Alcoholic Mad Men

How to Drink Like a Mad Man by Ralph Maloney

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The 24-Hour Drink Book, retitled for this edition as How to Drink Like a Mad Man, seems like a training manual for alcoholics, although interesting as a period piece--it was written in 1962. If Dover Publishers was really serious about cashing in on the whole Mad Men craze, they might have found another, more interesting book to republish than this, although this one was probably in the public domain. One book from this era that comes to mind is From the Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor and has recently been republished with artwork to tie it to Mad Men. See my blog post from June, last summer.
 

The Original Cover

View all my reviews

For Denny Lovers Only

A notice to all Martin Denny lovers. Vocalion has just released two two-fer CDs of Denny Albums--A Taste of Honey (1962)/Another Taste of Honey (1963) and The Versatile Martin Denny (1963)/Latin Village (1964). Three of these have never been issued on CD and the other, Latin Village, was only issued in a high-priced Japanese paper sleeve limited edition. This are available as of last weekend on Amazon and Dusty Groove.

A Taste of Honey was Denny's second highest charting album and the title tune was his only charting single of the 1960s. Latin Village is a personal favorite of mine with Denny's version of The Girl from Ipanema and Flying Down to Rio. Another favorite is The Versatile Martin Denny with the sublime Exotique Bossa Nova. There's definitely a real bossa feel through out these albums, especially the latter pair of albums.

Black Black Noir

One is a Lonely Number / Black Wings Has My Angel by Bruce Elliot/Elliot Chaze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stark House has reprinted two traditionally hard-to-find, much-sought-after paperback originals in one volume--One is a Lonely Number by Bruce Elliot "(1952) and Black Wings Has Angel (1953) by Elliot Chaze. One is a Lonely Number was originally published by Lion (100) and is nearly impossible to find, but yet doesn't command the same high prices as Black Wings, a Gold Medal (296) original, which usually goes for hundreds of dollars.

If you like your hardboiled crime novels gritty and violent and have never read either of these, I highly recommend plunking down $19.95 for this volume. Black Wings Has My Angel has had a cult following for years, even, as it turns out, in the movie business where it's currently being filmed for a 2013 release.

View all my reviews

Hall of Mirrors

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Reading PKD reminds me of being in a hall of mirrors in a funhouse at that moment when you catch a glimpse of yourself ad infinitum. I get this feeling not only with his books, but also movies based on his books or inspired by his work, such as The Matrix.

I've tried reading The Man in the High Castle (1962) before and never could get through it, but this time I stuck with it and it paid off. Though the ending left me scratching my head, which I imagine is pretty typical, until you have that "Oooh" moment.

It's a book about a man who wrote a book about an imagined future, an alternate history of a world imagined that's a parallel to the real world, though diametrically opposed to the world of the book itself.

Although I'm not much of a reader of science fiction, I've been intrigued by the steady flow of movies since Dick's death based on his books, i.e., Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc and will probably be reading more.

View all my reviews

Separated at Birth? #2

Undercurrent - Bill Evans/Jim Hall, 1962
Tears in Rain - This Ascension, 1989
Oceana - Osvaldo Golijov, 2007
Whispering Sin - The Beauvilles, 2009

Thia photo taken by Toni Fissell at Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida in 1947, has appeared on four album covers and on the cover of a novel (Tethered by Amy MacKinnon. It first appeared in the December 1947 issue of Harper's Bazaar.


Click on the thumbnail above if you're interested in
purchasing a copy or to check out our gallery on

Postcard of the Week #27

Bob and Joan and Richard and Mimi

Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina by David Hajdu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I considered reading Positively 4th Street when it first came out, but never got around to it. I considered reading Hajdu's second book, Lush Life, but never got around to it. But when The Ten-Cent Plague, his third book, was published I couldn't resist, it seemed like it would be such a fun book and it was. So naturally I went and got a copy of this book, the subject of which I was familiar, i.e., the tragic story of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Richard and Mimi Fariña.

I've never been a big fan of Dylan or Baez although I have albums of both, which I've always enjoyed. Nor was I fan of Richard Fariña's now cult classic novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Up, which I only got around to reading recently though I bought the book in the early 70s (see my review). Now, his wife on the other hand, Joan's sister Mimi, I recall being enamoured of in my adolescence.

I always thought that Mimi Baez was the most beautiful girl to come of age in the sixties. No other girl at that time, be it Pattie Boyd, Julie Christie, Brigitte Bardot or Edie Sedgwick, captured my attention the way she did. I first noticed her on that poster she appeared on with her sisters, the now infamous anti-draft poster "Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No." (Hajdu didn't doesn't mention the poster in the book, though, in his defense, it happened after the timeline of the book, I believe)

My family lived in Carmel at the same time as the four of them and we would see Joan and Bob tooling around in her Jaguar XKE, just hair and noses going by too fast for the more conservative townspeople who barely tolerated the beatnik artists and musicians as it was. I don't think Joan ever let Bob drive.

Anyway, I enjoyed the book tremendously. It was well-researched and well-written and is an intriguing story that not just anyone would have thought worth telling, which is true of his other books, as well. And it really is a tragic story of star-crossed lovers, to borrow a Shakespearian phrase. I don't think I'm giving away anything since it's well known how the story ends with two motorcycle accidents, the one in which Fariña is killed and Dylan's, which would so greatly alter the course of his life and music.

Hajdu's hypothesis, which he probably doesn't spend enough time trying to prove, is that these four people had a direct, or in some ways, indirect and subtle, influence on the music and culture of the sixties. Dylan and Baez, definitely, and Fariña with his book, which was the On the Road of the 60s, but also, with the music of the Fariñas. It was they, not Dylan, that first created a fusion of folk and rock. When you listen to Mimi's guitar playing and Richard's dulcimer you realize the influence they must have had over musicians such as Cat Stevens, Eric Burdon and the Byrds.

If you have any interest in 60s culture, the folk scene or folk-rock or in real-life tragic stories, this book is a must.

View all my reviews

My New Sixties Poster

The Sixties by Jeff Vorzimmer

Click on the poster if you're interested in
purchasing a copy or to check out our gallery on