“The Specialist’s Hat” (1998)

Kelly Link won a World Fantasy Award for this story. It’s a little too whimsical for me but not bad. The main characters are Claire and Samantha, 10-year-old identical twins who play a verbal game called Dead. “When you’re Dead ... you don’t have to brush your teeth.” “When you’re Dead ... you live in a box, and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.” So on and so forth. They’re staying in a haunted house once occupied by a minor poet who their father is studying, even though he doesn’t like the poet’s work. Their mother died almost a year earlier. They compulsively measure and count things. It seems fanciful, but it paints the strange scene and setting quickly, a little bit comical and perhaps even a little bit something to envy. Staying in a ginormous haunted house to study the papers of a minor poet you don’t like has its appeals as a lifestyle. There’s also an unnamed babysitter on hand who is somehow unsettling. Specifics of the very large house follow, called Eight Chimneys because that’s what it has, with fireplaces big enough to stand in. They keep things intriguingly odd. Ten-year-old identical twins playing a game called Dead are, of course, unsettling too. The babysitter distracts with what she says and what she knows. Along the way the language can sparkle. Snatches of strange poetry, perhaps the minor poet’s work, interrupt the narrative. The story dances around the points of any haunting, teasing us with evocative details. Ominous notes attend the babysitter, “whose name neither twin quite caught.... The reason that Claire and Samantha have a babysitter is that their father met a woman in the woods.” I love how loaded and deceptively simple it all is. No one can reach the babysitter but she always shows up on time, enters the house, and goes to the room the twins are in. The babysitter tells them about “the Specialist” as if he or it is both real and unreal. The Specialist’s hat itself is a strange and unnerving object: “There are holes in the black thing and it whistles mournfully as she spins it.... ‘That doesn’t look like a hat,’ says Claire.” As it turns out, it bites. A lot going on underneath the surface of this one.

Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen
The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Earth, Wind & Fire, “Reasons” (1975)

[listen up!]

I was doing my much belated due diligence recently, checking up on Earth, Wind & Fire, an act I too long neglected. That’s the Way of the World is something like their fifth or sixth album but it’s where the (multiple) hits started (plus don’t forget the worthy deep cuts): “Shining Star,” a #1 hit I admit I heard enough on the radio and in some telephone company ad, the glistening title song (#12) much better than I remembered, and then this beauty, never a Hot 100 hit but it did appear on the Adult R&B chart. I was surprised—I knew “Reasons” as well as the other two, and not because it has become an unlikely staple at wedding celebrations (unlikely because if you listen to the words it’s about a one-night stand). That doesn’t explain why it seems so familiar because I don’t make it to that many weddings. The leisurely five-minute “Reasons” insinuates with fluttering horns and electric piano and Philip Bailey’s haunting, darting, lovely falsetto. But what I really love is one of those moments I’m starting to think only the best pop songs can deliver, heard in snatches on the radio (or somewhere) that stop me cold—in this case the lurching, battling rhythms that hit when the singers start going “la-la-la-la-la” around 1:15. It gets even better about a minute later when strings take the “la-la” melody line and the song sails on pure intuition, a robot out on the dancefloor reeling and careening at deliberate tempo. I can’t get enough of it. Cover versions by Miki Howard, the Manhattans, Maxi Priest (smooth reggae), Musiq Soulchild, and Nelson Rangell (lite jazz) only remind how good is the EWF original. Stick with this—and no live versions need apply either.

The Girl With the Needle (2024)

I’ve never thought of myself as too particularly squeamish—hey, I look at horror movies and true-crime documentaries all the time—but this Danish picture and period piece, shot in black & white and set shortly after World War I in Copenhagen, seems designed only to make viewers uncomfortable. Male viewers, that is, which might be the source of my troubles. The needle in the title is a knitting needle which “the girl,” a factory worker named Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) and a full-grown woman, uses to attempt to abort her pregnancy in a public bathhouse. It doesn’t work, and later we get a harrowing birth scene. Still later, we get some breast-feeding scenes that range close to perverse. They were all hard for me to watch. At the bathhouse another woman there, Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), comes to Karoline’s aid. She tells her that, for a fee, she will take Karoline’s baby after it is born and find it a good home. Sonne is good as the hapless Karoline, but Dyrholm is reasonably the star of this show, or maybe I was just remembering her riveting, convincing performance as the singer Nico in the 2017 picture Nico, 1988 (make it a double feature if you must look at this one). I thought The Girl With the Needle tries too hard to merely shock. Well over halfway through this picture, I still had no idea where it was going, and that was not in a good way. The last words in the picture provide a vital clue: “Inspired by true events.” Any time I see that in a movie—more often placed at the opening—I know how to set my expectations. A lot of it will be unbelievable and, just so, most of The Girl With the Needle is hard to believe. There are good scenes here—notably the confrontation between Karoline and the mother (Benedikte Hansen) of her lover and would-be spouse Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup). This matriarch brings in a doctor to verify Karoline’s pregnancy (yes indeed, another uncomfortable scene) and then proceeds to shatter any illusions harbored by Karoline and her son. Jørgen is left weeping and unable to make eye contact with Karoline. But all the extremes about this story and this movie—I didn’t even get to Karoline’s husband, a war casualty—seem to exist purely in a context of unending miserablism. It left me cold. YMMV.

Double Star (1956)

I’m pretty sure Robert Heinlein remains a divisive figure among science fiction readers. Certainly I agree to the extent he injects his various conservative political ideas into his work. But he’s also reliably a very good storyteller, as this very short novel shows (under 150 pages). Yes, it’s on the preposterous side and has crazy ideas, but it’s so readable it’s not hard to knock off in a day. It’s set in the far future when the solar system has largely been colonized and settled. There’s still hope for Venus in 1956 and many planets are crawling with their own life forms. Martians, for example, look like trees. Our main guy and first-person narrator is an actor. The art of the theater is one place where Heinlein has a lot of strange ideas, but never mind. For complex political reasons the actor is called on to impersonate a high-level functionary who has been kidnapped, which would be no excuse for missing some ceremonies. There’s a lot here about the art and science of performance, sprinkled with “method” ideas and chin-pulling theory. Maybe an actual actor could speak better to it, but it struck me as a bunch of bloviating. Nevertheless, the story moves quickly and doesn’t leave us much time for doubting its assertions. Double Star is the first novel in the second volume of the Library of America’s American Science Fiction set of nine SF novels from the ‘50s, a big rollicking start. I don’t think I’d heard of Double Star before, but it won Heinlein his first Hugo. You can do worse in science fiction than go with award winners. Although the solar system setup is rife with science fiction gadgets and technology, this novel is mostly about politics, with a lot of complicated parliamentary procedures driving the action. Heinlein, happily, wastes little time on lectures and asides, but is obviously into the machinations of power—I thought that side of it was dullish. He is prone to some lecturing about acting here. The ideas are interesting but a little bit trite. No matter—Double Star is short, moves fast, and simply rushes past its flaws. It’s entertaining, as Heinlein often is for me, though I generally prefer his stuff before the 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land. After that one you’re on your own.

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

Green Border (2023)

[2025 review here]

Zielona granica, Poland / France / Czech Republic / Belgium, 152 minutes

Director: Agnieszka Holland

Writers: Maciej Pisuk, Gabriela Lazarkiewicz, Agnieszka Holland

Photography: Tomasz Naumiuk

Music: Frédéric Vercheval

Editor: Pavel Hrdlicka

Cast: Jalal Altawil, Behi Djanati Atai, Maja Ostaszewska, Tomasz Włosok, Mohamad Al Rashi, Dalia Naous, Monika Frajczyk, Piotr Stramowski, Jaśmina Polak, Marta Stalmierska, Maciej Stuhr, Magdalena Popławska, Joely Mbundu, Taim Ajjan, Talia Ajjan

The green border in director and cowriter Agnieszka Holland’s blockbuster, sickening war movie, shot in black and white, is the swampy forested region on either side of the border between Belarus and Poland. A family of Syrian refugees is making their way to Sweden, seeking asylum in the EU. They travel by air to Minsk in Belarus, on the flight picking up Afghani refugee Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), an older woman who is seeking a new home in Poland (rather than wait, as she says, for the Taliban regime to resume power). Belarus is where the problems start for them. They encounter corrupt, sadistic, and/or indifferent officials in the border patrols, thieves, bad weather, and more. Poland unofficially does not allow passage for refugees. Both Poland and Belarus have “pushback” policies, which means Leila and the family are repeatedly herded across the border, back and forth, over and over, between the two countries. Making progress is all but impossible, dependent on luck more than anything.

The family is notably vulnerable. A grandfather in poor health (Mohamad Al Rashi) is the family patriarch, a traditional Muslim who trusts in Allah and rolls out the prayer mat even in the depths of the forest. His grandson Bashir (Jalal Altawil) is more savvy to the world, more embittered, carrying a cell phone that is their lifeline along with powerpacks to keep it charged. His wife Amina (Dalia Naous) and three young children are total innocents who must trust Bashir (and Allah) to get where they are going. The youngest is an infant still being breastfed. Leila has a cell phone too and seems to be the most skilled at using it. She and the oldest boy Nur (Taim Ajjan) make a connection that will turn out to be fatal.

Link Wray, “Rumble” (1958)

[listen up!]

Link Wray’s “Rumble” was a few years late to be the first rock ‘n’ roll record, but it was the first something. Shoegaze, possibly, or dream-pop? Sonic Youth might have studied it closely. It’s an obvious influence on David Lynch’s musical projects. Jimmy Page cites it as a primary influence. So does Jack White, even U2’s The Edge. “Rumble” hits like a steamroller, dense with mass. In its own way it is very ur, even (or perhaps especially) as it stalled out at #16 in 1958. It should have been #1 for weeks and rivaled “Rock Around the Clock.” But the world may not have been entirely ready for it, though its influence now runs to the horizons. Others (notably Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Les Paul) had been exploring the tonal dynamics of the electric guitar, but no one previously treated it like a hot tub where you go take a soak. The best way to listen to “Rumble” is loud, of course, with eyes closed for maximal impact. Wray is in love with his ginormous chords and so am I. Reverb all over the place. His plectrum brushes the chords so slowly and methodically you can almost hear each string. The song plays slow and logy, hypnotic and seductive. Having established a mood so immersive it has your full attention (in a song that lasts only 2:26), Wray proceeds to begin abusing his instrument, whaling away on single strings and incidentally pointing the way to thrash, potentially yet one more innovation of this tune. We have heard it everywhere since 1958, all over oldies radio and in movies like Pulp Fiction, Independence Day, Blow, the original pilot for The Sopranos, the Japanese cult classic Wild Zero, and many more. It never gets old. I’m a little amazed it didn’t turn up in one of David Lynch’s pictures.

What Was the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Record? (1992)

I’m embarrassed to note it took me so long to get to this interesting music history, by Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, that a 30th anniversary edition has already been out for a few years. That’s the version I’m pointing to below. It’s probably even better than this original, adding forewords by Billy Vera and Dave Marsh, whose bio here asserts he is the dean of rock criticism, an interesting choice of words. As per the question in the title, the book is a densely researched list of 50 songs that are candidates for the honor, from “Blues, Part 2” by Jazz at the Philharmonic (1944) to “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley (1956). All the ones I might have nominated are here: “That’s All Right” by Big Boy Crudup and Elvis Presley, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” by Wynonie Harris & His All Stars, “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston With His Delta Cats, “Sixty Minute Man” by the Dominoes, “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Big Joe Turner, “Work With Me, Annie” by the Royals and the Midnighters, “Sh-Boom” by the Chords, and 41 more, including the correct answer (according to me) “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets. Each song is profiled in great detail, with chart positions, when and where recorded, release dates, interesting anecdotes, and more. Along the way a lot of industry currents are discussed, such as the stories of cover versions, the abuse of independent labels by the majors even as the indies marched on to further heights, and many of the interconnections between musicians, producers, and songwriters. Some of these songs I barely knew, such as “Blues, Part 2,” Arthur Smith’s “Guitar Boogie,” or Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man.” All were a pleasure to hear, even if I think some are barely rock ‘n’ roll. “Blues, Part 2,” for example, sounds much closer to me to free jazz, thanks to the wild, iconic tenor sax play by Illinois Jacquet. Maybe in some ways it prefigures the Stooges’ Fun House? It’s not on my streaming service, but I found it on youtube, posted by someone inspired by this book (likely 2nd ed.). It’s not just book and library research here. Dawson and Propes spoke to dozens of people involved with these records, including artists, producers, distributors, and many other industry figures. I was sad to reach “Heartbreak Hotel” because I cared less about answering the primary question and just wanted to keep hearing the stories of how great rock ‘n’ roll records came to be.

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

L’Argent (1983)

France / Switzerland, 85 minutes

Director: Robert Bresson

Writers: Leo Tolstoy, Robert Bresson

Photography: Pasqualino De Santis, Emmanuel Machuel

Music: J.S. Bach

Editor: Jean-Francois Naudon

Cast: Christian Patey, Sylvia Van den Elsen, Michel Briguet, Caroline Lang

Director and screenwriter Robert Bresson adapted a long tale by Leo Tolstoy as the basis for his last picture (translated as “The Counterfeit Bills” or “The Forged Coupon”). The result, L’Argent, is perhaps less about the evils of money (“l’argent” in French) and more a kind of practical thought experiment in the chaos theory butterfly effect, which holds that a butterfly flapping its wings can lead by circumstances to events as devastating as tornados, or as wonderful as an unexpected windfall. Anything might happen when it comes to cause and effect. It’s hard to say why the title was not translated for English-speaking countries. In Spain and Mexico, for example, it was released as El dinero. Perhaps calling it “Money” would imply too much about the intended evils thereof? But then what are people supposed to think anywhere else?

This story starts with adolescents in need of spending money who forge counterfeit bills and pass them to a camera shop. The camera shop manager, realizing later that he has been bilked, decides to pass the bills himself and does so the next day, paying a delivery driver, Yvon (Christian Patey), who accepts them without question. It’s the beginning of the end for Yvon. His superiors catch the counterfeits, but Yvon’s story does not hold up when the camera shop staff denies even knowing him. This seems a little unlikely given the way these things are tracked, with invoices and receipts and such, but maybe it was different in 1983 in France. Yvon goes to trial for the crime. He’s convicted and given three years, and then things only get worse. His child dies while he’s in prison and his wife leaves him for a new life. He keeps getting in trouble and fights with other inmates. His imprisonment is extended. He’s all the way into a terrible downward spiral.

“England Underway” (1993)

This story by Terry Bisson with its kooky, whimsical premise—perhaps too kooky and whimsical for me—was nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards in short fiction categories (it is apparently long enough to be a “novelette” by Nebula standards). It surprised me that Bisson is from the US, Kentucky specifically, as the story succeeds in feeling British. Or maybe it feels British to me the way an American conceives it. Anyway, for whatever reason—plate tectonics is the only detail given that sounds remotely plausible, but who cares in a fantasy, right?—England and some British territories (not Ireland) have come loose and set out west across the Atlantic. No one knows why. It’s all over the news. I have to admit some of this story went over my head because I don’t know UK geography and have never been good with spatial relations. The entire land mass is also spinning slowly so the south of England becomes the east and so forth. It’s confusing. The story does have a soothing, gentle tone, milking humor from the absurdity of the situation as well as UK politics (pre-EU), especially regarding Ireland. The main character is a British chap set in his ways, with a dog and a niece in the US who writes him monthly and says he must come visit to see her baby, his grand-niece. Eventually England delivers him for the visit and he meets the baby, shortly after which England departs the New York harbor, headed east, presumably returning. There’s a nice sense of how strange it would be if England were literally only a ferry ride away from New York, but what’s strange and interesting in this story is mostly swamped by what’s cute. On the whole it’s well done but on the whole it is merely cute. In a way it plays to my own, mostly unfortunate preconceptions about fantasy—that it’s intended to be harmless if not entirely vapid (I say this knowing better now that horror is a subset of fantasy). But in other ways the story pulls against my bad attitude. Though Bisson is obviously trafficking in British stereotypes he’s doing it with a good deal of urbane charm and wit. I’m curious how Americans and Brits respond comparatively to it. I wouldn’t be surprised to find Americans like it more.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Read story online.

Willows, “Church Bells May Ring” (1956)

[listen up!]

The Willows were a five-piece doo wop act out of Harlem who fell victim to the 1950s industry convention of covering Black artists threatening the pop charts with white groups who had the resources (label PR and dough) to nab the bigger hits. It produced strange and somewhat embarrassing results, such as Pat Boone covering Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and getting the bigger hit with it. Teens of the ‘50s, what hath thou wrought? The Willows were successfully prevented from reaching the pop charts, but the Diamonds (from Toronto) took their inferior version of what they retitled “The Church Bells May Ring” to #14 in 1956. The Diamonds version all but eliminates the bells, buried in the mix except for jazzy solos that miss the point of the song. What makes the Willows’ version so resounding is exactly the pounding bells it pushes so hard. The song, written by the Willows, was originally called “Church Bells Are Ringing” or maybe just “Church Bells”—church bells were always going to be involved. And, indeed, they are what makes the song stand out. They’re chimes, or tubular bells—as it happens, played by studio hand that day Neil Sedaka. They add a rhythmic luster around which the lusty singers dart in harmony. The song feels like the happiest wedding day, bursting with upbeat energy. “Oh ah linga linga linga linga ling ding-dong,” chants the lead vocalist with exuberance. You never knew you could dance to church bells but now you do. To be clear, I have nothing against the Diamonds. I like their big dance hit of a couple years later, “The Stroll.” But it’s a fact that the Willows plainly have the better version of this song.