Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, USA, 115 minutes

Director: Steven Spielberg

Writers: Lawrence Kasdan, George Lucas, Philip Kaufman

Photography: Douglas Slocombe

Music: John Williams

Editors: Michael Kahn, George Lucas

Cast: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Ronald Lacey, Paul Freeman, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott, Wolf Kahler, Anthony Higgins, Alfred Molina

As an inevitable fact of life, I've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark a few times (among other things, it's one everybody can watch at get-togethers) and have been toting around a VHS I don't remember acquiring. I have always resisted it a little and the nostalgic 1940s Saturday afternoon serial aesthetic it sports. The element is under willing influence of cowriter George Lucas, who in approximately 1981 could do no wrong. But ultimately Raiders has always struck me as too much about not enough. It's slapstick, it's swashbuckling, it has something for everyone. It's never dull so it is always dull.

I avoided it until it was two years old, at which point I learned a lesson I have had to learn again since, which is that director Steven Spielberg's movies should not be underestimated. They are so expertly made, tuned so uncannily to the audience, that I usually end up sucked into them even somewhat against my will. I ditched the VHS experience this time, opted to pay the $4 to stream it, and found myself greeted by one of the longest and most detailed disclaimer statements I think I've ever seen (and I look at horror movies on the semiregular): "Rated 16+: alcohol use, foul language, frightening scenes, sexual content, smoking, violence." I want to talk about at least a couple of these things—the drinking by Karen Allen's character Marion is insane—but let's start with the frightening scenes.

"At Chrighton Abbey" (1871)

This long story by the Victorian author Mary Elizabeth Braddon may be a bit of a dud in the payoff, but it's so much fun getting there I'm inclined to overlook the fizzle. Another story I know by her, "Good Lady Ducayne," a vampire story from much later in Braddon's career, has much the same strengths and weaknesses. There's a very strong pull to her tales from the start—she starts in laying on the class details in order to fix her characters in place. I suspect in general that she was a little disapproving of the supernatural. Both stories feature important characters who are notable skeptics, proved right in the vampire story. Here, not so much—our feet-on-the-ground hero, everyone's favorite beloved poor cousin Sarah, has a vision that must be taken as otherworldly (even as she resists it as such herself). So score one for the supernatural—a family curse that will not be denied—but I still get the sense Braddon disapproves. This is mostly a splendid Victorian Christmas story. The extended family gathers at the family estate, Chrighton Abbey, for all of the month of December and into the new year, which is how Christmas should be done. It's my favorite part of the story as long as the ghost bits are going to go bust. It's social manners with a keen eye. Cousin Sarah is dropping in for the first time in 12 years and everyone is so happy to see her. A marriage is in the offing between the Chrighton heir Edward and a proud young woman. As eldest son and chief heir, Edward is the target of the family curse, which is executed in the last third of the story. Sarah's vision foretells it too. There's another ghost story of about this vintage, John Berwick Harwood's anonymously published 1861 "Horror: A True Tale," in which the ghost goes corporeal and is seen actually wrestling in bed with the poor cousin hero—whoa! No such bolts of inspiration here (for that, see also F. Marion Crawford's 1885 "The Upper Berth"). There's not even really a ghost. Just a family curse that always seems to bear out. Even so, I like the style of the storytelling here, laying out the history of a great family and its estate and holdings and all the incidentals of how they live, for better or worse, with great problems and small. It's a terrific story of the holiday season, like the movie Fanny and Alexander, which also happens to be weak in the scary ghost story department. Apparently some of these people didn't get the memo from Andy Williams.

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"The Theatre" (1993)

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The lush, the gorgeous, the triumphant, the overdone "The Theatre" bursts with ideas and glory: musical, gestural, production, theatrical (no pun intended, at least not by me). It's fully glamorous and it's also a song about rich people stepping carefully over poor people. It's a high point of the album, though nearly too garish, too weird, too full of itself. It bears a well of molten anger that is deeply buried. It's melancholy, bittersweet—bitter. It's a Dickensian street scene in a theater district nearing show time, lighted wonders of the city after dark, I imagine the St. Petersburg theaters in winter. "The Theatre" sweeps in majestically with a whole battery of sound effects, a crying soul singer, laughing clowns and wheeling harlequins, a puffed-up keyboard-augmented orchestra. Somewhere you can hear the jugglers and the clowns when they all do tricks. It's like the late scenes in The Elephant Man, swirling into the magical other-world of the theater and its transports. But the other world of which the Pet Shop Boys sing appears to turn. It is seen from the view of the "bums you step over ... While you pretend not to notice / All the years we've been here." That is, the song notices not only the glowing electric displays of the theater marquees but also "Loan shark windows / Upon the pavement / Where you wave goodbye." (Or that's the way I hear it. The internet tells me it's "Below shop windows.") The scene is 19th century and Dickensian in its main strokes (though also 20th century and modern), with homeless teenagers lurking in the theater district, hoping for a little more porridge and/or tagging up the walls with graffiti, but more generally ignored at large. One production detail that always sticks with me is the way Sylvia Mason-James is submerged in the mix. She's singing her guts out in best Tina Turner fashion but is entirely subsumed under Neil Tennant's lead vocal and merely coequal to the sections with keyboards and orchestra, part of a three-ring circus providing atmosphere for the main show. At this point in the album, "The Theatre" is just another gaudy pleasure passing by, though one of the grandest floats of them all. Big song. Very big song.

The History of the Seattle Mariners (2020)

I will have some baggage to address involving this most peculiar and wonderful documentary, which I will get to as soon as I figure out how to describe what it is. It is over three and a half hours long and available on YouTube in six separate episodes or with all pasted together in one (recommended). It is closer to a 3D animated powerpoint presentation than what we think of as a documentary, with the visuals dominated by a calendar-page style chart of the years 1977 to 2019, which is filled in and cluttered up as we go with exciting photos, news headlines, and, most importantly, statistics. The statistics are there to be discovered. They are what make the hours of this documentary worth sitting for. They make the hours seem short. I suspect a job like this could be done with any team—that any professional sports franchise 25 years or older will have statistical freaks and jaw-dropping weirdness. But director/writers Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein have 100% made the case for the Mariners, who even statistically appear to be what they appear to be: a most peculiar study in unrelenting futility. Bois and Rubenstein, collectively known as Dorktown, work under the banner of SB Nation, a sports blogging network owned by Vox. As advertised, The History of the Seattle Mariners is a very thorough history, starting in 1932 and continuing with the Seattle Pilots episode, before literally charting Mariners history from 1977 on. I moved to Seattle in 1985 as an eager baseball fan ready to switch lifetime allegiances for the sake of witnessing a Gorman Thomas dinger in the Kingdome. As the years 1977 to 1988 are generally regarded as the tedious overture to the Mariners opera, I arrived just in time.

So to the baggage proper: 1) I have been actively turned off all professional sports by the response to the pandemic (start with hogging up too much of an already meager testing supply for the sake of meaningless exhibition games and continue a year and a half later with Aaron Rodgers). Don't even talk to me about college sports, which is a crime in progress on multiple levels, not just covid. 2) I have been actively turned off baseball since 1995, when players crossed the picket lines of others after their own strike was resolved even as owners turned to homerun derbies and other circus-like changes to the game to get butts back in seats, whistling and playing dumb about the complicated issue of PEDs. And 3) the Seattle Mariners. Where do you even start with this team? I can now say, thanks to this meticulously researched documentary, that the answer to that question is 1932. And I know better that the team has delivered more pleasure to me than I have generally been willing to admit. My favorite period is probably many people's, 1989 to 1995 (even if the last year was deeply soured by stadium politics). It was the coming of Ken Griffey Jr. and a bunch of Yankee-killers, which climaxed in a best-of-5 postseason series down two games to beat the Yankees in a freaking storybook finish.

I cried then and I cried again, watching the 1995 episode here, even though with mixed feelings still because of the stadium issue, a whole other story. Sticking to the main point, the underachieving powerhouse that was the Mariners for the rest of the '90s—with Griffey, DH Edgar Martinez, pitcher Randy Johnson (my favorite), and shortstop A-Rod—is well detailed here. They address disgruntled people like me at one point, with a weak argument that if all you want is a championship you're missing the point, but what I have learned about myself is I don't have such sisyphean levels of appetite for meaningless labor. The weakest part of this documentary is the portion devoted to the 21st century, starting with 2002. Yes, Ichiro Suzuki and Felix Martinez continue the amazing statistical march to pointlessness (and Adrian Beltre, and Robinson Cano), and in many interesting and dramatic ways. But what plays as tragedy first inevitably plays as farce in redux, and much of the last hour here is unnecessary, though still interesting in chatty distracted ways, for example, say, with the Jack Wilson story. Above all, on a personal level, The History of the Seattle Mariners renewed my appreciation for Griffey—I'd had a grudge against him since he left for Cincinnati, having always treated the Mariners as his quadruple-A steppingstone there. It wasn't really like that, I see here, and it reminded me of what it felt like to be a fan in 1989. Anyway, if a sports / baseball / Mariners curmudgeon such as myself can not just like this documentary but positively love it, there's hope for anyone with more moderated views. In short, don't miss it.

"Errand" (1987)

The last story in Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From collection—and possibly the last he wrote—is kind of a switch-up. It presents itself as the story of Anton Chekhov's death from tuberculosis in 1904 at the age of 44, perhaps anticipating his own imminent death at the age of 50. "Errand" appears to be factual but is not when read closely. The confusion is apparently deliberate because much of the story actually is factually accurate. Chekhov died in 1904, for example. I say it's obvious but it's not that obvious. Janet Malcolm has all the details in her book Reading Chekhov, pointing out how many of these confabulated details have seeped into other accounts of Chekhov's death, even formal biographies—the champagne, the layout of the room, observations of the physician and others who were there or might have been. Apparently a lot of people read this story and assumed Carver knew what he was talking about and these vivid but fictional details stuck with them. It's a shame in a way because it makes Carver look a little like a charlatan pulling it out of a hat. But no doubt it was intended as an homage and a secret desire (or not so secret) to be as great of a story writer. There's a scene within a memory of some seven years before the death, where Tolstoy visits Chekhov in the hospital and tells him he likes his stories more than his plays. Did that even "really" happen? I don't know. It feels like a dream but seems plausible, partly because I agree with Tolstoy in this anecdote. "Errand" never quite makes it to being typical Carver but comes closest after Chekhov dies, when the widow Olga Knipper is sending the bellboy for a mortician and giving him directions. In fact, it shifts into something else entirely toward the end, focusing on the bellboy and giving him some sort of epiphany around the champagne cork, which has fallen to the floor. The widow practically takes over narrative duties from that point in a strange kind of phantasm, seemingly from anxiety over whether the bellboy can carry out her complex and sensitive instructions. It's tantalizing to wonder whether "Errand" was the one-off it mostly appears to be, a strange meditation on death near his own end, or some new aspect to his work that would have seen further development.

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

A City Solitary (1985)

I came to this mass market paperback novel by Nicolas Freeling in an unusual way. In the '80s I subscribed to The Armchair Detective, the crime fiction zine, in its Otto Penzler era. At some point it called for volunteer reader reviewers, which I signed on for. I enjoyed getting a handful of free books in the mail, but they were not generally very good and immediately started cutting into precious reading time. Honestly, I don't know how book reviewers do it. Probably the most interesting thing I ever got was Rock Critic Murders by Jesse Sublett, which was not bad hardboiled detective stuff but not up to anything like what I hoped for from the title. And I could never get through A City Solitary until I force-marched it recently. It's short but it's ponderous and self-important. As messes go, it has interesting points, but the key word is still mess. It's basically a stream of consciousness exercise and not many people here are likable. The main guy identifies himself as the last of some aristocratic line. His thoughts roam through European literature for analogies and comparisons. He lives in the country in France. The novel starts with a home invasion. His wife is out and he's home alone. It's three young adults, two men and a woman. They steal some of his stuff—he doesn't have much of value—and also kill his dog. But instead of wanting to bring them to justice, he sympathizes with them, especially the leader, even wanting to protect them. It gets fairly complicated through the murk of the narrative, but finally our guy is on a road trip with the leader, our guy's wife, and his recent new lover. They are attempting to escape to Belgium or the Netherlands. It doesn't make a lot of sense, the pace is slow, and the digressions, often pointless, are continual. When I looked up Freeling's biography it made a little more sense. He wrote this in his 50s but his main thing was crime novels with a continuing detective character named Van der Valk (and another named Henri Castang). It feels like Freeling is just blowing off steam here, branching out with something experimental. Nice try, I guess, but it's just fatally indulgent. At least (and at last!) now I have read it, discharged my duty to The Armchair Detective, and can give it away.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Friendly Fa$cism (1991)

Consolidated was a two-man-plus-parts consortium, a white hip-hop act headed up by Adam Sherburne and Mark Pistel out of the Bay Area in the late '80s and early '90s. They conducted open-microphone message confrontation exercises in performance. They also wrote a bunch of good songs, preaching and all, and made a few great albums or parts of albums. Their messages tend toward eco-friendly warnings with a harsh edge of impatience for stupidity, focusing often on the political and economic arguments for veganism and animal rights. Friendly Fa$cism came to my attention when it was new, and I liked the follow-up album Play More Music almost as much. The in-your-face confrontation style, along with Consolidated's surprising musicality in the melodies, beats, and production and a general air of futile self-deprecating arrogance, often remind me of Frank Zappa. The album has hilarious episodes, as audience members at the live shows get the microphone to share views and make a lot of choice comments. Sometimes they nail Consolidated for various hypocrisies and stupidities of their own, but more often they are richly making fools of themselves. One woman attempts to quote the Bible at them, saying, "The Lord God said thou shalt have dominion over the animals of the earth, he didn't say say thou shalt have dominion over a big wad of tofu." Sherburne (or maybe Pistel?) comes back, "He also said the men shall have dominion over the women, so do you believe that, do you buy that line too?" A distant voice in the crowd: "You're goddamn right!" Sherburne: "Thank you brother, you're on the next record already." These breaks are lively and entertaining and often what people remember most from hearing the album. But Friendly Fa$cism is just full of great stuff, and don't let the titles fool you. These are great songs: "Unity of Oppression," "Typical Male," "The Sexual Politics of Meat," "White American Male '91 (The Truth Hurts) Part 2," and "Music Has No Meaning" among others in a long, solid album. "College Radio" is a terrific, caustic sendup of alt-rock at the very dawn of its brief commercial domination. The fact that Friendly Fa$cism mostly still sounds so fresh is paradoxically the most depressing thing about it. It was a little early for climate change, in 1991, but we can see most of Consolidated's issues are relevant to that discussion, such as wantonly cutting down forests in South America to create grazing land for beef cattle. As usual, the hippies and all their heirs are right about everything, and as usual they are ignored. What was an issue of economics in 1991 is an issue of existence on this planet in 2021, but the back and forth sounds exactly the same. Still, you can dance your rage to Friendly Fa$cism and sing along, if so inclined, and it's often funny in a miserabilism kind of way. Check it out.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

USA, 75 minutes

Director: James Whale

Writers: Mary Shelley, William Hurlbut, John L. Balderston, Josef Berne, Lawrence G. Blochman, Robert Florey, Philip MacDonald, Tom Reed, R.C. Sherriff, Edmund Pearson, Morton Covan

Photography: John J. Mescall

Music: Franz Waxman

Editor: Ted J. Kent

Cast: Elsa Lanchester, Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Ernest Thesiger, Valerie Hobson, Una O'Connor, E.E. Clive, Dwight Frye, O.P. Heggie, Gavin Gordon, Douglas Walton, Walter Brennan, John Carradine

Bride of Frankenstein is old enough that we are still seeing experimental ways of making and marketing movies. Boris Karloff is credited as "Karloff," which seems mindful of the way sophisticated French film stars of the time such as Arletty literally made glamorous names for themselves. Elsa Lanchester never properly gets credit for playing the Bride, only for playing Mary Shelley in the odd frame story. Bride of Frankenstein is also a sequel, a follow-up to the original 1931 Frankenstein, which was as much a sensation as any of the theater productions that preceded it by well over a century. We used to love this story. Bride of Frankenstein is more fun than the 1931 original. Technology had visibly improved even across four years, and the idea of making a movie that is basically "I'd like some more of that please" in regard to another popular movie might have still seemed novel. Some like to call this the greatest sequel ever made, or one of them, and I'm not inclined to disagree.

The movie is remarkably short but remarkably packed full of unique scenes swirling around the Frankenstein mythos. The frame story depicts another storm-driven night, like the famous one in Geneva that produced Shelley's Frankenstein novel and John William Polidori's story "The Vampyre." Lord Bryon (Gavin Gordon) struts around and acts decadent, handing us the "previously on" recap while Percy simpers. Mary says she has more to tell them about "Henry" Frankenstein's miserable experiments. They gather close. Dissolve to the chaotic scenes of the end of the first movie, where the monster has presumably been destroyed with the burning windmill in which he was trapped and the villagers are relieved and happy again.

"The Phantom Coach" (1864)

This story by Amelia B. Edwards is plain old-fashioned ghost-storytelling and a clinic in one way to do it. There's a hunter, the first-person narrator, traipsing the moors by himself for game. He's on a long honeymoon or independently wealthy. His new wife is at home and he loves her dearly. He has spent the day hunting, but now darkness is falling and he is lost. He is sad that his wife will be worried about him. It's set in December (all the good ones are in December, aren't they?) but that's as close to Christmas as it gets beyond a lovely snowfall. He must seek shelter for the night. He finds himself in the isolated home of a sort of British Voltaire figure, an intellectual renaissance man of letters and science, with a telescope, a microscope, and books stacked everywhere in his study. At first, finding himself 20 miles from home, the hunter intends staying overnight, but when the snow lets up and his host tells him there's a way home to his wife (his motivation to return to her is believable, not weird, and one of the most grounding details here), he jumps at it. It involves walking to a point where he can meet up with a night mail coach. On the way there he learns of a terrible accident involving this coach. It's a little late and a little clumsy on the foreshadowing, but all right. Edwards has spun her web and we are well caught up in it by now. When the coach shows up, sure enough, it's full of ghosts, presumably from the accident. It's mechanical in some ways, but what Edwards is good at is the extraordinary experience itself—the way the ghosts look and behave (and smell), the way the hunter responds, unknowing at first. "The icy coldness of the night air had struck a chill to my very marrow, and the strange smell inside the coach was affecting me with an intolerable nausea." The bad smell and some details about their appearance make it clear these ghosts are more like decomposing bodies than immaterial mist. The coach itself, on closer inspection, is about in the same condition as Miss Havisham's wedding dress. When the hunter comments on its deplorable state one of the ghosts is annoyed. "His eyes glowed with a fiery unnatural luster. His face was livid as the face of a corpse. His bloodless lips were drawn back as if in the agony of death, and showed the gleaming teeth between." It only gets worse and then there's a calamity, the accident of the coach, but the narrator survives. He swears the whole thing is true but the doctor thinks he's cracked. At least he's back with his dear wife again. The clarity of some of these older stories can just be remarkable. They effectively describe an uncanny vision of horror, and we're all good. That's enough.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby
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Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020)

I was drawn to this movie randomly by the title, thinking it might be a documentary about the competition. That's how I seem to be doing it these days, floating around the internet. Once I got to it I saw right away it's a Will Ferrell movie but by then I had the momentum. Full disclosure, I have not seen many Will Ferrell movies. I know he can be funny—I laughed at some of his antics here, for example—but he has always struck me as an unlikely comic figure. He's not funny so much as he is warm and almost wholesome in his basic ineptitude. Elf could well be his peak. Here he plays Lars Erickssong. a ne'er-do-well middle-aged man, still living at home, whose only dream is to compete and win in the Eurovision contest like his lifelong idols ABBA. The picture is set in Iceland and full of gorgeous location shots, slippery Nordic accents from the cast, and lots of Viking jokes. Rachel McAdams plays Sigrit Ericksdottir, who may or may not be the daughter of Erick Erickssong (Pierce Brosnan), the town lothario and father of many, including Lars. Thus there is a really funny (by which I mean not funny at all) running joke that Lars and Sigrit are half-siblings and incestual. I haven't seen much of McAdams either but I liked her in Mean Girls 17 years ago. It's all pleasantly mindless watching. For the most part the picture is making fun of Eurovision, which is not hard to do, but they are not entirely immune to the charms of eurotrash dance music either, and some of that comes through—not enough. The story beats are familiar. Either they're going to be unlikely winners of the competition or they're going to come close. That's not really a spoiler because even though it's predictable enough in all the big ways, down at the level of the narrative Eurovision Song Contest zigs and zags and has some surprises. My favorite parts, and there weren't nearly enough of them for a movie with this title, were the musical acts, all cheese, colored lights, synthy keyboards, and pouting expressions. I know there's no accounting for taste. I could never watch more than five minutes at a time of American Idol but I'm still inclined to put the time in on as much euro-disco as I can handle, which might be a lot. However, it looks like I also might have to put effort into hunting down some of the documents. In fact, I see there's one from 2002, Estonia Dreams of Eurovision!, that looks like it might have been the model for this Will Farrell vehicle, which: approach with caution.

The Professor and the Prostitute (1986)

Note the subtitle, And Other True Tales of Murder and Madness, as this is a collection of nine short true-crime pieces by Linda Wolfe. She notes here that her specific interest in crime focuses on the middle class. I was disappointed at first that the book is smaller pieces, but they turned out to be very good—interesting cases, and interesting journalistic ways of chasing down the stories. She talks to lots of people, but she's also thoughtful and informed when she probes into the psychological aspects. I found out about it originally from Bill James's book on true-crime literature, Popular Crime (basically worth reading itself). These pieces reminded me how good those Year's Best annuals on true-crime used to be, for as long as they went in the 2000s. The title piece here is the longest. The most interesting to me now was a case that involved twin gynecologists who both died at age 45 in strange circumstances. The case served as an obvious inspiration for director and writer David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers movie from 1988 with Jeremy Irons playing both twins. The real-life version did not invent strange and disturbing gynecology tools like in the movie, but they were similarly innovative researchers who had some reputation before going weird. An amazing amount of the movie comes right from the case, which makes the case even more creepy. Wolfe, who died in 2020 at 87, had a good nose for true-crime cases that can haunt—maybe because she does keep the focus on the middle class, which makes them familiar to me in subtly uncanny ways. My copy is a lurid mass market paperback from the mid-'80s, part of my intermittent downsizing project. I felt a little trashy seeing it laying around but I liked it in some nostalgic way for that reason too. Wolfe was more self-deprecating than warranted in her introduction and throughout. I liked her straightforward way of getting at these cases. She has a lot of insight into the people and the incidents and how they all add up. A lot of books look like this one, but not many of them are this good. It was over too soon. I wanted more.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Mothman Prophecies (1975)

Life at home: As my never-ending project of downsizing continues, my eye often lingers long and cold on cruddy old mass market paperbacks. I've got a handful or so that fell into the bin of "read before probably tossing" and here is the first. I read and enjoyed ufologist John A. Keel in the '70s, notably Operation Trojan Horse, but wasn't sure at all how I would feel about him now. But I enjoyed The Mothman Prophecies much more than I thought I would. The whole Mothman thing, I admit, has never meant much to me but I have known people who are into it. I didn't think the 2002 movie that gave this book a second life had much going for it. And I see a fair amount of grumbling around the internet that the book is disjointed, aimless, and obscure. It is all that, although at least it sticks to a timeline. But it's really all over the place—for one thing, is Keel a skeptic or a believer? He's trying to have it both ways. It's all anecdotes, as opposed to scientific or even methodical. But what anecdotes! It took me a while to figure out (as Amazon reviewers and many others have noted before me) that Keel is actually a pretty good paranoid horror story writer, working sneaky special effects, including the now famous "men in black," along with phones on the fritz and strained synchronicity, e.g., was I making too much of a coincidence? Yes, probably, we can only answer, but please continue. Basically, the book details scenes and incidents around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, from November 1966 to December 1967. So many UFOs you think they should have sold concessions. Then this man-shaped man-sized flying thing, like something out of a Ray Bradbury story, and the sightings thereof. The climax is a spectacular failure of infrastructure—a fairly famous disaster, as these things go—in the collapse of the Silver Bridge at rush hour during Christmas season. Wikipedia has the death toll at 46. Mothman and UFO sightings dried up after that, followed by Robert Stack, ominous organ chords, and a commercial break. This book is like a grand expiation of some kind, sold in drugstores. Keel comes across a little like one of H.P. Lovecraft's preoccupied investigators, or maybe just a nutty Bircher, especially when he is harassed by unseen but powerful forces. Not the phone ringing again! Men in black have been a joke since the movie franchise, but they work for me here. Keel is at pains to make clear they are not likely government men. They are the aliens, whatever the aliens are. The Mothman Prophecies is a lot of fun, complete with thrills and chills. Just don't ask me whether it is nonfiction.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

L'Age d'Or (1930)

The Golden Age, France, 63 minutes

Director / editor: Luis Buñuel

Writers: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, Marquis de Sade

Photography: Albert Duverger

Music: Luis Buñuel, Georges Van Parys

Cast: Gaston Modot, Lya Lis, Caridad de Laberdesque, Max Ernst, Lionel Salem, Germaine Noizet, Bonaventura Ibanez, Luis Buñuel

Surrealism means never having to say you're sorry, as director, cowriter, and editor Luis Buñuel seeks to show in his 1930 follow-up to the ragingly weird Un Chien Andalou. That short picture remains famous for an eyeball shot that will probably always work for as long as people look at movies. L'Age d'Or does not have anything nearly as memorable—very few movies do, actually—but Buñuel appears to have more confidence about what he is doing as a filmmaker. There's more juice to this one. He is once again working with Salvador Dali and in 1930 you couldn't get much more outré than that, or at least Parisian. Max Ernst is along for the ride as well in a small part.

L'Age d'Or, for one thing, has a much more detectable through-line. There's this couple, see—well, I can't tell you a lot more than that. Gaston Modot is billed as "The Man," Lya Lis as "The Woman." They're in a lot of scenes, together and separately. I didn't say it made sense, I said the movie has a more detectable through-line. Buñuel's loathing of the Catholic Church is often front and center. Pontiffs in full garb and later their skeletons are seen early. And there's something about Rome—stock aerial shots of the city, some locations on the ground. A clip from a documentary about scorpions starts it off. A cow is found in a very nice bed. A horse-drawn cart passes through a fancy indoor social gathering.

"The Festival" (1925)

Here is one of the many H.P. Lovecraft stories that did not make it into the skimpy Library of America collection edited by Peter Straub. In fairness, in most cases it's not hard to guess the reasons for exclusion—but, on the other hand, that collection had room for hundreds more pages and LOA projects devoted to an author generally bear some suggestion of completeness. A lot of stories were left out of that one. They could have been put in their own "approach with caution" section. So, right, not much happens in "The Festival." It's mostly Lovecraft laying an eldritch mood on thick. But making it a Christmas story redeems a lot of the inert qualities for me—or "the Yuletide," as our unnamed first-person narrator prefers to call it. He is obviously aware of the holiday's ancient pagan winter solstice origins. He is visiting the town of Kingsport for the holiday. He appears to have kin there who appear to know him. Or who anyway welcome him and bring him along to the festival. It's possible he is dead. The festival is held in a kind of cave next to an underground river reached by a stairway descending from a church basement. The church sits on top of a hill. There is a nice dream quality here as events unfold, an effect often sought by Lovecraft but less often achieved. This feels like a dream because it's in that realm where it almost makes sense, with careful use of details. The utter silence, for example—of the town, of the crowd of people shuffling to the festival, of the festival itself—is positively eerie and notably "off." Lovecraft had some mystical experience the first time he visited the Massachusetts town of Marblehead, the model for Kingsport. It gets mentioned a lot in relation to this story but I file it under Lovecraft's excitable temperament. ISFDB classes it as a Cthulhu story. The Necronomicon book is in it. The narrator's relative, "the old man," is a good character—he wears a subtle mask which is hard to notice at first and makes his facial features immobile. So lots of good stuff here but no real story—various horrors and grotesqueries of the scene at the festival proper, then over and out. That's not necessarily a bad thing when I think of the contrived getaway capers that mar some of his best stories, like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" or At the Mountains of Madness. Still, a dreamy march to a mysterious subterranean chamber and some grotesqueries don't feel like quite enough either, hence perhaps the reason it was left out of the LOA (S.T. Joshi did include it in his Penguin collection of Lovecraft). I like "The Festival" because it's a Christmas story after all, and I believe it is Lovecraft's only one. He always was a great one for respecting tradition.

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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
Read story online.

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.

"Where I'm Calling From" (1982)

Here we find Raymond Carver moving into the recovery phase of his writing (and life), acknowledging not only the realities of alcoholism but possibilities for the road back. He seems to understand the pitfalls well. This story is set in a treatment center ("drying-out facility"), with the first-person narrator there for a second round of rehab. Carver captures the best features of 12-step recovery while avoiding most of the worst. He notices without comment, for example, the coffee and sugar cookies. On the inevitable war stories he notes, "We'd all done things just as bad and crazy, so, sure, that's why we laughed." In fact, this story is mostly about their storytelling, specifically between the first-person narrator and another patient. They tell stories about broken relationships and bad mistakes. I feel sorry for these tellers more often than repulsed (which is often my reaction when 12-steppers start winding up into their stories). But they are still damaged and thus unsafe people. I appreciate the distance of only reading about them. Carver is so blunt and straightforward about these disasters that he is disarming. I don't think I'd care to meet either of these characters but their stories are absorbing and poignant. "Where I'm calling from" in this story is the treatment center—the narrator needs to talk to both his wife and his girlfriend but doesn't seem to be able to reach them. Carver was obviously fond of the story and its title, including it in Cathedral as well as in his last collection, which bears its name. Perhaps it represents his sense of both connection and distance, both at once. The treatment center is a place of connection, but many there are wounded and deeply flawed. Carver also parachutes Jack London into all this, name-checking both The Call of the Wild and "To Build a Fire," the latter given an interesting synopsis by the narrator. The story feels a bit mechanical but I think it works too. What's best is how the Carver voice carries on as usual even in a treatment center, a place that more often in fiction is overdone or underdone or done awkwardly, too piously. There is nothing like that here, and it is finally a great meditation on wreckage.

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

Pontypool (2008)

Canada, 93 minutes

Director: Bruce McDonald

Writer: Tony Burgess

Photography: Miroslaw Baszak

Music: Claude Foisy

Editor: Jeremiah Munce

Cast: Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly, Rick Roberts, Hrant Alianak

In most of the zombie movies from the George Romero era (since Night of the Living Dead in 1968), foundational explanations have tended toward viruses, environmental toxins including radiation, and/or other pathogens. Pontypool—which I never think of as a zombie movie, even though I have to admit they're all over the place in the last third—runs instead with an exceedingly high-concept twist, claiming that the virus is carried by and communicable through language and meaning. It's trippy stuff, especially in our slightly more informed pandemic era, and it's not the only place this movie shows a willingness to go wide.

It's basically a one-set piece, virtually all of it taking place in the broadcasting studio of a radio station in the fictional small town of Pontypool in Ontario, Canada. Stephen McHattie is Grant Mazzy, a washed-up talk-radio shock jock who has landed in this outpost. It's Valentine's Day, when folks in the northlands are exhausted by winter and starting to show snappish cabin fever symptoms. We know it's a cold bleak exterior out there, but we never see much of it. From inside this church basement radio station, we learn that some kind of bizarre outbreak has begun in Pontypool, with incidents of random and extreme violence as yet unexplained. Mazzy and his producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) and crew work with the scanty updates coming in from the wires and other reports to try to make sense of what's going on for themselves and their listeners and us.

"It's a GOOD Life" (1953)

Technically, the title of Jerome Bixby's remarkable story is "It's a Good Life," but I can't italicize blog headers so caps will have to do for this otherwise flawless tale of excruciating despair. It was published first as science fiction and is still claimed as such (and now as the "weird" as well) but really it's more accurate to call it horror. For one thing, it's often quite scary, even now, and it's also at pains to be creepy and ooky. I like the way Bixby keeps associating purple with Anthony, the monster 3-year-old with "a bright, wet, purple gaze." I like how there's no hope for anything rational with him for years, until Anthony is older and understands more. In the time of this story, he is merely an infant's id, with strange deadly powers. He is telepathic and able to change reality at will. In fact, the small Ohio town where it takes place (don't the best ones always take place in small Ohio towns?) no longer appears to be connected to planet Earth. Or perhaps Anthony destroyed planet Earth and the town is all that's left. It exists now next to "nothingness." Anthony the tot is not so much evil—though he might be evil—but more an infant struggling with his development and prone to infantile rages. But he also has these powers. He's shown doing things like playing with a rat in the basement and then growing bored and making the rat eat itself alive. He can just do things like that. He likes music but he doesn't like singing, instantly destroying anyone he hears doing so. The townsfolk have to learn by trial and error what Anthony likes and doesn't like. There's a graveyard in the corner of the cornfield where the results are buried. Anthony sends lots of things and people directly there. He's a lot like any 3-year-old, which is the profound hook to this story. When does a human start to become civilized? Age 3 is still pretty early. Anthony is already a loner, operating a kind of nature preserve, where he communes with the swamp creatures and makes life better for them. Basically Anthony has all the powers of the Old Testament God, which is also what is so terrifying about the story—its insidious familiarity. How do you make this God happy anyway? He is a jealous God, doesn't He say so Himself? But I digress. I read this story when I was a kid and it was one of a handful that got under my skin and kept me up late at night a lot and made me sweat from helplessness remembering them in the daylight. I see now why—it's just really well done, bleak, unrelenting, disturbing, shocking, ever-deepening. It was even my favorite episode when it became part of the Twilight Zone movie in the '80s—and the 1961 TV original with Billy Mumy and Cloris Leachman is not bad either. The Simpsons did a treatment of it too. But anyway, that's the situation—the dwindling population of humans is intent on placating Anthony until he comes to reason, which could be 20 years or never. He can read their minds so they have to keep their thoughts pure, which isn't easy as you can imagine. They mumble a lot. It seems to help. They keep everything upbeat. The story is desolate, strange and disorienting. Anyone acquainted with a 3-year-old is sure to get the horror of this little masterpiece right away.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.

"To Speak Is a Sin" (1993)

[listen]

I put this song on a mixtape once for a woman I liked. Yes, I did. It's my favorite on the album (or more accurately competes with "Liberation" and "Dreaming of the Queen" for the honor). She said it reminded her of Al Stewart, which I hadn't noticed before but she was right. Lucky for me I count him and "Year of the Cat" and Past, Present and Future as good things. I understand this song is often interpreted as the PSBs' AIDS era statement song, and I certainly can hear that when I listen closely to the words. "I always thought it was about sad old lonely homosexuals not daring to talk to anyone attractive in a bar," Chris Lowe said in conversation for notes to the Further Listening edition of Very. Tennant: "Yes, that's pretty much it. And also, when you go into a gay bar ... it's all done by looks and gestures.... We always used to like tragic gay bars." Lowe: "Everyone's too flaming happy now. Obviously it's great that people are happy, but a whole culture has kind of disappeared." I can't speak to any of that. I have never connected to this song exactly that way. To me it's just exquisitely sad, full of nameless regrets and longing, opening at will into appallingly beautiful spaces. It can melt me. Tennant remembers it as "a very slight song" and it is actually one of their first, written in the early '80s. "To Speak Is a Sin" may be simple but it is potent. It seems to be always falling down a little, slipping away, relinquishing. There's a sense of letting go but a much keener one of loss. It feels like you have descended into a place that is at once both comforting and frightening. The burden here is sadness and it is a heavy load. I bear it but it's the one song on the album it took me longest to feel so deeply. It sneaked up on me instead of clobbering me the way "Liberation" and "Dreaming of the Queen" did. In the totality of the album, here at the proximate midpoint of the whole Very Relentless package, "To Speak Is a Sin" serves as a bittersweet respite, a slowing down, a meditation. It details the textures of Very in another way, this swirling dreamboat parade float moving down the line. The way Al Stewart did it too, though perhaps never quite with all this lush depth.