United States of Trance (2001)

I’ve always been a little confused about how to think of albums like this. The major credit goes to a DJ—in this case the prolific Christopher Lawrence—who produces and/or remixes tracks by different artists. Contributing artists get so little credit that I was momentarily uncertain which were artist names and which were track names. On Lawrence’s Wikipedia page, United States of Trance is categorized with “DJ Compilations” (as opposed to “Albums,” “Singles & EPs,” or “Remixes”). OK, that sounds good. I somewhat crudely perhaps classify the genre with these exercises as “techno” at large. But hold up now, “trance” has its own meaning, which is fairly specific (again Wikipedia): “... typically characterized by a tempo between 120 and 150 beats per minute (BPM), repeating melodic phrases and a musical form that distinctly builds tension and elements throughout a track often culminating in 1 to 2 ‘peaks’ or ‘drops.’” Yes, all right, good to know. Moving on: “Although trance is a genre of its own, it liberally incorporates influences from other musical styles such as techno, house, chill-out, classical music, tech house, ambient and film scores.” A lot of styles in that list I would call “techno” and be done with it—I can’t shave hairs that fine. I have my suspicions that making such distinctions requires doses of stimulant drugs, which I imagine also go excellently with a set like this one here, beguilingly lurching and percolating and driving forward for nearly 74 minutes. I will note that the 12 tracks by 12 different artists (including one by Lawrence) are all largely instrumentals, with some occasional whispering or non-word vocalizations. They are largely matters of simple musical figures with unexpected tones and complex rhythms. They are thrilling and dull as your mood may dictate. Per the definition above, each track does indeed have its peaks and/or drops, although that does not exactly apply to the album as a whole, which chugs along in its established parameters modulating groove and finally goes out unbowed at the end, like a brass band parade disappearing down the street. You wouldn’t necessarily know it’s 12 artists. It’s less a collection of songs and more a collection of dramatic musical moments. What’s more, the album tracks seamlessly—that is, playing it on shuffle produces awkward and abrupt transitions from track to track. It’s not the same. Lawrence intends it to be listened to as sequenced. For me it is music that too often wants to recede into the background. It’s hard to stay focused. Another word might be boring, but I would not go that far. United States of Trance is more like an environment that you visit, as a kind of tourist. You may not absorb it all, but you come away with distinct memories and experiences.

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

USA, 112 minutes

Director: Fred Schepisi

Writer: John Guare

Photography: Ian Baker

Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Editor: Peter Honess

Cast: Stockard Channing, Will Smith, Donald Sutherland, Ian McKellen, Mary Beth Hurt, Bruce Davison, Heather Graham, Anthony Michael Hall, Eric Thal, Richard Mason, J.J. Abrams, Kitty Carlisle

Six Degrees of Separation is one degree of separation from a 1990 stage play of the same name, based on a real-life con man, which approximately sums up most of the problems here. Well, except for the conceit of a high concept that never quite comes off. Google AI summarizes: “Six Degrees of Separation is the theory that everyone on Earth is connected by a chain of no more than five other people (six acquaintance links).... [It may be] illustrated by the ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ game, where any actor can be linked to Bacon in six or fewer roles.”

The funny thing (funny dumbass, not funny ha ha) is that this idea has little to do with anything going on in this picture, beyond something that one major character is fascinated by in a daydreamy sort of way. That is the unbearably named Ouisa, pronounced “wee-zuh,” short for Louisa (Stockard Channing). Donald Sutherland plays her husband Flan. They are rich New Yorkers living off Central Park. Sutherland is excellent, as he always was, but he can’t save this mess. Will Smith plays Paul, who says he is the son of Sidney Poitier. That claimed connection might have something to do with the six degrees. I don’t know. I never figured it out. I did notice that Will Smith did not slap anyone in this picture.

“A Place to Stay” (1998)

[spoilers] I was impressed by this longish vampire story by Michael Marshall Smith. It deliberately applies a patina of confusion to a story of a man’s semi-lost evening with a woman he meets and wants to find again. It’s set in New Orleans, the French Quarter in all its touristy glory. The man works in the software development industry and is there for a convention and the excuse to party and blow off steam. These elements are perfect, in 1998, for a night of hard drinking and carousing. Eventually our first-person narrator blacks out. He wakes in the 4 a.m. hour in a bar that is cleaning up after closing. He remembers parts of the night, and parts come back to him as he retraces his steps trying to put it together. He thinks he remembers where the woman told him she works, a retailer of high-end kitchen goods. He finds the place, the next day, and enters, but instead of a store he finds himself in the bar from the night before, and it’s no longer day but night. Smith’s transitions as he switches back and forth between these realities can be jarring, and confusing, but they use my favorite of all the vampire powers, otherwise way too underutilized for my taste, which is the ability to cloud minds. Whatever your theory, by this point of the story the mystery is engaged. It’s hard to guess what might be coming next, specifically, but we’re starting to get the drift. There’s a decidedly modern tinge to it in the affluent, hedonistic, youthful software development world. The woman our guy searches for asked him at one point whether he believes in vampires. Decidedly, contemptuously, he does not. That’s really our only clue, beyond that I was reading the story in a fantasy/horror anthology. Nothing seems vampirish at all about her. Things reach a crescendo of confusion as our guy goes switching in and out of the night before and recovers more information about his missing time. It’s all nicely done with enough misdirection to fool me until the reveal only in the very last sentence. One thing I find interesting about vampire stories is that the lore is so wide-ranging—about mirrors and daylight and counting and all of it—that even if you know it’s a vampire story it’s hard to know how it’s going to play out. This story is obviously dependent on their ability to becloud minds, which I had forgotten as a possibility while reading the story. Smith springs it on us as an unfurling, horrific, endless nightmare, with romance and pleasure ultimately stripped away.

The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

Jody Reynolds, “Endless Sleep” (1958)

[listen up!]

[content warnings] One more out here on the morbid tip. Jody Reynolds was a one-hit wonder rockabilly artist, born in Denver and reared in Oklahoma. “Endless Sleep” reached #5 in 1958, his only appearance in the top 40. But the follow-up, “Fire of Love,” which peaked at #66, was later covered by both MC-5 and the Gun Club. The label Demon liked “Endless Sleep” enough to record it, but insisted on adding the happy-ending last verse as well as tacking on the name Dolores Nance to the songwriting credit; apparently they thought the tune would do better as the product of a songwriting team. OK, maybe. The story here is literally dark from the start, opening: “The night was black, rain fallin’ down.” In profoundly mournful tones, the singer tells us he’s quarreled with his girlfriend and doesn’t know where she went. He follows her footsteps to the shore of the sea (Reynolds wrote the song in San Diego and performed it that night). She’s gone, “forevermore.” Gasp! Suicide! Then the singer thinks he hears the sea speaking to him, albeit in a kind of awkward way to make the lines rhyme, saying, “I took your baby from you away.” But we’re not done yet. Comes the voice of his beloved: “Come join me baby in my endless sleep.” Suicide-murder! Lord! “Come join me baby in my endless sleep.” It’s high, keening, remorseless tragedy, but thanks to the honchos at the perhaps ironically named Demon label all’s well that ends well. The singer rescues his babe. The “angry” sea gives it up. “You took your baby from me away.” But I don’t believe it. One or both are moldering at the bottom of the sea even as we speak. I’m sure of it.

Babygirl (2024)

OK, fair enough, this cheesy erotic BDSM fantasy thriller is hotter than a pistol, sexy as hell, and a pleasure to enjoy exactly that way. You’ll have to ignore or somehow put out of mind your better angels and the movie’s many ancient views of women and men and sex and power. It seems to believe, with so many, that the powerful—especially the powerful women—secretly yearn to be dominated. This seems unlikely when you think about it, given their behavior otherwise (cf., adventures on Epstein Island, or the movie Salo). But it’s popular to think so, much like imagining the powerful will end up burning in hell. But who’s really thinking about anything like that when a movie like this is going on? Nicole Kidman is Romy, a high-flying CEO specializing in warehouse robotics and married to a successful theater director, Jacob (Antonio Banderas). Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness) is Samuel, an intern with a ton of poise and self-possession and a natural dominator. He takes control of Romy sexually and seems to be attempting to take over her life at large. He’s a little scary. Romy struggles with herself but keeps doing whatever he tells her to do. Turning up the sex charge is the kind of thing Kidman has done before and she’s good at it: To Die For, Birthday Girl, and most notably Eyes Wide Shut, among others. Indeed, in many ways Babygirl feels like an intentional reprise or shoutout to Eyes Wide Shut. Though this story takes place over weeks, months, or even years, for example, it is always Christmas in Romy’s living room, with a fully trimmed-up and lighted tree in the corner. The previous feature by director and writer Halina Reijn, the horror show Bodies Bodies Bodies, had some interesting ideas but was too cluttered and strangely focused to really work. She shows a lot of development in Babygirl, but the real stroke, of course, is the casting. Kidman is perfect and has a surprising amount of chemistry with Dickinson, who’s much younger and generally inexperienced than she is in real life too. Romy is the designated bottom here, but Kidman is the star of the show all the way in a tremendous performance. Dickinson, however, can keep up with her, and that has a lot to do with what makes Babygirl work at such exceedingly high levels. You might have qualms about it later regarding gender roles and such, but first you should enjoy the ride.

Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth (2017)

One more entry from the 33-1/3 series of fancy little books from Bloomsbury Publishing devoted to specific albums. This one is by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero, taking on the strangely beautiful and only album by Young Marble Giants, the Welsh minimalist trio who were briefly darlings in postpunk circles. It answered lots of my questions about the band and the album, including at least one I thought had no answer. First, both “young marble giants” and “colossal youth” are references to ancient Greek sculptures from circa 500 BCE called “kouroi,” depicting larger-than-life-size nude adolescent boys and girls. The statues can be as high as 10 feet. One of the Moxham brothers, Stuart or Philip, found a book about them and was fascinated. The third principal, singer Alison Statton, worked as a dental technician during the band’s heyday and is now a chiropractor. The answer I thought I’d never get is that Pedro Costa’s 2006 Portuguese movie Colossal Youth is indeed related to the album somehow. Released as Juventude em Marcha ("Youth on the March"), Costa, the picture’s director, writer, and co-cinematographer, specifically requested that releases in English-speaking countries bear the title Colossal Youth, harking to the album. Unfortunately, while this book is heavily footnoted, no source is given on this point, and little explanation of Costa’s reason. In fact, Blair and Bocciero seem mystified about it themselves, though convinced of the connection. I’ll take them at their word. This book reminded me of Geeta Dayal’s fine treatment in this series of Brian Eno’s Another Green World. It largely eschews personal anecdotes of their history with the album, replacing it with a lot of probing and erudite discussion of its purpose and sources. Colossal Youth really is a lovely and special album and I was grateful just for being sent back to it again. I like the way Blair and Bucciero cast the net wide to place this album culturally. Susan Sontag is mentioned a lot, as are Greil Marcus and Simon Reynolds. Usual suspects all, but Blair and Bucciero make use of them judiciously. This is a surprisingly rare thing in this series—a text that is a worthy companion to the album, enlightening and informative.

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

“Vampyr” (1871)

I should start by noting that Jan Neruda’s very short story (also known as “Vampire” and “The Vampire”) is not the basis for Danish filmmaker Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 film of that name. That honor goes to Sheridan Le Fanu. Neruda is on Wikipedia as an important figure in Czech realism and a member of the May School, although I don’t know what those things mean exactly. But probably this story is a one-off of some kind. It features a small Polish family touring the Greek islands, with a daughter who is sick. This being a vampire story, I was instantly suspicious of the family members, especially the daughter’s new husband. That’s how vampire stories can tend to go. But the vampire in the story, eventually identified as “The Vampire,” is a Greek man, a traveling young artist renowned (or notorious) for making sketches of the corpses of people recently passed. But he does them ahead of time, before their deaths. The daughter who is ailing appears to be merely ailing, but it's possible the Greek man is doing a vampire thing on her too, that is, sucking her blood or energy somehow. The story is not really clear about the matter, nor even about who the vampire is, though eventually it is spelled out more or less. The Greek artist guy shows up after the family has been settled into a hotel and begins to sketch the daughter. He does so discreetly, with his back turned so no one can see his work. He’s less like a vampire and more like a social misfit with uncanny intuition. (I will note also that daylight does not seem to bother him, nor do we know whether the daughter has puncture wounds on her neck.) That’s basically all the story is giving us. I didn’t think it was very effective or interesting and also it seems to be out of step with Neruda’s main currents and larger career. I think vampire stories by definition are not realism of any kind, not even magical realism. So possibly this was written for the money? The story is quite readable for something in translation from the 19th century, but I would have to say it’s fatally slight.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Cowboy Copas, “Hangman’s Boogie” (1949)

[listen up!]

Cowboy Copas was a country singer out of Blue Creek, Ohio, who’s probably most famous now for dying in the same plane crash in 1963 that also took Patsy Cline. “Hangman’s Boogie” does not appear to be his best-known song but it’s one that has stuck with me since I found it in the Hillbilly Boogie box set (on the Proper label). I admit it took me a few turns to grok what’s going on here. I didn’t expect anything like it from a song with “boogie” in its title (which includes most of the 100 tunes on Hillbilly Boogie). The jaunty air of Copas’s vocal perfectly belies the doom and darkness of the scene he paints, with the singer scheduled for execution in the morning for rustling cattle: “I’m gonna do the boogie with the drop me beat / Just a corny rhythm where you swing your feet.” The song was written by Larry Cassidy, another obscure workaday midcentury country entertainer with perhaps a more morbid comical bent than usual, the author also of the seagoing disaster “Save the Alcohol” (“Save the kids and the women first, then save the alky-hall,” says the captain). Cowboy Copas can be found sitting on the back of a flatbed truck in the 1949 movie Square Dance Jubilee to sing this confounding upbeat tale of woe, which seems to play capital punishment for something of a lighthearted joke. (The movie is rated 4.0 by 61 people on IMDb, but I think it’s worth a look for the music. “Hangman’s Boogie” starts shortly after 31:00.) The song even invokes the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and says outright but calmly, “It’s a doggone pity but I gotta go.” The last line and its foul image kept creeping up on me, amazed to find it so baldly in a song like this, softly hollering into eternity: “I’m gonna be dancing in the strangest way / Doing the hangman’s boogie at the break of day.”

The House of the Dead (1862)

For those keeping score, the only novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky that Vladmir Nabokov liked was The Double, and the only one that Leo Tolstoy liked was The House of the Dead. Both cases make sense for specific reasons. The Double is arty and literary (and good), The House of the Dead is full of humanity (and very good). I have to say so far I’ve liked very much everything I’ve read by Dostoevsky, even more than I expected. The House of the Dead has a tone that is different from any of the others—more sober, with more pathos. Gone is the screaming edge of anxiety, outrage, dread, hysteria. It's fair to call it a novel but much of it is lightly fictionalized, closer to autofiction, with scenes from his four years in prison at hard labor, following his mock execution, an unimaginably cruel and traumatizing exercise in which he believed he was about to die. There is little narrative through-line here, just scenes of prison life organized by theme: first impressions, new acquaintances, Christmas, the hospital, punishments, and animals they lived with and loved—a horse, a goat, etc. This journalistic novel is also where I learned that Dostoevsky’s family of origin had the status of nobility. Dostoevsky’s first-person narrator here is also from that upper class, and describes how the majority of prisoners were peasants and hated him for his class. Just another problem to deal with in prison. The book is rich with characters, and Dostoevsky’s ability to bring them to life with vivid detail and concise anecdotes is more evidence of how he continued to get better as a novelist. It may have been serialized in its initial publication, but it does not feel fragmented. Rather, it is methodical in its treatment of the subjects at hand. Some of the foreshadowing and references to other parts of the text feel a bit awkward but I like the approach he has taken. The narrator is serving a 10-year sentence for “assassinating” his wife (in the Constance Garrett translation) whereas Dostoevsky served four years for participating in a subversive literary discussion group. There are many beautiful passages here—notably the sections on Christmas, a theatrical performance staged by prisoners, and the prison animals. But I really enjoyed all of it. It’s interesting to see how much skill he has even when he is adopting a more restrained voice. The House of the Dead belongs with the best of prison literature and it’s one of Dostoevsky’s best too.

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

Batman Returns (1992)

USA, 126 minutes

Director: Tim Burton

Writers: Bob Kane, Daniel Waters, Sam Hamm

Photography: Stefan Czapsky

Music: Danny Elfman

Editors: Bob Badami, Chris Lebenzon

Cast: Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Michael Gough, Michael Murphy, Cristi Conaway, Pat Hingle, Paul Reubens, Andrew Bryniarsky

Director Tim Burton’s sequel to his first Batman movie makes it more obvious how much even that picture was attempting to split the difference between the campy ‘60s TV version and Frank Miller’s ‘80s reimagining of the caped crusader as a grizzled vigilante and sadistic mental case. The production design and some elements of the story lean hard into the latter but then there is Jack Nicholson taking top billing and slobbering all over the set in whooping cocaine-addled fugue states. Soundtrack by Prince. We might have thought the 1989 Batman worked, to the extent it did, because we wanted so badly the kind of Batman movie it took nearly 20 years to get. “We” meaning fans of the Frank Miller version, which I adored in the ‘80s.

Batman Returns is more like return of the camp. Casting Pee Wee Herman in the prologue as the Penguin’s father kind of gives away the game, as do casting Danny DeVito as the Penguin (who prefers to go by his given name, Oswald Cobblepot) and Christopher Walken (wearing a helmet of white hair) as Max Shreck, Gotham City’s power company tycoon implementing a dastardly scheme. Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle, who becomes the Catwoman, is another case. We’ll get to that. Early in the picture, when she is still a meek stammering secretary to Max, Batman rescues her from an assault. “Wow,” she says. “The Batman. Or is it just Batman?” The very question! So meta! “Batman” is in the tradition of the ‘50s and ‘60s comic book version leading into the TV show, whereas “the Batman” (subtle distinction!) is the original moniker for the creature of the night (including “the Bat-Man”) which Miller was trying to revive.