Caught by the Tides (2024)

Here’s an unusual picture, a kind of lightly fictionalized, impressionistic memoir of China in this century. It’s directed by Jia Zhang-ke and what makes it unusual is that he has used footage shot by him across this century, both in his personal life and for movies he has made. The only one I can vouch for is Still Life (2006), but I can tell you it’s a great picture, well worth tracking down. Caught by the Tides also includes scenes from Unknown Pleasures (2002) and Ash Is Purest White (2018), which I intend to seek out. All three feature Zhang-ke’s wife, Tao Zhao, who is rendered a silent woman in this picture for some reason, at least until she lets out a yelp in the last shot. By that point I was too muddled to really get it. There are many lovely shots here—notably those from the Three Gorges area and its massive damming project, featured in Still Life—and some reliably nice musical interludes too, EDM at random to juice up the energy, and pop tunes presumably for the nostalgic feels. But it must be said there’s little by way of obvious narrative here—it’s a guess for me (and largely because of what I’ve read about it) that this is even a historical allegory about China at all. My own sense from my Western perspective, and my distance, is that the 2008 Olympics were a certain cultural high-water mark in China. That seems to be supported by the way this movie goes. My further sense is that China continues to be an economic juggernaut poised well for the future. The commitment to EVs and alternative, sustainable energy sources are just obvious examples. Early scenes in Caught by the Tides gradually give way to scenes of the pandemic, where arguably (again supported by what we see) it was taken appropriately seriously, much unlike the US experience. So the movie may be a good place for testing ideas about China. I take Zhang-ke, based on Still Life, as a great filmmaker and now more than ever want to get to some of his other work. But Caught by the Tides felt confused and weak as much as anything, too allusive and ambiguous for me to get a good grip on what it’s all about.

The Book of Skulls (1972)

I read this 1972 Robert Silverberg novel in a kindle edition which included an afterword by Silverberg from 2004. He was at pains to defend it as science fiction because it is about an arguably scientific approach to seeking and perhaps finding immortality. But, well, no, I must demur. This novel hews far closer to horror, with its imagery and mythifying and above all with its ingeniously intricate premise. A college boy, Eli, has shown an aptitude for the study of ancient civilizations, which gains him entry to an archive where he discovers an untranslated document (in Catalan) called The Book of Skulls, which among other things dictates a route to immortality. By an amazing coincidence, Eli also notices an item in the newspaper about a cult in the Arizona desert that uses skull imagery. And so we are off to Arizona. Here are the terms: the cult must be approached in groups of four to submit to a trial for entry. During the trial, one of them must willingly commit suicide. Then two of the others must murder the third and the survivors will subsequently live forever. Easy-peasy. It’s a beauty of a concept, symmetrical, balanced, and savage. Silverberg tells the story in a tour de force of shifting first-person narratives among the four casual college chums on their spring break. Each of the four is individual but of a type. Eli, the instigator, is a scrawny brainy Jew. Ned is the scrawny sarcastic gay boy-man. Timothy is the rich and entitled WASP—his credit card is paying for the road trip. And Oliver is the scrappy Midwestern survivor, an orphan who is making it on charity, government assistance, and talent. In typical Silverberg fashion much about the tales, the present action and the flashbacks, are highly sexualized—“pervy,” as one reviewer noted. That reviewer approved of the novel overall but worried about the sex, which is constant. In fairness, that’s how lots of bestselling novelists were doing it in 1972. Also, apparently Silverberg wrote softcore porn for money at some point or points in his career. All the sex does date the novel somewhat in embarrassing ways, but at the same time it might be fair to say that Silverberg was clear-sighted and even prescient on gays. It’s a rollicking good time here. A genuine page-turner. But I claim it for horror, not science fiction.

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

Aerial Ballet (1968)

It’s not surprising that Harry Nilsson, the man responsible for the theme songs for the 1960s TV sitcom The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, would serve up a tub of corn syrup on his third LP, where he was well coming into his own as a recording artist. The album is rich and delicious, veering in lounge directions but saved always by the musicality. I don’t know Nilsson that well, at least not until recently. I have tended to think of him as a songwriter chiefly—and he is that, however eccentric—but recent forays into Aerial Ballet have convinced me his real strength is as a singer. His exuberant swoops and scats are only more impressive when you try to sing with them, and he packs his most surprising bolts of feeling into exactly that. Or, as he might put it, “Doo-wack doo-wack doo-wack doo-wacka-doo wacka-doo wacka-doo.” This album is the home of “Everybody’s Talkin’,” his inspired cover of Greenwich Village folkie Fred Neil, and “One,” later covered by Three Dog Night into a #5 hit. Both sound more amazing than ever in the context of this album. The album also includes performative turns of innocence that remind me a little of Jonathan Richman, in all the best ways (and make me wonder what Richman, a dedicated VU fan approximately then, might have thought of Nilsson). I read somewhere, for example, that “Little Cowboy” and its reprise was a lullaby his mother sang to him (I also remember reading that he copyrighted it to her, but that does not appear to be the case). Or, perhaps my favorite, “Good Old Desk,” in which he celebrates his dedicated workspace. “My old desk does an arabesque / In the morning when I first arrive / It's a pleasure to see it's waiting there for me / To keep my hopes alive.” Versioning problems exist with Aerial Ballet, unfortunately. A couple of songs, “Daddy’s Song” and “Bath,” were deleted at the last minute before the original release. Nilsson wrote both but had sold the exclusive rights to the Monkees, who had it removed from the album. The songs are back on streaming versions now but three bonus tracks from a later version have been separated away from the album. “Girlfriend”—adapted for the theme to The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (which I seem to recall did not have a laugh track, but maybe I’m confusing it with Room 222)—“Girlfriend” is there but you have to search for it specifically on my service.

Young Frankenstein (1974)

USA, 106 minutes

Director: Mel Brooks

Writers: Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks, Mary Shelley

Photography: Gerald Hirschfeld

Music: John Morris

Editor: John C. Howard

Cast: Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Madeline Kahn, Peter Boyle, Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr, Kenneth Mars, Gene Hackman, Richard Haydn, Mel Brooks, Danny Goldman

Young Frankenstein is so scrupulously faithful to the 1930s Universal franchise that it fairly fits itself into the canon itself. You must start with the 1931 Frankenstein and 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, of course. But then I say it’s your choice: the star-studded 1939 Son of Frankenstein (Boris Karloff! Bela Lugosi! Basil Rathbone!) or this affectionate send-up. It boasts a luminous black & white palette, old-fashioned wipes from one scene to the next, and arguably cowriter Gene Wilder’s greatest single performance. It comes with all the trimmings too, including the little girl, the bride, the blind man, pitchforks, torches, elaborate mechanical wind-up law enforcement out of Peter Sellers, and more.

Wilder is Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (pronounced fronk-un-steen in a running gag), grandson of the mad scientist Victor (renamed Henry in the old movies for some reason). Frederick is a professor of human anatomy and biology trying to live down his grandfather’s crimes, constantly needled by his students. Wilder, as ever, and perhaps more so here, is a paradox of style, a quiet-mannered player who uses off-beat pauses, the position of his head, and the volume of his speaking voice to convey great stores of molten angst, rage, and depression, which erupt in calibrated, pitch-perfect sobbing rants. The ongoing, never-ending, exhausting battle over the pronunciation of his name is just a foretaste of what’s to come with the driven, neurotic, obsessed fool Wilder has made of Dr. Frankenstein.

Smog, “Cold Blooded Old Times” (1999)

[listen up!]

Smog (not to be confused with Golden Smog) is basically one man named Bill Callahan, singer-songwriter resident of Austin, Texas, who has also recorded under his own name and, in some cases, such as this one, with a band. “Cold Blooded Old Times” hits first like an upbeat singalong, with a chorus large and in charge: “Cold blooded old times,” x3. The verses get down to the reality of things around here, which are not so upbeat. They seem to involve memories from childhood of an abusive and disintegrating marriage, memories that can “turn your bones to glass / ... And though you were / Just a little squirrel / You understood every word.” Some of the ways of expressing here are neither comforting nor very clear, notably the plaint: “How can I stand / And laugh with the man / Who redefined your body?” There’s a lot of things that could mean—the mind runs to all of them at once, the more you hear it, absorb it. None are good. But the song carries on over four minutes with its deceptive jaunty air, which includes submerged piano figures from Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” toward the end, absurdly calling things like “his hair was perfect!” to mind. The title phrase, “cold blooded old times,” cannot possibly mean anything good and the verses do what they need to tack that down. Yet the pleasure of singing with this song, learning its tricky small turns and getting them down, overcomes the dubious implications. Is there any right and wrong here? You can really belt this one with the singer if your voice is in good form and you have his key.

A Case of Conscience (1958)

This short novel by James Blish confirms a couple of things for me. First, I don’t really like religion getting mixed up with science fiction. “Few science fiction stories of the time attempted religious themes,” according to Wikipedia, “and still fewer did this with Catholicism.” That may be so, but The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (1996, so perhaps not “of the time”) and the 1959 A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. (which maybe I need to try again) both fit that bill too well. Second, my misgivings about fix-up novels—also called “mosaic” novels in an attempt to dignify them—proved out again. I did not notice this as a fix-up novel while reading it, but I did note a severe drop in quality after the first part, which was the original 1953 novella that won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 2004. The basic idea here is not bad. There’s a planet, Lithia, with an intelligent dominant reptile species. Four human scientists, including a Jesuit priest who is also a biologist, are visiting to determine whether it should be opened to human diplomacy. One of the four says no because it has a huge amount of materials that can be used to create weapons. The Lithian society appears to be harmonious and peaceful. But the priest keeps looking at it through his frame of religious ideas. He sees it as pre-Edenic, still innocent, with no fall from grace, and thus feels it should be respected as such and not interfered with. But then he decides it could be the work of “the Adversary” (i.e., Satan), offering a temptation to believe, or something. I thought it was muddled but I was already souring on it by then. The middle has a logic that is hard to follow. The ending is admittedly powerful, but I’m not sure I agree that the priest is a hero. So I had a hard time with this, my first time reading Blish. I’m open to reading more by him, just not necessarily the After Such Knowledge series, for which this is the first novel. A Case of Conscience won a Hugo for Blish but he is more famous (per Wikipedia) for a Cities in Flight series and for Star Trek novelizations he worked on with his wife, J.A. Lawrence. The biology in Conscience is often thoughtful and intriguing, but the physics is more lacking. Faster-than-light travel, for example, is just a thing that needs no explanation. I think that’s fairly common for a lot of 20th-century SF, but Blish absurdly ignores time dilation too. In a key scene near the end, in fact, our heroes are witnessing real-time developments on Lithia, which is 50 light-years away. It was distractingly hard to believe.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Live at the Apollo (1963)

[2010 review here]

I see via Wikipedia this is still considered one of the greatest live albums of all time. I don’t hear it that way—although I was more in thrall to it in 2010, I remember it still as one of my great disappointments when I finally got to it, finding it one day in the 1980s in a cutout bin. There’s definitely a “you had to be there” case to be made here, and I say that as someone who saw James Brown over 15 years later, in 1979, and count it as one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. It did not matter that Brown was actually on stage no more than 40 minutes. But the brevity of this album—31 and a half minutes all up—made me suspect at the time that I must have bought some defective product being moved through the cutout networks. But no, it’s actually little more than half an hour. There’s a long introduction and a few instrumental vamps between songs. Due to the excitement of the moment, I presume, most songs have rushed tempos and last little more than two minutes apiece, including a medley of eight songs that goes six minutes. “Lost Someone” kind of saves the set, with a groove that runs to more than 10 minutes, a harbinger of things to come beyond 1963. Brown would get pretty good with grooves that went 10 minutes or longer. I understand the historical importance here. The album sold like crazy and DJs reportedly played it like a double-sided 45, playing one side then flipping it and playing the other—in response to requests from listeners. Then there’s the weirdly haunting date of the show, October 24, 1962, at approximately the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when nuclear anxiety was reaching one of its highest and most intense points. I’ll tell you what: I like a book Douglas Wolk wrote about this album for the 33-1/3 series more than I like the album. And as fine as that book is, breaking down the show minute by minute, second by second, I like even more the later prizes of James Brown’s work and career (Roots of a Revolution, Foundations of Funk: A Brand New Bag, Make It Funky: The Big Payback, and the Star Time box). At this point, Live at the Apollo exists mostly as historical artifact with only modest levels of interest.

“The Man in the Black Suit” (1994)

I was excited to see a story by Stephen King in The Weird. I didn’t think editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer could leave him out but I guess I forgot about him by the time the chronologically ordered anthology got to Clive Barker in the ‘80s. This story is an interesting choice—a self-conscious reimagining by King of the kind of 19th-century American Puritan horror practiced by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving. The story takes place in the deep woods of New England where a boy has gone fishing. He encounters the figure in the title, who is there to steal his soul or some such. It’s all pretty traditional business in many ways. Not much is particularly original but some of the details are good. The man’s eyes are described as red and orange, for example, windows into his burning soul. The story was published originally in the New Yorker, which speaks to the status of King’s career in 1994. He would win some kind of lifetime honor from some reputable literary group circa 2002 or 2003, which I always think of as the moment when he was accepted and embraced by the literary mainstream. With this story from the New Yorker he was on his way to that fuller, wider recognition. It does feel like King might be trying a little too hard here. He comes by his New England bona fides honestly enough—born and raised there—but he has never felt remotely part of Puritan traditions. Well, maybe remotely. But his style is all 20th-century contemporary and his horror is catholic, my feeble pun indicating his stuff is all over the place in terms of its sources. The woods and soul-stealing do as well for King as sacred Indian burial grounds, cosmic horror, vampires, werewolves, and/or zombies. And more. The guy is so prolific he almost couldn’t help having tried everything by the mid-‘90s. I used to find him insanely readable and wish now I’d read more of him then. Or maybe I reached my point of exhaustion after a few thousand pages (still only a fraction, I know). At any rate, I respect what I understand he’s doing here—getting the Puritan phobias about woods and the devil into the mix. Hey, that’s horror pure as much as anything else, up to and including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Galaxie 500, “Tugboat” (1988)

[listen up!]

Even as metaphor I’m not sure at all what this song is about, so I take it at face value. The singer doesn’t want to be at your party, he doesn’t want to talk to your friends, he doesn’t want to vote for your president. He just wants to be your tugboat captain. It’s a place he’d like to be, x12. It’s a place he’d be happy, x4. The internet tells me it’s all a reference to the Velvet Underground’s guitarist, Sterling Morrison, who worked on and captained tugboats in Houston in the ‘70s and ‘80s, while studying for his PhD in medieval literature, specializing in the work of the 9th-century poet Cynewulf. Maybe—1988 was a certain peak time to glorify the VU. But now we have gone well afield of this mystifying and strangely alluring Galaxie 500 track. The singer’s words make little sense, but they flash with feeling. He really seems to mean it. Pressure from a souring relationship? That has usually been when I don’t want to be at their party, talk with their friends, vote for their president. At nearly four minutes “Tugboat” affords room for the meditative noise the Galaxie 500 trio specialized in. The second-half jam may be the part of the song to pay the most attention to. It’s certainly one to drift through. From a softly strummed acoustic guitar to the plaintive and beautiful notes picked out of an electric guitar and then the yelping, “Tugboat” sets out on the oceanic currents of its own creation. Dean Wareham’s lead guitar steps away from the melodic hook, withdrawing into its own thoughts as the volume level slowly rises and the mush of the gentle noise envelops us, with the moody singer’s quixotic declarations still ringing figuratively in our ears.

Black Mirror, s7 (2025)

It’s possible that Black Mirror creator, chief writer, and showrunner Charlie Brooker’s well is running dry, but I thought s7 was an improvement and even something of a return to form over s6, which leaned way too hard for me into easy horror. The show still feels a little tired, but priorities are back in order. The familiar sardonic view of corporate absolute control was sharp as ever in the first episode, “Common People.” It involves a miracle pharmaceutical that upgrades brain function against tumors and disease. The problem is that it’s expensive and only getting more so as tiered “membership” levels come available. To defray costs, lower-tier users serve as advertising media, involuntarily dropping product pitches into everyday random conversation, with predictably loony (and intense) results. Other episodes, creaking slightly as they may, take on the multidimensional lifestyle in a competitive work environment, immersive AI in a unique type of film restoration, and the usual world-ending levels of computer hackery. Perhaps the most interesting development here—perhaps a sign of where Brooker’s imagination is drifting—is a kind of sequel to the USS Callister storyline from s4. I say sequel, but the relation between them is more like the first was a pilot for a TV show and now this redux is the first episode of the first season. It’s a parody of Star Trek, a good one that rivals even Galaxy Quest, focused more on the original series (“TOS”) than The Next Generation or anything that followed. Jesse Plemons plays the Captain Kirk character—he is as interested as James T. Kirk in getting laid but a far more unbalanced and cruel person. In real life he is Robert Daly, a software developer and creator of a successful immersive space opera computer game. A DNA replicator enables him to bring coworkers into his private version of the game. At least a couple of familiar points are here. One is the little electronic nubbin you affix to your temple which enables so much technology in Black Mirror. The other is the idea that “digital cloning” brings an essential element of consciousness into the software and/or device or game. Digital clones are not just some kind of empty replicant but bear essential sentience and self-awareness in their own right. Both USS Callister scripts shade their characters to appear different from different angles. Daly at first appears to be a harmless dweeb, but when he keeps calling himself “a nice guy” in conversations with women we start to get the picture he’s more of a petulant incel. As the captain of a spaceship, he is a monster. But I suspect Brooker is having so much fun with his Star Trek universe that I wonder if he wouldn’t like to dedicate a whole season to boldly going around in it.