Contributions by:
Warren Leming
For me, fresh out of a Chicago suburb, it served as the diving board to Bohemian oblivion: a Second City show seen in 1961. To encounter people in post Fifties America, on a stage, skewering Ike, Liberal-indifference, and cookie-cutter Suburban conformity was bliss in that airless Cold War Utopia. Second City director Paul Sills was…
Read Full Article...Late in life when confronted by the mindless consumerism of Life magazine Edmund Wilson said: “I do not belong to the country depicted there… I do not even live in that country.” Every page of Lewis Dabney’s long awaited biography of Wilson is shadowed by his subject’s realization that the America which he had written…
Read Full Article...Iconic actor Peter Lorre once was described fondly as a rococo cherub gone slightly astray, but as Youngkins 613 page opus shows, this extremely talented man strayed very far indeed from his astonishingly accomplished theatrical beginnings propelled by the rise of Nazism, a World War, fickle Hollywood, and a witch hunt, to name but a…
Read Full Article...Sarah Wynn Williams was a diplomat in New Zealand and an international lawyer. Inspired by what she saw as Facebook’s formidable potential, she lobbied the platform for months, before being hired and ultimately rose to Director of Global Public Policy at the platform. Promoted it seems because her idealism was a completely new approach. It was to be a harrowing…
Read Full Article...The heroes and heroines of my late teens were a remarkably and unapologetically rowdy bunch. Almost all were tagged Communists, or whatever was worse, and all were part of what was known as “the Great Folk Music Revival” led by Pete Seeger and a ragtag band of fellow singer/songwriters, chief among them the now iconic, though formerly firmly forgotten and…
Read Full Article...Did it start with Bowie, or was it Gary Glitter—that vast mid-1970s dumbing down that glam rock initiated and then perfected? “Outrageous” outfits, the androgyny fix, retro Space fantasies, and at the fringes the desiccated meth freaks for whom the Velvet Underground was alpha and omega. The Stones, Yardbirds, Animals and even purist Eric Clapton;…
Read Full Article...It now seems indecent, given the almost total amnesia enveloping this celebrated enterprise, to pose any tart questions about what actually happened at Second City; something that might stumble beyond the booster reviews, cozy nostalgia, and promo brochures. When amnesia corrodes to official memory it seems downright unpatriotic to suggest that the place now reeks…
Read Full Article...In 1960 Paul Nelson founded the Little Sandy Review with his partner Jon Pankake and made it one of the first Zines to garner a small but influential audience, which grew not by hype but solely by word of mouth. The Little Sandy had a circulation of perhaps a thousand (my guess) and all of us…
Read Full Article...Lost & Found Books is an occasional Logos series reconsidering books that reviewers argue were lost in the shuffle, fell unjustly by the wayside or are otherwise worth a revival. Submissions are welcome but it is wise to propose pieces first.– KJ Lost and Found Books: Dave Van Ronk, The Mayor of MacDougall Street (New…
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