“Up in Michigan” (1921)

This early Ernest Hemingway story has something of a complicated history. Among other things it’s often given as revised by Hemingway in 1938 but I can’t find much about what the revisions entailed. It’s a very short story about a date rape in a small town in Michigan. That was the point of it when he wrote it and that’s what it remains. It’s a sharp, vivid, heartless story. In 1921 it was universally considered unpublishable. Gertrude Stein told him she thought it was pointless whether it was good or not because she knew it could not be published. Sure enough, it was left out of Hemingway’s first collection of stories, In Our Time, because the publisher considered it objectionable. Ralph Maughan over at Goodreads makes a good point. “Some reviewers mistake this description of sexist behavior as approval of sexist behavior,” he writes. “It is quite the opposite.” Yes, maybe. Considering what we know about Hemingway, and considering the tongue-in-cheek title which he joked about, approval of sexist behavior is not entirely out of the question. To be fair, I don’t really see that in the story. But there is certainly some sense that the waitress Liz Coates is naïve at best, “asking for it” at worst, blinded by her infatuation with the blacksmith Jim Gilmore. The story strikes me as true enough to reality in many ways, especially with the feelings of Liz, approximated as they are from Hemingway’s decidedly male point of view. It feels honest, like a story Hemingway may have heard from a woman. There is also a whole other side to the story of this story, as many of the manuscripts for Hemingway’s early stories were lost in the early ‘20s. A lot of the stories in In Our Time thus had to be rewritten from scratch. This one survived because it was not packed into the lost suitcase with the others, perhaps because he'd got enough feedback to know it wasn’t going to get published. But it did survive and may give some sense of what was lost. There’s not much dispute about how good the reconstructed stories are. In fact, it’s a little scary to think they might have been better, fresher. It may be strange, or even perverse, but I think this is as good a place as any to start with Hemingway’s short stories, arguably some of the best written in the 20th century, and certainly enormously influential, even still to some degree. “Up in Michigan” has to have some of the features of his lost writing and it’s also presumably burnished with the 1930s pass. His novels were getting steadily worse by 1938 but he still knew how to make passages shine. I’m glad we seem to have grown past finding this story objectionable rather than the events it depicts. It’s done with honesty, narrative force, and just good writing.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Read story online.
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“The Lady of the House of Love” (1975)

This story by Angela Carter is ostensibly, more or less, a straight-up vampire story. But little is ever really straight-up with Carter. The story obeys lots of vampire story rules: set in a deserted village in Romania (central / eastern Europe), sunlight harmful, weird (or no) reflections in mirrors, sleeping in a coffin. The female vampire lives in a decrepit mansion in the abandoned village. She is very old, spends her days drawing the same tarot cards over and over. She can appear as young as a teen. She feeds on small woodland mammals and people passing through. She has a servant, an old woman dressed in black. This story—and Carter’s work generally—is stuffed with heavy portents and symbols. The vampire’s eyeglasses break at one point and she cuts herself trying to clean up the shards. A fountain in the village square, with pure spring water bubbling from a lion’s mouth, is used to attract victims. The servant, who is mute, lures them with gestures of a promised meal. The intended victim here is a young man touring the country on a bicycle (a symbol, Carter notes, of the geometrically rational, “two spheres and a straight line”). He is a virgin. It is summer 1914. We see the dance of seduction—invited by the servant for dinner, then coffee and hazy mind-addled conversation with the vampire in her bedroom into the wee hours—but it’s not entirely clear how or why our young man escapes her. Is it because he is a virgin? Or perhaps because he is on the verge of being tossed into the greater blood-sucking maw of World War I? He wakes in the morning with dim memories of the night before. The vampire has died. Carter writes her epitaph:

I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness.
And I leave you as a souvenir the dark fanged rose I plucked from between my thighs, like a flower laid on a grave.

Roses are a recurring symbol not only in Carter’s work, but she does seem to have specific affinities for them. Shortly after this interlude our young man receives his draft notice and goes into training. There’s one more apparition of the rose, and then the story ends, “Next day, his regiment embarked for France.”

Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
Read story online.
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Master Gardener (2022)

I loved First Reformed but haven’t really kept up since with director and writer Paul Schrader, possibly due to his obnoxious online presence. I didn’t even know Master Gardener was his until I was looking up information about it before looking at it. But I might have guessed from the basic elements—the deliberate pace and stasis-oriented, off-rhythm editing style of his hero Robert Bresson coupled with one strain or another of American extremism. Here we have Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), former white supremacist hit man with a torso full of hate tattoos to prove it, now in witness protection, clean and sober, with a career as a master gardener. We catch up with him working the estate of Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), who in turn has a grand-niece, Maya Core (Quintessa Swindell), who she wants to put to work learning the trade from Roth. Maya is mixed-race and Norma is an uptight bigot, so it’s not a promising match. This is a movie that doles out information by bits as it goes. It takes a while to get Roth’s full backstory, which is brutal and unpleasant. But that’s all in the past now. He works and is good at his job, he attends NA meetings, and he loves flowers. It’s honestly a bit hard to believe and Edgerton’s studied low-key performance is not that helpful, except the way it sets up and adds to the high suspense that kicks in pretty quick. If there’s one thing Schrader knows how to do it is stoking monomaniacal tension. The best moments in Master Gardener are scenes of great economy that are purely kinetic, as when Roth is traveling on some deadly mission and we ride with him in the backseat, waiting for whatever is going to happen to happen. IMDb has the pictures as a “thriller” as well as “drama” and “crime”—and thriller is where it is best. On some levels it is trying way too hard, as with all the Nazi iconography. But trying too hard is also a long-time Schrader trait—compare Hardcore. Still, if there has ever been a time to think about deadly white supremacists who can be rehabilitated, it’s probably now. And Master Gardener is good enough as a thriller that even if you don’t care about deadly white supremacists you’re bound to get caught up in all the manifold scenes of riveting tension.

“A Literary Nightmare” (1876)

Here’s another humor piece by Mark Twain. It has an intriguingly modern aspect in that it is essentially about earworms—decades ahead of radio. Our outraged helpless narrator (presumably Twain) has run across a little poem that now haunts him. He saw it in the newspaper. The poem is the first thing presented in this piece and, yes, I can see how it works. It has an irresistible rhythm once it has been impressed upon you a couple times, along with eccentric spellings based on dialect-like pronunciation, as if to burnish the stickiness. The poem is apparently intended as a mnemonic for train conductors: “Conductor, when you receive a fare / Punch in the presence of the passenjare! / A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare, / A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare …” And it goes on. This piece later traveled under the title of “Punch, Brothers, Punch” for the line in the chorus, “Punch, brothers! punch with care!” If you are like Mark Twain or me your brain is now mentioning to you, perhaps repeatedly, “Punch in the presence of the passenjare!” Here we find, of course, the Mark Twain who chipped in to the development of Daffy Duck—exasperated, quick to fly off the handle, and something of a fool. If I’m in the right mood, this is a Mark Twain I love. Note the original title, the better title. Or: “I returned home, and suffered all the afternoon; suffered all through an unconscious and unrefreshing dinner; suffered and cried, and jingled all through the evening; went to bed and rolled, tossed, and jingled right along, the same as ever; got up at midnight frantic, and tried to read; but there was nothing visible upon the whirling page except ‘Punch! punch in the presence of the passenjare.’ By sunrise I was out of my mind, and everybody marveled and was distressed at the idiotic burden of my ravings.” Every time he shares his misery he makes it a little more your own. Between the prescience about the earworm problem and Twain’s general good form here—and the brevity, an asset in humor as well as horror—I’d call this one of his better humor pieces. For one thing, it’s actually pretty funny. See also “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences.”

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches (Library of America)
Read piece online.
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25. Iron Butterfly, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (1968) – “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”

[2011 review here]

As a convenience to myself now, in 2024, I wrote this album up in 2011, declaring myself a nostalgist yet perhaps more skeptical than I am now of Iron Butterfly’s wonderful bombastic ode to the Garden of Eden. That write-up basically says all I have to say, except now I think I like the long song more. I am back on board with it, like when I was 14, as an example of psychedelic music that thrilled and scared at once and in effect showed the way. I would call up the local underground FM station late at night to request it (“long version!”), no doubt another dopey kid to the DJs. My favorite, always (because I slept with the radio on all night despite my parents’ efforts to stop this terrible habit), was waking up to it or something like it (say, Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused”). One time I woke up just as the weird scraping noises of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” circa 11:00, had started, for a certain peak psychedelic experience in my dark bedroom in the middle of the night. I thought I said I wasn’t a nostalgist anymore?

Call Me Madam (1953)

USA, 114 minutes

Director: Walter Lang

Writers: Arthur Sheekman, Howard Lindsay, Russel Crouse

Photography: Leon Shamroy

Music: Irving Berlin, Alfred Newman

Editor: Robert L. Simpson

Cast: Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor, George Sanders, Vera-Ellen, Billy De Wolfe, Helmut Dantine, Walter Slezak, Steven Geray, Ludwig Stossel, Julie Newmar

I keep wanting to designate Call Me Madam as a guilty pleasure, perhaps because I have a personal reason for being predisposed toward it—I happen to know it was the movie my parents saw on their first date. We even had the 1950 Decca 10-inch soundtrack album from the Broadway show in our house. It’s possible my mother purchased it before the movie came out. She liked to sing “It’s a Lovely Day Today” and “You’re Just in Love” around the house. As a kid I could often be found cringing at this activity, which obviously I would love to be around again now. So I have a sentimental attachment to those songs specifically and thus, what’s more, something of a defensive attitude toward Ethel Merman, who largely seems to be taken as a joke these days, and not the right kind of joke.

As far as I can tell, this take on her rests chiefly on her unschooled singing style and her generally brassy demeanor. Her persona could run to the coarse—she had a reputation for telling dirty jokes—and always had the cynical midcentury American Bugs Bunny sheen of someone who actually does know better than you. A lot of her humor is influenced by Groucho Marx’s pattering tangents. She makes a baseball joke to sum up a situation, for example, and, at another point, when two characters attempt to flatter her as beautiful, she mutters, half to the camera, “A good optometrist could really clean up around here.” Another time someone refers to a palace estate and she assumes they are talking about Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. “The Palace? Who’s playing there?” she asks.

Prince’s Sign O’ the Times (2004)

I wasn’t sure what I’d be getting with Michaelangelo Matos’s treatment of Prince’s big album of the ‘80s—you never do with these 33-1/3 projects, I’ve learned—but I was impressed on many levels. Matos hails from north Minneapolis and grew up in a family that was aware of Prince Rogers Nelson from the start. I’m from Minneapolis and environs too, and lived there until 1985, but I had a lot to learn about my hometown, including the racism that made it hard for Prince and company to make headway in making music. A lot of the nightclubs Matos talks about I’d never even heard of, and those were my times. I’m embarrassed, to say the least. I knew most (not all) of the Prince biography given here. But what impressed me most was Matos’s breakdown of the album, which I’ve always respected but somehow never felt I could get close to. The title song, for one thing, a protest number, has always struck me as lame and forced. I was happy to see Matos largely agrees, though he points out its virtues too. A lot of the early part of the book involves Matos’s personal experiences with Prince and Minneapolis. It’s interesting and done well. I appreciated the landmarks and specific events, such as an arena show in 1983. I’m also learning these personal takes are often part of these projects and don’t always work that well, but Matos had more than usual going for him. On the other hand, with a publication date of 2004, it is an early book in the series, with some aspects that seem dated and unnecessary now, such as a discussion of “rockism.” I would count this among the better books in the series simply because it is so good on an album that has long been so enigmatic for me—and an artist too, I must admit. Matos’s personal revelations are harder to judge. They seemed in line with lots of others in the series. But the details on Prince and especially on Minneapolis (or the Twin Cities) offered countless ways for me to connect with this one—and they were practically on every page. If you know Minneapolis in the ‘80s you won’t want to miss this one. It’s also basically essential for anyone with any interest in Prince or the album. Recommended.

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

The Heiress (1949)

USA, 115 minutes

Director: William Wyler

Writers: Ruth Goetz, Augustus Goetz, Henry James

Photography: Leo Tover

Music: Aaron Copland

Editor: William Hornbeck

Cast: Olivia de Havilland, Ralph Richardson, Montgomery Clift, Miriam Hopkins, Vanessa Brown, Mona Freeman, Ray Collins

The short novel Washington Square by Henry James remains one of my favorites by him, even if James later sniffed at it himself, calling it “poorish.” What a loon! I suspect his problem may have been that the story depends very much on moral wrongs and attendant high emotions, much like the overheated revenge story. Certainly that is the source of the overwhelming and powerful final scenes of the movie version. Washington Square was adapted (with alterations) for a Broadway production in 1947 that cast Basil Rathbone as the smug controlling father and Wendy Hiller as “the girl” (as James describes her). Robert Osborne strolls into a DVD introduction to share some anecdotes about Olivia de Havilland and director William Wyler seeing the stage show and deciding to make a movie of it.

And what a movie! I’ve seen it several times and it only gets better, one of those silvery black-and-white midcentury Hollywood shows that make you glad you love the movies. Note that we are already a couple of removes from James now. The husband-and-wife team of Augustus and Ruth Goetz adapted his tale for the stage and then, with Wyler, for the movies. So no, it does not have the delicate shadings that James prized so highly (and may have found missing in Washington Square). It is instead a blunt and harrowing tale of all love gone between a domineering father who has lost the plot, his timid daughter, and a fortune-hunting cad. These three performances—Ralph Richardson as Dr. Austin Sloper, a wealthy and discriminating surgeon, Olivia de Havilland as his daughter Catherine, and Montgomery Clift as hound dog Morris Townsend—have a lot to do with it.

“We Have All Been Here Before” (1979)

Reading stories by the wonderfully unclassifiable Dennis Etchison can stand up to the age-old experience of eating potato chips. It’s hard to consume just one at a time, and all that. But surely these stories have more nutritional value. They can tend to run into one another, with their deliberate Los Angeles settings and often fuzzy high-blown titles: “It Will Be Here Soon,” “The Machine Demands a Sacrifice,” “We Have All Been Here Before.” This one’s a bit of a head-scratcher bound to leave you partly mystified, as Etchison stories often do. It bears a lot of the beats of a mystery story, though ultimately insisting on its place as horror. The scene is a police station and the action is a psychic for hire, doing her thing and upchucking information based on visions. Specifically, a cold-case murder has come to life when a hillside mudslide near a cemetery disinterred dozens of corpses. One of them did not belong and had a bullet in its head—investigation on! The first thing that’s weird about the psychic is she refuses to take money. She appears to be a professional, flying around the country to consult on cases. It’s a full-time occupation but she won’t accept money and doesn’t exactly seem to be independently wealthy either. Then, in the story’s designated primary twist, it turns out that she has her own reasons for helping on these cases. I thought Etchison’s usual genius for settings failed him a little here. Police stations are good for police procedurals, of course—and maybe for formal variety in an Etchison collection—but they’re tired everywhere else. The psychic is intriguing and promising but not enough is done with her and ultimately it all feels a little off. The secret twist about her is not that believable, not that hard to see coming, not that original. I’m also not sure the spectacularly grotesque mudslide works so well. These things happen, and indeed I suspect the genesis of the story could well be some news story about one such—mudslides being a regular point of Los Angeles life, at which Etchison tends to be exceedingly good. Find this one a little shruggable? Next!

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

Silent Night (2023)

Director John Woo’s first picture in six years—and he’s back in Hollywood!—is all cinematic stunt: no dialogue, just fast cars, fistfights, high-powered guns, dangerous knives, a single dove, and the Christmas season. Christmas Eve, to be specific, December 24, as written on the calendar of our grieving father guy, Brian Godlock (Joel Kinnaman): “kill them all.” Silent Night, speaking figuratively to Die Hard, says, “Hold my beer.” You see, there was a gang war that erupted, with some crazy wild shooting and driving—not kidding, this hanging out weaving moving vehicles firing automatic weapons, all Benny Hill and Keystone Kops but deadly serious, is impressive footage. Then a stray bullet kills a 7-year-old boy. This is also around Christmas, you see, and the father subsequently spends the next year toning up like Travis Bickle for a big finale like Taxi Driver. This is why we can’t have nice things. To be sure, I missed dialogue and noticed its absence in Silent Night, all the pleasant clarifying padding of exposition. In all the places where it would naturally occur, Woo the filmmaker draws away from it or cuts away from it. We know the routines of high-action revenge, but usually they include some exposition. I wouldn’t say Silent Night is an experiment that entirely works, but I wouldn’t say it fails either. These firefights and the hand-to-hand combat are intensely ludicrous as only classic Hong Kong action sensibilities can deliver. It’s very rock-‘em sock-‘em from one of the masters of rock-‘em sock’-em and it’s a very pure form of rock-‘em sock-’em too, for that matter. Revenge stories always deliver queasy satisfactions, so that’s here as well. Not really my cup of coffee, but I’m easily enough drawn into them and then easily enough manipulated and satisfied. Making the whole thing about a 7-year-old son is an upright way to do it, on one level, granted that involving children this way is always shamelessly pumping up the volume on stakes. It’s also something of a crass way to do it—nooo, not the children!! At least Woo wisely refrains from sexualizing the terrible crime and keeps the focus always on the action, which veers toward the outrageously improbable, but hey, stunt players deserve their time in the sun too. Silent Night is not as suspenseful as Die Hard, and it’s also not as subtly Christmassy. But the action is 1,000% better. If you like a Christmas movie that looks like Die Hard, make it John Woo’s Silent Night.

Eye in the Sky (1955)

This early short novel by Philip K. Dick is not bad, with a few points that struck me as remarkable. The premise is that a group of eight with a guide are touring a particle accelerator when there is an accident. The accelerator malfunctions and a platform collapses, dousing them in cosmic rays or something and tossing them into alternate universes with only passing resemblances to our own. In fact (or “in fact”), these alternate universes are actually the creations of individual members of the group. They are basically lying wounded in the accelerator all this time. The first we encounter is the vision of an elderly fundamentalist Christian. This was the first remarkable point for me, as the system of belief was not very different from that of evangelicals in our day, nearly 70 years later. Dick’s details are as convincing as this world is terrifying. God (or “God”) is actively involved and belief trumps science and reality at all turns. I thought this was the world we would be staying in—I’m pretty sure it’s what the title is primarily about. But we escape that and then enter the heads of others, in total about four of the nine characters. I thought these subsequent ones were weaker though the action is often strange and fun. The fourth is merely a plot device—got to tie these things up somehow! The other remarkable point here is that the tour guide is a key character, he is Black, and his life situation is dealt with accurately and sensitively. He’s a trained engineer, for example, but the tour guide job has been the only work he has been able to get. He’s an important character and an important part of the story resolution. Taking such views in the 1950s should not surprise me, maybe, but I liked finding this treatment. I’ve read hackwork by Dick from the ‘50s but Eye in the Sky is not that. It deals some heady concepts, keeps things moving, and altogether works well. The other two alternate universes are from two of the women characters. Sadly, they are sexist. One woman is single, which seems to signify that she is psychotic. The other is a champion of culture, but something of a philistine. She likes Beethoven but not Bartok, whose work is destroyed or nonexistent in her world. Just being in favor of cultural priorities makes her a winner in my book, but Dick doesn’t seem to think so—maybe because he’s a kind of Bartok of literature.

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

psych-25: Introduction

I’ve noticed before that defining “psychedelic” is something like the story of the six blind men and the elephant. Take some drugs, put on a blindfold, and reach forth. You can sit down now, Mr. “This being is like a thick snake.” You may or may not feel psychedelic music involves drugs—you’d be amazed how many folks going psychedelic with their nehru shirts and hypnotic visuals in the classic 1966-1970 period proudly swear they never took a hallucinogen once. Maybe you think long dark album-side jams are the ticket, or possibly whimsical, sprightly verse-chorus-versus tone poems about Emily, white bicycles, witch seasons, and such. Maybe only a sitar will do. Maybe you think Their Satanic Majesties Request counts. People are guaranteed to disagree about these things. Is psychedelic music an irrelevant fad well past its use-by date? Did it never go away? Do you need to take drugs to appreciate it? Do you need a colorful spiraling visualizer to accompany it? Will it damage your chromosomes?

Et cetera, because I don’t know the answers to any of these questions (except I think your chromosomes are safe). If I have to be pinned down to a definition it is this: “experienced as mind-manifesting.” That’s as far as I’m willing to go. This quest started because my friend Jack over at Swellsville asked me one day on a walk what I thought were the best psychedelic albums. We kicked it around a while. My first thoughts ranged well beyond the ‘60s and 1970. Next I had a notion to do a list of 10, to satisfy my own curiosities about what I would find there. Jack and I kicked it around some more and he signed on for a while. Then I read a couple of books— High Weirdness by Erik Davis and Turn On Your Mind by Jim DeRogatis—that opened up the field for me quite a bit, especially, on a practical level, the DeRogatis survey which covers 1966 to practically the publication date in 2003. At that point finalizing a list became a minor obsession over the second half of the past year.

Here is where I stop tinkering and commit to a countdown of my 25 favorite psychedelic albums as of approximately 2024, publishing biweekly in the year ahead. Some notes: quite a few albums made it by way of one or two songs that are undeniable godhead even if the rest of the album is often silly at best. These situations are noted by calling out the specific songs. I don’t really think you should track down a full copy of, say, Incense and Peppermints by the Strawberry Alarm Clock. The title song makes it, although the opening eight-minute “The World’s on Fire” does have its points. Don’t forget the Strawberry Alarm Clock is where Ed King of Lynyrd Skynyrd got his start.

Syndromes and a Century (2006)

Sang sattawat, Thailand / France / Austria, 105 minutes

Director/writer: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Photography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom

Music: Kantee Anantagant

Editor: Lee Chatametikool

Cast: Nantarat Sawaddikul, Jaruchai Iamaram, Arkanae Cherkam, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Jenjira Pongpas, Nu Nimsomboon, Sin Kaewpakpin

As a class, film critics seem inclined to line up and laud the movies of Thai director and writer Apichatpong Weerasethakul—this is the fourth of his pictures I’ve had occasion to write about by way of surveying the critical roundups at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT). Weerasethakul is a little bit Lynchy and a whole bunch Kubricky and don’t forget Antonioni. He likes to look at things. He’s Western in many ways and Asian in many others—practical, humorous, spiritual, inscrutable. Mostly his movies are quite beautiful—credit to cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Weerasethakul’s long-time collaborator—mostly they are slow, and mostly they are baffling. Syndromes and a Century, for example, appears to crack in half at the midpoint and go some other direction from the first half.

But it’s not really exactly so. Reading a synopsis helped me clarify that it’s more like a restart at the halfway point and pursuing other directions. It’s more a kind of memoir piece for Weerasethakul, presenting fragments of the lives of his parents, who were both doctors, amid sensory memories of his childhood. This simple explanation more or less put everything in order for me and, where I had been dreading looking at it again (I couldn’t make much of it the first time several years ago), I found it much more palatable and enjoyable this time. (Later I found that I might be entirely mistaken about what I saw.) Weerasethakul’s approach to narrative remains eccentric and opaque but that is offset somewhat by his pervasive, gentle humor. The result was one of my best times with his stuff.

New Year memo

Happy new year one and all, hope the holiday season treated you well, and all the best for the coming year! Meanwhile, here at the Can’t Explain offices, big things are brewing. Big, big things. —nah, just basically the usual. Well, on Saturdays, look for my first countdown in ages—the unquestioned 25 best psychedelic albums of all time. Note that this is not a list of “favorites” but a scientifically objective rundown of the finest, determined using the most carefully calibrated engineering principles and instruments. Sundays are for books and stories as usual. Last Sundays this year will feature early stories of Ernest Hemingway. I meant to do a broader overview of his whole career (and maybe even get to “The Old Man and the Sea”) but I ran out of time and only got through the first two collections. Some mighty good stuff there but already I was seeing way too much bullfighting. Cycling further through the days of the week, look for reviews of new movies on Monday and/or streaming selections because I was too lazy or uninterested to go out. Thursdays continue on horror short stories, focusing on the 1970s this year but also including stuff from before that, as I see fit. And Fridays are the good old classic movies, not all of which I like so much. This past year I traveled to Las Vegas and saw Cirque du Soleil’s Love, their riff on a slice of the Beatles catalog remixed by George Martin and son back in 2006. Yes, it only took me 17 years to get there but glad I did. Don’t miss it if you can. Among other things it inspired me to try the first list below of favorite Beatles songs (not all of which were in the show). No doubt this list would be different if I tried it again tomorrow. And for your further list-consuming pleasure, my Sight & Sound ballot if they had asked me to do one. Hopefully I make it another 10 years and can throw up another one for you then. Stay safe and warm everybody!

Top 10 Beatles songs
1. “A Day in the Life”
2. “Lady Madonna”
3. “You Won’t See Me”
4. “Help!”
5. “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You”
6. “I Want to Hold Your Hand”
7. “If I Fell”
8. “Rain”
9. “Back in the USSR”
10. “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”

“Imaginary” Sight & Sound ballot
City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
Scenes From a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)
Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)
The World of Apu (Satyajit Ray, 1959)
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)