Eddington (2025)

The range of opinion is wide on the latest from director and writer Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid). Filmmaker John Waters put Eddington at the top of his list of the best pictures of 2025, while movie critic Glenn Kenny put it last on his list, in the category “No Cigar” by itself with the brushoff comment, “Piss off, MAGA boy.” I’m somewhere between. It’s a mixed bag. It’s basically the Covid pandemic as viewed and experienced from the small town of Eddington, New Mexico, but it’s a satire so lots of things are exaggerated. Eddington is only tangentially related to the disease, to Black Lives Matter protests, to QAnon, or even to masking. But it’s all here. Mandates required masks in public, as I’m sure you recall—the main virtue of Eddington is the way it brings 2020 back so vividly. Masks are an ongoing issue here and, yes, the picture is sympathetic to people who won’t wear them. “There’s no Covid here,” Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) keeps saying, although he develops a terrible cough after an altercation with a homeless person who probably is infected. Sheriff Cross is in a dispute with the mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is working with shady tech bros to open a massive data center that he promises will bring jobs to the town. Sheriff Cross decides to run for mayor against Garcia’s reelection bid, dresses up his rig like the one Robert Altman used in Nashville for the Replacement Party candidate Hal Phillip Walker, and cruises the town speechifying through the loudspeaker as he goes. Like Aster’s last picture, Beau Is Afraid, Eddington is long and muddled. It's trying to stuff everything it can into it from 2020. The burgeoning hunt for pedophiles under influence of QAnon, for example. Sheriff Cross’s staff of three includes a Black man (Michael Ward), which leads to lots of easy plot developments. At least Beau had a great first hour before going off the rails. Eddington has isolated impressive points, such as Phoenix’s performance. He’s great as he always is, maybe even a little better here, disappearing into the role. The white-kid protesters are treated as robotic woke-spewing morons. One tries to explain himself to his parents, saying they’re “changing institutions, dismantling whiteness, and not allowing whiteness to reassert itself.” Certainly from the MAGA point of view that’s how the Left in this country can look, whereas the MAGA-friendly types here are arguably more down to earth. Maybe I’m talking myself into not liking this one. It didn’t give me that much to take away. Approach with caution.

Housekeeping (1980)

I thought this strange and beautiful novel by Marilynne Robinson worked really well, a kind of coming-of-age story of a girl raised first by her grandmother, then by two great-aunts (briefly), and finally by her Aunt Sylvie, her mother’s sister. The setting is Idaho or western Montana, probably in the 1950s. The narrator is Ruthie Stone, writing from memory about her girlhood many years later as an adult. Her grandfather died in a spectacular train accident. Later her mother committed suicide. Ruthie is with her younger sister Lucille for many years, but eventually Lucille runs away, leaving Ruthie with Sylvie. Sylvie is a loner and a natural transient, often sleeping with her clothes and shoes on, ready to depart at short notice. She can’t keep house and spends many days by herself disappearing into the woods. The title is less a reference to cleaning and more about what it takes to keep a roof over one’s head. This thing about spending whole days in the woods runs in the family apparently, as Ruthie and Lucille spend much of one school year doing it too. Eventually Lucille decides to go straight and runs away, making her home with a schoolteacher. That leaves Ruthie with Sylvie and the court system which is coming for them. Ruthie, it turns out, might well be the transient type herself. Her voice is straightforward yet lyrical. She makes the Idaho / Montana landscape alien and a little weird. This is not a typical western by any means—largely, perhaps, because there are no men except on the furthest margins—but the landscape alone makes it a western. No horses or Indians, but a mountainous land, western weather patterns, and of course trains and maybe Mormons. The language can lapse into dense passages of description and discussions of memory and perception. It’s odd but never particularly feels unlikely. I had a hard time feeling like I could get a handle on Sylvie, but I always liked her. Ruthie had her misgivings—and Lucille too, obviously—but in the end she comes to love Sylvie, fiercely, even as she enters a lifetime of estrangement from Lucille. Strange and wonderful, Housekeeping is a short and utterly fine little novel.

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

Kinda Kinks (1965)

The ever-amorphous state of mid-‘60s British Invasion LPs applies to the Kinks too. There are UK and US versions of Kinda Kinks, their second UK album, as well as at least two deluxe package editions that are equally close to essential. It seems likely, by the way their discography goes, that the Kinks were also bound like the Beatles and many others to an industry convention that frowned on releasing a single and then including it on the next album, whereas it was somehow OK to release singles from an album. Another significant factor is that EPs sold well in the UK but did not in the US. Because of these and other factors, and even though UK and US Kinks releases were identical as of late 1965 with The Kink Kontroversy, there are strange gaps all over their catalog. Songs like “All Day and All of the Night,” “Who’ll Be the Next in Line,” and “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” don’t have proper album homes now except on the CD deluxe package editions that started arriving in the ‘90s. In many ways the best version of Kinda Kinks is now found there. I know at least two on my streaming service, one of 53 minutes with 23 songs, and another of 80 minutes with 35 songs. I prefer the shorter one—many of the extra dozen on the 80-minute edition are redundancies, alternate versions, more b-sides (experiments that don’t always come off but usually have at least one interesting point), and/or are associated with live recordings and/or radio interviews (admittedly charming). Both playlists kick off with the 12 songs from the original UK release, which includes “Naggin’ Woman” and “Tired of Waiting for You,” neither of which are on the US version. It’s somewhat amazing when you consider “Tired” was one of their biggest hits in the US, #6 in early 1965. But that song instead wound up on a US-only release, Kinks-Size, where “All Day and All of the Night” also landed (admittedly a pretty good album!).

The nine songs on Kinda Kinks shared by the UK and US versions are as good as anything on the first album, notably in their lively jolting mode of ecstatic racket typified by “You Really Got Me.” With perspective, we can see it was rock ‘n’ roll transmogrifying into rock in front of our eyes and as early as 1964. But that’s not all the Kinks were up to. Elements of skiffle and music hall show up here as well and the songwriting is often ingenious, musical, distinct in style from song to song, and infectious. I may finally be tired after all these years of singing along with “Tired of Waiting for You,” but it remains an irresistible singalong even in my latter-day zombie variations. There’s more ecstatic racket in the cover of “Dancin’ in the Street,” which is exciting and surprisingly not that far off the Motown original by Martha & the Vandellas. Convincing tender exercises show up here as well, such as “Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl.” To cap it off, there’s “Something Better Beginning,” with its delicate baroque air and dense lyrical shadings: “Is this the start of another heart breaker / Or something better beginning / Something better beginning / Something better beginning.” I could do without the bawling “Naggin” Woman,” but even the stripped-down concentrated original UK 27-minute version of Kinda Kinks is quite enjoyable, standing up to close scrutiny and daily play, a pretty darned good album of itself. But there’s more, as they say on the late-nite shows, much much more.

Bell Notes, “I’ve Had It” (1958)

[listen up!]

I was listening to Vol. 2 of the Ace label’s excellent Golden Age of American Rock ‘n’ Roll: Hot 100 Hits From 1954-1963 when the Bell Notes’ one and only hit, which reached #6 in February 1959, leapt out and reminded me vividly of the early-‘80s cowpunk act Rank and File and specifically their theme song “Rank and File.” It seems likely this could be settled in a court of law because “Rank and File” sounds more like “I’ve Had It” than “My Sweet Lord” sounds like “He’s So Fine.” Just sayin’. The greater and more obvious influence on the Long Island act Bell Notes is the Everly Brothers, in both their close harmonies and in the sense in their songs of ineffective peevishness, miffed by the way things are going. In “Bird Dog,” “Problems,” “Walk Right Back,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” they have reason to feel short-changed and that there’s nothing they can do about it. Just so, the singer of this song has “had it,” an expression, “I’ve had it,” usually spoken by people who are likely to keep having it and know it. Exasperation as real as it gets, in a way. As for the cowpunk lift, I would not call it exactly theft on the part of Rank and File, just a pronounced family resemblance between songs, or maybe a kind of homage or salute (though it’s unlikely many in 1982 remembered the Bell Notes, who I have to keep fighting myself not to think of as the Bell Tones). Rank and File’s version, if you want to call it that, is twice as long and all rocked up heavy on a big drumkit and twangy electric guitar, with all-new lyrics. You can imagine what the “la-la-la-la” singing Bell Notes might have to say about it. It’s right there in the title of their only hit.

“Field Biology of the Wee Fairies” (2018)

This story by Naomi Kritzer is highly enjoyable, a canny mashup of girl power and “faerie” tale. To be clear, Kritzer spells it fairy, but still. In the world of this story—which is also 1962 US—adolescent girls are expected to catch a fairy and get a wish. It’s an adolescent rite of passage. The wishes are generally on the order of being more pretty. Our main character, Amelia, is a smart young girl whose skills and aptitude for science and math are frustrated by the profound sexism of the time. She is working on a science project, probably the best of anyone else’s in the school, yet she can’t get into the school Science Club because she’s a girl. The fairy thing is real in this story, though not what it appears, as the teeny creatures are wily, with their own agenda. They let themselves be caught because the touch of a human makes it possible for them to read the future. They grant a wish they know will come true, but there are other benefits in it for them. Amelia suspects some of this, and so, when a fairy appears to her and starts flitting around to be caught, her scientific instincts kick in. She captures it in a jar without touching it and then interviews it for information. What she learns enables her to triumph over the Science Club. It’s all stitched together well. As more of a girl power story it bears a light hand with the fairy stuff. The story is obviously as skeptical as Amelia—and yet fairies are real (in this story). I am undereducated on fairy lore myself, which I understand extends back far into antiquity, so I don’t know how ignorant I may sound when I talk about a Susanna Clarke model. This story anyway struck me as more of what I encountered in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, as these fairies are small and charming, but quite intelligent, with strange and great powers, and not necessarily on our side. I like the way Amelia can break down her fairy and get some straight talk from it. She’s remarkably clearheaded for a juvenile in the first place, but at the end she definitely has the look of someone who is going to go far in this world. It’s such a happy ending it’s irresistible even as the story’s strands are brought off nicely on many levels.

The Long List Anthology, Vol. 5: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List, ed. David Steffen
Read / listen to story.

United States of Trance (2001)

I’ve always been a little confused about how to think of albums like this. The major credit goes to a DJ—in this case the prolific Christopher Lawrence—who produces and/or remixes tracks by different artists. Contributing artists get so little credit that I was momentarily uncertain which were artist names and which were track names. On Lawrence’s Wikipedia page, United States of Trance is categorized with “DJ Compilations” (as opposed to “Albums,” “Singles & EPs,” or “Remixes”). OK, that sounds good. I somewhat crudely perhaps classify the genre with these exercises as “techno” at large. But hold up now, “trance” has its own meaning, which is fairly specific (again Wikipedia): “... typically characterized by a tempo between 120 and 150 beats per minute (BPM), repeating melodic phrases and a musical form that distinctly builds tension and elements throughout a track often culminating in 1 to 2 ‘peaks’ or ‘drops.’” Yes, all right, good to know. Moving on: “Although trance is a genre of its own, it liberally incorporates influences from other musical styles such as techno, house, chill-out, classical music, tech house, ambient and film scores.” A lot of styles in that list I would call “techno” and be done with it—I can’t shave hairs that fine. I have my suspicions that making such distinctions requires doses of stimulant drugs, which I imagine also go excellently with a set like this one here, beguilingly lurching and percolating and driving forward for nearly 74 minutes. I will note that the 12 tracks by 12 different artists (including one by Lawrence) are all largely instrumentals, with some occasional whispering or non-word vocalizations. They are largely matters of simple musical figures with unexpected tones and complex rhythms. They are thrilling and dull as your mood may dictate. Per the definition above, each track does indeed have its peaks and/or drops, although that does not exactly apply to the album as a whole, which chugs along in its established parameters modulating groove and finally goes out unbowed at the end, like a brass band parade disappearing down the street. You wouldn’t necessarily know it’s 12 artists. It’s less a collection of songs and more a collection of dramatic musical moments. What’s more, the album tracks seamlessly—that is, playing it on shuffle produces awkward and abrupt transitions from track to track. It’s not the same. Lawrence intends it to be listened to as sequenced. For me it is music that too often wants to recede into the background. It’s hard to stay focused. Another word might be boring, but I would not go that far. United States of Trance is more like an environment that you visit, as a kind of tourist. You may not absorb it all, but you come away with distinct memories and experiences.

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

USA, 112 minutes

Director: Fred Schepisi

Writer: John Guare

Photography: Ian Baker

Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Editor: Peter Honess

Cast: Stockard Channing, Will Smith, Donald Sutherland, Ian McKellen, Mary Beth Hurt, Bruce Davison, Heather Graham, Anthony Michael Hall, Eric Thal, Richard Mason, J.J. Abrams, Kitty Carlisle

Six Degrees of Separation is one degree of separation from a 1990 stage play of the same name, based on a real-life con man, which approximately sums up most of the problems here. Well, except for the conceit of a high concept that never quite comes off. Google AI summarizes: “Six Degrees of Separation is the theory that everyone on Earth is connected by a chain of no more than five other people (six acquaintance links).... [It may be] illustrated by the ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ game, where any actor can be linked to Bacon in six or fewer roles.”

The funny thing (funny dumbass, not funny ha ha) is that this idea has little to do with anything going on in this picture, beyond something that one major character is fascinated by in a daydreamy sort of way. That is the unbearably named Ouisa, pronounced “wee-zuh,” short for Louisa (Stockard Channing). Donald Sutherland plays her husband Flan. They are rich New Yorkers living off Central Park. Sutherland is excellent, as he always was, but he can’t save this mess. Will Smith plays Paul, who says he is the son of Sidney Poitier. That claimed connection might have something to do with the six degrees. I don’t know. I never figured it out. I did notice that Will Smith did not slap anyone in this picture.

“A Place to Stay” (1998)

[spoilers] I was impressed by this longish vampire story by Michael Marshall Smith. It deliberately applies a patina of confusion to a story of a man’s semi-lost evening with a woman he meets and wants to find again. It’s set in New Orleans, the French Quarter in all its touristy glory. The man works in the software development industry and is there for a convention and the excuse to party and blow off steam. These elements are perfect, in 1998, for a night of hard drinking and carousing. Eventually our first-person narrator blacks out. He wakes in the 4 a.m. hour in a bar that is cleaning up after closing. He remembers parts of the night, and parts come back to him as he retraces his steps trying to put it together. He thinks he remembers where the woman told him she works, a retailer of high-end kitchen goods. He finds the place, the next day, and enters, but instead of a store he finds himself in the bar from the night before, and it’s no longer day but night. Smith’s transitions as he switches back and forth between these realities can be jarring, and confusing, but they use my favorite of all the vampire powers, otherwise way too underutilized for my taste, which is the ability to cloud minds. Whatever your theory, by this point of the story the mystery is engaged. It’s hard to guess what might be coming next, specifically, but we’re starting to get the drift. There’s a decidedly modern tinge to it in the affluent, hedonistic, youthful software development world. The woman our guy searches for asked him at one point whether he believes in vampires. Decidedly, contemptuously, he does not. That’s really our only clue, beyond that I was reading the story in a fantasy/horror anthology. Nothing seems vampirish at all about her. Things reach a crescendo of confusion as our guy goes switching in and out of the night before and recovers more information about his missing time. It’s all nicely done with enough misdirection to fool me until the reveal only in the very last sentence. One thing I find interesting about vampire stories is that the lore is so wide-ranging—about mirrors and daylight and counting and all of it—that even if you know it’s a vampire story it’s hard to know how it’s going to play out. This story is obviously dependent on their ability to becloud minds, which I had forgotten as a possibility while reading the story. Smith springs it on us as an unfurling, horrific, endless nightmare, with romance and pleasure ultimately stripped away.

The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

Jody Reynolds, “Endless Sleep” (1958)

[listen up!]

[content warnings] One more out here on the morbid tip. Jody Reynolds was a one-hit wonder rockabilly artist, born in Denver and reared in Oklahoma. “Endless Sleep” reached #5 in 1958, his only appearance in the top 40. But the follow-up, “Fire of Love,” which peaked at #66, was later covered by both MC-5 and the Gun Club. The label Demon liked “Endless Sleep” enough to record it, but insisted on adding the happy-ending last verse as well as tacking on the name Dolores Nance to the songwriting credit; apparently they thought the tune would do better as the product of a songwriting team. OK, maybe. The story here is literally dark from the start, opening: “The night was black, rain fallin’ down.” In profoundly mournful tones, the singer tells us he’s quarreled with his girlfriend and doesn’t know where she went. He follows her footsteps to the shore of the sea (Reynolds wrote the song in San Diego and performed it that night). She’s gone, “forevermore.” Gasp! Suicide! Then the singer thinks he hears the sea speaking to him, albeit in a kind of awkward way to make the lines rhyme, saying, “I took your baby from you away.” But we’re not done yet. Comes the voice of his beloved: “Come join me baby in my endless sleep.” Suicide-murder! Lord! “Come join me baby in my endless sleep.” It’s high, keening, remorseless tragedy, but thanks to the honchos at the perhaps ironically named Demon label all’s well that ends well. The singer rescues his babe. The “angry” sea gives it up. “You took your baby from me away.” But I don’t believe it. One or both are moldering at the bottom of the sea even as we speak. I’m sure of it.

Babygirl (2024)

OK, fair enough, this cheesy erotic BDSM fantasy thriller is hotter than a pistol, sexy as hell, and a pleasure to enjoy exactly that way. You’ll have to ignore or somehow put out of mind your better angels and the movie’s many ancient views of women and men and sex and power. It seems to believe, with so many, that the powerful—especially the powerful women—secretly yearn to be dominated. This seems unlikely when you think about it, given their behavior otherwise (cf., adventures on Epstein Island, or the movie Salo). But it’s popular to think so, much like imagining the powerful will end up burning in hell. But who’s really thinking about anything like that when a movie like this is going on? Nicole Kidman is Romy, a high-flying CEO specializing in warehouse robotics and married to a successful theater director, Jacob (Antonio Banderas). Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness) is Samuel, an intern with a ton of poise and self-possession and a natural dominator. He takes control of Romy sexually and seems to be attempting to take over her life at large. He’s a little scary. Romy struggles with herself but keeps doing whatever he tells her to do. Turning up the sex charge is the kind of thing Kidman has done before and she’s good at it: To Die For, Birthday Girl, and most notably Eyes Wide Shut, among others. Indeed, in many ways Babygirl feels like an intentional reprise or shoutout to Eyes Wide Shut. Though this story takes place over weeks, months, or even years, for example, it is always Christmas in Romy’s living room, with a fully trimmed-up and lighted tree in the corner. The previous feature by director and writer Halina Reijn, the horror show Bodies Bodies Bodies, had some interesting ideas but was too cluttered and strangely focused to really work. She shows a lot of development in Babygirl, but the real stroke, of course, is the casting. Kidman is perfect and has a surprising amount of chemistry with Dickinson, who’s much younger and generally inexperienced than she is in real life too. Romy is the designated bottom here, but Kidman is the star of the show all the way in a tremendous performance. Dickinson, however, can keep up with her, and that has a lot to do with what makes Babygirl work at such exceedingly high levels. You might have qualms about it later regarding gender roles and such, but first you should enjoy the ride.

Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth (2017)

One more entry from the 33-1/3 series of fancy little books from Bloomsbury Publishing devoted to specific albums. This one is by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero, taking on the strangely beautiful and only album by Young Marble Giants, the Welsh minimalist trio who were briefly darlings in postpunk circles. It answered lots of my questions about the band and the album, including at least one I thought had no answer. First, both “young marble giants” and “colossal youth” are references to ancient Greek sculptures from circa 500 BCE called “kouroi,” depicting larger-than-life-size nude adolescent boys and girls. The statues can be as high as 10 feet. One of the Moxham brothers, Stuart or Philip, found a book about them and was fascinated. The third principal, singer Alison Statton, worked as a dental technician during the band’s heyday and is now a chiropractor. The answer I thought I’d never get is that Pedro Costa’s 2006 Portuguese movie Colossal Youth is indeed related to the album somehow. Released as Juventude em Marcha ("Youth on the March"), Costa, the picture’s director, writer, and co-cinematographer, specifically requested that releases in English-speaking countries bear the title Colossal Youth, harking to the album. Unfortunately, while this book is heavily footnoted, no source is given on this point, and little explanation of Costa’s reason. In fact, Blair and Bocciero seem mystified about it themselves, though convinced of the connection. I’ll take them at their word. This book reminded me of Geeta Dayal’s fine treatment in this series of Brian Eno’s Another Green World. It largely eschews personal anecdotes of their history with the album, replacing it with a lot of probing and erudite discussion of its purpose and sources. Colossal Youth really is a lovely and special album and I was grateful just for being sent back to it again. I like the way Blair and Bucciero cast the net wide to place this album culturally. Susan Sontag is mentioned a lot, as are Greil Marcus and Simon Reynolds. Usual suspects all, but Blair and Bucciero make use of them judiciously. This is a surprisingly rare thing in this series—a text that is a worthy companion to the album, enlightening and informative.

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

“Vampyr” (1871)

I should start by noting that Jan Neruda’s very short story (also known as “Vampire” and “The Vampire”) is not the basis for Danish filmmaker Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 film of that name. That honor goes to Sheridan Le Fanu. Neruda is on Wikipedia as an important figure in Czech realism and a member of the May School, although I don’t know what those things mean exactly. But probably this story is a one-off of some kind. It features a small Polish family touring the Greek islands, with a daughter who is sick. This being a vampire story, I was instantly suspicious of the family members, especially the daughter’s new husband. That’s how vampire stories can tend to go. But the vampire in the story, eventually identified as “The Vampire,” is a Greek man, a traveling young artist renowned (or notorious) for making sketches of the corpses of people recently passed. But he does them ahead of time, before their deaths. The daughter who is ailing appears to be merely ailing, but it's possible the Greek man is doing a vampire thing on her too, that is, sucking her blood or energy somehow. The story is not really clear about the matter, nor even about who the vampire is, though eventually it is spelled out more or less. The Greek artist guy shows up after the family has been settled into a hotel and begins to sketch the daughter. He does so discreetly, with his back turned so no one can see his work. He’s less like a vampire and more like a social misfit with uncanny intuition. (I will note also that daylight does not seem to bother him, nor do we know whether the daughter has puncture wounds on her neck.) That’s basically all the story is giving us. I didn’t think it was very effective or interesting and also it seems to be out of step with Neruda’s main currents and larger career. I think vampire stories by definition are not realism of any kind, not even magical realism. So possibly this was written for the money? The story is quite readable for something in translation from the 19th century, but I would have to say it’s fatally slight.

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

Cowboy Copas, “Hangman’s Boogie” (1949)

[listen up!]

Cowboy Copas was a country singer out of Blue Creek, Ohio, who’s probably most famous now for dying in the same plane crash in 1963 that also took Patsy Cline. “Hangman’s Boogie” does not appear to be his best-known song but it’s one that has stuck with me since I found it in the Hillbilly Boogie box set (on the Proper label). I admit it took me a few turns to grok what’s going on here. I didn’t expect anything like it from a song with “boogie” in its title (which includes most of the 100 tunes on Hillbilly Boogie). The jaunty air of Copas’s vocal perfectly belies the doom and darkness of the scene he paints, with the singer scheduled for execution in the morning for rustling cattle: “I’m gonna do the boogie with the drop me beat / Just a corny rhythm where you swing your feet.” The song was written by Larry Cassidy, another obscure workaday midcentury country entertainer with perhaps a more morbid comical bent than usual, the author also of the seagoing disaster “Save the Alcohol” (“Save the kids and the women first, then save the alky-hall,” says the captain). Cowboy Copas can be found sitting on the back of a flatbed truck in the 1949 movie Square Dance Jubilee to sing this confounding upbeat tale of woe, which seems to play capital punishment for something of a lighthearted joke. (The movie is rated 4.0 by 61 people on IMDb, but I think it’s worth a look for the music. “Hangman’s Boogie” starts shortly after 31:00.) The song even invokes the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and says outright but calmly, “It’s a doggone pity but I gotta go.” The last line and its foul image kept creeping up on me, amazed to find it so baldly in a song like this, softly hollering into eternity: “I’m gonna be dancing in the strangest way / Doing the hangman’s boogie at the break of day.”

The House of the Dead (1862)

For those keeping score, the only novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky that Vladmir Nabokov liked was The Double, and the only one that Leo Tolstoy liked was The House of the Dead. Both cases make sense for specific reasons. The Double is arty and literary (and good), The House of the Dead is full of humanity (and very good). I have to say so far I’ve liked very much everything I’ve read by Dostoevsky, even more than I expected. The House of the Dead has a tone that is different from any of the others—more sober, with more pathos. Gone is the screaming edge of anxiety, outrage, dread, hysteria. It's fair to call it a novel but much of it is lightly fictionalized, closer to autofiction, with scenes from his four years in prison at hard labor, following his mock execution, an unimaginably cruel and traumatizing exercise in which he believed he was about to die. There is little narrative through-line here, just scenes of prison life organized by theme: first impressions, new acquaintances, Christmas, the hospital, punishments, and animals they lived with and loved—a horse, a goat, etc. This journalistic novel is also where I learned that Dostoevsky’s family of origin had the status of nobility. Dostoevsky’s first-person narrator here is also from that upper class, and describes how the majority of prisoners were peasants and hated him for his class. Just another problem to deal with in prison. The book is rich with characters, and Dostoevsky’s ability to bring them to life with vivid detail and concise anecdotes is more evidence of how he continued to get better as a novelist. It may have been serialized in its initial publication, but it does not feel fragmented. Rather, it is methodical in its treatment of the subjects at hand. Some of the foreshadowing and references to other parts of the text feel a bit awkward but I like the approach he has taken. The narrator is serving a 10-year sentence for “assassinating” his wife (in the Constance Garrett translation) whereas Dostoevsky served four years for participating in a subversive literary discussion group. There are many beautiful passages here—notably the sections on Christmas, a theatrical performance staged by prisoners, and the prison animals. But I really enjoyed all of it. It’s interesting to see how much skill he has even when he is adopting a more restrained voice. The House of the Dead belongs with the best of prison literature and it’s one of Dostoevsky’s best too.

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

Batman Returns (1992)

USA, 126 minutes

Director: Tim Burton

Writers: Bob Kane, Daniel Waters, Sam Hamm

Photography: Stefan Czapsky

Music: Danny Elfman

Editors: Bob Badami, Chris Lebenzon

Cast: Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Michael Gough, Michael Murphy, Cristi Conaway, Pat Hingle, Paul Reubens, Andrew Bryniarsky

Director Tim Burton’s sequel to his first Batman movie makes it more obvious how much even that picture was attempting to split the difference between the campy ‘60s TV version and Frank Miller’s ‘80s reimagining of the caped crusader as a grizzled vigilante and sadistic mental case. The production design and some elements of the story lean hard into the latter but then there is Jack Nicholson taking top billing and slobbering all over the set in whooping cocaine-addled fugue states. Soundtrack by Prince. We might have thought the 1989 Batman worked, to the extent it did, because we wanted so badly the kind of Batman movie it took nearly 20 years to get. “We” meaning fans of the Frank Miller version, which I adored in the ‘80s.

Batman Returns is more like return of the camp. Casting Pee Wee Herman in the prologue as the Penguin’s father kind of gives away the game, as do casting Danny DeVito as the Penguin (who prefers to go by his given name, Oswald Cobblepot) and Christopher Walken (wearing a helmet of white hair) as Max Shreck, Gotham City’s power company tycoon implementing a dastardly scheme. Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle, who becomes the Catwoman, is another case. We’ll get to that. Early in the picture, when she is still a meek stammering secretary to Max, Batman rescues her from an assault. “Wow,” she says. “The Batman. Or is it just Batman?” The very question! So meta! “Batman” is in the tradition of the ‘50s and ‘60s comic book version leading into the TV show, whereas “the Batman” (subtle distinction!) is the original moniker for the creature of the night (including “the Bat-Man”) which Miller was trying to revive.

Arthur Smith, “Guitar Boogie” (1945)

[listen up!]

I was reading an interesting book by Jim Dawson and Steve Propes called What Was the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Record? (review next month!), which included this instrumental as one of its 50 candidates. Then I noticed the tune is included in a Hillbilly Boogie box set on the Proper label I’ve been listening to lately (with Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “The Shotgun Boogie” and one more gem for next week). Arthur Smith and his music have traveled under many names, in part because there was a Grand Ole Opry player named Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith and in part no doubt because the Smith name is so common. So we have Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith, Arthur Smith’s Hot Quintet, Arthur (Guitar Boogie) Smith & His Cracker-Jacks, etc., etc. Notably, he also wrote a song in 1955 called “Feudin’ Banjos” that was adapted by Eric Weissberg & Steve Mandell as the #2 1973 hit “Dueling Banjos” (from the movie Deliverance). Arthur Smith got around. I would not remotely consider this the first rock ‘n’ roll record—I’m not even sure it’s rock ‘n’ roll. Its chief virtue, as with “Dueling Banjos,” is the technical skill of the players and the “tasty” polish of the performance. It’s simple but resonant, and if it’s a quintet that must be at least three acoustic guitars with a bass. I’m not even sure I hear a drummer—one of the guitars is doing that duty. The tune has a nice boogie feel, of course, and some interesting interplay and solos. Overall it seems much closer to me to straight-up country—it’s telling that Wikipedia lists the people influenced by Smith as Glen Campbell, Roy Clark, and Hank Garland. In just that way “Guitar Boogie” is so smooth it’s almost soothing.

My Mom Jayne (2025)

Until this documentary came along, I did not know that Mariska Hargitay, flinty star of the longest-running live-action TV series of all time, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, is a daughter of Jayne Mansfield. Jayne Mansfield, of course, relegated to sex kitten status, was one of the midcentury “Three M’s,” the so-called blonde bombshells of the ‘50s and ‘60s, with Marilyn Monroe and Mamie Van Doren. Hargitay directed this picture, a patient and loving unraveling of the many complexities associated with Mansfield, her career, and her family and loves. Mansfield had her first of five children at the age of 16. She had wanted to be a Hollywood star for most of her life by then. After winning a series of beauty pageants she finally made it there at the age of 21. Hargitay interviews her brothers and her older sisters, visits storage units that have been left untouched for decades, and peels back the layers of family secrets, eventually uncovering a major one that involves Hargitay herself, Mansfield’s fourth child. She was named Mariska but Mansfield insisted on calling her Maria for most of the few years left to her—it’s a clue to this labyrinthine past. Full disclosure, I’ve never been a fan of Law & Order: SVU, which I think largely just leans into outrage about sex crimes to the point of monotony. A lot of my problems there persisted here as Hargitay often feels like she’s performing in her seething Olivia Benson mode. There’s no doubt, however, about her bravely facing the headwinds of heartache and family agony, and in many ways her tough detective mode is a perfect fit for this investigation. As with Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield was no dumb blonde, but was frustrated by the limitations, long-term as well as immediate, of the sex dolly roles that amounted to most of her opportunities. I still love the 1956 movie The Girl Can’t Help It (more for Little Richard and the other rock ‘n’ rollers) but have always found Mansfield hard to watch, it’s such a parade of stereotypes and cliché, pious about her maternal instincts, openly bug-eyed about her boobs. Hargitay skillfully if somewhat ham-handedly restores Mansfield’s dignity here. She doesn’t dwell much on Mansfield’s worst roles or the grotesque details of her death. She reaches out to and includes all the children and extended family of Mansfield, including Hargitay’s stepmother Ellen Hargitay as well as Mansfield’s friends and husbands still alive and she drenches it all in a lot of love. I would say it’s better than any episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but that’s a low bar for me. Good one especially for fans of SVU and/or Jayne Mansfield.

Quinn’s Book (1988)

The fourth novel in William Kennedy’s Albany cycle is fairly called a doozy. The opening scene, which describes a natural disaster, is insanely vivid and the tale at hand proceeds from there, with drowning victims recovered and a resurrection scene so over the top all you can really do is laugh. Daniel Quinn is there as a young teenager and he saves Maud Fallon, equally young, from drowning. She begs him to steal her away from her guardian, a sex worker and stage performer and her aunt with her own oddball retinue in tow. The rest of the novel never quite lives up to this amazing opening, but the glow lasts all the way. The incident takes place in 1849 and we stay with this motley group for about a year, before the novel shifts into the wartime future of 1864, with a brief stop in 1858, mostly in flashback. I was 100% on the side of Quinn and Maud but alas things don’t always go the way you’d like or expect. Some tantalizing details, such as a mysterious shiny disc recovered from its concealment at the bottom of a birdcage, never seem to amount to anything. Maybe this disc appears elsewhere and is explained in the cycle? For that matter, as familiar as the name Quinn is from the first three novels (Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and Ironweed) I don’t remember the circumstances and couldn’t find anything on the internet about him. Ironweed won all the awards and attention for Kennedy and his Albany cycle of novels, but I liked Legs more and Quinn’s Book might be even better. Kennedy is one of those writers who loves language and writing and his own voice, so he tends to be a pleasure to read no matter what. He’s even making up words my kindle dictionary doesn’t know, though their meanings are always plain from context. In many ways this feels like what you’d get if J.D. Salinger wrote Blood Meridian. I love the 19th-century setting—including, of course, as it must, the Civil War—even though the sensibility driving it is thoroughly late 20th century. I was worried for Fenimore Cooper’s stultifying voice, given his tales could well have taken place in upstate New York. But Quinn’s Book is way better than any Cooper I know. My advice, if you like Kennedy, is don’t stop with Ironweed.

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

“The Lodger” (1993)

Fred Chappell’s story is very clever and enjoyable exactly for that reason. I found it in a Year’s Best anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and what’s more it also won a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction too. Clearly a lot of people have enjoyed it. But I think it’s closer to literary satire than fantasy, let alone horror. The clear target is postmodernism. At the same time it certainly has affinities with the bookish surrealism of Jorge Luis Borges, so give it that too. “The Lodger” manages to eat its cake and have it too in many ways. Chappell namechecks Alfred Hitchcock (whose 1920s silent movie supplies the title) and Edgar Allan Poe. The main character, Robert Ackley, is a low-level librarian in a university with a modest collection (by the tone) of 2 million volumes. He spends his evenings plunged into the strange finds he makes by day in the library. He likes the weird and elusive and obscure. He may be living in the right universe for it because this is a strange one. It’s much like our own but with certain key differences, such as, apparently, no Allen Ginsberg or Howl. Instead, there is Gerald Grayforth and Squall, which has obvious fragments from Howl and affords Chappell the opportunity to unleash, in 1993, some no doubt long-simmering mockery of the beats. There are other targets I recognized here as well and many more I suspected. Basically Chappell is making a party out of it. Everyone’s invited. One evening Ackley is reading an obscure poet from Cleveland, Lyman Scoresby—something to do with Hart Crane—and picks up Scoresby’s spirit, who then lives in Ackley’s head and begins to systematically take him over. The story then becomes a contest of wills between them and a good time is had by all. I like it because I am open to this assessment of the po-mo project. As someone who loves Ginsberg and Howl, however, I also got a glimpse of what highbrow condescension looks like coming from a vanity-damaged specimen like Scoresby, in which case I’m afraid Chappell, by extension and presumption, looks merely smug. So perhaps he and I are both smug about postmodernism, if you follow me. It stands to reason. And the story remains entertaining on balance, an intriguing piece of intellectual stunt work, especially in the way it resolves.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

Tennessee Ernie Ford, “The Shotgun Boogie” (1950)

[listen up!]

Tennessee Ernie Ford had a big hit with this entertaining story-song in 1950, which sat for 14 weeks atop the Rockabilly & Western Swing chart. It hits with a rollicking piano, hip-wrigglin’ boogie bass figure, and upbeat nimble tempo. Our narrator is a good old boy living off the fat of his land with his shotgun standing in the corner. In the first part, he is out hunting. “The big fat rabbits are jumpin' in the grass / Wait 'til they hear my old shotgun blast.” Said blast is replicated throughout the song by hard hits on the snare drum, probably my favorite part of the song and its most ingenious. It sounds right purely by context. “Look out bushy tails, tonight you'll be in the pot.” In the second part, he meets a Daisy Mae type of beautiful backwoods gal. Among other things, of course, she is a deadly shot with her own shotgun. He is instantly smitten. “I looked her up and down, said, ‘Boy, this is love.’” But the usual complications soon prevail. “I sat down on a log, took her on my lap / She said wait a minute, bud, you gotta see my pap / ... He don't like a man that's gonna trifle.” And so our guy follows the script. “Well, I called on her pap like a gentleman oughter / He said, ‘No brush hunter's gonna get my daughter.’" And raising his shotgun, fires. No worries, our guy gets the drift and outruns the shot. “I wanted weddin' bells / I'll be back little gal, when your pappy runs out of shells.” Ford’s voice is homely and flat, especially on the long notes, but it’s all part of the charm.

“The Bride” (2020)

This story by Shaenon K. Garrity is another good one from Black Static magazine, which unfortunately closed down operations in 2023 after 30 years. Garrity’s bio says she is a cartoonist, and maybe some of that accounts for the vivid imagery here, but really this is more compelling on a meta-textual level, at once riffing on the Frankenstein mythos and addressing the reader in chanting, taunting, hypnotic ways. It opens: “As you drive south, the heat rushes up to greet you like your name is in the guestbook and it has your room prepared.” It’s set in the early 1930s insofar as it has a time setting, which suggests some affinity with the Universal movie franchise. But it is wild and cold and sophisticated more like Mary Shelley herself. It’s not Bride of Frankenstein but it’s in the neighborhood. This Frankenstein’s monster is made from the corpse of a beautiful young woman by a “Doctor” to be his mate. It is in the form of an animated dead girl. She smells bad. She falls apart easily and must be put back together with wax and other adherents. Radium as well as electricity was involved in animating her, so she is also radioactive. Her vision is x-ray and she sees and hears with her entire body. The relationship between the Doctor and the dead girl is, of course, fraught and desperate. Eventually she leaves her rotting body behind entirely and exists as a kind of energy vortex, dimly seen but in the shape of a woman. Meanwhile there is another narrative thread going on in second-person that has us driving and searching for something that appears to be the end of the story? It’s still not finished at the end, leaving us in limbo, even though it certainly seems to finish the story of the bride, but implies it hasn’t to keep us going? Maybe. It’s actually a pretty neat trick, a kind of narrative moebius loop. It’s one of the best stories I’ve read in a while, contemporary or otherwise. It is splashed with bolts of color. The language is blunt. It may be coy about its Mary Shelley and other Frankenstein sources, but they are there. Garrity even slips in an ”It’s alive!” But I like even more how she pushes beyond that, into a next phase of “the Bride” as a glimmering energy vortex. It wasn’t just life that was created in this experiment, but something more profound. And it’s irresistible! (Note: I see there is a movie called The Bride! set to be released this March. It sounds like it has a similar premise and shares elements with this story, but I don’t see Garrity’s name anywhere associated with it. Credit for direction and screenplay goes solely to Maggie Gyllenhaal, so maybe it’s just one of those “something in the air” coincidences. Obviously, I haven’t seen it yet, but plan to.)

Black Static #77
Story not available online.

So Beautiful or So What (2011)

In the ‘70s I was a dedicated fan of Paul Simon, maybe even more than I ever was of Simon & Garfunkel, who had some songs I liked but not many I loved (mostly on Sounds of Silence). All of Simon’s three solo albums in that decade—Paul Simon, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, and Still Crazy After All These Years—are good. I thought they verged on pop song masterpieces, especially the first. I even liked his 1983 album, Hearts and Bones, but by then he was turning into more of a slightly guilty pleasure. He definitively lost me in 1986, once and for all, with Graceland, which among other things was where I started to notice I was tired of his voice. Fast-forward 25 years to So Beautiful or So What, which reunited him with Rhymin’ and Still Crazy producer Phil Ramone. High production values is very much the name of the game here, as it always has been with Simon. So Beautiful is experimental in many ways, with ubiquitous bells and heavy samples, but it’s always “tasty.” He’s playing with exotic global music as he was on Graceland (and perhaps since?)—West African electric guitar blues, Indian percussion, the samples, and more. The personnel cited on Wikipedia runs to the dozens. So Beautiful seems to me to integrate its elements better than Graceland but it’s still a little too ostentatious to not be troublesome on the cultural appropriation tip. I notice the first song, the Christmas song (“Getting Ready for Christmas Day”), as I appreciate when artists try to create their own Christmas standards. But even that song and all that follows fade too quickly into the background, perhaps victim of the production values. When I remember to listen closely I hear a lot of craft going into it. But it’s not that interesting and rarely keeps my attention for long, not least from being tired of his voice now in the first place. I don’t seem to be able to shake that. Lots of establishment rock critics went for So Beautiful (Robert Christgau, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Jon Pareles), hailing it enthusiastically as Simon’s best in decades. Maybe—I don’t know anything after Graceland and sought this one out perhaps based on these reviews. In many ways Simon’s contributions, his voice and his songs, are simply not necessary. I think it’s cool that he listens widely, but I think we’d all be better off if he did something like David Byrne and put together anthology albums.

Addams Family Values (1993)

USA, 94 minutes

Director: Barry Sonnenfeld

Writers: Charles Addams, Paul Rudnick

Photography: Donald Peterman

Music: Marc Shaiman

Editors: Jim Miller, Arthur Schmidt

Cast: Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia, Christopher Lloyd, Joan Cusack, Christina Ricci, Carol Kane, Jimmy Workman, Carel Struycken, David Krumholtz, Christopher Hart, Kristin Hooper, Dana Ivey, Peter MacNicol, Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon, Peter Graves

My principled stance is that I avoid most movie sequels. Certainly there have been some that are winners—Bride of Frankenstein, The Dark Knight, Evil Dead II, The Road Warrior, Terminator 2. And, yeah, beyond that some noisy consensus on others I don’t like nearly as much as the originals: The Godfather Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens. Then there are sequels like Addams Family Values, which may be better than the originals but are just too lightweight and/or marketing-driven in the first place to take seriously. If you want to laugh, however, you could do worse than Addams Family Values.

Director Barry Sonnenfeld absorbed the lessons of the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams, who pumped up the gag volume in their Airplane!, Naked Gun, and other parody franchises. The pace of Addams Family Values is not as frenetic but the rhythm of punchlines and sight gags is reliably steady. Sonnenfeld’s IMDb known-fors include two Men in Black movies, which are comparable comedies for a sense of his style. He also did Wild Wild West and the original Addams Family adaptation from 1991 (which is not as good as this sequel). While you can argue that none of it amounts to much, the all-star cast and the overall vibe here indicate at least that people wanted to work with Sonnenfeld. They bring a lot of infectious we’re-having-a-ball chemistry to Paul Rudnick’s rapid-fire screenplay. It’s the director as popular guy, a tradition that goes all the way up the line to Howard Hawks.

Deep Purple, “Smoke on the Water” (1972)

[listen up!]

Lately I’ve been listening to an old high school favorite, Deep Purple’s Machine Head. The bluesy groove “Lazy” was always my favorite on the album, although I have found greater appreciation for “Highway Star,” “Space Truckin’,” and, for possibly the first time, “Smoke on the Water,” a ubiquitous #4 hit in 1973 in a shortened version. My perhaps grammar nazi beef was the line “Some stupid with a flare gun (/ Burned the place to the ground”). I couldn’t get past it. It’s so stupid itself, when, for example, the word “fool” would scan just as well and not feel so dumb. The good news is I’ve been able to set that aside and at last just let the heavy riff come to me—one of the best in classic-rock annals, so much so you may well be exhausted with it at this point. But, suddenly, I’m not. In the 5:42 that it lasts, the riff rolls through three times before wandering off in the somewhat protracted finish. The first appearance is the start of the song, of course, establishing it by basic elements—played twice on the electric guitar (Ritchie Blackmore), then drums come in (Ian Paice), then the bass revs up (Roger Glover), pushing it wide across the field of vision like someone flinging open double doors. Then the singer (Ian Gillan), the name-checking (“Frank Zappa and the Mothers”), and the terrible line. Now I’m staying with it. Jon Lord’s Hammond organ has joined the party. A verse or two, a chorus, and the riff returns, the band now fully engaged and moving like a freight train coming up to speed (the “official video” for once does little harm to the song, leaning into the down-the-road-in-a-heavy-machine vibe with cartoon animation). More verses, the chorus again, and back to the riff, taking on its own life. A guitar solo starts, not particularly inspired until ... return of the riff. The guitar suddenly finds its voice against the heavy momentum. At about 3:39 it turns into something glorious and sublime.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

The seventh feature film in the Alien franchise was directed and cowritten by Fede Alvarez. Alvarez, 47, has proved himself in the horror realm (Don’t Breathe) and inserting himself into ongoing franchises (the 2013 Evil Dead). So maybe he was a natural for making the best Alien movie in nearly 40 years. In fact, part of his shtick here is drawing skillfully on the first two movies even as he gleefully careens around a barrage of excellent original SF predicaments. He uses the spooky confines of decrepit spaceware floating in space, as in the first picture, and he composes a closeup shot of our hero Rain (Cailee Spaeny) confronting one of the creatures in profile, as in the second. Rain’s android friend Andy (David Jonsson) saves her from one attack saying, “Get away from her. You bitch.” But my favorite hark to the past is reviving Ian Holm from the first picture as the android Ash. They had to obtain permission from the estate of Holm, who died in 2020, to use his likeness (from the Lord of the Rings shoot). The rest is busy-busy special effects. It closes a neat circle in the larger enterprise. Ash is just as deceptive and manipulative here as he was in 1979. Romulus also gives us a new word for the alien (or at least new to me), mostly replacing “xenomorph” with “parisitoid.” Whatever. The picture runs nearly a full two hours but rarely flags. Romulus is intense and can be scary and it was a relief that Alvarez never goes jokey on us, which would probably not be hard with this “perfect organism” we know so well now that we could likely pass a pop quiz with ease on its properties: the face-hugger stage, the chest-bursting stage, the unstoppable acid for blood, the speed and cunning. There might be a little more biology to Romulus, as some cross-breeding happens between alien and human, which I’m pretty sure is new. The result is suitably horrifying, though weirdly too reminiscent of Terminator CGI to truly enjoy. I liked Romulus nearly as much as the first two pictures in the franchise, Alien and Aliens, which is not a low bar. Forget 3, Resurrection, Prometheus, and Covenant. Romulus should be your next stop after the first two.

The Shrinking Man (1956)

Richard Matheson’s next novel after I Am Legend went on to become one of the great 1950s science fiction movies, huffing up the title to The Incredible Shrinking Man. Matheson wrote the screenplay and, in fact, improves the story by making it much more straightforward in time. This novel is constantly hopping all over the place, from when the main guy, the shrinking man, is trapped in the cellar, missing and presumed dead by his family, to sections labeled by his height: 68”, 35”, etc. It feels similarly unfocused by perspective. Sometimes things seem larger or smaller than they should from descriptions in the same passage. I could also do without the masculine panic as he goes from 6’2” to subatomic, which reminds me of another complaint, this thing about shrinking proportionally at the rate of 1/7” per day. WTF is 1/7”? Just say an inch per week and leave the rest of the math to us. On the other hand most of this takes place in the previous week, so maybe that’s what you have to do. Another point that worried me is the sense that the structure of the novel by definition makes the timeline 74 weeks, from 74 inches to nil. It wasn’t that clear and I had the sense more time was elapsing, maybe even years, but maybe Matheson was true to the concept after all. The Shrinking Man is thus disorienting but not necessarily in good ways. Maybe I’m not the one to ask. I didn’t go much for I Am Legend either. Matheson is a good, active writer and still highly readable even when he can feel a little lost here. There are too many Hemingwayesque issues with masculinity and it is too easily read in contexts that developed after 1956 as panic about losing positions of power men had previously dominated. To be clear, I don’t think Matheson thought of it consciously that way at all, but that’s where his imagination went. He liked the possibilities of steady shrinkage (as George Costanza once yelped) and somehow it became something about satisfying women (that is, pacifying them). Matheson is famous for an ugly imagination. His vampire stories are particularly hard for me to read. This one manages to evade a lot of that, but I take the movie, with its own flaws, as Matheson’s second draft, with improvements. Hard to talk about fears of sexual inadequacy in a 1950s movie, which also helps.

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

The Band (1969)

I like the second album from the Band (or “The Band”) more than the first. It’s definitely a big-brother album in my life, in this case the big brother of a neighborhood friend. I felt pressure to like it even as I never connected much with it. In the aftermath of 1968, a lot of the counterculture-oriented groups seemed to be seeking a kind of downhome comfort-rock. Sometimes it works. It’s easy enough to just play the album and try to let it come to you, though it’s often boring. Sometimes it hits in spite of my larger misgivings about the project. I have never liked the song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” for example, not by Joan Baez, not by the Band. It was written by Robbie Robertson—within the confines of the copyright disputes among the Bandmates—and always struck me as unattractive pretend-old stoic warbling. I’ve cringed though it so much I can’t even tell you. At one time you could not get away from it. The Baez version went to #3 in 1971 and I’ve had friends and read the critics who are into the whole Bob Dylan / Band industrial complex and made it part of the air we breathe. Yet the last time I played through The Band I found myself singing along with “Dixie.” Go figure. It might mean I’m in denial about liking it or it might mean I sing to cope when I should be just using the skip button. I’m not sure why I have so much resistance to skipping songs when I listen to albums. Somehow it feels like cheating. Anyway, the only song I actively like here is “Up on Cripple Creek” (a #25 hit in 1969), another good singalong, but even then it’s not like I love it. I give it maybe a 7 of 10. “Jawbone” is another song I like enough to notice; specifically I like its deliberateness. But most of the rest of The Band just passes me by like wallpaper. I will say one of the most interesting things about the Band is the range of strong lead vocals, provided on different songs by three of the five players, working and interweaving distinctly but within a range. Only Garth Hudson (my favorite) and Robbie Robertson abstain from singing (or yowling, as the occasion warrants). Last point: In recent years I’ve seen the album referred to as the “Brown Album” (presumably because it’s self-titled in the middle of their career like the Beatles’ White Album or a crayola rainbow of self-titled releases from Weezer). Maybe The Band has always been the Brown Album, but I have never in my life heard anyone refer to it that way. Brown like the loamy earth, I’m going to guess, not brown like shit.

Another Woman (1988)

USA, 81 minutes

Director/writer: Woody Allen

Photography: Sven Nykvist

Music: Erik Satie, Woody Allen’s record collection

Editor: Susan E. Morse

Cast: Gena Rowlands, Ian Holm, Gene Hackman, Sandy Dennis, Mia Farrow, Blythe Danner, Betty Buckley, Martha Plimpton, John Houseman, Harris Yulin, Frances Conroy

Director and writer Woody Allen’s movie about the bourgeois in New York City entering their 50s is surprisingly very good. I suspect a good deal of that, especially nowadays with his reputation in shreds, is because this is one of his rare movies in which he does not appear. It doesn’t hurt that the cast is stellar: Gena Rowlands and Gene Hackman are excellent, as usual. Others—Betty Buckley, Sandy Dennis, John Houseman—have small roles but make the most of them. I also got a kick out of seeing a youthful Frances Conroy, who went on to the TV series Six Feet Under more than 10 years later.

It's still a Woody Allen movie, specifically in his “serious” key, aping the greats of European cinema, usually Ingmar Bergman. For Another Woman he hired cinematographer Sven Nykvist, hailing from the Bergman stable (Scenes From a Marriage, Fanny and Alexander, Cries & Whispers). He throws a coat of brown / golden / sepia over the proceedings, which gives the picture an aura of something from the past. This was their first collaboration, but Woody and Nykvist ended up working on a few more films together. Another Woman draws on the reminiscing structure and wistful, nostalgic notes of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries with an interestingly complicated scenario. Gena Rowlands is Marion Post, a tenured professor of German philosophy who reads Rilke for pleasure. Her life has reached a point where it suddenly falls apart.

“The Premonition” (1992)

Here’s another remarkable story by Joyce Carol Oates from her Haunted collection. Kirkus Reviews called it the best of the bunch in a rave review from 1994. I’m more inclined to give that honor to the title story, but this one is awfully good too. It never outright tells us what it is at elaborate pains to make perfectly clear. A few days before Christmas, Whitney has a premonition about his older brother Quinn. He drives over to Quinn’s mansion to check on him. There is a rumor Quinn has started drinking again after 11 months of sullenly attending AA meetings under some type of intervention pressure. His wife and two daughters are often bruised or patched up. Quinn is the obvious culprit. He has been brazenly planning to spend the holidays in the Seychelles with a girlfriend. So it’s not surprising Whitney would have a bad feeling about Quinn any time he thought about him. He is trouble itself walking around. When Whitney gets to Quinn’s place Quinn is not there but his wife Ellen and the girls Molly and Trish are, all of them in strangely high spirits. Molly is 14 and Trish 11. The house is in some disarray, with half-packed boxes and trunks and suitcases all over the place. They don’t seem to know where Quinn is. He’s gone on business, and they say they’ll be hearing from him when he finishes his business trip, when they plan to meet in Europe. It’s all quite vague, but it’s obvious the traditional family Christmas is off for this year. Still, they are happy and excited to see Whitney, the girls’ “favorite uncle.” The clues become more obvious—by the shape and size of some of the boxes, and the bathtub has been recently scrubbed with kitchen cleanser. Oates establishes a narrative tempo that enables her to use misdirection skillfully. She never has to tell us what probably happened, and she never does. She just plants it in our heads, where it festers. It’s likely that the probable slaughter in its vivid details (as imagined) is what we will remember of this story, even though Oates refrains entirely from doing any more than suggesting it by implication. We learn enough about Quinn that we never lose sympathy for Ellen and the girls even as our certainty about what they did only grows. The story—the collection—is more evidence that Oates is one of the best writers of short horror we’ve got.

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

Pets, “Cha Hua Hua” (1958)

[listen up!]

The Pets were a group of studio hands—drummer Earl Palmer is the only name I recognize in the quartet—who had a #34 hit with this exotic and deeply silly instrumental, which became a staple among Latino acts. I see that my streaming service offers versions by the Crownstars, Tito Gomes & Orquestra Riverside, Orquestra Riverside with sole credit, and Joe Lubin & Orquestra Riverside again (I believe Lubin was cowriter of the song, with someone named Irving Roth, who is also apparently the arranger ... note that information about this song is scant on the internet). There are more, some sounding like the same recording with different artist credits. But it does not have this version by the Pets, unfortunately, which is the first I heard and still my favorite. For my fix I have to go to youtube or the Volume 3 CD of the Ace label’s invaluable series The Golden Age of American Rock ‘n’ Roll. “Cha-Hua-Hua” (pronounce it “chihuahua”) attacks with something that sounds like a bubbly game show interlude and then quickly pivots to churning, soaring proto-Star Trek vocals, women putting it over in the high registers. The falling-forward momentum behind it is irresistible—beautiful, driving, single-minded, full of the drama of science fiction. After about 30 or 40 seconds of that (on a 2:15 track) and a quick cha-cha-cha it lapses into more conventional rock ‘n’ roll, eventually with a chattering alto sax solo (Plas Johnson). Have no fear, it’s good classic rock ‘n’ roll and outer space is never far again. I seem to find myself playing it a lot on repeat until I’ve had enough.

The History of Sound (2025)

This period romance plays around with a few interesting ideas but the whole of it unfortunately ends up somewhat muddled. It’s 1917—at first the picture acts like it’s going to be a coming-of-age story about a musical prodigy, Lionel Worthing (primarily Paul Mescal as the younger version, with Chris Cooper finishing up as Lionel’s older self). Lionel’s musical abilities later seem to be merely the explanation for his worldly mobility, with scholarships and good jobs. As an adolescent Lionel studies at the Boston Conservatory, where he meets David White (Josh O’Connor). Two lonely gay guys, they soon bond over folk music. Lionel is native to Kentucky and knows lots of material from his family and neighbors. David knows lots of material too—he has been on numerous song-collecting jaunts, making field recordings. And it’s not long before Lionel and David are embarked on a song-collecting expedition of their own, with a box of wax cylinders in tow, in Maine. Maine struck me as an unlikely destination for such a venture but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility and in any event avoids distractions by keeping things race-neutral, if that was the intent. The picture reminded me of Brokeback Mountain in the way Lionel and David have such stark mixed feelings about their love affair. Lionel seems to be more accepting of his sexuality but David is obviously uncomfortable. And it’s not just the sex. David has lots of ongoing internal issues that he doesn’t talk about much. The History of Sound dodges around its many cliché traps and is often neatly done, with surprises and various wrenching turns. It finishes with a Joy Division B-side playing on the soundtrack, “Atmosphere.” How you get from Alan Lomax to Ian Curtis is something you might be wondering, and will likely continue wondering. For all the folk music and country blues that dot the soundtrack here, director Oliver Hermanus and writer Ben Shattuck (from two of his short stories) keep moving us beyond what we think we’re going to get. It’s not exactly coming-of-age and it’s not exactly ethnomusicology. It plays a somewhat tiresome fan dance with those elements before settling on further confusion. But the performances are good and the characters felt acutely real to me in many ways. I wanted to like this one more than I did—some parts are very good.

“Seymour, an Introduction” (1959)

[2010 write-up here]

This long piece by J.D. Salinger is generally considered among the least of what he published in book form. Its companion story, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” gets most of the accolades for the #3 bestselling book in 1963. Fair enough. The complaints about self-indulgence and such are warranted. This is a writer drunk on his own talent and abilities. Formally it is Buddy Glass, oldest surviving boy in the Glass family, but arguably it may be J.D. Salinger perhaps working through his war experience, represented by Seymour’s suicide. When Buddy talks about his published fiction here, it can sound a lot like Salinger’s story “Teddy” and his novel The Catcher in the Rye. But for me, “Seymour, an Introduction” is the point where I fell for Salinger for the second time, after Catcher four or five years earlier when I was 15. At the time I read “Seymour” for the first time I was working nights full-time in a nursing home. On nights off I had to decide whether to readjust to a daytime schedule or just stay up all night and sleep through the days, maintaining continuity. Reading “Seymour” was on the latter schedule, reading all night, and there I was in step with Buddy, who was writing this chronicle at night, sometimes all night, for several nights. I felt right in step with him and loved his surges of energy. But this last time reading it I felt more the sadness that was giving Buddy such headwinds. He’s trying to keep up the brave front, but he’s writing less every night. He’s stuck on giving a physical description of Seymour, which is ultimately so shattered I still have only the vaguest idea of what Seymour looks like—or looks like, as Buddy would put it. It’s sadder and sadder and finally this “introduction” disappears into itself and walks away. I was left thinking the self-indulgence is all Buddy, and none Salinger himself, orchestrating a wallop that sneaks up on you sideways. It’s heartbreaking. It’s more than 10 years since Seymour’s death and Buddy still misses him so keenly he can’t stand it. And neither can I, in sympathy. I really think this may be the best Glass family story we have. UNLESS WE GET TO SEE SOME MORE. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction
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Revels, “Dead Man’s Stroll” (1959)

[listen up!]

The Stroll was a dance popularized by the Diamonds in 1958 with their vaguely bawdy #4 hit of the same name, following their moments in the spotlight, “Little Darlin’” (#2, 1957) and “Silhouettes” (#10, 1957). On the dance floor I understand the formal Stroll was a kind of descendant of the Virginia reel, with a line of men on one side and women on the other, facing each other. Couples step out one at a time, gyrating in unison to the slow tempo. The tempo suggests it was intended as a slow dance interlude, always popular of course at these affairs. In fact, chances are good that lots of dance occasions skipped the line part as participants wrapped their arms around their baby and swayed and shuffled with abandon. The next year the Revels, a Philly act, cracked the top 40 (#35) with this Halloween novelty. For delicate reasons of decorum, no doubt, the song was also released as “Midnight Stroll.” But they sing “dead man” in that version too. Two things I love about this oddball from late in the first wave of rock ‘n’ roll: the drumroll and gloomy church bell that opens and closes it, which with the tempo sets an appropriately somber and sobering tone, and the unexpected maniacal laughter that stands in as a solo at the break, girded by a phalanx of saxophones. “Ah ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” etc. Chilling, really, surprisingly so. It’s a cackle that belongs in the movies and would stand with the best. I get the impression the Revels & co. were doing all they could to make this as scary as possible and they basically succeeded by the standards of those more innocent times (compare Dickie Lee’s 1963 “Laurie [Strange Things Happen]”). The church bells, the laughter, the scenes described at the cemetery (“I never thought I could see such a sight / A poor soul doing the Dead Man’s Stroll”). It’s a pretty stiff drink overall, at least for its times and for me too. I almost think it should be as much of a Halloween staple as “Monster Mash.”

“If There Were No Benny Cemoli” (1963)

This story by Philip K. Dick is more like a paranoid dystopia all dressed up in sci-fi trappings. Aliens from Proxima Centauri have arrived to investigate, 10 years later, an all-out atomic war that occurred on Earth and led to massive destruction. There are a lot of levels and much complexity to the investigation and indeed to the story, with a Phildickian take on media coverage and distribution that he has used elsewhere and I’ve never quite understood, called “homeopapes.” Whatever it is exactly, it’s how news information gets around in this slice of the PKD universe. The group responsible for the war is still at large and they have taken control of the “cephalon” of the homeopape. My online dictionary defines “cephalon” as “(in some arthropods, especially trilobites) the region of the head, composed of fused segments.” So a somewhat distractingly precise way of saying brain or central processing unit. Maybe it’s me but I’m not sure Dick always gives us enough context. Anyway, the spy-craft villains are using the homeopapes to set up a more or less fictional character (albeit a real person, or patsy), one Benny Cemoli, to be framed for starting the war. They’re pretty sure they can outwit the alien investigators. This story is more short on Dick’s high concepts and works mostly as a kind of bitter, cynical spy story in a dystopic world. I’m turning to the internet for help on homeopapes. They also appeared in Ubik and I’m getting the definition “An automated device that produces a newspaper without human assistance.” In today’s parlance, a news feed made out of algorithms. So more of a production idea than distribution, presumably accessed via personal electronic devices, although who knows what Dick might have been thinking of in 1963. The subterfuge / propaganda work is only moderately compelling now. It feels like it’s been done a lot—start with Nineteen Eighty-Four—but maybe it felt more fresh in 1963. Sometimes it’s more evident than others that speed was basically Dick’s drug of choice. Paranoia gets to be a prime mode of thinking and then, in that frame of mind, the intricacies of betrayal and getting over can seem almost heroic, even though often they are not.

Philip K. Dick, The Preserving Machine
Story not available online.