In which the author briefly discusses five new books he’d read, if time permitted.

1. The Great Progression: How Hispanics Will Lead America to a New Era of Prosperity by Geraldo Rivera.
Like many Americans, I was disappointed by Geraldo’s anticlimatic incursion into Al Capone’s vault and decision to go bald, but I like idea that this mustachioed Hispanic-American hero of journalism is writing a book about the future of Hispanic-American leadership.

2. Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon.
Michael Chabon’s writing was once gay (in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh), then gay and Jewish (in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), and is now mainly Jewish (in this decidedly hetero, un-goyish memoir). I preferred Chabon when he was gayer, but hey, Judaism rocks too.

3. The Death of Bunny Munro: A Novel by Nick Cave.
If Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Ethan Hawke can write books, why not bad seed Nick Cave? This one’s about sex and death, two subjects on which I trust M. Cave has some illuminating thoughts.

4. Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby.
People love music. People love sex. But, sometimes, sex leads to relationships, which people also love, at least until they hate them, and end them—that is, until they regret ending them, and try to rekindle them but, after rekindling them, hate them again. Still, people love music.

5. Half Moon: Henry Hudson and the Voyage That Redrew the Map of the New World by Douglas Hunter.
16th and 17th-century explorers of the “new world” served European overlords that orchestrated multiple genocides (Native Americans, Aztecs, the slave trade, etc.). Still, they are pretty fun to read about, just like the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings.

Esquire editor-at-large A.J. Jacobs turns his curiosity and subsequent humiliations into New York Times bestsellers. After delivering book reports on the two most daunting tomes in Western civilization—Encyclopedia Britannica (The Know-It-All) and the Bible (The Year of Living Biblically)—Jacobs collates some of his smaller experiments in The Guinea Pig Diaries. For some, 256 pages of stunts involving morality, marriage, and objectification might seem more like a guide to the care and feeding of an outsized ego. But perhaps due to experiences like posing nude for Mary-Louise Parker, Jacobs’ Diaries are delightfully unpretentious. —Hilary Crowe

Read the full City Lights pick here; deets below the jump.

Read More “Tonight in Books: A.J. Jacobs at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue” »

Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution
By Phillip Prodger
($39.95, Oxford University Press)

“The vestigial result of something useful in earlier times”—this phrase can describe a number of things (naked pictures of your ex; the Zagat guide; newspapers; &c.). Phillip Prodger uses it to describe Charles Darwin’s theory of the human countenance. If emotions evolved biologically, Darwin reasoned, so did facial expressions. It’s an idea he put forth in 1872—a year after his Descent of Man—in a treatise titled Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Darwin’s Camera is an engagingly literate survey of the intersection between evolutionary theory and photographic technology at a time of accelerated development for both. Darwin came to depend on photography to bolster his speculative argument because, as Prodger notes:

[M]anually produced pictures were prone to all sorts of error…. Besides, works of art are made to communicate ideas, not facts. Artists trade in viewers’ perceptions, not accuracy for its own sake…. The comparatively new medium of photography offered a possible answer to these problems, so Darwin began to collect photographs….. Expression extended Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection to the realm of the mind; it was arguably his boldest extension of evolutionary theory.

But there’s one thing sexier than Victorian evolutionary theory. And that’s a photographic taxonomy of expressions published to bolster Victorian evolutionary theory! After the jump, witness the five most striking photo juxtapositions to be found in Prodger’s volume.

Read More “The Five Best Photos in Darwin’s Camera” »

When George Washington University music professor Kip Lornell teamed up with former Experience Unlimited (EU) manager Charles C. Stephenson to introduce academia to D.C.’s primary musical export in 2001’s The Beat, go-go blasted through boomboxes held by guys selling mixtapes out of cars near the intersection of East Capitol St. and Benning Road NE more often than it was heard on WPGC.

Eight years later, white frat boys are lining up to watch Chuck Brown headline the 9:30 Club. We asked Lornell and Stephenson about what has changed.

City Paper: Why does go-go face such a struggle for mainstream acceptance?

Charles C. Stephenson: I don’t think it’s a struggle. You go back historically—there’s been an evolution…most of the musicians are basically satisfied. They don’t want it commercialized. As long as they can play the music in its purest form, they feel good. Some bands would like to go international, national. Periodically, there are breakout artists that reach higher heights. But the majority of musicians associated with go-go are just happy to play the music.

Kip Lornell: It’s no more of a struggle now than it was 10 or 20 years ago….Keep in mind that media has changed so much….It’s much easier to consume go-go if you’re in Amarillo, Texas, and its 2009 than if you’re in Amarillo if it’s 1999.

But if you take go-go out of a club east of the river or in P.G. County, is it still go-go?
Read More “The Beat, Reissued” »

In which the author briefly discusses five new books he’d read, if time permitted.

1. We Did Porn, by Zak Smith.
A curious artiste with a pouty, smoldering look, Zak Smith grew up in Washington, achieved fame as a Yale Fine Art MFA/Whitney Biennalee who drew spooky pictures of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, moved to L.A. to make porn, then produced a hi-art/low-art picture book/memoir about it. Still not interested?

2. The Black Monk and the Dog Problem: Two Plays, by David Rabe.
Read any good plays lately? Enjoy turning the pages of Hamlet or The Crucible more than you like the bourgeois, expensive experience that is live theater? Then read these two plays by the guy that wrote Hurlyburly, which is a very good movie, and I assume a good play, but I’ve only seen the movie.

3. Green Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability, by David Owen.
New Yorker contributor David Owen turns the environmental movement on its head in this contrarian attack on the fake green-ness of rural living. Up yours, Thoreau!

4. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.
Fairy tales are scary. Russian fairy tales are scarier. Russian authors named Ludmilla who write bleak novels that young Washington City Paper bloggers-to-be read in sophomore Russian Lit are scariest. This picture of the author speaks for itself.

5. The Sibley Guide to Trees, by David Allen Sibley.
It’s unlikely that I’d read a tree guide, but I like the idea of wanting to read it, just like I enjoy the prospect of fly-fishing while watching A River Runs Through It or the possibility of becoming Mormon while reading Twilight.

Last night, the Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Oscar-winning Jennifer’s Body scribe Diablo Cody will be adapting Sweet Valley High, the beloved ’80s book series, for the big screen.

Beloved, that is, by seemingly all XX-chromosomed Gen Xers but me. Although I consumed my share of Judy Blume during some lazy, library-filled summers, the SVH books escaped me entirely as I leaped from tween-lit directly to Stephen King.
Read More “Amazon Thinks I’m a 12-Year-Old Girl” »

in which the author discusses three recent non-fiction works in re: Hurricane Katrina.

Hurricane Katrina was bad. Real bad. The Katrina body count (<2000) can’t compare with 9/11 (3000ish) or the War in Iraq (5130), but she (colloquially, Katrina is a “she,” no?) reinvented the Gulf Coast by destroying it, sparking the greatest population shift since the Civil War.

People responded to Katrina the way they respond to most bad things – they wrote a lot of books about it. There are narratives of the disaster and the disastrous response. There are novels. There are oral histories. There are photography books. There are books about race and class and FEMA’s incompetence. There are memoirs with forwards by Spike Lee. With so much Katredia (that’s “Katrina media”) to go around, where is one to spend those dollars one has allocated to memorializing this natural disaster?
Read More “Three Katrina Books, Recommended” »

Yesterday I received a preview copy of The Tao of Wu, a “spiritual memoir” in which Wu-Tang Clan producer RZA offers up pearls of wisdom. Actually, since we’re talking about an icon of ‘90s hip-hop here, I should probably say he is dropping gem or blessing us with jewelz or some such thing.

The press materials call the book a “nonfiction Siddhartha for the hip-hop generation.”  And if Siddhartha had been into kung-fu flicks and the Five Percent Nation and his trusty companion Govinda had been a small-time weed dealer, that comparison would be spot on.

If you’re  seeking a little bit of enlightenment Wu-Tang style, the book holds plenty of lessons and what RZA calls his “pillars of wisdom.” There’s actually some really touching stuff about RZA’s mother, and his time in jail, and his friendships.

But if you’re just looking for scoop on everyone’s favorite hip-hop supergroup, there’s plenty of that, too. The book is slated for an  Oct. 20 15 release, but here are a few nuggets to tide you over.

Read More “The Tao of Wu” »

in which the author briefly discusses five new books he’d read, if time permitted.

1. The Time of My Life, by Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi.
Though the phrase “modern renaissance man” is a contradiction in terms, Patrick Swayze was a modern renaissance man: dancer, Texan, actor, singer, recovering alcoholic, marital arts practitioner, plane crash survivor, monogomist, and co-author of this memoir with Lisa Niemi, his longtime companion. Buying the hardcover edition of a hastily-written memoir: there’s no better way to say goodbye to a dead celebrity.

2. A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore.
Everybody loves Lorrie Moore, but I’ve yet to read a word of her fiction. This 9/11-ish novel seems a good place to start before attending her reading at Politics and Prose on Thursday, September 24.

3. Fever Chart by Bill Cotter.
McSweeney’s publishes beautiful editions of obscure authors’ fiction. This debut novel about mental illness and Hurricane Katrina by “a writer who’s worked as a debt collector, book restorer, toilet scrubber, and door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman,” is probably interesting.

4. Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party by Max Blumenthal.
It’s unlikely Nation Books is publishing the most fair and balanced journalism about American conservatism, but any book that uses Eric Fromm’s psychology of authoritarianism to dissect Sarah Palin is a must-read or, if not a must-read, at least a good joke gift for your Republican parent(s).

5. Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz.
Pet-related non-fiction is often stacked in the front of bookstores, where unwitting consumers waiting to pay for a Stephen King book or the new Twilight are seduced by cover photographs of cuddly creatures. But that doesn’t mean pet-related non-fiction is worthless.

In January Richie Unterberger  was at the Library of Congress discussing his book The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film.  Now he is back, tonight, Monday August 3rd at the Library to talk about his new detail-packed, 368 page book, White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day by Day (I have not seen it yet).  According to his own website, Unterberger drew “on about 100 interviews [he conducted] and exhaustive research through documents and recordings rarely or never accessed…”  Unterberger is promising on his website that he will feature rare audiovisual material from throughout the Velvet Underground’s career at the Library of Congress presentation. 

Monday August 3rd at 7 P.M–writer Richie Unterberger at the Library of Congress, James Madison Bldg., Pickford Theater, 101 Independence Ave. SE. Call 202-707-7833 for details.  The Pickford has only 60 seats.