Because time isn’t always kind: economic reviews in a world full of waste!
As someone who let his longtime ROLLING STONE subscription lapse after one too many Spice Girls covers, I miss good journalism on good (and bad) music. Luckily, DA CAPO BEST MUSIC WRITING 2006 is like hiring a reader service to comb through a year’s worth of the music magazines and clip out all the stuff worth reading. No matter where your taste in tunes lies, there’s something in Mary Gaistkill and Daphne Carr’s collection for you, culling from sources as highbrow as THE NEW YORKER to, well, VIBE. Katy St. Clair has the best overall piece, an account of her taking a bunch of special-ed kids to a Huey Lewis concert. David Thorpe offers a jokingly academic breakdown of R. Kelly’s “Trapped in a Closet” video, and on the review front, Mike McGuirk weighs in with 10 capsule reviews that are either polished genius or stoner incompetence; I can’t decide.
With its disgusting Frank Quitely cover, AMERICAN VIRGIN: HEAD doesn’t exactly draw you in. Neither does the content, a collection of the first four issue from the Vertigo series, about a 21-year-old evangelist who’s a posterboy for the virginity-pledge movement. He’s dead-serious about his save-yourself policy, but is madly in love with his girlfriend, whom he intends to marry. Until she’s raped and decapitated on an overseas mission trip. Then he goes over there to find her head and take revenge on her killers, all the while being tempted with titty. It’s not bad, per se, but this is a story I have no desire to follow further.
The trick of Mark Crick’s KAFKA’S SOUP: A COMPLETE HISTORY OF WORLD LITERATURE IN 14 RECIPES is giving you actual, cookable, edible recipes for your culinary delight, yet each told assuming the distinctive style and voice of an acclaimed author. So, in other words, it’s like having the kids from TRAINSPOTTING teach you how to make some fuckin’ chocolate cake or Raymond Chandler’s noir narrator dish up the details on lamb with dill sauce. Other authors getting roasted (as it were) include Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, Graham Greene and even the Marquis de Sade. Best gag: Harold Pinter doing cheese on toast. If you know why, this book might be for you. For everyone else, it’s just a good idea for a magazine-article-length parody drawn out too far.
Sex and horror meet, collide and spill over all 32 pages of LOVE DAMNED LOVE, a new e-book from the folks at the appropriately named Shiny Hoohah. Edited by Wayne Simmons and Kriscinda Meadows, DAMNED features three original short stories and two utterly twisted poems designed to titillate and terrorize, sometimes simultaneously. There’s pitch-black humor in these red-light tales of sex in a cemetery, sex with dead sitcom stars and sex with a who-knows-what, from up-and-comers (no pun intended) James Harris, Alyssa Sturgill and BOOKGASM reviewer Rebecca Brock. Four talented artists provide illustrations inside and out (again, n.p.i.). I’m not a fan of reading books on a computer screen, but this is one is wild and well-designed enough – not to mention short – to make it worth the eyestrain. –Rod Lott
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