Terry Gilliam

"Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir" seems something like an episode of "Monty Python's Flying Circus." There are episodes of wild, funny and often disjointed narrative with regular interludes of off-the-wall artwork by Terry Gilliam.

Yet Gilliam strikes me as a bit too angry for his book to be as much fun as Monty Python. He neither forgets, which is good for someone writing an autobiography, nor forgives, which is not so good from someone looking back on a long and productive life. He show more can laugh about his own failures, however.

He writes of a "shockingly happy childhood" in Minnesota and later Southern California. He went to church and Bible school, read Mad magazine, attended summer camp, loved Disneyland and received a scholarship to a Presbyterian college. Yet though he boasts at one point about being a non-conformist, simply because he never took LSD, he soon conformed to the spirit of the radical Sixties and has never looked back. Interestingly, however, he twice decries the fact that people today are "losing touch with the Bible." Bible stories, he says, are the "building blocks of culture" and children, his own included, suffer by not being more familiar with them.

Gilliam has lived in England for most of his life, from even before the Python years, and denounced his U.S. citizenship several years ago, although he continues to depend on U.S. audiences to make his movies profitable. He refers to Osama Bin Laden and George Bush as two of "the world's most irrational despots," but he has nothing good to say about Margaret Thatcher either.

He doesn't discuss Monty Python or the many movies he has directed as much as we might like, although I did greatly enjoy reading about the making of my two favorite Terry Gilliam films, "Brazil" and "12 Monkeys." Something I never realized is that Gilliam worked with Harvey Kurtzman on Help! magazine right after college. That magazine was a favorite of mine during my teen years.

As interesting as the text of the book is, I suspect Terry Gilliam, being Terry Gilliam, devoted most of his attention to the illustrations, which alone are worth the price of the book. show less

4.5

“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is a wild and surreal journey through the American Southwest, written by Hunter S. Thompson. The story follows Raoul Duke, a journalist, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, as they embark on a drug-fueled road trip to Las Vegas. The novel captures the counterculture of the 1960s and explores themes of disillusionment, excess, and the search for the American Dream. Thompson’s unique writing style, known as Gonzo journalism, blurs the line between fact and show more fiction, creating a chaotic narrative filled with vivid descriptions and satirical commentary on the societal upheavals of the time. The book is a psychedelic exploration of the darker side of the American experience, marked by its unconventional narrative and unapologetic embrace of excess and chaos.

I would have rated it five stars if not for occasional confusion during certain scenes, although this aligns with the memoir’s inherently perplexing premise. Having watched the movie adaptation numerous times, relishing the book just as much was a refreshing experience. show less

The Brand New Monty Python Bok [sic] is the second book to be published by the British comedy team. Edited by Eric Idle, it contains more text based humour than the first book, Monty Python's Big Red Book.

The hardback version was originally published with a white dust jacket that was deliberately designed to appear grubby, with realistic looking smudged fingerprints on the front, which fooled enough booksellers to complain to the publishers when it first hit the shelves in the 1970s. This show more was just the beginning of the real gag however. Should the offended parties attempt to dislodge the grubby dust cover, they were met with an even more 'grubby' mock pornographic magazine cover underneath which purported to be titled 'Tits 'n Bums - a weekly look at church architecture', with articles such as "Are you still a verger?". Just imagine the shriek of embarrassment from browsers in WH Smiths, innocently slipping off the dust cover out of curiosity and then going red in the face with panic as they fumbled to stuff the book back into its sleeve as tits and bums, blazoned across the cover, caught the attention of opinionated bystanders in the shop. Mutterings of 'pervert' and disdainful glares following them as they 'leg it' out the door before they are recognised! (Or, at least, I like to imagine such a scenario). I laughed myself to tears before I'd even opened the cover - which is a good way to start a comedy book.
If you did not find that offensive enough, then the first page contains a glued in school library fly sheet containing a list of all the students who withdrew the book; incl. J.P. Sartre, S. Davis Jr., Shirley Bassey, and lastly a certain 'M. Thatcher'.
Once again, I fell onto the floor visualising this crude porn cover sitting proudly on the shelves of Ferndean School Library. What a thing to suggest! At this point I was crying so hard with shame and laughter that I could barely read the words on the first page. I don't think there has ever been a funnier T.V. Tie in comedy book released before or since!

Inside:
Learn the secret Welsh art of self defence Llap-Goch, acquaint yourself with the Python Book of Etiquette, read the comic adventures of Walter the Wallabee, learn how to cook rat, learn to play Cheeseshop - an exciting new word game for two based on real life retailing, Hamsters: a warning, Teach yourself surgery, and many, many other ridiculous and amusing notions...

Its all good smutty fun. Naughty school-boy humour really; with one foot just over the line of decency which made this troop of comedians so cutting edge at a time when businessmen still wore bowler hats and rubbed shoulders on the tube with the first punk rockers. Strange days indeed!

p.s. Look out for page 71 !!! show less

A companion book of some sort to Monty Python's Flying Circus, published in 1971. There's a lot of familiar stuff in here: the Upper-Class Twit of the Year competition, silly walks (in the form of a series of still photos), Dinsdale and his hedgehog, etc. There are also lots of very silly ads, naughty pictures, a bunch of forewords consisting entirely of people complaining about not being invited to write the foreword... Basically lot of the kind of silliness you expect from Python. The show more result is random, surreal, and ridiculous. So, pretty much exactly like the experience of watching an episode of the show, only without having the actual Pythons to watch, so not quite as good.

Still. I paid 50 cents for this at my local library sale, and I got at least a dollar's worth of laughs out of it, so I'm happy. show less