Bongorama Book Club

Ed Fox: Glamour from the Ground Up

Ronnie — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 18:35:00 +0000

Glamour from the ground up

The most tempting part of a woman's body is her feet. Feet are a woman's second body, the one I can visually enjoy without her being offended or even aware, and never would I have imagined that my little secret would attract so many people. —Ed Fox

Ed Fox has been called the new Elmer Batters, but he's clearly no imitator. Yes, there's that "little secret" he shares with the late Mr. Batters, but Fox celebrates the female foot in his own way, creating a style that is unique, contemporary and technically impeccable. Because he draws inspiration from both still photography and music video there's a strong sense of movement in his photos, reflecting his own energetic personality.

Fox is a native of Los Angeles, so its no surprise his specialty is finding and shooting the most compelling beauties in the adult film industry. Says Fox, "A beautiful foot is an extra, the same as shapely breasts or a nice ass, and all part of a feminine shape. It's all about voluptuousness." Accordingly, most of his models are exceptionally curvy from top to bottom. Fox was one of the first to shoot strip diva Dita von Teese, as well as Tera Patrick, Brittany Andrews, Jill Kelly, Kelly Madison, Temptress, Tall Goddess, Aria Giovanni, Jewel De'Nyle, Belladonna, Terri Weigel, Penny Flame, and Ginger Jolie, all of whom appear in this, his very first book.

Bonus: an hour-long DVD featuring many of the stars, with an original musical score.

The editor and author: Dian Hanson is a 25-year veteran of men's magazine publishing. She began her career at Puritan Magazine in 1976 and went on to edit a variety of titles, including Partner, Oui, Hooker, Outlaw Biker, and Juggs magazines. In 1987 she took over the '60s title Leg Show and transformed it into the world`s best-selling fetish publication. Most recently, she authored TASCHEN's Dian Hanson's History of Men's Magazines six volume set, The Big Book of Breasts, Richard Kern's Action and The New Erotic Photography.

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American Hair Metal

Ronnie — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 21:51:00 +0000

American Hair Metal

By Steven Blush

Visit the mini-site: American Hair Metal

Rare photographs of the biggest bands and unsung heroes surround revealing quotes about the sex, drugs and Rock & Roll style of ‘80s American hair metal.

Author Steven Blush’s best-selling American Hardcore (Feral House) is now a documentary feature film.

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Dark Mission - The Secret History of NASA

Ronnie — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 21:48:00 +0000

For most Americans, the name NASA suggests a squeaky-clean image of technological infallibility. Yet the truth is that NASA was born in a lie, and has concealed the truths of its occult origins and its sensational discoveries on the Moon and Mars. Dark Mission documents these seemingly wild assertions.

Few people are aware that NASA was formed as a national defense agency adjunct empowered to keep information classified and secret from the public at large. Even fewer people are aware of the hard evidence that secret brotherhoods quietly dominate NASA, with policies far more aligned with ancient religious and occult mystery schools than the façade of rational science the government agency has successfully promoted to the world for almost fifty years.

Why is the Bush administration intent on returning to the Moon as quickly as possible? What are the reasons for the current “space race” with China, Russia, even India? Remarkable images reproduced within this book provided to the authors by disaffected NASA employees give clues why, including spectacular information about lunar and Martian discoveries.

Former NASA consultant and CBS News advisor Richard C. Hoagland and Boeing engineer Mike Bara offer extraordinary information regarding the secret history of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the astonishing discoveries it has suppressed for decades. Co-author Mike Bara is an engineer who has worked for Boeing and other aeronautic firms.

The Freemasonic flag seen on the cover was brought to the Moon by 32° astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and later ceremoniously presented to Scottish Rite headquarters in Washington D.C.

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Diablo Cody "Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper"

Ronnie — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 20:29:00 +0000

Why, you might ask, would a healthy, college-educated young woman start stripping for a living, when she could work in a nice, clean office? Cody, now an arts editor for Minneapolis's alternative weekly, had spent her whole life (all 24 years) "choking on normalcy, decency and Jif sandwiches with the crusts amputated." When she moved from Chicago to Minnesota to live with the new boyfriend she'd found on the "World Wide Waste of Time," she took a job at an ad agency—a setup with good "porn shui" (desk well angled for undetected online porn surfing) but not much else. Attracted by a local bar's amateur stripping contest, Cody soon moved from stage stripping to lap dancing, from tableside to bedside customer service and, finally, peep-show sex. Removing her clothes and dry-humping strangers in sex clubs had become her way of escaping premature respectability. Quite inexplicably, her boyfriend was completely cool with her new occupation, even joining her on occasional sex jaunts. When the inevitable burnout set in, Cody switched to phone sex, until that, too, got old, and the 9-to-5 straight world beckoned. Cody's so alarmingly entertaining, readers will wish the book were longer, though they'll be glad it ends before anything really ugly happens.

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David Grazian "On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife"

Ronnie — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 21:07:00 +0000

Grazian, David On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife. 256 p. 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 2007

Cloth $25.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-30567-7 (ISBN-10: 0-226-30567-8) Fall 2007

It’s nighttime in the city and everybody’s working a hustle. Winking bartenders and smiling waitresses flirt their way to bigger tips. Hostesses and bouncers hit up the crowd of would-be customers for bribes. And on the other side of the velvet rope, single men and women are on a perpetual hunt to score—or at least pick up a phone number. Every night of the week they all play the same game, relentlessly competing for money, sex, self-esteem, and status.

David Grazian’s riveting tour of downtown Philadelphia and its newly bustling nightlife scene reveals the city as an urban playground where everyone dabbles in games of chance and perpetrates elaborate cons. Entertainment in the city has evolved into a professional industry replete with set designers, stage directors, and method actors whose dazzling illusions tempt even the shrewdest of customers. Public relations consultants, event planners, and a new breed of urban hustler—the so-called “reality marketer” who gets paid to party—all walk a fine line between spinning hype and outright duplicity. For the young and affluent, nightlife is a sport—a combative game of deception and risk complete with pregame drinking rituals and trendy uniforms. They navigate the dangers and delights of the city with a combination of wide-eyed optimism and streetwise savvy, drawing from their own bag of tricks that include everything from the right makeup and costume to fake IDs, counterfeit phone numbers, and wingmen.

As entertaining and illuminating as the confessional stories it recounts, David Grazian’s On the Make is a fascinating exposé of the smoke and mirrors employed in the city at night.

Subjects:

ANTHROPOLOGY: Cultural and Social Anthropology
CULTURE STUDIES
GENDER AND SEXUALITY
PSYCHOLOGY: Developmental Psychology
SOCIOLOGY: General Sociology
SOCIOLOGY: Sociology of Arts--Leisure, Sports
SOCIOLOGY: Urban and Rural Sociology

You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, consult our international information page.

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Joseph A. Massad "Desiring Arabs"

Ronnie — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 20:13:00 +0000

Massad, Joseph A. . 448 p., 1 halftone. 6 x 9 2007

Cloth $35.00spec ISBN: 978-0-226-50958-7 (ISBN-10: 0-226-50958-3) Spring 2007

Among the many shocking violations of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the most notorious was sexual torture. Military personnel justified this abhorrent technique as an effective tool for interrogating Arabs, who are perceived as repressed and especially susceptible to sexual coercion. These abuses laid bare a racist and sexually charged power dynamic at the root of the U.S. conquest of Iraq—a dynamic that reflected centuries of Western assumptions about Arab sexuality. Desiring Arabs uncovers the roots of these attitudes and analyzes the impact of Western ideas—both about sexuality and about Arabs—on Arab intellectual production.

Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, Joseph A. Massad instead reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural heritage and civilization. For instance, he demonstrates how, in the 1980s, the rise of sexual identity politics and human rights activism in the West came to define Arab nationalist, and especially Islamist, responses to sexual desires and practices, and he reveals the implications these reactions have had for contemporary Arabs.

A work of impressive scope and erudition, Joseph A. Massad’s chronicle of both the history and modern permutations of the debate over representations of sexual desires and practices in the Arab world is a crucial addition to our understanding of a frequently oversimplified and vilified culture.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Introduction

1 Anxiety in Civilization
2 Remembrances of Desires Past
3 Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World
4 Sin, Crimes, and Disease: Taxonomies of Desires Present
5 Deviant Fictions
6 The Truth of Fictional Desires

Conclusion
Works Cited Index

Subjects:

GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES
GENDER AND SEXUALITY
HISTORY: History of Ideas
HISTORY: Middle Eastern History
LITERATURE AND LITERARY CRITICISM: Asian Languages
MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES
RELIGION: Islam

You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, consult our international information page.

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Henry Diltz Book Launch

Ronnie — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 19:49:00 +0000

Henry Diltz Book Launch

“I get by with a little help from my friends.”

Graham Nash, Joe Walsh, Ringo Starr, Henry Diltz and Micky Dolenz shown here at Rona Elliot’s home in Los Angeles to kick off the release of Henry’s new book “California Dreaming.” Come and purchase a limited edition fine art print and limited edition book at any of our galleries
or call 1 800 778-9988 for information.

Photo by Nicole Apatoff

Morrison Hotel Gallery News

Henry Diltz's Book Release Party SoHo NYC Loft

View Slideshow of Henry's Work

Watch this slideshow from a fan in Japan

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Nazi Chic? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Dress, Body, Culture)

Ronnie — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 13:46:00 +0000

This is the first book in English to deal comprehensively with German fashion from World War I through to the end of the Third Reich. It explores the failed attempt by the Nazi state to construct a female image that would mirror official gender policies, inculcate feelings of national pride, promote a German victory on the fashion runways of Europe and support a Nazi-controlled European fashion industry. Not only was fashion one of the countrys largest industries throughout the interwar period, but German women ranked among the most elegantly dressed in all of Europe. While exploding the cultural stereotype of the German woman as either a Brunhilde in uniform or a chubby farmers wife, the author reveals the often heated debates surrounding the issue of female image and clothing, as well as the ambiguous and contradictory relationship between official Nazi propaganda and the reality of womens daily lives during this crucial period in German history. Because Hitler never took a firm public stance on fashion, an investigation of fashion policy reveals ambivalent posturing, competing factions and conflicting laws in what was clearly not a monolithic National Socialist state. Drawing on previously neglected primary sources, Guenther unearths new material to detail the inner workings of a government-supported fashion institute and an organization established to help aryanize the German fashion world.How did the few with power maintain style and elegance? How did the majority experience the increased standardization of clothing characteristic of the Nazi years? How did women deal with the severe clothing restrictions brought about by Nazi policies and the exigencies of war? These questions and many others, including the role of anti-Semitism, aryanization and the hypocrisy of Nazi policies, are all thoroughly examined in this pathbreaking book. [Publisher's Site, Official Web Site].

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PHOTOGRAPHER ETHAN RUSSELL'S BOOK ON THE ROLLING STONES' 1969 U.S. TOUR

Ronnie — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:35:00 +0000

Let It Bleed: The Rolling Stones 1969 U.S. Tour is Rhino's first foray
into the world of high-end music/art books. Authored by renowned
photographer Ethan Russell, the new limited-edition book tells the story
behind the band's pivotal tour through first-hand narrative, exclusive
interviews, and breathtaking photographs - 80% of which have never been
published.

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Born Standing Up A Comic's Life By Steve Martin

Ronnie — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 10:15:00 +0000

In his lean, incisive new book about the trajectory of his life in comedy, Steve Martin describes some of the danger signs that made him realize that his career in stand-up had peaked. In 1979 he was booked solid for the next two years and playing auditoriums too large for his sly, intimate stage act to be understood. And the critical backlash had begun: He had gone from being a wild and crazy guy, in his own phrase, to "a mild and lazy guy" in the none-too-original minds of reviewers.

When he went to a hospital in the midst of one of the panic attacks he had begun suffering, a nurse asked him to autograph a printout of his EKG. When he spoke with friends, conversations "often degenerated into deadening nephew autograph requests." He was perceived to be so funny that he might get a laugh simply by asking, "What time does the movie start?" And he could take a woman to dinner and discover that yes, she had a boyfriend - and the boyfriend liked the idea of her dating a comedy star.

By 1981, he writes, "my act was like an overly plumed bird whose next evolutionary step was extinction." And he deserves credit for not having beaten that poor, tired, figurative bird into the ground. Perhaps it was a methodical approach to humor that saved him.

"Born Standing Up" does a sharp-witted job of breaking down the step-by-step process that brought him from Disneyland, where he spent his version of a Dickensian childhood as a schoolboy employee, to both the pinnacle of stardom and the brink of disaster. Since then, he has spent more than 25 years using fiction, plays, movies, short humor essays and albums to escape the professional inertia that nearly led to his undoing.

Martin describes "Born Standing Up" as a biography rather than an autobiography, "because I am writing about someone I used to know." He need not specify that he has spent years dissecting that long-lost someone, since this book is written in the straight-from-the-couch voice of a dutiful analysand. That does not make Martin myopic or dull; it simply gives him more than the usual degree of insight into why his sense of humor evolved the way that it did.

Born in 1945, Martin grew up at a pivotal time in comedy history. As a boy he loved the lariat tricks and gimmicky props that were the epitome of that era's magic acts. But he also grew up with a sense of imminent change. With Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl to listen to, not to mention E. E. Cummings and Lewis Carroll to read, he developed an eagerness to experiment with new premises for how the comic and the audience might interact.

After early stints at such unpromising places as Knott's Berry Farm, Martin wound up footloose in San Francisco. One early job simply called for him to be onstage in a comedy club so passers-by on the street would think something was going on indoors. But in such anything-goes settings, he was free to ask himself interesting questions about how jokes worked: "What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it?"

One of the book's funniest touches is a picture of him in full hippie-Navajo regalia, with a simple caption: "No comment."

Eventually he would ditch the turquoise and adopt a white three-piece suit for his stage act. He had the same kinds of lucid reasons for this as he did for other pivotal decisions. He wanted to be visible from a distance. He wanted a vest to keep his shirt from coming loose. He wanted to escape the politics of the period, finding it funnier to look "like a visitor from the straight world who had gone seriously awry." And he wanted to honor a piece of advice about audiences that he had heard early on: "Always look better than they do."

Even for readers already familiar with Martin's solemn side, "Born Standing Up" is a surprising book: smart, serious, heartfelt and confessional without being maudlin. Decades after the fact, he looks back at a period of invention and innovation, marveling at the thought that his efforts might have led absolutely nowhere if they had not wildly succeeded.

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Ira Levin, of "Rosemary's Baby", Dies at 78

Ronnie — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 10:02:00 +0000

Ira Levin, a mild-mannered playwright and novelist who liked nothing better than to give people the creeps — and who did so repeatedly, with best-selling novels like “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Stepford Wives” and “The Boys From Brazil” — died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.

No specific cause of death had been determined, but Mr. Levin appeared to have died of natural causes, his son Nicholas said yesterday.

Mr. Levin’s output was modest — just seven novels in four decades — but his work was firmly ensconced in the popular imagination. Together, his novels sold tens of millions of copies, his literary agent, Phyllis Westberg, said yesterday. Nearly all of his books were made into Hollywood movies, some more than once. Mr. Levin also wrote the long-running Broadway play “Deathtrap,” a comic thriller.

Combining elements of several genres — mystery, Gothic horror, science fiction and the techno-thriller — Mr. Levin’s novels conjured up a world full of quietly looming menace, in which anything could happen to anyone at any time. In short, the Ira Levin universe was a great deal like the real one, only more so: more starkly terrifying, more exquisitely mundane.

In “Rosemary’s Baby” (Random House, 1967), a young New York bride may have been impregnated by the Devil. In “The Stepford Wives” (Random House, 1972), the women in an idyllic suburb appear to have been replaced by complacent, preternaturally well-endowed androids. In “The Boys From Brazil” (Random House, 1976), Josef Mengele, alive and well in South America, plots to clone a new Hitler from the old.

Few critics singled out Mr. Levin as a stylist. But most praised him as a master of the ingredients essential to the construction of a readable thriller: pace, plotting and suspense. Reviewing “Rosemary’s Baby” in The New York Times Book Review, Thomas J. Fleming wrote:

“Mr. Levin’s suspense is beautifully intertwined with everyday incidents; the delicate line between belief and disbelief is faultlessly drawn.” Mr. Fleming was less impressed, however, with the novel’s denouement:

“Here, unfortunately, he pulls a switcheroo which sends us tumbling from sophistication to Dracula,” the review continued. “Our thoroughly modern suspense story ends as just another Gothic tale.”

Mr. Levin’s other novels are “A Kiss Before Dying” (Simon & Schuster, 1953); “This Perfect Day” (Random House, 1970); “Sliver” (Bantam, 1991); and “Son of Rosemary” (Dutton, 1997), a sequel in which Mama’s little boy is all grown up.

The film versions of his books include “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), starring Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes; “The Stepford Wives” (1975), starring Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss; and “The Boys From Brazil” (1978), starring Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier and James Mason.

There was also a spate of made-for-TV sequels: “Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby” (1976), “Revenge of the Stepford Wives” (1980) and “The Stepford Children” (1987). A big-screen remake of “The Stepford Wives,” starring Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick, was released in 2004.

Ira Marvin Levin was born in Manhattan on Aug. 27, 1929. Reared in the Bronx and Manhattan, he attended Drake University in Iowa for two years before transferring to New York University, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in 1950. From 1953 to 1955, he served in the Army Signal Corps.

As a college senior, Mr. Levin had entered a television screenwriting contest sponsored by CBS. Though he was only a runner-up, he later sold his screenplay to NBC, where it became “Leda’s Portrait,” an episode in the network’s anthology suspense series “Lights Out,” in 1951.

While continuing to write for television, Mr. Levin published his first novel, “A Kiss Before Dying,” when he was in still his early 20s. Widely praised by critics for its taut construction and shifting points of view, the novel tells the story of a coldblooded, ambitious young man who murders his wealthy girlfriend, gets away with it, and becomes involved with her sister.

“A Kiss Before Dying” won the 1954 Edgar Award for best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America. It was filmed twice, in 1956 with Robert Wagner; and in 1991 with Matt Dillon.

Mr. Levin, who won a second Edgar in 1980 for “Deathtrap,” was named a grand master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2003.

Before returning to fiction with “Rosemary’s Baby,” Mr. Levin focused on writing for the stage. His comedy “No Time for Sergeants” (1955), which he adapted from the novel by Mac Hyman, was a hit on Broadway. (The play, and the 1958 film of the same title, starred a young actor named Andy Griffith.)

Mr. Levin’s later Broadway outings, among them “Drat! The Cat!,” a musical that ran for eight performances in 1965, were less successful. (A song from the musical, “She Touched Me,” with lyrics by Mr. Levin and music by Milton Schafer, did go on to become a hit for Barbra Streisand as “He Touched Me.”)

Then came “Deathtrap.” The tale of an aging dramatist who plots to kill a young rival and steal his new play, “Deathtrap,” ran on Broadway for 1,793 performances, from 1978 to 1982. It became a Hollywood film in 1982, starring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve.

Mr. Levin’s two marriages, to Gabrielle Aronsohn and Phyllis Finkel, ended in divorce. He is survived by three sons from his marriage to Ms. Aronsohn: Adam Levin-Delson of Bothell, Wash.; Jared Levin and Nicholas Levin, both of Manhattan; a sister, Eleanor Busman of Mount Kisco, N.Y.; and three grandchildren.

If Mr. Levin never achieved renown as a literary novelist, that, judging from many interviews over the years, was perfectly fine with him. It tickled him that the phrase “Stepford wife,” and even “Stepford” as an adjective (denoting anything robotic or acquiescent), had entered the English lexicon.

Mr. Levin was less pleased, however, at the tide of popular Satanism his work appeared to unleash.

“I feel guilty that ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ led to ‘The Exorcist,’ ‘The Omen,’” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2002. “A whole generation has been exposed, has more belief in Satan. I don’t believe in Satan. And I feel that the strong fundamentalism we have would not be as strong if there hadn’t been so many of these books.”

“Of course,” Mr. Levin added, “I didn’t send back any of the royalty checks.”

[via nytimes.com]

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Norman Mailer, literary rebel,dies

Ronnie — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 16:23:00 +0000

THE literary world paid tribute to Norman Mailer, the one-time enfant terrible of American letters, who died yesterday at 84. He suffered from kidney failure.

Joan Didion, the writer, described him tearfully as “a great American voice”.

The New York columnist and author Jimmy Breslin said: “From one end of his life to the other he sat in solemn thought and left so much to read, so many pages with ideas that come at you like sparks spitting from a fire.”

Mailer was regarded by a generation of feminists, however, as a quintessential male chauvinistic pig. He built and nurtured an image of a writer who was pugnacious, street-wise and high-living.

He drank, fought, smoked pot, fathered nine children, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party. He also headbutted his fellow writer Gore Vidal. His friends said he had a softer side, though.

“I found him to be extremely kind and gentle,” bestselling novelist Luanne Rice, a friend of Mailer, said. “The Norman Mailer that I knew was very different from the angry, contentious man that was famous.”

Born in Brooklyn, Mailer first hit the literary scene in the late 1940s with The Naked and the Dead, the novel based on his experiences fighting the Japanese in the second world war. The Sunday Times pronounced it too obscene to review, but it made him instantly famous.

He once told The Sunday Times: “I went from being an unknown young man from Brooklyn to a celebrity overnight. I was totally unequipped for it. As I said more than once, it was as if there was somebody else named Norman Mailer, but to meet him people had to meet me first.”

He moved into political activism during the Vietnam war. The Armies of the Night, a nonfiction work about the war protest movement, won him the first of his two Pulitzer prizes and broadened his appeal beyond America.

In later years, Mailer was particularly harsh on George W Bush and on “flag-waving patriotism”, which he regarded as misplaced in a superpower. Explaining his frequent critiques of the United States, he said that “when you have a great country, it’s your duty to be critical of it so it can become even greater”.

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The average American male video #3

Ronnie — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:02:00 +0000

The average American male video #2

Ronnie — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:01:00 +0000

The average American male video #1

Ronnie — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:00:00 +0000

Man Booker shortlist announced

Ronnie — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 07:19:00 +0000

Shortlist Announcement

Man Booker Prize for Fiction shortlist announced

NICOLA BARKER, ANNE ENRIGHT, MOHSIN HAMID, LLOYD JONES, IAN MCEWAN and INDRA SINHA are the six authors shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2007, the UK’s annual celebration of the finest in fiction. The shortlist was announced by the chair of judges, Howard Davies, at a press conference at Man Group plc offices in London today (Thursday 6th September).

The six shortlisted books were chosen from a longlist of 13 and are:

* Darkmans by Nicola Barker (4th Estate)
* The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
* The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
* Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
* On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
* Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

Howard Davies, Chair of Judges, comments:

“Selecting a shortlist this year from what was widely seen as an exciting longlist was a tough challenge. We hope the choices we have made after passionate and careful consideration, will attract wide interest.”

The panel commented on each of the titles as follows:

Darkmans – an ambitious and energetic contemporary ghost story with a vibrant cast of characters, set in modern day Ashford.

The Gathering – a very accomplished and dramatic novel of family relationships and personal breakdown in Ireland and England.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist – this is a subtle and thoughtful examination of the raw meat of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, and one man’s personal response to working within it.

Mister Pip – Mr Pip is well-rooted in dramatic and frightening events in Papua New Guinea, with vivid characters and a fascinating literary frame of reference.

On Chesil Beach – a tight and beautifully written narrative which sustains high emotional tension throughout.

Animal’s People – Indra Sinha is an engaged campaigning novelist. The book clearly draws from real life events in Bhopal, but is a sustained imaginative creation in its own right, with intriguing parallel use of new media.

The winner receives £50,000 and can look forward to greatly increased sales and recognition worldwide. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, receives £2,500 and a designer bound edition of their own book.

The judging panel for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is: Howard Davies, Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science; Wendy Cope, poet; Giles Foden, journalist and author; Ruth Scurr, biographer and critic and Imogen Stubbs, actor and writer.

The winner will be announced on Tuesday 16th October at an awards ceremony at the Guildhall, London.
Darkmans by Nicola Barker

Fourth Estate, £17.99

Darkmans is a very modern book about two very old-fashioned subjects: love and jealousy. It’s also a book about invasion, obsession, displacement and possession, about comedy, art, prescription drugs and chiropody. And the main character? The past, which creeps up on the present and whispers something quite dark – quite unspeakable – into its ear.

Nicola Barker was born on 30th March 1966 near Cambridge and lives and works in East London. She was the winner of the David Higham Prize for Fiction and joint winner of the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Love Your Enemies, her first collection of stories. Her second story collection, Heading Inland, received the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. Her novel Wide Open won the IMPAC Prize in 2000, and Clear was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004. She is one of Granta’s ‘Best Young British Novelists’ of the decade.

For further information on Nicola Barker or interview requests please contact Jessica Axe at 4thEstate on 020 8307 4928 or e-mail Jessicaaxe@4thestate.co.uk
The Gathering by Anne Enright

Jonathan Cape, £12.99

The Gathering is a family epic. It is also a sexual history: tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations – starting with the grandmother, Ada Merriman – showing how memories warp and family secrets fester. This is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

Anne Enright was born on 11th October 1962 in Dublin, where she now lives and works. After studying creative writing under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter at the University of East Anglia, she worked for six years as a TV producer and director in Ireland. She has published one collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, which won the Rooney Prize, and three previous novels, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. What Are You Like? was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and won the Encore Award. Her first work of non-fiction, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, was published in 2004.

For further information on Anne Enright or interview requests please contact Christian Lewis at Jonathan Cape 0207 840 8539 or clewis@randomhouse.co.uk
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Hamish Hamilton, £14.99

The Reluctant Fundamentalist traces the life and love of Changez, an idealistic young Muslim man who leaves Pakistan to pursue his education in the US. On graduation from Princeton, Changez is recruited to a top job on Wall Street, falls in love with an American woman, Erica, and hopes to achieve a position of status in elite Manhattan society. But post-9/11 he finds himself regarded with suspicion by his fellow New Yorkers and his budding relationship with Erica is overshadowed by her personal demons, as well as his own growing paranoia and resentment at the country he has made home.

Mohsin Hamid was born on 23rd July 1971 in Pakistan, where he grew up. He studied at Princeton and Harvard Law School, worked as a management consultant in New York and now lives in London. His first novel, Moth Smoke was a New York Times Notable Book, won the Betty Trask First Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel in America. Mohsin has written for TIME, New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman.

For further information on Mohsin Hamid or interview requests please contact Amelia Fairney at Hamish Hamilton on Amelia.Fairney@uk.penguingroup.com or 020 7010 3000
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

John Murray, £12.99

Bougainville. 1991. A small village on a lush tropical island in the South Pacific. When the villagers’ safe, predictable lives come to a halt, Bougainville’s children are surprised to find the island’s only white man, a recluse, re-opening the school. Pop Eye, aka Mr Watts, explains he will introduce the children to ‘Mr Dickens’. Matilda and the others think a foreigner is coming to the island and prepare a list of much needed items. They are shocked to discover their acquaintance with Mr Dickens will be through Mr Watts’ reading of Great Expectations. But on an island at war, the power of fiction has dangerous consequences.

Lloyd Jones was born in Wellington, New Zealand on 23rd March 1955, where he still lives. He travelled to Papua New Guinea at the outset of the blockade and visited the island twice ten years later; once, to visit the New Zealand Peacekeeping mission, the second time to stay with Sam Kauona, the military leader of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army. He is a graduate of Victoria University. In 1988 he won the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship; in 2007 he won the Commonwealth Writers’ Overall Prize for Best Book Award for Mister Pip. From August 2007 he will spend a year in Berlin as beneficiary of the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency.

For further information on Lloyd Jones or interview requests please contact: Nikki Barrow at John Murray on 020 7873 6440 or email nikki.barrow@johnmurrays.co.uk
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

Jonathan Cape, £12.99

It is July 1962. In a hotel on the Dorset coast, overlooking Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence, who got married that morning, are sitting down to dinner in their room. Bound by the protocols of the era neither is entirely able to suppress their anxieties about the wedding night to come. A subtle exploration of the sexual politics of a bygone age where lives are transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

Ian McEwan was born on 21st June 1948 in Aldershot. His novels include The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers (shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 1981), A Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs (shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 1992), The Daydreamer, Enduring Love (which has since been made into a film starring Daniel Craig and Rhys Ifans), Amsterdam (winner of the Booker Prize in 1998) and Atonement (shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize in 2001) which has recently been made in to a film starring Keira Knightley. He has also written collections of short stories including First Love, Last Rites and several film scripts. Ian McEwan lives in Oxford.

For further information on Ian McEwan or interviews please contact: Christian Lewis at Jonathan Cape on 020 7840 8539 or email: clewis@randomhouse.co.uk
Animal’s People by Indra Sinha

Simon & Schuster, £11.99

Ever since That Night, the residents of Khaufpur have lived a perilous existence. Their world is poisoned. Nobody has received compensation or help for the chemical leak, least of all Animal, as he is known, whose spine twisted at a young age, leaving him to walk on all fours. Though he inhabits a dark kind of half-life, he knows what love is. When Elli Barber arrives, an ‘Amrikan’ keen to set up a free clinic to help the victims of the disaster, deep suspicion arises amongst the community. Animal resolves to turn the situation to his advantage and starts to investigate Elli’s motives.

Indra Sinha was born in India on 10th February 1950 and spent his childhood in Bombay, Hyderabad and Rajasthan. As a copywriter for Collett Dickenson Pearce he won awards in every major advertising show. His previous work, The Cybergypsies, met with widespread critical acclaim and his is now a full time writer, living in France with his family. He lives with his wife and children in southern France.

***

Review of Douglas Coupland's 'The Gum Thief'

Ronnie — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:48:00 +0000

The Gum ThiefBy Douglas Coupland. 275 pages. $24.95; £10.99, Bloomsbury.

Tolstoy thought that "The Seagull" was a terrible play, and that Chekhov should never have put a writer in it. "There aren't many of us, and no one is really interested," Tolstoy told a friend. Yet over the decades memorable protagonists in books as different as "Cakes and Ale," "Misery," "The Information," "Lunar Park" and Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels have been writers. And if Tolstoy's fellow Russians had paid attention to him, there would be no "Doctor Zhivago," no "Master and Margarita" and no "Pale Fire." Fiction is drawn to writers for its heroes, and to writing itself for its subject matter.

Douglas Coupland's new novel, "The Gum Thief," puts the act of writing center stage. The book is not conventionally narrated, but told obliquely, through an assemblage of writings and letters, from which the reader reconstructs the story like the pieces of an Ikea wardrobe.

The book's central character is a thwarted writer. Puffy-looking, 40-something Roger is lost, stuck, divorced and sleep-walking through a job he despises at Staples. Roger is a closed, clamlike soul, trailing a U-Haul of emotional baggage and dosing himself with vodka to get through the day. He's a version of the person you often see in coffee shops, sitting alone, nursing a cold Americano and urgently filling a yellow legal pad with screeds of confessional material written in capital letters. Peering over his shoulder as you pass his chair, you find yourself trying to read what he's written and wondering: madman? bore? genius?

Read the full review on iht.com here.

***

Re-make/Re-model: Art, Pop, Fashion and the Making of Roxy Music, 1952-1972

Ronnie — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:22:00 +0000

Re-make/Re-model: Art, Pop, Fashion and the Making of Roxy Music, 1952-1972

Michael Bracewell Faber & Faber, 400pp, £20

Roxy Music, circa 1972, were a singularly strange group. Far from the laid-back musical proposition of later hits and Bryan Ferry's solo oeuvre, their first album was a thing, by turns, of raging, propulsive energy and addled, neurasthenic sentiment. TV footage from that period (on the cusp, as Michael Bracewell puts it, of their "imperial" phase) reveals a band whose sheer manic blare - not to mention a certain extraterrestrial coquetry - left shuffling, denim-wearing audiences open-mouthed at their audacity. Most strikingly, in a period when laborious dues- pay ing was a mark of musical authenticity, Roxy seemed entirely sui generis. Despite the singer's apparently having taken himself for the offspring of Marlene Dietrich and Johnnie Ray, they looked and sounded like nothing on earth.

Re-make/Re-model tells the story of how Ferry and company came to that iconic pass; then it stops dead, before their album Roxy Music is even released. Where the average rock-band biography describes a dismally familiar story arc - camaraderie and ambition giving way to anomie and sloth, diminishing narrative returns matching plummeting creative pros pects - Bracewell has brilliantly sidestepped all of that in favour of a prehistory of the whole Roxy milieu and a study, in a sense, of the creative potential of the scene as such. Extensive interviews with the principals and their numerous associates serve to reconstruct (amazingly, for any book about pop music) the collective invention of the Roxy moment. What emerges - slowly, forensically, stylishly - is nothing less than a portrait of cultural possibilities in Britain during the postwar period.

Dutiful mention of the subject's attendance at art school has become a cliché of the 1960s/ 1970s rock-star profile (John Lennon, Pete Townshend) without the writer, generally, having much of a clue what transpired at said institution. Bracewell, however, knows precisely what went on, and what it meant: his account of the creative and intellectual archipelago of British art schools in the 1960s would be fascinating enough, without the added allure of Ferry, Brian Eno and Andy Mackay. What set those "hyper-stylised, imperiously aloof" young men apart was the ravenousness with which they devoured ideas: Ferry from Rita Donagh and Richard Hamilton at Newcastle University; Mackay from visiting compos- ers such as Morton Feldman at Reading; Eno, at Ipswich, from the cybernetic experiments of Roy Ascott.

In 1969, the gloriously egoistic Eno wrote to his diary: "I was a teenage art school." This sense of omnivorous learning, of the artist as experimental nexus for images, ideas and attitudes, would be essential to the achieved entity of Roxy Music. Influences as diverse as Duchamp, Phil Spector, Warhol, doo-wop, the Velvet Underground and English music hall would all make it into the ravishing mix. A veritable movement of artists and designers would convene to contrive the band's preening, feathered, retro-futurist look. But Bracewell shows, too, how Roxy harked back (via aesthete advisers such as their publicist Simon Puxley and historian Jeremy Catto) to a deeper, more traditional strand of English dandyism. Their idea of pop success seemed to have been borrowed from Walter Pater's instruction at the end of The Renaissance: to burn always with a hard, gemlike flame.

It is no surprise, then, that Bracewell's working title was apparently Roxyism. The band itself was an idea, a movement, a design for life. It's easy, at this remove, and in light of the group's later falling away from this exacting ideal, to paint the Roxyist aesthetic as merely aspirational or naively, even laughably, faux-sophisticate. But their mid-1970s audience - haughty lasses in Waaf uniforms and stilettos, etiolated boys with a taste for electronics and eye-shadow - went on to invent punk and post-punk, to imagine new ways of being between art, music, fashion and literature. In the mid-1980s, a decade and more after its release, Roxy Music was still being passed around classrooms like an invitation to join some secret aesthetic society. Eno, especially, still remains an inspirational figure.

Perhaps because both futurism and nostalgia were always built into their sonic and visual fantasies, because they were so studiedly not of their time, Roxy Music seem immune to the kind of easy periodisation and crude revivalism that plagues rock bands today. (Of their contemporaries, only Kraftwerk have this peculiar quality.) They are in this sense the perfect subject for Bracewell, whose essays, fiction and art criticism have long been concerned with the still resonant, utopian potential of the cultural artefacts of the recent past. Re-make/Re-model is certainly a marvellous book about art, music, ideas and Englishness. But Bracewell's particular, uncanny achievement is to have brought his subjects to the brink of a future that, however familiar, seems suddenly unpredictable once more. As Simon Puxley's sleeve note asked in 1972: what's the date again?

***

Joachim Schmid "Photoworks 1982-2007"

Ronnie — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:03:00 +0000

Photoworks 1982–2007
by Joachim Schmid

Steidl & Partners
Joachim Schmid began his career in the early 1980s as a freelance critic and the publisher of Fotokritik, an iconoclastic and original contribution to West German photography. In the pages of Fotokritik and in his regular articles and lectures for other venues, Schmid argued articulately and at times vehemently against prevailing, predominantly conservative notions of “art photography” and in favour of a broad, encompassing critique of photography as a form of cultural practice. After ceasing publication of Fotokritik in 1987, Schmid focused on his own art production, based primarily on found photography and public image sources. Living near one of the largest flea markets in Berlin, he had already amassed a rich, deep, and varied collection of vernacular photography which formed the raw material for many of the works included in this publication.
Schmid’s use of extended series reflects his concern with photography as an encompassing, culturally dispersed and ubiquitous social and aesthetic discourse that runs throughout the public and private spheres of modern life. Yet the fundamental richness of Schmid’s photographic raw material – along with the sardonic wit he so often displays – derails any attempt to read his work as pure anthropology or social science. His artistic preoccupations reflect a close observation of photographic history and a fascination with photographic images themselves in all their alternately bizarre and conventionalized aspects.

Price
UK £30.00
US $55.00
EC €45.00

***

Leonard Cohen "Let Us Compare Mythologies By Leonard Cohen" (1956)

Ronnie — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 11:41:00 +0000

Published in 1956 when he was twenty-two years old, Let Us Compare Mythologies is Leonard Cohen's first book. Long out of print, it is now available exactly as it appeared fifty years ago as one of the four hundred copies published by the McGill Poetry Series in Canada, with its original cover and illustrations by Canadian artist Freda Guttman.

Leonard Cohen was born in Montreal in 1934. He is the author of twelve books, including, most recently, the national bestseller Book of Longing, and has released seventeen albums.

***

Leonard Cohen "Book Of Longing" (2006)

Ronnie — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 11:37:00 +0000

nternationally celebrated for his writing and his music, Leonard Cohen is one of the legendary writers, performers, and most consistently daring artists of our time. Book of Longing is his dazzling new collection of poetry -- twenty years in the making -- written on southern California's Mount Baldy and in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Mumbai. Following his highly acclaimed 1984 publication, Book of Mercy, and containing Cohen's own playful and provocative line drawings, Book of Longing brings together all the elements that have elevated Leonard Cohen's artistry to worldwide recognition.

Leonard Cohen was born in Montreal in 1934. He is the author of twelve books, including, most recently, the national bestseller Book of Longing, and has released seventeen albums.

***

Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book

Ronnie — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 08:42:00 +0000

Comedian Larry David was the co-creator and writer for the hit-show Seinfeld, which catapulted him to wealth, fame, and the L.A. lifestyle he so loves to hate. HBO®'s hit show Curb Your Enthusiasm follows Larry's fictionalized post-Seinfeld life as he makes the world and himself miserable during the pursuit of his own happiness, a fascinating account of the ingenious improvisational comedy where no detail gets left to chance.

With unprecedented access to the set, "Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book" provides a compelling picture of how things go from bad to worse in Larry David's Los Angeles. His character defies all reasonable expectations, especially when he tries to do exactly what's expected. Nothing is simple; not getting his wife's car washed or exiting a parking lot; not waiting in a doctor's office, or even wrapping, giving, or receiving a gift. In the course of the series' four ground-breaking seasons (the fifth season just began in September, 2005), each of these simple acts is a catalyst for an unthinkable sequence of blunders, inappropriate gestures, and far-fetched coincidences that culminate in the shocking yet expected humiliation of Larry David himself. As fans of the show will testify, the worse things get for Larry, the harder you laugh.

The book opens with an in-depth profile of Larry David, and the structure that follows is based around in-depth coverage of each of the 50 episodes, including:

* Anecdotal, behind-the-scene stories from people who were there, including interviews with such stars as Cheryl Hines, Jeff Garlin, Jason Alexander, Mel Brooks, Ted Danson, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kathy Griffin, Paul Reiser, Richard Lewis, Mary Steenburgen, Ben Stiller, and many others.

* 150 photographs, including behind-the-scene photos that fans will devour.
* First mentions of now legendary phrases.
* Reproductions of Larry David's original scene outlines (no dialogue) so readers can trace the actual evolution of classic scenes from "real life" to the cutting room.
* Outtakes, such as show titles and scenes that didn't make the cut and storylines that were too outrageous to use.
* Answers to nagging questions not revealed on the show.

For anyone interested in David's childhood, his roots as a stand-up comic, his various writing jobs before the breakthrough of "Seinfeld," and how the ideas that had been formulating in his mind for decades finally found its perfect expression in his show, "Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book" is the perfect tribute.

***

Suzi Quatro "Unzipped"

Ronnie — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 18:15:00 +0000

Little Susie from Detroit grew up to be legendary rocker Suzi Quatro, international superstar musician and actress, icon of the Seventies. The transformation was fuelled by huge talent, determination, hard work and a fabulous sense of humour, but it wasn`t easy.

In UNZIPPED, Suzi tells her story of life behind the scenes and in the thick of it , working, partying and rocking with other legendary figures such as Noddy Holder, Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop. Little Susie learned a love of music at home with her fascinating, fractious family, then she forged her sound by touring dives all over the States. She came to London just as Glam Rock was kicking off and became a star, a passionate woman in a man`s world.

Then there was fame as a Hollywood actress in Happy Days, a turbulent personal life and the need to juggle her family with her career, touring all over the world. There were lows as well as highs, but she never lost her total joy in music or her sense of adventure.

Suzi Quatro has met anyone who was anyone in music over the last thirty years. She remembers it all and this brilliantly personal, funny book is her thrilling account of life lived going hell for leather.

***

Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed [Excerpt: Chapter One]

Ronnie — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 13:56:00 +0000

EXCERPT
Chapter 1
Most Likely To

It was a beautiful drive up to Silver Lake, a resort just east of Lake Michigan where high school kids lucky enough to own their own automobiles would hang out on the beach for the summer. It was 1965, and Jim Osterberg had just joined the car–owning set, but as was his habit he had flouted the conventional entry requirements of parental approval, a driver’s license—or even driving lessons. Lynn Klavitter, his steady date throughout twelfth grade, was impressed that Jim had saved up enough cash to afford the ’57 Chevy station wagon, but she wasn’t so impressed by his driving on the two–hundred–mile trip to the resort. Yet the more she asked him to slow down, calmly, avoiding confrontation, the more her kindhearted, funny, but increasingly headstrong boyfriend floored the accelerator, insisting he was in control.

On the final stretch of Highway 31 up to Silver Lake, Lynn started to lose her temper as Jim coaxed the reluctant old red–and–white Chevy up to ninety miles an hour. Suddenly they were shouting at each other, and just as suddenly the wagon’s back end started fishtailing. They swerved out of control and veered off the road; before they could even react, the car flipped over once, twice, then a third time. It mowed down two trees on the grass verge and crashed through bushes upside down as it filled with wood splinters and dust.

As the Chevy groaned to a halt on its roof, its teenage passengers scrambled out of the open windows and looked at each other. The car was a total wreck, but apart from scratches from tree bark and Jim’s bruises from the steering wheel, they were both, unbelievably, unharmed. It was suddenly quiet. Calmly, Jim picked up a license plate that had been ripped from the Chevy, linked hands with Lynn, and they walked off, up the hill, and all the way to the resort, where they would both lie on the beach in the sun.

It was maybe a couple of days later that Osterberg told his closest friend, Jim McLaughlin, how lucky he was to be alive. “Here we go, another of Osterberg’s tall tales,” thought McLaughlin, and promptly forgot about it. A few years later, Iggy Stooge mentioned to a journalist how he was special, that he’d survived what should have been a fatal accident and was destined to make his mark. Even though the notion of an indestructible rock star seemed faintly ludicrous, like many of his inflated claims it made good copy.

These were optimistic, booming, postwar years in America, when anything seemed possible. It was a time and a place when a smart kid, brought up in an environment seething with intellectuals and scientific savants, driven by intelligent, hardworking ambitious parents, could seemingly do anything he wanted. He could make friends with some of the most powerful figures in the industrial world, and witness first–hand an intimate arts scene peopled with characters who would later become superstars. With this environment, the right kind of kid—one with drive, a fierce intelligence, and the right kind of charm—could become the president of the United States. And this was the future that classmates and teachers in Ann Arbor predicted for Jim Osterberg, the witty, well–dressed classroom politician, a kid with an enviable knack of making connections with the rich and powerful.

Coachville Gardens Trailer Park sits in green surroundings on Carpenter Road, just outside the city of Ann Arbor, officially in the town of Ypsilanti, Michigan. Although it’s gained the inevitable gaggle of sprawling big–box stores, Ypsilanti is still mostly a lush, quiet place where nothing much happens. There are plenty of isolated wooden houses where you can live undisturbed, watching out for cranes and squirrels in the summer and taking your dogs for long, reflective walks through the crisp virginal snow in the winter. It’s a beautiful setting, although, like many small country towns, there’s occasionally a feeling of claustrophobia, and it’s easy to bump into slightly odd characters who watch TV late into the night on jerry–rigged cable hookups, haunt Internet chat rooms, or get loaded on illegal drugs to numb their boredom.

Although these days Ypsilanti rather grandly terms itself a city, in reality it’s overshadowed by its much bigger neighbor, Ann Arbor, which since 1837 has been defined by the presence of the University of Michigan. The university was celebrated for its diverse curriculum and liberal ethos and, together with the presence of General Motors and Ford in nearby Detroit, it would attract a constant influx of new residents to the city and stimulate thriving local industries in engineering, pharmaceuticals, and electronics.

The influence of the university ensured that Ann Arbor was a classy town. People who lived there drank espresso, formed arts groups, and took dancing lessons. In contrast, people from Ypsilanti were often regarded as midwestern hillbillies. The two towns weren’t totally uneasy bedfellows: plenty of academics might dispense intellectual wisdom at the university and then return home to a sprawling isolated farmhouse in Ypsi’s beautiful countryside, but the divide was perceptible for anyone who crossed the city limits: the gap between people whose salaries were generated by their intellects and those whose weekly paychecks were earned with the rude labor of their hands on a farm or in a factory; between people of culture and rural rubes. It was on that divide that Jim Osterberg and Iggy Pop grew up.

As a rock star, Iggy Pop would often refer to his upbringing in a trailer park, the definitive blue–collar home. But as a schoolboy, Jim Osterberg was regarded as the middle–class boy most likely to succeed. Other kids admired, and some of them envied, his elegant dress, his parents’ house in Ann Arbor Hills—an elegant enclave peopled by academics, architects, and the nation’s most significant captains of industry—and a confidence that seemed unshakable.

In the late 1940s, Ann Arbor, along with most of Michigan, was undergoing an economic boom. Money still flowed in from military contracts, while industrial giants including Ford and General Motors were readying themselves for a huge expansion in demand as a million ex–servicemen prepared to spend their government mortgage loans. In the east of the state, all the way over to Detroit and its huge River Rouge Ford plant, new factory buildings sprouted in once-green, peaceful locations, with resonant Native American names. Multistory buildings shot up on the Michigan University campus, and although housing was being developed all around the city, there was still a severe shortage. In 1948, a small group of businessmen headed by Perry Brown, who managed a machine shop in the city, and the Gingras brothers—Irv, Leo and George—developed a small trailer park on Carpenter Road, which they named Coachville Gardens, aiming to attract workers at the Ford factory and the local telephone company. Among the first people to move in, in the fall of 1949, were James Newell Osterberg, his wife Louella, and their infant son, James Newell Junior, who had been born, prematurely, in Muskegon’s Osteopathic Hospital on April 21, 1947. The unconventionally small family would become well known around Coachville Gardens: “It was a small trailer with a very large mother and a very skinny tall father,” says Brad Jones, who lived nearby, “like something you’d see in a cult movie. The trailer was very small, and the dad was an Ichabod Crane kinda guy, real tall and thin, and mom was just a square body. But you know what? They connected alright. Somehow it worked.”

Jim Osterberg’s earliest memory is of being in Louella’s lap, playing a game where “she’d recite a kind of a chant, in Danish, then on the last word almost drop me to the floor and pick me back up. And I wanted to do it again and again.” Jim Junior grew up in his mother’s warm, nurturing love and surrounded by his father’s baseball accoutrements (“He had played some semi–pro baseball, he had an enormous bat, and the mitt, and everything that goes with it”).

James Newell Osterberg Senior, the dominating influence in the life of the son who carried his name, was born on March 28, 1921; he was of Irish and English descent, but spent his youth in a Michigan orphanage, lonely and unwanted until, when he was age fourteen, two spinster Jewish sisters named Esther and Ida Osterberg walked into the orphanage and decided that James was the child who most needed a home. They nurtured and loved him, and paid for his education, before passing away in quick succession; one in mourning for their lovely house, bulldozed to make way for a highway, and the second for her adored sister. James appreciated the break he’d been given late in life and worked hard at school. A keen baseball player, he later played in the minor leagues and tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, although he never obtained the contract card that designated professional athlete status. Like many of his generation, James Osterberg’s education was interrupted by the war, but his obvious college potential meant he was trained as a radio operator in the Army Air Force (in later years he would still remember his missions over Germany and warn his son off the place). After the war James Senior toyed with studying dentistry and osteopathy, before training as a teacher of English and moving to Ypsilanti to take a job at the high school on Packard Road, a four–minute drive from Coachville.

James Osterberg Senior was regarded by most of those who knew him as a reserved, even severe teacher, who graded his students strictly. He taught English, and assisted in sports; as a new teacher, he was more likely to teach the less academic pupils, in which case much of the emphasis was on public speaking. Many of his ex–pupils remember being intimidated by him during their school days, although as adults they’ve come to admire his tenacity and commitment; one pupil, Mary Booth, describes him as her most “feared—and favorite” teacher. Around 1958, Osterberg landed a better–paid job at Fordson High, in the Dearborn district, an area on the outskirts of Detroit dominated by a huge Ford plant. The bigger paycheck meant the family could move from their Spirit trailer to a much bigger New Moon, all futuristic and Jetsony. At Fordson Osterberg was respected as a committed, dedicated, and fair teacher who would occasionally unleash a quick, dry humor. “Mr. O” was an idealist; sometimes this made life difficult, notably when he unsuccessfully attempted to found a teachers’ union. According to Jim Junior, only one friend backed him up and the project was abandoned.

Not all of Mr. Osterberg’s charges remember his lessons, but those who do retain huge respect for his dedication and perseverance. Patricia Carson Celusta was inspired to become a high school teacher by his example and credits him for transforming her from a shy girl into a confident public speaker. “He made you think beyond yourself,” she recalls fondly, remembering that this inspirational figure helped impart “truths that have sustained us all.” Now retired after her own long career as an English and speech teacher, Patricia Celusta hails James Osterberg as “the very definition of a teacher” and still treasures a battered old copy of the English textbook from which he taught. “Mr. O” inculcated confidence and the power of the spoken word into his successful pupils, as well as encouraging their understanding of wider cultural and literary issues. Many other ex–pupils back up Patricia’s description of him as committed, capable, and fair. So does Osterberg Junior. But this was the fifties, and Jim Senior was a military–minded man, and that intellectual rigor required a backbone of discipline that meant on several occasions he would resort to using the belt or the hickory stick on his son.

While Jim Junior would disappoint his disciplinarian father countless times over the following years, and often confront him, sometimes with violent undertones, you could say that the belt and hickory stick worked. Like his father, Jim was a driven personality, although in his case that drive was wrapped up in a charm and wackiness that also betrayed the influence of his easy–going and cuddly mom.

Around Coachville Gardens, Mr. Osterberg was regarded as an intimidating presence, although a few people speculate that some of that severity came from necessity, given his job. According to Brad Jones, “He'd only be severe if you let him get away with it.” James Senior’s tough, no–nonsense attitude (“trailers make sense” was how he justified the family’s unconventional abode) was reflected in his dress and military haircut. But he would also take Jim Junior on long idyllic drives into the country. When Frank Sinatra came on the radio, Osterberg Senior would sing along with him. Over fifty years later, his son remembers drives in the Osterberg Cadillac, listening to his dad crooning “Young At Heart” and dreaming of becoming a singer.

Louella Osterberg, nee Kristensen, was a cuddly woman of Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian blood who doted on the two men in the house and became a well-loved figure around western Ypsilanti, despite working full–time in an office at Bendix, one of the main industrial employers in Ann Arbor. In later years she would preside over increasingly competitive arguments between father and son, but she remained remarkably unfazed. Somehow, for all the male aggression on display in the tiny trailer in later years, there seemed little doubt that this was a happy, loving, if unconventional family.

For many people in Coachville Gardens, the trailer park represented an American arcadia, where kids in bibbed denim overalls played happily in rolling fields, dreaming of Sputnik and Superman. Parents could leave their children to play around the park, safe in the knowledge that they'd be watched over by friendly adults in the close-knit community. It was probably this family atmosphere, plus the postwar housing shortage in Ann Arbor, that drew the Osterbergs to the park; once there, though, they stayed put until the fall of 1982, be–coming some of Coachville’s longest–term residents. There was green farmland all around, the nearest building being a stone, one-room elementary school on the other side of Carpenter Road and the Leveretts’ adjacent farmhouse, the premier hangout for kids in the area, who could earn pocket money working at Chuck and Dorothy’s vegetable stall or picking corn for them in the summer. For Osterberg Senior the presence of Pat’s Par Three golf course, right beside the trailer park, was a major draw. Behind the trailer park, a small track led to the railway lines. Young James could hear the mournful hoot of freight trains passing through at night, and in the daytime he could sneak down to watch them clatter past on their way from New York to Chicago.

On most days, kids from the trailer park played baseball or football around its snaking driveway. From the age of two or so, Jim was a regular at the kids’ birthday parties, although he spent more time in his trailer than most. Although not a snob, James Senior was careful about the kids with whom his son associated. He was particularly worried when Jim Junior wandered down to see the Bishops, who were “different.” Jim would later describe them as “bona fide hillbillies”; however, the Bishops were well–liked, fun to be around, and a natural focus for Jim’s attentions. But when Jim Junior later developed a fascination with the precocious Diane Bishop, Jim Senior seemed to acquire an almost supernatural omniscience, and he inevitably turned up to whisk his son away from her. Osterberg Senior had no such concerns about Duane Brown and Sharon Gingras, whose parents had helped develop the site, and both remember childhood games around the park, although Sharon remembers that “Jim didn’t play out as much as the other kids, although you’d always see him at parties. His mom was popular, I liked to go over there, she always seemed so kind, calm and pleasant to be around.” In contrast, Mr. Osterberg frightened the kids: “I don’t know why,” says Duane Brown, “he was a very tall thin man with a marine haircut and I didn’t like being with him. He never did anything that made us not like him, he just came across as very gruff.”

From the Hardcover edition.

***

Paul Trynka "Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed"

Ronnie — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 13:53:00 +0000

“Fellow rock stars, casual members of the public, lords and media magnates, countless thousands of people will talk of their encounters with this driven, talented, indomitable creature, a man who has plumbed the depths of depravity, yet emerged with an indisputable nobility. Each of them will share an admiration and appreciation of the contradictions and ironies of his incredible life. Even so, they are unlikely to fully comprehend both the heights and the depths of his experience, for the extremes are simply beyond the realms of most people’s understanding.”

—from the Prologue

The first full biography of one of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest pioneers and legendary wild men

Born James Newell Osterberg Jr., Iggy Pop transcended life in Ypsilanti, Michigan, to become a member of the punk band the Stooges, thereby earning the nickname “the Godfather of Punk.” He is one of the most riveting and reckless performers in music history, with a commitment to his art that is perilously total. But his personal life was often a shambles, as he struggled with drug addiction, mental illness, and the ever-problematic question of commercial success in the music world. That he is even alive today, let alone performing with undiminished energy, is a wonder. The musical genres of punk, glam, and New Wave were all anticipated and profoundly influenced by his work.

Paul Trynka, former editor of Mojo magazine, has spent much time with Iggy’s childhood friends, lovers, and fellow musicians, gaining a profound understanding of the particular artistic culture of Ann Arbor, where Iggy and the Stooges were formed in the mid to late sixties. Trynka has conducted over 250 interviews, has traveled to Michigan, New York, California, London, and Berlin, and, in the course of the last decade or so at Mojo, has spoken to dozens of musicians who count Iggy as an influence. This has allowed him to depict, via real-life stories from members of bands like New Order and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Iggy’s huge influence on the music scene of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, as well as to portray in unprecedented detail Iggy’s relationship with his enigmatic friend and mentor David Bowie. Trynka has also interviewed Iggy Pop himself at his home in Miami for this book. What emerges is a fascinating psychological study of a Jekyll/Hyde personality: the quietly charismatic, thoughtful, well-read Jim Osterberg hitched to the banshee creation and alter ego that is Iggy Pop.

Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed is a truly definitive work—not just about Iggy Pop’s life and music but also about the death of the hippie dream, the influence of drugs on human creativity, the nature of comradeship, and the depredations of fame.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. Turning 60 in April, "Godfather of Punk" Iggy Pop still displays the body and energy of a 20-year-old, and in this volume Trynka (Portrait of the Blues) captures Iggy's debauchery in an obsessively detailed and compulsively readable biography that is as high-energy and entertaining as its subject. Trynka covers all phases of the "driven, talented, indomitable creature" born James Newell Osterberg Jr. in 1947, with special attention paid to how his band the Stooges roared out of Detroit in the late 1960s, then crashed in a "slow, painful" drug-addled disintegration in the early '70s. While he expertly details Iggy's many comebacks, especially those involving David Bowie, Trynka is most sympathetic to how the Stooges' "brutal, monotonous riffing" was the perfect musical support to Iggy's outrageous gender-bending performances, in which "the blood running down Iggy's chest would become a defining image in his career." Ending with a look at how the Stooges' 2004 reunion shows attracted both older fans and younger postpunks, Trynka shows how every aspect of Iggy's work has now become "an integral element of today's rock and alternative music."

From Booklist:

In the last throes of the 1960s, Jim Osterberg, a charming, hyperintelligent, ambitious boy from a trailer park near Ann Arbor, Michigan, teamed up with two miscreant brothers to form the band the Stooges, single-handedly presaging the entire punk, new wave, metal, and alternative rock movements. His alter ego, Iggy Pop, perhaps the greatest rock front man and sex icon ever, was exalted with unbridled enthusiasm on the one hand yet reviled as an abject failure, a joke, and a loser on the other. A true survivor, Iggy Pop is today a respected elder statesman of rock, known as the Godfather of Punk, but his road was famously brutal. Trynka reminds us that this legendary shamanic performer, epitomized as the ultimate rock 'n' roll god, is a human being who struggled with the distinction between Jim, the sensitive poet, and Iggy, the outlandish child-man who must outdo himself at every turn. This fitting biography from a former editor of Mojo magazine finally tells the full story of Iggy's life, rescuing coherence from a tale of thrills, contradictions, debauchery, betrayal, and (ultimately) redemption.

**