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.

“His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood” (1990)

My first story by Poppy Z. Brite (aka William Joseph Martin) is a pretty good one, all things considered. It was published when he was only 23 but seems to be hardly his first—I’m seeing some 1987 publication dates, when he was 20. On ISFDB this story is classified as belonging to the “Cthulhu Mythos” series, which obviously has many H.P. Lovecraft stories as well as various by others. I did not get a Cthulhu hit off this story, but some of it reminded me of Lovecraft, macabre details like the grave-robbing, a main feature. Brite’s sense of sexuality is miles beyond the timid Lovecraft. Weird editors Ann & Jeff VanderMeer compare Brite to “Decadent-era French and English writers [more] than the contemporary horror scene.” That seems like a reasonable point—are we talking about Baudelaire, Rimbaud, de Quincey? The open perversions here are almost refreshing. Brite is a trans man and takes masculine pronouns, but he may be more nonbinary. I’m not sure. Sexuality is all over this but it’s also indeterminate. The first-person narrator is a man and so is his partner. They start out having sex with others, sometimes together, and end up having sex with one another. They drink absinthe they stole from a grave, which is partly responsible for inspiring them to rob more graves. Finally, apparently, they steal from the wrong grave, as one night a strange apparition of a beautiful boy appears at a nightclub. I love, by the way, how Brite integrates clubbing into the mise en scene of this story. And I like how it’s just out there in terms of “divine decadence” (my term by way of the movie Cabaret). It all comports with my sense of Brite—I’ve been meaning to look into him since the ‘90s—except it’s much better and more natural than I expected. It always sounded a little like a put-on and possibly it is. I still don’t know that much about him. I believe he has moved on from horror since the ‘90s, but I don’t know. This story, which is quite fine in its own right, even if I’m missing the specific Cthulhu elements, definitely makes me think he’s worth looking into further.

Poppy Z. Brite, Wormwood
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Story not available online.

Lou Christie, “Lightnin’ Strikes” (1965)

[listen up!]

What have we here? Confessions of a kissing bandit, episodes in the career of a serial killer, or just plain old date rape? As values changed in the 1960s with the Sexual Revolution, Pittsburgh native Lou Christie (with his long-time songwriting partner Twyla Herbert) decided his best bet leaned toward sexual frenzy, orgasmic release, and his keening falsetto. He duly obtained the rewards. “Lightnin’ Strikes” went to #1 early in 1966 and the similarly minded follow-up, “Rhapsody in the Rain,” hit the top 20 later that year. It’s arguable that these songs haven’t aged well—“Nature’s taking over my one-track mind,” Christie explains himself—but it is equally arguable that they are irresistible. I danced to them madly in my bedroom as an 11-year-old, not really understanding the connotations (having looked at Mad Men recently, I’m not sure how many did in 1966). The hook, a rising crescendo of intensity, features a trio of chick singers crying “Stop!” to his “I can’t stop!” The scene is kicked off in various fashion: “When I see lipstick to be kissed,” “If she’s put together fine and she’s readin’ my mind,” “If she gives me a sign that she wants to make time.” Followed by “Stop! I can’t stop! Stop! Stop!” This three-minute little symphony for the kiddies (apologies to Phil Spector) then spirals off to its insular thrilling self-justifying fugue state in the chorus, with the chick singers and horns at full throttle and a twangy guitar solo too: “Lightning is striking, again and again and again,” etc. There you go. Blame it on the weather. This also applies to “Rhapsody in the Rain.” Not all radio stations were on board with Lou Christie and his swingin’ kinks, but enough to make them big hits. Because of the somewhat rancid lyrical points, we almost certainly have to classify Lou Christie songs now as guilty pleasure. Not that he would likely care much. The pleasure was purely the point with him, guilty or otherwise.

The Hill of Dreams (1907)

I’m probably way out of line to compare Arthur Machen’s short, semiautobiographical novel to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both come from outer precincts of Britain. Machen was about 20 years older. I have no idea where Joyce was on genre writing. Certainly his Portrait is more naturalistic than Machen’s Hill of Dreams. Machen is trying to ground the events he recounts here even though, as a mystic, he can’t seem to help some indulgence of the weird. His young man / artist, Lucian Taylor, is in his early to mid-20s here, raised in rural Wales and eventually moving to London as he begins more seriously to write. In Wales, he is always distracted by the deep woods and by the Roman architecture. He’s drawn to an old Roman fort, in a clearing in the woods, and something happens there. Machen supplies few specific details. It involves Lucian taking off all his clothes and falling into a deep sleep with strange dreams. I have an idea what happened here—masturbation, possibly for the first time. That’s likely more crude and bound to this plane than Machen intends, but there is plainly something sexual about it. Machen wrote this in the 1890s but it was not published until 1907. Surely the rules of the time regarding sexual propriety applied—in short, don’t ever talk about it. So Machen may have felt he had to be coy. Full disclosure, I’m not sure what happens in much of this novel, although it is usually interesting to see Lucian grow and change. In Wales, he writes a first novel. When he submits it for publication it is stolen by another author and published as by him. Incredibly, Lucian doesn’t seem to mind that much. He’s already at work on another. He moves to London to work on it. The woods and nature of his homeland worried and discomposed him but he misses them keenly in the big city. The Hill of Dreams, according to Wikipedia, is “Generally considered Machen’s masterpiece.” That’s news to me—I hear a lot more about “The Great God Pan” (or “The White People,” which is actually his masterpiece). I would not suggest starting on Machen with The Hill of Dreams. But it’s one to get to sooner rather than later if you’re into him.

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

Set the Twilight Reeling (1996)

Lou Reed’s 17th studio album was standard-issue for him at that point in his career—overarching fealty to the rock band 2 guitars bass drums array of sound, with generous bolts of feedback and other rude noise, Fernando Saunders on bass, homely vocals, and densely varying tones of lyrics. New York City references abound. The album opens on “Egg Cream” (“a cold beverage consisting of milk, carbonated water, and flavored syrup [typically chocolate or vanilla] ... [it] originated among Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York City”) and follows with “NYC Man,” rife with twists on cliches, e.g., “I'm a New York City man, blink your eyes and I'll be gone.” “Hookywooky” is just for the infectious fun. The live “Sex With Your Parents (Motherfucker) Part II” (whither Part I?!) has him riffing on the outrage of Republican Party hypocrisy. Pretty good for 1996. He’s cracking jokes but he’s mad too. “Riptide” clocks in at 7:47 replete with howling feedback. For me the centerpiece and center of gravity to this album is the song “Trade In,” where Reed’s much vaunted emotional honesty might be shading over into cruelty. The singer is formally addressing someone he used to be. Namely, at least the way I hear it, the singer in “Heavenly Arms,” which credits Reed’s second wife, Sylvia Morales, with his most heartfelt redemption, calling her by name in an agonizingly beautiful passage. That was 1980. In 1994 they divorced, and Reed by then was already involved with Laurie Anderson. In “Trade In,” he refers to Anderson as “a woman with a thousand faces / And I want to make her my wife.” They married in 2008. I don’t take the song as deliberately malicious, though it veers close. The song has many powerful points, notably when the guitar comes in full, but I think what makes it work to the extent it does is that the singer seems as confused about his romantic reversals as anyone. Maybe he’s trying to atone for “Heavenly Arms,” whose own powerful moment is a little reduced by the failure of the marriage. The singer in “Trade In” is rueful and self-deprecating, saying he wants a “fourteenth chance at this life,” suggesting awareness of many previous mistakes. What feel like attacks on his former lover, and spouse—Reed does characterize the target in this song as a former self, so maybe that’s actually what the song is about ... I’m just spitballing here—are more often result of his own self-lacerations: “A child that is raised by an idiot and that idiot then becomes you / How could I believe in a movie? How could I believe in a book?” Nevertheless, he is stubbornly sticking to his guns. He wants a trade in. Amazing song on a pretty good album.

Belle de Jour (1967)

France / Italy, 100 minutes

Director: Luis Buñuel

Writers: Joseph Kessel, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carriere

Photography: Sacha Vierny

Editor: Louisette Hautecoeur

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Genevieve Page, Pierre Clementi, Iska Khan, Francoise Fabian, Maria Latour, Francisco Rabal, Marcel Charvey

Belle de Jour was sold in 1967 as director and cowriter Luis Buñuel’s “Masterpiece of Erotica.” Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, a young middle-class housewife who seems to be messed up about sex, likely the work once again, per Buñuel, of the Catholic Church. Severine’s sexual interests may or may not lie in taboo directions, BDSM, and degradation, but she has apparently decided her best bet is to present to the world as “frigid”—beautiful, and unattainable. Sha and her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel) sleep in separate beds and she repulses all his advances with sighs and sorrow, which he seems to accept with equanimity. He’s a certain model of ideal husband.

Severine finds an outlet for herself, drawn to it almost by forces beyond her will, as a high-end, “classy” prostitute. She works only in the afternoon, hence her prostitute name, Belle de Jour, literally “beauty of the day.” Presumably this is so she can be home in time to prepare her husband’s dinner. This particular operation takes place off the street, in apartments owned by the house madame Anais (Genevieve Page). No menacing pimps seem to be involved and it feels relatively safe. At first Severine resists the actual work—the undressing, showing her body, physical intimacy. Anais is gentle but firm with her, starting her with the more unobjectionable johns. The sex work seems to be what Severine wants or needs and soon she is a regular with two others, Charlotte (Francoise Fabian) and Mathilde (Maria Latour). We see a few scenes of the fetishes their johns are there to see served. It’s Buñuel and not surprisingly they are bizarre and often surreal, with BDSM themes. There’s even a flashback scene of Severine refusing communion. Ah, Buñuel and the Catholic Church! The eternal romance of opposites attracting.

Rebekah Del Rio, “No Stars” (2011)

[listen up! (7:20)]

I first heard this song (or first really heard it, that is, you know, as if for the very first time) on a bedtime playlist, or what was intended to be a bedtime playlist. My then-new streaming service helpfully kept adding songs to the mix so it played all night (later I figured out how to prevent that because I can’t sleep this way every night). I woke at 3 or 4 with this song playing, Rebekah Del Rio’s clarion, mellow, quasi-operatic vocal piercing the night and my sleep, with an aural vision of a lonesome universe and no stars in the sky. No stars, no stars. Never mind I live somewhere with cloud cover replicating that most nights. Del Rio’s vocal feels every ounce of that loneliness unto desolation in a universe with no light anymore, all winked out, especially when you wake up and don’t know what’s going on. She wrote this song with David Lynch and John Neff in 2001 and recorded it for her 2011 album Love Hurts Love Heals. It was used in the third season of Twin Peaks in 2017. Much like Del Rio’s appearance in Mulholland Dr. the sense of tragedy is at once affecting and slightly ridiculous. It is almost too deep, like a well that takes too long for the stone to hit something. It feels, in “No Stars,” as if the singer has spent a lifetime enduring pain and feeling love. They don’t cancel each other out but rather deepen the experience of both. The pain is palpable, on the long notes especially, which she can hold for a long time, but her love is equally profound, and you know from the grain that it is constant.

Him (2025)

Here’s an odd mashup of sports movie and horror show, carrying on another one of today’s genre-blending exercises that don’t even seem possible. Jordan Peele is an executive producer. The main problem here is that sports movies tend to build toward sentimental heroic upbeat triumphs whereas horror is more like the opposite. Here the sport under examination is pro football, with obvious similarities to the NFL but equally obvious (for legal reasons?) departures from it. The featured team is the San Antonio Saviors—the unlikely nickname captures well the strange vibe of Him. Do any sports teams bear the nicknames of holy figures? I’m drawing a blank. The Los Angeles Angels? New Orleans Saints? San Diego Padres? Not quite the same. We’ve got a veteran quarterback in Him, Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). He’s the GOAT, the greatest of all time. He’s won eight of the picture’s Super Bowl equivalent, as opposed, you can see, to Tom Brady’s seven. Frankly, I’m tired of the whole GOAT discourse, but here we are. The Saviors have drafted a promising rookie QB, Cam Cade (Tyriq Withers). This worries Isaiah, as Brady was worried when the New England Patriots drafted Jimmy Garoppolo (and Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers and Jordan Love, etc.). Isaiah feels threatened and undermined as the starting QB, but shows he’s a good sport about it, in a way, voluntarily taking on mentorship of Cade. But is he really trying to help Cade? Really? It doesn’t seem that way. Things start to drift in strange directions at the remote training compound in the desert, where Isaiah comes on with the snarling drill sergeant style of turning boys into men by taunting and humiliating them. Cade is given transfusions of Isaiah’s blood. Things have been strange even before that, as some rando wearing a goat costume knocks Cade on the head, giving him a serious concussion and endangering his career. Him explores some of the psychedelic implications of concussions and brain injury, which can be visually striking, as in a showdown fight toward the end. But as the title suggests, however—this is not remotely like the movie Her, by the way—the capitalized “Him” is as much a religious reference as anything. Fans are worshippers and the movie goes spinning off to some majestically ridiculous Cthulhu type places in the end. The picture does not work, but it has its overheated moments along with a soundtrack that collects some nice jams. You could do worse.

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863)

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short travel book—“notes” and “impressions” in the title give fair warning that it is closer to a think piece the size of an essay—was written after his first visit to Europe in 1862. He didn’t stay long, perhaps two and a half months in total, a few weeks in Paris, barely more than a week in London. And he came with a certain amount of innate disdain for Europe. Some see this piece as the point where the second half of his career began. The conventional wisdom is that it’s Notes From Underground, which followed the next year. I’m more inclined to go with the latter judgment, if only because this is so much more rambling and unfocused than Notes (and, for that matter, “A Nasty Story” from the year before). Dostoevsky may have been less comfortable with nonfiction, but my hunch is he knew he didn’t have much of a leg to stand on with the actual travels. Instead we get a lot of prejudices, which may or may not be right. He did turn into a raging antisemite as he aged and he never liked Europe much. He was close to a Slavophile, a believer in Russia as such, and even more in the Eastern Orthodox Church. So much faith in one church is really where I depart from him. He gets into some of that here, including some of his boldest statements of (cockamamie) faith. In many ways this is so short because, perhaps, he knew he needed more depth and understanding. He still lets it rip when he wants, notably on the French, but he may understand he’s not very persuasive. He would make a more detailed case against Europe in the novels to come. Here we merely see how early he was committed to Europe being the problem. It’s probably a misnomer to call it a travel book at all as it does few of the things we expect from travel literature. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions probably has to be taken as relatively obscure, and reading it through I think I can see the reason why. File under I read it so you don’t have to. I found a standalone kindle version—note that it’s not included in the Delphi anthology where I read most of his stuff.

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

Chimes at Midnight (1965)

Campanadas a medianoche, Spain / Switzerland, 115 minutes

Director: Orson Welles

Writers: William Shakespeare, Raphael Holinshed, Orson Welles

Photography: Edmond Richard

Music: Angelo Francesco, Lavagnino

Editors: Elena Jaumandreu, Frederick Muller, Peter Parasheles

Cast: Orson Welles, Keith Baxter, John Gielgud, Margaret Rutherford, Jeanne Moreau, Norman Rodway, Alan Webb, Fernando Rey, Michael Aldridge

I was going to say I like director and cowriter Orson Welles as much as the next guy but maybe that’s not so true. I might be more of a dilettante. I love Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil and I like to look at The Magnificent Ambersons to grieve for what might have been (Booth Tarkington’s novel is surprisingly good too). After that it’s certain dazzling shots and moments in some of the others, at least as long as they don’t have very much to do with Shakespeare. My problem there—I’m not proud of it—is I’ve never had a Shakespeare phase, not even in college, and I don’t know his work well, though I generally admire everything I’ve seen or read.

For that matter, Chimes at Midnight is not just a Shakespeare adaptation, it is a reimagining and refocusing of Falstaff, a recurring Shakespeare character, along with his relationship with Prince Hal. Per Wikipedia, the script for Chimes at Midnight includes verbatim text from five of Shakespeare’s plays: Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; Richard II; Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. It is a deep dive into a pool where I don’t how to swim well. And it’s not the first time Welles did something like this. Besides previously making pictures based on Macbeth, Othello, and Twelfth Night, he mounted a stage production on Broadway in 1939, Five Kings, based on nine Shakespeare plays. In many ways Shakespeare was a theatrical medium itself that Welles worked in well, capable of working up pastiche for anyone who would have it.

“Travels With the Snow Queen” (1996)

This story by Kelly Link was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 1999 but ultimately lost to another of her stories, “The Specialist’s Hat.” “Travels With the Snow Queen” is one more example of a fairy tale retelling from the 1990s, a certifiable trend likely tracing back to Angela Carter’s work in the 1970s. But Link’s story is more having a go at what is expected of girls in fairy tales. The tone is jokey and ironic and there is a lot of broad winking about fairy tale tropes in general. It’s also told second-person present-tense, which I would have to count as a strike against it—“you do this,” “you see that,” etc. Seems gimmicky to me. YMMV. “You” is a girl on the move, barefoot and heading north. Perhaps the gist and important points of the story may be gleaned (in a way that I couldn’t) by way of the passages I found highlighted in my kindle edition of the Link collection. I realize I might be taking the easy way out for a story I didn’t entirely connect with, but here are three of those passages. “Where you are, where you are coming from, it is impossible to read a map made of paper. If it were that easy then everyone would be a traveler. You have heard of other travelers whose maps are bread-crumbs, whose maps are stones, whose maps are the four winds, whose maps are yellow bricks laid one after the other. You read your map with your foot, and behind you somewhere there must be another traveler whose map is the bloody footprints that you are leaving behind you” (54 readers highlighted). “You were going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover leaves her. It’s hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is hard on the heart, and you weren’t quite ready to give him up yet” (31 readers highlighted). “You’re sick and tired of traveling towards the happily ever after, whenever the fuck that is—you’d like the happily right now. Thank you very much” (32 readers highlighted). I don’t know the original Snow Queen fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, which no doubt put me at some disadvantage. Honestly I didn’t get much from this story. Someone on ISFDB gave it a 10 so maybe I am the one woefully off the mark here.

Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen
The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Suicide Commandos, “Try Again” (2017)

[listen up!]

The original Twin Cities punk-rockers, the Suicide Commandos ruled the nascent local scene in the second half of the 1970s, an irresistible live act built out of trash rock ‘n’ roll, heirs to the Trashmen, Monkees, New York Dolls, and others. They entered oblivion as the three principals moved and reinvented themselves in various ways. But punk-rock means never having to say you’re old again just because you’re living forever. Approximately 30 years later the trio reassembled to play comeback gigs, pick up the trash on a stretch of highway in Minnetonka, and, eventually, record another album, Time Bomb. They acquitted themselves well there, with all-original songs and an unmistakable dedication to the ideals of rock ‘n’ roll aging grizzled but still effective, with no overreach, like the old friend of a plainly well-used amplifier they put on the cover of the album. The whole thing is worth checking out. “Try Again” may be as good a place as any to enter in—perhaps one of the best. It’s tidy. It can feel almost effortless. And it sets its hooks deep. With only the preamble of a single drum hit by drummer Dave Ahl it locks into a throbbing groove guaranteed to set heads bobbing. You feel it right away. It bears the potential to grow into something much larger and more significant. The doggy yips no one could have expected only signal the freewheeling dedication to fun—complicated fun, the band’s calling card. “Try Again” is a simple exercise in rock, all sustained control, the singer stalking and riding the surging glides with an air of patience and persistence. Declarations of fidelity like this seem likely to last a lifetime, or at least for the three minutes this song goes. Chris Osgood’s squalling electric guitar answers any remaining questions about this song written by Steve Almaas, my old high school mate who died last week. R.I.P.

True Crime Addict (2016)

James Renner’s quasi-meta meditation on true-crime fascination generally, and specifically on the disappearance of Maura Murray in February 2004, is the most un-put-downable book I have read in some time. Renner personalizes his research and investigations, probing himself for the sources of his own interest. It sounds like this is not the first time he has done this. His first book, in 2006, Amy: My Search for Her Killer, is about the abduction and murder of Amy Mihaljevic in 1989 when she was 10. Renner is the same age as Mihaljevic and he was impressed with the case as a 10-year-old and has been ever since. The Maura Murray case is slightly different—a baffling disappearance that remains unsolved. True Crime Addict chronicles Renner’s efforts to solve it. I saw the episode of Disappeared about Murray (from that show’s first season) and was impressed and intrigued by the case. It’s tantalizing and mysterious in all kinds of ways. So among other things Renner’s book rekindled my interest in the case. And then Renner takes an interesting approach to his narrative—total transparency (seemingly). Because there are still so many unknowns to the case, Renner can’t structure it around a resolution. There is still not one, and many questions remain open. Renner works a day job as a college instructor, has extensive editorial experience, has written novels as well as nonfiction, and possesses the whole panoply of podcast(s), a blog, and a youtube channel. We learn of his personal experience with crime and abuse in the story of his predatory grandfather. In many ways Renner is on a righteous mission. He says confronting miscreants is one of his favorite parts of his work, allowing that that is also dangerous. We see a lot of doors slammed in his face and hear about a lot of messages he leaves that never get responses. He keeps the focus on the Murray case and pursues his avenues of information. I don’t know how far I’m going to go with this guy. I’m already checking out his podcast but that may not last long. I’m interested in another of his true-crime books and maybe even one of his novels. I really loved True Crime Addict.

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

Vagabond (1985)

Sans toit ni loi, France / UK, 105 minutes

Director/writer: Agnes Varda

Photography: Patrick Blossier

Music: Joanna Bruzdowicz

Editors: Patricia Mazuy, Agnes Varda

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Meril, Stephane Freiss, Laurence Cortadellas, Marthe Jarnias, Yolande Moreau, Joel Fosse

In some ways it feels like director and writer Agnes Varda grew more carefree and even whimsical over the course of her career. In this century she made gentle, freewheeling, perpetually curious documentaries like The Gleaners & I and Faces Places. By contrast, 1962’s Cleo From 5 to 7 is about a young woman awaiting results of a biopsy. Vagabond, between them, is about Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), a runaway girl in rural France who finally dies of exposure—a sad and foredoomed story. Mona’s body is discovered at the beginning of the picture and the rest is flashback types of episodes. They follow the last months of her life as she hitchhiked from place to place, set up her tent, and lived her life as she could. These scenes are ostensibly based on journalistic interviews of those who interacted with and knew her—to the degree, of course, that anyone knew her. Varda’s instinct is often to go at least semi-documentary in tone.

We never see Mona in the home she ran away from. The picture is silent on her life before. We don’t hear from her family in these supposed interviews and we never hear why. Perhaps they just didn’t want to speak with interviewers, but it’s never explained. Varda is more interested purely in Mona’s life on her own and how she survives (and doesn’t) rather than potential details of domestic abuse and such. There is one scene here where it appears Mona is going to be assaulted at one of her campsites, but the picture quickly cuts away and we never hear anything of it again. It’s as if Varda wants us to know she’s aware of all the dangers of Mona’s life, but doesn’t want to dwell on them too much, doesn’t want the lurid details to distort what she wants us to see in Mona.

Silver Apples, “Oscillations” (1968)

[listen up!]

Here’s some early—and choice—pop electronica so far ahead of its time it takes some sorting out to get oriented. But the main point, as with Kraftwerk’s deadpan paeans to the PC, is the goofy pleasure of it. The drumming pattern recalls krautrock practically before there was krautrock. Silver Apples is just two guys alone in the studio with a producer. Dan Taylor beats that drum pattern and sings. Simeon works the oscillators and he sings too. They took their name from an album that came out the previous year by composer and electronics experimenter Morton Subotnick, Silver Apples of the Moon. Their self-titled debut LP opens with this song, as if the first order of business were to master the oscillator and now it is time for worship and celebration. The oscillator, Wikipedia tells me, “is an electronic circuit that produces a periodic, oscillating or alternating current (AC) signal, usually a sine wave, square wave or a triangle wave.” The song wobbles into existence on the angled-off tones, like some moist blind newborn amphibian. The drum pattern puts it in motion, granting it life and propulsion, redolent of a dark, throbbing place. A sound like a steam whistle, as the groove sets, lets us know it’s all in fun. The song trundles directly to your heart. Taylor and Simeon sound hypnotized, chanting, “Oscillations, oscillations / Electronic evocations of sound's reality / Spinning, magnetic fluctuations / Waves of wave configurations / That dance between the poles of sound / And bind my world to soul.” Gary Numan couldn’t have put it any better. Silver Apples was so far ahead of its time their patents still haven’t met yet.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this one, a sequel shot at the same time as the original (28 Years Later, itself a sequel), directed by Nia DaCosta (Hedda, Candyman) rather than Danny Boyle. But the story was rarely less than interesting and that helped a lot. Screenwriter Alex Garland has written all the entries in the franchise so far except 28 Weeks Later. That’s good for continuity and he seems to know what he’s doing. Garland also wrote Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Men, which are also interesting and generally worth seeing, especially Annihilation. The violence here is predictably extreme, with lots of horrible screaming and torture and things you’ll want to look away from. Most of them involve a terrible rampaging gang of teens and a heavy Apocalypse Now vibe. Ralph Fiennes is back from 28 Years Later as Dr. Ian Kelson, a scientist making the best of the zombie armageddon and also the architect of the so-called bone temple, which he primly calls an ossuary as he calls the zombies “infecteds.” In his spare time Kelson enjoys listening to Duran Duran and Radiohead. He is working with opioids to civilize one of the new type of zombies, super-creatures he calls “alphas,” who are giant and powerful and quite dangerous. There’s a lingering sense in all this that we may be witnessing actual devolution. The terrible rampaging gang of teens is led by Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), who calls his various hooligan followers “fingers” and names them all “Jimmy” (or, for a young woman, “Jimmima”) They wear blonde wigs. One is our old friend the young boy Spike (Alfie Williams) from the first movie, an unwilling participant just doing what he has to to survive. This gang is pretty sure Kelson is actually Satan, a view he accommodates and affirms with a somewhat unlikely Iron Maiden interpretive dance set to “The Number of the Beast.” On the whole The Bone Temple is fairly predictable, including a big spectacle at the finish. But it was better than I expected. The end leaves wide open the option for further sequels. My bet would be on a first season of a TV series, but we’ll have to see how these movies do at the box office. I am as dubious about further sequels as I was about this one coming into it. But I admit The Bone Temple was entertaining and I have few regrets about seeing it.

“Dead Air” (1988)

There’s not much information online about Gregory Nicoll, author of this longish story, which has intriguing points—namely, rock ‘n’ roll and Jack the Ripper—in a fast-moving tale set in an isolated broadcasting building late at night. The DJ, Mary Clark, is new to the job but seems to be pretty good at it. It’s a classic rock station, so she’s playing things like a Blue Oyster Cult “superset” (we’re told that means at least four songs). The DJ from the previous night was named Mary Kelly, which is close to Mary Jane Kelly, the last victim of Jack the Ripper. The Ripper connection is strained. Really, the whole thing barely hangs together. Time dilates and a lot can happen in the space of a minute or two. The DJ and indeed the story are busy with incident and motion, not entirely believable. It’s influenced by a lot of Stephen King tricks designed to scare or thrill, lots of action and anxious interior dialogue. On the rock ‘n’ roll side it’s attempting to bring in Screaming Lord Sutch, a self-consciously outrageous British rocker of the early ‘60s under direct influence of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Among other things Sutch wrote a song called “Jack the Ripper” and also adopted a stage persona as Jack the Ripper. Here the song is referred to as “The Hands of Jack the Ripper” and it’s nearly 10 minutes long, which does not appear to be factual. This is thus another story suggesting that Jack the Ripper is some kind of immortal being. It appears that the radio station manager, Bert, is him, even as the story reaches its screaming climax. I like a lot of the elements here, but somehow the whole misfires for me. I was distracted by its strange sense of time, which felt like Nicoll trying to pack too much action into too little time more than an intentional effect. I wasn’t convinced the story knew what it wanted from rock ‘n’ roll or Jack the Ripper, except to invoke them for effect. They are there not so much to scare as to give the story a modern-day gloss. But I might be complaining too much. The story has flaws, it may not all add up, but it’s still a fun one to read.

The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII, ed. Karl Edward Wagner
Story not available online.

“The Poacher” (1992)

This interesting story by Ursula K. Le Guin rolls through fantasy all the way back to fairy tales, according to coeditor Terry Windling in her introduction in a Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology. “The Poacher” is fantastic and vaguely allegorical, with a mysterious forest, a castle, a sleeping princess (actually a sleeping everyone), and much more. The main character, out foraging for mushrooms and berries, discovers a hedge in the forest so dense and tall it’s impossible to see beyond it. Then he discovers it is encircling a space and he sets out to hack his way through it with tools he steals, or poaches—he is a poacher in many different ways. Even reaching this interior space takes him something close to two years. “The hedge grew unnaturally fast, in season and out, even in midwinter thick, pale shoots would grow across my passageway, and in summer I had to spend some time every day clearing out new growth, thorny green sprays full of stinging sap.” The story takes its time getting to its points—if it takes years to enter the space, what he finds inside is fully and amply described: a castle, a full household of masters and servants busy at their tasks, except—they are all sleeping and remain asleep for as long as the main character is there, which at story’s end is decades. He discovers a princess sleeping in her chambers, and somehow knows that all this is her dream, that even touching her will awaken her with wholly unknown results, potentially including the end of everything. He’s taking no chances. The food replenishes every day, the weather is beautiful, the place is wonderful. He stays. Le Guin’s writing is patient and lovely, in no hurry at all, and thus her revelations are unforced and somehow believable. It reminds me of a 1964 story by Robert Aickman called “The School Friend,” which also concerns a mysterious space in the deep woods with fairy tale appointments. Aickman’s story at least leaves something of a line tracing back to reality but that’s much less the case in “The Poacher,” which seems to exist unconnected from anything we would call reality. We are verging on pure magic here, which Le Guin somehow keeps within range of suspended disbelief as we read, as if casting spells herself.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Unlocking the Air and Other Stories
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

Billy Nicholls, “Would You Believe” (1968)

[listen up!]

Some interesting names associated with Billy Nicholls and this luscious confection. The famous and infamous Andrew Loog Oldham hired Nicholls as a staff writer for his Immediate label and gave him an office. Del Shannon was a fan and recorded some of his songs. John Paul Jones plays bass. And the Small Faces are producers, notably with Steve Marriott bawling in the most swirling, dense, and wholly unexpected passages. Financial problems with Oldham’s Immediate label limited the original release and the album was shelved until Nicholls rereleased it on his own in 1998. Amazing that it could stay virtually hidden so long. It starts out barely there, then entertains a soothing lullaby mood by way of the Swingle Singers style, before ultimately exploding with the title line at about 0:45 in a song that runs 2:40. Nicholls’s vocal is clarion, fully aware of its utility as the primary irresistible hook. The title line anchors it from there. The song goes to it frequently, but it’s always good to return to. It might be where you are singing along. This hook does not seem capable of wearing out and they’re not afraid to pummel it. What’s more, the song has an equally beguiling second hook, a gorgeous wheedling violin figure. The rest is clouds of sparkling glitter. Here comes a ... banjo? A tuba? What? Then even more layers: someone calling urgently from a distance (Marriott?). A droning high note that seems to bear the meaning of everything. Finally the song leaves us approximately the way it arrived. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about it is that you can always listen to it again.

Caught by the Tides (2024)

Here’s an unusual picture, a kind of lightly fictionalized, impressionistic memoir of China in this century. It’s directed by Jia Zhang-ke and what makes it unusual is that he has used footage shot by him across this century, both in his personal life and for movies he has made. The only one I can vouch for is Still Life (2006), but I can tell you it’s a great picture, well worth tracking down. Caught by the Tides also includes scenes from Unknown Pleasures (2002) and Ash Is Purest White (2018), which I intend to seek out. All three feature Zhang-ke’s wife, Tao Zhao, who is rendered a silent woman in this picture for some reason, at least until she lets out a yelp in the last shot. By that point I was too muddled to really get it. There are many lovely shots here—notably those from the Three Gorges area and its massive damming project, featured in Still Life—and some reliably nice musical interludes too, EDM at random to juice up the energy, and pop tunes presumably for the nostalgic feels. But it must be said there’s little by way of obvious narrative here—it’s a guess for me (and largely because of what I’ve read about it) that this is even a historical allegory about China at all. My own sense from my Western perspective, and my distance, is that the 2008 Olympics were a certain cultural high-water mark in China. That seems to be supported by the way this movie goes. My further sense is that China continues to be an economic juggernaut poised well for the future. The commitment to EVs and alternative, sustainable energy sources are just obvious examples. Early scenes in Caught by the Tides gradually give way to scenes of the pandemic, where arguably (again supported by what we see) it was taken appropriately seriously, much unlike the US experience. So the movie may be a good place for testing ideas about China. I take Zhang-ke, based on Still Life, as a great filmmaker and now more than ever want to get to some of his other work. But Caught by the Tides felt confused and weak as much as anything, too allusive and ambiguous for me to get a good grip on what it’s all about.

The Book of Skulls (1972)

I read this 1972 Robert Silverberg novel in a kindle edition which included an afterword by Silverberg from 2004. He was at pains to defend it as science fiction because it is about an arguably scientific approach to seeking and perhaps finding immortality. But, well, no, I must demur. This novel hews far closer to horror, with its imagery and mythifying and above all with its ingeniously intricate premise. A college boy, Eli, has shown an aptitude for the study of ancient civilizations, which gains him entry to an archive where he discovers an untranslated document (in Catalan) called The Book of Skulls, which among other things dictates a route to immortality. By an amazing coincidence, Eli also notices an item in the newspaper about a cult in the Arizona desert that uses skull imagery. And so we are off to Arizona. Here are the terms: the cult must be approached in groups of four to submit to a trial for entry. During the trial, one of them must willingly commit suicide. Then two of the others must murder the third and the survivors will subsequently live forever. Easy-peasy. It’s a beauty of a concept, symmetrical, balanced, and savage. Silverberg tells the story in a tour de force of shifting first-person narratives among the four casual college chums on their spring break. Each of the four is individual but of a type. Eli, the instigator, is a scrawny brainy Jew. Ned is the scrawny sarcastic gay boy-man. Timothy is the rich and entitled WASP—his credit card is paying for the road trip. And Oliver is the scrappy Midwestern survivor, an orphan who is making it on charity, government assistance, and talent. In typical Silverberg fashion much about the tales, the present action and the flashbacks, are highly sexualized—“pervy,” as one reviewer noted. That reviewer approved of the novel overall but worried about the sex, which is constant. In fairness, that’s how lots of bestselling novelists were doing it in 1972. Also, apparently Silverberg wrote softcore porn for money at some point or points in his career. All the sex does date the novel somewhat in embarrassing ways, but at the same time it might be fair to say that Silverberg was clear-sighted and even prescient on gays. It’s a rollicking good time here. A genuine page-turner. But I claim it for horror, not science fiction.

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

Aerial Ballet (1968)

It’s not surprising that Harry Nilsson, the man responsible for the theme songs for the 1960s TV sitcom The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, would serve up a tub of corn syrup on his third LP, where he was well coming into his own as a recording artist. The album is rich and delicious, veering in lounge directions but saved always by the musicality. I don’t know Nilsson that well, at least not until recently. I have tended to think of him as a songwriter chiefly—and he is that, however eccentric—but recent forays into Aerial Ballet have convinced me his real strength is as a singer. His exuberant swoops and scats are only more impressive when you try to sing with them, and he packs his most surprising bolts of feeling into exactly that. Or, as he might put it, “Doo-wack doo-wack doo-wack doo-wacka-doo wacka-doo wacka-doo.” This album is the home of “Everybody’s Talkin’,” his inspired cover of Greenwich Village folkie Fred Neil, and “One,” later covered by Three Dog Night into a #5 hit. Both sound more amazing than ever in the context of this album. The album also includes performative turns of innocence that remind me a little of Jonathan Richman, in all the best ways (and make me wonder what Richman, a dedicated VU fan approximately then, might have thought of Nilsson). I read somewhere, for example, that “Little Cowboy” and its reprise was a lullaby his mother sang to him (I also remember reading that he copyrighted it to her, but that does not appear to be the case). Or, perhaps my favorite, “Good Old Desk,” in which he celebrates his dedicated workspace. “My old desk does an arabesque / In the morning when I first arrive / It's a pleasure to see it's waiting there for me / To keep my hopes alive.” Versioning problems exist with Aerial Ballet, unfortunately. A couple of songs, “Daddy’s Song” and “Bath,” were deleted at the last minute before the original release. Nilsson wrote both but had sold the exclusive rights to the Monkees, who had it removed from the album. The songs are back on streaming versions now but three bonus tracks from a later version have been separated away from the album. “Girlfriend”—adapted for the theme to The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (which I seem to recall did not have a laugh track, but maybe I’m confusing it with Room 222)—“Girlfriend” is there but you have to search for it specifically on my service.

Young Frankenstein (1974)

USA, 106 minutes

Director: Mel Brooks

Writers: Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks, Mary Shelley

Photography: Gerald Hirschfeld

Music: John Morris

Editor: John C. Howard

Cast: Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Madeline Kahn, Peter Boyle, Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr, Kenneth Mars, Gene Hackman, Richard Haydn, Mel Brooks, Danny Goldman

Young Frankenstein is so scrupulously faithful to the 1930s Universal franchise that it fairly fits itself into the canon itself. You must start with the 1931 Frankenstein and 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, of course. But then I say it’s your choice: the star-studded 1939 Son of Frankenstein (Boris Karloff! Bela Lugosi! Basil Rathbone!) or this affectionate send-up. It boasts a luminous black & white palette, old-fashioned wipes from one scene to the next, and arguably cowriter Gene Wilder’s greatest single performance. It comes with all the trimmings too, including the little girl, the bride, the blind man, pitchforks, torches, elaborate mechanical wind-up law enforcement out of Peter Sellers, and more.

Wilder is Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (pronounced fronk-un-steen in a running gag), grandson of the mad scientist Victor (renamed Henry in the old movies for some reason). Frederick is a professor of human anatomy and biology trying to live down his grandfather’s crimes, constantly needled by his students. Wilder, as ever, and perhaps more so here, is a paradox of style, a quiet-mannered player who uses off-beat pauses, the position of his head, and the volume of his speaking voice to convey great stores of molten angst, rage, and depression, which erupt in calibrated, pitch-perfect sobbing rants. The ongoing, never-ending, exhausting battle over the pronunciation of his name is just a foretaste of what’s to come with the driven, neurotic, obsessed fool Wilder has made of Dr. Frankenstein.

Smog, “Cold Blooded Old Times” (1999)

[listen up!]

Smog (not to be confused with Golden Smog) is basically one man named Bill Callahan, singer-songwriter resident of Austin, Texas, who has also recorded under his own name and, in some cases, such as this one, with a band. “Cold Blooded Old Times” hits first like an upbeat singalong, with a chorus large and in charge: “Cold blooded old times,” x3. The verses get down to the reality of things around here, which are not so upbeat. They seem to involve memories from childhood of an abusive and disintegrating marriage, memories that can “turn your bones to glass / ... And though you were / Just a little squirrel / You understood every word.” Some of the ways of expressing here are neither comforting nor very clear, notably the plaint: “How can I stand / And laugh with the man / Who redefined your body?” There’s a lot of things that could mean—the mind runs to all of them at once, the more you hear it, absorb it. None are good. But the song carries on over four minutes with its deceptive jaunty air, which includes submerged piano figures from Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” toward the end, absurdly calling things like “his hair was perfect!” to mind. The title phrase, “cold blooded old times,” cannot possibly mean anything good and the verses do what they need to tack that down. Yet the pleasure of singing with this song, learning its tricky small turns and getting them down, overcomes the dubious implications. Is there any right and wrong here? You can really belt this one with the singer if your voice is in good form and you have his key.

A Case of Conscience (1958)

This short novel by James Blish confirms a couple of things for me. First, I don’t really like religion getting mixed up with science fiction. “Few science fiction stories of the time attempted religious themes,” according to Wikipedia, “and still fewer did this with Catholicism.” That may be so, but The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (1996, so perhaps not “of the time”) and the 1959 A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. (which maybe I need to try again) both fit that bill too well. Second, my misgivings about fix-up novels—also called “mosaic” novels in an attempt to dignify them—proved out again. I did not notice this as a fix-up novel while reading it, but I did note a severe drop in quality after the first part, which was the original 1953 novella that won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 2004. The basic idea here is not bad. There’s a planet, Lithia, with an intelligent dominant reptile species. Four human scientists, including a Jesuit priest who is also a biologist, are visiting to determine whether it should be opened to human diplomacy. One of the four says no because it has a huge amount of materials that can be used to create weapons. The Lithian society appears to be harmonious and peaceful. But the priest keeps looking at it through his frame of religious ideas. He sees it as pre-Edenic, still innocent, with no fall from grace, and thus feels it should be respected as such and not interfered with. But then he decides it could be the work of “the Adversary” (i.e., Satan), offering a temptation to believe, or something. I thought it was muddled but I was already souring on it by then. The middle has a logic that is hard to follow. The ending is admittedly powerful, but I’m not sure I agree that the priest is a hero. So I had a hard time with this, my first time reading Blish. I’m open to reading more by him, just not necessarily the After Such Knowledge series, for which this is the first novel. A Case of Conscience won a Hugo for Blish but he is more famous (per Wikipedia) for a Cities in Flight series and for Star Trek novelizations he worked on with his wife, J.A. Lawrence. The biology in Conscience is often thoughtful and intriguing, but the physics is more lacking. Faster-than-light travel, for example, is just a thing that needs no explanation. I think that’s fairly common for a lot of 20th-century SF, but Blish absurdly ignores time dilation too. In a key scene near the end, in fact, our heroes are witnessing real-time developments on Lithia, which is 50 light-years away. It was distractingly hard to believe.

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

Live at the Apollo (1963)

[2010 review here]

I see via Wikipedia this is still considered one of the greatest live albums of all time. I don’t hear it that way—although I was more in thrall to it in 2010, I remember it still as one of my great disappointments when I finally got to it, finding it one day in the 1980s in a cutout bin. There’s definitely a “you had to be there” case to be made here, and I say that as someone who saw James Brown over 15 years later, in 1979, and count it as one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. It did not matter that Brown was actually on stage no more than 40 minutes. But the brevity of this album—31 and a half minutes all up—made me suspect at the time that I must have bought some defective product being moved through the cutout networks. But no, it’s actually little more than half an hour. There’s a long introduction and a few instrumental vamps between songs. Due to the excitement of the moment, I presume, most songs have rushed tempos and last little more than two minutes apiece, including a medley of eight songs that goes six minutes. “Lost Someone” kind of saves the set, with a groove that runs to more than 10 minutes, a harbinger of things to come beyond 1963. Brown would get pretty good with grooves that went 10 minutes or longer. I understand the historical importance here. The album sold like crazy and DJs reportedly played it like a double-sided 45, playing one side then flipping it and playing the other—in response to requests from listeners. Then there’s the weirdly haunting date of the show, October 24, 1962, at approximately the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when nuclear anxiety was reaching one of its highest and most intense points. I’ll tell you what: I like a book Douglas Wolk wrote about this album for the 33-1/3 series more than I like the album. And as fine as that book is, breaking down the show minute by minute, second by second, I like even more the later prizes of James Brown’s work and career (Roots of a Revolution, Foundations of Funk: A Brand New Bag, Make It Funky: The Big Payback, and the Star Time box). At this point, Live at the Apollo exists mostly as historical artifact with only modest levels of interest.

“The Man in the Black Suit” (1994)

I was excited to see a story by Stephen King in The Weird. I didn’t think editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer could leave him out but I guess I forgot about him by the time the chronologically ordered anthology got to Clive Barker in the ‘80s. This story is an interesting choice—a self-conscious reimagining by King of the kind of 19th-century American Puritan horror practiced by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving. The story takes place in the deep woods of New England where a boy has gone fishing. He encounters the figure in the title, who is there to steal his soul or some such. It’s all pretty traditional business in many ways. Not much is particularly original but some of the details are good. The man’s eyes are described as red and orange, for example, windows into his burning soul. The story was published originally in the New Yorker, which speaks to the status of King’s career in 1994. He would win some kind of lifetime honor from some reputable literary group circa 2002 or 2003, which I always think of as the moment when he was accepted and embraced by the literary mainstream. With this story from the New Yorker he was on his way to that fuller, wider recognition. It does feel like King might be trying a little too hard here. He comes by his New England bona fides honestly enough—born and raised there—but he has never felt remotely part of Puritan traditions. Well, maybe remotely. But his style is all 20th-century contemporary and his horror is catholic, my feeble pun indicating his stuff is all over the place in terms of its sources. The woods and soul-stealing do as well for King as sacred Indian burial grounds, cosmic horror, vampires, werewolves, and/or zombies. And more. The guy is so prolific he almost couldn’t help having tried everything by the mid-‘90s. I used to find him insanely readable and wish now I’d read more of him then. Or maybe I reached my point of exhaustion after a few thousand pages (still only a fraction, I know). At any rate, I respect what I understand he’s doing here—getting the Puritan phobias about woods and the devil into the mix. Hey, that’s horror pure as much as anything else, up to and including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Galaxie 500, “Tugboat” (1988)

[listen up!]

Even as metaphor I’m not sure at all what this song is about, so I take it at face value. The singer doesn’t want to be at your party, he doesn’t want to talk to your friends, he doesn’t want to vote for your president. He just wants to be your tugboat captain. It’s a place he’d like to be, x12. It’s a place he’d be happy, x4. The internet tells me it’s all a reference to the Velvet Underground’s guitarist, Sterling Morrison, who worked on and captained tugboats in Houston in the ‘70s and ‘80s, while studying for his PhD in medieval literature, specializing in the work of the 9th-century poet Cynewulf. Maybe—1988 was a certain peak time to glorify the VU. But now we have gone well afield of this mystifying and strangely alluring Galaxie 500 track. The singer’s words make little sense, but they flash with feeling. He really seems to mean it. Pressure from a souring relationship? That has usually been when I don’t want to be at their party, talk with their friends, vote for their president. At nearly four minutes “Tugboat” affords room for the meditative noise the Galaxie 500 trio specialized in. The second-half jam may be the part of the song to pay the most attention to. It’s certainly one to drift through. From a softly strummed acoustic guitar to the plaintive and beautiful notes picked out of an electric guitar and then the yelping, “Tugboat” sets out on the oceanic currents of its own creation. Dean Wareham’s lead guitar steps away from the melodic hook, withdrawing into its own thoughts as the volume level slowly rises and the mush of the gentle noise envelops us, with the moody singer’s quixotic declarations still ringing figuratively in our ears.