Josh Wilker, my doppleganger

The best advice my mentor gave me when I was a lost weary soul, which I still am, but younger and burning with ambition, he told me I had to find people my own age and somehow see myself through my generation. What a gift that he ever said to me, since my mentor thought most artists were awful, and was mostly ashamed at being an artist, in spite of his commitment to art, and I'm sure would've rather been a great athlete like many of us, but there you have it, the divide between the artist and the athlete, yin and yang. Josh Wilker is my doppelganger, and the only artist of my generation who I HAVEN'T met, that I really admire, though that's not true, if you count musicians (Kurt Cobain, Billy Corgan, Courtney Love, etc.). But Wilker is the only WRITER from my generation that I've really looked up to as a guiding light, and it saddens me how unknown he is, in spite of his greatness. Wilker's real gift is that he had a vision of what it meant to be brought up by hippies, and left on the abandoned shores of America in the ultra conservative Eighties, when America changed course.

I just read "Cardboard Gods" and it shook me to my core. I'm not sure I liked it as much as "The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training," because that was the most brilliant book on a worthless piece of crap movie that I've ever read, but one of my favorite movies. It made Wilker a God to me, in the same way that he, the author, fantasized about Ogilvie from the "Bears" franchise needing to be anointed for some kind of gifted crown (how right you are, Wilker!) You are Ogilvie, Wilker, but so am I, and only a few people will understand what that means!

Cardboard Gods is a great book, but I'll put on my publisher's hat, and really review it. Wilker uses baseball cards as a kind of memory releast/tarot card/mystical keepsake, to tap into his memories. On an intuitive level, this makes sense, and I loved how Wilker didn't only choose the famous players, or the best cards, but a real splash of humanity, and how he was able to paint the baseball world as a replica of human life, and thus understanding the great metaphor of sports, and why they mean anything to us, but a metaphor so subtle it's lost on the average sports fan (weird). We are the games we play and players we worship, but not only the heroes. In the words of Ray Davies, "You can see the stars when you're walking down Hollywood Blvd., some that you recognize, some that you've never even heard of," and so it is with major leaguers. Wilker is brilliant enough to see that the losers and winners both reflect us, and why (I guess) he wrote a memoir about fatherhood called "Benchwarmers" (I'm fearing this one a little, sorry Wilker), but "Cardboard Gods," and the "Bad News Bears in Breaking Training," are both top notch (and maybe Benchwarmers will be too!)

The Gen X hippie childhood story has a few grand mutations, but will most likely be forgotten by future generations as a failed social experiment. I'm not sure I've read anyone who has felt the failure of the social experiment more intimately than Wilker. I believe this is partly because he's such a naturally gifted writer, and partly because he had an exceptionally weird childhood, yet not so weird that I don't have friends who have similar stories. I actually think Wilker tapped into something universal about being born in the late Sixties and growing up in the Seventies, before anyone could imagine the Eighties. The great social experiments that came and went with little documentation. Hell, I wrote a high school paper on communes with books I checked out from the high school library, and remember thinking how little I found. The back to nature movement of the Seventies ate itself and its young and this is what Wilker gets since he was eaten, and came out the other end a poet.

I suppose the obvious point of Wilker is that he uses baseball, with a little bit of basketball, as a filter to understand American culture. Artistically, I think this is great and have tried to do the same thing myself but mostly as a literary experiment. Wilker has taken the literary experiment idea and expanded it tenfold so that his books are now epics in the baseball genre, and I'd say are stand outs, but...... (sorry, Wilker) it is a 'genre.' I'm not sure how many people who read baseball want poetry, or how many people who read poetry want baseball. Don't get me wrong, in a very personal, deep, and intense way, I like the two books I've read by you so much that I'm forever thankful the Gods put them into my hands. I really feel like you are my brother, so please take my criticism with a grain of sand. I'm envious that you had the courage to write any of your 'fandom' trilogy.

"Cardboard Gods" was far more accessible than the "Bad News Bears in Breaking Training," but art is personal and I liked the "Bad News Bears" poetry much much more. I think of your passages about Kelly Leak renting out cheap apartments when he's older, or running from his dad because that's all he can do, or of "Little Children," and how he became a creepy pervert by the 2000's. The "Cardboard Gods" is a real memory book, and is a beautiful portrait of Wilker and his brother, who he was enamored of, and almost reminds me of Kerouac's "Visions of Gerard," a story of his dead saintly brother, but that may just be Wilker's writing. I was especially haunted by his portraits of himself as a liquor store clerk in his early twenties living with his brother in the Big Apple. It was a beautiful portrait of poetic poverty that echoed my own memories of my life in San Francisco living in the Tenderloin, where I thought I was "Joe Buck" from "Midnight Cowboy," even though I would've scoffed at the idea of male hustling.

I read a review on goodreads that appreciated Wilker's prose but questioned where he got off writing a 'memoir.' In a way, I think Wilker would understand where the critic was coming from, and tried to filter the memoir through his baseball cards, so that it wasn't strictly memoir, but a generational meditation through a kind of mystical collection the author had taken up at a young age, and was a link to his past. For my money, Wilker has such a deep socio/political/historical understanding of America, that he naturally contextualized his life story so that it literally became my own, as I was reading it, or a best friend I had, or a friend I wanted to read it to, even though I grew up in Los Angeles. His story was mine, and I knew it like the back of my hand, but..... I was also a baseball fan as a kid, and had my own card collection, even if it didn't mean as much to me as Wilker through the years, though it may have at the time. And that gets back to the idea of a young man who is no "Lawrence of Arabia" and on his blog admitted to 'denying life,' having any qualifications to write a memoir. The answer is 'no,' but it's really a brothers story, and Wilker is focused. But it's a brother's story through the filter of baseball, and this just isn't everyone's cup of tea.

"The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training," can only appeal to avid fans of that movie, that struck a deep Neptunean chord in 1977, when it was released. I was changed by Jackie Earle Haley's performance of Kelly Leak, and what an anti hero he was for us, who were too young to 'dig' Travis Bickel, or Captain America from "Easy Rider." He was a Gen X Seventies outcast, and only captured as well in "Over the Edge," and maybe "Foxes" for those Gen X babes! The greatness of the book was that it broke down the divide between art and criticism, but Wilker took the movie personally, since he saw it as a kid, and cheered the Bears on. But he sees in the movie a kind of aesthetic explanation of the end of the Seventies dream of changing the world, and what divorce had done to the family, which took real poetic imagination. It's weird but "The Breaking Training" book read much more as a story to me, than "Cardboard Gods," that was a story, so maybe Wilker has turned the tables, turning criticism into art.

7/12 My doppleganger has been truer to me than even I predicted. I just read my first mediocre Wilker book, "Benchwarmers." It was so bad I couldn't believe he wrote it. I had to look deep inside myself, not only to the artist lurking within, but the critic. The artist forgives Wilker for trying though I fear he wrote "Benchwarmers" because a publisher expected him to, and that he wanted it to be family friendly. I wouldn't be surprised if it's his best selling book, but again I doubt it was a best seller. It's just too obscure.

The critic in me wants to rage against "Benchwarmers." Creatively, it is nothing more than a watered down "Cardboard Gods," his masterpiece, but instead of being about childhood, it's about the NOW, Wilker's life as a forty something Dad. He lapses into memories of baseball players, or games, in an attempt to understand his life like he did in "Cardboard Gods." The difference is "Cardboard Gods" was free of a traditional narrative and Wilker used ACTUAL baseball cards as anchors to recall his childhood, and early twenties, giving the book a mystical feel. "Benchwarmers" has NO voodoo and the critic in me wants to say that Wilker isn't really deserving of a memoir. He's best at remembering the distant past like he admits in "Cardboard Gods," and he's not really remembering anything in "Benchwarmers," making it like lukewarm beer on a Sunday afternoon at the park, with the wife and kids. Not what we want from this astutely observant soul.

The artist in me forgives, but the critic lashes. The artist in me knows that you have to write bad books before you ever get to anything good, so I forgive Wilker for coming down with "Benchwarmers." He's already given the artist in me more than enough for a lifetime, so here's to bad art! The question becomes was it bad in the name of experimentation, or redundant, with not even a glimmer of something new lurking beneath the surface of the page. The critic in me would say "Benchwarmers" offers nothing new, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe one day it will be seen as a great transitional work full of blemishes that offered a new way. I'm pretty much convinced Wilker is one of the great writers of my generation, or at least the year I was born, so I'll let the artist kiss the critic goodnight, and hope "Benchwarmers" was an aberration, and that Wilker will get off the bench for one more great season.

Later meditation: I shouldn't put my shit on Josh Wilker. He's free of me but by writing became a public figure I had a reflection on, but I'm me. I don't have a doppelganger, just an eternal soul, passing through this life.