“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” (1948)

[2017 write-up here]

When I first encountered J.D. Salinger’s work as an adolescent, I was most impressed and often identified with the privileged voice of middle-class dread—all of the accoutrements and none of the shows of happiness. Later, Salinger’s uncanny abilities as a writer came to impress me most. He is amazingly skillful at making his narratives dense with layers of meaning. This one, for example, works fine at its most obvious level (almost too obvious!), a caustic lampoon of empty suburban ways of life. But there is much more going on here, and the details tell. Two 30something women are getting together for a catch-up. They drink the afternoon away, bemoaning their present lives and reminiscing about college days when they first met. Both were dropouts within the year. Eloise gripes about her husband and waxes nostalgic about a boyfriend named Walt. In what may be a retcon, which I don’t think is exactly Salinger’s style, Salinger later said it’s Walt Glass—another member of the Glass family, yes. To me Walt is the most important part of this story, not because he is a Glass but because he died in the war. I am starting to sense, for the first time, how significantly Salinger’s experience in the war as a combat soldier affected him and reverberates out in his work. War experience is also a main point in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (he does favor some long and silly titles, doesn’t he?). Seymour was plainly overwhelmed by the war. Walt died of it. Eloise loved him and misses him keenly, but there’s little room in her upscale life now for grief, especially not all these years later married to another man. Her friend, Mary Jane, is not much better off—divorced, a career woman in 1948—too late for the war years, too early for women’s liberation, her life is just as narrow and constricted as Eloise’s. “Uncle Wiggily” is a nickname Walt had for Eloise after she sprained her ankle. Now she lives in Connecticut, miserable and drinking herself into stupors regularly. She’s also awful to everyone around her, including her husband, daughter, and maid. Eloise and Mary Jane are not close friends. It’s not even clear they like each other much. They close the visit as evening comes down, passed out. Mary Jane was over two hours late, claiming she got lost. In fairness, I often get lost in the suburbs myself. But that’s partly because I have a seething resentment of the suburbs that distracts me. That’s the kind of dynamics on display between these two, profound and unprocessed disappointment and regrets, all surmised from dialogue and the scene-setting.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

France / USA, 134 minutes

Director: David Lynch

Writers: David Lynch, Robert Engels, Mark Frost

Photography: Ronald Victor Garcia

Music: Angelo Badalamenti

Editor: Mary Sweeney
Cast: Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Kyle MacLachlan, Chris Isaak, Kiefer Sutherland, David Lynch, Harry Dean Stanton, David Bowie, Miguel Ferrer, Grace Zabriskie, Phoebe Augustine, Eric DaRe, Heather Graham, Madchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, James Marshall, Julee Cruise, Lenny von Dohlen, Walter Olkewicz

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me has long been polarizing even for a David Lynch picture. It was widely dismissed at release. Halliwell’s makes the basic points: “Mystifyingly obscure and dull prequel to the TV series Twin Peaks, which tries one’s patience with its visions and precognitions.” In response, legions of David Lynch partisans have risen in fury, defending the pathos of the Laura Palmer story. It’s true that the picture comes with a full ration of Lynchian nonsense: The red room where people talk funny. The roadhouse on the edge of town that programs dream-pop and extremely hard rock. Heck, we don’t even see Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) until more than 30 minutes in. There’s a lot of things here that could go if you wanted to make this movie closer to 90 or 100 minutes, although I’m not sure it would be as effective. The nonsense kind of necessarily softens us for the harrowing reality behind it.

The story at the heart of Fire Walk With Me is not mystifyingly obscure at all, nor dull. It’s about child sexual abuse—what it looks like and how it feels for the victim. Laura is 17 and has been raped by her father (Ray Wise) since she was 12. Much of her behavior can be interpreted through this frame and it is not exotic or unusual. The picture is practically a clinical profile. What is happening to her is unthinkable, and therefore Laura tries to distance herself from it. She can’t believe it’s her father. The cognitive dissonance is too much. She displaces him with this “Bob” figure who creeps into her bedroom through the window. She disassociates. The result is an ongoing bundle of contradictions. She is a volunteer in bobby socks for Meals on Wheels as well as a hooker for rent out at the roadhouse. She uses sex, drugs, and the approval of others to cope, as solace. Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) sums her up: “She’s in high school. She is sexually active. She’s using drugs. She’s crying out for help.”

Oddity (2024)

Oddity is a stylish, low-key horror exercise that mixes up a dash of folk horror with a notably impressive performance by Carolyn Bracken as identical twins. They are so distinct it’s hard to know they’re even sisters, let alone twins, let alone the same person. One, Dani Timmins, was married to the night physician at a nearby mental institution in the country, Dr. Ted Timmins (Gwilym Lee). Early in the movie she is brutally murdered one night by an escaped lunatic while Timmins is at work, the work of the one-eyed Olin Boole (Tadgh Murphy), subject of a 2013 short by director and writer Damian McCarthy. The other, Darcy Odello, is a witchy self-proclaimed psychic who is blind and does not believe that Boole killed her sister. Darcy’s specialty is reading objects, preferably personal items like rings and watches that have touched the skin of the people about whom she draws information. She runs an antique shop that sells only cursed items (one is the toy monkey used by Stephen King in his story “The Monkey”). It’s no place for shoplifters. The curses are removed only with legitimate purchases. Sometimes, she says, customers return with purloined items, begging her to take them back. Within a year of his wife’s death Dr. Timmins is already living with another woman, a woman he works with and knew before the murder. Darcy does not like this development and inserts herself into the life of Dr. Timmins and his new gal, Yana (Caroline Menton). She shows up at their spooky weird mansion with a gift: a wooden life-size statue of a man that is grotesque and horrific. This is basically the folk horror element, drawn, says McCarthy, from Jewish lore about golems. Oddity is unlikely to send anyone into paroxysms of terror but it has its share of jump scares, which are not entirely cheap, and a pervasive air of dread. Bracken modulates her performance—Darcy is generally meek and mild, but there’s a great deal going on underneath that and it peers out effectively. She can be quite unexpectedly fierce and commanding. The last image is almost perfect, set up across the length of the movie and presented slowly, quietly, playing with our expectations—and then delivering.

“The War Prayer” (1905)

This very short story by Mark Twain is painfully obvious, although I am sympathetic with its views and have even had my own experience that resonates with it. When I say very short I mean it—under five pages. Better to call it a parable complete with readymade moral, as it was written in response to US imperial adventuring in progress for the previous decade. A preacher on a Sunday morning is giving volunteers the patriotic sendoff. War fever is in the air. Then a strange man no one knows steps up, saying he is a messenger from God sent to finish the prayer. It’s more or less a depiction of what they’re praying for from the enemy’s viewpoint—death, dismemberment, and destruction. My experience like this happened shortly after 9/11—on the following Friday, 9/14, which President Bush Jr. had designated as a “day of remembrance.” Fair enough. It also happened to be the 20th anniversary of the death of my mother, and though I had little regard for the Bush-Cheney administration I was shaken up like most people by the array of 9/11 events. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head for weeks of those thousands of people crushed under tons of rubble. And the images of that day have been branded into many of us as well—the planes hitting, the towers collapsing, people leaping to their deaths to get away from fire. They are so traumatic, and have become so sacred, that it is still considered in poor taste to speak of them. Don’t call 9/11 iconic or the greatest anything. Anyway, feeling the need to be with others on this day of remembrance, I attended a public gathering in downtown Seattle that featured a lot of political mucky-mucks who were evidently lost about how to respond. They were uniformly uninspired and uninspiring. The moments of silence were the best part. They prayed. One talked about the guns of retribution roaring, which disappointed me. I wish the strange man in “The War Prayer” had been there to speak. He had things to say to a bunch of these people that they really needed to hear. Yes, they are painfully obvious things. But even so they don’t necessarily reach anyone. Twain never published “The War Prayer” in his lifetime. Friends and loved ones urged him not to, saying it would be taken as sacrilegious. Thus has it ever been.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

It’s a Wonderful Life (2006)

The 2006 version of Chris Stamey’s first solo album is what’s on offer on the internet today and that seems to be fine with Stamey, who remixed a couple of the songs from his curious 1982 release (the cover image above is from the ’82 LP), included three of the four songs from his 1984 Instant Excitement EP (minus the John Lennon cover, maybe a licensing issue), and for good measure added two alternate mixes of Wonderful Life songs and another from his 1991 LP Fireworks, “Something Came Over Me.” I was infatuated with the first version of It’s a Wonderful Life in the early ‘80s. Later my LP went missing and I never turned it up again. Thus, from memory, I must note that the remix of “Never Enters My Mind” seems inferior to the original, at least on first listens. I have no problem with the other remix from the original, “Face of the Crowd,” and, indeed, I’m already getting used to the new “Never Enters My Mind.” This 2006 release, which I somehow missed, is a reasonable approximation of a most peculiar solo album with a bunch of extra stuff. Stamey had gone from a sideman with Alex Chilton in the late ‘70s to playing in the band Sneakers with Mitch Easter to a principal with Peter Holsapple in the dBs, co-author of that band’s great first two albums. Stamey seemed to be working—and generally has all along—in a certain indie alternative pop mode where melody and the three-minute song are prized with smidges of feedback and noise (and sometimes smidges of sentiment, as on his Christmas albums). It’s a Wonderful Life—I think it’s just him overdubbing himself—suggests Stamey may have been more the force for racket in the dBs. It clunks and sprawls at slow pace like a New Orleans parade going down the line, with Stamey’s variously agonized vocals declaiming over it. The drumkit squats over it all, thundering. The album was early efforts by Stamey at production (the album is credited as “directed” by Stamey and recorded by Mitch Easter), so perhaps there’s some beginner’s luck at making all this work in almost a hypnotic way. You listen to it a few times and it gets to you. Stamey’s gift for melody does not fail him, as “Never Enters My Mind” (new and old), “Depth of Field,” and the title song are absolutely top of the line. I want to complain about “Get a Job,” which is not the Silhouettes 1957 sha-na-na hit but instead a cover of “Tobacco Road.” I’m still too scarred by too recently hearing the “Tobacco Road” cover by War with Eric Burdon. Points for prescience of a kind on “Brushfire in Hoboken,” where immigrants are blamed for a fire. The extra extras in the 2006 release are nice to have, notably the “Violin Version” of the title song with sawing and extra-added robot rhythms that somehow remind me of Harry Smith songs. I think it’s the shades of inexpertness. It’s a Wonderful Life—extremely odd, perhaps for fans only, but I found it worth the reunion revisit.

Barbarian (2022)

[2022 review here]

Bulgaria / USA. 102 minutes

Director/writer: Zach Cregger

Photography: Zach Kuperstein

Music: Anna Drubich, Ronettes

Editor: Joe Murphy

Cast: Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgard, Justin Long, Matthew Patrick Davis, Richard Brake, Jaymes Butler, Kate Nichols

(spoilers) Since at least 2013 and Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, Detroit’s amazing deterioration in areas such as Brightmoor has been there to be used as a powerful visual element for anyone willing to venture into them. Capitalism isn’t doing anything about it and whole blocks are going all the way back to nature, with barest hints of the decrepit decaying houses where people used to live. Barbarian makes good use of the wreckage. Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at night to her Airbnb destination in a pouring rainstorm and never gets a good look at the neighborhood until next morning, when it is almost as shocking for us as it is for her. The camera takes its time swiveling and panning and showing us everything it can see.

Tess is in Detroit for a job interview with a documentary filmmaker but already she’s in over her head by the whims of fate. The house at 476 Barbary has been double-booked and the other renter is already in there with the key. It’s an Airbnb nightmare. A large convention in town makes available hotel rooms scarce. The guy already there, Keith (Bill Skarsgard), doesn’t seem threatening, but you never know. Director and writer Zach Cregger reportedly based a lot of Keith and other males in Barbarian on a book by security specialist Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear, which details warning signals of dangerous men. If alarm bells are going off for Tess—and they are—they are going off for us as well through all the uncomfortable conversations that lead to Tess agreeing to stay there overnight. We won’t learn it for a while, but Keith is the least of her worries.

“The Autopsy” (1980)

David G. Hartwell, editor of The Dark Descent, was high on Michael Shea at the time the anthology was published in 1987. Shea’s Nifft the Lean won a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1983. Hartwell compares Shea to H.P. Lovecraft and that seems about right—Shea even wrote a couple of tales set in the Cthulhu universe (then again, in the 20th century who didn’t?). The connection is easy to see in this long, dense, vividly detailed story. Hartwell classifies it as science fiction and perhaps partly because of that I also thought of the movie Alien, which came out the year before this story. The aliens here are also small like they are in the 1982 picture Liquid Sky, which in turn may also have been influenced by this story. It’s not clear exactly what the aliens in “The Autopsy” are looking for but it doesn’t seem to be anything good. Brute survival is one part of it. The alien we encounter has been on Earth for a while, taking possession of bodies and sucking the blood and life out of them, as needed. It’s not a vampire story in any other way, but it does have a certain element of cruelty that is at once gothic, modern, and very unsettling. And there’s no Kevin McCarthy to stand around shouting, "Listen to me! You're next! They're already here!" I don’t want to get distracted by categorizing, but I do think it's completely fair to call this story horror (ditto Alien, ditto Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Our main guy, a 57-year-old doctor with stomach cancer, has been called to a small mining town to perform autopsies of victims in a mysterious and suspicious explosion at the mine. The corpses are stored in an abandoned ice factory on the edge of town. It’s the middle of the night. As with Lovecraft’s work, another fair point of comparison is that “The Autopsy” requires patience and a continuing willingness to give yourself over to it. The gore is rich and plentiful, all dolled up in arcane medical / biological terminology. You can’t say the title doesn’t warn you. In the Lovecraft vein, Shea even includes a reference to going mad from an experience, and it’s better than most such Lovecraft scenes (sans “tittering,” which I admit was one of Lovecraft’s better recurring word choices). Lovecraft’s characters driven to madness are often a little unintentionally comical. There is no hint of laughs in “The Autopsy.” It is relentlessly grim. It goes to mind-bending places that are similar to those in Aleister Crowley’s “The Testament of Magdalen Blair.” It’s a regular head fuck. Recommended.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Carole King’s Tapestry (2021)

Loren Glass is an English professor at the University of Iowa. Born approximately in the ‘60s he came to Carole King and Tapestry by way of hippie parents and stepparents. I think his appreciations are sincere but they felt a little too pious for my taste. He does a good job of locating King and the album within their contexts, rock ‘n’ roll close to the moment it became rock and of course the singer-songwriter tradition and feminism. Some things I hadn’t really known before: Carole King was born Carol Klein, and Tapestry is her third solo album, following her flight to the West Coast from New York in the ‘60s. I’ve never known those first two albums. Though Glass has ties to rock critics such as Ann Powers, for better or worse he has little of the spirit. Admittedly the spirit can often be loud-mouthed braying. But I felt Glass was circumspect and respectful to a fault. On the other hand it may be the best way to approach the album. It’s a favorite of mine (and a million others) for various personal reasons. I still consider “It’s Too Late” one of the greatest pop songs ever made. My biggest complaint about this 33-1/3 volume is that it overdoes the footnotes—nearly 200 of them, usually bare citations, and often not useful. This is not the first 33-1/3 I’ve seen with citations, but Glass may have set the record for sheer numbers. I’m just too easily distracted by them in this form, too inured to the chatty kind that has something to add. My favorite section was “Trilogy,” covering King’s first three solo albums, which she later called a trilogy. It’s a nice way of ambling into Tapestry itself and Glass provides a very neat analysis. He also—as one must—addresses her background as one of the great Brill Building songwriters of the early ‘60s. There’s a reason Glass is so solemn—King is genuinely a giant of the music industry, a rock ‘n’ roll and rock icon, and a singer-songwriter iconoclast out of Laurel Canyon. After more than 50 years she is still daunting to consider. I wish more of Glass’s passion came through and less of his inhibitions, but it’s still a useful primer on King and her greatest album. His best geeky rock critic point is about the “Album Era” of rock and the place of Tapestry in it. He dates this Album Era as from 1965 to 1975. I could quibble, but fair enough!

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

School Days (1976)

Rock critic Robert Christgau puts Stanley Clarke in the Meltdown list of his 1970s Consumer Guide (with England Dan and John Ford Coley, Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds, Klaatu, Chuck Mangione, Jean-Luc Ponty, and many others you wouldn’t want to meet in a music discussion group). I can see the point, listening to School Days again lately, but the album has certain sentimental attachments for me and vivid mood memories of the mid-‘70s. It was given to me as a gift by a friend who also happened in his own right to be a highly active bass player, playing in a free jazz ensemble and jamming around. Clarke was a kind of peer, or maybe role model just five years ahead of him, a founding member of Return to Forever and long-time sideman to Chick Corea. School Days is Clarke’s fourth solo album and it raised his commercial profile to new heights, reaching #34 on the Billboard 200 album chart (#2 on Jazz Albums). At one time—say, shortly after the gift exchange—high points like the riff on the title song starting around 1:41 sounded positively heroic to me. I played it loud and I played it often. But after that first one (of six tracks total) the songs drift toward the inane, with various exercises attempting to evoke moods and such: “Quiet Afternoon,” “Desert Song,” “Hot Fun,” so on so forth. There’s a strong sense of dynamics here and an ability to take it down low. The horns are a nice touch, the vocals not so much. There’s too much focus on the bass, but, well. And I loved the overall antiseptic cleanliness of the sound, perhaps the primary appeal to me of fusion. After all, cleanliness is next to godliness. It was never so much the playing fast that did it for me as it was the doing so cleanly. These were virtues for me in 1976. See Al DiMeola (also on the Meltdown list) or Chick Corea, to come full circle and return to forever. Yet inevitably, in my experience, the antiseptic leads too surely to the sterile. Next stop punk-rock.

Last Tango in Paris (1972)

Ultimo tango a Parigi, Italy / France, 129 minutes

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Writers: Bernardo Bertolucci, Franco Arcalli, Agnes Varda, Jean-Louis Trintignant

Photography: Vittorio Storaro

Music: Gato Barbieri

Editors: Franco Arcalli, Roberto Perpignani

Cast: Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Massimo Girotti, Veronica Lazar, Maria Michi, Gitt Magrini

I’ve been around the block so many different ways with this controversial picture I’m not even sure where to start. Like many, I must have been drawn to it in the first place by Pauline Kael’s ecstatic review of it in the early ‘70s, saying it “may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made.” I went to see it, of course, but in a skeptical mood, as a high school senior, and came away thinking the only thing great about it was Gato Barbieri’s soundtrack. It sounded even better to me on the OST album which I played a lot for years. For that matter it still sounds great, creaking in the background of the picture and, even more so, still, letting the soundtrack album play. I’m listening to it now. So good.

Then I came back to Last Tango in Paris in the ‘80s. I don’t know why—probably it was playing in a repertory theater and I didn’t have anything better to do. I had low expectations so naturally, perhaps, this time I was more impressed, especially with Marlon Brando as the low-life loser and US expatriate Paul. Perhaps the tortured romance in it resonated with the tortured romantic in me. Then I saw it a third time and thought it was too long and way too often too boring. I’ve seen it several times altogether now and never had exactly the same reaction. My look the other day came years after learning Maria Schneider, who plays the sexy ingenue Jeanne, registered complaints of mistreatment and manipulation on the set during the shoot, particularly in regard to the so-called butter scene, which is in line with the picture’s general exaltation of sex as end in itself, sex as sublimated violence, primal I suppose but pretentious even more, halfway trying to dignify rape as some kind of male mysticism. It was always an ugly, ignorant, foolish scene—start with the assumption that butter is an adequate lubricant. Learning of Schneider’s revelations tainted the whole movie for me, the main reason I turned away from it all this time.

Red Rooms (2023)

Here’s a French-Canadian movie with ambitions of addressing unhealthy public infatuations and obsessions with true-crime stuff, up to and including podcasters and so-called web sleuths and the many tricks of their trade. The statuesque, coldly numb Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariepy) has a day job as a model, with a terrific apartment in downtown Montreal. At home she is surrounded by high-end voice-activated computer equipment that enables her to pursue her various interests, which include checking her email, playing online poker for money, and looking for things on the “dark web” at large. She is presently attending the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who is charged with the murders, torture, and dismemberment of three teenage girls in separate incidents. He shot video of his depredations, two of which have been recovered and will be played at trial, although they don’t necessarily positively identify Chevalier, who wears a mask in the videos. Red Rooms intends to shock us with its revelations—“red rooms” are alleged sites on the dark web where people are tortured and killed, a kind of cross-pollination of OnlyFans and snuff films, suitable for Videodrome programming. But, while we hear the screaming and power tool noises in the brief clips we’re exposed to from the videos at the trial, we are never shown them. I’m not saying I’m disappointed (really, I’d rather not see these things) but it felt to me like a determinedly flinty movie going uncharacteristically soft. It might be an effort to get a more audience-friendly rating, but it has not been submitted anywhere for rating. Certainly, anyway, we can imagine what’s going on from the descriptions we’re given and what we hear, but it does seem notably coy. Kelly-Anne picks up a Chevalier groupie along the way, Clementine (Laurie Babin), and gives her a place to stay while the trial is going on. Clementine obviously represents a well-known type of troubled true-crime aficionado, but this all feels unlikely. Groupies like Clementine do exist, but I had trouble making out the motivations here. The icy Kelly-Anne seems to be a bit of a psychopath herself, is maybe the point, as she has illicitly acquired copies of the two known videos and we see how she acquires the third when she learns it is available. Another day, at the trial, Kelly-Anne shows up dressed explicitly as one of the victims, including metallic orthodontics on her teeth. She is forcibly ejected from the trial. I was not clear at all on why she did that. I liked a lot of things about Red Rooms but I’m not sure director and writer Pascal Plante ever brings it all the way home. Something at its center feels a little hollow, phony and pretentious.

“Ghosts” (1986)

The New York Trilogy
“Ghosts” is the second piece in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, a meditation on or perhaps a novel about detective fiction and New York City. It’s the shortest in the so-called trilogy, too short to call a novel itself, at 60 pages even shorter than Animal Farm or Heart of Darkness. But it is dense, compulsively readable, and eventually almost haunting. It starts with some obscure riffing: “First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown.” Let me explain. All the characters in this story are named for colors. The action (such as it is) takes place on Orange St. I don’t think Auster was making fun of Travis McGee novels, but it’s possible. Anyway, the opening has it right. The main character is a detective named Blue. A man named White (who may be disguised, wearing pancake makeup) hires him to follow a man named Black. In fact, White has already rented an apartment across the street from Black, where Blue can keep an eye on him directly. But mostly all Black does it sit at a table and write or, less frequently, read Walden. Black leaves his place once in a while for groceries or on other errands. The vigil is much like the one that ends the first entry in the trilogy, “City of Glass,” although this one is more comfortable. It lasts more than a year, and along the way Blue abandons a girlfriend without meaning to. It’s nearly as confusing as one of the unusual episodes with Black, where Blue witnesses what appears to be a breakup scene. But we get no further information about that. Or about why Blue abandons his girlfriend, for that matter. The tail job is very boring for Blue, but somehow fascinating for us as readers, much like “City of Glass.” I kept waiting for Auster’s deadpan style to slip into open mockery, but the color scheme of the character names is about as close as he gets to treating it like a joke. He does get at a certain emptiness, not just in detective fiction but extensible to all life, which is a pretty neat trick for something that has many earmarks of arch po-mo business. But there’s also an unmistakable sincerity to what Auster is doing here that carries it off well (unless he has actually fooled me). Also, perhaps most importantly, Auster is a good writer, slightly obsessed but lucid, and a pleasure to read.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
Story not available online.

Wanda (1970)

USA, 102 minutes

Director/writer: Barbara Loden

Photography/editor: Nicholas T. Proferes

Cast: Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins, Dorothy Shupenes, Peter Shupenes, Jerome Thier

Although director and writer Barbara Loden made two more short films in 1975, The Frontier Experience (25 minutes) and The Boy Who Liked Deer (18 minutes), Wanda was her only feature. She died in 1980 at the age of 48 having spent most of her career as a model or stage and occasional film actress. The filmmaker Elia Kazan was a kind of mentoring figure for her. She appeared in his Splendor in the Grass in 1961, won a Tony Award in 1964 for After the Fall (directed by Kazan), and married Kazan in 1967. Her bleak vision and semi-improvisational film style have earned her comparisons to John Cassavettes. Wanda got some attention at the time it was released, including an International Critics Award from the Venice Film Festival, but for the most part it has lingered in obscurity until more recently, when a resurgence of interest in women’s pictures gave it renewed life. Perhaps the most famous beneficiary of this trend was Chantal Akerman’s long domestic meditation, Jeanne Dielman, which won the most recent Sight & Sound poll and shot up from #85 to #12 in one year on the critical roundup at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Since 2006 Wanda, similarly, has risen from as low as #864 in that survey to its present position at #151.

Wanda is set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, birthplace of Joe Biden and home of the US version of The Office. It is punishingly low-budget, opening on a desolate scene of a giant coal mining operation and a house that is absurdly there. The house belongs to Wanda’s sister and brother-in-law. She is crashing there but not particularly welcome. She has a date that day in divorce court, where she appears late and wearing rollers in her hair. Her husband, her two kids, and her husband’s new girlfriend are stuck waiting for her. “She doesn’t care about anything,” the husband tells the judge while they are waiting. “She’s a lousy wife. She’s always bumming around, drinking.” This remark, coming so early in the picture, set up an expectation for me that turns out not to be true at all.

“The Doll” (1980)

This story by Joyce Carol Oates shows how sharp she can be at creating memorable effects even as she works with staples of horror. Here a professional woman, age 44, president of a private college, is visiting a city she has never been to before, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She sees what she is certain must have been the model for a dollhouse she had as a girl, a present for her 4th birthday. It was a big dollhouse—36 inches high—and detailed by a craftsman, some distant relative. She has fond memories of the dollhouse and seeing a mansion that looks just like it unsettles her. She stops the car, leaves the key in the ignition and her purse on the front seat, and stands before the house in reverie, trying to decide whether to ring the doorbell and introduce herself. She thinks she must be connected to this family somehow. But she decides to continue on to the conference she is in town for. But later that night she can’t sleep. She’s no stranger to insomnia and decides to pay that call at the mansion after all. This idea alone makes me nervous. It’s after 10 but before 11. She thinks it might not be too late if there are lights on downstairs. What follows is the centerpiece of the story, which seems most likely to be a dream (if you’re looking for the rational explanation here). It moves like a dream, feels like a dream—never easy to do, but Oates pulls it off. She has also calibrated her college president’s point in life, just beyond child-bearing age and never with time for a man. “I am not opposed to marriage for myself, she once said, with unintentional naivete, but it would take so much time to become acquainted, to go out with him, and talk.” The dream explores, at almost shockingly primal levels, how she views herself—as a doll. A simulacrum of a real woman, just as the simulacrum she meets in the mansion is that of a real man (in appearance it looks suspiciously like one of her childhood dolls). Oates’s descriptive language blurs the line and then she lets sharp edges flash out unexpectedly. It’s partly a playtime fantasy with dolls, but the bottom can fall out and leave the abyss on plain view. But the next day she’s up and back at the conference again.

Joyce Carol Oates, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
Story not available online.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

I read John Fowles’s third novel (after The Collector and The Magus) in the ‘70s. I might have seen the Oscar-bait movie that came of it too, with Meryl Streep. The only thing I remembered when I was coming back to The French Lieutenant’s Woman recently is that it’s more genteel than the first two, but comes with its own bag of literary stuntwork. Fowles attempts a 19th-century Victorian gothic romance, set in 1867. He gets the stuffy language down reasonably well and manages to keep it readable too (though not as well as Susanna Clarke would do some decades later). The narrative voice—seemingly standard third-person omniscient—often slips the reins, letting us know he is writing a century later, implicitly and even explicitly comparing the eras. A revelation to one character, for example, is likened to a nuclear strike on a city. Eventually, John Fowles himself climbs down off his narrative perch and injects himself into the story, telltale beard and all. It’s done gracefully enough but you have to wonder to what purpose, beyond showing off. The novel is surprisingly effective and absorbing. Both times I read it I didn’t want to put it down. The story is about a governess, Sarah Woodruff, in a seaside port who appears to have been deranged by a failed illicit love affair with, yes, a French lieutenant. He appears to have abandoned her. You have to use the word “appears” a lot with this one because many things are not as they seem. Fowles never entirely escapes his idea that life is better now (that is, in 1967), which is not entirely convincing even though I’m inclined to it myself. A gentleman shows up, with likely a rank to inherit and engaged already, and falls in love with Woodruff. She is fiercely independent, perversely protecting what we now (post-1967) would call her personal agency. The story takes a lot of twists and turns. Fowles has created a complex and interesting character in Woodruff and a good supporting cast with the rest. The ending is a model of ambiguity and a little frustrating for the cold calculations of it. I’m not wild about the trickery—I like my omniscient narrators anonymous and out of the fray. After that it's closer to a romance that’s too close to cheesy. But it’s never cheesy, only close, and it’s always compulsively readable. But here my adventures with Fowles ended. I think I attempted but never finished Daniel Martin and that was it. But now I’ve read both The Magus and this one a couple times each. Has to mean something.

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

Green Border (2023)

This epic and gripping picture by veteran Polish director and cowriter Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, The Secret Garden, Mr. Jones) takes on the humanitarian crisis of Muslim refugees making their way from Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to sanctuary in Sweden (or Poland, or anywhere). The problem is getting there. As Muslims entering the EU they face hostility and prejudice at every point, particularly at this brutal “green border” region that Green Border focuses on between Belarus and Poland. It is heavily forested and the terrain can be rugged and swampy. Both Belarus and Poland have semi-official “pushback” policies, which means the refugees are continually moved back and forth across the barbed wire by violent border patrols. Laws obviously don’t matter here. Green Border offers a sprawling set of characters and stories, focusing on the border patrols and activists working on the scene as well as the refugees. Of course it’s worst for the refugees, but the activists are laboring under dire conditions too and we see that even the border patrols, or those not particularly psychopathic, are under tremendous contradictory pressures themselves. The stories and situations are complex as they unravel in this swirling stew. One thing keeps leading to another. It’s often nighttime. The screenplay is rich with the difficulties of individual circumstances, a constant high-wire act. It bears elements of The Grapes of Wrath in the story of one family. The black and white film stock only makes it more stark, the shadows are deeper, darker, and the glimmers of light more fleeting and elusive. It’s hard to watch in places because Holland’s characterizations are drawn so fine these people just come alive even as they are grievously wounded or worse. The middle-aged Leila (Behi Djanati Atai) haunts me, fleeing Afghanistan from the specter of the Taliban. Her big glasses, her deft use of her cell phone, her compassion and generosity, and her fate are deeply felt, searing. The final scenes compare all we have seen in a long movie with the more recent treatment of 2 million Ukrainian refugees after the Russia-Ukraine War started. They are welcomed to Poland even as the inhumane treatment and atrocities continue on the green border. Heartbreaking portrait of a horrible situation but the movie is never less than enthralling. Double feature with Come and See, if you can stand it.

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948)

(spoilers) J.D. Salinger’s story shares some interesting points with Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Both were published in the New Yorker, both in 1948, both with shocking twist endings, and both in many ways made their careers as breakthrough stories. I also remember both being taught in my 10th-grade English class. “Bananafish” is basically the start of the Glass family saga. The twist ending is out of the O. Henry school of hit ‘em with never-saw-it-coming wry irony aka the temptations of fickle fate. Here the very ordinariness of the day described—the story feels aimless for much of its length—is what sets up the shock of the ending (content warning: suicide). Interestingly, it is better understood now that a suicidal person may appear cheerful and upbeat shortly before committing the deed, having finally made the decision. Not sure Salinger knew that, which might make it an impressive feat of intuition. There is ultimately a lot of psychological veracity here. Future trademarks of Salinger’s writing are apparent too, such as italicizing individual syllables to better mimic actual speech. One of the most seductive aspects of reading him is the sense that a real person is speaking directly to you. It may no longer be as effective, going on a hundred years later—speech patterns change. But, call it nostalgia if you must, but rereading these stories has often felt like something akin to going home. That’s not to say it’s entirely a pleasure. Rereading “Bananafish,” we know what’s coming. Seymour’s scenes with the young girl, Sybil, often struck me as cringy and forced. He is represented as ostentatiously “good with children” but I’m not convinced, partly because I know what is about to happen. And we know now—we learn elsewhere in the still fragmented cycle of stories—that Seymour’s worshipful brother Buddy is the author (or “author”) of this story. The jovial chatter and stream-of-consciousness bantering and joking—bananafish? bananafish?—feel empty and weird. Is Buddy trying to burnish the reputation of a suicide? Likewise the scene with the woman on the elevator, when Seymour accuses her of staring at his feet. It departs from the narrative of the suicide at peace, as now he is suddenly peevish. I think more of these miscues are Salinger, though some are also Buddy’s. But “Bananafish” is nonetheless an auspicious start, there’s no getting around that—to a singular and vastly influential writing career, to the Glass family tales to come, even just to the Nine Stories collection itself. This story is a good place to start in all kinds of ways.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Who’s Got Trouble? (2005)

I’m not entirely sure how I acquired my CD copy of Shivaree’s third album, featuring the deliciously named Ambrosia Parsley, singer, songwriter, and daughter of California, along with guitarist Duke McVinnie and keyboardist Danny McGough. Duke and Danny both, separately and together, collaborate with Parsley on many of the songs in this set. I must have found it in some used CD palace somewhere along the way. It has lurked there in my collection for many years. Or maybe I ordered it up online on an impulse, after reading some review. It has often happened that way. The most memorable track on Who’s Got Trouble?—perhaps all I took from it all those years ago before filing it away, because I responded to it so instantly again—is the cover of Brian Eno’s “The Fat Lady of Limbourg.” The icy-cool trio has a lot of fun bearing down on Eno’s 1970s tale of hapless groupie love on tour in the Benelux region. But returning to Who’s Got Trouble? again, and with regular attention, a good many more virtues begin to disclose. The band underplays it always, with arrangements that feel loose and warmly open, holding lots of space in a smoky room, and not afraid to bring in the horns at will. They let simple sharp musical figures propel the momentum in low-key fashion. Parsley has something of a baby-doll voice that can verge on too Betty Boop cute but on a song like “Lost in a Dream” her skill is eminently apparent, regularly working minor keys and blue notes to good effect, landing on every note and syllable with the precision of a jeweler. In turn, the sidemen support her with a heady voodoo lounge stew that often reminds me of the jazzy cabaret exercises of Tom Waits. Shivaree started off on career highs, with the 2000 “Goodnight Moon,” a Parsley/McVinnie composition, featured over the closing credits of Kill Bill: Vol. 2 and subsequently appearing in about 12 more movies, TV shows, and commercials. Blame it on Moby. By the time of Who’s Got Trouble? they appeared to be fading and the next album, a collection of covers (Tainted Love: Mating Calls and Fight Songs), would be their last. All their stuff is worth a visit on your streaming travels.

The Dark Knight (2008)

USA / UK, 152 minutes

Director: Christopher Nolan

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

Photography: Wally Pfister

Music: James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer

Editor: Lee Smith

Cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Ritchie Coster, Chin Han, Nestor Carbonell, Eric Roberts, Anthony Michael Hall, Patrick Leahy

I have no problem calling The Dark Knight the best Batman movie ever made—by miles, even. I just think we might need to call on Scott McCloud for some analysis of why no Batman movie has ever worked as well as most Batman comics—is it the space between the panels? (If McCloud has done so already, someone please point me there.) In command of a princely budget, shot on location in Chicago, Hong Kong, and London, The Dark Knight is committed to being a high-tech thriller like director Michael Mann makes. Lots of gadgets, stunts, special effects, chase scenes (involving a Lamborghini, fat-wheeled motorcycles, and semitrucks marked “SLaughter Is the Best Medicine”), fistfights, gunplay, and tedious orchestral music from Hans Zimmer, with a giant swirling story about Gotham City and the chaos the Joker (Heath Ledger) unleashes there with bank robberies, hospital demolitions, assassinations, so on so forth. The Dark Knight is also rich with movie stars: Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and the Democratic senator from Vermont, Patrick Leahy

I’m also happy to call Heath Ledger the best Joker of all and even to consider this performance possibly his greatest. But that’s more because his career was cut short in 2008, when he died at the age of 28. It’s hard to say where he would be now, still in his 40s. He rewrote the whole approach to the Joker but I’m pretty sure, given his willingness to take on a risky role and make it great like he did in Brokeback Mountain, that The Dark Knight and his Joker would be in competition with other performances by now. The big boffo attack of The Dark Knight continues to impress, but Ledger’s performance, embedded in it as the unsettling center of gravity, is one of a kind. The rest of the movie seemed kind of boring to me on my third time through. I’m still happy to call it one of the greatest superhero movies, but this might be a good place to wonder about the general utility of superhero movies.

“Grettir at Thorhall-stead” (1903)

About the closest I’ve ever got to the writer Frank Norris is the 1924 movie Greed, based on his novel McTeague. Norris, a Chicago native, died of appendicitis at the age of 32 but that was enough time to establish himself as a promising journalist and naturalist fiction writer, peer to Theodore Dreiser and under heavy influence of Emile Zola. But apparently, as this vampire tale seems to suggest, Norris also had some interest (perhaps only commercial?) in the dark and fantastical tales of European lore. This story is set in a dark, brooding, and unpleasantly cold and volcanic Iceland—not the exotic otherworldly home of Bjork and progressive politics we know from pictures today, but a harsh and remote cold rocky land. It sounds like Norris had been there, but maybe he only read accounts. The first section of this story introduces Glamr, a name associated with a 13th-century Icelandic saga and also used in an 1863 story by Sabine Baring-Gould. Another character here, Grettir, has similar origins. This Glamr is a big stocky handyman at Thorhall’s remote homestead, hired to be a shepherd. I’m not sure what to call Thorhall’s spread—a ranch? Plantation? Farm? What? Glamr threatens the harmony there as an “unbeliever” in a close-knit Christian community. But he’s the first victim along with some animals. This vampire has the strength and size to break the backs of both humans and horses. Before they can bury Glamr, however, his body disappears. Also there had been no trace of wounds on his body, not even the usual tell-tale puncture wounds on the neck. This is a different kind of vampire story, where the vampire is more a wild beast. No tuxedos required, and it’s not really that supernatural, except in a loose and ancient kind of way of thinking about things. Next, all household members, separately, are possessed by intense feelings of foreboding, followed shortly by a sighting by one of the maids of Glamr at a window. Summer comes and goes. Glamr’s replacement, Thorgaut, is more popular around the place than the ill-natured unbeliever Glamr. Grettir himself finally shows up well into the second half—the God of Thunder, more or less, a Hercules type, “well known and well beloved throughout all Iceland.” Nice color all along the way, seals and other things barking in the distance. A big fight ensues, which Grettir wins of course, but not before the vampire fills him with fear by telling him his future is bleak. A very strange story indeed from a young US American naturalist novelist, with not much online to tell when Norris wrote it. He died in 1902 and the story was published posthumously.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
Read story online.

Libra (1988)

I was hoping to like Don DeLillo’s 10th novel (and nominee for a National Book Award) more than I actually did. It reminded me of three things that all came later: director and cowriter Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, Norman Mailer’s lengthy journalistic account of Lee Harvey Oswald in his 1995 Oswald’s Tale, and Stephen King’s 2011 science fiction novel 11/22/63. In all cases the author (or auteur) marinated for years or decades in JFK assassination lore, with all its tantalizing red herrings, and then regurgitated a unified field theory of just what happened, more or less. Libra is among the early versions of this exercise, favoring the sinister CIA bloc of theorists. It’s early enough that it predates what has evolved into the before and after debunking of Gerald Posner’s Case Closed in 1993, which I still haven’t read. I know it says something about me that I know the others and not that one. DeLillo focuses more on Oswald, tracking his youth and his time in Russia and after. His assassination attempt on conservative activist Edwin Walker is here, his marriage to the Russian Marina, his travels from Dallas to New Orleans back and forth, his mysterious street activities. George de Mohrenschildt. David Ferrie. Guy Banister. All here. Jack Ruby too. And finally November 22. Such strange characters populating this murky submerged historical scene. I probably should have read Libra sooner. I’m sure it was revelatory in its time and fascinating as one of the first and best of its kind (the overheated paranoid kind). It has lost some of that by now, and honestly that’s probably more me than the novel. Although I will say, having previously slogged through Underworld, it may simply be that I don’t get along well with DeLillo’s writing, which is discursive and suggestive unto the death. I would recommend it as part of any plunge into the JFK assassination mythos, maybe even one place to start. Of the four I’m talking about here, I like Oswald’s Tale best and then 11/22/63. I haven’t seen Stone’s JFK since it was new. I suspect it might grate more now but I remember it as entertaining and think it could well be so still. As for Libra, I think it gets Oswald right, which would have been harder to do without the KGB transcripts Mailer had access to. But Libra, at this juncture, even as fiction, might be a little too open to amorphous conspiracy theories.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Summerteeth (1999)

Let’s start by clearing up the most pressing questions about Wilco’s third album. “Summerteeth,” first, is a colloquial expression for an incomplete set of permanent teeth (“some are teeth”). And, second, the black & white cover photo shows a young girl blowing a big bubblegum bubble. What either has to do with the musical set is not clear, but Summerteeth rocks righteously, tenderly, and shambolically, as Wilco does. At the same time, themes of opioid addiction and marital troubles float in the welter (honcho Jeff Tweedy was addicted to painkillers at the time and his marriage was on the rocks but survived). Some of the references are more blatant than others. Some are very blatant. They considered “A Shot in the Arm” such a winner they included two versions. Admittedly it’s a great song. But it’s clear what “Maybe all I need is a shot in the arm” means in this context, after all the reporting. “She’s a Jar” is more subtle about the relationship troubles, leading with the ambiguous but on balance affectionate stanza “She's a jar / With a heavy lid / My pop quiz kid / A sleepy kisser / A pretty war / With feelings hid / She begs me not to miss her.” The stanza is repeated at song’s end, but in the last line now she is begging him not to hit her. Before you can even grasp what he said it’s on to the next song, a neat, disquieting trick. “Via Chicago” starts “I dreamed about killing you again last night / And it felt all right to me,” going on to add details like blood to the idle fantasy. The song “Summer Teeth” may be trying to relieve our minds about any untoward intimations: “It’s just a dream he keeps having / And it doesn’t seem to mean anything.” Oh OK then! In many ways, though they make me uneasy too, I like the way Tweedy, Jay Bennett, and the band use these unsettling details to roil the waters. It’s more than 25 years later and I hope the survivors are doing well. I see Bennett died of a fentanyl overdose in 2009—details of the sad rupture between Tweedy and Bennett are covered in the essential documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. By my lights Summerteeth is essential too. But I’d like to register one tiny complaint about the CD, of which Wilco obviously is not the only guilty party. I’ve been listening to CDs in my living room lately along with a streaming service setup at my desk. It’s been a while since I’ve sat and listened to CDs this way, on the couch, one at a time, without even shuffle, and it has reminded me of some things I don’t like about CDs. Hidden tracks are one. You think an album is all finished and you go to change it and notice the counter is still measuring time. That’s when you know you’ve got a stinking hidden track on your hands. In the streaming version, track 15 of Summerteeth is titled “23 Seconds of Silence.” Ridiculous, followed by the two hidden tracks, one of which is the second version of “A Shot in the Arm” (I like both versions). At least 23 seconds is relatively merciful. Some hidden tracks make you wait for whole minutes or even parts of an hour, sometimes just for a stupid little throwaway. In summary, I like Summerteeth, but I HATE hidden tracks. Another thing I hate about CDs is skits, but that’s not relevant here.

“Manor” (1885)

If it’s a little surprising to find this gay vampire love story by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs from as long ago as 1885, it’s a little less surprising to find how hard it is to see online in English (get your auf Deutsch right here). It was not translated into English until 1991, per the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB), where it is Ulrichs’s only listed story. It has not been much anthologized either—in a way it still exists as underground artifact. Ulrichs was primarily a lawyer and pioneering gay rights activist in 19th-century Germany. He pressed his cases in the courts and published a lot of essays. Vampire stories were and maybe still are apt refuge for highly marginalized LGBTQ+ folks, already too often necessarily operating behind masks. Sheridan Le Fanu’s amazing 1872 novella “Carmilla” is testimony to that. Ulrichs picked up on the vibe in this tale, which is altogether more romance than shocker (knowing perhaps that the spectacle of man-love would be shocking enough to conventions). Its strength is its commercial weakness, which is that it’s just so plain what is going on here. The boy is 15. Manor, the young sailor, is 19. It’s hearts on eyeballs love at first sight, after a rescue scene. They live on an island system in the Norwegian Sea—way north (where Ingmar Bergman lived too). There is no overt sex but the chemistry and the contentment of sleeping together are palpable. They spend a lot of time in the woods, which I think might be intended as our big clue. Manor is an orphan and sailor by trade. He goes to sea and when he returns he is part of a terrible wreck, which he does not survive and is buried with the rest. But wait. At night, he comes scratching at the boy’s window. His love has transcended death but also he needs blood from the boy to keep this good thing going. You can guess. Soon the boy’s pallor is terrible. The sad moral: “They thrive on the blood of the living and, like a beloved, long for their embrace. But their yearning causes everyone nothing but grief.” The townspeople figure out what’s going on and they’re not having any of it and, well, we know how these things go. It’s worth asking what the townspeople are objecting to, the desecrated grave or the gay. It seems to be more about the grave which Manor keeps climbing out of and leaving a big mess behind. I have to say I can understand the problem. There’s no good end to this, yet however strange it is still a touching love story.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
Story not available online.

Brian Eno: 1971-1977 – The Man Who Fell to Earth (2011)

I went looking for last year’s documentary on Brian Eno, Eno, which reportedly has 52,000,000,000,000,000,000 versions (several billion each for everyone on the planet) and was a big Sundance hit. I’d like to know how it works and how you see it. Instead, on Prime, I stumbled across this useful little workup, which I missed in 2011. Word has it it’s the first documentary ever about Eno—hard to believe it took so long. The IMDb breakdown is unusually scanty. No director, for one thing, and no mention of lots of the folks interviewed, including Robert Christgau, Geeta Dayal, Simon Reynolds, and various biographers. It covers the main period I am interested in with Eno, his “rock era,” starting with his tenure with Roxy Music in the early ‘70s, and it is generously long, over two and a half hours. All of this documentary is enjoyable but the footage and songs of the early years of Roxy Music were particularly so for me. Lots of very good discussions, often followed by the specific songs talked about. I’m not sure of some sources of the visuals all throughout. There may have been video-like scenarios shot back then, or these filmmakers may just be obliging us with stuff to look at while the music plays. Opinions differ on the arc of Eno’s career, of course, but for me this is the high point, as it drifted after 1977 further into his ambient music exercises and an increasing role as a producer favored by a surprising number of high-profile rock bands (Toto, U2, Coldplay, Grace Jones, James, Ultravox). People in this documentary say that he was a calm and grounding presence in the studio, which I can believe as there is also a certain calm and grounding effect to his music, even the raucous stuff. What can I say? I vividly remember the ‘70s work of Eno and many in his orbit then, including David Bowie, Robert Fripp, and Talking Heads. I have some interest in his ambient work as well, notably the 1973 collaboration with Fripp, (No Pussyfooting). This documentary also covers his work with Cluster (Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius), which in many ways marks the origins of his ambient music ideas, born of an interest in cybernetics. From the crazy befeathered creature who constantly stole Bryan Ferry’s charisma out from under him in Roxy Music to the meditative student of the planet who created Another Green World to the rocker who might have invented Talking Heads in 1974 with “Third Uncle,” Brian Eno has put together a wonderfully unpredictable and wildly engaging career. Lots of details here and, for anyone with any regard for ‘70s Eno, it’s practically mandatory. You might know Eno in the ‘70s already but I can tell you this is worth the revisit. Remarkable creator. Now to track down Eno, hoping it’s more than just some Black Mirror: Bandersnatch stunt.

The Double (1846)

The Double: A Petersburg Poem

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s second novel was published the same year as his first, Poor Folk, in 1846 when he was 25. The Double was taken, then as now, as being under some influence of Nikolai Gogol (whose The Nose and The Overcoat I think I read many years ago but don’t remember well). At any rate I found The Double crazy impressive and impressively crazy. Wikipedia does not include The Double among Dostoevsky’s “major works,” but Vladimir Nabokov, who was not particularly a fan, called it the best thing Dostoevsky ever wrote. At this early stage of my reading through him somewhat systematically, I’m inclined to agree. No one (not even ISFDB) seems to see much of the fantasy/horror genre in it, but it’s one of the best and most effective doppelganger stories I know. Yes, it works at other levels as well: psychological search for identity, comic lampoon of St. Petersburg society, etc. But the bold absurdity of it is just right. “Our hero,” as Constance Garnett frequently translates, is a low-level bureaucrat in St. Petersburg who is not doing well in his work and entering into a nervous breakdown (that explains it! he's insane! per many). About a quarter or third into this short novel he encounters someone who looks like him and has his same name. This fellow, often designated “Junior” to the original’s “Senior,” is even further down on his luck, and homeless. Senior invites him to stay with him until he’s on his feet again. The next morning Junior is gone when Senior wakes. By the time Senior gets to his job he finds Junior working it for him, as him—and doing very well. It’s soon quite apparent that Junior is stealing Senior’s life. All this is rendered in an early but already accomplished version of Dostoevsky’s raving, raw, canting high-strung voice. You’d be wrecked too if this were happening to you. This little gem is rollicking and entertaining all the way. Like the best horror—I guess I’m going there but Dostoevsky, of course, is much more than mere horror—The Double gives us an impossible situation and little explanation. Where does Junior come from really and what does he want? No word. He’s just there, steadily taking over Senior’s life by way of meritocracy. No one seems fazed that there are two of him, and his employer is pleased with the new guy. The Double is often funny, pitched at this hysterical level. But also unnerving, strange, and very entertaining.

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

Mermaid Avenue (1998)

This interesting collaboration between Billy Bragg and Wilco—and two more that followed in 2000 and 2012, plus similar projects by other artists, none of which I know—started with Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora, the first director of the Woody Guthrie Foundation. It seems Woody left behind over 1,000 completed lyrics which he never set to music. In 1995, Nora contacted Bragg after seeing him perform at a Woody tribute concert. She wanted to know if he would be interested in setting some of them to music. He was indeed, and he invited Wilco to join, and the first results are on this album. For the most part the songs are divided about equally between them—Bragg writes his and Wilco writes theirs. Everybody performs on all—the credits are complicated, plus extras like Natalie Merchant sit in on some tracks. Some of the Wilco stuff is composed by Jeff Tweedy, some by Tweedy with Jay Bennett. Two—“Hoodoo Voodoo” and “She Came Along to Me”—are collaborations between Bragg and Wilco. The whole Wilco band gets credit on the first. “She Came Along to Me,” one of the best on the album, is credited to Bragg, Tweedy, and Bennett. In general, and somewhat surprisingly for me, as a fan of Wilco who has spent most of my life generally indifferent to Bragg, the best songs here are by Bragg. For one thing, he channels the spirit of Woody Guthrie better. The wry, resigned aside in “She Came Along to Me” and the pause that expresses everything—“Maybe we’ll have all of the fascists out of the way by then.... Maybe so”—might by the most Woody Guthrie moment on the album (and that might be Bennett or Tweedy on the rejoinder). But I think the most Woody Guthrie moment on the album actually goes to another Bragg workup, “I Guess I Planted,” which stoutly shouts for the union battle and is perfectly rousing about it. “Walt Whitman’s Niece” is a nice call-and-response wake-up number to start the album (by way of the sequencing given) and “The Unwelcome Guest” finishes it well. Both by Bragg. That reminds me. I get a kick out of Woody’s various celebrity fixations found in these lyrics: Walt Whitman, Ingrid Bergman (in her Stromboli phase, which to me is still a dish ordered in Italian restaurants), and Hanns Eisler, a composer associated with Bertolt Brecht. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the Wilco gang didn’t contribute anything worth our time here. “California Stars” and the shorty “Christ for President” are two of the best songs here. But I do think, and maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised, that Bragg is the most obviously plugged in to Woody Guthrie.

A Serious Man (2009)

UK / France / USA, 106 minutes

Directors / writers / editors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Photography: Roger Deakins

Music: Carter Burwell, Jefferson Airplane, Band of Gypsys

Cast: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolff, Jessica McManus, George Wyner, Amy Landecker, Adam Arkin, Peter Breitmayer

I wanted to make a point about A Serious Man being underrated, but every time I go looking for ranked lists of Coen brothers movies it’s chaos. I keep running into opinions I can’t believe anyone really has. A Rotten Tomatoes list that is aware of Ethan Coen’s solo Drive-Away Dolls from last year, for example, has True Grit #1 and Blood Simple #2 before getting to Fargo, No Country for Old Men, and Miller’s Crossing. The Big Lebowski is down at #14 in that list of 20 while A Serious Man sits comfortably in the middle at #11. That’s not exactly underrated but this list and many of the others strike me as weirdly perverse in any number of significant ways each.

Maybe Coen brothers movies appeal on a range of inscrutable, deeply personal points that may be difficult to discern. I know that’s at least partly the case for me with A Serious Man, which features, though not by name, the western Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park, the growing up home of the Coen brothers. St. Louis Park was the next school district over from mine (Hopkins) and it was where my Dad taught 9th-grade physics and reported he’d had one of the Coens in a class one year. Many of the exteriors in A Serious Man were actually shot in Bloomington, a southern suburb. But I know St. Louis Park in the ‘60s when I see it. They are dead-on, these flat treeless squared-off suburban developments. The trees are all grown up now but this is what it looked like there 60 years ago.

Red Harvest (1929)

Dashiell Hammett’s comical (as I take it) Red Harvest casts a long shadow. It’s arguably the first hard-boiled detective novel, a subgenre that dominated mystery fiction across the 20th century and into the 21st. It was also influential on the movies Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars, at least via a bank shot off Hammett’s own The Glass Key, serialized in 1930. Akira Kurosawa, director of Yojimbo, a certain influence on director Sergio Leone, said The Glass Key, not Red Harvest, inspired his movie. Be that as it may, they all involve corrupt townships which an outsider manipulates into open and devastating warfare. As always with Hammett and much hard-boiled detective fare (the exceptions are James M. Cain and Jim Thompson) I tend to get confused with the typical blizzards of characters, motives, and fedoras that can be virtually indistinguishable. Characters can tend to be embodiments or markers of motive. It’s still fun to read from time to time, and reminds me it’s been too long since I looked at Hammett (or Raymond Chandler). I call this one comical because it is often funny and what else are you supposed to do? It’s a bacchanalia of blood-simple depravity. A fictional town in Montana named Personville (which many call Poisonville) is overrun by bootleggers and gangsters. Our unnamed first-person narrator, the so-called “Continental Op” and a regular in Hammett fiction, arrives and sets the various factions in town against one another. They quickly get to killing every time. One of my favorite jokes is a paragraph where our guy adds up all the corpses in his head and comes to the number 16. Shortly down the road is a chapter called “The Seventeenth Victim.” And it doesn’t stop there. The spoiler would be telling you who survives. Red Harvest is short, under 200 pages, and Hammett remains one of the greatest writers of the form. Yes, sometimes the language may seem too chiseled and/or overly active. But come on. How many writers ever err on that side? Most of them, like me, run on at will and leave all their wordy little darlings in place. It’s possible some may find Red Harvest too dark and grim. But that’s only because of all the death. Lighten up, folks!

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Demolition Man (1993)

USA, 115 minutes

Director: Marco Brambilla

Writers: Peter M. Lenkov, Robert Reneau, Daniel Waters

Photography: Alex Thomson

Music: Elliot Goldenthal

Editor: Stuart Baird

Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, Nigel Hawthorne, Benjamin Bratt, Bob Gunton, Denis Leary, Jack Black, Jesse Ventura, Adrienne Barbeau

Demolition Man belongs with that genre of jokey science fiction action shows that includes RoboCop and Total Recall: come for the stunts and fistfights, stay for the laughs and scratchy high concepts. It’s not Schwarzenegger in the starring role in this case (or Peter Weller either), but Sylvester Stallone. And he’s not your dad’s Rocky but a triangular-shaped specimen from his neck to lean waist, in supremely good shape and inclined (or director Marco Brambilla, otherwise unknown to me, is inclined) to show off the impressive pecs and overall physique. He is well supported by a manic Wesley Snipes, a very funny Sandra Bullock, a strange Benjamin Bratt, and a handful or more of hey-that-guys from the ‘80s and ‘90s. I’m here for Demolition Man, a little against my will, because it seems to understand the sweet spot of action, humor, and science fiction—and I wasn’t prepared for that. In fact, I was astonished to see that Halliwell’s gives it two stars whereas Searching for Bobby Fischer, for example, does not even get one, and I thought maybe it deserved at least that.

Demolition Man is set in 2032, in a justice system that freezes the guilty for the duration of their sentences and then feeds them subliminal training based on their aptitudes so they will have a skill when they awake for parole or release. Detective John Spartan (Stallone) has been trained for knitting and sewing. He’s in for accidentally letting 30 hostages die. Oops, as he might say. The 21st century of this movie has turned into a paradise for hippie lovers of peace, harmony, and political correctness, a panacea of woke we would say nowadays. Everything bad, including swearing, smoking, drinking, and eating meat, has been outlawed. But when supervillain Simon Phoenix (Snipes in a blonde dye-job and high Joker hysterics) breaks out of his ice cube they have to get real (as one does) and turn to Spartan, who’s not a bad cop but a good cop who is brutal, if you can exactly tell the difference. Just go with it.

“The Monkey” (1980)

Overall I like this longish Stephen King story pretty well. It focuses on a wind-up toy monkey I know from the Close Encounters movie and elsewhere, a 1950s-era toy that had a resurgence in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Maybe even because of this story, although first I would like to know whether King was influenced by the Spielberg movie. King and Spielberg are both very strong on 1970s-era middle-class, young, usually suburban family life. In this story King makes the toy a harbinger or perhaps somehow the agent of doom by insisting on it. It’s true he’s really good at evoking the toy, particularly the sound of it: jang-jang-jang-jang accompanied by gears or springs working. I picked one up myself in the ‘80s at a garage sale or thrift store or something, although it never scared me (and I didn’t know this story anyway until much more recently). The wind-up gyrations even charmed me, which unfortunately makes it an obstacle for me to overcome in this story in terms of believability. Sure, I can see the creepy side of the thing, but it just reminds me again that King often depends on the spaces of novels to work most effectively. The late scenes in this story, with a man rowing to the deepest part of a lake and the sudden storm and all that, reminded me of the furniture-moving pulp styles of Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft. It’s a really big scene, almost ridiculously so, e.g., the cloud formation, the rowboat falling entirely to pieces, etc. I just noticed there’s a movie version coming out next month directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daugher, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House)—might be interesting. I wasn’t particularly moved by the family elements in the story, the father and son business, but that again might speak to King’s greater strengths as a novelist, where family stuff is often prominent and effective, with the space to breathe life into it. Here it is more like reflexive, with the jang-jang-jang-jang as a signal for anxiety and Pop and Junior a signal for pathos. King is going for the epic qualities of “The Great God Pan” and “The Dunwich Horror,” which have little of family feels. So he’s not quite getting it right in the story format, but he’s on the right track in many ways. David Hartwell, editor of The Dark Descent, discusses, in his introduction to “The Monkey,” “... the extent to which [King] is synthesizing and mutating, from his voluminous reading on horror, the entire historical development of the field.” That is absolutely true enough. After my teen exposure to the Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthologies in the ‘60s (including the magazine), King was my next jolt of experience in horror literature, both for his novels and, even more importantly, for Danse Macabre, which was very inspiring even if I could not really connect with Frankenstein, Dracula, or other landmarks he brought to my attention. I think the subtle problem in this story is a matter of overthinking it, or possibly trying too hard. It’s not that I have problems anymore with the ponderous, pulpy furniture-moving style.

Stephen King, Skeleton Crew
The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

The Substance (2024)

I had fair warning that The Substance would be gross, and it is, living up to its body horror and monster horror labels. Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging movie star now celebrity aerobics instructor with a line of videos and cable-TV show appearances (think Jane Fonda, I guess?). Moore was around 60 when this picture was shot and, while “she’s in great shape for her age” (and still likes taking it all off too), it’s not hard to see, all things considered, why Elisabeth might be tempted by the appeal of the mysterious “The Substance” product, an underground drug and procedure that produce ... Margaret Qualley, as “Sue.” There’s a lot of detail associated with this premise—only one activation per person, seven days of a stabilizing regime, and mandatory switching back and forth every seven days. As usual with anything that involves seven days in a horror show, they’re not fooling around with these rules. You really shouldn’t break them. But break them, of course, they do. The Substance is associated with a lot of “You Are One” mumbo-jumbo messaging with the instructions that the principals pay no attention to. We, the helpless viewers, can’t help thinking they really should abide by the rules. There’s not very much that’s original in The Substance, a mash of stories involving Cinderella, Carrie, and others. Break the rules and your horses turn into pumpkins in the middle of the prom. But The Substance has its moments. In fact, at two hours twenty minutes, it has at least 30 minutes of too many moments. If you’re there for the special effects you might enjoy every minute of it. I was intrigued by a lot of it. The whole way of getting the drug is suitably big city (Los Angeles) urban nightmare, though implausible. The problems between Elisabeth and Sue and how each can harm the other are interesting surprises. There’s not much by way of characters. Dennis Quaid is notably bad as Harvey, their manager. At least he seems to be having fun, but I winced every time he was onscreen. In many ways The Substance is just the latest chapter in the story of Demi Moore’s love for her own body, which I think ultimately has to be taken as wholesome. Margaret Qualley does not appear nearly as comfortable with the nudity but she’s a trouper. The Substance was nominated for the big prize last spring but ultimately only came away with a Cannes Film Festival award for Best Screenplay, and most recently got some Oscars love too. Worth a look if you’re not particularly squeamish.