Month: September 2010

This book includes a representative sampling of Frederic Remington’s drawings, paintings, and bronzes along with text that tells of his youth, his desire to be an artist at an early age, and his stints as Western artist for major magazines back East. I saw “Back East” as though Remington did his work from the frontier. He didn’t. He visited the West numerous times, including Mexico, and captured the spirit of the Fin de 19th siècle West in drawings and photos that he took home to NY to work on.

He found a lot of success as an artist, living from his art’s ample proceeds and able to experiment with a sort of Impressionism and enjoying some critical success at it. I’m always inspired when an artist has success in his lifetime.

Also, the book has lots of pretty pictures. One can flip through them and their explanatory text while watching football.

Watching football and looking at pictures of horses helps me recharge my Man Points after a hard day of découpage. At least, I hope it does.

This is the second Dick Tracy book report on this site; the first was a collection of the actual comics (The Dick Tracy Casebook in 2005–good Lord, has it been five years?).

This is a collection of original short stories including Dick Tracy written by a number of popular authors of 1990, or at least people Max Collins knew. It was released to ride the success of Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy film (which also starred Madonna–good Lord, has it been twenty years?). As such, it’s a mixed bag. Most of the stories are tolerable, but one of the volume is darn near unreadable as it goes into very heavily cinematic action and the writer can’t capture it well in the text.

Sometimes I get the urge to read short fiction as my primary fiction book because I think how easily I can put it down when it’s time for bed. That’s a double-edged wrist radio (sorry, I should have issued a spoiled metaphor alert). It makes it too easy to put down sometimes, and this book is a good example of that.

I suppose the book is more worthwhile if you’re a big Dick Tracy fan, but what person under the age of fifty is. I mean, really.

On a personal note, someone ran a contest tied into the movie where you could win a yellow trenchcoat and fedora like Dick Tracy. I entered the contest, and that’s when I started thinking of myself in a trenchcoat and hat. A couple years later, I got my first trenchcoat for Christmas and then my first fedora from Donge’s on Third Street in Milwaukee. Twenty years later, I still affect that look.

You cannot find this book on the Internet, mostly because it’s a 40-or-more-year-old (although I think it’s a later printing, but it’s still undated) comb-bound publication of the Naborhood Link News, a small free newspaper in south St. Louis County at the time. It’s a little better than photocopied typewritten article proofs, but the content is fascinating.

I lived in Lemay for a couple years in the middle 1990s, when the Naborhood Link News still existed (it ceased publication in 1996). This precedes my interest in reading up on the history of the region where I live, so I overlooked this book at that time. But Lemay has a far greater history than Webster Groves, word. Currently, the Lemay area is kinda defined as a portion of the unincorporated area in South St. Louis County where they tried to make Southpointe (with an E, like the car dealership whose owner led the charge) and that the small, 900-resident Bella Villa, best known as the eight-square-block speed trap on Bayless Avenue, helpfully offered to annex about the same time. However, historically, the Lemay area used to include Affton, Lakeshire, St. George, and a bunch of other municipalities that later made their own little town halls to…well, I suppose, impose a subdivision’s will on neighboring subdivisions.

The book tells anecdotes about Jefferson Barracks, how the villages that came to comprise Lemay were founded, the origins of Lemay Ferry Road and Telegraph Road (this last used to be called “El Camino Real” because it was built when the area was under Spanish control, which preceded French control, which preceded the Louisiana Purchase). A restaurant my wife and reviewed for our wedding rehearsal dinner dates from the 18th century; Lafayette purportedly stayed there once. Lemay was once considered for capital of the United States (story here).

And so on. Of course, the stories are all told informally with a lot of basis in recollections of the locals and some recourse to Missouri history periodicals. However, it’s best not to take them as the gospel truth. Still, good starting points for historical research or, at the very least, good legends to pass on.

I didn’t live in Lemay for that long, although my mother, the former owner of the book, lived there for much of her life, so I drove down some of the streets mentioned in the book (often accompanied by parentheses and “Now called Orient Avenue” or “Now called Ripa Avenue”). I sort of wish I was still in St. Louis so I could go look to see if many of these locations remain after the sixty years between the book’s publication and now.

As I mentioned, I inherited this book from my mother, who might have inherited it from her sister or mother. I wonder if my mother read it. I wish I could ask her and talk about it with her. One of the things I used to do on Sunday mornings was to have breakfast and coffee with her and regale her with stories and histories from books I read. This would be extra poignant as it is a book about her town.

I’ve been a fan of Vargas’s work since the Great Playboy Caper (someday, I’ll have to re-relate that story since I cannot find it on the blog here). Vargas (and his s-less alter ego Varga) did pinup and nude art for Esquire and later Playboy. They were always playful and attractive, so when I saw this book at Barnes and Noble, marked down, I knew it was the proper way to spend a Christmas gift card so long as I didn’t mention it in the thank you note by name.

The book chronicles the eras in Vargas life and selective art from each period from the collection of Vargas’s nephew. There’s plenty of text to tell the sad story of Vargas, from his start doing promo portraits of Zeigfield girls, to his rise when discovered by Esquire, to the final contract at that magazine that rooked him into indentured servitude, his break with Esquire, the lawsuit over the contract and its aftermath, and then his return to publication with Playboy.

He had a rough life, fiscally for sure, but he produced some great work. I cannot help but compare his life with that of Frederic Remington, whose art book I expect to complete during the Packers game next Sunday. Remington lived a generation before Vargas, and his work came from a life that was pretty cush and unfraught with drama. It puts lie to the hypothesis that great art must come from rotten lives. Sometimes art comes in spite of surroundings. Which is what I tell myself since I live a pretty cush life, which contrasts with my most productive writing period.

Although, to be honest, the Great Playboy Caper brought me more fiscal reward than my creative writing has.

So this book is worth a look if you’re not too embarrassed to buy it or be caught reading it. Because the other Republicans might ostracize one who knows who Vargas is or has an event in one’s life called The Great Playboy Caper.