20th-Century Dreams - Softcover

Twenty-six years ago, Guy Peellaert and Nik Cohn produced the legendary Rock Dreams. Mr. Peellaert studied art in Brussels and now lives in Paris; he exhibits in galleries and museums throughout Europe and the United States. The creator and painter of The Big Room: Portraits from the Golden Age, and the author of comic strips, he also produces set designs, video-clips, and graphics for the cinema and television. Mr. Cohn is a novelist and cultural observer whose works include The Heart of the World, Yes We Have No, and the short story that became the film Saturday Night Fever.

The casual browser will stare in amazement and some confusion at Peellaert's phantasmagorical computer collages. Freud and Gandhi consult in an English tearoom. Camus and Sartre come to blows in a sanatorium while Bud Powell plays the piano. Jacqueline Kennedy snuggles up to Cassius Clay in the front seat of a convertible. Mao and Nixon share a good cry, and Malcolm X and Lenny Bruce share a jail cell. These sly, cut-and-paste tabloid improvisations on twentieth-century history are accompanied by captions that have allegedly been taken from the private diaries of one Max Vail, a mystery man of great wealth and cosmic connections. Born Maxim Valesky in St. Petersburg in 1900, Vail died in New York in 1999, and though no one knew anything about him, he knew everything about everyone. Vail is a sly and convincing creation introduced by Cohn--who has a gift for chronicling the bizarre, whether it is imagined or observed--in a clever and seductive little tale in which he describes how he met the enigmatic Vail in 1971. He'd been hanging around in Max's Kansas City when John Lennon wandered in with Andy Warhol and Candy Darling. Lennon, who is in a foul mood, insults Robert Mapplethorpe, then announces that he's "off to see the Wizard." The Wizard is Vail, and Cohn and company tag along. Vail later asks Cohn for help in writing his autobiography, but he can't bring himself to reveal anyone's secrets and even blacks out his journals except for the tidbits preserved here in this make-believe photo album. Not only is Peellaert and Cohn's extravagant and provocative fantasy amusing, it provides a welcome antidote for the rash of more portentous end-of-the-century roundups. Donna Seaman