Youth Gossip Forum (and the Instigator Fantasy Football league which I run every year.  Jenn’s team is Snoopy’s Smash Squad, and anyone who knows her knows she has a near-fetishistic fascination with Charles Schultz and the Peanuts gang), I am so proud of this digital friend for grinding away, for continuing to write and submit, even though the rejections and tough times can seem never ending.  The band is very lucky to have someone such as her as a fan.

            One of the little oddities that I found endearing in this book, is the way that, as a super-fan, Ms. Benningfield describes the journeys taken to the shows, the people she meets and stays with, the long-distance friends she connected with, the fearful walks through unfamiliar neighborhoods in search of a pre-show meal, and everything that goes into attending rock shows.  I myself have attended countless hundreds of not thousands of rock shows, and these little details are the ones that actually make the occasions memorable, apart from the musical performances themselves.  There is a huge difference between going to a big, national touring show at a giant arena, and going to a small touring act performing at who-the-fuck-knows-where.  It is more personal, more intimate, and if you are one of the early arrivals, like Ms. Benningfield likes to be, you can be in the FRONT ROW!  (I never ever stand in the front row.  I am 6’2” tall, and no one likes my ass blocking their view.)

            Sonic Youth is no more.  The Sonic Youth Gossip Forum is creaky and increasingly less populated.  The Sonic Lifers have had to move on.  Our favorite band, the band that never even sold 250,000 copies of any release, that taught so many of us what noise as Art was, and the possibilities inherent in that, will never come together in skronk again.  All we have are our memories, and thanks to the mind and work of SY Lifers such as Jennifer Benningfield, we can all share in our collective Sonic Joy.  SONIC LIFE!

(This book can be downloaded and read here: https://trapperjennmd.blogspot.com/2018/07/spirit-desire.html)