Customer Reviews

Geniuses of Crack

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

While this book begins with an interesting and engaging scenario, it quickly fades into a stereotype of LA-isms vs. small-town Virginia life. Mark, Steve, and Gary are practically interchangeable in their personalities, with minor details etched out and changed, and the book is riddled with stereotypical California earth-children. Gomez' descriptions of Virginia life make me wonder if he's ever actually lived in the state, as he's horrifically inaccurate in his descriptions of the area that Bottlecap is supposed to hail from, and if he basically set out to make the majority of the state appear as country bumpkins.

His most interesting character, Steve, is given short shrift in the book, as most of the pages concentrate on the shallow and mainly unappealing Mark.

While it wasn't a difficult read, it's certainly not something I look forward to picking up again.

As i read through the negative reviews that have been posted here, I can't help but wonder A) how old they are, and B) what sort of kind of music they listen to. I wonder about these things because (hallelujah!) both GENIUSES OF CRACK and OUR NOISE focus on one specific subculture/age group. And thank God! For once I can really see myself in the characters of a book. I listen to the same music, I do the same things and I hang out with similar people. I have yet to read anything else that so accurately portrays, well...me and my peers! And what a nice change of pace! What other book can you read about a character who gets a tattoo of a Palace Brothers album title?! The characters may seem trite and foolish to those who are outside of this subculture (I can sorta see why people might not like this book, not everyone can relate), but I assure you...the characters are very real! Not all of the characters are very bright and they are not always cool, but then again not everyone can be so suave all the time! I'm hoping there is another sequel...I read OUR NOISE and GENIUSES.. back to back and now I miss the characters! I want to see what happens next...you see how they flounder...now i want to see how they get it together!

Absolutely dreadful writing. Far too verbose with shallow characters and a weak plot.
On a positive note, it gives me hope that one day I can get published.

I have read the negative reviews and to I agree to a certain extent. This is not an action packed book. However, it is not supposed to be one. Gomez writes about the daily life and random thoughts of, for lack of a better term, "average Americans".

Well, Gomez tells you what it's like to be in a band, and from the story laid out in this book, it's not very fun. Geniuses of Crack tells the story of Bottlecap, a group who travel from a small town in Virginia to Los Angeles to record their major label debut, only to run into nothing but roadblocks along the way.

I thought this book was funny and insightful, giving me a peek into a world I'd always wondered about. It's a little long but I didn't mind that because, even though the characters are kind of infuriating, I always got a kick out of the way Gomez handled the scenes and the material. He knows what he's talking about. Great stuff.

There are people who will read Jeff Gomezs' work and wonder who on earth behaves in such a repulsive manor... And then there are people like me who wonder if Gomez went to the same college that I did. When put together with his previous work, "Our Noise", Gomez has carved a fairly realistic example of what life is for a lot of todays bored post-college/pre-stuffy generation (myself included).

It's amazing to me that books like this gets published. It's a waste of a time, money and paper. Badly written with a stupid soap opera level plot. Void of any literary value. Gomez is obviously trying to appeal to 12 year olds who hanker after a rock band career. If this isn't you, avoid this book.

"In the year 1993 Mark, Steve, and Gary were in a band. Being in a band in late-twentieth-century America was kind of like being in trouble -it seemed that everyone had been in it at one time or another."
>
And so begins a book that I had really been looking forward to reading only to finish as one of the biggest literary disappointments I have ever come across. This is an awful book, but at its core it is still a story that is interesting enough to make a reasonably good screenplay (see: "GARAGE DAYS"). Maybe it was written on the gamble that a studio would buy the rights and make something palpable out of it. It has a very simple plot and as such requires a concentrated effort to keep the reader interested...and unfortunately, Jeff Gomez simply isn't up to the task. To sum up: Three early twenty-something year-old men (Mark, Steve, and Gary) are in a band called Bottlecap whose particular musical talents are never adequately detailed throughout the entire book; they are apparently good enough to have caught the attention of a name record label distributed through a megacommunications conglomerate, yet the only performances that we are told of as the pages turn are memorable only because of how awful they are. They burn their bridges and leave their one-horse home town in Virginia (Virginia?) to move to L.A. in order to realize their dreams (such as they are) of fame and fortune "...but remember that this was the last decade in the twentieth century in America, when kids might find $20.00 on the ground but then complain about having to bend over to pick it up."

And that was really the last line worth reading in the whole book. Sadly, it appears on page 11 of 430. The next 419 pages are spent wandering tediously through lives that could belong to anyone. It is a most unfortunate decision by the author to take the reader into the minds of all characters featured in the story, rather than those of just the three bandmates. The result is that we get too much overview; we know more than we need to about the people we don't necessarily want to care about and less than we'd like about the ones that (initially) we DO care for. We want to know why someone would travel all the way across the country and stand at the brink of commercial stardom/artistic annihilation and what thoughts are running through their heads. Instead we get an idea as to just how mind-numbingly boring life can be when simple-minded people find themselves without anything worthwhile to occupy their time and money enough so that actually finding something challenging is no longer something they need to worry about.

The worst of it is that even after slogging through 430 pages of weak style and artificial substance, there is no satisfactory resolution to the story. It is as though a publishing deadline was moved up and the project was prematurely concluded. The reader has a good idea of what is happenING, but after the self-flagellation necessary to reach the end of this book, one feels entitled to know what happenED. But Gomez can't even give us that small satisfaction.

If you still want to read it after all the one-star reviews it has so meritoriously earned, by all means go ahead...but as good as the premise is and as obviously simple as it should have been to write an entertaining story around it, you are doomed to be let down if you approach it with hopes as high as mine when I picked it up.

Although not quite as good as the book which it's a sequel to, "Geniuses of Crack" was still pretty funny. I'd recommend it for anyone who likes Generation X type fiction.

I am fascinated first by Rock 'n' Roll culture and secondly by captivating prose and formal excellence and I fear that Mr. Gomez has failed on both fronts to execute with accomplishment. His book is clumsy and awkwardly inept. Perhaps it is a problem for me because English is my second language. But I have read others who use colloquial American speech to much better effect. This is numbing: brand names, endless name-dropping of obscure and semi-obscure bands, reams of information that simply gets in the way of the story. Though perhaps that is a blessing. Mr. Gomez has chosen to bore us with his subject, and he has chosen to write about it badly, and he has further chosen to present it in the most boring way possible. If you are interested in the literary equivalent of "alternative" rock music than this book would be a definite no-no; it is the equivalent, rather, of Barry Manilow. A much better book is Christopher Sorrentino's SOUND ON SOUND (from whom Gomez appropriates, ineptly, certain techniques), or Camden Joy's BOY ISLAND. Or best of all, try Don DeLillo's GREAT JONES STREET.