May 8, 2020: I haven’t read Emma Straub’s 2012 novel, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, but I believe she wrote it just for me: it’s about a golden age of Hollywood actress, and it was inspired by Jennifer Jones’s obituary. Meanwhile, I have definitely read Emma’s swell new novel, All Adults Here, which I reviewed for Shelf Awareness. Shelf also let me interview Emma–the piece runs today–and she said lots of nifty things that you should consider reading here.
March 22, 2020: I’m trying to tell you that I just reviewed Anne Elliott’s short story collection, The Artstars, for the Portland Press Herald (see here). Was that really so hard to understand?
February 17, 2020: I’m always looking for an excuse to use a photo of Gilligan’s Island characters at this site, but sorry, Skipper: you’re just not the right person to flog my piece posted today–Presidents’ Day, non-coincidentally—at Salon, “‘Low Class’ Donald Trump and the Wasps: Reckoning with Snobbery, Vulgarity and the Presidency.” Even Lovey and Thurston would have thought that Trump talks way too much about money, although I’ll admit that they probably would have voted for the bastard.
February 2, 2020: Never mind the blueberries; what about the bodies? In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a rather high corpse count in fiction set in Maine. Uh-oh: there goes another one…
January 15, 2020: My favorite defense attorneys—thanks for asking!—are Lawrence and Kenneth Preston, the father-son team featured in the Reginald Rose–created TV series The Defenders (1961–1965). In The Fixed Stars, which pubs in May, Molly Wizenberg writes about her favorite (at least for a while) defense attorney, who happened to majorly alter the course of Wizenberg’s life. You can read my early review of The Fixed Stars in Shelf Awareness here, you can read my corresponding interview with Wizenberg here, and you can see an obscene, potty-mouthed Defenders gag reel here.
December 20, 2019: The blog Little Old Lady Comedy, my favorite thing with “Little Old Lady” in the title (just before this), is nice enough to run my piece “Ten Ways Not to Be a Chump About Money This Holiday Season” today; you can read it here. And egad, I’ve sure been writing a lot about money for someone who professes to have no interest in the stuff.
December 15, 2019: Actually, it turns out that Diana Altman’s novel We Never Told—which I review in the Portland Press Herald today; see?—isn’t about Old Hollywood at all. But when I read somewhere that the narrator’s dad worked out of New York for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, I wanted in. You know whose dad also worked out of New York for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer? Diana Altman’s. She wrote about it in Hollywood East: Louis B. Mayer and the Origins of the Studio System, which I have never read and do not own—good news for you because now you know what to get me for Christmas. You’re welcome!
November 18, 2019: It turns out that, incredibly, there are several. Yesterday the Portland Press Herald ran my review of Chances Are…—here it is—by Maine’s Richard Russo, who won the Pulitzer for his novel Empire Falls in 2002. Stephen King did not see this coming.
September 6, 2019: What’s the rush, Dave? I ask because Dana Thomas has a swell new book out, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, that makes the case that everyone needs to slow the crap down, fashion-wise. My recent interview with Thomas for Shelf Awareness was posted today; see here to find out why I am apparently not a total jerk for thinking that maybe we should all dress a little more like the characters on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
August 21, 2019: Well, I’m sorry, but this requires some setting up:
Twenty years ago, I tried and failed to interview Metallica’s lead guitarist, Kirk Hammett. I had begun to admire his band back in 1991, when I could find nothing not to like about “Enter Sandman,” which had taken over the world. I bought the album that begat the single. I bought a ticket to a Metallica concert that got canceled. I had an obstinately indie-rock and punk listening library, and the mild confusion that I felt about liking a metal band was instantly relieved by a remark from a guy I worked with: he said that Metallica deconstructs masculinity. Well then! I got the rest of the band’s catalog and wrote a short essay that I could never sell about why Metallica was a higher musical life-form. For one reason, I wrote, Metallica had never made a video with a sexualized woman in it. Later, at around the time I was trying to land an interview with Hammett, Metallica released its video for “Whiskey in the Jar.” I still don’t want to talk about it.
Fast-forward a couple of decades, and I kept running into comments by Hammett that reaffirmed my initial suspicion that he is a singular force for good. He’s an advocate for science. He tweeted in praise of the Women’s March. He’s a voice in the fight against climate change. I had to try again for an interview.
I saw my opportunity when I learned that It’s Alive! Classic Horror and Sci-Fi Art from the Kirk Hammett Collection would be opening on July 13 at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum and running through January 5, 2020. Hammett was indeed doing press for the exhibition, and thanks to the museum’s divine Anne Vranic, I got to speak with him by phone on July 24. The great Bright Lights Film Journal ran my piece today—see?