Reviews of three new books about crime, cultural appropriation and the Guarneri Quartet.   Stagestruck by Sarah Schulman (Duke University Press, 151 pages, $14.95) PAYING FOR RENT There's a story that takes place against an East Village backdrop of AIDS, homelessness and the struggle of young artists. One artist, a straight man, is learning to live with the fact that his lover, a performance artist, has left him for a woman. At one point, the artist performs a piece to defeat a greedy landlord trying to evict people from a building, and the performance leads to a riot. The story also has a subplot involving the relationship between an AIDS activist and his drag-queen lover. It may sound like the plot of a certain mediocre musical, but in fact it comes from People in Trouble, a novel by Sarah Schulman that was published to some acclaim in 1990. Schulman's latest book, Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America, starts as a chronicle of the author's realization that her novel had been plagiarized in Jonathan Larson's Rent. Few seem outraged by the act; Schulman is continually thwarted at the law firms and the editorial offices of gay glossies to which she goes for help. Meanwhile, Rent becomes a cultural phenomenon, and its dead fabricator is beatified. As the scales fall from Schulman's eyes, she begins to see that her case is not special, and her book becomes a stunning critical analysis of cultural appropriation. In America's marketplace of homogenized aesthetics, the voices of Schulman and other queer and marginalized artists count for little, yet their work is available for the entertainment machine's plundering and distortion. Stagestruck is a long-overdue J'accuse. Steffen Silvis   Crime Wave by James Ellroy (Vintage, 288 pages, $12) CRIME PAYS Dig it: James Ellroy is a Republican. That was the most surprising revelation the author of L.A. Confidential made during his rat-a-tat Feb. 26 performance/reading at Twenty-Third Avenue Books. Here to plug Crime Wave, his new collection of Los Angeles crime reportage and stony, noirish stories, he strode in from the wings of the small shop, cast off his sports coat, pulled up the sleeves of his crisp oxford and assumed a wide-legged stance, like a catcher readying himself to gun down a would-be base stealer. Then the man who claims to have read "Confidential, Whisper and Lowdown magazines before learning to ride a two-wheel bike" welcomed all the "peepers, prowlers, pederasts, prostitutes, pillheads, potheads, pimps and panty-sniffers" to the show. It's a good show, with easy-to-follow rules: Ellroy derides his fans, and his fans giggle nervously and come back for more. And as long as he remains what he is--a meaningful point on the literary line from Hammett, Chandler and Cain--they'll keep coming. Perhaps it isn't too much of a shocker that citizen Ellroy sides with the party tough on crime and easy on taxes--his mother, whose unsolved 1958 murder has been well documented, is the ghost muse for his highly regarded crime writing. His 1995 novel, American Tabloid, was named Time magazine's Novel of the Year; his memoir My Dark Places--the book meant to exorcise the demon of his mother's death--was a Time Best Book of the Year. After his lively rendition of the wonderfully hyperbolic, hard-boiled short story from the new book, Tijuana, Mon Amour, it was plain that this people's poet pens some pertinent, punk and completely unpoliced prose. Mac Montandon   Indivisible by Four by Arnold Steinhardt (Farrar Straus Giroux, 308 pages, $25) FOUR BY ONE Few musical ensembles are captivating enough to merit attention beyond their recordings and concert performances, but the Guarneri Quartet has been the subject of two books (Quartet and The Art of String Quartet Playing) and a feature-length documentary (High Fidelity: The Adventures of the Guarneri String Quartet). The interest people take in the ensemble is understandable: Not only is it composed of profoundly skilled musicians who play some of the most compelling works written in the past two centuries, but it is also exceptionally long-lived, with its founding members still together after 35 years. Now one of the fab four, first violinist Arnold Steinhardt, has taken a look back to tell the quartet's story from an insider's perspective. In relaxed and often witty prose, he tells how the four came to play together in the first place and what it's been like holding up the chamber-music standard for all these years (hectic, mostly, but also extremely gratifying). He describes his colleagues' personalities--"David Soyer is blunt and highly opinionated, John Dalley is spare in his comments and often reserved, Michael Tree is an efficient problem-solver with an ebullient manner, and (please don't tell the others) I am a voice of reason and accommodation"--and shows how they have meshed in an artistic collaboration that has lasted longer than most marriages. Along the way, he discusses some of the Guarneri's illustrious predecessors, the history of the quartet form and, most important, the music and how they make it. Steinhardt could well have peppered his memoir with musical arcana, but Indivisible by Four is eminently readable and accessible, even if you don't know your Smetana from your Sibelius. Pick it up and get acquainted with the musicians before they come to Portland in April (and keep an eye on WW's classical music listings for details). James McQuillen - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Willamette Week | originally published March 3, 1999