DISQUS

I am and have been a huge fan of Van Morrison, since I heard him open for the Airplane at the Fillmore East nearly forty years ago. I regard him as the greatest rock and roll singer alive, and have frequently referred to myself with a touch of aggrandizement, as the Van Morrsion of comics.

I had seats for shows he ended in mid song, disappearing from the stage never to return, and I continued to seek him out. Since I no longer live in Los Angeles proper, and I'm too damned old for the arena era of rock, I skipped the Bowl show--but I can't wait for the album. It seems to me there might be another reason underpinning Morrison's decision to revisit this material. Bear in mind, this is a fan's conjecture, but let's not forget his last album was entitled KEEP IT SIMPLE. There are those among us who recognize that as a truism of sobriety--and there are rumors that the Belfast Cowboy had finally stepped away from the drinking that was such a big part of his story.

Is it possible that this life style change was a part of the decision to recreate ASTRAL WEEKS? Beats the shit out of me, but I'd love to think it had a part in it.

I love this sort of stuff, whether it's true or not--so sue me, I'm a guy who still loves blind items, despite the fact that I'm too out of touch and disinterested in most contemporary pop iconography to intuit who I'm reading about, or even actually give a shit when I find or figure it out. But describing Gay Talese's piece, "FRANK SINATRA HAS A COLD.' as 'fawning' completely misses the point. Talese is a man who contributed at least as much to the paradigm shift of celebrity journalism as Wolfe, Capote and Mailer. He's the George Lois of the printed text, and the Beatles book clearly misses the irony underpinning everything Talese writes about Sinatra in this piece. Read it--it's brilliant--possibly even more so than "AND YOUR BIRD CAN SING." That was, for those not paying attention, irony intended.

The Bernie Gunther books are good--but if you really want to read the best material out there that deals with this era, read Alan Furst. He wrote a number of forgettable books in the 70s and 80s--none of which show up on his resume--but since 1989's NIGHT SOLDIERS, he's made Europe between 1933 and 1945 his own. A good place to start would be THE POLISH OFFICER, about a cartographer who becomes a secret agent, or THE WORLD AT NIGHT, about a filmmaker in occupied Paris. All his World War II stuff is sensational.

I saw "Pennies from Heaven" in its original run, and was blown away. I couldn't agree more about the film version--although Bernadette Peters can still ruin my life.

And let's not forget the extraordinary sequence with Christopher Walken doing his striptease with the blowsiest looking hookers ever seen in a Hollywood movie not taking place in a Berlin cabaret.

Hoskins also deserves props for a miniseries called "Flickers," about the nascent days of the British film industry, where he plays a lower class con man/hustler opposite the strictly upper crust Francine Latour, recently of "History Boys," doing, among other things, a serious tango.

Come to think of it, that was a golden time for BBC imports--"Thank You, Comrades," "I, Claudius," "Private Schulz," and that series whose title escapes me about Soviet sleeper agents in London.

I finished the book last night, and thought it was wonderful--as a novel, and as, you should please pardon the expression, a perversely modern work of Yiddishkeit.

I'm thoroughly delighted that Chabon references Jerome Charyn for his "The Hands of Esau," the fellowship of Jewish police officers from his Isaac Seidel novels.

Charyn is a terrific writer, an unfortunately neglected novelist long deserving of renewed attention--a man who wrestled the genre of police procedurals and crime fiction to the ground thirty years ago to astonishing and frequently surreal effect.

I saw Frost/Nixon last month on a trip to NYC, and thought it was extraordinary.

Langella lived up to every expectation--while Sheen, who gets nowhere near the attention he deserves, did equally wonderful work. I first became aware of him as Mozart in Amadeus, and was blown away by his performance. He's equally terrific as Tony Blair, but again is overshadowed by Helen Mirren.

For the record, if you get to more theater, you'll realize audiences give everything standing ovations these days--applauding their own misperceived good taste for being there, I suppose, but diminishing genuine excellence when it all too infrequently comes along.

I was equally shocked that the strip still exists. For me, those experimental sunday pages from the late 20s/early 30s, some of which show up in the Williams Smithsonian book, remain as stunning as Cliff Sterrett's POLLY AND HER PALS sundays and Herbert Paus' illustrations--visual ideas so completely ahead of their time that they seem to have come from an alien source.

I met Kliban--introduced to me as Hap--at the San Diego Comics convention, a few years before it became a mouth breathers bottom feeders media frenzy. I'd been a fan since the NatLamp days, and ended up getting a beautifully executed drawing of the archetypal Kliban cat for my then wife, who for all I know still owns it.

I've always been aware of his influence on Larson. Like so many genuine originals in all the creative fields, Kliban worked in comparative obscurity to those who followed him--although he did hit hard with all those cats--while Larson became an icon--operating within a much more conventional and acceptable parameter.

Kliban's graphic sensibility was far more sophisticated than any of his followers with the exception of Bill Watterson--and his writing was, as you've indicated, heartbreakingly dead on.