Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)

Memorias del subdesarrollo, Cuba, 97 minutes

Director: Tomas Gutierrez Alea

Writers: Edmundo Desnoes, Tomas Gutierrez Alea

Photography: Ramon F. Suarez

Music: Leo Brouwer

Editor: Nelson Rodriguez

Cast: Sergio Corrieri, Daisy Granados, Eslinda Nunez, Omar Valdes, Rene de la Cruz, Yolanda Farr, Jack Gelber, Ofelia Gonzalez

Memories of Underdevelopment came out in the globally tumultuous year of 1968, chipping in reports from Cuba less than 10 years after the Revolution. Indeed, the novel by Edmundo Desnoes that it is based on was published only in 1965. It bears a curious and interesting point of view in its main character, Sergio Carmona Mendoyo (Sergio Corrieri), a merchant capitalist who ran a “posh” furniture store he inherited from his father which has been destroyed or taken away by the new regime. Sergio is also owner of rental properties and retains an income stream there. The picture is set in 1961 and 1962. The first scenes show Sergio packing his mother and the rest of his family off to the US. He appears to be dubious about long-term prospects for the Revolution. He is staying and may join his family later. The picture is semi-documentary in style, with archival footage, and follows the suddenly aimless Sergio around, dealing with his girlfriend problems (he is divorced) even as he ponders, in voiceover, the finer points of “underdevelopment.”

His first and most problematic girlfriend is an evident example. “I try to live like a European,” he says. “[Elena] makes me feel underdevelopment with every step.” They are in a bookstore where he is purchasing a copy of Lolita. Elena (Daisy Granados) is scheming to force him into marriage, premised on their having sex, or, as they often say around here, “ruining” her. For his part, Sergio denies deceiving her and doesn’t think she was really a virgin, which of course does not help his situation. Eventually she enlists her brutal brother and parents into making a legal case of it. This situation is appallingly beneath a genteel man who would prefer to spend afternoons at the modern art museum. His allegiance to European culture is as bone-deep as Elena’s family’s is to old-world ways of blood honor and such, next stop clitorectomies. They could be closer to that than we would like to think or maybe Sergio and I are paranoid. It’s a real case of underdevelopment.

“The Affliction” (1995)

One thing you can say for sure about Joyce Carol Oates is that she’s both fearless and unrelenting about being gross when she wants to be. This includes posting pictures to social media, but here I am specifically talking about a story like this. The affliction of the title is a strange rash that also afflicts the young victim’s great-uncle. The doctors don’t know what it is or what to do about it, but the uncle does—it’s a matter of digging out biological “things” embedded under the skin, as he demonstrates. The highlights of the story are the descriptions of the “things”: “cobwebby strands of bloody mucus-matter, wormlike coils of puss, partly coagulated blood-clots.” Or, “The child had to be held as, with a deft hand, the uncle extracted the things, some of them no larger than a kernel of corn, some as large as a dime, throbbing with heat and of an odor of rankness, like an overripe peach. The operation took about forty minutes. The child screamed in pain and terror, thrashing in the tub.” Detailed scenes of the affliction feel like where Oates is most into it. They’re scattered all over the story. But then, as if to dignify an indulgence, the things become the source of the main character’s art. Over his lifetime—he’s in his 70s in the present time of the story—he becomes a great and renowned artist on the celebrity level, as I took it, of Picasso or Warhol. Oates is fascinated by art and the making of it, a frequent theme in her work. This story is making its metaphorical point obvious with the show of body horror: art is torn out of the artist, and it hurts. In this story art is organic in an unusually vivid way, the result of a process that doesn’t entirely involve consciousness. But it’s fair to say the story also exists to make us uncomfortable. The artist, in his 70s, is in the twilight of his career, fading. Remarkably, Oates does her horror work as a sideline project in an amazingly prolific career. This story, for any of its arguable flaws, is a prime example of one of the things she does best: shock, and more, shock with a purpose. The take on the agonies of art might be a little easy or overstated, but it’s real enough on its own terms. Art makes great demands of artists.

Joyce Carol Oates, The Collector of Hearts
Story not available online.

Damien Jurado, “A.M. AM” (2016)

[listen up!]

I can tell, when I pay a little more attention to the words than the vibe, that this is a fairly straightforward love song. “I was yours all along” x4 in the chorus, etc. But the title mystifies me down to the pronunciation (I’m going with “ay em am”), as does the song’s instant potent sway on me. I’ve had periods where I felt compelled to play it a lot most days. I’m not that much of one for pulling songs out of movies and TV shows—if the music is going to have oversize impact on me usually I know it beforehand—but I heard this first in the 2018 Netflix documentary miniseries Wild Wild Country, which is about the Rajneeshee cult that caused various bizarre political problems in Oregon circa 1981. The song plays at the high-point ending of one episode, when it seemed for a few flashing moments that things could work out in Oregon. I was transfixed, transported. I sat and listened to it, stunned, with the Rajneeshee events sinking in. It feels like music that could come from the time, with touches of new wave and synth-pop and a plodding tempo that serves up the overarching Simple Minds melancholy. Yet it feels deeply, profoundly joyful too, sacred even, full of life, in and of it. Jurado is a prolific Seattle native, born in 1972. His homely vocal bears all the contradictions that make the song work for me: sadness and bliss all at once, knowingness and the burden of it. I’ve checked in with more of his stuff, notably the album that is home to this song, Visions of Us on the Land, but haven’t yet found anything that hits like “A.M. AM.” Thanks to the producers of Wild Wild Country, a great show! Don’t miss it if you can!

The Naked Gun (2025)

Happy to note that the fourth installment in the Naked Gun franchise, 31 years in the making, carries on in the fine old Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker tradition, at least judging by how much I laughed sitting alone in my apartment. It’s a fast-paced barrage of dad jokes, bad puns, sight gags, slapstick, and outrageous dirty jokes. Random action such as fistfights between principals is often going on in the background. Mug shots are taken by fashion photographers. Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) is always running over things when he drives. There’s even an OJ Simpson gag. If one bit doesn’t get you, there’s another one coming in about 20 seconds. Eventually, you just have to give in to this intense desire to amuse. I love how they mix up the styles and strategies, such as redundancy. Whenever Drebin Jr. shows up at a crime scene or the Police Squad headquarters, some underling is sure to hand him a latte cup of coffee. It just seems like another cop show cliché the first time but then it keeps happening, with slight variations. While he is driving, for example—a hand with a cup of coffee reaches into the window. Drebin Jr. is the son of Frank Drebin Sr. from the original franchise (Leslie Nielsen). Besides sharing initials, Neeson and Nielsen traveled similar screenway paths to fame, from romantic leads to roles as hard-bitten heavies into these surprising turns toward comedy—based in part on their previous sober personas (Z-A-Z did the same for Peter Graves, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges, of course). Neeson does not quite have Nielsen’s deadpan genius, but he’s good enough here I’m willing to give him time to get it (meaning, yes, I hope there are further installments ... the Z-A-Z attack somehow remains reliably fresh). Neeson is good, and so is a game Pamela Anderson as Beth Davenport, Drebin Jr.’s love interest at the center of the murder story. Her brother has been killed using a Primordial Law of Toughness (PLOT) device, which turns rational human beings into savages under influence of their worst impulses. This short movie has a long, long credits reel with extras, including a tender and hilarious love song that Drebin Jr. sings (poorly) to Beth. I recommend sticking around for it.

“The Words That Count” (1976)

This Ramsey Campbell story is purely a gimmick story, but as it happens it’s a gimmick I’m a little susceptible to. It reminded me of a detail I liked in a story by Margaret Irvin, “The Book,” where a possessed man’s prayers come out backward, in reverse word order. In this story, as explicitly spelled out in the last paragraph, the first word in every paragraph is the Lord’s Prayer in reverse word order. So the first word of the story is, of course, “Amen.” The conceit entirely eluded me in a story that wasn’t entirely making sense anyway, so making that explicit at the end is important. It brings home a certain aspect of the story to explain it, but formally it also weakens the story. A lot of things are definitely awkward here, perhaps most notably the first three paragraphs, which read like throat-clearing. The story features a pamphlet, as it’s called, with recognizable words from the Lord’s Prayer (e.g., “trespassers”) and a bizarre fundamentalist patriarch. Mostly it’s muddled, but also desperate and unpleasant, as the pamphlet appears to hypnotize the first-person narrator, daughter of the patriarch. The story may also be another example of a sad case where people had no idea how bad conservative Christianity was going to get. It’s unsettling because it’s unpleasant and confusing, and it gets a nice charge of the uncanny (at least for me) with the revelation of the gimmick. Unfortunately, that does not come until the end of the story, which until then veers between a trite treatment of conservative Christianity and impenetrability. Under other circumstances I might have abandoned it as early as the first paragraphs, which are terrible, and it doesn’t get much better from there. But as I say I’m susceptible to the trick of prayers in reverse word order as a symptom of demon possession. The Margaret Irvin story is much better. Interestingly, the story Campbell compares it to is W.F. Harvey’s “August Heat.” I don’t read that story the same way Campbell does, but I think another story by Harvey, “The Beast With Five Fingers,” has similar effects, featuring a man’s left hand writing with pen and paper unbeknownst to the owner of that hand. Things like that are practically impossible to do, which is where the kick of the uncanny comes in for me. You probably know the Lord’s Prayer. Try saying it backward—“amen, evil, from,” etc. It’s harder than you might think. I don’t like to imagine that religion is part of the effect here, but I suppose it could be.

Masters of Darkness, ed. Dennis Etchison
Story not available online.

Thirteen (1993)

For a long time I knew Teenage Fanclub for Bandwagonesque and that was it. I didn’t even know they had a first album until last year and I didn’t know anything about Thirteen either or the rest of the catalog. Bandwagonesque was a handful for me—one of the best albums of that year, 1991, I was drawn to playing it repeatedly, because it’s good, but at the same time I was embarrassed for the abject aping of Big Star and Alex Chilton (a bit too close for me to the Replacements piling on the pyre of the Big Star legend circa 1987). I didn’t know how many agreed with me in 1993, for example slagging the album’s title as more of same (for the Big Star song “Thirteen”). But if the problem with Bandwagonesque has somehow worn off for me it never existed with Thirteen (which has 13 songs). I only arrived at it last year. Oh, I admit it took sitting with it a few times for the high points to assemble and register. But they are there. File under the slippery label “power pop,” with Teenage Fanclub and Thirteen further landing in the shambolics wing. Even as it comes rumbling in like bad weather with the exquisite five-minute opener, “Hang On,” when the singing starts it’s all homely heart, lovely melody, glowing harmonies, a flute, a lulling orchestra. It’s like that all the way. One of the secrets here is three songwriters, in singer guitarist Norman Blake, singer bassist Gerard Love, and singer other guitarist Raymond McGinley (plus drummer Brendan O’Hare contributes the 1:22 gem “Get Funky,” which comes complete with irresistible handclaps). I can’t say I’ve picked out anything distinct about any one of them. I’m more impressed with how the songwriting blends, like the singing, into something with its own distinct identity. I will say it’s Love who wrote the opener “Hang On” and the closer “Gene Clark,” which strike me as notably apt in their sequencing positions (although the latter has a somewhat annoying two minutes of silence at the end of the song. What’s up with that, streaming service?!). “Gene Clark” bears a worthy name-check by reputation, although I don’t know Clark well enough myself to know how well the song works as tribute. It’s nominally hard rock with an epic electric guitar solo leading the way into a fine round of righteous head-bobbing. Turn it up. Light that Bic. Get with the Teenage Fanclub.

Millennium Mambo (2001)

Qian xi man bo, Taiwan / France, 106 minutes

Director: Hsiao-Hsien Hou

Writer: T'ien-wen Chu

Photography: Ping Bin Lee

Music: Yoshihiro Hanno, Kai-yu Huang, Giong Lim

Editors: Ju-kuan Hsiao, Ching-Sung Liao

Cast: Shu Qi, Chun-hao Tuan, Jack Kao, Jun Takeuchi, Ko Takeuchi, Doze Niu, Pauline Chan, Rio Peng

This confusing but beautiful and often striking picture is the first I’ve seen by Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien Hou. My points to follow may thus (actually, as always) say more about me than the movie or any of its principals. It was released in 2001, and it is set in 2001 (perhaps to avoid arguments about which millennium the year 2000 belongs to), but the premise is that the events are memories of the main character, Vicky (Shu Qi), 10 years later, in 2011. It dwells in the Taipei rave scene, rife with drugs and lowlifes, crime, bad relationships. Vicky and her boyfriend, the overbearingly abusive Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan), live together in a dump. They do drugs and try to get by. She works as a hostess in a popular night spot. They circle one another warily. They are never at ease together.

In a way it did not surprise me to learn that Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai were first offered the roles. Millennium Mambo reminded me a lot of the pictures of Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express) and even more of Hou’s countrymen Edward Yang (Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day) and Tsai Ming-liang (What Time Is It There?). The camera is liquid, often in motion, images may be out of focus, amounting only to blotches of color, though often vivid and always expressive. The pace is slow, studied, deliberate. Hao-Hao is some kind of DJ, and EDM is a pulsing constant, even in the background as if from the next apartment. In Millennium Mambo—in many of these pictures—the style is in direct opposition to the terms of the narrative, which is explicitly, even wantonly, focused on squalor. As cognitive dissonance it is exquisite.

“His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood” (1990)

My first story by Poppy Z. Brite (aka William Joseph Martin) is a pretty good one, all things considered. It was published when he was only 23 but seems to be hardly his first—I’m seeing some 1987 publication dates, when he was 20. On ISFDB this story is classified as belonging to the “Cthulhu Mythos” series, which obviously has many H.P. Lovecraft stories as well as various by others. I did not get a Cthulhu hit off this story, but some of it reminded me of Lovecraft, macabre details like the grave-robbing, a main feature. Brite’s sense of sexuality is miles beyond the timid Lovecraft. Weird editors Ann & Jeff VanderMeer compare Brite to “Decadent-era French and English writers [more] than the contemporary horror scene.” That seems like a reasonable point—are we talking about Baudelaire, Rimbaud, de Quincey? The open perversions here are almost refreshing. Brite is a trans man and takes masculine pronouns, but he may be more nonbinary. I’m not sure. Sexuality is all over this but it’s also indeterminate. The first-person narrator is a man and so is his partner. They start out having sex with others, sometimes together, and end up having sex with one another. They drink absinthe they stole from a grave, which is partly responsible for inspiring them to rob more graves. Finally, apparently, they steal from the wrong grave, as one night a strange apparition of a beautiful boy appears at a nightclub. I love, by the way, how Brite integrates clubbing into the mise en scene of this story. And I like how it’s just out there in terms of “divine decadence” (my term by way of the movie Cabaret). It all comports with my sense of Brite—I’ve been meaning to look into him since the ‘90s—except it’s much better and more natural than I expected. It always sounded a little like a put-on and possibly it is. I still don’t know that much about him. I believe he has moved on from horror since the ‘90s, but I don’t know. This story, which is quite fine in its own right, even if I’m missing the specific Cthulhu elements, definitely makes me think he’s worth looking into further.

Poppy Z. Brite, Wormwood
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Story not available online.

Lou Christie, “Lightnin’ Strikes” (1965)

[listen up!]

What have we here? Confessions of a kissing bandit, episodes in the career of a serial killer, or just plain old date rape? As values changed in the 1960s with the Sexual Revolution, Pittsburgh native Lou Christie (with his long-time songwriting partner Twyla Herbert) decided his best bet leaned toward sexual frenzy, orgasmic release, and his keening falsetto. He duly obtained the rewards. “Lightnin’ Strikes” went to #1 early in 1966 and the similarly minded follow-up, “Rhapsody in the Rain,” hit the top 20 later that year. It’s arguable that these songs haven’t aged well—“Nature’s taking over my one-track mind,” Christie explains himself—but it is equally arguable that they are irresistible. I danced to them madly in my bedroom as an 11-year-old, not really understanding the connotations (having looked at Mad Men recently, I’m not sure how many did in 1966). The hook, a rising crescendo of intensity, features a trio of chick singers crying “Stop!” to his “I can’t stop!” The scene is kicked off in various fashion: “When I see lipstick to be kissed,” “If she’s put together fine and she’s readin’ my mind,” “If she gives me a sign that she wants to make time.” Followed by “Stop! I can’t stop! Stop! Stop!” This three-minute little symphony for the kiddies (apologies to Phil Spector) then spirals off to its insular thrilling self-justifying fugue state in the chorus, with the chick singers and horns at full throttle and a twangy guitar solo too: “Lightning is striking, again and again and again,” etc. There you go. Blame it on the weather. This also applies to “Rhapsody in the Rain.” Not all radio stations were on board with Lou Christie and his swingin’ kinks, but enough to make them big hits. Because of the somewhat rancid lyrical points, we almost certainly have to classify Lou Christie songs now as guilty pleasure. Not that he would likely care much. The pleasure was purely the point with him, guilty or otherwise.

The Hill of Dreams (1907)

I’m probably way out of line to compare Arthur Machen’s short, semiautobiographical novel to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both come from outer precincts of Britain. Machen was about 20 years older. I have no idea where Joyce was on genre writing. Certainly his Portrait is more naturalistic than Machen’s Hill of Dreams. Machen is trying to ground the events he recounts here even though, as a mystic, he can’t seem to help some indulgence of the weird. His young man / artist, Lucian Taylor, is in his early to mid-20s here, raised in rural Wales and eventually moving to London as he begins more seriously to write. In Wales, he is always distracted by the deep woods and by the Roman architecture. He’s drawn to an old Roman fort, in a clearing in the woods, and something happens there. Machen supplies few specific details. It involves Lucian taking off all his clothes and falling into a deep sleep with strange dreams. I have an idea what happened here—masturbation, possibly for the first time. That’s likely more crude and bound to this plane than Machen intends, but there is plainly something sexual about it. Machen wrote this in the 1890s but it was not published until 1907. Surely the rules of the time regarding sexual propriety applied—in short, don’t ever talk about it. So Machen may have felt he had to be coy. Full disclosure, I’m not sure what happens in much of this novel, although it is usually interesting to see Lucian grow and change. In Wales, he writes a first novel. When he submits it for publication it is stolen by another author and published as by him. Incredibly, Lucian doesn’t seem to mind that much. He’s already at work on another. He moves to London to work on it. The woods and nature of his homeland worried and discomposed him but he misses them keenly in the big city. The Hill of Dreams, according to Wikipedia, is “Generally considered Machen’s masterpiece.” That’s news to me—I hear a lot more about “The Great God Pan” (or “The White People,” which is actually his masterpiece). I would not suggest starting on Machen with The Hill of Dreams. But it’s one to get to sooner rather than later if you’re into him.

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