Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic is one of the most entertaining and provocative rock books I've ever read. Enter Naomi is a completely different animal. It reads like a love letter to a long lost punk rock crush, with some memories about the good old days of SST tossed in. Naomi Petersen was the photographer who took all of the those great shots of the Minutemen, Blag Flag, Meat Puppets, etc., and if Carducci is right, everybody fell just a little bit in love with her, but nobody really felt like treating her right. She drinks herself to death at 38 in 2005, and nobody notifies the old friends, most notably, Carducci, and so we have this book. It started as an email to get folks to recognize her contribution to that time in music and get her work out there. Thus, this is a plea, not criticism. The tone is far less angry and polemic and far more poignant. The man has lost track of somebody he once loved and now he's lost her, and the words are ways to express the pain and purge the hurt.

The book highlights how hard it was to be a girl in that most masculine of scenes, and it illustrates how completely devoted the SST crew was (if you buy all of it) to the work. Carducci argues that something like that is impossible now. Everything is too easy, when you can download anything for free. The result, is watered down mediocrities and art that falls further and further from the human heart.


At 25 clams, the price for this book is an outrage. Typos rule, the prose is third-rate, and pictures take up close to half the 200 pages. That said, throw the guy a bone. He lived it, he's hurting, and many of those photos are gripping. I was surprised by how badly this was written, but I was strangely moved by it. I've been listening to My War a lot lately, and thinking about what life must have been like in the trenches for a young woman at some of those sausage parties I used to go to at Fender's back in the day. Naomi must have had balls. It's SST from the inside and what happened after, and while the whole thing feels patched together and blended into book form without a whole lot of care, there is poignancy here.