Cultural Artifacts

I've been remiss in not keeping people up to date with my reading and listening.

In honor of the anniversary of JFK's assassination, I give you Max Allen Collins trilogy. Max Allen Collins' private eye, Nathan Heller pieces together the plot to assassinate JFK in Bye Bye, Baby,his novel about the death of Marilyn Monroe,Target Lancer, which covers the real but long lost assassination attempt in Chicago just prior to the successful one, and the finale Ask Not.

Collins was supposed to close out the Heller series with the JFK assassination but he promises at the end of Ask Not to bring us more on LBJ, one of the co-conspirators, and Watergate.

I like James Ellroy on the JFK assassination best but Collins hits the mark with the triangulation of the CIA,the Mob and the Oil men around LBJ. In Ask Not,he reproduces Jack Ruby's testimony from prison and has his own solution to the identity of Lee Harvey Oswald. Heller manages to tie up all the historical loose ends without reading as a forced thesis. He supplies amble references to his narrative in the appendices and doesn't thing much of books like Posner's Case Closed. He agrees with my 13-year old self when I blurted out at the time "LBJ did it." But he had a cast of supporting characters.

In the news has been the fight over Gore Vidal's will. The New York Times this past Sunday published an account of the family fighting over Vidal's $35 million estate. After his long-term partner Howard Austen pre-deceased him, Vidal changed his will, which left Howard everything to leaving it all to Harvard University. Having never gone to Harvard, let alone college,Vidal left his step-sister and nephew perplexed. Vidal also left off his Fillipino man servant. His step sister claimed Vidal owed her $1,000,000 or half a million, depending on the interviewer, from the lawsuits with Bill Buckley. His nephew claimed Gore promised him his Hollywood house. But missing in the equation was the fact that Vidal never left them anything in the prior will and he had already left his papers and publications to Harvard. So we got an account of his late life drunkeness and dementia and the argument he was non-compis mentis. The will is in court. Harvard says they have no house in the fight and will just wait for the ruling.

But we can read Tim Teeman's In Bed With Gore Vidal:Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of An American Master. Despite the blurbs, I find the book tough going when I wanted gossip. Teeman spends an inordinate time trying to define Gore's sexuality while quoting from past interviews with him where he tried to persuade people that he never had sex with Howard Austen--well, almost never. His step-sister comes off as a pistol, defending her mother whom Gore hated. There is a whole lot of discussion whether James Trimble was in fact Vidal's love of his life. His mother and sister says Trimble was never gay. But you do get to read about all the celebrities Gore had sex with and those with whom he didn't. 

If you are actually interested in Gore Vidal's sexual ambiguity,you can read Anais Nin's Mirages: the unexpurgated diary of Anais Nin 1939-1947. All her lovers are here starting with Henry Miller and ending with Rupert Pole. The extensive section on her Platonic romance with Gore Vidal exposes his sexual identity more than Teeman's book does. The suprise of the volume, to me, was that almost all Nin's life during this period was in New York City, since I always associated her with Paris. And the second aspect of the book that was interesting was the extent that Nin privately arranged small printings of her work. It was not until Sparrow Press picked up her work in 1961 that she had a regular publisher.

Lucien Freud refused to sit down for an official biographer but London journalist and editor Geordie Grieg captures Lucian in Breakfast with Lucien:The Astounding Life and Outrageous Times of Britain's Great Modern Painter.  I thought Francis Bacon took the cake but Lucien makes the previously mentioned people like Nin and Vidal look like puritans and prudes. Between all the legitimate and illegitimate children, lovers and wives,Lucien Freud had a management problem. The eruption in the prices for his paintings were not just the acceptance of his style on the art scene but necessary for paying off his amazingly large gambling debts. Grieg treats his subject with much love and respect while tracking down his private life, which he never spoke about.

If you want a guide to how America got here, ignore the new biography of Norman Mailer and go straight to Mind of an Outlaw,his Selected essays. His early hits with the Village Voice are here like his endorsement of Ernest Hemingway for President and "The White Negro". His convention coverage is in this volume starting with the Kennedy nomination in 1960 and ending with George H.W. Bush in 1996. By the time of George W., Norman has mellowed into a wise, old Jewish man from the time when he was a proclaimed "libertarian socialist". The older Mailer was still penetrating about the myths and lies America told itself about its institutions and the "noble causes" it went to war. If anything summed up Mailer's view of contemporary America, it is his review of "American Psycho", which he took as an exacting critique of the consumer and capitalist society we became by the end of the 20th Century. It really is a must read. Luckily, we now have his best essays in one place.

For Albert Camus' 100th anniversary, Robert Zaretsky had offer his marvelous A Life Worth Living--Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning. In this short but compact book, Zaretsky not only adds to Camus' biography with new details but does a marvelous exegesis on Camus' use and insights into classical myths. One is his take on Camus' Sisyphus and what he omitted from the myth in his account. The other is the notion that The Plague is based on Thucycides account of the Plague in Athens and how it destroyed all the "democratic" structures in that ancient land. Of course, like many recent accounts of Camus, we have a fuller appreciation of his Algerian roots and the dilemma that posed later in his life when Algeria fought for it independence.

For your listening pleasure:

Jimi Hendrix at the Miami Pop Festival in 1968. 

The Band "Live at the Academy of Music 1971--the Rock of Ages Converts" with Legion of Honor winner Bob Dylan.