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Crack open a book on wit and you'll find MAE WEST doing her best work on the sheets.
• • The indefatigable James Geary has cobbled together a new collection: "Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists" [London: Bloomsbury, 2007]. And there's a third edition out of "Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations" [NY: Oxford University Press] edited by the late Ned Sherrin and reissued in paperback.
• • Book-belle Katherine A. Powers discussed these entertaining collections [and their usefulness as holiday gifts] in the Boston Globe.
• • Speaking of Sherrin's edition, Powers said: The book contains over 5,000 humorous aperçus, maxims, aphorisms, epigrams, snippets of repartee, blunders, and oddities arranged by topic with an index of contributors and key words. The contents include the words of lesser people as well as the great comic geniuses, among them my heroes G. K. Chesterton, Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, W. S. Gilbert, S. J. Perelman, P. G. Wodehouse, Saki, MAE WEST, Evelyn Waugh, Gore Vidal, Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, and the two heaviest-hitting contributors of all, Oscar Wilde and that old wag, Anonymous.
• • Not all the entries were hammered out on a hot funny bone; some are inadvertent gems. Politicians are particularly gifted in this area: Donald Rumsfeld's parsing of knowns and unknowns is here, as is onetime Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's "I am not denying anything I did not say." Margaret Thatcher is, as in so many other areas, a mistress of the form ("We have become a grandmother"), although she has nothing on our president, who has had whole books devoted to his utterances. Strangely, however, he has only three entries in these pages, another instance of his being, in his own parlance, misunderestimated.
• • Indeed, if the book has a fault — — aside from some things striking me as not funny at all — — it is the preponderance of British entries over American ones, especially in the selections that have been drawn from the press, radio, and TV. This is the result of the editor's having been British. ...
— — excerpt — —
• • "The spirit of wit, distilled"
• • By Katherine A. Powers
• • Published in The Boston Globe
• • Published on: 16 December 2007
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • none • •
NYC
Mae West.
MAE WEST didn't think she belonged in a lonely hearts club. 
• • New England journalist James Sullivan muses on the events of forty years ago that reunited Mae with her Salvation Army musings, dramatized in "Diamond Lil," and her encounter with Britain's fab foursome in March of 1967.
• • James Sullivan writes: It was 40 years ago . . . today. On the evening of March 30, 1967, four young musicians gathered with a large group of artists and assistants in a London studio to shoot a photograph for an album cover. The album, to be called "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," would, of course, become synonymous with the creative revolution of the 1960s. The cover artwork, a photo-montage of the Beatles posing for photographer Michael Cooper among a gallery of several dozen celebrities ("People We Like," as the crew took to calling them) was itself a radical departure, with its elaborately designed "gatefold" layout, bonus insert, and printed song lyrics -- the latter a first in pop.
• • Behind the real-life Beatles, who were dressed in candy-colored military-band costumes and sported newly cultivated mustaches, the "crowd" was actually made up of wax figures and cardboard cutouts of singers, actors, writers, artists, athletes, and critical thinkers -- some of them (Marlon Brando, Bob Dylan) as familiar as the Beatles themselves, others (Bobby Breen?) now as obsolete as a monaural recording.
• • The cover concept was originally conceived by Paul McCartney and London art dealer Robert Fraser as a tableau for a fictitious Salvation Army-style brass band. But in the hands of its designers, then-husband-and-wife Pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth (who ended up choosing more than half of the faces), it became a droll satire of celebrity and influence. While many of the famous figures in the gallery were heroes to the Beatles, others were chosen out of sheer, Beatlesque audacity. The group's record company, EMI, rejected three of John Lennon's suggestions -- Jesus, Gandhi, and Hitler.
• • Inspired by Victorian-era composite photographs, Dada collage artists, and Pop artist Richard Hamilton's surreal cut-and-paste suburban scenes, the "Sgt. Pepper" cover has become a visual touchstone. Haworth, now living in Utah, still has the Grammy she and her ex-husband shared for the graphic design: "I let the children play with it," she says with a laugh. "The trumpet fell off, and the dog chewed on it. It's been destroyed in an iconoclastic way."
• • • • James Sullivan is a frequent Globe contributor and the author of "Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon."
Some of the "People We Like" on the "Sgt. Pepper" cover:
• • 1. Sri Yukteswar Giri: Indian guru, one of four chosen for the cover by George Harrison.
• • 2. Aleister Crowley: Notorious mystic, polymath, and drug user - - chosen, designer Jann Haworth says, by John Lennon.
• • 3. Mae West: "What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club?" she reportedly joked. Ringo Starr appeared in her 1978 film "Sextette."
• • 4. Lenny Bruce: By 1967, the Beatles shared some of the late comic's persecution complex.
• • 5. Karlheinz Stockhausen: Avant-garde composer who (though chosen by McCartney) once credited John Lennon as the crucial link between pop and "serious" music. . . .
- - excerpt - -
• • Source: Boston Globe - www.boston. com -
• • Published: 24 March 2007
• • Byline: James Sullivan
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/________
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • Ringo Starr • • 1978NYC
Mae West.
