"Top Hat"

Graphic Mondays

Dzyd Wayne has a new column up at Coilhouse, called From the Continental Shelf, in which he
discusses his favorite European Comics. This installment features Dylan Dog...Dzyd Douglas has writes in the Times on the offerings from Los Bros Hernandez, some of which have crossed my desk (and one of which I've started and am enjoying). I approve of the usage of "Zeppo":

“Amor y Cohetes,” the final volume of seven collecting the first (1982-1996) “Love and Rockets” series, is a gallimaufry of 42 short pieces that don’t quite belong to either Jaime’s Maggie-and-Hopey continuity or Gilbert’s tales of the inhabitants of Palomar, aside from a pair of tales in which the brothers tackle each other’s characters. (There are also a few stories by Mario Hernandez, the Zeppo of the family.)

...Also in the NYT, a front-page piece on Feiffer's Explainers...This is not comics, but while we're reading the Book Review, the penultimate and antepenultimate sentences of David Thomson's take on an Astaire bio seems specifically designed to drive B. Kite bonkers:

Astaire is never going to be “rescued” for a trashy age by the revelation of a sordid private life. At the same time, his terrifying concentration and his refusal to acknowledge certain appetites lead to a conclusion seldom reached about performers in ballet or other musical forms: Fred Astaire was not human, not sexual, not sexed. But in his total disregard of the hardship and squalor of the ’30s, he let it be known that art need have nothing to do with life. That’s where “Citizen Kane” betrays itself. It is heavy-handedly about “America.” “Top Hat” and the others are strolls through Arcadia.

Face time

A Fred and Ginger panel examined that famous partnership in detail, John Mueller asserting that Ginger Rogers was among the best actresses of her time, a statement he backed up with clips showing her reactions as Astaire sang – what better test of acting talent than to react convincingly while someone croons to you? —TLS

This is true! Look at Ginger beginning around :56...





(Link originates, as all things do, here.)

Weekend rubble

I. From the Parkives, a review of Adam Rapp's The Year of Endless Sorrows, from Bookforum:

The unnamed young protagonist—a fledgling fictioneer with an entry-level job at a Viking-like publisher—fits White’s description of “a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart,” except that he keeps his slowly growing manuscript in the empty freezer of his East Village walkup, and his main wound is the gnarly result of a hoops injury. Limping becomes “a kind of personal theatre,” and he tells anyone who asks that his book-in-progress is about “acute knee pain and the end of the world.” It’s a heartbreaking work of staggering.

II. The return of Ten Words?

III. Fred Astaire as Keith Moon in the Wodehouse adaptation Damsel in Distress (via Mr. Cairns)

Freudian slip

From Dizzyhead Brent (whose two-part Rivette epic concludes in the latest Cinema Scope):

I LIKE
Coffee, cigarettes, pasta, pizza, De Quincey, Bresson, Astaire, Kinks, cats, the first and middle fingers

I DON'T LIKE
Most other food, Kieslowski, Updike, The Doors, insects, Freud, the ring finger

I LIKE DON'T LIKE
Nabokov, Beatles, dogs, people, thumb

* * *

Bonus post—etymology of the day: "A 'rival,' for instance, is someone you are bickering with over river water rights." (A.E. Stallings at Harriet)

And: Over at the PEN America blog, David Haglund digs up a great George Plimpton memory, a name-dropper's delight in which a bit of advice from Steinbeck compels GP to address Jean Seberg while writing about going to a baseball game with Marianne Moore.