Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (2023)

It’s possible that you need to know Judith Blume’s 1970 YA novel of the same name to fully appreciate this movie. I never read it but at least I remember it was a popular sensation in high school. And I have seen another picture by director and screenwriter Kelly Fremon Craig, The Edge of Seventeen from 2016, which is approximately as good. It’s 1970 here and sixth-grader Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) is experiencing personal challenges. Her family has just moved from New York City to the suburbs of New Jersey where she has to make all new friends. She also happens to be enduring some ongoing religious issues. Her father Herb (a strangely miscast Benny Safdie) is Jewish, her mother Barbara (an excellent Rachel McAdams) was raised by blood-of-Jesus evangelicals from Ohio who disowned her when she married a Jew. In fact, Margaret has never met her grandparents on that side. As a result, Margaret’s parents have decided to leave all personal religious choices to Margaret herself. Also, her teacher has assigned her to do a study of religion for a year-long project. Margaret is definitely curious about religion, which leads to lots of conversations / prayers she has with God (as per the title). Her Christian grandparents do make an appearance, and also, maybe, something of an effort, but that piece of the story is left open-ended by movie’s end. Mostly Margaret hangs around in a clique of three other girls her age, all of them worried about starting their periods and growing their breasts (behind closed doors in their bedrooms they fly off into exercises of “We must, we must, we must increase our bust”). They worry a lot about attracting boys, starting by liking some of the worst, not knowing any better. Are You There God? is indeed a tender coming-of-age story, and heck, maybe I should go back and read the novel. I loved this movie. It’s funny and warm and often touching. It’s rated PG-13, with lots of Disneyesque family feels. I had to wince a few times, and some of the plot threads are not resolved entirely convincingly. But Are You There God? is a nice place to stop and smell the roses. Fortson is terrific as Margaret and McAdams is also great. And the picture is full of tart little life lessons for Margaret that won’t hurt any of the rest of us to relearn. The mission of this feel-good movie is to make you and your loved ones feel good. Mission accomplished.

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936)

This story by Ernest Hemingway takes place on an African safari, which is not promising. Then it gets into Hemingway’s moralizing about courage and integrity, which is even less so. It doesn’t help, reading the story nowadays, that big game hunting has become something much more painfully perverse, especially if the game is animals in dwindling populations. But this story somehow still works with its shocking scenes and revelations. It’s a hunting party of three: a rich fool, his wife, and their guide. The guide is the obvious Hemingway hero and/or stand-in, stoic and judgmental and above it all by right of his own excellence. The rich fool, who is paying for all this, has already committed the act that brands him a coward before the story begins, earlier that day. He turned and ran from an approaching lion. The guide had to bring it down and it turned into a messy kill. Some of us might be more inclined to call turning around and running away prudent, and a lot of us think they shouldn’t even have been there in the first place, even in 1936. Take the coward thing as given, it leads to severe humiliations for the rich guy. He and his wife are not getting along. She takes the opportunity of his shame to sneak into the guide’s tent for a few hours that night. The infidelity is so blatant I’m not sure you can even call it deception. These two events may (or may not) seem unlikely if you think about them but they work in the story, casting an awful pall. The story finishes on a third terrible event, just as extreme and unlikely, as the rich guy is charged by an African buffalo the next day. There has been an incident that morning in which his cowardice was redeemed. But, apparently, it’s just some illusion, as ultimately true nature cannot forgive him, or something. Or his wife, who gets him in the head trying for the buffalo (or was she?). I don’t know. It worked for me at the same time I was moaning and groaning about all these hypermasculine rites and rules and all the immutability of it. It does get tiresome. But this story is done pretty well and worked for me in spite of all that. It’s moving in a number of ways. And I don’t mind the arrogant contempt the guide has for the rich couple, who remind me of Tom and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby. No doubt unconscious on Hemingway’s part.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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Aliens (1986)

UK / USA, 137 minutes

Director: James Cameron

Writers: James Cameron, David Giler, Walter Hill, Dan O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett

Photography: Adrian Biddle

Music: James Horner

Editor: Ray Lovejoy

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, William Hope, Jenette Goldstein

Now that it’s Christmas week and all time has stopped making sense, consider catching up on one or two or three of your favorite movie series. In the case of the Alien franchise, do as I say not as I do, because I haven’t even seen Alien: Romulus yet (soon!) or any of the TV treatments or Predator crossovers. The first two—Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986)—are classics that are worth multiple looks and basically after that you are on your own, except remember: Christmas week is a generous time for mediocre movies so don’t hesitate to go for three or more movies a day. On the other hand, no one will blame you if you don’t get far past this one. Aliens is rather a different movie from Alien but it’s nearly as good in its own way. Where Alien is a monster horror picture with trappings of science fiction and lots of suspense, Aliens is more science fiction action / adventure with trappings of horror and also lots of suspense. Aliens also has Sigourney Weaver and wholesome girl power all over it—even on the alien side. What’s not to like?

Now that you mention it, and speaking as someone dedicated to not liking sequels, yes, there are things not to like about Aliens: director and cowriter James Cameron, the unctuous sitcom star Paul Reiser (albeit six years before Mad About You), a generally slow start, an overly militarist mindset (albeit 15 years before 9/11), and even some noticeable cribbing from Steven Spielberg’s style. Aliens rationalizes all the shock of the Alien revelations into a systematic universe with a known sequence of so-called “xenomorph” malevolence: the face-hugger, the chest-buster, the blood that is an incredibly corrosive acid. In many ways this alien life form is the perfect terrifying monster. Except—is it my imagination or are they a little inconsistent about the whole alien-blood-is-acid thing? Sometimes it seems much less corrosive than others.

“Beyond Lies the Wub” (1952)

This may or may not be Philip K. Dick’s first published genre story—some say yes, others say it’s “Roog” (which also features an animal for those keeping score at home). “Beyond Lies the Wub” is very simple and in many ways playful, although the twist may fairly be called chilling. Certainly it works. The story opens on a scene like the biblical Noah’s ark story, with animals on Mars being led aboard a spaceship. A lot of the crew, such as the first mate, appear to be unhappy about something. They seem to disapprove of the work, or possibly have problems with the captain. One of the crew comes aboard with a “wub,” which is described as a 400-pound pig. The captain says he’d like to eat it, at which point the wub speaks up with perfect English—indeed, polished and intelligent. He says he would prefer not to be eaten. No one else really wants to eat it either, especially once they realize it is sentient, with a detectable personality. In typical Phildickian fashion, these things just happen and no one is particularly fazed. Not even Peterson, who has jurisdiction of the wub and has been carrying on a running conversation with it about cultural matters (specifically, at the moment in the story, Odysseus). We are instinctively on the side of the wub—it has been humanized, so to speak—but alas. The captain gives the orders and the wub is butchered and roasted. At the dinner table the story’s twist occurs and it surprised me, though you might guess it if you think about it enough. “Beyond Lies the Wub” is an early story for Dick but already has many of his hallmarks: the effortless reach for universal Western cultural markers like Odysseus, the whimsy and “soft,” almost magical science. Given: there are animals on Mars, including pigs, and they are sentient and intelligent (and have unique powers too). Take it or leave it. I notice on ISFDB that this story has an unusually high number of rankings, with a fairly high aggregated score of 8.22. Ten “Beyond Lies the Wub” fans can’t be wrong. The story is worth tracking down for all followers of the Phildick.

The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume 1
Read story online.
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1. Jimi Hendrix Experience, Electric Ladyland (1968)

[2010 review here, 2011 review of “All Along the Watchtower” here, 2011 review of “Rainy Day, Dream Away” here]

Jimi Hendrix never reached full musical maturity, with scads of impressive flashes of brilliance but still showing streaks of goofy amateur playfulness, based on intuition and/or being stoned, that did not come off. It’s serve-to-taste with a lot of his posthumous material. I don’t care for swaths of it, but I love what I love very much. I was interested to learn in Wikipedia that Electric Ladyland was considered a failure by many contemporary critics. Robert Christgau was all over it, in Stereo Review, but both Melody Maker in the UK and Rolling Stone in the US found it flawed, if not exactly fatally so. I admit I had to circle this album for many years before it became as important to me as it has. It’s the second-best rock album by my lights after only Highway 61 Revisited. It is obviously well within the vinyl era, which I claim as explanation for my persistent orientation to it, interpreting it by sides. My now irrelevant view was / is that any good to great album—especially a multi-LP package—must have at least one side that is perfect or close to it. Electric Ladyland has that—side 3—but it also has a sequencing dialogue going on between the various sides that is intuitively suggestive if never quite articulate.

Side 4 presents a suite that responds to one song each from the other sides, and for good measure throws in a hit song, “All Along the Watchtower.” that is arguably the greatest Bob Dylan cover ever recorded. The 15-minute “Voodoo Chile” on side 1 is answered by the five-minute “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” (The copy editor in me winces at spelling it like the South American country the first time and then just spelling it straight from the dictionary the second. If you’re going for dialect, have you ever heard of an apostrophe?! Chalk it up to the freewheeling.) “Rainy Day, Dream Away”—the sordid tale on side 3 of life in the Pacific Northwest—is answered by “Still Raining, Still Dreaming.” And—I know this is a stretcher—“Burning of the Midnight Lamp” on side 2 is answered by “House Burning Down.” (As an interesting and pointless aside, even a year ago most versions of Electric Ladyland on youtube omitted “House Burning Down”—algorithms, apparently, disapproving of arson.) All three of these tracks on side 4 are even better and more amazing than the tracks they respond to. Side 4, thus, is eccentric but also near perfect.

“An Exciting Christmas Eve” (1883)

This story by Arthur Conan Doyle was written when he was about 24 and does not alas have very much to do with Christmas or the Christmas spirit. I’m not sure why it is set in the season, except that might have made it more marketable in publishing circles of the time. The plot is ludicrous and, contra the title, not so exciting. But Doyle is good enough, even at young age, to make it suspenseful and it is often enjoyable in spite of its various weaknesses. The first-person narrator, Herr Doktor Otto von Spee of Berlin, is a chemist who specializes in explosives. The Franco-Prussian War of 1871-1872 is raging along. Foreign spies or undercover agents (presumably French) want information from him about bombs, so they kidnap him to get it. In a way it makes sense in 1883 for an explosives expert to be heroic like von Spee is here. That might have changed after about World War I and it does seem strange here. Nobody ever thought much of the Unabomber, for example. In the end a lot of the problems in this story may be more about the inexperience of Doyle. The kidnapping of von Spee is not handled well and in general the story assumes we are more keenly interested in bombs than we might be and that we already know what things like “guncotton” are. I suspect the explosions here would be likely to kill people. Von Spee notably survives a big one. Basically, the story describes von Spee’s expertise and bona fides, then he is kidnapped and told he must train bomb-makers with his knowledge, and then he figures out a way to escape. You really have to lean into your suspension of disbelief if this story is going to work for you, especially with this premise. But even as a young writer still coming up, Doyle has a knack for making his stories entertaining and engaging. Just don’t expect this one to work well if you’re including it in some kind of Christmas ritual. Yes, I do think Christmas is a good time for ghost stories. But this story is not really that.

Chillers for Christmas, ed. Richard Dalby (out of print)
Read story online.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

Speaking as someone who watches too much true-crime TV, I was curious to see how this celebrated fictional movie from last year about a crime and trial might go. It won the big prize at Cannes and got a handful of Oscar nominations too, with a win for Best Original Screenplay. I’m happy to note first that, as far as I can tell, it is not a story based on real-life incidents, which somehow usually turn out terrible and strangely unbelievable in the movies. This French picture, much of it in English, is basically a domestic drama tucked away inside a courtroom drama, involving one of those cases where the evidence is too ambiguous to make an undisputed call. A man falls to his death—in the classic formulation of Richard and Linda Thompson, “Did [he] jump or was [he] pushed?” The widow, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller), is accused of murder and taken to some kind of jury trial in a very interesting and confusing French legal system. Police procedure is part of the story too, as cops and prosecutors attempt to divine what happened from odd blood spatter patterns and witness testimony, the latter of which is mostly only their 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner). The marriage has been going rotten for some time. Voyter is not particularly sympathetic, arguably cold and ambitious to the detriment of her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis). Both are writers but only she is successful, which adds to their growing tensions. Anatomy of a Fall thus becomes a kind of rorschach test, which in many ways puts their son Daniel uncomfortably in the middle. He was partially blinded in an accident when he was 4. Samuel blamed himself for it and Sandra is inclined to agree. One of the pleasures of this picture could well be pie and coffee discussions afterward about the crime and the verdict and what happened. Anatomy of a Fall is on the long side, running to two and a half hours, but I found it entirely riveting, especially in the trial scenes that take up so much of it. Huller’s performance is pitch-perfect, reserved, self-contained, with unsettling portents and few definitive clues about the truth of the situation. Also, speaking again as someone who watches too much true-crime, Anatomy of a Fall is not a bit cheesy, which is too often a major temptation in that realm. This movie deserves all the accolades it got.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

I read George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel in high school—saw the 1956 movie then too, which fit well with my taste for 1950s paranoid science fiction, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, etc. Looking at the movie again reminded me how much I associated it with the novel. Edmond O’Brien, Jan Sterling, and Michael Redgrave are not much like the characters I imagined when I reread it. But the heavy gray mood is pinpoint perfect. For some reason I don’t think of Nineteen Eighty-Four as science fiction, though obviously enough it is. Maybe I’m distinguishing science fiction from dystopian from utopian literature in my head, the paradoxical three sides of the future-seeing coin. For all its foreboding mood, Nineteen Eighty-Four is surprisingly funny in places. I didn’t notice that in high school. England (or Britain, or the UK), for example, has been renamed “Airstrip One.” I love that! But note to self: George Orwell is not Ayn Rand. I don’t want to hold it against Orwell that he has been championed so ardently by braying right-wing clowns like Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan. (In fairness, Hitchens died before Trump’s political era began and Sullivan is now more of a Never Trumper and ally, however temporary.) I like the deeply somber mood Orwell constructs here. Many of his ideas are intriguing and some maybe even prescient. He certainly understands how propaganda works, and the best single aspect of it might be “Newspeak,” the updates to the English language made by the totalitarian regime of Oceania. They’ve been working on it for decades, eliminating not only redundancies of the language but also attempting to retire ideas of political and intellectual freedom by eliminating all the words associated with them. Orwell may have been a little too enamored with some of his ideas, filling up the back half of this novel with large sections of exposition. A book banned for political reasons is quoted at stultifying length though fans of world-building might like it. He also tacked on an appendix that goes into more detail on Newspeak (which alone could well have inspired the slang in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange). I suspect, ultimately, that Nineteen Eighty-Four might have been more meager without this supporting material. The rise and fall of the love affair between Winston Smith and Julia would probably not be enough to put this over. And whatever reservations I may have here, to be clear, the prevailing vision of this novel—the surveillance culture (slowly coming true, the prescient part) coupled with a fastidious industry constantly at work rewriting and erasing history in the actual archives—is chilling, bleak, pervasive, and cleverly designed to demoralize. Totalitarianism, get your totalitarianism here. The reputation of Nineteen Eighty-Four is deserved. Something about it gets into your bones.

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

Memories of Murder (2003)

Salinui chueok, South Korea, 132 minutes

Director: Bong Joon Ho

Writers: Bong Joon Ho, Kwang-rim Kim, Sung-bo Shim

Photography: Hyung Koo Kim

Music: Taro Iwashiro

Editor: Sun-Min Kim

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Kim Sang-kyung, Kim Roe-ha, Song Jae-ho, Byun Hee-Bong, Ryu Tae-ho, Ko Seo-hie

I had a harder time than usual getting a look at director and cowriter Bong Joon Ho’s second full-length picture. It’s still, by all the markers I can find, his most popular after only Parasite. It was on Amazon last month—I know it was, because I kept checking. Maybe it rotated out with December. But the other day when I went to look at it it was no longer there, it wasn’t on the Criterion Channel (although Memories of Murder, Okja, and Parasite have all got the Criterion blu-ray/DVD treatment), it’s not on Kanopy either (a service worth checking out if you have a library card), and the youtube version seemed to be UHD only, which my system can’t handle. I finally found it on Tubi, whatever the heck that is—at least it was free and without commercial interruptions and didn’t appear to infect my computer. I got the sense—maybe it was the UHD-only avail—that Memories of Murder, a movie that has never much appealed to me, may be appreciated best for its cinematic qualities. I admit they are impressive, if you have the right setup or can take advantage of an opportunity to see it in a theater. Maybe you can luck into a double feature with something by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

“In his breakthrough second feature, Bong Joon Ho explodes the conventions of the policier with thrillingly subversive, genre-defying results,” raves the Criterion write-up. “Policier” is cineaste for “police procedural,” a favored sub-subgenre of mine; “thrillingly subversive, genre-defying” gives away that they’re doing it wrong. It’s arty to a fault—with many, many arresting and well-composed shots—and Bong’s jarring sense of humor intrudes everything. The coarse jokiness is easier to handle for me in Bong contexts that are more formally science fiction or fantasy, like The Host (still ruined for me by it, but I may owe that one another look), Snowpiercer, or, indeed, Parasite. I’ve been actively repulsed when Bong applies it to these two-thirds inept cops tracking a serial killer in a remote village. I don’t see it as anything like the right context for slapstick, however thrillingly subversive.

Law & Order, s8 (1997-1998)

The Law & Order franchise continues its twisty ways in the eighth season. There is some increasingly ongoing misbegotten attempt to humanize the principals. Detective Curtis’s wife is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and begins to deteriorate. Lt. Van Buren files a lawsuit alleging discrimination when she was passed over for a promotion. Lennie’s daughter is in trouble with the law over drugs. These threads are random, sideline themes advanced even as single throwaway lines in an episode. They feel mechanical but they can be affecting—or I am a ridiculous softy. On the other hand, we are explicitly left hanging on all of them. Interested to see whether and if so how they are resolved in the next season. There’s a two-part tie-in episode here with Homicide—the first part is a Law & Order episode and the second a Homicide, with all the orange-filtered jittery japing style of a show I never cared much for. Some of the Law & Order episodes in this season I could recognize from the very first scenes and sometimes even knew the line on which the plot turned, such as one where Lt. Van Buren turns to a key suspect in a murder and says, “Hello, my brother.” Another, starting in a rooftop parking lot, involves clitoridectomies—surgical removal of the clitoris, an ancient barbaric practice in some cultures. It’s feeling ripped from the headlines, as usual. You can tell because, in the more sensitive ones, the disclaimer is the first thing you see. Other episodes I was not even sure I had seen before. They must not have appeared as much in reruns, because I faithfully watched them for years. Dr. Emil Skoda (J.K. Simmons) is introduced as the new forensic psychologist, a hard-ass replacing the more touchy-feely Elizabeth Olivet. Trump gets name-checked occasionally. In one case involving real estate shenanigans, Curtis says, “If the other owners jump on the bandwagon, Donald Trump Jr. goes right down the tube.” For the record, Lennie, as usual, bites off the best and most bitter observations about the human condition. “I guess the macarena wasn’t exciting enough for them,” he says one time, reminding us this series arguably had its heyday in the ‘90s. But the formula stands up—about 20 minutes of police procedure and 20 minutes of a trial, with lots of variation involving plea bargains and other legal maneuvering. It stands up and would keep me loyal to the show for years. But I would never be as happy again with the casting decisions and other developments. From now on Jack McCoy is a fixture and all of his assistants will be beautiful babes he may or may not bed. I think Claire Kincaid is the only we’re sure of? He’s still losing (a minority of) his cases. As the show went on he would tend to win them all. We have probably reached the ceiling of Law & Order by this point in the franchise, but it also has a surprisingly durable, high floor. It may be starting to feel somewhat stale, but the scripts remain zippy and the cases complex and interesting. You could do worse with a 20th-century crime show—say, Homicide.

Poor Folk (1846)

Poor People
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel is fairly called “epistolary”—it is a series of letters between two distant cousins in love with one another by all their many declarations. The approach brings some some awkwardness to the narrative related directly to the stop-and-reset nature of a series of letters. Epistolary novels were more common in 19th-century literature, but usually they involved correspondents who are monied people, middle class at least, with leisure time to write. Dostoevsky’s innovation here is to put the emphasis directly on “poor folk.” In terms of classifications, I’m less sure about “novel” because it’s pretty short, less than 150 pages by my count, whereas I see later work of his that appears to be longer characterized as “novella.” As always, go figure. Dostoevsky wrote Poor Folk in his mid-20s but it feels like mature work, perhaps because the epistolary nature of it may cover up to some extent his inexperience as a writer. Critics in the 1840s declared it a social novel—Russia’s first, according to some. The correspondents detail many lives of poverty, including their own, but their anecdotes are fragmented, not the point of their letters even if they are the point of the novel. Some story elements go unfinished or must be surmised. The main subject of these two is their love for one another. Other stories may be broken off but that one never is. There’s a large age gap between them too—he is close to 50 and she’s not even 20. Dostoevsky’s style, his voice, is already in evidence. I’m not sure how to describe it. He enters into passages that are like ranting, full of wild invective, justifications, and self-lacerations. Yet they are also concrete and vivid and serve to propel the stories. Even this early in his career he can sweep you up into them. The best example here is the longest letter by far, written by the woman (in my C.J. Hogarth translation she is Barbara, though more often elsewhere I see her called Varvara). She intends the letter to be the story of her life and it covers a lot of territory. Most of their concerns are otherwise about the daily inconveniences of poverty and how they attempt to overcome them. These persistent, ever-shifting daily problems will be familiar to anyone who has had periods of no money. The crises may seem trivial, especially to people of means, but they are constant and can be imposing. They can take a lot of time and energy to deal with. Despair is never far. The correspondents also make some connections over reading—both are literate. He works as a copyist. The ending is sad because a rich (and cruel) man proposes to Barbara and she accepts, leaving her cousin behind in grief. I don’t particularly like the epistolary mode much, but it’s interesting to encounter Dostoevsky so young and fresh. Call him DJ Dusty F.

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

2. Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) – “A Day in the Life”

[2011 review of “A Day in the Life” here]

My unconventional conventional choice here has become something of a lightning rod for conventionalists and contrarians. Since approximately 1978, Sgt. Pepper’s has been named in multiple places via multiple surveys as the greatest rock album of all time, though support for it has flagged a little in this century. Certainly many also consider it the greatest psychedelic rock album of all time, which is where a contrarian like myself starts to clear his throat. The only songs besides “A Day in the Life” that might qualify as psychedelic—“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (John Lennon being cute about LSD, i.e., Lucy Sky Diamonds, plus the lyrics are trippy), “Within You Without You” (George Harrison droning ineffectively on a sitar for five minutes), and maybe “Fixing a Hole” (by Paul McCartney shortly before composing “Rocky Raccoon”). It is otherwise the omnibus anthology style that arguably started with Revolver and continued through the White Album and Abbey Road, with songs of all genres and semi-genres chockablock side by side. (In that sense, Rubber Soul may be the last cohesive Beatles album.) “She’s Leaving Home” on Sgt. Pepper’s, for example, is a tender, sentimental ballad likely to make the weak cry. Compare Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days” (produced by McCartney) or Glen Campbell’s “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.” Let me stipulate I have nothing against crying. I do it all the time. “When I’m Sixty-Four,” written by McCartney when he was 14 and now a tradition to call out for any baby boomer turning that precise age, is more like a nagging earworm, featuring clarinets. There should be polaroids with a birthday cake and grandkids. You’re not dropping acid for that, if you are dropping acid, which I am not necessarily endorsing.

To be clear, I have nothing against most of the songs on Sgt. Pepper’s. I thought I might, and have thought so for many years of not listening to it, but, when I started playing it again in recent days, the first thing I realized was how well I know it, from the sequencing to all the words in all the songs. I can even sing with “Within You Without You.” It’s among the first albums I ever bought and it’s thoroughly imprinted on me, so taking the contrarian stance is tricky. I do believe Sgt. Pepper’s has been vastly overrated. But it’s still the Beatles and thus has undeniable appeals for fans like me who came up on them. It’s not the greatest rock album of all time (that’s Highway 61 Revisited or possibly Sandinista) and it’s not the greatest psychedelic album of all time either (that’s—well, why spoil the surprise, right? you've probably figured it out by now anyway). All that said, Sgt. Pepper’s does have arguably the greatest psychedelic song of all time. “A Day in the Life” is so perfect, in fact, I’m convinced the song and its placement as the last heard on the album are what have convinced people that the album is a psychedelic masterpiece when it is really just a workaday Beatles album—if I were going to stack-rank them all I’m pretty sure it would fall in the bottom third.

But it does have “A Day in the Life” and that’s not nothing. So majestic in its ambitions and scope that you would have to classify it as a novelty, comparable perhaps to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (more operatic than psychedelic) or exercises by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and the Who, all of which came after Sgt. Pepper’s. “A Day in the Life” is also (with “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”) a source of the controversy around whether the album is pro-drug and thus a target for censorship. Obviously, in 1967, it was pro-hallucinogens. It’s also in favor of transcendental meditation. While a lot of songs on the album are just goofs (a Beatles tradition of its own, again arguably since Revolver), “A Day in the Life” comes in deadly serious and stays that way, even as the lyrics are deceptively quotidian. McCartney pounds the piano with great authority. Lennon’s words are disorienting. “I heard the news today, oh boy....” They don’t seem to make sense but feel like they should. “He blew his mind out in a car....” Ringo’s fills are subtly perfect. Three verses of this and then, at 1:40, with a wobbly drawn-out “I’d love to turn you on,” it spirals into the first of its two blunt force avant-garde classical orchestra interludes, which frankly were too much for me to handle as a 12-year-old hearing it for the first time on the radio. It felt like my head was exploding and I was going insane for the 35 seconds or so that it lasts. The Paul McCartney section in the middle is a perfect counterbalance to the Lennon and the orchestra. But with “Found my way upstairs and had a smoke / And somebody spoke and I went into a dream,” we are off again to the wilds of the raggedy edges of the brain, in a place the Moody Blues studied well for “Tuesday Afternoon.” Powerful orchestral notes usher us back to Lennon and “I read the news today, oh boy.” One more verse and one more orchestral fever break and then McCartney hits a grand chord on a grand piano and they let is resonate for 45 seconds. Spectacular. What hit you? Another masterpiece.

“On the Down Line” (1867)

This story by George Manville Fenn is primitive stuff. The structure is weird and veers toward the pointless. It’s from the Chillers for Christmas anthology, the second in a series of four on the theme edited by Richard Dalby. So far the connections to Christmas have been fairly strained, or merely coincidental. Yes, typically, this one takes place at Christmas. It involves a flashback to the Christmas the year before. Dalby is obviously well-read in 19th-century gothic / romance / horror lit. The anthology also ranges into the 20th century so he’s probably good all over. But he seems to have a collector / fan streak that can trump his taste. His intro to this story boasts of its obscurity, for example. OK but sometimes that happens for a reason. Dalby compares Fenn to Dickens and that seems apt. This story starts on an appalling scene of poverty and desperation on a Christmas (Eve, perhaps). Our first-person narrator is down and out, has been out of work for a year. He’s out scrounging and begging. A little girl gives him a penny, which makes him weep for his abject state. Then he sees a guy who is familiar and who eventually recognizes him too, promises him a job, gives him money. Our guy wanders off and has a merry Christmas after all, and finally gets around to telling us the story of the year before, when he lost his job because of this generous guy. Our guy was an engineer or perhaps stoker, and the generous guy got on board the train and hijacked it, reasons unclear. He had a gun so our guy went along with him, as one does, but that’s the reason he lost his job. Anyway, the ghost part of the story may be the most muddled yet, though it has a notably striking doppelganger element. Annoyingly, it also involves technical details about train lines—me, I’ve never heard of up lines or down lines and they aren’t really explained. Clearly enough they are parallel adjacent tracks. When the lines run close, in the story, a ghost train appears and travels alongside it so precisely that our guy can look over into its engine compartment and see himself there. I liked that, as doppelganger themes and images don’t often register with me. And while I often complain of too much explanation I fear this one has too little. Why is our guy seeing a ghost train at all, let alone with himself on it? And who is this generous guy and why did he hijack the train last year? Not clear.

Chillers for Christmas, ed. Richard Dalby (out of print)
Story not available online.

Fresh (2022)

Fresh starts as a movie about dating apps and The Dating Scene Today. That’s a premise I can buy for a horror show, and the opening scene fully delivers on all expectations. But Fresh has some other fish to fry and soon moves on to its destiny as a movie about billionaire cannibals and their exquisite tastes. One such, for example, is that they all believe women taste better. In many ways Fresh is riffing on American Psycho, featuring a yuppie scum guy, Steve (Sebastian Stan), who is making his way in the gig economy picking up women, capturing them, holding them, and eventually cutting them up into chops and cutlets. It offers up some very fine food cinematography along the way—fans of Big Night might think about giving Fresh a try (think hard, I say). Steve promises his victims to keep them alive as long as he can. But there’s something different for him about Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones). Why, he seems to be falling in love with her. What makes Fresh work for me is that it’s much less focused on gore and shock—there’s some, but it’s more antiseptic, just enough to convince you it’s horror. By contrast, and somewhat confusingly, it is more focused on maintaining a light and engaging tone. It’s entertaining, in short. A lot of it is clonkingly obvious by the points it wants to make. Director Mimi Cave and writer Lauryn Kahn seem aware these points are not that fresh, casting a wry and ironic wash over the proceedings. Still, billionaires consuming people, where have we heard that before? Women as disposable consumer product. Et cetera. To be clear, Steve is no billionaire. He’s just the moral equivalent of the Uber Eats driver delivering goods to the doorstep. He’s obviously making big money on it as he lives in a spectacular mansion with large walk-in freezers all over the place. Once we are hep to all the nuance of the details and tone in Fresh, the picture does start to flag some. It’s especially hard for me to believe the love story, and the action-oriented escape attempts only take you so far. But the picture is warmly humorous with an admirable relentlessness. A strange way to put over a cannibal holocaust, but there you go.

The Female Man (1975)

I’m not sure what to think of this Joanna Russ novel, billed as science fiction, nominated for a Nebula, and now widely considered a classic of so-called New Wave science fiction, though not without controversy and detractors. It bears a lot of the hallmarks of New Wave SF, but to me it seemed about two parts science fiction to seven or eight parts righteous feminist critique. What I liked best is that Russ is a witty and genuinely funny writer, skewering herself as well as men at large. What I liked least was feeling lost most of the time. Wikipedia helped with some of it. Reading it with others would probably be good too. That’s a feature I associate with New Wave SF—it’s often confusing. The Female Man is freewheeling and reads like someone’s head has just exploded, presumably Russ’s. There are multiple characters from multiple settings, a time travel theory, alternative histories, and more by way of high concept. The novel feels like it’s chasing its own tail for the first two-thirds, however entertaining. Then, with Part Seven, it focuses and bears down harder on its characters and even more on its complaints about men, which comes down to the famous quote from Sarah Moore Grimke, “All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks.” There’s a lot to complain about men, of course, and even more she may not have known yet in 1975. The endless sexualizing, the never taking women seriously, the use of women as slave labor, etc., etc. One thing she may not have known (or maybe did) is how much work women have done for science without credit. There’s also the whole baby-making expectation—men claiming motherhood as sacrosanct yet not offering much of anything tangible to help with it, as a matter of political policy, and even indignant about requests for life-saving healthcare. There’s not much new here for anyone who lived through the ‘70s and beyond. But Russ is way more fun than it might sound from the summaries. She’s playful, weird, and sardonic, all with a light touch. She’s angry too, with a good outlet for it here. The science fiction aspects feel more like a costume she has donned for the occasion. The ideas are intriguing but need more development and/or clarity. The main point here is—I don’t want to say the “war,” so let’s say the human condition between the sexes.

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