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

TV: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: J-Zone’s Root For The Villain: Rap, Bullshit And A Celebration Of Failure

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

If you’re lucky, you can pinpoint the exact moment you gave up on your dreams. For rapper, producer, curmudgeon, and all-around character J-Zone, that moment came in the form of a phone call from his distributor over at independent rap label Fat Beats about the thousands of unsold J-Zone albums currently taking up space in their warehouse. J-Zone faced a grim professional and personal reckoning when Fat Beats presented him with two options: He could take the thousands of unsold CDs back and try to transform dead product into something saleable, or he could concede that his career as ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: La Toya Jackson’s La Toya

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the second and final installment of a two-part La Toya Jackson series here at Silly Show-Biz Book Club, where we’re too stubborn to let the muted response to the first installment keep us from plunging madly ahead into the dark, cavernous depths of Jackson’s fractured psyche one more time. Released in 1992, La Toya is essentially the same book as Starting Over, La Toya’s second memoir, published in 2011. Both books are about a meek, abused, and devout young woman overcoming horrendous physical and emotional abuse at the hands of a demonic manager with the ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: La Toya Jackson’s Starting Over

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:00:00 -0500

Historically, schools, religious institutions, and the military have performed the job of socializing young men and women. In the future, though, we will increasingly look to reality television to give children and washed-up celebrities the valuable job skills they’ll need to succeed in life. Take La Toya Jackson. Before she enrolled in Reality School University, she was, by her own admission, an unusually naïve woman unschooled in the ways of the world. But after enrolling in Armed And Famous and Celebrity Apprentice, she acquired the financial and procedural know-how to tackle the biggest case of her career: solving ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: Robert Hofler’s Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale Of Sex, Drugs, And Rock ’N’ Roll Starring The Fabulous Allan Carr

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:00:00 -0500

When Tasha Robinson handed me a copy of the Allan Carr biography Party Animals, she wryly noted that the cover featured a giant, sexy photograph of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John at the height of their nubile beauty, and the name of the book’s subject in borderline-microscopic type. For all his egomania, Carr—the producer of Grease, Grease 2, Where The Boys Are ’84, Can’t Stop The Music, and the infamous 1989 Oscar telecast—probably would have loved the cover. Carr worshipped beauty. He was a marketing genius who understood better than anyone that if you want to ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:00:00 -0500

There comes a time in all Neil Strauss-assisted rock-star tell-alls when the sex and sin of life at the top of the show-business food chain stops being fun and turns soul-crushing. Marilyn Manson’s The Long Hard Road Out of Hell—the title is literal; Manson really does come from Florida—and Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt each contain moments of clarity where their protagonists take a step back and ponder the moral morass they’ve reached. Manson has at least two such moments. In the first, he stops throwing lunchmeat at a naked, deaf groupie long enough ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: Dustin Diamond’s Behind The Bell

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 12:00:00 -0500

The author of the memoir Behind The Bell presents himself as the voice of experience, wisdom, and authority. He’s the man at the end of the bar with an impeccably rumpled trenchcoat reeking of sadness and scotch. He has the craggy, deeply lined face of a man who has lived. Every scar tells a story. Every wrinkle uncorks a boozy anecdote. You think you’re hot shit with your tight jeans and your hipster haircut? You think you’re fucking Charles Bukowski because you cried when you wrote some poetry in college after your sophomore roommate committed suicide? You ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: Perfection Is Not a Sitcom Mom by Janet Hubert

Thu, 19 May 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The notion of family honor can’t help but feel a little anachronistic in this day and age, a remnant of an earlier era where matters of honor were resolved via pistols at dawn rather than legal maneuvering, and the mere whisper that a virgin’s purity had been sacrificed before marriage could ruin a family’s reputation for generations. Yet, as an actress, Janet Hubert’s name is her calling card. After she parted ways with The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air, the show that made her semi-famous, she felt as if that name was tarnished because, well, her name ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: The Other Other Guy’s Fallin’ Up

Tue, 17 May 2011 12:00:00 -0500

In his recently released memoir, Fallin’ Up: My Story, Taboo—otherwise known as The Other Other Guy from Black Eyed Peas—stands naked before the world and bares his scars and his soul. He’s unafraid to depict himself as either a lonely, sad little grandma’s boy or as a pathetic drug addict so wasted, he shits himself in public and crawls around the Four Seasons naked in an Ecstasy-fueled haze. Taboo’s candor is admirable, but it makes being a cynical smartass about his achingly sincere book much harder. Taboo’s memoir is a terrifying reminder of how ...

Film: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: Rodney Dangerfield’s It’s Not Easy Bein’ Me: A Lifetime Of No Respect But Plenty Of Sex And Drugs

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 12:00:00 -0500

“My life is nothing but pressure. All pressure. This pressure is like a heaviness. It’s always on top of me, this heaviness. It’s always there since I’m a kid. Other people wake up in the morning, ‘A new day! Ah, up and at ’em!’ I wake up, the heaviness is waiting for me nice. Sometimes I even talk to it. I say [adopts cheerful voice] ‘Hi, heaviness!’ and the heaviness looks back at me, [in an ominous growl] ‘Today you’re gonna get it good. You’ll be drinking early today.’”—Rodney Dangerfield, No Respect Rodney Dangerfield ...

Music: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: Larry Harris’ And Party Every Day: The Inside Story Of Casablanca Records

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

If you’re lucky, sometimes you get to live through an important cultural moment. But if you’re really, really lucky, sometimes you get to inhabit the epicenter of an important cultural moment, hooking into something in the process of exploding and riding that lightning as far as it will take you. Record executive-turned-And Party Every Day author Larry Harris experienced something just like that when his fiendishly charismatic cousin Neil Bogart asked him to work alongside him doing radio promotions for the influential independent label Buddah in the early ’70s. But Harris and Bogart’s saga wouldn’t ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: Kiss And Sell: The Making Of A Supergroup

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 12:00:00 -0600

C.K. Lendt’s Kiss And Sell: The Making Of A Supergroup captures something profound and insightful about its subject’s essence while dealing only tangentially with the group’s artistic side. That’s fitting. As musicians, Kiss never rose above the level of a decent bar band with some catchy songs and a terrific stage show. As a business proposition and commercial entity, however, Kiss continues to cast a long shadow over the sum of pop culture. Kiss was never merely about four guys playing rock ’n’ roll. It was never about musicians performing music. It was about entertainers ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s A Shore Thing

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0600

If Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi seems markedly different this season of Jersey Shore, it’s with good reason. Seemingly overnight, the reality-television supernova has made a stunning transformation from famously ditzy, malapropism-prone, seemingly illiterate space cadet into published author. I haven’t caught the debut of the new season of Jersey Shore yet, but I suspect we’ll be seeing a new Snooki this year, a woman of letters who has traded in her signature pouf for a prim librarian bun, and her sparkly shades for reading glasses. While her housemates stumble blearily from one drunken bacchanal to another, Snooki will ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: Here’s The Situation

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:01:00 -0600

Just as Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino’s ascent to fame might just represent the nadir of Western civilization, Here’s The Situation, Sorrentino’s literary debut, might just mark the death of irony. Whether you laugh with it or at it, you’re still playing into Sorrentino’s rigged game. What made Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino so much fun to watch during the first season of Jersey Shore was his unique combination of shamelessness and lack of self-consciousness. Sorrentino’s defining moment in the show’s first season was the monologue where he broke down, for the benefit of the ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: Killing Willis by Todd Bridges

Thu, 20 May 2010 12:00:00 -0500

A few weeks back, my editor Tasha Robinson plunked a book down on my desk and said, “When I saw the title, I thought you might want this.” The tome in question was Killing Willis: From Diff’rent Strokes To The Mean Streets To The Life I Always Wanted. It’s Todd Bridges’ sordid exposé of how he went from teen idol to small-time crack kingpin/crack-whore enthusiast to guy who feels kind of bad about having been a small-time crack kingpin/crack-whore enthusiast. Tasha was right, of course. Some people are put on Earth to help young people, inspire ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: Thirty-Nine Years Of Short Term Memory Loss

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0500

A few years back, I was buying pot from a lovely young woman. I mentioned that I had gone to University Of Wisconsin At Madison, and she asked if I knew a friend of hers who went there around the same time. “I figured maybe you’d know her, since you’re both stoners,” she reasoned. I felt strangely insulted. How dare this woman suggest I was a stoner just because I bought pot from her on a regular basis? I then experienced an epiphany: People who don’t smoke pot tend to hate stoners. Then again, people who smoke ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: Life With My Sister Madonna by Christopher Ciccone

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:00:00 -0600

At one point late in his memoir, Life With My Sister Madonna, Christopher Ciccone professes to be stunned to find his older sibling treating him in a cold, disrespectful fashion. I was reminded of the scene in Casablanca where Claude Rains’ endearingly corrupt officer claims to be shocked, yes shocked, to discover that there’s gambling going on at Rick’s Place, just as a croupier discreetly slips him his winnings for the evening. In Life With My Sister Madonna (co-written with Wendy Leigh), the titular shrew never treats Christopher with anything but cold disregard and complete lack of respect ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: “I slept with Nas” double feature

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:00:00 -0600

The Nas who recorded Illmatic as a hungry teenager was many things: a self-taught poet who dropped out of school in the eighth grade, the second coming of Rakim, a fiery political activist with a singular gift for rhetoric, and hip-hop’s lyrical messiah. He was a genius who created one of rap’s greatest, most unimpeachable albums while not old enough to drink legally. It’s hard to overstate Illmatic’s importance: Last year, Michael Eric Dyson edited Born To Use Mics: Reading Nas’ Illmatic, a compilation of essays about the album from leading members of the smart set ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: David Lee Roth’s Crazy From The Heat

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:00:00 -0600

A while back, my editor Keith had the dubious honor of interviewing the sentient ball of self-regard that is David Lee Roth, though “interview” implies a conversation between two people, whereas any chitchat with the excitable Van Halen frontman is destined to feel like an endless, one-sided rant. At one point Roth prodded, “Are ya smiling, Keith? Are ya smiling?” That might just be the quintessential David Lee Roth moment. Roth is less a singer than an entertainer in the classic sense, the kind of secretly sad clown who weeps uncontrollably if he doesn’t get a standing ovation after ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: Mackenzie Phillips’ High On Arrival

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:00:00 -0600

As someone who enjoys the deplorable practices of drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana, I’d feel like a hypocrite giving my future children the same hysterical lectures about the evils of pot and booze I received as an impressionable member of the “Just Say No” generation. Yet in a strange way, I’m grateful I was inundated with histrionic anti-drug propaganda from a young age. I’m strangely appreciative that it was drilled into me that my first marijuana cigarette would lead irrevocably to sucking off random passersby for crack money a mere week later. I’m glad I read ...

Books: Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: The Michael Jackson Tapes by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:00:00 -0600

In the aftermath of his death, everyone had their own private Michael Jackson. Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach was no exception. For a brief idyll, Boteach served in an unofficial capacity as Michael Jackson’s spiritual advisor and his partner in an initiative to encourage parents to prioritize their children. The rabbi and the pop star were going to save the kiddies, preserve families, and make the world a better place. Both men were driven by formative early traumas. Jackson spent his adult life trying to experience the childhood that had been sacrificed on the altar of prepubescent superstardom. Boteach was ...