The A.V. Club - Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Mike Sacks’ And Here’s The Kicker

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:00:00 -0500

After devouring And Here’s The Kicker: Conversations With 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft, a compulsively readable dissection of the comic mind by Vanity Fair staffer Mike Sacks, I want to give its author the highest praise any writer can give another: His book made me insanely fucking jealous, and not just because he’s kicking ass on Amazon. Sacks has written a book I wanted to write myself. Even more unforgivably, he’s done a better job than I probably would have. A few years back, I thought about writing a book of interviews about the craft ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Mark Curry’s Dancing With The Devil

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:07:00 -0500

Mark Curry’s Bad Boy expose Dancing With The Devil: How Puff Burned The Bad Boys Of Hiphop tells a story as old as music itself, a cautionary tale that echoes through the history of hip-hop and the genres that birthed it. It’s the story of a hungry, ambitious young man of modest means who dreams of something better and seizes on music as his ticket out. Then one day, this plucky striver meets an enterprising young businessman who promises him the world if he’ll sign on the dotted line. With visions of wealth, fame, and groupie love ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Nitro’s Nitrofessions

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:00:00 -0500

I picked up Gladiator: A True Story Of ‘Roids, Rage, And Redemption, the brutally honest tell-all from American Gladiator Dan “Nitro” Clark, intending to mock its author from a safe distance. Oh, what sport I planned to make of the foibles! For weeks, I would point at the book accusingly and bray with laughter. “Haw! Haw! Haw!” was my exact sentiment. The Silly Show-Biz Book Club post I planned to write belonged very much to the Nelson Muntz School Of Literary Criticism. Muntz is one the preeminent thinkers of our age: his “I jeer, therefore I am” philosophy pervades the ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:I Married Dee Dee Ramone

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:12:00 -0500

The essential Ramones documentary End Of The Century makes it clear how much angst, friction and despair went into creating the band’s joyful noise. Imagine Leonard Cohen pushing himself to the brink of madness writing “Walking On Sunshine” and you have a fair approximation of the eviscerating darkness that lurked behind the band’s exuberant oeuvre. Vera Ramone King’s Poisoned Heart: I Married Dee Dee Ramone (The Ramones Years), today’s entry in Silly Show-Biz Book Club, provides a distaff take on the Ramones’ well-worn mythology through the story of her tumultuous relationship with ex-husband Dee Dee Ramone ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Fatty fall down, make tragedy: The Chris Farley Show

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:10:00 -0500

Many, many years ago, corpulent cut-up Chris Farley hosted a fundraiser for a blow-dried, super-slick local anchorman-turned-Republican-politician Scott Klug’s congressional campaign at State Street Brats, a fraternity-friendly beer and burger joint. I remember thinking very vividly at the time, “You know, if a giant meteor were to hit Madison I have a pretty good idea where I would like it to land.” State Street Brats was notorious for their “Big Ass Burger," a two-pound monstrosity that came with a mess o’ French fries and a 32 ounce beverage. If you gobbled it all down in a half-hour without dying ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:17:00 -0600

Carrie Fisher’s life is a perfect storm of funny. Not many folks are privileged enough to have Bob Dylan show up at one of their cocktail parties wearing a parka and sunglasses. Even fewer are capable of coming up with the perfect zinger for the occasion: “Thank God you wore that, Bob, because sometimes late at night here the sun gets really, really bright, then it snows.” Fisher’s big, beautiful brain is the perfect filter for a life too trippy and surreal for fiction. I like to think that in every soul-shattering trauma lies an amusing anecdote. Fisher ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Eminem’s former bodyguard’s whiny little bitchfest

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:45:00 -0600

Some saintly sorts make it their life’s work to improve literacy or eliminate land mines. I have made it my life’s work to read/write about every half-assed, sleazy, amateurish tell-all written about Dr. Dre and Eminem. So it was inevitable I'd eventually get around to writing about Shady Bizzness, a typo-ridden, self-published expose on Eminem written by his former bodyguard. This invites the question: has anything good ever come of self-publishing? Do any of you have positive experiences with it or the bastard industry it has spawned? Looking back probably the best self-published book I’ve ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Silly Little Show Biz Book Club #22 Richard E. Grant's With Nails And I

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:38:00 -0600

The cornerstone of actor, writer, director and all around bon vivant Richard E. Grant distinctive writing style is mad, frenetic CAPITALIZATION of key words for emphasis, rhythm and intensity. In the hands of another writer this literary tic could easily come across as a headache inducing mannerism if not the deranged ravings of a lunatic intent on SCREAMING FUCKING EVERYTHING AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS with little regard for the delicate sensibilities of his readers. Yet in With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant such crazed capitalization seems not only appropriate but weirdly charming. For Grant is ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club # 20 and 21: Double Daredevil Edition starring Evel Knievel and Don Simpson

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:33:00 -0600

My colleague Scott Tobias hates biopics, or at least he despises their tendency to reduce tricky, complicated lives to a melodramatic series of giddy highs and agonizing lows. I'm more inclined to like superior biopics like Milk but I share Scott's frustrations with the limitations of biographies, whether onscreen or in print. It's damn near impossible to do justice to the complexities of a human life over the course of a single book. If the subject of a biography is dead or isn't cooperating with their biographer than the task become infinitely more difficult. The biographer ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club #19 John Leguizamo's True Hollywood Stories

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:20:12 -0600

One of my favorite features here at the A.V Club is Random Roles. Doing Random Roles feeds into my insatiable curiosity about shitty movies and, to a lesser extent, the mysteries of the human condition. I also appreciate that I don't have to do research for Random Roles. I just fire up the old computer box, log onto Internet Movie Database, get a crusty old character on the Ameche and whammo, soon all my lingering questions about what it was like to, I dunno, bask in Stephen Baldwin's outsized shadow on the set of The Flintstones in ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club #18 My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 10:46:37 -0600

"If I made one mistake as a mother, it was giving in to my eldest son's every whim" frets Debbie Nelson in the introduction to the recently published tell-some My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem. So there you have it folks: if, and that's a very big if, Nelson made any mistakes in raising an angry, profane, drug-addled son who hurls invective at her at every opportunity, it was being overly indulgent. That's like job applicants crowing that their biggest weakness is being too much of a perfectionist or doing too good of a job; shameless self-aggrandizement ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club #17: George Plimpton's Fully Charmed Life

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:47:13 -0600

One early evening about a half decade ago a seventy-something George Plimpton put on an argyle sweater and a pair of khakis and pitched a game of softball against my colleagues on the Team Onion New York softball team alongside his compatriots in the Paris Review squad. Oh sweet blessed Lord do I wish I could have been there. I treasure the mental image of a grey-haired, distinguished-looking, impossibly lanky and still youthful Plimpton staring down the Team Onion softball team, then taking them out afterwards, apologizing profusely for not being able to procure better scotch and trying to arrange ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club #15: You'll Never Suck Cock In This Town Again Too: The Cock-Re-Suckening

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:43:27 -0600

Sequels are generally inferior to the originals that spawned them, as Hamlet 2 recently reminded us. But when the original was no damned good in the first place, an inferior sequel can be brutal. That was certainly the case with two previous installments of Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club, The Vixen Diaries, Karrine "Superho" Steffans' wildly anti-climactic follow-up to her explosive celebrity cocksucking expose Confessions of a Video Vixen, and Driving Under The Affluence, Julia Phillips' mind-meltingly awful sequel to her infamous Hollywood tell-all You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again. Today's whoretastic entry in Silly Little ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club #13: You'll Never Suck Cock In This Town Again

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:41:37 -0500

Just when it seems like the Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club has finally hit rock-bottom, that it has reached a new low of debauchery and decadence I find a book that makes previous nadirs of sordid sensationalism look positively pristine. That's the case with today's tacky trifle, a tawdry, titillating tome entitled You'll Never Make Love In This Town Again that makes previous purveyors of prurient porn like Supahead and Angela Bowie look like C. S Lewis by comparison. This perverted exercise in literary prostitution recounts the horizontal misadventures of three hard-living show-biz whores (though, honestly, doesn ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club #12: Sammy Davis Jr.'s Yes, I Can

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 11:13:59 -0500

Frank Sinatra will live forever as an icon and a legend. It is his Rat Pack compatriot Sammy Davis Jr's profound misfortune to live on primarily as a joke, a punchline and a cheap, popular impersonation. Part of this is attributable to the mediums in which they thrived. While Sinatra made movies and albums his ideal mediums, the places where Davis' phosphorescent talent shined the brightest–the nightclub stage, variety show and talk show couch–were ephemeral by design. If you want your children to understand Sinatra you can play themSongs For Swinging Lovers or show them Some ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club #10: Raymond Burr: Corpulent Gay Liar

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:44:19 -0500

Like many kids, I had a weakness for Perry Mason. It was the law drama equivalent of a Harlem Globetrotters game, with its straight-arrow hero (Raymond Burr) invariably trouncing nemesis Hamilton Burger, the hapless Washington Generals of the legal world. There was something strangely reassuring about the film's uncomplicated moral code, where evildoers never prospered and the hero always triumphed. Then I found out that Burr was gay. My world was rent asunder. The ground beneath me gave way. I was heartbroken, destroyed, shattered. Actually, my response, if I remember it correctly was "eh, whatever". Who cares if Burr ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club #7: Terrance Dean's Hiding In Hip Hop

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:53:59 -0500

It's hard out there for a pioneer. Imagine how rocky baseball's integration would have been if Jackie Robinson were a weak-fielding, weak-hitting utility infielder who drunkenly cussed out his teammates after every loss, got into fistfights with umpires and hit on the owner's wife. In order to permanently break baseball's color line, Robinson needed to be an exemplar of nobility, resilience and quiet determination. For Robinson represented not just himself but every black ballplayer dreaming of crossing over from the Negro to the Major Leagues. That was an enormous burden for any one man to carry ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club #6: W.C Fields & Me

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:30:19 -0500

Carlotta Monti and Cy Rice's W.C Fields & Me boasts perhaps my all-time favorite dedication. Where humbler scribes dedicate tomes to mothers and husbands and lovers and grandparents and dear, dear departed friends Monti wholly eschews false modesty, quipping "I dedicate this book to myself, for the many years of loving service and kindness I willingly gave him." Over the course of Monti's briskly readable memoir of her fourteen years as the kept woman of cinema's all-time favorite misanthrope, her smartass dedication becomes deliciously passive-aggressive. Far from the narcissistic ego trip her dedication would suggest, W.C ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club # 5: David Bowie's Throbbing Cock

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:08:05 -0500

Let's talk about David Bowie's penis. I know that may seem a little sordid but we here at Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club Incorporated are committed to unearthing only the sleaziest and least reputable of truths. About David Bowie's penis. Thankfully, Angela Bowie, Lady Stardust herself, shares our commitment to trawling through the gutters in search of sordid sexual revelations. Lady Bowie knows exactly what readers are looking for and delivers it without shame or self-consciousness. She even apologizes, more or less, for straying too far from her comfort zone of sex and sleaze. In the midst ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club:Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club #4: Art Linson's What Just Happened?

Fri, 16 May 2008 14:23:33 -0500

While perusing the vast oceans of tortured prose that constitutes my life's work recently, I came to a horrifying realization: I am a terribly wasteful and long-winded wordsmith, the kind of self-indulgent writer who never uses a strong, simple word when several dozen fancy ones will suffice. Needless to say, this filled me with shame. Also embarrassment. And shame. Did I mention shame? It also made me feel very shamefullified. Down to my bones even. Looking back on past projects I was horrified and chagrined, not to mention somewhat flummoxed, by the sheer volume of extraneous words in my ...