Just got my first JG Ballard. Kept it to his short fiction (Vermillion Sands) because my bad ADD brain can't deal with finishing Master and Margarita, even though it's an easy read and relatively okay.  Just not particularly engaged with that guys style.

I'm currently working through a couple of books.

Finally getting to Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures, his account of the independent film movement of the '90s.  I had intended to read another Biskind book first, Seeing Is Believing, his take on '50s American films, but I pulled out early on.  I don't really like that it's set up as a series of essays on specific films, rather than a chronological overview, and in the first essay I read, on 12 Angry Men, exposed some of Biskind's personal biases, describing Henry Fonda's Juror as an epitome of the "corporatist" and "centrist", both terms which he associates with a standard Democratic liberal.  (Although Biskind mostly neglected his personal politics in his Raging Bulls and Easy Riders, there was that one point later on where he bemoaned the decline of Maoist influence among the New Hollywood elite.)

No evidence of such politics in Down and Dirty, which is mostly focused on two institutions, Sundance and Miramax.  And the basic takeaways are not surprising for anyone already familiar with the era, namely that the Weinstein brothers are brutal abusers and manipulators and that the only reason why their suffering employees stuck around was out of the sheer love of the films they were working with; and that Robert Redford was paradoxically too aloof and too interferring with the filmmakers he worked with for the Sundance labs to be very successful at producing quality films.  At least we can finally get a conclusion which I think we've all suspected, which is that most of the films produced in their labs were not very good, with the filmmakers frequently confusing "homegrown" with "banality", and even the most talented filmmakers who went through the labs would go on to make their best work elsewhere.  However, Sundance's film festival and, a little later, their cable channel still provided admirable promotion for the ethos of independent film.

..........

But my deeper dive has been on Sticky Fingers, the Tom Hogan biography of Jann Wenner.  For background, in 2017, the 50th anniversary of Rolling Stone magazine, Wenner had planned a number of self-congratulatory pageants to his success, including this intended book and a feature documentary.  Because of Jann's ungodly confidence and utter lack of introspection, he naturally gave Hogan total freedom and final cut, only to act surprised when the result was less than flattering.  The fired Tom Hogan then took his manuscript to get published elsewhere. 

Again, anyone even moderately familiar with Wenner and his magazine will not be surprised to learn that he's a fairly awful cuntbag, and while this book, as more of a personal biography of Wenner than a chronicle of Rolling Stone itself, has far fewer details concerning Stone's legendary writers and creative contributors, the book does feature a lot more detail on the extent of bagged cunts within Jann Wenner himself.  The obvious comparison point is with the 1990 Robert Draper's "Uncensored History" which has been the definitive account of Rolling Stone to date, and is still best for covering all of the creative voices involved (appropriately, its first chapter is dedicated to establishing Ralph J. Gleason rather than Wenner as the true godfather of the publication), but in 1990, Wenner was not yet out-of-the-closet, and this new book has about a metric ton of extra material on Wenner's relationships, and the toll of his pansexual predations on his various intimates including his wife Jane, which simply would not have been acceptable to publish at that time.

The overall consensus - that Jann Wenner is a transactional selfish prick bastard - is still essentially the same, only with a lot more specific corroboration.  Wenner was one of those Boomers who was always more of a Yuppie than a Hippie, and (born the same year as Donald Trump) more of an animal of the 1980s than anywhere else.  The history of Rolling Stone is a consistent series of bridge-burning and back-stabbing from its editor in chief, and there doesn't appear to be anyone close to Wenner who didn't inevitably harbor some bad blood and lawsuits.  Even long-loyal photographer Annie Lebowitz, almost single-handedly responsible for RS's many iconic covers, had to resort to stealing her negatives out of the offices late one night after she learned that Wenner had lied to her over who owned the rights to them.  The book has lots of quotes which begin to get redundant: "He had real trouble with interpersonal relationships", "The closer that people got to Jann, the more likely they were to get fired"; "He was a master at going after people's insecurities"; "People around Jann were people who could do something for him".  Hunter Thompson, who not incorrectly felt that he had helped give the magazine some serious journalistic clout, would describe Wenner as "the rotten little dwarf", which maybe was kinder than Joe Eszterhas' "fascist insect".  Tom Wolfe, who thankfully never needed to rely on Wenner for employment, observed that "He seems immune to guilt", to explain how little shame Jann had in treating people as NPCs in his own grand saga, for his perpetual lying and duplicity.  "It would be nice to think that he would die in the gutter", says Rolling Stone's first film critic, Grover Lewis.

But the book's best trick was in its framing, using a prologue to illustrate Wenner's relationship with his hero, John Lennon.  Wenner is fundamentally a starfucker supreme, and he's admitted that his motive in starting Rolling Stone was to meet his rock and roll idols.  (Incidentally, true music journalists like Greil Marcus and Jon Landeau were never less than astonished by Jann's ignorance of actual rock music.)  And in 1967, when Wenner put his face on the very first cover of Rolling Stone, there was no bigger idol to Jann than John Beatle Lennon.  Soon, Lennon would be allowing Wenner to use the back of the notorious Two Virgins LP as a cover (its best selling at that point) and giving exclusive interviews.  Not least of which was his "Remembers" two-issue marathon of bile and resentment, released to coincide with his "Primal" album, his first true solo release.  Lennon was notably nervous and vulnerable at this time.  Hogan recalls the account of Lennon bursting into tears with Wenner watching the rooftop performance at the end of Let It Be at a theater showing.  Lennon would give Wenner his exclusive interview with one condition: that it would never be reprinted elsewhere.  Wenner would republish the interview as a best-selling standalone paperback within the year, owing Lennon no royalties.  Wenner fucked over the man whom he had claimed to have been the most important hero that he had ever had.  The prologue ends, "The two never spoke again".  So even after Lennon's murder, with Wenner glomming on about "my dear friend" and once again exploiting him with a self-serving magazine cover (albeit with an excellent, iconic Lebowitz photograph), there's little denying Jann's ultimate corruption as a human being.  The more hagiographic Rolling Stone documentary released that 50th anniversary in 2017 would feature a scene with Jann Wenner staring at this iconic cover, with no mention of how he screwed over both Lennon and its photographer Lebowitz, and allows the camera to stay on him for a pregnant minute as he forces himself to cry.
 

Last edited by Jinnistan (2/28/2025 8:58 pm)