Wow, I was going to post the next paragraph as a comment to the blog entry I thought I made months ago and discovered it was still in my draft file. Must have buried it under newer entries, Now I am resolved to look it over again, correct typos and publish it with intended comment leading off.
Antonia Fraser and her husband, Harold Pinter, visited Ollie [aka Dr. Oliver Sacks] at his "little dark-red clapboard house" on City Island, a most un Bronx-like section of the Bronx. The only other details she provides about the house was that it had a porch and "was extremely close to the sea. She also mentions that Sacks told her and Pinter that he swam "in and out of the moored boats like a seal." Fraser, Antonia, Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter, p.141. A line from Awakenings was the seed of inspiration for Pinter's play A Kind of Alaska which premiered at the NT with Judi Dench as Deborah.
A friend of mine occasionally bikes on City Island so I've asked him to check this out and send me a photo if he identifies the place. Of course, many of the houses on the island are near water and piers -- several films have been shot on City Island as was much of the final episode of the U.S. version of Life on Mars if you want some idea of the area. In any case, if I get a photo of Oliver Sack's [old?] house, I'll share it here.
Like many people I first became aware of the work of Dr. Oliver Sacks from the 1990 film, Awakenings. Memorably portrayed by Robin Williams, the film's neurologist finds that a new drug, L-DOPA, "awakens" patients who survived the 1917-1928 epidemic of encephalitis lethargica but have spent the intervening 30-40 years in a catatonic state. The movie was a fictionalized version of the book of the in which Dr. Sacks chronicled of his efforts in the late 1960s to help patients at Beth Abraham Hospital, a Bronx, New York hospital, which was providing long-term care for a sizable group of individuals who had contacted this form of "sleeping sickness."
Oliver Sacks is a master storyteller and Vintage Sacks shows him to great advantage. For readers who must read Sacks' work as soon as it is published, this collection serves to highlight the best and possibly refresh the memory. For those like me who haven't done as good a job keeping it up, it was a re-introduction to a remarkable human being and scientist who could have had a full-time career as a writer, if the mysteries of the human neurological system hadn't led him along another path.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Glamour Girls
Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood : Seventy-five Profiles by Tom Lisanti (2008) is a title from McFarland Publishing's extensive film and television performing arts category (http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/about.html). Sometimes it's hard to believe any more can be written about Hollywood in the 1960's but new angles on the motion pictures and television shows of the era keep popping up. In this book author Lisanti profiles 75 actresses of the era, most of whom briefly (some in close to the blink of an eye) passed across the big and little screens. Each actress gets at least one nice photograph from her heyday, a short description of career highlights, a longer section on "groovy" roles of the 60's, background on their pre-Hollywood years, and a section - lengths vary - on their post-1960's life and career(s). 13 of the women are interviewed as well and these interviews are the most interesting part of the book, imo.
For me, the most amazing thing about this book was a fleeting appearance by actor Steven Rogers (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0734779/). Mr. Rogers is shown getting close to one of the lovely ladies who are under a beach umbrella in one of those mid-60's beach movies. Rogers portrayed Doc on the first season of a hugely popular tv series, Combat! (the actual title includes a stylized bayonet, but an exclamation point is as close as my keyboard will get) and I had a huge crush on him. He disappeared from the show at the start of its second season (a sob from my pre-teen self), opting for the cushier life of beach and ski movies for a few years before departing from show business. A quick check of the yahoo group, combatfan, failed to provide much information beyond the imdb info.
All in all this is a fun read for fans of American films and television shows of the 1960's aimed at the teenaged audience that was dominating the tv set at home, if not the box office of the local movie theatre. Unfortunately, library books with excellent photos of movie actresses (or actors) are apt to have been vandalized at some point during their shelf life. This copy of Glamour Girls was no exception. Happily, the high quality of the book production work, another McFarland seliing point, has prevented the excisions from becoming too noticeable unless the reader goes through from cover to cover. In this case it was only a few pages into the Introduction before I realized 4 pages were missing and missing pages continued through to the end, generally in 4-page blocks. A less well-constructed book would have likely fallen apart before it had circulated very many times.
I meant to stick a note in when I returned it to the library the other morning but forgot; I'll try to remember to look up the catalog record and see which library owns the copy I read and call about the condition. Perhaps they'll take it out of circulation and obtain photocopies of the missing pages or replace it entirely before it goes out-of-print. Once someone has removed pages or otherwise damaged a book, subsequent users tend to be less careful than normal.
For me, the most amazing thing about this book was a fleeting appearance by actor Steven Rogers (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0734779/). Mr. Rogers is shown getting close to one of the lovely ladies who are under a beach umbrella in one of those mid-60's beach movies. Rogers portrayed Doc on the first season of a hugely popular tv series, Combat! (the actual title includes a stylized bayonet, but an exclamation point is as close as my keyboard will get) and I had a huge crush on him. He disappeared from the show at the start of its second season (a sob from my pre-teen self), opting for the cushier life of beach and ski movies for a few years before departing from show business. A quick check of the yahoo group, combatfan, failed to provide much information beyond the imdb info.
All in all this is a fun read for fans of American films and television shows of the 1960's aimed at the teenaged audience that was dominating the tv set at home, if not the box office of the local movie theatre. Unfortunately, library books with excellent photos of movie actresses (or actors) are apt to have been vandalized at some point during their shelf life. This copy of Glamour Girls was no exception. Happily, the high quality of the book production work, another McFarland seliing point, has prevented the excisions from becoming too noticeable unless the reader goes through from cover to cover. In this case it was only a few pages into the Introduction before I realized 4 pages were missing and missing pages continued through to the end, generally in 4-page blocks. A less well-constructed book would have likely fallen apart before it had circulated very many times.
I meant to stick a note in when I returned it to the library the other morning but forgot; I'll try to remember to look up the catalog record and see which library owns the copy I read and call about the condition. Perhaps they'll take it out of circulation and obtain photocopies of the missing pages or replace it entirely before it goes out-of-print. Once someone has removed pages or otherwise damaged a book, subsequent users tend to be less careful than normal.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
