Eno (2024)

This odd documentary about Brian Eno is billed as “generative” (as opposed, they say, to AI), which means, according to the PR, there are some 52 quintillion distinct random versions—“no viewing is the same twice.” I don’t know how this technology works. Are there 52 quintillion possibilities in physical media or on streaming platforms? The Criterion Channel seems to have answered that for the moment: no. What they’re doing instead is posting a new version every month (for as long as it’s there and I don’t know how long that is). If you look carefully, there’s a credit in the picture for Criterion and the month. I looked at the June, July, and August versions, and it’s perfectly possible I will make a monthly habit of it for as long as I can. The three I saw, each running about 80 minutes, were indeed distinctly different. I’d guess less than half the scenes I saw in any one of them were in more than one. Roxy Music, for example, was severely underplayed in the July version. Eno’s love of Fela Kuti and a brief scene where he gives his full name (Brian Peter George St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle Eno) were in all three. Also discussions of the Oblique Strategies deck of cards, though they varied. Some recurring scenes occur at different points in the picture. Thus among other things it all seems to be unpredictable by design. It’s refreshing and obviously it fits with Eno’s cybernetic ambient aesthetic in a wry sort of way, but I do have some concerns. It’s clear there is a good more than 80 minutes’ worth of material it can plug in, likely much more. How much goes unseen? How many viewings are recommended for a fuller sense? What are they doing at the Criterion Channel—hitting the scramble button and taking the first version given, or screening more than one to help sort out the better from the good enough? I think it’s safe to say Eno is primarily for Eno fans who already know his work and biography. In fact, there’s a 2011 documentary, Brian Eno – 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell to Earth, that’s probably worth checking into first. While it only covers the ‘70s it is over two and half hours and full of great music and useful information. I suspect the more you know about Eno the more you are likely to enjoy this peculiar exercise—and seeing multiple versions is arguably important too. The interviews are great and so is the music but I found myself missing things I saw only once, such as an anecdote involving Joni Mitchell. Eno may be for fans only, but fans will likely be gratified, especially if they see more than one version. For me, it’s on to September.

“I Do Not Hear You, Sir” (1958)

Avram Davidson was a prolific oddball midcentury genre writer and satirist who specialized in science fiction and fantasy and perhaps most notably the spaces between. He worked in the early ‘60s as editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This story from an Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthology is a good example of the way science fiction often intruded on horror in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Like Cornell Woolrich’s “Someone on the Phone” from 1949 or Robert Aickman’s “Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen” from 1953, it’s also dependent on a certain uncanniness associated with communicating intimately by voice across great distances. Telephones and radio still had the potential to be unsettling—and do to this day, in some cases, as the mysterious ham radio numbers / letters broadcasts attest. But this story is more along the lines of gimmicky and preposterous, like a Twilight Zone episode that can’t quite find its groove. First there’s a convoluted frame story that has the main character in desperate straits for money. He’s defrauded the wrong person and needs to make it good. Even if he can he’s still likely to be murdered. Then there’s something about an inheritance that isn’t worth enough. But there is this mysterious box he hasn’t really figured out yet. It turns out to be a telephone into the 18th century and he’s able to call people like George Washington (who doesn’t sound like any George Washington I’ve ever heard of). But he can call each person only once. How in the world this is supposed to help him I have no idea, but he gets busy calling Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, and others. Really what’s needed here—and I’m not sure there’s anything that can save this story—is some of that H.P. Lovecraft tempo and detail. What is this machine? Why do American Revolution elites have it? Is this something about masons? Unknown, unknown, unknown. In the end they can’t help our hero and all’s not well that doesn’t end well. This story is a weird mix of brash ‘50s cynicism with schoolbookish American history. I do not understand. It does not compute. It may be more the type of story I claim to like—with little explanation—but in this case I must reserve the right to change my mind.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories My Mother Never Told Me, ed. Robert Arthur
Story not available online.

35 Shots of Rum (2008)

35 rhums, France / Germany, 100 minutes

Director: Claire Denis

Writers: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau

Photography: Agnes Godard

Music: Tindersticks

Editor: Guy Lecorne

Cast: Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue, Gregoire Colin, Julieth Mars Toussaint, Adele Ado, Jean-Christophe Folly

I’ve seen a handful or so of pictures by director and cowriter Claire Denis and have to admit they often leave me mystified. That is notably the case with Beau Travail, a much-acclaimed picture I see turning up on all kinds of best-ever lists, though it left me cold. For all its allusive beauty it is ultimately a French Foreign Legion picture with most of the cliches intact, just more gritty and beautiful. Trouble Every Day was an oddly unpleasant vampire show that did not live up to advance billing. On the other hand, I love White Material and its examination of postcolonial Africa, playing it like tense horror. 35 Shots of Rum, by contrast to all the foregoing (she gets around), is set in suburban Paris and far more domestic and meditative, observing bonds of a fractured family and work group and apartment building community as things inevitably shift and change. Time, life, all that.

Lionel (Alex Descas) is a widower in his 50s who works the commuter trains, riding the complexities of the rail lines which we see in hypnotic shots from his view, tangling and disentangling. He lives with his grown daughter, Josephine (Mati Diop), who has an advanced degree in anthropology. It’s unclear when or how her mother, his wife, died but it feels like it’s many years in the past. They still feel her loss, as a road trip to visit her grave late in the picture shows. Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) is a neighbor who drives a cab for a living. She and Lionel have a history and she still has feelings for him, and motherly feelings for Josephine too. Tensions exist between them, but a good deal of sincere affection too. Rounding out the main four in 35 Shots is the brooding, somewhat standoffish and self-mysterious young man Noe (Gregoire Colin), who also lives in the building.

“The Delicate” (1994)

[spoilers] Here’s what Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, editors of the anthology The Weird, have to say about this story by Jeffrey Ford: “Although his fiction comes at the weird sideways, some of his stories, like ‘The Delicate’ (1994), enter the weird with complete abandon. It’s a short, sharp shock of the grotesque.” It is definitely short, only three pages, a riffing free-form assault by some life form called “The Delicate” (which, by the way, appears to have nothing to do with any Michelle Shocked album). The description is compressed and vividly effective, which at least is more than you get from various masters of the weird. “He comes in the latter days of afternoon, through blowing snow, dressed in black, while Schubert’s ‘Eighth’ plays magically in the background.” I like the Schubert detail, but come on. Still, I have to admit there is something inspired in this brief screed. Ford’s imagination is on fire and his voice mostly in control. It could be a vampire, this Delicate. Blood-sucking seems to be involved. The woman he “ingests,” however, has something in her—perhaps taken deliberately?—that turns him into a dog. This all happens in a place called Absentia. Next comes Pharsalus, the hunter, “in from the wilderness.” Absentia sounds like the last outpost of civilization before the North Pole. Pharsalus adopts the dog that used to be or still is the Delicate. Demons are a danger in the wilderness. Winter seems to be called Night and spring Morning. We spend relatively a lot of time with Pharsalus. The Delicate becomes a human-like dog and fights with Pharsalus, who loses and dies but wounds the Delicate, who is soon on a rampage, ingesting townspeople two at a time. I’m enjoying the story more rereading it slowly and somewhat reassembling it here. The army is sent in to get him. What army? Unclear. It all feels Roman to me in a way. “They collect the creature into a plastic bag and freeze-dry him. His remains are taken to Spire City in the Sunbelt where they are stored for the edification of future generations. The funding never comes through to study the crumbs of the Delicate, so he lies in a bag on a shelf and waits.” That’s how it ends. A wild ride but doesn’t add up to much more than that last image maybe.

Jeffrey Ford, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant: And Other Stories
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Listen to story online.

Paloma Faith, “Crybaby” (2017)

[listen up!]

Paloma Faith’s first single from her fourth album kept reminding me of “The Boy Is Mine” by Brandy & Monica, which I see (hear) from a side-by-side listen is about the arpeggiated figure (if I’ve got the term right) played on what sounds like a harp, or maybe some keyboard—glistening, spidery, quite lovely. Listening more closely, I must admit I found the misspelling of the title setting off frustrated copy editor peeves. It should be and by the usage it is “Cry, Baby,” with or without a comma (author’s choice). I looked up a “lyrics video” to clarify, and things got more confusing as I found it given there as “Oh go on and cry baby, crybaby,” as if the singer is encouraging the display of emotion but also mocking the tearfulness and the crier. But that doesn’t fit with the tone of the song and I’m willing to call more misspellings on the part of the video too. The song, according to Wikipedia and it seems plausible enough because why not, is about toxic masculinity. Says Faith, it’s "a conversation between a man and I, and the song questions whether global conflicts would cease to exist if men successfully dealt with their feelings.” OK, whatever, I don’t hear it that way, but I see the point and it’s fair enough to call the whole thing a muddle. The main point is that it’s a catchy, beautiful, and endearing pop song with the harp figure going and Faith churning it out in full warm clarion voice. I think I’m on board with the general sentiments too but as I say that’s a little muddled. Who cares anyway? A message is not often the point of pop music.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Shirley Jackson’s last novel is often called a masterpiece and that’s fair enough, except I’m more inclined to think of Jackson as a short-story writer and “The Lottery” as her masterpiece. ISFDB relegates this short novel to “non-genre” and Wikipedia classifies it as a mystery. No one seems to know what to do with it, including me, though I have no objection to the masterpiece label. It’s about a family with many dark secrets. The darkest may be the one kept by Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood, age 18, the first-person narrator. The Blackwoods have long been resented by the locals for being rich and aloof. A few years before the time of this story someone poisoned the entire family with arsenic in the sugar bowl. Only three survived: Merricat and her sister Constance, who didn’t take sugar with the berries that were served, and Uncle Julian, who barely survived the poisoning and is now disabled and in a wheelchair, with mild encroaching dementia. Merricat is the one most able to go into town twice a week for groceries, but she has to be careful or the townspeople will hassle her. I’m not going to give it away but it’s not hard to figure out who did the poisoning, which is readily revealed at about the beginning of the last third of the novel. Constance was charged with the crime but acquitted, leaving the Blackwoods more isolated and reviled than ever. One day their unpleasant cousin Charles shows up and makes an attempt to take over the family. He’s mostly interested in their money. Merricat can’t stand him and wants him to leave, but he intends to stay. Eventually the conflict leads to the house catching fire, destroying the upper floors. Firefighters—who also hate the Blackwoods—arrive to put out the blaze and the rest of the town shows up to watch and catcall. “Let it burn,” is their sentiment. After the fire is under control a riot breaks out. The townspeople enter the home and destroy everything in it that they can. The fire and the riot are amazing, vivid, painful scenes. The entire novel is suffused with intense tensions. In some ways it’s hard to know why We Have Always Lived in the Castle even exists, it is so full of hate and rage and pointless fury. But it’s also powerful and unforgettable—as good as any reasons to exist.

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

A Session With Gary Lewis & the Playboys (1965)

Around the time I was 11 I got a paper route and joined the Columbia Record Club for the usual deal: a dozen or so albums upfront for almost nothing and then an expensive commitment that never seemed to end (I had a round 2 in the CD era). The club did not have much to offer by way of the Beatles, my main interest, but I got the US version of the Hard Day’s Night soundtrack and an Alvin & the Chipmunks album of all Beatles covers. I also got albums by Cher, Jay & the Americans, Gene Pitney, Johnny Rivers, and more. Sometimes it wasn’t easy even picking out enough freebies. I would say now that the prize of the pack was Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, an album I voluntarily return to that still holds up and then some. But in 1966 I might have pointed to Gary Lewis & the Playboys. I got all three of their first albums (all released in 1965, all clocking in under 30 minutes each) and I listened to them quite a bit. The formula, hardly unique to this band, tended to be two or three hits and/or original songs otherwise matched, to get to the mandatory dozen, with rock ‘n’ roll covers of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s: Chuck Berry, the Coasters, Bobby Darin, the Kinks, Bobby Rydell, the Searchers, Bobby Vee, so on so forth, giving me an oldies education foundation. And the originals, many of which became top 10 hits, were good: “This Diamond Ring” (cowritten by Al Kooper and intended originally for the Drifters), ”Count Me In,” “Everybody Loves a Clown” (written by Lewis, Leon Russell, and producer Snuff Garrett), “She’s Just My Style” (also written by Lewis, Russell, and Garrett, with Al Capps), and “Sure Gonna Miss Her.”

The one exception now, the one big hit I have the hardest time calling good, is “Save Your Heart for Me,” a knockoff of the much better “See You in September.” “Save Your Heart” seems ultra-dippy to the max to me now, but the fact is it was one of the first three singles I ever bought (as I think I’ve noted elsewhere the other two on that momentous occasion were Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” and the Beatles’ “Help!” b/w “I’m Down”). Yes, liking “Save Your Heart for Me” that much embarrasses me now, though I also admit I don’t really mind hearing the song. And of course it also embarrasses me that I was so nutty for Gary Lewis & the Playboys in the first place, but honesty is the best policy around here. Here we have an example of the original “guilty pleasure” problem, though now the pleasure is chiefly nostalgic I suppose. My esteem did not have anything to do consciously with Gary’s famous father (which probably did have something to do with their big showbiz success). Jerry Lewis has never appealed to me much. In fairness, however, I should note I was also into superstar kid group Dino, Desi & Billy at the time (respectively, son of Dean Martin, son of Desi Arnaz, and neighbor kid), who had top 30 hits in 1965 with “I’m a Fool” and “Not the Lovin’ Kind.” It’s possible I was starstruck and don’t remember it that way. By all rights, I should have been embarrassed about any enterprise using the word “playboy” in 1965 but it’s perfectly possible that it was an appeal for me anyway and I have suppressed that memory.

In the ‘90s I picked up a Gary Lewis & the Playboys greatest-hits anthology on CD. They had more and better hits than I remembered, but still only maybe a third of that collection is worth revisiting. I haven’t been near the original albums in decades, an opportunity streaming has afforded me. So, right, I would not remotely call A Session With Gary Lewis & the Playboys—their second LP and the most successful by chart standards—a great album or even a particularly good one. But it’s not terrible. “Count Me In” is one of their best singles, “Without a Word of Warning” is a pretty good original (written by Lewis, Russell, and Garrett). “Little Miss Go-Go” is another original (written by Russell, Garrett, and Louis Yule Brown) but more of a blatant Beach Boys ripoff. “Voodoo Woman,” written by Bobby Goldsboro (!), is very silly but maybe, because it is so silly, the best example of a very silly theme that runs through whole swaths of rock. The covers include Ricky Nelson (“Travelin’ Man”), Everly Brothers (“Walk Right Back”), the Yardbirds (“For Your Love”), Freddy Cannon (“Palisades Park”), and Del Shannon (“Runaway”), five solid lessons in rock ‘n’ roll. They are nowhere near the originals, but if Gary Lewis & the Playboys were only a gateway to the greater glories, well, that will just have to do.

Kesha, “Praying” (2017)

[listen up!]

Curmudgeon incoming: my problems with the pop warbling mode started with Whitney Houston and accelerated in the new century with the coming of TV’s performance competition reality show American Idol, which prized vocal technique and histrionic stagecraft above melody and arrangement. It was deeply alienating for someone reared on the Beatles and Tommy James and, I firmly believe, it’s a misnomer to call it pop music. But by 2017 I was making or trying to make my accommodations and sufficiently softened by then that “Praying” could reach me. It was Kesha’s first single in something like four years. It starts exactly as what I don’t like, all full of its own faux humbleness, with churchy piano chords and Kesha sneaking in at low volume, low energy, laying the ground for the wall of emo to come. I don’t know Kesha’s other work well, but Wikipedia tells me this lead single from her third album can be taken as a departure (from her “dive bar party anthems,” per Vox’s Caroline Framke). Some even characterize “Praying” as a comeback. The high pitch of drama—even the idea that prayer is the recommended necessity for the situation at hand, whatever that somewhat murky situation is exactly—somehow wears down my innate objections, as the overwhelming attack kicks in and washes over me like redemption. When the drums come in full at about 2:25 the song is fully ablaze and roaring. Kesha says it is about forgiving our trespassers. Others hear the calls for forgiveness more as cold brushoff, the moral equivalent of saying “thank you with a capital F.” I mean: “I hope you find your peace / Falling on your knees.” Me, I just get lost in the sweltering gospel texture and hope it works out right for everyone involved. Pray for it, even.

The Sheep Detectives (2026)

The Sheep Detectives is rated PG for “thematic material, some violent content and brief language,” but I felt like I was watching something absolutely suitable for the entire family on a summer outing, perfect for the drive-in if you’ve still got one near you, with both jokes that are surprisingly funny and events that are surprisingly moving. And it’s packed with stars, both live and voice: Bryan Cranston, Hugh Jackman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Patrick Stewart, Emma Thompson, etc. Jackman plays George Hardy, a struggling sheep rancher who despises the town butcher. Every night he reads chapters from mystery novels to the flock, who bleat satisfaction in unison. They love story time. When humans aren’t around they speak English to one another, as funnee talking aminals are wont to do. They are a bunch of irresistible charming characters. Lily (Louis-Dreyfus) is an expert in mystery stories and usually sees developments coming before they get there. Sir Ritchfield (Stewart) is a pompous strutting ass who’s wrong about everything. Sebastian (Cranston) is a proud loner with a complicated background. Cloud (Regina Hall) extravagantly admires her own beauty and always thinks it’s the maid who committed the crime. There are more, all distinct, along with sheep acting like sheep and a whole thing about “winter lambs,” which they say are often rejected by the flock. Then, unexpectedly, Hardy turns up dead. At first police call it a heart attack but before long Lily and the sheep are on the case. The police investigation is led by Officer Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun. Succession, The Perks of Being a Wallflower), who reminded me of Don Knotts. Basically the plot from that point is a takeoff on the Agatha Christie style, with a handful of suspects—including an obvious one who just as obviously won’t be the miscreant—and, eventually, a confrontation with an explaining detective that leads to the revelation of the culprit. Lily and the other sheep are well-versed in these stories. They see all the wrinkles coming before they get there. They are always hanging around the periphery, helping to guide Officer Derry to the truth. No one seems to think it’s strange the way these sheep are just hanging around. Consider bringing a hanky to this show because somehow it gets credibly intense in the second half and you will likely need it. I was prepared for something a little silly, and hopefully entertaining, but I came away from it all wrung out in the best ways. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, your heart may go pit-a-pat. Big franchise potential here too, for better or worse.

The Terror (1917)

[spoilers] This short novel is one of Arthur Machen’s more effective tales, at least until it gets to the end and starts offering up the explanations, which unfortunately are lame. But until then it made me nervous more than once. “The terror” is a series of murders and fatal accidents no one can explain. It is set in 1915 and very much mindful there’s a terrible war going on. A fair amount of the speculation on who’s doing it focuses on the suspicion that German agents are somehow embedded in the Welsh countryside, wreaking havoc. But there’s very little evidence of their presence, and the circumstances of some of the deaths rule that out entirely. A serial killer (our modern term) is the most popular theory but there is also evidence pointing away from that. Plus the victims are killed by different methods, which is unusual for such a fiend. Two deaths occur in a similar timeframe but separated by too much distance for one person to do both, so eventually that is ruled out too. Law enforcement types arrive and impose curfews and limit people’s movements—no one allowed near the cliffs where people have fallen, for example. But that also has limited effect on the ongoing terror. Among other things you can really feel Machen’s anxieties about the war. This is not Machen’s only story from that time with the element. See particularly “The Bowmen,” which single-handedly established a sense of divine intervention assisting Britain and the Western allies. For most of The Terror Machen keeps piling on and, as I said, piling on effectively and skillfully. It’s often scary. This may be in part because we know Machen was a spiritualist whose stories often indulge the ineffable and the powerful, against which we poor pitiful humans have little defense. As the tension flies high so do our expectations, until it’s a perfect mystery and hard to imagine what it could be. I stuck with it knowing Machen can deliver on this kind of stuff. Alas, not this time. It turns out to be antiwar animals in allegiance, all kinds of animals—birds, bees, beasts of the fields, etc. They are alarmed and indignant about all these years of the Great War, later known as World War I (because humans just had to do it one more time). I mean, I don’t blame the critters. I’m outraged and indignant myself, even born many years later. But still, The Terror is ultimately a little too lame.

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