An uneven ride through an intriguing journey of sex, lies, and videotape.
This debut memoir follows a stripper from her first days at the infamous Mitchell Brothers club to the fatal shooting of her lover.
Corday (her stage and pen name) began stripping in early 1980s San Francisco, seeking more freedom and money than her office job allowed. After winning an amateur night contest, the author quickly found an artistic home at the O’Farrell Theater, run by the enterprising Mitchell brothers. Jim and Art “Artie” Mitchell were known for the theater, which was constantly sued or shut down by the police, and for producing the 1971 porn film Behind the Green Door, starring former Ivory Snow model Marilyn Chambers. Early on, Corday began a sexual relationship with Artie, which led to a long-term connection. The author staged several of her own shows at the O’Farrell, including an act where she portrayed then-San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, who vehemently opposed the club. Corday also befriended legendary writer and longtime Mitchell Brothers ally Hunter S. Thompson, and performed with burlesque and pornography luminaries like Tempest Storm and Traci Lords. The author acted in three Mitchell Brothers porn films, including the long-anticipated sequel to Behind the Green Door. Artie’s constant substance abuse as well as his harem sometimes compromised but never dimmed the powerful bond Corday experienced with her boss, who was shot by his own brother in 1991. The author delivers incredible tales of a strip club post-sexual revolution, offering rich details and historical tidbits. But her writing style is somewhat flawed. Though she has a master’s degree in English, her sentence structure is repetitive and her use of past and present tense inconsistent. She’s also highly critical of certain fellow dancers and performers, often commenting on their weight and her own superiority. In one behind-the-scenes story, Corday refers to a little person as a “freak.” Though memoirists don’t require likability to be compelling, the author’s judgmental attitude and habitual telling rather than showing transform what should be a titillating read into a bumpy experience.
An uneven ride through an intriguing journey of sex, lies, and videotape.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-934248-62-1
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Denizen Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.
A collection of affirmations, noncloying and often provocative, about the things that make justice worth fighting for and life worth living.
Gay—a poet whose last book, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, bears the semantically aligned title Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015)—is fully aware that all is not well in the world: “Racism is often on my mind,” he writes by way of example. But then, he adds, so are pop music, books, gardening, and simple acts of kindness, all of which simple pleasures he chronicles in the “essayettes” that make up this engaging book. There is much to take delight in, beginning with the miraculous accident of birth, his parents, he writes, a “black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination.” As that brief passage makes clear, this is not a saccharine kind of delight-making but instead an exercise in extracting the good from the difficult and ugly. Sometimes this is a touch obvious: There’s delight of a kind to be found in the odd beauty of a praying mantis, but perhaps not when the mantis “is holding in its spiky mitts a large dragonfly, which buzzed and sputtered, its big translucent wings gleaming as the mantis ate its head.” Ah, well, the big ones sometimes eat the little ones, and sometimes we’re left with holes in our heads, an idiom that Gay finds interesting if also sad: “that usage of the simile implies that a hole in the head, administered by oneself, might be a reasonable response.” No, the reasonable response is, as Gay variously enumerates, to resist, enjoy such miracles as we can, revel in oddities such as the “onomatopoeicness of jenky,” eat a pawpaw whenever the chance to do so arises, water our gardens, and even throw up an enthusiastic clawed-finger air quote from time to time, just because we can.
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-792-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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