Here’s a link to my review of Caryl Flinn’s biography of Ethel Merman in Newsday. [pdf version here]
Ethel Merman on “The Love Boat,” with Ann Miller, Carol Channing, and Della Reese. Click through for Merman and the Muppets.
Here are a couple links to my book roundups for 2007: Frieze Magazine and Newsday. Each article involves some scrolling. Definitely worth it to read all the lists–Ali Smith’s piece at Frieze is especially nice, and it looks like The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters should be the next book I pick up.
Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini
Here’s a link to my review in Bookforum of two recent studies of censorship and film: William Bruce Johnson’s Miracles and Sacrilege: Roberto Rossellini, the Church, and Film Censorship in Hollywood and Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration.
Mailer and Germaine Greer in 1971.
From the Guardian: “It was a quiet end to one of the loudest and most controversial voices in American letters.”
From Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s astonishing Town Bloody Hall, comes this immortal bit of Mailer: “If you wish me to act the clown, I will take out my modest little Jewish dick and put it on the table and we can all spit and laugh.”
It is quiet indeed today, with no spitting and no laughing.
Norman Mailer, Outspoken Novelist, Dies at 84 (NY Times)
“Let’s Do It,” Joan Didion’s review of The Executioner’s Song, 1979
Norman Mailer, Rip Torn, and hammer (YouTube)
“Changes,” Rebecca Mead on Town Bloody Hall, May 3, 2004
Here is a link to my review of Foster Hirsch’s biography of Otto Preminger in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Known as “Otto the Terrible,” the director was legendary for bullying actors, although Kathryn Grant managed to overcome her fear of the man during the filming of Anatomy of A Murder by relying on a crucial bit of advice from Alice Faye: “‘He has bad breath,’ she told me, ‘and you can’t be afraid of someone with terrible breath.’”
Due to space constraints I was not able to run on at length about my abiding love for the film Skidoo, but I was very happy to learn of the writing of Christian Divine, “the world’s foremost authority on Otto Preminger’s 1968 acid-comedy.” Skidoo was Preminger’s cinematic foray into the counterculture and it features Groucho Marx as God and Jackie Gleason on acid. See below:
Can’t say I shared Muschamp’s adoration of Frank Gehry, but I certainly marveled at his bravura essay on 2 Columbus Circle. Some excerpts:
Early on in the AIDS crisis, the city registered the cultural impact caused by the loss of gay artists. The effect produced by the loss of the gay audience is more insidious, however. An audience retains the memory of a performance. What happens to that memory when the audience is gone?
…
Female impersonators like Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, Wayne County and the Hot Peaches were also part of it. They were an alternative modernism, too. Just as the Bauhaus designers dealt with the conventions of industrial production, the transvestites of those years were exploring the conventions of gender production by the image-making industries that were then coming into their own. Goodbye, Henry Ford. Hello, Estée Lauder.
Performers like Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn mattered for a more important reason: they were a phenomenon of the audience, of the city’s new frame of cultural reference. There’s no such thing as a bad drag act. There are only bad drag-act audiences. A female impersonator functions chiefly as a stand-in for the deranged mosaic of theatrical stereotypes that spectators have stored up in their heads. As mistresses of ceremony for this synthetic work in progress, these two personified the shift that concluded the final days of High Modern New York. They signaled the erosion of trust in top-down cultural pronouncements and the commencement of a period when the relationship between High and Low would be extensively reconsidered.
The whole article is here.
“Herbert Muschamp, Architecture Critic, Is Dead,” The New York Times
There is the summer pop song, the summer blockbuster, and for some, the summer font, so of course there is the summer drink. In recent summers, it’s been Campari and soda—which should not be confused, a friend tells me, with Campari Soda.
A little research reveals that the deep crimson color comes from carminic acid extracted from the cochineal insect. The bug relies on the acid not for its formidable decorative powers but as a deterrent to predators.
During a recent tipple, a film editor told me of a critical moment in her childhood, a moment that perhaps foretold a career. She was seven when she saw the ad below on television and understood that some images are put together better than others.
Federico Fellini’s ad for Campari
I remember watching Celine Dion perform Phil Spector’s “River Deep, Mountain High” on MTV’s first Divas Live extravaganza in 1998. I was full of contempt at the time, having endured a roommate’s long-running obsession with “My Heart Will Go On.” But then Celine took the stage. She wore a dark duster as though she were trying to channel not only Tina Turner but also Johnny Cash and I could not look away. Along with Celine, Deep Purple, Neil Diamond, Erasure, the Saints, and the Supremes have covered the song. The version of all versions, of course, belongs to Tina Turner.
In Mick Brown’s new biography Tearing Down the Wall of Sound, Spector explains his ambition for his music: “I wanted to be in the background. But I wanted to be important in the background. I wanted to be the focal point.” It’s hard to imagine, though, there can ever be any other focal point if Tina Turner’s in the room.
“Phil Spector vs. The Wall of Sound,” my essay about “River Deep, Mountain High” is online at Design Observer.
“One of the most ingenious, inspired and impressively stubborn sons-of-a-bitch the music industry ever saw”
That’s from Lee Hazlewood’s obituary on myspace. Hazlewood died Saturday in Las Vegas, but right now in the lefthand corner of his website, the little orange figure is blinking away: “Online Now!”
Hazlewood probably would’ve enjoyed the absurdity. He titled his penultimate album “Farmisht, Flatulence, Origami, ARF!!! and Me.” His last one was simply “Cake or Death.”
I’ve been trying to track down an online version of Phil Milstein’s excellent article, “Nancy & Lee and Sonny & Cher,” from Hermenaut’s Camp issue, which I recall pushing on friends like The Watchtower when it came out, but I’m not having any luck. I have found a wonderful tribute over at New York Night Train by Jonathan who attended the same mesmerizing documentary series on Hazlewood at Anthology Film Archives that I did. Cowboy in Sweden, if I remember correctly, followed Hazlewood and his horse through the country’s stark, barren landscape. Kind of like Bergman with reverb and airline stewardesses.
From the film, here’s “Hey Cowboy” with Hazlewood and Nina Lizell. And the horse.
