Archive for the ‘books’ tag
Ten Thousand Hours
“Outliers: The Story of Success” (Malcolm Gladwell)
I’ve already ordered Malcom Gladwell’s new book, Outliers1 just on the strength of a few excerpts I’ve stumbled upon. His New Yorker magazine style of writing is easily consumed2, and his ideas are usually interesting, if not always perfectly formed. His theories are what they are, but truth be told, I really just like his anecdotes. Speaking of the Beatles, I did not know this factoid about their Hamburg days…
Is this a general rule of success? If you scratch below the surface of every great achiever, do you always find the equivalent of the Michigan Computer Centre or the hockey all-star team - some sort of special opportunity for practice? Let’s test the idea with two examples: the Beatles, one of the most famous rock bands ever, and Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest men.
The Beatles - John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr - came to the US in February 1964, starting the so-called “British Invasion” of the American music scene. The interesting thing is how long they had already been playing together. Lennon and McCartney began in 1957. (Incidentally, the time that elapsed between their founding and their greatest artistic achievements - arguably Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the White Album - is 10 years.) In 1960, while they were still a struggling school rock band, they were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany.
“Hamburg in those days did not have rock’n'roll music clubs. It had strip clubs,” says Philip Norman, who wrote the Beatles’ biography, Shout! “There was one particular club owner called Bruno, who was originally a fairground showman. He had the idea of bringing in rock groups to play in various clubs. They had this formula. It was a huge nonstop show, hour after hour, with a lot of people lurching in and the other lot lurching out. And the bands would play all the time to catch the passing traffic. In an American red-light district, they would call it nonstop striptease.
“Many of the bands that played in Hamburg were from Liverpool,” Norman continues. “It was an accident. Bruno went to London to look for bands. But he happened to meet a Liverpool entrepreneur in Soho, who was down in London by pure chance. And he arranged to send some bands over. That’s how the connection was established. And eventually the Beatles made a connection not just with Bruno, but with other club owners as well. They kept going back, because they got a lot of alcohol and a lot of sex.”
And what was so special about Hamburg? It wasn’t that it paid well. (It didn’t.) Or that the acoustics were fantastic. (They weren’t.) Or that the audiences were savvy and appreciative. (They were anything but.) It was the sheer amount of time the band was forced to play. Here is John Lennon, in an interview after the Beatles disbanded, talking about the band’s performances at a Hamburg strip club called the Indra: “We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over. In Liverpool, we’d only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.”
The Beatles ended up travelling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, of five or more hours a night. Their second trip they played 92 times. Their third trip they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg stints, in November and December 1962, involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1,200 times, which is extraordinary. Most bands today don’t perform 1,200 times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is what set the Beatles apart.
“They were no good on stage when they went there and they were very good when they came back,” Norman says. “They learned not only stamina, they had to learn an enormous amount of numbers - cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock’n'roll, a bit of jazz, too. They weren’t disciplined on stage at all before that. But when they came back they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”
The excerpt goes on, click if you want to read more. Or just buy the book!
Footnotes:Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Henri Cartier-Bresson (Aperture Masters of Photography)” (Aperture)
Was lucky enough to sneak over to the Art Institute of Chicago this week, and explore the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit. Wow. My art-speak muscles have atrophied from inactivity1, so I’m not going to bore you with faux critical analysis, suffice it to say, I was blown away, and want to explore the exhibit again before it leaves, January 4th, 2009. I was not familiar with his work, besides perhaps one image that became famous recently2 when uploaded to Flickr. Amazing will suffice as an adjective for Mr. Cartier-Bresson.
The exhibit also mixes in drawings3 from contemporaries, sometimes uncannily similar, sometimes related in other fashion - such as a photo of Henri Matisse in his studio alongside a Matisse sketch.
From the AIC:
To celebrate the centenary of the birth of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Art Institute will present, for the first time, a comparison of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs to the modern drawings, etchings, and paintings of his contemporaries—works that would otherwise be in storage in preparation for their installation in the Modern Wing.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, the legendary photojournalist whose work was characterized by the term “the decisive moment,” began his career as a painter influenced by the Surrealist poets who were a mainstay of Parisian café culture in the 1920s. Although his subsequent work in photography was concerned primarily with time and timing, it also reveals an appreciation for the irrational and subconscious gleaned from the work of writers and poets of this time.
Pulling from the Art Institute’s Julian Levy Collection—the legendary gallery director who assembled the first exhibition of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs in the United States—this exhibition provides a rare glimpse into the early stages of Cartier-Bresson’s career. Work by his painting instructor André Lhote parallels Cartier-Bresson’s early photographs, as does that of Salvador Dalí. Also included will be work by Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso that relates to photographs by Brassaï, André Kertész, and other photographers active in Paris between the World Wars.
When I got home, I ordered this book from Amazon
Henri Cartier-Bresson reveals–as only a few great artists have done consistently–the richness, the sensibilities, and the varieties of the human experience in the twentieth century. This volume of Aperture’s Masters of Photography series confirms the genius of the photographer whose pictures with the new, smaller hand-held cameras and faster films defined the idea of “the decisive moment” in photography.
Cartier-Bresson’s imagery is intimate, but it is also utterly respectful of his subjects. In his wide travels throughout the world, he has captured universal meanings through the glimpses into the lives of individuals in scores of countries. Each photograph is in itself a masterpiece of dramatic form; taken together, Cartier-Bresson’s works constitute a personal history of epic scope.
Henri Cartier-Bresson presents forty-two of the artist’s photographs, each recognized a a masterpiece of the medium. In addition, Cartier-Bresson offers a brief statement of his own artistic ethos, his striving for the spontaneity through intuition that imbues his work.
Forty-two 5″X7″ quality reproductions, well worth the $10 price tag. If you have the slightest interest in photography or art history, you should swing by the Art Institute, or at least pick up a copy of this book.
Footnotes:- University of Texas was a long, long time ago [↩]
- A wiseacre uploaded this photo to a Flickr group called “deleteMe”, a group that invites photography critique. Some of the more dismissive comments seem to have been deleted, but plenty still remain, criticizing his lack of focus, weird depth of field, should have been in stronger focus, and so on. Flickr is a great site, but rewards a certain type of photo over all others. Color photos of beaches are fine, but are they really art? Over-saturated postcard style images usually get viewed much, much more than photos containing less technical polish. [↩]
- and paintings? The trouble with spending a couple hours browsing the Art Institute is that there is a certain amount of blur [↩]
FreeDarko presents The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac
Received my copy today. Looks like a lot of fun. Bloggers making good - the tome was written by Bethlehem Shoals (Author), Dr. Lawyer IndianChief (Author), Silverbird 5000 (Author), Brown Recluse Esq. (Author), Big Baby Belafonte (Illustrator). Excerpts are available if you want to dip your toe in FreeDarko waters. I jumped right in on the strength of their brand.
The indispensible, amazingly illustrated companion to today’s NBA—a roundball Rosetta Stone that hilariously decodes the trends and tendencies of pro basketball.
The NBA of the moment is a league of hugely charismatic celebrities, crackling aesthetic intrigue, sociopolitical undercurrents, and raw humanity: every Kobe Bryant pump-fake or LeBron James dunk holds within it a Shaq-size load of meaning. The Macro-Phenomenal NBA Almanac is a one-of-a-kind guide to this tumultuous and exciting league. In a series of brilliantly illustrated chapters—from Master Builders like Tim Duncan to Destiny’s Kids like Amare Stoudemire to Lost Souls like Lamar Odom—the almanac breaks down the styles of the NBA’s most colorful characters, showing what each one reveals through his play and conduct, both on the court and off. Filled with some of the smartest, funniest sportswriting known to fankind, this book will cast an entirely new light on one of our favorite games.
From the book site:
The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac functions simultaneously as the ultimate basketball book for the ultimate NBA fan as well as the ideal sports book for the person with no interest in sports. This book will satiate the passionate sports fan’s desire to see athleticism legitimized as a cultural element extending beyond mere cro-magnon brawn.
Within the pages of this tome, NBA hoopery collides with Japanese noise-rock, municipal politics, experimental zoology, Belgian surrealism, and behavioral economics like never before. The mystical deities of this hallowed league of professional basketball are finally given the treatment they deserved, as they are scrutinized not as men, but as embodiments of our own core cultural values and insecurities.
Whereas past sports-literary endeavors have attempted to paint sports as a metaphor for life or life as a metaphor for sport, we depict the National Basketball Association as a universe unlike any that one would encounter in daily existence. The NBA is a sphere in which Indiana farmboys, housing project messiahs, African tribesmen, and escapees from war-torn Eastern Bloc countries, coalesce by the nature of their superhuman physicality. Free Darko was born to make sense of it all.
Awesome I say, awesome indeed.
One other point: the book is well designed, slick, with heavy paper stock, and brightly colored illustrations. Not a tri-fold manifesto published at night at a local copy shop, but a book that feels like it is something.
Year of Living Biblically
I had forgotten that I had pre-ordered this book a while ago, but it arrived via UPS today
The Year of Living Biblically is about my quest to live the ultimate biblical life. To follow every single rule in the Bible – as literally as possible. I obey the famous ones:
•The Ten Commandments
•Love thy neighbor
•Be fruitful and multiplyBut also, the hundreds of oft-ignored ones.
•Do not wear clothes of mixed fibers.
•Do not shave your beard
•Stone adulterers
Why? Well, I grew up in a very secular home (I’m officially Jewish but I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant). I’d always assumed religion would just wither away and we’d live in a neo-Enlightenment world. I was, of course, spectacularly wrong. So was I missing something essential to being a human? Or was half the world deluded?I decided to dive in headfirst. To try to experience the Bible myself and find out what’s good in it, and what’s maybe not so relevant to the 21st century.
The book that came out of the year has several layers.
-An exploration of some of the Bible’s startlingly relevant rules. I tried not to covet, gossip, or lie for a year. I’m a journalist in New York. This was not easy.
–An investigation of the rules that baffle the 21st century brain. How to justify the laws about stoning homosexuals? Or smashing idols? Or sacrificing oxen? And how do you follow those in modern-day Manhattan?
–A look at various fascinating religious groups. I embedded myself among several groups that take the Bible literally in their own way, from creationists to snake handlers, Hasidim to the Amish.
–A critique of fundamentalism. I became the ultra-fundamentalist. I found that fundamentalists may claim to take the Bible literally, but they actually just pick and choose certain rules to follow. By taking fundamentalism extreme, I found that literalism is not the best way to interpret the Bible.
–A spiritual journey. As an agnostic, I’d never seriously explored such things as sacredness and revelation.
–A memoir of my family’s eccentric religious history, including my ex-uncle Gil, who has been, among other things, a Hindu cult leader, an evangelical Christian and an Orthodox Jew.
Perfect reading for the plane, methinks.
The Amazon blurb:
Jacobs, a New York Jewish agnostic, decides to follow the laws and rules of the Bible, beginning with the Old Testament, for one year. (He actually adds some bonus days and makes it a 381-day year.) He starts by growing a beard and we are with him through every itchy moment. Jacobs is borderline OCD, at least as he describes himself; obsessing over possible dangers to his son, germs, literal interpretation of Bible verses, etc. He enlists the aid of counselors along the way; Jewish rabbis, Christians of every stripe, friends and neighbors.
In an open-minded way he also visits with atheists, Evangelicals Concerned (a gay group), Jerry Falwell, snake handlers, Red Letter Christians–those who adhere to the red letters in the Bible, those words spoken by Jesus Himself, and even takes a trip to Israel and meets Samaritans. Through it all, he keeps a healthy skepticism, but continues to pray and is open to the flowering of real faith. Jacobs is a knowledge junky, to be sure. He enjoys the lore he picks up along the way as much as any other aspect of his experiment. One of the ongoing schticks is his meeting with the shatnez tester, Mr. Berkowitz. He is the one who determines whether or not your clothes are made of mixed fibers, in keeping with the Biblical injunction not to wear wool and linen together. The two become friends and prayer partners, in only one of the unexpected results of this year.
In the end, he says, “I’m now a reverent agnostic. Which isn’t an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there’s a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred.” Not a bad outcome.
An interview with the author here including this Q/A:
You found that following biblical rules dovetailed with your tendency toward obsessive compulsive disorder. If somebody who doesn’t have OCD did the same experiment, would they end up with it?
I think you have to be a little obsessive to do the experiment in the first place. So the question is probably unanswerable. It was fascinating, though, to see the overlap between OCD and religious rituals – an overlap Freud talked about. I actually found it comforting. Why should I come up with my own idiosyncratic rituals, when the Bible has ones that my ancestors have practiced for thousands of years?
Another Green World
“Brian Eno’s Another Green World (33 1/3)” (Geeta Dayal)
A favorite album of mine, and now the 33.3 book is imminent. I’ve already pre-ordered it I believe. As a teaser, here is the opening few paragraphs of Geeta Dayal’s book
When I initially set out to write a book on Brian Eno, I didn’t realize what a massive endeavor it would turn out to be. This short book has taken several years to write. I wrote, rewrote, threw out entire chapters, and started over more than once. Every idea fanned out into ten other intriguing ideas, and eventually I found myself enmeshed in a dense network of thought. Finally, I realized that I had to pick a direction and run with it, or risk never being finished.
Sometimes a good way to begin a drawing is to first carve out all of the negative space. So I will start out by telling you what this book isn’t. This is not a rock biography that meticulously documents the making of Another Green World. Nor is it a book that dwells very much on Eno’s personal life. It certainly touches on both of these things, to the extent that they are useful in creating a larger picture. This is a book about process. How did these songs grow from kernels of ideas into fully-formed pieces? How were these kernels of thought formed in the first place? I attempt to examine the confluence of ideas at a certain time in a certain place in the 1970s, and how these notions helped to shape the form of three records, all released in 1975: Another Green World, Discreet Music, and Evening Star.
My own background is in the sciences, and I approached this book as a sort of scientific experiment. I came up with hypotheses and tested them by doing research. Sometimes these hypotheses were wrong, so I went back to the drawing board. I did a lot of interviews, read a lot of books, and spent a lot of time thinking and listening. I spoke with dozens of people; one of the great gifts of writing a book on Eno is getting to interview some of the very interesting collaborators that he has worked with over the past thirty-odd years. I wasn’t just interested in speaking with those who worked on Another Green World; I wanted to learn more, in a general sense, about how Eno worked with other people.
I read dozens of books on a number of different subjects — from visual art to cybernetics to architecture to evolutionary biology to cooking to tape loops — for inspiration. Of course, I read books about Eno as well. But many of the most helpful books for understanding Eno’s methods are not explicitly about Eno at all. They are books like Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, Stafford Beer’s The Brain of the Firm, and Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music. What these books have in common — besides being books that Eno rates highly — are that they unite a variety of seemingly disparate things, and lay out general principles for thinking about these things. In this book, I look at how Eno devised his own sets of tools for thinking, such the “Oblique Strategies” cards he created with Peter Schmidt. (I used a deck of these cards myself while writing this book, whenever I reached an impasse).
Of course, there is the music. In the chapters that follow, I dig into some of the many unique sounds on these records. This is not any kind of formal musicological analysis. What it is, instead, is an exploration of the sonics–the timbres and layers of shifting textures. I spend more time on sonics than I do on the words. Eno has stated many times that lyrics, especially at this time period in his life, did not interest him very much. But that does not mean that words did not serve an important function. Using some ideas from cognitive science, I probe two different phenomena at play in Another Green World. The first, as Eno himself has pointed out, is that only five out of the 14 tracks on Another Green World have words, but that listeners tend to perceive the album as a “song record,” not an ambient record. Each song with lyrics “bleeds” into the surrounding ambient tracks. How does this effect work in our heads? The second phenomenon has to do with another type of sleight of hand — how chains of words, even nonsense words that do not make any sense in sequence, can nonetheless generate distinct, powerful images.
[Click to read more of 33 1/3: Another Green World]
On a different subject, have installed a Feedburner redirect plugin, so if it is properly configured, you’ll be reading this in your newsreader without issue. If it isn’t, doh! Sorry, and please let me know so I can fix or attempt to fix.
Tears of Rage: Richard Manuel is Dead
One of my most favorite songs ever is Tears of Rage from The Band’s first album.
The opening track on 1968’s Music from Big Pink is one of the most perfect pop compositions ever. It is a perfectly atypical opening number and a perfect introduction to the intriguing style of The Band. It is also a depressing suggestion as to how much more perfect they could have been had Richard Manuel been able to keep himself from himself.
Co-written by Manuel and Bob Dylan, “Tears of Rage” is the painful lament of a betrayed parent. The first recorded version of the song is the Dylan-sung one that was released on The Basement Tapes. Dylan’s – usually extraordinary – ability to capture the essence of the song was utterly obliterated by Manuel’s on the official Big Pink reading. The extraordinary anguish in Manuel’s voice added exponentially to the already heartbreaking lyrics. The slower composition, Garth Hudson’s haunting organ, Robbie Robertson’s swirling guitar, the unparalleled rhythm of drummer Levon Helm and bassist Rick Danko (who also provides backup vocals), as well as Manuel’s own piano work combined for one of those very rare occasions in which Dylan was completely schooled on one of his own songs (ironically, Manuel does it again on the same album with his version of “I Shall be Released”).
Sadly, the mood of “Tears of Rage” was forebodingly symbolic of the pain and suffering that would eventually consume Richard Manuel – who hanged himself in 1986 after two decades of extreme substance abuse. Perhaps the rarest attribute of The Band was the deficiency of a definitive front-man. With three lead singers and all five members’ status as exceptional musicians, there was no member of The Band who was more important to its achievements than the other; but for the first five minutes of their first album, they seemed to revolve around one genius.
[Click to read more of Tears of Rage: Richard Manuel is Dead | Sound Affects | PopMatters]
Robbie Robertson’s greed re: publishing credits probably had some contribution to Manuel’s early death. Anyway, here’s a YouTubed searing live version from 1969.
On the topic of Robbie Robertson, and The Band, Levon Helm’s autobiography is a good, fun read. Highly recommended.
“This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band” (Levon Helm, Stephen Davis)
The Band, who backed Bob Dylan when he went electric in 1965 and then turned out a half-dozen albums of beautifully crafted, image-rich songs, is now regarded as one of the most influential rock groups of the ’60s. But while their music evoked a Southern mythology, only their Arkansawyer drummer, Levon Helm, was the genuine article. From the cotton fields to Woodstock, from seeing Sonny Boy Williamson and Elvis Presley to playing for President Clinton, This Wheel’s on Fire replays the tumultuous history of our times in Levon’s own unforgettable folksy drawl. This edition is expanded with a new afterword by the authors.
The Prosecution of George W Bush for Murder
“The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder” (Vincent Bugliosi)
I picked up a copy of this book, but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. I should start soon. Funny how the book has been basically ignored by the media, and yet still appeared on the New York Times bestsellers list, even without bulk orders1…
Vincent Bugliosi wants George W. Bush prosecuted for murder. There are others who are complicit in the crime, namely the Vice President and Condoleezza Rice, but Bush is the target of this famed former Los Angeles prosecutor (the Charles Manson case) and best selling author (Helter Skelter and The Betrayal of America as two examples). He is undeterred by the virtual major media blackout on interviews and advertising. He’s taking his case directly to the people through alternate media and the internet.
Bugliosi constructs a devastating case in The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. As I write this review, it is still difficult to grasp my sense of shock at this title with this author’s name below it. A legendary prosecutor with a near perfect record in big cases, Bugliosi articulates one of the most revolutionary ideas imaginable in a mix of today’s otherwise vapid and obtuse political thinking. But first, the book and how the prosecutor makes his case.
He wastes no time in following up on the shock generated by the title. In the first sentence, we’re told:
The book you are about to read deals with what I believe to be the most serious crime ever committed in American history - - the president of the nation, George W. Bush, knowingly and deliberately taking this country to war in Iraq under false presences, a war that condemned over 100,000 human beings, including 4,000 American soldiers, to horrific, violent deaths.” (V. Bugliosi, p. 3)
The president “knowingly and deliberately” caused the deaths of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians and that’s called murder, plain and simple. This is not a hypothetical case that could happen under special legal interpretations. When the president leaves office, he is subject to the same law as the rest of us. Bugliosi explains the ability to prosecute the case against George W. Bush by a district attorney or states attorney in any local jurisdiction where a life was lost in the Iraq war. Federal prosecutors also have that option. Bugliosi’s detailed analysis of this phenomenon offers some of the best analysis in the book and the detailed end notes.
[From A review of Bugliosi's The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder]
George Bush better get his world traveling finished before he leaves office; once 2009 arrives, there might be a few impediments to visiting certain enlightened countries.
Oh, Mr. Bugliosi has a website too, check it out.
Footnotes:- certain right wing organizations bulk purchase, and give away, books they want publicity for. Many bookstores will prominently display a book if it is on the NYT best-seller list. If I was wealthy enough, I’d bulk purchase selected liberal-leaning books [↩]
The Most Happy Bordello
The historic bordello district was slightly south of where I currently reside, the city still has certain residues of days gone by, if one knows where to look.1
“Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul” (Karen Abbott)
sounds like an interesting overview of the period.
The Most Happy Bordello - WSJ.com:
One doesn’t hear much nowadays about bordellos, also known as cathouses, brothels, houses of ill repute or simple whorehouses. When I was an adolescent in Chicago, in the early 1950s, the trip to such a place was a rite de passage for nearly every male youth of unambiguous appetites. In my day the chief such institutions, operating on assembly-line principles, were to be found outside the city, one in Kankakee, the other in Braidwood. Students at the University of Illinois relieved the tedium of their sound liberal arts or business educations by visiting establishments in Danville, birthplace of Dick Van Dyke and Bobby Short.
…But the great cathouse era of Chicago was in the first decade or so of the 20th century. This era and those cathouses have now been described with scrupulous concern for historical accuracy and in clear, lively prose by Karen Abbott in “Sin in the Second City.” Lavish in her details, nicely detached in her point of view, Ms. Abbott has written an immensely readable book. “Sin in the Second City” offers much in the way of reflection for those interested in the unending puzzle that goes by the name of human nature.Ms. Abbott’s account of fleshly sin and the response to it in the city of Chicago in the early 20th century centers on a bordello known as the Everleigh Club, which even now is talked about in Chicago by men interested in the sporting life. The club was the creation of two sisters, Minna and Ada Everleigh, who themselves had earlier worked the hard trade of harlotry in Omaha and elsewhere.
The Everleigh Club opened on Feb. 1, 1900, and closed on the morning of Oct. 25, 1911. In between times, the sisters accrued assets, by Ms. Abbott’s estimate, worth more than $20 million in today’s dollars, while their establishment acquired world-wide fame as one of the wonders of the city of Chicago, which, in the words of First Ward Alderman Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, “ain’t no sissy town.”
The Everleigh Club was a cathouse with a vast difference — it was more like the Ritz, with, of course, added attractions. Sumptuous food was served (entrées on the buffet included guinea fowl, pheasant and broiled squab), music both serious and popular played while a basso continuo was supplied by the popping of champagne corks, and the downstairs décor included a gold piano that set the sisters back no fewer than 15 grand.
Unlike their consoeurs in the Levee, as the whorehouse district on Chicago’s South Side was called, the sisters Everleigh enforced a high standard of luxury, carefully culled their clientele and monitored the behavior of staff. They also treated their girls — known as courtesans, and sometimes as the butterflies — with fairness and an utter absence of cruelty, which was far from the case in other houses in the Levee. Girls working at the Everleigh Club made more than a hundred dollars a week, a fine wage at the time. To give some notion of the general tone of the place: While customers were upstairs frolicking with the girls, downstairs their suits were being pressed.
Although Ms. Abbott does not describe what went on in the girls’ rooms chez Everleigh, she informs us that corporate accounts were available to good customers, and she chronicles the gaudier scandals. These include one of the Marshalls Field, of the famous department-store family, being shot in the Levee; and, later, Herbert Swift, of the great meatpacking family, dying of unknown causes after supposedly departing the Everleigh Club with one of its girls. The heavyweight champion Jack Johnson served time in jail under the Mann Act for transporting an Everleigh butterfly named Belle Schreiber across state lines.
The characters of Minna and Ada Everleigh and their thoughtful way of going about their business are intricately delineated by Ms. Abbott, who, I think it fair to say, views them affectionately and with measured admiration. But her book is ultimately a saga of a clash between the forces of vice and those of reform in the city of Chicago. In this battle, reform has right but absolutely no humor on its side — right, that is, if one assumes that human weakness is easily eradicated through the changing of institutions.
The methods proposed for dealing with the extensive prostitution in Chicago early in the last century were, first, to segregate it in a particular part of town, and, second, to root it out and eliminate it altogether. Ministers, ambitious young lawyers set on forging political careers, anti-smoking campaigners, temperance workers, the B’nai Br’ith, vegetarians, and others on the side of sweetness and light naturally enough went for complete elimination.
I did finish reading this book several months ago, well worth reading if you have a chance.
Footnotes:- reposted because there is something wrong with the original movabletype post from 2007 [↩]
Franz Kafka porn brought out of the closet
Surprised Kafka’s porn stash took so long to emerge.
A stash of explicit pornography to which Franz Kafka subscribed has emerged for the first time after being studiously ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the iconic writer’s saintly image.
Having stumbled by chance across copies in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford while doing unrelated research, James Hawes, the academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of this erotic material in Excavating Kafka, to be published this month. His book seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a “quasi-saintly” image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.
Their additional significance is that the publisher, Dr Franz Blei, was also the man who first published Kafka in 1908 - a series of miniature stories later gathered in his book Meditation.
[From Franz Kafka’s porn brought out of the closet - Times Online ]
[Raindrop Porn will have to suffice unless I find any graphic goodies on the internet]
and the stash, kept locked with a key only Kafka had, was apparently pretty racy
Even today, the pornography would be “on the top shelf”, Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. “These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action… It’s quite unpleasant.”
“Academics have pretended it did not exist,” Dr Hawes said. “The Kafka industry doesn’t want to know such things about its idol.”
He added: “Perhaps Kafka’s biographers simply don’t like the idea that their literary idol was helped out in this… way in the vital early stages of his career
As far as I can tell, the book is only available in England at the moment. American Puritanism at work.
“Excavating Kafka” (James Hawes)
a different title by James Hawes is available in the US, maybe covering some of the same topics:
“Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life” (James Hawes)
Everybody knows the face of Franz Kafka, whether they have read any of his works or not. And that brooding face carries instant images: bleak and threatening visions of an inescapable bureaucracy, nightmarish transformations, uncanny predictions of the Holocaust. But while Kafka’s genius is beyond question, the image of a mysterious, sickly, shadowy figure who was scarcely known in his own lifetime bears no resemblance to the historical reality. Franz Kafka was a popular and well-connected millionaire’s son who enjoyed good-time girls, brothels, and expensive porn, who landed a highly desirable state job that pulled in at least $90,000 a year in today’s dollars for a six-hour day, who remained a loyal member of Prague’s German-speaking Imperial elite right to the end, and whose work was backed by a powerful literary clique.
Here are some of the prevalent Kafka myths:
*Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime.
*Kafka was lonely.
*Kafka was stuck in a dead-end job, struggling to find time to write.
*Kafka was tormented by fear of sex.
*Kafka was unbendingly honest about himself to the women in his life – too honest.
*Kafka had a terrible, domineering father who had no understanding of his son’s needs.
*Kafka’s style is mysterious and opaque.
*Kafka takes us into bizarre worlds.
James Hawes wants to tear down the critical walls which generations of gatekeepers—scholars, biographers, and tourist guides—have built up around Franz Kafka, giving us back the real man and the real significance of his splendid works. And he’ll take no prisoners in the process.
Get Paid
Harlan Ellison tells us, “Get Paid”! Applies to photography (no more freebies if there’s an option), music, writing, everything. Especially when a corporation as wealthy as Warner Bros is asking for free content, why should they get it?
(Note, Harlan Ellison uses many, many NSFW words, so adjust your viewing accordingly)
Netflixed: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (Julian Schnabel)
Another film based on a book, though a true story this time.
In 1995, author and Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a stroke that put him in a coma; he awakened mute and completely paralyzed. Mathieu Amalric stars in this adaptation of Bauby’s autobiography, which he dictated by blinking. Julian Schnabel was nominated for the 2008 Best Director Oscar and won the Golden Globe in the same category for his poignant film about the strength of the human spirit.
A powerful film. Not sure if it was the late night viewing, or other maudlin reasons, but was immensely engrossed by this film. A meditation of life, and death, family relations, and the wheel of samsara. Well, not really the rebirth thing, more a ‘life flashing before one’s eyes right before death‘, expanded over a years time, with one of the eye being sewn shut. I had hesitated viewing the movie, since the premise is a bit unnerving (and a real fear of mine - such a horrible thought to be cognizant, 42 years old, trapped in a body that no longer functions), yet couldn’t stop once I started. Innovative cinematically: the Point of View is nearly always through the blinking eye of the narrator (which some exceptions later on).
The director, Julian Schnabel, who also directed Basquiat, filmed on location in Calais, France, using several actual hospital employees, and the movie is better for those choices. Seems authentic, non-Hollywood, as a result.
Johnny Depp chose to be in the dreck, Pirates of the Caribbean, instead of in the Diving Bell, his loss, as one film will be played for years, and one cartoon movie will just make Disney a lot of money. Mathieu Amalric was wonderful in the role, emoting without moving his face muscles at all. Max von Sydow was also magnificent as the dying father of Jean-Do.
From the book jacket:
We’ve all got our idiosyncrasies when it comes to writing–a special chair we have to sit in, a certain kind of yellow paper we absolutely must use. To create this tremendously affecting memoir, Jean-Dominique Bauby used the only tool available to him–his left eye–with which he blinked out its short chapters, letter by letter. Two years ago, Bauby, then the 43-year-old editor-in-chief of Elle France, suffered a rare stroke to the brain stem; only his left eye and brain escaped damage. Rather than accept his “locked in” situation as a kind of death, Bauby ignited a fire of the imagination under himself and lived his last days–he died two days after the French publication of this slim volume–spiritually unfettered. In these pages Bauby journeys to exotic places he has and has not been, serving himself delectable gourmet meals along the way (surprise: everything’s ripe and nothing burns). In the simplest of terms he describes how it feels to see reflected in a window “the head of a man who seemed to have emerged from a vat of formaldehyde.
Michelangelo wears Kabbalah bracelet
Could be another case of Dan Brownism (conspiracy theories created without much basis in fact, but fun), I don’t know enough about Michelangelo or Kabbalah to proclaim with any authority.
The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which the renaissance artist worked on for four years in the early 16th century, is actually a “bridge” between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish faith, according to The Sistine Secrets: Unlocking the Codes in Michelangelo’s Defiant Masterpiece.
The book, which is already on the New York Times bestseller list, is the work of Rabbi Benjamin Blech, an associate professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University in New York, and Roy Doliner, a tour guide at the Vatican.
Scanning through the arrangement of figures on the vast 14,000 square foot ceiling, the authors have found shapes that correspond to Hebrew letters.
For example, the book states, the figures of David and Goliath form the shape of the letter gimel, which symbolises g’vurah, or strength, in the mystical Kabbalah tradition.
[From Michelangelo 'hid secret code in Sistine Chapel' - Telegraph]
Making obscene gestures toward the Pope? Do tell…
The authors believe Michelangelo picked up his knowledge of Judaism while at the court of Lorenzo de Medici in Florence.
In addition, they say there are several attacks on Pope Julius II, who commissioned the work, embedded in the painting.
Disgusted with papal corruption, they think Michelangelo painted the prophet Zechariah in the pope’s likeness.
Behind him, one angel is “making an extremely obscene hand gesture at the back of his head.”
Selected Essays of Gore Vidal
“The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal” (Gore Vidal)
I’ve read a few of Gore Vidal’s 24 novels, and actually agree with this slightly prickly review by Louis Bayard - Vidal is best as an essayist.
Vidal has confessed that his primary passion in life is not writing but reading, and judging from these deeply informed essays, I can well believe it. Others may suspect him of less pure motives. His social circle has been notable for its glamour, and his willingness to grant audiences to every reporter who comes calling has passed well beyond compulsion. Interviews, in general, bring out his very worst grandstanding impulses and goad him into his most insupportable statements (a bizarre defense of Timothy McVeigh, for instance, and the usual cockamamie theorizing about 9/11).
Vidal’s well-documented reputation as a go-to provocateur has made it all too easy to overlook his astonishing work ethic: 24 novels, five plays, two memoirs, screenplays, television dramas, short stories, pamphlets and more than 200 essays. As this particular collection makes clear, Vidal writes to live. Approvingly, he recalls the final days of Edmund Wilson: “He was perfect proof of the proposition that the more the mind is used and fed the less apt it is to devour itself. When he died, at seventy-seven, he was busy stuffing his head with irregular Hungarian verbs. Plainly, he had a brain to match his liver.”
Plainly, too, Vidal has a brain to match his self-regard. And late at night, when the blandishments of ego subside and a new book lies open in his lap, his lifelong, half-requited love for the novel still burns bright — no matter that the novel itself is fading into insignificance. “Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end,” he wrote in 1967, “if not the end. Yet that is no reason not to want to practice it, or even to read it. In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words.”
[From Lou Bayard's review of "The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal" | Salon Books]
From Amazon/Reed Elsevier:
Vidal’s daunting career has encompassed 24 novels, 11 essay collections, six plays, two memoirs and countless occasional writings. This new collection is an entry point into this literary giant’s work for a new generation of readers, offering some of Vidal’s most famous and entertaining essays from the past 50-odd years. Compiled and introduced by Parini (The Last Station), Vidal’s literary executor, the pieces range across Vidal’s far-flung areas of expertise, resting most frequently and contentiously on literature and presidential politics of the past and present. His assessment of The Top Ten Bestsellers of January 7, 1973, is a savagely meticulous dissection of middlebrow American taste, while American Plastic tacks in the opposite direction, skewering the academy-approved, theory-based fiction of Donald Barthelme and William Gass with derisive glee. Vidal’s comfort in puncturing conventional wisdom with his wit and analysis is fully displayed throughout, most notably in his discussion of the battle over the Kennedy legacy in The Holy Family and the controversial Black Tuesday, which condemns the Bush administration for its alleged imperial ambitions in the wake of September 11.
Though, many of the essays chosen for this new collection have been previously published in United States: Essays 1952-1992. If you already own that, not much need to repurchase the same writing in different jacket.
This mammoth omnibus of 114 essays is vintage Vidal, a marvelous compendium of sharp wit and independent judgment that confirms his status as a man of letters. The prolific novelist/critic offers withering putdowns of the French “new novel,” billionaire Howard Hughes and bestseller lists. He displays a reporter’s hard nose for facts in travel pieces on Nasser’s Egypt and Mongolia. He pens definitive portraits of H. L. Mencken, Oscar Wilde, Anthony Burgess, L. Frank Baum. He reminisces on his boyhood friendship with Amelia Earhart, who, we learn, was in love with Vidal’s father, Eugene, FDR’s director of commercial aviation. Mingling patrician impulses and egalitarian, subversive sentiments, Vidal takes unfashionable stances, as when he urges the legalization of drugs or ending military aid to the Middle East, including Israel. His sense of the United States as hub of an overextended empire informs pieces on “American sissy” Theodore Roosevelt, JFK, CIA spook E. Howard Hunt and the bloated military budget.
Levon Helm is back
Levon Helm is cool; his voice is a public resource and a treasure. I wish I could have heard him perform, as I liked his recent album a lot.
What remains of that world-weary drawl is a bit frayed around the edges, but it remains a potent instrument, as evidenced by last year’s “Dirt Farmer” (Vanguard), Helm’s first solo album in 25 years. It contains rural blues and mountain-soul laments that he learned from his parents while growing up on a cotton farm in Helena, Ark., as well as more recent contributions from Buddy and Julie Miller and Steve Earle. It’s done up in low-key rustic colors that evoke Helm and the Band in their “Basement Tapes” glory with Bob Dylan. This is the sound of friends gathered in a room to make music of intense conviction at a relaxed pace, and it feels as comfortable as a well-worn flannel shirt, as heart-breaking as a death-bed kiss, as vibrant as a Saturday-night, moonshine-fueled hootenanny.
The cast of co-conspirators includes Larry Campbell, who has served ably as Dylan’s touring guitarist and now plays the role of Helm’s producer, guitarist and fiddle-player. Campbell’s wife, Teresa Williams, contributes sublime harmony vocals, alongside Helm’s daughter, Amy. But at the center of it all is Helm, who plays drums, mandolin and sings with gusto. He brings a wounded yowl to the Stanley Brothers’ “False Hearted Blues Lover,” a lonesome pathos to Earle’s “The Mountain.” These songs are reminders of a rural way of life that is fast fading, as are singers who actually lived through these experiences.
Helm is 68 and has been paying off his medical debts by playing regularly in his adopted hometown of Woodstock, in upstate New York (Helm doesn’t collect songwriting royalties on Band songs, because Robbie Robertson laid publishing claim to most of the band’s material, so he’s largely dependent on live performances for income). His Midnight Rambles in Woodstock, modeled after the traveling minstrel shows of his youth, have attracted the likes of Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Dr. John and Donald Fagen.
[From Turn It Up - A guided tour through the worlds of pop, rock and rap | Chicago Tribune | Blog]
Robbie Robertson screwed his bandmates out of royalties, as far as I can tell, and should be ashamed. The Band were excellent because they were a collaborative effort, not because Robbie Robertson was a genius. Helm wrote a marvelous book on the history of The Band, including the topic of publishing credits, if you haven’t read it, you should.
“This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band” (Levon Helm, Stephen Davis)
His voice doesn’t quite have the range that it used to soar to, but it still contains a lot of power. I don’t know enough about drumming to recognize if his drumming skills are still stellar, but some say his drumming is still good:
Helm survived a bout with throat cancer that was diagnosed in 1998, and his voice is noticeably more weathered than it once was, but in many respects the additional nooks and crannies suit this material beautifully; his interpretations of traditional rural folk songs like “Poor Old Dirt Farmer,” “Little Birds,” and “False Hearted Lover Blues” sound thoroughly authentic but with a bracing sense of force and commitment in Helm’s vocals, and if Steve Earle’s “The Mountain” and Buddy & Julie Miller’s “Wide River to Cross” aren’t venerable classics, they sound like they should be once Levon’s done with them. Though Helm adds a touch of boogie to “Got Me a Woman” and a jumped-up interpretation of the Carter Family’s “Single Girl, Married Girl,” in this context they add some welcome spice to the stew, and Helm’s drumming remains superb. Dirt Farmer is a hard-edged but compassionate and full-hearted set of roots music from a master of the form, and it’s a welcome, inspiring return to form for Levon Helm after a long stretch of professional and personal setbacks.
J Bloglandia, volume 1, issue 1 is now on sale at Lulu and Amazon
[The Rookery - 35mm, Illford film, Nikon 8008, scanned in Photoshop 3.5, or maybe 4.0]
Received my copy of this collection of essays, put together by Friend of B12 (FOB, as it were), Ginger Mayerson. Haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it looks good. Damn good. The front and back cover are photos of mine, so if you are creating a library of my published works, go ahead and order a copy (the Lulu Press version is larger, and is only $7, or you can order a slightly smaller version at Amazon for $9).
The Journal of Bloglandia, volume 1, issue 1, is a collection of the following blog essays: On Essays by Paul M. Rodriguez, Liberal Fascism: An Interesting Moral Question by Steve Gimbel, Paint Splatters & Pixie Dust by Dan Kelly, Ten Dates of Christmas? Ten Lords A Leaping: The Gallant Mariner by Deborah Teasdale, Vanity by Susan O’Doherty, The Pillory of Hillary by Becki Jayne Harrelson, Reparation… by TJ Bryan, Richer Than The Sum Of My Skirt by Birdie C. Jaworski, The Music’s Between Us by Kathy Moseley, How to Scare People With Statistics by Tom Good, Red Lipstick by Eva Lake, Barbarella: A Woman of her Time? by Patti Martinson, An Invert’s Manifesto by Chad Denton, Roadtripping by Molly Kiely. Enjoy!
[From The Wapshott Press » J Bloglandia, volume 1, issue 1 is now on sale at Lulu and Amazon]
The Journal of Bloglandia is soliciting essays for a second volume, with more details here
