[Illustration by ALEX FINE] BALTIMORE CITY PAPER: It’s 10 years since Anthony Bourdain delivered Kitchen Confidential, the “obnoxious, over-testosteroned account of my life in the restaurant business” as he told The Observer in 2006. A classic of its kind, Confidential was a pugnacious, take-no-prisoners look into the murky world of restaurant kitchens and the misfits and miscreants who inhabit them. Above all, it was brilliantly written and had the ring of truth–a memoir/rant by one of the culinary world’s foot soldiers, a battle-scarred veteran who’d done his time and lived to tell the frequently sordid and salacious tale. Cooks across […]
BOOKS: Mark Twain Will Have His Revenge
THE INDEPENDENT: Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain’s dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published. The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century. […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR Writer Hampton Sides was a 6-year-old living in Memphis when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. “I remember the tension,” he says. “I remember seeing tanks, and I remember feeling that our city was ripping apart.” Four decades later, Sides, an editor-at-large for Outside magazine and the author of the historical books Ghost Soldiers and Blood and Thunder, has returned to the subject of King’s assassination. In his new book, Hellhound on His Trail, Sides carefully weaves the movements of King’s assassin, James Earl Ray, with those of King, who had traveled to Memphis […]
BOOKS: Still Kinda Blue
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] BALTIMORE CITY PAPER: “Lovers give each other Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, even though its mood offers no consolation, let alone ecstasy,” veteran British sportswriter and music critic Richard Williams writes near the top of The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music (Norton), his thoughtful look at what went into, and came out of, Davis’s 1959 album. “But those who give it want to share its richness of spirit, its awareness of the infinite, and its extraordinary quality of constantly revealing more to those who know it best. Sometimes […]
BOOKS: Charles In Charge
Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays Vol. 2 1946-1992 By Charles Bukowski City Lights Publishers April 2010, 274 pp. BY PAUL MAHER JR. BOOK CRITIC Charles Bukowski, the ever-prolific even in death American novelist and poet, continues to satisfy the insatiable hunger of his vast cult-audience for more, not with bottom drawer rejected pieces, but with significant work that instills into his canon an ever-growing indication of his true importance as a man of letters. The posthumous shadow he casts across American lit only continues to loom larger with each passing year. Editor David Calonne has ably compiled […]
THE EARLY WORD: The Price Of Free Speech
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] Journalist Maziar Bahari and Dr. Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia University, join the National Constitution Center for a conversation on the future of free press and free speech in Iran on Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 6:30pm at the National Constitution Center. Bahari was held in solitary confinement following Iran’s disputed elections in June 2009 for allegedly playing a role in a Western media effort to instigate unrest. He was released in October 2009, and is currently an international correspondent for Newsweek. The program is taking place in conjunction with the One Book, […]
BOOKS: Michele Bachmann Vs. The Gays!
TALKING POINTS MEMO: The new issue of the Michele Bachmann comic, False Witness! The Michele Bachmann Story, is now out on sale. The producers of the comic appear to be taking a thematic approach in the series, dedicating an issue to a particular area of Bachmann’s right-wing obsessions — and they’ve done a great job of it in this issue. This episode: The gays. As for the treatment of the subject matter, the creators set out to make a serious point: That Bachmann has advanced her career on a platform of singling out a group within society for hatred and […]
BOOKS: Edward Gorey, The Godfather Of Goth
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Edward Gorey was a lot of things — illustrator, author, designer, screenwriter, animal lover, pop culture junkie, antiquarian aesthete — but above all else, he was, for better or worse, the post-modern godfather of goth, a lineage that stretches back to Edgar Allan Poe, the pre-modern godfather of goth. Absent Gorey’s meticulously cross-hatched pen-and-ink chiaroscuros — typically exquisitely gloomy drawing room interiors and the forlorn coal-eyed waifs that haunt them — there would be no Tim Burton. Though he illustrated and authored countless books from the 1950s through the 1990s, and continued re-packaging and publishing his work […]
REALITY CHECK: The Paranoid Style Of American Politics Minus Adult Supervision Equals Right Now
[Illustration by ALEX FINE] THINK PROGRESS: Des Moines register reports: “A third of Iowans from across the political spectrum say they support the ‘tea party’ movement, sounding a loud chorus of dissatisfaction with government, according to The Des Moines Register’s new Iowa Poll.” But how loud a chorus is this, really? 55 percent of Americans say they’re personally protected by a guardian angel. 38 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Cuba and 36 percent are favorably disposed toward socialism, but I don’t see anyone writing newspaper articles about how a populist wave of socialism is sweeping the country. […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR For the last three years, comedian John Oliver has been telling some serious jokes as “Senior British Correspondent” on The Daily Show With John Stewart. He won an Emmy for his work on the show in 2009, but his comedic career is not confined to the fake newsroom. Also last year, Oliver wrote and starred in his own stand-up special, John Oliver: Terrifying Times and appeared in the Mike Myer comedy flop The Love Guru. When he’s not on the screen, you can hear Oliver on the airwaves as the host of the TimesOnline weekly satirical news podcast […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
FRESH AIR There’s an abundance of journalist coverage of U.S. involvement in the Iraq war, but Jeremy Scahill has found a niche investigating Blackwater, a military contractor with a long involvement in the war. He’s broken many stories in The Nation, and his latest, published Nov. 23, uncovers the contractor’s involvement in a covert program run by the U.S. Joint Special Command (JSOC). Scahill says that even though tax payers are funding this shadow army, their operations are shrouded in secrecy. In his article, Scahill reports that Blackwater (which has officially changed its name to Xe Services LLC) is operating […]
LET IT BLURT: Lester Bangs Speaks
ROCK SNOB ENCYCLOPEDIA: Back in the day, Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches formed a terrible triumvirate of rowdy, hard-living rock scribblers — angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of rock — feared and loathed by the music industry’s power elite. They didn’t just write about rock ‘n’ roll; he lived it, drank it, smoked it, felt it up, snorted it down and puked it up all over the page the morning after. BOING BOING: So what an incredible thrill it was to come across a 90-minute interview with Lester […]
CINEMA: Fly The Friendly Skies
MANOHLA DHARGIS: For most people there’s no joy in sucking down recycled oxygen while hurtling above the clouds. The free drinks and freshly baked cookies in business might be nice. (I wouldn’t know.) For most of us, though, air travel largely invokes the indignities of the stockyard, complete with the crowding and pushing, the endlessly long lines, hovering handlers, carefully timed feedings, a faint communal reek and underlying whiff of peril. The skies rarely seem friendly anymore, but to Ryan Bingham, the corporate assassin played by George Clooney in the laugh-infused stealth tragedy “Up in the Air,” they’re so welcoming, […]