In this week’s newsletter, I share more about my next book—which is part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 books series and focuses on Dr. Dre’s 1992 album, The Chronic—including a peek at the proposal and the other contenders.
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Moord in Rotterdam is not for the faint of heart. It compiles crime scene photos taken by the Rotterdam police between 1905 and 1967. The cover features a woman who un-alived herself. She appears to be napping. Her lookalike doll is at her side. Is it creepy, beautiful, tragic? The scene is in the eye of the beholder. Flipping through the pages of homicides, suicides, and crimes of passion, one is struck by the grand artistry of it all. I don’t know whether to credit the Rotterdam police for their photography skills or chalk it up to fantastic editing of a gruesome body of work. A great pick for fans of Joel-Peter Witkin and Wisconsin Death Trip.
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E. M. Carroll’s A Guest in the House is a tricky book to review because about 90% of it is terrific. It’s a dark, weird, gloomy story about what happens when you marry a man who seems normal and it turns out he may have murdered the wife before you. One of the most exciting things about the book is how it occasionally explodes out and across the page in moments of colorful surrealism. So, mostly, I really liked this book. But the ending left me baffled. It felt rushed, patchworked together, and I had to search the internet to try and understand it. Your experience may vary. But in general, this is a great work. She didn’t nail the ending.
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I’m happy to announce my next book: Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. It’s part of Bloomsbury’s much-loved 33 1/3 series. I’ll be writing about the seminal album and its influence. Thanks so much to Bloomsbury for the opportunity.
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Thanks to John Wooden, who gave me my first editing job, for these nice words about my memoir, Data Baby. John has a new newsletter on Substack called EPOSTASY, where he rails against the all consuming “ebyss.”
You should subscribe to it.
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I’ve read Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” several times, so when I saw Taschen had produced this oversized version with photos by Phil Stern, I had to have it. I really enjoyed re-reading Talese’s work this way, Stern’s photos, and the ephemera that includes Talese’s hand-drawn outline for the work. A good buy.
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This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In June, I read three books. (You can find all my short book reviews here.) My favorite was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Tove Jansson Edition which I called “vibrant and beguiling.” My least favorite was Art Monsters by Lauren Elkin which I did not finish.
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I guess I have sort of a strange relationship to Desolation Jones, because I was the inspiration for one of the characters in it: Filthy Sanchez, a kind of Los Angeles porn czar who says things like: “Everything goes better with bukkake.” I believe that I only ever read the first comic in this series, so when I saw that the first six had been republished in a single volume, The Biohazard Edition, I had to buy it. The quality of the book is great — oversized, colorful — and I enjoyed reading the full narrative. There was also a short return of Sanchez at the end that I hadn’t been aware of previously. The story itself is about a man who has PTSD from having his brain fucked and is on a quest for some Hitler porn. If you like your comics weird and filthy, this one is for you.
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Cool to see a photo of mine in Charles Saatchi’s 2015 book Dead: A Celebration of Mortality. I found it on eBay.
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In my Instagram Stories for Father’s Day, I posted a few links to my late father and his work, including his New York Times obituary, my favorite thing he ever wrote, his Rothko biography, Hilton Kramer’s New York Times Book Review review of my father’s Rothko biography, and my father’s Rothko biography research archive at the Getty Research Institute. It’s been almost 30 years since my father died, and I’ll miss him forever.
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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Tove Jansson Edition combines two of my favorites from childhood: a marvel of literature and the creator of the Moomins universe. So I was delighted to learn this book united the two. Rereading Lewis Carroll’s text was illuminating—how willy-nilly he is with language and imagery and how much magical conjuring happens when a creator allows pretty much anything to sprout from his brain. I adore Jansson’s images for the text. They are more vibrant and beguiling than the originals. My favorite illustration features Alice peering over the lip of the mushroom to consider the caterpillar.
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This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In May, I read seven books. (You can find all my short book reviews here.) My favorite book was David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish, which has no pictures but I made an exception because I’m a big Lynch fan: “My favorite part is when he talks about Mulholland Drive’s box and key and says, ‘I don’t have a clue what those are.’” My least favorite book was Charles Burns’ Caprice, which, although interesting and enjoyable, was a collection of images with no narrative: “The themes are classically Burnsian: girls in trouble, blobular creatures, impossible landscapes.”
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Earlier this year, I submitted a proposal to do a 33 1/3 book on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. The 33 1/3 book series is published by Bloomsbury and each slim volume is a close study of an album. I proposed doing one on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. Recently, the editors shared all the artists that were proposed this year, which you can see here. In any case, I’ll learn if my proposal was accepted in June or July. I’ll share that info on this blog.
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Scenes from a recent evening in Highland Park in L.A. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Caprice by Charles Burns is a small thing. It’s not really a comic book, per se. And it’s certainly not a graphic novel. It’s a collection of fictional comic book covers, apparently. The themes are classically Burnsian: girls in trouble, blobular creatures, impossible landscapes. It’s an interesting journey through a curious mind.
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I wish I hadn’t waited so long to read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis because it is incredible. A feminist Maus, it takes a young girl’s story as its subject to examine the broad themes of identity, empowerment, and resilience. The drawings are simple, but the impact is powerful. A must-read for all, including young people.
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I picked up a copy of Peter Kuper’s graphic novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for a few reasons. I’m a fan of Kuper’s work, which I admire for its ability to express strong emotions in a terrifying way, which seemed fitting for this project. I’ve read Conrad’s novella and appreciate many things about it, including its unique framing structure. And Apocalypse Now, which was inspired by Conrad’s book, is one of my favorite movies. I found this retelling riveting, spooky, and considered. I guess that last word is sort of a strange thing to say, but Kuper’s version brought something new to the material for me. Perhaps it was the illustrated strife between natives and invaders, or the intensity of this Kurtz’s having “gone native,” or maybe it was the monstrous depiction of what happens to one when one travels far enough up the river. Either way, I loved it.
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I read Dave Cooper’s Mudbite some years ago, lost my copy, and so I was happy to find it again and reread it. I love Dave’s work! It’s so insane. Mudbite is especially fun because it contains two stories that you read by flipping the book back and around. It’s hard to pick a favorite between “Mud River” and “Bug Bite.” The former, starring Eddy Table, who I love so much I have a figurine of him on my desk, is probably my favorite; little Eddy’s bottom ride on the lady is just so hilarious! But the latter had me literally loling, too, with its crazy twists and turns and creepy critters. Anyway, this book is a two-for-one that will make a Cooper devotee out of anyone.
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Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! is perfect for those who want to remind themselves that a masterpiece starts as something less than that. A reprint, with an expansive new introduction, of work published early in his career, this collection contains the seeds of what will become the author’s greatest work: Maus. From a one-page strip version of Maus to the arresting “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” in which he grapples with his mother’s suicide, these are the experimental steps that were required for Spiegelman to create the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize. Oversized, colorful, dazzling.
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Although I was aware of Hilma af Klint’s work, I didn’t know much about her until I read The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint by Philipp Deines. The oversized book features five chapters of visual biography of the artist’s life, from her privileged upbringing to her spiritual journey to her secret queerness. I recommend this book to anyone who is an artist, who wants to feel inspired by a woman who wasn’t “discovered” until long after her death.
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