HELLO!

Is my boat comin' in? Have a look at Kyle Gann's post. I had no idea. And of course, I'm terribly unhappy about it. (That's how my staff of thousands spells thrilled.)

Writings from the Village VoiceWhat I really love -- besides the pleasure he got from my Wyler biography -- is how he compares an issue in one field to another, in this case auteurism in film and stylistic identity in music. It's not an exact comparison by any means, and he makes no claim that it is. But it's the sort of transposition of ideas -- offbeat and unexpected -- that comes naturally to him from what I've read on his blog and in his latest book, "Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice." When he insists "art is about appearances, not reality," I'm convinced.

What impresses me most about Kyle Gann's writing in general, apart from the consistent clarity and the ease of expression, is its personal touch. And no, his mother didn't pay me to say this. But yes, I realize gratitude like this is unseemly.

Postscript: Looks like my rowboat is really comin' in. Although it just got bigger, mebbe to a motorboat. The New Yorker has a Hilton Als profile of cinematographer Gregg Toland coming next week that refers to and quotes from my Wyler bio, which will likely move the book up from #396,483 to #396,481 on Amazon. Row, row, row, etc. And now this, from an earlier life:

Jed Birmingham surveys the avant-garde publications of Jan Herman: the Nova Broadcasts, the San Francisco Earthquake, and his collaborations with William S. Burroughs.

THE CAMERAMAN by Hilton Als [The New Yorker, June 19, 2006]
PPS: Still rowing my boat this ayem -- Monday, June 12 -- per Als's New Yorker piece, which is not online, goddammit. So I've scanned in the front page of the article, left, not that you can read it. If you take a look at the magazine's table of contents, which is online, here's what you see minus a link:

ANNALS OF HOLLYWOOD
The Cameraman
America's first great cinematographer

Looks like a great issue, by the way, with two other non-fiction pieces by writers I admire, William Finnegan and Oliver Sacks. Their stuff is not online, either. Will somebody tell David Remnick to get over it? Stop with the tease, please.

June 8, 2006 1:12 PM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
more picks

Sites to See

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on June 8, 2006 1:12 PM.

PASSION AND PERPS was the previous entry in this blog.

END OF SUSPENSE is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.