April 2004 Archives
In the late 1990s. David Denby the movie reviewer for The New Yorker decided he wanted to make $1 million so he could buy out his soon-to-be-ex-wife's share of the New York apartment they owned. What better way to make that kind of money, he figured, than by investing it in high tech stocks? The market was rising daily, and seemed unstoppable. He started hanging out with the founder of imClone, Sam Waksal, and Merrill Lynch's famous high tech analyst Henry Blodgett. Denby fell hard for their hype and invested nearly everything he had in the tech sector.
As you might guess from the title of this memoir, Denby didn't make a million. In fact, he lost almost that much money. Because he's such an insightful writer, it's thrilling to read how he deals with his long hard tumble towards financial disaster. Link
Lil Abner has always been one of my favorite newspaper comic strips. The wacky storylines, lovable hill people, and cute mountain girls appealed to me even when I was a little kid. 
This Lil Abner anthology has some of the best stories and art of the strip's entire run. The stories are funny -- the $19.95 Japanese import car, called the Nomoto (get it?) is a classic. Best of all, the girls are drawn by Frank Frazetta! Link
House Industries, the world's greatest typeface designers, have published a 240-page book chronicling their work. I haven't seen the book itself, but the sample spreads shown here are stunning. The $69 book has a 32-page section on House's design process and it comes with four fonts. Link
Chris Ware's cartoons have fascinated me for a decade. He has an extremely clean line, and his compositions are so painstakingly rendered it must take him weeks and weeks to do a single page. It's not surprising that he makes old fashioned penny arcade style contraptions -- he has the talent and the patience to create such mechanical marvels. This sketchbook of his work from the 80s and 90s is a treat, because it shows his looser, quicker studies and ideas. I am surprised he has so many different styles. The book itself is a work of Ware art. Link
Back in 1966, a New York Newsday reporter named Mike McGrady decided to play a joke on the world. He wanted to write a dirty book along the lines of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, but he wanted to make it intentionally bad. He wanted it to be awful, and loaded with sex. He enlisted 24 of his Newsday colleagues to each crank out a chapter of the book, then hired a young woman to pretend to be the author. Imagine his surprise when Naked Came the Stranger shot to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list and stayed there for 25 weeks, selling millions of copies (each of the writers got their share of the $1.2 million it took in). When the world discovered the hoax, the book sold even more copies, thanks to the masterful way McGrady worked the press into a frenzy, offering an "exclusive" to everyone who called him, and even getting Walter Cronkite to fly out in a helicopter to interview him. Bill Moyers, publisher at Newsday during the time, was fired in part for his participation in the hoax.
In 1970, McGrady wrote a book called Stranger Than Naked, or How to Write Dirty Books for Fun & Profit, which reveals the story behind the story. It's been optioned for a by a movie production company. Link
This biography of Frank Sinatra, now out in paperback, sounds plenty juicy. It was written by George Jacobs, Sinatra's personal valet, who worked for Ol' Blue Eyes for 13 years, addressing him as "Mr. S."
JFK snorting lines of coke at Mr. S's house with Peter Lawford? Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich making out in Mr. S's swimming pool? Jacobs says it's all true.
From the book: "He couldn't sit still, and he couldn't be alone. Thus he always needed a girl, and she didn't have to be famous. First he'd go for his leading lady. If she wasn't free, he'd try some famous ex, like Lana Turner, whom he'd dated in the forties, for old times. Then he'd work his way down the food chain, starting with the starlets, then the hookers, and, if all else failed, he'd call Peggy Lee, who lived down the block."
Link
This book reminds me a lot of Chip Rowe's The Book of Zines, a one-shot digest of the best of paper zines from the 1990s. Blogs have pretty much replaced zines as the medium of choice for amateur publishers. The main difference is that there are far more blogs than there ever were zines. This is is probably because it's much easier to do a blog than a zine. Anyway, Alan Graham and Bonnie Burton did a wonderful job finding some very funny, thought-provoking material from the enormous slush pile of blogs. I don't know how they did it, but here it is, in one easy-to-read book. (Full disclosure -- my work appears in both The Book of Zines and Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers). Link
