Kudos to cartoonist Flash Rosenberg for having the huevos to illustrate cult film icon John Waters’ remarks at the New York Public Library in real time before a live audience. The first half minute of this animated Conversation Portrait had me worried on her behalf. What a relief when the the coiled lump she was swabbing with brown watercolor turned out to be a cinnamon roll, and not the substance Divine (the director’s muse) famously ate—for real—in 1972’s Pink Flamingos.
It’s a very free associative process. The topic under discussion turns out to be not baked goods, but rather role models. (Roll models, get it?)
As to who the Sire of Sleaze chooses to elevate in this capacity:
Crooner Johnny Mathis, whose heavenly pipes Waters prescribes as a potential remedy for bipartisan ugliness.
And, touchingly, his parents, whom Rosenberg draws with arms encircling their pencil-mustached tot, a sweet Three Is a Magic Number tableau. (In non-animated life, Waters is one of four children.)
The Prince of Puke modestly deflects interviewer Paul Holdengräber’s assertion that he himself is a role model, advising his fans to pick ten flawed individuals from whom they’ve learned something and “let them know how much you mean to them.” (He may have meant “let them know how much they mean to you,” but it might be a fun sort of exercise to follow his instructions as uttered.)
And if on some far off evening, you’re moved to have sex on his grave, know that this role model’s ghost will rest content.
I first discovered Stephen King at age 11, indirectly through a babysitter who would plop me down in front of daytime soaps and disappear. Bored with One Life to Live, I read the stacks of mass-market paperbacks my absentee guardian left around—romances, mysteries, thrillers, and yes, horror. It all seemed of a piece. King’s novels sure looked like those other lurid, pulpy books, and at least his early works mostly fit a certain formula, making them perfectly adaptable to Hollywood films. Yet for many years now, as he’s ranged from horror to broader subjects, King’s cultural stock has risen far above his genre peers. He’s become a “serious” writer and even, with his 2000 book On Writing—part memoir, part “textbook”—something of a writer’s writer, moving from the supermarket rack to the pages of The Paris Review.
Few contemporary writers have challenged the somewhat arbitrary division between literary and so-called genre fiction so much as Stephen King, whose status provokes word wars like this recent debate at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Whatever adjectives critics throw at him, King plows ahead, turning out book after book, refining his craft, happily sharing his insights, and reading whatever he likes. As evidence of his disregard for academic canons, we have his reading list for writers, which he attached as an appendix to On Writing. Best-selling genre writers like Nelson DeMille, Thomas Harris, and needs-no-introduction J.K. Rowling sit comfortably next to lit-class staples like Dickens, Faulkner, and Conrad. King recommends contemporary realist writers like Richard Bausch, John Irving, and Annie Proulx alongside the occasional postmodernist or “difficult” writer like Don DeLillo or Cormac McCarthy. He includes several non-fiction books as well.
King prefaces the list with a disclaimer: “I’m not Oprah and this isn’t my book club. These are the ones that worked for me, that’s all.” Below, we’ve excerpted twenty good reads he recommends for budding writers. These are books, King writes, that directly inspired him: “In some way or other, I suspect each book in the list had an influence on the books I wrote.” To the writer, he says, “a good many of these might show you some new ways of doing your work.” And for the reader? “They’re apt to entertain you. They certainly entertained me.”
Like much of King’s own work, many of these books suggest a spectrum, not a chasm, between the literary and the commercial, and many of their writers have found success with screen adaptations and Barnes & Noble displays as well as widespread critical acclaim. For the full range of King’s selections, see the entire list of 96 books at Aerogramme Writers’ Studio.
I envy nobody the clearly torturous task of interpreting the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, from Peter Jackson on down. With his three Lord of the Rings films in the early 2000s, New Zealand’s cinematic native son actually did an admirable job of deflecting much of the inevitable wrath of Tolkien’s enormous, highly detail-oriented, easily angered international fan base. One senses, however, that he stands on slightly less firm ground with his newer adaptation, and indeed expansion, of The Hobbit. The novel, which Tolkien wrote for children in 1937 and whose success led him to go the full distance with the Lord of the Rings books, now finds itself turning into its own trio of film spectacles, each installment of which gets the strongest possible marketing push (up to and including Middle-Earth-themed dishes at Denny’s) upon its theatrical release. It can seem an awfully grand treatment for a humble (if enduringly adventurous) book. To grant The Hobbit a separate visual dimension, then, wouldn’t we want a talent which, though formidable, tended toward subtlety and understatement — and, lest we forget the novel’s target audience, one who understands children?
We nearly had one in Maurice Sendak, he of Where the Wild Things Are, who in the mid-1960s created sample artwork for The Hobbit’s proposed 30th-anniversary deluxe illustrated edition. For a variety of reasons, from Sendak’s reluctance to Tolkien’s crankiness to a labeling snafu by the publisher to a heart attack that took Sendak out of commission for a while, the promising concept never came to fruition. Specifics of the accounts conflict, though you can find one from Tony DiTerlizzi at the Los Angeles Times and another, proposing corrections to the former, at Too Many Books and Never Enough. Whatever the ultimate obstacle, Sendak completed just two drawings for the book; the only one that survives appears at the top of this post, showing us how he envisioned the hobbit hero Bilbo Baggins and the wizard Gandalf. Just above, we have Tolkien’s own drawing of Bilbo at home, proving him none too shabby an illustrator in his own right, and one who by definition gets the details right. Still, I grieve for never having seen the directions in which Sendak could have taken this bit of material from the beloved Tolkien canon — and, better yet, what minor heresies the irreverent artist could have slyly inflicted upon it.
The decade beginning with the late 1930s is known as the Golden Age of comic books. Many of the superheroes from today’s blockbuster franchises, including Batman, Superman, and Captain America, emerged during this period, and the industry grew into a commercial powerhouse. Following a sales dip during the early 1950s that marked the end of the Golden Age, the Silver Age began (circa 1956) and lasted for some fifteen years.
During this era, superhero comic books initially lost steam — letting stories of horror, romance, and crime grow in popularity — before emerging triumphantly once more with characters like Spider-Man and The Flash. While copyright remains very much in effect for such titles, a slew of comic books from the same period, many of which have narrowly missed attaining such iconic status, are available online at Comic Book Plus.
Similar to the Digital Comic Museum, which we wrote about last week, Comic Book Plus contains a near inexhaustible quantity of Golden and Silver Age comic books. The collection’s timespan ranges from the late 1930s through to the early 1960s, and includes many thousands of comic books in the Superhero, Sci-Fi, and Horror genres.
Those hankering for something a little more unusual will also be in luck. Desperate to read about a hospital romance? Why not give Linda Lark Student Nursea read in the Medical Love category? Sick of landlubbers hogging all the attention in comic books? Head to the Water/Boats section, where you can read all about Davy Jones, the navy lieutenant who lives in Atlantis and does battle with the evil Dr. Fang, in Undersea Agent.
For further reading, head on over to Comic Book Plus. You can preview all materials without registration. But you will need to register (for free) if you want to download the various comic books.
H/T to Yocitrus for making us aware of this archive.
If you are a movie maven, you know about the Criterion Collection. Since the days of Laserdiscs, Criterion has made a name for itself by amassing a vast and thorough catalog of indie films, art house flicks and the occasional blockbuster. They distribute DVDs of directors as diverse as Akira Kurosawa, Jane Campion, and Stan Brakhage.
For their website, Criterion has asked a number of filmmakers, writers and other cultural figures to come up with their Top 10 Criterion movies ever. They are fascinating, illuminating and often surprising.
Less surprising are Martin Scorsese’s picks. He puts Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan at number one and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Technicolor marvel The Red Shoes at number two. Scorsese has on multipleoccasions declared his love of the former and was central to getting the latter restored.
I’ve seen Marienbad at least twenty times over the past fifty years, and I don’t understand one scene of it, but what a fantastic experience. I don’t understand the Grand Canyon or Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, either, but they continue to move me.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
I’ve often called documentary my favorite kind of film, knowing full well that the label designates less a defined genre than a usefully malleable description. What does a documentary have? An unscripted, nonfictional story; interviews; footage candidly shot — maybe. It may also include scripted, staged, fictional material, and may treat real events in a fictionalized manner or search for the reality in events clouded by fiction. For fine examples of the last, see the works of Errol Morris, four of which — A Brief History of Timeon Stephen Hawking (above), November 22, 1963on JFK, They Were Thereon IBM, and Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe on, well, subject obvious– you can see right here in our collection of 200 free documentaries online. And speaking of Herzog, the other living filmmaker doing the most to push outward the boundaries of documentary, we have From One Second to theNext, on the dangers of texting while driving, and Portrait Werner Herzog, on his own life and work.
But cinema had the documentary long before it had the likes of Morris and Herzog, and our collection includes a diversity of such pictures from all over the past century. 1958’s Ansel Adams: Photographer, for instance, profiles in motion the practice of the man whose work in still imagery anticipated, in many ways, the modern nature documentary. Documentary films have arguably provided the richest means of viewing every kind of creative mind at work, from Alfred Hitchcock (The Men Who Made the Movies: Hitchcock, Dial H for Hitchcock) to James Joyce (The Trials of Ulysses) to Joni Mitchell (Woman of Heart and Mind) to Charles Bukowski (Born Into This). Some of them even came as early entries from not-yet famous directors, including Stanley Kubrick (Day of the Flight, Flying Padre, The Seafarers), Jean-Luc Godard (Operation Concrete), and Kevin Smith (Mae Day: The Crumbling of a Documentary). Nobody can ever say where the documentary form will go next, but watch these 200 and you’ll have a pretty fair idea of all the exciting places — geographical, intellectual, personal, and artistic — it’s gone already.
French New Wave filmmaker Alain Resnais, who died at the age of 91 last week, changed cinema forever with a string of intellectually rigorous, nonlinear masterpieces like Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Both films are about Resnais’s two obsessions – time and memory. Hiroshima is about a doomed relationship between a French actress and a Japanese architect who are both haunted by the war. Marienbad is an enigmatic puzzle of a movie that sharply divided audiences – either you were mesmerized by the movie or you were bored and infuriated by it. For better or worse, Marienbad influenced generations of fashion photographers; Calvin Klein’s Obsession ads were directly influenced by the film.
Resnais got his start just after the war making short documentaries. His best known is Night and Fog (1955), a meditation on both the Holocaust and the memory of the Holocaust. And above you can see another one of his documentaries – his 1956 short Toute la mémoire du monde (All the World’s Memories). It was put online by Criterion.
While the movie beautifully shows off the labyrinthine expanse of the Bibliothèque nationale de France – its vast collection of books, manuscripts and documents along with herculean efforts to compile and organize all of its information – the film becomes a rumination on the lengths that humanity will go to keep from forgetting. The film features some gorgeous cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet and a soundtrack by Maurice Jarre. Check it out.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
Published in 1959, Williams S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch ranks with other mid-twentieth century books like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and the works of Jean Genet as literature that sharply divided both critical and legal opinion in arguments over style and in questions of obscenity. Among its disturbing and subversive characters is the sociopathic surgeon Dr. Benway, who inspired the medical horrors of J.G. Ballard and was inspired in turn by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Benway provides some of the more satirical moments in the book, as you can hear in the section below, which Burroughs reads straight with his distinctive nasally Midwestern twang. A short film of the scene (sadly unembeddable), called “Dr. Benway Operates,” has Burroughs himself playing the doctor, in a dramatization that looks like low rent farce as directed by John Waters.
A series of loosely connected chapters that Burroughs said could be read in any order, Naked Lunch seems both fascinated and repelled by the grisly medicalized violence in scenes like those above (one vignette, for example, presents “a tract against capital punishment”). This ambivalence was not lost on writers like Norman Mailer. The highest praise of the novel probably came from Mailer during the novel’s 1966 obscenity trial before the Massachusetts Supreme Court. In one among a handful of literary depositions, including one from Allen Ginsberg, Mailer described Burroughs’ “extraordinary style,” and “exquisite poetic sense.” Despite the fact that its images were “often disgusting,” Mailer called the book “a deep work, a calculated work” that “captures that speech [‘gutter talk’] like no American writer I know.”
Perhaps one of the work’s most damning pieces of criticism comes from the Judicial Officer for the U.S. Postal Service, who called for the book’s banning, appraising the writing as “undisciplined prose, far more akin to the early work of experimental adolescents than to anything of literary merit.” Mailer, Ginsberg, and the book’s other supporters won out, a fact beat essayist Jed Birmingham laments, for a surprising reason: The unbanning of Naked Lunch led to the book’s taming, its gentrification, as it were: “The wild, exuberant offensiveness of the novel fades,” he writes, “in the face of all the legal arguments and the process of canonization.” In fact, the full novel may never have been published at all had it not been for the Post Office in Chicago seizing several hundred copies of The Chicago Review, which contained some few Naked Lunch sections. Hearing of the controversy, French publisher Maurice Girodias hastily threw together a manuscript of the first 1959 text.
And yet, prior to the mid-sixties, the decision to ban Naked Lunch, “even before it was published in book form,” meant “that questions of obscenity and censorship dictated the academic and public reception” of the book. Burroughs commented on the effects of such censorship—using an analogy to “the junk virus”—in part of a new preface to the 50th edition called “Afterthoughts on a Deposition.” The heath risks of opiates “in controlled doses,” he writes,“maybe be minimal,” yet the effects of criminalization are outsized “anti-drug hysteria,” which “poses a threat to personal freedoms and due-process protections of the law everywhere.”
Since the novel’s vindication, critical consensus has centered around sober, reverent judgments like Mailer’s—and to some lesser extent Ginsberg’s terse, irritable testimony. While there are still those who despise the book, it’s significant that Burroughs’ work—which the Washington Post called the first of his “homosexual planet-operas”—has achieved such widespread admiration amidst the notoriety. The novel deals in themes we’re still adjudicating daily in courts legal and public some 55 years later, pointing perhaps to the continued gulf between the thoughts and aims of the reading public and those of hysterical authoritarians and “the media and narcotics officials,” as Burroughs has it. After all, at its 50th anniversary in 2009, Naked Lunch was pronounced “still fresh” by such mainstream outlets as NPR and The Guardian, evidence of its persistent power, and maybe also of its domestication.
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