Thursday, October 13, BookCourt, 163 Court St. between Dean & Pacific Sts, free, 718-875-3677, 7:00
Friday, October 14, McNally Jackson, 52 Prince St. between Lafayette & Mulberry Sts., free, 7:00
www.henryrollins.com
Henry Rollins speaks his mind. For more than thirty years, the DC-born Rollins has been letting loose his anger at the world in the seminal punk groups Black Flag and Rollins Band, on spoken-word tours, on his IFC series The Henry Rollins Show, in self-published books, and on his current KCRW radio gig. He has seen a lot while traveling around the world, either on his own or with the USO, notebook and camera at the ready. “In my life, I have sought to bridge the gap I have felt between myself and the world,” he writes in the introduction to his latest book, the coffee-table-size Occupants (Chicago Review Press, October 1, 2011, $35). “I would hate to think that my understanding of life is derived in part from what I have not seen. While one cannot possibly see everything, I think the more one sees, the better.” Occupants consists of more than eighty color photographs taken since 2003 in such countries as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Mali, Russia, Thailand, and Vietnam, each one accompanied by conceptual text by Rollins, in the first or second person, in which he abstractly rails about fear, terrorism, AIDS, poverty, capitalism, hunger, genocide, and the struggle for peace, letting the photograph take his mind to new places, thoughts, and ideas. “The search for serenity only makes the scars scream louder,” he writes next to a picture of a praying monk in Burma. The photographs themselves are striking, from a lone boy in a parched landscape in Mali to opulent rooms in Saudi Arabia, from a man missing a limb crawling along a Thailand street to children behind a fence in Cambodia, from a military guard in front of a public photo of Mao in China to a grassy field where a house once stood in New Orleans. Rollins devotes a special section near the end to Bhopal, where he went to experience the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fatal gas explosion in 1984; he snuck into the Union Carbide factory there, capturing powerful images of the disaster that in many ways still embodies the ongoing battle between corporations and people. The book concludes with captions that specifically describe each of the photos, although even then Rollins can’t hold back his anger. “I hope it burns to the ground,” he writes under a picture of a Ronald McDonald statue in Thailand. Rollins will be at BookCourt in Brooklyn on October 13 to discuss and sign Occupants, then will be at McNally Jackson on October 14 speaking with Thurston Moore. “That should be good,” Rollins notes on his website. “He’s an interesting person.” And so is Rollins, of course.