I seem still to be stuck on pop culture non-fiction with these two books. One's OK, one's pretty bad. The OK one is England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond by Jon Savage. The subtitle says it all; the surprisingly dense book is about the Punk movement's cultural moment, in the mid-70's. Savage uses the Sex Pistols' short and brutish life, from their inception in London under the wing of Malcolm McLaren in 1975 to their implosion at the end of their U.S. tour in early 1978, as his narrative through line, branching off regularly to take note of other punk bands in both England and America. I was astonished to discover how much of punk was really about fashion, used as a way to express a range of feelings, from inarticulate personal rage to political ideology. This was the rare book on pop music I chose to read that centered on a kind of music of which not a single example lives in my head. Though I have heard music by The Sex Pistols, The Buzzcocks, Siouxsie & the Banshees, etc., I was not a big fan of the genre and no "punk" songs come to mind (bidden or unbidden). I know some later-period Clash, but I wouldn't know "God Save The Queen" or "Anarchy in the U.K" if Johnny Lydon stood in front of me and played them live. Still, the book was interesting if a little clotted with extraneous detail.
The bad book was Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited by well-regarded movie critic and historian Molly Haskell. I've seen her on TCM and heard her give movie commentaries, but I guess I've never read one of her books before. The relatively slim volume presents itself as a look at GWTW, the book and the movie, as pop culture phenomenon, but it reads like a poorly organized potpourri of ideas that Haskell's had for years and couldn't get to cohere into a thesis-driven argument. She focuses on three important figures in the GWTW legend (author Margaret Mitchell, producer David O. Selznick, and star Vivien Leigh), and also spends a lot of time examining, rather superficially, the Southerness of the story and characters, mostly as filtered through her own experiences. There are occasional interesting tidbits buried in the labored prose and the confusing structure, but not enough for me to recommend this.
I seem still to be stuck on pop culture non-fiction with these two books. One's OK, one's pretty bad. The OK one is England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond by Jon Savage. The subtitle says it all; the surprisingly dense book is about the Punk movement's cultural moment, in the mid-70's. Savage uses the Sex Pistols' short and brutish life, from their inception in London under the wing of Malcolm McLaren in 1975 to their implosion at the end of their U.S. tour in early 1978, as his narrative through line, branching off regularly to take note of other punk bands in both England and America. I was astonished to discover how much of punk was really about fashion, used as a way to express a range of feelings, from inarticulate personal rage to political ideology. This was the rare book on pop music I chose to read that centered on a kind of music of which not a single example lives in my head. Though I have heard music by The Sex Pistols, The Buzzcocks, Siouxsie & the Banshees, etc., I was not a big fan of the genre and no "punk" songs come to mind (bidden or unbidden). I know some later-period Clash, but I wouldn't know "God Save The Queen" or "Anarchy in the U.K" if Johnny Lydon stood in front of me and played them live. Still, the book was interesting if a little clotted with extraneous detail.
The bad book was Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited by well-regarded movie critic and historian Molly Haskell. I've seen her on TCM and heard her give movie commentaries, but I guess I've never read one of her books before. The relatively slim volume presents itself as a look at GWTW, the book and the movie, as pop culture phenomenon, but it reads like a poorly organized potpourri of ideas that Haskell's had for years and couldn't get to cohere into a thesis-driven argument. She focuses on three important figures in the GWTW legend (author Margaret Mitchell, producer David O. Selznick, and star Vivien Leigh), and also spends a lot of time examining, rather superficially, the Southerness of the story and characters, mostly as filtered through her own experiences. There are occasional interesting tidbits buried in the labored prose and the confusing structure, but not enough for me to recommend this.
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