Sunday, this and that...

The Wall Street Journal reviews (slide show style) the book Rock Covers by Robbie Busch and Jon Kirby in this weekend's edition:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-art-of-rock-album-covers-1417808393



I also love that there's an article on Peggy Lee in the same issue:

The Voice of Experience

Peggy Lee had an essential duality—soulfulness lurking inside the manufactured blond goddess.

By  David Freeland          

“Fever,” of course, was the 1958 pop smash that, as Mr. Gavin observes, “define[d] [Lee] permanently.” The song, a heavily rewritten version of an earlier hit by rhythm & blues stylist Little Willie John, embodied the coolness and sophistication—as in those opening finger snaps reprised spectrally during Richards’s gathering—that distinguished Lee and helped bring a new standard of restraint to pop vocalizing. Dusty Springfield, Bette Midler and Diana Krall are just a few of the later performers who would credit Lee’s less-is-more aesthetic as an influence.

For all her subtlety, though, Lee retained a sense of swing, a rhythmic fluency grounded in the idiom of the blues. Peggy Lee’s essential duality—the soulfulness lurking inside the manufactured blond goddess—is a main theme of Mr. Gavin’s probing, perceptive account. As the author reveals through numerous interviews with family members, friends and former associates, Lee’s abundant contradictions, so beguiling in performance and on record, bubbled over to engulf her life, trapping everyone in her world—including, most sadly, Lee herself—in a web of delusion and instability.

Read the rest here:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-is-that-all-there-is-by-james-gavin-1417811803


The New York Times has a small article on an interesting documentary airing this Thursday night on CNN:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/arts/television/whose-dinosaur-is-it-anyway.html


I love Google Play Books and how you can read novels on your iPad or iPhone, scanned exactly as they would have looked to readers during their original publication. This didn't get much reception during its day, but I just started it and it looks like it had potential:

Though our parents were very strict with grades, clothing and where we could go when my sister and I were growing up, they somehow were mind-bogglingly permissive with our tv viewing. We could watch everything from "Little House on The Prairie" (no surprise there) to "Happy Days" to "Charlie's Angels" to the ABC Movie of The Week, the last possibly the most adult and scary of all.

So many of the 70s movies were dark (much more so than today's Lifetime movies), several featured big name movie stars like Tony Curtis ("The Third Girl From The Left") and Natalie Wood (1979's "The Cracker Factory") and a lot later made their way to VHS and even DVD.

I remember the tv being on in the background one night, an image onscreen that haunted me for months afterward. I tried to track it down based on what little I remember now, but so far no luck. There is this book though, plus a great list at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_films_produced_for_American_Broadcasting_Company

Saturday odds and ends...

I still can't believe that a book as violent and uncomfortably racy as Suzie and The Monsters lead me to this wonderful 18th century book. New Yorker magazine mentions it in this article about fictional music and its composers:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/24/imaginary-concerts

Our personal history (especially the cruel parts) can help keep things in perspective. I'm pretty sure (though I wasn't so appreciative at the time) that being teased in middle school actually might have been a good thing for me. It made me far more realistic than I might have been otherwise, gave me more years than most people have, to brace for the future.

From my early teens on, I just knew that I was destined to never pair off in like or love. This wasn't just something I learned from always being foisted on some poor soul's team by the gym teacher or seeing everyone's eyes avert when it was time to choose a partner for science lab. It was something I saw in other people's eyes during after-school dances and other social events, even in the ones of the kindest souls.

I'm not saying people who are different deserve to be picked on (they most certainly don't!) but I do think I was so far gone from normal there was no way I'd ever have been the kind of girl who had friends. I always brought a book with me wherever I went and would read in homeroom, between classes, after our tests were turned in. I had horribly out-of-control hair and wore unusual clothes.

I didn't try as hard as I should have to fit in, probably because I was more interested in books than in other kids. I think I might have even been prissy, in the sense that I behaved like a schoolmarm instead of a student. I was an Adam Ant song, minus the fashion sense and style. I developed such indifference (on top of my already almost pathological shyness) to all that was around in middle school the guidance counselor told my parents there might be something wrong with me.

Back then I was terrified, much more than I am today. I tried not to let the spitballs (my hair was huge!) throw me off or the nasty comments ("Did you know your picture is under 'ugly' in the dictionary?") get to me. High school improved some and college turned out to be pretty wonderful and most people agree that middle school is Hell anyway.

But there are some times now when I wish I could get that detachment back. Then again, I don't have to run away or hide anymore so maybe it's for the best. I'd like to think I relate better to others nowadays even if I still secretly want to retreat when I meet people outside of my job or an already familiar social situation.



 

So the title character from the book I mentioned the other day (Suzie and The Monsters) has almost no scruples. But her iTunes play list is rather unbelievably good.

I do not particularly like the book itself (though the writing's decent enough) but I can't stop reading because I've already added five of the songs Suzie Kew (yes, that's her full fake name) listens to as she either moonlights at a strip club, jogs with her iPod on or uses her stealthy vampire skills to hypnotize men to get past check points at various places she's trying to break in along the way.
 

If not for Suzy Kew, I'd have no idea there's a samba version of "The Pink Panther," (also check out Mancini's Meglio Stasera) that there was a ridiculously (and shamefully) likable song in the early 90s called "People Are Still Having Sex" or that vampires (at least in this case) have amazing taste in classical music (see below.)

Also interesting is this book Suzie thinks about at one point; I have never heard of The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr before: