New Vonnegut Film and Book
Plus Springsteen meets Hank Williams.
Will get to today’s Kurt report in a bit, but first the usual political cartoons. Down below, Bruce live with a nod to Hank Williams. Enjoy, then subscribe, it’s still free.
Vonnegut, from Dresden to Manhattan (and Back)
Readers of this newsletter (except perhaps fairly new ones) perhaps recall my two-part series reflecting on my close encounters with the famous novelist and former youth cult hero Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in the 1970s.
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Then there’s my little e-book which expands on all that quite a bit. Now there’s a new documentary, decades in the making, coming to theaters and on demand on November 19—and a soon to be published book exploring the legacy of his Slaughterhouse-Five experience in his writing and in his life. For now, I will pretty much leave it at that and return to the subject another time, I hope.
First, the lengthy trailer for the doc:
And the book, coming on November 9, is THE WRITER'S CRUSADE: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five. The publicist promises that “journalist Tom Roston unpacks Vonnegut's life through interviews with his children, scholars, psychologists, and more to better understand the PTSD and anti-war themes permeating the ‘Dresden’ novel.” I’ve read the intro which unpacks a claim that Vonnegut once suggested that he and a fellow soldier who survived the firebombing went out afterward and took revenge on a brutal guard, perhaps killing him. I’ll not spoil what Roston found after investigating.
Film
My award-winning film Atomic Cover-up gets its NYC premiere (and a live screening) on opening night of the Big Apple Film Festival next Monday. Reserve tix here and read more about the film here or view trailer below. Still screening at the Portland Film Festival and next month at the major Hawaii International Film Festival.
Song Pick
If you missed Bruce singing an acoustic “The River” on Colbert show this past Monday, here it is. Surprisingly, he revealed the spark was set by the classic Hank Williams song below, “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” with its reference to going down to the river and finding it dry….Of course, Bruce was flacking his new Obama podcast and book and release of his full 1979 No Nukes performance….BTW, just tonight caught old buddy Clarence in episode in season 3 of The Wire, no idea he was in it…
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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. His new film that he directed, Atomic Cover-up, has drawn wide acclaim this year.