Natural Selection Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books

by Giddins, Gary

• ISBN13: 9780195368505
• ISBN10: 0195368509
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-09-29
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Long recognized as America's most brilliant jazz writer, winner of the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award, Gary Giddins has also produced a wide range of stimulating and original cultural criticism in other fields. With Natural Selection , he brings together the best of these previously uncollected essays, including a few written expressly for this volume. The range of topics is spellbinding. Writing with insight, humor, and a famously deft touch, he offers sharp-edged perspectives on such diverse subjects as Federico Fellini and Jean Renoir, Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison, Marlon Brando and Groucho Marx, Duke Ellington and Bob Dylan, horror and noir, the cartoon version of Animal Farm and the comic book series Classics Illustrated . Throughout, Giddins reveals his uncommon ability to address in very few words an entire career, so that we get an in-depth portrait of the artist beyond the film, book, or recording under review. A wonderful gathering of little-known treasures, Natural Selection will broaden the perception of Gary Giddins as one of our most important cultural critics.

Author Biography

Gary Giddins wrote the Village Voice's 'Weather Bird' column for more than thirty years. His eight books and three documentary films have garnered unparalleled recognition for jazz, including a National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, two Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Awards, six ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim, and a Peabody. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Comedy

Speechless

Hanging Tough

There Ain't No Sanity Claus

This Guy Wouldn't Give You the Parsley off His Fish

Cowardly Custard

Idiot Semi-Savant

Film

Best Picture, 1889

Who Was That Masked Man?

Reviving Ghosts

The Pulse of the World

Ways We Weren't

Naked Truth

Things That Go Bump

A Few Stops on the Way to the Grave

Hokum Became Him

Primal Fear

Tales of Treachery and Loyalty

Incomparable

Awash in Ambiguity

Going His Way

Blond and Beaming

The Two Leons

Kong Has Crazed His Mind

All the Screen's a Stage

Eternal Times Square

Once upon a Time on the Via Veneto

Charming Imagination

I Spy

McCarey Nods

Across the Pacific

"My Life Makes Me Cry"

The Holland Line

Still Curious

Broken Promises

Calm, Cool, and Now Collected

Rock Heads

Real Reality TV

Roll Out the Sixties and We'll Have a Wonderful Time

'Round and Around and Around

Color Him Purple

Call It Anything

Savage Servility

Simplicity Itself

Pretty Boy

French Doubt

Blown Away

Music

Mixing Hot Licks with Vanilla

Brush Up Your Porter

Long

Jazz for the Eyes

Regrets, They've Had a Few

Ambassadors

Explosive

"I'm Supposed to Deliver"

Brother Al

The Arranger

A New Kind of Virtuosity

Beale Street Talks

Old Man Rivers

Who's Gonna Throw That Minstrel Boy a Coin?

Fresh Flowers

Put Your Voice Where Your Mouth Is

On Her 90th Birthday

Books

"Harsh as the sounds of a man's snore was the name of Khufu"

The Grove of Academe

Carrying a Torch

Muddy Waters, I presume

Soupspoon's Blues

Short and Acerbic

Oxford Jazz

A Public Burning

Doin That Waitin

Closed Minds

Laughing Man

He's Got No Kick Against Modern Jazz

Meet Mr. Matisse

Fighting for Freedom and Bad Taste

Pops and Pops

Seduced

Fear and Trembling

Kaddish for the Jews

Index

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