Strangers on a Train (1951)

USA, 101 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writers: Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde, Whitfield Cook, Patricia Highsmith, Ben Hecht

Photography: Robert Burks

Music: Dimitri Tiomkin

Editor: William H. Ziegler

Cast: Robert Walker, Farley Granger, Patricia Hitchcock, Kasey Rogers, Marion Lorne, Ruth Roman, Leo G. Carroll, Howard St. John, Jonathan Hale

In director Alfred Hitchcock’s rogue’s gallery pantheon of woman-hating psychopaths—which includes at least Joseph Cotten as Charlie Oakley in Shadow of a Doubt, Robert Walker as Bruno Antony here in Strangers on a Train, and Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho—Walker is not to be underestimated or taken for granted. I would not put him last in any stack-ranking and might put him first. Everyone knows the story in Strangers on a Train from the Sonic Youth song “Shadow of a Doubt”: “Met a stranger on a train / ... He said / ‘You take me and I’ll be you’ / ‘You kill him and I’ll kill her.’” Tennis player Guy Haines (Farley Granger) becomes the target of convenience in Antony’s plot for the perfect murder(s). Antony wants to rid himself of his judgmental tycoon father and save his inheritance too. He offers to kill Haines’s troublesome wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers, billed as Laura Elliott), who won’t give him a divorce now that she knows he’s involved with a senator’s daughter. Miriam is also pregnant by another man. Antony says his plan is perfect because no one can connect the murderers to their victims. Haines, who has indeed just met Antony on a train, takes it as an unpleasant joke and thinks no more of it. Then Miriam turns up dead, strangled to death in a lover’s lane near an amusement park. And now Haines begins hearing from Antony about what he needs to know to murder Antony’s father.

Miriam is killed surprisingly quickly, almost as soon as the idea comes up—barely 20 minutes into the movie. It’s practically a shock to the system. Miriam and the amusement park and the two men she is on a date with are lurid and wanton and the whole scene seems made to order for murder if not orgies of violence. Once the deed is done the boom increasingly lowers on Haines, who doesn’t know how to get out of the mess and instinctively tries to hide that he knows Antony at all—which of course does not work. Antony has ways, as a D.C. party scene shows, of insinuating himself into the life of Haines and the senator’s family. Granger plays Haines like a cornered rat, sweating and licking his lips in anxiety and trying to square the various points of guilt that are hemming him in. Inevitably the movie ends up back at the amusement park, whose ambience has not improved any.

“The Machine Demands a Sacrifice” (1972)

This story by the ever-restless Dennis Etchison might be more science fiction than horror, though it’s certainly horrific. In the future, in Los Angeles, freelancers cruise for deaths among the auto accidents of heavy traffic, hunting body organs to sell. Policemen, called COPters, patrol from above in jetpacks somehow built into their nightsticks. The “COPter” neologism reminds me of Philip K. Dick and the story does too. As usual, Etchison’s setting is a strong part of the story. Here it is Los Angeles traffic—freeways full of cars that wait minutes to travel feet, and the web of arterials that feed them. We see one freelance team commit a heinous murder to get to the product, and Etchison even notices that the victims are Black, using racism to jack up the horror a little more. It’s good stuff, although, ever since the urban legend (waking in a strange hotel bathtub with a terrible wound in your side), criminal organ harvesting has been somewhat overplayed as an idea (even if your story was written before that market opened up). And it’s arguable that the Phildickian aspects ultimately work against the story. On paper, it shouldn’t be as good as it is. Maybe I like it more than some other Etchison stories because it’s direct rather than allusive or suggestive. I wouldn’t call it restrained and, in a way—perhaps paradoxically, and perhaps I’ll change my mind—I’m saying that’s a virtue. The crime it depicts is horrible. It makes clear what a horrible world this is. Maybe that’s too black and white? I couldn’t find much about it on the internet, which suggests it’s not considered among his best. And that’s fair enough. The science fiction trappings are probably a net negative. On aesthetic grounds “restrained” probably still wins the day. But I liked Etchison’s effortless turn to the soul-eating traffic jam. Even in 1972 he obviously knew that scene well. I also like Etchison’s Southern California roots, this seems like a good time to say. He’s like the Beach Boys—maybe he didn’t surf and all that, but he knows the landscape intimately—psychic, cultural, and otherwise. Now that I think about it, the title is also Phildickian, which does make sense for 1972 California. Etchison remains an intriguing problem in horror for me. I don’t always know why his stories work, but they often do.

Dennis Etchison, Talking in the Dark
Story not available online.

The Green Ripper (1979)

I was sure I could randomly pick up any Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald and find unpleasant scenes of diabolical sexual assault and murder, because that was my experience when I was reading them in the ‘80s. But this was my second in recent times where it didn’t happen. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong or maybe I’m tougher or maybe this is related somehow to my “best travis mcgee novels” google search? I might try a couple more and see how it goes. I’m not unhappy with this result. MacDonald and his McGee novels are very popular among fans of mystery and detective fiction and with good reason. MacDonald is good at doing this. But the rapey qualities drove me away so I’m enjoying what I have while I’ve got it. This one starts with a girlfriend dying suddenly. It’s another of MacDonald’s glowing Man and Woman relationships. One shtick in the series is that McGee is a bit of a white knight for the ladies. It’s typically heroic heterosexual sex out of the Hugh Hefner mold. I have no idea whether Gretel appears in previous novels. McGee gets around. In his defense, he may feel a little smarmy, but he always seems to deliver the noble sex of dignity and gentle care. I’ve heard these affairs described as the “sexual healing” part of the story. No raping for McGee though he lives in a world full of it. But revenge—that’s another story. Revenge he will do. Once he finds out Gretel was murdered by poison, not done in by disease, he is on the case. It leads down byzantine corridors until he finds himself in a training camp for Christian terrorists. “The Green Ripper” is a private joke with Gretel, a mangling of “the Grim Reaper.” It is here solely to get the color word into the title for the series’ ridiculous titling scheme. This is the 18th McGee novel of 21, so it’s near the end, which came with MacDonald’s death in 1986. The Green Ripper is a bit rote but pulls us right along, with few slow patches and little to distract by way of plausibility, although that’s more a personal call. I didn’t miss the various plot conveniences, but I didn’t mind them either. YMMV. A lot depends on what you think of MacDonald. I know he’s got nasty stuff out there, it just wasn’t in the two I looked at. He’s good enough I may read on. But I don’t trust him yet either.

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

La Llorona (2019)

La Llorona is a ghost out of Mexican folklore that hangs out, by reputation, near bodies of water, howling and mourning for her drowned children. There are lots of versions of the story and how the children came to be drowned and actually there are even lots of movies too, going all the way back at least to a 1933 La Llorona, a Mexican picture. Lately there has been a spate of them, perhaps connected to an appearance in Pixar’s Coco of the Mexican folk song about the business, “La Llorona.” Wikipedia details a specifically Guatemalan version of the La Llorona story so it shouldn’t be a surprise that a Guatemalan, director and cowriter Jayro Bustamante, stepped up with his own take. It made the rounds of film festivals a few years ago and remains worth a look. This version of the tale takes an interesting political bent, with a former dictator who has been forced from office, brought to trial for genocide and convicted, and then his sentence commuted by the country’s supreme court. No doubt they were more interested in looking forward, not backward. This dictator figure, played by Julio Diaz, is called Enrique Monteverde here, but he is based on the real-life Guatemalan dictator in 1982 and 1983, Efraín Ríos Montt, who faced his own charges of war crimes and genocide. The movie takes place soon after his conviction has been set aside, when Montaverde and his family (wife, daughter, granddaughter, servants, and security) repair to their home where they are virtual prisoners. The action is mostly interior but constantly punctuated by chants and calls from the crowds that gather daily to protest him. Sometimes they throw stones and break windows. The swimming pool is strewn with wanted posters for him, tossed over the fence. Even most of the servants have given up and taken off. But the need for servants is still there and one day a woman shows up ready to work, and with experience—Alma, played by an otherworldly Maria Mercedes Coroy. Later her credentials turn out to be falsified but she’s in the household by then. This La Llorona skillfully blends the horrors and depredations of Latin American death squads and repressive right-wing regimes with the La Llorona legend. Julio Diaz is nearly perfect as Monteverde, still a monster after all these years, with a little bristly mustache, an omnipresent sidearm, and bottomless horndog notions. I admit this La Llorona feels a bit like a film festival usual suspect, but don’t hold that against it.

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978)

The second novel by William Kennedy in his Albany cycle turns on a plot point I also noticed in Legs: kidnapping. I just didn’t realize it was so common. I thought the whole Lindbergh baby thing was kind of a one-off. In fact, this novel is based on an actual case, per Wikipedia an “attempted 1933 kidnapping of John O’Connell Jr., the nephew of Albany Democratic boss Daniel P. O’Connell.” The Wikipedia article also notes, “The kidnapping is the central point of the story, but Kennedy also details the everyday lives of the characters inhabiting Albany’s working class and poor neighborhoods.” Just so, Billy Phelan and Martin Daugherty, an Albany reporter, feel more like side characters, as does the kidnapping story. Albany itself is beginning to emerge as the main player. Kennedy must have already had a trilogy in mind when he wrote this. He says as much in an introduction to An Albany Trio, relating that he needed to tell the Legs Diamond story before this one, and this one before the next, Ironweed, which by itself you may recall won a lot of prizes and such. Legs felt like a self-contained fictionalized biography—and a highly entertaining one—but this felt more like setup and transition, made out of the Albany color in 1938. Which worked fine as such but also very much like a second part in many series, so busy laying groundwork and developing backstory that it practically forgets to include a main narrative arc. Billy Phelan’s career as a low-level gambling hustler bore some interest. Martin Daugherty’s story seemed more cliché as a slightly ignorant, slightly idealist columnist for a daily paper. I have no idea why Martin’s father’s story is here, nor for that matter Billy’s father’s story, which is also here but not at such length. For reasons, no doubt. More will be revealed. The usual things with series. None of it had much of anything to do with the kidnapping story either. Quibble, quibble. Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and Ironweed are short enough they can be contained in a single trade paperback of 600 pages. They are eminently readable and enjoyable even when they are confusing. Kennedy is just that good of a writer. This second one in the Albany series is probably informative for the bigger picture but not truly a stand-alone, the ways Legs is and Ironweed might be. But I’m happy to read on. I even have the fourth and fifth installments on hand (Quinn’s Book and Very Old Bones).

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.
William Kennedy, An Albany Trio

19. Isaac Hayes, Hot Buttered Soul (1969) – “Walk On By”

Isaac Hayes came up originally in the ‘60s as an influential songwriter at the Memphis-based Stax label, cowriting “Soul Man” which became a hit for Sam & Dave in 1967. Later he struck big with the score for the 1971 blaxploitation picture Shaft. In between his soul was psychedelicized and he delivered up a stone classic in Hot Buttered Soul, which he followed with two more albums similar in intent and strategy (The Isaac Hayes Movement and ... To Be Continued)—that is, approximately two songs per albums side, covers of well-known pop songs, and running times that approached and often sailed by the double-digit minutes mark. “Walk On By” is the place to start—it's conveniently first on the LP too. For the most part it’s the place I’ve stayed. This mighty 12-minute cover of the Bacharach-David standard, originally recorded by Dionne Warwick. takes your heart away and explodes with delicious noise. From the opening it’s easy to see the plan—the notes are longer, the tempo slower, there appears to be a sawing orchestra on hand swelling up at the big moments. Guesting Funkadelic alum Harold Beane and his vicious fuzz-toned guitar lead a march to the glorious entry of Hayes’s vocal, a rumbling mumble sorely beset by the vicissitudes and pompatus of love. It goes way down deep as he opens up every bit of the agony. It’s your beloved one and all you can do is hope they will just pretend they don’t know you. “You put the hurt on me,” he moans, getting to the point. (“when you said it,” the chick singers sing) “You socked it to me, mama. When you said goodbye.” (wail wail) Warwick made it work dramatically, even though the production on her more upbeat version is buoyed by gently puffing horns and sweet strings. Hayes takes it another direction and I have never heard the song again in the same way, however indelible Warwick’s version is (and it is—it is Hayes’s genius to recognize that it is). On the flip side of Hot Buttered Soul Hayes tries repeating the trick: Jimmy Webb’s beautiful “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” here clocking in at 18 minutes. I swear Hayes holds down a single uninterrupted organ chord for the first half of it, and the subsequent release and finally getting into something like a song is liberating and revelatory, a brilliant moment. But 18 minutes is a little long for that payoff. The rest of Hot Buttered Soul— a tender ballad, “One Woman,” and the playful "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" riffing on Mary Poppins syllables—can be taken or dispensed with at will.

Songs From the Second Floor (2000)

Sånger från andra våningen, Sweden / Norway / Denmark / France / Germany, 98 minutes

Director/writer/editor: Roy Andersson

Photography: Istvan Borbas, Jesper Klevenas

Music: Benny Andersson

Cast: Lars Nordh, Sten Andersson, Stefan Larsson, Torbjorn Fahlstrom, Lucio Vucina, Hanna Eriksson, Peter Roth, Tommy Johansson, Sture Olsson

As I get deeper into the aggregated critical roundup list of best 21st-century movies over at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? I find more and more movies and filmmakers that are new to me. A lot of them are generally more difficult than my perhaps entertainment-oriented values would like (hi Holy Motors, hi Tabu, hi Colossal Youth). I know now that Ari Aster, for one (and his mother too), has very high regard for Swedish director, writer, and editor Roy Andersson. But I had never really heard of Andersson in any meaningful way until the last year or two, when Songs From the Second Floor made a chart leap, up from several years in the range of #57 to #73 to its present position of #41. A friend (Steven Rubio aka Mon-Sewer Paul Regret) posted a review last fall that allowed Songs might be for others, but it wasn’t for him. Based on that, I put off looking at it for a first time last year, hoping it would fall again out of my reach. But no.

Thus I came to Songs with rock-bottom expectations (and this won’t be the last time this year!). Terms like “absurdist” and “existential” associated with Songs and Andersson did not help. But low expectations can sometimes be your friend if you can still bring yourself to look at something. Songs From the Second Floor is a loosely connected series of vignettes made out of single shots of long scenes that are indeed absurd. A stage magician starts to saw a volunteer from the audience in half—wounds him, actually. A parade of performative self-flagellants playing in the background of scenes creates a traffic jam that lasts for eight hours and more. A passenger choir on the subway erupts in song, like flash mobs can do now. A man has a son he says was driven insane by writing poetry. At least these scenes often have the virtue of being funny.

“Reflections” (1974)

Angela Carter is a dense prose stylist. This story, formally a kind of M.C. Escher exercise, gets to strange places. The first-person narrator is taking a walk in the woods—his voice feels to me more like a woman, but he is a young man. He hears the singing of a bird, then the singing of a woman. His reverie is interrupted when he trips on something, which turns out to be a seashell. “A shell so far from the sea!” It’s very big and also the pattern of whorls on it goes the wrong way, our first clue that we are inside some mirror world. The singing young woman has a gun and shoots at him. She sics her “enormous black dog” on him. She forces him at gunpoint to an ”ancient brick house” surrounded by a magnificent walled garden. Wikipedia, via ISFDB, summarizes: “A boy goes on a Through the Looking-Glass-like adventure into a bizarre, reversed world. He encounters an elderly woman who is actually a hermaphrodite, and is raped by a girl in a forest before ultimately escaping.” That’s about it all right. The girl’s name is Anna, a palindrome. Everything in this world is reversed or reversible. Perhaps the androgyne represents a kind of balance between the two worlds. Here’s a typical Carter sentence, during the rape of the narrator: “I shouted and swore but the shell grotto in which she ravished me did not reverberate and I only emitted gobs of light.” What would the reverse look like, one wonders. By this time our guy is aware he is in a mirror world. He takes Anna’s gun and shoots her. He knows where the mirror portal is and intends to escape. The androgyne, I should mention because I’m sure it means something, if not everything, seems to spend all their time knitting prodigiously. Attempting to put it all together, the story has much the feel of dreams in the retelling (and rereading by fragments). Carter is one to read almost like poetry, slowly and carefully, savoring and pondering its raw ways. It’s at least as weird as, and maybe even better than, the Lewis Carroll tale. I know that’s saying something but also I have always found the classic Carroll tales slightly oversold.

Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
Story not available online.

If Morning Ever Comes (1964)

Anne Tyler’s first novel was published when she was 22, which is impressive in itself. She had not yet discovered Baltimore—this is set in North Caroliina, where she was raised. Many of the elements we associate with Tyler are here, but not yet quite in focus. It’s about a big family of misfits and emotionally wounded. Some tend toward the isolated eccentric brooders she would later sharpen to a fine edge. Others are the natural healers and binding elements of families, dysfunctional by nature but, again, not quite as sharply drawn. In fact, many of her characters here tend toward more undifferentiated blends of these two favored Tyler types. The Hawkes family is big—six girls and one boy, Ben Joe. Ben Joe (not to be confused with banjo) is 25 and has just started law school at Columbia, but he worries about his family living in the small town of Sandhill, North Carolina. It’s November and he skips a week of school to take the train down to visit them. Various antics ensue. His older sister left her husband in Kansas and has shown up in Sandhill with her baby. Their father was a doctor who kept a mistress and died of a heart attack at her place. Their mother is bitter and depressed. Their grandmother is kooky. Tyler would get much better with kooky characters. The other five sisters have some distinguishing traits—two are twins, Jenny is on the road to becoming isolated and eccentric—but they’re more like a blob of sisters. It’s a very short novel, which is part of the problem. Tyler has a good reason for the family to be big but there’s little time to detail them all. I read this in my first flush of infatuation with Tyler (ca. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist) and was disappointed. I was better prepared for it this time and enjoyed it for what it is, a pretty good novel by a young writer with lots of potential and limited life experience. Tyler got better with seasoning but she was always a natural at novels, learning the craft early. If Morning Ever Comes is strictly for Tyler completists. It’s not her best by a fair shot but it’s not her worst either. Don’t ask me what her worst is. I like them all even if just a little.

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

Women Talking (2022)

Star-studded Women Talking has a kind of twist on the familiar “based on a true story” cliche of a lot of topical movies. It is based on a novel, Women Talking by Miriam Toews, which in turn is based on real events—or, as Toews puts it, is “an imagined response to real events.” Those real events took place in a conservative Bolivian Mennonite community and have been dubbed the “Bolivian Mennonite gas-facilitated rapes.” These rapes took place between 2005 and 2009 and involved a group of men who sprayed a sedative intended for animals into the windows of houses, later taking advantage of the passed-out women, girls, and children. Their confirmed victims numbered 151. The movie is pretty much as the title advertises. These women or their loved ones have been assaulted. Lately a man has been caught at it, which has finally explained all the incidents of women waking to clear physical evidence of an assault (including pregnancies) but no memory of it. Now they are meeting clandestinely—Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand, Judith Ivey, Emily Mitchell, and more—to decide what to do next. They formally vote on their three choices: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The first is eliminated and the debate circles around the latter two. It’s mostly talking, but there are many uncomfortable flashbacks. Sarah Polley directs and cowrites (I realized later I had confused her with Sarah Paulson). It’s Polley’s fourth feature and her first in 10 years. While it is easy to make conservative religious groups like Mennonites out to be rife with such problems, blaming it on sexual repression, that’s partly because these things predictably happen over and over. Does anyone still think celibacy is a good idea for Catholic priests? Has anyone noticed that Southern Baptists are presently laboring under a major such crisis? Look it up. The strength of this movie is its focus literally on women talking—talking out the issues, the violence of men, their attachments to men, the difficulty of starting a new community, the line to draw for bringing their sons. They finally settle on under age 15—me, I’d go a little lower. The picture is somewhat plodding and talky, but that’s also the intention. I have a hard time sympathizing with people who can’t quit the religion that is actively harming them—Stockholm syndrome, anyone?—but I also believe everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. Groups like those in this movie challenge me on the latter point, but I think the picture is worth seeing for its distinctly feminist and/or even feminine approach to conflict resolution.

“Indian Camp” (1924)

This story brings us to the somewhat confusing welter of the In Our Time collection featuring Nick Adams, with its multiple versions and quasi-sense of being more than just a collection of short stories, on the order of some kind of interconnected cycle. My version (from the Finca Vigia Complete edition) is prefaced by a single paragraph labeled “Chapter 1” with a war scene. One of these vignettes shows up between every story. I’m more prone to take the stories as standalones and the vignettes as unrelated prose poetry flourishes. “Indian Camp” is very short and very good. It’s the first appearance of Nick Adams, seen here in Michigan as a kid. He is accompanying his father, a doctor, on a late-night call. The occasion is a problem childbirth for a Native American woman. The baby is coming out feet first and ultimately the doctor has to perform a caesarean using a jackknife and no anesthetic. The husband, meanwhile, in the upper bunk, has killed himself by slashing his own throat. He’s not discovered until after the birth. There’s blood everywhere. The brutality here surprised me, but what is perhaps more surprising is that little about it feels overdone. It comes close, and some might disagree. The suicide was particularly gruesome. The doctor hurries Nick out of the cabin, sorry now that he brought him. In general, the story is racist toward Native Americans, but more by way of ignorance than hate. Certainly Nick is getting a life lesson out of this—about life and death, about men and women, about whites and minorities and the realities of poverty. It’s Nick’s point of view through the story. Much of the focus is on the father and son relationship as the father provides a stream of soothing explanations about the situation, at least until the point when it becomes clear what he has to do. We learn about the jackknife in a conversational aside later. Hemingway’s self-serious tone works well here. The best Hemingway—even including some of the vignettes—bears a sense of dismay and devastation, as if captured at the moment innocence is shattered. He often seems to prize stoicism above all else in the face of calamity, but it’s apparent he’s trying to protect the side of himself that believes in the goodness of humanity and life. As must we all. At the same time, a more cynical side of him appears to believe everything is worth nothing, and thus the basic internal conflict of Hemingway. He is just starting to discover it in these Nick Adams stories from In Our Time, which can be gripping, vital, and immediate. The suicide here may be a slightly false note, reaching too far to make an impact, but it’s not hard for me to believe these events could have all happened just this way. The story is shocking but poignant and altogether done well.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

20. Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow (1967) – “Somebody to Love,” “White Rabbit”

[2010 review of “White Rabbit” here.]

In high school daze we all seemed to have Jefferson Airplane albums and among us we had close to a complete collection. I owned After Bathing at Baxter’s and Crown of Creation—also Volunteers, which I never cared much for. Someone even had Bless Its Pointed Little Head, and a few had Surrealistic Pillow, which even then seemed to be considered best by the general consensus. I admit I spent most of my life doubting that until I arrived at this project and put in some time listening systematically. I loved Creation and Baxter’s, and I still swear by them, but what they don’t have are the songs “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.” They are a certain ne plus ultra of psychedelic pop chart artistry. Yes, the turn to Ravel’s Bolero in “White Rabbit” is arch but the drama is carried off well. It burns and scratches and builds like a drug trip. Grace Slick never sounded better; she wrote it and she sings the hell out of it. Both are under three minutes. “White Rabbit” is closer to two and a half. It was the only song that could have worked in the bathtub scene in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (the book, not the movie). It’s a sensible way to die, if you have to die—at the climax of “White Rabbit.” I would even listen to arguments that everything you want to hear in psychedelic music is captured in “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.” But in other news, Surrealistic Pillow otherwise has merely the quixotic and typical virtues and problems associated with a band with multiple songwriters with multiple agendas. Grace Slick wrote “White Rabbit.” Her former brother-in-law Darby Slick wrote “Somebody to Love” when they were both in the Great Society, a forerunner to Jefferson Airplane. Marty Balin is involved in five songs on Surrealistic Pillow, Paul Kantner in two, Jorma Kaukonen two, and Skip Spence chips in one. They’re not bad, sincere ballads mixed up with various folky strains and goofs, but the songs on Crown of Creation are better. There is also, on a 2003 reissue of Surrealistic Pillow, a very nice six-minute blues workup written by Kaukonen, “In the Morning,” which is not to be missed and would have been a good album closer on the original release.

The Terminator (1984)

UK / USA, 107 minutes

Director: James Cameron

Writers: James Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd, William Wisher

Photography: Adam Greenberg

Music: Brad Fiedel, Tryanglz

Editor: Mark Goldblatt

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Earl Boen, Bess Motta

It had been a long time since I’d seen a Terminator movie—and, full disclosure, I’ve only seen the first two (of six, not counting TV, video games, action figures, and other treatments)—so I wasn’t entirely sure what I would be getting into these 40 years later. As I recall, the first sequel, from 1991, was the better picture. And sure enough, this 1984 original puts an impossibly young Arnold Schwarzenegger into a thriller milieu that is at least 80% 1980s cheese. Even the projected dystopian future of 2029, a wrecked war zone with deadly purple rays and other high-tech war gadgetry going pew-pew-pew, seemed faintly rinky-dink. Meanwhile, in 1984, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and her big-hair best friend Ginger (Bess Motta) are grooving to walkmans and the relatively newfound portability of music. Can’t stop, won’t stop—which means they don’t always hear the dangers coming down. Let’s not even get into the rockin’ soundtrack by Tryanglz, whoever that is. Was 1984 the most ‘80s year of all? I know there’s a theory it was the best year all-time in pop music. Tryanglz is not evidence for it.

In spite of the many dated aspects, The Terminator remains relatively good entertainment (even if the sequel might be better). It has an intriguing science fiction / time travel premise, based on the oldest chestnut in the books, about going back in time to kill your grandfather. But that means—I couldn’t be alive—to kill him—he never died—so I was born, but— Don’t think about it too much because the paradoxes will make your brain hurt. Oh, wait, it’s a whole franchise later now, and the many zigs have profoundly zagged. The fact of the matter is that The Terminator is closer to Beverly Hills Cop and The French Connection, in terms of what it is, than to heady science fiction like Blade Runner or 2001. What it is is lots of gunplay, lots of car chases, and a light dusting of sci-fi. Action, baby. As a movie, The Terminator notably loves guns to the point of fetish. Everyone has different models of automatic weapons and shotguns, sawed-off and otherwise, with fancy laser attachments and such. Later there will be pipe bombs. Let the ordnance fly!

“The Events at Poroth Farm” (1972)

My first foray into T.E.D. Klein is this long story which Klein reworked with variations and later developed into a novel, The Ceremonies. Often classified as cosmic horror, and thus duly under influence of H.P. Lovecraft (perhaps even making a bid for place in the Cthulhu universe), it also has some of the smooth smarty-pants style of Ray Russell in his gothic mode. “The Events at Poroth Farm” is presented as an affidavit that incorporates a summer’s worth of journal entries, when our narrator repaired to the deep New Jersey countryside to study. So it also takes a classic epistolary approach of horror. Our guy is some kind of academic specializing in early gothic and horror literature. Among other things he can’t stop talking about what he is reading, and I can’t stop jotting down the titles: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (1794), The Monk by Matthew Gregory (1796), Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin (1820), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Arthur Machen’s “White People” (1904), The Lost Traveller by Ruthven Todd (1943), and many more. You should see the reading list you get just from this story. The narrator is renting an outbuilding at a remote farm owned by a couple who belong to a Mennonite sect. The couple, Sarr and Deborah Poroth, are religious but they are often surprisingly more sophisticated than might be expected. They like to drink, though they know the church frowns on it. Meanwhile, our guy is phobic about insects and especially spiders, attacking them with strong toxic chemicals. The mildew keeps climbing the exterior of his building. Giant white moths flap at his screens, obscured by ivy. The Poroth couple are in their 30s, with no children, but they love cats and have seven of them. This also seemed to me to mark them as more urban. They both also attended college. It’s an ANTI-Lovecraft story in one way because his beloved cats, particularly a specific one, are the source of all the evil that transpires. But it’s not the cat, it’s the god-like being passing through the cat and inhabiting others as well. Klein manages it pretty well, with a slow but inexorable build-up of terrible things and tension. This is so good I’m almost afraid to look at the rewrites. It also appears to be Klein’s first publication, an auspicious start. He didn’t write a lot and he generally favored long stories. I’m looking forward to reading more.

A Century of Horror 1970-1979, ed. David Drake
Listen to story online.

“A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” (1974)

This story by Philip K. Dick is the last story in The Dark Descent. So I finished it, huzzah! Editor David G. Hartwell often reached beyond horror in the oversize anthology—sometimes to a fault, e.g., Faulkner, Turgenev—so ending on Dick is not a big surprise. He argues for science fiction horror writing: “Bodies of work from such writers as Dick and [Gene] Wolfe and [Thomas] Disch ... demand the broadening of the older definitions of horror literature, and require discarding criteria based on content in favor of the effect itself.” I think a Dick story from the ‘50s, “The Hanging Stranger,” makes an even stronger case for him as a horror writer, but there’s no reason this can’t be a “both/and” situation, at least in principle. “Tempunauts” is a time travel story that takes the Apollo moon mission as a model. A crew of three “tempunauts” has been hurled 100 years into the future in a launch attended by media frenzy. But, in fact, something went wrong and they traveled into the future only a few days. They soon learn they perished on their return from the future. These various paradoxes somehow mean they have thrown themselves and possibly the world or even universe into a closed time loop that is eternal. A successful reentry would break the loop. I’m not sure I understand how they know these things, even that they are in a loop at all. The reentry has failed and we come to learn it’s the result of sabotage by one of the tempunauts in order to (per Wikipedia) “find resolution in death and close the time-loop, freezing all of humanity, and possibly the whole universe, in endless repetition of a single week.” At one time, when I was a kid, time travel was my favorite SF idiom, but these days honestly the paradoxes can just put me on overload. I like Dick’s storytelling skills but the ambiguities here are a bit arch for science fiction, let alone horror. It seems to be an irrational act on the part of the tempunaut. He learns they die because of the reentry and that it’s because of sabotage and he even speculates a closed time loop may exist. But he has a choice not to sabotage the return and does so anyway. The problem I had was that it wasn’t entirely clear while I was reading. I thought that’s what was going on, but it seemed perverse and unmotivated. It’s a chilling enough idea, like horror should be, but it’s also at way too many removes for me. So the anthology ends on a curiosity, but there’s still another edited by Hartwell and nearly as big, Foundations of Fear. Look forward to getting into that.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Altered Reality (2024)

In Altered Reality, the reality that is altered is only the movie’s artificial reality, a tongue-in-cheek noir melodrama thriller, with time travel and “Jack” (Lance Henriksen), who is kind of a science fiction ghost, living outside time as we understand it. For him it’s a flat circle. I think that’s how Billy Pilgrim tried to describe it too? Jack is likewise unstuck in time (not the movie’s term). Then there are the noir folks, starting with the Cook family, Oliver (Charles Agron) and Caroline (Alyona Khmara) and a young daughter who disappears tout de suite. Tragic. There’s a whole drippy sentimental thing about how the Cook family goes to a park called Spring Manor twice a year. That’s where Jack hangs out and Oliver often goes looking for him when he’s there. Jack is like an old family friend to Oliver. Oliver doesn’t understand why Jack doesn’t age. Spring Manor is where the daughter disappeared. There’s also Oliver’s business manager, Cooper Mason (Tobin Bell), and the femme fatale he picks up—or more like picks him up—Alex Parker (Krista Dane King). She is a very sexy and terrible person. I liked the gently mocking tone enough to stick around but I was honestly expecting something a lot more trippy given the title, something more like Brainstorm maybe. I kept waiting for the reality to alter, but the only things that changed were history as per certain time travel story rules, though admittedly it’s an impressive plot point. Henriksen is great as a grizzled seen-it-all eternal being—hits all the right notes. Agron is good too playing tormented good-guy Oliver with a certain gullibility. I spent part of his scenes wondering if that was actually his forehead or a prosthetic. He is a great genius, you see. The details are there to be discovered—the picture has some neat surprises. I definitely got some Alfred Hitchcock vibe circa Vertigo out of this. The music by Andrew Morgan Smith seemed to be going for something like that or even Psycho in some of the duller patches. The movie is not boring—the dull patches are like the dull patches in many noirs. They occupy space. Sometimes they add to the suspense. You sit there and watch. I cannot recommend Altered Reality whole-heartedly but it’s an interesting curiosity, somewhat reminiscent of Choose Me.

“The Stolen White Elephant” (1882)

Mark Twain sets his sights on cliches of detective fiction, even before Sherlock Holmes was around to explain everything. “The Stolen White Elephant” is obvious and probably longer than it needs to be, but I think it still works. Humor pieces are so hit and miss, among the hardest to do, that you can’t ever guarantee anything for anyone about them. Perhaps I should be less critical of the various miscues because he can also be pretty good at this. The case involves a white elephant that is a gift from Siam to Queen Victoria. The storyteller accompanied the elephant on the voyage, which for some reason requires a layover in New York. The elephant is put up in New Jersey but stolen in due order. Thus begins the investigation and the parody. First, a detailed description of the elephant is required by police investigators. It’s not enough that the elephant is white and an elephant. One of their questions, for example, is “Parents living?” A team of detectives descends on the case, all with many different theories. The side of the barn where the elephant was kept has been destroyed, but none of the detectives think that’s how the elephant was taken. Most of them, in fact, think the broken-down wall is a ruse intended to distract them. And so forth. They refuse to believe anything credible but eventually find the carcass of the beast. And yet, even still, some of them stay on the case. One tracks footprints across the North American continent into Canada. He’s still working the case as the story ends, reporting in from the road. So that’s how it goes. Twain is once again mocking literature, but this time it’s mystery fiction instead of Romantic literature, his usual hobbyhorse. He is prolix about it. It’s another era and a much slower pace. And he’s obvious, for example with the cretinous police demanding a detailed description of a white elephant. But this piece does go on a long time. Every good comic element is protracted and tortured within an inch. I’d still call it a good one. Twain’s voice carries it when nothing else does. He often stays in character well and the jokes land because it can all be so deadpan. Worth remembering for any dips into Twain you may be contemplating.

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

21. Demon Fuzz, Afreaka! (1970)

I did not catch up with the strange and wonderful Demon Fuzz and their only LP Afreaka! during the classic psychedelic period of 1966 to 1970. They came up for me instead in this century, during the short-lived (too short!) downloading era. But I knew what I had right away—jazz-rock with horns and a potent voodoo drone at the bottom, driving relentlessly. Details online about the band still seem scarce. The members moved to London in the ‘60s from otherwise mostly unspecified “Commonwealth countries,” which I take to be remnants of the UK empire. The band’s name has something to do with police brutality. At least one principal, Paddy Corea (saxes, flute, vibes, congas), is from “the Caribbean.” Indeed, they may all have been from the West Indies originally, but there’s little about the band that sounds like calypso, ska, or reggae. Instead, their self-declared primary influences, from a sort of crossroads trip the band took, come from Morocco. I can also hear strains of an obscure British jazz-rock band I did know circa 1971, named If—that’s mostly in the horn arrangements and the way they are fitted against a rock band. “Another Country” is typical of what Demon Fuzz is selling. It’s over eight minutes long and starts with a bit of horn-driven throat clearing and some verse-chorus sing-songy pastiche (Smokey Adams gets the vocals credit). At about 2:20, it settles into its methodical monster groove of choice. The tempo slows, bassist Sleepy Jack Joseph plays a simple hypnotic figure. Ray Rhoden plays an uninterrupted chord on the organ, quiet but forceful. Corea takes out his sax and cobbles up a solo—it’s jazz, but the droning bottom carries the mood, somber, exalted, alluring, menacing, beatific. On the album opener “Past, Present, and Future” (9:56) they get down to business even more quickly. And they carry on similarly all over—“Hymn to Mother Earth,” “Mercy (Variation No. 1),” “Fuzz Oriental Blues.” Generally the longer songs are the better songs, and you can skip the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins cover. I wouldn’t say they understand the song. Afreaka! is a bit up and down perhaps, dated or conventional in certain ways (their management also handled Mungo Jerry, if that tells us anything). But at its highest points it’s nearly as high as anyone can get.

The Philadelphia Story (1940)

USA, 112 minutes

Director: George Cukor

Writers: Donald Ogden Stewart, Philip Barry, Waldo Salt

Photography: Joseph Ruttenberg

Music: Franz Waxman

Editor: Frank Sullivan

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart, John Howard, Ruth Hussey, Virginia Weidler, Mary Nash, Roland Young, John Halliday, Henry Daniell

I first saw The Philadelphia Story quite a long time ago, on early missions to collect all the various Hollywood classics of the late ‘30s and ‘40s. The first thing that struck me coming back to it again was what a phenomenal amount of star power it has, with not one not two but three major players: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart. Plus the great Hollywood director George Cukor (Little Women, Holiday, part of Gone With the Wind, Gaslight, Born Yesterday), a specialist in romantic comedy arguably at the peak of his powers. That’s the view from now anyway—interestingly, Hepburn at the time was considered box office poison for some reason, so when Grant demanded top billing in this one he got it. Hepburn had also flopped on Broadway a few years earlier, making it something of a low ebb for her career, though of course she is remembered now as a steady-glowing superstar.

In fact, The Philadelphia Story started life as a vehicle written for Hepburn by playwright Philip Barry. Talk about star-studded: in the Broadway production, Joseph Cotten had Cary Grant’s role and Van Heflin had Stewart’s. And it was a big hit, so I’m not sure what the Hollywood moguls were worried about. But I’m sure there’s a story. At any rate, the film version is bracingly modern for its times, acknowledging the reality of embittered marriages and divorce. On the other hand, it reverts more to the form of its times by making a joking matter out of routine domestic violence. It’s given as funny that C.K. Dexter Haven (Grant) “socked” his then wife Tracy Lord (Hepburn) (no apparent relation to the porn star). This movie loves the word “sock.”

“Mackintosh Willy” (1979)

By way of something like due diligence I note first that this Ramsey Campbell story won a World Fantasy award for best short fiction. Huzzah! But I’m not sure of it myself. I may have to face that UK writer Campbell, now I’ve read some dozen or more of his stories, is a blind spot for me. My complaint is that his stories are generally way too much into a kind of cerebral “restrained horror” vein, where everything is quite normal, except one or two things are slightly off. The idea is that you notice these one or two things and their implications and then you spin off into rabbit-holes where the terror only enlarges. If only it worked so well. This story offers up a memoirish incident from childhood remembered by an adult. Mackintosh Willy might be a homeless person surviving in a ramshackle abandoned shed in a public park, or he might be a figment of a boy’s imagination, or he might be something more sinister, otherworldly, and evil. Campbell tries to tilt the story in the direction of the last, but my money is on the first—a homeless person, mocked, feared, and reviled by visitors to the park like the boy and his friends. Campbell is so circumspect that anything unsettling about the incidents simply does not come off for me. There’s an intimation that one boy may have mutilated Mackintosh Willy’s corpse, but it’s very uncertain, as is Willy himself. I struggle because The Dark Descent, which includes it, is largely reliable, “Mackintosh Willy” won that award, and Campbell has a perfectly respectable reputation as among the best horror writers of his generation (born in 1946). Indeed, Dark Descent editor David G. Hartwell waxed rhapsodic about Campbell in 1987, calling him “perhaps the most important living writer in the horror fiction field” and praising his abilities across the totality of horror, “from the Lovecraftian to the Aickmanesque.” That’s a heavy burden of expectations to lay on readers (not to mention the writer himself) and, in another century, sadly, I am not seeing it bear out. In the case of this story, I think I get that it’s the very uncertainty of Mackintosh Willy’s existence at all that is intended to be unsettling, but it seemed like a pretty slender reed to me on which to hang the whole thing. The good news about cerebral writers like Campbell and this restrained style of horror is they’re often quite lucid. The less good news is they don’t always seem to understand the main points of writing horror and thus the stories don’t always really land. Perhaps needless to say—and I’m not done with Campbell yet—YMMV.

Ramsey Campbell, Alone With the Horrors
The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
A Century of Horror 1970-1979, ed. David Drake
Story not available online.

R.E.M.’s Murmur (2005)

J. Niimi’s 33-1/3 entry departs in some interesting ways from the usual in this series. His track-by-track rundown is more abbreviated and his history of the band is a bit of a rush job. Murmur is R.E.M.’s first full-length album, though they had already hit by then with a first single in 1981 (“Radio Free Europe,” an alternative version of which kicks off Murmur) and followed it with an equally auspicious EP in 1982, Chronic Town. The album was thus eagerly anticipated and for many fulfilled all expectations. Niimi sprinkles in some personal details of buying it when he was a young teen and how much it meant to him. He bought the cassette tape from a store in greater Chicagoland. But he seems more interested in exploring the lyrical strategies of the album, the singer, and the band. Full disclosure, Murmur has always been mostly lost on me though I’ve come to make my peace with it. In this book, written around 2004, I wish Niimi would have written more about what followed for R.E.M., because what interests him most about the album—the (enduring) mystery of its indeterminacy—is something that changed across the band’s career. Niimi passes along, with a straight face, a story about how the title Murmur was chosen because someone in the band (I think it was singer Michael Stipe) read somewhere that it’s one of the easiest words in the English language to pronounce. Fair enough, and ha ha ha, but let’s also look at a dictionary definition: “a soft, indistinct sound made by a person” (Encyclopedia.com, emphasis mine). The indeterminacy of the lyrics is mostly what Niimi is focused on here. He’s read reasonably widely in semiotics and such and has the wit to pull in both David Johansen and Wire as influences on either side of Stipe in terms of lyrics. I’m generally dubious about the project of focusing on lyrics over anything else in rock music. Niimi has some balance and perspective, but the mystery of the lyrics remains his defining quest with Murmur. I more hear an interesting variation on Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September Song” or the Cocteau Twins, who came after R.E.M. All those syllables come across to me like blank slates on which to project. Nearly as often they sound like people who ran out of time or inclination to say anything distinctly. I like Murmur now, but it has never sounded or felt profound to me. If you feel another way about it then this book might be just what the doctor ordered.

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

Small Axe (2020)

[Earlier review here.]

Mangrove; Lovers Rock; Red, White and Blue; Alex Wheatle; Education; UK, 407 minutes

Director: Steve McQueen

Writers: Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Steve McQueen, Alastair Siddons, Courttia Newland

Photography: Shabier Kirchner

Music: Mica Levi

Editors: Chris Dickens, Steve McQueen

Cast: Letitia White, Shaun Parkes, Malachi Kirby, Rochenda Sandall, Gershwyn Eustache Jnr., Gary Beadle, Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn, Micheal Ward, Shaniqua Okwok, Francis Lovehall, Kedar Williams-Stirling, John Boyega, Steve Toussaint, Antonia Thomas, Tyrone Huntley, Sheyi Cole, Robbie Gee, Jonathan Jules, Elliot Edusah, Fumilayo Brown-Olateju, Kenyah Sandy, Sharlene Whyte, Tamara Lawrance, Josette Simon, Ryan Masher

“Small axe” is a reference to a Bob Marley song of the same name, with the line “If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.” It’s another way of talking about incrementalism, in line with Martin Luther King’s “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And just so, director Steve McQueen with screenwriters Courttia Newland and Alastair Siddons have examined that arc closely as it applied to West Indians living in Britain in the late ‘60s, ‘70s, and early ‘80s. You might think the British are immune from racism, too genteel or something, but Small Axe and the five distinct films clustered under that banner beg to differ. They remind us not only that the British are the authors of a specific type of racism but that in large part the US digested it whole. The police brutality in Small Axe—one of the few constants across these stories—looks a lot like the police brutality we see in the US. It’s one of our inheritances from Britain, however much we rebelled against it in other ways.

The favorite of these stories in Small Axe by acclaim is almost certainly the second (though they do not need to be looked at in any order), Lovers Rock. In all the episodes music is a saving grace, a lifeline, and a solace and true source of joy, but nowhere is that emphasized more than in Lovers Rock, which is a straightforward depiction of a house party and its motley of attendees. The prep takes all day. The food looks amazingly good, most are dressed up in their best, and the music is everything. Two scenes—one involving “Silly Games” by Janet Kay and the other an unidentified dub rave-up played over and over—illustrate the point.

True Detective: Night Country (2024)

Lots of things to like about the latest HBO True Detective season, Night Country (they seem to be burping them up now at about the rate of every five years): a solid cast, featuring Jodie Foster with Kali Weiss, John Hawkes, and more good players. A terrific setting in Ennis, Alaska, within the Arctic Circle, at the time of year (late December and Christmas) when there is no daylight. And an interesting, bizarre, and unsettling mystery, in which all the scientists in a remote research post have gone missing. Some great music too. There are ultimately a lot of moving parts to the story, chief among them strands from a nearby environmentally damaging mining operation and Alaskan Natives opposed to it. A lot of history stalks the tenuous relationships in Ennis. In the early going Night Country throws off vibes from John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing and it often flirts with the supernatural, settling into indigenous spirituality. For once I caught wind of the series in time and/or in the right mood to follow along with the whole thing real-time. I did some of that with Succession too last spring, although that was prefaced with binging the first three and a half seasons. From the two experiences I have to say binging may be the better way to go for me. Night Country has lots of twists and turns, lots of intricacies in the personal relationships as well as the mystery, and lots of red herrings and confusion. Six episodes may not be enough to build momentum, although that’s kind of a TV series perspective. Let’s face it, it’s six hours. Maybe I just wanted it to go in some other direction. But I ended up underwhelmed by Night Country. It has a pretty good windup and payoff, I could see that, so I’m wondering if I just should have waited and binged it. Pretty weak recommendation, I suspect. Maybe you could binge it and report back how it looks. I saw a lot of good in it that might have cohered better if it were more concentrated instead of spread out across weeks. But now in a way I’m complaining about the terms of TV entertainment itself.

Me, the Mob, and the Music (2010)

I enjoyed this memoir by Tommy James, written with Martin Fitzpatrick. All the “Mob” portions were interesting, I suppose—a key reason James waited so long to write it was waiting for certain figures to die. Most notably that included his kinda sorta mentor Morris Levy, who died in 1990, operated the Birdland nightclub, ran the Roulette label, and never paid James a fraction of the royalties he owed him. I was more interested in Tommy James the teenybop star because he was an absolute favorite of mine in junior high days. He played his first gig (a high school talent show) at the age of 12 and was playing professionally a year later with his own band. For many years he had to worry about being underage in the venues he played. The amazing story of “Hanky Panky” is told here, one with many twists and turns that broke open his career. In retrospect, he was at his rock ‘n’ roll purest with “Hanky Panky” and, later, “Mony Mony”—raw blasts of infectious power. But as a kid I was more infatuated first with the hothouse teen drama of “I Think We’re Alone Now” and then with the faux mellow psychedelia of “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” which I had not thought of for years and then played six times in a row the other day. Beauty! I know it’s plastic, inauthentic, and all that, but I just love it. The stories of all James’s hits and more are covered here, along with his three marriages, drug adventures (mostly speed and booze, he may never have taken a hallucinogen), and eventual substance abuse recovery and turn to Christianity. I could have done with a little less of the latter, though he never goes overboard. For me he’s not that likable, more of a hypocritical hedonist and general opportunist. But there’s no question of his talent. He got his break in 1966 and rode it into the ‘70s and beyond. He wrote and/or recorded some great songs I will probably never stop liking. The organized crime angle of this memoir is interesting and no doubt part of his success. He indulges a little “I’m cool because I hung out with gangsters” attitude, but reading between the lines it’s apparent it caused him a good deal of pain. When he hired a lawyer at some point who used forensic accounting to uncover Levy (and/or the Roulette label) owing James $40 million in royalties, Levy threatened their lives and they backed off. Full of strange and harrowing anecdotes, James’s memoir is thoroughly enjoyable, informative, and compulsively readable.

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

22. Meat Puppets, Up on the Sun (1985)

[2012 review of “Two Rivers” here.]

Surprise—it turns out the Meat Puppets have a much bigger catalog than I remembered, including the 1987 Huevos which I’m sure I owned at one time. I count at least six or seven albums before Kurt Cobain reached down and gave them a hand back up in the ‘90s. It’s possible I lost track because I never felt the need to go far beyond this album—in many ways beyond just the song “Two Rivers,” which hits like sunlight glinting on water. I can feel the heat of the desert and the glare makes me want to reach for sunglasses. Stepping back on more recent revisits it’s not hard to make out the psychedelic intentions across the length and breadth of Up on the Sun, starting with the cover art, reminiscent of pre-psychedelic visionary Van Gogh’s naked lunch style. A more recent video on youtube of the gentle, rambling title song, created by the Australian video artist SPOD, updates the vibe to this century (and emphasize the psychedelia). So you know, at the moment there’s a certain parade of Meat Puppets rereleases going on. Make Record Store Day special this year. If you’ve always been curious, now is the time. The Kirkwood brothers Curt and Cris, MP mainstays, hail from Phoenix, Arizona, but their hearts seem to lie in a canny blend of country strains ever so slightly inflected by hallucinogenic experience and distant memories of hardcore punk. They sing off-key, miss notes all the time, but the play of guitars is rich and intricate. The mood is somber and soaring at once, as if on a quest for a spirit animal. The songs are short like punk (their origin) but they warp at will as if the recording itself has a tremolo bar attached. I see this compared to the Byrds—sure, I’ll go along with that, but the country is more fully absorbed and the Byrds never had much punk in them. But this is equally the place, eight miles high, where the sights and the sounds may become overwhelming. Sometimes you sense the music is just a dim echo of the sources, of what was experienced. In this case, a dim echo might be as much as you need.

Imitation of Life (1959)

USA, 125 minutes

Director: Douglas Sirk

Writers: Eleanore Griffin, Allan Scott, Fannie Hurst

Photography: Russell Metty

Music: Frank Skinner, Henry Mancini, Earl Grant

Editor: Milton Carruth
Cast: Lana Turner, Juanita Moore, John Gavin, Susan Kohner, Robert Alda, Dan O’Herlihy, Sandra Dee, Mahalia Jackson, Troy Donahue, Elinor Donahue, Jack Weston

Double feature seekers may be interested to know that the 1959 Imitation of Life directed by Douglas Sirk is actually a remake of a 1934 picture. This was news to me and I found they make an interesting and entertaining comparison. Both are based on a 1934 novel by Fannie Hurst (all three go by Imitation of Life), which might be worth tracking down itself. I don’t know anything by the bestselling author, now largely forgotten. Highly popular in the 1920s and 1930s—at one point among the highest-paid US writers—Hurst was what we’d now call a social justice warrior, taking on feminism, race relations, and more in her novels and stories from that roiling period of change. The 1934 movie was directed by John Stahl (Leave Her to Heaven), and it is more out to make you cry and generally successful at it. In that version the Black maid, Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers), has a pancake recipe which enables the white widow lady, Beatrice Pullman (Claudette Colbert, winning as always), to open a restaurant and escape the economic severities of the time. Some great character actors show up along the way.

In Sirk’s version the Black maid, Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), is merely a maid (albeit the glue that holds this unusual family together, as much as it stays together). The white widow lady, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), has aspirations to be a serious actor in The Theater. There’s an interesting tension here between the themes and Sirk, whose reputation is for an artificiality that goes to comical extremes (later the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder would carry the torch even further). Lora Meredith is routinely decked out in spectacular gowns and jewelry, for example. Everyone looks stunningly great, with the possible exception of the meek and mild Annie, who goes through life with her humble clothes on. She prefers shawls. Everything else is immaculately antiseptic verging on sterile. Yet the story feels personal, and it is searing.

“The Rockery” (1912)

E.G. Swain was a cleric and a colleague of M.R. James. Swain wrote his own collection of ghost stories, The Stoneground Ghost Tales, where “The Rockery” comes from originally. I got a kick out of this one. The characters are so oblivious they are in a vampire tale that it reads to me like a lampoon of the trope. Mr. Batchel, a vicar with a small estate next to the church (a “glebe”?) and its churchyard, takes great pride in and fastidious care of his garden. At one edge of it is “a cluster of tall elms … and about their base is raised a bank of earth, upon which is heaped a rockery of large stones lately overgrown with ferns.” Mr. Batchel finds it unsightly and determines to have it removed. Swain is humorously cynical about the relationship of Mr. Batchel and his gardener. Mr. Batchel thinks of the work as a “we” project, but it is the gardener who labors. Among the stones they find architectural debris of columns and capitals and such, as if perhaps a temple of some kind had collapsed or been destroyed. It’s a fantastic afternoon’s work and here is where we can start to feel Swain winking at us: “One detail, however, must not be omitted. A large and stout stake of yew, evidently of considerable age, but nonetheless quite sound, stood exposed after the clearing of the bank. There was no obvious reason for its presence.” Au contraire, Sherlock! we want to cry. It's really quite obvious, and I suspect, in 1912, that Swain knows that exactly. A lot of time and effort (all by Mr. Batchel’s gardener, of course) subsequently goes into removing the stake, which includes finding a plate of copper nailed to it, bearing a message punched in with hammer and nail: “MOVE NOT THIS STAKE, NOV. 1, 1702.” Does this stop our industrious pair? It does not. You know where this is going and you are correct, not to be too spoilery about it. This vampire, once released, is more the beast type. But even that got me thinking. Maybe, after two centuries of being buried under tons of rubble with a stake through its heart, it’s going to take a while for the beast to get its bearings and get back up on its legs and create that life of leisure and sophistication and seduction we know so well. Count Dracula, in his castle and tuxedo, etc. It takes some time to put that undead life together again. I’m interested in reading more by Swain.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
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“Out of Season” (1923)

This story by Ernest Hemingway is possibly his first under influence of Ezra Pound and Pound’s “imagism,” which attempts to use omission to strengthen the impact or meaning of a poem or story. It’s an intriguing and very Poundian idea. Look at him go in perhaps his most famous poem, “In a Station of the Metro”: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough” (that’s the whole thing; let it tumble in your mind). In many ways Hemingway is just the man for imagism. This story is also the first that Hemingway reconstructed after a suitcase full of manuscripts was stolen. He claimed later this story came back to him quickly. There is some sense in it of laboring to exhaustion (natural enough as he is recreating it), but for the most part I think it works pretty well. Set in Italy after the Great War, it involves a local, Peduzzi, who has signed on to take an American married couple on an illicit fishing expedition. The incidents are fragmented yet potent with suggestion: Noticing a “Fascist café” sets the historical era vividly and economically. Peduzzi, the guide, is working to make the outing as easy for himself as possible yet he also hopes to make as much off the Americans as he can, including, perhaps most importantly, drink. There is tension between the couple. It’s not clear she’s interested in fishing at all, as she lags well behind the two men, carrying the fishing rods and saying very little. The townspeople observing this group seem sullen, as if resenting how the Americans can break the rules with impunity, or perhaps they are envious of Peduzzi. Hemingway is obviously working out his technique. It’s often not subtle or effective at all that things are missing. Yet just as often these things can be felt through the gaps. This story first appeared in a 1923 privately published edition, Three Stories & Ten Poems. By the time it made it into the 1925 edition of the In Our Time collection it was accompanied by vignette paragraphs that alternate with the stories. I don’t always understand the relation of these vignettes to the stories—it’s art, it’s poetry—but “Out of Season” is preceded by one about bullfighting. The first time I read this story that vignette annoyed me and colored my reaction some. A later second reading (minus the vignette) won me over more. A tremendous amount is communicated here by the shattered minimalist approach. It seems strange to me that someone so resolutely masculinist—it’s arguably Hemingway’s greatest influence, and not a good one—is also so tender and studied about his aesthetics.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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Scarface (1983)

USA, 170 minutes

Director: Brian De Palma

Writers: Oliver Stone, Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht, Armitage Trail

Photography: John A. Alonzo

Music: Giorgio Moroder

Editors: Gerald B. Greenberg, David Ray

Cast: Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Robert Loggia, Paul Shenar, Harris Yulin, F. Murray Abraham, Miriam Colon, Richard Belzer, Dennis Holahan, Michael Alldredge, Mark Margolis

I was surprised, perhaps 25 years ago, when I noticed that director Brian De Palma’s 1983 homage to Hollywood gangster cinema had a lot of fans. Scarface appeared to be significant for bro wannabe gangsters, no surprise—but also cineastes of various stripes. Glenn Kenny just published a book about it, for example. For a long time I wondered how they could all be so wrong. My first impression was not a good one. My takeaways (and pretty much all I focused on) were a gruesome early scene involving a chainsaw in a motel shower, and then the last hour of a picture that runs nearly three, where the operatics and scenery-chewing reach various spectacular yet ludicrous climaxes. Yes, this includes Tony Montana (Al Pacino) sitting in his monogrammed chair at his desk piled with a mound of cocaine, into which he periodically bobs his head and comes up with a frosty powdery nose-tip. The emptiness of gangster life, as always, is appalling. But making it so buffoonish is something else again. Hoo-yah!

It took me this long to get back to Scarface, such was my recoiling reaction, even given that I might be a little more indulgent of De Palma’s prolific work than some others I know. But a lot of serious people continue to have a lot of serious things to say about Scarface, so I made a point of looking again. And yeah, it’s not bad—certainly stands up to gangster pictures of the ‘70s and ‘80s as well as the originals from the ‘30s. Not that, full disclosure, I really like gangster pictures as such that much—it seems to be kind of an overachieving genre. But Scarface fits, it belongs—it’s the story of a rise and fall, with the usual self-serving moral qualms. The chainsaw scene now seems more like the kind of wanton ultraviolence we are more used to as entertainment. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, and I am saying it’s still hard to watch, but the scene does what it’s supposed to do in this movie, in terms of plot and character development. And the last hour—well, we’ll get to the last hour.

Sanctuary (2022)

Sanctuary feels a little like a stage play, with the basic setup of two primary characters largely confined to a sumptuous hotel suite. It’s practically the only element of stability in this tricksy loop-the-loop tour de force which fully showcases Margaret Qualley as Rebecca and Christopher Abbott as Hal. You think these guys can’t perform? Come and take a look. Hal is a rich guy with issues whose father just died, leaving him the family business worth $185 million. Rebecca is a dominatrix for hire. The seesawing dynamics here are all about power and control. It’s more than a BDSM hobby for both, though they both take turns declaring it’s only that. Eventually they start talking about “the game” because it’s nearly as hard for them as it is for us to figure out when they are speaking directly and when they are speaking in various characters or simply being deceptive. The action revolves around Hal trying to cut Rebecca off now that he’s stepping into the responsibilities of his inheritance. He gives her a watch worth $32,000, goes doe-eyed, tells her how much it all meant to him. Rebecca is having none of it. She claims she can blackmail him—and we are on. I better admit I found this movie hot—Qualley is notably on her game. But it’s all in the script and by way of performance, on both their parts, within the movie and without. It’s hard to tell what’s real in the ever-shifting dialogue (again like a play)—there are a lot of movies like this—but in this case Sanctuary keeps things moving fast enough to distract from the general unbelievability. I’d say it takes about 15 or 20 minutes after the movie is over for the spell to dissolve. Perhaps the point is that during the movie we have no questions and few objections as the tensions ratchet and the back and forth goes everywhere. What unfolds is often quite startling from minute to minute and for me the movie was entirely unpredictable. I believe someone with more experience with tricksy movies might have seen this finish coming from a long way away, but I never. Sanctuary—for the kicks.

Pale Gray for Guilt (1968)

I wanted to revisit a Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald partly to test myself. Admittedly, MacDonald is a good mystery writer in the hard-boiled vein and McGee is a certain classic. I read a half-dozen or so of them some years ago but finally had to give them up. They almost always included scenes that triggered me, usually women being mistreated or assaulted in ways that left me sick. I had the impression MacDonald enjoyed writing them. Someone once described his style as rabbit-punching and that clarified it for me. But the people blurbing and praising him remain big names: Lee Child (who wrote an introduction for my 2012 edition), Donald Westlake, Roger Ebert, Sue Grafton, etc., etc. As it turns out, I can say “almost always” because—happily—no such scene occurs here. It has all the stuff I remembered: a senseless title that is there to name a color, the brooding loner on a Florida houseboat Travis McGee, a revenge story, a sting, various beautiful women, and me thinking her? Is she the one who gets it? But nothing, or very little. I’m going to try another and see how it goes. I picked this from a generic google search (“best travis mcgee novels”). Later I found it at #13 on a ranked list of all 21 and nowhere near any rando top 5. What up, google? Maybe people like those terrible scenes? As usual, damsels in distress are all over Pale Gray for Guilt, as well as many shades of gray (literal, not figurative). But MacDonald is just good at pulling you into his crazy storylines. Here a friend of McGee’s is murdered, which isn’t clear at first because it was elaborately staged as a grotesque suicide. That leaves behind a widow in distress and a thirst for cold as you can stand it revenge in McGee. It all comes to revolve around a stock swindle, which gets complicated and I got lost. But you can see it works by the way the bad guys yelp and carry on and somehow MacDonald makes even that satisfying. Pale Gray for Guilt (ninth in the series btw, which don’t really need to be read in order) also has a poignant love story that runs parallel to the main mystery story, with an affecting, bittersweet ending. Still, there’s always a little more Hugh Hefner than I like in MacDonald. A lot of things about Travis McGee have not aged well—but all the bigs love him.

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

23. Echo & the Bunnymen, Porcupine (1983)

[2021 review here.]

Once again a previous review says a lot of what I want to say (it’s the same album, after all, and it’s still me). I don’t plan to make a habit of this, but still: the weirdly titled Porcupine “arguably tends more toward the cerebral side of psychedelia, full of trippy climax and those thrumming string contributions from L. Shankar [no relation to Ravi].... these woozy dim images playing from wake-up movies, tarted up with exotic Eastern elements and a dense and sludgy production that bursts at will into clarity. The trademark dread of the Bunnymen lurks constantly. They're afraid of something. What is it?” (No, I don’t know what I meant by “wake-up movies” either.) Though Porcupine is now considered an album in good standing in the Bunnymen canon, in 1983 it got a fair amount of bad press. The knock, mainly from the UK, was that the band was already, with their third album, starting to go stale and recycle themselves. I have never heard Porcupine that way. For one thing it has two of their best songs in “The Cutter” (quite possibly their single best) and “The Back of Love.” It’s my favorite by them, and it's not just the exotic Eastern flourishes, but equally that creeping, gnawing sense of anxiety. Certainly on the druggy side of psychedelic experience dread and anxiety are usually there. Consider a first trip, or any. waiting to come on. Everyone is a little nervous and conversation is hard to focus. This is probably also the place for me to mention that, while I don’t consciously participate on either side of any rivalry between Ian McCulloch of Echo & the Bunnymen and Julian Cope of the Teardrop Explodes, I certainly have a preference. Cope if anything has pursued more determinedly psychedelic avenues but I couldn’t connect with any of his solo stuff lately, at least not on first listens (of Peggy Suicide and Interpreter), nor have I ever cared much for the T.E. But when I reached for the first four albums by Echo & the Bunnymen they all sounded at least as good as ever. And this still sounded best, as psychedelia or otherwise.