Literary Riches, From Dylan to the Damned
Jared Paul Stern
March 18, 2008
It’s a melodious month in music-oriented manuscripts, filled with photographic evidence that there was life before boy bands and Britney Spears. To kick off, see where it all began with a cacophonous cornucopia of posters, album artwork, memorabilia, film stills, and photographs in Rock’n’Roll ’39-’59 by Charlie Gillett, et al. (Steidl, $80), with accompanying text by the likes of David Halberstam and Greil Marcus. Everything Elvis Presley ripped off is revealed.
Brit physicist and political radical turned photographer John “Hoppy” Hopkins snapped everyone from Malcolm X to heroin users and Hell’s Angels in the ’60s, but it’s his rock pics of the Rolling Stones and Marianne Faithfull that really sing in From the Hip (Damiani, $50). Who knew ’60s icon Bob Dylan was a talented artist as well? Indeed he is, judging by the watercolors and gouaches he produced from 1989-1992, collected in Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series (Prestel, $60), edited by Ingrid Mössinger, which were originally exhibited in Germany.
The aptly-named Jenny Lens lets rip in Punk Pioneers (Universe, $30), which features the likes of the Germs, the Ramones, the Damned, and Iggy Pop in all their gory ’70s glory… As for the biggest punk of the modern era; Fabio Paleari had the dubious distinction of being the only authorized photographer to document the highs and lows of the Babyshambler and Moss-shagger Pete Doherty for the past two years; the colorful results appear in I Won’t Give Up (Damiani, $40).
Elsewhere in the world of reading, our favorite gal-about-town Sloane Crosley proves herself a brilliant belletrist in I Was Told There’d Be Cake (Riverhead, $14), a collection of essays both mordant and mortifying. Brian McDonald tells a titillating tale of slinging drinks at the famed Upper East Side watering hole-slash-shrine to Plimptonian literary hijinks in Last Call at Elaine’s: A Journey from One Side of the Bar to the Other (St. Martin’s, $25). And Brad Pitt wishes he was as boss as Steve McQueen, but he’s trying just a little too hard—the whole point was how effortless the King of Cool made it all look, as we’re artfully reminded in Unforgettable Steve McQueen (powerHouse/Verlhac, $60), edited by Henri Suzeau.
Also worth adding to your list: Simon Doonan’s campy talents are a treat in Eccentric Glamour: Creating an Insanely More Fabulous You (Simon & Schuster, $24), part style manual, part makeup mirror confessional… The architect of L.A.’s out-of-sight Chemosphere house and other modernist masterworks is gorgeously fêted in Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner (Rizzoli, $60), edited by Nicholas Olsberg… A modern masterwork of another sort—BMW’s new high-tech HQ in Munich —is celebrated in BMW Welt: From Vision to Reality (TeNeues, $125)… And the work of iconic photographer Richard Avedon, who died in 2004, is fully exposed in Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004 (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art/ D.A.P., $70), edited by Michel Juul Holm.
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