WaPo Book Review: Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll

In 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.'”

WaPo Book Review: One Lucky Bastard: Tales from Tinseltown

"Passion without pressure" is how Roger Moore describes the kissing technique he says in his (second) memoir that Lana Turner taught him in 1956, a century or so before he replaced Sean Connery as 007. Gross. This poor girl. Gross.

Roger Moore was 45 when he made his first debut as James Bond ­ -- older than Sean Connery, who’d played the role in five films before he got fed up and abdicated, then was coaxed back and quit a second time – and approximately 110 by the last the last of his seven appearances as 007 12 years later. On the DVD extras for Live and Let Die, his 1973 debut as the superspy he and no one else refers to as “Jimmy” Bond, Moore tellingly bemoans the “30 minutes of daily swimming” he endured to develop the not-particularly-athletic physique he displays in the movie. In the three Bonds he made in the 80s, he rarely looked hale enough to survive a tryst with one of his decades-younger leading ladies, much less a dustup with punch-pulling henchpersons like Tee Hee or Jaws or May Day.

Such was the strength of the Bond brand: Audiences would buy that this guy, who looked and acted like the world’s most condescending game show host, was an elite assassin, as long as he looked good in a tuxedo. Which just happened to be Moore’s primary, not to say only, skill.

To his credit, Moore was aware of his limitations in the part, and in general. This ingrained self-deprecation is present even in the title of his new, low-impact memoir, One Lucky Bastard (which I review in Sunday's Washington Post), wherein Mr. I Hate Swimming, sorry, that’s Sir I Hate Swimming, now, allows that current Bond Daniel Craig -- the most chiseled man to play the part, in concordance with our unforgiving expectations of 21st-century action heroes, but also the best actor, too -- “ looks as though he could actually kill, whereas I just hugged or bored them to death.”

One thing I loved about writing this review is that it meant my best gal Rachel Manteuffel and I were both trying to get references to cunnilingus through the Post's Standards & Practices Dept. at the same time. You'll have to wait another week to read her story, but see to it that you do. It's funny and insightful and honest, like everything she writes, and very, very sexy.

WaPo book review: Easy Street (The Hard Way)

My review of Ron Perlman's autobiography Easy Street (The Hard Way) is in the Arts/Style section of this Sunday's Washington Post. But you can read it now. 

Perlman's frequent deployment of the phrase, "Any muthafucka but this muthafucka!" really endeared him to me. I've always liked him as an actor, though. I watched Beauty and the Beast when I was a kid because I had a crush on Linda Hamilton stemming from The Terminator, of course.

Concerning the Death of Ray Price

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"Well, if I’m going to go out, I’ll go out singing." Ray Price, 1926-2013.

I was waiting to board a plane at Reagan National Airport this morning, operating on about two hours’ sleep, when the Washington Post‘s J. Freedom du Lac, who used to assign me music reviews back when he was the paper’s pop music critic, Tweeted me the WashPo’s obit of country legend Ray Price.

Price’s death had been falsely reported by his son over the weekend, but as I read Terence McArdle‘s thoughtful summing up of Price’s extraordinary life, it quickly became clear he really had left us this time.

I'm quoted briefly in the story, from my review of a 2007 concert that featured Price, Willie Nelson, and Merle Haggard, touring together as The Last of the Breed. It was a great show. I brought my dad along as my plus-one. "I'm 81 and I ain't quit yet!" Price told us on that evening six years ago.

Anyway, I was honored. R.I.P, Ray.

The Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2007

My Life as a Getty Image

I wish I'd taken my socks off before the photographer got there.​

Great Scott! I like attention as much as anybody but I do wish that one of the roughly 170 pieces I wrote for the Washington Post between 2006 and 2012 had generated a response like this photo did when it ran on the Post site yesterday. Here I am in uniform (though the cargo shots are not exactly regulation, as has been observed) as Neptune, Roman god of the sea, one-eighth of a clue in the 2013 Post Hunt.

Relevant keywords for your @ctklimek stock photo searches: "Trident" "Crown" "Abs" "Those Shorts Your Uncle Wears To His Rotary Picnics"

— Glen Weldon (@ghweldon) June 3, 2013

"Earth" was the answer to the riddle the eight of us embodied. The 12,000-plus (says the Post) participants who showed up were instructed, via a sandwich-board sign, to FIND WHAT'S MISSING. A lovely girl from the Post's investigations team named Amy was dressed at the sun, in bright yellow shorts and a top, along with clown-sized yellow sunglasses, and seated in a plastic chair near the western boundary of Pershing Park. One at a time, the rest of us walked -- or stumbled over our diving flippers -- into the crowd to do an "orbit" around her.

Mercury - A fellow dressed as a thermometer, with a giant red sphere suspended via lots of tape over his crotch. I kept thinking of the codpieces worn by Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange.

Venus - My dear pal Liz, wrapped in a sheet, arms tucked inside her T-shirt to approximate the Venus de Milo. Which Liz, with her sense of serene entitlement, already does anyway. Which means we probably didn't need to cover her face with toxic white paint to sell the illusion, but I'm glad I got to do that nonetheless.

Mars - Roman god of war, as indicated by his plastic helmet, chest-plate and sword.

Jupiter - My buddy Derek, wearing a pink yarmulke and brown trousers, and exclaiming "Oy vey!" with a decidedly un-semitic fervor each time he missed a (pretend) golf shot with his (real) putter. A Jew-putter, do you see?

Look, you: The guys who wrote this puzzle, Dave Barry, Tom Schroder and Gene Weingarten, have at least three Pulizers among them. What do you want me to say? Derek also MacGuyvered together the box-top and tree-branch trident I carry in the photo after the prop promised by Post Hunt organizers failed to materialize.

Saturn - My friend Alexis, who blew both hips out hula-hooping around the square all afternoon to depict the rings of Saturn. She'll never walk again. The Washington Post Company thanks her for her efforts and reminds her she is an independent contractor.

Uranus - Annie Mueller, long-suffering housemate of my friend Rachel, who roped all of us into this, wearing a gigantic, strap-on butt with backpack straps.

Neptune - Hi! My Getty image is now available in a variety of sizes, formats and licensing options.

Prices start at Really?! and go as high as You Must Be Fucking Kidding Me. I am entitled to a royalty of 0.00% of all sales, so please give generously. My eyes are up here, by the way. Jerk.

What Potter Stewart Said About Christmas

My essay about making my Christmas mixtape is in the Style section of yesterday's Washington Post, the pullout section with Helen Mirren on the cover. I was surprised how difficult I found it to write about this silly little project that's come to claim so many tens of hours of my time and creative energy every fall.

Here's an outtake:

To ask what constitutes a Christmas song is really to ask, what is Christmas? This is a loaded question, one that recalls for me what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography: “I really, really like it.”

No, of course I’m kidding. Stewart said “I know it when I see it.” I know a Christmas song when I hear one. Christmas is a Christian holiday, but it’s also a seismic economic event and a tradition-bound, nostalgia-spreading national art project. It’s a sparkly, brightly colored, tinsel-wrapped rorschach blot. It’s Jesus’ birthday, and if he died for my sins then it follows that it’s my party, too. I’ll put Tom Waits songs that make me cry on the soundtrack if I want to.

You can read the whole piece here. My Christmas mixtapes from 2009-2011 are posted on the Christmas Mixtapes heading by year.