Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford and The Way We Were

I opted to listen to Barbra Streisand’s 2023 memoir, My Name Is Barbra, rather than reading it in hard copy so that I could hear her inimitable phrasing – the quality that made me a diehard fan of her albums when I started collecting them in 1964, at the age of thirteen. (The first one I owned, a gift from my aunt and uncle, was the original cast album of Funny Girl, which had recently opened on Broadway; I played “Don’t Rain on My Parade” through so many times that it’s a miracle I didn’t wear down the vinyl.) I was lucky: Streisand’s movie career began the week I started university, when she opened in the film version of Funny Girl, and I saw each of those great early performances – in Hello, Dolly!, The Owl and the Pussycat, Up the Sandbox and The Way We Were – as they came out, on the big screen. What I mostly desired from the memoir was information about, and her personal response to, her early triumphs on stage (her scene-stealing supporting performance in I Can Get It for You Wholesale led to Funny Girl), television (where she, Joe Layton and Dwight Hemion reconceived the variety special with the explosively inventive My Name Is Barbra in 1965), LP and film. My usual experience with the memoirs of performers I love is that they’re fun as long as they chronicle the origins of a career but run out of steam once the writer has made the leap into stardom. And this one comes in at a shade under a thousand pages! Plus I haven’t cared much for Streisand’s pop albums and found only a few of her later pictures interesting – though, notably, I’ve never missed one. (Her film career had pretty much faded by the early nineties.)

Stoner by John Williams: The Most Famous Unknown Novel in the World

NYRBooks Classics.                University of Texas Press.     

“But first, are you experienced? Or have you ever been experienced?”

--Jimi Hendrix

Like most folks who read books and watch films as a professional activity, it can sometimes feel as if we’re expected to pass cogent judgment on all books or films (or in my case also on music, visual art and buildings) to discern and share whether something is worth reading or watching. To me, however, life is too short to advise people on what to avoid, what didn’t work, succeed or achieve its creative aims, and what the artistic flaws were that made it a failure. There are plenty of good critics who do that to some degree, and I too enjoy reading their opinions, but I’d much rather talk about films, music or in this case books, that are so marvelous that they can or might actually alter the course of your life in some significant way if you read them. Stoner, released by John Williams in 1965, is just such a book. So is the book about his book, written by Charles Shields in 2018. In fact, The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel might even be that rare case of a work that will really help readers to appreciate the whereof and what-for of the book it examines, in such micro-detail and macro-fondness, that it could even benefit from being consumed prior to Stoner itself.

Accurate Sounds – Robert Hilburn's Paul Simon: The Life

Paul Simon in a promotional photo for his 2018 farewell tour. (Photo: KeyArena)

With his farewell tour ending September 22 in Queens, NY and a new album coming out this Friday, Paul Simon remains current. To coincide with the tour, Simon granted L.A. Times music writer Robert Hilburn more than 100 hours of interviews for a new biography released last May, according to the press release from Simon & Schuster. But rather than hook a new album and a farewell tour to a book for commercial purposes, Hilburn goes much deeper by writing a balanced study of his subject. His focus, and it’s a good one, is to identify and explain the driving impulses behind Simon’s creativity. Naturally that’s an easier task with the co-operation of the person you’re writing about.

Her Majesty: The Soul of Aretha

“Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R&B, rock and roll – the way the hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty. American history wells up when Aretha sings. Because she captures the fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and also the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation and transcendence.” – Barack Obama, Kennedy Center, 2015

Somehow, in a way that might forever remain inexplicable, Aretha Franklin managed to alter the landscape of soul music by transforming herself into both a rock icon and a pop goddess. For me, there were three key hinges to her remarkable swinging stylistic door. The first was synthesis: she was the perfect corporate merger between sacred gospel music and secular blues music. Next was reconciliation: she was the ideal reconciliation between and rhythm and blues music and rock and roll music. And finally, transcendence: she was the unexpected redemption of spiritual soul music by perfectly pure pop music.

Sex, Hype, and Abstract Painting: The Secret Life of Willem de Kooning

Elaine and Willem de Kooning. (Photo: Rudy Burckhardt)

A married couple, the painters Willem and Elaine de Kooning had what might be called an open relationship. From their wedding in 1943 until Elaine's death by lung cancer in 1989, both de Koonings were known for their sexual promiscuity. He had several partners, but she had many, many more. Their bedroom was overcrowded, which is perhaps why author Lee Hall used a plural noun when she called her 1993 book about them Elaine and Bill, Portrait of a Marriage: The Lives of Willem and Elaine De Kooning.

As Hall details in her controversial but thought-provoking biography, Elaine’s conquests were as legendary as her drinking, and her gift for inspired – and inspiring – chatter. Said by all who knew her to have been a legendary beauty and feisty femme fatale, she had no trouble bedding whomever struck her fancy. But there was method to the sexual madness: Mrs. de Kooning slept primarily with men who would advance her husband's career. Elaine’s lovers included Harold Rosenberg, the influential art critic, Tom Hess, the trend-setting editor of Art News, and Charles Egan, a leading New York gallery owner. By sleeping with these men Elaine ensured that her husband was crowned the king of Abstract Expressionism. Merit seems to have been beside the point. In Portrait of a Marriage, Hall quotes an anonymous dealer that "if Elaine had slept with different people – or, God forbid, if she had remained faithful to Bill – the whole history of American art would be different."