The last three weekends I've read a book every Saturday. Three weeks ago I devoured Joe Carducci's Enter Naomi: SST, L.A., and All That... (2007) in a matter of hours. It's a memoir of Carducci's time at SST, with a specific focus on Naomi Petersen and other women who worked at SST. It has so many of my favorite things: L.A. apocalypse visions! women in male-dominated scenes who take no bullshit from anyone and build a world on their own terms! the grand SST mythology, distilled to a fine focus! What the book does well is allow Naomi Petersen's story to exist in her own words, through her photos and color scans of her detailed planners. The dark side, of course, being that in trying to show how and why Naomi is special, Carducci cuts down so many other women to caricatures of crazy lost girls, which is a bit of a pill, since as a text of the SST myth we're privy to rampant sexual violence throughout. COOOOOL! Still, inspiring and awesome to see one woman's reaction to that and how much of an era's aesthetic and images she literally created and defined.
Two weeks ago it was Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer (1990). The central argument of the book is that journalists operate on deception, that a subject's candor and access is obtained through a false sense of trust or friendship, that pathos or the illusion thereof is the catalyst for this deception. Dark thoughts about all my human relationships notwithstanding, it was an engrossing read, though the premise seemed very self-evident to me. I am too much a product of my liberal arts education/Unitarian progressive hippie upbringing to find the idea of a journalist's subjectivity and shifty motives to be shocking (illusions shattered long ago leaving me yearning for a true sincerity at times, obv), but as an outsider to journalism/its attendant debates perhaps I'm missing something. Any suggestions?
More soon...
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