This website is the Internet home of respected private citizen and professional bad egg Leonard Pierce. It features his writing on subjects abstruse and arcane; hosts his podcast, the PetardCast; contains links to his work all over the web; and allows you to get hepped to his various other projects and endeavors. It is a place where ordinary Joes and Janes can blow their money on the ravings of a demented lout. It will manifest, from time to time, short humor, cultural criticism, made-up stories, political punditry, and other sorts of time-killing whimsy.
Leonard was born in Glendale, Arizona, just after the first manned moon landing, and just before the Woodstock Music & Art fair. His parents were not present at either event. Although his father was an Arab-American, he compensated by being adopted by two resolutely white people and growing up in an intensely uninteresting Southwestern suburb. An only child and the product of a working-class broken home, Leonard grew up bookish, unsuited for work, academically unspectacular, and filled with an intense boredom with people who blame their bad character on childhood or birth order.
After a flirtation with higher education that ended in embarrassment for all concerned, Leonard sought to escape the intense boredom of the suburban lifestyle by plunging head-first into hopeless urban poverty. Over the years, he has lived in Phoenix, AZ; Oxnard, CA; Columbia Heights, MN; San Antonio, TX; Seattle, WA; and, currently, Chicago, IL; during that time, he has failed at careers in insurance, sales, office administration, book publishing, and freelance writing. He has visited nine foreign countries and road-tripped through every state of the union except those in New England, the remote location of which ensure that he always runs out of money before he gets there. He is currently considering a career as a ward of the state, professional lottery winner, or petty criminal.
Among his many obsessions are post-war film noir, the campaign for real time in superhero comics, television comedy, neo-pragmatism, worldbuilding, the novels of B. Traven, hard bop, knuckleballers, working-class revolutionary history, sandbox video games, crime scene photographs, and anything that happened in the year 1968. Over the years, he has gone from charmingly self-deprecating to hilariously self-destructive. He is so politically liberal that he remembers what the Democratic Party used to stand for, and he believes that if there was a God, the reward for eating lots of pie would be more pie instead of diabetes. He is very tall and very fat, so naturally, he played baseball and football as a student before his athletic career was tragically cut short by incompetence. A childhood love of illegal drugs has blossomed in his maturity to full-blown alcoholism, and he holds the martini as one of the few manifestations of human perfection. He owns a number of firearms; his two cats, Doc and Vera, do not, but are nonetheless extremely proficient killers. He enjoys the Chicago White Sox, the Manchester United Red Devils, the Phoenix Suns, the Chicago Blackhawks, and the Oakland Raiders, but does not hold your variant rooting interests against you, unless you are a Cubs fan.
This site was created with WordPress (using the Fashy template) and is hosted on BlueHost.com. Leonard uses a Mac, but wouldn’t get into a fistfight about it. He can be contacted at leonard pierce at gmail dot com. Thanks for visiting, and please enjoy yourself.
Hey Leonard,
Just caught the news on the AVC and wanted to offer wishes of support and strength. Get through this and focus on the good things. You’ll be high in the saddle again.
All the best,
–JVS
If you can get the assholes from the AV Club to come here and voice their support, you must be doing something right. Keep it up. Will definitely miss your writing at the AVC.
Leonard Pierce is a fine writer and a perceptive reviewer. It means he’s got a good brain and he’s not afraid to use it.
Be cool, bro; the skills you’ve developed over two decades will hold you in good stead. Give a shout if you roll through Asia.
I hope you keep writing about metal, wherever you end up. Metal Box was one of my favorite columns on the AV Club. You’re a very insightful and entertaining writer and that never goes out of style.
Keep your head up kid. I’ve always enjoyed, and will no doubt continue to enjoy your work wherever I read it.
B.G.R.H.N.
JUDAS!
I’m seriously close to tears right now. Don’t get down on yourself Leonard, one mistake does not negate all the good work you’ve done. Not even a little bit.
For those of us who have been around AVC for some time now, this comes as an understandable shock. It’s unfortunate that you have to leave under these circumstances but I’m sure you will again prosper somewhere else. As much as it’s worth from one anonymous Internet poster to another, I wish you the best of luck. It’s been nice reading your work and I hope to again someday.
Please send me an email as soon as you find your next regular gig. I always enjoy your contributions and writing voice. Good luck!
Pierce, you will be missed. Rest assured, many of your readers will check this site regularly, hoping to find out where you land. Thanks.
Just bookmarked this site, Leonard. You’re a fine writer whom I’ve enjoyed reading for quite a while. Keep your head up and your chin covered.
I wouldn’t have given a damn if any other writer was canned from any other site. You’ll be missed.
You fucked up son, but you’ve paid your dues. You shall rise again, and when you do, I’ll be happy to read you. Keep stepping strong…
Love your writing, and will miss your work at the av club. I’ll come here to read you now. Take care, man.
what are all these people talking about? you lied and fabricated a review for a book that doesn’t exist! how did you think you were going to get away with that? it’s inexcusable, and who knows how many times you did it in the past? just because you got caught once, that doesn’t mean it’s the only time it happened. that’s why what you did was so wrong, it calls everything you’ve ever read into question. you’re a grown adult and you should have known better. you should be ashamed of yourself.
@chris You don’t think he already is? The guy made an error in judgement. It doesn’t change the fact that he’s a solid *writer* (even if he can’t take a joke…and not make it his own! haha, LP, see what i did there?), so why not assume he’s learned from the mistake, and allow the guy to move on?
Leonard, good luck. You’ll be missed over there.
i dunno,
it just pisses me off that there’s all this support for a guy who willfully and knowingly lied. something like this doesn’t just *happen*, he did it, and let it sit there, knowing it was dishonest, for a month. this kind of deceit isn’t a one time thing, it’s ongoing, and it bothers me that everyone’s feeling sorry for the deceiver. i’d like to see a little more disappointment from people i guess.
i guess i should also point out that the guy was sassy to me in a response on the very article where he posted the fraudulent review. and his comment wasn’t insightful or interesting, it was just a put down and then he was gone.
i suppose i don’t like being condescended to by a fraud.
Loved your work – especially Metal Box, Leonard. Here’s wishing you all the best, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of your work in the future. Rock on, brother.
Well, everyone else including but not limited to their moms has chimed in and given you some sort of reprimanding or support, so I will now try and do both.
On the one hand, there were times when I would question your judgment over at the AVC and wonder of you had even listened to the record you were either praising or shit-canning. I was of course being internally pedantic whenever I would have these doubts, but now in light of the circumstances, I the invaluable commodity that is an internet patron, would now remain more suspicious the next time you claimed Watershed was the best Opeth album of the 2000s. Of course, this sort of disbelief is exactly what the AVC cannot afford to have lingering around their pop culture juggernaut, so they had to do what had to be done, despite your now very obvious popularity. It is hard to blame them for it regardless of how small the write up in question was.
On the other hand, I consider myself to be fairly acquainted with one of the subjects you so frequently write about — heavy metal. I have been a fan for nearly two decades now, and have been surrounded by others who also love the genre for most of that time. During your last 18 months running the Metal Box column though, I have discovered a lot of great music I would not have otherwise found. I would be living in some serious Monday morning quarterback-based denial if I told you that a good portion of the metal I have discovered in the last year or so did not come directly from your articles. Earthless and Shining come immediately to mind, and these are two bands that I have in turn shared with others who also immediately loved them. That said, I don’t know a damn thing about comics, but when it comes to metal your credibility is still standing strong enough that I hope you continue to write about it.
The Sword will always suck like Cubs though. They suck oh so bad.
Leonard, I’m very sorry that you have to leave the AV Club. It was a dumb thing to do and all, but you still seem to have a lot of integrity as a writer and I hope you land on your feet. You will be missed at the AVC, so I guess I’ll have to get my LP fix over here.
That’s a martini, cold as death, with a strong British gin and just enough vermouth to change the light. It’s a freezing shot of altered consciousness, delivered straight to your spine in a glass that’s so aesthetically perfect that it’s become a universal icon, with no filler to get in the way of the alcohol, but with a flavor that nothing else can mimic. It goes with almost any fine food, it makes you feel smarter and more sophisticated and better-looking, and it gets you drunk in the kind of way that no one holds against you. Plus at the end of the drink, a nice olive for dinner! There’s a reason whole books have been written about it. It fueled the lunch meetings of the capitalists who built the modern world, and the subversive snotty salons of the literati who hated them. There are a million quotes about martinis, and they’re almost all funny and clever (which tells you a lot about the drink and the people who favor it), but I’ll pick my favorite: H.L. Mencken called it the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet. Next time we all meet, sonnets are on me.
^one of my favorites pieces ever on that site.
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Hey Leonard—
Harold Schechter here. Just read your reviews of the Ed Gein graphic novel I did with Eric Powell. Appreciate the nice words about my work but am puzzled about your comment that I have “a poor grasp of the facts of the case.” Can you clarify what you meant?
HOLY GHOST:
The Life & Death of
Free Jazz Pioneer Albert Ayler
By Richard Koloda
The first extended study of Albert Ayler, one of the most important
innovators in the history of jazz.
‘A meticulous and passionate critical biography of Albert Ayler.’
RICHARD BRODY, THE MILLIONS
ALBERT AYLER synthesized children’s songs, La Marseillaise, American march music, and gospel hymns, turning them into powerful, rambunctious, squalling free-jazz improvisations. Some critics considered him a charlatan, others a heretic for unhinging the traditions of jazz. Some simply considered him insane. However, like most geniuses, Ayler was misunderstood in his time. His divine messages of peace and love, apocalyptic visions of flying saucers, and the strange account of the days leading up to his being found floating in New York’s East River are central to his mystique, but, as Koloda points out, they are a distraction, overshadowing his profound impact on the direction of jazz as one of the most visible avant-garde players of the 1960s and a major influence on others, including John Coltrane.
A musicologist and friend of Donald Ayler, Albert’s troubled trumpet-playing brother, Richard Koloda has spent over two decades researching this book. He follows Albert from his beginnings in his native Cleveland to France, where he received his greatest acclaim, to his untimely death on November 25, 1970, at age thirty-four, and puts to rest speculation concerning his mysterious death.
A feat of biography and a significant work of jazz scholarship, Holy Ghost offers a new appreciation of one of the most important and controversial figures in twentieth-century music.
RICHARD KOLODA has a master’s degree in Musicology from Cleveland State University, having written a thesis on the piano music of Frederic Rzewski. He was a contributor to the critically acclaimed documentary My Name Is Albert Ayler by Swedish filmmaker Kasper Collin and a consultant on Revenant Records’ ten-CD retrospective of Ayler, Holy Ghost: Rare And Unissued Recordings (1962–70), which has been called ‘the Sistine Chapel of box sets.’ Richard lives in Wayland, Ohio, where he practices law. When he is not in court, he is working on his second book (not about music).
Review copy/PDF available now.
Author is available for an interview.
For more information, contact books@jawbonepress.com
For interviews, contact jassin@copylaw.com or (917) 748-7300
Holy Ghost: The Life & Death Of Free Jazz Pioneer Albert Ayler
Published November 15, 2022, by Jawbone Press (www.jawbonepress.com)
312pp softcover with 8pp photo insert
ISBN 978-1-911036-93-7 / $24.95 US / $32.95 CAN / £14.95 UK
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