Bøger af George Berger

As noted in the description of the first volume of this book, every punk book seems to be about the bands, about the 'faces', about the music. Volume 2 of All The Young Punks brings you more stories from the frontline, from the trenches. Stories from the foot soldiers who made punk what it was without turning it into a career. Born too late for the inner circle, but shining like a thousand comets nonetheless - this is the story of the punks. "It felt like pure energy - like a Sherbet Dip, when you have the first mouthful and your face scrunches up" "Punk Rock had saved me and I dedicated myself to it's glory" "there was music I could relate to for when I was feeling sad, happy, funky or whatever, but nothing for when I felt angry... until THIS." "Then there was the day a bunch of us painted my mate's Woolworths acoustic guitar white then set light to it in the local park while another mate filmed it with his dad's Super 8 Camera as a 'Dada-ist Performance Piece'. Unfortunately we didn't tell the bloke who's guitar it was, and when he found out we had to go into hiding for a couple of weeks as he recruited a bunch of local 'hard nuts' to 'sort us out'...." "Records with swearing in!" "It was like a story with no pre-ordained ending. I still get a electrical twinge when a band hits that first note or chord, what will happen next." "bum flaps fashioned from an old kilt of my mum's, black bondage trousers with the baby reins I had worn as a toddler attached behind, hastily marker penned anarchy armbands." "I remember buying a white catering jacket (on which I pinned a Crass badge with the 'broken gun' image in day-glo orange on white) that I fancied looked a bit like the tuxedo that Sid wore in the My Way video. Margate being a seaside resort, though, I was always being asked if I'd got a job as an ice cream seller." "Its naïve to think that society could change, but to a certain extent, in the early years and with the optimism of youth I believed it could happen." "I still had long hair and was wearing a 'Tales From Topographic Oceans' teeshirt. The guitarist of Slaughter came up to me after the gig and said "Do you like Yes then?", I very nervously mumbled "Er I suppose so", to which he replied "Me too mate, fuckin' great band!" "It came along just at the right time though and gave me somewhere to belong, which was a lifesaver." "I'm still in awe of the sex, style and subversion that the original Punk Explosion thrust upon unsuspecting England and if I'm not out smashing the system then I'm doing my bit to resist it's clammy clutches." "He said, "This album can't be any good. It's got 14 tracks on it." I love that quote."

Oisin is a college freshman whose most noteworthy skill is, like most men his age, the unerring ability to jump to perfectly well-reasoned and yet completely incorrect conclusions. When he meets an imitation college student who might be named Gwen, he decides she's probably an undercover cop. She isn't, unfortunately--but after Oisin asks her out to lunch, he slowly begins to discover both the complicated history and personality hiding behind her rather gruff exterior. He might even come to like the strange young woman, if her troubles don't get him killed, first... Gorp is a thirty-thousand word (around two-hundred page) new adult story about college, cats, love, and leftovers. Contains no sex, no werewolves, no vampires, no handsome millionaires, and no tentacles, but does include mild language, a secret society of militant octogenarians, a talking cat, and leftover Chinese food.

If you know what it is, punk is everywhere nowadays - in fashion, in TV ads, in loads of books and in retro mags. And as the characters aren't waxworks but in many cases living beings, some have staggered, tramped or even rocketed back into public life. It's a bit tricky to sort the crap from the class but this unusual book deserves the latter tag. If your world was influenced by Crass, the Levellers or Adam & The Ants, Let's Submerge is for you (Berger has written the definitive work on Crass and also a biog of the Levellers). The anthology is more than memoir - it's a personal take on punk and its place in Berger's life. Built on a superb, rangy interview with Crass linchpin Penny Rimbaud and including in-depth talks with mavericks such as Mark Perry, Marco Pirroni, the late Steven Wells and Spizz, it seeks to unearth what the movement/phenomenon was about and how its protagonists fit with the Berger view that punk was "a place where misfits could be accepted and conformity didn't rule". His choice of subjects might make consensus likely but that is not the point as an unflinching style gets the best out of his interviewees. A key passage in the Mark Perry interview has the priceless line: "My old mate Danny [Baker, erstwhile Sniffin' Glue colleague] did an advert for Daz! They're a major corporation! Give us a break! They're destroying the fucking world - why are we working for them? I'm not a particularly political person . . .". Perry also tells a great tale of how he was asked to appear on Baker's edition of This Is Your Life and was chastised by his ma for turning it down. "Even people I respect didn't understand. I don't live by those rules." Wherever their careers have taken them, all have consciously avoided settling in the mainstream. Berger's writing career took him to 3am (not the Daily Mirror column, but 3ammagazine.com - "Whatever it is, we're against it") and the pieces he contributed are to me the hard core of Let's Submerge. They are a riveting set, composed with passion and spiked with insight and humour, covering an unexpectedly wide terrain - drinking at the Ritz, flag-waving nationalism, the virtues of Jeffrey Archer, Crass redux and voting among others. There's also an equally spiky and humorous memoir of a spell of horse-drawn life in Ireland, and quite a bit more. In conclusion, an illuminating interview with the author puts the foregoing into historical perspective. The impression is that while Berger wants to "draw a line" rather than march on as a modern-day torchbearer, the light is unlikely to go out.

A monster-slaying hero. An invisible ninja assassin. A hopelessly lovestruck pair of teenagers. A woman who may or may not be a zombie. A disreputable gentleman of means. Humor. Adventure. Romance. Intrigue. A... goat? Unmarketable Dross collects six of George Berger's unique pieces of short fiction, previously published as e-books, together in print for the first time. These comprise: Hamaika Well Met by Gaslight Never According to Plan Stanley and his Sword All the Wrong Reasons and Midnight's Tale

Small towns sometimes hold the biggest secrets. Kevin should know; attending college in sleepy little Mud River, he's got plenty of secrets of his own. None of them, however, can explain why he and his co-ed roommate are being framed for ecoterrorism. Untangling that mystery would probably be easy, if his personal, professional, and love lives didn't keep getting in the way. He's sure common sense and reason will prevail, and that his actual innocence will see him through. When dead bodies start turning up, however, he knows the government might well throw reason to the wind... Without A Spark is a 210-page novel about life, love, ecoterrorism, the people who commit it--and the people who take the blame.

All The Young Punks is the 3rd Volume of the series in which famous people and people in bands are gently pushed aside to make way for the voices of the rest of us - Punk Rockers In Their Own Words, the real stories of punk. From the 70s to the present day and stretching all around the world, this is the the punk rockers - not controlled in the body or in the mind. "I also remember a group of mates finding an abandoned copy of the Sex Pistols file in a park and reading it like it was a porn mag or something." "One of my older sisters, Luisa, was a punk punk - bin liner dresses; new wave boyfriend who drove a bubble car and had odd socks; she dyed her hair orange and the bus conductor told her that "that'll be 10p for you and 10 for the parrot." I felt a sense, as a Gay Outsider, in finally belonging to something that was ours. Punk was inclusive and seemed to offer young Gays a way of self expression that was uniquely theirs. "punks were starting to appear at the school I attended, too, and following all my previous years of hating music but loving horror/sci-fi films and books, the way punks looked just tapped into a similar sensibility. They resembled the monsters, aliens and creatures I already somehow loved and identified with." Until punk happened, although I was always sociable and had many good friends, I felt somehow outside of everything. "Punk was perfect for people like me; people who felt like me. I'd often felt as I was growing up that I was just on the edge of everything, that I didn't quite fit in somehow. But now I fitted right in, ta very much; it was everyone else who didn't, and I liked it. A lot." "Looking back I just can't see how a shy and naïve teenage boy such as me could have suddenly started dressing in such an anti-social stick-out-like-a-sore-thumb way. It must have been the hormones." "When I first bought Never Mind the Bollocks, my dad heard it and smashed the record to bits. I went out and bought it again, and only played it when he wasn't around." "I think the simple truth is that we were all caught up, engulfed and swept along by an unseen, magical current of energy. Some of us floundered, some of us drowned, and some us learned how to surf that wave" I think I actually 'identified' with punk before I even had any punk records. After getting to the end of side two, it was like a bomb had gone off in my head The days in my middle teens with sex, drugs and violence totally suck, but I survived thanks to punk rock. I still think 'Get up and do it' regardless of age Every week I'd receive letters and packages of records or tapes from America, Poland, Finland, Brazil drinking 6 packs in my car behind the Whisky A Go Go night club, and late nights in Barney's Beanery. We made DIY amps, recorded rehearsals on a crappy tape recorder and we knocked on doors - just like Jehovah's Witnesses - in the hope someone would be ok to buy it. We sold one. haha! It did not lead to glorious, life-affirming self-empowerment. To the contrary, a lot of it but made me feel even more separated and freakish from my surroundings When bad-girl attitude and unhealthiness of punk rock made me uncomfortable, I got to know Crass and I thought this was the punk I had been looking for. Then, Throbbing Gristle made me feel positive about my own kinkiness and express it through music and art. Since then, I've always been a feminist and an anarchist. It made me realise that pissing people off was really, really good fun. Punk celebrated the outsider, the ostracised and the disconnected, as well as embracing the absurd, the extreme, being independent, and notions of trying to be honest and true to one's self as much as possible. The revolution didn't start in Oxford Street so instead I'd walk to the train station w