“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.