Nicholas Rombes
Author of The Ramones' Ramones (33 1/3)
About the Author
Nicholas Rombes is professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy. He is the author of several books on cinema and punk, including The Ramones (2005), and he is the editor of New Punk Cinema (2005). He also directed the feature-length lo-fi paranoid thriller The Removals (2016).
Works by Nicholas Rombes
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Rombes, Nicholas
- Other names
- Rombes, Nick
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Bowling Green State University (BA)
Pennsylvania State University (MA & PHD) - Nationality
- USA
- Places of residence
- Waterville, Ohio, USA
Detroit, Michigan, USA - Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
Nicholas Rombes writes:
As she sleeps in the dark, Evie cannot have known that the black sky has filled with silent drones so completely autonomous that even to their ground controllers their purpose is obscure, or that the forest ferns produce haploid spores that travel impossible distances, or that her lost sister Kate is sleeping also on some other patch of earth, or that she has not yet even arrived at the deepest part of the forest, or that the animals that have followed her and Farris show more earlier are still nearby and that they aren’t animals at all but, like the drones, machines in the guise of animals, created by the State for the simple reason that they could be created and once created set loose to explore, as if the State, having already discovered and mapped itself, created these things to experience itself anew, not through the eyes of humans but machines, and not to collect information but to forget information so that it could be discovered again as if for the first time, or that one theory of the well – being debated at this very moment by functionaries of the State – was that the well existed only insofar as it receded from view, a perpetually vanishing vanishing point, and that Evie’s useless, carefully tended tools are already antiques aged beyond use and that she had been on this journey for a very, very long time, not days but months. Or years. show less
As she sleeps in the dark, Evie cannot have known that the black sky has filled with silent drones so completely autonomous that even to their ground controllers their purpose is obscure, or that the forest ferns produce haploid spores that travel impossible distances, or that her lost sister Kate is sleeping also on some other patch of earth, or that she has not yet even arrived at the deepest part of the forest, or that the animals that have followed her and Farris show more earlier are still nearby and that they aren’t animals at all but, like the drones, machines in the guise of animals, created by the State for the simple reason that they could be created and once created set loose to explore, as if the State, having already discovered and mapped itself, created these things to experience itself anew, not through the eyes of humans but machines, and not to collect information but to forget information so that it could be discovered again as if for the first time, or that one theory of the well – being debated at this very moment by functionaries of the State – was that the well existed only insofar as it receded from view, a perpetually vanishing vanishing point, and that Evie’s useless, carefully tended tools are already antiques aged beyond use and that she had been on this journey for a very, very long time, not days but months. Or years. show less
"Hey Nicholas, we'd really like you to write a 33 1/3 book on the Ramones' first album."
"Nah, I'm writing this long treatise on punk and..."
"Seriously, we need a book in this series on that first album."
"But punk...and treatise...and..."
"Think you can angle it toward the Ramones' first album?"
"...yeah."
I listened to the audio version of this, so it lends itself quite nicely to me being able to fraction out this book. So...the first two-thirds of this short work is about the larger context of show more the punk movement. Yes, Rombes does remember occasionally that this is supposed to be about the Ramones' first album, so he grudgingly inserts their name here and there, and circles around to them to include them, but he plays just as much lip service to the other bands that existed at the time, or preceded them. The Velvet Underground. The Sex Pistols. The Talking Heads. Blondie. The Dead Boys. The New York Dolls. Hell, even Black Sabbath gets more air time than you'd expect.
Finally, just when you think Rombes is going to run out the clock, he finally (perhaps accidentally) meanders around to a really short, mostly non-illuminating track-by-track run through of the album. It works out to about one-sixth of the book. As soon as that last track is discussed and forgotten, he angles right back on that bigger discussion of punk as a whole for the last sixth of the book.
So, despite the title, literally only one-sixth of this book focuses on one of the greatest albums of a decade full of great albums. And five-sixths is devoted to the author citing his reading sources and talking about everything except the album.
Self-indulgent crap. show less
"Nah, I'm writing this long treatise on punk and..."
"Seriously, we need a book in this series on that first album."
"But punk...and treatise...and..."
"Think you can angle it toward the Ramones' first album?"
"...yeah."
I listened to the audio version of this, so it lends itself quite nicely to me being able to fraction out this book. So...the first two-thirds of this short work is about the larger context of show more the punk movement. Yes, Rombes does remember occasionally that this is supposed to be about the Ramones' first album, so he grudgingly inserts their name here and there, and circles around to them to include them, but he plays just as much lip service to the other bands that existed at the time, or preceded them. The Velvet Underground. The Sex Pistols. The Talking Heads. Blondie. The Dead Boys. The New York Dolls. Hell, even Black Sabbath gets more air time than you'd expect.
Finally, just when you think Rombes is going to run out the clock, he finally (perhaps accidentally) meanders around to a really short, mostly non-illuminating track-by-track run through of the album. It works out to about one-sixth of the book. As soon as that last track is discussed and forgotten, he angles right back on that bigger discussion of punk as a whole for the last sixth of the book.
So, despite the title, literally only one-sixth of this book focuses on one of the greatest albums of a decade full of great albums. And five-sixths is devoted to the author citing his reading sources and talking about everything except the album.
Self-indulgent crap. show less
A far weirder book than Night Film but a sibling to it in a wonderful way. I looked at the world differently after reading The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing, not in the sense of understanding it differently but in the sense of having briefly slid across into a neighboring universe and seen a glimpse of a place that is just slightly not the one we’re currently inhabiting. At its core, this is a novel about the power of film – but it achieves so much more than that with an ease and show more skill that bely the author’s debut status. And if you’re lucky and you reach out to Mr. Rombes, you might even end up, as I did, with more sense of the blurring line between fiction and reality – for in my mailbox the other day came a note with a filmstrip and some ephemera from Laing’s own archive…
More at TNBBC: http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/drew-reviews-absolution-of-rober...
and at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2015/08/26/the-absolution-of-roberto-acestes-laing... show less
More at TNBBC: http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/drew-reviews-absolution-of-rober...
and at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2015/08/26/the-absolution-of-roberto-acestes-laing... show less
A far weirder book than Night Film but a sibling to it in a wonderful way. I looked at the world differently after reading The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing, not in the sense of understanding it differently but in the sense of having briefly slid across into a neighboring universe and seen a glimpse of a place that is just slightly not the one we’re currently inhabiting. At its core, this is a novel about the power of film – but it achieves so much more than that with an ease and show more skill that bely the author’s debut status. And if you’re lucky and you reach out to Mr. Rombes, you might even end up, as I did, with more sense of the blurring line between fiction and reality – for in my mailbox the other day came a note with a filmstrip and some ephemera from Laing’s own archive…
More at TNBBC: http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/drew-reviews-absolution-of-rober...
and at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2015/08/26/the-absolution-of-roberto-acestes-laing... show less
More at TNBBC: http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/drew-reviews-absolution-of-rober...
and at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2015/08/26/the-absolution-of-roberto-acestes-laing... show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 10
- Members
- 203
- Popularity
- #108,638
- Rating
- 3.5
- Reviews
- 5
- ISBNs
- 26
- Languages
- 2