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

Franz Nicolay

aug 2016 · Tantor Media Inc · Verteld door Franz Nicolay

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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.

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Franz Nicolay is a musician who lives in New York. In addition to records under his own name, he was a member of the bands the Hold Steady, the World/Inferno Friendship Society, and Guignol; has performed and recorded with many more acts; and was a cofounder of the new-music collective Anti-Social Music.