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Yep, we're free to offer these mint, autographed copies of the original Catalog of Cool for just $20 apiece ($25 outside the U.S.) while supplies last. Send the scratch to P.O. Box 31227, LA, CA 90031, checks or money orders payable to Gene Sculatti. |
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Bound for Glory: The Boss Books
AGAINST NATURE-Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin paper). Decadent nobleman throws an all-black dinner party to celebrate his impotence; creates "taste symphonies" with liqueurs; gets horny over Dickens novels and pays for a street punk to go to the greatest whore for a month before cutting him off, hoping he'll turn to crime to keep balling. Like sick. R.B.
A BEAR FOR THE FBI- Melvin Van Peebles (Pocket 1968).Mario's dad didn't just conquer Broadway (Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death), bust moves on Hollywood (directing Godfrey Cambridge in Watermelon Man, writing and starring in 1971's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song), and cut the outrageously hip Br'er Soul lp (A&M, 1969). MVP wrote one sharp little gem of a growing-up novel, now sadly out of print. Dig the wicked "dozens," sex mentor Sammy, the throat club and more.
MVP on CD: Two original soundtracks, Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song/ Don't Play Us Cheap: The Melvin Van Peebles Collection
THE BEAT GENERATION AND THE ANGRY YOUNG MEN-edited by Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (Dell). "A product of the Age of Anxiety, this is the HIPSTER, a man without a country-who digs everything and is shocked by nothing." And that's just the opening blurb on this 1958 masterpiece that throws Mailer, Ginsberg, Kerouac, J. P. Donleavy, and Kingsley Amis into a pot and simmers. The essays are the best, with each writer trying like hell to tie down his part of the elephant. Howl on. P.L.
BEEN
DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME-Richard Farina (Random
House; Dell paper). The fact that he may inadvertently have invented
Tom Robbins should not be held against this late great. This tale
of a hopped-up dropout clashing with early Sixties college life
is the missed link between the beatbooks of Kerouac, Brossard,
etc. and the great hippie novels that were never written. Maybe
the flower kids took one look at Been Down So Long and
gave up. Dig its dialogue, Farina's wild prose dance, and characters
like Gnossos and the malevolent hepcat Motherball. Pynchon called
the book "hilarious, chilling, sexy." Farina called
it quits 4-30-66: Returning from a party celebrating Been Down's
publication, he was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was twenty-nine.
Somebody get this one back in print pronto. Sounds: his album
with wife, Mimi, Reflections in a Crystal Wind (Vanguard,
1965). S.Z.
BORDER RADIO- Gene Fowler & Bill Crawford, with foreward by Wolfman Jack (Texas Monthly Press 1987). They sold baldness cures and deathbed remedies, pushed bibles and baby chicks and raw blues. They were the the million-watt mad daddies of Cal-Tex-Mex radio, in the crackling nights before the dawn of formats and faceless jocks. This is their story.
BRIGHTON ROCK-Graham Greene (various). A really cheap hood wreaks metaphysical havoc in Greene's best potboiler. Cool is here extrapolated as relentless evil and total alienation. Compared to "Pinky" here, James Dean, Elvis, et aL were a bunch of namby-pamby wimps. D.S.
CHOCOLATES FOR BREAKFAST-Pamela Moore (Holt, Rinehart and Winston; Bantam paper). This eighteen-year-old "answer to Francoise Sagan" penned the ultimate teen sophisticate fantasy in '56. Her fifteen-year-old heroine first balls a fag actor in H'wood, then makes it with some hermetic, filthy rich, hotel-bound Italian count in New York, where she's gone to swing at the Stork Club. At home, mom serves martinis at eleven, breakfast at noon. R.B.
COFFIN ED AND GRAVEDIGGER JONES series-Chester Himes (various paper). These two black plain-clothesmen operate out of a Harlem full of drunks, ragpickers, religious nuts, street gangs, dykes, and sissies. Bizarre deadpan violence on every page, but Ed and Dig always keep their cool. Cotton Comes to Harlem was the (1970) movie version, starring Godfrey Cambridge. R.B.
COLLECTED POEMS 1947-1980- Allen Ginsberg (Harper & Row Perennial Library; paper, 1984). In his heyday, Ginsberg was like nothing that had ever shot out of the canon of American poetry: a high-strung, certifiably flipped word machine flashing on the impending mania. Remember, when Big Al dropped such electric Highway Poesy as "Howl," "Kaddish" and "Reality Sandwiches," most of America was bowling. D.W.
COMING
THROUGH SLAUGHTER- Michael Ondaatje (W.W. Norton 1977). Wildly
hallucinogenic account of the saga of Buddy Bolden, the schizoid
"inventor" of New Orleans jazz who blew so hard blood
once came out of his cornet. Storyville seen through a cockeyed
kaleidoscope. Unforgettable set piece: the fiery death of Bellocq,
the hydrocephalic dwarf who
photographed whores. D.B.
THE
COMMITMENTS- Roddy Doyle (Random House 1990). Tough, funny,
no-shit-whatsoever account of an Irish green-eyed soul band's
rise & fall. Mostly dialogue and simply sentences. James Brown's
"Night Train" gets a local re- do: "Startin' off
in Connolly / Movin' on ou' to Killester/ Harmonstown Raheny/
an' don't forget Kilbarrack the home o' the blues!" Tight
and all right! D.B.
A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES-John Kennedy Toole (Grove Press). The coolest American hero of recent years wore earflaps, caroused with b-girls in a Bourbon Street dive called the Night of Joy, and contended with a mad world and a mother who feared he'd become "a communiss." They don't make 'em like this anymore.
CONFESSIONS OF A HOAXER-Alan Abel (Macmillan). OK, there've been odder political candidates than Yetta Bronstein, more ludicrous rock stars than Count Von Blitzstein, social protests every bit as ill-founded as the campaign to clothe nude animals. But they didn't all have a single mastermind behind them. Alan Abel got away with the above and more (including staging the debut of the world's first topless string quartet). Confessions makes it look easy, as well as eminently worthwhile. P.L.
DANCERS
IN THE SCALP HOUSE- William Eastlake (Viking 1975). Something's
gone positively batshit in Indian Country. The water is rising
rapidly at the new dam, threatening to engulf Checkerboard Mesa
and annihilate the Navajos. Developers are bulldozing the once
pristine landscape and throwing up The Back To God Estates. Out
by Route 44 an FBI man is playing with himself beneath a 60-foot,
lasso-twirling naked neon lady. And some nutcase has a scheme
to
transport the Caspian Sea to New Mexico as a tourist trap.Are
the noble redmen PO'ed? You bet your sweet, leather burned tuchas.
But there won't be any flaming arrows this time out, no staking
the palefaces to anthills or impaling them on the nearest teddy
bear cholla. This time, you see, the Indians have an atomic bomb!
R.S.
DEADWOOD- Pete Dexter (Random House 1986; Penguin paper). Paris Trout author's second and best. A fantastic, poetically compressed western. Begins with Wild Bill Hickok, cursed with gallstones, needing half an hour to take a leak, and just gets better. Almost as good: Ron Hansen's retelling of a cool blizzard in his collection Nebraska (Atlantic Monthly Press 1989). D.B.
DELIBERATE SPEED: THE ORIGINS OF A CULTURAL STYLE IN THE AMERICAN 1950s- W.T. Lhamon, Jr. (Smithsonian Institution Press 1990). "You should have been there," Lennon said, but not everyone could make the gig. This perceptive study of the decade won't take you there, but it makes a strong case that much subsequent American culture -- from the vaunted Sixties to the vacuous Eightiesnineties -- is one long aftershock from the shook-up epoch. Looks book: POPULUXE - Thomas Hine (Knopf 1986), a solid-state overview of the designs of the times (1954-1964).
DIALOGUES WITH MARCEL DUCHAMP-Pierre Cabanne (Viking Press). In which it is proved that there were great smart-asses even before our generation. The man who said "To be what people call anti-art is really to affirm art, in the same way that an atheist affirms God. The only way to be really anti-art is to be indifferent" says more still. R.S.
THE DUBLINERS- James Joyce (orig. 1916; Penguin paper). The original Jimbo had the word right from the start with this amazingly clear-eyed study of a world that remains in the psyche of many of us. Social problems that would be treated in turgid TV movies today are painted with chill lucidity in prose that is the definition of "deceptive simplicity." J.T.
FLASH AND FILIGREE-Terry Southern (Dell paper). The brilliant comic writer's first novel, containing the boss TV game show "What's My Disease," a seduction scene comprised solely of grappling maneuvers, and "Onononopleaeno's." Surpassed only by his short story "Blood of a Wig" (in Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes). R. B.
FRANKENSTEIN- All-time cool ghoul profile. Inked by Mary Shelley. Ms. Mary, her goodman Percy Bysshe, and good friends Lord Byron and John Polidori were lounging in the land of Alpine-heads deep into spooky stories of Germanic origin, this being the year 1816 A.D. Out of the clear, Lord B. opined they should each and every get down to lucubration and quill their own. Frankenstein (subtitled The Modem Prometheus -proving this was one lady who knew her Greek) debuted in 1817 and in our own century has proven fodder of the finest degree for movielanders, who have turned out such films as Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman. M.M.
GO- John Clellon Holmes (1952; 1988 Thunder's
Mouth Press). Before Jack hit the road, Holmes sleuthed for truth
in the crash pads of Forties N.Y. bohemia. Many of the same cast
tread the boards in both books (here, Neal Cassady's "Hart
Kennedy"), but they play under different lights. More "conventionally"
written than Kerouac's account, Holmes' somehow manages to tune
in more acutely. Like Seymour Krim says, "His radar dishes
were up."
GORMENGHAST TRILOGY-Mervyn Peake (Ballantine paper). One critic described Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone as "Charles Dickens on opium." Psychologically rich, koo-koo characters live in a huge crumbling castle located somewhere in Peake's brain. The first two novels are great, the third isn't. A companion novella Boy in Darkness (which appeared only in Ballantine's sci-fi collection Sometime, Never) is even more unreal. Although Tolkien is full of epic sweep, he is and in comparison. Plus, this poet-painter excludes all elves, fairies, and gnomes from his work. R.B.
THE GREAT ROOB REVOLUTION- Roger Price (Random House 1970).
The former Mad humorist didn't live to see Desert Storm
trading cards or last week's Big Hair band, but his treatise on
the vulgarization of American culture still drops savage science.
Why are good movies, books and music in such short supply? Price's
First Law: "If everybody doesn't want it, nobody gets it."
A HALL OF MIRRORS- Robert Stone (Ballantine paper). His first and finest, set in a goofy, gone-to-seed French Quarter and starring a superhip DJ lush and a cast of weirdo squares who bug him. R.B.
HERACLITUS (collected fragments with a text by Philip Wheelright). This pre-Socratic son-of-a-gun "said it all" long before saying boss stuff succinctly was the topical vogue. No boho epigrammist ever said anything as on-the-money as "The way up and the way down are one and the same," or "You can't step in the same river twice" (and dig: "Nature loves to hide"). Why Western hipsters chose Lao-Tzu and Alan Wafts over him is probably an accident of available pulp. R.M.
HIGH TIMES, HARD TIMES- Anita O'Day (Putnam's 1981). As Krupa and Kenton's canary, she got hooked on jazz and sang a storm. As a bop Boswell, she tells well of scenes and swingers. On her first hubby, drummer Don Carter: "He had a thing about water. When it rained in the middle of the night, he'd get dressed and go for a walk. When he'd come back, he'd write down the rhythm of the raindrops on the umbrella."
S.E. HINTON - Tulsa native wrote her first book (The Outsiders, Viking 1967) at age 17. Rumor has it the androgynous tag was suggested by a publisher who thought the masses would have a hard time buying gritty gang dramas from a teenage girl. Her books, including Rumblefish (Delacorte 1975) and That Was Then, This Is Now (Viking 1971), create a blue collar world filled with dysfunctional or out-of-the-way parental units, kids who are either socs (madras shirts, new wheels) or greasers (denim jackets, cool wheels) and teen angst for days. If for no other reason than she named the female soc in Outsiders Cherry Valance, these books are recommended. Coppola made a series of art films for pizza-faces outta them, the best being Rumblefish which has Matt Dillon, Dennis Hopper and Mickey Rourke as kin. A literary breath of Marlboro-stoked air for future sluts and JD's. A.L.
HOMEBOY- Seth Morgan (Vintage Contemporaries 1990). A tossup. Some find it a "trust kid's stab at nostalgia de la boue." Others dig it as a crazed scumbag cartoon slangfest. Whichever, this tour of S.F.'s Tenderloin freaks and porno-makers is the last we'll get from Morgan. In 1990, he drove into a wall and out of this life. D.B.
HUNTER
- J.A. Hunter (Harpers 1952). Ultimate Brit white hunter sangfroid.
Unfazed by the stickiest wicket, the author faces down every bad-ass
beast in the African bush, then rates 'em on a danger scale. Find
out what the baroness was after when she stripped in front of
our hero during
the lion hunt. D.B.
I JAN CREMER (Shorewood hardcover 1965; Signet paper). An autobiographical (we'll have to take his word for it) novel by post-Beat, Kerouac-influenced Dutch "action painter." Cremer might very well have lived the life credited to Jagger. Art, Harleys, hardcore sex and an anarchist's jaundiced eye make the book an encapsulation of proto-Europunk. B.M.
INTO
THE HEART OF BORNEO- Redmond O'Hanlon (Random House). In 1983,
British naturalist O'Hanlon and his poet-journalist buddy James
Fenton took off for the world's third-largest island to contend
with rivers, tropical jungles, and mountains no Westerners had
tackled in 50 years. Into The Heart Of Borneo -- one of
the hippest travel books ever -- is O'Hanlon's half-surreal, mostly
hilarious report on their crack-brained expedition. Armed with
books, medications and liquors and daily doused with anti-fungus
powder until their "erogenous zones looked like meat chunks
rolled in flour," the pair and their three antic Iban guides
meet with nations of pests (leeches, wild-boar ticks, inch-long
ants) and dazzlingly rare creatures (fish-eagles, pig-tailed macques,
dinosaurlike water monitors) alike. They see 800 weird kinds of
trees and have almost as many bizarre jungle-inspired dreams.
Though the rumored blowpipe-toting Bornean cannibals never materialize,
the explorers are obliged to teach the natives they do encounter
the seven-step disco and to improvise war dances for them in raucous
-- and bibulous -- tribal jam sessions. The Iban tribesmen, O'Hanlon
writes, always lay down when they "know that they are going
to laugh for a long time." Definitely the sort of book to
take lying
down. P.F.
I
PAID MY DUES...GOOD TIMES, NO BREAD- Babs Gonzales (Expubidence Publishing).
The bop bard ("Oop-Pop-A-Da," "Be-Bop Santa") and raconteur
spills all in this 1967 autobio. Daddy G's a king word-head (upon hitting
the Apple, he gets a gig and "enough bread to burn a wet mule")
who had his priorities in place from the start ("With my paper route,
my gambling in school and my other hustles, I was able to acquire a radio
and two new drape suits"). In '61, Babs participated in an anti-segregation
"wade-in" in Tampa Bay, and opened his own N.Y. nightclub, the Insane
Asylum. The waiters and bartenders dressed in strait-jackets).
JUKE
JOINT- Birney Imes (University Press of Mississippi, 1990). His funny,
funky-exotic photos of a culture both strange and familiar prove Imes is not
just some whiteboy shutterbug slummin' through the Delta. These trip pix show
he's got a great eye, and a great heart too. D.B.
THE KILLER INSIDE ME-Jim Thompson (Lion paperback). The first appearance of a classic demented character: Sheriff Lew Ford, sadistic psychopath who comes on like a folksy cretin but is unequivocally unhinged. R. B.
KING BLOOD- Jim Thompson (Sphere 1973). Judged too psycho-sadistic for U.S. publication, it's only available as a Brit paperback. A "western" unlike any other, written by the king of roman noir. D.B.
THE LATE RISERS-Bernard Wolfe (Signet paper). Everybody's got a favorite; this is my "ultimate hip novel," first published in 1952. The guy who runs the New York Times' electric billboard on Times Square programs false messages in exchange for a small amount of marijuana. Cast includes "Movement" (a black pusher who's given to quoting Melville's Confidence Man). Sample interior monologue: "Do you realize a pickpocket who had only one finger could only steal Life Savers?" Wolfe also helped out on Mezz Mezzrow's jazz novel Really the Blues. J.G.
LES
CHANTS DU MALDOROR- Comte De Lautreamont (Isidore Ducasse)
(Originally published 1879; available now in Penguin, New Directions
paper). In the mid-Nineteenth, Izzy
laid these pages -- the first Surrealist prose wig-out -- on a
publisher, then split. Narrator raps with toads, hermaphrodites,
and a gigantic hair inside a whorehouse before balling a shark.
D.B.
LIBRA- Don DeLillo (Viking 1988). The unofficial, hence coolest, version of one of contemporary history's darkest chapters, with prose so heady you expect side effects. Says as much about the haunted here & now (converging vectors of fate and politics, small men swept up in big events) as it does about 11/22/63.
THE LONG GOODBYE-Raymond Chandler (various). The actual great American novel (so-called), this opus works its way into the woodwork of friendship debunked, marriage debunked, drunkenness as a way of life, etc., all with a touch of life-and-life-only that neither Dylan nor Melville (let alone Hemingway or Fitzgerald) can claim to hold a candle to. If Kerouac had taken Chandler seriously, he'd have been a monster. R.M.
LOS ANGELES-Reyner Banham (Harper & Row). Only a convert can write with such zeal. It took an English architectural critic to formulate a nononsense, non-snob appraisal of the Big Orange, but he did it so well, no one's bettered him (and this book is over a decade old). Banham's wide angle takes it all in, in one affectionate, informed sweep: freeways, surf, turf, everything from Brown Derbys and stucco Aztec eateries to the low-brow slop art of Jack In The Box. Good looks indeed.
LOST IN THE COSMOS: THE LAST SELF-HELP BOOK-
Walker Percy (Washington Square Press, 1983). The late Louisianan
pulls the rug out from under the cult of mediocrity in this self-
help book which argues that there may be no self, and no way to
help "it." D.W.
LOVE IN THE RUINS-Walker Percy (Avon paper). Subtitled "The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World," Percy's too-real tale projects a fast-approaching future full of warring fellow Americans. Knotheads, Bantus, Love People, and Catholics bearing lapsometers hole up in Ho-Jo's, sniping at each other with automatic weapons and Heavy Sodium rays. Doc, our hero, shacks with nurses in a gone-dead motel, prays, waiting "until the Campbell's soup and Early Times run out." Que sera sera. Equally great: The Second Coming (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). S.Z.
THE
MAMBO KINGS PLAY SONGS OF LOVE- Oscar Hijuelos (paper; Harper
& Row Perennial Library, 1989). Don't let the fact that this
was a national best-seller, copped a Pulitzer, and has been turned
into a big-time H'wood flick make you take a left. The saga of
Cuban musician brothers Cesar and Nestor Castillo, who come to
New York in 1949, ride the Latin music-craze wave, and bend to
the pleasures and perils of semi-fame (after a tune of Nestor's
hits the charts), is
hands-down cool. Writing with equal parts soul and chops, Hijuelos
quickly has us not only seeing, hearing and smelling but also
thinking right inside the Castillos' world. You have the opulent
food, drink, sex, and streetlife; the packed and jumping nightclubs;
and the cheesy small-time recording studios, yes. But the main
richness is in the penetrating psych portaits of brooding, bedeviled
Nestor and of nonstop hedonist Cesar. In the novel's especially
powerful second half, Cesar ruminates on Nestor's untimely death
and slowly rots because of it and his addiction to carnal delights.
The insides of a helpless sensualist have rarely been so deftly
plumbed. All this and Desi Arnaz as a fully realized character,
too. P.F.
MINE ENEMY GROWS OLDER-Alexander King (Simon and Shuster; Signet paper). By 1958, the man Lenny Bruce christened "the junkie Mark Twain" had seen it all and done most of it twice. Long before he became a high-waft fixture on Jack Paar's TV show, Alex the Great had painted covers for Mencken's Smart Set mag, scrawled Chinese murals on the walls of kosher deli's, and been photo editor of Life (where he proudly published life-sized portraits of the Twenty-two Inch Man). He'd also been a morphine addict, submitted to bagel therapy at an asylum as batty as Kesey's cuckoo's nest, and played chess with A-bomb 11 spy" Alger Hiss. Bonus: King explains why, between the years 1917 and 1948, he only wore pink neckties.
ME AND BIG JOE-Michael Bloomfield with Scott Summerville (Re/ Search). The eternal question "Hey, white boy, what you doin' uptown?" is answered directly: accompanying blues guitarist Big Joe Williams on an other-world tour between Chicago's South Side and St. Louis, navigating the funkiest streets imaginable. In Gary, Indiana, they find Lightnin' Hopkins entertaining in a roadhouse. Hopkins "had a real high conk on his head and wore black, wraparound shades," recalls Bloomfield. "He had only a drummer behind him, and when the blue lights hit that conk-man, that was all she wrote."
THE MONKEY WRENCH GANG- Edward Abbey, with illos by R. Crumb (Tenth Anniversary Edition by Dream Garden Press, 1985). An eccentric physician, a sexy feminist, a river-running Mormon polygamist and a supremely self-sufficient, violently unpredictable Vietnam vet decide to actually do something about the environment. Their ultimate goal? Blow up the despised Glen Canyon Dam. Warning: Not for Sting-oriented armchair environmentalists.) R.S.
MUMBO JUMBO-Ishmael Reed (Doubleday; Bantam paper). Fake history as the only after-the-fact cosmic vision. The Jazz Age in retrospect as the forces of voodoo versus Warren Harding (who was black anyway). St. Louis Woman as a cultural archetype realer than the stock market crash (a manipulation from on high to forestall the forces of jazz-boogie epidemic). Even as art criticism it has legs galore. R.M.
MY GUN IS QUICK-Mickey Spillane (various). Nobody ever took Hemingway more literally as a generatrix for banal dialogue and trigger-happy psychological rationalization. Still, Spillane had his head up his ass, and in this one he takes on the entire "call-girl establishment" of NYC, with a vengeance that in any less fucked-up writer would've ended him up in the toilet. (Give him points for being a proto-Scorsese buffoon without an inkling of irony or prevailing publishing-biz taste.) R.M.
NIGHTMARE IN PINK-John D. MacDonald (Fawcett paper) Any one of MacDonald's twenty-odd Travis McGee novels makes for a good rainy day read, but this is his finest 140 pages. A grown-up Hardy Boy, McGee enjoys racier scenes, real violence, and works out of the Florida Keys rather than Bayport. Here, helping a damsel in Manhattan, he unscrambles high finance shenanigans, hunts, hides, and gets dosed in what may be the first published account of the encounter between P.I. and LSD (1964). A color freak whose prose always keeps on the right side of purple, MacDonald also turns in top Travis in Darker Than Amber and The Long Lavender Look. Surprise: two lame TV movies-The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything and Condominium -came from good MacDonald potboilers. S.Z.
NORTHANGER ABBEY-Jane Austen (various). Maybe it's better read after you've waded through a slough of authentic gothic novels. But Baby Jane's parody of eighteenth-century ghoul cool still comes on pen ablaze, standing dungeon-and-Drac style on its head. Despite heroine Catherine Morland's big eyes for the Dark Shadows scene, nothing happens. Frequently. S.Z.
ON THE ROAD-Jack Kerouac (various). Truman Capote dismissed this as mere "typing" and not quality literature. What he failed to realize was, this was really cool typing. R.S.
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST-Ken Kesey (Viking Press; Signet paper). Like the Acid Test and those Zeitgeists, the Prankster moves on, having written up a storm those cold nights up on the ward. Cuckoo Randle Patrick McMurphy was surely Everyman, but he was also the metaphoric mystery tramp of the last new age that meant anything. Both facts make this one a must. P.L.
OZZIE-Ozzie Nelson (Prentice-Hall). Dedicated to Harriet. It takes 309 pages, but Daddy-O spills it all in this 1977 autobio: what he did for a living all those years on Ozzie and Harriet, his days on the road, that time at Rutgers when a young student presented him with a lit marijuana cigarette (Oz put it in his pocket. It burned).
THE PARKER SERIES-Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) (various). Pro heist-man Parker, living through stolen credit cards and aliases, has a steel heart and no room for small talk. Life as a series of calculated chess problems. If there's an obstacle blocking the goal, then remove the obstacle. If you can't survive at any cost. Recommended: Slayground; Butcher's Moon. R.B.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL (FROM A TO B & BACK AGAIN) (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). In which the Greatest Living Legend recalls almost dying (from the pistol attack by a member of the Society for Cutting Up Men), regrets not having invented blue jeans, and reveals the great unfulfilled ambition of his life: "my own regular TV show. I'm going to call it Nothing Special."
PREJUDICES-H. L. Mencken (various). A great legacy. Every wiseguy living today has somehow been influenced by what H.L.M. wrote here, even it they haven't read it. R.S.
QUAKE-Rudolph Wurlitzer (E. P. Dutton). The hero is knocked out of his bed at Hollywood's seedy Tropicana Motel, and it's downhill from there on out. Some of the best end-of-the-world stuff ever. D.S.
RED DIRT MARIJUANA-Terry Southern (New American Library). Where to begin? In "Apartment for Exchange," Franz Kafka and mom place an ad to rent their flat; Freud answers the ad. In "Put-down," Boris and his boho friends get loaded and chase a ball of quicksilver along the floorboards. Fake cool gets its comeuppance in "You're Too Hip, Baby" and "The Night the Bird Blew for Doctor Warner," and-best of all-there's "The Road Out of Axotle," which reads like a wired-up Jazzbeaux Collins monologue and can scare the pants off you at twenty paces. Did we get to "The Blood of a Wig" or "Terry Southern Interviews a Faggot Male Nurse"?
SAME BED, DIFFERENT DREAMS- Hugh Gross (Mid-list Press 1991). Japanese adman Toshio Matsuzaka is an irreverent wise-ass whose bullet-train-paced banter and sardonic brain, like his nightly business "entertaining" amid the "snacks" and "pink salons" of Tokyo, compensate him somewhat for his entrapment in a workaholic culture. Toshio also does a mean karaoke version of "My Way" -- "The Salaryman's Anthem." Gray flannel suit, Rising Sun style. J.T.
THE SECRET LIFE OF SALVADOR DALI-Salvador Dali (Dial Press). A Forties autobiography from the twentieth century's most profound comedian. Mind-boggling anecdotes, opinions, and self analysis spill out over the page, filtered through Dali's aristo-punk attitude (he once shellacked his hair). Always outrageous, never dull. R.B.
SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION-Ken Kesey (Viking Press; Bantam paper). "Second verse same as the first" was a line Kesey decided not to sing. As wide-skyed as Cuckoo's Nest is claustrophobic, this blood-and-tears story of life among lumberjack brothers reaches for more and often achieves it. Readers have been impatient for Novel #3 ever since. Be thankful for what you've got: a three-part search for ancient pyramids (Rolling Stone, 1974) and a still-smoking Neal Cassady obit ("The Day after Superman Died," Esquire, October 1979).
SOMEWHERE THERE'S MUSIC-George Lea (Lippincott paper). This 1957 Kerouacked jazz novel is a later version of Who Walk in Darkness, itself spawned, as were most boho novels, by The Sun Also Rises. "What's my habit?" muses bopster guru Lucretius. "I don't know exactly. I switch around ... I get bored with drugs an' chemicals an' pot, because the music takes me a way out farther. That's truth." R.B.
STONE CITY- Mitchell Smith (Signet paper 1991). Ancient history prof convicted of manslaughter is forced to solve a murder in a place where everybody's a killer: state prison. Portraits of different gangs and rich introspection of the main character add depth to this disturbing chiller. J.T.
VEGAS-John Gregory Dunne (Warner paper). "in the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada." So begins Dunne's masterpiece, published a scant three years before his True Confessions hit. This "memoir of a dark season" comes on like a One from the Heart, with all bulbs blown, power out, as Dunne's narrator swaps hard-luck sagas with P.I. Buster Mano, hooker Artha Ging, and lounge comic Jackie Casey. Have mercy.
VIEWS
FROM A WINDOW: CONVERSATIONS WITH GORE VIDAL (Lyle Stuart
1980). Vidal hits above and below the belt in what could serve
as an excellent intro to the prejudices, criti-
cisms and unique observations of America's greatest living essayist.
On American gullibility: "Television and newspapers are
all
part of the con game. Revolution will begin when people
find they haven't got the money to buy what they need, and
when this happens they'll get angry, and since a fair
percentage own Saturday-night specials, the consumer society
will fall apart."
On American men: "To hear two American men congratulating
each other on being heterosexual is one of the most chilling
experiences -- and unique to the United States. You don't
hear two Italians sitting around complimenting each other
because they actually like to go to bed with women. The
American is hysterical about his manhood." R.S.
WANDERER- Sterling Hayden (Knopf 1963). "I wonder whether there has ever before been a man who bought a schooner and joined the Communist party on the same day? I smiled in spite of myself as I poured from a tall green bottle." Precious fluids had Hayden's head long before he obsessed about them as Strangelove's Commander Jack D. Ripper. Here's his outspoken account of, among many things, his affair with the sea -- to which he took after he walked out on Hollywood, marriage and mortgage one velvet morning.
THE WANDERERS- Richard Price (Houghton Mifflin; Avon paper). The coolest, craziest juvenile delinquent trip ever put down. Noo Yawk at its most fearsome, funniest. Irish Ducky Boys roam their gang turf like midget dinosaurs, Chinese Wongs take no shit, and everybody listens to Dion. Never to be forgotten: "Going Down with Murray the K," Price's priceless DJ obit, in Rolling Stone April 15, 1982.
WHO WALK IN DARKNESS-Chandler Brossard (Harper & Row). First Beat novel with a cool (as opposed to frantic or fuzzy) style. Lots of reefer, jazz, boxing, and neurosis. R.B
WISEGUY- Nicholas Pileggi (Simon & Schuster 1985; Pocket Books 1987). The true story of GoodFellas' Henry and Karen Hill, the Lufthansa heist, Sonny Bamboo, Charlie Flip, etc. Reality check: read back-to-back with the GoodFellas screenplay (Scorsese & Pileggi; Faber and Faber paper 1990).
WRITE IF YOU GET WORK: THE BEST OF BOB & RAY (Random House). Worth hunting for if you remember their insane commercials, Mad articles, or the deadpan dada of their radio comedy. Reprints classic bits-"Spelling Bee," "Lightbulb Collector, " and more. Bob & Ray's House of Toast is somewhere in here, too.
YOU CAN'T WIN- Jack Black (Macmillan 1926). Crusty old "Bull Lee" Burroughs copped a lotta style offa this hobo/ yegg's memoir from the aughts and 'teens. Falls somewhere between Huckleberry Finn and On The Road, but with jewel thieves and opium dens. Second edition boasts intro by Mr. B himself, cover by Joe Coleman, one of the scariest artists alive. D.B.
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