Don't F**k With Cats (2019)

When we last saw web sleuths in action (two weeks ago, in Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel) they were mostly all wrong. Here they are mostly all right. This Netflix miniseries starts, as so many things do, on Facebook, when a video was posted called "1 Boy 2 Kittens." Part of what is so interesting about this documentary is the power of this video and others posted by the same fellow. They are mercifully never shown to us, except in very small fragments, but they literally break down web sleuths and a police detective, who respond with blubbering tears and outrage, as do we all just knowing about it. In the first video the cats are killed by being placed in plastic bags from which the air is removed with a vacuum cleaner. These kittens are barely weaned, not even two months old, and they die. We see the corpses briefly, which he keeps in his refrigerator for later videos. This mysterious fellow kills other animals for videos and eventually goes on to kill a person. His story is another one that belongs to the internet age, interesting and creepy in its own right. Those of us who believe that wantonly killing animals ritualistically is a sign of a serial killer working himself up to bigger crimes are not surprised by how this case turns, but until that murder the web sleuths are unable to get the attention of the police IRL to take it seriously. For one thing, figuring out who the guy is at all and then where he lives in the world is no easy thing. The web sleuths manage it—all the various details of how they do so are there to be discovered. It's fair to call it fascinating, and relatable too, especially when they can't get the attention of the police once they have found the guy. Along the way, unfortunately, they do find at least one wrong guy, who is then hounded and harassed by web sleuth hangers-on until he commits suicide. Oops. That's the problem with these internet things. You can find out amazing things, but the mob feelings incited can also go out of control and ruin the lives of innocent people as well as guilty. On the other hand, our cat killer is anything but innocent and in general police will not take the case seriously until he actually does kill a person, also again done for the camera. Thanks to the work of the web sleuths—basically one of those private Facebook groups that can cause so much trouble—police are able to get the guy after only the one murder. If you have tender feelings like me for animals you have to be careful with this miniseries, which I think is worth seeing. They never show much, but your imagination is fully inflamed to terrible things. It's probably the next-worst thing to seeing the videos (which I refuse to look at myself) but at least there's a happy ending here and altogether it's an interesting ride.

"Menudo" (1987)

I like this story by Raymond Carver, but it probably bears comparison with John Updike's philandering suburban dwellers. It also hits really close to home if you know Carver's biography or anything about his first wife. The ex-wife in this story ("Molly") is obviously her. Molly's New Age chatter and other details, as reported by the first-person narrator, may be exaggerated but the story is never kind to her. Still, the premise is instantly affecting, even gripping. Our man has been having an affair with the married woman across the street. Her husband found out she was cheating, though not with whom. At the same time, or recently, our guy's second wife discovered his affair, though also not with whom. He won't tell her even as she keeps guessing and he lies when she guesses right. Amanda, the neighbor he has been sleeping with, has been given an ultimatum by her husband to leave within the week. Amanda wants to marry the narrator. He doesn't think he wants that but he doesn't know what he wants. He can't sleep. It's 4 in the morning. He sits in his kitchen and watches the lights in Amanda's place. She evidently can't sleep either. But he can't call her. His wife is in the house with him and she's having her own sleeping problems and mad enough already. Mostly the story follows the narrator's distraught thoughts and memories, many about his first wife. He's trying to sort out what it all means: love, commitment, change. He and his first wife grew apart even as it was the great love affair of their youth, if not their lives. His present wife and Amanda don't feel like deep commitments. Now he's middle-aged. His first wife has changed forever. He has nothing. As usual with Carver, it is vivid, strange, sharply thrown in our face. The narrator is not looking for advice. He would snarl at us if we tried. He is looking for relief. Suddenly he is middle-aged and he still doesn't know what he wants. It's a great portrait of a desperate state of mind, but also painful to read in its treatment of the first wife. I think it's also good enough it has a chance, circumstances allowing, of outliving us all.

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

The Thin Red Line (1998)

USA, 170 minutes

Director: Terrence Malick

Writers: James Jones, Terrence Malick

Photography: John Toll

Music: Hans Zimmer

Editors: Leslie Jones, Saar Klein, Billy Weber

Cast: Jim Caviezel, Elias Koteas, Ben Chaplin, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, John Savage, Jared Leto, Dash Mihok, Tim Blake Nelson, Adrien Brody, John Travolta, George Clooney, John C. Reilly

In 1998 the director and screenwriter of The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick, had not made a movie in 20 years. To that point, he had made only two feature-length pictures (Badlands in 1973 and Days of Heaven in 1978). But they are well-made and had shown some cult appeal, so it was manifestly not hard for him to cast this World War II picture with all eager stars of the 1990s all up and down the line. At the time Malick was 55, which is pretty amazing all things considered, but what might impress even more about his career is that, in the past 10 years, into his 70s, he has made five more: The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song, and A Hidden Life. (Of them, I have only seen The Tree of Life and Song to Song, neither of which I liked.)

So this movie is already kind of a strange project even before you have seen a frame. It's based on a James Jones novel, but there is a lot of Malick in it too. All his familiar filmmaking tics are here: the brooding voiceovers, the attention to the natural world, the stately pace, the tone all but exalted. It affects me in the peculiar way so many of his pictures before 2011 have. I didn't like The Thin Red Line the first time I saw it, but I have liked it more every time since. This has unfortunately not worked as well for me with The Tree of Life, or even the intervening picture from 2005, The New World, part of why I've given up on the rest.

"One and One Make Five" (1993)

[listen]

What I've always liked about this song is the turn of phrase in the title, which at first makes it sound like someone is just dumb or something. But there's a story here, another sad one on an album that features them, about a philandering partner who has just been caught again. I like the compression, proceeding to the inevitable via logic. The singer is adding up the clues, and then comes the flash of understanding, jumping to the number of betrayals it makes, and it's not a trivial number (5). On the album it provides a kind of light palate cleanser after the big stagy production of "The Theatre" and before "To Speak Is a Sin," an equally big production but different in tone. "One and One Make Five" comes across as one of the most frivolous tracks here, relatively short and with gimmicks, except for this sadness, which is experienced in the context of Very almost like a flavor of candy, cherry sadness vs. lemon-lime vs. blue raspberry. I like it—I like everything on the album. But it's a bit overdone in patches ("... giddy-up giddy-up giddy-up ..." etc.) (actually "here we go" but the moral equivalent of "giddy-up"), and it doesn't particularly add up to much. But what am I saying? It's good on relationships and the discussions therein. The singer, the betrayed one, can't believe his beloved homely comforts could be boring and foolish to his partner. The singer is the fool, and he doesn't know it completely quite yet. He is practically learning even as we listen. Thus it is poignant. But the singer also seems callow and smug. It sounds like he won't accommodate anything but his homely comforts. He could even be using them to imprison his partner. We don't know. It is just fragments of a bad relationship passing by.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

Riddles and confusion. You can see in this strange little novel that Mark Twain has a few scores to settle with the Catholic Church and romance literature, but I'm not as sure about the good old American can-do capitalism. Is that parody, or is it good old American can-do capitalism? I tried this novel when I was a kid, attracted by the time travel science fiction premise, but bogged down. I started over and finished more recently but it certainly does have dull passages. The premise is only a device and there's little here to tickle the imagination about time travel. Mostly the point seems to be that the time traveler, Hank Morgan, is way ahead of the people in King Arthur's time in 6th-century England. It's possible that the point is Morgan only thinks he's way ahead of everybody (human hubris, don't you know), but it appears more likely he actually is way ahead, as he quickly sets up as a tycoon, building factories and getting that backward world up to speed with dynamite, a stock market, and even telephones. Good job! If he is ultimately defeated—because people are sheep, or something—he still knows what's best, and we're probably still intended to agree with him. I know I do, on general principles: democracy is to be preferred over theocracy and/or feudalism. The structure is episodic, per the usual Twain, but these adventures just aren't that interesting. He meets a woman who serves as his guide, calls her the most boring person he has ever known, and sure enough, the whole thing collapses in on itself every time she speaks. And it's not that funny or effective to make your main character a basic egotist. He's not sympathetic and his accomplishments are not at all believable. Some of the things he claims to be doing give some idea how far back in history this is set. He builds a match factory so he can smoke, for example. He might note in passing that smoking is entirely unknown in that time, and really matches should be more impressive to them than just evidence of his peculiar habit (and where did he get the chemicals and facility, etc.). I guess it falls under humor, which doesn't always age well and doesn't always work for me here. Twain obviously has more sympathy and respect for Connecticut Yankees than Knights of the Round Table, which I can go along with to a degree. Perhaps the best part of this book is Morgan's unswerving contempt for royalty and nobility. Huzzah! But a grasping American-style hustler is not much of an improvement. If that's the point, it ends up tiresome.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

East Side Story (1981)

New wave UK popster unit Squeeze was always more popular elsewhere than the US, so I was surprised, looking it up, first to see that they did chart twice here and then that those occasions were in 1987 and 1988, with "Hourglass" and "853-5937," respectively. Full disclosure, I don't know those songs. I barely knew they were even still together then—and note, furthermore, they are still together today. But I think the very early part of the 1980s remains their heyday, on the new wave project of a self-conscious return to three-minute pop aesthetics and dynamics (and "fun"). I had the 1980 album Argybargy, their third, and loved it dearly, playing it to death. This follow-up East Side Story is arguably their best. The first single they released from it, "Is That Love," felt like a continuation of the Argybargy groove, a sprightly tune that skips and dazzles and clocks in at 2:31. The second single, "Tempted" (4:00), better represents attempts at growth and development, not to mention a certain star power. It features the band's newest keyboard player then in Paul Carrack, who sings the lead. You may recall Carrack's steady imploring style from the 1975 hit by Ace, "How Long." "Tempted" also features vocal support from Elvis Costello and it's still an exciting moment to hear his memorable, barely competent voice burping up and squeaking out his lines and harmonies. My complaint about East Side Story is not exactly a complaint. I just have never quite been able to put my finger on the whole. It skips around so willfully from style to style, asserting the pop mastery of Chris Difford's and Glenn Tilbrook's collaborative songwriting, that it never quite finds its own groove. These exercises include essays at country in the third single, "Labelled by Love," a limping "Eleanor Rigby" take in "Vanity Fair," all tarted up with a dreary string arrangement, and some tossed-off rockabilly in the fourth and final single, released only in the US, "Messed Around." The song that caught my attention most often listening to East Side Story again recently was the unfortunately named "F-Hole" (in fairness, an F-hole is technically the opening in the body of stringed instruments in the violin family). But "F-Hole," more of a rock band number with a driving hypnotic groove, is another song unlike any other on the album. I see I've used the word "groove" a few times, which is kind of unusual for a project that is so determinedly pop, at least in formal terms: it's all verse-chorus-verse variations with a lot of emphasis on melody and hooks, clocking in at three minutes at least aesthetically. The average song length here is actually closer to four minutes but you take the point. These songs swing wildly in style though most are recognizably Squeeze. I never quite feel like I have a firm grip. Yet playing it, I often find myself noticing how it is full of amazing moments. Maybe they don't quite all add up to an album (14 accomplished tracks notwithstanding) and maybe no song stands very well on its own—they seem to need each other somehow. Curious project, curious reaction. Solid good album?

"Nurse's Stories" (1860)

This piece by Charles Dickens has appeared under different names ("Captain Murderer," "Captain Murderer and the Devil's Bargain"). I found it in an anthology of stories and assumed that's what it was, a story—a rambling and strangely put together one. But it's actually closer to an essay or memoir, with Dickens (or the narrator) recalling in daylight the horrific stories a nurse used to tell him at bedtime. It appeared originally in The Uncommercial Traveller, a collection of pieces with a little theme of travel lightly thrown over to unite them. The first effect of "Nurse's Stories" is that it feels like someone crazy talking to themselves. There are elements that make the stories feel like fairy tales, unusually gruesome ones. Dickens—or his childhood nurse originally—is intent on getting under our skin, effectively doubling the impact with two stories related only by their intensity. The first is about Captain Murderer, a serial cannibal who marries and eats his brides ritualistically, three times: "he chopped her in pieces, and peppered her, and salted her, and put her in the pie, and sent it to the baker's, and ate it all, and picked the bones." The repetition along with the extraordinary scene described are part of what remind me of fairy tales. Captain Murderer comes to a bad end eventually and then it's off to a completely different story, this one about a family of shipbuilders named Chips. Each generation sells their soul to the devil for a specific list of products that are apparently irresistible to them: an iron pot, a bushel of tenpenny nails, a half-ton of copper (which they seem to be just toting around), and a rat that can speak. They're not as interested in the rat generally, but it comes with the deal. That story then goes off on a strange tangent about rats. This whole piece takes some getting used to—well, full disclosure, Dickens always takes some getting used to for me—but I like the rambling style here and when the narrator decides to be vivid he is quite vivid. It's obviously intended to scare with one overwhelming jolt after the next—that kind of horror, rushing you along, never letting you get your bearings. It's more effective than a lot of horror literature its age. In its antiquated way it's squarely in the mindfuck vein, which I can respect. I don't typically think of Dickens as a horror writer, but of course even the beloved A Christmas Carol is full of ghosts and creeps and let's not forget Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. I've been impressed with the other forays I've seen by Dickens into the genre too.

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Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (2021)

I was surprised to see that this Netflix miniseries has been ranked in aggregate on IMDb by some 16,000 viewers at 5.9 stars out of 10. I did what I could, giving it 8 stars, but one person can only do so much here. The complaint, as far as I can tell, seems to be the same as mine about Wormwood a few weeks ago, which is that it is too long and padded out. But that was not my experience. Parachuting in to check out the first few minutes of the first episode—a new habit of mine, and I'm quick to abandon ship—I was completely pulled into this strange story of a young woman's disappearance from the legendary Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Looking further into it before committing myself to all four hours I noted that the documentary was coproduced and directed by Joe Berlinger, coproducer and codirector of the memorable Paradise Lost series, recounting the harrowing story of the murder of several children in May 1993 in West Memphis, Arkansas. So that did it and I went all the way with this fascinating documentary, which is so skillfully put together. It tells the story of Elisa Lam who disappeared from the hotel in 2013 in mysterious circumstances. She was a young Chinese-Canadian woman traveling. She kept a prodigious account of her own life on Tumblr. The elements in the case were baffling and tantalizing: video of Lam behaving strangely in a late-night hotel elevator the night she disappeared basically drove the whole phenomenon of it. Unexplained editing of the video confused it further, along with an army of eerie coincidences and the very strange circumstances of her death and how her body was discovered. Everything is ultimately explained, and it's all there to be discovered. Berlinger evidently still has some of his old sympathies, as the case also involves accusations against an outsider figure, a Mexican death-metal musician named Morbid who happened to be staying in the hotel at the time Lam disappeared. In this age of social media mob action, he found himself the object of hundreds of self-styled web sleuths who were sure he was good for the crime. Not surprisingly, perhaps, The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel and the case are deeply involved with the effects of swarming social media. Sometimes I think social media is all there is to think about after climate change. Add to the mix that the Cecil Hotel, located at the edge of the Los Angeles Skid Row, has a longstanding reputation for being haunted, tainted, cursed, and otherwise an ineffable vortex of evil. What a cluster! The only spoiler I'll mention is that, even though I am generally sympathetic with their impulse, 99% of the web sleuths were wrong about everything in this case. Berlinger and crew put this miniseries together artfully, making it work well as a suspense production, and a lot of the interviews are just great—not only the people corralled for it but all the things they have to say. This is a good one. I think I've talked myself into revising my ranking to a 9.

Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (2005)

Kim Cooper is a busy author based in Los Angeles with many different interests, publishing zines and blogs that run well afield of rock music. She's still obscure enough that she doesn't have her own Wikipedia article, but her 33-1/3 entry remains one of the bestselling in the whole series. I take that as mostly artifact of the cult following of the band, such as it is. Neutral Milk Hotel was mostly a product of one man, Jeff Mangum, who came up with two albums before moving on to mysterious other things. He's considered by many to be one of rock's great lost souls, like Syd Barrett or Arthur Lee. It's not entirely fair, but there are the facts: he's an eccentric, he made an amazing one-of-a-kind album, and then he has mostly disappeared since. Cooper is not particularly into the myth. Like most of the cult she is into the album. I am too. I will say that, for being one of the bestselling titles in the series, it gets kind of a shabby translation to e-book, with what looks like a quick and dirty OCR scan job. But maybe that's more of a jab at Amazon and its customers. It's legible enough. Cooper goes with a clipped, just-the-facts-ma'am approach, detailing the travels and interactions of the informal Elephant 6 consortium, of which all NMH members were more or less participants (along with Apples in Stereo, Beulah, Olivia Tremor Control, and others). The project was mostly based in Athens, Georgia, although Denver, Austin, and other towns were involved too. I like the continuum from the B-52s to R.E.M. and on. In fact, a graphic designer for R.E.M. was responsible for the Aeroplane cover. Long after the album and even this book came out I finally had my own infatuation period with the strange masterpiece. Nothing else is quite like it and it stands timeless of itself. Cooper gets into the history of Mangum and the band, has some insights on the nuts and bolts of recording and production (based on numerous interviews with nearly all the principals but Mangum), runs through the album track by track, and entertains the inevitable questions about Mangum and his semiretirement from music. I learned a lot of things I didn't know. Some I might have been exposed to before, such as the oblique focus on Anne Frank or Mangum's cryptic Southern Christian spirituality, which I wanted to respect but found a little more creepy. I hadn't actually noticed the yelping for Jesus that much before. But that's OK—really, as weird as it is, it only makes the album richer, deeper. If we're going to make comparisons of classic rock, I think Mangum is linked more closely to Jonathan Richman than Syd Barrett. Check out this album sometime if you haven't yet. You could be surprised. If the appreciation runs deep enough, and you have some questions, that's the time to turn to this useful little book.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

His Girl Friday (1940)

USA, 92 minutes

Director: Howard Hawks

Writers: Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Morrie Ryskind

Photography: Joseph Walker

Music: Sidney Cutner, Felix Mills

Editor: Gene Havlick

Cast: Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy, Gene Lockhart, John Qualen, Helen Mack, Alma Kruger, Billy Gilbert, Abner Biberman

His Girl Friday is an older picture, like Casablanca or The Wizard of Oz, that remains worth seeing for everyone at least once. It pulls off a killer stunt in the impossible pace alone, and you also can't miss director Howard Hawks's evident ability to translate a party atmosphere on his shooting sets into his movies. Everyone appears to be having a ball. Hawks's version of the stage play The Front Page (which has been made into movies three or four times) is still unique as it sprints on a tempo that defies all speed limits, along with some interesting and innovative technique like overlapping dialogue. Admittedly His Girl Friday may look primitive to a lot of contemporary viewers, but it's still impressive and likely to surprise. Not even Billy Wilder could come close when he took it on in a 1974 version with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.

The play's original story and dialogue carry it some way, doubtless the reason it has been made into a movie so many times. Cary Grant by himself puts on a clinic in screwball timing and fast talking and Rosalind Russell keeps up admirably. Grant is Walter Burns, a newspaper editor and political kingmaker in the cynical mode of the time (slower and possibly more corrupt versions would appear in Citizen Kane and Meet John Doe). Russell is Hildy Johnson, Burns's best reporter and ex-wife. Now she is about to remarry and move to Albany but Burns has one more last-minute assignment for her, which she can't resist. The blood of a newspaperman plainly courses her veins.

Top 40

1. Eve 6, "Black Nova" (3:27)
2. Vampire Weekend, "2021 (January 5th, to be exact)" (20:21)
3. Mike Casey, "No Church in the Wild (Radio Edit)" (7:13)
4. Sault, "Strong" (6:18)
5. Masked Wolf, "Astronaut in the Ocean" (2:12)
6. Jazmine Sullivan, "Pick Up Your Feelings" (3:49)
7. Rolling Stones, "Monkey Man" (4:12, 1969)
8. Lindsey Buckingham, "I Don't Mind" (4:05)
9. Denzel Curry, "Bad Luck" (2:52)
10. K.Flay feat. Tom Morello, "TGIF" (3:19)
11. Mastodon, "Forged by Neron" (3:05)
12. Frank Turner, "The Gathering" (2:39)
13. Los Lobos, "Sail On, Sailor" (3:20)
14. Rilo Kiley, "Dreamworld" (4:43, 2007)
15. Beharie, "Don't Wanna Know" (3:53)
16. Wings, "Let 'Em In" (5:10. 1976)
17. Avalanches, "Since I Left You" (4:22, 2000)
18. Jorge Ben, "Os alquimistas estão chegando os alquimistas" (3:15, 1974)
19. Blossom Dearie, "Once Upon a Summertime" (2:47, 1958)
20. Love, "Alone Again Or" (3:17, 1967)
21. Love, "A House Is Not a Motel" (3:31, 1967)
22. Marias, "Hush" (3:01)
23. Hadda Brooks, "That's My Desire" (2:44, 1947)
24. Happy Mondays, "Dennis and Lois" (4:23, 1990)
25. A Place to Bury Strangers, "Never Coming Back" (5:14, 2018)
26. P.J. Proby, "Niki Hoeky" (2:34, 1967)
27. Van Morrison feat. P.J. Proby, "Whatever Happened to P.J. Proby" (3:42, 2015)
28. Kaleidoscope, "Mr. Small the Watch-Repairer Man" (2:44, 1967)
29. Kaleidoscope, "The Sky Children" (8:01, 1967)
30. Yoko Ono, "Greenfield Morning I Pushed an Empty Baby Carriage All Over the City" (5:39, 1970)
31. Liza Anne, "I Love You, But I Need Another Year" (3:42, 2018)
32. Mamman Sani, "Five Hundred Miles" (5:53, early 1980s)
33. Wire, "I Should Have Known Better" (3:52, 1979)
34. Jimmy Castor Bunch, "Space Age" (3:21, 1977)
35. New Order, "Your Silent Face" (5:59, 1983)
36. Jessie Ware, "Please" (4:32)
37. Funkadelic, "If You Don't Like the Effects, Don't Produce the Cause" (3:48, 1972)
38. Newcleus, "Jam On It" (8:15, 1984)
39. Charles Mingus, "Haitian Fight Song" (12:01, 1957)
40. Girl in Red, "Bad Idea!" (3:39)

thnx: Billboard, Spin, Skip, Dean, unusual suspects

Three Junes (2002)

This novel by Julia Glass, her first, was a National Book Award winner, which is how I came to find out about it. I had a hard time with it—too many characters in general, and specifically they were hard to tell apart as I went along. The title is literal. The novel has three sections, each set in the month of June—of 1989, 1995, and 1999. Within each, the narrator tends to swing between a flashback or flashbacks and an ongoing scene in the present. It's sympathetic to the AIDS epidemic—in many ways that's what it's about. I read it in March 2020 and confess to mixed feelings about epidemics. Suddenly, isolated in my apartment from coronavirus, I felt the epidemic touchpoints keenly, especially as flu symptoms could be such a threat. But it also felt like AIDS was beside the point, with something like a cure for it and better understood now. It's possible I just read this at the wrong time for me. It reminded me of some of my struggles with writers like Flaubert (which might be a compliment), as the writing feels so labored over that it's almost labor to read. It forces one to read slowly, which I'm not against in principle—and I note Flaubert gets a lot better on a second reading. But I was often frustrated with the plodding pace of Three Junes. Some of the issues most important to these characters, such as having children or their fraught relationships with mothers, seemed less important and more the concerns of yuppies, and shallow. The character dying of AIDS seemed more like a caricature of a cultural type, as he is a music critic for the New York Times and has a lot of arrogant opinions about opera and such. There's a dope-smoking chef who's hard to believe and an easygoing macho kind of gay guy I've only read about in books. I also wonder how a straight woman gets a pass to tell this story. She's not insensitive but her stuff about gay men and their mothers hews close to stereotype. It isn't stereotype, it's an issue that is interesting, but I wish I felt she had more insight. I feel like the high praise for Three Junes may have been related to the timing, published when AIDS needed better understanding and more acceptance. I want more than that now.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"Schalken the Painter" (1839)

With a story as old as this one by Sheridan Le Fanu there are always going to be problems of antiquated writing, but this is not bad overall—well conceived and with some very effective scenes. The original title, "Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter," has a 19th-century wordiness. But the edit (as it appears in The Dark Descent and elsewhere) brings its own distortions because Godfrey Schalken is a fairly minor character here, more of a witness for whom we have sympathies. He's not even really "the painter" in this story. That's his master Gerard Douw. Schalken is merely a student, and haplessly in love with Douw's niece. Both Douw and Schalken are actual historical figures, by the way, but there's no word about Douw's niece in the Wikipedia article. In the long perspective of this story, as in life, Schalken eventually becomes a great painter in his own right, noted for his use of candlelight. In the 17th century, when this story takes place, arranged marriages were very much the norm. Douw cannot offer much of a dowry for his niece so he hopes for a man of means for her, although Schalken with his raw talent still might have a chance if love has anything to do with it. But then the mysterious man of means shows up. He comes by night. His hat is pulled down over his face and he has a box of gold whose value is to be verified by a nearby Jew (note clonking antisemitism). He's also in a huge hurry to close this deal—it has to be tonight or never. This is not going to turn out well for Rose, obviously (yes, as happens remarkably often, the woman gets it), but aside from that the story has a lot of surprises and effective moments. The marriage takes place, in all its haste, and then bride and groom disappear entirely. It turns out the groom is not from Rotterdam, as he had said. No one there has ever heard of him. Then, one night, Rose shows up in a terrible state—bedraggled, starving, frightened out of her mind. She keeps saying things like "The dead and the living cannot be one: God has forbidden it" and "Rest to the wakeful—sleep to the sleep-walkers." Real spooky shit. It's obvious what's happening, but still ambiguous enough to leave gaps where the imagination can dwell and fester. So, right, the guy is dead all along. There's a curious detail here about how he doesn't breathe. I wonder if I would notice that about someone because I don't think I particularly notice people are breathing—hard to test that one. As a kind of ghost our dead guy is an interesting conception, a dark shape that speaks but does not breathe, is fabulously wealthy, and wants a bride. Pretty good story all around.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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The Confession Killer (2019)

I thought this Netflix miniseries was a pretty good primer on Henry Lee Lucas, who emerged in the '80s as pretender to the throne of King of the Serial Killers, the most prolific, rampant, and eclectic of all time. The legend was printed in the movie Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, although now we know it is mostly fiction and Lucas should be up for some posthumous credit along with screenwriters Richard Fire and director John McNaughton, plus Michael Rooker in possibly his greatest performance. It may be the single greatest serial killer movie of all time. Please don't talk to me about The Silence of the Lambs or M. The Texas Rangers, according to this documentary, still have Lucas down for some 200 murders—hitchhikers and housewives stabbed, shot, bludgeoned, strangled, stomped, throats cut, necks broken. After he killed them he had sex with them. Sometimes he didn't like their look so he cut off their heads first. He was thus set up as the Monster Truck Rally of serial killers. The worst any human could imagine. Pure E - V - I - L. It turns out—and it took awhile to really get to it, well into the 2010s, because the Texas Rangers resist the truth to this day (according to the doc)—Lucas probably killed three people: his mother (an abusive prostitute), his 15-year-old girlfriend (when Lucas was in his 40s), and a landlady. All the rest were more or less a matter of Lucas amiably going along with Texas law enforcement when they found this easy and fun way of clearing cases: Get Lucas to confess to it. He'll do it! Ironically, people-pleasing is in the nature of Lucas's pathology and his skills for reading people were prodigious. When others looked harder they started seeing 1) a crazy thing, and 2) something that should have signaled we're done here. The crazy thing was how much driving Lucas would have had to do to commit these crimes. There were periods of days and weeks on the timeline where literally, physically, the only way he could have done it was with constant driving, killing, and no sleep. The "case closed" thing was irrefutable documentary evidence in dozens of the murders that Lucas was elsewhere—a matter of timeclock stamps, receipts, and witnesses. He could not have been in New Mexico killing a housewife when he was buying gas and a hot dog that day in Florida. However, again by the slant of this miniseries, which is compelling, law enforcement by then was flocking in from 20-odd states with their cold case files, and Lucas was clearing them left and right. He'd grin, suck on a milkshake, and admit to every single one, offering up the lurid details, including his favorite about the having sex with the corpses. Uncovering the fraud of all this is basically the arc of this miniseries, a twisting complicated story that is there to be discovered. Lucas died in prison in 2001 awaiting execution for a murder he could not have committed. Required viewing for anyone like me who thought Lucas might be the ultimate boogeyman. He's still pretty creepy.