More Stuff I’ve Been Reading

— This is a really interesting piece by Christina Marie Newland – about a world I really know nothing about, but she’s a good guide. The Rise And Fall And Rise Of Tyson Fury, Boxing’s Most Dangerous Man

— This is so great: Kim Morgan on Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas: “GoodFellas is a gangster picture, of course, but it’s a rock ‘n’ roll movie if I ever saw one. At times it’s, in an oblique way, one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll movies ever made.”

— I am continuing my 2018 project, started in January, abandoned for about 6 months when freelance work obliterated my free time and brainspace, and now picked up again: reading Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays. I should say re-reading, although I don’t think I had ever read Massacre in Paris before. Marlowe was such a fascinating man (putting it mildly), with such a singular viewpoint on what Power means and how it operates. He was not a moralist. To simplify, in his plays, terrible shit happens and then everyone dies. There’s very little soaring belief in the human spirit. He’s tough to take sometimes. This is why I love him. Tamburlaine is my favorite, it’s such a gigantic work of sympathetic imagination … and unbelievable poetry. I wrote about it here.

— This week was the anniversary of the airing of Elvis’ legendary 1968 television special. NBC actually aired it again! It’s certainly something to be proud of. Here’s a piece in the LA Times about the special. Steve Binder, who directed and produced, pushing Elvis to go further, deeper, and to ignore the Colonel’s call for a nice family-friendly Christmas special, is still alive and is interviewed.

— Another Elvis link: Tom Breihan is doing an absolutely fantastic series where he reviews every single Billboard #1 hit, since its inception in 1958. Here, he writes about Elvis’ “Suspicious Minds,” and it’s a great analysis of where that hit came from, its background, and also what Elvis does with it. It’s thrilling to read. “Suspicious Minds” was Elvis’ final #1 single.

— Also continuing my project to read all of Tom Wolfe’s stuff (at least non-fiction), a project I started when he died (actually, weirdly enough, I began slightly before he died.) I’m not as crazy about his fiction, but his essays … my God. I am now making my way through Hooking Up. I remember reading the title essay when it first came out, an examination of the “dating” rituals at the turn of the millennium. It’s slightly “get off my lawn” but Wolfe always had a vague “Get off my lawn” tone: he was an outsider. An outsider in his own generation, and in the world, in general. He forged his own path. He may have been an outsider, but his powers of observation are without rival. I am now reading his lengthy and super-fun history of the formation of Silicon Valley, “Two Young Men Who Went West.”