Newspaper Page Text
Ampersand
November. 1979
ConnuNiCMioKit
r r»-r -ri.m
1 SBZ TA HER, UME
aimt half as
important as
RESPECT AN' RE
SPECT AIN'T /VEMLV
AS IMPORTANT AS
FRIENDSHIP, T 562.
EA56 UWAT
COUNTS IS
FRIENDSHIP' YA
(3C.TTA RELATE TA
EACH UPPER, T
5«.
i sr z—two
EOOAL SOULS
TALKIN' To ONE
ANNl'DRER. A3
PEEPLE! rjn
feOCP-
SO, piD
/OU SPT
ANT’
ZILCH.
Do Unto Others
In ihe lengthy prologue to his new novel,
Jutlbtrd (Delatorte Press/Seymour Law- :
rente, $9.95), Kurt Vonnegut quotes a let- ,
ter from an Indiana high school student
who claims to have discovered the idea thai
lies at the core of all his work to date: “Love
may fail, hut courtesy will prevail.” Von-
negut goes on to say that if he’d known that
before, it would have saved him the trouble
of w riting several books. Fortunately, he
didn’t find out before he finished this nifty
little fable, his best novel since
Nlaughter htni.se Fn*.
I he narrator, one Walter K. Starbuck, is
a pathetic little creature, a weak-willed
Washington bureaucrat, the sorriest casu
alty of Ixilh the McCarthy era and Water
gate. In typical Vonnegut fashion, the nar
rative skips bat k and forth in time, relating
Walter's childhood as the son of domestics
f or a stammering scion of a robtier-liaron
industrial magnate, his brief career as a
campus Communist in the Thirties, his
rise and fall in Washington, and his im
prisonment after getting enmeshed in the
Watergate business. At last, he is out of
prison, an old man beref t of money,
friends and prospects, when a sudden
twist of fate makes him an executive in a
superconglomerate Ixmt on buying up the
whole country.
Hut Vonnegut isn't out to give us a
tragicomic history of modern America;
what he's really after is the American Free
F.nterprise System, with its attendant em
phasis on the sacred ness of private prop
erty, forces whic h, he seems to contend, lie
Ix-hind all of our recent history. Through
the narrative and its seemingly irrelevant
asides to things like American lalxir his-
I know, I know, this sounds like basic
Marxism. Hut Vonnegut says that isn't the
answer, eithei, because something always
manages to go wrong with any revolution.
In the end, at least in this book, the only
happy people aren't the ones with money,
but the* ones who do nice things for each
other.
There are some Haws here, most notably
a plot tw ist that Vonnegut gives away much
too soon, but it's still a fine l»ook. It suc
ceeds in moving us w ithout preai hing, and
in lifting the spirits even at its most pes
simistic. We don’t need money or revolu
tions or science or even love to make life
better, Vonnegut tells us. All we really need
is kindness and simple decency to each
other. They may not save the world, but
they're alxiut the only things that make it
tolerable.
Sol Louis Siegel
Pretty Pictures
Once upon a time there were two brothers
who drew pretty pictures for the Moguls,
Tolkien and Lucas, that they would turn
them into gold in the guise of Star Wars
posters and Lord oj the Rings calendars,
'(.awl!” saiil one brother. "Why don’t we
write and illustrate our own book?”
Damn!" said the other. “What stories we
could tell!” "And what money you could
make," said their agent.
Thus the brothers llildebrant lahoicd
mightily, and brought forth Urshurak
(Hantain, $8.95), with writer Jerry Nichols
helping in the delivery. Urshurak is coolly
calculated to separate foolish sword and
sorcery fans from their $8.95, from the
f rontispiece ("full color Urshurak post
ers...just send $5.00”) on. The narrative,
like the cover, is a full-blown menagerie,
with something foi everyone: Fives,
Dwarves, Hobbits, Kobin llcxxl, Amazons,
Vikings. Nubians, winged unicorns —and
those are just theefood guvs. We even get two
Zyra,
Amazon
wizards, hurling enough deus ex machmas
about to keep even the most bumbling
heroes out of trouble.
In fad, Urshurak is downright annoying
in its constant pandering to the lowest
common denominator of liberal Seventies
alternative consciousness: we are told (but
not shown) th.it ecology is good, Ixxoming
one with something (anything) is good,
sexism is bad, reason is bad, technology is
very bad. except when used to slaughtei
evil (bad) and gain f reedom (goexi).
The complexity of theme and depth of
character that make Tolkien's trilogy a
classic are nowhere to lx* found in these
expensive pages. There is instead a happy
land where the capacity for extreme de
struction dcx*s not corrupt, where the liad
guys are pronounced evil and live in an
evil-looking city that could pass lot Cary,
Indiana on a bad day, though they don’t
really seem to do anything worse than put
people to work. Tolkien's quest is a
metaphoric lite of passage from child
hood innocence to the mixed blessing ol
adult maturity — this sortie is little more
than a sophomoric scarch-and-dcstroy
mission, punctuated by beer drinking and
hell raising. Hut then, this it supposed lobe
fantasy.
The book is nearly redeemed by the
Hildebiants' illustrations. Their work,
especially in the 12 color plates, is at once
photographic in detail and surrealistic in
color and composition. Their fantasy is
rooted in reality, which makes it all the
more arresting. They capture dawns and
dusks in which even commonplace* ob|ec ts
.lie transformed. Shadows are long and
luminescent, skies chartreuse and tui-
(I noise; clouds hover eerily like purple and
orange I'FOs. Their paintings succeed lx*-
causc, unlike the l.ord of the Rings illustra
tions, these do not have to compete with
out pre-conceived notions of w hat the
characters and settings look like. The pic
tures shine so brightly that they overpower
the limp and often ludicrous prose*, whic h
is little more than a crudely sketc hed
screenplay (the brothers conceived this
I story as lx>th nove l and film, and no doubt
a rotoscoped epic is in the offing), hurrv-
ing along with great violence and little
I sense. Most readers will gladly let them
selves lx* left behind, gazing at the pretty
I pictures.
Michael Ward
princess
I rshurak
55*
tti
Fantasy artists, 7bn (left) and Greg
HUdebrandi, <m location m New Jersey.
lory and science fiction stories (another
typical Vonnegut technique), we see how
the American mania for money and prop
erty results in vast scrap-heaps of unneces
sary human refuse and demeans the haves
as well as the have-nots.
Folk, Rock & Disco
Taken together, side by side, these three
books —tialry, Let Me Follow You Down: The
Illustrated Story oj the Cambridge Folk Years by
trie von Schmidt Sc Jim Rcxinev (Anchor.
$8.95), Horn to Run. The Hruce Springsteen
Story bv Dave Marsh (Doubleday Dolphin,
$7.95) and The Complete Hook on Disco and
Hallroom Dancing by Ann T. Kilbride He A.
Algoso (Hwong, $7.95) — make absolutely
no sense at all.
The first is a voluminous compendium
of photographs, drawings, anecdote* and
‘I was there" reportage of the late Fifties/
early Sixties Cambridge folk era, when
pimply, skinny kids like Hob Dylan, Frit
Andersen. Joan Haez and Torn Rush used
to sit around in coffee houses playing then
guitars, scribbling lines like ” I hiisty
Boots” and “From the crossroads of my
dexirstep my eves start to fade” on lorn-up
pieces of paper.
Ha try Let Me Follow You Down is. if not an
essential Ixxik, at least one no one will re
gret having purchased. The authors re
minisce, recount and recreate the
amoeba-like group's romantic intertwin-
ings (Dylan and Haez. F.ric and Debbie
Andersen, Richard and Mimi Farina,
(feoff and Maria Muldaur), the musical
intertwinings (rural bluesmen meet rich
kid Honnie Raitt, hillbillies meet Paul
Butterfield's Blues Hand, and so on) and
the many eccentrics and outright weirdos
w ho were part of the scene (remember Mel
Lyman from Kwcskin'sjug Hand —
Cambridge's answer to Charles Manson?).
Somehow, Hairy ties it all up into a happy,
sentimental oversized hcxlge-podge, man
aging to throw in the Chambers Brothers,
the Lovin’ Spoonful and Peter, Paul and
Mary for goexi measure.
Horn to Run is a picture-permeated fan’s
hook on Bruce Springsteen, chronicling
his early Asbury Park days (Marsh points
out that Springsteen actually grew up in
Freehold, New Jersey, alxiut fif teen miles
inland from Asbury Park —Ha! Another
myth squashed!), his apprenticeship in
lex al bar bands like Steel Mill, and then on
to his humpv rule to the summit of rex k Sc
roll stardom. Marsh, with a minimum of
hype and hyperbole, has carefully and
earnestly documented Springsteen’s
career, enhanced with healths dollops of
biographic a straight f rom the horse's
mouth. Maish lays out the Time and News-
week cover boy’s life story (including all the
ill effects resulting from that media over
kill) and in doing so manages to dex unient
the evolution of rock itself, fiom its Sixties
inncxence to its Seventies cynic ism.
The l)i sco book is self-explanatory.
Iwo-hundred-and-cighty pages of dance
steps (diagrammed in left (exit, right (exit,
dot-dot-dot graphics) and photos of'these
two natty ethnic-type couples doing end
less variations on the Hustle, the Salsa, the
Slow Disco, the Hump, the Freak, the
Ride-A-Hike and "free style" dances like
the Split Pivots, Taxi Driver (wherein the
dancer shaves his head Mohawk-stvle.
packs some mean hardware and attempts
to assassinate a well-known politician) and
Dolphin Rolls (which everybody knows arc
what dolphins eat for breakfast). The in-
ticxiuction features a "Historical Rex its of
Dance,” w ith photos of scantily clad Afri
can iribespcople doing war stomps around
a fire.
In fact, taken together, these three
books do make some sense. The com-
araderie, the new consciousness and inno
cence manifested by the Cambridge
folksters strikes a sharp contrast to the