BLACKLISTING MYSELF.

Roger L. Simon. 2008. Encounter Books. Hardcover. 190 pages. $25.95.

Roger L. Simon arrived in Hollywood in the late 1960s, just as the long shadow cast by the McCarthy hearings and the 1950s blacklist was finally receding. He was raised in New York and had a good, liberal education. He had also been a civil rights worker in the South. He aspired to being a screenwriter and novelist. As he recounts, "In a sense, I was a wannabe blacklisted writer myself – a young man with left-wing political street cred . . ."

Simon’s life after that was as interesting as they come. For one, he helped the Black Panthers found an inner-city breakfast program for kids ("Just knowing the Panthers then was a great talking point in Hollywood meetings. Of course, I didn’t know them very well, but who cared and who knew? The point was to give off a whiff of danger, but not so much people would be worried about working with you."). He also worked with actors such as Richard Pryor, Richard Dreyfuss and Woody Allen; won awards for his mystery novels about the hippie detective Moses Wine; was nominated for an Academy Award; was recruited by the KGB (he didn’t realize he was being recruited until later, but never joined). He’s also the only living man to have been featured in positive articles by both Mother Jones and National Review. Whew!

He’s frank about his liberal/left days, and he openly admits to using cocaine and even going to a crack house with LSD guru Timothy Leary.

What Simon presents is an interesting look at Hollywood, the entertainment industry and liberal politics from inside the belly of the beast. He’s candid about the whole trip and doesn’t hesitate to show himself in a less-than-flattering light, including his recreational drug use and the affair he had that accelerated the dissolution of his first marriage (she was fooling around as well). He’s no knight in shining armor, nor is he a monster; he’s a product of his times and the world he lived in.

Simon is also one of the early pioneers of the blogosphere and the use of the Internet. He’s able to spot the Hollywood phonies, and doesn’t hesitate to name them for what they are: narcissists who want to always be in the spotlight and whose personal lives are never what they deliberately portray to the public. One example he cites is director/producer Oliver Stone who was frequenting a New York brothel during the mid-1980s – the height of the AIDS scare – having unprotected sex there and exposing his wife and child to the virus. Or there is Sean Penn, a known wife-beater (Robin Wright-Penn) who harangues against U.S. military action overseas.

Though he had been drifting more to the middle of the liberal side, 9/11 had him voting for the reelection of George Bush. Even though on many issues these days he’s on the conservative side of the aisle, there are others where he’s still liberal – gay marriage for one.

He’s become one of those people who are almost impossible to categorize, and that’s just the way he likes it. As the title suggests, he’s almost blacklisted himself, pulling away from much of Hollywood for several reasons–the hypocrisy he sees there, the lack of real creativity, and he’s getting too old by Hollywood standards, even for a screenwriter. He’s now the CEO of the Internet-based Pajamas Media.

Simon’s style is a refreshing and honest. He doesn’t try to find fancy ways to say things. He just puts it out there. I found this an enlightening book that I’m sure I’ll want to read again.

ANGRY MANAGEMENT.

Chris Crutcher. 2009. Greenwillow Books. Hardcover. 246 pages. $16.99

Young Adult author Chris Crutcher gives readers three novellas here, all featuring characters from his previous books and his other short story collection. As the title suggests, they all deal with anger.

This book is the perfect example of the love/hate relationship I’ve developed with Crutcher and his work. His novel Stotan was one of the very first young adult novels I read, and it moved me: It made me laugh and cry, it touched me and elevated me – everything for a book to be great. Because of that one and two others, for years I eagerly awaited each new Crutcher release.

Crutcher still knows how to tell a compelling story. His style, particularly here, is tight, sparse and the pacing is breakneck. He also knows how to pull raw emotion from his readers, and he does that here as well. Though, in this case, it borders on a dentist pulling a tooth without Novocain.

Over the years, however, he has shifted from being a writer who moves and elevates to a shrill scold, one who is unable to give any credence to a worldview that is not his own. These days, reading him is like a time-warp back to the day when Jim Crow laws held sway, even in the Pacific Northwest (even though the timing of the novels is always in the late 20th century up to the present day), and back to the days when The Who’s mantra of "Never trust anyone over 35" was in full swing. (For all the surviving members of The Who, and Crutcher himself, 35 is receding in their rear view mirrors. For Townshend and Daltry, it’s almost invisible now.) No teacher or authority figure is to be trusted – always with the exception of the one cool teacher who bucks the system.

On the plus side, Crutcher moves you emotionally. But he’s too shrill and unsympathetic to anyone with a more conservative worldview than his to be enjoyable. I keep hoping to find the power and beauty of those earlier works, but I think it’s a lost cause.

DRIVING LIKE CRAZY.

P.J. O’Rourke. 2009. Atlantic. Hardcover. 258 pages. $24.00.

When I say my prayers at night, I ask God to turn me into P.J. O’Rourke. Why? Because he’s the funniest man writing today (with the possible exceptions of Barak Obama’s speechwriters, but I can’t tell if they’re writing comedy or horror). And if God can’t answer that prayer, maybe he’ll give me the direct phone number to O’Rourke’s agent and editor.

P.J. grew up in Ohio, the son and grandson of automobile dealers. The dealerships employed aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, second cousins, etc, etc., etc. So he turned to writing. But he always kept his love for cars.

"The saga of the American car is no abstract matter to me, no subject of fanciful theories. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid may think they were transported home from the maternity ward on pink, fluffy clouds, but I know that the car got me to where I am. . . My family owes everything to the American car. What with the inability to read and write and no food and all, O’Rourke family history doesn’t begin until the beginnings of the American car. Now some O’Rourkes have even gone to college."

After years of taking on politics and American culture at large, O’Rourke finally turns his eye and pen on one of the very definitions of our culture and nation – the American car. Actually, he’s been doing automotive journalism for the past thirty years while also editing National Lampoon, writing for Rolling Stone, and several other magazines.

So we are treated to thirty years of his automotive writing. And he’s just as funny writing about cars as he is about everything else. He’s collected and updated several of his best car pieces and handed them to us in this handy little volume. Included are three trips to Baja (2 ½ too many), a trip through India, and one to the Philippines to cover the ouster of the late Ferdinand Marcos, where he discovered the Filipino worship of all things Jeep. There are also musings on the fixation Los Angelinos have with their cars – in his opinion they don’t’ deserve them.

And after all the craziness of the last year, what does he think about the future of the American car industry? "It’s time to say . . . How shall we put it? . . . sayonara to the American Car. The American automobile industry – GM Ford, even Chrysler – will live on in some form, a Marley’s ghost dragging its corporate chains at taxpayer expense. The fools in the corner offices of Detroit (and the fool officials of Detroit’s unions) will retire to their vacation homes (in Palm Beach and St. Pete). They no more deserve our sympathy than the malevolent trolls under the Capitol dome. But pity the poor American car when Congress and the White House get through with it – a lightweight vehicle with a small carbon footprint, using alternative energy and renewable resources to operate in a sustainable way. When I was a kid we called it a Schwinn."

One word of caution. While P.J.’s penchant for salty language is actually toned down here, the first piece was written in his National Lampoon days and could be offensive. If language and innuendo offend you, you’d best skip it. But if you do, the second piece – the author writing to himself 30 years later – is nowhere near as funny.

This is a celebration of all things automotive and a joy to read.

Rich welcomes questions and comments from readers. You may contact him through this paper or by email at 62rich@gmail.com.