Three Great Tales of Youth Subculture

1. Concerning Big Fun by Gus Mueller
   Big Fun was a house outside Charlottesville, VA featuring a rotating cast of goons & tenants who formed what the author calls an “accidental community” in the mid-1990s. After moving to Charlottesville in ‘99, I became obsessed with the the original Big Fun diaries even though the principle characters had just gone their separate ways. I gathered that many in Cville had been pissed at seeing their personalities dissected publicly on the website as this was years before blogging was common.

   As with the other two examples below, collisions in the ‘plot’ of this book stem from an unstable chemistry between young creative-minded folks who get into trouble while evading all but the essential responsibilities—this familiar story might not seem so special if not for Gus’s hilarious, dramatic style. He strings together stories like a mad scientist, and his laboriously hand-edited glossary of characters pre-dates the wiki by about ten years. Geeks will recognize these pages as flat HTML, not database-driven.

   Eventually, Gus’s world of Tussin abuse, utility bill evasion, goths & skinheads, astrology, general unrest, event-crashing, and journeys into Redneckistan was transferred from blog to paperback format and distributed Matthew Farrell’s local Hypocrite Press.

   Personal connection: A few years after living in C-ville, I met and befriended (and started a band with) a handful of folks from Gus’s glossary simply because I recognized them from the website. A voyeuristic way of meeting people, pre-MySpace.

2. Burn Collector by Al Burian
   Burian’s stories originally appeared in the popular Burn Collector zine which chronicled his Greyhound travels across the country and back, living in squalor from Providence, RI to Portland, OR. There is a tone of sadness to some of the stories (ie, “I went to college and ended up like this?”) though he clearly enjoys slumming it. Burian seems too smart and self-aware to maintain the truly gutter lifestyle many in his demographic fantasize about, leading to to perpetual conflicts of credibility for him and his slumming friends. His world consists of odd jobs, disillusionment, chaotic living arrangements, weirdos he meets on the bus— standard punk-DIY-zine stuff but done right in the hands of a witty author. Burian’s self-deprecating honesty is the perfect antidote to many similar DIY (I hate that term and I’ve used it twice now) publications that take themselves, their scenes and their politics too seriously.

   Personal connection: After college, I spent a year being down-and-out in Portland and even worked for the same temp company and held many of the same jobs.

3. The Royal Nonesuch by Glasgow Phillips
   Of the three authors, Glasgow Phillips has the most impressive pedigree, growing up in Marin County, CA and attending both Brown and Stanford where he was a Stegner Fellow. Somewhere along the way to what would have probably been a successful academic writing career, he gets derailed—the obligatory stint in Austin TX followed by a decade in Los Angeles making dodgy low-budget movies, meeting dodgy people and becoming a “barnacle” (his term) on the Sundance Film Festival, the Trey/Matt/South Park franchise and the DotCom business culture. While Glasgow’s friends seem to genuinely have fun making silly & doomed film projects with little regard for profit, Phillips unabashedly seeks “money and fame, our gods”. On the road to becoming an “asshole” (his term) his main skill seems to be befriending other semi-famous barnacles around Los Angeles.

   Like the other authors, Phillips’ pronounced self-awareness helps him cut through the bullshit around him (Los Angeles not lacking for bullshit), and despite being expensively educated he has no interest in acting like it. Of a few memoirs I’ve read about the early DotCom days in California, none have Phillips’ sense of absurdity for the many, many bad ideas floated during that time. Toward the end of the book, the realities of turning 30 and of his mother’s lymphoma are the only things pulling him back to reality.

   I really enjoyed this book, which I bought based on Phillips’ Might Magazine essays in the 90s. Take a look at some of the official reviews to read a better synopsis.

   Personal connection: My friend Arthur studied writing at Stanford with Glasgow, then made a movie called How’s Your News (whose website I built back in the day (and it shows)) which was funded by Glasgow’s buddies Trey and Matt.

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