RICHARD Goldstein is a 70-year-old gay, Jewish American writer who styles himself as "the first critic to write regularly about rock music in a major publication", through his "Pop Eye" column in New York's Village Voice magazine.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Caitlin Doughty is a 30-year-old mortician, blogger, author and online sensation whose has mined her lifelong obsession with death to create a book destined to sit beside Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One as one of the great observations of the funeral business.
Waugh was a master of the deadpan aside and Doughty uses great dollops of humour - some of it slapstick, much of it droll and well-observed - to take us inside a world that most of us, for all sorts of reasons, want as little to do with as possible.
It's an impossible task, of course, because death catches up with all of us at some stage, but Doughty uses a withering wit to skewer the pretensions of modern undertaking; primarily America's latter-day obsession with embalming, a practice that has not, as far as I know, taken full hold in Australia. Yet.
Goldstein is also blessed with a nice line in observational comedy, and in this book, a memoir of his time as a young man in search of great music and a sexual identity, he is more or less the butt of his own joke.
His column, Pop Eye, began in June 1966 in the Village Voice, a hip New York magazine founded 11 years before by a small group of writers that included the infamous Norman Mailer.
Goldstein was 22, a graduate of Columbia University's journalism school and he'd already written his first book, One in Seven: Drugs on Campus, with a publisher he later, disgustedly, found was a CIA front.
The cover of Little Piece features an angelic young man, complete with Botticelli curls, with a woman on each arm in the midst of what appears to be an outdoors "happening" of some sort.
The photo is uncaptioned, but it's not the author, and I can only imagine that it's a photograph of one of a number of young men called "Groovy" who populate the book, and Goldstein's life as a then bisexual young man finding his way through the Summer of Love.
Unfortunately, it's the only photo in the book, which is a disappointment given the milieu that Goldstein moved in, interviewing the cream of the rock world on both sides of the Atlantic at the very time that when the sounds that still accompany our lives today were still new, fresh and revolutionary.
A fair proportion of those 1960s pop stars, including Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and his good friend Janis Joplin, all died while Goldstein was writing about them.
Morrison, especially, was obsessed with death, and his grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris is one of the city's most popular tourist attractions.
Doughty doesn't do Morrison's grave in Smoke but she does rally against society's obsession with celebrity deaths.
She has also put her ideas into practice, starting a death acceptance organisation called the Order of the Good Death.
For Doughty, a good death is one where the earth takes back the body, as quickly as possible, and as naturally as possible.
After reading what goes on in the typical American funeral parlour, I think I'd be happy to go straight into the ground, feet first, and let the worms, maggots, beetles and bacteria do their stuff.
