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28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
one of the defining voices of our times tells ... most, March 16, 2010
This review is from: Backing Into Forward: A Memoir (Hardcover)
I hadn't heard the term "spirit guide" when I was growing up in the Sixties. But if I had, I would probably have nominated Jules Feiffer to be mine. A Jewish-ish kid in a suburb north of Chicago, I was smart enough to see how predicated on injustice much of society of the mid-Sixties was as well as being very aware of my lack of power as a teenager to do much about it. The person who best articulated this perspective (and thus made me feel as if I weren't alone in holding it) was Jules Feiffer. In his strips, I saw someone I recognized as an older brother as he came up against stuff I knew I would come up against shortly. At a time when there weren't a lot of people to trust, on the basis of his writing and drawing I knew Feiffer was one who would give it to me straight. Not that he offered answers, but he seemed to at least identify what the true issues were accurately, and that was a pretty good start.
I came to New York in time to see the Alan Arkin productions of LITTLE MURDERS and THE WHITE HOUSE MURDER CASE, both of which knocked me out and seemed to me to be the logical next step from the sketches by Nichols and May and Second City that also spoke to me. Then CARNAL KNOWLEDGE came along (directed by Nichols), and that, too, seemed revelatory. (For those who think David Mamet invented candor between the sexes in drama, CARNAL KNOWLEDGE pre-dated Mamet's excellent SEXUAL PERVERSITY.) Again, it gave definition to my confusions.
BACKING INTO FORWARD is billed as Feiffer's memoirs. It is not a full account of his life, but it is a pretty thorough account of his thought process in the face of a changing American culture. To be accurate, it is also about Feiffer's part in CHANGING the American culture. (Conventions now accepted as part of comics were innovations he introduced in his strip for the VOICE.) I am fascinated by how what we think of mainstream culture shifted between the mid-Fifties and the late-Sixties. Feiffer was in the middle of this. Having been in the middle, he doesn't offer an Olympian perspective. But he is more self-conscious and analytical than many of the others who were involved -- sort of like the gang's designated driver.
Did I mention that the book is entertaining? Deeply so. I wolfed it down in a few gulps, carrying it with me everywhere, reading it everywhere -- subways, during intermissions at the theatre, even in an elevator once because I couldn't be bothered to wait to finish the end of a given section.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Time and again, I discover how dismally dim I am about myself or how I really feel.", March 20, 2010
This review is from: Backing Into Forward: A Memoir (Hardcover)
Feiffer and "The Village Voice" were two of the great joys of my arrival in New York City; he accompanied me to the 'burbs ten years later, and seemed just as popular there as he did on the Upper West Side.
He has written a vast hodgepodge of a life, skipping around from experience to experience and finishing with a three page strip that describes a few omissions in the book, including Lennie Bruce's obscenity trial.
He started early in therapy, working through, he writes, rage and guilt for his overbearing mother, and his nebbish father -- a man "not very significant in my life -- or his own."
"My mother had failed to live up to her early promise as a fashion designer. It was never clear why her career had gone flat, but what was clear, much too clear, was how she toiled, night and day, over her drawing table stationed in a corner of our living room, sandwiched between the piano no one knew how to play and the bookcase stacked with Russian, French, and English novels (read by my father) and uplifting essays by Emerson and others (studied by my mother). She drew her fashion sketches, cloaks and suits they were called, in pencil and lightly tinted watercolor. Three days a week she packed them up and subwayed down to the Garment District on Seventh Avenue, where she peddled them door-to-door to dress manufacturers. Each sketch earned her three dollars. Since my father perennially failed at business and his various other jobs didn't last that long, it was my mother's three-dollar sketches that brought us through hard times."
The book samples his hectic life in the '60s and '70s with David Levine, Maurice Sendak, Hugh Hefner (at the 1968 Chicago riots), Bernard Malamud, and Norman Podhoretz and many others. He calls himself a "pop culture junkie among the intellectuals" and confesses to being somewhat self-conscious about not having a college education. He writes on his website that "persistent failure inspired [me] to reinvent himself as an artist over and over.
There are bits I would have like to learn more about -- the wonderful Tantrum, for example. There is a great collection of his work online at a gallery carrying much of his work; Google Jean Albano Gallery . But overall, I greatly enjoyed reading about his version of his life, one I shared over the years through his strips, books and plays, with great pleasure and at times with fear and despair, tinged often with ruefulness.
Robert C. Ross 2010
The Bruce trial took place during my first summer in New York City; as a young lawyer it fascinated me. Feiffer was a star witness; this extract from Kuh's (the prosecutor) cross examination shows why:
Kuh said, with proper respect,
"You puncture holes in almost anything..."
"Only things I don't like," Feiffer corrected him.
"...government authority that tends to run away with itself..."
"That's all government authority," said Feiffer...
"Have you found it necessary to use all these words?"
"I haven't used them because I can't get those words in a newspaper."
Whereupon Kuh pointed out that he had seen [a particular word] in The Village Voice. Mr. Feiffer pointed out that he was syndicated in certain other papers where that word had never been seen.
Under direct examination by Martin Garbus, who is handling the defense with London, Feiffer called Bruce "brilliant," saying that he goes beyond social commentary "into an area I would think of as metaphysical, going to the very core of life in America today, especially for my generation ... When he's on there's nothing like him." Feiffer pointed out that Bruce began working his way up as a comedian during the McCarthy era "when no one would dare say anything" and that in that sense he is "part of the history of liberalism in this country."
This section comes from the archives of the "Village Voice". July 16, 1964, Vol. IX, No. 39.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Put down the Little Red Book! Read this instead!, April 27, 2010
This review is from: Backing Into Forward: A Memoir (Hardcover)
There's a certain style of parenting--intractable, relentlessly inflexible--that crushes a child. Not only does it preclude any intimacy between parent and offspring, it produces childish adults, who spend their lives forever (and often futilely) whining about the disaster that was their upbringing--unable to communicate just how bad it REALLY was, but awfully willing to try. They get stuck at age 15, and remain furious, angry children indefinitely. Jules Feiffer is one of those ex-kids.
That his Bronx upbringing was so bad is our blessing. If you've laughed (and cringed) at Feiffer's cartoons over the years, you'll agree. He's all about the socially aware pose, the skin with which we hide our icky insides from the world. His cartoon personae are, in short, obsessed at what the neighbors think. Thank goodness he got so good an education in his early life!
Lest you think he jests, he informs us his sister became a communist later in life, with an addiction to the authoritarian ministerings of Joe Stalin. How's that for a guilt-trip?! But seriously: this is one of the best autobiographies I've ever read. Feiffer's language is so beautiful that I want to quote you whole sections out of the beginning alone. Feiffer's insights into a different age--the children of WWII and the radicals they became--are spot on and beautifully expressed. But for the dearth of loving hugs from his mother, he says, he may well have been a normal person. I've of two minds on this, and secretly thank the God Feiffer doesn't believe in that he misses those hugs still. The cartoonist, playwrite and conscience of the American Left is my new favorite author, too.
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