The Chronic (1992)

I’m normally opposed to the very idea of “guilty pleasure,” which is usually about toxic social pressures and often involves hit pop songs—KISS fans secretly liking the Carpenters and Olivia Newton-John, stuff like that. In a natural development people have come to pride themselves on their guilty pleasures. But for me, in the case of Dr. Dre’s auspicious debut album, both parts of the term apply. I genuinely feel guilty about liking this set so much. Swearing a lot is just the start of it. All the N-words hamper singalongs. The sexism goes beyond mere sexism and proceeds directly to misogyny (“Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks,” etc.). Powerful automatic weapons, grotesque street violence, and swaggering Black-on-Black crime are frequent themes. The sex talk and scenes are so explicit they verge on revolting, viz., the “walnuts / chestnuts / deez nuts” skit. Speaking of skits—as I was just last month, complaining about them—they bust out all over here. I admit they have their moments even as my general objections to skits stand. One, “The $20 Sack Pyramid,” is nearly three minutes. “The Doctor’s Office” is a full minute and coarse as it can be. I worry about my neighbors when I start sneaking up the volume on The Chronic, which brings us to the “pleasure” side of the equation. I take it as entertainment so I can evade the problematics, as a full-on musical revue complete with comedy interludes. The only thing missing is a guy spinning plates at the top of sticks. I know it’s a tough balance here. The comedy may not land reliably, but “The $20 Sack Pyramid” is lacerating social critique. As for the songs, all team-written by Death Row principals, they just roll from one great one to the next, with fresh hooks and poised raps and melodic jams and no question about who they are or what they’re doing. You have to accept that to get to the wonders of, say, “A [N-word] Witta Gun,” with its ominous chorus “Who’s the man with the master plan?” Full disclosure, I mostly missed Dre until Eminem opened his catalog for me 10 years on. I was all over Snoop Doggy Dogg at last then too. But here I am squeamish to engage, or reproduce, the language featured on this album, which I find entertaining and even funny more often than I would think. It’s not hard for me to play the whole thing at once—mostly enjoyable, with its pitfalls, most of the way. Maybe a little long. They push the Death Row label constantly and attack with announcements like: “This should be played at high volume, preferably in a residential area.” You know what to do next, despite perhaps feeling guilty about it. P.S. I also admit, somewhat sheepishly, that I love the cannabis positivity. Inspirational line: “Make my bud the Chronic, I want to get fucked up.”

Rocco and His Brothers (1960)

Rocco e i suoi Fratelli, Italy / France, 179 minutes

Director: Luchino Visconti

Writers: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Vasco Pratolini, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, Enrico Medioli, Giovanni Testori

Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno

Music: Nino Rota

Editor: Mario Serandrei

Cast: Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girardot, Spyros Fokas, Max Cartier, Rocco Vidolazzi, Katina Paxinou, Roger Hanin, Paulo Stoppa, Claudia Cardinale, Corrado Pani, Claudia Mori, Suzi Delair

Rocco and His Brothers is classified as an “epic melodrama” on Wikipedia, which I suspect is as much about its length as it is about, say, Nina Rota’s shimmering if too occasional score. The movie is BIG by design. The story is about the migration of a family of peasants, the Parondis, one mother and five brothers, from rural southern Italy to the modern urban environs of Milan. The family patriarch has died and the farm no longer supported the family anyway. The results are predictable at a high level, but Rocco and His Brothers is more about the details, which are often surprising. (See La Notte for more on modern Milan. See The Grapes of Wrath on migration.) There are five brothers and each gets a section of the movie: Vicenzo (Spyros Fokas), Simone (Renato Salvatori), Rocco (Alain Delon), Ciro (Max Cartier), and even little Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi), though that is more by way of a coda to the picture.

The main conflict here, a towering and epic one, is between Simone and Rocco, egged on by a bad woman with a good heart, Nadia (Annie Girardot with the most sparkling, riveting performance in the whole thing). On arrival in Milan, Simone quickly finds himself with a promising boxing career, which immediately goes to his head. This is also a boxing movie, I should say, and of course mandatory for aficionados of boxing movies. Simone’s thoroughgoing rottenness is a main theme here—you think he’s bad, but he only gets worse. He wins bouts and swaggers around with a lot of cash and an eye for the babes. He’s reluctant to do anything to help the family. He’s selfish. But he falls hard for Nadia, whose biography is practically shocking. I mean, it seemed sufficiently lurid to me. They don’t call this an epic melodrama for any old reason.

“That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French” (1998)

I think this story by Stephen King may represent an interesting point in his career: the moment he went from being underrated to being overrated. From about this point on he started winning more and more serious literary awards and recognition. That’s no reflection on the story. It’s a good one. But it is some reflection on its publication in the New Yorker. I’m not sure it’s his first for that magazine and at this point it’s probably not his only. The premise is not particularly original—the French term in question is “déjà vu” and you might be able to imagine the rest—but it does show King’s deep knowledge of horror literature, resorting to a very nicely modulated stream of consciousness sort of attack. Start with the title, an actual line of dialogue which sets the whole dreamy tone. King has tried and failed with dreams before, but this is one that works. It saws away on familiar fears of flying but skillfully applies misdirection by making it a private rented jet, raising class resentments. The occasion is a middle-aged couple and their 25th wedding anniversary. The husband has made them comfortably wealthy. Perhaps they can be forgiven a little for splurging. These are details that emerge. The main arc of the story takes place on the road from the airport to the resort where they are staying. The woman is consumed by an extended experience of déjà vu. But she’s mostly wrong. She sees what is about to happen, or thinks she does, little things like the look of a mailbox around the next bend. Sometimes parts of it come true but usually not. It’s hard to know what to make of it. The story runs its route a few times: she wakes from a nap on the plane, and then the road to the resort. There is a gnawing dissatisfaction between them that is sad and sadder. The ending is something of a genuine surprise. It does not feel strained. We realize what has happened at almost exactly the same time as the woman. King plays perfectly fair, distributing clues but distracting us from them. It’s nicely done, with no gore and a minimum of mayhem. King has never stopped being prolific, and at my most recent check-in point, 2011’s 11/22/63, he was still in fine form. I follow booktubers reading him systematically with great interest because I’d like to narrow down his catalog after about 1990. I know I don’t like King enough to read all of it. But I like finding a little gem of his like this, because it gives me strength to contemplate taking on, say, the Dark Tower series.

The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Listen to story online.

Blur, “Song 2” (1997)

[listen up!]

I used to hear this song on the radio and wonder who it was—it never seemed to be announced, or I didn’t notice if it was. At 2:02 it doesn’t last long, a flashing blast over and done before you know it, but utterly perfect in its way. It’s an irresistible banger practically by definition and in 1997 it was also easy to hear it as grunge, or perhaps a parody of grunge, with the studied soft / loud dynamics. “I feel heavy metal” indeed. I was surprised when I finally found out it was Blur. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing they would do. I had them slotted in my mind with XTC and generally cerebral new wave. Of course, if it’s a conscious parody of grunge the departure in style makes a certain sort of sense. Word is the band intended it originally as a prank on the record company, but wouldn’t you know, they liked it and set about making plans to release it as a single. And then, wouldn’t you know, it became a UK and MTV hit, winning awards and attention. Never a top 40 hit in the US, it didn’t fit on classic rock stations either. Alternative rock radio is where I heard it played a lot, living at the time in Seattle, land of the grunge. I never took it as a goof, or if so an inspired one. I admit the song has lost some of its impact for me over the years from overexposure—I can recognize it now even just by the opening drumkit. Ain’t that the way, but if it hits me somewhere by surprise it can still be rousing. If you haven’t worn this one out yet for yourself, get to it and knock yourself out. I envy you for that. Play loud, of course.

Notes From Underground (1864)

It’s not hard to understand why this short novel is widely considered a starting point for reading Fyodor Dostoevsky. It’s short and, perhaps most importantly, it’s a good example of his narrative style (when he finally gets to a narrative). I read it and didn’t like it when I was about 20, but it may (or may not) stay with me longer now even if it hasn’t been so easy getting here. In many ways Notes From Underground is Dostoevsky pure and you may like the ranting style sans narrative more than me. You obviously have to get here, if you are reading Dostoevsky, but I think it can wait. Crime and Punishment is a better place to start, if it doesn’t have to be short (or The Double, if it does). Notes From Underground has some intellectual heft, as an existential or otherwise philosophical treatise. I can certainly see how this leads directly to Nietzsche—it often felt like I was rereading him, which is admittedly remarkable—and even to Kafka. Not for nothing was Dostoevsky included in somebody’s list of the four great sick men of Europe (I think it was J.D. Salinger’s list and I’m guessing the fourth is Kierkegaard). For me the first part of Notes is a slog, a blistering rant about even the most basic elements of social life. The anonymous first-person ranter extols the virtues of the will over the tediously suffocating rational, even if the will is perverse and self-destructive. It’s a natural human right, or something. It often feels like he is railing against the terms of existence itself, heady and bracing with lunatic assertions. The second part of Notes is more the Dostoevsky I like, when our unpleasant ranting narrator—unnamed, for that modern existential flourish—is seen in action with acquaintances and a sex worker who is just being drawn into the life. The narrative momentum may still be fragmented, but it has some great scenes of painful social interactions, one of Dostoevsky’s great abilities as a writer. I sympathize with our guy’s reclusiveness and even to some degree with his resentments. But I draw the line at his cruel and vindictive behavior (nonetheless understanding the impulses). At that point Notes becomes an amazing freakshow spectacle, at which we can only gape in astonishment. All these harrowing and maddening terms of existence—that’s what Dostoevsky does best and still, arguably, better than anyone else. Notes From Underground stands with his greatest, but you might have to exercise some patience at first, or anyway I had to.

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

Paisan (1946)

Paisa’, Italy, 126 minutes

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Writers: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Klaus Mann, Marcello Pagliero, Alfred Hayes, Roberto Rossellini, Rod E. Geiger, Vasco Pratolini

Photography: Otello Martelli

Music: Renzo Rossellini

Editor: Eraldo Da Roma

Cast: Carmela Sazio, Robert Van Loon, Dots Johnson, Alfonsino Pasca, Gar Moore, Maria Michi, Harriet White, Renzo Avanzo, William Tubbs, Dale Edmonds, John Whaling Allen, Dan, Roberto Van Loel, Cigolani

Film critics and historians appear prone to grouping director and cowriter Roberto Rossellini’s pictures into trilogies, even if they were not exactly intended that way. Paisan is thus the second in his so-called Neorealist trilogy, with Rome, Open City (1945) and Germany, Year Zero (1948). But not only is Paisan a genuinely standalone picture on its own, it is also composed of six separate episodes with six separate stories and casts. As the trilogy’s name suggests, the pictures are united mainly by the formal aesthetic, which in turn was imposed in the first place by conditions of low-budget financing and a country literally in ruins from war. From Rossellini to Bicycle Thieves to Jack Webb and beyond I come to the aesthetics of neorealism already in favor: shooting on the fly, casting amateurs, studying the underclasses—better without agenda, as Rossellini generally did it (though also implicitly pointing ways toward social reform).

I like the structure of Paisan almost as much as the little separate stories. The larger arc is the liberation of Italy by Allied forces, which started in 1943 and continued until it helped bring the end of the war in 1945. Just so, Paisan starts with the invasion of Sicily and advances north. The stories are not specifically about the progress of the war but rather just wartime stories involving ordinary soldiers and civilians caught in extraordinary situations. In the first a young woman whose father and brother have been missing for days, Carmela (Carmela Sazio), is drafted by invading US forces who are trying to root out dangerous nests of Nazis in a contest of urban warfare conducted at night. The movements of the US soldiers and the Nazis are complicated, information is lacking, mistakes are made, there’s no time to think, and the entire episode is all done in maybe 25 minutes. All the tales here are approximately the size of a Twilight Zone episode. The rhythms are formative but familiar.

Flaming Lips, “Do You Realize??” (2002)

[listen up!]

Things that this former official rock song of Oklahoma would like you to realize: That you have the most beautiful face. That we’re floating in space. That happiness makes you cry. And, perhaps most important, that everyone you know ... someday ... will die. In the “official music video” directed by Mark Pellington—another among those rare music videos that actually enhance a song I already like—an elephant is shown falling over on that last line, a shocking, absolutely quiet moment that drives the point home with simplicity, sensitivity, and a weird serenity. In fact, the video is full of stuff that doesn’t seem like it would work but instead is somehow tremendously moving. Yes, the intro and outro are too long—let the song play! And I’m not sure what to make of the animal costumes. Co-songwriter and Flaming Lips principal Wayne Coyne walking around strumming an acoustic guitar is the only band member shown. He’s on a Las Vegas street full of bright, flashing lights, accompanied by a phalanx of four models in baby-doll negligees and two very tall people wearing rabbit costumes. Why does this tableau of seven work as well as it does? It just does. I can’t say exactly why it all reaches me, but it does, which helps me realize, as the song would like me to, that happiness makes you cry. These lines, these images, are so absurd and yet so beautiful—the lights, the elephant, the prancing models, the somber giant rabbits, the song’s sentiment—they often make me cry somewhat against my will as I compulsively play the video on repeat, helpless not to. I’m sure I’m overselling it here, but Wikipedia notes that the song, from the album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, “is one of the group's most accessible and popular.” YMMV, but honestly I don’t see how it could.

The Bride! (2026)

This movie reminded me again that Mary Shelley’s reputation, along with regard for her 1818 novel Frankenstein, has continued to grow almost exponentially even within my lifetime. Here she is a brooding cackling witchy ghost figure who appears to so-called “The Bride,” offering mocking counsel and support. Jessie Buckley plays both The Bride and Shelley in what seems to be intended as a bravura tour de force over-the-top rereading of the Frankenstein story. And Buckley is impressive, a main feature of the picture and carrying it with talent and charisma. But it feels more like showcase than performance. Much of the movie is that way, in fact, heaving with ideas intriguing and otherwise in a very busy stew that never manages to quite come off. Maggie Gyllenhaal wrote and directed it and it’s full of stars: Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Penelope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard, even brother Jake Gyllenhaal as Ronnie Reed, an unconvincing song and dance star of the 1930s. He’s no Fred Astaire, not even close. The Bride! sets out to retell the bride part of the Frankenstein story, based partly on Shelley’s novel and partly on the Universal Frankenstein franchise of the time. For better or worse, the vibe is generally more out of Badlands or the Raymond Pettibon cover for the Sonic Youth album Goo (“I stole my sister’s boyfriend. It was all whirlwind, heat, and flash. Within a week we killed my parents and hit the road”). As long as we’re dwelling in the 1930s the picture also slips in obvious references to Bonnie and Clyde. But there’s more. The picture also reaches for Herman Melville’s brilliant Bartleby story, because why not? The Bride offers up a regular refrain of “I would prefer not to.” Buckley also plays the role with a kind of Tourette’s variation. She doesn’t swear but erupts in thesaurus-like streams: “Freeze!” she says at one point, holding a gun on people. “Firm up, stiffen, thicken.” I thought The Bride! had a lot of potential with all of its various elements but there might actually be too many of those elements, from Melville to the 1930s setting to the Frankenstein legend itself. The picture is unfortunately not greater than the sum of its parts but some of the parts are pretty good. Approach with caution.

Batman: Year One (1987)

I had a pretty good time revisiting this Barman story written by Frank Miller and illustrated by David Mazzucchelli. I happened to have the four Batman comics on hand (#404-407) as opposed to any of the later graphic novel reprints. It was interesting to see all the extras—advertisements, promotions for other comics, and letters from readers (which often included street addresses!). But the print job was murky and often difficult to read. The main arc is about the arrival of Commissioner Gordon to Gotham City, where eventually he makes his alliance with Batman. It also shows how Bruce Wayne developed and took on the role of Batman. Miller’s narrative style is brooding, dense, and creative. I don’t think he came up with some of the best ideas himself, but he uses them well. One narrative thread, in boxes colored yellow, is Gordon’s internal dialogue. Another, in white boxes with cursive lettering (particularly hard to read), represents Batman’s and/or Wayne’s thoughts. Lots of basics to the legend are here: the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents in a street crime, the whole “I will become a bat” scene, and some focus on Catwoman. Robin would not come until after this first year. Probably because Miller is involved, Batman’s fighting style is loaded up on martial arts technique. Mazzucchelli’s art is evocative but almost primitive, with simple lines and heavily saturated color. It’s possible it is better in one of the graphic novel treatments. I don’t like Year One as much as the previous year’s The Dark Knight Returns, written and penciled by Miller with his Daredevil inker Klaus Janson. I also liked it more the first time I read it many years ago. But it is solid Batman fare even if some of its elements are overused by this point. Year One was an important part of the renaissance of the dark Batman, signaled in many ways by the attachment of “the” to his name: the Batman. It’s worth looking into because Frank Miller’s work is genuinely worth looking into. If I say I’m a little tired of the Batman now it’s mostly because this dark Batman has been so overdone in the years since, in the movies as well as the comics. I miss the goofy Batman that predated the 1966 TV show, which was also goofy but in a different, “campy” way. For the dark Batman, Year One remains essential.

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

Vampyr (1932)

Germany / France, 75 minutes

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

Writers: Sheridan Le Fanu, Christen Jul, Carl Theodor Dreyer

Photography: Rudolph Mate, Louis Nee

Music: Wolfgang Zeller

Editor: Tonka Taldy

Cast: Julian West, Sybille Schmitz, Maurice Schutz, Jan Hieronimko, Henriette Gerard, Albert Bras, N. Babanini, Jane Mora

Danish director and cowriter Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet) based his vampire story on the Irish horror writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s essential 1872 collection, In a Glass Darkly, which includes “Carmilla,” the famous lesbian vampire story. It’s an important point of distinction from the more popular vampire source of the time, which, of course, was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published 25 years later in 1897. Stoker’s epistolary novel was responsible informally (later settled legally) for F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu and then, in 1931, for the kickoff of the Universal horror franchise, Dracula. In fact, Vampyr was required to wait for its release until after Dracula and then Frankenstein. These are all notably slow and very quiet dream movies, perhaps Vampyr more than any of them, which moves like thawing syrup. It often reminded me of Eraserhead, which makes me wonder how much influence it might have had on David Lynch.

The star, Julian West as Allan Grey, was the primary source of funding for the picture in exchange for the role. His real name was Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, a French-born member of Russian nobility. In that way Vampyr is a kind of vanity project—in a way perhaps even more so for Dreyer than the baron. Pursuits into horror literature have traditionally not often won respect and admiration. Dreyer may have been taking a kind of calculated risk with his career, moving from Saint Joan of Arc only four years earlier to these creatures of the night.

“The End of the Garden” (1991)

I thought this short story by Czech author Michael Ajvaz was charming and fun. As the editors Ann & Jeff VanderMeer say in their introduction to it in the anthology The Weird, “Ajvaz comes by the ‘weirdness’ in his fiction through dark humor and absurdity.” Some credit may also need to go to translator James Naughton. There’s a precise use here of “monitor lizards,” which are better known to us (or me) as “Komodo dragons”—a big lizard species (possibly multiple species). I don’t think about them much, but yes, now that my attention is drawn to them, they’re pretty weird. Something goes off in my own lizard brain. The repetition of the term “monitor lizard” does a lot of work here, and effectively. They are at once a dream element and a point of humor, used almost rhythmically. They are all over this story, starting with a cry for help our first-person narrator hears on the street. When he enters an apartment to respond he finds a woman wrestling on the floor with a monitor lizard. He rushes to assist her until he realizes it is the monitor lizard calling for help. In the dilemma facing him—which of them to help—he invokes the philosophers Kant and Hegel. I would probably be wondering how the monitor lizard could talk, but that’s me. Ajvaz’s voice puts the story over. The narrator is some kind of innocent, but also intellectual, a kind of affable absent-minded professor raconteur. His story is interesting and we want to hear more. He goes dithering off on questions of philosophy and always returns to monitor lizards. He separates the woman from the fight. She goes to her bookcase “holding neatly arranged rows of adventure novels by Alexandre Dumas pere and Paul Feval pere,” pulls out a volume—and it is At the End of the Garden, authored by the narrator. “I have never written a book in my life,” he says. Among other things this story is a great dream tale. Absurdity is handled remarkably well, with a light and playful touch. Too often it can be thunderingly obvious. So I really liked this story. Would I like more from Ajvaz? It’s hard to say but I’m inclined to think I would because his voice and the humor are so good here. Will I seek him out? Hey, I’ve got a lot on my plate. I’d certainly be interested if more fell my way.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
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Kinks, “Lola” (1970)

[listen up!]

EDM artist Moby has earned a reputation in recent years for putting his foot in his mouth—just ask Natalie Portman. The latest came earlier this year when he named this song in an interview with the Guardian, responding to a question about music he can no longer listen to, calling it “gross,” “transphobic,” and “unevolved.” Predictably enough, Kinks main guitar man and occasional songwriter Dave Davies fired back, citing trans entertainer Jayne County’s endorsement of the top 10 hit song’s influence on her. Fair enough, but for context you only have to turn to David Reuben’s bestselling Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (* But Were Afraid to Ask), a middlebrow Q&A sex manual published the year before in 1969 which was tremendously popular—later a Woody Allen movie. Trans issues were so far beyond the horizon at the time that Reuben is basically silent on anything related to gender identity, reducing transsexuality to the rather different transvestism, or cross-dressing, which he argued was practiced mainly by married heterosexual men with families (see the Woody Allen movie for the idea, a strange one). That’s the world the Kinks, of all people, were stepping into on a concept album from 1970. Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One was intended among other things as the band’s return to their hard-rocking bona fides, after several years of turning out albums with twee pop masterpieces (and that, of course, after initially busting down the walls of rock ‘n’ roll and making the world safe for rock with “You Really Got Me,” “All Day and All of the Night,” “Tired of Waiting for You,” etc., etc.).

I can see it both ways on “Lola” now: it was a thrilling rock song at the time and that side of it holds up well. It’s a Ray Davies song—the guy can write them. But the nuance of the lyrical thrust, such as it is, was basically over my 15-year-old head. They seemed to be playing the scenario for laughs, as a farce, and that’s how I took it, though somewhat uneasily. I understood it was trucking in outrageous taboo sexual themes but I took that more as pose. It feels sleazy, I think that’s the main thing Moby is complaining about, where nowadays respect and dignity are what’s on the menu for the LGBT+ community. But the mysteries of sexuality often make respect and dignity kind of party poopers in the clinch, giving up sexual charge for social acceptance, and who can blame anyone for that? There’s still some sexual charge to “Lola,” but it definitely feels dated, on the wrong side of right behavior. The song now hits as less than liberatory in most ways, though I can believe it could sound that way in 1970 and echoes are still there. And it’s not a bad rocker at all, a worthy addition to the Kinks catalog and a stone classic by any metric. I just don’t put it on very often and it sounds strange in public settings. One last odd detail: I recall at the time that Coca-Cola was incensed by the use of their name in this song and took legal action. It was hastily patched over in the studio as “cherry cola.” The versions on my streaming service now, however, are all once again “Coca-Cola.” I wonder when that happened? P.S. I love the comic book “official music video” on youtube. Worth a look even if you are like Moby and can’t stand to hear the song anymore.

Bring Her Back (2025)

I thought I saw promising signs to this one going in. The cowriting and codirecting team of the Philippou twins from Australia, Danny and Michael, previously gave us the raucous Talk to Me (and both incidentally were associated as crew with the revelatory Babadook). Sally Hawkins is a featured player, an actor who has worked well with Mike Leigh (Vera Drake, the amazing Happy-Go-Lucky), Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water), and others. And the reviews I saw were favorable, if not enthusiastic, with a 7.1 ranking on IMDb from 128,000 viewers (I generally handicap rankings on IMDb for horror movies a full point, meaning Bring Her Back had the potential for 8.1 quality). Its reputation, in fact, made me a little afraid of what was increasingly a mandatory viewing. You can see I put it off awhile. Indeed, it’s not a picture to be looked at during dinnertime, as it has many gross and harrowing scenes of extreme violence and abuse. I should have remembered that Talk to Me bore themes of grief, depression, and trauma in its plot, because once again, in Bring Her Back, contemporary horror has rooted itself in grief, depression, and trauma. In this case, Laura (Hawkins) has become deranged by the death of her daughter Cathy, who was blind and drowned in their swimming pool (which has been drained during this movie, making it a dangerous concrete hole in the backyard). Laura was a social worker before Cathy’s death. Now she is a foster mother. In many ways this is a movie about the importance of the vetting process of foster parents. Laura takes in a blind Asian girl, Piper (Sora Wong), and, under some duress because Laura only wanted the girl, Piper’s older brother Andy (Billy Barratt), who looks like Mark Hamill in 1977. Laura also has another foster living with her, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who is a certain model of creepy horror movie kid, Deliverance style. The rest is mostly tiresome working out of the grief. I can’t tell you any of the details because they would be spoilers. The Philippous can supercharge their scenes with lively, kinetic energy, but I kind of wish they’d lose the grief, depression, and trauma business. Nothing that way in this movie felt remotely real, only more like pink frosting.

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967)

I guess we can give Harlan Ellison some points for paranoia prescience with this very early vision of an AI dystopia. As such, it reminded me a lot of 19th-century horror, which often seems to believe that simply mentioning something uncanny, such as a ghost, is enough to set the mood. The idea of an AI takeover is barely developed here. It just happened somehow. Computers around the world have become sentient and they really hate people. They have allied into one thing—called “AM”—and wiped out all humanity except for the five featured in this story, who are being tortured and kept alive indefinitely. It’s been going on for 109 years at the time of the story—apparently the machines can somehow confer immortality or at least long life too. Lucky day. They seem to be able to do practically anything they want. The bad news is that the machines hate with molten rage (an Ellison specialty) even if specific reasons are not given here. They just do. The story is basically scenes of torture and terror alternating with world-building explanations and exposition. Ellison brings a lot of energy to his work, which has always been one of the main appeals about it. He may often feel like he’s making shit up, but at least it’s usually interesting shit. At this point I am beginning to think, however, that he might be more of a young person’s writer. He’s not impressive to me now the way he was when I read him in my 20s. I always intended to read more of him then but unfortunately never got around to it. Now his stuff too often feels made up, though certainly he goes deep into his themes and ideas. The thing about this one is that it never goes much further than its striking title and premise. It doesn’t have to, or didn’t. Now it has a lot of stiff competition in the realm of AI dystopia. Start with The Matrix and no doubt whole shelves of SF I don’t know at all. In fact, we might be living in that dystopia any day now. Still, I was glad to get to this story finally.

Harlan Ellison, Greatest Hits
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Listen to story online.

Run-D.M.C. (1984)

I owned a copy of Run-DMC’s debut when it was new—blind squirrel finds a nut, OK sure, but I must admit it baffled me. It was so stripped down it seemed unfinished, and primitive, appealing to that side of my taste perhaps, a semi-mystifying pleasure when it played. But it didn’t play for long before I put it away. More than 40 years later it hits different. The groove is obviously in the beats and the beats are the hooks as the brain locks into them. It’s a blast to play. They were already on to the project of making room for a rock guitar, famously and influentially on the second track here, “Rock Box,” with Eddie Martinez playing the butt-simple but evocative electric guitar. What once puzzled me now thrills me. Time comes to all folks. The guitar is hard but the beats are harder and therein lies the greatness. That’s arguably the chief feature here—certainly it is already pointing the way to the Aerosmith collaboration—but there are other points of interest and pleasure as well, such as the fiercely swapping vocals. I try to pick one or the other and chant with it. It’s not easy. It’s nimble and surprising and would only get better (see “It’s Tricky” on their third album). The high-profile themes are hard life: “Hard Times” and “It’s Like That” were the first two singles, where their bitter poverty gibes are somewhat overplayed, viz., “Won’t you tell me the last time that love bought you clothes?” My riposte would be most (not all) of people’s childhoods, where providing clothes to children is considered at least a parental duty, more often than not performed out of love. Run-DMC would often traffic in less than inspired or muddled language, especially when trying to be sincere. I much prefer the playful braggadocio of “Jam-Master Jay,” “Jay’s Game,” and the Krush-Grooves, “Hollis Crew” and “Sucker M.C.’s” (note that I do not know any applicable backstories but may look into it). “Wake Up” and “30 Days” have interesting and fun (respectively) narrative conceits. But “Rock Box” along with the B-Boy Mix in the extras count as the continuing stars of this show, with a slow-but-sure deep synthesizer line counterpointing a wind-chime same in the upper registers plus the soaring, screaming guitar, fully under control, like a panther in a cage. But stick around for the whole album. It’s good stuff, and lately a reliable raver around here.

The Great Beauty (2013)

La grande bellezza, Italy / France, 141 minutes

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Writers: Paulo Sorrentino, Umberto Contarello

Photography: Luca Bigazzi

Music: Lele Marchitelli

Editor: Cristiano Travaglioli

Cast: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, Giovanna Vignola, Galatea Ranzi, Sonia Gessner, Anna Della Rosa, Luca Marinelli, Giusi Merli, Roberto Herlitzka

Purely by coincidence I was looking at Italian director and cowriter Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte a week or two before looking at Italian director and cowriter Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. The Great Beauty came out over 50 years later but I thought I saw a good deal of basic similarities as I was watching: a main character who is an Italian novelist wandering his city (Rome or Milan), an unfocused rolling gait to events, music, parties, carousing, philosophizing, evading. Wikipedia affirms critics have seen homages in The Great Beauty to La Notte, as well as to Italian director Federico Fellini’s Roma and 8½ and Italian director Ettore Scola’s The Terrace and Splendor.

I still need to catch up on the Scolas myself but certainly can see The Great Beauty locating itself within Italian cinematic traditions. It admirably lives up to them too. I don’t know Sorrentino beyond this one—his IMDb known-fors also include This Must Be the Place (2011), Youth (2015), and The Hand of God (2021)—and I only came to this one recently. The Great Beauty focuses on the peregrinations about his home city of Rome that Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) makes as he turns 65. Jep published a novel when he was 25, highly regarded and widely read and known, but has not written another one since. He is able to live on its proceeds and also works now as a culture journalist at an arts magazine published and edited by a charismatic dwarf, Dadina (Giovanna Vignola). He is pursued constantly by people who love his novel and want to know why he never wrote another, to which he has shifting answers. He has reached an age when it is natural to look back and reflect. Not that that is what he is doing.

Small Faces, “Itchycoo Park” (1967)

[listen up!]

This top 20 hit by the Small Faces (who later became the Faces with Rod Stewart) was preceded in October 1967 by the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s smash #1 “Incense and Peppermints,” together defining a kind of deceptive wide-eyed teenybop style of bubblegum psychedelic. These songs could somehow parade around fearlessly on the AM radio, at least in my market when I was 12. They both, in fact, scared me a little because, if it was not entirely clear what is going on, the feeling is unmistakably illicit, outside the bounds of grownups, an exotic guided adventure. The mood was like little I had heard before and it appealed to me even before I got the sense of the words. The fictional Itchycoo Park in this one is a place you go to rest your eyes in shades of green. Wikipedia has the file on where the name “Itchycoo” might come from. It feels like a real place, this park. Implicitly the song is about a day of skipping school and it’s straightforward from there: “What did you do there? / I got high / What did you feel there? / Well, I cried / But why the tears there? / I’ll tell you why:” Chorus: “It’s all too beautiful” x4. Later the singer invites us to touch the sky with him. I knew “high” meant drugs, mostly likely LSD—I’d read all about it in Life magazine—but I was a kid remote from any scene that could connect me to that part of the song. I just more, like the ducks here, grooved about, was nice and had fun in the sunshine of this song, notably late at night, borne on the cool feelings it conveyed, buoyed by tunefulness and a great vocal performance from Steve Marriott.

Who? (1958)

I’m tempted to make fun of Algis Budrys for the title of his short novel. If it were up to me I would have called it The Man With the Metal Head. I would have insisted on it. But all right. What we have is a somewhat dubious Cold War story, ripped from the pages of Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy feature. For reasons that seems likely to be unreasonable, a top-secret weapons development program is doing its work near a border between the Allies and the Soviets. Something goes amiss in the calculations and there is an explosion. Soviet forces rush into the chaos and kidnap the top Allies scientist, Lucas Martino. He’s been seriously injured but they patch him up with evidently superior reconstructive technology, even as the Allies press for his return. Several months later the Soviets finally return him. His left arm and much of his head have been replaced in the fixups. The problem becomes confirming that he is actually Lucas Martino and not some Soviet replacement agent there to gather intel. The story is thus playing with ideas about the veracity of identity (as indicated in the title, to be fair). Everything the Soviets might have needed to know could have been pumped out of Martino. They had the time. The novel and its Lithuanian-American author refreshingly understand that torture works. The metal head obscures Martino’s most identifying feature, his face. Everything else, including fingerprints and maybe dental work (unmentioned), can evidently be fudged. DNA ID was of course unknown in 1958. I appreciated the brevity of this one, maybe 150 pages, because some characters were interesting but the big ideas about identity kind of fizzled and the ending was not very satisfying. But Martino, or his facsimile, was an interesting person, an outcast just from his Tin Man appearance. His long detention upon his return and the constant surveillance that followed make him sympathetic. The Cold War is deeply baked into all of it, a pervading reality imagined into the near future of the 1960s and beyond as never-ending. Which is much how it felt, even up to the time when it finally did end. This novel relies to a great extent on military spycraft, which makes it kind of ho-hum for me. But again, it’s over quickly and mostly enjoyable most of the way.

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

So Tough (1993)

Saint Etienne’s second album is something of a disappointment after the impressive Foxbase Alpha debut. Insert the hoary rock critic term “sophomore slump.” The elements are largely the same, but the emphasis has shifted away from more pure pop aesthetics and toward maddeningly vaporous experimental realms with sound collages, witty skits and audio clips from movies and TV ads, and hushed little semi-grooves under influence of ambient house figures of the moment such as the Orb. Saint Etienne is perfectly capable of the popsmithery I love them most for, later albums like Good Humor prove that out, and for that matter there’s a couple of winners at the very end of So Tough, “Who Do You Think You Are” and “Join Our Club.” For those studying versions of things as a hobby, those songs were released separately as singles and apparently included only in some (not all) US versions. It’s all actually quite complicated and I don’t have the heart to go into it for something that misfires more than not in my version. Those last two songs save the album for me, to the extent it is saved and to the degree you consider them part of the album, but set that aside. “Mario’s Café” starts things well, then “Railway Jam” follows with a certain template for much of the album: a witty audio clip, a droning train-on-the-tracks sound collage that goes more than a minute, and finally wisps of a song that sounds like it could be pretty cool. “Calico” and “Avenue” (5:12 and 7:34, respectively) similarly start out strong but ultimately go dithering off into ... stuff. I find it’s actually hard to specifically focus on this album as it plays, which might give it some utility as background music for dinner parties and such. The witty skits and audio clips are sure to be sources of conversation. Mix and match them with the sources listed at Wikipedia: “Peeping Tom, Billy Liar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord of the Flies, and That'll Be the Day, as well as the television series The Family and the 1958 stereo demonstration album A Journey into Stereophonic Sound.” When I think of myself and witty skits and audio clips I think of Lou Grant from Mary Tyler Moore and spunk. I hate witty skits and audio clips. YMMV

La Notte (1961)

Italy / France, 122 minutes

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra

Photography: Gianni Di Venanzo

Music: Giorgio Gaslini

Editor: Eraldo Da Roma

Cast: Marcello Mastrolanni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Bernhard Wicki, Maria Pia Luzi, Gitt Magrini, Vincenzo Corbella, Rosy Mazzacurati, Umberto Eco

“Sometimes beauty can really be depressing” is a random line of dialogue earkt in La Notte, where, in fact, all the lines of dialogue can be taken as random. It could well represent the theme not only for this picture but for the larger “Trilogy of Incommunicability” of which it is the second part. Director and cowriter Michelangelo Antonioni’s project started with the much-decorated L’Avventura (1960), continued with La Notte, and finished on L’Eclisse (1962). As usually happens with three-packs like this, the second one tends to get shorted in terms of credit. For example, La Notte is presently ranked at #196 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? whereas L’Eclisse sits at #130 and L’Avventura is in the top 40 at #38.

I would call La Notte my favorite of the bunch, but I suspect it’s only because my long-term quarrels with the other two have been resolved by time and learning how to look at Antonioni movies. Just look. Don’t try to connect. Connections come unbidden. You see how thoroughly composed within the frames his shots are, the placement of objects, heads, and bodies, using techniques as needed such as deep focus for contrast and startling images. The narrative is in a dated style, out of self-conscious midcentury existential texts. It takes place in Milan, a bustling city with ongoing construction and traffic jams. The main couple here—the novelist Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni) and his elaborately “alienated,” sometimes almost zombie-like wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau)—wander this urban landscape aimlessly. Eventually we learn that, while Giovanni is a respected novelist with a new one just out, it is Lidia who has all the money and whatever control it might give her. They seem perfectly happy to spend their time going from place to place, seeing people, mingling, posing. Well, maybe not perfectly happy.

“The Woman in the Painting” (1993)

I liked a lot of things about this story by Lisa Goldstein. It’s old-fashioned in a way that is somehow fresh, not only focused on a mysterious witch monster shape-shifter, but told epistolary style, in a nicely done series of letters among three characters. It’s set in the 19th century too—1858 specifically, if it matters, and it might. It’s effective, a little bit hysterical, a little bit scary, and compulsively readable. I note that it’s not easy getting a handle on the shape of horror short fiction in the 1990s. Novels by then had replaced short stories as the essential product of horror literature. In a way this story represents a kind of nostalgia for those short stories, drawing on the traditional structure of correspondence among principals. Goldstein has been a prolific writer in the realm, ranging into fantasy as well as its subset horror. I would classify this particular story as closer to horror, but the genteel 19th-century approach may be more by way of the eclectic nature of what horror had become by 1993. Lots of writers prefer working in the shorter form (and not just horror writers), but publishers and the public at large had made it clear by then they’d rather look at novels. “The Woman in the Painting” feels more natural than contrarian, almost quaint as it takes care of its horror business. The scary parts feel modern, though they are also constrained by the historical context. The horror is in the uncertainty of what the monster is, or even at first whether it’s a monster at all. The uncertainty, the anxiety, is what feels modern. If it were actually 19th-century literature, it might, by contrast, focus rather on the certainty, both that it’s a monster and that it actually exists. So Goldstein pulls off a neat bit of almost uncanny ambivalence here. But it wouldn’t work at all if it weren’t done so engagingly in the first place, which makes me kind of hopeful I will run across more of her stuff. This story is boldly experimental in its retro way, with the epistolary strategy, which is exactly right. It’s a pretty good story all the way around.

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

Harry Nilsson, “You Can’t Do That” (1967)

[listen up!]

With this Nilsson throwaway, more stunt than song proper and often credited as the world’s first mash-up song, it’s not hard to see how he and it used flattery and songwriting chops to win the Beatles over to Nilsson’s side. They were impressed—in the late ‘60s, when they were still together and even touring, they regularly named Nilsson as their favorite US artist. The truth is I’m not even sure how much I like this song, though I suppose you have to give it to him on some level for pulling it off. Formally a slowed-down cover of the Beatles song found on the UK Hard Day’s Night LP (released in the US on The Beatles’ Second Album), this version of “You Can’t Do That” quickly unmoors itself and wanders into lines from some 18 more (per Wikipedia) Beatles songs—“Daytripper,” “Drive My Car,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” “I’m Down,” “Paperback Writer,” “Yesterday,” etc. They’re all there, one or two lines at a time. The original is a John Lennon song in his tough-guy misogynist vein, the best example of which is the lamentable “Run for Your Life” on Rubber Soul. Nilsson’s exercise is the kind of brainy turn that seemed to fit best with Lennon’s sensibilities, though all the Beatles swore by Nilsson too. But Lennon was the one who caroused with Nilsson most, on his 18-month lost weekend in Los Angeles. I’m filing this under novelty. Most Beatles songs have their appeals for me, but this workup is so caught up in its own concept that it’s hard to enjoy for the musical pleasures found in the 18 or whatever Beatles songs it quotes.

Wick Is Pain (2025)

The John Wick franchise has been a boon for the careers of Keanu Reeves and director Chad Stahelski as well as a boon for the action movie genre itself. It’s one of the best. Fortunately for us they have also been documenting their story as they go—“they” meaning Jeffrey Doe, director of this documentary, and whoever was shooting interviews and asking questions along the way. Wick Is Pain is on the long side for a documentary, running over two hours, and more than half of it focuses on behind-the-scenes drama getting the first movie made. It’s a familiar pile of anecdotes about options, properties, getting funding, losing funding, drilling screenplays throughs rounds of revisions (“notes,” they say). Honestly, I don’t know how anyone survives these agonies, which can go on for years. It’s great fun to learn how the Wick principals met and how deeply steeped Stahelski and co-director David Leitch are in martial arts choreography and the culture surrounding it (after the first John Wick they parted ways and Leitch went on to direct Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, and others). It’s even more fun to relive the chutzpah of breaking one of Hollywood’s strictest rules: never kill the dog (which gave rise to one of my favorite quotes imputed to Wick: “Be kind to animals or I’ll kill you”) (although apparently the actual original source is Morrissey). I learned—no doubt Wick fans already knew—that Wick’s style of action is sometimes called “gun fu.” Reeves is universally beloved in the kind of way that Betty White was and he cuts an interesting figure here, a kind of enthusiastic stoner who is wholly committed to his art. It sometimes feels like he is saying John Wick saved his life. The title comes from the reality of making the movies. As with professional wrestling, it’s all mostly scripted and choreographed playacting, but that doesn’t mean the people involved don’t get hurt doing it. We’re told Reeves does 90% of Wick’s stunt work and you can see, say in the hall of mirrors sequence in Chapter 2, that he’s being brutalized, thrown around and into things. I know there are safety guardrails for stunts on the set, but there’s only so much that can be done to minimize the danger of getting the shots and scenes they get. And besides, Reeves is obviously stoked by it. Wick Is Pain is an essential addendum to the franchise.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1987)

I first read this Lester Bangs collection edited by Greil Marcus when it was published. At the time I was much closer in age to the Bangs who wrote these pieces and more sympathetic to the wild man style of rock criticism. The collection is framed by a great prank: two letters purporting to be from Bangs writing from heaven which open and close the book. One was sent to Dave Marsh and the other to Wayne Newton, to be forwarded to Marsh. They sound like Bangs, who is trying to figure out what MTV is. He says God doesn’t think he should know. Then, after Marcus’s gentle introduction to the work of his friend, the first piece bears the title of the collection, a piece Bangs worked on for years. It’s all over the place, as Bangs often was, devolving into a faux history of the Count Five, who scored a #5 hit in 1966 with “Psychotic Reaction.” They did not actually release most of the albums Bangs describes and ascribes to them. He made them up, but they do chart the early history of rock music (post-rock ‘n’ roll) in an interesting way. There are more flights like that here, but also a fair amount of workaday rock journalism. His taste is too slippery, eccentric, and/or perverse to put much stock in. Sad to say, some parts have aged badly. There are way too many N-words for me to be comfortable with now, and he’s not much better on women. But all that is forgivable—most of us thought racism was dying out then and fair game to mock openly (see also Randy Newman in the ‘60s and ‘70s). Coming back to Carburetor Dung wasn’t quite the thrill I was hoping for. Still, despite the occasional cringing and slogging, Bangs remains close enough to a force of nature to be reckoned with. This collection includes the titanic mid-‘70s face-off with Lou Reed, along with scads of record reviews, think pieces, feature articles, and extremely oddball fanzine or previously unpublished write-ups. He reminded me more of Hunter Thompson than he has before. He might have even put the thought in my head himself, from an early reference where he compares himself favorably to Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and Thompson. That might be a window into where Bangs saw himself in the literary scene at large. This collection remains a must for anyone foolishly considering the pursuit of a career in rock criticism. It’s one of the landmarks.

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

The River (1951)

France / USA / India, 99 minutes

Director: Jean Renoir

Writers: Rumer Godden, Jean Renoir

Photography: Claude Renoir

Music: M.A. Partha Sarathy

Editor: George Gale

Cast: Nora Swinburne, Esmond Knight, Thomas E. Breen, Patricia Walters, Arthur Shields, Adrienne Corri, Suprova Mukerjee, Radha

Director and cowriter Jean Renoir’s first color movie is something of a departure from his acclaimed pictures of the ‘30s, Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, which in many ways set terms for European cinema to come. The River not only flashes with vivid technicolor but is set and was wholly shot in India. Heck, Satyajit Ray is even on the crew as an assistant director, speaking of the greater connections of cinema. The narrative style is familiar to Renoir, an easy-flowing stream of incidents, anecdotes, and storylines in the lives of British colonialists with their families. The main family has a patriarch (“Father,” Esmond Knight), a matriarch (“Mother,” the regally maternal Nora Swinburne), a boy, and four girls, plus Indian servants. The oldest girls, Valerie (Adrienne Corri) and especially Harriet (Patricia Walters), are as close as we get to main characters. It’s told from the point of view of Harriet as an adult, reminiscing, and it’s fair to call the overall picture a coming-of-age tale for both girls.

In my latter-day state of woke I was immediately uncomfortable with the spectacle of British patricians in India, however well meaning (debatable), with their Indian servants and attempts to understand Indian culture, especially via the point of view of white adolescent girls. Father, for example, operates a jute mill (“exploiting resources”—it’s hard not to see it glaringly that way). But Martin Scorsese, in an interview on the Criterion Channel, scoffed at the idea of looking at this movie through a colonial frame. It’s a movie that means a good deal to him personally, and as usual in his interviews he argues eloquently, even emotionally, for the picture. OK, maybe, I’m with him on Renoir, truly, but I could never entirely shake my misgivings even as, of course, The River stands up to all of Renoir’s films.

Sagittarius, “Hotel Indiscreet” (1967)

[listen up!]

Sagittarius coproducers and co-honchos Curt Boettcher and Gary Usher are primarily responsible for the Present Tense album that gives “Hotel Indiscreet” a home. The song was also released as a single that went nowhere. Boettcher and Usher are known for sunshine pop verging on a fork in the road: psychedelics in one direction and bubblegum in the other. They worked with the Association, the Millennium, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Tommy Roe, and many others. Sagittarius was their project—they got the recording deal on the strength of a band they had not yet put together, just the two of them at first. They wrote most of the songs but not this one, which is credited to future Bread-man Jimmy Griffin and his songwriting partner Michael Z. Gordon. It might be the best thing on the album, shimmering with bright harmonies, fizzy pop flourishes, soaring heights they seem able to hit at will. It’s easy to hear the Association connections, and the song can also sound like music for a montage in a movie made for TV. Yet it bears an undeniable pop swagger and beauty at the same time. It blows up into rounds of delicious ringing chants and fleet-foot runs up and down the scales. It grows mighty, something to behold, all hooks and cotton-candy sweetness. Most of it’s done with vocals but little extras like a muted cornet keep the mix frothy and delightful. The original single, a b-side, included a spoken-word skit by members of Firesign Theater, which I admit I prefer excised. Yes, it’s silly pop music, but with this level of purity it’s also utterly thrilling. At least it should have been a hit for sure, but maybe the implied adultery in the lyrics did that in.

The Death of the Heart (1938)

I’m really not sure what to make of this novel by Elizabeth Bowen. Her novel-of-manners approach fits and puts her in line with other writers such as Edith Wharton or Muriel Spark—just a little acerbic and cynical, with a fine finicky approach to sentences and word choice, along with a commitment to ambiguity and allusion. The story involves 16-year-old Portia Quayne, who moves to London to live with her half-brother Thomas after her mother dies—not Thomas’s, it is the father who they have in common. It’s a fractured family—17 years separate Thomas and Portia in age and Thomas never thought much of Portia’s mother after their father took up with her as a widower, after the death of Thomas’s mother. Thomas is married to Anna, a shallow socialite who controls everyone around her as much as she can. As the novel opens Anna is telling her unusual friend St. Quentin, a novelist who seems to be gay, how upset she is at what she found in Portia’s diary. Reading other people’s diaries this way tells us most of what we need to know about Anna. An example of Bowen’s somewhat exasperating ambiguity is that we never learn what Anna read in the diary. We can imagine, of course, but I think that gives us too much latitude. Because Portia is still too young to know herself yet, it’s hard to think what she might put in her diary. Portia is obviously a romantic victim waiting to happen, and soon enough there’s a man trying to take advantage of her, or something. Eddie is 23, works in Thomas’s marketing firm, and is a friend of Anna’s. We learn he has made a pass at Anna, and later this is some suggestion (more ambiguity) that they are having an affair. I enjoyed this novel all the way—again, Bowen is a very good writer—but I’m not entirely sure where it went. There are some great characters here, notably a clan at the seaside where Portia is sent to live with Anna’s former governess while Thomas and Anna vacation in Europe. Not taking Portia with them is another telling detail in a tale full of them. Bowen also had a reputation, like Edith Wharton, for writing ghost stories. Pursuing more of them is likely my next step with Bowen. I’ve already read one, though it didn’t make much impression. But I’m more curious about her now. As Bowens go in that realm, Marjorie is still the one to beat.

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

Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)

Memorias del subdesarrollo, Cuba, 97 minutes

Director: Tomas Gutierrez Alea

Writers: Edmundo Desnoes, Tomas Gutierrez Alea

Photography: Ramon F. Suarez

Music: Leo Brouwer

Editor: Nelson Rodriguez

Cast: Sergio Corrieri, Daisy Granados, Eslinda Nunez, Omar Valdes, Rene de la Cruz, Yolanda Farr, Jack Gelber, Ofelia Gonzalez

Memories of Underdevelopment came out in the globally tumultuous year of 1968, chipping in reports from Cuba less than 10 years after the Revolution. Indeed, the novel by Edmundo Desnoes that it is based on was published only in 1965. It bears a curious and interesting point of view in its main character, Sergio Carmona Mendoyo (Sergio Corrieri), a merchant capitalist who ran a “posh” furniture store he inherited from his father which has been destroyed or taken away by the new regime. Sergio is also owner of rental properties and retains an income stream there. The picture is set in 1961 and 1962. The first scenes show Sergio packing his mother and the rest of his family off to the US. He appears to be dubious about long-term prospects for the Revolution. He is staying and may join his family later. The picture is semi-documentary in style, with archival footage, and follows the suddenly aimless Sergio around, dealing with his girlfriend problems (he is divorced) even as he ponders, in voiceover, the finer points of “underdevelopment.”

His first and most problematic girlfriend is an evident example. “I try to live like a European,” he says. “[Elena] makes me feel underdevelopment with every step.” They are in a bookstore where he is purchasing a copy of Lolita. Elena (Daisy Granados) is scheming to force him into marriage, premised on their having sex, or, as they often say around here, “ruining” her. For his part, Sergio denies deceiving her and doesn’t think she was really a virgin, which of course does not help his situation. Eventually she enlists her brutal brother and parents into making a legal case of it. This situation is appallingly beneath a genteel man who would prefer to spend afternoons at the modern art museum. His allegiance to European culture is as bone-deep as Elena’s family’s is to old-world ways of blood honor and such, next stop clitorectomies. They could be closer to that than we would like to think or maybe Sergio and I are paranoid. It’s a real case of underdevelopment.

“The Affliction” (1995)

One thing you can say for sure about Joyce Carol Oates is that she’s both fearless and unrelenting about being gross when she wants to be. This includes posting pictures to social media, but here I am specifically talking about a story like this. The affliction of the title is a strange rash that also afflicts the young victim’s great-uncle. The doctors don’t know what it is or what to do about it, but the uncle does—it’s a matter of digging out biological “things” embedded under the skin, as he demonstrates. The highlights of the story are the descriptions of the “things”: “cobwebby strands of bloody mucus-matter, wormlike coils of puss, partly coagulated blood-clots.” Or, “The child had to be held as, with a deft hand, the uncle extracted the things, some of them no larger than a kernel of corn, some as large as a dime, throbbing with heat and of an odor of rankness, like an overripe peach. The operation took about forty minutes. The child screamed in pain and terror, thrashing in the tub.” Detailed scenes of the affliction feel like where Oates is most into it. They’re scattered all over the story. But then, as if to dignify an indulgence, the things become the source of the main character’s art. Over his lifetime—he’s in his 70s in the present time of the story—he becomes a great and renowned artist on the celebrity level, as I took it, of Picasso or Warhol. Oates is fascinated by art and the making of it, a frequent theme in her work. This story is making its metaphorical point obvious with the show of body horror: art is torn out of the artist, and it hurts. In this story art is organic in an unusually vivid way, the result of a process that doesn’t entirely involve consciousness. But it’s fair to say the story also exists to make us uncomfortable. The artist, in his 70s, is in the twilight of his career, fading. Remarkably, Oates does her horror work as a sideline project in an amazingly prolific career. This story, for any of its arguable flaws, is a prime example of one of the things she does best: shock, and more, shock with a purpose. The take on the agonies of art might be a little easy or overstated, but it’s real enough on its own terms. Art makes great demands of artists.

Joyce Carol Oates, The Collector of Hearts
Story not available online.

Damien Jurado, “A.M. AM” (2016)

[listen up!]

I can tell, when I pay a little more attention to the words than the vibe, that this is a fairly straightforward love song. “I was yours all along” x4 in the chorus, etc. But the title mystifies me down to the pronunciation (I’m going with “ay em am”), as does the song’s instant potent sway on me. I’ve had periods where I felt compelled to play it a lot most days. I’m not that much of one for pulling songs out of movies and TV shows—if the music is going to have oversize impact on me usually I know it beforehand—but I heard this first in the 2018 Netflix documentary miniseries Wild Wild Country, which is about the Rajneeshee cult that caused various bizarre political problems in Oregon circa 1981. The song plays at the high-point ending of one episode, when it seemed for a few flashing moments that things could work out in Oregon. I was transfixed, transported. I sat and listened to it, stunned, with the Rajneeshee events sinking in. It feels like music that could come from the time, with touches of new wave and synth-pop and a plodding tempo that serves up the overarching Simple Minds melancholy. Yet it feels deeply, profoundly joyful too, sacred even, full of life, in and of it. Jurado is a prolific Seattle native, born in 1972. His homely vocal bears all the contradictions that make the song work for me: sadness and bliss all at once, knowingness and the burden of it. I’ve checked in with more of his stuff, notably the album that is home to this song, Visions of Us on the Land, but haven’t yet found anything that hits like “A.M. AM.” Thanks to the producers of Wild Wild Country, a great show! Don’t miss it if you can!

The Naked Gun (2025)

Happy to note that the fourth installment in the Naked Gun franchise, 31 years in the making, carries on in the fine old Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker tradition, at least judging by how much I laughed sitting alone in my apartment. It’s a fast-paced barrage of dad jokes, bad puns, sight gags, slapstick, and outrageous dirty jokes. Random action such as fistfights between principals is often going on in the background. Mug shots are taken by fashion photographers. Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) is always running over things when he drives. There’s even an OJ Simpson gag. If one bit doesn’t get you, there’s another one coming in about 20 seconds. Eventually, you just have to give in to this intense desire to amuse. I love how they mix up the styles and strategies, such as redundancy. Whenever Drebin Jr. shows up at a crime scene or the Police Squad headquarters, some underling is sure to hand him a latte cup of coffee. It just seems like another cop show cliché the first time but then it keeps happening, with slight variations. While he is driving, for example—a hand with a cup of coffee reaches into the window. Drebin Jr. is the son of Frank Drebin Sr. from the original franchise (Leslie Nielsen). Besides sharing initials, Neeson and Nielsen traveled similar screenway paths to fame, from romantic leads to roles as hard-bitten heavies into these surprising turns toward comedy—based in part on their previous sober personas (Z-A-Z did the same for Peter Graves, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges, of course). Neeson does not quite have Nielsen’s deadpan genius, but he’s good enough here I’m willing to give him time to get it (meaning, yes, I hope there are further installments ... the Z-A-Z attack somehow remains reliably fresh). Neeson is good, and so is a game Pamela Anderson as Beth Davenport, Drebin Jr.’s love interest at the center of the murder story. Her brother has been killed using a Primordial Law of Toughness (PLOT) device, which turns rational human beings into savages under influence of their worst impulses. This short movie has a long, long credits reel with extras, including a tender and hilarious love song that Drebin Jr. sings (poorly) to Beth. I recommend sticking around for it.

“The Words That Count” (1976)

This Ramsey Campbell story is purely a gimmick story, but as it happens it’s a gimmick I’m a little susceptible to. It reminded me of a detail I liked in a story by Margaret Irvin, “The Book,” where a possessed man’s prayers come out backward, in reverse word order. In this story, as explicitly spelled out in the last paragraph, the first word in every paragraph is the Lord’s Prayer in reverse word order. So the first word of the story is, of course, “Amen.” The conceit entirely eluded me in a story that wasn’t entirely making sense anyway, so making that explicit at the end is important. It brings home a certain aspect of the story to explain it, but formally it also weakens the story. A lot of things are definitely awkward here, perhaps most notably the first three paragraphs, which read like throat-clearing. The story features a pamphlet, as it’s called, with recognizable words from the Lord’s Prayer (e.g., “trespassers”) and a bizarre fundamentalist patriarch. Mostly it’s muddled, but also desperate and unpleasant, as the pamphlet appears to hypnotize the first-person narrator, daughter of the patriarch. The story may also be another example of a sad case where people had no idea how bad conservative Christianity was going to get. It’s unsettling because it’s unpleasant and confusing, and it gets a nice charge of the uncanny (at least for me) with the revelation of the gimmick. Unfortunately, that does not come until the end of the story, which until then veers between a trite treatment of conservative Christianity and impenetrability. Under other circumstances I might have abandoned it as early as the first paragraphs, which are terrible, and it doesn’t get much better from there. But as I say I’m susceptible to the trick of prayers in reverse word order as a symptom of demon possession. The Margaret Irvin story is much better. Interestingly, the story Campbell compares it to is W.F. Harvey’s “August Heat.” I don’t read that story the same way Campbell does, but I think another story by Harvey, “The Beast With Five Fingers,” has similar effects, featuring a man’s left hand writing with pen and paper unbeknownst to the owner of that hand. Things like that are practically impossible to do, which is where the kick of the uncanny comes in for me. You probably know the Lord’s Prayer. Try saying it backward—“amen, evil, from,” etc. It’s harder than you might think. I don’t like to imagine that religion is part of the effect here, but I suppose it could be.

Masters of Darkness, ed. Dennis Etchison
Story not available online.

Thirteen (1993)

For a long time I knew Teenage Fanclub for Bandwagonesque and that was it. I didn’t even know they had a first album until last year and I didn’t know anything about Thirteen either or the rest of the catalog. Bandwagonesque was a handful for me—one of the best albums of that year, 1991, I was drawn to playing it repeatedly, because it’s good, but at the same time I was embarrassed for the abject aping of Big Star and Alex Chilton (a bit too close for me to the Replacements piling on the pyre of the Big Star legend circa 1987). I didn’t know how many agreed with me in 1993, for example slagging the album’s title as more of same (for the Big Star song “Thirteen”). But if the problem with Bandwagonesque has somehow worn off for me it never existed with Thirteen (which has 13 songs). I only arrived at it last year. Oh, I admit it took sitting with it a few times for the high points to assemble and register. But they are there. File under the slippery label “power pop,” with Teenage Fanclub and Thirteen further landing in the shambolics wing. Even as it comes rumbling in like bad weather with the exquisite five-minute opener, “Hang On,” when the singing starts it’s all homely heart, lovely melody, glowing harmonies, a flute, a lulling orchestra. It’s like that all the way. One of the secrets here is three songwriters, in singer guitarist Norman Blake, singer bassist Gerard Love, and singer other guitarist Raymond McGinley (plus drummer Brendan O’Hare contributes the 1:22 gem “Get Funky,” which comes complete with irresistible handclaps). I can’t say I’ve picked out anything distinct about any one of them. I’m more impressed with how the songwriting blends, like the singing, into something with its own distinct identity. I will say it’s Love who wrote the opener “Hang On” and the closer “Gene Clark,” which strike me as notably apt in their sequencing positions (although the latter has a somewhat annoying two minutes of silence at the end of the song. What’s up with that, streaming service?!). “Gene Clark” bears a worthy name-check by reputation, although I don’t know Clark well enough myself to know how well the song works as tribute. It’s nominally hard rock with an epic electric guitar solo leading the way into a fine round of righteous head-bobbing. Turn it up. Light that Bic. Get with the Teenage Fanclub.

Millennium Mambo (2001)

Qian xi man bo, Taiwan / France, 106 minutes

Director: Hsiao-Hsien Hou

Writer: T'ien-wen Chu

Photography: Ping Bin Lee

Music: Yoshihiro Hanno, Kai-yu Huang, Giong Lim

Editors: Ju-kuan Hsiao, Ching-Sung Liao

Cast: Shu Qi, Chun-hao Tuan, Jack Kao, Jun Takeuchi, Ko Takeuchi, Doze Niu, Pauline Chan, Rio Peng

This confusing but beautiful and often striking picture is the first I’ve seen by Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien Hou. My points to follow may thus (actually, as always) say more about me than the movie or any of its principals. It was released in 2001, and it is set in 2001 (perhaps to avoid arguments about which millennium the year 2000 belongs to), but the premise is that the events are memories of the main character, Vicky (Shu Qi), 10 years later, in 2011. It dwells in the Taipei rave scene, rife with drugs and lowlifes, crime, bad relationships. Vicky and her boyfriend, the overbearingly abusive Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan), live together in a dump. They do drugs and try to get by. She works as a hostess in a popular night spot. They circle one another warily. They are never at ease together.

In a way it did not surprise me to learn that Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai were first offered the roles. Millennium Mambo reminded me a lot of the pictures of Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express) and even more of Hou’s countrymen Edward Yang (Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day) and Tsai Ming-liang (What Time Is It There?). The camera is liquid, often in motion, images may be out of focus, amounting only to blotches of color, though often vivid and always expressive. The pace is slow, studied, deliberate. Hao-Hao is some kind of DJ, and EDM is a pulsing constant, even in the background as if from the next apartment. In Millennium Mambo—in many of these pictures—the style is in direct opposition to the terms of the narrative, which is explicitly, even wantonly, focused on squalor. As cognitive dissonance it is exquisite.