The New York Review of Books - USA (2020-04-09)

April 9, 2020 21

future, painting was still the way to

bring home the bacon.”) And he could

imaginatively project himself into a

consciousness that feels like kin, as

when he looked at photographs of Kurt

Cobain after his death:

He is slumped as if exhausted or

about to fall down—but junkies

don’t fall down—maybe it’s just

“I have very bad posture.” Kurt is

knocking back a quart of Evian,

unlike Keith and his Jack Daniels.

He is lucid, but still the light seems

to be fl ickering. T he pose is obvious.

His posture is crushed. He’s in a

slump. He’s on the edge of the world

we inhabit, peeking into another.

But then he could be cornball or

vaguely fogeyish, as in his complaint

about the decline of embarrassment or

his proposal for a Guilty Party in the

elections or his suggestion that the Pen-

tagon sell ad space on the B-2 bomber.

As befits a dandy, he excelled at hand-

ing out advice:

It’s always better to be overdressed

than underdressed for an occasion.

It will appear that you are going

somewhere better later.

If you order white wine in a restau-

rant and it’s not cold enough, dump

the contents of a salt shaker into

the ice bucket and mix well.

So some of these pieces now fall flat,

sound like routines or, worse, like his-

torical ephemera. Some of the con-

tents here remind me of the volumes of

midcentury modern saloon chatter by

Bennett Cerf, which as a kid I found

enjoyably mystifying when I’d turn

them up at yard sales. Not coinciden-

tally, O’Brien acknowledges his debts

to Steve Allen and Jack Paar, urbane

talk-show hosts of that same era, and

his choice of profession is unavoidably

connected to the period as well: “The

creative executives enjoyed much of

La Vie de Bohème, hobnobbing with

photographers and models, frequent-

ing jazz clubs, possibly smoking an oc-

casional jazz cigarette.”

What chiefly distinguished O’Brien

from his downtown milieu was that at no

point was he ever a bohemian. Instead,

he was, eternally, a hepcat: “Hip is a

noun, a verb and an adjective. Hiply is

the adverb. Hip is a joint. When hips get

together they do the bump. They do the

hip shake. When a hip gets cut off and

smoked, it’s a ham.” He was hip begin-

ning at the very last point when hipness

was still connected to secret knowledge

imparted by members of a disenfran-

chised minority, in his case largely by

gay men. He remembers the era in lower

Manhattan when common aesthet-

ics and partying proclivities seemed to

override other sorts of identity:

Everywhere Andy went we all

went. Usually we would wind up

dancing at a club. The clubs we

went to were basically gay discos

but they were integrated in a way

that no longer exists as far as I

know. We were a weird posse of

gay and straight guys and straight

girls with wandering tendencies.

The book is something of a curate’s

egg, but then he wrote so damn much,

much of it tossed-off and time -sensitive,

Madonna and Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York City, 1982 ; photograph by Glenn O’Brien

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The Robert B. Silvers Foundation herewith invites applications

for the 2020 Silvers Grants for Work in Progress. Authors with

contracts (or editorial agreements) for long-form articles or full-

length book projects in the fields of criticism, political analysis,

social reportage, or the intellectual essay that require up to

$10,000 in financial support for travel and/or research may apply.

Applications should take the form of a curriculum vitae, a one-

page description of the project, a statement of estimated costs,

and one sample of the writer’s work. Completed applications may

be submitted until April 20th, 2020, and should be emailed to

[email protected], or sent via post to:

The Robert B. Silvers Foundation

PO Box 141

New York, NY 10014

ʴʨʥʘʖʘʖ

ʳʩʬʶʥʲʳʧʲʡʮʴʳʦʯʲ

ʷʯʲʫʩʮʰʲʯʧʲʥʳʳ

The Robert B. Silvers Foundation is a charitable trust established

by a bequest of the late Robert B. Silvers, founding editor of

The New York Review of Books, with the aim of supporting

writers in the fields of long-form criticism, essay, and journalism.

FREEMAN DYSON

(1923–2020)

JAMEY GAMBRELL

(1954–2020)

FIONA MACCARTHY

(1940–2020)

We mourn the death of these

long-standing contributors and friends.

A star of French comics imagines America—its movie stars, its history,

its fashion—in these tantalizing graphic short stories

about everything from love to, yes, the actor Robert Mitchum.

Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500, or visit http://www.nyrb.com

    

MITCHUM

Blutch

    

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ALSO BY BLUTCH

PEPLUM

Blutch is one of the most inventive storytellers in comics,

and nothing reveals it like Mitchum.

Serialized and collected in the mid-1990s and never

before available in English, this is Blutch at his most wide-

ranging. From Puritan fever dreams to an encounter with

a shape-shifting Robert Mitchum, Blutch builds stories

out of his dreams, visions of America, and anything else

he can get his hands on.

Drawn in his unmistakable line that veers in a moment

from crude to elegant, blotchy to crisp, horrific to serene,

these comics show Blutch searching for new artistic

frontiers. What he finds is sometimes surprising, occa-

sionally unsettling, and endlessly fascinating.