“Beyond Lies the Wub” (1952)

This may or may not be Philip K. Dick’s first published genre story—some say yes, others say it’s “Roog” (which also features an animal for those keeping score at home). “Beyond Lies the Wub” is very simple and in many ways playful, although the twist may fairly be called chilling. Certainly it works. The story opens on a scene like the biblical Noah’s ark story, with animals on Mars being led aboard a spaceship. A lot of the crew, such as the first mate, appear to be unhappy about something. They seem to disapprove of the work, or possibly have problems with the captain. One of the crew comes aboard with a “wub,” which is described as a 400-pound pig. The captain says he’d like to eat it, at which point the wub speaks up with perfect English—indeed, polished and intelligent. He says he would prefer not to be eaten. No one else really wants to eat it either, especially once they realize it is sentient, with a detectable personality. In typical Phildickian fashion, these things just happen and no one is particularly fazed. Not even Peterson, who has jurisdiction of the wub and has been carrying on a running conversation with it about cultural matters (specifically, at the moment in the story, Odysseus). We are instinctively on the side of the wub—it has been humanized, so to speak—but alas. The captain gives the orders and the wub is butchered and roasted. At the dinner table the story’s twist occurs and it surprised me, though you might guess it if you think about it enough. “Beyond Lies the Wub” is an early story for Dick but already has many of his hallmarks: the effortless reach for universal Western cultural markers like Odysseus, the whimsy and “soft,” almost magical science. Given: there are animals on Mars, including pigs, and they are sentient and intelligent (and have unique powers too). Take it or leave it. I notice on ISFDB that this story has an unusually high number of rankings, with a fairly high aggregated score of 8.22. Ten “Beyond Lies the Wub” fans can’t be wrong. The story is worth tracking down for all followers of the Phildick.

The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume 1
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

1. Jimi Hendrix Experience, Electric Ladyland (1968)

[2010 review here, 2011 review of “All Along the Watchtower” here, 2011 review of “Rainy Day, Dream Away” here]

Jimi Hendrix never reached full musical maturity, with scads of impressive flashes of brilliance but still showing streaks of goofy amateur playfulness, based on intuition and/or being stoned, that did not come off. It’s serve-to-taste with a lot of his posthumous material. I don’t care for swaths of it, but I love what I love very much. I was interested to learn in Wikipedia that Electric Ladyland was considered a failure by many contemporary critics. Robert Christgau was all over it, in Stereo Review, but both Melody Maker in the UK and Rolling Stone in the US found it flawed, if not exactly fatally so. I admit I had to circle this album for many years before it became as important to me as it has. It’s the second-best rock album by my lights after only Highway 61 Revisited. It is obviously well within the vinyl era, which I claim as explanation for my persistent orientation to it, interpreting it by sides. My now irrelevant view was / is that any good to great album—especially a multi-LP package—must have at least one side that is perfect or close to it. Electric Ladyland has that—side 3—but it also has a sequencing dialogue going on between the various sides that is intuitively suggestive if never quite articulate.

Side 4 presents a suite that responds to one song each from the other sides, and for good measure throws in a hit song, “All Along the Watchtower.” that is arguably the greatest Bob Dylan cover ever recorded. The 15-minute “Voodoo Chile” on side 1 is answered by the five-minute “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” (The copy editor in me winces at spelling it like the South American country the first time and then just spelling it straight from the dictionary the second. If you’re going for dialect, have you ever heard of an apostrophe?! Chalk it up to the freewheeling.) “Rainy Day, Dream Away”—the sordid tale on side 3 of life in the Pacific Northwest—is answered by “Still Raining, Still Dreaming.” And—I know this is a stretcher—“Burning of the Midnight Lamp” on side 2 is answered by “House Burning Down.” (As an interesting and pointless aside, even a year ago most versions of Electric Ladyland on youtube omitted “House Burning Down”—algorithms, apparently, disapproving of arson.) All three of these tracks on side 4 are even better and more amazing than the tracks they respond to. Side 4, thus, is eccentric but also near perfect.

“An Exciting Christmas Eve” (1883)

This story by Arthur Conan Doyle was written when he was about 24 and does not alas have very much to do with Christmas or the Christmas spirit. I’m not sure why it is set in the season, except that might have made it more marketable in publishing circles of the time. The plot is ludicrous and, contra the title, not so exciting. But Doyle is good enough, even at young age, to make it suspenseful and it is often enjoyable in spite of its various weaknesses. The first-person narrator, Herr Doktor Otto von Spee of Berlin, is a chemist who specializes in explosives. The Franco-Prussian War of 1871-1872 is raging along. Foreign spies or undercover agents (presumably French) want information from him about bombs, so they kidnap him to get it. In a way it makes sense in 1883 for an explosives expert to be heroic like von Spee is here. That might have changed after about World War I and it does seem strange here. Nobody ever thought much of the Unabomber, for example. In the end a lot of the problems in this story may be more about the inexperience of Doyle. The kidnapping of von Spee is not handled well and in general the story assumes we are more keenly interested in bombs than we might be and that we already know what things like “guncotton” are. I suspect the explosions here would be likely to kill people. Von Spee notably survives a big one. Basically, the story describes von Spee’s expertise and bona fides, then he is kidnapped and told he must train bomb-makers with his knowledge, and then he figures out a way to escape. You really have to lean into your suspension of disbelief if this story is going to work for you, especially with this premise. But even as a young writer still coming up, Doyle has a knack for making his stories entertaining and engaging. Just don’t expect this one to work well if you’re including it in some kind of Christmas ritual. Yes, I do think Christmas is a good time for ghost stories. But this story is not really that.

Chillers for Christmas, ed. Richard Dalby (out of print)
Read story online.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

Speaking as someone who watches too much true-crime TV, I was curious to see how this celebrated fictional movie from last year about a crime and trial might go. It won the big prize at Cannes and got a handful of Oscar nominations too, with a win for Best Original Screenplay. I’m happy to note first that, as far as I can tell, it is not a story based on real-life incidents, which somehow usually turn out terrible and strangely unbelievable in the movies. This French picture, much of it in English, is basically a domestic drama tucked away inside a courtroom drama, involving one of those cases where the evidence is too ambiguous to make an undisputed call. A man falls to his death—in the classic formulation of Richard and Linda Thompson, “Did [he] jump or was [he] pushed?” The widow, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller), is accused of murder and taken to some kind of jury trial in a very interesting and confusing French legal system. Police procedure is part of the story too, as cops and prosecutors attempt to divine what happened from odd blood spatter patterns and witness testimony, the latter of which is mostly only their 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner). The marriage has been going rotten for some time. Voyter is not particularly sympathetic, arguably cold and ambitious to the detriment of her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis). Both are writers but only she is successful, which adds to their growing tensions. Anatomy of a Fall thus becomes a kind of rorschach test, which in many ways puts their son Daniel uncomfortably in the middle. He was partially blinded in an accident when he was 4. Samuel blamed himself for it and Sandra is inclined to agree. One of the pleasures of this picture could well be pie and coffee discussions afterward about the crime and the verdict and what happened. Anatomy of a Fall is on the long side, running to two and a half hours, but I found it entirely riveting, especially in the trial scenes that take up so much of it. Huller’s performance is pitch-perfect, reserved, self-contained, with unsettling portents and few definitive clues about the truth of the situation. Also, speaking again as someone who watches too much true-crime, Anatomy of a Fall is not a bit cheesy, which is too often a major temptation in that realm. This movie deserves all the accolades it got.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

I read George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel in high school—saw the 1956 movie then too, which fit well with my taste for 1950s paranoid science fiction, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, etc. Looking at the movie again reminded me how much I associated it with the novel. Edmond O’Brien, Jan Sterling, and Michael Redgrave are not much like the characters I imagined when I reread it. But the heavy gray mood is pinpoint perfect. For some reason I don’t think of Nineteen Eighty-Four as science fiction, though obviously enough it is. Maybe I’m distinguishing science fiction from dystopian from utopian literature in my head, the paradoxical three sides of the future-seeing coin. For all its foreboding mood, Nineteen Eighty-Four is surprisingly funny in places. I didn’t notice that in high school. England (or Britain, or the UK), for example, has been renamed “Airstrip One.” I love that! But note to self: George Orwell is not Ayn Rand. I don’t want to hold it against Orwell that he has been championed so ardently by braying right-wing clowns like Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan. (In fairness, Hitchens died before Trump’s political era began and Sullivan is now more of a Never Trumper and ally, however temporary.) I like the deeply somber mood Orwell constructs here. Many of his ideas are intriguing and some maybe even prescient. He certainly understands how propaganda works, and the best single aspect of it might be “Newspeak,” the updates to the English language made by the totalitarian regime of Oceania. They’ve been working on it for decades, eliminating not only redundancies of the language but also attempting to retire ideas of political and intellectual freedom by eliminating all the words associated with them. Orwell may have been a little too enamored with some of his ideas, filling up the back half of this novel with large sections of exposition. A book banned for political reasons is quoted at stultifying length though fans of world-building might like it. He also tacked on an appendix that goes into more detail on Newspeak (which alone could well have inspired the slang in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange). I suspect, ultimately, that Nineteen Eighty-Four might have been more meager without this supporting material. The rise and fall of the love affair between Winston Smith and Julia would probably not be enough to put this over. And whatever reservations I may have here, to be clear, the prevailing vision of this novel—the surveillance culture (slowly coming true, the prescient part) coupled with a fastidious industry constantly at work rewriting and erasing history in the actual archives—is chilling, bleak, pervasive, and cleverly designed to demoralize. Totalitarianism, get your totalitarianism here. The reputation of Nineteen Eighty-Four is deserved. Something about it gets into your bones.

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

Memories of Murder (2003)

Salinui chueok, South Korea, 132 minutes

Director: Bong Joon Ho

Writers: Bong Joon Ho, Kwang-rim Kim, Sung-bo Shim

Photography: Hyung Koo Kim

Music: Taro Iwashiro

Editor: Sun-Min Kim

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Kim Sang-kyung, Kim Roe-ha, Song Jae-ho, Byun Hee-Bong, Ryu Tae-ho, Ko Seo-hie

I had a harder time than usual getting a look at director and cowriter Bong Joon Ho’s second full-length picture. It’s still, by all the markers I can find, his most popular after only Parasite. It was on Amazon last month—I know it was, because I kept checking. Maybe it rotated out with December. But the other day when I went to look at it it was no longer there, it wasn’t on the Criterion Channel (although Memories of Murder, Okja, and Parasite have all got the Criterion blu-ray/DVD treatment), it’s not on Kanopy either (a service worth checking out if you have a library card), and the youtube version seemed to be UHD only, which my system can’t handle. I finally found it on Tubi, whatever the heck that is—at least it was free and without commercial interruptions and didn’t appear to infect my computer. I got the sense—maybe it was the UHD-only avail—that Memories of Murder, a movie that has never much appealed to me, may be appreciated best for its cinematic qualities. I admit they are impressive, if you have the right setup or can take advantage of an opportunity to see it in a theater. Maybe you can luck into a double feature with something by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

“In his breakthrough second feature, Bong Joon Ho explodes the conventions of the policier with thrillingly subversive, genre-defying results,” raves the Criterion write-up. “Policier” is cineaste for “police procedural,” a favored sub-subgenre of mine; “thrillingly subversive, genre-defying” gives away that they’re doing it wrong. It’s arty to a fault—with many, many arresting and well-composed shots—and Bong’s jarring sense of humor intrudes everything. The coarse jokiness is easier to handle for me in Bong contexts that are more formally science fiction or fantasy, like The Host (still ruined for me by it, but I may owe that one another look), Snowpiercer, or, indeed, Parasite. I’ve been actively repulsed when Bong applies it to these two-thirds inept cops tracking a serial killer in a remote village. I don’t see it as anything like the right context for slapstick, however thrillingly subversive.

Law & Order, s8 (1997-1998)

The Law & Order franchise continues its twisty ways in the eighth season. There is some increasingly ongoing misbegotten attempt to humanize the principals. Detective Curtis’s wife is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and begins to deteriorate. Lt. Van Buren files a lawsuit alleging discrimination when she was passed over for a promotion. Lennie’s daughter is in trouble with the law over drugs. These threads are random, sideline themes advanced even as single throwaway lines in an episode. They feel mechanical but they can be affecting—or I am a ridiculous softy. On the other hand, we are explicitly left hanging on all of them. Interested to see whether and if so how they are resolved in the next season. There’s a two-part tie-in episode here with Homicide—the first part is a Law & Order episode and the second a Homicide, with all the orange-filtered jittery japing style of a show I never cared much for. Some of the Law & Order episodes in this season I could recognize from the very first scenes and sometimes even knew the line on which the plot turned, such as one where Lt. Van Buren turns to a key suspect in a murder and says, “Hello, my brother.” Another, starting in a rooftop parking lot, involves clitoridectomies—surgical removal of the clitoris, an ancient barbaric practice in some cultures. It’s feeling ripped from the headlines, as usual. You can tell because, in the more sensitive ones, the disclaimer is the first thing you see. Other episodes I was not even sure I had seen before. They must not have appeared as much in reruns, because I faithfully watched them for years. Dr. Emil Skoda (J.K. Simmons) is introduced as the new forensic psychologist, a hard-ass replacing the more touchy-feely Elizabeth Olivet. Trump gets name-checked occasionally. In one case involving real estate shenanigans, Curtis says, “If the other owners jump on the bandwagon, Donald Trump Jr. goes right down the tube.” For the record, Lennie, as usual, bites off the best and most bitter observations about the human condition. “I guess the macarena wasn’t exciting enough for them,” he says one time, reminding us this series arguably had its heyday in the ‘90s. But the formula stands up—about 20 minutes of police procedure and 20 minutes of a trial, with lots of variation involving plea bargains and other legal maneuvering. It stands up and would keep me loyal to the show for years. But I would never be as happy again with the casting decisions and other developments. From now on Jack McCoy is a fixture and all of his assistants will be beautiful babes he may or may not bed. I think Claire Kincaid is the only we’re sure of? He’s still losing (a minority of) his cases. As the show went on he would tend to win them all. We have probably reached the ceiling of Law & Order by this point in the franchise, but it also has a surprisingly durable, high floor. It may be starting to feel somewhat stale, but the scripts remain zippy and the cases complex and interesting. You could do worse with a 20th-century crime show—say, Homicide.

Poor Folk (1846)

Poor People
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel is fairly called “epistolary”—it is a series of letters between two distant cousins in love with one another by all their many declarations. The approach brings some some awkwardness to the narrative related directly to the stop-and-reset nature of a series of letters. Epistolary novels were more common in 19th-century literature, but usually they involved correspondents who are monied people, middle class at least, with leisure time to write. Dostoevsky’s innovation here is to put the emphasis directly on “poor folk.” In terms of classifications, I’m less sure about “novel” because it’s pretty short, less than 150 pages by my count, whereas I see later work of his that appears to be longer characterized as “novella.” As always, go figure. Dostoevsky wrote Poor Folk in his mid-20s but it feels like mature work, perhaps because the epistolary nature of it may cover up to some extent his inexperience as a writer. Critics in the 1840s declared it a social novel—Russia’s first, according to some. The correspondents detail many lives of poverty, including their own, but their anecdotes are fragmented, not the point of their letters even if they are the point of the novel. Some story elements go unfinished or must be surmised. The main subject of these two is their love for one another. Other stories may be broken off but that one never is. There’s a large age gap between them too—he is close to 50 and she’s not even 20. Dostoevsky’s style, his voice, is already in evidence. I’m not sure how to describe it. He enters into passages that are like ranting, full of wild invective, justifications, and self-lacerations. Yet they are also concrete and vivid and serve to propel the stories. Even this early in his career he can sweep you up into them. The best example here is the longest letter by far, written by the woman (in my C.J. Hogarth translation she is Barbara, though more often elsewhere I see her called Varvara). She intends the letter to be the story of her life and it covers a lot of territory. Most of their concerns are otherwise about the daily inconveniences of poverty and how they attempt to overcome them. These persistent, ever-shifting daily problems will be familiar to anyone who has had periods of no money. The crises may seem trivial, especially to people of means, but they are constant and can be imposing. They can take a lot of time and energy to deal with. Despair is never far. The correspondents also make some connections over reading—both are literate. He works as a copyist. The ending is sad because a rich (and cruel) man proposes to Barbara and she accepts, leaving her cousin behind in grief. I don’t particularly like the epistolary mode much, but it’s interesting to encounter Dostoevsky so young and fresh. Call him DJ Dusty F.

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

2. Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) – “A Day in the Life”

[2011 review of “A Day in the Life” here]

My unconventional conventional choice here has become something of a lightning rod for conventionalists and contrarians. Since approximately 1978, Sgt. Pepper’s has been named in multiple places via multiple surveys as the greatest rock album of all time, though support for it has flagged a little in this century. Certainly many also consider it the greatest psychedelic rock album of all time, which is where a contrarian like myself starts to clear his throat. The only songs besides “A Day in the Life” that might qualify as psychedelic—“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (John Lennon being cute about LSD, i.e., Lucy Sky Diamonds, plus the lyrics are trippy), “Within You Without You” (George Harrison droning ineffectively on a sitar for five minutes), and maybe “Fixing a Hole” (by Paul McCartney shortly before composing “Rocky Raccoon”). It is otherwise the omnibus anthology style that arguably started with Revolver and continued through the White Album and Abbey Road, with songs of all genres and semi-genres chockablock side by side. (In that sense, Rubber Soul may be the last cohesive Beatles album.) “She’s Leaving Home” on Sgt. Pepper’s, for example, is a tender, sentimental ballad likely to make the weak cry. Compare Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days” (produced by McCartney) or Glen Campbell’s “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.” Let me stipulate I have nothing against crying. I do it all the time. “When I’m Sixty-Four,” written by McCartney when he was 14 and now a tradition to call out for any baby boomer turning that precise age, is more like a nagging earworm, featuring clarinets. There should be polaroids with a birthday cake and grandkids. You’re not dropping acid for that, if you are dropping acid, which I am not necessarily endorsing.

To be clear, I have nothing against most of the songs on Sgt. Pepper’s. I thought I might, and have thought so for many years of not listening to it, but, when I started playing it again in recent days, the first thing I realized was how well I know it, from the sequencing to all the words in all the songs. I can even sing with “Within You Without You.” It’s among the first albums I ever bought and it’s thoroughly imprinted on me, so taking the contrarian stance is tricky. I do believe Sgt. Pepper’s has been vastly overrated. But it’s still the Beatles and thus has undeniable appeals for fans like me who came up on them. It’s not the greatest rock album of all time (that’s Highway 61 Revisited or possibly Sandinista) and it’s not the greatest psychedelic album of all time either (that’s—well, why spoil the surprise, right? you've probably figured it out by now anyway). All that said, Sgt. Pepper’s does have arguably the greatest psychedelic song of all time. “A Day in the Life” is so perfect, in fact, I’m convinced the song and its placement as the last heard on the album are what have convinced people that the album is a psychedelic masterpiece when it is really just a workaday Beatles album—if I were going to stack-rank them all I’m pretty sure it would fall in the bottom third.

But it does have “A Day in the Life” and that’s not nothing. So majestic in its ambitions and scope that you would have to classify it as a novelty, comparable perhaps to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (more operatic than psychedelic) or exercises by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and the Who, all of which came after Sgt. Pepper’s. “A Day in the Life” is also (with “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”) a source of the controversy around whether the album is pro-drug and thus a target for censorship. Obviously, in 1967, it was pro-hallucinogens. It’s also in favor of transcendental meditation. While a lot of songs on the album are just goofs (a Beatles tradition of its own, again arguably since Revolver), “A Day in the Life” comes in deadly serious and stays that way, even as the lyrics are deceptively quotidian. McCartney pounds the piano with great authority. Lennon’s words are disorienting. “I heard the news today, oh boy....” They don’t seem to make sense but feel like they should. “He blew his mind out in a car....” Ringo’s fills are subtly perfect. Three verses of this and then, at 1:40, with a wobbly drawn-out “I’d love to turn you on,” it spirals into the first of its two blunt force avant-garde classical orchestra interludes, which frankly were too much for me to handle as a 12-year-old hearing it for the first time on the radio. It felt like my head was exploding and I was going insane for the 35 seconds or so that it lasts. The Paul McCartney section in the middle is a perfect counterbalance to the Lennon and the orchestra. But with “Found my way upstairs and had a smoke / And somebody spoke and I went into a dream,” we are off again to the wilds of the raggedy edges of the brain, in a place the Moody Blues studied well for “Tuesday Afternoon.” Powerful orchestral notes usher us back to Lennon and “I read the news today, oh boy.” One more verse and one more orchestral fever break and then McCartney hits a grand chord on a grand piano and they let is resonate for 45 seconds. Spectacular. What hit you? Another masterpiece.

“On the Down Line” (1867)

This story by George Manville Fenn is primitive stuff. The structure is weird and veers toward the pointless. It’s from the Chillers for Christmas anthology, the second in a series of four on the theme edited by Richard Dalby. So far the connections to Christmas have been fairly strained, or merely coincidental. Yes, typically, this one takes place at Christmas. It involves a flashback to the Christmas the year before. Dalby is obviously well-read in 19th-century gothic / romance / horror lit. The anthology also ranges into the 20th century so he’s probably good all over. But he seems to have a collector / fan streak that can trump his taste. His intro to this story boasts of its obscurity, for example. OK but sometimes that happens for a reason. Dalby compares Fenn to Dickens and that seems apt. This story starts on an appalling scene of poverty and desperation on a Christmas (Eve, perhaps). Our first-person narrator is down and out, has been out of work for a year. He’s out scrounging and begging. A little girl gives him a penny, which makes him weep for his abject state. Then he sees a guy who is familiar and who eventually recognizes him too, promises him a job, gives him money. Our guy wanders off and has a merry Christmas after all, and finally gets around to telling us the story of the year before, when he lost his job because of this generous guy. Our guy was an engineer or perhaps stoker, and the generous guy got on board the train and hijacked it, reasons unclear. He had a gun so our guy went along with him, as one does, but that’s the reason he lost his job. Anyway, the ghost part of the story may be the most muddled yet, though it has a notably striking doppelganger element. Annoyingly, it also involves technical details about train lines—me, I’ve never heard of up lines or down lines and they aren’t really explained. Clearly enough they are parallel adjacent tracks. When the lines run close, in the story, a ghost train appears and travels alongside it so precisely that our guy can look over into its engine compartment and see himself there. I liked that, as doppelganger themes and images don’t often register with me. And while I often complain of too much explanation I fear this one has too little. Why is our guy seeing a ghost train at all, let alone with himself on it? And who is this generous guy and why did he hijack the train last year? Not clear.

Chillers for Christmas, ed. Richard Dalby (out of print)
Story not available online.

Fresh (2022)

Fresh starts as a movie about dating apps and The Dating Scene Today. That’s a premise I can buy for a horror show, and the opening scene fully delivers on all expectations. But Fresh has some other fish to fry and soon moves on to its destiny as a movie about billionaire cannibals and their exquisite tastes. One such, for example, is that they all believe women taste better. In many ways Fresh is riffing on American Psycho, featuring a yuppie scum guy, Steve (Sebastian Stan), who is making his way in the gig economy picking up women, capturing them, holding them, and eventually cutting them up into chops and cutlets. It offers up some very fine food cinematography along the way—fans of Big Night might think about giving Fresh a try (think hard, I say). Steve promises his victims to keep them alive as long as he can. But there’s something different for him about Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones). Why, he seems to be falling in love with her. What makes Fresh work for me is that it’s much less focused on gore and shock—there’s some, but it’s more antiseptic, just enough to convince you it’s horror. By contrast, and somewhat confusingly, it is more focused on maintaining a light and engaging tone. It’s entertaining, in short. A lot of it is clonkingly obvious by the points it wants to make. Director Mimi Cave and writer Lauryn Kahn seem aware these points are not that fresh, casting a wry and ironic wash over the proceedings. Still, billionaires consuming people, where have we heard that before? Women as disposable consumer product. Et cetera. To be clear, Steve is no billionaire. He’s just the moral equivalent of the Uber Eats driver delivering goods to the doorstep. He’s obviously making big money on it as he lives in a spectacular mansion with large walk-in freezers all over the place. Once we are hep to all the nuance of the details and tone in Fresh, the picture does start to flag some. It’s especially hard for me to believe the love story, and the action-oriented escape attempts only take you so far. But the picture is warmly humorous with an admirable relentlessness. A strange way to put over a cannibal holocaust, but there you go.

The Female Man (1975)

I’m not sure what to think of this Joanna Russ novel, billed as science fiction, nominated for a Nebula, and now widely considered a classic of so-called New Wave science fiction, though not without controversy and detractors. It bears a lot of the hallmarks of New Wave SF, but to me it seemed about two parts science fiction to seven or eight parts righteous feminist critique. What I liked best is that Russ is a witty and genuinely funny writer, skewering herself as well as men at large. What I liked least was feeling lost most of the time. Wikipedia helped with some of it. Reading it with others would probably be good too. That’s a feature I associate with New Wave SF—it’s often confusing. The Female Man is freewheeling and reads like someone’s head has just exploded, presumably Russ’s. There are multiple characters from multiple settings, a time travel theory, alternative histories, and more by way of high concept. The novel feels like it’s chasing its own tail for the first two-thirds, however entertaining. Then, with Part Seven, it focuses and bears down harder on its characters and even more on its complaints about men, which comes down to the famous quote from Sarah Moore Grimke, “All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks.” There’s a lot to complain about men, of course, and even more she may not have known yet in 1975. The endless sexualizing, the never taking women seriously, the use of women as slave labor, etc., etc. One thing she may not have known (or maybe did) is how much work women have done for science without credit. There’s also the whole baby-making expectation—men claiming motherhood as sacrosanct yet not offering much of anything tangible to help with it, as a matter of political policy, and even indignant about requests for life-saving healthcare. There’s not much new here for anyone who lived through the ‘70s and beyond. But Russ is way more fun than it might sound from the summaries. She’s playful, weird, and sardonic, all with a light touch. She’s angry too, with a good outlet for it here. The science fiction aspects feel more like a costume she has donned for the occasion. The ideas are intriguing but need more development and/or clarity. The main point here is—I don’t want to say the “war,” so let’s say the human condition between the sexes.

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

The Celebration (1998)

Festen, Denmark / Sweden, 105 minutes

Director: Thomas Vinterberg

Writers: Thomas Vinterberg, Mogens Rukov

Photography: Anthony Dod Mantle

Music: Lars Bo Jensen

Editor: Valdis Oskarsdottir

Cast: Ulrich Thomsen, Henning Moritzen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Paprika Steen, Birthe Neumann, Trine Dyrholm, Helle Dolleris, Therese Glahn, Klaus Bondam, Bjarne Henriksen, Gbatokai Dakinah

The Celebration may (or may not) be known best as the first so-called Dogme 95 picture, a filmmaking aesthetic created in 1995 by director and cowriter Thomas Vinterberg with bad-boy director Lars von Trier. Based on 10 rules they called the “Vow of Chastity,” it attempts to refocus movies away from special effects, commercial considerations, and general bombast, and more toward “traditional values of story, acting, and theme.” Rule number 8, for example (yes, they are numbered), specifies no genre work. Number 3 requires the camera to be handheld. “Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted.” There are strict limits as well on visuals and music. As far as I know, no Dogme 95 picture has ever been made that doesn’t break at least one of the rules even in small ways. The Celebration violates number 1, which precludes use of props, and number 4, which prohibits special lighting. Dogme 95 pictures include The Celebration, The Idiots (directed by von Trier), Julien Donkey-Boy (directed by Harmony Korine), and some 32 others. Original inspiration for the rules came from von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (which also breaks many of them).

The Dogme 95 aesthetic produces an interesting effect, certainly in The Celebration, but I can’t help feeling it’s mostly some kind of big joke somehow, athwart the point of the narrative. Maybe that’s something to do with how I take von Trier generally. Still, The Celebration, for all its disheveled shambolics, has a real power, drawing us into its rancid family dynamics in spite of a jittery feel of improv, a sense that it is formally maintaining its distance from human naturalism. I’m not sure how improv fits with the Dogme 95 rules but a lot of the action here feels impromptu, executed by inspiration in the moment. The story is also a curious one, half deadly serious, half darkly comic, and “based on real events,” except not really.

“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933)

James Joyce once said this is one of the best stories ever written, so Ernest Hemingway can’t really be blamed for saying it “might” be his favorite. When I first encountered it as a young man in the throes of Hemingway infatuation, I thought even the title was great—no need for a story. What I expected is how I tend to remember it, although it’s not even close. I thought it had something to do with finding a good place in public to write. But not at all. Instead, it is a strange Parisian café scene at night, involving two waiters closing it up and their last customer, an elderly man deaf and at least 80 years old. He is a regular at this café. He recently attempted suicide. One waiter is impatient for him to leave, but the older waiter is more philosophical. The old man is drinking his fill of brandy. The story has a funny look as it lays on the page, partly telling the story itself that way. Normal and large blocks of text in some paragraphs (notably a long one near the end) alternate with blasts of dialogue in short, rapid sentences. Attributions drop away as two interlocutors converse, usually the two waiters. Hemingway is skillful enough to keep it lucid—it’s rare to lose track of who is speaking. A good deal is made of the differences between bars, bodegas, and cafes. The preference among the soul-tormented here (the old man and the older waiter) is the “clean, well-lighted” café. Bars require too much standing. The young and impatient waiter has a wife waiting for him at home. Late in the story we learn the older waiter is insomniac and does not expect to sleep until daylight. The café closes between 2 and 4 a.m., apparently depending on when the last customer finishes. Joyce said this story “reduced the veil between literature and life, which is what every writer strives to do.” Maybe so, but I have to admit I’m not entirely feeling it. I love the title and generally how Hemingway can do more with less. His subtraction method doesn’t always work—it doesn’t always work here—but it’s an interesting way to approach fiction and can certainly make it rich in unspoken implications. But I haven’t lived a life that includes very much that seems to be happening in this story, as someone who generally shuns bars and cafes as places to go aimlessly and hang around for human company.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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3. Chambers Brothers, The Time Has Come (1967) – “Time Has Come Today”

The Chambers Brothers were four brothers from Carthage, Mississippi, an unlikely pinpoint source of psychedelia. George, Joseph, Lester, and Willie Chambers started out singing in the choir and eventually ended up in Los Angeles. The brothers were augmented by drummer and cowbell administrator Brian Keenan, an important element of “Time Has Come Today.” The song comes in many versions, most of them edits. The 1966 original, 2:37, is rather different from the more familiar hit but already shows inclinations toward the weird and trippy. The one we know best from 1967 or 1968 comes in three sizes: 3:05, 4:45, and 11:07. The first two were single versions. One of them (or both?) made it to #11 for a few weeks in 1968. The one you really want, of course, is the 11:07, which closes out the second side of The Time Has Come, an album, full disclosure, I don’t otherwise have much need for.

The bonanza of “Time Has Come Today” is all I’m here for and it is exactly what I’m here for. From its double-cowbell cuckoo clock opening it is a wholly disorienting gem: the fuzzed electric guitar crushes, the unfuzzed electric guitar wheedles out simple figures, Keenan hits everything hard, and the song roars into shape with the clarion call, “Time has come today!” The ’60s were full of moments like it, charged with apocalyptic howling at the moon, but don’t let this one get lost in the shuffle. There is also something slyly funny about it, as if it somehow distances itself from the youth generation it otherwise formally exalts in an amiably generic way, eating its cake and having it too—“Young hearts can go their way,” “The rules have changed today (Hey),” “There’s no place to run (Time),” so on so forth—until it finally fully climaxes with all the weight it can muster: “I've been loved and put aside (Time) / I've been crushed by the tumbling tide (Time) / And my soul has been psychedelicized (Time).” It feels like something Foghorn Leghorn would say, erupting into the frame in close-up.

Then, at about 2:37, the time of the 1966 original, the song shifts into its freak-out. Time slows to a crawl (time). The heavy effects come up. Producer David Rubinson also worked with Moby Grape, the United States of America, Skip Spence, and Herbie Hancock, among others, so he knew his way around a psychedelic soundboard even if “Time” was relatively early in his career. As the tempo starts from a near dead stop and gradually builds, the echoing, phasing effects set in like bats swarming a cave. The fuzz guitar man, either Joseph or Willie, soars in with a workmanlike solo buoyed by a band in ecstatic unity. At 5:40, somewhat famously, he breaks into the tune of “Little Drummer Boy.” All bets now seem to be off as the groove locks in. At 6:50 someone can’t stand it anymore and starts screaming. This jumbo jet is banking in for a landing. Maniacal laughter and a chaotic scene follow. It very possibly inspired the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Eric Burdon & the Animals even as it was perhaps inspired itself by the Royal Guardsmen. It descends upon us like a storm. Crazy sounds like small mammals and what you might imagine plants making if we could hear them creep into the underside. Are we in some Satanic Garden of Eden? Howling and sirens. At 9:05 the main theme returns. They like the line “my soul has been psychedelicized” so much they do it again. And I like it so much I don’t mind either. The ending may be about one minute too long, but hey, they might get burned up by the sun, but they had their fun. In sum: A masterpiece.

“The Voice in the Night” (1907)

[spoilers] I like this story by William Hope Hodgson pretty well—certainly my favorite of his many seagoing stories I’ve read. It may be more squarely in the traditions of “weird” than horror but it’s still creepy and unsettling. In a way it’s kind of a “lost world” story. But what a horrible lost world. More than anything it’s a seagoing tale, specifically within that a “fog” or “doldrums” story, a Hodgson staple. There’s a ship, and it is stuck in still waters and haze, with no wind. In the night, after some time there, a voice is heard calling out of the darkness, begging for food. The man calling refuses to let himself be seen. It’s annoying behavior that makes it hard to hand off food. But they manage. Some time later, the next night or maybe a few more, the voice returns to explain himself and his partner. The story involves shipwreck and struggling to survive on an island infested with a gray fungus and nothing to eat. The story is just well done. I had a bad feeling about that fungus from the first it’s seen, but it’s mostly innocuous for quite a while. Then it’s a nuisance and finally a fearsome force. It’s all over everything and if you scrub it away it returns the next day. Then it starts infecting the castaways themselves, with the gray fungus appearing on patches of their skin. As food stores dwindle, however, they find that not only is the fungus edible but it’s also quite tasty, though it hastens the infection. Late in the story a humanoid shape is seen in the fungus, moving like a living person. Details like this reminded me of the movie Annihilation and were particularly effective. For once one of these old-fashioned framing devices works. There’s a fair amount of setup but the payoff is this amazing story related by a voice calling out of the darkness. Hodgson gives us a glimpse of the terror near the end, the lumbering humanoid mass of gray fungus, but otherwise keeps a light hand. It’s also a good idea to make the voice a married man. He and his wife are alone together in this, trying to keep each other alive. So it’s also an affecting love story. I don’t know that you can call this gray fungus supernatural—it’s plausible enough, in 1907, that such things could exist. It may be a stretch to make it delicious, and also that it may have psychic powers of attraction, but I’m even willing to accept those things here. Hodgson makes it all work.

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Evil Dead Rise (2023)

I finally caught up with the late installments in the Evil Dead franchise. Sam Raimi’s original trilogy worked itself into an inspired Three Stooges mode that remains utterly original and worth seeking out. But a lot of people forget how actually terrifying as a horror movie the first one was, even with the low-budget trappings, or that’s how it hit for me anyway in the early ‘80s one weekend with rented VCR and movies. The 2013 remake and this, what? sequel?—are true to the essentials of the 1981 original. The roving demon spirit is represented by impossibly fast tracking through landscape, there’s an evil book made of blood and human body parts, and the possessions begin when the field recording made by some anonymous paranormal researcher scientist is played. On the recording he says the words that summon the demon spirit to take possession and from then on it’s chaos. Also there’s usually a scene of an animated tree raping one of the young woman victims, in usually a mixed group of five. There to honor the original apparently. You never know where a tradition is going to come from. The 2013 remake, directed by Fede Alvarez (Alien: Romulus; Don’t Breathe), is perfectly competent but has few surprises and became a little monotonous for me in the last third. Evil Dead Rise switches things up while remaining true to the essentials. Perhaps its boldest move is to change the setting from the famous “cabin in the woods” to an urban landscape in Los Angeles. An earthquake unearths the Naturom Demonto (updated from the trilogy’s Necronomicon Ex-Mortis for reasons unclear, perhaps an effort to leave behind any suggestion of the H.P. Lovecraft universe). The cracked vault also yields up field recordings by the researcher. The kid making the discovery is a wannabe DJ. He knows what to do with recordings, which look like 78s but play differently. The possession target is a single mother with three kids. Her sister is visiting. They have a tense relationship. As usual in this franchise, it gets bloody and gruesome. Check all content warnings. The tree thing is replicated inside an elevator. True to the trope! Yes, there were scenes of grotesque violence that were hard to watch, usually short. But director and writer Lee Cronin also has a lot of nifty tricks up his sleeve and there are a surprising number of surprises. Definitely worth running down if you’re into the franchise.

“Eve’s Diary” (1905)

I must say I am mystified by Mark Twain’s relationship with religion. I understand he despised it. Perhaps that’s too strong. He returns to Bible themes all the time, sometimes mockingly, sometimes piously. He’s fascinated by Joan of Arc. Satan is a wonderful character in his unfinished Mysterious Stranger. Whole sections of the travel books are devoted, in hushed spiritual tones, to “the Holy Land.” Et cetera. Then there’s the question of comedy. Is it even funny? I’m not sure. I read “Eve’s Diary” somewhat under duress, also known as being in a bad mood for no particular reason. It did not change my mood. It seems to have feminist sympathies more than not, or at least Adam is something of a surly caveman lout. Eve is part flower child, part curious intelligent interesting person. The problem is more the situation itself. For example, they are naming things: “fire,” “smoke,” etc. It just seemed dumb, not funny. Dinosaurs are around—I liked that, it felt like one place where he is thumbing his nose at religion. I didn’t get the idea from nowhere that he’s hostile to religion. Adam and Eve have no sense of perspective, apparently. Eve thinks she can knock stars out of the sky by hitting them with clods of dirt. I don’t know what to make of some of it: “I found some tigers and nestled in among them and was most adorably comfortable, and their breath was sweet and pleasant, because they live on strawberries.” Say what? Most of all it feels like Twain is just not trying very hard, or worse—trying too hard plagued by writer’s block, which was possible. There’s a clumsy insertion of an Adam passage and a no-warning transition back to Eve. It hops about in time, though at least it is always moving forward and I guess a diary gives him license. I generally like Twain’s folksy voice, but it can grate. At least no racism I could detect here! That was a surprise for me in his earlier work. Racism is rarely a main feature but it's usually there. Here we have dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, a comic point that does wear well I must admit. Adam at Eve’s funeral acting like Dick Nixon at Pat’s was a jarring shift in tone, but I understand Twain lost his own wife the year before this story was written and published so that probably accounts for it. I wouldn’t call this one of his best.

Mark Twain, “Eve’s Diary” (Library of America)
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The King of Comedy (1982)

USA, 109 minutes

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writer: Paul D. Zimmerman

Photography: Fred Schuler

Music: Robbie Robertson, Ray Charles

Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker

Cast: Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Diahnne Abbott, Sandra Bernhard, Ed Herlihy, Shelley Hack, Tony Randall, Martin Scorsese, Margo Winkler, Dr. Joyce Brothers

Director Martin Scorsese is famous for making great movies, but his best arguably fall into various types. This may be the last, for example, after Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, of his pictures featuring Robert De Niro as an unbalanced madman representing Social Decay. Another type is seen (at its best) in Goodfellas and Casino. The King of Comedy adroitly takes on celebrity culture and media criticism and does not feel 42 years old. One of the most surprising parts is that it was made decades before smartphones and social media, which now feel strangely missing from the action here. Another surprising and impressive part was snagging Jerry Lewis, who practically sold the movie on name recognition (to the limited extent it sold). He plays Jerry Langford, a late-night TV host modeled on Johnny Carson. And he is good, extremely low-key and self-contained. There’s no mugging or pratfalls, no loony voices. But you keep halfway expecting them, which creates an interesting tension.

Langford, like Johnny Carson, like any celebrity, has a lot of problems with fans and wannabes who won’t leave him alone. De Niro plays a wannabe named Rupert Pupkin. It’s an interesting role for De Niro because his signature rage is more subsumed under a slimy façade of someone who thinks he knows his way around show business. He wears natty suits with bold patterns and color schemes. He is soft-spoken and almost gentle. But the rage is there and so is the lunacy, once we get down to the basement of his mother’s place in New Jersey, where Pupkin lives. Everyone, including his mother (the bawling off-screen voice of Scorsese’s mother Catherine), plainly thinks he is a grating, pathetic loser. He wants to be famous and show everybody. The idea he comes up with to break through is to kidnap Langford and force him to let him do his standup in a prime spot on the show. In order to accomplish this Pupkin must enlist the aid of Sandra Bernhard as Masha, who proceeds to steal the whole show.

The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy (2016)

The best part of Paula Mejia’s 33-1/3 volume has to be her enthusiasm for the band and album. That’s always there in these little books to some degree, but often it is kind of sublimated into the research or something. She had no luck getting one of the Reid brothers (William) to talk to her at all. She may not have cast the interview net very wide, or gotten a lot of good quotes, because that stuff is minimal here. It’s organized by song titles from the album, not in sequencing order but riffing on the ideas associated with them. Like Geeta Dayal’s meditation on Brian Eno’s Another Green World, it is more discursive and (free-) associational. There are fewer personal details too. It might be dense—she cites a lot of academic sources along the way. Or it may have been my mood. I was reading it slowly, a chapter or two at a time, and thinking it might be one of the weaker ones. But then something kind of strange and perhaps alchemical happened. I played the album and it sounded fabulous. Better than ever. Now Psychocandy is an album I’ve had my infatuations with. I didn’t really catch up to it until the 1990s but I had an intense few months with it when I did. But returning to it later—even preparing to read this—was often disappointing. Too much noise, not enough sweets (more or less the shoegaze formula, which more or less the Jesus and Mary Chain may have invented) (although don’t forget Husker Du). A couple points by Mejia definitely helped. How, for one thing, did I miss those girl group drum patterns? Anyway, I don’t think an album under consideration has ever sounded so good while reading one of these 33-1/3 books. One of the regular blurbs that shows up with them talks about liner notes, which, full disclosure, I rarely read. But that’s what the experience of this book came to feel like for me. I’d read some of the text and return to the glorious album. I did learn about the literal riots of their shows in the ‘80s, which I hadn’t known. I think comparisons to the Velvet Underground and Sex Pistols go too far in a general way, though of course they’re not entirely overstated. And the riffing on psychopathy and candy seemed more obvious than insightful. I mean, you can find something to complain about in anything. I’m just a little shocked she somehow found a way to make the album sound better than ever.

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

4. Talking Heads, Fear of Music (1979)

[2007 review here, 2011 review of “Cities” here, 2012 review of “Animals” here, 2014 review of Jonathan Lethem 33-1/3 book here]

I was stoked to see that Wikipedia classifies this album as “psychedelic funk”—only after “new wave, postpunk, and art-rock,” but still. I thought I might be out on a limb stanning one of my all-time favorites since the day it was released, whatever category you want to put it in. But songs like “Mind,” “Memories Can’t Wait,” and of course “Drugs” make the sonic and lyrical case (and the band finishes the thought with supreme funk). What often confuses me about Fear of Music is the unexpected layer of humor wrapped into it. It may be most obvious in the hilariously bizarre “Animals,” which the raging singer cries “are laughing at us” when they “don’t even know what a joke is.” Yes, he’s talking about the extant nonhuman fauna on the planet at large. “They think they know what’s best,” he says. “They’re making a fool of us.” Further sins: “Shit on the ground ... see in the dark.” Other songs continue in similar veins, often named for nouns (“Mind,” “Air,” “Heaven,” “Electric Guitar”). We hear that “Air can hurt you too,” that heaven is a place where nothing happens, and that members of a jury at trial have rendered verdict. “Never listen to electric guitar,” they solemnly chant. “Someone controls electric guitar.” David Byrne’s lamentable inclinations to mock people he considers ignorant and/or beneath him can be discerned developing here. His main character, who wavers in some detail from song to song, remains recognizably a type of political crank prone to conspiracy theorizing. No doubt he is as worried about fluoridation as he is about the conspiracy of the air when the weather turns cold. Byrne’s impulse would continue with the album he made with Brian Eno in 1981, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, where a lot of the vocals are screeds tape-recorded from late-night religious stations on the AM band. It would be worse and most fully on display in the 1986 album and related movie True Stories. But these things are still more indeterminate on Fear of Music.

The most famous song from the album is likely “Life During Wartime,” which is more dystopic than psychedelic and seemed uniquely suited to the Cold War moment in the late ‘70s, on the eve of the conservatism that continues to metastasize into fascism, a hit in the UK but not the US. “Cities” is another song that’s not particularly mind-altering by intention, but I hope it remains relevant to people in their 20s and 30s trying to figure out where they want to live. Implicitly it recognizes that a better life can be consciously sought by starting with this vital choice. Preach. Most of the rest of the album is trippy one way or another. “Mind” reminds me a little of P.M. Dawn’s “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine,” in that the lyrical concerns are more on the order of pedestrian love troubles. “I need something to change your mind,” the singer wails plaintively. Then a walloping “MMMMMIIIIINNND,” reminds us where we got the idea this music is psychedelic. The strange, unlikely views of air, heaven, animals, and the electric guitar infect us with new ways of looking at them. The longest song on the album, at 5:10, is also the last. Called “Drugs” here, and “Electricity” in earlier versions, it presents a guy (likely the same paranoid-delusional we’ve seen in many of these songs) obviously tripping out on hallucinogens. Byrne reportedly got the unusual intensity of his vocal in this song by going outside and running around the block a few times at top speed, and then recording while he was still out of breath. The effect is stunningly accurate, full of the strange sights and sounds and feelings, the coincidences and the social anxieties, of the hallucinogenic at full effect. “I'm charged up ... I'm kinda wooden / I'm barely moving ... I study motion.” You know it when you hear it. Play loud.

“The Minister’s Black Veil” (1832)

This story by Nathaniel Hawthorne is more of a literary affair than horror, as the Wikipedia article I looked up can attest. “Hawthorne writes the story in an allegorical format, using a didactic tone,” etc. I should note the subtitle, “A Parable,” but it’s not an easy parable (or allegory) to understand. I think that’s what I like about it. One day the New England town Puritan minister shows up wearing a veil, two pieces of semitranslucent black cloth “[s]wathed about his forehead and hanging down over his face.” That’s it, basically, the whole story. He wears the veil for the rest of his life and never explains. Not even his fiancée can get a word out of him about it, and she’s the only person who can approach him. She breaks off the engagement. There are certain tantalizing clues. On the day he first appears wearing it, he conducts a funeral for a “young lady” in town. We don’t learn very much about her either. The minister is 30 when he begins wearing the veil, and he gets the usual threescore and 10 or so. It does seem profoundly symbolic, practically obliterating his face for others and occluding his own vision as well. Hawthorne notes more than once how it moves like curtains with his breath. The minister’s stoic absurd stubbornness is reminiscent of the scrivener Bartleby’s perverse refusal to work, in the story by Herman Melville, never explaining himself beyond that wonderful “I prefer not to.” Here the minister responds to queries much the same, though they are more simple demurrals. The story says he gets better at his job over the years, but that could also be just growing into it. So I guess I like this story the way I like “Bartleby.” There’s something powerful about the secrets these timid men keep—why they do what they do. What’s asked of them is not greatly inconveniencing in either case, the responses more like exasperating little character traits, which grow into more. I take the death of the young woman as significant, some kind of warmup for, or variation on, The Scarlet Letter. In that light, the black veil is cowardly in a way reminiscent of our old friend Arthur Dimmesdale but at the same time more forthright, if cryptic, in declaring his status as a sinner, if that’s what he’s doing. Of course, there may not be enough about the young woman to build even that much out of it. You could sit in a hundred classroom discussions or reading groups and probably still never get to the bottom of it. If horror is a grasp of the empty abyss, then maybe this is horror.

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Watcher (2022)

Watcher has a good premise and a good start, as our main character Julia (Maika Monroe) finds herself in Bucharest, Romania, with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman). Both were raised in the US and both have Romanian roots, but only Francis can speak the language, and he is there for a demanding job in marketing with long hours. Julia’s isolation is near complete, as she spends most of her time by herself in their excellent apartment, frustrated by the language every time she goes out. Then, actually almost right away, she notices a man in the building across the street, standing in his window. She gets the feeling he is looking at her. She gets the feeling he is following her. She thinks she sees him everywhere she goes. Maybe—we only catch glimpses of him if that. We see a couple of the events she reports to her husband and skeptical police. A man sits directly behind her in a movie theater in one, but we never get a good look at him. He might be some other creep. She might be overthinking the guy in the window (though we doubt that given that we know the chosen genre of our show). Her overworked husband starts to wonder about her. The police plainly think she’s a little kookoo. There are nice notes here of paranoid classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Rear Window. It’s never entirely clear whether it’s all not Julia’s imagination, though the movie gets noticeably more predetermined to an agenda as it goes, particularly in the last third. When Julia waves at the figure in the window and it waves back the picture is all in as a serial killer Psycho kind of show with some strange ins and outs and, ultimately, explaining every last blasted thing, complete with twists and turns that are not that unexpected. The first half is better, creepy and sneaky with uncertainty. We feel Julia’s isolation keenly. The language barrier is done really well. Director and cowriter Chloe Okuno never gives us subtitles for the Romanian and not many Romanians have even passing English. Monroe puts on a good show as someone who might be cracking up from culture shock. Then, well, you might as well stay for the end. It’s not a long movie.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998)

I had a lot of fun with this account of the “New Hollywood” movie industry in the 1970s. Author Peter Biskind had access to dozens of main players and people who knew them. There are so many characters quoted, in fact, that it can get to be hard sorting them out. Some, including Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg, later claimed indignantly that Biskind got it all wrong, which is possible. But I’m pretty sure a lot of these characters are fabulists themselves so take it all with due caution. It took me so long to get to the highly entertaining (and, yes, gossipy) Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that I found myself wondering which came first—the cemented-in legends of the New Hollywood, or this book. At any rate, the ‘70s was approximately my coming-of-age time and, from, say, 1968 on, I was a dedicated moviegoer. I had no idea I was living through such exciting times, though I noticed later how anemic Hollywood fare seemed to become in the ‘80s and later. I still think it’s fair to blame that on Jaws and Star Wars, but Biskind is not blind to that. The most puzzling story for me remains Francis Ford Coppola—responsible for some of the greatest movies ever made, and just as suddenly a nonfactor after the ‘70s. Go figure. I had forgotten about Peter Bogdanovich who, according to Biskind’s portrait, made a couple of good movies and then became as insufferable as the memorable character he played on The Sopranos. Biskind’s treatment of Dennis Hopper is hilarious—this utter incompetent who somehow drew the director credit for Easy Rider. I already knew the general history under consideration, but Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is packed with delicious details and anecdotes. There are some weird gaps. Biskind uses Oscars results as one of his metrics along with revenue figures, reviews, and general consensus. But Woody Allen is barely mentioned. That’s likely because Biskind couldn’t get him or his tribe to talk. But Woody Allen, however reprehensible he appears now (certainly no worse than Paul Schrader and other notable rats here!), is an obvious model of a film auteur, plus he won big in Hollywood for Annie Hall. Strange omission. But an always interesting and entertaining book.

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

Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)

Céline et Julie vont en bateau: Phantom Ladies Over Paris, France, 193 minutes

Director: Jacques Rivette

Writers: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Jacques Rivette, Eduardo de Gregorio, Henry James

Photography: Jacques Renard

Music: Jean-Marie Senia

Editor: Nicole Lubtchansky
Cast: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder

Given the surreal rambles of Celine and Julie Go Boating, along with a release date not far past the 1960s, you have to wonder if psychedelic or something like it was the intention here. There are references here to Lewis Carroll and Alice’s adventures with big rabbits and clocks and such. Hard candies falling in the laps of Celine and Julie in dream-like situations (falling literally into their mouths) and provoking visions bears some suggestion of LSD, whose doses at one time were famous for coming on sugar cubes. Today’s viewers may be more likely to think of cannabis edibles, which were largely unheard of in 1974 as far as I know. That works too. I haven’t seen much by director and cowriter Jacques Rivette, but he seems to have some penchant for going long. La Belle Noiseuse (1991) is four hours, a pair of Joan of Arc pictures from 1994 run nearly five hours together, and of course the 1971 Out 1 famously goes nearly 13 hours.

Not until the very end of Celine and Julie is any kind of literal boating seen. The boating in the title is more like the boating found in the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows”: “Turn off your mind relax and float down-stream / It is not dying.” There is a recurring title card in Celine and Julie that in a way tells the story of the whole movie: “But the next morning...” Black screens of a few seconds are used as transitions, sometimes the usual matter of “later that day,” but sometimes mere seconds or less, suggesting powerful epiphanies of some kind to the brain. From over here it looks like a pretty good time, as Celine (Juliet Berto) and Julie (Dominique Labourier) bop about on somewhat mystifying adventures in an alternate reality—looks like they’re having a great time. But merely watching it is not the same thing.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839)

[spoilers] I have to admit Edgar Allan Poe can be a chore for me and here is a sterling example. The action, such as it is, is molecular, the language is dense and requires parsing—practically every sentence in every brick-wall monolith paragraph. Not much in this story makes sense except perhaps as some fever dream of the afterlife. Editor David G. Hartwell in The Dark Descent anthology sees the story as a foundational transition from haunted castle to haunted house, but that’s splitting hairs pretty fine considering this house feels like a castle or at least a mansion. The Ushers live in it, a brother and sister. Maybe I should use the scare quotes, “live” in it. The narrator was college chums with the brother. The chum has come in response to a strange, unexpected, and urgent letter from him. The sister is dying of disease unspecified, and in fact dies while the narrator is there. The narrator and brother transfer the body to some room in the basement. This being a Poe story, it’s little surprise that she is not actually dead but buried prematurely. Furthermore, the brother kinda sorta knew it (parsing the murk) when he enlisted the help interring her. The brother and narrator otherwise appear to spend most of their time reading aloud to one another from great works of fantasy (in the name-checking paragraph I recognized one of them, and suspect they’re all real) or reciting poetry and singing songs while whaling on a guitar. I should have stuck with that Netflix series a little longer to see how they treated these scenes but I was already struggling with the TV gloss. The story itself erupts into a poem of six stanzas at one point. Then the sister escapes her entombment and shows up just in time to die with her brother. The narrator discreetly departs the premises, at which point the house cracks in half and sinks into the lake it was built on. This is all accompanied by extensive excerpts from a fictional Romance tale involving Ethelred the knight. It’s no wonder Hammer Films (and Netflix) felt like they could do whatever they wanted with some of these stories (“The Pit and the Pendulum” another great example). I might have liked “Usher” more on previous readings, but not lately. It’s ridiculously extravagant with the collapsing house. Nothing with the sister makes sense. We find out later they are twins but that is not particularly helpful. It’s not like one of them ate the other in the womb. Yes, it is admirably thick with a good mood of dread and gothic atmosphere but that is almost all it is. Trade-offs: it can also be boring and impossible to believe. The language takes considerable getting used to and was slow, slow going for me. I do get a kick out of Poe’s obsession with premature burial. It shows up a lot in his stuff, like Mr. Mxyzptlk in the Superman comics. Me, my policy is not to think about being buried alive. Not always easy, I must admit.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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“In Another Country” (1927)

After the longish “The Undefeated” in Ernest Hemingway’s second collection of stories, Men Without Women, most of the stories are short and even micro-sized. This one goes five pages. It’s a war story but set in a hospital, where our unnamed main character and first-person narrator is recovering from wounds. The war was obviously a horrific, traumatizing experience for Hemingway—in many ways these stories are about untreated PTSD. Perhaps hard to believe, but they are going on a century old and in many ways it shows. We just think of PTSD differently now—they didn’t think about it much then, with vaguely derisive terms for it like “shellshock.” Hemingway struggled with these mental and psychological problems in a time when people were not very sympathetic, considering them signs of weakness. He bought into that himself to some degree. Much of his work is marred by mawkish repressed self-pity. That said, this story is not one of the worst examples. I like the hospital scenes and the sense of both the war and the detachment from it in the hospital. First line, a good one: “In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.” Perfect! However, the story, such as it is, involves another man getting treatment at the hospital. It turns out his wife died recently and unexpectedly. So it’s a heavy-handed irony. The husband survived a war wound but his wife died from pneumonia and/or the influenza pandemic no one ever seems to talk about in literature. The widower erupts randomly with the narrator, telling him he must never marry, and later apologizes for his outbursts. That’s when we learn about the death of the man’s wife. So, yes, losing a partner is a great tragedy—and often a good story. But it feels more like a device here and somewhat clumsy. The war is terrible and it’s not talked about particularly in those terms. The pandemic is terrible and not talked about at all. The wife’s death is understood as terrible but that’s only as far as it goes. No one is really dealing with anything here, which we are given to understand is the human condition. Maybe in 1927! Not now (I hope). In the past I liked this story more for its concision, and this “iceberg” sense there is much more under the surface than what we see. Now the repressed behavior annoys me more. At a certain point there is little to say about the tragedies of others. You can only witness them. But is that really what Hemingway is doing here?

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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5. P.M. Dawn, Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience (1991)

[2006 review here]

The “utopian experience” on this studio-groove and sample-heavy debut album by P.M. Dawn (aka rapper Prince Be and producer DJ Minutemix) is suffused with an unmistakable melancholy, which makes it a strange and more personal trip. A brief intro yields to a faceful at full force in this laidback landscape, with “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine” setting the tone. It’s more about heartbreak and mourning a time when reality was better, but the double-jointed words lead to the alternate realities lead to the heavenly visions lead to the utopian experience. “Chase the blues away,” Prince Be raps gently. “Take your mind off reality and leave her alone.” Exalted but frequently sad, as the next track “Paper Doll” points up with its sample of “Angola, Louisiana” by Gil-Scott Heron & Brian Jackson and a deepening sadness. It is gorgeous, delivered in bruised purple tones of unknown, secret agony. It also made it to #28 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992 as a follow-on to the freak #1 “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” buried near the back of the album sequentially. “To Serenade a Rainbow,” with its whipcrack sample of Hugh Masakela, is more workmanlike than “Paper Doll,” which in this context may feel more upbeat (“Think I’m gonna fly away / I think I’m gonna fly away,” goes a refrain). It is still a declaration of love that somehow feels futile, and it is followed by “Comatose,” which takes some time getting up to speed and then proceeds like a slow-motion cartoon ambulance, with low-key samples of Sly & the Family Stone and Dr. John squawks and hollers. P.M. Dawn were connoisseurs of the vinyl crates for sure. The first half of this album resolves finally into the first single, “A Watcher’s Point of View (Don’t ‘Cha Think),” which embraces the Doobie Brothers. It goes like that all over this lovely set, occasionally escaping the gloom tinge but never getting too far from it. The biggest hit, of course, was “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” which made it to #1 for a glorious week, sampling Spandau Ballet’s “True” so boldly that it feels more like augmentation of the song than sample or cover. By this point in the album, track 9 of 13, we are deep inside the head of Prince Be and/or his fictional narrator. Our guy, in “Set Adrift,” is tripping exactly on hearing the Spandau Ballet song, which sets him spinning off on memory associations. I know how this goes—it’s a vivid experience that can still occur for me with pop music radio hits. Of the Heart, unwieldy long title and all, has always hit me as psychedelic, maybe just because the person at the center of it feels both real and disconnected from reality, set adrift in his own world. The lofty ambition of the title is absurd but sincere and thus affecting. The anguish is here but measured and precise, funneled into the flow of a larger utopian experience, which somehow feels all the more real for being so unreal, inside this guy’s head.

Terrifier (2016)

USA, 85 minutes

Director / writer / editor: Damien Leone

Photography: George Steuber

Music: Paul Wiley

Cast: David Howard Thornton, Jenna Kanell, Samantha Scaffidi, Catherine Corcoran, Pooya Mohseni, Matt McAllister

My lifelong general policy on sequels—don’t ever, ever bother with them—does not help very much with franchises nowadays, arguably including the whole 16 years and counting Marvel universe. The Terrifier franchise, a canny mix of bitterly sardonic humor and extreme violence, is a good example. It starts with a 20-minute short from 2011, also called Terrifier and also featuring Art the Clown (and also available in the 2013 All Hallows’ Eve anthology picture by director and writer Damien Leone). That short provides a good overture and stake in the ground for what’s to come. Or so I presume because, full disclosure, my gorge rose basically as far as I could stand with this one and I invoked my sequel rules out of fear of what I’ll find in Terrifier 2 (2022, which got good reviews from people who like it better) and Terrifier 3 (2024 and now playing in theaters).

Art the Clown is not exactly a mime, but he never speaks. He is more like Charles Chaplin, using mincing gestures and exaggerated facial expressions to communicate—and, mostly, in his case, to terrify. Which he does quite effectively. He is terrifying and gross and powerful. His unsettling appearance pitches in to the melee with thick black lines of makeup and that stupid cockeyed hat. There is some uncertainty for most of this picture about whether he is just another fictional serial killer in the movies wearing a costume or something perhaps more supernatural. There is no uncertainty about his brutality. One particular scene here, more or less the centerpiece of the picture even though it occurs relatively early, really merits content warnings. Pay attention to them and to your limits because this movie can be very unpleasant.

“The Saint” (1981)

There is no way I don’t like this story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, published originally in 1981 and translated into English in 1993. Part of me wants to register the wannabe literary note that crops up among horror anthology editors. I found this story in a Year’s Best anthology for 1994, which means by the logic of these things stories published in ’93. It’s edited by the durable team of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. This particular story is a Windling pick. With that note registered, I must say with Windling (and Datlow too, no doubt) that Garcia Marquez is always a pure pleasure to read and I don’t know how this story doesn’t stand as horror or weird or fantasy at least, for which “magic realism” anyway might just be an alternate spelling. Setting aside the multiple frames and filters—that’s the literary part, of course—it’s about a guy who, because the cemetery is being moved, has to dig up the corpses of his wife, who died giving birth, and his daughter who died at age 7, 11 years earlier. He discovers his daughter’s body has not decomposed. His wife, by comparison, is “dust.” The flowers in his daughter’s hand that she was buried with are still alive and smell sweet. Also her body weighs nothing now. Lots of good details here. It is obviously a miracle, she deserves to be canonized as a saint, and, because the father has nothing else to live for, he packs it / her into a cello case and leaves Colombia for Rome to meet with the pope. The story is told by someone who met the Colombian in Rome while he (the narrator) was in film school—film school! In Rome! Everyone who sees the corpse of the daughter is impressed, but comically dozens of others are also in Rome seeking sainthood for their own non-decomposed corpses. As Garcia Marquez, or the film school narrator guy, describes it, most of the other corpses are more like mummified. This case—come on, the flowers are still alive. She weighs nothing. Go ahead, put her on a scale. The Colombian stays in Rome for 22 years, seeking audience with four different imaginary popes. The film school narrator guy left Rome long ago and is back for some reason and happens to run into the Colombian. The story is full of memories of Rome when they met, the strange case of the Colombian’s daughter, and just sort of all the wonder and pathos of life. Garcia Marquez is so good it’s no wonder horror editors want to claim him for fantasy literature. In many ways it is where he belongs, though his stories even more are about the sensory joys and mysteries of being alive and sentient.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Strange Pilgrims
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
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