2012 Round-Up: The Best of the Rest

In any given year, more books cross my path than I could ever possibly read, let alone review. As this particular year winds down, I want to devote a column to the books that land on my desk and never leave; I never get around to writing about them, but I hang on to them just the same—sometimes for personal enjoyment, sometimes with horrified fascination. So here, a highly selective list of the best—and the weirdest—of the orphans, cast-offs and also-rans that lit up my 2012 while you weren’t looking.

Biggest Boat Missed: Jerry Scheff’s ...

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Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?

Heartbreak—the agony of lost love, the ache of a disintegrating relationship, the depression that comes with a one-way ticket to Splitsville—is no fun at any time of year. But getting dumped during the holiday season is orders of magnitude worse. A kiss-off under the mistletoe can ruin Christmas—not just this year, but for years to come, as twinkling lights become the trigger for waves of painful memories.

This holiday season, if your bells have lost their jingle and your nights are all too silent, you can take comfort (if not joy) in a simple, eternal truth: Misery ...

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Yoko Ono, On Her Own

And so this is Christmas—or near enough, anyway—and what have you done? Maybe you’ve spent an afternoon trimming your tree. Maybe you’ve baked some cookies to share. And maybe you’ve listened to the radio; and there’s Yoko Ono’s voice, behind John Lennon’s. Though she’s been making art and music on her own for more than half a century, this is about the only time of year you stand a chance of hearing her—in the chorus of a holiday song, singing with her superstar husband.

Now, that may not be just ...

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The Outlaw Art of 'El Cid'

After the congressional hearings of the 1950s that saw comic books blamed for contributing to juvenile delinquency, the comics industry spent the better part of two decades churning out kid-friendly material under a rigid code of self-censorship. It was not until the mid-1970s that American comics dared again to try and cultivate an adult audience. Several publishers experimented with oversized black-and-white comics magazines; free from the restrictions of the Comics Code Authority, the black-and-whites could explore more mature themes and approaches than the four-color funnybooks.

The results were mixed—in practice, “mature” usually translated as “gore and titties”—but at ...

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How to Be...Funnier Than This Book

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Kurosawa's Pearl Harbor

Maybe we expect too much of our artists. We try and remind ourselves that they are only human; but when a novel or a film makes a statement that elevates us, that speaks of our common humanity in a voice true and wise, it can be a huge letdown to discover that its creator holds divisive political views, or harbors unexamined prejudices. When the artist is the late filmmaker Akira Kurosawa—whose works remain beloved the world over for their powerful statements on timeless themes—the letdown carries a special sting.

But there’s no earthly reason I should feel ...

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Variety's Illustrated History of the World

It’s a whole subgenre of celebrity photography—the snap of the movie star reading Variety. It never looks as candid as it’s meant to; the cover and headline are always plainly visible, and the intent look on the subject’s face tells us less about personal powers of concentration than about the significance of the publication in hand. Like so much in Hollywood, these shots blur the line between recreation and marketing, between human interest and business news. And really, in a company town, where the personal is the professional, what’s the difference?

The shots may be ...

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Aunia Kahn & Russell J. Moon: The Lowbrow Tarot

I own more than three decks of Tarot cards—which I suppose makes me a collector—and my library contains at least one acknowledged classic book on the topic (Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom), which I suppose makes me an aficionado. I don’t use ‘em for divination, mind. I’m a mystic, sure, in the sense of awareness of the presence of the numinous and all that, but in a loosey-goosey Van Morrison kind of way—no guru, no method, no teacher.

So I’m not sold on the cards as a system of knowledge, no. But ...

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Firefly: A Celebration

One of the biggest filmmaking challenges of this summer’s megahit The Avengers was its sprawling ensemble cast. With super-spies and demigods sharing screen time with a rampaging green behemoth, a living legend of World War II and Robert Downey Jr., the challenge of keeping everything in balance—of giving each character a chance to shine while integrating them all into a done-in-one narrative that nevertheless leaves the door open for a sequel—was massive.

Some in Hollywood were skeptical when this daunting task went to writer-director Joss Whedon. While he came with a proven track record in series television ...

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Photojournalist Pamela Klaffke Gets Cute

Everybody loves cute. We’re biologically programmed for it by long millennia of evolutionary psychology, and it’s a good thing, too. The signifiers of cute, you see—soft, rounded features, head oversized relative to the body, eyes oversized relative to the head—are characteristic of infants; and man, we let babies get away with murder. Dig it: If an adult stranger threw up on you or spattered your home with filth, you’d probably give him a punch in the mouth for his trouble. But a baby can drench your favorite shirt with barf, and it elicits a chuckle ...

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Perfect Youth: The Birth of Canadian Punk

London, 1977. New York, 1975. Los Angeles, 1979. Punk rock arose (and arises still) in conditions of urban alienation. The Canadian scene, as chronicled in rock journalist Sam Sutherland’s new book Perfect Youth: The Birth of Canadian Punk, was no exception.

Canada is, contrary to perceptions abroad, a more urbanized country than the US, with its four largest cities accounting for a full 30% of the total population—that is, double the concentration in the States. But—and here’s where the alienation comes in—those urban areas are geographically isolated from each other. The endless miles of prairie ...

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Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page

Despite a renewed media presence—a new concert film hitting theaters this Wednesday, Brad Tolinski’s new book Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page reaching bookstores later this month—it’s not quite right to say that Led Zeppelin is back, simply because they never really went away. True, it’s been 30some years since the band’s breakup following the death of drummer John Bonham, and the surviving members have reconvened only a handful of times since, for one-off events like the 2007 Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert captured in the aforementioned documentary Celebration Day. But the band has remained ...

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Celebrating 25 Years of 'The Princess Bride'

I’m at home sick as I write this. It’s a mild cold—sore throat, headache and general lassitude—but the most unbearable symptom (for those around me, anyway) is pernicious self-pity. Fortunately, this is eminently treatable with baby aspirin, pats on the head and repeated applications of The Princess Bride on DVD.

The film—which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year with a splendiferous new coffee-table book, The Princess Bride: A Celebration (Universe Publishing), to mark the occasion—was neither a box-office smash nor a big award-winner; it received only one Oscar nomination, for its theme song. But ...

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Tracey Miller-Zarneke on 'The Art and Making of Hotel Transylvania'

If we are living in a Golden Age of American animation—although that’s an open question that only History can answer, signs point to yes—then the roots of this renaissance can arguably be traced to the mid-1990s, when Cartoon Network began to shift its focus from endless reruns of Scooby-Doo and towards original programming. The upstart cable channel soon established itself as a home for innovative young talents like Craig McCracken, Maxwell Atoms and Danny Antonucci, all of whom brought idiosyncratic design sense and understated humor to a medium that had long been dominated by static, formulaic Saturday-morning ...

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Michael Heatley & Frank Hopkinson: The Boy in the Song

I am an incorrigible gossip. That means, as the old joke goes, that I usually need no incorrigement. And it may be why I was attracted to criticism—which John Updike puckishly called “the higher gossip”—in the first place. I like being the guy with the inside dope, the straight skinny: the guy who can look at anything from a renaissance masterpiece to an inter-office romance, and tell you what’s really going on.

So it’s no surprise that The Boy in the Song: The True Stories Behind 50 Rock Classics (Chicago Review Press) was catnip for the ...

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Harris Wittels Explores the Art of False Modesty

A couple of weeks ago, I began a column with a paragraph on my process for selecting which books, of all those that cross my desk, I will choose to review. It was a cute opening, I thought: humanize the critic with the old day-in-the-life routine. When the column ran in this space, though, I was surprised to see that My Gracious Editor had snipped the entire opening. I pulled up the original draft to see what I had done wrong (there was no question in my mind that I had done something wrong; I’m not such an egomaniac ...

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A Good Man and His Good Wife: Meet Crockett Johnson & Ruth Krauss

The Hollywood blacklist was a formative trauma for a generation of American artists. From the late 1940s through the 1950s, powerful governmental organizations declared open season on the American left. J. Edgar Hoover was running the FBI as his personal fiefdom in pursuit of domestic enemies, real and imagined, with a special focus on rooting out supposed communist infiltrators in the entertainment industry. In 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which for years had been scrutinizing Hollywood product for signs of socialist propaganda, began a series of public hearings that would continue on and off through the end of ...

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Rock 'n' Roll All Night with Dale Sherman's KISS FAQ

Lots of the show-business books I receive are packaged as series—written by numerous hands and covering a variety of topics, but sharing a distinctive format and trade dress. To date, I’ve been loath to revisit subsequent volumes in any series I’ve already covered. It’s not that if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all—Dave Thompson’s analysis of The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the Music on Film imprint is rather a different sort of book than Ray Morton’s earlier entry on A Hard Day’s Night, for example. But the same ...

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70 Musicians Talk ‘My First Guitar’

Maybe it’s the punk rocker in me breeding an inherent mistrust of nostalgia, or maybe it’s the fact that I grew up in family of musicians so there were always guitars around the house, but I’ve never understood why guitarists get so attached to their instruments.

Music is a trade as much as an art, and guitars are simply tools for pursuing that trade. Sure, they’re expensive and hard to replace, but so is a good set of socket wrenches, and no mechanic, well at least none we’re familiar with, ever gave affectionate nicknames to ...

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Revisiting 'Scott Pilgrim'

True story: There was this kid putting the moves on my teenage daughter—a kid a few years older than her. That in itself was enough to get my back up. But when I spotted the red-and-black “X” patch on the jacket, I braced for the worst. If she was dealing with an X-Men fan, that would be one thing; she can handle a garden-variety geek. But if the patch signified that this kid was taking Scott Pilgrim as a role model—red flag territory, baby.

Read the last Popdose on working-class music in 'Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People ...

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