Himelstein & Schweser at FringeWare
The particular strain of punk rock emerging from Washington, D.C. in the early 1990s was all about entrepreneurial spirit and idealistic youth. It’s no surprise, then, that Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing, which chronicles a fictional character’s absorption into the D.C. scene, bears that lineage. Authors Abram Shalom Himelstein and Jamie Schweser stopped into FringeWare on Saturday night doing what they’ve done for the last eight months: trying to get interested parties to buy their self-published book from them, directly, $8 for 150 pages of labor of love.
“We’ve probably approached 10,000 people in the last eight months,” Schweser said at the Saturday reading.
“We initially printed 500 copies, took it to the streets in D.C., and asked people for 30 seconds of their time so we could tell them about the book,” Himelstein explained. “When we sold them all in 10 days, we decided to print another 4,000. This tour has really changed the way I perceive America. There are a surprising number of people out there who don’t have 30 seconds to hear about the book.”
Tales follows Elliott Rosenberg, a Tennessee teen who expresses his disenchantment with small-town life by taking a baseball bat to a storefront window after hearing the store’s owner making racist comments. Rosenberg flees to D.C., where he lands a spot in the Positive Change House, a collective made up of high-minded vegetarian punks. The duo decided on an epistolary approach to telling Rosenberg’s story — but in addition to letters, faux documents such as zine articles and flyers are interspersed, in order to allow other points of view to be worked into the story. Names of bands, scenesters, record labels, etc. have been changed cosmetically, and often punningly, to give those in the know some in-joke awareness.
At the reading, Himelstein and Schweser traded excerpts between themselves, including a section of one of the faux zines where they ping-ponged each other a paragraph at a time, referring to it as the “Whack-A-Mole” portion of the reading. One excerpt, involving Rosenberg and friends visiting the Holocaust Museum, contained some poignant, earnest observations about racism, religious prejudice, and cool-group elitism deep within their anecdotal retellings. Although they admit the book started as a collection of riffs on their acquaintances, it has become an apropos monument to an idealistic movement, a sort of upscale zine from a pair of affable guys who deserve at least 30 seconds of your time. — Phil West
Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing is available by mail order: Send $10 to New Mouth From The Dirty South, PO Box 19742, New Orleans, LA 70179.
This article appears in March 5 • 1999 and March 5 • 1999 (Cover).