Tag: cultural history

Rock Bios

The Literary Voyeur2 Comments
Self-Portrait, DIA Chelsea, 2018

The Beautiful Ones by Prince 

Autobiography – Music and Musicians – 21st Century – Cultural History

One part personal scrapbook, one part cultural history, The Beautiful Ones is Prince’s final “letter to the world.” Filled with handwritten notes, lyrics, and journal entries, Prince’s singular vision springs from the pages like a flight of doves. The Beautiful Ones begins with Dan Pipenbring’s moving introduction and then winds its way through Prince’s early life as the child of two musicians, his beginnings on the stages of Minneapolis, and his inevitable mega-stardom.  Every inch of this book is pure Prince: witty, naughty, melodic, and brilliantly, blisteringly cool. Even his handwriting, looping and elegant, is a sparkling work of art. 

Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge by Mark Yarm

Biography – Music and Musicians – 20th Century – Cultural History

Fans of Please Kill Me might like to fast forward twenty or so years to the start of the nineties when a sound that is often considered the wayward stepchild of punk began raging out from the basements and garages of the gloomy Northwest. Mark Yarm employs the model set forth by McNeil and McCain in their landmark oral history to tell the story of grunge. Comprised of almost 250 interviews conducted over twenty years that cover all the glory, gore, and greed that accompanied the movement. Everybody Loves Our Town is compulsively readable and deeply nostalgic.  

Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin by Alice Echols

Biography – Music and Musicians – 20th Century – Cultural History

Alice Echols uses the life of Janis Joplin to illuminate the seismic cultural shift that took place between the late 1950s and early 1970s. Beginning with her conventional but lonely upbringing in Port Arthur, Texas, Scars of Sweet Paradise traces Joplin’s journey from a misunderstood school girl to a raucous genius of rock and blues all the way to her tragic end in a lonely hotel room and the legendary status she has maintained ever since. Echols gives us a vibrant and honest portrait of this one-of-a-kind artist. 

Erotic Memoirs

The Literary VoyeurLeave a comment
Librarian

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany

Erotic–Memoir–Cultural History–20th Century

Samuel R. Delany, best known for his groundbreaking science fiction, chronicles his escapades on Forty-second street in this vivid and honest memoir. If you were even mildly tickled by David Simon’s attempt to recapture the glory days of Times Square smut in The Deuce, you will likely delight in Delany’s nostalgic descent into the recesses of the theaters, peep shows, and toy shops, while he describes a world in which men, both straight and gay, felt the freedom to indulge in their desires and at the same time tap into a tenuous yet potent feeling of camaraderie and community that has long since been replaced by cartoon musicals and personal handheld devices.

The Surrender by Toni Bentley

Erotic–Memoir–21st Century

Dancer Toni Bentley is effusive and at times hyperbolic in her admiration for backdoor bliss, but despite the dramatic flair, her memoir can’t help being both sincere and charming in its way. By exalting both the physical sensation and the incredible sense of power and release she feels while engaging in the act of anal sex, Bentley makes a convincing plug for those who have yet to cross this particular Rubicon. 

A Letter From My Father: The Strange, Intimate Correspondence of W. Ward Smith to His Son Page Smith by Page Smith

Erotic–Memoir–20th Century

Strange and intimate indeed! Upon his father’s death in 1968, Page Smith was bequeathed the epic letter that his father had intended for him to read and learn from.  In between the mundane details of his business and family life, W. Ward Smith frequently litters his missive with intensely graphic retellings of his gluttonous sexual escapades that spanned decades. Thankfully, Page Smith rejected his initial impulse to burn the over ten-thousand pages, and instead decided to publish A Letter From My Father, making it a rare and abundant social/sexual document written by a genuine and prolific libertine.