Rant: An Oral Biography Of Buster Casey

So today I finished reading the home stretch of Chuck Palahniuk's latest novel, Rant: An Oral Biography Of Buster Casey. Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while now or know me personally know that I have a very deep reverence for Palahniuk's work and that I probably spend a tad too much time championing his work. He is my favorite author. Naturally, I was expecting to really love Rant.

It's very safe to say that I was not disappointed.

The novel is the story of a man by the name of Buster Casey and it's told in a series of interviews with the characters who knew the man and interacted with him. The fact that the story is told in this manner is something that I was having trouble coping with early on as I had to train myself to pay attention to which character was saying what, but that was a minor obstacle to overcome. It's also interesting to read a book that unfolds its story in such a way. It shows that Palahniuk is willing to take risks with his style. His prior novel, Haunted: A Novel was a series of short stories told within the framework of a larger encompassing story much like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which is a style that you don't see very much at all in contemporary literature. At least not in popular literature. I don't think that the oral biography is a style that will suddenly become a trend, but it's refreshing to see something stylistically different.

The story itself revolves around Buster Casey, as I already said. The character of Buster Casey reminded me a lot of Tyler Durden from Palahniuk's most famous novel Fight Club in the sense that he is an outside-the-box thinker and, at times, a bit of a revolutionary, but he's not nearly as outspoken and his perpensity to preach is minimal. Palahniuk does seem to draw a little bit from biblical references to draw parallels to Buster's life and it becomes more and more apparent as the story draws closer to its end.

Buster becomes the leader of an underground demolition derby circuit known as Party Crashing and knowingly spreads rabies to just about everybody, making him a quite effective serial killer. He's an interesting character who exists only in the interviews of the book and for most of the book I found myself very intrigued by his wealth, his rapport with the other characters, and just how a man of his particular background really becomes a legend. He seems to have a really disgusting background, growing up with his limbs stuck down holes in the ground a lot of the time, baiting unseen animals for a bite, hence the source of his deadly strain of rabies, but he's given color in a habit of chewing road tar instead of bubble gum and having extremely heightened senses of taste and smell, which some people may read about and be offended by, but I won't spoil it too much for you. It is a bit on the colorful side. Palahniuk has a great eye for the vulgar and he handles it well in his writing. A lot of detractors say that he goes too far, but I think in this book at least, it's a baseless argument given that the story shifts quite dramatically as it evolves from a story about underground demolition derbies to a story about time travel, legends, and immortality.

And if there is one thing that Rant suffers from it's a plot line that becomes difficult to follow near the end. I think that with me, personally, I had trouble understanding the ins-and-outs of the notion of time-travel as it pertains to the character of Buster Casey. I could tell what was happening, but I had trouble understanding why it was happening or how it was happening. The story gets a bit esoteric when it comes to time travel and it left me, at times, trying to deal with concepts like the Grandfather Paradox and the notion of Holy Trinity of Buster's Father Chet, the history Green Taylor Simms, and Buster himself. I think I would have liked a bit more space devoted to explaining the phenomena, but as it was it did keep the plot going.

Truthfully, I really wish I could tell you more about the latter parts of the book, but I really think that it's best for you to read it and find out what I'm talking about for youself. It's a great book. If and when you get around to reading it talk to me about. Tell me what you think. I really liked the book, but it's fodder for thought and discussion. I need to discuss this.

Anyway, I just thought I would let you know that you need to read this book so that I have something to talk about with you.

Neon Bible

I suppose there are a few of you out there who are wondering why it took me so long to finally get around to posting a review (or my best attempt at a review)of The Arcade Fire's latest album, Neon Bible. It's definitely not a case of me not buying the album as soon as humanly possible, that's for sure. I was at HMV the morning of the release to pick it up as is customary for me when it comes to music releases that I highly anticipate (remember, I did book a day off work just for the day that Tool's 10,000 Days was released). So why the delay in telling you, my gentle readers, what I thought of the disc?

Well, to be very honest with you, I wanted to love the album as much as I possibly could so that I could properly gush over it. In order to do that I had to listen to it a number of times just so that it could emerge from the mighty, practically monolithic, shadow that the Arcade Fire album that preceeded it Funeral I knew would cast. I love Funeral so much that I'm sure I'll be gushing about that one for years and years to come. My grandchildren (or the grandchildren that I one day hope to have) will find it more than mildly irritating to listen to me hype Funeral and that will be decades and decades from now. They will subsequently disown me, but you know what? Fuck 'em! Funeral is that fucking great!

So you can imagine how difficult for me it would be to just pick up any album that would have the gall to try to follow-up such a huge album.

I don't want you to think that the album didn't appeal to me at all when I first heard it. Almost instantly "Intervention" had me hooked, but, truthfully, I bought it as a pre-release single off iTunes weeks before Neon Bible came out so it had some time to sink in. Even though "Keep The Car Running" seems to be the first single from the disc I think it will be "Intervention" that will hook the casual listeners. I mean how many radio-friendly songs out there are built around the sound of a big church organ? 274. I checked. But damn it, this one will be 275!

What Neon Bible does more than Funeral is it brings to the forefront of The Arcade Fire's music an immense sound. Immediately I was struck by how loud this CD can get at times. The aforementioned organ in "Intervention" is grandiose, and it gets even bigger, possibly as big as an organ can sound during "My Heart Is A Cage." But aside from the organ, horns come to life in "An Ocean Of Noise" and strings almost drown lead singer Win Butler's voice out during the Bruce Springsteen-esque "(Antichrist Television Blues)."

Gone, though, is a lot of the romance that really made Funeral so stunning for me to listen to. And at first I was actually a little disappointed by that, but now I see it as necessary. The subject matter that the band is dealing with here is actually quite a bit darker, but ultimately I think the message that comes through is that there is redemption to be had. The romance that I detected in Funeral had a time and place and it was on that album. This album is a completely different beast and has its own voice and messages to convey. There is a bleakness that seems to haunt a lot of the music here:


"Mirror, mirror on the wall,
show me where the bombs will fall,"

Win Butler closes "Black Mirror" with. He then goes on to sing:


"Oh God! well look at you now!
Oh! you lost it, but you don't know how!
In the light of a golden calf,
Oh God! I had to laugh!
Take the poison of your age
Don't lick your fingers when you turn the page,
It was wrong but you said it was right,
In the future I will read at night."

in Neon Bible's title track. This is bleak. And, sure enough, as the album nears its end the message becomes more uplifting; its ultimate optimism starts to show.

Which leads me to a somewhat interesting aside about this CD. The second-to-last track on the disc is "No Cars Go," which puzzled me by its inclusion since it was a song that was released on a prior recording by The Arcade Fire, in particular, their self-titled EP, which even got some more widespread commercial appeal in a reissue after the band became a critical darling. So it was odd to see a song that was already released being re-release, albeit arranged slightly differently than its first incarnation. However, in the scheme of Neon Bible's evolution, it's a song from the catalogue that fits in the cycle perfectly, being the last song before the culmination of the album.

The culmination comes in the form of "My Body Is A Cage" and it's my favorite track on the disc so far because its the biggest sound and it erupts from such a humble start. But the message of redemption is its most painfully obvious during this last song. And climax? This song has climax in spades:


"Set my spirit free!
Set my body free!"

You have to check this album out. It comes with my highest recommendation.

I'll leave you with a video that I found on youtube of an unofficial music video some guy made for "My Body Is A Cage" out of ripped footage from Once Upon A Time In The West. I love how technology is letting people do stuff like this. It's strange to see this song played over a gunfight, but it seems to work. Check the video out even if you just want to hear a good song.