Lenny bruce biography book
Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce!!
August 17, 2014
How can I dig this cat knowing that he narked on his wife? Later the authorities persecuted him for all the wrong reasons, but there's a certain justice in that.
It's weird how the hippest adults of that era remind me of my own classmates in junior high school. The drug humor, the in-crowd slang, the superficial and ruthless division of people into categories, the entrenched misogyny, the bullying, the callow obliviousness to how stacked the deck was - it all brings me back to ninth grade, and then I remember I'm reading about people in their thirties. I had the same feeling when I read Lou Reed's biography (by Victor Bockris, who quotes this book, and whose style is also rather breezy and informal, perhaps in imitation of this author). I have to keep reminding myself that everything's relative, that the hipsters in those days really were more enlightened than the squares: that cops harrassed interracial couples on the street, unwed mothers were treated like monsters, gay men were arrested for dancing together, etc. Even so I can't help wondering, where would someone like me have fit in, in those days? As a chick who wasn't hot-looking, I'd have been stuck in some typing pool for life, too intelligent to relate to the unthinking conformists, yet excluded from the hip crowd by my appearance and unglamorous job. Come to think of it...oh, never mind.
Anyway, this book is interesting (to me) in ways the author never intended. He's alternately clueless and insightful. One minute he's all, "Wife-beating, har har!" and the next he's offering some great little nugget like this:
"(Somehow, hipsters and Beats were always getting mixed up by those who knew very little about either. The difference was drastic: the hipster was your typical lower-class urban dandy, dressed up like a pimp, affecting a very cool, cerebral tone--to distinguish him from the gross impulsive types that surrounded him in the ghetto--and aspiring to the finer things in life, like very good 'tea,' the finest of sounds--jazz or Afro-Cuban--and maybe, once in a while, a crazy sex scene, laying up in bed for a weekend with two steaming foxes. The Beat was originally some earnest middle-class college boy, like Kerouac, who was stifled by the cities and the culture he had inherited, and who wanted to cut out for distant and exotic places, where he could live like 'the people,' write, smoke and meditate for weeks in virtual isolation while rhapsodizing about this great land of ours.)"
Ha!
I keep changing my mind about how many stars to give.
It's weird how the hippest adults of that era remind me of my own classmates in junior high school. The drug humor, the in-crowd slang, the superficial and ruthless division of people into categories, the entrenched misogyny, the bullying, the callow obliviousness to how stacked the deck was - it all brings me back to ninth grade, and then I remember I'm reading about people in their thirties. I had the same feeling when I read Lou Reed's biography (by Victor Bockris, who quotes this book, and whose style is also rather breezy and informal, perhaps in imitation of this author). I have to keep reminding myself that everything's relative, that the hipsters in those days really were more enlightened than the squares: that cops harrassed interracial couples on the street, unwed mothers were treated like monsters, gay men were arrested for dancing together, etc. Even so I can't help wondering, where would someone like me have fit in, in those days? As a chick who wasn't hot-looking, I'd have been stuck in some typing pool for life, too intelligent to relate to the unthinking conformists, yet excluded from the hip crowd by my appearance and unglamorous job. Come to think of it...oh, never mind.
Anyway, this book is interesting (to me) in ways the author never intended. He's alternately clueless and insightful. One minute he's all, "Wife-beating, har har!" and the next he's offering some great little nugget like this:
"(Somehow, hipsters and Beats were always getting mixed up by those who knew very little about either. The difference was drastic: the hipster was your typical lower-class urban dandy, dressed up like a pimp, affecting a very cool, cerebral tone--to distinguish him from the gross impulsive types that surrounded him in the ghetto--and aspiring to the finer things in life, like very good 'tea,' the finest of sounds--jazz or Afro-Cuban--and maybe, once in a while, a crazy sex scene, laying up in bed for a weekend with two steaming foxes. The Beat was originally some earnest middle-class college boy, like Kerouac, who was stifled by the cities and the culture he had inherited, and who wanted to cut out for distant and exotic places, where he could live like 'the people,' write, smoke and meditate for weeks in virtual isolation while rhapsodizing about this great land of ours.)"
Ha!
I keep changing my mind about how many stars to give.
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