Dave Van Ronk’s The Mayor of MacDougal Street
1922 was a special year for modernist literature. On February 2, James Joyce was the shy guest of honor at a small publication party for Ulysses in Paris. Sylvia Beach showed Joyce the book for the first time that day, thus establishing 2/2/22 as its Joycily pleasing official publication date.… Read the rest
There are two great cinematic jokes in the new film Kill Your Darlings, two sly references to the dilemma of self-consciousness that this movie about the Beat Generation struggles to overcome. First, it must overcome the suffocating celebrity of Daniel Radcliffe, who plays the poet Allen Ginsberg, and the … Read the rest
Jack Kerouac’s poetry has just been enshrined in the prestigious Library of America
This is Willets Point, a sprawling center for automobile salvage located just west of Flushing Meadows Park in New York City, a place of amazing squalid beauty. CitiField, where the Mets play baseball, is visible just beyond the scrap yards. Willets Point, one of the last remaining vestiges of the … Read the rest
I used to buy records in a Chicago shop called the Jazz Record Mart on Grand Avenue. It was run by a guy named Bob Koester, a jazz and blues fanatic. He also had his own record company, Delmark Records, where he recorded a lot of blues artists who’d been … Read the rest
… Read the restWith all this acting experience behind me, Shelton thought I was ready for a crack at the movies. Not Hollywood, just Astoria, Long Island. He got me a part out there playing mob scenes in a picture with Paul Robeson. From that I got a real part in a short
The odds didn’t look good for the new film version of The Great Gatsby this weekend, I thought, as I donned my plastic 3-D glasses and entered the dark theater. I wasn’t expecting to like the movie much at all.
I don’t love glitzy Hollywood spectacle, though I was willing … Read the rest
If you’re trying to analyze F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz age novel The Great Gatsby and you’re not thinking about Dante’s Inferno, you’re missing an obvious connection.
The connection is easy to spot and hard to dispute, though it rarely comes up in discussion of the book. I haven’t heard … Read the rest