Jewish Women and Their Salons by Emily Bilski & Emily Braun

From their debut in Berlin in the 1780s to their emergence in 1930s California, Jewish women’s salons served as welcoming havens where all classes and creeds could openly debate art, music, literature, and politics. This fascinating book is the first to explore the history of these salons where remarkable women of intellect resolved that neither gender nor religion would impede their ability to bring about social change.

Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun examine the lives of more than a dozen Jewish salonières, charting the evolution of the salon over time and among cultures, in cities including Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London, New York, and Milan. They show how each woman uniquely adapted the salon to suit her own interests while maintaining the salon’s key characteristics of basic informality and a diversity of guests. 

Other distinguished contributors to the volume discuss in detail the Berlin salons of the 1800s; the salon in terms of Jewish acculturation and its relation to gender and music; and the relations of Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, and Gertrude Stein to the literary salon. 

The book is enriched with a lavish array of illustrations, including documentary photographs, paintings, drawings, prints, and decorative arts.

Face It by Debbie Harry

As a musician, an actor, a muse, an icon, the breadth of Debbie Harry’s impact on our culture has been matched by her almost Sphinx-like reticence about her inner life. Through it all – while being acclaimed as one of the most beautiful women in the world, prized by a galaxy of leading photographers and fashion designers, beloved by legions of fans for her relentless, high-octane performances, selling 50 million albums or being painted by Andy Warhol – Debbie Harry has infused her perennial Blondie persona with a heady mix of raw sexuality and sophisticated punk cool.

In Face It, Debbie Harry invites us into the complexity of who she is and how her life and career have played out over the last seven decades. Upending the standard music memoir, with a cutting-edge style keeping with the distinctive qualities of her multi-disciplined artistry, Face It includes a thoughtful introduction by Chris Stein, rare personal photos, original illustrations, fan artwork installations and more.

Peppered with colourful characters, Face It features everyone from bands Blondie came up with on the 1970s music scene – The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Iggy Pop and David Bowie – to artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Marina Abramovi and H.R. Giger of Alien fame. It explores her successful acting career (she has starred in over 30 film roles, including David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and John Waters’s Hairspray), her weekends with William S. Burroughs and her attempted abduction by serial killer Ted Bundy. 

Ranging from the hardscrabble grit and grime of the early New York City years to times of glorious commercial success, interrupted by a plunge into heroin addiction, the near-death of partner Chris Stein, a heart-wrenching bankruptcy and Blondie’s break-up as a band, an amazing solo career and then a stunning return with Blondie, this is a cinematic story of an artist who has always set her own path.

Record Play Pause by Stephen Morris

There’s some great foreshadowing in the first volume of drummer Stephen Morris’s enjoyable memoir. “Drummers, Stephen,” says his dad in the early 1970s. “They all end up taking morphine and drinking absinthe. You don’t want to end up like that, do you?” Morris says no, but this book is, to start with, less about Joy Division (and not about New Order until the final chapter) and more about his vivid childhood in Macclesfield as a “compulsive liar and compulsive crier”. Written in a wryly conversational tone, the dialogue from 40 years ago is often too good to be true, but makes for a unique and thoughtful musical memoir about a boy inching his way to success, then having to deal with tragedy.

From the Publisher:

Joy Division became the favourite for a new name. We decided to try it out on people and see how it went down. In Macclesfield, predictably, it didn't go down too well.

'Sounds like the fuckin' Salvation Army or sommat' was the man-in-the-pub's response, and I suppose he did have a point. But after a while whatever you call yourself, however silly it sounds at first, does take on another meaning. Once it gets tangled up with how you look and the music that you play, it becomes part of your image, but we didn't think of implications of that . . .

Before he was responsible for some of the most iconic drumming in popular music, Stephen Morris grew up in 1960s and '70s industrial Macclesfield, on a quiet road that led seemingly to nowhere. Far removed from the bright lights and manic energy of nearby Manchester, he felt stifled by suburbia and feared he might never escape. Then he joined Joy Division - while they were still known as Warsaw - a pioneer of the rousing post-punk sound that would revolutionise twentieth-century rock.

Following two landmark albums and widespread critical acclaim, Joy Division were at the height of their powers and poised to break the US, when lead singer, Ian Curtis, committed suicide.

Part memoir, part scrapbook and part aural history: Stephen Morris's innate sense of rhythm and verve pulses through Record Play Pause. From recollections of growing up in the North West to the founding of New Order, Morris never strays far from the music. And by turns profound and wry, this book subverts the mythology and allows us to understand music's power to define who we are and what we become.

Joni Mitchell hand-drawn book for friends in 1971 set to be published

From The Irish Times: 

A rare book of lyrics, poems and illustrations that Joni Mitchell created for her closest friends more than 40 years ago is to be commercially published for the first time this autumn.

The Canadian musician put together Morning Glory on the Vine in 1971, the year her album Blue topped charts around the world. Collecting lyrics, poems and more than 30 of her paintings, just 100 copies were hand-produced in Los Angeles for her friends. “Existing copies of this labour of love have rarely been seen in the past half-century,” according to the singer’s website.

The book features handwritten lyrics and poems, along with watercolour paintings depicting “a superb array of landscapes, still lifes, portraits of friends, self-portraits, innovative abstractions, and more”. The publication is part of celebrations of Mitchell’s 75th birthday year, which have also included a tribute album and concert.

Sex Pistol Steve Jones Finally Outgrew His Punk Outlaw Past

Interview with Jeff Slate from Esquire:

Jones confesses to the kind of sordid, outlaw upbringing that would make even Keith Richards blush. His frank tales about his childhood addiction to masturbation, run ins with the local pedophile in his rough and tumble London neighborhood, his abusive stepfather, homosexual dalliances, and acute kleptomania read like the tales of a crazy uncle who comes to holiday dinner and shares hard-to-believe stories of his youthful exploits with abandon. But it also ensures that Lonely Boy is unique amongst rock star memoirs: Jones is the real deal, and he isn't afraid to put it all—the good, the bad, and the truly ugly—out there for all to see. In fact, those tales of his early life make Jones' days as a Sex Pistol seem almost the least remarkable part of his story.

read more here @ Esquire, Penguin Books, The Guardian

Sticky Fingers describes Rolling Stone founder's dirty deeds

From Financial Review:

Sticky Fingers is an exhaustively researched, remarkably candid biography of Jann Wenner, who 50 years ago started the world's first newspaper to take rock'n'roll seriously, and last month sold most of his family's remaining stake for $US50 million.

This could also be the most honest business book published in 2017, for Wenner succeeded despite doing many of the things an MBA teaches you not to.

A long-form journalist whose list of credits includes Rolling Stone, Hagan was Wenner's choice as biographer and thus gained access to his archives and his peerless network – Dylan, Jagger, McCartney, Midler, Richards, Springsteen, Townshend and Wenner himself all go on record.

However, Hagan made sure Wenner did not play the old Rolling Stone game, refusing him final copy approval and allowing the multiple character assassinations and sordid 1970s stories contained herein to see the light of day.

Hagan and Wenner have fallen out since Sticky Fingers was published in November. An authorised biography needs no greater recommendation.

Patti Smith: 'It's not so easy writing about nothing'

Patti Smith: 'It's not so easy writing about nothing'

M Train tells the story of Patti Smith's musical creativity. She was such an influential part of the punk rock movement that it’s easy to forget she had influences of her own. Her new memoir M Train follows the journey that led her to create her most iconic work. The “train” in this memoir stops at 18 “stations,” each representing one of the most significant turning points in Smith’s life, that she believes were responsible for shaping her creative identity.

M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafe where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations, we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith's life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith. Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable artists at work today.