Two authors turn the fascinating into the mundane and vice versa
by Adrienne Martini
Somehow, Village Voice music reporter Frank Owen managed to transform one of the 1990's most intriguing crimes into a dull night at the club. His Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture (St. Martin's/$24.95) reads like third-rate Dashiell Hammett, starring Owen as the hard-bitten private dick. But Owen lacks Hammett's panache, and the result frequently falls flat.
It's sad, really, given how spectacular the players in this true crime are. Clubkid Michael Alig, a regular Springer guest at the start of the last decade, was a flamboyant mess. His costumes and general aura defined the party in Manhattan at the time and his hangers-on were equally as magnetic. Like an X-ed-out Little Bo Peep, where Alig went, a wild show was soon to follow. It all turned ugly,  eventually, as harder drugs further warped Alig's already tenuous grip on reality and he murdered his dealer Angel, who wore life-sized angel wings. After letting the corpse fester in his bathtub, Alig hacked it up and sank it in the Hudson.
While the killing is ostensibly the peg around which Clubland revolves, other characters threaten to hog the spotlight. Like the one-eyed Peter Gatien, the French-Canadian entrepreneur whose clubs (Limelight and The Tunnel) are the brick and mortar of the scene. Gatien turns a blind eye, literally, to the drug deals going on in his properties as long as his dealers hook him up with lots of blow and babes for his frequent hotel room binges. Or Lord Michael Caruso, the penny-ante thug who turned America on to techno, then became the Wu-Tang Clan's manager. Or Chris Paciello, the Miami club owner who has been linked with Madonna, Sly Stallone, and the Gambino crime family.
With such meaty players in which to sink his journalistic teeth, Owen shouldn't have failed to write a gripping account. He does fall short, however. Granted, his research skills are exemplary.
Where he fails is in the execution and in this presentation of all of this material. His workmanlike prose is the cement around a stool pigeon's ankles, drowning the color and pageantry of the decadent decline of these party boys.
Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything (Broadway Books/$27.50) sits in direct opposition to Clubland. Bryson—who is best known for travel books A Walk in the Woods and In A Sunburned Country—takes on what could be a deathly dry topic in this new tome, where he endeavors to explain how the earth works. The amazing part is how wonderfully he succeeds.
The short history starts with the Big Bang and works its way outward, illuminating everything from plate tectonics to quantum mechanics to atomic attraction—and that's just in the first 200 pages. What should read like an endless series of lectures, the sort that any non-science major learned to sleep through by the end of freshman year, is instead a fascinating look into what makes this world tick as well as offer a peek at the kooks who managed to figure it out.
Bryson's words make hard science come alive, much in the same way scientist-writers like Richard Feynman and Stephen Jay Gould are able to offer insight into the nuts and bolts of how the universe works. But what makes Bryson's take unique and alive is that it's fueled not by years of working behind a calculator or microscope, but by simple and insatiable curiosity. In many ways, this makes all the difference.
It helps, of course, that Bryson is also just a flat-out engaging writer, full of sprightly phrases, cheeky remarks and clean organization. Take his description of the Big Bang: "It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no 'around' around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there—whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it to emerge from.
"And so, from nothing, our universe begins."
With a Short History, Bryson's awe and irreverence makes a potentially uninteresting subject impossible to peel your eyes from. Would that Owen could have done the same with sexier source material.
June 12, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 24
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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