“Cat in the Rain” (1925)

A lot of people have made a lot of things out of this very short story by Ernest Hemingway. Wikipedia uses it to talk about an “iceberg theory” of literature, in which a story shows the 10% that’s above the surface while also somehow suggesting the 90% of it hidden below. This story works pretty well that way, in spite of being obviously another one of Hemingway’s marriages / wives. It’s raining, and the woman, the wife of the American couple at the Italian hotel, sees a kitten outside their hotel crouched under a table and wants it for the companionship. So much depends upon it,  But it is elusive. At story’s end a maid knocks on their door with a cat in arms for her. Others see the story as related to wanting or having children. That’s fair. Another theme discussed is that she’s lonely because her husband (Hemingway) abandons her to his writing every day for hours and she doesn’t have anything to do. He is somewhat neglectful. Sadly, that sounds the most like Hemingway to me and thus the most plausible interpretation. I like it best as literally about a cat in the rain who is rescued, as we say now. A cat that has found its forever home with a woman or couple who will always take care of it. Never mind that Hemingway and this particular wife, Hadley, lost all or most of his literary work to that point when a suitcase went missing. Now a somewhat overblown legend, it does remind that literally lost writing can be debilitating. I have my own examples from the early days of word processing, when hours of work could be lost by accidentally pressing the wrong key. This story may be a little too typical of Hemingway in some ways (the stoic writer at his poetic work) but I just stubbornly like the cat story and that’s all there is to it. I won’t hear of it any other way. I suspect I may sound dismissive of Hemingway’s imagist impulses, but they do generally work and that includes this story very much. (The preface paragraph, on the other hand, is another bullfighting scene. Again, works well. Again, I'm not interested in bullfighting.) The cat scenes are better than the marriage scenes, but overall it’s another good Hemingway story by all the usual rules of judgment.

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

Lost Highway (1997)

France / USA, 134 minutes

Director: David Lynch

Writers: David Lynch, Barry Gifford

Photography: Peter Deming

Music: Angelo Badalamenti, David Bowie, Rammstein, Marilyn Manson

Editor: Mary Sweeney

Cast: Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Robert Blake, Robert Loggia, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Richard Pryor, Gary Busey, Jack Nance, Marilyn Manson, Henry Rollins

I don’t like director and cowriter David Lynch’s Lost Highway as much as Blue Velvet or Mulholland Dr., but I like it more than Inland Empire, which came nearly 10 years later. They have much the same basic problem for me. They start with profoundly intriguing premises which are later swamped by inexplicable turns in the movie. Lost Highway cracks in half nearly an hour in and becomes another story entirely, though obscure connecting points—such as Patricia Arquette appearing in both as different characters—make the viewer feel tantalizingly close to making sense of it. In previous viewings I have tried to make them work together. This time I tried to let go and just enjoy the parade of great moments that go rolling by in the second part.

The first part involves jazz saxophonist (and boy does he blow) (I mean that in the good sense of “blow,” the way Bruce Springsteen meant it in instructions to Clarence Clemons), Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), and his disaffected wife who might be cheating on him, Renee (Arquette). They’ve got a nice mansion in Los Angeles and lately unmarked packages with unmarked videotapes have begun to appear on their doorstep. When they play them, they show images of their home. Renee assumes it’s some kind of realtor promotion, but a second tape shows the camera operator entering their home and taking shots of them sleeping in their bed. This is soon explained (I should use scare quotes: “explained”) in one of Lynch’s single greatest scenes.

“If Damon Comes” (1978)

Charles L. Grant was a prolific writer who is basically new to me. I found this story in The Dark Descent, where editor David G. Hartwell may have slightly oversold it in his intro piece. The story is good, but muddled. Damon is the strange son of Frank and Susan, whose marriage has hit the skids. Frank is not the best husband or father. Damon is 8 and has seen him kissing another woman. He hit Susan at least once when they were fighting. Susan wins custody, yet Damon seems abnormally attached to Frank. He’s never far from Frank’s sight, even when Frank is at work. Susan almost seems to be jealous. She makes it part of her reason for moving away with Damon after the divorce to “the city.” That’s New York, as the story is part of Grant’s Oxrun series, set in the fictional town of Oxrun Station, Connecticut. Damon is even more distant with Susan after the move. However, in the end things appear not to be as they appear. That is, Damon is attached to Frank because he hates him, evidently for various failings—kissing the strange woman, not trying very hard to find a lost cat. What’s more, Damon appears to be some sort of supernatural being (note his name). He suddenly dies, but he is still after Frank. There’s a nice mood and lots of great effects in this story, but I’m really not sure it adds up in any satisfying way. Frank, late in the story, realizes “Damon didn’t love him: Not since the night on the corner in the fog [kissing the other woman]; not since the night he had not really tried to locate a cat with a milk white face.” But we saw Frank looking for the cat at the beginning of the story—not as hard as he might have, perhaps, but he did make an effort. Have you ever gone looking for a missing cat? And, yes, in a drunken moment, presumably with a failing marriage, he kissed a strange woman. These are lapses, surely, but do they really merit a death sentence? It seems all out of proportion. Yes, suddenly Damon is evil and irrational and terrifying, but also, what? It seems we are falling back on the unfeeling universe once again, which seems nearly as tired here as tittering madness, even in 1978. Or no? Grant remains an interesting figure to me—I want to read more of his stuff. Besides writing scads of novels and stories he also edited the legendary Shadows anthologies through the late ‘70s and ‘80s. “If Damon Comes” has its points. Give it a B+.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Story not available online.

The Holdovers (2023)

The latest from director Alexander Payne is aimed squarely at boomers like me, with its coming of age tale and Payne’s familiar warm sitcom light touch. Most notably it is set in December of 1970, deliberately but artfully raising the nostalgia level to 11 for viewers of a certain age. It feels like we’ve seen this story a million ways in a million movies, but for whatever reason the one I kept thinking of was The Last Detail, director Hal Ashby’s deft 1973 dramedy of a young Navy man headed for the brig for a long stretch, escorted by an irascible Jack Nicholson who shows him one last good time. The Holdovers is much more genteel, and otherwise different in many ways, taking place in a boarding school over a Christmas break. Some students have nowhere to go and must stay at the school for the holiday, with faculty sharing the oversight duties year to year. Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is the unfortunate candidate this year. Among other things, Hunham is an insufferable blowhard on the subject of Greeks, Romans, and other stuffy figures of classical humanities. He’s there with a gang of five boys, which briefly made me smell some version of The Breakfast Club coming. But soon, four of the kids are granted reprieve and taken away by the parents of one of them. The parents of the fifth, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), cannot be reached, which dooms Hunham and Tully to make do with one another. Hunham had briefly been hoping to binge on mystery novels. The school’s African-American cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), is also staying over. Her son graduated from the school the year before and was then drafted and died in Vietnam. The Holdovers has a great sense for how the last two weeks of December can go, especially among the holiday-orphaned—making do until Christmas, finding odd moments of poignant beauty randomly in the get-togethers (there’s a Frank Sinatra Christmas song here that hits me), and finally the release of Christmas week until the new year. These three holdovers make it to awkward Christmas affairs, doing their best. Tully and Hunham bicker a lot. The generational tension between them is thick, and Tully is on the verge of going wild. He’s on his third boarding school and he’s failing again—next stop, military school. David Hemingson’s script is well-fit to the unlikely trio, notably Giamatti, who preens and bellows as only he can, obviously at war with internal insecurities. The Holdovers is a thing of beauty and a wonderful holiday movie—bound to be a classic!

“Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke” (2021)

I heard a lot about this long story by Eric LaRocca when it came out, on twitter, on booktube, all over the place. I’m glad I got to it because it’s pretty good—deeply creepy, and maybe trying a little too hard on that score. The approach is epistolary, that old-fashioned style (see Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde, and many many more). But LaRocca makes it work by updating the idea and using internet exchanges as his primary documents, largely email and chat transcripts. I thought it was cheeky to make the two principals both female-presenting, pursuing a lesbian affair, but the two never meet in real life (“irl”) as far as we know. It remains perfectly possible that one or both are men, all things considered, and perhaps even more likely given that the time setting is the year 2000. LaRocca has a pitch-perfect sense for how these exchanges went in that timeframe, the wild years I knew between Netscape (1994) and smartphones (2007). “Things Have Gotten Worse” has all the hallmarks of the loneliness and desperation encountered everywhere online then (and likely still, wherever it’s happening, I’m long out of it now), and, just as it does online (or did?), it slips seamlessly into internet BDSM dynamics with all the rules of tops and bottoms. And the story is particularly good there, leaning into the stilted master / slave language and even throwing in a brief but convincing cybersex passage. Now, yes, in the ever-ratcheting grossout sweepstakes of horror since approximately Stephen King, or at least Clive Barker, or maybe E.F. Benson’s obsession with worms, I must report it goes too far. I won’t spoil the things that happen here (or “happen,” as it’s all online reports). They are creative, I’ll say that, though I don’t know enough to say with certainty how original they are. I also thought it ended abruptly. It could be longer. There’s more to know. Maybe I just didn’t want it to end. It was mesmerizing to read, like finding a diary with super-secret confessions. What makes it work above all is that LaRocca has captured perfectly the wreck and wrack of alienation that was the lingua franca of cybersex scenes in 2000. These two are both singularly needy, hopping from one online relationship to the next and/or managing multiples. The alienation was true in 2000 and I bet a version of it still is now. “Things Have Gotten Worse” has been through two publishers, even seemed to disappear for a time. Now it’s available packaged with a couple more LaRocca stories. I’d say this strange and juicy tale is worth hunting down, though note well that it is not for the squeamish. P.S. I totally adore the title. It’s what drew me to it in the first place, along with the amazing cover artwork by Kim Jakobsson in the original Weirdpunk Books publication (above).

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

14. Robyn Hitchcock, I Often Dream of Trains (1984)

[2019 review here]

I have to admit most of the albums on this countdown list are flawed one way or another—bum tracks mainly, sometimes swamping the good stuff (see Donna Summer’s I Remember Yesterday, down at #47, where you’re better off just getting “I Feel Love” as a single). But Robyn Hitchcock’s third solo album I Often Dream of Trains may be the exception—a nearly perfect album start to finish, bracketed by the lovely piano instrumental “Nocturne” (“Prelude” and “Demise”). The album tends to stay within itself yet exceeds all goals. It probably belongs higher on this list but it’s too late for that now. Like Todd Rundgren on A Wizard, a True Star, the set finds one person alone in the studio with his thoughts. James Fletcher plays saxophone on one song (“Flavor of Night”), Chris Cox plays bass on one other (“Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus”). The rest is Hitchcock, often overdubbing intricate and beautiful harmonies on the vocals. The mood is far more austere and elegiac than Rundgren’s. Hitchcock’s piano and acoustic guitar are a simple, hushed accompaniment to his prolific casual flights of surreal lyrics, all packed up with semi-opaque psychotherapy-related meaning. Hitchcock’s weird scenes and people, his blurring the lines of mental illness and treating death candidly as an interesting sideshow, all of it somehow often hilariously funny—they are given center stage where they arguably belong in his work. Most of it has been accompanied by bands. I Often Dream of Trains is psychedelic in the way many of these songs can function as earworms, ringing in your brain for days, where the strange words enable the strange, chilly way of thinking to emerge. This music is filled with dread yet equally full of elfin and beguiling touches.

The ghost of perhaps even Sigmund Freud hovers over these proceedings, from the title forward. The novelty song “Uncorrected Personality Traits,” a 1:46 a cappella number, may be the single purest distillation here. But you must be prepared to endure an epic earworm of Kars 4 Kids proportions. It reminds me in many ways of Joni Mitchell’s “Twisted,” also an earworm. But it’s so twisted it makes “Twisted” look like a reusable drinking straw. Hit it, Robyn: “Uncorrected personality traits that seem whimsical in a child / May prove to be ugly in a fully grown adult / Lack of involvement with the father, or overinvolvement with the mother / Can result in lack of ability to relate to sexual peers.” The program for life is found in the bridge: “The spoiled baby grows into / The escapist teenager who’s / The adult alcoholic who’s / The middle-aged suicide. / (Oy!).” Extra points for prescience, recognizing and acknowledging transsexuality in various ways, tongue in cheek, daffy and gentle: “Even Marilyn Monroe was a man, but this tends to get overlooked / By our mother-fixated, overweight, sexist media.” Wut? That’s just one song on this original set of 14 so I’ll leave off about it now. “Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl” is another that hits similarly. Many more tracks here are warm evocations one way or another, such as “Cathedral” and “Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus” with their obvious gospel overtones. “Trams of Old London” indulges a wry nostalgia that feels like Dickens. I Often Dream of Trains is largely a comfortable album, standing up well to daily listens. The stranger songs are often the shortest, with longer songs that follow, letting your brain marinate, deceptively, as when “Uncorrected Personality Traits” is followed by “Sounds Great When You’re Dead.” As I say, some of the greatest pleasures here come hours and days later, when the album is only playing in your head. Hitchcock has made a good number of albums in a long career, but this one still sounds like the best to me. And even after all these years it still has new things to disclose too. Play in darkened rooms, in winter, with lava lamps.

The Stars My Destination (1956)

Tiger! Tiger!
This science fiction novel by Alfred Bester was not anything like what I expected. I’ve been aware of it for decades, with a library roomful of other classic science fiction authors and titles I’ve been meaning to get to all this time. But honestly, the title this one is known by in the US, The Stars My Destination, always gave me pause. It sounded like something aspirational or inspirational intended to dignify SF. But no. In fact, Wikipedia says some consider it foundational to cyberpunk. That’s closer to the truth, along with Bester’s original title, published that way in the UK, a reference to the William Blake poem “The Tyger.” Indeed, this novel helped me get a better sense of that poem. It’s potent stuff. It’s not without flaws, notably its treatment of women, which ranges from unfortunate to very bad. And the revenge story on which it hinges is fairly weak soup as well. But this main character—Gully Foyle—is a ferocious survivor, his face covered with glowing Maori tattoos. He’s finely tuned, a human machine of reflex, transcending hero figures and mythical whatnot by the expedience of his single-minded focus on staying alive, out in cold space in barely imaginable, always hostile conditions. Among other things it’s fair to call this short novel pulpy space opera too, involving a 25th-century war among the humans who have settled 11 planets and satellites in the solar system. A teleportation ability called “jaunting” is a new but natural human skill that must be developed and trained for, still not entirely understood. It’s one of the ideas that keeps the action well-paced—exciting, even, which was revelatory for me about a 1950s sci-fi novel. It’s dated to the degree it’s a future based in Cold War dynamics—thermonuclear weapons are the standard for military-grade options—which is not really a future we imagine anymore. But Gully Foyle is something more abiding, a figure that works still today, a model of the antisocial antihero whose ethos and everything is about simply not dying. Bester’s novel works so well it practically overcomes all defects. Don’t be put off like I was by the New Age-sounding The Stars My Destination. Lay into it for the Tiger! Tiger! It might blow you away like it did me.

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

Titane (2021)

[Earlier review here.]

France / Belgium, 108 minutes

Director: Julia Ducournau

Writers: Julia Ducournau, Jacques Akchoti, Simonetta Greggio, Jean-Christophe Bouzy

Photography: Ruben Impens

Music: Jim Williams, Sixteen Horsepower, Kills, Severin Favriau, Caterina Caselli, Zombies, Future Islands, Lisa Abbot, Johann Sebastian Bach

Editor: Jean-Christophe Bouzy

Cast: Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier, Lais Salameh, Mara Cisse, Marin Judas, Diong-Keba Tacu

Titane is the kind of movie that raises preposterous to art form, asking us to believe things unbelievable, simply asserting that they exist, with a simmering undercurrent of trauma unresolved. Agathe Rousselle as Alexia delivers a profoundly harrowing performance, throwing herself fully into the body horror. As a girl Alexia is in a serious auto accident that requires a titanium plate to be installed on her skull. It tells us nothing, it makes no rational sense at all, but presumably that is the explanation for everything that follows, along with compelling clues that her father has sexually abused her. As a young woman she is working as a lascivious model at auto industry shows, making love to the vehicles under the spotlight if not using them to masturbate. She loves cars. Soon there is a scene—after hours, after the show and after most of the people have gone—where she seems to be having sex with a car, which has summoned her to the garage with imperious honking.

Fetishizing cars this way hits differently for me in the 21st century, knowing better what cars are doing in terms of carbon pollution—even in 1996, David Cronenberg’s Crash might still seem like an innocent boy hobby, like memorizing stats from the back of baseball cards. Identifying and stack-ranking car models as they pass on the road always felt ridiculous, at least to someone like me who can barely make out even the most familiar ones—Jaguars and Mustangs is about the best I can do, and even then I don’t always get them. But now it seems worse than a frivolous pastime, more depraved, decadent in the worst sense. The next thing we know Alexia appears to be pregnant. And she seems to be leaking motor oil.

“There Are More Things” (1974)

[spoilers] This story by Jorge Luis Borges is from his collection The Book of Sand. It is formally dedicated “to the memory of H.P. Lovecraft.” There seems to be some confusion at Wikipedia about the dedication because Borges is elsewhere dismissive of Lovecraft. Is it a case like Scott Bradfield (and kinda sorta me), a reversal after a lifetime of bewilderment and disdain? It took me a second reading for Borges’s story to really click, but ultimately it is good at hitting the high notes of dread, piling on with humdrum detail. It’s short but requires a good deal of setup. Reports of glazing over are common among readers. I thought, as with Lovecraft, that it got better with familiarity, as the concepts settle in. You have to read this stuff slowly, more slowly than I can always manage. Borges indulges the Lovecraftian with a mysterious mansion changing hands, windows permanently covered, work that goes on all night, and strange furniture. I like the ending, but I see why some complain. Borges foreshadows monsters more and more intensely, and just at the moment we are about to see them—the story stops. “... I heard something coming up the ramp—something heavy and slow and plural. Curiosity got the better of fear, and I did not close my eyes.” That’s how it ends. No attempt at further description is made (which I must say is not very Lovecraftian). By the literary rules under which I’m pretty sure Borges is operating, this first-person narrator survives the encounter to tell the tale. We know that (or we think we know that)—and, further, he tells it calmly, soberly, thoroughly. What did he see? One element of Lovecraft not used here is the tendency for characters to be high-strung and/or go mad. It’s an interesting omission on Borges’s part. Exactly what he is up to with this story I don’t know—a general hallmark of his work. It’s a reasonably good facsimile of Lovecraft overall and strikes that mood well. Why doesn’t the narrator tell us what he saw and how he escaped? Perhaps, I like to think, because he thought it might drive us mad, turning us as the readers into that element of Lovecraft, tittering mindlessly at the throne of chaos where the thin flutes pipe (with apologies to Destroy All Monsters). The title is from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory
Read story online (scroll down).
Listen to story online.

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

They said 50,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong (on Elvis Presley’s second collection of gold records in 1959) so maybe the same principle applies to the second movie in the Avatar franchise? About the 2.9 billion who saw the first? They can’t be wrong? I don’t know. I saw a 3D IMAX version of that first one some double-digit years ago, with all the many folks (and me) ridiculously wearing the 3D glasses and gasping in wonder. Every generation seems to get its turn at the buying end of 3D as the future of cinema. I was duly impressed and inclined to defend it in a general way, the problematic auteur James Cameron notwithstanding. What’s wrong with a hit? I even looked at it again a few years later across the living room on my not-so-big TV and still liked it then, perhaps some kind of lingering hangover effect from the wonderful theater experience. But certainly things about the blockbuster rankled as insipid—looking at you, “unobtanium”—and they’re not particularly better in this sequel. I never thought the putdown of “Dances With Wolves in space” was that insightful, maybe because I like Dances With Wolves, even with all its problems, including a running time close to four hours. And speaking of long, I spent half my life the other day looking at a non-3D non-IMAX streaming version of the 2022 Avatar sequel. The Way of Water (which is over three hours) spends nearly an hour reprising the situation established in the first one, then shifts gears from the forest culture of the planet Pandora to the sea culture. Native forest Pandorans are tinted blue whereas the sea tribes helpfully have teal skin, for easy identification during the pitched battles. There’s probably nothing I can say to convincingly encourage or discourage anyone about seeing this movie, particularly at this late stage of the affair. It’s all world-building and big battles, with the now-usual blockbuster dose of family feels sprinkled in. Those inclined may find it wise to keep a hanky handy. In the first one, if it was there, I missed that Pandora is a moon of a larger gas giant type of planet. They make good use of it here as periods of light and darkness are dramatically affected, with a regular (daily?) event called “Eclipse,” functioning something like our tides. There’s also a lovable whale-like creature with specific interesting features who must suffer from human stupidity. Among other things, The Way of Water is a condemnation of game hunting. I can allow that in many ways its heart is in the right place and now and then it even rises to the level of entertainment. I thought The Way of Water was mostly boring but, you know, how can 2.9 billion people be wrong?

Ironweed (1983)

Even after the first two novels in William Kennedy’s series based in Albany, New York—Legs and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game—I wasn’t entirely ready for the plunge into alcoholism that Ironweed delivers. It’s almost certainly the most famous in the series, which spans eight novels published between 1975 and 2012. Kennedy is still alive too, so there could be more, although note he is now 96 years old. Ironweed won a Pulitzer and other awards and ended up on multiple lists of the greatest novels of the 20th century. You may, like me, have heard of it but not known it was part of a series. Kennedy is a very good writer and storyteller—I’m not sure Ironweed is my favorite of the first three, but it’s the least shaggy, a very short but fully packed novel that reaches severe depths as well as heights. It tells the story of the return to Albany after 22 years of Francis Phelan, Billy’s runaway father. He ran because he dropped his third baby, which caused its death. He ran because he had a career as a professional baseball player, a third baseman who could hit and field too. Perhaps most of all he ran because he was and is an alcoholic, a certifiable bum at story’s start and finish. For various reasons stories of profound alcoholism tend to trigger me to contempt and despair. I barely survived the movies Barfly and Leaving Las Vegas, for example. So I struggled with a lot of the events recounted among these down-and-outers and their very hard lives. There’s a beautiful scene where Francis returns home and is welcomed and many wounds healed—and nothing goes wrong. After I finished the book and looked it up on Wikipedia I found it has a structural resemblance to Dante’s Inferno. An opening headnote from that source might have alerted me. I love how Kennedy loves Albany (more than I think I could ever love Albany), with prose that sings across vernaculars, from the argot of gangsters to the poetics of literature. With Dante’s underworld journey supplying its spine, Ironweed becomes a little more pretentious. And yet—it’s one I am more tempted to revisit to trace through its sources more carefully. The novel felt strangely episodic as I read, but now I see there may be larger patterns at play in its background. Lots of meat for such a slender volume.

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

15. Doors, The Doors (1967)

[2010 review of “Light My Fire” here]

Decades after the fact, the Doors remain controversial. To a significant number of people, they—specifically the singer, Jim Morrison—are preening, drunken buffoons. I recently happened to see some quotes on social media by David Crosby before he died, deriding the Doors hard. Good grief, man. David Crosby! He should talk. Even Jim DeRogatis, in his wide-ranging psychedelic rock compendium Turn On Your Mind, dismisses the Doors as non-psychedelic. On one level I see the point. They were a bit silly and perhaps too mindful of the top 40 charts, if that’s your issue (“Light My Fire,” #1 ’67; “People Are Strange,” #12 ‘67; “Love Me Two Times,” #25 ’67; “The Unknown Soldier,” #39 ’68; “Hello, I Love You,” #1 ’68; “Touch Me” #3 69; “Love Her Madly,” #11 ’71; “Riders on the Storm,” #14 ‘71). Later they turned convincingly more to bluesy fare, but this debut LP harks much to the source of their name—The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley’s 1954 memoir of psychedelic experience. The album opens with the rousing “Break On Through (To the Other Side),” which makes you want to, and it closes with 12 minutes of something called “The End,” a wandering exercise that dramatizes the Oedipal situation with a thudding foot and other stuff too. “The End” may not be the kind of thing you’ll be tempted to play on repeat. But I bet you like the way it kicks off the movie Apocalypse Now. In between, the album is a smorgasbord of little happy surprises. The seven-minute “Light My Fire” is moving toward if not already in the category of songs, with “Stairway to Heaven,” “Maggie May,” and their own “Riders on the Storm,” that we have likely heard as much we need to by now. But try this long version of “Light My Fire” one more time. Sit and listen to it. You don’t have to do it a second time, but you might be surprised how much is still there in terms of mood, tone, and explosive movement. I also love their version here—and especially that they thought to do it at all—of “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar),” the Brecht/Weill song from one or another of their operettas. Among other things it emphasizes that the mood-altering substance of choice by the Doors (certainly Morrison) appears to be basically booze and sex. They’re not mine, at least, for sex, not the way the cover of Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man” means it. But fair enough. I’m more by way of the mainstream psychedelic camp of weed and acid. It doesn’t mean I can’t get with what’s being put down here and find my mind blown on the way.

The Exterminating Angel (1962)

El ángel exterminador, Mexico, 95 minutes

Director: Luis Buñuel

Writers: Luis Buñuel, Luis Alcoriza

Photography: Gabriel Figueroa

Editor: Carlos Savage

Cast: Silvia Pinal, Enrique Rambal, Luis Beristain, Jacqueline Andere, Jose Baviera, Tito Junco, Ofelia Montesco, Claudio Brook, Nadia Haro Oliva

For the record, and FYI, director and cowriter Luis Buñuel has no fewer than six titles in the top 200 of the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?, a roundup of critical opinion from around the world: Viridiana, #88; The Exterminating Angel (my favorite), #138; Los Olvidados, #139; the inestimable Un Chien Andalou, #149; L’Age d’or, #166; and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (my other favorite), #172. A seventh, Belle de jour, is trailing not far behind at #256. He’s obviously a very big deal among cineastes, partly for his dedication to surrealism and the originality of it, partly for his caustic treatment of religion and capitalism, partly for a prolific, globe-trotting career that saw him making pictures in Spain, France, Mexico, and elsewhere—and partly because he’s pretty good at making movies.

Among other things, The Exterminating Angel shows a lot of skill unrolling the premise. It starts with a dinner party—how many Buñuel pictures involve (and mock) the genteel dinner party, attended by the upper-middle class as they strain after more social class? In fact, the picture is a bit dull in the first third as they gather and work their status symbols, though it is enlivened somewhat by slapstick and sarcasm. For some reason all the servants, including the cooks, are leaving. They can’t explain themselves but only apologize. And they will not stay. But the host and hostess make do and muddle through with the only servant left, a butler. After the dinner the group retires to the parlor for brandy and more polite intercourse. They’re a bit bored but not yet inclined to leave. The hours peter away until finally, around 4 or 5 a.m., the hosts, eager to break it up, offer them rooms in the mansion. But they prefer to undress and bunk down where they are. So do the host and hostess. It’s not until the next morning, when the group wakes and starts thinking about breakfast, that they realize they are somehow trapped there.

Turn On Your Mind (2003)

All fans of psychedelic music (whatever “psychedelic music” means exactly) will want to look into this wide-ranging and eccentric survey by Chicago rock critic Jim DeRogatis. It’s actually a second edition of his first effort on the topic, Kaleidoscope Eyes from 1996, expanded not just to account for the intervening years but also to continue casting the net wide. He has ideas that don’t comport with mine, for example naming Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys as the #2 greatest psychedelic album of all time (or at least his #2 favorite). I love Pet Sounds but have never heard it as psychedelic at all. It’s hard to imagine Terence McKenna grooving in the jungle to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” DeRogatis also gives short shrift to the Doors and Sonic Youth, artists with an obvious (to me) foot in psychedelics. But he also broke things open for me about whole new fields of psychedelic potential by giving Brian Eno his own chapter. And I would have said punk-rock has so little in common with psychedelic as to be practically anti-psychedelic, but then he names Pere Ubu, Wire, and the Feelies and I can see the point. Then he raises Julian Cope (of the Teardrop Explodes), Robyn Hitchcock (of the Soft Boys), and XTC, and, again, I can see the point. When it gets down to cases I diverge from his takes fairly often, but I appreciate the touchpoints. Once you expand psychedelic music beyond the time period generally agreed on, approximately 1966 to 1970, you start to see the sky is the limit. You spend more time thinking about the sky too. DeRogatis, in 2003, was plainly a rockist in the poptimist scheme of things. His focus is not psychedelic music but more specifically psychedelic rock, and he indulges a lot of righteousness on the point. He might grant some psychedelic music as mind-expanding, but it must also rock to win his approval. Whether something rocks is an eye-of-the-beholder thing if anything is (or ear-), but again I take his point. I like my psychedelics to rock too. Turn On Your Mind is also one of those sweeping views of rock and rock ‘n’ roll history that spurs a lot of list-making. I came away with something close to 200 albums I wanted to hear immediately, or hear again—in the latter case, sometimes for pleasure and sometimes for reassessment. So far I’m having a blast and I’m barely out of the classic period. Read the book, turn on your mind, and have a fun time.

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