9. Terry Riley, A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969) – “A Rainbow in Curved Air”

The first side and 19-minute title track on Terry Riley’s third album, A Rainbow in Curved Air, has been another durable bedtime set for me. It may have started from rumors I’d heard that Riley gave “sleep-in” concerts where people attended with blankets and pillows and he played all night. Whether that’s true or not (I couldn’t find anything to confirm it in a cursory internet search), I see where people get the idea. The play, all instrumental, is light and trippy, high-spirited and mellow, full of synthy sound effects and driven by Riley’s noodling, odd rhythms, and drone that comprehends the observable universe. Psychedelia works for me both light and heavy and this one definitely goes the former route, though the drift has no time to waste, restless and relentlessly probing. Amplified keyboards and synthesizers were very much a novelty in vogue in 1969. Riley is credited with playing an “electric organ,” for example (thought they were generally all electrically powered?). If it veers close to the rinky-dink to modern ears now too familiar with classic keyboard textures, it still hits blustery cheerful and wandering, roving in all good ways. The music is soothing but the tempos and most of the playing is zippy, tangling fast, which creates interesting tension. The end is so headlong and abrupt you almost feel yourself crashing through something. Down the line, when the technology allowed, I played it on repeat some nights and found the ending simply propelling me into the piece again, a kind of perfect loop. By my lights it is the best single psychedelic piece suited to that purpose. It can also be nice to wake to after a night of it, though the nervous energies might take some time to adjust from sleep, like waking up after you’ve had too much coffee the day before. So the sleep-in idea works with caveats, for special occasions perhaps, but specifically in the case of “A Rainbow in Curved Air,” it would be tricky to pull off live. Riley plays all instruments here (electric organ, electric harpsichord, Rocksichord, dumbec, and tambourine) with lots of overdubbing. He finally played it in concert for the first time in 2007 with additional musicians. The impacts of “A Rainbow in Curved Air” are seen in unsurprising places: Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Pete Townshend’s keyboards on the Who’s Who’s Next album, many works by fellow minimalist Steve Reich, the prog band Curved Air, etc., etc.

Boogie Nights (1997)

USA, 155 minutes

Director/writer: Paul Thomas Anderson

Photography: Robert Elswit

Music: Michael Penn, Emotions, Apollo 100, Melanie, Three Dog Night, Eric Burdon & War, Elvin Bishop, Hot Chocolate, KC & the Sunshine Band, Sniff ‘n the Tears, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, Brook Benton, Roberta Flack, Rick Springfield, Beach Boys, Electric Light Orchestra

Editor: Dylan Tichenor

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Heather Graham, Luis Guzman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Alfred Molina, Don Cheadle, Robert Ridgely, Philip Baker Hall, John Doe, Joanna Gleason, Laurel Holloman, Thomas Jane, Lil’ Cinderella, Melora Walters

I like director and writer Paul Thomas Anderson’s treatment of what Wikipedia calls “The Golden Age of Porn,” 1969 to 1984. Boogie Nights starts at the halfway point, in 1977, a kind of high-water mark from the look of it here, where the work is fun and the living in Southern California is easy. The picture bounds with bottomless energy and a rollicking jukebox soundtrack that rarely stops or slows. It is a basic rise and fall movie—of one Dirk Diggler nee Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg), porn star with a legendary cock. Dirk prefers the term “actor.” He is prone in his exuberance to throwing spontaneous kung fu moves all over the place. He is 17, 18, 19, and in love with his body.

There are problems in Boogie Nights as it moves from the high points of its characters’ lives to the lows, but they are relatively minor. It is one of those long movies that feels short. Scanning the credits, you might think it was Oscar-bait. Most of these players were just starting their careers at the time. Burt Reynolds is one exception, playing porn producer and director Jack Horner, who has ideas about being an artist. At the time, I recall, it was taken as attempting what John Travolta had managed with Pulp Fiction—a “comeback” role that redefined him ironically. Philip Baker Hall is another exception, playing porn industry titan Floyd Gondolli. Hall may be the only one who could deliver the classic line, “I like simple pleasures, like butter in my ass and lollipops in my mouth.”

“Peekaboo” (1979)

I got a kick out of this very short story by Bill Pronzini, although—perhaps because I’ve been reading Saki lately—it reminds me a little of Saki. That is, it’s all a bit of a joke, however macabre, and also it has some dependence on familiarity with horror fiction. When the man in the story starts recounting the history of the house he has just rented and moved into, we know there is only going to be trouble. A man who lived there for 40 years sounds something like Aleister Crowley or Jimmy Page. The first renter after him was murdered there within two weeks. But our man doesn’t believe in any of that and feels he can protect himself against anything. After all, he has a gun. More trouble—we know this is headed only for more trouble. Part of what makes it work is that Pronzini is foreshadowing within an inch of our lives. Our man wakes in the middle of the night. He doesn’t know what woke him, but he has an intense feeling that someone is in the house. He gets up, takes his flashlight and gun, and starts searching the place methodically, top to bottom. The story is short but these descriptive paragraphs—sweeping each room with the flashlight, then all lights on for further inspection—adequately slow things down and power up the suspense. As his search goes, he remembers a phrase from hide-and-seek games he played as a kid: Peekaboo, I see you. Hiding under the stair. I kept wanting to go for the extra rhyme, with “Hiding there.” The internet says Pronzini has it right, however, on that score, but insists on “chair” rather than “stair.” You may know more about this than me. Naturally our guy checks under the stair but there’s nothing there. Then it’s down to the cellar, where “the odors of dust and decaying wood and subterranean dampness dilated his nostrils.” I won’t tell you the ending because you already know it anyway. There’s plenty of time for “he’s not here, he’s not there,” but no time for what he or it is. Pronzini is having it both ways by making our guy a skeptic and withholding what he’s up against. It could be a home invader, after all. But that’s doubtful. Pronzini is better known for writing mysteries, but he’s good here with ratcheting suspense, evoking the sense of the uncanny, and snapping off a good one.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Story not available online.

The Velvet Underground (2021)

This documentary on the legendary ‘60s rock band—source of Brian Eno’s jokey observation in 1982 that everyone who bought their poorly selling first album started a band—is refreshingly restrained and judicious, basically giving everyone from Andy Warhol to Doug Yule their fair share of the spotlight. It starts with John Cale and Lou Reed, as it must. Reed gets all the credit he deserves, though perhaps not as much as he asserted. Director Todd Haynes traces the Velvet Underground’s most profound roots to the New York world of art and avant-garde music, placing emigrant Welshman Cale in the welter that followed John Cage and La Monte Young. Reed, for his part, was an undergraduate at Syracuse studying under poet Delmore Schwartz. A brief snippet of a Schwartz reading is all we need to hear that influence. Reed and his doo-wop love then went on to house songwriting for Pickwick Records, exploiting the confusion of kids shopping for albums at Woolworth’s (anyone interested in my copy of The Mustang Plays the Beatles Song Book?). Later he would become a student of 2 guitars bass drums. Perhaps most sorely needed in this story, Warhol is given his due as the force behind making that first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico (also called the “banana album” for its famously peelable cover). Warhol sewed up the art bona fides and the aesthetic working ethos. He delivered the vision. He never stood near a soundboard, let alone twiddled a knob, but his producer credit was entirely warranted. Reed and Cale say so too. There’s a good argument, expressed here as well as I’ve seen it anywhere, that Warhol is almost solely responsible for producing the Velvet Underground.

There’s a lot of backstory to The Velvet Underground and it takes some time to get to the music proper, but when it does the picture is as generous as anyone could hope. I’ve always thought “Venus in Furs” and especially “Heroin” are more like overrated novelties, but they have their time and place and they may be best appreciated here. “Venus in Furs” and especially “Heroin” certainly appear to be Haynes’s favorites. But most of mine are in here too, such as “Sweet Jane” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” Further principals, from Moe Tucker to Sterling Morrison to Nico, are brought in to the documentary essentially as they were brought in to the band. The banana album gets the most attention, but the entire catalog is featured, including the “lost album” set (now the VU album). The only exception is the very last album, when Reed was gone and Yule was trying to bear the standard ... true confession, I’ve still never heard it. The band’s ever-shifting chemistry was amazing, and it was also amazingly unsuited to its commercial times, which is cringingly obvious on their ill-fated tour of the West Coast with the multimedia Exploding Plastic Inevitable extravaganza. West Coast pop aesthetics are unfairly derided here—too much hapless hippie hatred for me, but point taken. The Velvet Underground in many ways left them all eating their dust in the long haul. “Sunday Morning” is as good as anything by the Left Banke or the Mamas & the Papas, for example. This documentary is a good way in for novices (born every day, you know) and it’s a very apt summation for fans, particularly those who resent Reed’s hogging of the show for many decades. He was only part of something very big—an important part, but only part. In a very welcome way, this has made me rethink Warhol’s contribution, which I underestimated. It’s massive. All of it, the entire arc, is massive.

“Soldier’s Home” (1925)

[2017 review here]

Another good one from Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time collection, also prefaced by an isolated paragraph with a war scene. At least it was a war scene—they don’t always feel on point. This story is not about Nick Adams but about Harold Krebs, a veteran of the Great War recently discharged and sent home. I don’t know the timeline of PTSD stories, but this certainly counts as one and may be an early one—it feels more like a Vietnam-era story in many ways. Krebs—not otherwise seen in Hemingway’s fiction as far as I know—was held over and not sent home until 1919, missing all the parades and such. Now he doesn’t want to do anything. The story feels so modern on this point that TV itself (not generally available in 1925) feels missing in action. There’s also some vibe from the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, with family and friends at home trying to help but not knowing how—arguably not even able because they weren’t there. All that is in Krebs without Hemingway having to spell it out. The title is a little double-jointed, playing off an ambiguous apostrophe, signifying a home that belongs to the soldier and also that the soldier has arrived there. The story is burdened and foredoomed with the certain sense it is true about homecomings from war, the confusing sense of being lost that the returning have. They have changed—they have aged. They don’t understand and rage dogs anyone trying to engage them. There are no real eruptions here. When Krebs’s mother presses him on his next step it is tense but ultimately uneventful. He decides to move to Kansas City, less a decision and more just a response to his mother’s pressure. In turn that’s more about the silent, absent father’s pressure. Krebs’s one point about leaving for Kansas City is he hopes he can skip a scene with his father that way. A good no-nonsense story about aimlessness and desperation and the stupid futility of war.

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

Here Comes the Night (2014)

I picked up this biography of songwriter and record producer Bert Berns by Joel Selvin for a couple reasons. I know Selvin’s first book, a biography of Rick Nelson, which is pretty good. And then I was curious to know more about Berns and Van Morrison, whose T.B. Sheets album was produced by Berns, rumored as under unusual and extreme circumstances. The subtitle to this bio, The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues, suggested all the juicy details would be here about Morrison being stranded in Boston with no money to get home, virtually held against his will and forced to record the original version of T.B. Sheets, called Blowin’ Your Mind! That story, if there is any truth at all in it, is not here. Instead it sounds more like Morrison was merely unhappy and surly. Take as you will. The album remains great and powerful, in either version, both of which include the amazing 10-minute “T.B. Sheets.” The Berns story and all its accomplishments are here, as songwriter and producer. Born in 1929 with a heart condition he was told would kill him by 21, Berns served a long apprenticeship in the proto-Brill Building milieu under such leading lights as Doc Pomus, Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Jerry Wexler, and Ahmet Ertegun. His biggest hits are very big: “Twist and Shout,” “Cry to Me,” “Hang On Sloopy,” “Here Comes the Night,” and “Piece of My Heart,” among others. His production credits include Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” and the Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk.” He owns a share of the ‘60s even though his heart problems finally caught up with him late in 1967, before he was 40. I have been working on building a playlist out of the massive, detailed discography Selvin includes here as an appendix (see here). I love the pop music across all of his proximate era—1959 to 1967—and even a lot of his obscurities (often blatant variations on his biggest hits) are a pure pleasure for me. Selvin’s book largely contains the stories of Atlantic Records, Leiber & Stoller, and the Brill Building ferment. It features lots of bad actors, as the subtitle suggests, including Berns himself in many cases, stealing from artists by taking publishing rights and/or just not paying royalties. Berns is interesting but his music is even more so. The discography may well be the single most valuable point about this book—very valuable indeed. Everything else is perfectly competent.

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

10. Grateful Dead, Live/Dead (1969) – “Dark Star”

[2012 review here]

At one time the second side of the first LP of Live/Dead was my favorite on the classic double live set, cobbled together from different shows early in 1969. Side 2 has longish versions of “St. Stephen” and “The Eleven” (named for its time signature, hence proggy). I can’t say I ever warmed much to Pigpen, who owns the third side with 15 minutes of “Turn On Your Love Light,” and then the fourth side has stark and sometimes interesting fare with feedback, somber moods and such, but somehow I have never listened to it much. “Dark Star” did not hit me for 20 years, at a peculiar passage in my life, living alone again. I flipped for the 23-minute workup, with all its many twists and turns. I played it at night in bed. It felt light, or like light shining, inviting and playful, but also dark and mysterious, suddenly swelling up like The Rite of Spring with great power. I know now those moments are at approximately 8:05 and 12:20. The singing parts are like some Maynard Krebs troubadour stepping off a spaceship, something from a dream. Sometimes I fell asleep to the album side, sometimes I pondered the agonies and victories of the day, with the snarls of Jerry Garcia’s wandering electric guitar and that throbbing bass or gentle organ catching at me. Many years after that, in downloading times, I made a hobby of collecting other versions of “Dark Star,” almost always live of course, with many variations across the years for how they approached playing it. Perhaps not surprisingly, my favorite turned out to be the one I fell in love with originally from this album. But I was amused to discover it was also released as a single, running time of 2:42—basically all the singing parts, and a little more up-tempo. Where a fair amount of the psychedelia I went and still go for is fairly described as space-rock, “Dark Star,” even with all its astronomical features (and even with heady modern physics finally catching up with it in a way)—“Dark Star” does not hit as space-rock for me but as something more interior. With, perhaps, the figurative dimensions of a galaxy—but all inside, more absorbed now over the years of listening to it. The bass fading up and in after a few seconds of silence and then the tones of the electric guitar following it. I am triggered within 20 seconds for all the swoops and shifts, the embarking journey, the rising squalls and peaceful passages, that beatnik (Bob Weir) who keeps showing up to warble verses—almost immediately I’m sent to this place of great comfort, serenity, bliss. Other albums sides+ that can send me this way include Pharoah Sanders’s Karma and the Rascals’ “Peaceful World.” What can I say, I must be an easy mark. But nothing does it like “Dark Star,” all full of Steve Ditko visions.

Batman Begins (2005)

USA / UK, 140 minutes

Director: Christopher Nolan

Writers: Bob Kane, David S. Goyer, Christopher Nolan

Photography: Wally Pfister

Music: James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer

Editor: Lee Smith

Cast: Christopher Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman, Cillian Murphy, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer, Morgan Freeman, Linus Roache, Gus Lewis, Ken Watanabe, Mark Boone Junior

On my second look at Batman Begins in recent days—I saw it when it was new in 2005—I was a little surprised to realize it wasn’t exactly the movie I thought it was. I had the impression it was an adaptation of the Frank Miller / David Mazzucchelli series, later a graphic novel, Batman: Year One. It’s fair to say Year One is an influence—how many Batman productions have we seen since 1987 that include details of the murder of Bruce Wayne’s father and mother in a back-alley stickup, Bruce witnessing it, Bruce going single-minded OCD on it and swearing eternal vigilance against crime and violence? A lot, is the correct answer. “A bat! That’s it! It’s an omen. I shall become a BAT!” Also: “I am vengeance, I am the night, I am Batman.” These are the kinds of things the original Batman told himself for motivation, and they echo on today.

As a superhero Batman is a little different, of course, having no superpowers. Well, but he does have the real-world superpower of being obscenely rich. Bruce Wayne is a billionaire and able to afford stuff at will: a Batcave underneath his mansion, a costume with cowl and swirling cape (for standing atop the tallest city towers in high winds, don’t ask me why he isn’t just blown off), the Batmobile, a superior utility belt, the batarang (here looking more like a ninja weapon, the shuriken), of course the bat-signal when Commissioner Gordon needs him and he’s not answering the hotline bat phone, and no burdensome regulation, ever. The origins of most of that stuff is in this version of Batman’s origin, so there’s plenty of bang here for your origin story bat buck.

“The Same Dog” (1974)

Here’s another nervy good one from Robert Aickman, operating much like a fairy tale at altitude. He introduces us to Hilary—a boy, but his name often confuses others. He’s the third son in a broader extended family that has only boys. Already coming at us with the small, absurd, unsettling details. Hilary’s brothers are both older than him by double-digit years. Their mother is dead. Hilary has no memory of her. He is sent to the boarding school everyone in his family goes to, and there, as a young boy, he meets Mary, who becomes his closest friend. She is the first female in his life. It seems likely to be a lasting union, even so early. They take longs walks in the woods, share imaginary stories, and make detailed maps of imaginary places, such as Fairyland and the bordering Giantland. On one day’s walk, deep in the woods, they find a very high wall. A dog that can’t be seen makes strange noises: “... barking—if, indeed, one could call it a bark. It was more like a steady growling roar, with a clatter mixed up in it, almost certainly of gnashing teeth.” This is frightening, but they take turns being frightened and reassuring. They follow the wall to a gate, where they see the dog, a strange yellow beast, and also the house, which appears abandoned. After they return from the adventure, Hilary takes sick the next day and is bedridden for two months. When he recovers, he is told that Mary is dead. No further word is ever learned about Hilary’s sickness or how Mary died. No one seems willing to tell Hilary how she died. It’s a shocking development, for the reader too. The story then jumps ahead 20 years, to when Hilary as a young man has occasion to visit the school again, visiting a friend who lives in the region. The area has been developed considerably, with many new homes. It’s hard to tell whether they can even find the strange house. Hilary tells his friend the story meanwhile. Then they find it. It has been fixed up and is occupied now. The title has already given away what they find, but there is more—Aickman’s usual ration of unsettling more. It’s arguable Aickman was the best short story writer of horror or fantasy in the second half of the 20th century. More evidence here.

Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine
Listen to story online.

Dark Waters (2019)

If you’re looking to feel good you could do worse than this docudrama directed by Todd Haynes with a star-studded cast: Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins, Bill Pullman, Victor Garber, Mare Winningham, etc., etc. It tells the story of Rob Bilott, the brave and hardworking attorney who sought to hold the chemical company DuPont accountable for their deceitful treatment of so-called “forever chemicals” and other microplastics that live in most of us now with the lead and mercury. Teflon is probably the most famous forever chemical. Yes, they’re bad. Yes, they’re very bad. No, they’re not worth the easy wipe and clean. DuPont knew it, Bilott knew they knew it, etc., etc. If you’ve seen The Insider, the story of the tobacco industry and its legal reckoning (directed by Michael Mann, starring Russell Crowe, nominated for seven Academy Awards), then you have a good idea of what you’re in for with this one. Erin Brockovich is another good comparison point (directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Julia Roberts, nominated for five Academy Awards, Roberts the winner for Best Actress). On one level Dark Waters, like the others, is simple outrage porn, satisfying in a kind of grinding morally righteous way. But I also think it’s worth asking why we love these heroic David and Goliath battles instead of simply insisting that stuff be done right in the first place. Give the government sufficient authority to provide the necessary informed oversight and make corporations behave responsibly as part of their internal cultures. That's what I say. Oh stop, oh stop now, now you’re cracking me up. I can’t remember the last time I had such a good laugh. I know how it goes. How can people be so cruel? Easy to be hard. Easy to be cold. Especially people who care about— Wait a second, that’s an old pop song. Anyway, I’ve got enough to be outraged about these days (have you heard about the $10 million cash Egyptian bribe?!?) but I guess I can save room for a little more, especially when Todd Haynes is at the helm. It’s not as lunatic inspired as some of his best stuff—it’s about a serious issue and he seemed to be leaning more toward straightforward professional restrained with this and, for that matter, with his previous picture too, Wonderstruck. But on that level he certainly delivers. You can’t say he doesn’t know how to make a picture. This one is beautiful, often gripping, and a pleasure to watch, even if it leaves you feeling mad about things.

A Room With a View (1908)

I did not end up liking this E.M. Forster novel as much as I thought I might. It got the Merchant-Ivory treatment even before Howards End, which is much the better novel. A Room With a View the novel is under heavy influence of Henry James and Jane Austen, with a novel of manners about one Lucy Honeychurch. The narrative is a little smirky. The names are ridiculous, for one thing—Lucy Honeychurch. Miss Lavish, a shallow writer and feminist. Cuthbert Eager, a clergyman. Lucy’s wrong choice for a husband is Cecil Vyse (vice as in the gripping tool, I take it, and not as in the moral weakness). Her best bet is telegraphed quite clearly and then it’s just a matter of getting there. Half is set in Italy, the second half in England. There’s a suitably quirky cast of characters. I thought I might be reading a first novel but it’s more like Forster’s third. A lot of it is clumsy and feels inexperienced. My sense was that Forster wanted to write a Jane Austen novel, but also felt above it and thus wanted to mock it a little. The names, for example. Some of the characters are stock devices to make the plot work, such as an older fuddy-duddy cousin who is annoying. Others are unique and strange, such as the father and son Emersons (which I suspect may be allusion to Ralph Waldo). They are iconoclastic freethinkers. The elder made a fortune or seems to be financially independent. More or less they are Americans, plainspoken and bumptious. There’s a little clan of clergymen too, whose point seems to be to grease the social wheels. I liked the first half quite a bit. The writing seems more open and engaging, loose and fun, with a number of nice scenes as the tourists explore Italy at the turn of the 20th century. Wikipedia notes that Forster added an appendix or epilogue in 1958, detailing the fates of these characters. I kind of wish the edition I read had included it, but looking over the summary I’m kind of glad it didn’t. The more I read Forster the more I’m not sure who he is as a writer. Howards End is a much better Jane Austen novel, and the years-later A Passage to India is not at all like either, with much more politically charged themes. Curious now about that Merchant-Ivory version of A Room With a View.

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

The Time Machine (1895)

H.G. Wells published this long story—a novella by the technical rules, but many call it a novel—when he was still in his 20s. It’s widely considered his first, based on a story he published in a college newspaper. The Time Machine was serialized, cut off about three-quarters through, and finished later. It's a very early fix-up novel, in a way. It gets credit for launching the time travel branch of science fiction. Many dabbling in the concept still use the term “time machine.” I read it when I was a kid and found the first half thrilling and then got bored with it. Coming back to it more recently I saw how little it actually involves any of the knotty speculative paradoxes more associated with time travel now. It’s an excuse for a moderately interesting fantasy story or allegory based on projecting the specter of class divisions forward. Once our time traveler leaves for points unknown in his machine—I imagine it looking like Fred Flintstone’s car for some reason—he travels a mind-blowing 800,000 years into the future. That’s a long time! It’s amazing anything is recognizable. Even Earth itself would likely have changed radically. That’s where (when?) most of the story takes place, with conflicts (Wells would have us believe) between an aboveground race descended from effete elites and an underground race descended from workers that are notably monstrous. This is from a writer with well-known socialist sympathies. Apparently it’s what society made them into eons on. Later, in the finish that was delayed, the time traveler travels 30 million years into the future to make a significant contribution to the always intriguing “dying earth” subgenre of science fiction. By using such stark geological time spans this way, Wells sidestepped the burden of prediction (seen in utopian and dystopian tales as well as time travel), except in the most general sense, i.e., there will always be class divisions. Most of the problems in this still highly entertaining story are a function now of its century-plus age. H.G. Wells is already an engaging writer, fun to read and full of surprises. I read at least one more by him when I was a kid, War of the Worlds, also worth a look. And I have some ideas of getting to a few more, which I seem to often find enthusiastically touted on booktube (The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, etc.). Fun project if I can get to it.

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

11. Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced (1967)

[2006 review here, 2012 review of “Third Stone From the Sun” here]

Hearing “Purple Haze” on the radio as a kid headed for 7th grade in the fall—only occasionally, usually late at night, because remember the single only made it to #65—scared me and intrigued me. It took me a few years to gird up and give the album a listen, by way of a friend. At that time the issue under discussion was Jimi Hendrix’s somewhat strained or restrained or even muffled vocals, which some reviewers called a detriment. The guitar playing and (surprisingly for me) the songwriting too were obvious. We both agreed his singing was a strength, not a weakness, and I still think so. I accepted the working-hard-but-hardly-working rhythm section at face value, the two Brits Hendrix took with him back to the States (bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell) for a tour opening for the Monkees, which altogether speaks volumes about the nascent state of “rock” music in 1967. Redding and Mitchell may or may not have been poorly recorded here, but mostly it’s that their talents are over-swamped by Hendrix. They were competent but little more. I’m not sure what I was expecting at the time, in relation to my favored Grand Funk Railroad and Led Zeppelin, but certainly Are You Experienced exists for me now as a bouquet or cornucopia of all that psychedelia led by electric guitar could be.

It opens with a strategy often turned to here, the primitive attack of “Purple Haze” as blunt as a tomahawk, spiraling out at will from there like galaxies. In a word, trippy. Hitting you hard often seems to be the intent, springing spinning rainbow globes in the brain for stunning seconds. Many a suspended open space of near silence is squelched on this album by bumptious power chords. I must say that claiming songs that are about drugs are not about drugs is something people did in the ‘60s. Perhaps it was finally retired by Spacemen 3? Hendrix was no exception. He explained he had intended “Purple Haze” as a science fiction narrative inspired by a Philip Jose Farmer novel. He was frustrated the song would be too long with all the verses. OK, maybe. I can’t hear anything now but “’scuse me while I kiss this guy.” Later availability of LSD tabs dubbed “Purple Haze” (or anyway buyers hoped it was LSD) speaks to how the song was taken by a significant cohort of fans.

Most of my favorites were on the other side—the glorious near seven minutes of the space-rock epic “Third Stone From the Sun” along with the introspective and strangely moving “The Wind Cries Mary.” But the first side had high points I didn’t want to miss either. “Manic Depression,” “Love or Confusion,” and “May This Be Love” are inspiring workups in a vein out of a vein. “I Don’t Live Today” has a spook factor for the obvious reasons, with nice droning undertones on a guitar string. I like the sequencing of following “Love or Confusion” with “May This Be Love,” although that reminds me there is another issue with this album between markedly different US and UK versions. “Love or Confusion” and then “May This Be Love” don’t follow one another on the UK edition and that album also includes “Red House,” which is sorely missed on the US edition, now that I know about it. We got “Hey Joe” instead, which is not “Red House” (available in the US then only on 1968’s Smash Hits). “Hey Joe” and “Foxey Lady” are the low points of the album for me, which is otherwise an outstanding set. The second side also includes the big-time fun rave-up of “Fire” as well as the album-closing title song. Which, like the album-opening “Purple Haze,” is formally disclaimed (explicitly in “Are You Experienced”) as a song about drugs. Yeah, OK, whatever. Please, just let me stand next to your fire.

Daisies (1966)

Sedmikrásky, Czechoslovakia, 75 minutes

Director: Vera Chytilova

Writers: Vera Chytilova, Pavel Juracek, Ester Krumbachova, Jaroslav Kucera, Zdenek Blaha, Vaclav Nyvit, Bohumil Smida, Ladislav Fikar

Photography: Jaroslav Kucera

Music: Jiri Slitr, Jiri Sust

Editor: Miroslav Hajek

Cast: Ivana Karbanova, Jitka Cerhova, Julius Albert, Ester Krumbachova, Marie Ceskova

Taking the US-centric view, it’s tempting to connect this tidy little experimental art film from the Soviet-era Czechoslovakia to the famous Daisy ad that Lyndon Johnson used against Barry Goldwater two years earlier in the 1964 presidential contest. That 60-second spot—aired only once—involved a 3-year-old girl, a daisy flower, and a mushroom cloud. Daisies similarly features images of warfare and bombing and one way or another seems to be about destruction. It's admittedly a tenuous connection—I’m not even sure Daisies includes a mushroom cloud.

Most of the screen time of Daisies is devoted to a Betty and Veronica pair of young women—ID’d as Marie I (Jitka Cerhova, the brunette) and Marie II (Ivana Karbanova, the blonde). Marie II wears a garland of daisies in most of her scenes. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that no one associated with this picture had any idea who Barry Goldwater was, let alone anything about whether or why the Daisy ad existed in the first place. In many ways the vibe in Daisies points in another direction altogether for me, reminiscent of the 1974 Celine and Julie Go Boating, which is much longer but similarly features two happy-go-lucky young women and their various randomized hallucinatory adventures.

It’s likely there are many more Czechoslovakian pictures I don’t know providing a context for Daisies, which hits me as pretty weird, challenging and seemingly out of nowhere. It is colorful and dazzling enough even to be considered psychedelic in places, but I’m not sure that’s what director and cowriter Vera Chytilova (with a team of seven more credited as writers) was going for. In fact, I’m not sure what she was going for.

“Jeffty Is Five” (1977)

Wikipedia calls this story by Harlan Ellison a fantasy, which seems about right. It makes no sense what’s going on, has no rational basis. Jeffty—Jeff Kinzer—seems to be permanently 5 years old, that’s all. The first-person narrator was his age when they met in the neighborhood and became friends. Now he is a 22-year-old college graduate starting his own business, an electronics repair shop. He grows on, but Jeffty does not. For some reason this is not entirely clear to people around him until Jeffty is 14, which seems a little slow on the draw, but that’s how the story goes. Could be psychological denial on the part of his parents, who are notably depressed. Ellison throws in another nice wrinkle when it turns out Jeffty is apparently living in an alternate timeline. The radio in his bedroom plays old-time radio shows, not the rock ‘n’ roll and pop music of the story’s present day. But the shows Jeffty listens to are also contemporary, aware of and making references to current events. Jeffty can even enter contests on the radio and send away for prizes, which are old-fashioned but also brand-new. The narrator stays friends with Jeffty, but inevitably the dynamic starts to have aspects of babysitting, or maybe the old Big Brothers program. There are good, inexplicable things going on here, but I’m not sure Ellison understands the situation any better than we do and he’s the author for crying out loud. He has a responsibility. But it feels more like he’s just playing with it, riffing on it. It has less of Ellison’s typical rage to propel it, but there is a detectable bitterness about time and aging. Over at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB), I have only rarely seen so many rankings for any other story I can recall, 12 votes with a composite 9.08 (of 10), which certainly speaks to Ellison’s lasting popularity and regard. As usual, I am feeling a little contrarian. I like the wistful tone of this story but there’s something rancid in it too—it’s on the fence about what it means to be 5 years old maybe even forever. Ellison also didn’t seem to know how to finish it except by kind of blowing it up, which doesn’t really work. In fairness, I wouldn’t know how to end it myself. Despite any misgivings, the story does have many nice passages.

The Essential Ellison, ed. Terry Dowling
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