New Reads

Just picked up Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover. I'd read Conover's Rolling Nowhere: A Young Mans Adventure Riding The Rails... A couple years ago. Great read in one of my favorite genre's which I'll call Hobo Adventure. Newjack has been popping up on my Amazon recommendations list for at least two years due to my many purchases within one of my other favorite genre's, Prison History, and yesterday I just happened to pass by it at the library. Fortuitous. I'm about 60 pages in since last night and so far it hasn't disappointed. I'm normally more interested in old Prison history, Newjack is set in the mid-late 1990's.

Just finishing up .45 Dangerous Minds: The Most Intense Interviews From SECONDS Magazine by Steven Blush & George Petros. Wow this was a great read and another great score from the new release section of the library. For you not in the know. Seconds Magazine was a music-centric zine based out of NYC from the late 1980's up into early 2000. Seconds tagline was The Art of The Interview. Very appropriate as Seconds interviews were art. Always obscure and always in depth Seconds delved mostly into the underground of art, music, culture with their subjects. In their decade plus run they have interviewed thousands of underground notables from Walter Gorilla Biscuits to Anton LaVey. .45 Dangerous Minds compiles 45 of the editors favorite interviews along with a couple thousand random quotes from others. It'd be difficult to pick a best interview from the 45 published though I am partial to the GG Allin, Wino and Rahowa pieces, it's a piece of cake to pick my favorite quote.

"If music is like sex my music would be pornography"
- Masami Akita/Merzbow

There are many other great quotes but this one is currently my pick. I've taken to changing it up in my mind depending on the band I'm listening to or the dream band I'm singing for. Just substitute whatever phrase or word you want for pornography. Examples: Rape, prison rape, double penetration, premature ejaculation... You get the idea.