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The Humorless Ladies of Border Control
The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar | Franz Nicolay
5 posts | 3 read | 8 to read
In 2009, musician Franz Nicolay left his job in the Hold Steady, aka the worlds greatest bar band. Over the next five years, he crossed the world with a guitar in one hand, a banjo in the other, and an accordion on his back, playing the anarcho-leftist squats and DIY spaces of the punk rock diaspora. He meets Polish artists nostalgic for their revolutionary days, Mongolian neo-Nazis in full SS regalia, and a gay expat in Ulaanbataar who needs an armed escort between his home and his job. The Russian punk scene is thrust onto the international stage with the furor surrounding the arrest of the group Pussy Riot, and Ukrainians find themselves in the midst of a revolution and then a full-blown war. While engaging with the works of literary predecessors from Rebecca West to Chekhov and the nineteenth-century French aristocrat the Marquis de Custine, Nicolay explores the past and future of punk rock culture in the post-Communist world in the kind of book a punk rock Paul Theroux might have written, with a humor reminiscent of Gary Shteyngart. An audacious debut from a vivid new voice, The Humorless Ladies of Border Control is an unforgettable, funny, and sharply drawn depiction of surprisingly robust hidden spaces tucked within faraway lands.
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LouLouLane
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This book is going to make me a better person! Thanks #herbookshop #nashville

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Genrebending
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hgrimes I misread that title as "The Humorless Ladies of Birth Control" and my jaw dropped for a second. ? 7y
50 likes5 stack adds2 comments
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samalot
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"And so we ride eternal cycles of hope and disillusionment."
A most timely paragraph from this lovely travelogue. It's a journey through places and cultures as much as a jouney through the travel literature that preceded it - a florid way to say the Nicolay quotes Custine (and others) every step of his way, to great effect.

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samalot
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"Be inconspicuous all day, I learned, except for the thirty minutes onstage, when you must be the most conspicuous thing in the room. Your livelihood depends on being unable to ignore."
[Thrilled to have met Nicolay at Brickbat Books earlier this fall ?]

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Imjasondiamond
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Basically missing shots of vodka.

MrBook I like this post for so many reasons 😁👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👍🏻!!! 8y
7 likes1 stack add1 comment