BOOK

Moon Palace
Paul Auster
Penguin Books, 1990

Paul Auster's third novel, Moon Palace, delves deep into themes of paternity, solitude and coming of age. This novel isn't easy to summarize without spooling the many plot twists and coincidental developments that occur. It's essentially about the tragic life of young Marco Stanley Fogg, an illegitimate child, whose mother died in a bus accident when he was 11. Since her untimely death, he has lived with his Uncle Victor, a musician. We meet MS (as he is known to friends) in 1969, the year man first walked on the moon and the year he begins university at Columbia in Manhattan. We follow him as he changes from an inquisitive student, to poverty-stricken graduate, to an adult seeking the meaning of his own existence. Along the way he encounters pivotal characters like his best friend Zimmer, the charming and beautiful Kitty Wu, and the curious blind tyrant Thomas Effing. The relationship between MS and Thomas Effing proves to be pivotal to the tale.

This novel of well-woven and improbable twists of fate is a joy to discover. "I wanted to live dangerously," says MS Fogg, "to push myself as far as I can go, and then see what happened to me when I got there. As it turned out, I nearly did not make it."

This neo-beatnik novel reeks of Americana — and feels almost like an updated version of On the Road — it too takes a journey from the naivety of youth to adulthood and in each of the books a protagonist seeks to find the meaning of his own life.

— Abigail Sevigny

You might also like Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

FILM

The African Queen
Dir. John Huston
Romulus/Horizon, 1951

"I never dreamed that any mere physical experience could be so stimulating!" So exclaims Rose Sayer, the prissy missionary played by Katharine Hepburn, after she and the unflappable captain Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) manage to pilot his rickety riverboat, African Queen, down a huge waterfall.

The dialogue sparkles, the chemistry crackles, and the action never stops. Rose, the spinster who faces every setback with British sangfroid and Charlie, the hardboiled gin-swilling sailor, are possibly movieland's most loveable characters. No wonder they fall in love so quickly. Thankfully director John Huston doesn't torment us with a drawn-out opposites attract plot. The great director clearly knew there was too much work to be done to mess with a fine romance, like navigating an unnavigable river, fighting off giant leeches and building torpedoes to blast the Germans straight out of Africa.

The bar was bound to be set high for a film that brings together three of filmmaking's greatest legends. So it's a huge relief to discover that the hype was justified. It's a pleasant surprise too that a movie more than a half century old still has a lot of kick (and some implied premarital middle-aged sex) in it. The only thing that could potentially take the shine off this film is Ms Hepburn's 1987 tell-all The Making of the African Queen, or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind. Gulp. And it looked so fun.

— Toss Taylor

You might also like White Hunter, Black Heart , Clint Eastwood's semi-fictional film about the making of The African Queen

POP

Friends
The Beach Boys
Capitol Records 1968

Much has been written about Brian Wilson's moody masterpiece Pet Sounds and its aborted followup Smile, but the conventional wisdom writes him off as a spent force after these records. This couldn't be further from the truth. In many ways the finest Beach Boys album of them all is 1968's little known commercial failure Friends. The title track is an at once homey sounding and musically ambitious ditty in waltz time. "Busy Doin' Nothin'" is a similarly successful juxtaposition featuring delightfully quotidian lyrics, a bosa nova beat, complex harmony and a fluid melody.

Friends is also the album where the previously unrecognized artistry of younger brother Dennis Wilson came to the fore. He contributed the haunting "Be Still" and whimsical "Little Bird", nearly equalling his older brother's work.

The two instrumentals here ("The Diamond Head" and "Passing By") are far more interesting than those featured on Pet Sounds.

The disc's only misfire is the dated final track, "Transcendental Meditation" which is beset with an oddly jarring sound that doesn't fit the title. The rest of the record is fun, mellow and defiantly out of step with pop music of the late 1960s. While the Rolling Stones were bellowing, "I'll shout and scream, I'll kill the king, I'll rail at all his servants," the Beach Boys sang that "I talked your folks out of making you cut off your hair."

The 1990 re-issue of Friends also includes a lesser album called 20/20 plus some top notch bonus tracks including a wonderful medley of Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home" and "Old Man River." Another bonus track is the overlooked single "Breakaway" which features one of the best vocal performances of the late Carl Wilson, the best singer in the best vocal group in the history of rock 'n roll.

— Abe Konigsberg

You might also like Beet, Maize and Corn by the High Llamas.