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Coloring Outside The Lines: A Memoir
From slamdancing at punk gigs and running from riot police, to facing the consequences of violence and betrayal, Coloring Outside the Lines explores one girl's true journey through the underground punk scene of Los Angeles.
146 pages, Paperback
First published September 23, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 20, 2016
What a sad little waste of a book. It is not actively hateful or uniquely bad, so it would be a 1 1/2 star rating if that were possible. But I can't say "it was OK," because it's not. It is a waste of an opportunity.
Why anybody thought to encourage the author to share these utterly banal and even boring mini-anecdotes is beyond me. This memoir contains no insight, no sense of a journey undertaken, no frank re-appraisal of the younger self, no social or political perspective. For that matter, it barely contains any punk rock. What it does contain is a series of disconnected 2-3 page memories that add up to…nothing. There is less here, much less, than meets the eye.
I have a feeling that I know this woman by type. She is (or was—we learn nothing about any changes over the intervening years) the flighty, disconnected, eternally baffled person who some people feel sorry for and begrudgingly befriend out of pity…or perhaps out of self-interest. She basically comes across as a schlub, a compliant and empty person who others took advantage of without giving much in return.
Most notably, she provided living quarters for 8-15 members of what she calls 'The Connected', a loose collective of outcasts. This has the feeling of having been a desperate kind of "please like me so I can feel like I have friends" financial & emotional masochism. It's sad, but she doesn't seem to have grasped that fact, much less learned from it and moved on.
There are so many problems & jarring omissions that I hardly know where to start, but perhaps here: one of the central 'characters' in the book is her friend and minor LA scenester Maggie Ehrig. Ehrig was kind of an 'it' girl in the LA scene for six months around 1981 and was briefly in a band with a couple of famous guys.
Cooper relates a few episodes when it seemed as if their friendship had come undone, for reasons she can't or won't explain. And yet Ehrig served as the nominal 'editor' of this work, written over twenty years later. What had gone wrong in the friendship? She doesn't say. What happened to bring them back together? She doesn't say. Had her perceptions been wrong at the time? She doesn't say. What was it like when Maggie's band (Twisted Roots) actually emerged and then faded away? She doesn't say.
The punk scene in LA from 1979-82 was a bizarre, kaleidoscopic world. I was there, at some of the same gigs Cooper mentions in the book. It was an exhilarating, scary, confounding, and ultimately enervating time and place (Repo Man captures the general sense of sun-baked entropy best, though the Runaways movie and the Darby Crash bio-pic What We Do Is Secret are also quite good).
But almost none of that comes across here in anything but the smallest, most banal focus. Worse, Cooper seems vaguely to realize that It Should All Mean Something, so she occasionally gestures toward the ineffable Something with would-be cliff-hanging chapter endings that are ripe melons of portentousness. A few examples (to be clear, these are all final sentences of chapters):
"It had begun."
"Four days later, Darby Crash killed himself."
"…I no longer felt the need to search out trouble. Besides, I think it had my number."
"It was a quality I would come to envy in the weeks ahead."
"It's funny…[sic] The laughter was gone. But the tears still fell."
"Our first dinner party soon came to a close, to my great relief. Looking back, perhaps I would have appreciated it more -- had I known it was to be our last."
"The ice had just shattered beneath me."
and finally;
"But I could still slamdance with the best of them."
Why do I single these out? Partly to convey the cliché-ridden writing, but mostly to note that none of these desperately striving aperçus is followed up by anything. None of the stories come to any point. Darby Crash's suicide is the last we hear of him, and the meaning of it (if any), for the scene, for her group of friends, for later generations of punks, is left unexamined.
At one point, she learns that a female friend has a crush on her. Quel shock!
"I shook my head. A crush? How could Bobbi have a crush on me? She wasn't…I mean, she didn't…she had a boyfriend!"
End scene. Did she ever talk to the girl about it? She doesn't say. Did she sleep with the girl? She doesn't say. Was gender ambiguity or object-choice fluidity common in the scene? She doesn't say. Did she ever have sex with anybody? She doesn't say.
Socrates famously remarked that the unexamined life is not worth living. Neither is it worthy of writing, to say nothing of reading.
Why anybody thought to encourage the author to share these utterly banal and even boring mini-anecdotes is beyond me. This memoir contains no insight, no sense of a journey undertaken, no frank re-appraisal of the younger self, no social or political perspective. For that matter, it barely contains any punk rock. What it does contain is a series of disconnected 2-3 page memories that add up to…nothing. There is less here, much less, than meets the eye.
I have a feeling that I know this woman by type. She is (or was—we learn nothing about any changes over the intervening years) the flighty, disconnected, eternally baffled person who some people feel sorry for and begrudgingly befriend out of pity…or perhaps out of self-interest. She basically comes across as a schlub, a compliant and empty person who others took advantage of without giving much in return.
Most notably, she provided living quarters for 8-15 members of what she calls 'The Connected', a loose collective of outcasts. This has the feeling of having been a desperate kind of "please like me so I can feel like I have friends" financial & emotional masochism. It's sad, but she doesn't seem to have grasped that fact, much less learned from it and moved on.
There are so many problems & jarring omissions that I hardly know where to start, but perhaps here: one of the central 'characters' in the book is her friend and minor LA scenester Maggie Ehrig. Ehrig was kind of an 'it' girl in the LA scene for six months around 1981 and was briefly in a band with a couple of famous guys.
Cooper relates a few episodes when it seemed as if their friendship had come undone, for reasons she can't or won't explain. And yet Ehrig served as the nominal 'editor' of this work, written over twenty years later. What had gone wrong in the friendship? She doesn't say. What happened to bring them back together? She doesn't say. Had her perceptions been wrong at the time? She doesn't say. What was it like when Maggie's band (Twisted Roots) actually emerged and then faded away? She doesn't say.
The punk scene in LA from 1979-82 was a bizarre, kaleidoscopic world. I was there, at some of the same gigs Cooper mentions in the book. It was an exhilarating, scary, confounding, and ultimately enervating time and place (Repo Man captures the general sense of sun-baked entropy best, though the Runaways movie and the Darby Crash bio-pic What We Do Is Secret are also quite good).
But almost none of that comes across here in anything but the smallest, most banal focus. Worse, Cooper seems vaguely to realize that It Should All Mean Something, so she occasionally gestures toward the ineffable Something with would-be cliff-hanging chapter endings that are ripe melons of portentousness. A few examples (to be clear, these are all final sentences of chapters):
"It had begun."
"Four days later, Darby Crash killed himself."
"…I no longer felt the need to search out trouble. Besides, I think it had my number."
"It was a quality I would come to envy in the weeks ahead."
"It's funny…[sic] The laughter was gone. But the tears still fell."
"Our first dinner party soon came to a close, to my great relief. Looking back, perhaps I would have appreciated it more -- had I known it was to be our last."
"The ice had just shattered beneath me."
and finally;
"But I could still slamdance with the best of them."
Why do I single these out? Partly to convey the cliché-ridden writing, but mostly to note that none of these desperately striving aperçus is followed up by anything. None of the stories come to any point. Darby Crash's suicide is the last we hear of him, and the meaning of it (if any), for the scene, for her group of friends, for later generations of punks, is left unexamined.
At one point, she learns that a female friend has a crush on her. Quel shock!
"I shook my head. A crush? How could Bobbi have a crush on me? She wasn't…I mean, she didn't…she had a boyfriend!"
End scene. Did she ever talk to the girl about it? She doesn't say. Did she sleep with the girl? She doesn't say. Was gender ambiguity or object-choice fluidity common in the scene? She doesn't say. Did she ever have sex with anybody? She doesn't say.
Socrates famously remarked that the unexamined life is not worth living. Neither is it worthy of writing, to say nothing of reading.
August 9, 2023
A quick read. Not super engaging, but still a slightly interesting fast read. The stories are too short for my preference and you don't really get attatched to anyone or anything with that style of writing imo but still a personal story and experience
January 26, 2021
I was looking for some info on LA punks living at the Oxford House in the early '80s when Black Flag briefly stayed there, and found what I was looking for. The memoir also has some of the only descriptions of the band Oziehares I've stumbled across. Told in a series of short vignettes, Cooper explores what it felt like to walk in her shoes during her 18 months in the scene, but doesn't go much deeper than that. I wish it were longer virtually everyone in the book let the author down so I can understand her reluctance to expand the story.
May 11, 2017
This is handled in a more interesting way than I expected. It presents itself from the lens of the inner, vulnerable part of the author as a person rather than through the tougher, more genericized lens of punk itself. That made it far more interesting, a vivid picture of the scene as well as an individualized experience of it and what it seemed to mean. Nice storytelling and nice overall.
May 30, 2018
LA early 80s punk scene beautifully told by a punk who was there, worked at Slash magazine, and has the Germs scar to prove it. It's a great coming of age punk rock survival story. The author is no 'frustrated hack of a journalist' her story is told as vivid memories. There's no ego - no bigging herself up - it's not her way into a career as an established author. This is one kids story of her teenage years. It's amateur it's punk rock
July 22, 2007
I liked this book but it wasn't what I expected. Basically if you imagine SLC Punk set in California with a girl as the main character you pretty much have this book. It is a true story, though.
May 31, 2008
Such a good memoir about a girl who lived in LA during the height of punk rock. A quick, but interesting read.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews