Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla/Guilty of Everything

Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla

Ann Hansen

Toronto: Between the Lines, 2001. 493 pp. $19.95 paper.

Guilty of Everything

John Armstrong

Vancouver: Transmontanus/New Star Books, 2001. 98 pp. CDN$16/US$12 paper.

THE AUTHORS OF Direct Action and Guilty of Everything made their mark in BC popular culture during the first few years of the 1980s. John Armstrong was a creative force in Vancouver's independent rock music scene, "while Ann Hansen made her mark with a bang - literally - as a member of the urban guerrilla group Direct Action, better known after their arrest as the Squamish Five.

Authors Hansen and Armstrong revisit and confront their respective cultural legacies. Both works are autobiographical and explore a narrow segment of the authors' lives soon after they had come of age.

Some reviewers will inevitably link Direct Action and Guilty of Everything with Vancouver's punk rock subculture - indeed, that is why they are being reviewed together. In Armstrong's case the punk link is self-evident because his story directly concerns his role in Vancouver's then developing punk scene. Hansen, on the other hand, is only distantly and accidentally related to punk, so this linkage is a bit misleading. However, Direct Action does offer a glimpse of the relationships that were formed between some of the city's radical activists and punks in the late 1970s.

Although it is possible that Hansen and Armstrong crossed paths at a punk concert at the Oddfellows Hall, or rubbed elbows at the Smilin' Buddha Cabaret, they probably did not know each other at all. Armstrong and Hansen tell two different, but not necessarily opposed, sides of the punk experience. Hansen's story is concerned with the nature of political activism, commitment, self-doubt, and the gritty day-to-day realities of being an urban guerrilla. Armstrong, mirroring the nature of his musical contributions, is totally unconcerned with punk's political dimensions; rather, he focuses on the romance of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle and...