Charles Bradley, “Can’t Fight the Feeling” (2018)

[listen up!]

Charles Bradley was born in 1948 but found few outlets for his musical ambitions until this century. Per Wikipedia, his first single came in 2002. Abandoned by his mother, he spent much of his early life homeless on the streets and roaming the country at large until finally working as a restaurant chef gave him an income he could rely on. The long delay in recognition was partly a matter of his stage fright and also perhaps due to his calling card as a James Brown impersonator. He learned his chops there—how could it not have served his career well?—but may have limited his bookings. I don’t hear Brown as much in this early single from his last album, Black Velvet, as I do the Stax-like approach of an act like Sam & Dave or Eddie Floyd, defined in many ways by its horn charts. Others have compared him to Otis Redding. But JB is plainly in the mix as well. Bradley’s rough guttural style of singing and his throat-clotted screams say it all. There’s no question he belongs in the halls of soul music. He died too soon, even at 68, with too little public appreciation. He was a natural, and no doubt the close study of classic 1960s soul served him well even if it did take most of his life to start to get the attention he deserved. In 2018 I did not know his story, already dead by then from stomach cancer, with less than 20 years in any kind of spotlight. I just liked the raw feel and horns of “Can’t Fight the Feeling” and the faith Bradley obviously had in soul music and all the ways it can galvanize, soothe, and reach ecstatic heights.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025)

For such a frothy light time travel comedy with a notable Ghostbusters vibe, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie comes with a long, winding pedigree. First, in the late 2000s, it was an internet-based series, Nirvana the Band the Show (the extra “n” in Nirvanna the Band would come later). Ten years on it was two seasons in TV-land proper, with Nirvanna the Band the Show. Now add the Movie, which is where I come in, the only one I know. But apparently the idea is basically the same in all: Nirvanna the Band principals Matt Johnson (vocalist, and director and cowriter of this picture) and Jay McCarrol (pianist and cowriter) are perpetually trying to get a booking at the Rivoli nightclub in their hometown of Toronto, cooking up various outrageous publicity stunts. Nirvanna the Band consists of McCarrol playing piano while Johnson improvises spoken-word rants and chants. The featured stunt here involves leaping off the top of the CN Tower and parachuting into the Skydome stadium. If you’re like me this amazing footage is looked at through your fingers. The human fear of heights is universal, and severely challenged here. These guys get away with everything, parking their RV any old place in Toronto and getting dangerous tools up onto the tower with them. Anyway, the weather’s bad, the Skydome roof is closing even as they jump, and they can’t make it through in time, landing instead on the roof of the stadium. That’s pretty much the way everything goes here. Johnson and McCarrol have lots of simple comic ideas that work—camera crew in tow for everything, for example, and making up shit we have no choice but to go along with, like the time travel aspect, which is all there to be discovered and unpacked, if you can. If it’s even possible. Johnson and McCarrol are likable blokes. Johnson likes to do his thinking with a whiteboard. His pants are ridiculously ripped. McCarrol obviously has most of the musical talent. The picture rushes about headlong and gets by on its own affability as much as anything. All bad language is bleeped out. I can’t speak to anyone who has been with them since about 2007, but I’m curious now about a reverse-engineering perspective and maybe looking into the earlier incarnations. I hesitate to guarantee a good time here, because this is a very odd one, but I can say for sure at least that I had a good time.

Crime and Punishment (1866)

The first of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s majors was a reread for me. I have always liked it, but perhaps never more. It is intense, sprawling, never less than fascinating, and compulsively readable—you just have to get used to the names. Our main guy, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, is one of literature’s great antiheroes. He’s not particularly likable but it’s also hard not to pull for him. As with the unnamed narrator in Notes From Underground he is at war with the terms of existence. There is some sense that his double-homicide axe murders—the first 100 to 150 pages of the novel are harrowing and mesmerizing—is some kind of philosophical test of a “superman” idea. Certainly the 23-year-old Raskolnikov has published an essay to that effect, which brings the attention of the police. There’s an even greater sense he has no idea why he killed. If it was part of a robbery he botched it entirely. If it’s to rid the world of a shrewish pawnbroker, all right, maybe, but he also kills the pawnbroker’s kindly sister Lizaveta. You need the stupid “superman” idea to justify that at all, and basically you can’t, and basically Raskolnikov knows that. But Dostoevsky is not done with just these murders. He goes spinning off handfuls of threads with a web of characters associated with Raskolnikov—his mother and sister, his sister’s suitors, a good and loyal friend, destitute families, and a police investigator who is reported to be the model for TV’s Columbo. Crime and Punishment was serialized and involved agonies of rewriting for Dostoevsky. What he produced may feel impromptu and full of digressions but in fact it is well organized for what it is doing. It works first as a thriller and then, as long as it has your attention, it has another million things to tell you and they are all interesting. You are there for them. I don’t know how to describe reading this amazing novel any other way. It has always held my attention even though I don’t always remember specific details. How could I forget it was a double-homicide axe murder?! Yet what I always remember, even when it’s not as fresh, is that it is a wonderful experience to read it. Any translation, but this time I was happy to go with Constance Garnett again, one of the great translators of Dostoevsky (and Chekhov too).

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

Brazil (1985)

UK / USA, 132 minutes

Director: Terry Gilliam

Writers: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown, Charles Alverson

Photography: Roger Pratt

Music: Michael Kamen

Editor: Julian Doyle

Cast: Jonathan Pryce, Katherine Helmond, Kim Greist, Ian Holm, Robert De Niro, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Bob Hoskins, Derrick O’Connor, Peter Vaughan, Kathryn Pogson, Jim Broadbent, Sheila Reid

I like the array of genre labels at IMDb for director and cowriter Terry Gilliam’s dystopic SF comedy. Besides the predictable—"dark comedy,” “dystopian sci-fi,” etc.—there is the perfectly apt “steampunk.” That gets to the heart of both what’s good and not so good about Brazil. It is dystopia practically by the numbers and wants it all ways it can get it: nightmares of calcified bureaucracy, ongoing random terrorist bombings, brutal police state, rampant incompetence, nothing mechanical really works, humanity is benumbed and disappearing into plastic surgery for the rich and misery for the rest. The future is crowded, overheated, and overstuffed. The technology is semi-powerful PC computers in Victorian garb. Office workers look at Marx Brothers movies on them when the boss isn’t looking. Yes, steam is visible.

Jonathan Pryce is Sam Lowry, a low-ranking bureaucrat happy to hunker down in his specific situation. He wants no further responsibilities. But his mother (Katherine Helmond) is rich, can’t stand the stigma of his lack of ambition, and keeps pulling strings to get him promoted. He has so far resisted them successfully. At night he has dreams of a woman and then he thinks he sees her in real life. He uses the surveillance power of the state via his job to track her down. She’s Jill Layton (Kim Greist), a truck driver who may or may not have terrorist ties. It doesn’t matter for Sam, who has loved her from afar and now wants to love her up close. What could possibly go wrong?

“The God of Dark Laughter” (2001)

I was surprised to find a story by Michael Chabon in The Weird—I had not realized he wrote in that vein. But he does and here we are. This was published originally in the New Yorker, so we’re not fooling around. It’s almost a parody of cosmic horror, lifting some of H.P. Lovecraft’s ideas whole and generally monkeying around with the Cthulhu mythos. Why not? It’s set up as a mystery, told by the district attorney in a quiet rural area where they don’t see much crime. The victim is a clown that has been horribly mutilated. All the skin from his head and shoulders has been cut away with “a very sharp knife.” It seems like I’ve been seeing a lot of clown and killer clown stuff lately, so I perked up for that part—really the whole story is pretty good. As our investigating DA digs into the case he starts finding literature that references a conflict between two ancient sects. One worships the God of Dark Laughter. The term “coulrophobia” comes up along the way: “morbid, irrational fear of or aversion to clowns.” Nice touch. The specific Lovecraft reference is to the mythical author Friedrich von Junzt (which is actually original to Robert E. Howard though Lovecraft used the device too). Von Junzt wrote, “Űber das Finstere Lachen” (“About the Dark Laughter”), as well as “a small volume bound in black leather and printed in no alphabet known to me, the letters sinuous and furred with wild diacritical marks.” An actual baboon in a clown suit shows up at one point, there for the color mostly (and the Poe reference). It takes the story a while to get to its concepts. The God of Dark Laughter is “the proto-Urartian deity Yȇ-Heh.” Chabon is obviously having fun making stuff up (or maybe it’s original Lovecraft? all the same). The god in opposition to Yȇ-Heh is “Ai, the God of Unbearable and Ubiquitous Sorrow.” Yȇ-Heh’s followers are hedonist, cruel, and mocking. Ai’s “gloomy fanatics saw the world as no less horrifying and cruel than did their arch-enemies [Yȇ-Heh’s followers], but their response to the whole mess was a permanent wailing.” Never mind the inadvertent reference to artificial intelligence. Ai-ites are on a mission to wipe out the remaining followers of Yȇ-Heh, most of whom “have survived, for the most part, by taking on work in traveling circuses." Thus does Chabon close this loop. More than anything it is a traditional mystery story with exotic touches of cosmic horror and Chabon’s inspired language. It all hangs together and it’s quite good, very entertaining.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Story not available online.

Eagles, “Best of My Love” (1974)

[listen up!]

Those not really in favor of the Eagles, where I count myself, often nonetheless seem to have one of their songs that they will admit to liking a lot. “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” “Desperado,” “Witchy Woman,” I don’t know, you name it—even haters seem to have a soft spot for one or the other in the widescreen catalog. They made the top 40 18 times, hit #1 five times, and I believe I’ve heard their best-of is the bestselling album of all time. This is not an unpopular act. They reached me in the winter of early 1975 with their first #1. Product of collaboration between Glenn Frey, Don Henley, and J.D. Souther, it is sweet and melancholy with no (make that little) (make that arguably verging on rancid) bitterness, a tale of resignation straight out of the freewheeling breakup / get a divorce / got to move on ‘70s. Don’t, don’t do it, don’t use the word insipid. I’m feeling a little sad here. What appealed to me chiefly was the hit off the vibe of Carole King’s immortal “It’s Too Late,” the resignation to a relationship ending. I always found these breakup songs of the time the ultimate in romantic, which may explain too much. Related: “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” by Carly Simon and “Someone to Lay Down Beside Me” by Linda Ronstadt. The sadness in these songs is abundant, but “It’s Too Late” and “Best of My Love” also bear an undertow of liberation, a certain ecstasy of anticipation. “Best of My Love” (I strongly suspect the irony of the title was lost on the authors, but then I’m a hater) is perhaps more specific on how the cookie is crumbling, referring directly to the toxic back and forth when they are in full tailspin: “We try to talk it over / But the words come out too rough / ... / I wake up and worry / What's gonna happen today?” This one filled me with a delicious self-satisfied melancholy then and it can still make me ache a little now.

Wise Blood (1952)

When I first read it I didn’t care much for this short novel by Flannery O’Connor, her first. But I read it again recently, for the sake of the lists of 20th-century novels I’m going through, and liked it much more this time. It does shore up a lot of my biases about Southern writers and their strange ways of religion. Yet I could feel—or maybe I read it somewhere—that O’Connor has detectable affection for these oddball nitwits. The main character, Hazel Motes (great name—they’re all great here), has just arrived in the city. It is unspecified but in director John Huston’s 1979 movie version it’s Memphis and that just feels right. “Haze,” as the third-person narrator often calls him, is all fucked up. He has a strong calling to preach, and people see him as a preacher by his manner and dress. He hotly denies that but has plans to preach a “Church Without Christ” message and win a following. He attaches himself to a con man pretending to be blind and his 15-year-old daughter—Asa and Sabbath Weeks. Sabbath has her name because she was born on a Sunday. In turn, a young man barely adult, Enoch Emery, attaches himself to Haze. Enoch believes the “new jesus” exists inside a case in a natural history museum, a preserved corpse. I see now at Wikipedia that Wise Blood can fairly be called a fix-up novel as a handful of O’Connor’s stories, including one from her master’s thesis, are involved. That explains in part, perhaps, why this very short novel feels so packed full of incident and action. But O’Connor also has a sharp and pointed voice, compressing a lot into just a few words. Her dialect is absolutely perfect, with a refreshingly light touch that still conveys all the drawl and twang. It’s not often that dialect is this good. I would not want to live in the world of Wise Blood, but it certainly is worth the visit and I’m glad I gave it another chance. I saw the movie years before I read it even once. Enoch’s pronunciation of “muv-zee-vum” has always stuck with me for some reason—Dan Shor is the performer—and for some reason I really like that it comes directly from the novel. In a way it almost perfectly captures the comical and pathetic yet somehow lovable abject ignorance of these characters. They are all you see here but the kaleidoscope works exceptionally well.

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

“Valentine” (1996)

This Joyce Carol Oates story appears simple (and fanciful) but it is working on many levels. It’s a memoir piece told first-person by a grown woman, Erin, recalling an incident (fantasy) when she was 15 years old during a snowstorm on a Valentine’s Day. There’s a lot of specificity—1959, Buffalo, New York. She is living with an aunt on her mother’s side. The rest of her family, seven of them, have “dispersed” and no longer live together. It’s a whopper of a snowstorm, with drifts up the side of the house to the attic and her room. In the middle of the storm, in the middle of the night, a car pulls up outside her house. It’s her algebra teacher, Mr. Lacey! Just that morning she had slipped him an anonymous valentine. He’s the teacher she has a crush on, a young man still in his 20s. He stairsteps up the snowdrift by the side of the house and collects her to take her ice skating. She’s never been very good at it, but she improves in his kind company. He speaks strangely, the words italicized. Erin? Make haste, he says at her window. He drives a Volkswagen. While skating they encounter some jeering bully boy types who pelt him with snowballs and make him bleed. After skating they stop for coffee at “the Bison City Diner adjacent to the Greyhound bus station.” She follows his lead and takes her coffee black, but she hasn’t learned yet to like coffee. She feels too awkward with him to order food. The narrator, the memoirist, plays it straight all the way as if this were a story that really happened. Of course it can’t be, but it lives exactly between a daydream and a night-dream. It’s another story that captures the sense of dreaming well, but the action is all the fantasy of an adolescent with a crush on a teacher. I like the way Oates uses a legendary Buffalo snowstorm, with snowdrifts you can climb. Mr. Lacey is perfectly chaste and aboveboard with Erin, but the fact he comes for her in the middle of the night speaks to a reckless romantic side of him, at least in Erin’s view. This story goes well afield of reality, but it has gritty edges and undertones. Mostly I take it as the fantasy of an adolescent girl who is ready to let loose and let it fly—and I believe every bit of that.

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

Craig Finn, “God in Chicago” (2017)

[listen up!]

I would not call this song particularly sad—“melancholy” might be the better term, starting with the untimely death of a friend. But full disclosure “God in Chicago” rarely fails to reduce me to wanton sobbing. Maybe that’s because it’s so goddamn beautiful. And it may be a bit of a misnomer to call it a song, though some singing does occur. But not much. Mostly Finn, a principal in the band the Hold Steady with a now-established solo career, is simply talking, storytelling, accompanied by somber piano chords. I don’t know the Hold Steady well enough to compare. The singer / storyteller’s friend has died, and his friend’s sister has discovered “unfinished business” among his effects, “roughly the size of a baseball.” She doesn’t want to just throw it out so she contacts this storyteller, who has a college buddy willing to buy it, “but we’d have to come to him.” The dealer is in Chicago. The sister wants to come with. They start early and spend the time listening to 1999 and Led Zeppelin III on a failing boombox in the backseat. They get there. The deal goes down without incident. Then the sister says, “I've never been to Chicago / I've got nothing going on tomorrow / Maybe we could stay here tonight / Lose ourselves in the glass and light.” And so they do. They get a hotel room, eat and drink at an Italian restaurant. It’s headed exactly where you think. Or, as Finn memorably puts it, “We all want the same things,” which is also the name of the album this track is from. As a sentiment, as a truism, as a platitude, I’m not sure it has ever sounded more right. The song ends on their return: “We drove back all hungover / And all the way to Eau Claire, she played with her hair / Came up on St. Paul and she was sobbing.” So am I. So are you. And that’s it, the end, except for maybe playing it again, to verify the amazing, powerful magic going on here. I’ve since been through Finn’s solo catalog and haven’t found anything close to this searing, haunting tale.

Send Help (2026)

The latest from director Sam Raimi is more survival adventure than straight-up horror—but it is laced as always with streaks of comedy. Rachel McAdams is Linda Liddle, a brilliant office spreadsheet analyst wonk with a serious lack of social skills. She’s carrying her corporate team in many ways but the bros that constitute most of it have little regard for her. She is the only one surprised when she is passed over for a promotion she has earned, deserves, and expected. Linda is also a major fan of the reality show Survivor and has long been attempting to get an audition to be on it. We see portions of her video application, which is pathetic and ridiculous of course, but also sets up what follows. Indeed, it’s interesting that Survivor is so central to the story here because my theory about that show is that it is primarily about office politics, using those types of skills to get ahead and win. Then she ends up on a plane with her team, going to Thailand for a business meeting. But the plane goes down and Linda is washed up on a remote island with her boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who got his job in the first place because he’s the son of Linda’s former boss. On the island, of course, it’s Linda who has all the survival skills, using the little available to them to create shelter, gather fresh water and food, hunt wild boar, and even brew liquor. The arc of the story feels like it’s headed toward an enemies-to-lovers romance narrative. But this is Sam Raimi so that’s not going to happen, and besides, the difference between Linda and Preston is stark: she is likable in spite of everything. He is not. There are occasional eruptions of extreme violence in Send Help but for the most part they come somehow with a light touch. McAdams often plays it broadly but she’s good in this more or less loser tomboy role. O’Brien has little more to do than be an asshole and that’s what he does. Lots of elements here feel familiar because we have seen them elsewhere—Triangle of Sadness may be the most obvious source they are lifting from. Still, it’s reasonably entertaining all the way. McAdams has everything she needs to pull off her role effectively. It’s satisfying to see her turn the tables on the bro culture. Is it even remotely realistic? Well, that’s another question. But it’s always entertaining enough.