Dedicated to classics and hits.

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Glamorama (1998) by Bret Easton Ellis

The male model: How did we get to Zoolander? - BBC Culture
Glamorama reminded many of the  movie Zoolander, including Brett Easton Ellis- he settled with the producers of the film for an undisclosed amount.

Book Review
Glamorama (1998)
 by Bret Easton Ellis

  Re-reading a fun book like Glamorama, with plenty of sex, gore and fashion, reminds me how tedious many of the 1001 Books are when I am reading them.   I bought the first edition hardback copy when it was released in 1998, and I still have it on my shelf.  I couldn't get my hands on the Audiobook version- which is an Audible (Amazon) exclusive, so I re-read an Ebook I checked out from the library.  I had fond, if vague, memories of my original reading, but everything came back into focus 50 pages in.

  This time, I was so struck by the similarities between Glamorama and the plot of the film Zoolander, that I looked into it on Google, and found that Ellis settled out of court with the producers, after publicly claiming that he had been ripped off.  Indeed, the two stories, both about a band of fashion-terrorists.  The prose of Glamorama also seems like a direct inspiration for the "Stephan" character on Saturday Night Live ("New Yorks hottest club is...):

 The bar is mobbed, white boys with dreadlocks, black girls wearing Nirvana T-shirts, grungy             homeboys, gym queens with buzz cuts, mohair, neon, Janice Dickerson, bodyguards and their models from the shows today looking hot but exhausted, fleece and neoprene and pigtails and silicone and Brent Fraser as well as Brendan Fraser and pom-poms and chenille sleeves and falconer gloves and everyone’s smoochy. I wave over at Pell and Vivien, who are drinking Cosmopolitans with Marcus—who’s wearing an English barrister’s wig—and this really cool lesbian, Egg, who’s wearing an Imperial margarine crown, and she’s sitting next to two people dressed like two of the Banana Splits, which two I couldn’t possibly tell. It’s a kitsch-is-cool kind of night and there are tons of chic admirers.

  Spooky similarities.  I was also reminded anew about the shocking descriptions of the impacts of terrorism- pre-9/11- it is hard to imagine that this book would have been published as is in the aftermath of that attack:


   The force of the first explosion propels Brad into the air. A leg is blown off from the thigh down and a ten-inch hole is ripped open in his abdomen and his mangled body ends up lying in the curb on Boulevard Saint-Germain, splashing around in its own blood, writhing into its death throes. The second bomb in the Prada backpack is now activated. Dean and Eric, both spattered with Brad’s flesh and bleeding profusely from their own wounds, manage to stumble over to where Brad has been thrown, screaming blindly for help, and then, seconds later, the other blast occurs. This bomb is much stronger than the first and the damage it causes is more widespread, creating a crater thirty feet wide in front of CafĂ© Flore. Two passing taxis are knocked over, simultaneously bursting into flame. What’s left of Brad’s corpse is hurled through a giant Calvin Klein poster on a scaffolding across the street, splattering it with blood, viscera, bone.

    Even an ending which ranks as nonsensical by Ellis standards didn't dissuade me from my opinion that Glamorama was and remains a hit.

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Cuba Libre (1998) by Elmore Leonard

The war in Cuba SpanishAmericanWar.info
Activity of the Spanish American War in the Cuban theater, as featured in Cuba Libre by Elmore Leonard.
Book Review
Cuba Libre (1998)
by Elmore Leonard

   Cuba Libre is the great outlier in the Elmore Leonard bibliography, set, of all places, in Cuba immediately before, during and after the Spanish American war.   Martin Amis, in his 1998 interview of Leonard at the Writer's Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, singled-out Cuba Libre as astonishing, and told Leonard he had trouble believing Leonard had written it.  Reading that interview (included at the end of Pagan Babies in Ebook format, and indeed, after the end of this book as well, also read in EBook format), piqued my interest in Cuba Libre, so here I am.

   Calling Cuba Libre sui generis isn't exactly accurate.  Leonard did have his early period of Western fiction, but Cuba Libre represented his first non-contemporary crime fiction novel in over twenty years.  At its heart, Libre has a plot that mirrors other common elements of Leonard's capers:  A crime that involves ripping off bad guys, double crossing, a male protagonist with many strengths but a troubled past, and a female love interest/femme fatale/partner in crime who is young and sexually adventurous.

   As the outlier of his recent bibliography, Cuba Libre is worth pulling out of chronological sequence if you are making your way through the Leonard ouevre, but it ends up reading similar to his other books in terms of plot and character.

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