Andre Williams, aka Mr. Rhythm, whose talkin’ R&B dance-dittys, Bacon Fat, Greasy Chicken, Pass the Biscuits Please, Ribs n' Tips, and the immortal Jail Bait hit the charts during the mid-late 1950s but whose career later hit the skids, followed by a descent into an alcohol and drugs-fueled skid-row life, has got his mojo workin’ once again with his first literary effort.Sweets and Other Stories is a fictional narrative that takes readers on a wild, edgy ride from Chicago to Houston, New Orleans, and New York City, as a teenage girl finds herself in a family way, without, alas, a...
“Legitimate Contender For World’s Most Expensive Book” (Not)
“Legitimate Contender For World’s Most Expensive Book” ?(Twelfth edition)“Hiya kids, hiya, hiya, hiya!”Froggy, the croaking - and long-croaked - gremlin, has risen from the graveyard of 50s television to pluck his magic twanger once more and bedevil a hapless victim. This time, a deluded "rare book dealer" is his prey.Who’s the poor sap? Why it’s Milliondollarauctions123, aka Ebay’s most egregious example of sub-amateur rare bookseller, who declares, after stating his headline above:“Far more important than $30.8 million Codex Leicester.”A page from daVinci's Codex LeicesterThe book in question? Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Seapower Upon History 1660-1783. What’s the asking...
The Lowest Entry-Level Job In Hollywood, Part Two
I Should Have Stayed Home by Horace McCoy. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938.I Should Have Stayed Home is one of the great, if largely unknown, Hollywood novels. Written by Horace McCoy (1897-1955), author of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1933), it is the tale of young Ralph Carson, a wanna-be from Georgia who comes to Hollywood to be discovered. The title of the book sums up the results of his effort. It’s a message that should be plastered on all Hollywood city limit signs, in L.A. bus depots, train stations and airports.Ralph and his girl, Mona, another hopeful, wind up...
The Lowest Entry-Level Job in Hollywood
A portion of the backlot at Universal City Studios,my home for eighteen monthsI was 23 years old, at loose ends, per usual, had hammed it up in Junior High School plays, my mother had been a showgirl during the 1940s, I looked okay and I lived in Los Angeles. Clearly, the cinema was aching for my presence.I huddled with the General Manager of Universal Studios, a friend of one of my father’s cousins by marriage, to plot a career-launch strategy. After grilling me on what I thought about the symbolism in Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and perusing my very...
Will the Real N.R. De Mexico Please Stand Up?
Madman on a Drum (Cavalcade Books, 1944)In 1944, a noir suspense novel, a paperback original, was issued by a small paperback publisher out of New York. Madman on a Drum would be the first full-length book written by one N.R. De Mexico. In 1951, De Mexico wrote a book that would put his name into the Congressional Record, front and center in a debate about the negative effect of paperback literature on American culture. That book, Marijuana Girl, would become Exhibit A in Rep. Ezekiel C. Gathings' Congressional Sub-Committee's mini-crusade against drug use in popular literature.Marijuana Girl (Uni Books 19,...