Can't Explain

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001)

2012-01-29T08:01:00.000-08:00

It causes me anxiety to remember that Barbara Ehrenreich's participant/observer-style examination of the plight of the American underclass actually took place late in the Clinton adminstration, when the U.S. economy by all indications was roaring and good times were upon the land. I really hate to think what it must be like now. Like so many great things, Ehrenreich's strategy for this experiment, which takes its place alongside the legacy of such writers as Jack London and George Orwell, is the soul of simplicity. Parachuting into Florida, Maine, and Minnesota with only a car ("Rent-A-Wrecks"), money enough for a place to stay, and an ATM card for food if she absolutely must, Ehrenreich posed as a housewife returning to the workforce with minimal skills and experience and then attempted to survive. "The idea was to spend a month in each setting and see whether I could find a job and earn, in that time, the money to pay a second month's rent," she writes. All things considered, even these basic terms and the levels of support she allowed herself might reasonably be deemed cushy by anyone actually living the life. She lands jobs as a nursing home aide, a house cleaner, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. The results are predictable enough—there's a whole lot of soul crushing going on out there. Well-meaning friends of Ehrenreich encouraged her to skip the field work and just do the math, but if she'd taken their advice she'd never have found out some of the hidden realities she uncovers here, which are almost beyond imagining for many in privileged positions. For example, Ehrenreich details how the cost of living is not just proportionally higher for the underclass, but often is actually higher too. If a person can't afford to pay the deposits required to secure an apartment, and has no resources to borrow the money, the only choice left for many is taking rooms in cheap motels, paying by the week or night—and even cheap motels can cost well upwards of a thousand dollars a month. Obviously staying in a motel is intended as a stopgap measure but Ehrenreich makes all too clear how easy it is to slip into vicious cycles of economic entrapments. People in these positions are perilously close to disaster, day in and day out, and often they don't take good care of themselves either, eating poorly and eschewing exercise. Medical care, of course, tends to be out of reach. And I haven't even started on the realities of the kinds of jobs Ehrenreich took, which I happen to know some of from periods working as a nursing home aide myself and in a K-Mart. This is a bleak and tremendously valuable book and warrants continual updating. I wish I had a fraction of the courage Ehrenreich demonstrates here.

In case it's not at the library.

Underwater Moonlight (1980)

2012-01-28T07:19:00.000-08:00

The second album by the Soft Boys was pure revelation when I finally caught up with it, a few years after Robyn Hitchcock was fully embarked on his solo career, with and without the Egyptians. Already Hitchcock's trademark wry European surrealism cross-pollinated with New Wave sonics is fully on display: "You've been laying eggs under my skin / Now they're hatching out under my chin / Now there's tiny insects showing through / And all them tiny insects look like you," he casually tosses off on "Kingdom of Love." The album opener, "I Wanna Destroy You" is an ostensible anti-war sentiment that sets out to flatten you with all its might. The expressions of love, as on "I Got the Hots" or "Insanely Jealous" (which reports jealousy of, among other things, the people that you see, the people that aren't me, the places that you go, the people that you know, the hairs upon your back, the spiders in your path) are just barely this side of unhinged. The context, the primary feature, and the raison d'etre all through is crunchy, pile-driving, Brit-derived rock 'n' roll at full propulsion, the sound of guitar strings snapping on open chords played hard, with Hitchcock's adenoidal boarding-school twit vocals riding the top with variously sweet melodies. The original vinyl LP was nearly perfect, one to flip over and over and over. Some 20 years later came a reissue with seven or eight extras (one, a cover of Syd Barrett's "Vegetable Man," had previously appeared on some of the LP editions) and a whole second disc of live performance/rehearsals from the time, known as ...And How it Got There. I'm rarely one to complain about excesses of the things I like, but the reissue has never hit me with the same force as the original, which just means, I suppose, that I need to learn how to apportion my things more carefully. Because actually, taken on a case by case basis, a number of the added tracks are among those I enjoyed most in revisiting the album recently: "Strange," with its eerie and beautiful harmonies and spare arrangement, "Where Are the Prawns?," which rocks a good deal, and "Black Snake Diamond Rock," which also rocks a good deal (and is not to be confused with an early solo album, Black Snake Diamond Röle). This is good stuff, bringing interesting variety to an already impressive set. But the original 10 remain as fresh and weird and potent as the day I first heard them, raving up at will and putting themselves across effortlessly.

The Future (2011)

2012-01-27T07:20:00.000-08:00

Germany/USA, 91 minutes
Director/writer: Miranda July
Photography: Nikolai von Graevenitz
Music: Jon Brion
Editor: Andrew Bird
Cast: Miranda July, Hamish Linklater, David Warshofsky, Joe Putterlik, Isabella Acres

There's a fair number of disclaimers I need to hit with this one so I will just get right to it. This is one of those pictures I would not think could ever work—even, or maybe I should say especially, after actually seeing it. But both times I have seen it now I have come away in something of a not entirely pleasurable daze. So the first disclaimer has to be the obligatory SPOILER ALERT. I think much of the impact turns on a particular plot point, which I will talk about beyond the jump, a plot point that for me was entirely unexpected, for which I was not prepared, and that utterly floored me. Yeah, it still works fine knowing it ahead of time, as I discovered looking at The Future again. But spoiler rules are spoiler rules, so there you go.

There's also a matter of director/writer Miranda July's steely determination to operate within the dimensions of a twee preciosity. The inclination was a good deal more pronounced in her 2005 debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know, but it's here too. I would argue she's shrewd about the way she goes about using it, ultimately playing very hard against expectations even as she packs this full of familiar indie mumblecore-type gestures, with self-involved 20somethings (who are actually 30something, as we shortly discover) living their ironic alternative lifestyles with pluck and humor, buoyed by a stream of wide-eyed and gentle knowing sarcasm that threatens constantly to tip over into bitterness and bad temper.

Perhaps most key, one must at least have sympathies or some understanding for the impulses and various eccentricities of pet owners. There's a rescue cat here; its name is Paw Paw and it provides passages of voiceover making observations of wry wisdom. And that voice is unmistakably Miranda July, in a croaking half-whisper that is so silly I was initially quite embarrassed for her, squirming painfully as I attempted to keep riding along with wherever she might be headed. Again, the element of twee is strong with this one.

The focus is Jason and Sophie (played by Hamish Linklater and Miranda July), a comfortable couple in their mid-30s living in Los Angeles. They have decided to take on the care of a rescue cat that suffers from renal failure and is likely to die within the year. When the veterinarian tells them they will need to wait another few weeks before they can take it home, she also mentions that the cat could very well live for years with good care. The burden of this suddenly enlarged commitment weighs on the couple heavily. They do the math, realizing they could be in their 40s by the time Paw Paw dies. Almost immediately they begin to act out, quitting their McJobs to attempt more meaningful work, giving up their Internet access, and otherwise spiraling into vaguely pathetic dithers. Jason goes door to door as a volunteer soliciting for a project that works to stop global warming. Sophie starts her own YouTube channel to make videos of herself dancing.

The strange desperation only ratchets higher and higher, and suddenly the picture has notably departed from the kind of gentle quirky comedy one has been led to expect of it. Sophie drifts into an affair with a divorced middle-aged man in Tarzana who has a young daughter. The terms of their connection, unexpectedly, are raw and sexual—yet it doesn't seem entirely wrong for Sophie. At the same time Jason has made a connection with a strange and lonely old man who increasingly appears to Jason as a discomfiting future version of himself.

The last third of The Future slips into an increasingly strange phantasmagoria, right at the point when Sophie is about to tell Jason about her affair. Jason's previous whimsical declaration that he has the ability to stop time suddenly appears to be factual, albeit in a deeply flawed way that does not actually stop time. The moon begins to speak, trying to clarify the very point to him. Jason and Sophie have individually and together arrived at a crossroads.

During this juncture, in all the confusion of the stuttering slipstream of time, the couple neglects to make their appointment to get Paw Paw from the shelter, and Paw Paw is subsequently euthanized. It's left to Paw Paw to deliver this news to the audience, and the cat's shock and sadness at the turn is matched by our own. This never felt like the kind of movie where lives we cared about, even incidentally and with modicums of annoyance, would be so thoughtlessly cast aside. Suddenly the stakes have become vastly higher than we could have anticipated.

In many ways The Future operates as a self-conscious and all but barefaced allegory, with Paw Paw standing in as the ailing state of our planet and society, and the bumbling good-natured Jason and Sophie as the well-intentioned among us who seem to be powerless to change anything—including changes required within themselves.

Miranda July, in only her second feature, demonstrates a lot of poise and nerve in pulling this off. She's not afraid to cross the line into an almost saccharine preciousness because she knows how devastatingly she is going to undercut and turn the tables on it. I started this movie groaning about a couple too cute by half and their banter and indeed the totality of their silly, inconsequential, and only fleetingly charming lives. In the end, July made a mockery of my expectations, effectively reducing them, and me, to rubble.

Top 10 of 2011
I guess my first choice here makes the distinction plain enough, in case anyone was wondering, that this series is going to be yet another consideration of "favorite" as opposed to "best" or "greatest"—because if it were either of the latter The Tree of Life, currently stalking the year-end lists of nine out of 10 film critics (often at the very top), would be featured more prominently. I didn't dislike The Tree of Life, but I wasn't wild about it either—the shoe-leather stink it gave off of pious religiosity and the various indulgences it took in too-easy clichés of American-style post-'60s spirituality put me off, even as I recognized it overall as stunningly beautiful. At first I was inclined to give Malick my usual pass on a first viewing because so many of his pictures have grown better the more I look at them. This has notably been the case with The Thin Red Line. But a second and disappointing recent look at The New World has inclined me to take my time revisiting The Tree of Life.

Hugo probably makes more sense as my #1—I loved it top to bottom, it's from one of my perennial favorite directors, Martin Scorsese, it's an exciting departure from his usual fare, and it's a glorious paean to the pleasures of movies at many, many levels. But The Future is the movie I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

Otherwise, at a point notably lacking in perspective, it seems to me that 2011 was, as many are claiming, a pretty good year for movies, probably the best since 2007. On the other hand, as I will get into next time, I don't think 2010 was as bad as many thought, not least because many of the movies people are mentioning for 2011 I will be listing under 2010. This is always a tricky issue, so I may as well clarify my position here and now, at the outset. My guideline is going to be IMDb, which tends to date from first public screenings (which often means festival screenings) rather than when a picture goes into wide release in the U.S. Just so you know.
1. The Future
2. Hugo
3. Drive
4. Trollhunter
5. We Need to Talk About Kevin
6. Meek's Cutoff
7. Super 8
8. The Descendants
9. Beginners
10. Paul

Didn't like so much: Captain America, Margin Call, Melancholia, The Skin I Live In, The Tree of Life

Gaps: The Artist, A Dangerous Method, A Separation, This Is Not a Film, War Horse

And, because I would like to make a habit of these categories, here's my best of oldies seen this past year....
Best seen first: Cache, The Devil and Daniel Webster, Eyes Wide Shut, Grave of the Fireflies, Oldboy, Orchestra Wives, The Spirit of the Beehive, Union Pacific, The Wages of Fear, World on a Wire

Best seen again: A.I. Artificial Intelligence; Boogie Nights; Dogfight; Enter the Dragon; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Ikiru; The King of Comedy; Run Lola Run; A Simple Plan; Velvet Goldmine

Facebook 50 '11: Introduction

2012-01-17T07:53:00.001-08:00

Last year a friend (Phil Dellio) invited another friend (Steven Rubio) and myself to participate in a countdown of our 50 favorite movies. It was staged in a Facebook group—Phil had just completed another countdown exercise in another Facebook group with another friend (Scott Woods), which was devoted to 100 favorite songs. I had some impression that Phil's impetus for these countdowns grew at least as much out of an infatuation with The Social Network as from an appreciation for Facebook, about which most of the planet now appears to be variously dubious. But the turn of a decade, approximately, is usually a good time (read: excuse) for copious list-making anyway and I was happy to sign on. And so we went at it, at a rate of two picks per week each (I posted on Tuesdays and Fridays) for nearly six months, with a few dozen others cheering and jeering us along in comments.

Though I have made many song and album lists, I had tried only once before, in the '90s, to formally make a list of favorite movies, and then it was just a top 10, riddled with so many ties and also-rans and otherwise yoking in so many titles along the way that I think I managed to mention nearly three dozen movies when it was all said and done. (Before that I had long nursed a favorite three, all of which have place names for titles, but only one of which appeared as a pick on this list; explanations forthcoming.)

Clearly it was time to try again. There are a million ways to do these kinds of things. The way we did it was to compose our lists separately (more or less), without consulting with one another. We knew this meant there was a good chance there would be duplications and even triplications. This created some concern, which we dealt with in different ways, as will be seen. Each pick was accompanied by write-ups that started around 300 words apiece but quickly grew, occasionally to mammoth proportions (by Facebook standards, that is—1,000+ words). We also did the best we could to find and point to representative and/or favorite clips culled off YouTube, which was often the most frustrating, time-consuming, and/or satisfying part of the exercise for me.

Phil and Steven have already reproduced their write-ups on their websites (well, nearly—Steven still has a dozen or so to go as I write this), so the least I can do is ape them, sticking with the Tuesday schedule that's so familiar to me now. I will point to their pieces as I go along, and also provide comments, as relevant, on how I came to pick the titles and rankings—how I came to construct the list. And, in the end (approximately one year from now, God willing), I plan to finish with an updated list of 50 favorites because a) I can't help myself, and b) I'm pretty sure the mutability of these lists (or my lists) even across only a couple of years is likely to be remarkable. These days I seem to be constantly looking at movies I have never seen before, or looking again and reconsidering movies I have, and even as I finalized this Facebook list I already had regrets and misgivings. "Second guessing, thy name is list-making." I will say that my #1 has been my #1 for approximately 25 years, and my #2 is looking more and more like a permanent fixture now too. Otherwise, who knows what that follow-up list will look like. First, however, the Facebook 50 of 2011.

Thanks to Phil and Steven for including me and to all the commenters in that Facebook group who kept us going and made it worthwhile. Thanks to Scott Woods for taking care of Facebook technicalities. The group is still there, by the way—anyone who wants to join and see the originals complete with comments, that can be very easily arranged. Just let me know, in comments or at the email on the right, and I will see what I can do about setting you up.

Bad Behavior (1988)

2012-01-15T08:26:00.000-08:00

Mary Gaitskill's first collection of stories remains daring and remarkable to this day, I think, assiduously working further edges of conventional propriety with dedication and nerve. It's arguable enough that these stories are sensational simply for the sake of winning attention, but I think there's more to them. They are populated and overpopulated with prostitutes, practicing sadomasochists, and fucked-up Americans of many stripes, usually urban creatures operating out of New York or various points elsewhere, such as San Francisco and Michigan. Young women turn to prostitution to make ends meet. Grown adults in marriages carry on empty affairs, or indulge mockable perversions. People in these stories keep trying to connect but are thwarted by the static noise of sex and all its confusions, most often the confusion with love. One of the best stories here, "Something Nice," tells about a john who fancies himself apart and above the exploitation in which he regularly indulges, and falls in love with a prostitute. Later, after she has left the trade and he sees her in public with a boyfriend, she pretends not to know him. He is devastatingly humiliated. Perhaps the most famous story here, "Secretary"—because it was made into a decidedly minor indie movie in the '90s—is also one of the most puzzling and least effective, relying heavily on a tendency to reduce characters and situations to ciphers that don't compute; it appears to be trying to work as some kind of representational allegory. At those times it feels like Gaitskill is attempting to have her cake and eat it too, so to speak—attempting to extract the pathos she knows well in these empty middle-class lives even as she ruthlessly, casually, and heartlessly makes fun of them And Everything They Stand For. Better when she just goes right at the poignant details and lets the stories sort themselves out, as in the long hodgepodge of the last story, "Heroes," with all the siblings of two generations coming and going and some characters that seem flatly unbelievable, until the totality of the events recounted mounts to an impressive presence, and one finds oneself half in love with a few of them, and feeling as though one knows them all very well and cares what happens to them. It's no wonder that this was taken as an auspicious first book—it is.

In case it's not at the library.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1998)

2012-01-14T08:03:00.000-08:00

I find myself of several minds on this decidedly strange set by singer/songwriter Jeff Mangum's Neutral Milk Hotel. On balance they fall on the positive side—which is just another way of saying I like it a lot, even though I see the various problems plain. There's a lot of adenoidal yelpin' and wailin' contained herein, more than I usually have the tolerance for and most of it dallying on the borders of the dread twee. Directly so, in fact, with "The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One" to open, followed immediately by "The King of Carrot Flowers Pts Two & Three." The various eccentricities of instrumentation—accordion, cornet, flugelhorn, bowed banjo, etc., etc.—are whimsical unto the death. It's folk music on its face, with forerunners Camper Van Beethoven and Beat Happening attempting to enclose it at either end of a spectrum. It's not afraid to swell the bottom and rock out awhile when it has a mind, most obviously on the imposing "Holland, 1945." I haven't tried much to puzzle out if the strange fragments of lyrics floating by add up to anything. They're weird and that's enough for me. There's the aforementioned king of carrot flowers, there's a two-headed boy, and, indeed, as promised, there's an aeroplane over the sea. These various nouns are combined with verbs and adjectives and the syntax all seems correct. Hell if I know what it's going on about, however. But Jeff Mangum, who wrote and sings most of these songs, seems to mean every syllable. That feeling is quite strong. And there are so many strange winning moments swirling about this, musically in the various mash-ups of sound achieved or when the cornet sounds impossibly, unbearably sweet in passages. Mangum is frequently at the head of calibrated yet powerfully moving performances; he flails at his acoustic guitar with precision and poise and lets the strange words uncork at the top of his lungs. It excites a kind of awe in such moments, so willfully dwelling in the place it has chosen, and respect too, the kind of feelings I also have for Frank Zappa or Todd Rundgren—brainy (maybe overly so), musical, restless, ruthlessly creative. Obviously everything has been poured into this—indeed, it is practically the last thing we have heard from Mangum and this band since. But what is it? Devastatingly original, we can start there for sure.

L'Avventura (1960)

2012-01-13T07:11:00.000-08:00

Italy/France, 143 minutes
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, Tonino Guerra
Photography: Aldo Scarvada
Music: Giovanni Fusco
Editor: Eraldo Da Roma
Cast: Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti, Lea Massari, Dominique Blanchar, James Addams, Lelio Luttazi

The last time I looked at L'Avventura I found to my surprise that it went by lickety-split fast for a slow-moving movie nearly two and a half hours long. It struck me as lean and supple and basically in full control of its powers. Yet it's very likely that L'Avventura may be the single most disappointing movie I've ever seen, when I saw it the first time, looking forward from its length and reputation and the general contours of its storyline to something narratively engaging and instead finding what looked and felt like a puffed-up (and boring) piece of cruelly deliberate aimlessness.

It might have had something to do with the circumstances—that first look was at a VHS tape checked out from the library. I'm sure most would agree that's not the way to see Michelangelo Antonioni's widely hailed and regarded masterpiece. In fact, I haven't yet had (or anyway taken) the opportunity to see it on a big screen; the sense I get, not just from the tenor of the praise but from the way the visuals have since caught me, is that this is one that likely improves with size, and the bigger the screen and the house and the more packed you can get it, the better. Otherwise it's a little bit of a crapshoot.

I think now that the problems anyone might have with L'Avventura mostly boil down to problems of expectations. After all the acclaim, which is beguiling enough to anyone like me so easily swayed by critics and their pronunciamentos, I think it's the storyline that's the primary culprit in the confusion. I made a note the last time I looked that a plot summary with this one is a bit beside the point—in fact, might even fairly be called misleading (much as quoting Newt Gingrich directly is a distortion of his words). "The mystery is that the mystery isn't a mystery, so much." Why is it even there at all? You would have to talk to Michelangelo about that.

Regardless, here's what you're looking at (I hasten to add again, don't be misled into thinking this is a thriller): A group of peevish and wealthy Italian friends go on a yachting cruise that includes a stop at a small rocky volcanic island, where they spread out to explore. When it's time to leave again one of their party, a woman named Anna (played by Lea Massari), is missing. They search for her with no result, and for much of the rest of the film her one-time fiancé Sandro (played by Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend Claudia (played by the luminescent Monica Vitti) continue to search for her together until they stop, even as they begin to slip into a relationship with one another.

The crisis Antonioni appears to be addressing, if I may be so bold as to characterize it as a crisis, is a kind of slow-moving yet inexorable spiritual pestilence infecting the privileged classes—or, more likely, infecting all of us, but the privileged must play the role of those well-known canaries in coal mines, warning of sickness. The rest of us struggle for survival and fragments of the refined leisures with which our heroes live so comfortably here. Our great efforts are thus blessed with concrete ends, whereas that is not the case for the privileged as a matter of class status. In fact, it is precisely what opens them up to the dread wasting-away malaise of ennui and emptiness and meaninglessness.

I hope this gives you some idea of how annoying L'Avventura can be, because in a way that's the trick to the whole thing, for me anyway. When I go into it expecting to be annoyed and bored I find the picture working so much better. It's remarkably beautiful, for one thing. The silvery glowing black and white manages space with a freshness and economy that is often surprising, and can be audacious and breathtaking. Objects and people may be close enough to touch on one side of the (wide)screen while on the other a doorway frames a horizon that stretches away forever. Yins and yangs continually yaw away at you visually.

The juxtapositions, of space and object, background and foreground, light and dark, man and woman, are something to which Antonioni resorts often, dividing and conquering within the big-canvas frame, which I recall De Sica doing as well in Bicycle Thieves with a necessarily more boxy outline. Indeed, Antonioni takes the big picture to places you never imagined. The sequences on the volcanic island in the first hour are wonders of perspective, with boulders and people's heads and inlets of churning water shot from above all balancing one another adroitly. The figures are positioned carefully on the landscape and wander it like pieces on a board game. Back on the mainland, imposing architecture is omnipresent, lovely and impressive, somehow suffocatingly oppressive too. It's probably even worth taking a look at L'Avventura with sound and subtitles turned off, just watching the way Antonioni moves his characters around and the various discourses of gesture and affect.

Maybe I'll get around to that one day. I can't say this is a movie I love—I'm not sure making anyone love it was ever among its intentions. But it has an allure and a real compactness in the way it goes about maximizing exactly its seductive impulse. In some ways, once expectations are set appropriately, you can't take your eyes off it. A note at the very front crows that the picture won a Special Jury Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 "for a new movie language" (also for "the beauty of its images"). With Fellini and De Sica and Rossellini and Leone (and maybe even Mario Bava and Dario Argento), I can see where there's a case to be made that Italian filmmakers have a pretty good knack for new movie languages. Antonioni, who authors a whole new slant on the "slow" film with this, certainly takes his place with them here.

1. Chills, "Song for Randy Newman, Etc." (1992)

2012-01-11T07:44:00.000-08:00

(listen)

I like how Chills songwriter and mainstay Martin Phillipps tries so hard to make this as particular to a concrete place as he can, to bucolic New Zealand. "In New Zealand our volcanoes and towns / Rest together in peace, keep their roots in the ground," he nonchalantly leads with on one verse. New Zealand, yeah, right. This song contains one of the most plain universal themes I've ever heard, laid out and rendered flat and bland and stripped down to the essentials of a singer and keyboards, masking itself in them, charting the dark night of the creative soul behind private choices and pains. All of us are implicated one way or another. Even the desperate name-checking—Randy Newman in the title only the most obvious, perhaps because those are his piano licks providing accompaniment. But there's another handful or so of usual suspects lurking and darting about the passageways of this deceptive little three-minute ballad ("Wilson, Barrett, Walker, Drake," Phillipps reels them off at one point). It's so full of humility and yet so arrogant and so certain of what it knows and resigned to it that it transcends and leaves behind the downer vibe it carries like a cross. I seem to keep saying things like that a lot, making excuses perhaps for a bunch of downbeat songs picked by a gloomy man. Looking over the last 15 or 20 on this list, oh hell the whole thing, I can see it fits a pattern. There's self-pity here (as there is in "Nightime" and "Somebody to Lay Down Beside Me" and down the line). Certainly self-obsession. But all of them, from Martin Phillipps to Alex Chilton to Jonathan Richman and all the others, also make a case, simply by doing what they do, for dignity and for cheer too, for staying engaged with the best of all things, however one may find them, and whatever pains they bring with them. Because the one thing we know is that there will be pain. Martin Phillipps makes that point here, but he also describes as poignantly as anywhere I know the rewards, with his elegant description of a songwriter's powers: "Can you hear sounds forming in your head / Do they say more than you've ever said." The answer is yes, I have heard them, hundreds of times, here and a thousand places. I can hear them still and they still say that much.

2. Big Star, "Nightime" (1974)

2012-01-10T07:27:00.000-08:00

(listen)

At the time I was getting to know this song, in the mid-'80s with the vinyl release of the Third album by Big Star with the big blue cover and liner notes by Howard Wuelfing, I was pretty busy myself with a life full of "At night time I go out and see the people," and I felt about it much the same way the singer here sounds, dismal and sour and maybe a little studiously bored. "And dressing so sweet, all the people to see"—there we go. Those details caught my attention but really it was the mood of it that seemed to swallow me whole, even from the first, a sound that runs all through the near-score of great tracks that cluster around this album. But gradually I focused on this song as I came to realize the plight of the singer was my own at the time. "I'm walking down the freezing street / Scarf goes out behind," he sings. It sounds like the loneliest street of all time. I think I walked it too. Then suddenly the song swells into its raw climax, a bleating from the bottom of the soul that never plays quietly in the background for me: "Get me out of here / get me out of here / I hate it here / get me out of here." I connected with what this song was saying and with how it felt all at the same time, and in many ways I followed that trebling vocal performance across a couple thousand miles, Pied Piper style, into a new life in a new city. This is really a dark moment that is captured here, but rendered so purely and so absolutely that it becomes a moment of exaltation as much as anything, and hope too.

3. Mott the Hoople, "Ballad of Mott the Hoople (March 26, 1972, Zurich)" (1973)

2012-01-09T08:39:00.000-08:00

(listen)

In one way or another I frequently seem to be writing about one of these last three songs, even as they lean decidedly toward the margins. This is likely the least obscure anyway, a landmark of '70s glam. I spun the name for this blog out of it, and later, to be clear, threw up a clarifying verse when I realized how many people took me for a dedicated fan of the Who. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But I'm more a dedicated fan of this particular song, with its many great turns of phrase ("I wish I'd never wanted then what I want now twice as much") and with its luscious mood of weary introspection, its brooding considerations of the various satisfactions and dissatisfactions. It focuses on a rock band touring act but the psychic place it describes could as well be a frazzled Fellini production shot in Italy, a grifting traveling carnival show in the mid-century Midwest, maybe even (a stretch) circuit riders, horseback and camping at night, out saving souls in slave-owning frontier districts of the old South. Or it could be your own interior life, trying to keep it together day to day. It's a place that lives for the extremes of ecstasy and despair, most poignantly at the crack of dawn. It's there in every line, from the highly particular ("Buffin lost his child-like dreams / And Mick lost his guitar") to the most broadly general ("Rock 'n' roll's a loser's game / It mesmerizes and I can't explain"). It calls the whole thing a circus and then calls it a night. Beyond exhaustion and directly into clarity. Out of the mouths of babes. A magic trick. A guide to the construction of one's own life and myths, a place to go get lost for a lifetime, and eternity, all wrapped up into one.

Digging to America (2006)

2012-01-08T08:08:00.000-08:00

On balance this is a pretty good one, with an interesting combination of Anne Tyler's by-the-numbers themes and a whole new wrinkle that makes sense in terms of her biography. By-the-numbers first: the familiar collision and results ensue between a fussy controlling person and a more freewheeling vibrant disorganized personality is well-known territory. Here the usual gender roles are switched (not for the first time either, as in A Patchwork Planet): the controlling person is Maryam Yazdu, an Iranian immigrant, and Dave Dickinson, a Baltimore native and recent widow, is the one who embraces life willy-nilly yet always with exuberance. What I thought was particularly interesting and fresh here is Tyler's takes on immigration experiences, as the Yazdus and their clan all have significant roots in Iran. That's a fascinating choice of itself; it makes sense that Tyler's husband (who died in the late '90s) was himself Iranian-American, and first or second generation at that, a reasonably recent transplant. It makes sense all kinds of ways—both because she (Tyler) lived a lifetime with exposure to the customs and ways of Iranian immigrants, and also as a solace to remember her husband and her life with him. It's a huge twist compared to other Tyler but there's also no mistaking it for anything but. The usual heartaches are all over it, the sad and lonely people failing to connect even as they yearn on their deepest levels for exactly that. The characters are vivid and feel like people I've known. A small point: Something about the title seems off to me. It's connected in the book to the way children all talk about digging holes to China—I know I did it myself, and it feels universal—with even a funny child-like cast to it, and in an interview Tyler talks about how she intends it almost inversely, as digging through facades that people erect for themselves, made doubly difficult for immigrants with the additional cultural (and political, she might have added) overlays. Still, something about the title doesn't work for me. Paradoxically, it reminds me both of an Albert Brooks movie and of deadly earnest documentaries, which was a little distracting. This is good enough that it deserves an audience with nothing standing in its way.

In case it's not at the library.

Hard Line (1985)

2012-01-07T07:45:00.000-08:00

On Hard Line the Blasters get their gospel on more self-consciously (and more awkwardly) than ever, turning to the Jubilee Train Singers and the Jordanaires for sweetening, for effect, and perhaps even for the power of the Lord. The one cover this time is by John Mellencamp, along with a couple of collaborations with John Doe. As usual the originals dominate and they stand with and even above the rest. But the calculated gestures work some toward making this third in line for me of their three great studio albums. Although just because it's third in line doesn't mean it isn't great. It rocks low and sweet and hard, like they know how to do. Yet at this point, after years of constant touring and rarely getting their heads up above semi-obscurity, there's a nagging feeling of exhaustion worrying the edges, as though somebody were pushing them for a breakout, or even more likely, they were pushing themselves. Semi-obscurity grinds fine as poverty, even if it keeps the cachet pure. Not long after this album Dave Alvin would split for a solo career, and not long after that their stuff would start showing up in movies such as Someone to Watch Over Me, Bull Durham, and From Dusk Til Dawn. It's good movie music, of course, but I think their stuff more properly lives on in blood-bucket clubs in the middle of the night all over the land, wearing their rock 'n' roll hearts on their sleeves. It's no kind of life for a good person—you can talk to Hank Williams about that, who died before he was 30—but to me those dank stinking clubs are where the Blasters are most naturally vital. In many ways the end feels near here (which I understand could be just another way of saying "apocalyptic"). The songs and playing are as tight and sharp and explosive and vibrant and appealing as ever on Hard Line and I won't argue with anyone who might even find it their best. But it feels close to the end to me on some basic level. Phil Alvin has somehow kept them together to this day, albeit intermittently and often only for one special occasion or another. But some of the joy and exuberance and hence some of their most natural power is beginning to ebb away and this album often feels as close as they ever got to genuinely sad—not necessarily such a good thing.

(Testament box)

Movie of the Year: Introduction

2012-01-06T08:19:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, when the best-of-decade lists for the 2000s started rolling out, I realized with some dismay that I had let most of those years go by without benefit of my old movie-viewing habits. There are a number of reasons for this, none good—distracting full-time work, souring relationship, miasma of Bush/Cheney rage and depression (aka BDS), various encroachments of middle age—and I saw that my early cuts at a list were woefully inadequate.

At approximately the same time a number of movie bloggers I had discovered and begun to follow had started a project that really fascinated me: systematic evaluations year by year of movie history, with lists of their favorites and a write-up for their pick of their very favorite for each year. Most of them started in the distant past, as early as the mid-'20s but never any later than 1931, and moved forward. I realized I also had a ton of gaps before the '60s.

By then I had signed on with Netflix and grown a little drunk on the possibilities of their catalog, as increasingly so many great movies of all eras became available as DVDs. The problem was not one of access, as it had been previously been most of my life, certainly prior to VCRs, but of time. I have since become one of those unfortunates who carry a burden of the chronically overstuffed queue, watching movies most days, and never feeling quite caught up (admittedly not an altogether unpleasant feeling).

Thus a number of strands contributed to my interest in taking on this project: foremost, providing shape and direction to the endless task of "catching up," on the 2000s, on the greats and worthies before 1960, and on all the other gaps in cinema history and/or appreciation I might have. It's a great excuse to look again at the things I remember loving, and often love again (and sometimes don't). It's a great excuse to look at more and more movies all the time. It's a great excuse, period. Full stop.

One thing I will be doing differently from others I know is turning it around, beating-against-the-current-borne-back-ceaselessly-into-the-past style, starting with 2011 and making my way back, one year at a time, hopefully getting all the way into the '20s by the time this is all done. Yes, it's going to take awhile. I'm making it a Friday feature, alternating every other week with the usual weekly movie reviews I have been doing (currently picks from the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list, but eventually wandering afield of that and then, according to the list I'm working from, eventually returning there again too, also), starting two weeks from today. Yes, it's definitely going to take awhile.

I owe thanks, especially for their infectious enthusiasm, to the following blogs, which have produced some excellent work with this concept, by both the bloggers and their various commenters: Goodfella's Movie Blog, which has unfortunately gone inactive, but whose archives are still there and very much worth a look. The Last Lullaby (and) Peril, which also finished up its survey a couple years ago, but proprietor (and filmmaker) Jeffrey Goodman continues to update various entries in red as he sees more pictures, which makes those archives worth checking regularly too. Moon in the Gutter mixed its efforts in this vein with all the rest of its impressive offerings, and though it apparently abandoned the project some time ago in the late '30s the entries are worth seeking out (and it's actually a real pleasure to spend time digging through its archives) for the unusual even iconoclastic picks made by proprietor Jeremy Richey. Movies over Matter may be the most ambitious of them all, with write-ups for each movie of a top 10, along with Oscar-style awards/appreciations of lead and supporting male and female performances.

Last but not least, I also found Jonathan Rosenbaum's writing and his road map of a proposed canon in Essential Cinema to be an invaluable resource. Thus, onward.

4. Randy Newman, "I Want You to Hurt Like I Do" (1988)

2012-01-05T07:35:00.000-08:00

(listen)

Some of those early Randy Newman albums seem to me a bit overrated, but it all balances out because I think the ones from the '80s are underrated—Trouble in Paradise and Land of Dreams, the latter of which provides a home for this. A lot of Randy Newman's best stuff tends to get over by slapping a wiseass smirk in front of calculatedly ignorant, outrageous statements, usually about racism and its analogues, set carefully into musically lulling settings (he takes his place in a family of movie composers), and then letting his partisans fob the excesses off on capital-I irony. It's a lot of passive-aggressive energy, to get to the point, but mostly I think it does work, not least because Newman himself remains so sly and so shrewd about what he does. He's got a lot of courage and a lot of wit. That's a good combination and this is where he puts it over with few peers, I think. At first it seems like the usual, in the singer's self-reported reprehensible behavior, the way he treats his family and loved ones and all his responsibilities, most painfully his children. But it's bracing when you realize how truthful he is, from beginning to end, and how he has found perhaps the perfect mouthpiece to do so, himself—or anyway, the singer is a performer too, it turns out. There's nothing funny about it. It's tragic. It's mean. It's chilling. The only thing giving irony any purchase at all is the idea that anyone like the singer describes himself would have this level of self-awareness, let alone the ability to articulate it so clearly and so matter-of-factly, a question as well with the great material on William Shatner's Has Been. This one's not got its due yet.

5. Jonathan Richman, "That Summer Feeling" (1983)

2012-01-04T07:30:00.000-08:00

(listen)

I like how Jonathan Richman comes at us like a kind of wide-eyed innocent, an outright naif even, charming and boyish and silly. But let him close and the game becomes more evident. Perhaps nowhere more so than in "That Summer Feeling," from the 1983 album Jonathan Sings! The whole album is worth tracking down. The song that opens it is a kind of nursery inversion of Alice Cooper's "School's Out," seemingly all about the free and easy pleasures of the warm season, with a lot of free and easy sing-songy rhymes to move it along: "When the cool of the pond makes you drop down on it / When the smell of the lawn makes you flop down on it / When the teenage car gets the cop down on it." But this is no nostalgia trip. This is about the kinds of things you live with all your life, propelled against your will through time, the pain and regrets and longing that inevitably accrue. He's serious and he makes it plain as sunshine: "But if you wait until you're older / A sad resentment will smolder one day / And then this summer feeling will come haunt you / Then that summer feeling will come taunt you / That summer feeling will hurt you / Later in your life." Who is Jonathan Richman and what does he want? What is he telling us? I'm still not entirely sure, and I'm not convinced he could even articulate it himself. But he's working on the deep levels when he's at his best, and just like that summer feeling, if you listen close enough, he's going to haunt you the rest of your life.

6. John & Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band with the Harlem Community Choir, "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" (1972)

2012-01-03T07:27:00.000-08:00

(listen)

Is there any music more willfully isolated and sequestered as what swamps us every December? By the math, on a rational basis and objectively speaking, a handful or better of titles on a list like this, or approximately 8.3%, should be Christmas music. But does that ever happen? No—not least probably by dint of the resentments raised in so many of us bludgeoned by it in public spaces and via media every year. I share this problem but I also have a secret to tell you. There's a lot of Christmas music I like a lot, from Brenda Lee's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" to the Phil Spector holiday album to classics by all the usual suspects, Nat King Cole and Burl Ives and even Andy Williams. I even love many of the hymns, in their time and place. For many years after the murder of John Lennon, starting in fact that very year of 1980 when I made a point of acquiring this single, this was how I greeted the Christmas morning: "So this is Christmas and what have you done, / Another year over, a new one just begun." I wanted very much for it to become a holiday standard (as much as, later, when I discovered it, I wanted it again for Big Star's "Jesus Christ," an even more hopeless cause). Perhaps it has finally become one across these long decades, though I haven't noticed it on any radio station I listen to any more than "Fairytale of New York" (#37 on this list, which means I actually made a 2% Christmas nut, which I bet you $10,000 is better than anyone else offering up a list of 100 favorite songs). Now "Happy Xmas" sounds to me more diminished, sad and echoing with faraway memories of a distantly remembered past. But if that's not one perfectly apt description of the best Christmas music, I don't know what is.

7. Velvet Underground, "Sweet Jane" (1970)

2012-01-02T00:09:00.000-08:00

(listen)

It's practically impossible by definition to pick a favorite Velvet Underground album but if forced I'm going with Loaded. There's a warmth and an unaffected and generous adolescence to it, looking forward to Mott-style glam, that never fails to catch me up. It's an odd affect, particularly coming at the tail end of their ride. It hardly hurts that it piles on upfront with one of the great rock anthems in "Sweet Jane," an allusive tale, supported by a nearly perfect array of acoustic guitar chords, about kids moving to the city and living their lives. In the right moment it is the thrill of a lifetime. I've talked before about how a person may aspire to master the phrasing of certain signature songs, enabling a kind of process of transubstantiation in order to actually become those beloved singers and songwriters (Buddy Holly and Prince), at least for the duration of the songs and one's ability to sing with them perfectly. I have long held strong suspicions that the same holds for Lou Reed and this one, but I have never managed (yet) to entirely duplicate the various asides and chortles and feints and dodges of his deceptive singing in the verses, not for lack of trying. It's a pleasure every time to hear, particularly when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, folksinger Lou Reed style. As loud as you can now: "And there's even some evil mothers / Well, they're gonna tell you that everything is just dirt / Y'know, that women never really faint / And that villains always blink their eyes / And that, y'know, children are the only ones who blush / And that life is just to die." P.S. Never mind the later metal versions of this, as on Rock n Roll Animal. I insist it's the Loaded version you want.

New Year memo

2012-01-01T06:25:00.000-08:00

Happy new year, everyone. It's been a decent year here and I hope the same's true for all of you too. Thanks as always for checking in and following along at "the Home of the Plangent Memoria"™—it appears there were more of you showing more interest than ever in this little blog over the past year, and it's much appreciated!

First: Good news! The prolonged 100 Other Songs countdown is wrapping up soon—I never thought it would extend into the new year, but what the hell, I took a train out of town for the holidays, so there you go. Between it and last year's 100 Hit Songs countdown I have found the write-ups to be fun and plan to continue them sans the countdown overlay into the future forever (or for the time being), probably on Wednesdays. For those of a mind, I also chip in a "song of the week" over at Balloon Juice, a sensible place for the U.S. citizens among us to go get on your political exasperation. My song picks usually appear on Fridays or Saturdays.

Planned new stuff for this year mostly involve movies. I spend a good deal of time with them these days, at home with the remote or out at the theaters predictably annoyed by fellow viewers, who chat, say "what was that?" and "what's going on now?" a lot, and check email on their smartphones. Furthermore, they all appear to be standing on my lawn. But I digress. I am starting a Movie of the Year feature on Fridays, looking at favorites by year, which will alternate every other week with the usual Friday movie reviews. It starts with 2011 and then I work my way back. This one's going to take awhile. More on that soon.

And too: Last year I was invited to participate with a couple of others on Facebook in a countdown of our 50 favorite films. I will reproduce my write-ups for that here on a weekly basis (so, yes, this will take awhile too) and will include invaluable thoughts on the enterprise of constructing and addressing a countdown too—exciting. The Facebook 50 '11 will also start later this month, as a regular feature for Tuesdays. More on that one soon too.

Thanks as always for stopping by, reading, and leaving comments—I love to get them. All the best to everyone for a great new year!

Non Fiction (1983)

2011-12-17T07:50:00.000-08:00

I see that Robert Christgau has rated this a quasi-notch higher than the first, eponymous Blasters album (A vs. A-). I won't split hairs about that, not so much because I agree but more because I am too busy reveling in the bracing sounds found on both of them—and besides, the two of them together add up to only a little more than an hour of this glorious music. This one has a much higher ratio of originals to covers (9-2 by my count) and they are just as hard to differentiate as they were on the first. But the sounds range as wide, the band is just as tight if not more so, and why the hell can't I get this blasted volume knob to go any higher? What?! Can't hear you! I know people complain about retro-oriented acts because a) it's nothing new, b) you can always go back to the originals if you really want to hear it, and c) some combination of both, including arguments based on race. On some level I sympathize—notably when the retro-oriented acts are demonstrably inferior to their sources, which happens way, way more often than not. But I don't see it that way with the Blasters. Their appreciation for their forebears is written into every moment, but they're not simply aping the sounds they like. They are marinated in the stuff, with extra helpings of love sweet love L-O-V-E love. Like, oh, say, Creedence Clearwater Revival before them, they consciously root themselves in familiar traditions yet manage to transcend them at the same time, simply by staking them out and updating them so forthrightly, warping and adding to and redefining them at will, yet subtly, hurtling them right beyond the boundaries of time itself, where they can exist in eternally enlightened present. This is nearly as old now as they music they were drawing from then—we are getting into whole networks of historical bridging and networks and access points—but it's as fresh and galvanizing and surprising and deep as if they had released it in 1948, well before any of them had been born. I know others might differ but I count that as irreducibly good and when I'm in the mood for the Blasters nothing else will do and the pleasures last a long time. Essential.

(Testament box)

Ordet (1955)

2011-12-16T06:01:00.000-08:00

Denmark, 126 minutes
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Writers: Kaj Munk, Carl Theodor Dreyer
Photography: Henning Bendtsen
Music: Poul Schierbeck
Editor: Edith Schlussel
Cast: Henrik Malberg, Emil Haas Christensen, Preben Lerdorff Rye, Cay Kristiansen, Birgitte Federspiel, Henry Skjaer, Ejner Federspiel

There's every good chance this could well be the silliest, most frivolous and beside-the-point SPOILER WARNING ever issued, but I suppose it has to be done. The "twist ending" delivered here, in one of the handful of cinema wayposts given us by master director Carl Th. Dreyer (going well back into the silent era and including The Passion of Joan of Arc, previously discussed), is about as far from the usual kinds of narrative stunts we're supposed to warn about as it's possible to imagine. Not to mention it's almost better to know what's coming, the better to appreciate the pace and careful foreshadowing and development of themes that goes into this. Not to mention that the people who require these kinds of warnings probably have Ordet way down on their to-see lists in the first place.

Among the top 50 films on the list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, only L'Atalante rivals Ordet (with maybe a couple of others, still to come) among the most obscure for me; at least I had the advantage of knowing Dreyer from that long-ago college film class I've mentioned before. Dreyer's career is fascinating, nearly as sparse as his aesthetic, spanning the silent era and penetrating all the way into the '60s, based in Denmark but traveling well afield, with long gaps between projects, and a continuing obsession with religious themes approached from a variety of angles: Joan of Arc, one of the great vampire pictures (Vampyr), 16th-century witch hunting hysteria (Day of Wrath, produced and released during World War II). Ordet, with its radical and homely meditation on faith as lived and experienced, fits perfectly with these.

It's a slow, ponderous, austere, strange film, deeply religious with no apologies. Indeed, one of its most refreshing aspects is the simple way in which most of its characters are profoundly serious about coming to terms with and living their lives by their understandings of faith, seeing everything through that prism. And faith puts everything about daily life at stake for these people—who they will love, how they will love, how they will understand and respond to the setbacks in their lives, and more. The metaphysical issues of God's grace and presence in the world are vitally important here, even—or perhaps especially—among the nonbelievers.

It can, yes, become alienatingly religious, particularly as it gets deep into the sectarian divides between two strains of Protestant Christianity in 1920s Denmark. At those moments of conflict a skeptic like me almost wants to wave my arms around and bawl out, "How can you even tell the difference?" And, at that moment, I can imagine the characters turning their heads to the camera and launching into hectoring monologues for my benefit, touching on issues of transubstantiation or immersion baptism or faith-in-works or God's grace or any of the issues that these subdivided strains have picked to quarrel about with one another. (But at least, in that moment, united against me.)

I also found myself impatient with the holy-fool ramblings of the middle brother Johannes, who as one character helpfully mentions to another is "incurably mad." He spends much of the picture wandering about in a daze impolitely declaiming excruciatingly inapt lessons from the Bible. The nut who thinks he's Jesus—it just seems so easy. Yet, setting aside the incurable madness, he does work well on the level of plot device: a point of unbearable stress and sadness to his family, who are resigned to caring for him and putting up with him for the rest of his or their lives. And, of course, functioning as the messenger who repeatedly tells the others that their faith is insufficient, even during a horrible episode when a child and mother are lost in childbirth.

For as slowly as Ordet proceeds it is actually quite lean and a pleasure to watch unfolding. Setting and characters are established with quick strokes and then set in motion, hurtling off into destinies as seemingly inevitable as they are painful. The black and white images are carefully composed, almost soothingly so; one always feels in the hands of artists who know what they are doing. The performances are subdued yet stately, hitting their marks and getting the job done seamlessly and transparently at every point. Everyone and everything is believable, for the most part. The screenplay is a marvel of complication and concision. If the first half often seemed to be a lot of aimless hand-wringing and interpersonal complications on my first look, headed in no direction particularly good for anyone present, it all seemed to me much more tightly crafted the second time through.

But the last half hour seemed remarkable even the first time, simply because it pulls off what it intends to—and, if a second viewing is any indication, it only gets better as one is more familiar with it. A woman dies and it is a great tragedy, but the faith of those who believe bring her back to life—literally, back to life. And when she comes back, their faith is justified and spreads immediately, of course, to the nonbelievers among them, not to mention sealing the healing between the sects, already in motion even before the miracle.

The funeral itself felt to me absolutely real, which is crucially important—particularly the grief of the widower, the nonbeliever in the family. This funeral is no exercise of any kind in religious object lessons. It's a moment, like any funeral, when grief rules the day, when the reality of death in the face of the corpse and the incident of the ritual is impossible to deny and must be accepted—the purpose of funerals, along with the humble and sad words honoring the decedent's life, and the occasion it presents to the survivors to say, "Goodbye." It is perfectly done, with no corners cut. It is wrenching. And then the miracle occurs, out of a discomfiting welter of horrible, painfully "inappropriate behavior" (as we like to say) on the part of Johannes, who rudely stands at the feet of the corpse in her coffin and demands that she return to life.

It is truly utterly beautiful in that moment—transcendent, I guess I might as well say—a remarkable confluence of vision, performance, and a nearly breathtaking willingness to dare to take the story in such a radical direction. It wisely sets aside any impulse whatsoever for "special effects"—I have no doubt Dreyer never once considered it, but you have to wonder what others on the project thought might "work." No, instead the corpse simply begins to stir in the coffin and eventually opens her eyes even as Johannes outrages all present by standing there speaking in the way he is. I will say, conditioned to special effects as I am at this point, I had a hard time believing it the first time I saw it. But it worked better the second time, and I have no reason to think it won't work even better when I look again. In the end, Ordet proceeds with a remarkable will all its own. I guess that's Dreyer.

8. Modern Lovers, "Pablo Picasso" (1972)

2011-12-15T08:42:00.001-08:00

(listen)

Before Jonathan Richman became the spritely endearing saint we have known today and for the past many decades he was some kind of a rock 'n' roll demon, the genuine article. Most of the surviving evidence exists on the essential album The Modern Lovers. It's true that the rock 'n' roll is still strong with him, and always has been, as I witnessed again for myself just a couple weeks ago. He was playing an acoustic guitar as usual and accompanied only by Tommy Larkins on a lovely shambolic drumkit, traveling the land with a compelling polyglot message of inner peace and childlike fun. "Pablo Picasso," by contrast, is raw, frustrated, and gripping, with Frankenstein rhythms and a corkscrew electric guitar that drills for the brainstem. I love it insanely. I love it to pieces. Arguably it fits with his series of latter songs about artists such as Vermeer, Van Gogh, and Walter Johnson, but not really: "Well some people try to pick up girls / And get called assholes / This never happened to Pablo Picasso." That's the gist. "Well he was only five foot three / But girls could not resist his stare / Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole / Not in New York." It's laugh-out-loud funny once you realize what he's doing and I never get tired of it as I never get tired of anything else on that great album. A few years ago, again with Larkins, I saw him do a version of it, but he's made it more "family-friendly" now, clipping off the swear word entirely, which I think is a bit unfortunate. But Jonathan Richman gets to do what Jonathan Richman wants to do. Those are the rules around here and the least any of us can do is comply.

Note: Countdown to wrap up next month (finally—I promise!) in order to enable me the opportunity for holiday cheering und so weiter.

9. Linda Ronstadt, "Someone to Lay Down Beside Me" (1976)

2011-12-14T06:44:00.000-08:00

(listen)

It's a Karla Bonoff song, and she's actually got a really nice version of it herself, but the Linda Ronstadt is the one that got enough radio airplay to catch my attention, somehow only late at night as I recall, so here we are. I only needed to hear it once. It felt like dying inside, like one of those dreams where you're caught naked somewhere you're not supposed to be. It's one obviously for all the lonely people, and if I'm giving away too much about myself with this—which I may or may not be—I'm also pretty sure that everybody out there has to know what this song feels like in some way. At some Dark Night of the Soul level. Has felt the yearning ache alone in bed in the middle of the night. The planet is overcrowded, everybody on TV is coupled up and happy as hell, so are half the people walking around in the songs and movies, and all the rest are having dramatic breakups and quickly moving on to next partners. This song, in its arguable self-pitying solipsism and self-centered baby boomer ingratitude, speaks for the rest of us: Can't I just please get some just a little bit of that for myself, once in awhile, maybe? Is it so much to ask? "People all over the world are starvin' just for affection," as Jonathan Richman reminded us earlier. The immediacy of that starvation lives in every measure of this song, desperately. It occupies a kind of miraculous hushed space of fragile piano and human voice and swelling sound. It's a bummer, it's haunting, it's depressing—it might even be depressed itself. But you know how true it is too.

10. Replacements, "Unsatisfied" (1984)

2011-12-13T08:21:00.000-08:00

(listen)

The Replacements seemed vaguely comical at the time for their sundry vainglorious pretensions to rock immortality. Oh, hell, they were hilarious—they named the album this comes from Let it Be, and included a KISS cover on it as well as this quasi-defiant gesture in the direction of the theme that broke the Stones wide open in their time. It was a good joke, and still is today, but listen close and it's apparent that songwriter Paul Westerberg anyway was playing it for laughs not least as purposeful deflection of his deepest, fondest desires. Ambitions this big are hard to face up to in cold light of day, let alone own plainly as such. But the modesty and bashful toe-kicking was just another of their manifold charms as well. "Unsatisfied" is as big as nations. The Stones sound positively peevish by comparison. It thunders with a kind of power to make mortals tremble as it articulates the wracking emotional frustrations simply of being born into the world. "Look me in the eye and tell me that I'm satisfied" unfolds and unpacks all the way to distant horizons. Once again I have had some trouble over the long years penetrating the densely constructed walls of mythos and adoration and worshiping overstatement thrown up by fans—the loss is entirely mine, I know this—but "Unsatisfied" has always, always got through. If he had never done anything but this Westerberg would have made his bones as one of the great rock vocalists and one of its great songwriters, and this is certainly as good a place as any to hear what brooding, powerful, deeply felt music these self-conscious misfit artistes of the shambolic were capable of when they tuned up and got over themselves and actually started playing together.

11. Pet Shop Boys, "Left to My Own Devices" (1988)

2011-12-12T07:50:00.000-08:00

(listen)

Here we have the Pet Shop Boys' Phil Spector confectionery moment nonpareil: a brilliant "little symphony for the kids"—more accurately, perhaps, a little opera for the kids. It goes on over eight minutes in the full album version (and it's likely there are even longer mixes of it out there), riding the crests and troughs of its waves of energy with a cool that is like nothing so much as surfers and skiers in recreational promotional documentaries. Nowhere is Neil Tennant more deliberate about the way he proceeds, and nowhere is he more droll or funnier, as Chris Lowe's glittering gem setting builds over and over again to its orchestral heads of steam: "When I get home, it's late at night / I pour a drink and watch the fight" ... "I don't like to compete, or talk street, street, street" ... "Maybe if you're with me we'll do some shopping." The psychic center is located in this verse: "I was faced with a choice at a difficult age / Would I write a book? Or should I take to the stage? / But in the back of my head I heard distant feet / Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat." The groove, of course, is whomping and omnipresent and irresistible and it ends so soon the only way you know it's eight minutes is by checking the time again. I can tell you from personal experience that it is actually possible to wear this one out—after more than 20 years, it suffers for me now from some exhaustion. But such is its power that I can hear the pleasure of it in there still the way I once experienced it directly, in memory now, echo-fashion. Even that is worth it, and once in a happy while it all comes rushing back again the way it used to. Stone classic.

Great Plains (1989)

2011-12-11T09:04:00.001-08:00

A revisit to Ian Frazier's first nonfiction book is almost as good as a revisit to the place he's writing about—almost. I envy Frazier's ability to make the most of his travels around that north-south band of continent just east of the Rocky Mountains. He goes out there, he stays out there, he wanders the place with determination and grace, and he meets all kinds of wonderfully fascinating people. He's oriented much the same way I am—loves Crazy Horse the historical figure to distraction, and the Crazy Horse monument in western South Dakota, still under construction (and will be for generations to come), maybe even more than me. He may or may not experience the Black Hills as holy land in quite the same way I do, but he's close. My last trip that way, in 2004, I self-consciously attempted to emulate him. But alas I was too often out of my comfort zone away from a familiar bed. I couldn't reach out and connect to others the way he can, and most disconcerting, I didn't appear to have his energy for the things writers are supposed to, such as taking copious daily notes on all of my experiences and immediate circumstances. There's very little structure here—or perhaps there's a deceptive one, because even as Frazier's chapters wander well afield of their apparent focuses, they are always extremely interesting and readable, full of nuggets of anecdote and story and studded all through with bracing arrays of facts. As if to underline the seriousness of the effort, which often feels light-hearted and desultory, the last quarter of the book is notes and sourcing and an index. It's probably worth reading but so far I've only scanned; mostly it seems to be dry business compared to the enthusiasm and rolling momentum of the text proper. For the most part Frazier gets things right, at least according to my own experience. Like him I am only a passing-through visitor to the Great Plains. I have family in western North Dakota that we visited many summers when I was growing up, but I did my growing up in Minnesota, and that's not the Great Plains. In fact, I never even began to appreciate the region until a road trip I took with a friend when I was 21, which I think of now, among other things, as my "discovery" of Montana. Something about those falling-away horizons and the vast scopes of tableau, Big Sky and railroad tracks and buttes stretching away forever in blazing sun always make my heart swell. Frazier gets that experience right on every page.

In case it's not at the library.

The Blasters (1981)

2011-12-10T08:47:00.001-08:00

Stationed at their post in the punk-rock nether regions of Los Angeles, label mates with the likes of X, Dream Syndicate, and the Gun Club, the Blasters reached out across the land to broadcast the grand traditions of rock 'n' roll, from Memphis to New Orleans to Texas to St. Louis to Chicago and elsewhere, working rockabilly variants, rockin' blues, rockin' country, and good old straightforward rock 'n' roll the way we know it and the way we love it: sassy, loose, warm, irresistible, worth playing all night. They concocted a brew that will never go out of style as long as any of us lives and that will probably endure beyond the end of our lifetimes too. You know it already, and it belongs on a space capsule hurtling beyond the edge of our solar system with the Beethoven and the Chuck Berry. The longest song here is three and a half minutes. Most are closer to two minutes flat. The whole thing barely lasts half an hour. There are love songs, sad songs, nervous songs, songs about funky beds and Highway 61 and dancing all night. They jump, they move, they shuffle. It's hard to write about this stuff because it's so much pleasure to listen, and the pleasures are so distracting it's hard to articulate. The rhythm section is tight as fresh rubber, the guitars supple and lean and fast, the rhythms as compelling as freight trains and riverboats and cannonades. Flourishes of barrelhouse piano and raunchy sax and blowing harp are added as needed. Complain if you must about the strained vocals of Phil Alvin; for me, his strange affect is simply all of a piece with the convincing, often breathtaking facility the Blasters evince for playing rock 'n' roll, fresh and ancient and fleeting and eternal at once. More than half the songs here are originals but I defy anyone to pick them out from the covers without a cheat sheet. The Blasters are plain marinated in what they do, and the themes of the originals—evident even from the titles, such as "Border Radio" and "American Music"—are made up equally of an impulse to mythologize and just to be part of it, all of it, the history and traditions and the raw energy and exuberance and the joy at playing and discovering it for themselves. This one works nicely on repeat, played very loud.

(Testament box)

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

2011-12-09T06:04:00.001-08:00

USA, 93 minutes
Directors: Charles Laughton, Robert Mitchum, Terry Sanders
Writers: Davis Grubb, James Agee, Charles Laughton
Photography: Stanley Cortez
Music: Walter Schumann
Editor: Robert Golden
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, Don Beddoe, Evelyn Varden, Peter Graves, James Gleason, Billy Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce

Anyone who watches true-crime TV is likely well acquainted with the feebleness and gesture of last resort that has become the word "evil" in such contexts. It's what people say when they don't know what else to say about the horrors that confront us, horrors that seemingly have been with us for all time. But in The Night of the Hunter the whole notion of evil is taken on and aired out quite deliberately and self-consciously. Harry Powell (played by Robert Mitchum) famously goes about the picture with "L-O-V-E" tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand and "H-A-T-E" on the knuckles of his left, and he's got a funny little story to tell about that too. It's something of a conceit that wears thin the more often one sees the picture, but it's also a useful avenue in to the fanciful, occasionally alienating extravagances of this project and what makes it work so well as a whole, in spite of some of its rather painful limitations.

The Night of the Hunter must stand as yet another example, with Casablanca and The Third Man, of a uniquely collaborative happy accident. It's Charles Laughton's only film-directing credit; Laughton was better known as a classical Shakespearian-style actor on stage and in the movies (he did direct a few theater productions as well). It's on a short list of James Agee's screenplays, with The African Queen; Agee was better known as a journalist and novelist who slummed as a film critic. And, perhaps most significantly, it's only one of dozens of photography credits for Stanley Cortez, whose work ranges among The Black Cat, The Magnificent Ambersons, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, Sam Fuller pictures Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, a couple of episodes of TV's "Family Affair," and Chinatown.

Indeed, it's arguable that if this picture belongs to any one single auteur it would be Cortez, whose stark black and white imagery is often the most animating aspect of the picture, offering up one indelible image after another: the shadow of Harry Powell in his preacher's hat on the wall of the Harper children's bedroom when he first shows up at the Harper home in the night, the corpse of Willa Harper (played by Shelley Winters) in her Model T at the bottom of the river, a house and barn that the runaway children find for a night's shelter by the side of the river, and more: water, sky, moon, shadow. The stars in nighttime skies. The sun behind clouds. It is a remarkable film visually.

Yet it often feels as if it moves and proceeds like a TV show, like an episode, say, of "Gunsmoke," though of course with a good deal more attention paid to the production values of the visuals. (It's analogous in this way to the episodes of the "Alfred Hitchcock" TV show that Hitchcock himself directed—or for that matter to Psycho.) I suspect this effect is largely the result of how poor the performances of the child actors are (Billy Chapin as John Harper and Sally Jane Bruce as Pearl Harper), which is not to complain specifically about them—they are obviously doing the best they can—but rather about the enormous burden placed on them for this story. They are expected to portray complex roles with deeply mixed motivations, harboring a highly charged secret that their fugitive father (rather unfairly) laid on them shortly before his incarceration and eventual execution. John and Pearl are critically central to the story, and thus necessarily a pervasive presence all through the picture. That only exacerbates the problem.

It's not a problem that sinks the whole thing, but rather more like the annoyance of a small blister one suddenly notices at the start of a long hike with others. There's not much else to do but bear up with it because it's not a problem that's going to go away or be easily mitigated, and there's certainly no point in abandoning the effort altogether. Because make no mistake—The Night of the Hunter is definitely a film to be seen at least once. It's strange and scary and it moves in unusual ways to its internal rhythms: Agee's strange charged language, all its fanciful elements, and Cortez's brilliant photography. There are terrific performances too from Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, Evelyn Varden, and, of course, especially from Robert Mitchum.

Mitchum, in fact, is basically the center of gravity of it and this role certainly has to be up there with the best he ever did. You could probably make the case that this is his picture too, as much as anyone's. He's a con man posing as a preacher, actually a psychopath drawn cold and fine—even a kind of serial killer, to put a point on it, well before serial killers had caught on as such—and he inhabits the role every inch. He roams through the picture in deceptively laid-back fashion, dressed in black and wearing his preacher's hat, moving slow and easy, accepting with pleased equanimity that his mission in life is to swindle the vulnerable for money, willing to kill anyone who gets in his way with his frightening switchblade knife, and otherwise rearing back and singing a haunting hymn about Jesus and providence.

I think a good deal of what I like about The Night of the Hunter is that even as it makes its various approaches in stark black and white, and I'm not just talking about the photography, the more one looks at it and turns it about this way and that to examine, the more complexity there is to it. The most overtly pious person here, the nosy interfering Icey Spoon (played by Evelyn Varden), turns out to be the most viciously shallow, shown in various turns that are actually pretty funny. The widow Rachel Cooper (played by Lillian Gish) is a kind of "catcher in the rye" type of character, collecting orphans and minding them like a mother duck. But she has actually been abandoned by her own son, for reasons never made clear. She sings hymns, tells Bible stories, and bakes cookies until you almost want to throw up, but she keeps a shotgun around too and she's not afraid to haul it out and use it on a moment's notice.

And so this very strange, compact picture goes. Its primary business appears at first to be some kind of morality tale, and then it appears to be perhaps some kind of amoral thrill ride, and then, in the end, it becomes something not at all easy to get to the bottom of, something about good and evil and the American experience and how we all make our own beds. I've seen it a few times now and it's one of those that only seem to get better and stranger and more confounding. "They abide and they endure," says Rachel Cooper from her Christmas pantry as her parting shot to the camera, speaking perhaps of the children, perhaps of innocents more abstractly, or perhaps just rotely quoting Bible verse again. And then: The end. So weird.

12. Pixies, "Monkey Gone to Heaven" (1989)

2011-12-08T08:34:00.001-08:00

(listen)

Back when the noble purpose of this blog was to provide more or less illicit music downloads—the kind of criminal enterprise I had indulged in another era by making tapes for friends—the writing was not nearly as prolix (or erudite!). When I threw up the first three Pixies releases shortly before shutting the whole thing down for a couple of years ... something about getting a job and tired of all the hassles of offering downloads (perhaps the epitome of unrewarding labors, although come to think of it writing into the void like this is not always that much better) ... I found myself entering a kind of frenzy attempting to write about Doolittle and this song particularly. I think I about said it all at that time, as eccentric as it may be, so I'm simply going to reproduce it here. This is also known as taking the easy way out: "This is my favorite [album by the Pixies], and to put a point on it, I think 'Monkey Gone to Heaven' is where everything comes together in a glorious and eternal 2:56 that stands up to repeated play and endless analysis, stoned or otherwise. Consider the deceptively nonsense lyrics of the final verse and chorus (aka 'searing climax'): 'if man is 5 (3x) / then the devil is 6 (5x) / then god is 7 (3x) / this monkey's gone to heaven.' You can't overthink this, it just keeps deepening and deepening into itself, with man represented by the digits of one hand, the devil by the ancient lore of the number 6 (particularly when 3x, of course, but here presented 5x, effectively echoing the number of man), god by the same, viz., the number 7 (rhymes with heaven), in symmetrical relation 3x to man, underlined by a host of unholy shrieking. Then the monkey appears. The strings throughout are very nice too. This is amazing stuff."

13. Van Morrison, "Into the Mystic" (1970)

2011-12-07T09:08:00.001-08:00

(listen)

In previous exercises like this I have (absurdly, I admit) attempted to pass off side 1 of Moondance as "a song," even though there are actually five perfectly distinct songs on it and two of them—"Moondance" and "Crazy Love"—have suffered some exhaustion over these long years. I'm not doing that this time, but you should know that it's one of the great album sides and "Into the Mystic" does work somewhat better in the context of closing out the set, particularly coming after the deceptively gentle rockin' "Caravan" ("turn up your radio, turn it up")—somehow, in the moment, sailing off "into the mystic" seems an obvious next logical step. I might also as well have picked "And it Stoned Me," which opens the set, as it is nearly equally transcendent yet grounded in concrete, quotidian details that somehow add up to the joy he's at pains to communicate, here and all through most of his work ("Oh, the water / Let it run all over me"). Plus it just afforded me the opportunity to mention every song on the side. "Into the Mystic" is the point where Morrison is perhaps most plainly straightforward and yet concise and economical (at 3:30) about his ongoing, career-long project of the pursuit of ecstasy. When he reaches for the heights and unfurls the package and makes the big reveal with "I want to rock your gypsy soul" (yes, that's "gypsy soul"), it's a lot like the feeling I get at the one and only moment of pleasure I still find in flying travel, the moment at takeoff when the craft leaves the ground. Only I'm just sitting at home and Van Morrison is singing and some people are playing in a band, acoustic guitars and saxophones and piano and other things. Oh, and I love this factoid from Wikipedia: "It is among the most popular songs doctors listen to while operating."

14. Lou Reed, "Families" (1979)

2011-12-06T07:54:00.001-08:00

(listen)

In a solo career that now spans 40 years, Lou Reed has released something like 21 albums and an additional handful of collaborations, so naturally there are any number of lost highways, failed experiments, and ~~mistrial~~ misfires to sort through among the brilliant triumphs at this point. "Families" lives on The Bells, one of the more overlooked/undervalued among this motley, and it's an example of Reed donning his mask of naked sincerity—as believable and heartfelt as he gets, which doesn't mean he hasn't fooled me one more time (there's that thing about the family dog, for one example of overplaying his hand here). But the wretched monotony of the "how's the family?" chant, in combination with the riffing sax and handclap rhythm-keeping and I guess I have to say various circumstances in my own life too when this came along, worked together to produce a heartrending experience. There's nothing uniquely insightful about it. "Families that live out in the suburbs often make each other cry" and "I don't come home much anymore" are the lines that go through me on a reliable basis, and they're things you could say with just as much accuracy about families and people that live right in town, or out in the country, or other suburbs. But I was on strained relations with my family then—the usual crap, in my 20s, but with our mother dying to make everything that much more confusing, and me trying to "make something of my life" after years of fooling around and being essentially given up on, as it felt, plus all the alienation and loneliness to be expected. Nothing remarkable, just the normal stuff you can imagine and probably know for yourself one way or another. Still, this song provided some kind of touchstone for me, even as, like those families out in the suburbs Lou Reed is singing about, it often made me cry.

15. Neil Young & Crazy Horse, "Powderfinger" (1979)

2011-12-05T08:07:00.001-08:00

(listen)

Neil Young is obviously fascinated with American culture and hailing originally from Canada has always, I suppose, been at a good vantage to observe it. But it still amazes me that he can reach so far back into primal American experience and just pull something out like this. It's a Civil War story, evidently not on the fields of battle, about an anonymous young man (and Southern, at that) killed in an ambush. There's not much to it: the attacking boat appears on the river, the kid foolishly tries to defend against it even in the absence of elder male family members. He can't, and he dies. The moment of his death is recorded: "Raised my rifle to my eye / Never stopped to wonder why. / Then I saw black / And my face splashed in the sky." It's a particular moment I have found myself pitching headfirst into, so stark and matter of fact and profoundly universal. It's breathtaking—the whole thing is. I can't think of many other moments in all of rock that get to such depths with such economy and so little bombast. A few years ago Phil Dellio compiled an exhaustive list of Neil Young covers, and identified six for this song, by the Beat Farmers, Chris Burroughs, the Cowboy Junkies, Tonia Sellers & Laura Hagen, Uncle Tupelo, and Yung Wu. "Not sure why," he writes, "but this is one case where any voice other than Neil’s seems to automatically diminish the song." Young offered an early version of it to Lynyrd Skynyrd in the mid-'70s, perhaps some kind of response in their mutual "Southern man" quasi-contretemps (or whatever it was). I wish we could have heard what they'd done with it, but their faces splashed in the sky first.

The Amateur Marriage (2004)

2011-12-04T07:59:00.001-08:00

If I were inclined in any way towards rankings and making lists (and who's to say I'm not?) I'd put this fairly high among Anne Tyler's novels, after only Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Saint Maybe. It's interesting to watch Tyler working through her various tried and true themes—in the one just before this, Back When We Were Grownups, she went perhaps as far as she's gone in making her loose, freewheeling woman the unblemished hero, and the taciturn, repressed man the rejected object of scorn. Here she very nearly goes to the other extreme: Pauline is familiar as the wacky, uninhibited center of a Baltimore family's gravity, but there's an unpleasant tincture of rage to this round, even as her long-suffering husband Michael is not nearly as suffocating—suffocating, yes, but not nearly as much so—as Tyler's familiar Leary types. In fact, this time around the uninhibited freewheeler is very nearly as suffocating in her own way, as the type generally is. Speaking as more of a Leary myself, it's nice to see Tyler grasping the point. Or maybe I only missed her grasp of it before. There is a tremendous amount of sadness to this story of a long-term marriage that ultimately fails, told from beginning to well past the end. The story of the oldest daughter Lindy, who simply vanishes for nearly 30 years, is particularly shocking, and wrenching. Pauline dies before they ever are reunited, and the reunion itself is shrewdly enough mostly an anticlimax. Even though the mystery of Lindy is solved, it lingers on. This seems to me absolutely true to life, and does nothing to dispel the sadness. In fact, as much as I like the happy ending to Saint Maybe, I think I like the sour ending here even a little more. Again the characters are nicely drawn and as always feel effortlessly distinct and real, like people you've known all your life. The narrative strategy is a good one and nicely executed, dipping into the lives of Pauline and Michael once or twice a decade across their long marriage and its aftermath, moving with a sure hand as its story just enlarges and enlarges. In many ways it's the story of America from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, but never feels pushy about the point. Just another poignant visit with more folks that Anne Tyler knows.

In case it's not at the library.

The Original Soundtrack (1975)

2011-12-03T08:13:00.001-08:00

10cc is a strange beast that came lurching out of the swamps of '70s pop and art-rock, with some roots even in the '60s so-called British Invasion. Perhaps too tuneful (and, frankly, commercial) to be considered prog they nonetheless flit determinedly around the edges of it, showing off their smarts and their chops every chance they get, particularly on the eight-minute suite that opens the album, "Une Nuit a Paris," which Wikipedia tells me was a direct influence on both Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera. Don't forget the grain of salt. Me, well, in general I am more often put in mind of a British comedy novelty act such as the Bonzo Dog Band or even Monty Python—there's a lot of broad humor larded all through this, and as the title desperately wants to imply it probably wouldn't be hard fitting visuals to most of it either. How it came into my life I can't remember—I think a friend liked it, and I liked the hit "I'm Not in Love" (here in all its six-minute glory), and then I found it in a cutout bin. Something like that. I've never counted it a huge favorite but it's rife with melody, cutesy mannerism, and small-bore winning moments. "I'm Not in Love" happens to be the thing here that's not like the others, but it's a big beautiful mellotron boat and a pleasure to experience floating by, I suppose also because of some memories of its times that have become attached. Drat, the personal element again. And so on and so forth: "Une Nuit a Paris" gets its Ratatouille/Triplets of Belleville Parisian underclass on a long time before the cartoons came along. "The Second Sitting for the Last Supper" and "Life Is a Minestrone" work ham-handed jokes in sparkling pop and/or rockin' settings. After "I'm Not in Love" (which, you should know, you really owe it to yourself to have around, though you can probably still count on the radio to feed it to you on a regular basis), my favorite here has always been the album closer "The Film of My Love," a five-minute piece of bloated puffery that works like a piece of overly rich pastry, luscious, irresistible, monotonous, bursting with comic affect, high concept, a mocking love song that plays effectively on the emotions even as it resorts to one movie pun after the next, "forever and ever and ever ... Over and over and over (over and over and over)." I won't make you wonder—here's what it sounds like.

Chinatown (1974)

2011-12-02T05:46:00.001-08:00

USA, 130 minutes
Director: Roman Polanski
Writers: Robert Towne, Roman Polanski
Photography: John A. Alonzo, Stanley Cortez
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Editor: Sam O'Steen
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, Perry Lopez, John Hillerman, Darrell Zwerling, Diane Ladd, Roy Jenson, James Hong

I've spent most of my adult life admiring Roman Polanski movies but I was surprised when I got another look at Chinatown recently. It had probably been decades (how the time does fly)—yet not only had I seen it enough to still practically be able to quote the dialogue verbatim right along with the cast, but the complexities of the story are now sufficiently clarified that I'm better able to understand the motivations and sense of each scene. That's no small thing in this densely plotted neo-noir (particularly for someone who has a hard time following a "Perry Mason" story). I would guess that screenwriter Robert Towne's most direct source within the tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction is Ross Macdonald, even more than Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. All three concocted similarly byzantine narratives, but Macdonald always rooted his in the reverberations of fractured families, which is the story at the heart of Chinatown.

In its details the story stands, in fact, as a very nearly perfect match for the kind of sensibilities Polanski has honed (even had thrust on him, as those who know his biography might argue) all his career—a dark, sexualized, twisted undercurrent of debauchery and malevolence, which acknowledges that unblemished innocence may exist in the world, but insists on seeing it only as opportunity. Indeed, Chinatown exists as another of those great collaborations where so many are operating at peak form and bringing so much to bear: Towne, Polanski, actors John Huston, Jack Nicholson, and Faye Dunaway. Richard Sylbert's production design is studded with scores of self-consciously authentic details. The gauzy orange/brown-filtered photography bursts with warm color and texture. Even the perennial pro Jerry Goldsmith chips in a terrific score, used sparingly and just right, guaranteed to rend hearts every time that trumpet swells again (R.I.P. Uan Rasey).

As a clockwork thriller, it's hard to see how this could be much better. Every element is in place in a story that hooks one immediately and proceeds inexorably from the luridly public to the heartachingly private. It moves quickly—by 10 minutes in it's already complicated with subterfuge and deceptions, puzzling behavior and menace. With Faye Dunaway's first appearance the floor opens beneath our feet, the mystery deepens, the stakes soar. Emerging naturally out of its basic elements it's almost hard to get a grip on what the actual mystery is. But it's already impossible to look away. Those are hallmarks of classic American detective fiction and here they are done to a tee.

But Polanski's determined focus broadens Chinatown well beyond a typical "down these mean streets" tale, finding any number of ways to signify the rot that is wrecking the world occupied by its severely flawed human beings, not just the political scandals associated with managing water in Los Angeles (which are faithful to the history of the region), but even seeping through a kind of fourth wall into the world of its viewers too, with one foot planted mockingly in the nostalgia continually hollowing out mainstream popular culture. All the details—those classy titles, the cars, the fedoras, the $2 bill and Social Security card glimpsed in a wallet, even the carefully calibrated argot and Goldsmith's soundtrack itself—it's all designed to evoke a past time calculated, in the moments we watch, to make us yearn to be there with them, in those simpler, better times, even though they are quite manifestly anything but.

As events proceed, one heartache and/or Machiavellian political maneuver leading inevitably to the next on a plunging roller-coaster of rancid behavior, Noah Cross (played by John Huston) grows into one of the great screen villains. The 68-year-old Huston memorably takes that home, playing it with a queasy-making gusto, the lined and pockmarked jowls along his jaw line moving and snapping as he eats and talks like a hungry reptile hunting insects. Even his adamant and deliberate habit of never correctly pronouncing the name of Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson) is a subtle, effective, and nagging reminder of the power he wields within the world of Chinatown.

Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway are the stars here and they are just about perfect, their chemistry curdled to a precisely correct degree. Time has not been particularly good to either, but certainly a sense for how they earned and maintained their status as superstars of Hollywood is on display here. The central character of private eye Jake Gittes is a very good one for Nicholson, who clearly relished wading into playing this sardonic, sassy wiseacre who mocks everyone he sees and, typically enough for these kinds of stories, gets knocked around and beaten up time and again for his troubles.

Dunaway, for her part, manages her usual otherworldly, occasionally off-putting starchy woman of privilege with her usual style, relying as much on her cheekbones and the shape of her mouth and a throaty way of swallowing her words to bring it off. She strides through the part in a familiar bubble of perfectly groomed unattainability, but nowhere is it more appropriate and right perhaps than here as Evelyn Mulwray, the troubled daughter of Noah Cross.

Polanski's own appearance (as the otherwise unnamed "man with knife") is little more than a cameo, yet somehow so much more. It's one of the most unnerving moments in the whole picture. He is wearing a foppish white suit and hat, licking his thin lips and talking fast and nervous, calling his prey "kitty-cat" with a kind of beguiling affection. When Nicholson asks Polanski's companion, "Where'd you get the midget?" Polanski produces a knife and flicks it open with a sickening click, preparing to administer his lesson in what happens to nosy people.

With the closing sequence, set in the Chinatown of Los Angeles, the movie's long-game intentions—all of its squalor by now marched into plain view—suddenly begin to snap into focus. A feeling of dread falls over us as real as any experienced by the characters on screen. All through the picture we have seen one character after another talk about Chinatown with shuddering revulsion, a metaphor we can't quite understand but whose impact is apparent on Jake Gittes and the cops with whom he once worked, almost comically so at some points. And now here we are.

There's nothing comical about Chinatown in the end, coming to vivid life in a payoff that stands as one the great endings in movies. In fact, it's brought off with such flourishes of confidence and economy and powerful imagery that it somehow becomes extraordinarily beautiful in itself, bearing up nearly perfectly under the finality and weight of the great and famous last line, which tells the entire 130-minute story we have just witnessed in a brief handful of words: "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

16. Jimi Hendrix Experience, "If 6 Was 9" (1967)

2011-12-01T08:03:00.001-08:00

(listen)

If 16 was 91 I guess it's pretty clear that I already would have written about this song some time ago. Loopy logic pervades this little masterpiece and it's one of the things I love most about it, and about Hendrix more generally. He was just fun—and amazing at the same time. Here he opens with a clobbering riff he returns to all through, at varying sonic levels, even as the lyrics meditate on ... something. "Individualist freedom," maybe—yeah, that's the ticket. "If all the hippies cut off all their hair / I don't care," but also, he's gonna wave his freak flag high, and "wave on, wave on." Oh, JPK, stop trying to make sense of the song. It doesn't make sense. It's not supposed to. "[laugh] Fall, mountains, just don't fall on me." But I can't stop myself keeping picking out all the choice bits: "White-collar conservative flashing down the street / Pointing their plastic finger at me"—I think maybe that's my favorite. Wait a minute, what am I thinking? "Now if uh 6 turned out to be 9 / I don't mind," and it's heavy, truly. The structure is a freewheeling glorious mess, modeled loosely on a blues and moving from one set piece to the next, with his lyrical guitar-playing and sound-making leading the way. Towards the end he picks up a flute or recorder or something and makes like a mad bird on the fade, rockin' robin rockin' the tree like Albert Ayler in the rockin' forest. I think the point, in the end, is that 6 has indeed turned out to be 9. So put that in your calculator and work the returns on your stock investment portfolio now, Mr. Business Man. Oh yeah, dig, that's telling 'em.

17. Beatles, "A Day in the Life" (1967)

2011-11-30T06:30:00.001-08:00

(listen)

John Lennon and Paul McCartney were always steadfast in their denial that this was a drug song, a tag that earned it a ban from the BBC and a lot of unwelcome stigma as well. I think it's true that "I'd love to turn you on" and "found my way upstairs and had a smoke / somebody spoke and I went into a dream" are fairly slim reeds on which to hang the charge. On the other hand, the eerie racket that follows those lines is not, particularly. That is some strange stuff, and I still remember the moment I first heard this because of those passages. I was getting up early, before daylight. I was getting dressed. I was putting on a blue and white plaid shirt, buttoning it. It was winter and I was wearing long underwear under my pants. I knew it was the Beatles by the voices and general tenor of it but I didn't know anything else about it. And it scared me badly. I thought something was wrong with my radio and kept fiddling with the tuning and then the song would come back. And then that weird shit would come back. And then the song again. It reminded me of a frightening dream I'd had before, in which I could not make my radio stop playing, even unplugging it from the wall and finally smashing it, only to discover a small person inside it singing. I was basically too young (and/or naive) to understand about drugs, but "A Day in the Life" was profoundly disturbing and unsettling for me. Eventually, perhaps artifact of Stockholm syndrome or something like it, I came to embrace it as basically my one favorite Beatles song. It's got all the tunefulness I loved and came to expect from them, but it really packs a wallop as well, and on multiple levels.

18. Bruce Springsteen, "The River" (1980)

2011-11-29T08:36:00.001-08:00

(listen)

Bruce Springsteen works best for me in a doleful mood—it's the thing about him that took me awhile to figure out, that finally got me past his fans and my worst contrarian impulses and those early exercises in beatnik poetry and all the hoopla attached to him like skin ink. I arrived as a doubter and left as a believer, late as usual, which I doubt will impress either his skeptics or his most ardent partisans, but there it is. The sad take of "The River" on the state of marriage has always gone to work on me the moment I hear its mournful sounds fading up. It comes from a singer, at least—and a songwriter too, I'm pretty sure—who believes in the institution, and if it's ultimately more about class and the grinding conditions and above all the loss that class imposes than it is about love, it's about love too. It has to be. The loss amounts to more, even to something else entirely from love: youth, hope, wonder, the sense that life holds great things in store for anyone with the opportunity to go skinny-dipping on a warm summer night with one's partner. But it starts and ends with faith in love. I'm still not entirely sure about Springsteen's many first-person songs addressing some anonymous authority figure known only as "mister" (which is to say I'm still not entirely sure about Nebraska), but it works here. As do the concrete details, even when they veer dangerously close to cliché. And as does, more than anything, the critical center of this song, the impossible question we're left to ponder: "Now those memories come back to haunt me / They haunt me like a curse / Is a dream a lie if it don't come true / Or is it something worse?" Answer that one and you get a prize.

19. Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man" (1965)

2011-11-28T07:29:00.001-08:00

(listen)

The fact is I could have taken any song from Highway 61 Revisited and put it approximately here, or spread them all up and down this list—it's my favorite album and has been for as long as I can remember and somehow it stays fresh and bracing every time I come back to it, even broken down to constituent parts. But this is the song that I recall amazing me first and most, doing things I didn't know could be done in a song or anything like it. It proceeds like a dream, a nightmare of powerlessness from the point of view of the tormentor, existing languidly within the smoky music of that remarkable session. It's at once funny and caustic. I laughed at parts of it like it was a stand-up routine: "And you say 'What does this mean?' and he screams back 'You're a cow / 'Give me some milk or else go home.'" And I gulped at others, recognizing myself in Mr. Jones nearly as much as I recognized myself (or the desire for it to be myself) in the ultra-cool uber-hip insider singing the song. One has only to see Dylan's treatment of Donovan in the D.A. Pennebaker documentary Don't Look Back to realize that a good deal of the time, at this point in his career, he was trading in the kind of alienating clique-mongering that's more appropriate to junior-high kids (and there are any number of reasonable explanations for that, given the totality of his experience at the time). Yet "Ballad of a Thin Man" is as seductive a portrait of the impulse as can be found anywhere, and a fine example of the pure blasts of dazzling language that populate that album too. It still amazes me—even knowing that I have become someone, like Mr. Jones, who has been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books.

Best American Crime Writing 2005

2011-11-27T08:19:00.001-08:00

This edition of the redoubtable series credits James Ellroy with an "Introduction and an Original Essay," which I take to mean Ellroy didn't participate closely or at all in the actual selection of pieces here. I have enjoyed Ellroy's nonfiction work, particularly his memoir My Dark Places, but I'm not much of a fan of his fiction. But you can't blame series editors Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook for bringing in the marquee talent when possible, and certainly Ellroy qualifies as that much. His introduction is brief and by the numbers, and the original essay, which pays tribute to Joseph Wambaugh, is pro forma, Ellroy style. I hope the name helped it sell a lot of books and keep the series going. If it would help, I would be happy to see Ellroy do the same again for the 2011 edition, which appears more than ever to have gone MIA. This 2005 edition is in all ways a worthy entry; I haven't yet, I say again, seen the series dip even close to mediocre. This one includes a great long piece from "The New Yorker" by Lawrence Wright (author in 2006 of the exhaustive The Looming Tower as well as a much earlier favorite of mine, Remembering Satan) about the commuter-train bombings in Madrid that took place on March 11, 2004. The bombings killed some 191 and injured hundreds more and were eventually linked indirectly to (that is, inspired by) al-Qaeda. Wright's piece is a fascinating tick-tock that works to unravel the complexity of cultural connections and the very old and often bad blood between Christian and Islamic cultures, persisting more virulently than ever in the Internet age. And speaking of the Internet age, another piece, by Clive Thompson from "The New York Times Magazine," visits the shadowy, intriguing, and often infuriating world of the miscreants who create computer viruses, trojan horses, worms, and whatnot and spread them on the Internet. They're clever about it, often trading on our own worst impulses, and even when someone manages to track them down there is many times little legal recourse. Some seven or eight years old now, it's a bit dated but as interesting as ever. I think my favorite in this volume is another long piece from "The New Yorker" (I tell you, if this series is anything to go by that magazine remains our best source of true-crime literature), by David Grann, which details the mysterious death of Richard Lancelyn Green, "the world's foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes." At the time of his death, Green was embroiled in some kind of intrigue involving highly valuable papers of Arthur Conan Doyle that were to be donated to the British Library but instead somehow ended up going for sale via Christie's auction house. Green was investigating, believing the papers had been stolen, and he was subsequently found dead in his home, with a black shoelace around his neck and a wooden spoon in his hand. It's a mystery and a genuine whodunit, ruled a suicide but with more similarities to the Sherlock Holmes story "The Problem of Thor Bridge" (in which a suicide is deliberately contrived to look like a murder in order to implicate an enemy of the suicide) than to an actual suicide. Case still unsolved if a murder.

In case it's not at the library.

It's a Wonderful Life (2001)

2011-11-26T08:06:00.001-08:00

With a host of recognizable names on board making guest appearances, headed up by Tom Waits and PJ Harvey (and including John Parrish, Vic Chesnutt, Jane Scarpantoni, Nine Persson of the Cardigans, and others), this just might qualify as the highest-profile and maybe the single best album we ever got from Mark Linkous of Richmond, Virginia, aka Sparklehorse. It's my favorite, but it's also the one I know best, which might make it a kind of circular self-fulfilling prophecy. It's anyway usually my first impulse when inclined in the direction—warm and serious and plays like the night, starry and enveloping and good to return to every 24 hours or so. The songs are uniformly brave, lovely, allusive, often fragmentary, pointed toward single idealized moments of burnished beauty, and they are built out of strange materials that would occur to few others, strings and raw noise and lovely keyboards and acoustic guitar chords and random open spaces and Linkous's gentle wheedling vocal. After a career until then spent mostly working his songs out by himself alone in the studio the presence of a band and guests does provide a certain charge. "Dog Door," the relatively short song that Waits works on, certainly jumps out to the casual listener. Spend time with the album, however, and it becomes as much of a piece as all the rest here, and that's the real beauty. Harvey and the others are mostly integrated seamlessly, almost invisibly so. For a long time, before I got a look at the album credits, I thought the guitar and vocal harmonies on "Piano Fire," for example, sounded a lot like something I already knew. But I never guessed it was Harvey, provoking a kind of delicious forehead-smacking moment. I don't know why I'm going on about all this—I guess it's the easy thing to write about. The real thing is that this is some of Linkous's best songwriting, the kind of stuff that will stick with you a long time and come back in an instant every time you return, and if it sounds strange and even a little alienating the first time or two it only gets better. I know I keep a perhaps overly careful and tenuous distance from ongoing currencies in music, but his death last year reached even me, and I recognized it as the kind of loss that only grows in effect, a loss for all of us.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

2011-11-25T08:33:00.001-08:00

USA, 202 minutes (Redux, 2001)
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Writers: Joseph Conrad, John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Herr
Photography: Vittorio Storaro
Music: Carmine Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola
Editors: Lisa Fruchtman, Gerald B. Greenberg, Walter Murch
Cast: Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Marlon Brando, Sam Bottoms, Dennis Hopper, Laurence Fishburne, Albert Hall, Harrison Ford, G.D. Spradlin, Francis Ford Coppola, Scott Glenn, Jack Thibeau, Herb Rice, Christian Marquand, Aurore Clement

Apocalypse Now has long been preceded by the legendary stories of its troubled production, one of those film enterprises that appears oddly cursed (The Exorcist is another), whose backstories may be nearly as entertaining as the final product itself: in this case, weathering a typhoon that wrecked the sets, condemnation from the Animal Humane Society for filming the ritual slaughter of a water buffalo, Marlon Brando at this stage in his career, and various haphazard budget overruns and casting adventures (e.g., Harvey Keitel dumped at the last minute for Martin Sheen, who subsequently suffered a heart attack during the shoot). All this and more is ably detailed in the documentary Hearts of Darkness, which makes a worthy companion piece for a night of Apocalypse Now.

The final result is hardly flawless. Attempting to transpose Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness on America's Vietnam adventure, it's very nearly torpedoed by Brando's performance in the final hour, and it's often marked by an impulse to amp up the drama beyond what its fundamentals can support. Yet for all that it contains unforgettable sequences and, in its totality, becomes unforgettable itself, using Heart of Darkness as its ticket into an even deeper American story, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which is also set on a river (only going in the other direction), also episodic, also with an unsatisfactory ending—and also somehow vastly bigger than the sum of its parts.

And let's not forget it's also the work of a gifted film director, Francis Ford Coppola, at very nearly the top of his form. The sequences it conceives and strings together may be all too easy to take for granted. The mission led by Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (played by Robert Duvall) to take the point of a river and drop a patrol boat past a point of danger upriver, for example, is a visual feast of filmmaking, with battle scenes on an epic scale existing cheek by jowl with Kilgore's overriding interest in seeking out prime surfing spots in the theater of war—at one point, even with the chaos of battle settling dread over everything, he attempts to impress a draftee who was a famous surfer back in the world by describing himself as a "goofy foot," complimenting the draftee's ability to "ride the nose," and asking for his opinion about heavy surfboards versus lighter.

At the same time the voiceover by Captain Benjamin L. Willard (played by Martin Sheen) wryly puts Kilgore in context, describing him as someone "you just knew" was going to come out of the war without "so much as a scratch." Kilgore lives that out larger than life—striding through scenes densely compacted with action, providing a foreground focus in tracking shots that are impossibly busy in the background, with explosions, amphibious vehicles leaving water for land, a television filming crew, helicopters flying low to the surface and diving into the action, eventually a phalanx of jets napalming a tree line. Kilgore never shows a hint of concern, even as his men all around him are cringing at the smoke and confusion and carnage, and gets off his famously ridiculous remarks: "Charlie don't surf!" and "I love the smell of napalm in the morning ... it smells like ... victory."

In those moments, Apocalypse Now is riveting as spectacle. As it continues to move up the river virtually every cliché of the American Vietnam experience is encountered and given practically the best treatment it gets anywhere: the various futilities of using draftees who barely understand how they got there to fight entrenched, committed, desperate guerilla forces, limning the realities of corruption within the military, the lurid vulgarities of American culture, the acid-drenched killing savants fighting to a Hendrix soundtrack, all the paranoia and easy death that existed everywhere in that place, the choppers, the fear, the drugs, the confusion.

Eventually it crosses the physical border of Cambodia and the psychic border of credibility and moves into an even stranger realm, where corpses hang from trees and disembodied heads are impaled on poles, where soldiers have gone native and Dennis Hopper as a photojournalist chews the scenery, where a Green Beret colonel (Walter E. Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando) is worshiped as a god, though he appears to prefer reading poetry aloud and washing his head, when he is not scurrying in the dark on horrific missions designed to seal his position and reputation.

This all works for me. Apocalypse Now remains one of my favorite movies in spite of its numerous manifest flaws. I even prefer the longer Redux version, which adds nearly an hour to an already long movie, deepening and adding nuance to its various themes. This occurs most notably in the addition of a lengthy scene set on a French plantation, making cogent points about colonialism and its parallels without beating one on the head with them.

On some level I understand the reservations and complaints about Apocalypse Now. I think my willingness to forgive its excesses stems from something like the fact that Vietnam is more or less "my" war, by which I mean it's the war I came of age to and the war that has tended to define all wars for me. In a larger sense, it's a war that traces back more directly to the toxic exercises of World War I than to World War II, the "good war," which conveniently came with a model of undeniable evil (though not without its atrocities on all sides).

Indeed, one element that drew me to Apocalypse Now in the first place continues to draw me back, and redeems it still, and that is the participation of Michael Herr, who gets a writing credit for "narration." Herr is the author of the book Dispatches, a collection of journalism pieces ("new journalism," more like) out of Vietnam in the '60s and early '70s. As far as I can tell, Herr's book almost single-handedly established many of the conventions we still use to understand "the Vietnam experience," all the strange, hallucinatory, and death-fetishizing filters through which many of us still view it, and indeed war, particularly in the movies. Details as simple as the ubiquity and omnipresence of helicopters, or as profound as the alienation of Americans who refuse to give up the pleasures they know such as surfing and acid-rock, even under fire, can be traced to his work.

Herr's sensibility haunts everything most central here: the breakdown of chains of command, order giving way to chaos, a loss en masse of moral compass. "Do you know who the commanding officer is here?"Martin Sheen's Willard demands of soldiers he encounters in a nighttime scene, who are dug in and attempting to return fire on the jungle from a single assailant unknown by anything but his taunting voice. One soldier slowly takes Willard's measure. "Yeah," he finally says, and then deliberately turns to walk away.

There's nothing small about Apocalypse Now. It's done on the grand scale, and remains for me the one great Vietnam picture by which all others are measured.

20. Leon Russell, "Me and Baby Jane" (1972)

2011-11-24T08:38:00.001-08:00

(listen)

Sometimes it feels like Leon Russell has been lost to history since even before the '70s ended, dwelling forever there with his makeup and top hat and hair as one of the clownish features of the times, with maybe Leo Sayer, Minnie Riperton, and Carl Douglas. But I have never been able to get a handful of his songs out of my head, most of them circa 1972 and the album Carney—"Magic Mirror," "Tight Rope," a few others, but more than any this woeful hymn to a love affair ruined forever by heroin and death. At the time I was hearing it on the radio (how it got there I don't know) it never failed to leap out and get me by the throat, though I had no concrete connection with any of its themes or scenarios. I just had some idea how it felt, and the feelings were overwhelming, love arrived and gone forever. The croak of Russell's voice, now and then missing its intended notes, the softly marching tempo at the chorus, and the signature rich tones of his piano playing throughout serve him well. It uses the drug lifestyle just right—though no doubt the reason it never made the hit parade—never glorifying but never judging or condemning or blaming either, and hardly shrinking from it. Just a brief memory of "the needle in her vein" to etch the image in. I'm not sure exactly how Leon Russell does what he does—sometimes I'm not even sure what it is he's doing exactly—but "Me and Baby Jane" may be the best single example of him doing it: swooningly sad, ripe to the point of bursting, dramatized within an inch of its life, yet somehow softly understated, always tender, and above all completely beautiful.

21. Eminem, "Kim" (2000)

2011-11-23T07:10:00.001-08:00

(listen/NSFW)

A strange and remarkable hybrid of pop song (you can sing with the chorus!) and relentless radio-theater horror movie, this is the best example I know of Eminem's ability to make his own interior life vivid and disturbingly recognizable enough that it literally sends people shrieking from the room when it plays—well, maybe figuratively. "Kim" is so stunning in its details that, simply hearing it, one feels one has actually witnessed or even been party to a crime. It's what makes it challenging to enter into and engage with and judge—it took me weeks just to get all the way through it. Now I find it riveting, powerful, and quite moving, horrific in its details but a picture of a person so real, in so much pain, that it's impossible to deny. Things like this, let's call them "transgressive," have all kinds of ways to go wrong. Too often they feel merely like someone stretching limits for the sake of stretching limits, pushing beyond believability into easy outrage or, worse, jokey mocking excess, and ultimately they come off like a cheat. "Kim," by contrast, pulls in the other direction, as if Eminem knew well how far out he was going to have to go with this, took a deep breath, and, for the six minutes it lasts, threw himself into the project of blasting it out of himself once and for all with everything he had. It's poised, sharp, wicked, funny, thrilling, mortifying, and terribly sad all at once. It's just remarkable. Sheila O'Malley did way more justice to it at her blog earlier this year than I am even coming close to, so I will take the easy way out and quit trying now and just point to her piece.

22. Lou Reed, "Perfect Day" (1972)

2011-11-22T08:04:00.001-08:00

(listen)

Here's one truly that moves in mysterious ways—I've been aware of it ever since I was aware of Transformer, my first real introduction to Lou Reed, but it wasn't until I saw the way it was used in the movie Trainspotting that I came to embrace it (it later became a memorably star-studded BBC promo, and frequently covered elsewhere as well, but I think the original is still the best). On its face it is hilarious, a croaking monotone Lou Reed barely getting over the swooning orchestra he reclines on so luxuriously, with a swelling Liberace by way of Ferrante & Teicher hammering on a grand piano at the bridge that sends it swirling to the heavens. The theme? Remembering the good times through a haze of bitterness. "I thought I was / Someone else, someone good." The good times may be saccharine, the bitterness arch, but it remains a place we likely all know. Reed plays it straight on every measure and that's the key to the irony—if, indeed, there is a shred of irony in this at all. As likely as not the irony is imposed by the listener, by you and me, made rattling uncomfortable and awkward by the straightforward plainspokenness and a concomitant unwillingness to, er, feel the feelings. The things that constitute this perfect day—drinking Sangria in the park, feeding animals in the zoo, then later a movie too—are so unexpected, so homely, so pretty, and so right, that you just have to laugh in recognition. Or bawl your eyes out, depending on the mood. And then listen again to make sure you got it all right. I can't blame anyone for trying to figure out how this even works at all, let alone works so well.

23. Rolling Stones, "Street Fighting Man" (1968)

2011-11-21T08:20:00.001-08:00

(listen)

A friend and I were agreeing the other day that over the long haul of the decades it seems more and more that the best Stones albums, the ones we most tend to return to again and live with, are the early half dozen or so—Now! and 12 X 5 and Out of Our Heads—and less so that more typically lionized run of the late '60s and early '70s that started with Beggars Banquet and finished with Exile on Main St. They really were a remarkable rock 'n' roll blues band before they were signifiers for a generation or anything else, and track by track those early albums still sound almost impossibly fresh. Yet, even so, one way or another, I never find myself drifting too far from Beggars Banquet, which is somehow deceptively less than the sum of its parts. But taken one item at a time it houses what seems to me to be their enduringly best, not the least of which, indeed the greatest of which, is this ratatat, irony-inflected paean to political street demonstrations of the times generally, and more specifically to Tariq Ali, a radicalized British Pakistani who has remained relevant long beyond the immediate life of this great, great song. Everything about it is rock hard, and rocks hard: Charlie Watts hits the drums impossibly hard, even for him, and the strange off-rhythms of Keith Richards's opening acoustic guitar are nothing less than electrifying. So that accounts for the first 10 seconds, and it only gets better from there. Jagger's melody lines crease with ferocity, keyboards and whining electric guitar and strings and other things steal in. It's potent with visceral energy, climaxing lyrically with the question, "What can a poor boy do but sing in a rock and roll band?" It's the one thing by them I would save if ever forced to such an extremity.

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (1994)

2011-11-20T08:58:00.001-08:00

I read this not so much because I was interested in Sylvia Plath, though I've come to have a good deal of respect and admiration for her work, but more because I was interested in the work of Janet Malcolm generally and specifically for her take on "the biographical enterprise," which is the theme of this book at least as much as it is Plath. And incidentally because at the time this was published I had some ideas of my own about taking on a biography, of a figure who seemed to me to occupy a point equidistant between Plath and Hank Williams—Williams, who may (or may not) have committed suicide proper, but at the very least drank himself purposefully to death, with a harpy at his side shrieking away. Thus many of Malcolm's most trenchant points about suicide and/or the various impossibilities of biography I now find underscored in my copy of the book rather forcefully ("As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy," "In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened," etc.). Going through it again recently, I enjoyed Malcolm's wry pleasure at inserting herself into the fraught perils of Sylvia Plath's and Ted Hughes's lives. Hughes died in 1998, nearly five years after the publication of this book. I never followed up enough to know Malcolm's thoughts or actions after such a momentous occasion, or indeed anyone else's involved in the Plath biography industry, with the removal of such a monumental obstacle to the project. For the most part here Malcolm trudges down all the previously trod pathways, not unearthing much new as far as I can tell, but bringing her razor-sharp sensibility to bear, one that is particularly well-suited, I think, to Plath's own at the height of her powers in the last year of her life. Lots of unpleasant people populate this narrative, many of whom clash unpleasantly with one another. I do know the Ann Stevenson biography that animates so much here, Bitter Fame—animates Malcolm herself, who evidently knew of Stevenson when they were both going to college in Michigan. When Malcolm says Stevenson's book is the best biography of the bunch then existing I'm perfectly willing to take her at her word. I remember thinking pretty well of it myself, though I could have had no idea of all the stresses and tensions Stevenson endured to get it done. Malcolm at least seems to have had a milder time of putting hers together, the chief strength of which is in her ability to deal on particularly conscious levels with the sideline "meta" issues that shape and distort the narratives of biographies.

In case it's not at the library.

The Temptations Sing Smokey (1965)

2011-11-19T08:24:00.001-08:00

Probably few would argue with the idea that Motown, as a label, was best at chucking out nonstop streams of hit singles. But now and then, across the colossal breadth of the catalog, whole albums will turn up that are worth tracking down and snapping up—and not just those sponsored by Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder. This is a prime example right here. It's practically a concept album in its way, combining the marquee act Temptations on the one hand with one of the label's best songwriters (with and without assorted other Miracles), Smokey Robinson. What's particularly appealing here is how nicely it cuts across the various looks of the act, with David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, and Paul Williams each getting their individual shots to shine as lead singers, as well as various combinations of them and others (such as Melvin Franklin and Otis Williams) and the group in ensemble. I guess Ruffin tends to be my favorite Temptation, but there are cases to be made for them all, and perhaps most of all for the versatility of the act itself. There are big hits here—"My Girl," "The Way You Do the Things You Do," and "It's Growing"—along with straight-up covers that other artists got the hits with, including the Miracles themselves: "You Beat Me to the Punch," "You've Really Got a Hold on Me," "What's So Good About Good Bye." But the central concept holds for every one of the dozen songs here: Smokey Robinson had a hand in writing them, the Temptations performed them. And that's it. The result does not go on any longer than 35 minutes, except it's easy enough to lengthen out by playing over and over and over, back to back to back. It does no harm to this set—in fact, the music just gets better with such familiarity, as any number of fine points continue to disclose themselves: the always clever word play of Smokey's lyrics, a handful of particularly nice arrangements from the Funk Brothers (the guitar support on "You'll Lose a Precious Love" just jumped out at me a minute ago), and/or simply the knack the Temptations so often demonstrated for any of a number of different ways to stand a song up and get it to hold its position forever in one's memory. This is some highly durable product.

Breathless (1960)

2011-11-18T08:22:00.001-08:00

À bout de soufflé, France, 90 minutes
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard
Photography: Raoul Coutard
Music: Martial Solal
Editors: Cecile Decugis, Lila Herman
Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger, Jean-Pierre Melville

I better cop to a problem with Jean-Luc Godard right up front, if only as a matter of fair warning: hidebound conventions (and spoilers) directly ahead. Godard is and remains, for me, an acknowledged blind spot, likely weighed down as much as anything by the imposing reputation that has preceded him practically since the day I first heard of him. His most widely hailed pictures—and Breathless, his feature debut, is the first among them in many ways, along with Pierrot le fou, which affects me similarly, and Contempt, which seems slightly a bit of a different animal, but all that in due time—tend to strike me as monumentally silly or academically pretentious or both, the result of children playacting with motion picture technology.

I will grant these are no ordinary children—they have levels of aesthetic sophistication, and no small degree of high critical argle-bargle, to back themselves up. Godard seems to me to be continually about finding ways to demonstrate he is a million times smarter than anyone else in the (darkened) room, which his followers are as much at pains to defend seemingly on any terms within reach, on grounds of avant-garde experimentalism, defiant anti-convention, unique vision, I-know-you-are-but-what-is-he, the continuing perception of a widespread and penetrating influence, and as many others as can be and are adduced in seminar environments. And all that may be true enough. But they do tend to derive almost purely from the cerebrum. My problem is more acutely with the overall experience his pictures tend to deliver for me, which is narrow and small.

Breathless is a fine example and nearly perfect object lesson in Godard's various problems and strengths. Ostensibly it's a picture about a gangster and/or alienated thug on the lam for shooting a policeman; and he's in love with an American doll, which ultimately leads to his downfall. But it's actually anything but a gangster picture, much less a thriller. It starts with tired old academic notions of existentialism (perhaps not as tired in 1960 as they are now) and dresses itself up in gangster garb—or, more accurately, in Hollywood B-movie drag—even ostentatiously dedicating itself, in the opening, "to Monogram pictures" (home of a recycled Charlie Chan series, the Cisco Kid and many other westerns, and Joe Palooka, and also the place where such players as Alan Ladd, Robert Mitchum, and Gale Storm first found work).

Whereas pictures such as Scarlet Street or Night and the City actually locate meaningful examples of existentialism in the desperate lives of criminals and anonymous denizens of modern cities and then let those forces play out in ways that powerfully make their points about the terms and meanings of being and remaining alive and engaged with life, Breathless offers a couple of pretty faces, one of them, Michel Poiccard (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo), engaging continually in ornate gestures that he self-consciously picked up from the movies, or just invented evidently because it's something fun to do (the spliffy cigarettes, cocked fedoras, and a deliberate gesture of squinting his eyes and tracing his pursed mouth with the edge of his thumb, homage to Humphrey Bogart).

For all my (cerebral) objections, I can't deny there's a good deal of charm embedded all through Breathless. It's light and playful and cool, like its jazzy soundtrack, and it's almost always great to look at. At least two of the hallmarks of filmmaking I most associate with Godard are present and accounted for here and hitting on most cylinders too: the jump cuts, which emphasize the false and constructed nature of film and/or narrative at the same time that they effectively establish a pace to the storytelling that enables Godard to cut away a good bit of the flab associated with most of the Hollywood B-movies he is honoring (it's singularly well edited); and, my single favorite feature of Godard pictures, the mad swirl of language, here shuttling effortlessly, transparently between French and English. Later Godard pictures would accommodate even more languages at once, producing an effect for me that is surprisingly and pleasantly immersive.

I see that I have probably tipped my hand there on something about my own personal orientations with that "immersive." It's what I want from the movies I watch (including documentaries), the novels and histories I read, the music I listen to, indeed from all the art and culture with which I engage—a convincing sense of being swept up and carried away to another place, which may or may not resemble the places I occupy in reality (though I do prefer a connection between my reality and the reality of a narrative, as too much fantasy bores me). I sometimes think that that immersion is the one thing Godard is so often at pains to deny, even as he shows himself capable of it in frustratingly patchy passages all through his career.

I like Breathless best when it is a relationship movie, a story about a boyfriend and girlfriend (Patricia Franchini, played by Jean Seberg) attempting to connect, sorting out their issues, getting close, yet not quite making it. They are like any 20something couple hanging out in a big city, taking off their clothes and spending a lot of time in an apartment having sex and talking and talking, about their aspirations and choices and preferences, playing music for one another, getting out to cultural events— here uniformly represented as "press conferences," including one priceless scene with Jean-Pierre Melville playing a puffed-up iconoclastic figure wearing shades who is reminiscent of Henry Miller. Asked to name his greatest ambition, he says, "To become immortal, and then to die."

I like Breathless least when it is pretending to be a gangster movie, which unfortunately provides the overarching frame of the thing and permeates every last scene of it. It's rife with cultural signifiers in that vein, Humphrey Bogart and loud jazz and incidental shots of movie posters that say things like "Live desperately until the end!" And speaking of living desperately to the end, I will add that somehow the protracted death scene in the street at the end works for me as well, all the way through to the silly mugging at the very end that brings it momentarily back to its charming, even innocent boyfriend/girlfriend theme.

But it also leaves me shaking my head at Godard's usual overly determined frothiness, if not entirely disinclined to want to praise it. Those interested in Godard can probably start here, of course (and/or Contempt and/or Pierrot le fou), and take it from there, with all due caution and expectations set appropriately. And I'll see you there, as I'm pretty sure I'm not yet done with this guy by a long sight.

24. Johnny Cash, "Folsom Prison Blues" (1955)

2011-11-17T08:04:00.001-08:00

(listen)

This is a country standard now, covered far and wide by artists including Charley Pride, Slim Harpo, and the Reverend Horton Heat, which is some indication right there of the range of its appeal. It's also become one of a handful of Johnny Cash's signature songs, easily my favorite among them, but gosh, he made a whole lot of really great songs. It's closer to American folk idioms, self-consciously drawing on familiar and well-worked traditions of both train and prison songs. But it's so dark, largely the work of the one famously memorable line—"I shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die"—that it remains as fresh as ever, decades on. The Sun version is the one I like best, though Cash is one of those artists whose work is worth chasing down in all its forms, live performances, outtakes, alternate versions, even covers and tributes by others, the whole shebang. There's a popular version from the late '60s, recorded live at Folsom Prison itself (and sweetened some in the mix to make it sound more raw and desperate), that's nearly as popular as his first run at it in the mid-'50s. But the original Sun version is such a model of the form, stripped down to essentials, occupying a kind of eerie hush that entirely gets out of the way of the song proper, just Marshall Grant playing bass, Luther Perkins playing a spidery, barbed-wire electric guitar, and Johnny Cash sounding as lonesome and lost as he ever did, which is saying something. The melody is plain and lovely and sticks—if anything, Cash may have been underrated as a songwriter. If the whole thing doesn't last even three minutes, it always sounds good, and the more closely you listen the more it gets under your skin.

25. Prince, "Sexuality" (1981)

2011-11-16T08:53:00.001-08:00

(listen)

Yet another living room classic for me—I knew of Dirty Mind, but the album that hosts this scorching hot romp, Controversy, happened to be my first real introduction to the many pleasures of Prince, a good deal of them present here. It's fast and nimble as can be, launched on a scream and never stopping or slowing once until the end. And couldn't be more plain about where it's coming from, what drove him, his message boiled down to essentials: "Sexuality is all I'll ever need / Sexuality, I'm gonna let my body be free." I put this on, volume up, and danced, by myself or with whoever was handy. It's plain irresistible. And that was my life at least once a day, day or night, for several weeks. It has remained one I can return to virtually any time. I've talked before about the spoken/chanted interlude that emerges out of nowhere in the middle of it; it's precious, crazy, wacked, insane, very funny, and bears a kind of grace achieved by few: "We live in a world overrun by tourists. Tourists—89 flowers on their back. Inventors of the Accu-jack. They look at life through a pocket camera. What? No flash again? They're all a bunch of double drags who teach their kids that love is bad. Half of the staff of their brain is on vacation." And so forth. The pleasure of it is how neatly it's integrated, how he uncorks it and lets it unreel, even as he stops, pops, and shoots within the complexity of the rhythms of it. It's amazing and you have to hear it. And, while you're doing so, please, my advice: Let your body be free.

26. Velvet Underground, "I'm Waiting for the Man" (1967)

2011-11-15T08:26:00.001-08:00

(listen)

The banana album (formally, The Velvet Underground & Nico) was my first real exposure to the band, as before that I hadn't taken the opportunity to examine them closely and by then, honestly, it was already the early '80s, when I finally brought home a copy from the record store. One of those necessity purchases procrastinated, I guess—and I wish I had all those years back now so I could hear it that much more often. After the low-key and utterly pleasant overture of "Sunday Morning" this comes along to set the basic terms: a monotony of driving rhythm with pounding instruments stacked on top, packaged with a patented Story of Gritty Urban Reality™ (in this case scoring heroin out of Harlem). It's full of small wisdoms ("First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait") and sly humor ("Oh pardon me sir, it's furthest from my mind"), and it affords itself a good deal of untoward glee as it wallows in the various indignities and ultimate pleasures of the adventure it describes. But mostly it's fast and rocks righteous hard, functioning like a rave-up with a sour aftertaste, a gathering storm that can blow down houses, a pummeling beatdown you don't soon forget. For me, it always, always rewards turning up the volume, and for the first six months or so that I owned the album I rarely finished listening to this song not standing on my feet. It's one for waving your hands in the air like you just don't care and carrying on like a regular fool, and damn the neighbors pounding on the walls and ceiling.

27. Who, "My Generation" (1965)

2011-11-14T07:52:00.001-08:00

(listen)

This one surprises me still every time I encounter it again. It never made the radio where I was, though I recall hearing it show up on oldies stations now and again, always fresh and exciting and sudden. I'd known about it from reading Nik Cohn's Rock From the Beginning when I was 15, which made it absolutely one thing I was intent on tracking down immediately. Cohn wrote: " ... the Mod was trying to justify himself, wanted to lash back at everyone who'd ever put him down, but he'd taken too many pills and couldn't concentrate right. He only stammered. He was mad, frustrated, but he wasn't articulate; he couldn't say why. The harder he tried, the worse he stammered, the more he got confused. In the end, he got nowhere: 'People try to put us down / Just because we get around, / Things they do look awful cold, / Hope I die before I get old.'" Cohn got that all about right, and certainly it did the job of setting me into action, which is the effect that the best rock criticism should have. Even in 1969 it wasn't easy to recognize the staying power of one of the great lines of rock 'n' roll, "Hope I die before I get old," which we can see now will likely survive all of us (even as we think we are clever by turning it around and hoping now that we get old first, as many of us have). Cohn also neglected to talk about how brash and galvanizing it sounds. It's not exactly noisy, there's plenty of open spaces in and around the racket, and the guitar even sounds acoustic, at least in the early going. But the way they're playing, as if abusing and beating up their instruments, hitting everything so hard—it really gets your attention.

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (1984)

2011-11-13T08:32:00.001-08:00

Stanley Booth is an American music journalist from the South. He happened to fall into the orbit of the Rolling Stones shortly after the death of Brian Jones, and was on hand for a good deal of the band's first extensive tour in several years in 1969, including the ill-starred show at Altamont in December that year. Even the Stones formally recognize and acknowledge the legitimacy of Booth's reporting in a brief, vaguely mocking letter to him, dated October 21, 1969, which is reproduced in my 1985 paperback edition (I'm not familiar with the 2000 edition, which reportedly contains minor revisions and an afterword that discusses the writing of the first edition): "This letter assures you of the Rolling Stones' full and exclusive cooperation in putting together a book about the Stones for publication," and it's signed by Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and Mick Taylor. It's fair enough to call this book a labor of love, but the emphasis there must fall on the "labor," as it took Booth some 15 years to complete and the language feels well worked over, honed and buffed to a point where it's occasionally a labor to read as well. But I don't know of anything better anywhere on the Stones, or particularly on Altamont, and it makes an excellent companion piece and counterpoint to the Maysles brothers well-known documentary Gimme Shelter; each is a nice tonic to the excesses and deficiencies of the other, and both offer converging yet significantly differing points of view that harmonize well. Both have also earned colossal burdens of reputation, hailed as landmark works about the times—figures of no less stature than Harold Brodkey and Robert Stone, for example, call Booth's book the best single volume on the '60s. OK, fair enough. I'm inclined myself to put that on a few other volumes first (Dispatches, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Manchild in the Promised Land, or Catch-22 come to mind immediately). But I see how it works. And if I'm going to indulge hyperbole of my own here, it's for the 50-some pages that Booth devotes to the Altamont show proper, which open with a section of transcript from the discussion between Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips on the epistemology and ontology of evil, and hell, in the context of the song they are attempting to record, "Great Balls of Fire." It's an earnest and serious discussion, at least on the part of Lewis, steeped in old-time Christianity. Just so, I have never encountered anything anywhere that penetrates so deeply into the simple facts of what was happening that day at Altamont as Booth's book (and that includes Gimme Shelter, which I have always counted as impressive and important)—nor, more importantly, any more powerful, simple, and nuanced suggestions of "what it all meant." There are no easy answers here, and not much comfort. I should get that 2000 edition, if only to find out for sure what held up the writing of this for 15 years. But I have a feeling I might already know.

In case it's not at the library.

Wind & Wuthering (1976)

2011-11-12T08:45:00.001-08:00

This is approximately exactly what you might expect from mid-'70s post-Gabriel Genesis—long, densely structured, rarely inspired, occasionally pretty. I took home a copy of it from the used record store when it was still a fairly recent release, and found that, in patches, it sometimes fit a few moods quite nicely, something about late at night in Minnesota winters, locked in by snow but warm at whatever I was calling home at the moment. The "Wuthering" of the title, in case you were wondering, is indeed a reference to the Emily Bronte novel, with two tracks near the end of the second side evidently built around (or anyway directly named after) the novel's last sentence: "I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." In fact, "Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers..." (at 2:23 far and away the shortest track) and "...in That Quiet Earth" contain some of my favorite passages here. There are also some nice moments in "Blood on the Rooftops." But with the typically ornate way in which these often rather long tracks are put together—four of the nine coming in over six minutes, one of them practically 10 minutes, and all but two of the rest four minutes or more—there's a lack of focus and general aimlessness to them; only too infrequently do they become interesting. I know lack of focus and general aimlessness is more or less what they did, leavened with smatterings of British literary lore—I understand that, even understood it then. I recall enjoying a handful of their albums, sometimes even intensely (and not just The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which I still like a fair bit). But it rarely comes back to me now, seemingly lost for good, and alas, much of this album was no exception recently. Mostly it sounds silly and self-indulgent and empty, which, OK, may have been suitable for me to some degree at one time. I find myself impatient with it now, even embarrassed for what they seem to think they are doing. It's nice and goes down smooth and everything, and bully for them that they know the Bronte novel. But nothing here is even within hailing distance of it.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

2011-11-11T08:11:00.001-08:00

UK, 95 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, Peter George
Photography: Gilbert Taylor
Music: Laurie Johnson
Editor: Anthony Harvey
Cast: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Peter Bull, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, James Earl Jones, Tracy Reed

There are a number of facts about the historical context of Dr. Strangelove I hadn't understood well before looking into the picture a bit more deeply. The original premiere, for example, was scheduled for November 22, 1963, which obviously meant it had to be postponed for several weeks. On that same tip there was even a scene that contained the line, "Gentlemen! Our gallant young president has just been struck down in his prime!"—part of a pie-throwing scene that sounds altogether too silly and was cut for that reason. It was cut before the assassination of John Kennedy happened, but you see what I'm getting at here.

In many ways, Dr. Strangelove stepped in as an augur of public moods to come and it exists there still, a model to be aspired to. As black comedies go, it's fairly obvious: inept bureaucracies unable to identify and ward off their threats from within find themselves on the brink of planetary annihilation. In response, those who ostensibly have the power to take action act like schoolchildren. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? If Stanley Kubrick hadn't been the one to get to it first, someone else would have, and not long after. It's been a theme returned to again and again since. So it's good, I think, that it was Kubrick who got there first.

As someone better acquainted with the second half of his career than the first, I thought one of the most striking things about Dr. Strangelove is how compressed and generally nimble it is, clocking in just a bit longer than 90 minutes. At the same time, with its disparate points of focus—the federal government War Room, presumably in a bunker in Washington, D.C., the air force base somewhere out West from which the rogue attack is launched, and the interior of the B-52 bomber intent on delivering the final payload—it's also oddly episodic, even a bit disjointed, depending a good deal on individual performances to carry the momentum once the plot has been set in motion.

Fortunately, there are a bunch of fine performances here. Peter Sellers is often the most lionized among them, taking on three separate roles—in fact, he was originally cast for four, also as the pilot of the bomber, Major T.J. "King" Kong," the role eventually played by Slim Pickens, but Sellers reportedly couldn't master a Texas accent. Sellers is indeed particularly good as Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake, a British officer of eminent sense and reason who finds himself attempting futilely to deal with the madman Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (played by Sterling Hayden), who has launched the attack in an effort to preserve the American way of life against those who would intrude, famously, on our "precious bodily fluids." In particular, his concerns seem to be related to government programs systematically fluoridating water supplies.

Sellers underplays the British officer almost perfectly, getting out in front of the scenery-chewing Sterling Hayden and playing off him in understated ways that serve constantly to heighten the contrasts between them and the insanity of what General Ripper has wrought. Sellers is also pretty good as the American president Merkin Muffley, playing it mostly straight as a well-meaning egghead liberal who has lost control of the military. He's somewhat less successful as the over-the-top Dr. Strangelove (Herr Doktor Merkwürdigliebe, which you will note is German for "strange love"), a leftover scientist from Germany's Nazi regime now working at high levels on American military projects, who primarily occupies the final scenes. It's shrewd enough to get a Nazi in there, since there were so many of them in such positions in the postwar American government, but his basic function in the picture seemed too broadly obvious to me: "Humans, will they ever learn?" Nor was it as funny as so many in and around the production reportedly found it.

For my money, the best performances here come from George C. Scott and, to a lesser degree, Sterling Hayden. I would say they take a page out of the playbook of Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack, and the Zucker brothers, except Kubrick & cast obviously got to it first—even set the template, you might say. Players such as Hayden and Scott (and Nielsen and Bridges and Stack), because they were best known for the gravitas and grim realities of the roles they typically played, were well positioned to take advantage of a surprise element in these turns toward comedy, particularly with such flat-out absurdities as they are given to work with here.

My favorite scene in the whole picture is George C. Scott, as General "Buck" Turgidson, briefing the president on the situation, which is almost entirely hopeless by that time, an all but foregone conclusion of disaster. Scott is nevertheless trying to put the best face on it, all jaunty and upbeat about the whole thing even as he doles out the worst news imaginable one little piece at a time. He's chewing up sticks of gum like a maniac, and even in the midst of all this, still making a priority of defending his bureaucratic turf. When the president has finally grasped the situation and sharply rebukes him, Turgidson replies, with a little bit of a whine in his voice, "Well, I don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slipup."

This is black satire and there's little that's subtle about it, from its opening disclaimer to its final images. Even the names of the characters give some idea of how dangerously close to ham-handedly broad and obvious this can verge—General Jack D. Ripper, Colonel "Bat" Guano, Major "King" Kong, President Merkin Muffley. But it's Kubrick, who was smart enough to take out a pie-throwing scene and generally keeps a tight rein, working the comedy as hard and as well as he does its bleak points about politics, bureaucracies, and human nature. If this didn't have its various laugh-out-loud moments, which tend to stand up to and even enrich themselves with multiple viewings, there's no way it would still be ranked so high as a matter of critical consensus.

28. Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the U.K." (1977)

2011-11-10T07:12:00.001-08:00

(listen)

This is so obvious and, in a way, self-serving that I'm almost embarrassed to put it here. But long before it was the hallmark of a cultural earthquake/tidal wave that changed everything, etc., blahhh, it was this funny-weird song that a friend turned up on a 45 single. A 45 single! That by itself seemed strange enough at the time. Then it was this. Sure, there's a lot of scary sensation to it, big swaggering words like "anarchy" and "Antichrist" and all that unholy cackling from Johnny Rotten (later John Lydon), and plus he's not such a great singer you know, or anyway misses a lot of notes. But it's as much a pure pop song for now people as anything concocted by Nick Lowe and his Stiff brethren and that's exactly how I took it. I just loved it. Somebody put it on a tape for me, and I dubbed it from there onto all kinds of tapes for other people. I still think it's a pretty swell song, with a big raw wailing guitar sound and martial marching tempos, and all the howling and caterwauling from Lydon. There's something just thrilling about it. "There's so many ways to get what you want!" "It's the only way to be!" And, of course, the one that resonates across the ages, "I wanna destroy!" Each and every with an exclamation point embedded in the grain of the vocals and the emphatic kick of the band. I was perfectly prepared to accept this as the future of rock 'n' roll. I'm still not sure it wasn't, although by the time I was reading about them regularly in fan magazines they were pretty much over. They weren't exactly dead, they still aren't (and that includes poor old Sid). But they were over—an interesting state of affairs that this song utterly embodies, tensions and all.

29. Nirvana, "Sliver" (1990)

2011-11-09T08:47:00.000-08:00

(listen)

On some level I can understand the reluctance to embrace Nirvana, who stood so obviously on the shoulders of those who had gone before. Never mind that Kurt Cobain himself was all too painfully aware of that. That said, I don't know how anyone denies this pure blast of kid pain and joy, which seems to me to go to the heart of who Cobain was, what he wanted and what he was capable of. It's only a little longer than two minutes but it's pretty much got everything we've come to associate with Nirvana: raw vocals, the exaggerated soft/noisy dynamics, squealing feedback, surprising flashes of melodics, and a certain amount of self-consciousness in the lyrics, which are more straightforward than usual. In fact, it's the lyrics that make it, a story of a kid's night with his grandparents babysitting him while his parents are out on a date. The details are just right: "I kicked and screamed, said please, oh no" and "Had to eat my dinner there / Mashed potatoes and stuff like that / Couldn't chew my meat too good" and "I fell asleep, and watched TV / Woke up in my mother's arms" and, maybe best of all, "Grandma take me home X19." He completely inhabits the world of a seven-year-old, the constant bewildering onrush of overwhelming crises and banal routines disrupted, bicycles and and roast beef, the rapid insensible switch back and forth between terror and fun and peace, all the familiarities that define the boundaries we push against, that hold us in place. In Cobain's case, of course—in many, many cases—the boundaries ultimately gave way, a defining tragedy, or trauma anyway, and in that sense "Sliver" also represents a critical piece in understanding Cobain and Nirvana, and ourselves.

30. Love, "My Little Red Book" (1966)

2011-11-08T07:43:00.000-08:00

(listen)

There's something so deliciously infectious about this nicely appointed little rave-up. It hooks on right away with a fast-tempo'd nervous high-hat pitter-pat and fine rubbery bass figure and builds up its impossible head of steam so efficiently you're probably not even half aware how good it is until it's over. You have to hear it again, almost immediately, or anyway I always do. It just had to be a surefire hit on the '60s discotheque dance floors. I don't know how it could miss. And it all seems so hit/miss unlikely now too: I get a big kick, first, out of the fact that it's a Burt Bacharach/Hal David song, featured with pipe organ (and too slow!) as recorded by Manfred Mann for the kooky mid-'60s comedy, What's New Pussycat? (written by Woody Allen, starring Peter Sellers, and with Tom Jones turning the title theme into a big hit). How in the world did it ever fall into the orbit of Arthur Lee? I don't even care. I'm just glad it did. Lee and Love were authors of the great album Forever Changes, recommended to anyone who doesn't already know it, but this was from the band's first, self-titled album, appropriately enough kicking it off with this burst of pure sugar rush energy. Speed, speed, speed, haste, haste, haste, the thing just moves. It's got so much propulsive momentum indeed that I almost get nervous when it plays, but the Bacharach melody and composition is as sweet and beguiling as anything he did. If it's an unexpected alliance of pop forces, it's also one that works as well as practically any other out there. Play it play it again, play it again!

31. Joy Division, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" (1980)

2011-11-07T07:56:00.000-08:00

(listen)

As epitaphs go, you're hard put to find many more apt ones to chisel onto the gravestone of Joy Division's much lamented and still missed Ian Curtis, who wrote this song with mates Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, and Bernard Sumner, who would go on—improbably, or so I thought for a long time—to become New Order (and please don't miss the Nazi thematics bridging the two). Curtis poured a lot of himself into this, somehow you just know it even if you don't know who he is or much about him. He even picked up a guitar to play a few chords. I have never found it as ruinously bleak as the first two albums, perhaps because I happened to acquire the single shortly after it was released and spent many weeks and months puzzling over it. As sonics, it strikes an almost impossible balance between robotic and organic, even as it brims with a sadness almost impossible to put one's finger on. It's also catchy as hell, with a melody that sticks good and hard. Often, when I find myself frustrated by something yet compelled anyway to continue worrying it—a particularly knotty anacrostic, say—I have found myself singing cheerily, "There's a taste in my mouth / As desperation takes hold," humming and even whistling. Maybe that's something about me. Joy Division occupies an interesting niche at this juncture, lo these many decades on, at once overrated and underrated. I don't like Closer the way I know so many others do, but I have often been intimate with Unknown Pleasures. And this, from title to tune to verse to chorus, has long been a stone favorite, perfect, and surprisingly so, for so many occasions.

Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

2011-11-06T06:34:00.001-08:00

For anyone who's read much of Anne Tyler there are a number of non-surprises here: the main character, Rebecca Holmes Davitch, is loving, sensitive, nurturing, humorous, expansive, a middle-aged woman who is taken for granted by her family, who maintains a continual air of upbeat enthusiasm and forced gaiety, and who doesn't quite understand how she ended up where she is. Surrounding her are any number of halfway lost ne'er-do-wells, vaguely unpleasant emotional leeches, and self-centered nincompoops who feed casually on her energy (among them her 87-year-old mother). It's arguable that she's happier than she knows, means more to the people in her life than she knows, is richer than George Bailey, etc., etc. But that's at best an even-money bet, I think. The surprise for me in this one was the hard rejection of the typical Tyler fussy person, who is perhaps best personified across her oeuvre by the Leary family in The Accidental Tourist. In this case it's Will Allenby, the boyfriend of Rebecca's youth that she threw over on the way to her present life, which shortly left her a widow responsible for four daughters, only one of them her own—not to mention emotionally responsible for a ragbag collection of characters from her deceased husband's extended family. Rebecca reaches out to Allenby, finding herself in a place where she rues the loss of a relationship that in memory was safe and warm and comfortable. But Allenby, as a tenured academic and aging divorced man, with a daughter with whom he cannot connect, has remarkably few charms. He is like the worst of the Learys with nothing to offset it, disconnected from all around him and deeply delusional about himself and his capabilities, which include at least one frightening episode of losing control and more generally a pathological inability to love and accept love. I had some personal identification with him in spite of all that, and thus his categorical rejection by Rebecca came almost as a shock. I didn't see how it could work out, but Tyler is usually more generous about the way she approaches these things and Rebecca was almost brutal with him. And then Tyler reveals how deeply depressed she actually is, what a blow the loss of her husband decades earlier had been, and how easily the callous disregard of her adopted family can leave her feeling adrift and lost. In many ways this seemed to me a notably depressing novel, rather unusual on the whole for Tyler. It does end on a note of cautious optimism, and I'm pretty sure, reading the tea leaves of interviews with her, that she sees the resolution as much closer to feel-good than I do. It left me feeling, in its immediate glow, a bit gloomy on the whole.

In case it's not at the library.

Peter Gabriel (1980)

2011-11-05T09:06:00.000-07:00

This was Peter Gabriel's third self-titled album in a row—at the time he likened the naming strategy in interviews to "Time" magazine, as a regularly published periodical ... or something equally incoherent (it's also known as "III" and "Melt," the latter for the cover image). I think it's the best thing he ever did outside of Genesis. Make that the best thing he ever did, period. It was my favorite album of 1980, certainly in terms of gross numbers of hours spent with it, an everyday (or even twice-daily) album for most of that summer. At some point, likely because of fatigue, I left it behind and had not really heard much of it since until I sat down with it again recently. As usual, things get a little mixed up because it's come to bear a lot of memories of the time, good and bad. But yeah, I still think it's pretty great. I am reminded that Steely Dan and Todd Rundgren were two major favorites of mine shortly before punk-rock sent a distortion field of discontinuity across my tastes. There's a case to be made that this fits with either or maybe both, but as much as anything it's a studio production of impressive sophistication, Steve Lillywhite's breakthrough effort, and I think it was those earlier tastes that drew me in here. The drums are pushed up whomping big—it's Phil Collins, sitting at the feet and studying closely the style of Gabriel's singing, paying for his education with a day job drumming. Others on hand for the festivities include Kate Bush, Robert Fripp, and Paul Weller. All sounds are filtered within an inch of their lives, floating by in sweet layers, including allusive scraps and fragments that function the way samples would later and often stick and/or provide the pleasure as much as any of the main features. Gabriel wrote everything, from the little throwaway "Start" (the third song in) to the seven-and-a-half-minute album-closer "Biko," perhaps the most obvious example of a political consciousness and sensibility that Gabriel was beginning to entertain, with some ferocity even. "Family Snapshot" has a foot in the '70s fascinations with political assassination (think Taxi Driver or Nashville), a kind of studied mythologizing of the familiar patterns, marked equally by its horrors of them and a romanticized longing for more. (Funny how much this kind of thing dwindled away after the attempts, successful and unsuccessful respectively, on John Lennon and Ronald Reagan. Or maybe it really was just a '70s thing.) "Games Without Frontiers," a rebuke of the virulent international military adventuring by the vestiges of colonial powers, was the kinda-sorta hit. No doubt altogether too serious for American radio. "Biko" always seemed a bit long to me at the end, but mostly I listened to the album then the way I have recently, from start to finish, with a good deal of pleasure and various attractions taking their turns stepping forward and making themselves known. Worth visiting again and again, still.

The Gold Rush (1925)

2011-11-04T05:51:00.000-07:00

USA, 81 minutes (72 minutes, 1942 re-release)
Director/writer/editor: Charles Chaplin
Photography: Roland Totheroh
Music: Charles Chaplin (1942)
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Mack Swain, Tom Murray, Georgia Hale, Henry Bergman, Malcolm Waite

The Gold Rush offers another example of a classic movie that exists in multiple, somewhat controversial versions, although in this case, sadly enough, it's the auteur himself who is arguably the villain in the drama. Chaplin, in 1942—likely emboldened by his ability to survive in the "talkie" era, as evidenced by his three previous, laudable efforts, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator, all of which managed to maintain the aesthetics he had established in the silent era even as they took shrewd advantage of the developing technologies—set himself to recutting The Gold Rush, which many consider his greatest picture. He trimmed away some 10 minutes, scored it, and then made the colossal error of removing the intertitles in favor of adding his own voiceover narration.

I was first exposed to the original version in a film class some 30 years ago—where, again, I wish I would have paid a little more attention (or at least kept my notes from the class), because I have to think the instructor, Rob Silberman, must have discussed these versions, and deliberately chose to show us the original. But I was blissfully unaware a year or two ago when I finally got around to seeing it again, and found, lo and behold, the simpering, unctuous voice of Chaplin carrying on as if he is reading bedtime stories to children. It seemed to me unbearable.

So my first impulse when I knew I was going to write about it was to find the original. I found the choices are not entirely pleasant: 1) go with the 1942 remake, which is the version carried by Netflix and otherwise most easily available, 2) get a copy of the 2003 Warner Home Video two-disc DVD package, which includes the original as a special feature on the second disc, or 3) get a VHS copy of the original. The second option is probably best in a perfect world, but currently that package is out of print and prices for used copies start at $40; for new versions, it's $90 and more. The VHS versions are much more reasonable, in the range of a few dollars or less, but there the trick is working with indifferent sellers on determining the version. By trial and error (and luck) I finally found that the Vintage Video edition, labeled (wrongly) as running 112 minutes, is indeed what I was looking for. But it's a mediocre public domain print, scored indifferently with what sounds like a series of Django Reinhardt tunes. And the intertitles can drift so far to the left of the frame that the first letters of words get clipped off.

Is it worth the effort? Yes and no. I don't happen to count it among my favorite Chaplins—I would put it after the titles I mentioned above, and perhaps after The Kid as well. But many do call it his best and it's not hard to see why. It contains some of his most ingenious and cleverly worked out sight gags and physical comedy. Even the choice to set it in turn-of-the-20th-century Alaska is unusual and interesting, ripe for exploitation by Chaplin's fertile visual comedy, which takes place, as usual, among the desperately indigent. The love story elements—involving a dancehall girl named Georgia (played by Georgia Hale)—are generally awkward and ineffective, an unnecessary appendage, so much so that it helps me understand better all the usual complaints about Chaplin's overly sentimental bent. Except for an unexpected and somewhat unbelievable turn at the end, and a few foreshadowing intimations of it before that, she is mostly unlikeable. (Well, for that matter, so was the flower girl for a minute or two at the end of City Lights—but then she straightens right up.)

As with the first time I saw this I was most impressed with the famous set pieces. In a scene in which a shoe is devoured as the main entrée in a Thanksgiving meal (I understand it's actually made of licorice) the comedy is all in the way that Chaplin treats it as food, and more than that, as a sumptuous dining experience. The laces are eaten as if they were spaghetti and the sole tenderly bitten into like a chop of meat, with the nails treated like bones from which he sucks the meat clean. He is utterly unself-conscious about all of this, simply enjoying his meal with a good deal of gusto, even as his unhappy partner looks on in patent disbelief at the spectacle.

In the "dance of the rolls," a very quick bit that is presented as part of a dream sequence, he spears two long dinner rolls on forks and puts them through the paces of a can-can dance. This is the scene that most impressed me the first time I saw it—I didn't realize it at the time but, as with Children of Paradise more recently (and probably Michael Jackson's moon walk too, now that I think of it), I was actually finding my way in here to the amazing art of mime. The "dance of the rolls" is so tightly focused, just the forks and dinner rolls standing in as the shins and feet of a dance performer, that it seemed more like some illusion or magic trick. I simply wanted to gape at it and experience it over and over.

I also enjoy picking some of Chaplin's odd signifiers out of the action here, which tend to become even more funny as I note and start watching for them. For example, whenever he takes a drink he tends to grab his ass and rub it, as if making sure it is still there, to signal how the booze has gone to his head. In other films, notably City Lights, he frequently uses a gesture in which one throws one's jacket or coat half off, taking it off the shoulders, to show he is ready and willing to fight if that's what's going to be required in the situation. And, of course, the subversively gay gestures of outlandish eyelash-batting and cocked-head coy smiles that he produces around larger men he wants to impress with his good intentions.

As for the two versions of The Gold Rush, I gathered them up together and watched them back to back. I still prefer the original, and am happy to have the access to it, but the music is better in the 1942 remake and the superior print I think helps do a better job of telling the story and keeping the narrative points straight. The voiceover narration may have had some hand in that as well and was not as grating this time. But what I really want is something we'll never have: the print quality and music of the remake applied to the original. Maybe if the price ever comes down I'll get a chance to see if the print quality, at least, isn't there on that DVD package.

32. Dolly Parton, "Down From Dover" (1970)

2011-11-02T07:50:00.000-07:00

(listen)

I'm never sure when I need to backtrack with folks on Dolly Parton and address a popular misconception of her as a redneck nitwit celebrity with big boobs who wears too much makeup. I was disabused of all that myself some time ago thanks to Robert Christgau, who sold those '70s best-ofs by her particularly hard and incidentally opened the door for me when I later turned them up in a cutout bin. There's been no looking back since. "Down From Dover" vies with "Just Because I'm a Woman" as my one favorite, but there's so much by her that's so good it's almost silly to try to narrow it down. In the end I give this one the edge because it's so sad, and so sneaky about the way it does that. There's a story here, the elements are familiar, you've heard it before or think you have and you follow along almost in spite of yourself, absent-mindedly. That's the way of storytelling country music. You follow the story. It's not hard to guess as you go along that the things in "Down From Dover" won't come to a good end, but it is hard to anticipate how far it will go. How bleak it will become. How hard it will hit. It's sad. People cry when they hear it. I have cried listening to it. It's relentless and doesn't let go until it's finished with you. You think it's corny—it's arguably made of corn—but the irreducible truth is there. Finally calling it corn is so inadequate to its powers that almost certainly a trick of perception has been played on you. This is hardly the only place Dolly Parton pulls off such stunts, but it might be the best one she ever did.

33. Beatles, "Yes it Is" (1965)

2011-11-01T07:35:00.001-07:00

(listen)

Somewhere, once, I read a casual yet passionate tribute to this song that changed the way I heard it forever. I thought it was something Richard Meltzer wrote but I haven't been able to track that down, so maybe it was in a fanzine or a letter someone wrote to me. The song is one of those semi-lost artifacts from the mid-'60s, appearing originally as the B-side of the "Ticket to Ride" single but never making it to either of the Help! albums (US or UK), or the movie itself for that matter, landing instead on one of the American butchery byproducts, Beatles VI, and finally, in the grand reorganization of the catalog in the CD era, finding its (stereo) home on Past Masters, Vol. 1. It's a lovely, bracing, slow-tempo'd singalong, with dense, aching harmonies from Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. Harrison is also working some gadget with his guitar that lends it a tactile sensation of rubbery items vibrating and squeaking. It's a Lennon song, primarily, so features his usual mixed-up attitudes towards women, at once his saviors and demons, ever shadowed of course by his lost mother. She's wearing red ("scarlet") in this one, and there's some sense that a betrayal has occurred, but the details are not clear. Nor is she necessarily the one at fault, the singer himself makes clear enough. By avoiding the concrete so studiously the song manages, purely by its sounds and textures, to express a powerful sense of loss, and yet the melody and key are so apt for certain singers (such as myself, for whom Lennon's range is nearly a perfect match) that as often as not one finds oneself singing lustily from deep down in the diaphragm, as we're told we should. Thus, it becomes a nearly perfect abstraction, as vague and affirmative as the title itself.

Best American Crime Writing 2006

2011-10-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

A couple of commenters showed up this month asking about the status of this series, as the 2011 edition does not appear to be available at this time and there's very little information anywhere about if and when it will be coming. I don't know any better than anyone else, but in my poking around I came across a news item about Ecco Press senior editor Matt Weiland leaving for another house earlier this month. It may or may not be related. I have written to HarperCollins, the parent company of Ecco, to see if I can find anything out and will report back if I do. Meanwhile, I'm going to stick with my project of reviewing the series by volume, hoping that it's not about to become a memoriam.

The 2006 edition was edited by Mark Bowden, a journalist and academic who often examines crime in the context of foreign policy and war. He is likely best known for Black Hawk Down, which recounts the 1993 American adventure in Mogadishu in harrowing detail (and was later made into a loud movie by Ridley Scott). This also happens to be the last volume in the series that would be labeled as "Crime Writing"; henceforth, to avoid confusion with crime fiction, it would be known as "Crime Reporting." In a way I was sorry to see this. I think it's a shame that detective and mystery fiction have managed to effectively win the label of "crime writing," relegating true-crime literature to its current awkward, hyphenated, overly descriptive, and somewhat ghettoized status. But I don't doubt the marketing people know best in this. As always, it's a good collection, its pieces as interesting now as the day they were published, although I must say that, this far out, one does wish (somewhat impractically) for a bit longer view in some of the codas—again, that nice sense of wrapping up each piece is one of the best features of the series overall. I'm not sure whether it says more about Bowden (and/or series editors Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook) or about the times—probably the times—but there seems to be a bit more attention here than usual to crimes of priests and other Catholic Church officials, in terms of both the crimes themselves and of their subsequent (seemingly massive) cover-ups. Various crimes of doctors and police are also featured, so it may be more of a broader interest in the corruptions of our most important pillars of civilization. In another hallmark of the series, the ridiculous and light-hearted shows up cheek to jowl with the tragic and the horrific. A thoughtful and searching examination of the Emmett Till story and its long aftermath by Richard Rubin from the "New York Times Magazine" is here as well as a strange story by Skip Hollandsworth from the "Texas Monthly" about a serial bank robber known as Cowboy Bob who was actually a woman. My favorite piece in this one was once again the last—I'm starting to think they may save the best for last as a matter of policy. "The Great Mojave Manhunt" by Deanne Stillman appeared originally in "Rolling Stone" and tells the story of the capture of one Donald Kueck, a desert outlaw with a long history of bad blood with authorities taken down with considerable prejudice. The echoes of Waco are unmistakable. When police finally reached his body it was so thoroughly burnt that it crumbled when they attempted to move it. Stillman is something of an unusual writer of true-crime, far more poetical and effusive than the usual brisk just-the-facts-ma'am exercises offered up by most of its writers. Her allusive language does not always work, but it certainly does in this case.

In case it's not at the library.

Reconsider Baby (1954-1971)

2011-10-29T06:59:00.000-07:00

It shouldn't be any surprise that my favorite albums by Elvis Presley are barely albums proper in the way we typically think of albums now. He just never was that much of an albums artist, too busy making himself a colossal force of culture. Or anyway making movies, or something. So if The Sun Sessions was cobbled together 20 years or more after the fact, and Elvis' Golden Records, Vol. 3 appears deceptively to be just another entry in the ongoing ossification of the '60s, this was conceived, assembled, and released in 1985, nearly a decade after his death. I don't think it ever got a real CD release and it's not particularly easy to reassemble its various pieces from the bewildering thickets of product existing out there now. Its stated purpose was to make the case for Presley as an accomplished blues singer; note the hues of the album cover, for emphasis. The track listing: "Reconsider Baby," "Hi-Heel Sneakers," "Stranger in My Own Home Town," "Down in the Alley," "Merry Christmas Baby," "Tomorrow Night," "So Glad You're Mine," "One Night," "When it Rains, it Really Pours," "My Baby Left Me," "Ain't That Loving You Baby," "I Feel So Bad." I haven't been able to reproduce this album since my turntable went bust and I let it slip away in various purges of vinyl, at least in terms of the versions I remember for each title, but with what's out there now one can still come close enough to affirm, positively, "Mission accomplished." Presley reportedly found his greatest comforts and pleasures singing gospel, he's adequate as a crooning balladeer (some would surely argue he's even better than that), and of course he's the widely acknowledged "king of rock 'n' roll." But he was no slouch when it came to the blues, whether it's flavors of raunch, rave-up, desperation, jumping joy, or just plain sadness. He was all over it. This is a set, though you may have to go to some trouble now to gather it up together in one place, that stands up to and actually gets better and better with extended regular play. Sometimes I feel like Presley is overrated, with all the hoopla and everything that is claimed for him. No one could live up to that. But when I listen to a set like this I realize how genuinely gifted he was. Multiply that across varying tastes by the millions and I think you start to get some idea where the reputation comes from. He's one of those rare figures who comes very close to managing to be all things to all people. And if you'll excuse me now, I really must go spend another six minutes with this amazing version of "Merry Christmas Baby" that's just starting....

Sunset Blvd. (1950)

2011-10-28T08:04:00.000-07:00

USA, 110 minutes
Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D.M. Marshman Jr.
Photography: John F. Seitz
Music: Franz Waxman
Editors: Doane Harrison, Arthur P. Schmidt
Cast: Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Fred Clark, Jack Webb, Lloyd Gough, Cecil B. DeMille, H.B. Warner, Anna Q. Nilsson, Buster Keaton, Hedda Hopper

Billy Wilder is one of my favorite film directors, and Sunset Blvd. happens to be my favorite picture by him, so naturally I'm happy to see it placing so high on the list of all-time greats at the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? website. Wilder is cynical, bitter, and funny, pretty much in all the right proportions, and his talent as a screenwriter is at least as abundant as his ability to work with actors and frame visuals. Nowhere does he bring all that together in a more dazzling confection than here.

Sunset Blvd. is frequently characterized as a film noir—indeed, one of the great ones. It's good to see it lauded for any old reason, and all the various deep and angled shadows, along with the incidental crime in its story frame, make the designation appropriate enough, I suppose. But its black absurdity makes it seem to me more of an American gothic—or even more specifically a Hollywood gothic. Is there any other noir that makes such flawless use of not only a dead chimpanzee, but a pipe organ that catches the wind in a way that makes it sound as if it is on its deathbed of lung cancer? Or any other one even like it?

It's packed full with endless inside Hollywood touches, pitch meetings, sweet-talking agents on the golf course, name-dropping brainstorms, thoughtful budget considerations, and incidental glitzy insider lore. "You'd probably have turned down Gone With the Wind," says an angry Joe Gillis (played by William Holden) to the script reader, Betty Schaefer (played by Nancy Olson), who's just deep-sixed his pitch. "No, that was me," says the glum producer who's about to turn him down. "I said, 'Who wants to see a Civil War picture?'"

The great lines come fast and frequently. "Then I talked to a couple of yes-men," says Gillis, describing his desperate attempt to raise the money to stave off repo men. "To me they said no." Or, describing his screen credits as he begins to feel out the possibilities for work from Norma Desmond (played by Gloria Swanson), into whose home and life he has just randomly wandered: "Last one I wrote was about Okies in the Dust Bowl. You'd never know it, because when it reached the screen the whole thing played on a torpedo boat."

The initial premise is perfectly endemic to Hollywood, by way of Los Angeles, where a car is an absolute necessity of life. Gillis, spotted by the repo men to whom he has earlier lied about the whereabouts of his car, finds himself literally taking it on the lam from them and forced to park his car in an empty garage of what he believes to be an abandoned mansion on Sunset Boulevard when one of the tires inconveniently blows.

I'm not sure any film has ever been more aptly cast. The Joe Gillis part calls for a handsome, vaguely idealistic guy who's just desperate enough to make a few wrong decisions and William Holden is more than up to it. The apple-cheeked Nancy Olson as Betty Schaefer, the girl next door—next door literally, that is, if you come from Hollywood—couldn't be better.

And a lot of unexpected familiar faces come floating out of this: Erich von Stroheim as the dour and mysterious butler, Max Von Mayerling, who comes with a highly significant past; Cecil B. DeMille in a cameo as a director of the silent era who survived the transition to talkies; Hedda Hopper as the glib, fast-talking reporter at the end, dictating the story by phone; and Jack Webb perhaps as cheerful as anyone has ever seen him. Even Buster Keaton's stone visage turns up, as an old friend of Norma Desmond's, aged a couple of decades and sitting at a table playing cards.

But Gloria Swanson is the star, as she deserves to be, playing a leading light of the silent era, passed over when the talkies arrived. Independently wealthy now—with oil wells somewhere "pumping ... pumping ... pumping"—she seethes with resentment and broods in her creaking old Addams Family mansion, scheming an impossible comeback ("I hate that word!"). The force of her personality is such that she can still reach out, almost as if casually, and destroy lives.

The shrewd play of casting figures such as her and von Stroheim and DeMille is in how naturally plugged in they are to the larger themes, a kind of mocking yet somehow sincere lament for the grand Hollywood tradition that was swept away with the Depression, various returns to morality, and the advances of technology.

Swanson in particular brings her natural talents to bear. "We didn't need dialogue," she says at one point to Gillis. "We had faces." She goes on to prove the point all through, particularly in the ending, where her character's crazed madness is full on display in the leering set of her mouth, the tilt of her chin and slope of her shoulders, the arch of her eyebrows, the way she plays so cannily, and so constantly, to the camera.

The final minutes, of course, are famous, with her declaration, "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up," and the way she slinks forward, literally shoving her mug right into the lens. But for me she's even more poignantly on top of her role in the scenes just before that, when she and Holden are having it out, bitterly hashing through all the fantasies and resentments of their grotesque relationship, which is dying at that moment. She's so great, amped up and making her tragic faces, turned directly at the camera rather than Holden and with a spotlight full on her. At that moment, she really is as nearly completely lost in her role as any other player anywhere. It's funny and terrifying all at the same time.

Movies as famous for being famous and well-regarded as Sunset Blvd. often carry the burden of their reputations, and for everyone who knows the line about Mr. DeMille and the close-up there are probably hundreds who have forgotten how effectively tragic and genuinely sad the story is, and how expertly and economically the screenplay puts it all together. Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond are doomed souls from the first we see them. Their relationship never had a chance—Gillis, at least, had some understanding of that. Norma Desmond, never.

Billy Wilder's wickedly malicious wit and his sharp eye and ear for the smug complacencies of the film industry make the whole production a lot of fun. It's another one of those with a seemingly endless supply of lines made familiar by their entry into the common lexicon. But it's no empty camp exercise. The story plunges right in and remains engaging, even harrowing, every step of the way, and it's operating at high levels from its first shot to its last.

34. Beatles, "I'm Happy Just to Dance With You" (1964)

2011-10-26T08:42:00.000-07:00

(listen)

I see on Wikipedia that this likely qualifies as something of a minor Beatles song—never a hit, written as a confidence-booster for George Harrison to sing, and lightly derided by Lennon and McCartney. It's short too, at less than two minutes. But it has always been among my favorites and even more so as increasingly my favorite albums by the Beatles have become the two bearing the titles of the first two movie projects. This is from the Hard Day's Night album and it's as shimmering and punchy and lustrous and black-and-white as the movie itself, attacking with brilliant ringing chords and a churning rhythm that set the tone instantly. I guess it's rather sing-songy (for George's sake apparently), but it has all the hallmarks of what made those first Beatles songs so perfectly attractive: innocent and full of children's energy, but compressed to diamond-points, overflowing with shrewd musical ideas and strategies that are never busy calling attention to themselves but are simply there to make the songs better. And they do make the songs better, unique and unusual and interesting, not in a way that shouts, "Look how clever we are," but rather that says, "What do you think of that? How do you like that?" "Silly love songs" as Paul McCartney would later make a fetish of it. That's all this is. "Before this dance is through / I think I'll love you too / I'm so happy when you dance with me." But it's driven by those chords and that rhythm and God knows what other musical tricks. It gets right under my skin and makes me instantly happy and I'm happy just to play it over and over—and particularly thrilled when it shows up unexpected on the radio, which believe me is not often enough. Hardly ever, in fact.

35. Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man" (1965)

2011-10-25T08:24:00.000-07:00

(listen)

I've always considered Highway 61 Revisited the best Bob Dylan by a fair sight, but Bringing it All Back Home, home of the original (and best) version of "Mr. Tambourine Man," is worthy in its own right. Worthy, did I say? Downright essential. "Mr. Tambourine Man" kicks off the second side and has often seemed to me a far-reaching look to what was to come, even though it's plainly as acoustic as can be, with Dylan strumming away and blowing his mouth harp, accompanied only by a subtle electric guitar figure from Bruce Langhorne. I was not much a fan of the Byrds cover, so for a long time I was reluctant to play that second side, drawn to it more by the dark, penetrating, and often very funny long song, "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," which of itself practically made it the better side (with "Gates of Eden" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"). I don't recall the circumstances, but I put it on once for another chance at that long one and finally this leapt out at me. It's so many things all at once: Controlled, caustic, soothing, mournful, plain as can be, as light and nimble on its feet as a cat, and ultimately quite beautiful, but in a way that leaves one stammering around outside the edges of it. The best way in is ultimately just listening, letting the levels peel back and back and back. The language spills like rushing water as it does on so much of Dylan's best material, the rhythms of it and its meanings vying at once for attention, tumbling together stream of conscious style, enveloping one all at once in an indelible moment and feeling. It's not my favorite song by him—there's still one more ahead, and a good many candidates always ready to surge (including the aforementioned "It's Alright, Ma")—but it may be the single warmest thing he ever did.

Asylum (1997)

2011-10-23T08:37:00.000-07:00

If Patrick McGrath's amazing novel of psychological horror never quite transcends the niche it occupies so well as a puzzle box of tricks and deceptions, it nevertheless must be counted as one of the finest examples of it you will find. It's creepy, nerve-wracking, clever, written with such elegance that the decadence rolls off in unrelieved waves, so engrossing from the first page forward it's a dark thrill ride at some point you find yourself hoping will never stop—even as it gets wound up so tight you wish it would for God's sake. I haven't yet read anything else by McGrath that matches it, and very few things by anyone else beyond the accepted masters, such as Edgar Allan Poe. John Fowles (The Magus) and Ian McEwan (The Innocent) are about as far as I'm willing to venture in terms of comparison, and even there I'm worried that I'm just mixing up my morbid Brits. Maybe Alan Moore, another Brit, and one who works in another medium altogether, comic books. Certainly McGrath matches his facility for storytelling and for striking the macabre tone without being a cackling buffoon about it. This is truly scary, disturbing stuff in its best moments. So many things that I naturally gravitate toward are on display here: Freudian obsession, cruelty, high gothic overtones, and a nicely plotted story that may fairly be called "gripping," its momentum hurtling one forward into the dark night to the finish. There's a beautiful woman married to an official at a high-security psychiatric hospital. There's a madman who's not actually mad who seduces her. Or wait, he's probably mad. No. I don't know. There's a Machiavellian puppet-master pulling strings. Maybe. There are masks behind masks and layers of identity peeling away, and of course multiple twists and surprises. And always we are in the hands of a storyteller whose seductive power only grows, a pitiless master. At some points it feels as if the book could instruct one to go make a cup of tea for the author and it's as likely as not that readers, zombie fashion, would. It's not often enough that someone capable of imagining a plot as intricate and byzantine as this can deliver it with such precise and lovely language. Anyone who hasn't read this yet, I envy you. Go have yourself a good time.

In case it's not at the library.

Close to the Edge (1972)

2011-10-22T09:28:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure the general consensus on Yes is that Fragile is the best album they did, with maybe The Yes Album in there too, though I suspect there's another quarter who would argue for Tales From Topographic Oceans, a double LP with four songs. I like Fragile, I never warmed to Tales (and I have nothing to say about the '80s comeback, except I did kind of like that hit). Close to the Edge, the album that came between, was the one I owned and was fanatical about for a time, a daily habit even, mostly for the side-long title song, although I thought the flip was worth the time too when I was in the mood for more where that came from. But I was done with it more years ago than I like to think. So I approached it again recently with some trepidation. Boy howdy what do you know, it still sounds terrific. Visiting Wikipedia, I am reminded that two of its three tracks, including the long one, are presented as suites composed of titled sections: "The Solid Time of Change," "Total Mass Retain," "Seasons of Man," "Cord of Life," and like that. I probably didn't need to remember that, because it only emphasizes the silly pretensions of a lot of the progressive-rock I consciously walked away from. But it doesn't mean even so that there isn't a good deal of soul and energy and imagination incorporated here, not to mention a good groove once in awhile, and always a kind of sincerely felt yearning after transcendence. I am also seeing that the long one has something to do with Hermann Hesse and one or another of his novels, but the thing is they really could get it worked out on the musical plane and that's the level on which it operates still. In fact, setting aside all the ponderous conceptual hippie (or post-hippie) shtick is not hard at all with the thing playing. As far as I can tell it's a real band working things out the way real bands do—rehearsing, jamming, locking up with one another, and knowing what they're all about all the way from the inside, each connected equally to all the others, and then just playing until it comes together. I mean, it's possible that what I'm hearing is a sentimental hit of nostalgia, re-embracing with an album I remember well loving, and all the memories and lost youth and all that associated with it. Or, on the other hand, maybe it's just a really good album.

The Third Man (1949)

2011-10-21T07:52:00.001-07:00

UK, 104 minutes
Director: Carol Reed
Writers: Graham Greene, Alexander Korda, Carol Reed, Orson Welles
Photography: Robert Krasker
Music: Anton Karas
Editor: Oswald Hafenrichter
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Bernard Lee, Wilfred Hyde-White, Ernst Deutsch, Siegfried Breuer, Erich Ponto, Paul Hoerbiger

In his introduction on the Criterion DVD, Peter Bogdanovich calls The Third Man "perhaps the greatest 'non-auteur' film ever made," going on to compare it with Casablanca as an "extraordinarily happy accident." That's probably fair enough. There's plenty of talent to go around here: Graham Greene wrote both the screenplay and the literary property on which it's based. Cinematographer Robert Krasker is positively heroic about converting postwar Vienna into a malevolent place of inky blacks, confusing geometries, and outsize shadows. And of course Orson Welles, in spite of his limited screen time—he doesn't even appear until the first hour has passed—imposes enough sheer presence to make it feel as much like a Welles picture as any on which he carries the director's credit.

Obviously I still need to see some of director Carol Reed's other efforts, particularly of the period—Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol, which immediately preceded The Third Man, are widely praised. But Bogdanovich's assessment does confirm my impression of this as one of those unique and special projects where so much falls into place just right, with contributors working together well and at the same time achieving personal heights.

For me, it's one of those pictures that only get better the more I see. After hearing it so routinely lauded to the skies it was something of a disappointment the first time I saw it, but that's in the past now. Krasker's photography may be the most showy aspect of it, certainly the easiest to notice and perhaps the most discussed—that first shot of Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles) standing in a doorway at night when a light lands on his face, and the elaborate chase scenes at the end through the Vienna sewers. Vienna is presented as dank and moist, which may be fine for a good piece of chocolate cake but somehow feels unrelievedly corrupt for an ancient city. The feeling of corruption is palpable, deeply embedded in everything here.

At the same time, Krasker finds numerous ways to open up his field of vision, as in the tremendous final shot of a tree-lined lane down which walks Harry Lime's lover Anna Schmidt (played by Alida Valli), slowly, slowly approaching the camera, with Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotten) waiting patiently for her in medium on the left-hand side of the frame.

The story is pure Graham Greene: stiff-upper-lipped wise and forbearing Brits personified by a formidable Trevor Howard, carrying on with their endless duties in the face of anything, ever unflappable, never surprised by whatever ugly facade of society may present itself, even as things go from bad to worst. They indulge occasionally in slight sighs of impatience, like long-suffering parents with willful children whom they love, at the naivete of those (here, mostly Americans, and more specifically mostly Martins) who won't grasp the evils in the world for what they are. It's also full of the kind of spies and subterfuge and deceptions (self-imposed and otherwise) with which Greene loves to stuff his tales.

Yet somehow this feels to me more than anything else like a Welles picture. His big fat American face is pleased to carry the lion's share of the horrors so circumspectly on display here. His work in the postwar black market is vastly more, and worse, than simply providing people with needed items and/or luxuries in short supply. He is willing to commit the most unforgivable crimes almost casually, and he is so glib and sanguine about rationalizing himself that it's hard to know, with his old college pal Martins, whether to be disgusted or charmed. The first impulse is for the latter, but we learn to know better.

The Third Man is also one of those classic films noir (there's another coming up next week) that doesn't seem to me to fit the label well—indeed, in this case, seems to me to transcend it by a good bit, its story altogether too big, its crimes a matter of war and vast injustice and ultimately more monstrous, above and beyond the typical interpersonal scheming and grasping I tend to associate with the form. Even among the British flavors of noir this seems to me somewhat overshadowed (no pun intended) by Jules Dassin's Night and the City, which fits more neatly into my idea of the genre (or style, or whatever "noir" is).

But there's little question that this is a fine and dark entertainment, an excellent production hitting on all cylinders: a masterful story and screenplay, unforgettable cinematography, and a cast turning in uniformly fine performances. Welles is just the most obvious example on that latter point. I think Trevor Howard has never been better, and Joseph Cotten makes the case once again for being one of the most reliable players of the time, able to take on a variety of roles. The Viennese milieu is pitch-perfect and altogether the picture is paced just right, never losing its momentum in the thickets of narrative and holding back its surprises until the right moments to spring them.

One last note: I have run across a few complaints here and there, actually in many very different quarters, about the soundtrack, and thus feel vaguely compelled to issue a qualifier or user warning on its behalf. Anton Karas's zither-driven music is capricious and weird, even jarring, and may strike some as overly cute, or at least out of place. I understand the apprehensions on some level, but it also seems to me now so much of a piece with this movie that I rarely think about it anymore. But because I have actually seen people complain that it ruins it for them, caveat emptor: Here there be copious zither flourishes.

36. Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put a Spell on You" (1956)

2011-10-19T07:59:00.000-07:00

(listen)

This early rock 'n' roll novelty—recorded in a drunken session Hawkins claims he didn't remember even the next day, banned from radio in some places for its "cannibalistic" noises, and generally so weird that it never cracked the charts—has managed to transcend its strange pedigree to become a classic in its own right. I know I was aware of it before Jim Jarmusch's 1984 film Stranger Than Paradise but that's certainly where it really caught my attention, bawling out of a cassette tape player that the female lead carried with her wherever she went (Hawkins himself later made a memorable appearance in another Jarmusch film worth seeing, Mystery Train). Knowing the backstory to the song, the elements of the drunkenness and even the "cannibalistic" noises, may (or may not) clarify what you're hearing, but I think the truth is that they work only to the extent they complement and sharpen the tension with the careful and plodding attack by the sax and rhythm section—and what's that, a banjo?—setting up something that is equal parts clownish and supernaturally powerful, and altogether startlingly original, which Jarmusch played to perfectly. I'm not entirely convinced Hawkins ever had a firm handle on what he had wrought, but he was anyway able to take it and parlay it into an over-the-top shtick involving props such as coffins, capes, skulls, and the like, all of that rather remarkable of course for the '50s. Now it bears the label generally of "shock rock," and it laid the ground for the likes of Screaming Lord Sutch, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, arguably even Alice Cooper and everything that followed in his wake. But this is ground zero for all of that, and it's pretty special in its own right.

37. Pogues, "Fairytale of New York" (1987)

2011-10-18T07:33:00.000-07:00

(listen)

Apparently I have been living in a cave because until just now via Wikipedia I had not realized the efforts people have made to turn this into a holiday classic—as admirable as they are ludicrous as they are perfect. Ludicrous because the song is so determinedly squalid, so dank and fetid, a drunk man in jail on Christmas Eve who pines uselessly for better days; perfect because with all that it works so well. My hat is off to those who hear this so clearly now. It gives me cause for hope after all. The album it comes from, If I Should Fall From Grace With God, is an utter revelation itself, but this was the point where it tipped over for me into something so strange and bewildering and good I don't have adequate words for it. I have been known to play it again and again. Shane MacGowan's gruff, whiskey-soaked, forever off-pitch growl matched with Kirsty MacColl's forever upbeat pop fashionista femme warble, the lush grand piano that launches it, the strings that carry it home, all the Irish strains, the nostalgia and regret and other symptoms of despair, the presence of law enforcement, and overall the sense of a nagging sadness, omnipresent, only temporarily, fleetingly redeemed, are overwhelming when heard under the right circumstances, e.g., alone, whether by oneself literally or in a madding crowd or at the family hearth. Maybe it's the Christmas theme that makes it hit so hard. Maybe I'm vulnerable to any flavor of pop music syrup that comes along. But the tension here is visceral, operating at multiple levels: a strange duet, foul-mouthed and sweet, with intimations of both jail and joy, bittersweet, wise, and knowing.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

2011-10-16T09:26:00.000-07:00

I read this book back in the day, though I'm pretty sure only the once, when I was so entirely in thrall to Vonnegut, toward the end of my high school career. I'm pretty sure I never understood the enormity at the center of it, the February 1945 fire-bombing of Dresden, the way he intended, only approximately. By the numbers (135,000 dead and the images he gives us of the destruction, comparing the Dresden landscape to the moon) it was worse than the March 1945 fire-bombing of Tokyo (81,000 dead), which was worse than August 1945 Hiroshima A-bomb attack (71,000 dead). It was very bad, and 25 years after the fact Vonnegut is still gnawing away at it here, still quite evidently shattered by it, which is reflected in the strange way that his slender volume proceeds, with its Tralfamadorian aliens that kidnap the protagonist, its use of "so it goes" to punctuate every death (whether any mention of the thousands in Dresden or various life-forms), and the mystifying use of time travel, the coming "unstuck" in time that Billy Pilgrim experiences. It's something more than intense memory, but not by much. Then there is the very calculated and self-conscious way that Vonnegut injects himself. It's a novel, but there's Vonnegut using Chapter One the way others might use a preface or foreword, where he talks about how he begins the novel, which actually starts with Chapter Two. Just weird, but also convincingly reflective of a soul in extremity. It was a lot easier for me this second time through to set aside Vonnegut's variously annoying and beguiling tricks and focus on what he tells us about Dresden and to imagine what it must have been like to experience that and understand the horror. It's no wonder he spent the rest of his life opposed to war. It also raises questions about our conduct in and prosecution of the "good war." Both Dresden and Tokyo (and of course Nagasaki, and there's a case for Hiroshima too) appear to stand as acts of state-sponsored rage, a kind of terrorism, justified or no nevertheless coming from impulses that sensible people have always known must be set aside for the sake of civilization and humanity and other quaint ideas. It's cause for despair that these atrocities have mostly been covered up by history—which, I know, the victors write and all that. That's the despair that uniquely haunts this very strange little novel, and the reason it belongs in libraries until the end of time.

In case it's not at the library.

Aqualung (1971)

2011-10-15T07:54:00.000-07:00

I had some hope I might actually like this after 40 years. I never warmed to it much at the time, though I did love the first three Jethro Tull albums—Benefit, probably the least of them objectively speaking, is an eternal favorite for being one of the first albums I ever owned. This Was had Mick Abrahams and Stand Up was just charming. I saw a Tull concert in support of Aqualung that I remember liking pretty well. A bit on the histrionic side, naturally enough I suppose, but some very sharp and memorable moments that are with me still. And taken a track at a time as it would come on classic rock radio, the title song or "Cross-Eyed Mary" or "Hymn 43" or "Locomotive Breath" or whatnot, I thought it was pretty good too, hooks and atmosphere and groovy hard-rock guitar, etc. But alas maybe its moment has simply come and gone for me; listening to the whole thing now has proved little better than a numbing chore. Partly it's because I don't often connect with such big hairy brawny concept albums (I know, there are exceptions) and partly because somehow this particular concept leaves me a bit squeamish. It's not that I have anything against anti-religious sentiments, but when the rage reaches certain levels of vitriol I often find myself looking around nervously for the exits. I don't doubt the severity of the problems. But as one of the damned, I was fortunate enough to escape many of them. Honestly, I'm glad my Midwestern United Methodist Church never ran any of the trips on me—if anything, it was "too liberal" and threw the curse of a lasting impression of tolerance on me. So no horror stories, thank God, and not much of the seething resentment to share, except of course for Fred Phelps and his ilk, and we all know dicks like that are a special case. I don't doubt that for some this album is a tonic, even a life-saver, in its time and place. As for the matter of whether Ian Anderson (pic) and Alan Moore (pic) are actually the same person, that's just a rumor from irresponsible quarters and I refuse to traffic in such things.

Children of Paradise (1945)

2011-10-14T08:40:00.000-07:00

Les enfants du paradis, France, 163 minutes
Director: Marcel Carne
Writer: Jacque Prevert
Photography: Roger Hubert
Music: Maurice Thiriet
Editors: Henri Rust, Madeleine Bonin
Cast: Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur, Marcel Herrand, Maria Casares, Louis Salon, Pierre Renoir, Gaston Modot, Jane Marken

Children of Paradise is regarded as being nearly as famous for the circumstances of its production as for anything else about it so I will start there. Filmed under Vichy France, during the German occupation of World War II, there's an undeniable scrappiness to all the extras and the vigor of many of the exterior shots, a sense of making do and a kind of spiritedness to it that I think may be genuinely unique. Vichy authorities, for example, had imposed a maximum film length of 90 minutes, and so the 163-minute Children of Paradise is presented as a kind of double feature, two back-to-back films each with their own elaborate (and parallel) opening titles. In so doing, they found even more ways to make their production a self-consciously "theatrical" work, with its seams showing and some of the stuffing hanging out.

They weren't, of course, so daring as to try to compress some anti-authoritarian allegory into it—they probably never would have got away with it, for one thing, if they had even been inclined that way—so this tale of Parisian culture of the 1840s wild and free on the streets does not have much to do with Parisian culture under German rule a century later, except for generalities such as the immutable human spirit. The title refers to the players and backstage crew, the participants actively involved in the exciting life of theater and drama, as well as the working-class people who attended the shows and could afford only the cheapest seats. What we would now call "nosebleed" seats were then referred to as "paradise" or "the Gods" and the best players were said to be playing explicitly to "the Gods," whose patrons gave the most immediate and unfiltered reactions to performances. "Up in the Gods," says one character, "their lives are small, but their dreams are vast." It's a heartening view of culture and theater and democracy.

I liked Children of Paradise quite a bit more the first time I saw it, perhaps because many of its surprises were still so unexpected and lustrous. The second time through it was harder to concentrate on the various subtleties of the narrative, a slightly curdled melodrama that swirls around the character Garance (played by Arletty), with whom four or five of the male leads are in love or at least have some involvement. Instead, I spent my time waiting for the handful of showy theatrical sequences that had so impressed me the first time and halfway through found myself lost in the narrative thickets. Oops.

Those theatrical sequences are still impressive, by the way, but familiarity took away a good deal of their impact too. The great and beloved mime, Baptiste (played by Jean-Louis Barrault), who is luminous and even more than Arletty the real star of this show, is virtually worth the nearly three-hour commitment by himself. He scrambled my mind about mimes, to tell you the truth; after a lifetime of rejecting them as second-rate entertainment and an easy cynical joke, Barrault's uncanny fluid expressiveness sent me back to rethink.

In fact, one of the more interesting narrative tensions here is between the theatrical art forms of mime, represented by Baptiste, and of drama, represented by "the actor" Frederick Lemaitre (played by Pierre Brasseur), who struts about declaiming constantly, usually Shakespeare. He will never shut up. He scoffs constantly at the overbearing "silence" of mime work. In that way Children of Paradise found a way to stuff in a somewhat random allegorical theme on the relationship between the original silent films and the later "talkies." Lemaitre triumphs in just about every way that it's possible to triumph, even casually winning over Garance at one point, but he clearly loses on the all-important Q Score of likeability and comes off in the end as something of an unredeemable buffoon. Drama wins and mime loses, except not really, in the way that this film so often manages to have things both ways.

Barrault, for his part, resembles a kind of Buster Keaton or Stan Laurel figure, slender and slight, shy and private, until he lets loose his powers in performance, which remain a delight from his first appearance as a player used to draw people in off the street to the main show and all the way to his ascent, complete in the second half, to becoming a much loved and prodigiously talented star. The bigger the shows the more impressive he becomes—and the less interesting, alas, becomes the overarching narrative.

As with another French film that has already appeared on this list, L'Atalante, I can't help but think that Children of Paradise is here for reasons somewhat extraneous to what the viewer actually sees. It represents a kind of triumph in the face of adversity that is always admirable of itself—getting to the moon by the end of a decade simply because someone who later died thought it would be a good idea if we did. It's a juicy drama to while away a rainy afternoon, a great big "movie movie," with passions and jealousies and other exciting human emotions on display. And when it decides to make itself beautiful, it becomes very, very beautiful.

What sticks, however, for me anyway, are the images of Barrault in his loose-fitting all-white costume flitting about a stage masterfully creating illusions and magic. I'm not sure that's enough to support a painstaking three-hour production more than a few times altogether. I like what the Halliwell guide has to say about Children of Paradise, its usual enviable pith full on display: "A magnificent evocation of a place and a period, this thoroughly enjoyable epic melodrama is flawed only by its lack of human warmth and of a real theme."

38. Iggy Pop, "Five Foot One" (1979)

2011-10-12T08:19:00.000-07:00

(listen)

Iggy's 1979 New Values was way high on my list of favorites of that year even if it is somewhat uneven. With horns and the band tight as can be and Iggy's various improvs, whether they work or not, carefully preserved in the pristine rock amber of the precise, dusky production by James Williamson, it works a lot of the time. The title song avails of this aesthetic too and to varying degrees other songs here, "Tell Me a Story," "Girls," "I'm Bored" (a candidate at #138), "Billy Is a Runaway." But the sound is nowhere more put together than on this five-minute display of wanton modulated chamber-rock. Everything from the heartbeat bass to the tidy drumkit to the rolling waves of the horn charts and electric guitars and Iggy's goofs off all of it—studied, and thus vaguely abstracted and distanced, but compensating with a surprising good humor that is lusty and alive, and a band that is rocking, rocking. No one but Iggy Pop is capable of such stunts. Here he is out front making jokes about a short-guy complex; at an actual height of just a shade under 5'-8" it's something Iggy is not likely unfamiliar with, one of the reasons he can make it work so effectively. The scenario is funny too, a guy working at an amusement park and hot for some. "With a bottle of aspirin and a sackful of jokes / I wish I could go home with all the big folks," he declares outright. "I wish life could be Swedish magazines." At that point the song's about opened up wide and working on open cylinders like a mighty machine or intricate household appliance. You can dance to it if you want. "I won't grow any more any more any more," he finally concedes as the noise envelops him.

39. Alex Chilton, "Thank You John" (1985)

2011-10-11T07:42:00.000-07:00

(listen)

From early in Chilton's neo-Memphis going on neo-New Orleans phase of his second half of the '80s, just as he was simultaneously becoming an underground indie darling cum icon of transfixed youth forever. I knew this originally from an EP set called "Feudalist Tarts" that's got a few nice things: cover of Carla Thomas's "B-A-B-Y," cover of Slim Harpo's "Tee Ni Nee Ni Noo / Tip on In," the whole jazz band riffing like a rock band thing alone. But this Willie Tee moment of parable truth out of the beach music scene of the Carolinas was ahead of its time at least in terms of the studied matter-of-factness of the way in which it reveals itself. The contempt the pimp has for the john is done to a ripe turn by Chilton. The business-as-usual interchangeableness of the ho under control is suggestion and allusion. The horns and snaky rhythms keep it amiably rolling forward, flowing and warm and easygoing, which enables Chilton to go as icy cold as he can jettisoning the suave savoir faire of Willie Tee's original and lingering instead on the most suggestive details to draw out the shades of meaning, like lancing a boil with swift furious thrusts. There's nothing subtle going on here: "I know that you've been ballin' / You're as high as you can be ... I know he wanted to handle you / I could tell by the bruises on your arm ... I don't blame you baby for trying to swell his head / 'Cos after all baby he's giving us his bread." Willie Tee's version is more about getting over, but Chilton is bent on making the getting over the gotten over and every thing from his mouth is washed in bitter patina. His frail-voiced wizened hipster youth flirting with the downward spiral is just convincing enough of itself to sell this good and hard. It's unforgettable, even.

A Patchwork Planet (1998)

2011-10-09T08:21:00.000-07:00

This is one by Anne Tyler that seemed to me not so easy to get a bead on. On the one hand it's as compulsively readable as anything by her; I have now found myself twice rip-roaring through it in short order. Its first-person story of Barnaby Gaitlin the poor little rich boy and black sheep of a wealthy family of Baltimore philanthropists has all the usual Tyler hallmarks: quirky lovable characters who bring the pathos, a jumble of amiable incident, and a moderately surprise twist in its ending that satisfies more than not. Gaitlin has rejected his wealthy family nearly as much as they have rejected him, though all remain enmeshed with one another. After some serious problems as a teen, including a late graduation from high school and legal troubles involving burglary charges, he has spent all of his adult life working for Rent-a-Back, which provides manual labor services to the elderly. Gaitlin turns 30 as the novel begins. Divorced from a brief marriage, he has a 9-year-old daughter who lives with her mother and stepfather in Philadelphia. Gaitlin is a bit of a Holden Caulfield, reflexively rejecting anything he identifies as phony. He rents the basement of a home from a family with whom he must share a bathroom. The patriarchal side of his family believes that angels traditionally visit them at portentous points in their lives to deliver fateful messages. Gaitlin believes he may have found his angel in the person of Sophie, who he meets on a train ride between Baltimore and Philadelphia after watching her carry through on a good deed on an earlier train ride. But when they end up involved, Gaitlin is no longer as sure about that. Taken altogether, A Patchwork Planet notably has its oddities, perhaps none greater than Tyler's decision to tell the story first-person by Gaitlin. Over the duration of the novel he seemed to me less and less believable as a man, and indeed begins to come off like one of those Woody Allen characters—philosopher or TV comedy writer or documentary filmmaker—who only sounds like Woody Allen. Gaitlin sounds more and more like the typical garrulous, overfeeling Tyler female with an overlay of pro forma male characteristics, such as a certain degree of handiness with tools. Some of Gaitlin's plaintive declarations and assertions at points started to remind me of Jack Handey Deep Thoughts shtick ("If you go parachuting, and your parachute doesn’t open, and you friends are all watching you fall, I think a funny gag would be to pretend you were swimming"), which brought things dangerously close to capsizing under their own weight at various points. Yet this is also one of Tyler's more tightly constructed and symmetrical plots as well and certainly worth it for any fan.

In case it's not at the library.

Sleeping With the Past (1989)

2011-10-08T10:03:00.000-07:00

This is the other Elton John album I pulled out of the slush pile the same day I picked up the Thom Bell set. It was officially the new one at the time, hailed by fast-talking PR types who called me on the phone as some kind of rapprochement and reunion of Elton and his long-time lyricist Bernie Taupin. Something about it certainly struck home for me as I played it quite a bit, used various tracks as staples on mix tapes I made for years ("Sacrifice," "Sleeping With the Past," "Club at the End of the Street"), and in general just had myself a real nice glowing Elton John renaissance over it. I don't hear much of that as clearly now—though the music has well-grooved associations with a momentous period of my life and so some value on that level. I had the whole thing on the side of a tape that I took with me on a trip to New York, playing it a lot on my walkman as I pounded the streets and stopped into stores such as the Strand bookstore, and it worked nicely in that context, surprisingly. But mostly it sounds ponderous and lumbering to me now, though with all the usual high production values and some occasional moments that whip themselves up to a fine spirit or to very lovely passages or both, much like virtually all of Elton John for 30 years or more. In the end, maybe Elton John has become a kind of Elvis Presley for me. I'm still mostly enamored with much of his early work and certainly all the hits when he exploded in the '70s. He has steadily ossified into nothing ever particularly surprising, let alone meaningful. "I'm Still Standing" indeed, career statement of purpose. I said before that people were grateful for his reworking of "Candle in the Wind" as an elegy for Princess Diana, but I wasn't actually one of them. On the other hand, I wanted to stand on a chair and cheer when he and Eminem pulled their little stunt. So I don't actually have anything against him or resent him his success the way I might some others. I'm glad he's around and still out there and it's even nice to hear this again once in awhile.

Psycho (1960)

2011-10-07T08:10:00.000-07:00

USA, 109 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Joseph Stefano, Robert Bloch
Photography: John L. Russell
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editor: George Tomasini
Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam, John McIntire, Simon Oakland, Frank Albertson, Patricia Hitchcock, Mort Mills

Alfred Hitchcock’s full-tilt stab at horror must have come as something of a shock to those who had grown used to the technicolor antics and capers of all those sparkling Hollywood stars in Hitchcock’s ‘50s productions, whatever weird trails they might have gone down, such as Vertigo. But Psycho remains a classic horror show to this day, one of the pictures most associated with Hitchcock and one by which he may be best remembered. It came at the tail end of arguably his greatest run, after Vertigo and North by Northwest, and it heralded the dawn of the kandy-kolored tangerine dream decade that was to follow with the grit and harsh contrasts of a movie that was black and white on multiple levels to its core.

It takes a number of chances, most notably in the single-minded way it goes for the look and feel of a tawdry low-budget shocker as well as in the relatively brief screen time given to its female lead, Janet Leigh. In many ways, and in spite of its feature length, it operates as a particularly meticulous installment of his TV show, complete with story twists and surprises and a clumsy everything's-all-right-after-all coda, grounded in the reassuring avuncular tones of a professional psychiatrist. Because of those story twists and surprises, and how artfully the picture manages to husband its secrets, I feel obligated at this point to mention that spoilers are ahead.

The best parts of Psycho, no question, all feature Janet Leigh, and once she's done in in the famous shower scene, the life of this movie tends to drain away as inexorably as the chocolate syrup used for blood in that scene drains down the bathtub, lingering on that brilliant and brilliantly cold shot of Leigh's dead face pressed into the bathroom floor, eyes wide open and unblinking. Until that point it is as lean and taut and ruthless in its brutal arithmetic as anything Hitchcock or indeed most other filmmakers have ever done.

An opening shot of the Phoenix skyline slowly, slowly swirls in on and finally enters from the outside a cheap hotel room where a midday tryst between Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) and Sam Loomis (played by John Gavin), her jut-jawed lunk of a boyfriend, is just then being concluded. Marion Crane is a good girl, you know that because she's prowling around the hotel room in white underwear, and talking seriously about marrying Sam. But still, she's prowling around in her underwear (Sam is recently divorced, we finally learn, and under a heavy yoke of alimony). "They also pay who meet in hotel rooms," Marion Crane murmurs, trying to make the case that she's already taken on the for-better-or-worse of a marriage, as ready for the commitment (and pleasures) as anyone could be. When Sam scoffs that she can lick the stamps when he sends his alimony payments, Marion says, "I'll lick the stamps."

Later, back at work, she finds herself on the wrong end of a leering flirtation with an older man (played by Frank Albertson) flaunting a pile of cash, and even whose comments on the weather are somehow lascivious: "Hot as fresh milk!" On an impulse she finds a way to rob him. Back in her home, packing to get out of town, she's shown prowling around now in black underwear (or perhaps red—it's not easy to make out through the gray tones), because now she's a bad girl, even if her crime is for love. And thus begins the greatest low-speed chase sequence for 35 years, until O.J. Simpson and his buddy took a suitcase full of wigs and disguises and his white Ford Bronco and attempted to beat it to Mexico. (Once again a score by Bernard Herrmann is called on to perform yeoman's work in making Marion's flight so effective.)

By the time Marion spots the Bates Motel sign swimming out of nighttime rain it's likely plain to any and all that she is a doomed woman—no friends, no help, guilt heavy on her single woman's brow. These are facts about her that it doesn't take Norman Bates (played by a youthful and unsettling Anthony Perkins, who has perhaps never been better) long to figure out. Her false name on the register, her shifting stories of her circumstances, and finally her all but unambiguous acknowledgment of her guilt and her isolation quickly mark her as an ideal victim for a serial killer.

Perkins is so great because he's at once so boyishly charming and yet so disquieting and malevolent that he is almost perfectly creepy, establishing himself as one of the great screen villains, surrounded by his stuffed birds and with his peephole into Marion's room, where we can watch nearly as eagerly as him as Janet Leigh's clothes come off and she wraps herself in a sexy robe before heading into the bathroom to take her final shower.

For all his charm, Bates has an evident edge gnawing away at him, which never lets viewers relax in his presence, as when he responds to Marion's suggestion that he consider institutionalizing his mother, who is obviously troubled. He bristles, furious. "What do you know about caring?" he says. "People always mean well. The cluck their thick tongues, and shake their heads, and suggest, oh so very delicately..." It's not a comfortable moment, sequestered at that moment in Bates's parlor behind the office, eating a sandwich and milk while he watches her sardonically.

The appearance of Perkins also heralds the arrival of the film's unexpected humor, which is icy and cutting and very funny, one of its greatest and most enduring features, yet always careful, again, never to give away too many of the film's secrets. Some of the best jokes are not understood until later viewings, as when Bates, apologizing for the awkward position created by the fight that Marion has overheard him have with his mother, says, "My mother—what is the phrase?—she isn't quite herself today."

If the first half of Psycho stands as the greatest episode of Hitchcock's TV show ever, the second half for the most part is more typical of its humdrum output, as Marion's sister Lila (played by Vera Miles) and a private detective (played nicely by Martin Balsam) and Sam all put their heads together to try to solve the mystery of what happened to Marion. And solve it they do, of course, eventually, and then, as embellishment, as a kind of dessert for the gourmand, the psychiatrist (played by Simon Oakland) struts on to illuminate mysteries of serial murder itself. For me the best way to take this last scene is as another of Hitchcock's jokes, and in that light it's not a bad joke, though unfortunately as much as anything one at the expense of the squares watching. I suppose they don't deserve any better, but it's as cold as anything else here.

The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

2011-10-02T08:34:00.000-07:00

Even for someone without the formidable writing skills of Joan Didion there's a story of significant dimensions to be told here: A few days after Didion's daughter lapses into a coma for reasons not entirely clear, her husband of nearly 40 years, the writer John Gregory Dunne, suddenly suffers and dies from a cardiac event in their home, which Didion witnesses just as she's about to serve dinner. Her daughter's health remains precarious over the year that follows. Because of Didion's and Dunne's reputation, or even fame, there's an odd blending here of facile gossipy fascination and genuinely gripping story of human pathos. As we have seen, Didion has spent much of her career trafficking in highly personalized anxiety and dread, and here she is, out of a long life of evident privilege, suddenly confronted with samples of some her worst nightmares—some of the worst nightmares of anyone. I found my sympathies thus not entirely unmixed, though more often than not feeling for her, and achingly so. One doctor very early, shortly after the death of her husband—I mean literally in the few hours following—refers to her as "a pretty cool customer," which rings true in every way imaginable. Yet her life's nonfiction work, even as it maintains the pose, makes apparent that she is actually anything but. Acting as if she is "a pretty cool customer" is simply what she knows to do. Typically enough, for example, she reports, and with a good deal of lucidity, on how she is unable to throw away Dunne's shoes because he will need them when he comes back, even as she more than readily acknowledges how well she knows he is not coming back. Even at the end of the book, when she is writing a year and more out from the events, she notes in passing that she still has the shoes. Things like that make this finely observed work, to a remarkable degree. Sudden death, even long-expected death, does have a way of throwing one into such mindsets. The denial of reality is very clear in such moments. One may continue to function entirely as someone who has accepted reality, yet the denial rages on inside, consciously or not. Didion, thrown willy-nilly into the greatest extremities of her life, reports back with exactly the kind of poise and eye for the telling detail and sharply etched prose that we have come to expect from her in even the most dispassionate areas. It makes me suspect what a lifeline her work must be for her, and I find myself respecting her for it all the more.

In case it's not at the library.

The Complete Thom Bell Sessions (1977)

2011-10-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

It may seem vaguely comical to label something that amounts to all of six songs totaling just 35 minutes of music "complete," but complete is complete, and the reference here is to an EP released in 1979 with just three of these tracks. This complete set, though recorded in 1977, didn't come along until the end of the '80s, well after Elton John had settled into the calcified glamour he has occupied so well over recent decades and producer Thom Bell had registered his greatest work with the Delfonics, Stylistics, and Spinners (who show up here singing background vocals). Those soul acts rank way high for me among those from the late '60s into the '70s and Elton John of course is a lifelong favorite, so this was a bit of a natural when I fished it out of a slush pile circa 1989. Yet it nevertheless came as a surprise as I had not been particularly aware of the EP and its associations with Bell and the Spinners. The truth is I was about done with Elton John by 1979, though now and then I took a chance on one of his albums, such as 21 at 33 (which usually proved disappointing). The general thrust is apparent just from scanning the titles, where the word "love" appears in four of the six, though not always without something of a bite: "Nice and Slow," "Country Love Song," "Shine on Through" (which showed up in different form on 1978's A Single Man), "Mama Can't Buy You Love," "Are You Ready for Love," and "Three Way Love Affair." Elton gets songwriting credit for three of them, and Bell also for three; the only one they collaborated on was "Nice and Slow," with Bernie Taupin chipping in lyrics. Two songs come in close to or over eight minutes, and the rest are about five minutes each, so there's some stretching out here but not to unruly lengths. To me there's a slightly muffled sound to the recording, as if the seals were fixed too tight and the oxygen depleting, which something could maybe be done about in a remastering, or perhaps that's the way Bell and John intended it. It's not that distracting—the main attraction is the late-disco sound verging on adult contemporary that moves so confidently through everything here. Those are a couple of genres where it's all too easy to go wrong and where so many before and since have wrecked. But there's something sweet and poignant about this set, a feeling that history waited too long but it's good to have at last, a feeling that persists. I still hear these songs as revelation and surprise, with some sadness I can't quite pin down, nonetheless inflected, enlivened, heartened, even redeemed by the joy they bear. It's one '70s set that seems likely to quietly endure a good long time.

The General (1926)

2011-09-30T08:51:00.001-07:00

USA, 107 minutes
Directors: Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton
Writers: Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, Al Boasberg, Charles Henry Smith, William Pittenger, Paul Girard Smith
Photography: Bert Haines, Devereaux Jennings
Editors: Buster Keaton, Sherman Kell
Cast: Buster Keaton, Marion Mack

With the exception of Charlie Chaplin I have long tended to struggle with comedies of a certain vintage, those pratfall-driven productions usually headed up by various familiar names: Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, Harold Lloyd, the Keystone Kops, even the Marx Brothers all tend to be lost on me. And I'm quite sincere in my use of the word "lost"—I envy all those who get the kind of pleasure and solace out of them that I seem to find only with Chaplin. Even Woody Allen, at one point as important a filmmaker for me as anyone (hard to remember now sometimes!), has several times made his case for the Marx Brothers. But I have only barely glimpsed any of that for myself so far.

The Three Stooges, to briefly wander off on a tangent, is something of a different matter. They don't do much for me any more, but as a kid and for years into being an adult, I did find them very funny, particularly in the company of others—the sound effects, the silly ways they carried on, the fierce concentration on their various cruelties. I remember attending a ballgame once, it must have been in the '80s, where a Three Stooges clip was played between innings. I was struck, looking around, at how hard so many of the men were laughing, and at how cross so many of the women looked. There's something about the Three Stooges that really divides by gender.

Buster Keaton is often opposed to Charlie Chaplin in a kind of Beatles/Stones or Coke/Pepsi manner of systematic binary duality, and he is another one who seems lost on me for the most part, though my exposure to him even still remains fairly limited. But I will say that I have had an interesting experience with The General.

A couple of years ago I got my first look at it, alone in my living room, courtesy Netflix. Not a laugh disturbed my cats even once. Not a smile was even barely cracked. I appreciated some of the comments I had read ahead of time about the elaborate stunts making it as much an early action-style picture as a comedy, but I wasn't entirely convinced either, as nothing about it delivered the kind of edge-of-seat experience I expect from the action genre. I recognized that Keaton's stunts could be ingenious, often evidently intricate in the way he got them to work, such as various tricks he pulls with moving sizeable pieces of lumber about on or within the vicinity of trains in motion. So perhaps a few scattered moments of interest, of no longer than a few minutes apiece.

A few months later I had the opportunity to see it in a theater with a big crowd. It was a fundraising event and the expectation by the organizers was that it would likely be so poorly attended by informed cineastes they felt obliged to trot someone out ahead of time to make a few general educational remarks about silent films: "They couldn't record sound at that time or it was too expensive. The dialogue is shown between pictures on what are called intertitles. It won't be like movies you are used to now. You may have to allow yourself some patience." A handful of musicians had been pressed into service to provide music, and even before the lights went down it was apparent they were having a great time, dressed up in Civil War garb and carrying on with one another excitedly in an impromptu orchestra pit right in front of the stage the screen hung over.

Lights down. Film on. That house rocked with laughter from beginning to end, from the first sight of the picture Buster Keaton carries in his jacket of himself standing in front of his beloved General, a train engine, until the last bit of slapstick at the end with swords and vulnerable butts. They really loved it—and I enjoyed myself too. The laughter was infectious, and so was the surprise shared by so many there at the sophistication of those stunts. Even such relatively small matters as the unexpected stupidity in the clutch of Keaton's otherwise arrogant girlfriend (played by Marion Mack), and Keaton's evident attempts to moderate his reaction to it, sparkled in ways they just had not before.

For the first time I had some appreciation of Keaton's much ballyhooed "stone face," which is not so much inexpressive as it is self-consciously composed, the expressiveness leaking out in tiny gestures such as the way he blinks his eyes more rapidly to register reactions to train cars disappearing and reappearing, and entire armies suddenly swimming into his field of vision. Bits of business, such as with a cannon that gradually slips into a position where it is actually aimed directly at him and he is suddenly in great danger, are handled with a good deal of adroit, compressed energy. And some of the set pieces, such as the collapse of a burning bridge under the weight of a train attempting to cross it, may fairly be considered spectacular.

At the same time I could see and remember what had seemed so dull before I felt the pleasure of being with a crowd caught up in the moment and enjoying itself thoroughly, the air of discovery and the simple, classic ways that entertainers apply the tricks of comedy. I found myself laughing often even as I thought to myself, in a moderately scolding way, "This is not actually all that funny."

Watching it again yesterday, alone once again in my living room, I found the process inverted. Once again very little laughter, but more smiles this time, remembering how something had worked on the crowd before, and hence on me. I'm not sure what this says about the bedrock of my critical point of view, let alone about the unchanging standards of cinema classics. I know that a certain feeling of comfort accompanies The General for me now, and I suspect it will from here on out. That, in turn, makes me wish that I could attend packed-house charity events every month, every week even, with the films of the Marx Brothers and Laurel & Hardy and all the others. I want all those people there again to help me appreciate these pictures as much as I suddenly, and unexpectedly, find myself appreciating The General.

40. T. Rex, "Ballrooms of Mars" (1972)

2011-09-28T09:07:00.000-07:00

(listen)

I know Marc Bolan almost surely qualifies as superstar to most, at least those of a certain age, but somehow I get the feeling he's been overlooked in the long decades since his death in 1977, by which point that star was certainly fading anyway. That's probably on me, coming rather late to the best of T. Rex, which to me are the matching pair of albums from the early '70s, Electric Warrior and The Slider. No one else sounds like this. They are studies in smoldering understatement, cool bravado, tempered joy, and a hedonism restrained only by unknown laws of comportment, strictly enforced, all of it burnished to a fine buff. "Ballrooms of Mars" comes from The Slider, which I like a little better—but only because it's the one I've ended up playing the most frequently—and it's a nearly perfect example of the things that Bolan could do so well. (I hasten to add that if you like this at all you shouldn't waste another minute about getting either or both of the albums. They are fine.) I particularly like how everything about it is so casually deliberate, from the studied name-dropping (Bob Dylan, Alan Freed, John Lennon) to the science-fiction setting implied in its name to the various fashion inventories to the hoary old call to "Rock!" Everything is as cool as can be even as it manages to build itself up to a colossal head of steam. By the time Bolan commands us to "Rock!" and sends the tune sprawling into nether regions of the solar system, tumbling and spinning slo-mo in a place absent all gravity—well, I really don't see how it's possible for anyone to do anything but exactly that.

41. Hole, "I Think That I Would Die" (1994)

2011-09-27T08:04:00.000-07:00

(listen)

I have always been a sucker for a good drama, and among other things this delivers one of the great declarations of "Fuck you" in all of rock 'n' roll. This one's personal—well, they all are with Courtney Love, but you know what I mean—it rolls up all the grievances she forever nurses about feminist backlash and unfair and you wouldn't with anyone else and why me and low self-esteem and there should have been something about Olympia, Washington, and all the fans and sycophants not appreciative (read: ingratiating) enough, and football players, and John Cheever, and thick meat sandwiches with ketchup. The usual upchuck of association, sung calculatedly out of key. Mostly this is a locus for all the seething resentment she bore over the baby Bean and Child Protective Services and so-called friends who narc'ed her out and who knows what else. But that whole episode. On that level it's just about as authentic as I've ever heard her. That's, I believe, why the chant goes, "I want my baby / Where is the baby? / I want my baby / Who took my baby?" The mumbled, "It's / Not / Yours" before the great volcanic eruption. The point is it's cathartic, like the album, but with a particularly fine point, which somehow never seems to wear away. She really seems to mean it. For a few naked moments the self-centeredness is deliberately cast off—no doubt for self-serving motives, but done all the same. And there she is, with a great band at its peak churning away behind her, genuine: "There is no milk / There is no milk / There is no milk."

Best American Crime Reporting 2007

2011-09-25T06:46:00.000-07:00

Linda Fairstein is the editor of this volume—a former Manhattan prosecutor who has gone on to writing crime fiction. I haven't read any of her novels but I do remember her appearance on "Murder by the Book," the old Court TV (now the lamentable TruTV) show, which featured crime-fiction authors as guest hosts. Canceled too soon, it was actually one of the better true-crime shows in recent years, because the cases were often so interesting. Fairstein focused her prosecutorial career on crimes of violence against women and children, but unfortunately wound up on the wrong side of things in the Central Park jogger case, winning the wrongful convictions, later overturned, of a handful of teenage African-Americans. There's a cautionary tale there. But her collection nevertheless stands up to all the others in this excellent series, many pieces coming from a global point of view with evident interest in issues related to terrorism and public safety, not surprising for a New York official. Mark Fass contributes a fascinating mystery story for "New York" magazine about a person who disappeared in New York City on September 10, 2001, and the byzantine efforts to determine her fate. The difficulties of it lend perspective to the scope of 9/11. Then there's the harrowing story by Tom Junod for "Esquire," now done up on true-crime TV, of Katrina and a pair of nursing home operators who stayed behind in the storm and attempted to do the right thing, and found themselves in a lot of trouble for their pains. There's a clinically precise and chilling account by C.J. Chivers, also for "Esquire," of the incident in September 2004 in which Chechen terrorists took control for three days of a school in Beslan, Russia. And there are the usual round-up of quotidian incidents, with their horrors and charms alike: a master thief of rare books ... grown women seduced by 14-year-olds online ... quiet roommates who turn out to be international jewel thieves ... priests who kill. The most interesting for me this time around was "The Monster of Florence," a bizarre and twisting tale of the investigation into a serial killer who operated in Italy in the '70s and '80s. The case remained open for years and incidentally almost devours professional true-crime writer Douglas Preston, author of the "Atlantic" piece that appears here, and Italian journalist Mario Spezi, with whom Preston collaborated on a private investigation and later a book about the case. At the time of this article the case was still open, but this reminds me, I still want to track down the book that came of it.

In case it's not at the library.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973)

2011-09-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

At one time, along about 1975, I was pretty sure Elton John was that decade's natural heir to Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Later I thought that was pretty ridiculous. But I guess the last laugh is on me when I look up the numbers in my Billboard book: There, on the list of 100 Top Artists 1955-2009, is Elton John at #4, behind Elvis, the Beatles, and Madonna (yes), and just ahead of Mariah Carey, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson. Wikipedia pipes up, somewhat tentatively, that this iconic double-LP package "has come to be regarded as Elton John's best and most popular album," noting that it's his best-selling anyway, with some 31 million copies moved. Checking around, I see that's good enough to put it in the vicinity of the top 20 all-time bestsellers, no small feat. So when I call it my favorite I understand that puts me with the rest of the unwashed, but at least I've pretty much thought as much since the day it came out. There has always been something a little bit different about Elton John, and I don't mean just that he was the only rock star of the time pretending to be gay who actually was gay. From his various folkie-cum-country-rock-raver postures early to the glittering glamour and pure pop insouciance on display here to the range seen across his strings of hits, he's a tough one to figure out. Me, I gave in entirely with this, a big pop confection that opens with an 11-minute suite in which you don't even hear his voice until nearly the 6:00 marker—that's "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding." It's followed by a valentine to Marilyn Monroe, "Candle in the Wind," so universally beloved and genuinely touching he was able to rework it in memory of Princess Diana after her death 24 years later, and a lot of people were grateful. Then the weird faux live glam of "Bennie and the Jets," a song I am still waiting to understand, but one that nevertheless continues to thrill me. Then the title song, which verily cracks it open: that's it, this is all a big fat hosanna to beauty in the face of debilitating nostalgia, knowing the moment would never be so right because, and perhaps he even knew this too on some level, the moment would always be so right, from that point forward. And on it goes: the luscious piano textures of "Grey Seal," the sassy rock 'n' roller "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," something about a made-up cowboy, "Roy Rogers," something about a made-up Depression-era gangster, "The Ballad of Danny Bailey (1909-1934)," and something about "I've Seen That Movie Too." My favorite song has always been "Sweet Painted Lady," even recognizing all the execrable prostitute clichés it bears. It's so goddam fucking beautiful it makes me want to cry in spite of everything, and that's how the whole album affects me, when the moment is right, and often when it isn't. We don't know how many right moments this guy has left, except we've already seen that movie too. And now it's 40 years later.

Taxi Driver (1976)

2011-09-23T08:05:00.000-07:00

USA, 113 minutes
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: Paul Schrader
Photographer: Michael Chapman
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editors: Tom Rolf, Melvin Shapiro
Cast: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd, Albert Brooks, Leonard Harris, Peter Boyle, Martin Scorsese

A good way to start an argument is to ask people what's the best picture by director Martin Scorsese. We have already seen that Raging Bull is the consensus favorite of critics, and there are cases to be made for Mean Streets, The King of Comedy, GoodFellas, and others. But it's not hard for me to see how Taxi Driver deserves to rank very high on this list. As strange and brave and unique and enthralling as it is from beginning to end, it's also one of the most influential movies from an influential period, and its reverberations continue to be felt to this day (most recent: Ryan Gosling's brilliant turn in Drive).

In fact, that image of Travis Bickle we all know so well now, the tormented loner waiting for “a real rain” to “come and wash all this scum off the streets” and who ultimately guns up and takes matters into his own hands, has recurred one way or another in film after film after film over the 35 years since its release. Matt Zoller Seitz listed some of them in a recent slideshow article for Salon: Mona Lisa, Evil Dead II, The Killer, The Fan, I Shot Andy Warhol, Fight Club, The Brave One, others. You can probably think of a few more yourself.

As Jonathan Rosenbaum famously pointed out, Taxi Driver brings a tremendous amount of talent to bear in one place. There’s Scorsese, of course, and the iconic performance of Robert De Niro (as well as Jodie Foster, and Cybill Shepherd, and Peter Boyle, and Leonard Harris, and…). There’s also screenwriter Paul Schrader, whose lifelong themes of tortured guilt and a bottomless yearning for redemption find perhaps their best expressions here, reputedly springboarding off the diaries of would-be George Wallace assassin Arthur Bremer. And, finally, there’s the Bernard Herrmann soundtrack—it's not just good, it's arguably the one element that sets this picture apart all by itself, above all the other worthy entries in the Scorsese canon.

Bernard Herrmann almost has to be taken as a kind of force of nature when one steps back to consider his prolific output across the breadth of his career—he wrote the scores for a good many of Hitchcock's best pictures, including that incredible run in the late '50s, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. He virtually invented the science fiction cliché of the theremin in his score for The Day the Earth Stood Still. He wrote the music for Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and for a dozen or so episodes each of "Twilight Zone" and the "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour." He even contributed to The Magnificent Ambersons and Citizen Kane. Taxi Driver is the last picture he worked on, shortly before his death toward the end of 1975, and it's a doozy. From the very first image, a brilliant and eerie shot of the yellow cab at bumper level, gliding through the fog, his work sets the mood and creates the unmistakable feeling of stepping into a dark, mysterious place where the usual rules are not going to apply.

In many ways Taxi Driver does indeed defy the old saw about too many cooks and the broth. Director Martin Scorsese was still in a phase of his career where he positively attacked his material with an unholy energy only slightly mitigated by his artful strategies of storytelling. One of the great pleasures of Taxi Driver is all the small devices he exploits to tell the story, such as a simple pan away from the back of Robert De Niro as he is pleading on the phone for another chance with Cybill Shepherd's Betsy, pivoting the vantage to gaze down a long hallway. It's entirely unexpected, at once as if the camera is embarrassed for the loser taxi driver in his shame, and averting its eyes, even as it suggests the hollowness at the core of the character.

De Niro is huge in this, of course, virtually pulling off a one-man show in its totality: youthful and occupying the frame with preternatural confidence, well before his smoldering stick of rage had turned to shtick. With Mean Streets, this is where he perfected what he would later abuse. The rage crawls under his skin at such shallow levels it is virtually rippling under the surface and distorting his features. The way he pauses and chokes on his thoughts and confusions even as he attempts to express them ("What's moonlighting?") works to create an indelible portrait of a man under enormous self-imposed pressure, a chilling picture of the mass murderer who everyone remembers as someone who was quiet and kept to himself.

The whole cast is great: Cybill Shepherd, perfectly deployed as the unattainable WASP goddess. Jodie Foster, a 13-year-old playing a 13-year-old runaway turned prostitute with sickening precision. Peter Boyle, the swaggering cabbie all the others look up to, a self-evidently pathetic pathological liar with an empty life of his own. Harvey Keitel, menacing and long-haired and so slimy you feel like you need a shower after even a minute or two of screen time. Albert Brooks, a privileged innocent working on the political campaign of Charles Palantine, a pal of Cybill Shepherd and a person hopelessly out of touch with the evil in this world. Leonard Harris as Palantine, the stereotyped limousine liberal who spouts tired old platitudes the way the rest of us belch and fart. Even the nervous-talking Scorsese himself takes a small walk-on role that is played perfectly.

The first time I saw Taxi Driver, I walked out of the theater stunned. In the short term, almost as a defense against its extraordinary power, I raised complaints about what seemed to me then (and still does, if I think about it enough) the overweening precious irony of its ending. In the long term, I think it's the same kind of complaint I had with the "Rosebud" element of Citizen Kane—that is, it doesn't quite work, doesn't quite make the picture end with the flourish that appears to be intended. But it doesn't matter in the context of the totality. Scorsese would work this same territory again a few years later in The King of Comedy, complete with iconic Robert De Niro performance and ironic ending, and in a way that helped me put it in perspective. The case can be made that these endings veer toward the cheap. But there's no denying the overwhelming power of all that has preceded.

Over the years I often forget some of the many small-bore pleasures that Taxi Driver has to offer, such as Herrmann's soundtrack, which only makes this picture a very happy surprise for me every time I look again. A restored version made the rounds earlier this year, a night out at the movies I found as thrilling as any other so far this year, and a good deal more than many others. Taxi Driver is always worth seeing again because there’s always more to see in it.

42. B-52's, "Rock Lobster" (1979)

2011-09-21T08:04:00.000-07:00

(listen)

You may not know it, but this prototypical masterpiece of new wave pop music—that halcyon form which exalted the "three-minute pop song" above all else—actually goes on for nearly seven minutes in the album version, hitting every silly note and striking every silly posture it can possibly think to do. It appears, more or less, to be a song about a beach party that turns into a scene from a bad science fiction movie. "It wasn't a rock / It was a rock lobster." Aieee! The sea creatures, they want to dance too! Oh, wait, they're cute. And so on. The sheer oddity of the B-52's is so beguiling that I never noticed how weird it actually is until Fred Schneider made his attempt to accommodate the grunge moment in the '90s. The sound is quick and nimble and cartoony and almost skeletal in its function, bursting with melody and rhythm as much as the self-conscious jokiness, single-string figures on a guitar joining forces with a jerky yet loping bass, piercing, percussive organ notes, and tip-tap drumming. The boisterous interplay of vocals from Fred Schneider (who sounds like he stepped off the set of a musical, playing the small-town geek) with Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson is largely what creates the illusion that you have somehow wandered into a basement rehearsal session and/or impromptu house party. And while I am loath as ever to endorse music that must be studied, I must admit this now takes me a time or two through before I begin to fully connect, as I recall once doing instantly. It's just very, very strange music, as butt-simple as it appears to be at first. The point seems to be to dance, and that's usually what I find myself doing in short order. This is one of the best songs that I know to hear in public places—loud.

43. Sister Sledge, "Lost in Music" (1979)

2011-09-20T08:16:00.000-07:00

(listen)

The Chic brothers, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, never strayed far from a fairly predictable set of lyrical concerns, which is one of the reasons I love them as much as I do: living well, experiencing joy, and dancing. Sometimes feeling sad. That about covers it. One subset dedicated itself narrowly to the pleasures of music itself—the 1983 "In Love With Music" by the flagship Chic is a good example. But this is the best, from Sister Sledge, one of their greatest side projects, particularly with the We Are Family album that houses it. It feels like a statement of purpose, a virtual manifesto. All the usual elements are in place: bass and funky guitar chops locked in groove, the powerful, sweet undertow, the keyboards/strings establishing a swirling, soaring context, and then the glorious harmonies and interplay of the Sledge sisters, who sound vaguely hypnotized and helpless before the power of the music in which they declare they are lost—and in which they are obviously fully engaged. It's inspiring in its single-mindedness: "We're lost in music / Feel so alive / I quit my 9 to 5." The verses get down to details, elaborating on the pleasures of performance and throwing everything away for it: "Some people ask me / What are you gonna be / Why don't you go get a job, uh-uh / All that I could say / I won't give up my music / Not me, not now, no way, no how, oh...oh..." There's even a throwaway reference to "Suspicious Minds" ("caught in a trap")—who knows what the hell it's doing there. To me it's just more evidence of the sheer abandon to music itself, the abstracted ideal, an underlining of the point simply because they can. Simply because they saw the opportunity and did.

How to Be Alone (2002)

2011-09-18T07:57:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Franzen's immediate follow-on to his big commercial breakthrough, The Corrections, was this collection of essays. Most were published before the massive cultural event that the third novel became, and many after a literary polemic he published in 1996 that came to be known as "the 'Harper's' essay." Franzen has a deceptive knack for stirring up trouble in and around literary circles and I came to this more interested in his account of the dust-up he had with Oprah Winfrey, "Mr. Difficult," a late add to the paperback edition. On its publication, The Corrections was named as a selection of Winfrey's book club, a distinction that virtually guaranteed bestseller-level sales all on its own, but Franzen spurned the notice, concerned that it would turn off the kind of audience he had hoped the book would find—"male," as he put it. Winfrey in turn rescinded her offer to him to appear on her show. It was altogether an unpleasant episode for all concerned, even as it was easy enough, for me anyway, to see either side of it. Franzen shows in his consideration of it that he's capable of a good deal of soul-searching and honesty, admitting that he was as uncomfortable with Winfrey's status as an arbiter of middlebrow taste as anything, even as he acknowledged the far-reaching effects of her endorsement and the harm he did himself by rejecting it. (Last year, following the publication of his fourth novel, Freedom, they resolved their differences and he appeared on her show to discuss them.) Franzen is similarly lucid and straightforward throughout this collection, whether recalling the death of his father, who was suffering from Alzheimer's, or thinking through the implications of supermax prisons, or grappling with the toxic and worsening patterns of the American political climate, or trying to set the terms for literary validity in this day and age. The "Harper's" essay, published originally as "Perchance to Dream" and appearing here in revised form as "Why Bother?," swirls around the arguments for a return to and/or calculated abandonment of the fiction of social realism. In the gap between, Franzen tells us in a foreword, his views had altered somewhat: "I used to consider it apocalyptically worrisome that Americans watch a lot of TV and don't read much Henry James," he recalls ruefully. As someone who worries about watching too much TV and not reading enough Henry James, but does very little to change that, I may be exactly the right audience for Franzen. I certainly know that I have liked nearly everything I've read by him, and this collection is probably as good a place as any to start. Well, no—The Corrections is probably the better place to start.

In case it's not at the library.

Houses of the Holy (1973)

2011-09-17T07:41:00.000-07:00

By the end of the '70s, under the sway of punk-rock and poor old beleaguered new wave pop music, I had come to loathe two bands above all others: the Eagles and Led Zeppelin. My distaste for Led Zeppelin had started in the aftermath of IV, which, paradoxically, perhaps I "loved too much" in its immediate moment. After the number of times I heard "Stairway to Heaven" on the radio began to approach approximately five figures the bloat and the exhaustion were unmistakable. And though I would later make a fetish of "Kashmir" for the most part I was done with them, their appeal for me on a long slow slide that would not bottom out until some point in the '80s. Thus I did not make the effort to acquaint myself with this until about 15 years after the fact, wondering at myself for even buying it at all the day I left the used record store with a copy. But lo and behold it struck like a lost treasure, full of pleasures great and small, and turned out to be one of the better purchases I made that day. I listened to it frequently for months. Listening again, I think a good deal of that was making my peace with a band I had loved, bitterly rejected for reasons good and bad, and come to rediscover. It sounds patchier to me now than I remember, and "The Crunge" very nearly torpedoes it. A kind of tribute to James Brown that can as well be heard as misplaced mockery, needless to say it's not in possession of even a fraction of Brown's funk power, no surprise from the anti-dance fancy-time-signatures Led Zeppelin, which raises questions about the decision to do it at all. A good deal of the bombast, the risk for which was ever the downside to their winning power equation, is replaced more often here by a decidedly softer side, gentle exercises in things that might almost be taken as ballads, except the power dynamics intrude on them, achieving a welcome balance, especially as the album opens and takes off: "The Song Remains the Same," "The Rain Song," and "Over the Hills and Far Away" are fine additions to their classic catalog. The second vinyl side loses its way some, though I think "Dancing Days" goes with their best, and I don't have the complaints about "D'yer Mak'er" that certain factions among the faithful do. "No Quarter" and "The Ocean" now suggest to me much of what was to come as the band left Atlantic and moved on to their own label: largely unfocused exercises with all too fleeting moments of clarion brilliance. I don't hate them any longer the way I did in 1979, but I haven't forgotten how I came to that position in the first place either.