The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar

by Franz Nicolay Narrated by Franz Nicolay

Overview

In 2009, musician Franz Nicolay left his job in the Hold Steady, AKA "the world's 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 Ulaanbaatar 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. 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.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Liesl Schillinger

…[a] wry and wide-ranging memoir…

Publishers Weekly

06/20/2016
Musician Nicolay, who has performed around the world with indie bands including the Hold Steady, the World/Inferno Friendship Society, and Guignol, in addition to teaching music at Bard College in New York, attempts to merge literature, politics, travel, and punk rock into something bigger than its parts. And he succeeds, to a degree, in this account of a six-month tour in 2012 that began and ended in Kiev with runs through Turkey, Russia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Romania, among others. The book often veers into rote tour diary entries despite Nicolay’s best attempts to integrate perspective into the account by bringing in other voices—notable authors such as Christopher Hitchens, experts who have written about his current location, etc.—to help tell the backstory of the places he visits. He adds a layer of depth by exploring the ways music, specifically punk music, inspire and unite the local populace. Though he’s clearly researched his destinations, there’s no real arc to the narrative, and as a result Nicolay’s journey gets to be repetitious for the reader. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

Praise for The Humorless Ladies of Border Control:
“A pleasing romp: punk in attitude but literary in execution and a fine work of armchair travel for those unwilling to strap on an accordion on the streets of Rostov for themselves.”
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"A pleasing romp: punk in attitude but literary in execution and a fine work of armchair travel for those unwilling to strap on an accordion on the streets of Rostov for themselves." —Kirkus

Library Journal - Audio

12/01/2016
Musician and author Nikolay, a former member of the Hold Steady and World Inferno Friendship Society, crisscrosses Eastern Europe alone, then with his wife, and finally with their small daughter in a travelog that includes punk ideology, local politics, flimflamming venue promoters, history, and communication breakdowns. The author is accompanied by historical travel writers Rebecca West and the 18th-century Marquis de Custine in the form of the paperbacks he uses to compare his 21st-century perspective with theirs. It's a more thoughtful journey than one would expect from a punk tour memoir, and there's a sense of quiet reflection to the narrative. Nikolay's narration is cool, clear, and often drily funny. VERDICT Recommended for listeners who want at least as much history and politics as music memoir. ["This complex combination of punk history, travel narrative, and politics is recommended for fans of Nicolay's work and punk music in general": LJ Xpress Reviews 6/24/16 review of the New Pr. hc.]—Jason Puckett, Georgia State Univ. Libs., Atlanta

Kirkus Reviews

2016-05-18
Want to see the seamy side of a country? Go on tour as a rock musician.Nicolay, a multi-instrumentalist and founder of a Brooklyn collective called Anti-Social Music, combines a number of interests and skills, all serving him well in his effort to épater la bourgeoisie and see the unusual parts of little-visited nations: he is not only a master of such things as the electric banjo and the accordion, but also a self-described Slavophile and "enthusiast of Balkan music since an encounter with a bootleg cassette of the Bulgarian clarinetist Ivo Papasov." A knowing reader of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), his copy of which was stolen in comparatively safe France, Nicolay conjures up all manner of scruffy types: the promoter who swears he's getting out of the business after trying to rob his moneymakers ("Can I PayPal you the money?" he pleads on getting caught in the act); a "stocky, ham-fisted, forty-five-year-old veterinarian" with a bent for weird conspiracy theories; a Romanian soundman who "played cajón, of all things, with the opening act, alongside an acoustic guitarist and a singer in a Wasted Youth T-shirt." Such figures lend themselves to lampooning and rough stereotyping, but Nicolay is mostly sympathetic and gentle; he likes the DIY spirit of the post-communist frontier, clearly, and doesn't mind a little bad food. In the end, the book would be much like what Paul Theroux might write if he played the musical saw, lived on beer and borscht, and had a sense of humor—more humor than the KGB officials, at any rate, who classified Kiss and AC/DC as punk rock and therefore suspect of aiding and comforting young Soviets of a "contrarian bent." A pleasing romp: punk in attitude but literary in execution and a fine work of armchair travel for those unwilling to strap on an accordion on the streets of Rostov for themselves.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170493685
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	08/02/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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