Alan Aldridge's kaleidoscopic vision

From 1965 to 1967, British artist Alan Aldridge was the art director of Penguin UK, bringing an edgy, growingly psychedelic design sensibility to its always iconic paperbacks. Eventually, Aldridge and the publisher parted ways and he spent time designing for rock stars such as Elton John, Mick Jagger and John Lennon. The snapshots are a fun addition to the art in his book, "The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes: The Art of Alan Aldridge," released in the U.S. this year after an exhibit of the same name at the British Design Museum.

Aldridge's book flows with a bit of the burbling and elaborate illustration he brought to the cover of "The Penguin Book of Comics" and "The Beatles Sinister Songbook," a 1967 interview he did with Paul McCartney that lasted three hours and first appeared in the NY Observer (this is also his own book's cover, at right). Unlike most retrospectives, this book doesn't set up a clear chronology or thesis -- instead, it leads visually, letting the art and design create the narrative. In it, text and illustration have traded roles.

The text does provide some context. For "The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics," an award-winning anthology, Aldridge writes, "I approached seventy of the world's best illustrators to contribute. What was left, or what needed to be replaced because it was too risque to be published, I did myself. I saw the book as an illustration of the sixties."

If Aldridge's name is less well known than that of Peter Max, another 1960s Beatles-associated illustrator, it may be because he's got a broader vision. He went from novice outsider illustrator to Penguin and then rock art -- he did the Elton John "Captain Fantastic" album cover, which is after the jump -- but he didn't stop there. In 1973, his children's book "The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast" (with William Plomer) won the Whitbread Award. And he also applies his talents to creating images for others, like the logos for the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues; he remained in-house creative director at the latter for two years. In later years, the glossy, airbrushed style of his '60s illustration has been joined by the hand-hewn feel of block prints and hand-inked drawings.

The one set of illustrations I wish was included is represented only by this anecdote. Back in 1967, Aldridge was sitting in an airport bar doodling in his copy of "The Hobbit." In walks a noisy entourage which, it turns out, includes Salvador Dali. The artist sees the doodles and, in Spanish -- which Aldridge finds incomprehensibl -- challenges him to a draw-off. Dali draws a rearing unicorn and signs it. Aldridge draws Dali as the Mad Hatter from "Alice in Wonderland" and gets a big laugh. Dali draws a winged dragon being lanced by a horse-mounted knight, calling it "St. George da Inglaterra" (Aldridge gets that this is skewering his homeland, England). "The drawing is exquisite," Aldridge writes. "Dali, his raging machismo restored, slowly pushes the pen and book back to me." Although Dali's plane is ready, he refuses to leave, waiting to see Aldridge's response. Aldridge draws a fishtailed plane with Dali as the nose, complete with oversized mustache. When Dali left, Aldridge kept the book, but it was lost in a fire years later in his studio in Los Angeles, which he now makes his home.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Book news: Mailer, Sterling, Cohen, Roth, Angelou

Would the history of letters be different if self-publisher Lulu had been around in the 1950s? Norman Mailer wrote that he was "as mad as I had been at any time since the Army because the book as it stood then had faults, but it was still so much better than the kind of ... which is printed all the time that I was livid enough to publish it myself." The book was "The Deer Park," which Putnam published in 1955. But imagine the momentum self-publishing might have gained back then if a young Norman Mailer had gotten behind it with all his ambition and pugilistic impulses? You may ask this and other questions reading Norman Mailer's letters on the Daily Beast. 

BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow picks his favorite book of 2009, despite it being only February: "The Caryatids" by Bruce Sterling. It's a water-bound almost-dystopia with angry sister-clones and two major opposing civilizations, and it wrestles with the ideas of technology and military aggression.

Philip Roth will publish two more novels with Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt. New York magazine reports that one book will be about an aging artist (actor, not a writer) "into whose bereft life bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire" and the other will be a historical fiction about a 1944 polio epidemic in New Jersey.

If the voice in your head is a throaty bass, you might hear a song when you read Leonard Cohen's new poem "A Street." It's in the New Yorker.

Speaking of poets, if you were following Maya Angelou on Twitter, turns out the account was held by an impostor. While it's possible the 80-year old Pulitzer Prize winner is tweeting away on her Blackberry, it's not likely. Remember, people, when driving the Internet, use caution.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo courtesy the Norman Mailer Society.

'Drink Play F#@k': Doesn't the title really say it all?

In his 195-page tome, humorist Andrew Gottlieb pumps out a funny take on what men are looking for in life. It’s Bob Sullivan’s story: a fully jilted, newly divorced New York liberal who sets foot into the world, after years of lockdown domesticity. His journey takes him (and us) to Ireland to get smashed, to Vegas to throw dice and to Thailand to … well, enjoy the pleasures of the opposite sex.

What Bob finds, however, is not what you might expect at the beginning of what seems like an obvious parody of Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat Pray Love."

Here’s Gottlieb, discussing his book with Jacket Copy:

JC: First of all, your book is clearly a play on "Eat Pray Love." It is nearly the husband of that book taking his own journey. Did you love or hate "Eat Pray Love"? Does your book mock or embrace it?

Gottlieb: I had this idea I was aware of the widespread success of "Eat Pray Love." And knowing of the success of that, I thought it would be funny to do it from a guy’s perspective. I admire "Eat Pray Love’s" intentions, but it was a hard read for me. I didn’t want to mock it; I just thought it would be funny because there’s another perspective to tell a completely different version of the same story.

JC: Why did you write this book?

Gottlieb: Beyond being funny, I thought there was something more significant and profound that could be told from a guy’s perspective.

JC: It’s a fictional tale of Bob Sullivan, a newly divorced guy. Tell us a bit about your main character.

Gottlieb: He’s like a lot of guys I know. Guys talk about grandiose stuff — if I could do this or that.…Bob was hemmed in for so long that he lost his wanderlust. But Bob learns he doesn’t need total crazy reckless freedom. He still wants someone to share his life with. Someone to have fun with. Once you stop worrying about what’s going to make you happy or have fun, you find out what really makes you happy and have fun.

JC: What are we supposed to learn from Bob’s failings and triumphs? Anything?

Gottlieb: I would never presume to teach anybody anything. But what’s interesting is that while it is so different from the original, and as different as men and women are, we all want the same things. You want to share your life with someone who makes you feel good.

(More after the jump)

Finding the black in noir

The origins of noir are as twisted as one of its best plots. Mysteries and detective stories were published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the US and UK; there were books and cheap paberbacks and  popular magazines. Maybe it was their accessibility that led Hollywood to make movies from them. Or maybe it was that, by the 1930s and '40s, some of those writers lived in L.A. -- James Cain, Raymond Chandler -- and they were the kind of guys a movie producer might have a drink with. The result ranged from really lousy films to B-movies ("D.O.A.") to high-end productions like "Double Indemnity," which was nominated for seven Oscars. The people who worked on them fell along a huge spectrum of Hollywood nobodies and up-and-comers and gadflies and oddballs and ambitious visionaries; expatriate directors Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder (from Austria) among them. But nobody, in all that time, called them "noir."

After WWII, France saw a sudden influx of American films that they'd missed during the war. Film scholars noticed that many had dark themes (all those mysteries and drinking detectives) and dark screens (a legacy of German Expressionism). They called these films "black" -- in French, noir. 

But the parameters of noir were never clear to people at the time they were making the films -- not like someone making a musical knows they're making a movie with song-and-dance numbers. But something in the idea was so powerful -- that detectives and mysteries with dangerous women and little chance of things turning out all right could play out in a twisted moral landscape -- that it was exported back to America, and back to fiction and books. It is, sometimes, an awkward fit.

But there are a few running threads, and one is that noir is very, very white.

Except it's not. That's what "Black Noir: Mystery, Crime, and Suspense by African-American Writers" shows. It includes writing by Chester Himes, Edward P. Jones, Gary Phillips, Paula Woods and Walter Mosely, and is edited by Otto Penzler. Details after the jump.

Joseph O'Neill wins PEN-Faulkner Award

Joseph O'Neill has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction for his book "Netherland." O'Neill, who lives in New York City, will take home $15,000 and bragging rights.

Actually, the PEN/Faulkner Award is designed to tone down the bragging. Other literary prizes announce a scrum of finalists from which a final victor emerges; in England, bookmakers take bets on the Booker Prize, just like they would a horse race. But the PEN/Faulkner Award announces its finalists and winner all at once, calling the top prizewinner "first among equals."

The equals for the 2009 prize are Southern California's Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, for "Ms. Hempel Chronicles"; Susan Choi for "A Person of Interest"; Richard Price for "Lush Life"; and Ron Rash for "Serena." Each will get $5,000, a sum that indicates they're more than just runners-up.

The wide-field approach means that the PEN/Faulkner Award has covered a lot of literary ground since its debut in 1981. That year, "How German Is It?" by Walter Abish was the winner, and experimentation was popular. Finalists were Shirley Hazzard for "The Transit of Venus," Walker Percy for "The Second Coming," Gilbert Sorrentino for "Aberration of Starlight" and John Kennedy Toole for "A Confederacy of Dunces." In the intervening years, some usual literary suspects have taken the top honor — John Updike, E.L. Doctorow (twice), Philip Roth (twice), Don DeLillo. But experimentalists like Toby Olson also have been honored, as has popular novelist T.C. Boyle.

Where Joseph O'Neill will fall in the literary spectrum remains to be seen. "Netherland," his third novel, is about a man who finds himself playing cricket in New York after Sept. 11. Our reviewer wrote:

Yes, the novel is a lucid celebration of a complex sport that is little understood here, but it’s also a book about the emotional legacies of Sept. 11, and it’s a book that takes up some deep and enduring literary themes: connection, estrangement and, not least, what it means to be American.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Attend class, or just download it?

In 2007, professor Hubert Dreyfus of UC Berkeley, above, said that he'd seen classroom attendance drop after his courses became a cult hit on iTunes U. But now it turns out that the students who were cutting to listen to his podcasts may actually be scoring better on exams.

A new study by a researcher at the State University of New York at Fredonia shows that students who download podcasts of lectures do better on tests than those who attend the lectures themselves.

When it comes to literature, most of the podcasts on iTunes U tend to stick to lectures and special events. Oxford has podcasts on Milton and J.R.R. Tolkein. Emory has posted lectures by Umberto Eco and Alice Walker. MIT, USC and Yale have all posted a handful of lectures.

Stanford has an outstanding actual literature course, which appears as the Literature of Crisis in the listings. That's the umbrella topic for last year's required introduction to the humanities. As the podcasts begin, you can hear the scuffing of people settling into chairs, the professors -- Martin Evans and Marsh McCall -- speaking up to bring the room to order. The entire course, from Plato to Voltaire, is now online, and it sounds not like a lecture but like a class.

That liveliness is what can set a podcast apart. Which is why I also like the "Stanford Three Books" lectures (found among their Authors podcasts), given at the beginning of the year to incoming students, who have been told to read the books during the summer and who cheer with enthusiasm for Tobias Wolff, Julie Orringer, Khaled Hosseini, Junot Diaz and more.

Downloading classes may help student test scores, but the grades were not impressive: a D average for those who went to class, a C average for the podcast-listeners. Obviously, more is required to get an A than just playing audio or video tracks. But if we're not in school, we can download the classes without fear of being called on unprepared or getting hit with a pop quiz.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Dave Getzschman / For The Times

Patton Oswalt for poet laureate

In the guise of a tweedy E. Hamish Plumbrick, Patton Oswalt campaigns for the position of poet laureate. The position is currently occupied by Kay Ryan ... but does she know the Five Forbidden Poetic Death Talents? Because Plumbrick does.

Patton Oswalt for poet laureate -- watch more funny videos

So far, Plumbrick is not onto the fact that California has a state poet laureate; Carol Muske-Dukes is safe.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

A Different Light going dark

After almost 30 years as the preeminent gay, lesbian and transgendered bookstore in Los Angeles, A Different Light in West Hollywood will be closing its doors. As far back as 2000, manager Brad Craft, above, warned the L.A. Times that the bookstore, which he called "the intellectual focus of our community," was struggling. This week owner Bill Barker, who has no intentions of shuttering the San Francisco store, says there were two circumstances that made things increasingly difficult for the WeHo location.

The first, he told Instinct Magazine yesterday, was a massive construction project on Santa Monica Boulevard that began in 2001. "[The city] came in and ripped all the sidewalks out, and foot traffic and parking disappeared from West Hollywood for a year or 18 months," he said, "and it never came back."

Then in 2007, Mickey's, a bar next door, had a terrible fire. "They closed it down, barricaded the front, and again I saw a dropoff in sales. The bars attract people," Barker said. "They [Mickey’s] were supposed to open last June, and that didn’t happen, and then it went to October before Christmas and that didn’t happen. And now the economy is very, very serious."

Earlier this month, the nation's oldest gay bookstore, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York's Greenwich Village, announced it will close in late March. The closures are bad news for independent bookstores in general and gay bookstores in particular.

But one thing that A Different Light has going for it, in addition to its storefront in the Castro in San Francisco, is a robust online marketplace, where it sells books, DVDs and "adult selections." And you know how the Internet loves "adult selections."

The West Hollywood store will close sometime this spring.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Al Seib / Los Angeles Times

Round couch with surround shelves

This illustration of a round couch with built-in bookshelves comes from Russian industrial designer Irina Zhdanova (unless she really goes by last name first, as it appears on her portfolio site).

Although I learned Russian in college, it's too rusty -- and the type is too small -- for me to figure out what she's saying about the couch in her mockups. What I can tell: It is imagined in chartreuse and turquoise, as well as red. It is clearly designed to be thinner at the top than at the bottom.

If it rolled 180 degrees, would it snap? Or could it roll and roll? Could the couch-shelf be repositioned with a gentle shove? I can see it in a cement-floored loft, being rolled along to follow the sun.

If it were to be roll-able, you'd have to really pack the books into those spaces so they wouldn't shake loose. For some of us, though, that wouldn't be tough at all.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Illustration: Irina Zhdanova

Magazine premieres

Some people take their obsessions and collect things, filling up closets, storage spaces, garages, even bookshelves. Others collect things and then decide to share them -- that's what Danielle Huthart did with her Premiere Issues archive.

She's posted the first issues of almost 200 magazines, mostly from the 1990s to the present. Many come with a stats sheet, like a baseball card -- founder, editor, creative director. After the project started -- inspired by the iconic Ray Gun magazine -- people started submitting their own first issues to build the online collection.

As Huthart's interests are art and fashion, design and culture, the main archive display reveals what some of our expectations are. Logo magazine (not pictured above) parodies these expectations. Its first issue's cover looks like a sketch, with a woman in a bikini labeled "famous person" and directions to "smooth out skin" and "reduce waist"; words along the side read "HOT SEX/fashion/diet."

Each magazine's premiere issue has to announce itself, and most do something to interject themselves into the existing visual conversation. Ray Gun used fonts in unexpected, sometimes illegible ways, like the distortion in the music it covered. George wanted to establish itself as a hipper, sexier political magazine, so there's Cindy Crawford as George Washington -- with a bare midriff. And home design magazine Nest, instead of going with a sparkling, enviable interior like most shelter mags, featured a room wallpapered, walls and ceiling both, with black-and-white pictures of Farrah Fawcett. Nest intended, its cover declared, to see the beauty in obsession.

There is beauty in Huthart's site. I just wish it were augmented with wilder and earlier magazines -- anybody got the 1966 premiere of Crawdaddy? Or a 100-year-old copy of Vogue they might share?

Hat tip to the NY Public Library for the link.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Credit: Carolyn Kellogg