No Apocalypse: Punk, Politics, and the Great American Weirdness

by Al Burian

War seems to have frazzled the punks. That's an unusual turn of events considering punk is the subculture that gave us the phrases"let's have a war," "let's start a war," "war on 45," "my war," "wargasm," "war all the time," and so on. "Rock n' roll is war," said the band Frodus; but you know, it really isn't. "Rock n' roll is just rock n' roll," assessed AC/DC, somewhat more accurately, and, while not necessarily noise pollution, it is, in the estimation of the Archers of Loaf, "too bad that the music doesn't matter." Rock remains rock, war remains war, and, despite everything being subjective and meaning something else entirely from what it appears to under the tenets of post-modernity and end-of-historicism, the fact remains that having a lot of dead people is a terrible, terrible thing and having a lot of people voluntarily self-inducing hearing loss is a less terrible thing. Yes? We are all in agreement here?

Genres: Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2018

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend introduced me to Al Burian's Burn Collector zine in college, and every so often I check around the Internet to see if he's got anything new. He does. The pieces collected in No Apocalypse begin in 1999, however, and pick up from where Burn Collector left off...or from where I remember it leaving off, anyway. Here we find Al barely scraping by on rent, not paying the energy bill in the deadly cold Chicago winter until the energy company turns off his heat, worrying about not going to the dentist, worrying about his health and mortality, meeting weird people while traveling across the country on the Greyhound, contemplating the shoplifting of road maps at rest stops, feeling miserable about the invasion of Iraq, and quoting Black Sabbath to try to make sense of it all.

Al is good company, and he reminds me just a bit of what the past couple of decades have been like. He's about 14 years older than I am, he was born in 1971, and you might say that he should have gotten his life in order by this point (I would never say a thing like that, but the general "you" might), but maybe "order" for some people is continuing to write, make music and scrape by. Maybe that's even one of the saner options in a world that is becoming uninhabitable at an accelerating pace. As Black Sabbath sang, leave the earth to Satan and his slaves.

I'm also glad that he's continued to write about the Greyhound, which perhaps hasn't been so much as mentioned in American literature since Bukowski or Ed Bunker. Fine, maybe that's not entirely true, but somehow I doubt you'll catch George Saunders on the Greyhound. I can't be certain at this point, but I think it was reading Al's interstate chronicle in Burn Collector in '05 that inspired what has become my compulsive habit of taking the Greyhound over distances that cause others to worry for my sanity (Las Vegas to Boston last year being one example). Should I thank Al Burian for that? I think I probably should, if only because it's led to my share of strange and edifying/traumatic encounters, the majority of them I believe not merely the product of my sleep-deprived imagination, and if only because I have now seen Arizona from I-40, as everyone should at least once in life.

Al is originally from North Carolina, and I seem to remember from earlier reading that he lived in Portland for a while as well, and apparently Chicago for a few years. He signs off his introduction here with "Berlin, 2018." It sounds like he's lived there for about a decade now, and that he doesn't regret his decision to opt out of American life. I'm glad he's still out there doing his thing.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been a long-time fan of Al Burian's writing and I remember reading several of these columns in Punk Planet and HeartattaCk back when they were first published. However, reading these columns consecutively dims some of the effect of getting a monthly dose of Burian's writing.

If you really want to get a sense of what Burian can do with words, check out the collection of the first nine issues of his old zine here: Burn Collector: Collected Stories from One Through Nine

[Nora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great collection that made me re-appreciate Punk Planet and other indie publications that helped shape me. A MUCH better snapshot of a time, place, and mindset than Klosterman's recent book about the 90s. Some of the essays would have been helped by a bit more context, and I say that as someone the same age, location, and scene when these were written. The intro is great, but I wished for some revisitation...and a few more essays, because these were great.

[Shaun Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yeah, not the best. This book, which is a collection of columns from Heartattack and Punk Planet, is choppy at best. I used to think that Al Burian was a fantastic writer back in my old zine days, but reading this left me with a very “meh” feeling.

[Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Al’s writing is always personal - to him obviously, and to me as well. It’s like listening to stories from a person you barely know who feels like an old friend who gets his buttered roll from the same corner store.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

These columns, along with Burian’s writing for his own zine, are fantastic writing, a first person perspective on the aimless, drifting punk that we all want to be.