The Scott Peterson Affair (2022)

I was intrigued to see Matt Orchard take up the Scott Peterson case on his Crime and Society youtube channel, because it was one I never got to and I was happy for the chance to see it laid out. Scott Peterson’s wife Laci, eight months pregnant, disappeared on Christmas Eve of 2002 while Scott spent the day fishing. Then news came he had been having an affair. Later Laci’s body was recovered from the San Francisco Bay. At the time the case broke, circa early 2003, I was too busy to wallow in the true-crime cable coverage (as I had with OJ Simpson, JonBenet Ramsey, and others). The coming of Nancy Grace was a turnoff, for one thing. She was and is an unpleasant presence on crime stories because her takes feel less like mama-bear instincts to protect victims (because she is one herself, etc., etc.) and more like bitter vindictiveness thirsty to punish miscreants. Partly because of that, and partly because all the evidence against Scott Peterson seemed circumstantial, and partly because I just wasn’t following it closely, something about the case seemed off to me. Aren’t there any number of spouse-on-spouse homicides in any given year? Why was this the one selected for the high profile treatment? Maybe because he seems like such a creep? OK, but it’s weak sauce. Orchard focuses on that—the visceral reaction Peterson provokes in so many (including me to some degree), which is almost uncanny—and then basically gives us the sequence of events and the theories and how they stack up. Then, with 15 or 20 minutes to go in the 70-minute video, he switches up and addresses the Scott Peterson truthers, those who believe he’s wrongly convicted based on public outrage and a rush to judgment. They have various evidence, including witness statements, to shore up their case. This had been my sense of it. But it’s all a red herring on Matt Orchard’s part as these theories quickly fall apart on close examination. A few key details of fact (via cell towers and such) make the circumstantial evidence of Peterson's guilt almost irrefutable. It’s a pretty neat trick—it might even be a spoiler for me to reveal it. But I feel like any doubt about the case is cleared away here with Orchard’s usual patient, straightforward explanations. And I think the notoriety of the case has less to do with Scott Peterson and more to do with the hungry maw of true-crime cable news coverage and Nancy Grace as its face. I still think she’s a shabby person to represent true-crime to the general public. Let’s make it Matt Orchard.

“The Fifty-Nine Sound” (2018)

This story by Dan Howarth is another good one from the Trigger Warning webzine edited (full disclosure) by my old friend Eric Lindbom, with snazzy graphics by John Skewes. The story has various flavors but fits neatly with the larger Trigger Warning aesthetic: Twilight Zone intersections of crime story moods and the inexplicable. They tend to come with a certain level of built-in hysteria already in progress, a Twilight Zone staple. Here the hook is a messed-up radio station our guy is listening to on the way home from cutting out early on a dismal business conference. In his life he’s just trying to put bread on the table for his wife and kid, his true loves. Already we sense he’s a bit of a loser with no salesman instinct for closing. So he’s driving home, looking forward to being there, and he tunes in a station way at the end of the FM dial. It’s a strange station with some vibe of being pirate. It plays hits of the 2000s or older, sentimental favorites for our guy—songs by name from Ash, the National, Oasis, and others, including “The ’59 Sound” by the Gaslight Anthem. But the radio show seems to be gradually turning into something else, some kind of grand guignol audio epic, picking listeners out for death in some way that is not clear at all. This is one of those stories whose lack of explanation helps make it work. How, for example, are these listeners transported to the broadcasting studio to be tortured and contribute their terrible screams? No word. Why don’t others hear the screaming? Who knows? It just happens that way. I like the specificity of the songs mentioned. They are real. I looked them all up and added them to my playlist—many were new to me, like the Gaslight Anthem, perhaps better known in the UK, Howarth’s home. It all reminded me, of course, of my own fascinations with the radio and driving and it make me like our hapless, doomed main character more and feel like I could get to know him better as I got to know the songs better. Guys and mixtapes! What the heck. The story proceeds to its conclusions with soundtrack going all the way and thoroughly enjoyable. Trigger Warning is currently on hiatus, but in the meanwhile the fulsome archives are there to be browsed. And the stories tend to be worth it at higher rates than I’m used to in the horror story world.

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Band of Gypsys (1970)

The fourth and last album from Jimi Hendrix while he was alive is also the first and only without the Experience. Hendrix had been criticized for using the white Brits as his backing band on the studio albums—bass player Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell—and more generally for a lack of political relevance, a charge that could be common at the time. So he turned to bass player Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles. Miles is on parts of Electric Ladyland and Cox, an Army buddy, played with Hendrix at Woodstock. The Band of Gypsys tracks were recorded live at the Fillmore East on January 1, 1970. The album got a lot of mixed reviews, both in the press and by way of word of mouth in my high school circles. I never knew anyone who owned it and loved it enough to play it for me with regularity, so it took me some time. But I have to say I wonder what was the holdup. It sounded great when I finally really got to it recently. It features two long, ambling jams, “Who Knows” and “Machine Gun,” which did take some time to cohere but now are more unfolding every time I play them. Both are powered most by Hendrix’s guitar, but “Who Knows” has an insane earworm riff that the band rolls into like thunder, at the same time leaving large open spaces suitable for utterly expressive guitar and passages of scat singing from Miles. The Vietnam-focused “Machine Gun” is the obvious play for political relevance here, although really Hendrix had answered those questions by then at Woodstock with his inspired “Star-Spangled Banner” performance. I see many consider “Machine Gun” a rival to it, at least in terms of instrumental sound effects for helicopters, bombs, firefights, etc. Hey, sure, I can get with that—the Woodstock “Star-Spangled Banner” is the most original and trenchant, but my problem there is that I just don’t like the song, which means I don’t listen to Hendrix’s brilliant version often. The “bombs bursting in air” and such tend to work more like novelty stuff for me—clever before it is expressive. “Machine Gun” has some of that, but it’s a better song, and then some of this guitar play is nothing less than sublime. The more I listen to Band of Gypsys the more I wonder how any criticisms could outweigh the high points here, which are frequent and frequently very high. Sometimes it’s a matter of a single sustained note. The guy could do it. I can see part of the problem might have been it’s a bit of a one-sided album. The long songs on side 1 of the LP—9:39 and 12:41, respectively—somehow make the four 5-minute songs on side 2 less appealing. I assure you they have their merits, but in LP style I likely would stick to the first side myself too. The live aspect of the recording is nicely underplayed, with minimal crowd noise and vamping. It’s just a gifted band jamming it out on stage, feeling their way through, knowing it was being recorded, of course, but still loose and capable of surprises everywhere. Within the year, as Sonic Youth would later say of other things in a different context, confusion is next. Over the decades that followed (and still, I believe) the recorded archives are being mined diligently. I like Band of Gypsys, like I like the three before it, because I like that Jimi Hendrix was the one basically overseeing them.

Dodsworth (1929)

I was reading Sinclair Lewis anyway, and I liked the 1936 movie directed by William Wyler based on Dodsworth, so I decided to give the novel a try. The Wikipedia article sees it as a novel of Europe and the US, Old World and New, in the Henry James tradition. Yes, it’s that, but I think more centrally it is about middle-class—really, upper-class—marriage in the US. Samuel Dodsworth is an auto manufacturer tycoon who has made his nut and retired at age 50. He built his auto company up from the ground and has now sold out—not to General Motors by name, but it’s GM. The elder of his two kids, a daughter, is getting married, and his son is a junior at Yale or something. His wife now wants to go to Europe and roam for a long time, like months and years. She feels they deserve it. Particularly she deserves it. So a fair amount of traipsing around goes on here, along with the people they meet—in London, Paris, Berlin, Italy. Written in 1927 and 1928, published in 1929—the year before Lewis won his Nobel (which specifically cited Babbitt)—Dodsworth is curiously silent about the rise of fascism, which might have still had a relatively low profile in the late ‘20s. But there’s also no mention in the Berlin scenes of any calamitous economic conditions. Fascism comes up as a background item in Italy, but it’s all quite anodyne. I chalk it up to the difficulty of reading the sweep of history in any present moment, at which few are actually very good. The comparisons of European and US customs and manners seems more accurate to me than those of Henry James, who could be more soft-headed and romantic about the Old World. Lewis had already demonstrated his keen eye for Midwestern white man business ways and how the good ol’ boy stuff works here—still works here. So there are lots of interesting scenes with Dodsworth trying to find himself somewhere in between. He’s a creative spirit, even as a tycoon, which is not 100% believable, but the suspension of disbelief was worth the price here for me. Lots of things creak along the way, but the dissolving marriage is handled particularly well, as affairs of the heart (chaste as they may be in terms of actual sex) begin to happen on their travels and the future of the marriage seesaws precariously. Dodsworth is made a little too much the hero for my taste, and his wife a little too hateful, but I think the novel makes its points candidly and well about the difficulties of marriage. I would compare it favorably to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, which travels similar paths. Lewis is your basic 20th-century workaday social realist. He may not have the best eye for US class distinctions—in fact, he doesn’t as a general rule—but he gets lots of details right about humdrum rituals we still know.

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

Indecent Proposal (1993)

USA, 117 minutes

Director: Adrian Lyne

Writers: Jack Engelhard, Amy Holden Jones

Photography: Howard Atherton

Music: John Barry

Editor: Joe Hutshing

Cast: Robert Redford, Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson, Seymour Cassel, Oliver Platt, Billy Bob Thornton, Rip Taylor, Billy Connolly, Sheena Easton, Herbie Hancock

About the time Indecent Proposal was released I belonged to the Quality Paperback Book Club, which you may recall retailed by mail a lot of nice trade editions of interesting novels and other fare, in the familiar monthly subscription format. One of the more interesting books I acquired there came in a size actually smaller than mass market, suitable for toting around for social occasions. The Book of Questions by Gregory Stock is full of open-ended questions intended to provoke discussion. For example: Would you rather die peacefully among friends at age 50, or painfully and alone at age 80? Assume that most of the last 30 years would be good ones. Or: Would you give up half of what you now own for a pill that would permanently change you so that one hour of sleep each day would fully refresh you?

The premise of Indecent Proposal is essentially that type of thought experiment. Would you give up your wife for one night to a billionaire in exchange for $1 million? “One million dollars” now immediately brings to mind Dr. Evil in Austin Powers with his little finger poking at the corner of his mouth. But never mind, $1 million still looks like a lot of money to me even today. That is the motivating plot device here. By 1993, it wasn’t just the decision of the husband anymore (in this case, Woody Harrelson as David Murphy). Marriage is a partnership and the wife has a say in it too (in this case, Demi Moore as Diana Murphy). Inevitably, unfortunately, the picture turns into a lot of rancid preening masculinity. This was Harrelson in approximately his promising phase, fresh off Cheers. And with Adrian Lyne directing, it’s just as inevitably full of a lot of sexy agony as well. These three—with Robert Redford, the billionaire—are almost too beautiful for these problems, which their beauty has itself wrought. Artificial, pumped-up beauty runs to all horizons here.

“Clarimonde” (1836)

This long story by 19th-century French man of letters Theophile Gautier has a number of points to recommend it, though it’s a bit of a sloggy, slow-moving read, with long preambles and asides. Published originally as “La morte amoureuse,” it’s fun to look at how translators have treated the title over the years: “The Deathly Lover,” “The Amorous Corpse,” “The Dreamland Bride,” “The Beautiful Vampire,” “The Dead in Love,” and of course “Clarimonde,” the given name of this beautiful, strange lover / corpse / bride / vampire / dead / creature. It’s a lovely name for an obviously breathtaking beauty, if the reaction of our young priest is anything to go by. He’s all in a tizzy. One of the best details here is how Romuald, the priest and first-person narrator, shuttles back and forth between embracing the church and his calling, and abruptly rejecting them. Clearly he is a concern to his superiors, as he is basically too callow to hide his feelings. Just as clearly, to them, he is locked in pitched battle with Satan or a minion—objectively true by the standards of this story. Stories this old just seem to have their own ways of going and the glacial pace and hanging for long paragraphs on more or less incidentals are weak points for me, nearly capsizing the story at some points. The seduction must be taken as given—it says the young priest is in love with her, so he is—but at least his naivete with women makes his befuddlements more believable. She is clouding his mind, after all. Clarimonde has a remarkable dream-like presence all the way, even in indirect conversations about her. Certain logistical things about the story don’t add up, such as the priest’s close oversight by a superior who lives three days’ journey away. He seems to drop in a lot. There’s a quite memorable blood-sucking scene, once we get to all that, neatly done for shock. “A few drops of thy rich and noble blood, more precious and more potent than all the elixirs of the earth, have given me back life,” Clarimonde says after Romuald’s accident cutting fruit for breakfast has opened the floodgates of her appetite. It takes a while getting there, but finally the story begins to move swiftly, with the corpse of Clarimonde disinterred in a reasonably stunning finish and all the scales finally falling (I think—we can hope) from Romuald’s eyes. He’s telling the story as a 66-year-old, but you can never be too sure about these things.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
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The People You're Paying to Be in Shorts (2022)

The latest from Dorktown focuses on the 2011-2012 season of the Charlotte Bobcats, the worst season in NBA basketball history, registering a 7-59 record in a lockout-shortened season for a winning percentage of .106. The story and the telling are complicated by the fact that the Bobcats were owned by superstar Michael Jordan, author of ridiculously high winning percentages and other feats. The Bobcats are now the Hornets—not the original Charlotte Hornets, but that whole story is covered here. Jordan still owns them, and they are still undistinguished, with no championships (or even conference-level play). More often than not they miss the playoffs altogether. It’s a perfect project for Dorktown in many ways, whose principals Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein may not yet have met an outrageous loser they don’t love (Seattle Mariners, Atlanta Falcons, Dave Stieb, etc.). They are joined by Seth Rosenthal and Kofie Yeboah as the stories unwind. It’s a very rich irony, of course, that this feat of mediocrity happened to Michael Jordan. Anyone who fell victim to Jordan’s domination of NBA basketball in the 1990s is sure to find some gratification and portions of good old schadenfreude here (for example, the best Seattle SuperSonics team I ever knew was entirely overshadowed by him, with one shot at the annual role of patsy for the Bulls). However, Bois is maybe not as good about hiding his gloating here as he could be. He addresses a recurring photo of Jordan as “Mike” and frequently asks mocking questions and takes a few jabs for good measure, which gets distracting in its unseemliness. Given Jordan’s dimming star as the greatest basketball player of all time—LeBron reminding us of Kareem suddenly starts making MJ look more like #3 GOAT around here—along with his embarrassing lack of graciousness about it, it’s an understandable impulse. Jordan may be petty and vindictive and too preoccupied with burnishing his own legend, but that’s on him. And he’s not doing himself any good. That’s obvious now. This longish documentary—two and a half hours, relatively short by Dorktown standards—lands on one of the best examples of Jordan’s various comeuppances since the glory. If they need to pile on further, maybe the next project could be about Jordan’s baseball career. The People You’re Paying really only needs to lay out the humiliations that ownership has brought to Jordan, whose retirement is not a happy one because the only thing that still appears to matter is that 7th championship even 25 years later. As a passion play of futility it is otherwise nearly flawless in the Dorktown mode, with scads of charts, graphs, and statistically based argument. The verdict is in. For losing, I’m not sure those Bobcats can ever be beat.

In a Lonely Place (1947)

Before I ever got to the Library of America series (Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s ... and then four more from the 1950s), I did not know much about Dorothy B. Hughes’s reputation. I picked In a Lonely Place out of a list of recommended short mystery novels on the CrimeReads website. I thought I’d check it out, along with some others such as Georges Simenon’s Tropic Moon, as long as they were being recommended (and short!). In a Lonely Place is far more daring than the Humphrey Bogart movie of the same name based on it and, when you break down the feminist themes (as Megan Abbott does in an afterword), it’s pretty remarkable, anticipating Patricia Highsmith’s whole Ripley series among other things. Jim Thompson might have liked making a main character a narcissistic psychopath. Hughes keeps all her violence offstage, which is one way to do it, maybe better than Thompson’s full-frontal assaults. Dix Steele (Dix Steele!!), our (anti)hero, is closer to Ripley, a smooth-taking con man, however brutal under the surface. But Steele is also a brutal psychopath, and—chillingly—it seems to be all misogyny. There’s a lot of really sharp inversion here, such as a woman who appears at first to be standard-issue femme fatale, playing it cool, until the moment you suddenly realize she’s onto this guy and scared out of her wits. The novel is also really good on Los Angeles, reminding us again it’s the only city for noir. New York and London don’t have the sunshine to make the distinctions so plain between light and shadow, or something. Hughes makes the urban sprawl itself and the geography as sinister as they need to be. In a Lonely Place helped me see how good Dennis Etchison is on that city too. I struggled some with the language—for all its clarity it felt labored in patches. But I have the same problem with Dashiell Hammett so no doubt it is me. Certainly it qualifies as well-written. I have some interest in seeing what else Hughes has done—Ride the Pale Horse seems to be a favorite, though I didn’t get much from that movie version. If anything, In a Lonely Place is prompting me to look into Highsmith’s Ripley novels further. I don’t like the misogyny in Lonely Place, but I think that’s the intent. The novel is often simply about the fear of men that women can have to live with constantly. Hughes is quite thorough about justifying that here.

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

Philadelphia (1993)

USA, 125 minutes

Director: Jonathan Demme

Writer: Ron Nyswaner

Photography: Tak Fujimoto

Music: Howard Shore

Editor: Craig McKay

Cast: Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Jason Robards, Mary Steenburgen, Antonio Banderas, Ron Vawter, Robert Ridgely, Charles Napier, Joanne Woodward, Julius Erving, Ann Dowd, Roger Corman, Anna Deavere Smith, Bradley Whitford

Although it is obviously intended as big-ticket Oscar-bait, Philadelphia benefits from having Jonathan Demme as director, who finds ways to make it worth seeing. It is always eminently watchable for its entire running length. Demme is capable of pulling off mawkish feel-good scenes with a straight face, so to speak, and also, perhaps as a result of the success of his mediocre horror picture, The Silence of the Lambs, attracting top-tier commercial talent, with which Philadelphia is bursting. Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Jason Robards, Joanne Woodward, Mary Steenburgen, on and on the list goes, down to minor cameos like Dr. J, scads of hey-that-guys, and early glimpses of Antonio Banderas and Ann Dowd.

Plus Philadelphia has both Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young contributing theme songs. They could be the crucial point here because, however bland and obvious Philadelphia may be in terms of its TV movie of the week vibe, it comes with these unmistakable Demme touches, notably the music and the social gatherings, ritual communal events. It doesn’t have the musical brio of, say, Something Wild, let alone Stop Making Sense (or Swimming to Cambodia, whose only music is supplied figuratively by Spalding Gray’s tumbling stories)—they are the soundtracks you would want to acquire first. But Philadelphia does have those Springsteen and Young songs, plus a cocktail lounge party version of Talking Heads’ “Heaven,” performed by Q. Lazzarus, among many other bright moments spotted through. The social gatherings may not be all the way up to those in Rachel Getting Married, but few are and what’s here is in generally good form, given the story elements, including a memorial service and “gay parties.”

“The True Story of a Vampire” (1894)

The modest Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock published most often as “Eric Stenbock,” along with some other variations, of which the one I prefer of course is “Count Stenbock.” It’s crisp and to the point, no false modesty, and also, as with Lord Dunsany, brings an aristocratic twang of authority that can’t help but impress me. Vampire stories particularly should be written by the wealthy and landed. It suits them—they have the inside track. The tone of the narrator here plays to that. She sounds infinitely sophisticated and world-weary. The Vampire Tales anthology I found it in had it under an alternate title, “The Sad Story of a Vampire,” which actually fits it better. The narrator is an older sister who witnessed the terrible events detailed, including the deaths of her beloved brother and father. The story is set as usual in Central Europe—specifically Styria, a region in southeastern Austria. This vampire has a Northern European look and manner, insinuating his way by luck and circumstances into the placid life of this happy little family. There is no mother, she died giving birth to the younger brother, and the father is rather old, nearing or past 60. The narrator is telling the story in her own old age, when she is known locally as “the Baroness and her beasts” for her eccentric project of caring for stray animals. The story opens, “Vampire stories are generally located in Styria; mine is also.” A sad tone is established at once, even as the information about certain malevolence pulls against it. The story is short and proceeds quickly. The vampire is besotted at first sight of the brother. In due order, the vampire’s health and vigor swing up and down in opposition to the boy’s, who had been a healthy, animal-loving nature boy all his life. He carries on his activities communicating with the wild animals and collecting specimens. They all love him. Birds sit on his shoulder and squirrels gather ‘round his feet, etc. But with the arrival of the vampire—the father found him stranded at the train station—the boy’s health flags. Interestingly, the vampire’s health improves. The father is blind to it all—he kind of likes the guy, who presents himself as a knowledgeable antiquarian, and he invites him to stick around—but the older sister sees plainly what is happening. The visitor’s name is Count Vardalek, recalling the story “The Family of the Vourdalak” by Russian author Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, although a google search of the name mostly produces only results related to this story by Count Stenbock, which is pretty good overall. It doesn’t try to be any more than what it is, the story of an unholy monster that moves in and takes what it wants, including a family’s most prized member. Even the animals must have wept.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
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Top 40

1. Lalalar, “Abla Deme Lazim Olur” (3:09)
2. Elliott Smith, “No Name #3” (3:13, 1994)
3. Wire, “Single K.O.” (2:23, 1979)
4. Joy Division, “Shadowplay” (3:55, 1979)
5. TLC, “Waterfalls” (4:39, 1995)
6. Otis Rush, “Gambler’s Blues” (5:41, 1969)
7. Raydio, “Jack and Jill” (4:35, 1978)
8. Beyonce, “Break My Soul” (4:38)
9. Steve Lacy, “Bad Habit” (3:52)
10. Nicky Youre, “Sunroof” (2:43)
11. Benny Blanco, “Bad Decisions” (2:52)
12. Boy George, “Death of Samantha” (5:28, 2013)
13. Blk Odyssy, “Ghost Ride” (2:30)
14. Art Moore, “Snowy” (3:13)
15. Caamp, “Lavender Girl” (3:23)
16. Voice of Baceprot, “God, Allow Me (Please) to Play Music” (3:31)
17. Mac DeMarco, “Enter Sandman” (5:46)
18. Ravagers, “Shake the Reaper” (3:58)
19. Maluma, “Nos Comemos Vivos” (3:45)
20. Defcee, “Cash” (2:42)
21. Friedberg, “Never Gonna Pay the Rent” (3:01)
22. Come to Grief, “When the World Dies” (4:07)
23. Tianna Esperanza, “Lewis” (3:57)
24. Florence + the Machine, “Free (The Blessed Madonna Remix)” (4:23)
25. Ellevator, “Easy” (3:11)
26. The Weeknd, “I Was Never There” (4:01, 2018)
27. Engelbert Humperdinck, “A Man Without Love” (3:19, 1968)
28. Lady Gaga, “Born This Way” (4:20, 2011)
29. ABBA, “Angeleyes” (4:20, 1979)
30. Post Malone feat. Doja Cat, “I Like You (A Happier Song)” (3:12)
31. Brenton Wood, “I Think You’ve Got Your Fools Mixed Up” (2:15, 1966)
32. Magdalena Bay, “You Lose!” (3:24)
33. JID feat. 21 Savage & Baby Tate, “Surround Sound” (3:49)
34. Roy Orbison, “I Drove All Night” (3:46, 1987)
35. Celine Dion, “I Drove All Night” (3:59, 2003)
36. Damien Jurado, “A.M. AM” (3:16, 2016)
37. Beach Boys, “Let’s Go Away for Awhile” (2:20, 1966)
38. Beach Boys, “Sloop John B” (2:58, 1966)
39. Morphine, “Cure for Pain” (3:14, 1993)
40. Rihanna, “Diamonds” (3:45, 2012)

THANK YOU'S: Spin, Billboard, rockcritics.com, unusual suspects

Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

J.M. Coetzee’s third novel was written while the South Africa apartheid regime was still in place and fearsomely powerful. It shows here in the ways all the recognizable evidence of colonialism is kept so generic. “Barbarians” is the term for native nomads who roam the plains beyond the village where this novel takes place and in the mountains beyond that. They are considered a problem that must be managed. The “Empire” is the distant power in control. The first-person narrator, the “Magistrate,” is a civil servant of the Empire who has spent most of his life in the village. The village is small and settled into routines that are comfortable for the village, the “barbarians,” and the narrator, who is genial and corrupt, mostly in the form of serial affairs. He was evidently always sympathetic to the natives and becomes even more so in this short novel. I stick with the scare quotes for “barbarians” because Coetzee is making the case here that these representations of the Empire show it as no less barbaric. In fact, the Empire’s use of torture is one of the main threads here. The novel has sections devoted to the village life the narrator has become accustomed to. He discusses the brutalities of the Empire, which he grows hostile to as they begin to affect him. After a long and arduous journey to return a young woman (in whom he has developed an interest) to her “barbarian” clan, he is accused of treason (or something) upon his return. He is imprisoned and tortured, and his meditations on the treatment follow. What he describes is horrible, of course, but Coetzee’s clinical dispassionate voice take some of the edge off it. Not that much. He covers the basic points, such as being denied sleep, water, food, bathing, and treatment for his wounds. He is turned into a grotesque and repulsive creature, though his narrative voice remains cool and descriptive. We see the actions of the Empire from his view. They all seem random and irrational. The Empire remains distant and almost benign in its affect. Soldiers appear, life changes in the village. Now the Empire is focused on aggression against the “barbarians”—who prove to be barbaric indeed, though not of course with the obviously vast resources of the Empire. Among other things, Coetzee is very good at showing how the Empire is basically a large and somewhat dysfunctional bureaucracy. Much here is absurd, but the realities of the terrorism of colonialism are vivid and disturbing. As Coetzee intends, this short novel admirably gets under your skin and keeps you uneasy. It has humor but more often horror. It feels authentic to what it is like to live in such regimes.

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

Axis: Bold as Love (1967)

The second album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience came out less than seven months after the debut, and only about 10 months before Electric Ladyland, which may explain some things about it. Most of the songs feel to me like they needed a little more time in the oven, which suggests it may have been a bit of a rush job after the commercial success of the stunning Are You Experienced. Give principal wunderkid Hendrix a little more time and his own head in the studio with the space of a double-LP and watch what he does. Still, if Axis suffers from a type of sophomore slump, it is not really to be missed even for casual Hendrix fans. It features possibly my single favorite song by him, the loopy and playful “If 6 Was 9,” which is obvious and murky all at once. Axis also contains what might be single favorite songs of others, such as “Spanish Castle Magic” or “Little Wing.” The latter, a tender guitar-picker’s ballad, has been covered early and often by Eric Clapton—it’s on Layla and remains a staple of Clapton’s live act. Just because Eric Clapton is a fool is no reason to hold anything against “Little Wing”—Gil Evans, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and the Corrs are other acts that have taken it on. With the LP as such coming into its own circa 1967, the EP format was largely out of favor. But in retrospect it’s probably what Axis should have been. Take all the time and effort used on these 13 songs and apply it to only five or six of them and you might have had a much better product overall. It’s a thought experiment anyway. Breaking it down, the opening shorty, “EXP,” starts as a radio theater skit that isn’t very funny, but then turns into 80 seconds of a feedback exercise, one of the earliest of its kind, raw and ferocious. Then “Up From the Skies” works a slick bluesy groove—Hendrix seemed to toss these off effortlessly. It’s fair of course to class him as a psychedelic artist but he was always an innovating natural when he played blues. “Spanish Castle Magic” is where I start to notice the general underdevelopment of most of these songs and most of the second side is lost to me as a mush. All (or most of) these songs have their points—great guitar play always. But often something about them, the lyrics maybe or the song structure, bridge or chorus, feels like they need another look, a little more time to think about them, paring away potential musical darlings to get them into sharper focus. I’m not really complaining—after Are You Experienced and Electric Ladyland, everything in Hendrix’s career would have been gravy, even if he were still alive. But let’s not drift into thinking about what might have been.