"The Pale Man" (1934)

Julius Long is a fairly obscure horror story writer, a lawyer from Ohio who published his handful in Weird Tales between 1933 and 1938. He died of conditions related to asthma in 1955 when he was 47 or 48 years old. In some ways this very short story, written when he was about 27, may have been a kind of vision of his own death. The first-person narrator is a low-level academic. "If only..." he laments, "I should now be a full-fledged professor instead of a broken-down assistant." He is even losing that position, likely for reasons of health, as he has been exiled to this rundown hotel in some small town on a mandatory vacation. "There is something positively gratifying about the absence of the graduate student face," he tries to console himself. He has a room in front with a view, 201—he had to haggle to get it. Way in the back is the pale man's room, 212. He arrived the same day. The pale man is more like moon-age daydream Ziggy Stardust with snow white tan. "I can not believe that he is ill," the narrator says of him, hinting the place might not exactly be a hotel, "for his paleness is not of a sickly cast, but rather wholesome in its ivory clarity." There is a sick woman in 208 or 207, however (the confusion could be a typo or it could be Long's suggestion of the narrator's mental unbalance), and she dies as the pale man moves closer to her. The pale man is steadily changing rooms in the story, like a checker piece on a board, from 212 to 211 to 210 and closer. The narrator wonders what will happen when he reaches the sick woman's room, but what happens of course is that she dies. And still the narrator does not understand who or what the pale man is. At one point the hotel manager is seen insisting the narrator leave and go to the hospital, which he refuses. That suggests his own death is not for long and it isn't. The story is almost underwhelming at first but things about it stick. "I suppose I should have guessed his identity when he skipped the three rooms the night I fell unconscious upon the floor." It stays with you.

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"Young Offender" (1993)

[listen]

"Young Offender" comes floating in like a jet airliner landing roaring at a busy airport. The lights are flashing. It's probably night. On the ground, Neil Tennant's (I presume) tilt at petulance in a world where youth is preferred currency is doomed to failure as all such expressions are. Age having a go at youth, as noted by Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange, is never a pretty sight. We are each fated to age and die—aging still the better alternative. But along the way this singer gets off a few good ones, notably "I've been a teenager since before you were born," which remains just right. Or, "I'll put down my book and start falling in love. Or isn't that done?" Otherwise there's not much more to this song. Under the lush packaging and razor wit it's pretty much a ditty. It's better, in fact, when there's no singing and it's just working on its groove. "Young offender, what's your defense?" The words are cutting but we know who's going to win this dispute. The question is whether the older fellow knows he is the vulnerable one or merely believes he is scoring points. Perhaps that knowledge accounts for the faint but distinct melancholy of this song (still a lift from the abyss of "To Speak Is a Sin"). On the fade, "Young Offender" still sounds like an airport but now it's more like 3 a.m. and quiet, much less busy, and the singer might be alone. Perhaps someone was supposed to pick him up and hasn't arrived yet. I imagine traffic on a nearby freeway visible through big airport windows, the white headlights going one direction and the red taillights another. There's always someone else will come along. That's how youth works, and this singer should know it, but maybe he doesn't.

"A Small, Good Thing" (1981)

It's possible this Raymond Carver story with its suite of many versions is the best example of editor Gordon Lish's troubled relation to Carver's writing. First there is the Beginners version as originally submitted. It took a few significant changes from what Carver ultimately settled on for the later versions in Cathedral and Where I'm Calling From, adding back some of the weaknesses Lish had been likely trying to fix, but these three versions are reasonably consistent. Lish's version appeared as "The Bath" in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It is barely recognizable and easily the most severe of all Lish's edit jobs. He slashed it from about 25 pages down to less than 10, basically just cutting out what are arguably the most important parts. It's really not even the same story and feels chaotic and pointless, especially when read with the other versions. Acknowledging Lish's overreach, however, does not mean I don't understand where his impulse came from. The story, which is used in the movie Short Cuts, might be Carver's single most famous, about an 8-year-old boy who is hit by a car on his birthday in a hit and run accident. His mother has ordered a special cake for his birthday but she never picks it up because she rushes to the hospital and forgets it after the accident. The baker gets mad and harasses them with crank calls. In the end, after the boy has died, the mother figures out who has been calling them and she and her husband go to the bakery to confront the baker. He apologizes and offers them rolls and bread fresh from the oven. Suddenly it is all a mellow introspective scene—the only thing left to hope is that the butter is freshly churned. It doesn't help that Lyle Lovett played the baker in the movie. And I think sentimentalizing hot bakery products is exactly what Lish was trying to push off the tracks here. It's frankly unbelievable. Lish may have been going about it all wrong—because ultimately such significant factors in a story are the author's call, however addled, and they should get final word (as Carver finally did). But I think Lish had the right impulse. The final version shows Carver taking many of Lish's other edits to heart, but obviously he liked and could not let go of the scene with the rolls and apology from Lyle Lovett and so forth. I think there might have been other, better ways to fix the story. But it remains interesting anyway for all these reasons and because the first two-thirds is actually prime and excellent Carver.

Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From (Library of America)

Earth (1930)

Zemlya, USSR, 87 minutes

Director/writer/editor: Aleksandr Dovzhenko

Photography: Daniil Demutsky

Cast: Semyon Svashenko, Stepan Shkurat, Nikolai Nademsky, Yelena Maksimova

My full disclosures here have to start that sometimes the whole narrative style of another country's cinema, or silent movies, or in this case both, can throw me off. Usually, even if I'm not particularly in the mood, I can throw on whatever movie I want to review and pretty soon the thing more or less sweeps me up. Even though Earth is short and should be quick, it feels alienating, ponderous, and opaque to me. For one thing, I had a hard time just following this "masterpiece" picture by director, writer, and editor Aleksandr Dovzhenko, partly because I had (and have) only the dimmest context for the story itself, rooted in the tension between Russia and Ukraine, which I barely understand today, let alone in 1930 Soviet Union. Something about agricultural resources.

And once again we confront a picture of great reputation that comes with version problems. I started with my commercial Grapevine DVD from 2003, which is 87 minutes and has one score. Later I looked at a version on YouTube posted in 2016 that was 76 minutes and had another and much better score (note: at the moment, YouTube appears to have up to four versions). For what it's worth, the picture is listed as 75 minutes on IMDb. My sense was that the additional footage on the DVD was largely devoted to livestock shots. Among other things Earth is a movie about oxen being replaced by tractors. It is also a movie about wresting control of land from the putative owners who won't work with the collective in early Communist times. I probably should have read the Wikipedia article first (or maybe the YouTube version is really that much better), because understanding more context and paying more attention to plot-wise visuals helped on the second look at least as much as the score.

Law & Order, s7 (1996-1997)

Law & Order was well-primed for the mid-'90s surge of interest in true-crime, with the OJ Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey cases occurring bang-bang even as DNA and other forensic technology burgeoned. All of a sudden cases were being solved that had never been solved, innocents freed from prison, and everyone seemed to have detailed opinions about any given case. The show played to the interest simply by sticking resolutely to the formula that got it there, focusing on police and court roles in complicated cases more than characters, willy-nilly removing another mainstay the previous season in ADA Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy)—killing her off, in fact, which ended her tenure absolutely as this is one show that does not do flashbacks. She was replaced by ADA Jamie Ross (Carey Lowell), unfortunately introducing a bad habit of making that role a series of highly attractive women. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) annoyingly beds them all, or so we may surmise because at least the show tends to be reasonably subtle about it. To be sure, there are character arcs happening all over the peripheries: Detective Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) is a self-righteous religious conservative going through a separation from his wife. Detective Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) had an alcoholic relapse at the end of the previous season and now there's concern about his sobriety. Ross is divorced from her former law partner, a high-flying defense attorney who plays head games with her over custody of their daughter. One of the best episodes in this season is the finale, in which DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill) has to decide whether to pull the plug on his dying wife. But the primary focus remains the twisting, turning cases that confront the principals and viewers with each episode. There's usually a murder in the first scene before the titles but it can go anywhere from there. A number of episodes are more about legal principles than guilt or innocence in the specific cases at hand. I thought the prosecutors seemed to lose more often, or at best come up with mixed results, more so than I think would be the case later in the series, when they were regular winners, the New York Yankees of New York City jurisprudence. It's actually nice to see McCoy lose a few. This season does have perhaps the nadir of the whole franchise in a three-part arc that takes the crew to Los Angeles—not a very interesting case, and little point forcing in the West Coast setting, especially across the interminable, padded-out three episodes. To be scrupulously fair, as nadirs go it's still better than the high points of many other series. As always, the show attracted a good many obvious but unfamiliar talents from within the New York theatrical world, one of its great secrets. Various up-and-comers with later careers can also be spotted here, such as Edie Falco as a defense attorney, but there didn't seem to be as many in this season. The most tantalizing who-is-that-anyway for me was Reiko Aylesworth, whose face kept bothering me for a whole episode until I later recalled through the miracle of IMDb that she was Michelle Dessler on 24. In its seventh season Law & Order is all product, a juggernaut coming into its own ratings-wise with the dread spinoffs not many years away now. As product, it is A-1.

Relic (2020)

This Australian picture is good at setting a mood and sustaining it but unfortunately can't make up its mind about two separate directions: a sensitive movie about aging and dementia on the one hand and a big ol' scary horror show on the other. Most of us already know one way or another—it's intuitive—that aging is its own horror show (like so many aspects of living as the better alternative to dying). Michael Haneke seemed almost gauche when he noticed this about aging with his gimlet eye in Amour. Relic starts with the disappearance of Edna (Robyn Nevin), who has been missing for days. People turn out to search the woods for her. She's a woman in her 80s who has been forgetful lately and it doesn't look good. Then one day after a week or so she's back again, with no explanations about where she was—won't even talk about it. Her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) traveled to be in on the search and now they decide to stick around. All relationships are wary, tentative, and distant, but the bonds plainly run deep too. They're not really a happy family but we know their unhappiness. And now at long last is the old lady losing it? Well, possibly, these things happen, but then instead the movie develops a fascination with the house. Noises are heard beyond the walls—literally things that go bump in the night. More and more Relic becomes a story about the irrational space inside that house—that's where Edna went, apparently, and Sam spends some time there too. There's some mumbo-jumbo backstory about an older house on the property that was destroyed but its windows kept for the present house. A mistake, possibly. Portals, in short, maybe. After a few cycles of that we land again on the angst and unease of aging and constant peekaboo about dementia—is Edna losing it or isn't she? How sad if she is! Inquiring minds want to know but Edna wants inquiring minds to leave her alone. I think, out of this elegantly mounted mess, the better movie is the one about aging and dementia, but even the horror story would be better without the aging and dementia notes. So Relic for me was not really a win-win.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," Ernest Hemingway said in 1935 (wrote, actually, in The Green Hills of Africa). Hemingway went on to undercut his case by saying everything in the ostensible boy's book can be disregarded after "the [N-word] Jim is stolen from the boys." If I understand what Hemingway is complaining about here I agree with him, but I see the problem starting earlier than that, including at the start in the early chapters. Hemingway also, in a typically clod-footed way, inadvertently raises another issue, perhaps the single biggest at this point in the 21st century—the wanton use of the N-word, a much less serious problem in 1935 or 1884. It's clod-footed because, in the first place, "[N-word] Jim" is 100% Hemingway's locution. Twain never uses the term, even as first-person narrator Huck Finn. While it is possible to make a case that Twain on balance means well, and a more strained one that he is not a "real" racist, the N-word is used liberally all through this highly regarded classic of American literature. At the price of one wince per use it gets to be a pretty expensive book to read. The introduction in my Delphi kindle version says Twain's novel "is regarded as a scathing look at entrenched attitudes toward racism." Well, maybe—certainly mocking racist attitudes is part of it, though maybe more nuanced than we would like now. Huck, for example, can't believe in one scene that Tom Sawyer would sink so low as to help a runaway slave. It is gentle satire, you see, and Huck has already shown his regard for Jim (and thought poorly of himself too for helping a runaway slave). Normalized racism can come along at any time and even dominates the story. Huck is seen playing heartless tricks on Jim, taking advantage of Jim's ignorance. He means Jim no harm, perhaps, but he's quick to use his racist social advantages. Overall Twain is plainly loath to condemn racism as such, willing only to mock it when it is convenient to do so. He doesn't want to offend, and that is disheartening. The only good parts of this book as far as I'm concerned are when Huck and Jim are alone on the raft on the river together. All the rest of it is foolishness and gentle satire, sliding back and forth at its convenience across the borders of toxic racism. The first appearance of the con men "king and duke" signals the end of what's worth reading beyond historical interest. You also have to wade through some chapters in the beginning before you get to Huck and Jim on the river. Maybe a third of Huckleberry Finn is thus worth the wincing. Admittedly it's good stuff—the beauties and wonder of wilderness as only a few American writers can do (and American writers do it best), including Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jack London, and others (many problematic themselves one way or another, usually). The good stuff here is right up there with the best, you just have to pick your way through a lot of crap getting in and out of it. I'm still enamored of Twain's steady-rolling voice—and Huck Finn is more likable and closer to Twain's heart than Tom Sawyer—plus the narrative predicaments here can be clever business. But content warnings to one and all are sadly now in order for Huckleberry Finn.

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

Clear (1969)

An early expedition into fractured fickle completism on my part ended here—as I recall, I bought Clear as a used record the same day I bought the first Spirit album (also used), and I effectively bailed on Spirit here, their third album and the last produced by Lou Adler. I never got to know Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, an album I often see hailed as a high point of Spirit's catalog. OK fine, there are still some Spooky Tooth and Wishbone Ash albums I'm hoping to get to too. I finally gave Twelve Dreams a listen a few days ago and didn't find it much better than Clear, so now as then this is my proximate stopping point with Spirit. Maybe I should have tried harder. In fact, I don't think I listened to Clear much at all even back then, because it was mostly unfamiliar to me when I got to it whereas I recognized the first two quite readily—used to play them a lot. To get to the point, Clear strikes me as very generic 1969 rock. It might be better than the first three Grand Funk Railroad records but sadly not by that much. Another touchpoint might be the Savoy Brown album Looking In (which might overall be better). I like a lot of this stuff but even so these are not high compliments, and so it must be said about Spirit and Clear. It kicks off with "Dark-eyed woman on a hot summer's night" accompanied by heavy riffing and that's about where it stops too. The songwriting is just not there. It's uninspired and feels labored and obvious. They're hacking up lungs trying to pull it together. "Ground Hog," especially when it gets into its "old man winter" jive, is verging on Spinal Tap for ludicrous self-parody. "I'm Truckin'" speaks for itself. For once the extras deliver up the prize: a 1969 radio ad for the album tacked on to the end of the track "Coral." It starts with an eerily prescient (I admit) voice montage of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Then the hip doleful voice guy enters: "Many sounds don't make sense," he intones. "But one thing is clear: Spirit." Sound of belabored rock song stirring to half-life. This message approved, no doubt, by Lou Adler.

Things to Come (1936)

UK, 100 minutes

Director: William Cameron Menzies

Writer: H.G. Wells

Photography: Georges Perinal

Music: Arthur Bliss

Editors: Charles Crichton, Francis D. Lyon

Cast: Raymond Massey, Edward Chapman, Ralph Richardson, Margaretta Scott, Cedric Hardwicke, Sophie Stewart, Derrick de Marney, John Clements, George Sanders

From the distance of nearly a century, the 1930s looks like a period of constant historical reckoning. Two of the most interesting movies in 1936 and one in 1937—Modern Times, Things to Come, and Make Way for Tomorrow—thought very hard about where things were going after most of a decade in a persistent economic depression and with fascism strutting around and acting ever more aggressive. None of them really "got it right" about the future (Make Way for Tomorrow comes closest by keeping its ambition in check), but getting it right happens so rarely in futuristic tales that we can't stop talking about it when they do. Consider Network. And remember there were still phonebooths in 2001: A Space Odyssey (just as there were in 2001, though they were gone by 2010, nor have we seen anything remotely like commercial space travel, the Musk & Bezos clown shows notwithstanding).

Thus, in Things to Come, a worthy science fiction heir of Metropolis, the coming war with fascism was seen quite clearly, and it starts in 1940, which is pretty dang accurate for a UK film although maybe not that hard to predict in 1936. Director William Cameron Menzies and writer H.G. Wells work it up as a 30-year grinding death-fest that makes the Great War look like a picnic with Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo. Pay attention, class! The war in Things to Come ends in the late '60s and is followed by an epidemic of "the wandering sickness," which weirdly looks like zombies without all the scabs or gore. It's certainly some kind of prescience. From that point it all becomes a figment of H.G. Wells's imagination, which was prodigious but also a little unfocused and wrong. The movie ends circa 2036 (so as yet still in the future for us) with the coming of space exploration that looks nothing like space exploration as we know it.

"Seaton's Aunt" (1922)

Walter de la Mare has been something of an acquired taste for me—this story might be the place where I acquired it. It's good enough I'm going to go back and look at some of the others again. Nothing overtly supernatural happens, nor anything cruel beyond a certain cold haughtiness, yet it is charged with uncanny tension and malevolence. It feels in many ways like a dry run for Robert Aickman's later style of "strange" story. It halfway feels like a dream much of the time, the kind where you can't remember all the parts or how things changed. Arthur Seaton is a classmate of the first-person narrator, both of them in early adolescence at the beginning and for much of the story. Seaton is a sickly outcast at school, vaguely ethnic. The racial note is another point of unease. He is orphaned as well, and in line when he comes of age to acquire the mansion his aunt now inhabits (and has all her life). The narrator befriends Seaton out of pity as much as anything. When Seaton invites him home on a break from school he accepts for no apparent reason. Things like that just seem to happen in "strange" stories. Seaton's aunt is a woman of great appetite and poise, with a very large head and imperious manner. She needles everyone in her orbit, including our narrator the hapless houseguest, whose name she can never get right. It's Withers, which is provocative itself in this context, but she more often calls him Wither or Smithers. The story is often funny in a way but the aunt is also casually monstrous. She's terrible but it's never personal. She is like some greater being dwelling among us—amused by us. She might be using up and/or killing people but it's hard to say. There's no evidence, beyond her vaguely sinister manner and oversize head. People are dying, as they do, but it's not clear she has anything to do with it. It just feels like she does. Lots of poetical turns in the language and unsettling asides along the way, which is typical of de la Mare, who can be allusive almost unto vaporous, but here every sentence, every word practically, is effective and it leaves a chill.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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Love's Forever Changes (2003)

Andrew Hultkrans's 33-1/3 book is only the second in the entire series, which is presently up to some 157 titles, so among other things it must be regarded as a pioneering effort. Hultkrans, a Brooklyn-based writer at large and one-time editor of Bookforum, focuses more on the context of Arthur Lee and Love's classic album in tumultuous late-'60s Los Angeles, basically all library-style research—lots of quotes from books, virtually none from original interviews. It's one way to do it and not a bad way either. But too often this one reads like an industrious term paper, although at least we are spared the heavy footnoting of other 33-1/3 volumes. The Love album is a famously tough nut to crack. My experience with it is much like Hultkrans: drawn to it (late) by its reputation, underwhelmed, until finally finding a way in, when it becomes indelible. Hultkrans says the only other album he's had a similar experience with is Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. That insight comes early and the good news and bad news is that it's one of the most original in the whole thing. There is definitely some kind of psychic connection between those two albums. Anyway, most of the book is focused on California in the late '60s, mostly Los Angeles, and don't think we're going to get out of this without hearing about Charles Manson. It only makes sense, even beyond time and place, because it appears someone with a glancing involvement with Love was later associated with Manson. Joan Didion naturally gets some attention too, as the reigning Los Angeles essay poet of dread, but the person Hultkrans turns to most often is political activist Todd Gitlin. I think we may have the perspective now to see that the overly familiar and much ballyhooed underside of the hippie experience—Charles Manson and Altamont, with a side dish of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago—has been grossly exaggerated as equal to the values of peace, love, civil rights, and respect for the environment. Yes, stuff like the Weathermen happened. And actually a book about Forever Changes is not a bad place to bring it all up again and air it out. Even so, Arthur Lee was alive in 2003 and we miss hearing from him here, understanding that he was an exceedingly tough interview to get. It's hard to say whether that would have improved the book but it might have helped put the focus more where it belongs. It is more intensely trained on context, and in many ways unfortunately the band and the album too are relegated to the background. You can't blame Hultkrans because Forever Changes is a notoriously difficult album to nail down properly anyway. But the result in this 33-1/3 entry is a bit like the joke about losing your keys in the alley but looking for them under the streetlight because the light is better there.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Family That Plays Together (1968)

The second album by Spirit is actually the first one I purchased (circa 1971, used from the Wax Museum on Lake Street in Minneapolis for $1.90) so it's the one album of theirs that still has the most sentimental attractions for me. It also has their one and only top 40 hit in the album opener, "I Got a Line on You," which made it to #25 in March 1969. I don't remember ever hearing it on the radio, but among other things it's a big showcase for guitarist Randy California and the ongoing purity of his tone, describing the abstracted geometrical two-dimensional line they got on you. It's probably their best song. I understand now that California's instantly identifiable tone may have been an effect of double-tracking. Streaming does a disservice to the first four songs on the album, which connected seamlessly on the original vinyl but are separated on streaming like ordinary tracks with brief silences, which destroys the effect. Spirit fans should not feel singled out because even the second-side suite of Abbey Road suffers the same problem. These first four songs—"I Got a Line on You," "It Shall Be," "Poor Richard," and "Silky Sam"—seem intended to show off their musical range across a fancy 13-minute suite, with '60s three-minute pop, jazz, and "hard rock" too. Lou Adler is producing again. "Poor Richard" and "Silky Sam" are closer to precious whimsy, recalling songs (the Beatles again) like "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Rocky Raccoon." In fairness to Spirit, The Family That Plays Together came out well before Abbey Road and was coincident with the White Album. The title comes from the peculiar setup of the band—drummer Ed Cassidy (45 in 1968 and way past the legal hippie age limit of 30) was Randy California's stepfather. No word on allowance or disciplinary arrangements. The band also mostly lived together family style in a shared house in Topanga Canyon with Dr. Demento, who produced their first demos. Two other members of the original Spirit lineup—singer Jay Ferguson and bassist Mark Andes—are also significant because they broke away in the early '70s to form Jo Jo Gunne, which was more of a straightforward rock act with intimations of glam and looking forward to the coming of pub-rock. In terms of songwriting, lead singer Ferguson was always fully coequal with California, both of them writing separately with contributions on some songs from other members. Although I have my nostalgic attachments to it there is some dreadful stuff on this album, like "Drunkard," which appears to be their "Eleanor Rigby" bid (again the Beatles), and "Darlin' If," which may be prescient but only for doleful rock balladry by way of John Sebastian, not really a great development. "Jewish" is so weird I don't even know what to say about it. I don't think you can call it klezmer but it does have recognizable Jewish musical stylings. It was written by California who was Jewish. I'm not sure whether he's keeping the faith or reaching for exotic novelty sounds (perhaps under influence of Demento) but it's certainly off the beaten track.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

USA, 110 minutes

Director: Wes Anderson

Writers: Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson

Photography: Robert D. Yeoman

Music: Mark Mothersbaugh, Wes Anderson K-tel Collection

Editor: Dylan Tichenor

Cast: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Danny Glover, Bill Murray, Seymour Cassel, Kumar Pallana, Alec Baldwin

I knew the earlier films Bottle Rocket and Rushmore by director and cowriter Wes Anderson when I first saw The Royal Tenenbaums. I liked Bottle Rocket more than Rushmore but I knew people who were nutty for Rushmore and the soundtrack was notably good so I had nothing in particular against Anderson. But I had a bad reaction on this one—The Royal Tenenbaums hit me as precious and ironic to a fault, with a pointlessly colorful palette and other empty ornate flourishes, way too many trendy stars in the cast, and a ludicrous story about selfishness and redemption in a dysfunctional family I just couldn't buy—any of it. It has since colored my whole attitude toward Anderson pictures. Basically I like only his animated stuff (Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs) although under peer pressure I've ended up checking in with most of the rest.

Seeing The Royal Tenenbaums again finally for a second time and braced for the worst, I thought it was more deftly entertaining than I recalled. I wouldn't say it's motivating me to go back and revisit the catalog, but I am a little more willing to consider it. Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) is a New Yorker, a terrible father, and not much of a businessman either—your basic rat. Now he seems to want to make amends with his unusually brilliant family of prodigies: ex-wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston), sons Chas (Ben Stiller) and Richie (Luke Wilson), adopted daughter Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), and all their various friends and hangers-on (Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Danny Glover, etc.). It's not an ensemble piece so much as everybody, in their colorful outfits, gets a turn being the main also-ran of passing interest.

Wormwood (2017)

For the most part I have been out of step with many fans of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who directed this Netflix miniseries in typical fashion for him. His breakthrough picture for most—The Thin Blue Line (1988)—also happens to be where he lost me, though his previous films (Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida) certainly had their own problems. With The Thin Blue Line, Morris adopted a more sincere, crusading journalist approach even as he indulged various arty cinematic impulses, which have dogged his work (and apparently impressed the critics) ever since. Wormwood is a great example of both. On the journalist side, he takes on the case of Frank Olson, a CIA scientist specializing in biological warfare who died under mysterious, unexplained circumstances in 1953. Morris works with Olson's son Eric, who was a young boy at the time of his father's death and has spent much of his life trying to get to the bottom of it. In many ways Morris even shows up the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who once called the Olsons the most "uncurious" family he'd ever heard of for accepting the CIA's first account of the death, which is that Olson "fell or jumped" from a 10th-floor hotel room in some kind of terrible accident, smashing the window on his way out. Hersh made his observation of the Olsons in 1975, when a second version of the story came out. Now we were told that Olson had been surreptitiously dosed with LSD in a CIA experiment, subsequently suffered a mental breakdown, and now his death was called a suicide. This is the story that a curiously uncurious Hersh believed until circa 2014, when Eric Olson personally challenged him with his own theory that the CIA murdered his father. This had somehow never occurred to Hersh, who checked with a source and within 48 hours could confirm the murder, though he could not give any more detail than that for fear of burning his source. In many ways, Morris the journalist is thus able to paint himself as superior even to Hersh, who does not come across well in this documentary.

On the cinema side, meanwhile, Wormwood is Morris at his best or worst, depending on your view. It's full of art and cinema: slo-mo reenactments with Hollywood stars, brooding layers of text and images, fancy transitions, clips from practically every movie anyone mentions, some pretty good pop music, a whole treatment of Hamlet (from which the title among other things), etc., etc. It took me until the last episode to notice the clock in the room where the lengthy interview with Eric Olson took place is stopped at 2:35—the time his father died in 1953. That's all clever and good, but at four hours this six-part epic miniseries is just way too long, and a lot of it is padding. As a reviewer says on IMDb, there's an excellent 90-minute documentary here lost in the caverns of overproduction. Eric gets to make a pretty good case that his father was killed by the CIA, but Morris's intention seems to be more along the lines of wondering what we can ever really know for sure. Certainly this is one of those cases where it seems likely we will never know the whole story. At least, perhaps, Eric got the chance to argue convincingly for murder, in what has turned out to consume his whole life. He may have got some closure or satisfaction with this version of the story (certainly in regard to Hersh), but sadly, Wormwood is mostly more of a wasted opportunity.

The News From Paraguay (2004)

I went into this novel by Lily Tuck cold, thinking vaguely about a project involving National Book Award winners, and didn't suspect it was historical fiction until its events started to grow ridiculously improbable and I had to look them up to verify because they are so astonishing. You know, they say, truth is stranger... The News From Paraguay is basically about the disastrous war waged by the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano Lopez on Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in the mid-19th century. Franco is a main character and the other is Ella Lynch, his Irish mistress. He meets Lynch when he is in Europe for education and training with the Napoleonic army. The novel is fragmented and full of vignettes, composed of scenes in Paraguay and Paris intermixed with Lynch's correspondence and diary entries. Everyone involved is extravagantly foolish and many are very cruel. Franco, for example, routinely throws his political enemies and suspects in prison and tortures them. And he's probably more humanitarian than his father, except for that war, which reduced the Paraguayan population by half or more. As barbaric as they may be the events in this novel feel modern because they are objectively so absurd, rendered from such a distance. It's that brutally violent way of conducting politics and wielding power, with all the calculation and abstractions of dissociation. Aborigines are in the mix too, woven into the fabric of Paraguay society (mostly as servants, but with their language preserved). Lynch has five boys by Franco, plus a girl who dies as an infant, and always is regarded merely as his courtesan. His sisters and family won't recognize her or Franco's sons. Tuck's note at the end reminds us that the novel is historical fiction—some of these events more or less happened the way they're told. Others are wholly the invention of Tuck. That's the way it can go with historical fiction and the reason The News From Paraguay is cataloged as a novel. It starts out fine, funny and intriguing and strange, then lost some steam for me in the second half once it arrives at the terrible war. Ella Lynch is by far the most interesting character, though Franco's pathologies bear interest too and so do their children. And there are many wonderful minor characters with indelible little scenes. Definitely worth a look.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Spirit (1968)

Lou Adler was a fixture of 1960s Southern California pop music shading into rock, represented loosely (and only in part) by John Turturro's Joel Milner in the movie Grace of My Heart. He worked as a manager for Jan & Dean before founding the Dunhill label, then became a producer and occasional songwriter for the Grass Roots and the Mamas & the Papas, largely presiding over their runs of hits. In 1967 he sold Dunhill and founded Ode, which is approximately where Spirit enters the picture, along with Carole King (Adler produced Tapestry), Cheech & Chong, Scott McKenzie, and the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. I mention this as context for Spirit's odd appeal. Like the Doors and Jefferson Airplane, it was a band still working basically in the mode of 12 three-minute songs per album and focused on making it into the charts. But also, the times they were a-changin'. Coming in that strange golden period between Revolver and Let It Be a lot of rules were uniformly disregarded, e.g., Make one song real heavy and longer than seven minutes. Think about jazz. Don't forget production stunts. Wail, guitar man, wail! And so on. Albums could do well with no real singles action. Spirit made it to #31 on the Billboard albums chart with virtually no singles support. Five of the 11 tracks on this album are under three minutes, but there's also an 11-minute jazzy "Elijah" to finish it off.

There are actually a lot of moving parts in Spirit, so I'll start with what drew me into what turned out to be one of my first projects as a consumer of used records in the early '70s. The guitar man in this case was a guy who went by the name of Randy California, dubbed thus by Jimi Hendrix. He was playing in New York as part of Hendrix's Jimmy James & the Blue Flames and there was another Randy in the band Hendrix called Randy Texas. Again like the Doors or Jefferson Airplane, or Hendrix, Spirit (and producer Adler) threaded the needle between pop song formalities and gestures of unrestrained hippie bacchanalia. I loved California for the purity of his tone, a clean tubular sound that was probably achieved in some simple technical way, like maybe plugging the guitar directly into the soundboard. His real showcase here for me is the five-minute "Mechanical World," the only single (amazed it wasn't "Fresh Garbage" but maybe taste makers had a problem with that title?). "Mechanical World" is the corollary of course to Hendrix's "White-collared conservative flashing down the street, / Pointing their plastic finger at me." The song has an odd stilted quality, like many Spirit songs, but California's solos in the breaks are simple and effective, consisting largely of holding single beautiful notes for a long time, even as Adler sends coteries of string-players in to sneak behind him and sweeten it up. Good, good stuff. Note that the song was written by singer Jay Ferguson (the band's most prolific songwriter) with bassist Mark Andes. These two would later break away from Spirit and form Jo Jo Gunne.

Randy California's guitar legend may be most attached now to "Taurus," which he wrote, and which sounds suspiciously enough in part like Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" to produce lawsuits against our favorite hapless plagiarists Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. California died in a drowning accident in 1997 but his estate was still pursuing legal action as recently as just last year. I'm agnostic on this one—"Taurus" is more an example to me of Adler's overproduction and over-sweetening here, a mostly uninteresting instrumental (with harpsichord even). But yes, it's not hard to hear the similarity to the Zepp classic, plus Spirit toured with Led Zeppelin so Page and Plant knew the material. Spirit is probably the one album to hear by Spirit as their albums tend toward diminishing returns and even this one has ups and downs. But it has more good songs than any other and there's an interesting tension for me in Adler's pop instincts as they collide with jazzbo rock band instincts in the era of—as Frank Zappa put it—"I will love everyone / ... I will go to a house / That's – that's what I will do / I will go to a house / Where there's a rock and roll band / Because the groups all live together."

"The Aleph" (1945)

I haven't read that much by Jorge Luis Borges so I don't know how typical "The Aleph" may be, but it's pretty good. Much of the story is spent on the first-person narrator (named "Borges") and his awkward relationship with a mediocre poet who is also the cousin of a woman he (the narrator) loved deeply and ridiculously. She is dead at the time of the story. The narrator gives examples of the poet's work along with the poet's own analyses. He's mocking how the poet dotes on his own work. It does seem mediocre, although of course he is celebrated and beloved by the story's end. The word "Aleph" does not even appear until well into the story. An Aleph is a very strange thing. The poet claims there is one in his basement. By this point the narrator has decided the poet is merely a nut, but he forces the issue on the Aleph and says he's coming over to see it. It's a lot of setup and foreshadowing and while it pays off for me I'm not sure it would for everyone. An Aleph, as Borges describes it, "is one of the points in space that contains all other points." Borges describes its physical presence as little more than an inch in diameter, so about the size of a ping-pong ball. His willingness and ability to attempt describing the sensation of seeing everything in the universe at once is what makes this story, along with all the effortless transitions from the mundane to the exalted and back again. The narrator's precious moments with the Aleph have imposing religious implications—experiences like this are what change lives and start churches. It's comical in a way how little it seems to affect the narrator. He won't even give the poet the satisfaction of admitting he saw it. But he saw it—he can't help but give us, anyway, the satisfaction of a narrative account. He saw it and his life has been changed by it. Borges is not generally considered a genre writer but he has obvious parallels with M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, and other bibliophile types. They are all notably fascinated by obscure texts, old books in libraries, and the study of literature, all the way down to the minutia of scholarship and citations. Borges feels a little sardonic here about the poet's fine points of erudition whereas Lovecraft is generally more focused on pumping up the cosmic wonder. What's really great about this story are the contrasts, from the petty lives of the narrator and his cousin to the trippy ecstasies of the little portal to everything. Borges doesn't tease the Aleph hard at all, beyond the title, but holds it back to the last third, and it's about perfect that way.

The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
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