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Filtering by Category: books
For the Dallas Morning News, I reviewed folk singer Billy Bragg's new history of skiffle, a largely forgotten British musical form that linked blues and "trad jazz" with rock and roll in the mid-to-late 1950s. Enjoy.
I've admired music critic Steven Hyden's writing in Grantland since I first took notice of it a couple of years ago, so I was grateful for the opportunity to review his new book, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life, for the Washington Post. If you'd like to read an excerpt from one of my favorite chapters, about the mid-80s clash of egos between Michael Jackson and Prince, Slate ran a piece of that chapter the day that Prince died.
Read MoreJim Jorgensen, Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, and Bradley Foster Smith in The Pillowman (Forum).
My reviews of the British theatre collective Headlong's adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, and Forum Theatre's new staging of Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman, are in today's Washington City Paper.
Here's the trailer the 1984 Michael Radford's version of 1984 that I mention I saw at an impressionable age. I can't imagine ever saying this in any other context, but the Eurythmics soundtrack was not a good idea.
My review of Rich Kienzle's new biography The Grand Tour: The Life and Music of George Jones, is in Sunday's Washington Post. There's probably some other stuff in there that would be good to read, too, I bet.
Anyway, here's a paragraph I had to cut for space.
Amid his dutiful, carefully sourced recounting of booze-lubricated recording sessions and singles, Kienzle highlights some amusingly unexpected sides of Jones, like when he told his ex-wife Tammy Wynette in a 1980 interview in Country Music (a magazine Kienzle contributed to for 24 of its 31 years) that if he had to find a second career he would enjoy being an interior decorator. He might fare better than he did as the proprietor of three outdoor country music parks, which he opened at three different points in his life and quickly abandoned. He was also wanton enough with his brand to lend it to random products: George Jones Country Sausage and, also, troublingly, George Jones Country Gold Dog Food and Cat Food. Kienzle notes that a TV spot for the latter was called “George Jones Talks About His Greatest Lines.” If a TV commercial has to have a title, that’s either an unfortunate one or a brilliant one for a pitch from a man whose life and career were so damaged by his eight-year dalliance with cocaine.
I wouldn't ordinarily be so flip discussing something as serious as an addiction problem but that ad just beggars belief.
I'm a big fan of Andy Weir's debut novel The Martian. I was actually listening to the audiobook on the day in April when I visited NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where the book is partially set. (It's also set in space and on Mars.) I was out there doing some reporting for my day job wit Air & Space / Smithsonian, and it was in that capacity that I got on the phone this week with Matt Damon, who plays the story's protagonist, stranded astronaut Mark Watney, in Ridley Scott's film adaptation, due out Oct. 2. The film hasn't screened for critics yet, but the fact its release date was moved up by nearly two months suggests the studio is convinced it works.
Read MoreAudrey Hepburn & William Holden in a promotional image for Billy Wilder's Sabrina, 1954.
I reviewed Audrey and Bill: A Romantic Biography of Audrey Hepburn and William Holden, a crummy book about the two stars' affair during the making of Sabrina in the early 50s, for The Washington Post. If decades-old Hollywood gossip is your bag, I recommend Karina Longworth's podcast You Must Remember This. The author of Audrey and Bill, Edward Z. Epstein, is a former publicist; Longworth is film critic and historian. It's a crucial difference.
UPDATE: Whoops, You Must Remember This already covered Hepburn and Sabrina. I should've checked that. Also, I stumbled upon this 10-year-old Slate piece about Arnold Schwarzenegger's incredibly luxe deal for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, by one Edward Jay Epstein. It's richly reported and has a strong point of view, two qualities Audrey and Bill lacks, in my opinion. Having written for Slate myself, I know that their editors encourage this sharper, more argumentative tone, but even allowing for that, this Schwarzenegger piece and Audrey and Bill still don't read like the work of the same author. Probably because they're not: Edward Jay's site is here; Edward Z.'s is here. But that's still a pretty big coincidence.
My review of Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams, & Rumours, a new biography by British rock journalist Zoë Howe, is in Sunday's Washington Post.
Almost all of the music that shaped my taste at an impressionable age is contemporaneous with Fleetwood Mac's heyday – 1975 to 1989 or so – but I never got into that band though they've obviously written some sublime songs. I won't pretend to have more than a passing familiarity with their catalog, but the ones I've always liked are Nicks', especially "Landslide" and "Dreams," their only No. 1 hit.
Read MoreIn tomorrow's Washington Post – the part of it that's already out today, in fact– I review Peter Bebergal's Season of the Witch, a book that actually manages to make the intersection of rock and roll and the Occult seem boring. The Bowie photo is from Nic Roeg's creepy movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, wherein the Thin White Duke plays an alien visiting Earth from a drought-stricken planet.
But other than the skull cap and the contact lenses, that's what he really looked like in 1975 when a 19-year-old Cameron Crowe interviewed him. His raging abuse of cocaine during this period had made him paranoid, and specifically convinced that witches were trying to steal his semen to create a homunculus. According to Bebergal. I regret that I couldn't find space to mention this in my 500-word review. (I don't remember anything about that in the Bowie biography I wrote about in the Dallas Morning News a few years back, but my memory is worse than useless.)
I also lament not being able squeeze in something about Bebergal's discussion of Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, who argued “that the Satan of his church was not a literal personification of evil, but rather a stand-in for ‘the spirit of discovery, freethinking, and rebelliousness. He told the Los Angeles Times: “'It’s just Ayn Rand’s philosophy, with ceremony and ritual added.'”
