The first story in this tasty collection is Love Is A Grift – a twist on classic noir and crime fiction tropes that sharply changes its location – Ireland, Belgium, Finland, Scotland – and POVs – a hit-man, a femme fatale, a patsy – as it cleverly tells its tale. Hammer Films, Girl On A …
Continue reading Recommended Read: Love Is A Grift by Graham Wynd
I have a new favourite caper movie thanks to The Cultural Gutter’s Carol: Black Lizard (黒蜥蜴 Kurotokage) from 1962. Based on the novel by popular 30s mystery novelist Edogawa Rampo (AKA Taro Irai) the book was adapted for the stage by no less than Yukio Mishima himself — who appears in the 1968 film of the novel (see …
Libby Holman (1904 – 1971) by Sarony New York, ca. 1928. The torch singer Libby Holman had a life so wild there have been at least two films inspired by it. In 1904 she was born to what had been a well-to-do Jewish family in Ohio—that is until her uncle embezzled all their money. …
Love is a Grift by Graham Wynd Cover and layout by S.L. Johnson Images Sex, Death and Crime: The essentials of Noir. How does obsession begin? For one hit man it starts with a target he just can’t kill. She leads him on a deadly spree across Europe. With every step he’s in deeper. …
For some, the opening notes of ‘MacArthur Park’ provoke joy—for others panic, especially if it’s on a tinny car radio and there’s no escape for the next seven minutes. Songwriter Jimmy Webb has said many times that he’s given misleading answers to the perpetual question of just what the hell this mock epic …
Continue reading Short Story in a Song/ Noir Songs: Richard Harris—MacArthur Park by Graham Wynd
The night they kicked me out of the band, everything fell apart. Yet we were grooving so well that night — in sync — and the audience (such as it was) had been right there with us, swaying and laughing and dancing and all, like we always hoped for and seldom got. It felt as …
The new exhibit at the Museum of Sex in NYC has a lot to offer. Anger may be an energy, but lust is too. This show crams a lot of it into a relatively small space. Everything from vintage posters and adverts to memorabilia shows the overlaps between punk, DIY zines, the burgeoning 70s porn …
Continue reading Punk Lust @ Museum of Sex, NYC by Graham Wynd
He took the bus because the cacophony was minutely less than on the underground, where the tinny tannoy kept up its assault with nonsense messages meant only to confuse. Not that you could make out what was being said. Anyone who tried was daft. You could read the boards though the times listed were often …
Most of the time when I think of the 70s I think of it as the most horrible time to be kicking around. Bad hair, bad clothes, arena rock and disco—at least until punk came along and kicked it all to the curb for a while. But then I remember cool things like glam and …
I was watching a TIFF interview with Phyllis Nagy who adapted Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt as the 2015 movie Carol directed by Todd Haynes, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara and Sarah Paulson. Among the bon mots – along with her story of her first fascinating meeting with the author herself – was the fact that she had …
