In the early 90s or so I used to read ‘Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll’. This San Francisco newsprint ‘World Bible’ of the punk music scene still runs today, though I haven’t read it in years. It was always a great place to see interviews with your fave obscure American punk bands (cos I was right into that stuff back then, sending off to small –at that time – labels like Lookout! Records and whatnot to get punk platters that nobody on the Scottish side of the Atlantic had ever heard of, except for a small select group of people into that music) and find out about new records they and a million other bands (always loved looking at the mad bad band names to see who had come up with the weirdest one that month) from here and there and everywhere were putting out.

MRR (as it was known to those in the know, or the lazy who couldn’t be bothered spelling out its whole name) had a few regular columnists I recall that were worth reading: Ben Weasel of Screeching Weasel (who has a foreword in ‘I, A Me-Ist’), George Tabb, The Reverend Norb…and Mykel Board. I probably forgot a few, but it’s so long ago I’m just putting down names that have stuck in my mind. The columns were always interesting, dealing with life in and out of the punk music scene from an idiosyncratic perspective, and I lapped all that stuff up, seeing as how I always wished I could be part of the US side of the punk scene as it seemed a lot more lively and less static than the UK side (which I wasn’t hugely heavily involved in anyway, more just listening to records and going to gigs here and there). Easy thing to think or daydream, of course, when you’re thousands of miles away, but I was 19, 20, 21 and in love with all that stuff.

Late last year I learned that John ‘Jughead’ Pierson, a guy I know from Chicago (who was also in Screeching Weasel) had put out a book of Mykel Board’s columns. I got a review copy from him, figuring I could take a trip down memory lane and see if the Board columns stood up today. I recalled him (from the swamp of memories of his and other people’s columns all coalescing in my head into one big syllabic soup of faded words and thoughts) as an interesting writer who said some things that had stuck in my head years later as being true and valid. So I started reading. And was pleasantly – and occasionally unpleasantly – surprised.

The columns in ‘I, A Me-Ist’ are culled from 17 years of MRR writings (roughly 1983-2000) by Board. Many of them are topical, dealing with issues and politics of the day (PC, etc), so they are of quaint historical value. Others, however, are more timeless, dealing with humanity in the raw (and I mean raw), so they still bear a deal of scrutiny even today. I flew through this book (after all, it’s full of bitesize reads, with each column only a few thousand words max) and remembered a fair few of the columns (some printed later in the 90s than I remembered them, but memory can be treacherous sometimes). But before I say anything else, I should point out one thing: Mykel Board, to me at least, is worth defending more as a state of mind than a human being, because the person in these pages, and his forthright, contentious views on anything and everything, can be very grating or stupid or unsavory indeed.

Board is a perennial societal misfit, an “archetypal discontented Jew” as he describes himself. Pathologically unable, or unwilling, or both, to fit into mainstream society (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing) because of his views or actions, he rails at the world from the marginalized sidelines of the punk music scene because, well, he would never fit in anyplace else, would never be accepted anyplace else. Not that he even really fits into the punk scene either – he deliberately goes out of his way to try and alienate punks reading his columns and to distance himself from their worldviews with endearing rants like this, from page 75:

“Punk rock is no different from communism. Both are ideas whose time has come and past. Both have adherents blindly clinging to them. Both have meaningless ideological disputes and violent disagreements. In both cases, nobody but the tiny self-centered groups themselves care.

Punks are like teddy boys or old hippies with bell bottoms and granny glasses. Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll is a Jurassic Park. We’re the dinosaurs. There’s not going to be a punk revolution, any more than there’s going to be a communist revolution. All we have is the music. We’re fans, but that’s it.”

As you can imagine, to a blinkered self-righteous musical subsect like punk rock (and there are few people more self-righteous than some of the people in that scene, especially the DIY types – they would put Christians to same with their pious, pompous preaching and hardercore-than-thou punk puritan proclamations) statements like these would be viewed as somewhat contentious, especially when coming from somebody who is involved in the punk scene playing in a band, and who would label himself a punk. Except he isn’t a punk. Except he is. Except he is.n’t. What Mykel Board ultimately is, is a total wind-up merchant.

Even if you agree with Board, he’ll disagree with you, just on general principle or for a laugh. This would make it practically impossible to connect with him in (m)any ways because he would just skip away from you, gaily mocking you for agreeing with anything he said, whether he believes it or not. Frustration and fury must and would result. Mykel Board is a free spirit, a free thinker. But that doesn’t always make him right – often times he just talks juvenile, stupid shit because he seemingly can’t help himself. So as a concept – Free Speech For All, No Matter What Is Said – Board is worth protecting. But as a human being I have the feeling he would be so utterly infuriating within five minutes of meeting him you’d want to punch him in the mouth for being a smart cunt (which, as Ben Weasel notes, actually happens on occasion, which doesn’t surprise me one bit).

I used to have a friend like that, though to a lesser degree. You knew the guy agreed with your worldview on many things, otherwise you wouldn’t be hanging about with him (we don’t want our core beliefs challenged on a daily basis – mental stasis is easier than constant evolution after all, and much less tiring) but he would still argue things from the opposite side of the coin toss just for the hell of it, just because he could. I have a streak of the same wind-up merchant stuff in me too (just ask the Edinburgh International Film Festival, from where I was banned for jokingly writing satiric nihilist prose poetry about how the festerville should be burned down and people should fuck in its ashes one year). But there are many times during the course of the book where Board’s extreme intelligence (when somebody thanks JG Ballard, William S Burroughs, Celine and the Marquis De Sade, as well as GG Allin and Lydia Lunch, amongst others, as inspirational, in their book, you pretty much know what you’re getting) just crosses the line into willful perversity and/or stupidity and/or creepiness you can’t help but grit your teeth and want to slap him for what he is saying, just tell him to get a grip. He says “I don’t think sex is bad unless it’s an obsession” (P92) but if there’s one person in the world that’s sex-obsessed, it’s Mykel Board (he does contradict himself often, if he thinks it’ll make a good annoying half-chewed soundbite), and his frequent sleazy, drooling, frottage-like writings (about his exhibitionist group sex, masturbation, etc etc etc) in the book endlessly prove this point.

Now. Board is now 56 years old. He is still involved in the punk scene, still writes for MRR. He knows nobody or nowhere else would accept him (hell, even he doesn’t fully accept him), warts and all. He seems absolutely incapable of growing up, which explains his obsession with a tired juiceless retro musical medium he even mocks himself. Well, that and the endless new waves of teenagers of both sexes (he swings both ways) coming into the music when the older ones grow up and move on or overdose, cos Mykel likes ‘em young. And of course there’s nothing wrong with that, but personally I can’t think of anything sadder than being in your late 50s in a scene where most of the people around you will be a third(!) or under of your age. For all the man’s intelligence (he comes across as being one of these people who are so far out from mainstream thought that they don’t even realize how bizarre their thoughts seem on some things to other people), it doesn’t say a lot about his social skills. But it seems that Peter Pan-like forever youth is sanctioned in the music scene in some quarters (hell, just ask Michael Jackson), so, well, good luck to him.

The same friend I mentioned earlier on had a saying: “It’s easy to shine in shite” (or to put it another way: ‘In the Land of the Creeps, the One-Eyed Asshole is King’ as the February 1995 column here is named). It’s very easy to lord your intellect over a load of kids when they haven’t been on the planet more than a third of the time you have, but far more difficult to impress a person older and wiser and maybe more world-weary who has grown out of their teenage years. And you know what’s funny? For all his intelligence (and make no mistake about it, Board is a very intelligent person) he has very little real insight into certain aspects of life and what is truly important and meaningful (with real, lasting interpersonal relationships seemingly beyond him). Here’s a case in point from page 342, when he’s talking to his friend Bruce LaBruce (star of the cover for the classic 1991 Screeching Weasel 7” on Shred of Dignity Records, ‘I Wanna Be A Homosexual’), who is a gay porn filmmaker (LaBruce starts):

“Sarcasm’s so fashionable these days…” (Note for future enemies of mine: few things grit my teeth more than being called fashionable.)

“It’s such an excuse,” he continues. “It lets you get away with anything. You can say what you really mean and then run away by claiming you were sarcastic. You never have to stand up for what you believe. If someone attacks you, you say you were only being sarcastic.”

I open my mouth to defend myself. No sound comes out. I’m hit. Bruce’s verbal bullet tears my throat with an entrance wound to the left and the Adam’s apple. Expanding as it travels, it rips apart my esophagus and windpipe. It exits, blowing a tennis-ball-sized hole through the back of my head.

The epiphany. Sarcasm’s a wall, although I would’ve used another word. Maybe just-kiddingism or piss-people-offism. It’s a dodge, a shield you can hide behind when the shit starts flying. I scream about people not taking responsibility for their actions. But what about me? What is “I didn’t really mean it” or “I was just being sarcastic” or “I just wanted to piss people off”? You can do anything, then run away and hide behind these excuses. Get it?”

It’s truly bizarre that it takes Board until the age of 42 to realize this fundamental fact of life and adulthood, and that it takes somebody else to point it out. Then again, if you’re hanging about with a bunch of kids amongst whom it’s ‘cool’ or ‘punk’ to say anything you please or who are too young or dumb to know any better…life lessons are not going to be arrived at too swiftly. Of course, no doubt Board will just go right back to being an obnoxious bastard again, because he can do no other, plus he can get away with it in the punk scene because the people in it don’t (as The Queers put it in the great happy song ‘Everything’s Okay’) “toss and turn all night/worry about what’s right/who’s punk as hell and who’s rude.” These kids don’t give a fuck; it’s not the real world, it’s Punk Neverland, where you can escape society’s brutal scriptures and structures and strictures and say anything you want. As long as you don’t really mean it…or even say you don’t…or shit, even if you do. But there comes a time when we all have to stand up and be counted, show what side of the fence we’re on. Or every word that comes out of our mouth ultimately means absolutely nothing.

Now. Having written this, you might wonder why I have even bothered reviewing this book if I disliked it or found it so stupid and contradictory in places. Well. I found some of it hugely enjoyable (his visit to an anarchist convention – surely an oxymoron – is laugh-out-loud stuff), utterly hilarious and got a kick out of his constant-duck-and-dodge intellect. The man makes a lot of very lucid, cogent points on a great many subjects, and wears his badge of Otherness with a professional (very) perverse pride. At least he’s not a mental sheep, and it’s always good to have somebody question your most basic assumptions about race, politics, feminism, drugs, language, sex, art, or whatever topic the man tackles in the book; he certainly made me think a good few times anyway, even if I didn’t agree with him a lot of the time. The oddly masochist, forever-out-of-step, enjoying-annoying-people Mykel Board is a necessary evil, and I’m glad he exists. Well, maybe ‘evil’ is too strong a word. He’s just not the kind of person I would ever want to hang out with, is all.

The man’s writing style (very minimalist and reminiscent of Bukowski, a writer whom he admires) and subject matter he discusses is the reason why I wanted to read the other book of his I am going to talk about here, ‘Even A Daughter Is Better Than Nothing,’ which encompasses Board’s adventures in Outer Mongolia. The few columns about this subject in the MRR book whetted my appetite for reading about his experiences there because of the vast east-versus-west cultural differences, how he described them and his obvious excitement at the culture shock he experienced.

Multilingual Board, who has a Master’s Degree in Linguistics, went to Ulaanbataar for a year in August 1995 to teach Spoken English for $65 a month at the School of Foreign Service at the National University, apparently the most prestigious school in Outer Mongolia. Various chaos ensued. A correspondent of his collected emails about daily events Board sent and these formed the basis for this book, and there’s very little overlap between the two books in the material presented.

Now. I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, with reservations. Mostly free of tired juvenile punk posturing, and not having to try and offend/annoy musical scenesters on a monthly basis, Board gets down to the meat of the matter at hand, ie reporting on a foreign country, its alien (to western eyes) culture and the things he found there. This means that his sick, creepy streak is somewhat muted (though always in the background – moron which shortly), the book is a pretty entertaining read from start to finish and, to my mind, it’s the better of the two volumes.

If there’s one word to describe the man’s journalistic style, it’s Gonzo. He dives right in at the deep end and cheerfully masochistically swims in the sometimes-over-his-head anarchic waves his actions, and living in the country, stir up. He finds himself in a country for a year that is quite unlike anything he, or we, have ever experienced, where “This is Mongolia” becomes a catch all expression to describe or excuse any and all bizarre happenings in a place that seemingly runs in some sort of timeless twilight zone where nothing works right and tardiness is a national pastime.

Now. Whatever his faults, Board has an ear for white noise, an eye for surreal barely-believable deranged detail and a knack for turning his idiosyncratic experiences into eminently readable prose. He knows how to tell a story, that’s for sure, being the kind of person who seemingly goes out of his way to get into as much deep shit as possible because he knows that, when (if) he comes out the other end it will make for a much better tale to recount. If there’s an easy or hard way to do something, Board will unerringly instantly choose the latter. Which makes for good reading but not, it must be said, for a particularly easy life. Which is fair enough, but rather him than me because some of the things he recounts in this book make for good reading but would undoubtedly have been utterly hellish to endure at the time.

And to what events am I referring? Well, there’s a mixed bag: going out on a trip to the Gobi desert in a stolen wires-crossed-started car with a sullen surly Mongolian driver. Traveling to Korea for a holiday, replete with all the intolerable ticket-purchasing hardship that entails. Spending a Mongolian New Year eating and drinking meal after meal and glass after glass at house after house until escape seems like a distant dimly remembered feverdream. Attending a seemingly ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’-like play where you hardly speak a word of the language and making up your own plot (as Board often does anyway in real life anyway). Getting constipation and eating Mongolian food to free up the old internal waterworks (which works only too well). Accidentally ending up by default being the US Embassy gate guard on a visit by Hillary Clinton. Attending a Mongolian wrestling match. Interviewing ‘Hurd’ (‘Speed’), the only rock band (in 1995 at least) in the country. Going on a super-saddle-sore-inducing horse ride on a horse with a wooden saddle. Trying to get laid by your fellow teachers, students, ANYBODY.

Board doesn’t try to maintain much of a professional distance between himself and his students (who are at least 25 years younger than him – he was in his mid-40s at the time) and he letches after them. It’s cringeworthy to read about the man pining like an adolescent after youths (of whatever age he encounters in the book) who will never reciprocate his lustful advances and then about his melodramatic teenage mood swings where he fantasizes about throwing himself into a lake because they won’t have sex with him. He truly is stuck mentally in some sort of retarded adolescent timewarp, but he himself cheerfully admits that he doesn’t want to grow up and watch his friends become “serious adults.”

I actually found myself being embarrassed for the man a few times. He’s like an elder statesman precursor of the contemporary trend in America prolonging adolescence for as long as possible (if 50 truly is the new 30, as I saw yesterday on TV here, then Board is still only 16 – if that - mentally, even though he is 56), a trend which has spawned the likes of Kevin Smith, Jackass, The Bloodhound Gang and Andy Milonakis, (physically) grown men in their 30s behaving like drooling idiotic 15-year-olds. It’s actually deeply, deeply sad, and symptomatic of a country whose mental age dropped after the 60s to spoiled teenage level and which now caters cheerfully to this Peter Pan-like trait just so long as it makes money, even though it traps its (often middle class) mollycoddled cultural adherents in an early stage of their lives. But they’re happy there anyway, so…

…ah, fuck it, what’s the point, it’s never going to change, let them get on with it. As I said, ‘Even A Daughter Is Better Than Nothing’ (a title which comes from an old Mongolian proverb) is an entertaining, fast read, peppered with occasionally indistinct photos of the people and places under discussion. I was gaily skimming through it, chuckling away here and there, when I came across this on page 281 (‘QT’ = is Board slang for ‘cutie’ here): “Her six year old sister is a QT in the making. Thin, her long body mostly legs, she’s got the kind of smiling oval face and flirty walk that makes it easier to understand pedophilia.” How creepy is THAT? This line is near the end of the book. I instantly wanted to shower after reading it, and it retroactively ruined reading the work for me, as I felt once again that I had been in the company of a fucked-up pervert. If anybody ever said that kind of thing about my niece, I would break their fucking jaw. Six-year-olds don’t have ‘flirtatious’ walks, they don’t know a thing about sex; it’s only a certain kind of diseased mind that would read sexual intent into the walk of a child that age. And it’s not just the man being contentious. There’s something deeply pathological there, something that would make you want to stay well away from the author. To me it’s sort of like the work of one of his heroes, the aforementioned Burroughs: you read his work and take certain stylistic and poetic things from it, whilst skipping over sick shit like the hanging boy motif and being very glad you never had to deal with the author in person.

Board’s views on youthful sexual expression and experimentation are deeply contentious and somewhat disturbing, surfacing a few times in ‘I, A Me-Ist.’ He basically seems to believe that sexual repression is the worst evil in all western civilization and that everybody but him is fucked up on this score. He will say something like if you tell a child to push a stranger away and run if the stranger tries to grab them, you will scar that child for life, make them afraid of tactile contact. Which may have an element of truth (not too much) to it, but Board…what would you suggest that a child attacked by a would-be pedophile do? As I said, sometimes the man’s intelligence outweighs its common sense quota, with disturbing, creepy results.

And another thing. “There is no patronizing analysis of a foreign world on display,” writes Jennifer Blowdryer, an old MRR columnist buddy of Board’s, in a quote on the back of the book. Well, that’s not entirely true. How else would you account for quotes like: “Moron: a hapless name for a town – especially one in a country already associated with mental retardation” (P273) or (when Board and cohorts are contemplating impersonating Mongols to get reduced-rate tickets for an event) “”You think we could pass? You smear on lambfat. I’ll drink a bottle of vodka. Hannah will squat and pop half a dozen sexy Oriental kids. That’ll convince them” (P321) or “I don’t want to be arrested for impersonating a Mongolian. I don’t want to end up in chains, in the middle of a desert, having birds peck at my liver, while I’m raped by hordes of wrestlers with Gobi sand in the KY. KY? They don’t have KY in Mongolia.” (P322)

If those quotes aren’t condescending, I don’t know what is. You get the feeling that, despite not wanting to be seen as a tourist (which he most assuredly is in the country, doing the place on the cheap, a fact he is not happy about having pointed out to him by a Mongolian because he recognizes the truth in it), Board still has the ‘Ugly American’ mentality and could never do anything but maintain a certain sneering distance from the country he is visiting, no matter how much he might not want this to be the case. Then again, he maintains a certain sneering distance from practically everything and everybody everywhere, so why should Outer Mongolia be any different? He’s a perpetual Outsider whose mental and physical (short, with a small dick, as he gleefully tells us) differences are even more pronounced in a land he doesn’t belong to or fully understand except on some sort of shallow cartoon ‘they don’t do things like us in the west’ level and will only ever be a tourist wherever he goes in the world, with all the loneliness and alienation and frustration and annoyance that entails.

Now. Having said this, there is genuine affection displayed towards Mongolia and its inhabitants in these pages. ‘Even A Daughter Is Better Than Nothing’ is a genuinely good, entertaining memoir. It’s just that Board the man, and his waspish spiky demeanor, is so utterly inextricable from the prose (which I suppose goes without saying about any writer’s work or worldview; it’s just that it’s vastly accentuated in this case) that it’s impossible to talk about it without talking about him and his worldview, which is often unpalatable for many different reasons. It’s not so much a matter of taking or leaving the man, it’s a matter of taking funny or interesting or intelligent bits of him and leaving some stuff you’re not comfortable with. Which applies to all of us to a greater or lesser degree. Some of the comments in ‘Daughter’ really take the shine off enjoying the book. If he had just canned some of this sleazy stuff it would have vastly enhanced reading it and being able to recommend it unreservedly. No doubt Mykel Board would disagree with that last statement, just for the hell of it Then again, if he wasn’t an asshole every now and again to start a fight or make somebody uncomfortable on purpose…

...he wouldn’t be Mykel Board. And whether that’s a good or bad thing is for you alone to decide.

Graham Rae is a Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk, now resident in the US. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and am halfway through my first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 18 years now, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his ramble/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.