Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Zora Neale Hurston’s classic of the Harlem Renaissance has followed a tortuous path in its relatively brief time. Poorly reviewed when published, Hurston was subsequently attacked on dignity grounds. Folks like Richard Wright were embarrassed by her celebrations of the culture of poor Blacks. The book went out of print. All of her books, novels, nonfiction anthropology collections from oral tradition, and a memoir, went out of print. She was working as a maid and substitute teacher at the end of her life. Their Eyes reads to me as somewhat disjointed and it is very thick with dialect. But there is great beauty in many of the descriptive passages, and Janie is a lively and always interesting character with lots of interesting characters and situations around her as she travels Florida pursuing her destiny. There is a hurricane scene that is amazing. Hurston died in 1960. There was an attempt to revive interest in her in the late ‘60s, in the context of the civil rights movement. That effort fizzled and her books again went out of print. In 1975 there was another attempt, in the context of second-wave feminism, and this one stuck. It started with an essay by Alice Walker published in Ms. magazine. Hurst’s books have been read, taught, and stayed in print ever since. I suspect Wright, whose Native Son is one of the great novels of the 20th century, may have been uncomfortable with the frank sexuality of Janie, who has no problem leaving her first marriage to marry her second husband without divorcing, and was otherwise perfectly faithful to her partners even when they mistreated her. The larger point may be that Janie’s first marriage was not really her choice, at age 17. Her grandmother picked him for her. The other two—both of whom die, with Janie still in her 40s in the present time of this novel—may have been odd unions and perhaps not her best options, but at least they are her own choices. It’s not hard to see how Their Eyes works better as feminism than civil rights. At any rate, it’s a rollicking tale that travels far in Florida. I like the setting very much, and parts of this shaggy tale are just knockout good.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“Son of Celluloid” (1984)

This might be the story that finally sold me on Clive Barker because it shows his impressive range with a variety of sources. It also has many of his flaws, for example starting slow with an arguably unnecessary overture piece. The story proper really starts when we get to the end of the night at a rundown repertory movie theater—the night’s show had been a spaghetti western double feature with Clint Eastwood. The only staff are Ricky the janitor, a big thinker and drug-taker, and Birdy the manager, who is 34 and overweight. A woman is waiting in the lobby for her date, who went to the restroom. Ricky goes to check on him and the Barker carnival whirs into existence. The restroom is not a restroom but has become a desert scene from a western movie and someone is firing gunshots at Ricky. The date has already been killed. Ricky has a very hard time getting back to the reality of the restroom and theater, and this is only the start of a phantasmagoric lunacy that unfolds as Ricky and Birdy try to close the theater for the night. There is a monster in there with them and it is so weird you really should get it from Barker in the story. It’s rooted in movie pop culture the way “New Murders in the Rue Morgue” is rooted in Edgar Allan Poe. But it is also all Barker. The gore proceeds logically, focusing on the organs with which we consume movies. Barker likes to go prolix—let him. He tends to close all open loops, which is good because he opens so many of them. I could complain about too much explaining, but not everything is explained and that’s good enough in that regard. The main thing, so often, is that you just don’t know where he’s going. You expect him to go for extremes, as the putative author of splatterpunk, but you can’t guess which ones. Sometimes it feels too loose and wild, but the appeal often remains wondering where he’s headed. I love this one because it doesn’t love just great cinema, but also the venues where it’s shown, or was once (the style of repertory theater I knew in the ‘70s and ‘80s is all but dead now). And what a monster this one has!

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 3 kindle)
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“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” (1948)

[2017 write-up here]

When I first encountered J.D. Salinger’s work as an adolescent, I was most impressed and often identified with the privileged voice of middle-class dread—all of the accoutrements and none of the shows of happiness. Later, Salinger’s uncanny abilities as a writer came to impress me most. He is amazingly skillful at making his narratives dense with layers of meaning. This one, for example, works fine at its most obvious level (almost too obvious!), a caustic lampoon of empty suburban ways of life. But there is much more going on here, and the details tell. Two 30something women are getting together for a catch-up. They drink the afternoon away, bemoaning their present lives and reminiscing about college days when they first met. Both were dropouts within the year. Eloise gripes about her husband and waxes nostalgic about a boyfriend named Walt. In what may be a retcon, which I don’t think is exactly Salinger’s style, Salinger later said it’s Walt Glass—another member of the Glass family, yes. To me Walt is the most important part of this story, not because he is a Glass but because he died in the war. I am starting to sense, for the first time, how significantly Salinger’s experience in the war as a combat soldier affected him and reverberates out in his work. War experience is also a main point in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (he does favor some long and silly titles, doesn’t he?). Seymour was plainly overwhelmed by the war. Walt died of it. Eloise loved him and misses him keenly, but there’s little room in her upscale life now for grief, especially not all these years later married to another man. Her friend, Mary Jane, is not much better off—divorced, a career woman in 1948—too late for the war years, too early for women’s liberation, her life is just as narrow and constricted as Eloise’s. “Uncle Wiggily” is a nickname Walt had for Eloise after she sprained her ankle. Now she lives in Connecticut, miserable and drinking herself into stupors regularly. She’s also awful to everyone around her, including her husband, daughter, and maid. Eloise and Mary Jane are not close friends. It’s not even clear they like each other much. They close the visit as evening comes down, passed out. Mary Jane was over two hours late, claiming she got lost. In fairness, I often get lost in the suburbs myself. But that’s partly because I have a seething resentment of the suburbs that distracts me. That’s the kind of dynamics on display between these two, profound and unprocessed disappointment and regrets, all surmised from dialogue and the scene-setting.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

France / USA, 134 minutes

Director: David Lynch

Writers: David Lynch, Robert Engels, Mark Frost

Photography: Ronald Victor Garcia

Music: Angelo Badalamenti

Editor: Mary Sweeney
Cast: Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Kyle MacLachlan, Chris Isaak, Kiefer Sutherland, David Lynch, Harry Dean Stanton, David Bowie, Miguel Ferrer, Grace Zabriskie, Phoebe Augustine, Eric DaRe, Heather Graham, Madchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, James Marshall, Julee Cruise, Lenny von Dohlen, Walter Olkewicz

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me has long been polarizing even for a David Lynch picture. It was widely dismissed at release. Halliwell’s makes the basic points: “Mystifyingly obscure and dull prequel to the TV series Twin Peaks, which tries one’s patience with its visions and precognitions.” In response, legions of David Lynch partisans have risen in fury, defending the pathos of the Laura Palmer story. It’s true that the picture comes with a full ration of Lynchian nonsense: The red room where people talk funny. The roadhouse on the edge of town that programs dream-pop and extremely hard rock. Heck, we don’t even see Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) until more than 30 minutes in. There’s a lot of things here that could go if you wanted to make this movie closer to 90 or 100 minutes, although I’m not sure it would be as effective. The nonsense kind of necessarily softens us for the harrowing reality behind it.

The story at the heart of Fire Walk With Me is not mystifyingly obscure at all, nor dull. It’s about child sexual abuse—what it looks like and how it feels for the victim. Laura is 17 and has been raped by her father (Ray Wise) since she was 12. Much of her behavior can be interpreted through this frame and it is not exotic or unusual. The picture is practically a clinical profile. What is happening to her is unthinkable, and therefore Laura tries to distance herself from it. She can’t believe it’s her father. The cognitive dissonance is too much. She displaces him with this “Bob” figure who creeps into her bedroom through the window. She disassociates. The result is an ongoing bundle of contradictions. She is a volunteer in bobby socks for Meals on Wheels as well as a hooker for rent out at the roadhouse. She uses sex, drugs, and the approval of others to cope, as solace. Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) sums her up: “She’s in high school. She is sexually active. She’s using drugs. She’s crying out for help.”

Oddity (2024)

Oddity is a stylish, low-key horror exercise that mixes up a dash of folk horror with a notably impressive performance by Carolyn Bracken as identical twins. They are so distinct it’s hard to know they’re even sisters, let alone twins, let alone the same person. One, Dani Timmins, was married to the night physician at a nearby mental institution in the country, Dr. Ted Timmins (Gwilym Lee). Early in the movie she is brutally murdered one night by an escaped lunatic while Timmins is at work, the work of the one-eyed Olin Boole (Tadgh Murphy), subject of a 2013 short by director and writer Damian McCarthy. The other, Darcy Odello, is a witchy self-proclaimed psychic who is blind and does not believe that Boole killed her sister. Darcy’s specialty is reading objects, preferably personal items like rings and watches that have touched the skin of the people about whom she draws information. She runs an antique shop that sells only cursed items (one is the toy monkey used by Stephen King in his story “The Monkey”). It’s no place for shoplifters. The curses are removed only with legitimate purchases. Sometimes, she says, customers return with purloined items, begging her to take them back. Within a year of his wife’s death Dr. Timmins is already living with another woman, a woman he works with and knew before the murder. Darcy does not like this development and inserts herself into the life of Dr. Timmins and his new gal, Yana (Caroline Menton). She shows up at their spooky weird mansion with a gift: a wooden life-size statue of a man that is grotesque and horrific. This is basically the folk horror element, drawn, says McCarthy, from Jewish lore about golems. Oddity is unlikely to send anyone into paroxysms of terror but it has its share of jump scares, which are not entirely cheap, and a pervasive air of dread. Bracken modulates her performance—Darcy is generally meek and mild, but there’s a great deal going on underneath that and it peers out effectively. She can be quite unexpectedly fierce and commanding. The last image is almost perfect, set up across the length of the movie and presented slowly, quietly, playing with our expectations—and then delivering.

“The War Prayer” (1905)

This very short story by Mark Twain is painfully obvious, although I am sympathetic with its views and have even had my own experience that resonates with it. When I say very short I mean it—under five pages. Better to call it a parable complete with readymade moral, as it was written in response to US imperial adventuring in progress for the previous decade. A preacher on a Sunday morning is giving volunteers the patriotic sendoff. War fever is in the air. Then a strange man no one knows steps up, saying he is a messenger from God sent to finish the prayer. It’s more or less a depiction of what they’re praying for from the enemy’s viewpoint—death, dismemberment, and destruction. My experience like this happened shortly after 9/11—on the following Friday, 9/14, which President Bush Jr. had designated as a “day of remembrance.” Fair enough. It also happened to be the 20th anniversary of the death of my mother, and though I had little regard for the Bush-Cheney administration I was shaken up like most people by the array of 9/11 events. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head for weeks of those thousands of people crushed under tons of rubble. And the images of that day have been branded into many of us as well—the planes hitting, the towers collapsing, people leaping to their deaths to get away from fire. They are so traumatic, and have become so sacred, that it is still considered in poor taste to speak of them. Don’t call 9/11 iconic or the greatest anything. Anyway, feeling the need to be with others on this day of remembrance, I attended a public gathering in downtown Seattle that featured a lot of political mucky-mucks who were evidently lost about how to respond. They were uniformly uninspired and uninspiring. The moments of silence were the best part. They prayed. One talked about the guns of retribution roaring, which disappointed me. I wish the strange man in “The War Prayer” had been there to speak. He had things to say to a bunch of these people that they really needed to hear. Yes, they are painfully obvious things. But even so they don’t necessarily reach anyone. Twain never published “The War Prayer” in his lifetime. Friends and loved ones urged him not to, saying it would be taken as sacrilegious. Thus has it ever been.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)
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It’s a Wonderful Life (2006)

The 2006 version of Chris Stamey’s first solo album is what’s on offer on the internet today and that seems to be fine with Stamey, who remixed a couple of the songs from his curious 1982 release (the cover image above is from the ’82 LP), included three of the four songs from his 1984 Instant Excitement EP (minus the John Lennon cover, maybe a licensing issue), and for good measure added two alternate mixes of Wonderful Life songs and another from his 1991 LP Fireworks, “Something Came Over Me.” I was infatuated with the first version of It’s a Wonderful Life in the early ‘80s. Later my LP went missing and I never turned it up again. Thus, from memory, I must note that the remix of “Never Enters My Mind” seems inferior to the original, at least on first listens. I have no problem with the other remix from the original, “Face of the Crowd,” and, indeed, I’m already getting used to the new “Never Enters My Mind.” This 2006 release, which I somehow missed, is a reasonable approximation of a most peculiar solo album with a bunch of extra stuff. Stamey had gone from a sideman with Alex Chilton in the late ‘70s to playing in the band Sneakers with Mitch Easter to a principal with Peter Holsapple in the dBs, co-author of that band’s great first two albums. Stamey seemed to be working—and generally has all along—in a certain indie alternative pop mode where melody and the three-minute song are prized with smidges of feedback and noise (and sometimes smidges of sentiment, as on his Christmas albums). It’s a Wonderful Life—I think it’s just him overdubbing himself—suggests Stamey may have been more the force for racket in the dBs. It clunks and sprawls at slow pace like a New Orleans parade going down the line, with Stamey’s variously agonized vocals declaiming over it. The drumkit squats over it all, thundering. The album was early efforts by Stamey at production (the album is credited as “directed” by Stamey and recorded by Mitch Easter), so perhaps there’s some beginner’s luck at making all this work in almost a hypnotic way. You listen to it a few times and it gets to you. Stamey’s gift for melody does not fail him, as “Never Enters My Mind” (new and old), “Depth of Field,” and the title song are absolutely top of the line. I want to complain about “Get a Job,” which is not the Silhouettes 1957 sha-na-na hit but instead a cover of “Tobacco Road.” I’m still too scarred by too recently hearing the “Tobacco Road” cover by War with Eric Burdon. Points for prescience of a kind on “Brushfire in Hoboken,” where immigrants are blamed for a fire. The extra extras in the 2006 release are nice to have, notably the “Violin Version” of the title song with sawing and extra-added robot rhythms that somehow remind me of Harry Smith songs. I think it’s the shades of inexpertness. It’s a Wonderful Life—extremely odd, perhaps for fans only, but I found it worth the reunion revisit.

Barbarian (2022)

[2022 review here]

Bulgaria / USA. 102 minutes

Director/writer: Zach Cregger

Photography: Zach Kuperstein

Music: Anna Drubich, Ronettes

Editor: Joe Murphy

Cast: Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgard, Justin Long, Matthew Patrick Davis, Richard Brake, Jaymes Butler, Kate Nichols

(spoilers) Since at least 2013 and Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, Detroit’s amazing deterioration in areas such as Brightmoor has been there to be used as a powerful visual element for anyone willing to venture into them. Capitalism isn’t doing anything about it and whole blocks are going all the way back to nature, with barest hints of the decrepit decaying houses where people used to live. Barbarian makes good use of the wreckage. Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at night to her Airbnb destination in a pouring rainstorm and never gets a good look at the neighborhood until next morning, when it is almost as shocking for us as it is for her. The camera takes its time swiveling and panning and showing us everything it can see.

Tess is in Detroit for a job interview with a documentary filmmaker but already she’s in over her head by the whims of fate. The house at 476 Barbary has been double-booked and the other renter is already in there with the key. It’s an Airbnb nightmare. A large convention in town makes available hotel rooms scarce. The guy already there, Keith (Bill Skarsgard), doesn’t seem threatening, but you never know. Director and writer Zach Cregger reportedly based a lot of Keith and other males in Barbarian on a book by security specialist Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear, which details warning signals of dangerous men. If alarm bells are going off for Tess—and they are—they are going off for us as well through all the uncomfortable conversations that lead to Tess agreeing to stay there overnight. We won’t learn it for a while, but Keith is the least of her worries.

“The Autopsy” (1980)

David G. Hartwell, editor of The Dark Descent, was high on Michael Shea at the time the anthology was published in 1987. Shea’s Nifft the Lean won a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1983. Hartwell compares Shea to H.P. Lovecraft and that seems about right—Shea even wrote a couple of tales set in the Cthulhu universe (then again, in the 20th century who didn’t?). The connection is easy to see in this long, dense, vividly detailed story. Hartwell classifies it as science fiction and perhaps partly because of that I also thought of the movie Alien, which came out the year before this story. The aliens here are also small like they are in the 1982 picture Liquid Sky, which in turn may also have been influenced by this story. It’s not clear exactly what the aliens in “The Autopsy” are looking for but it doesn’t seem to be anything good. Brute survival is one part of it. The alien we encounter has been on Earth for a while, taking possession of bodies and sucking the blood and life out of them, as needed. It’s not a vampire story in any other way, but it does have a certain element of cruelty that is at once gothic, modern, and very unsettling. And there’s no Kevin McCarthy to stand around shouting, "Listen to me! You're next! They're already here!" I don’t want to get distracted by categorizing, but I do think it's completely fair to call this story horror (ditto Alien, ditto Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Our main guy, a 57-year-old doctor with stomach cancer, has been called to a small mining town to perform autopsies of victims in a mysterious and suspicious explosion at the mine. The corpses are stored in an abandoned ice factory on the edge of town. It’s the middle of the night. As with Lovecraft’s work, another fair point of comparison is that “The Autopsy” requires patience and a continuing willingness to give yourself over to it. The gore is rich and plentiful, all dolled up in arcane medical / biological terminology. You can’t say the title doesn’t warn you. In the Lovecraft vein, Shea even includes a reference to going mad from an experience, and it’s better than most such Lovecraft scenes (sans “tittering,” which I admit was one of Lovecraft’s better recurring word choices). Lovecraft’s characters driven to madness are often a little unintentionally comical. There is no hint of laughs in “The Autopsy.” It is relentlessly grim. It goes to mind-bending places that are similar to those in Aleister Crowley’s “The Testament of Magdalen Blair.” It’s a regular head fuck. Recommended.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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Carole King’s Tapestry (2021)

Loren Glass is an English professor at the University of Iowa. Born approximately in the ‘60s he came to Carole King and Tapestry by way of hippie parents and stepparents. I think his appreciations are sincere but they felt a little too pious for my taste. He does a good job of locating King and the album within their contexts, rock ‘n’ roll close to the moment it became rock and of course the singer-songwriter tradition and feminism. Some things I hadn’t really known before: Carole King was born Carol Klein, and Tapestry is her third solo album, following her flight to the West Coast from New York in the ‘60s. I’ve never known those first two albums. Though Glass has ties to rock critics such as Ann Powers, for better or worse he has little of the spirit. Admittedly the spirit can often be loud-mouthed braying. But I felt Glass was circumspect and respectful to a fault. On the other hand it may be the best way to approach the album. It’s a favorite of mine (and a million others) for various personal reasons. I still consider “It’s Too Late” one of the greatest pop songs ever made. My biggest complaint about this 33-1/3 volume is that it overdoes the footnotes—nearly 200 of them, usually bare citations, and often not useful. This is not the first 33-1/3 I’ve seen with citations, but Glass may have set the record for sheer numbers. I’m just too easily distracted by them in this form, too inured to the chatty kind that has something to add. My favorite section was “Trilogy,” covering King’s first three solo albums, which she later called a trilogy. It’s a nice way of ambling into Tapestry itself and Glass provides a very neat analysis. He also—as one must—addresses her background as one of the great Brill Building songwriters of the early ‘60s. There’s a reason Glass is so solemn—King is genuinely a giant of the music industry, a rock ‘n’ roll and rock icon, and a singer-songwriter iconoclast out of Laurel Canyon. After more than 50 years she is still daunting to consider. I wish more of Glass’s passion came through and less of his inhibitions, but it’s still a useful primer on King and her greatest album. His best geeky rock critic point is about the “Album Era” of rock and the place of Tapestry in it. He dates this Album Era as from 1965 to 1975. I could quibble, but fair enough!

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.