Lowbrow, Highbrow and No-Brow

originally published July 23, 2008

The Joys of Danger: One of the most heartbreaking moments of my life in the last few years was the day that I discovered I was no longer in love with Angelina Jolie. This may not seem like much to most people, but I was a full-on altar boy in the Church of Angie, back when she was disastrously married to Billy Bob Thornton, carrying his blood around with her and sharing her love of knife-play and backseat coitus with a tongue-clucking world, the very soul of dangerously hot. Then she had to go and trade up, and her tabloid life became all about baby bumps and real estate and imaginary feuds with Jennifer Aniston while making three lousy movies for every one good one. The dangerously hot Angie is now guarded and conservative and, well, ordinary. She’s become Julia Roberts with better lips and the occasional ability to act.

The point is that while we may crave security, home and hearth, such things carry with them a life sentence in Dullsville. Some of us are fine with that tradeoff, some of us chafe at it, and some of us reject it altogether. The last group are the ones we want to read about: the people who wade into the situations the rest of us only wish we had the balls to face, and then come back with the scars and prizes that make us green with envy. Because of this, Mike Edison is my new hero. Punk drummer, amateur wrestler, pothead and smut peddler, Edison is a wiseassed and wickedly funny road warrior whose memoir I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World (Faber & Faber, 2008) is some of the most fun reading I’ve had since Hunter Thompson capped himself.

Beginning with the moment in his dysfunctional teens when he scored his first joint and never looked back, Edison drags us along on the demented hayride of his life. While dropping out of NYU film school because they looked askance at his proposed zombie epic, Edison began to make his bones as a writer for third-tier pro wrestling magazines and hardcore porn publishers, learning his craft (and yes, good porn takes craft) and eking out a living while pursuing his other passion, very loud drumming. Over the years Edison pounded cans for his band Sharky’s Machine, the Lunachicks, the semi-legendary Raunch Hands, and the hardest-working punk band in Spain, the Pleasure Fuckers, all the while getting into all the alcohol- and drug-fueled hijinks a single boy with a screw-you attitude and a high tolerance for pain can encounter. Edison describes going on a Vegas drunk with Evel Knievel, opening for The Ramones, and barbecuing (!) with the late great GG Allin.

Upon his return to America, burnt out and without a future, Edison discovered that he had somehow become an in-demand journalist on the below-the-radar magazine circuit, and after learning the business side of the publishing industry and renewing his ties with old connections, was hired as the publisher of High Times. Long a bastion of the ’60s counterculture and staffed by inveterate hippie holdovers, the place saw Edison bring a unique combination of business savvy and punk recalcitrance to the job, turning a perpetual punchline of a publication into a real magazine with edge and funk (and profit) by doing daily pitched battle with his employees. As Edison describes the Sisyphean task of trying to motivate a motley crew of pot casualties into doing their damn jobs, even Deadheads will feel the urge to kick the patchouli out of some of these people.

Edison’s book is brash, irreverent, funny as hell and beautifully written, proof positive that one can be both edgy and erudite, lowbrow and literate, and take joy in the unbridled pleasures of the id without sacrificing the higher mind. Mike Edison is my hero, and I’d love to send his book to Angelina. Maybe it’ll inspire her to scrub off the Brad Pitt stink and go back to being dangerously hot. She’s so much more interesting that way.

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Meanwhile, On the Other Side of the World: Despite what I’ve written above, the key to the interesting life isn’t just the abandon to fall ass-backward into situations, but also the talent and ambition to capitalize on those situations. There actually is such a thing as being in the right place at the right time, but once you’re there you have to have some skills to make the most of it.

John Nathan may not have had the sex, drugs and rock and roll Mike Edison got, but his own journey is no less twisted and turned. Nathan, a Harvard man in the Kennedy years who decided to roll the dice and become a scholar of Japanese literature, relates a life spent among some of the greater lights of his era in his book Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere (Simon & Schuster, 2008). In the ’60s, Japan had finally begun to shake off the ravages of World War II and become a global player again, embracing the West and jumpstarting the accelerated learning curve that would result in its economic boom 20 years later. Expatriating to Japan to teach English, Nathan was part of the first wave of Americans to forge cultural bridges, mastering the nuances of the language and culture sufficiently to become the first postwar Westerner admitted to the prestigious University of Tokyo and parlaying his expertise into a gig as a literary translator. Nathan helped introduce the brilliant but doomed novelist Yukio Mishima to readers of English and translated future Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe’s seminal novel A Personal Matter.

Nathan’s time in Japan brought him into Oe’s circle of friends, including filmmakers, journalists, and the novelist Kobo Abe, during a renaissance period of the Japanese art scene. He also describes meetings with Allen Ginsberg and an unfortunate encounter with Saul Bellow, who did not take well to Japan. After stints as an actor on the Tokyo stage, Nathan became a filmmaker, directing and producing several documentaries illuminating daily Japanese life for American public television. Soon, however, he began to regard himself as a novelty act and returned to America to try his hand at a career that didn’t depend on Japan. After failing as a Hollywood screenwriter (for, among other people, ’70s disaster-film king Irwin Allen), Nathan took a professorship at Princeton and then became a very successful director of commercials and business documentaries. But all the while, Japan kept calling to him. He made a film (and later wrote a book) about the Sony Corporation that opened the doors of the uniquely and often dysfunctionally familial nature of big business in Japan.

Nathan’s book, much like Nathan himself, tends to go adrift whenever it leaves Japan, that material being the most compelling. When Nathan writes of his tribulations as a commercial filmmaker and entrepreneur in America, replete with loving details about the amount of money he raked in and lost, he’s much less compelling. But when Nathan writes of Japan his muse is with him, and he succeeds in painting a vibrant portrait of an oft-misunderstood land and people and his own peace of mind among them.

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Now Available in Paperback: John Nathan had become estranged from his friend Yukio Mishima by the time the troubled author committed public suicide through ritual seppuku, followed by beheading at the hands of an accomplice. As Mishima’s head tumbled from his shoulders, what must he have been thinking?

Robert Olen Butler purports to know Mishima’s last thoughts, and Marie Antoinette’s, and Sir Walter Raleigh’s, and Jayne Mansfield’s, among many others who were decapitated in the course of their deaths, in his book Severance (Chronicle Books, now available in paperback), a collection of short-short stories of exactly 240 words each. The word count is the book’s conceit, based upon Butler’s calculation of the maximum number of words a fast-talking person could use in the time established for the brain inside a severed head to die. Each of the stories, then, is the final observations of a decapitation victim.

The limited word count makes these stories yield mixed results, often coming out beautiful and brutally poignant - as in the case of poor damned Grendel - or falling flat, as in the case of poor damned Medusa. But as an experiment, the book has the virtue of being a different experience than the usual, and half the interest in the book lies in seeing how many ways Butler manages to pull off such a difficult feat. Like Ernest Vincent Wright’s 1939 novel Gadsby, famous for being written entirely without the letter e, Severance is a particularly fascinating party trick of a book.

John G. Nettles