“Like Mother Used to Make” (1949)

I’m starting to see where Shirley Jackson may have been done some disservice by editors and/or publishers. The Library of America edition edited by Joyce Carol Oates restores the full title to Jackson’s Lottery collection originally published in 1949: The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris. It was simply The Lottery and Other Stories in most editions. The idea of James Harris, a literary figure who traces back at least to an English 17th-century murder ballad, may not have been fully developed across all of Jackson’s stories in the collection, but James Harris (or variations of the name) shows up frequently as a sinister demonic figure, notably in “The Daemon Lover” and “Like Mother Used to Make.” “Like Mother” is one of his best appearances. He seems to have unusual powers, or at least a preternatural, seductive confidence. David and Marcia are neighbors in an apartment building and have some kind of ill-defined relationship. Marcia would likely call it a friendship, no more. David has traits that suggest he could be gay. He’s fussy and fastidious and thinks a lot about things like decor and silverware patterns. Marcia is more of an ungainly mess, always late to everything. On this occasion, David is making her dinner at his place and we get well inside his head as he works on it. He doesn’t seem terribly attracted to Marcia. In many ways she annoys him. But they are friends and get along with mild friction. Just as they finish eating Marcia hears someone at her door across the way. It’s “Mr. Harris,” who says, “I just thought I’d stop by.” He completely takes over the social situation and seems to have designs on Marcia. Somehow, before long, David is excusing himself from his own place, leaving it and going over to Marcia’s. He can hear that Marcia and Mr. Harris have turned on his radio. “Wearily,” he begins to clean Marcia’s place. It’s a remarkable situation and unsettling to witness as a reader. Even if David is gay it’s still humiliating, forced (somehow) to leave his own place to them. Jackson may have intended, somewhat homophobically, to deepen David’s humiliation by making him gay and explicitly less manly and thus prone to the will of Harris, as opposed to gay and why would he care. Although, well, it’s 1949 and likely at best he is closeted—and he abandons his own place to them, that’s the fine point, bowing to Harris. Presumably Harris could have David too if he wanted.

Shirley Jackson, Novels and Stories
Listen to story online.

Charles Bradley, “Can’t Fight the Feeling” (2018)

[listen up!]

Charles Bradley was born in 1948 but found few outlets for his musical ambitions until this century. Per Wikipedia, his first single came in 2002. Abandoned by his mother, he spent much of his early life homeless on the streets and roaming the country at large until finally working as a restaurant chef gave him an income he could rely on. The long delay in recognition was partly a matter of his stage fright and also perhaps due to his calling card as a James Brown impersonator. He learned his chops there—how could it not have served his career well?—but may have limited his bookings. I don’t hear Brown as much in this early single from his last album, Black Velvet, as I do the Stax-like approach of an act like Sam & Dave or Eddie Floyd, defined in many ways by its horn charts. Others have compared him to Otis Redding. But JB is plainly in the mix as well. Bradley’s rough guttural style of singing and his throat-clotted screams say it all. There’s no question he belongs in the halls of soul music. He died too soon, even at 68, with too little public appreciation. He was a natural, and no doubt the close study of classic 1960s soul served him well even if it did take most of his life to start to get the attention he deserved. In 2018 I did not know his story, already dead by then from stomach cancer, with less than 20 years in any kind of spotlight. I just liked the raw feel and horns of “Can’t Fight the Feeling” and the faith Bradley obviously had in soul music and all the ways it can galvanize, soothe, and reach ecstatic heights.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025)

For such a frothy light time travel comedy with a notable Ghostbusters vibe, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie comes with a long, winding pedigree. First, in the late 2000s, it was an internet-based series, Nirvana the Band the Show (the extra “n” in Nirvanna the Band would come later). Ten years on it was two seasons in TV-land proper, with Nirvanna the Band the Show. Now add the Movie, which is where I come in, the only one I know. But apparently the idea is basically the same in all: Nirvanna the Band principals Matt Johnson (vocalist, and director and cowriter of this picture) and Jay McCarrol (pianist and cowriter) are perpetually trying to get a booking at the Rivoli nightclub in their hometown of Toronto, cooking up various outrageous publicity stunts. Nirvanna the Band consists of McCarrol playing piano while Johnson improvises spoken-word rants and chants. The featured stunt here involves leaping off the top of the CN Tower and parachuting into the Skydome stadium. If you’re like me this amazing footage is looked at through your fingers. The human fear of heights is universal, and severely challenged here. These guys get away with everything, parking their RV any old place in Toronto and getting dangerous tools up onto the tower with them. Anyway, the weather’s bad, the Skydome roof is closing even as they jump, and they can’t make it through in time, landing instead on the roof of the stadium. That’s pretty much the way everything goes here. Johnson and McCarrol have lots of simple comic ideas that work—camera crew in tow for everything, for example, and making up shit we have no choice but to go along with, like the time travel aspect, which is all there to be discovered and unpacked, if you can. If it’s even possible. Johnson and McCarrol are likable blokes. Johnson likes to do his thinking with a whiteboard. His pants are ridiculously ripped. McCarrol obviously has most of the musical talent. The picture rushes about headlong and gets by on its own affability as much as anything. All bad language is bleeped out. I can’t speak to anyone who has been with them since about 2007, but I’m curious now about a reverse-engineering perspective and maybe looking into the earlier incarnations. I hesitate to guarantee a good time here, because this is a very odd one, but I can say for sure at least that I had a good time.

Crime and Punishment (1866)

The first of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s majors was a reread for me. I have always liked it, but perhaps never more. It is intense, sprawling, never less than fascinating, and compulsively readable—you just have to get used to the names. Our main guy, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, is one of literature’s great antiheroes. He’s not particularly likable but it’s also hard not to pull for him. As with the unnamed narrator in Notes From Underground he is at war with the terms of existence. There is some sense that his double-homicide axe murders—the first 100 to 150 pages of the novel are harrowing and mesmerizing—is some kind of philosophical test of a “superman” idea. Certainly the 23-year-old Raskolnikov has published an essay to that effect, which brings the attention of the police. There’s an even greater sense he has no idea why he killed. If it was part of a robbery he botched it entirely. If it’s to rid the world of a shrewish pawnbroker, all right, maybe, but he also kills the pawnbroker’s kindly sister Lizaveta. You need the stupid “superman” idea to justify that at all, and basically you can’t, and basically Raskolnikov knows that. But Dostoevsky is not done with just these murders. He goes spinning off handfuls of threads with a web of characters associated with Raskolnikov—his mother and sister, his sister’s suitors, a good and loyal friend, destitute families, and a police investigator who is reported to be the model for TV’s Columbo. Crime and Punishment was serialized and involved agonies of rewriting for Dostoevsky. What he produced may feel impromptu and full of digressions but in fact it is well organized for what it is doing. It works first as a thriller and then, as long as it has your attention, it has another million things to tell you and they are all interesting. You are there for them. I don’t know how to describe reading this amazing novel any other way. It has always held my attention even though I don’t always remember specific details. How could I forget it was a double-homicide axe murder?! Yet what I always remember, even when it’s not as fresh, is that it is a wonderful experience to read it. Any translation, but this time I was happy to go with Constance Garnett again, one of the great translators of Dostoevsky (and Chekhov too).

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

Brazil (1985)

UK / USA, 132 minutes

Director: Terry Gilliam

Writers: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown, Charles Alverson

Photography: Roger Pratt

Music: Michael Kamen

Editor: Julian Doyle

Cast: Jonathan Pryce, Katherine Helmond, Kim Greist, Ian Holm, Robert De Niro, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Bob Hoskins, Derrick O’Connor, Peter Vaughan, Kathryn Pogson, Jim Broadbent, Sheila Reid

I like the array of genre labels at IMDb for director and cowriter Terry Gilliam’s dystopic SF comedy. Besides the predictable—"dark comedy,” “dystopian sci-fi,” etc.—there is the perfectly apt “steampunk.” That gets to the heart of both what’s good and not so good about Brazil. It is dystopia practically by the numbers and wants it all ways it can get it: nightmares of calcified bureaucracy, ongoing random terrorist bombings, brutal police state, rampant incompetence, nothing mechanical really works, humanity is benumbed and disappearing into plastic surgery for the rich and misery for the rest. The future is crowded, overheated, and overstuffed. The technology is semi-powerful PC computers in Victorian garb. Office workers look at Marx Brothers movies on them when the boss isn’t looking. Yes, steam is visible.

Jonathan Pryce is Sam Lowry, a low-ranking bureaucrat happy to hunker down in his specific situation. He wants no further responsibilities. But his mother (Katherine Helmond) is rich, can’t stand the stigma of his lack of ambition, and keeps pulling strings to get him promoted. He has so far resisted them successfully. At night he has dreams of a woman and then he thinks he sees her in real life. He uses the surveillance power of the state via his job to track her down. She’s Jill Layton (Kim Greist), a truck driver who may or may not have terrorist ties. It doesn’t matter for Sam, who has loved her from afar and now wants to love her up close. What could possibly go wrong?

“The God of Dark Laughter” (2001)

I was surprised to find a story by Michael Chabon in The Weird—I had not realized he wrote in that vein. But he does and here we are. This was published originally in the New Yorker, so we’re not fooling around. It’s almost a parody of cosmic horror, lifting some of H.P. Lovecraft’s ideas whole and generally monkeying around with the Cthulhu mythos. Why not? It’s set up as a mystery, told by the district attorney in a quiet rural area where they don’t see much crime. The victim is a clown that has been horribly mutilated. All the skin from his head and shoulders has been cut away with “a very sharp knife.” It seems like I’ve been seeing a lot of clown and killer clown stuff lately, so I perked up for that part—really the whole story is pretty good. As our investigating DA digs into the case he starts finding literature that references a conflict between two ancient sects. One worships the God of Dark Laughter. The term “coulrophobia” comes up along the way: “morbid, irrational fear of or aversion to clowns.” Nice touch. The specific Lovecraft reference is to the mythical author Friedrich von Junzt (which is actually original to Robert E. Howard though Lovecraft used the device too). Von Junzt wrote, “Űber das Finstere Lachen” (“About the Dark Laughter”), as well as “a small volume bound in black leather and printed in no alphabet known to me, the letters sinuous and furred with wild diacritical marks.” An actual baboon in a clown suit shows up at one point, there for the color mostly (and the Poe reference). It takes the story a while to get to its concepts. The God of Dark Laughter is “the proto-Urartian deity Yȇ-Heh.” Chabon is obviously having fun making stuff up (or maybe it’s original Lovecraft? all the same). The god in opposition to Yȇ-Heh is “Ai, the God of Unbearable and Ubiquitous Sorrow.” Yȇ-Heh’s followers are hedonist, cruel, and mocking. Ai’s “gloomy fanatics saw the world as no less horrifying and cruel than did their arch-enemies [Yȇ-Heh’s followers], but their response to the whole mess was a permanent wailing.” Never mind the inadvertent reference to artificial intelligence. Ai-ites are on a mission to wipe out the remaining followers of Yȇ-Heh, most of whom “have survived, for the most part, by taking on work in traveling circuses." Thus does Chabon close this loop. More than anything it is a traditional mystery story with exotic touches of cosmic horror and Chabon’s inspired language. It all hangs together and it’s quite good, very entertaining.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Story not available online.

Eagles, “Best of My Love” (1974)

[listen up!]

Those not really in favor of the Eagles, where I count myself, often nonetheless seem to have one of their songs that they will admit to liking a lot. “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” “Desperado,” “Witchy Woman,” I don’t know, you name it—even haters seem to have a soft spot for one or the other in the widescreen catalog. They made the top 40 18 times, hit #1 five times, and I believe I’ve heard their best-of is the bestselling album of all time. This is not an unpopular act. They reached me in the winter of early 1975 with their first #1. Product of collaboration between Glenn Frey, Don Henley, and J.D. Souther, it is sweet and melancholy with no (make that little) (make that arguably verging on rancid) bitterness, a tale of resignation straight out of the freewheeling breakup / get a divorce / got to move on ‘70s. Don’t, don’t do it, don’t use the word insipid. I’m feeling a little sad here. What appealed to me chiefly was the hit off the vibe of Carole King’s immortal “It’s Too Late,” the resignation to a relationship ending. I always found these breakup songs of the time the ultimate in romantic, which may explain too much. Related: “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” by Carly Simon and “Someone to Lay Down Beside Me” by Linda Ronstadt. The sadness in these songs is abundant, but “It’s Too Late” and “Best of My Love” also bear an undertow of liberation, a certain ecstasy of anticipation. “Best of My Love” (I strongly suspect the irony of the title was lost on the authors, but then I’m a hater) is perhaps more specific on how the cookie is crumbling, referring directly to the toxic back and forth when they are in full tailspin: “We try to talk it over / But the words come out too rough / ... / I wake up and worry / What's gonna happen today?” This one filled me with a delicious self-satisfied melancholy then and it can still make me ache a little now.

Wise Blood (1952)

When I first read it I didn’t care much for this short novel by Flannery O’Connor, her first. But I read it again recently, for the sake of the lists of 20th-century novels I’m going through, and liked it much more this time. It does shore up a lot of my biases about Southern writers and their strange ways of religion. Yet I could feel—or maybe I read it somewhere—that O’Connor has detectable affection for these oddball nitwits. The main character, Hazel Motes (great name—they’re all great here), has just arrived in the city. It is unspecified but in director John Huston’s 1979 movie version it’s Memphis and that just feels right. “Haze,” as the third-person narrator often calls him, is all fucked up. He has a strong calling to preach, and people see him as a preacher by his manner and dress. He hotly denies that but has plans to preach a “Church Without Christ” message and win a following. He attaches himself to a con man pretending to be blind and his 15-year-old daughter—Asa and Sabbath Weeks. Sabbath has her name because she was born on a Sunday. In turn, a young man barely adult, Enoch Emery, attaches himself to Haze. Enoch believes the “new jesus” exists inside a case in a natural history museum, a preserved corpse. I see now at Wikipedia that Wise Blood can fairly be called a fix-up novel as a handful of O’Connor’s stories, including one from her master’s thesis, are involved. That explains in part, perhaps, why this very short novel feels so packed full of incident and action. But O’Connor also has a sharp and pointed voice, compressing a lot into just a few words. Her dialect is absolutely perfect, with a refreshingly light touch that still conveys all the drawl and twang. It’s not often that dialect is this good. I would not want to live in the world of Wise Blood, but it certainly is worth the visit and I’m glad I gave it another chance. I saw the movie years before I read it even once. Enoch’s pronunciation of “muv-zee-vum” has always stuck with me for some reason—Dan Shor is the performer—and for some reason I really like that it comes directly from the novel. In a way it almost perfectly captures the comical and pathetic yet somehow lovable abject ignorance of these characters. They are all you see here but the kaleidoscope works exceptionally well.

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

“Valentine” (1996)

This Joyce Carol Oates story appears simple (and fanciful) but it is working on many levels. It’s a memoir piece told first-person by a grown woman, Erin, recalling an incident (fantasy) when she was 15 years old during a snowstorm on a Valentine’s Day. There’s a lot of specificity—1959, Buffalo, New York. She is living with an aunt on her mother’s side. The rest of her family, seven of them, have “dispersed” and no longer live together. It’s a whopper of a snowstorm, with drifts up the side of the house to the attic and her room. In the middle of the storm, in the middle of the night, a car pulls up outside her house. It’s her algebra teacher, Mr. Lacey! Just that morning she had slipped him an anonymous valentine. He’s the teacher she has a crush on, a young man still in his 20s. He stairsteps up the snowdrift by the side of the house and collects her to take her ice skating. She’s never been very good at it, but she improves in his kind company. He speaks strangely, the words italicized. Erin? Make haste, he says at her window. He drives a Volkswagen. While skating they encounter some jeering bully boy types who pelt him with snowballs and make him bleed. After skating they stop for coffee at “the Bison City Diner adjacent to the Greyhound bus station.” She follows his lead and takes her coffee black, but she hasn’t learned yet to like coffee. She feels too awkward with him to order food. The narrator, the memoirist, plays it straight all the way as if this were a story that really happened. Of course it can’t be, but it lives exactly between a daydream and a night-dream. It’s another story that captures the sense of dreaming well, but the action is all the fantasy of an adolescent with a crush on a teacher. I like the way Oates uses a legendary Buffalo snowstorm, with snowdrifts you can climb. Mr. Lacey is perfectly chaste and aboveboard with Erin, but the fact he comes for her in the middle of the night speaks to a reckless romantic side of him, at least in Erin’s view. This story goes well afield of reality, but it has gritty edges and undertones. Mostly I take it as the fantasy of an adolescent girl who is ready to let loose and let it fly—and I believe every bit of that.

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

Craig Finn, “God in Chicago” (2017)

[listen up!]

I would not call this song particularly sad—“melancholy” might be the better term, starting with the untimely death of a friend. But full disclosure “God in Chicago” rarely fails to reduce me to wanton sobbing. Maybe that’s because it’s so goddamn beautiful. And it may be a bit of a misnomer to call it a song, though some singing does occur. But not much. Mostly Finn, a principal in the band the Hold Steady with a now-established solo career, is simply talking, storytelling, accompanied by somber piano chords. I don’t know the Hold Steady well enough to compare. The singer / storyteller’s friend has died, and his friend’s sister has discovered “unfinished business” among his effects, “roughly the size of a baseball.” She doesn’t want to just throw it out so she contacts this storyteller, who has a college buddy willing to buy it, “but we’d have to come to him.” The dealer is in Chicago. The sister wants to come with. They start early and spend the time listening to 1999 and Led Zeppelin III on a failing boombox in the backseat. They get there. The deal goes down without incident. Then the sister says, “I've never been to Chicago / I've got nothing going on tomorrow / Maybe we could stay here tonight / Lose ourselves in the glass and light.” And so they do. They get a hotel room, eat and drink at an Italian restaurant. It’s headed exactly where you think. Or, as Finn memorably puts it, “We all want the same things,” which is also the name of the album this track is from. As a sentiment, as a truism, as a platitude, I’m not sure it has ever sounded more right. The song ends on their return: “We drove back all hungover / And all the way to Eau Claire, she played with her hair / Came up on St. Paul and she was sobbing.” So am I. So are you. And that’s it, the end, except for maybe playing it again, to verify the amazing, powerful magic going on here. I’ve since been through Finn’s solo catalog and haven’t found anything close to this searing, haunting tale.

Send Help (2026)

The latest from director Sam Raimi is more survival adventure than straight-up horror—but it is laced as always with streaks of comedy. Rachel McAdams is Linda Liddle, a brilliant office spreadsheet analyst wonk with a serious lack of social skills. She’s carrying her corporate team in many ways but the bros that constitute most of it have little regard for her. She is the only one surprised when she is passed over for a promotion she has earned, deserves, and expected. Linda is also a major fan of the reality show Survivor and has long been attempting to get an audition to be on it. We see portions of her video application, which is pathetic and ridiculous of course, but also sets up what follows. Indeed, it’s interesting that Survivor is so central to the story here because my theory about that show is that it is primarily about office politics, using those types of skills to get ahead and win. Then she ends up on a plane with her team, going to Thailand for a business meeting. But the plane goes down and Linda is washed up on a remote island with her boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who got his job in the first place because he’s the son of Linda’s former boss. On the island, of course, it’s Linda who has all the survival skills, using the little available to them to create shelter, gather fresh water and food, hunt wild boar, and even brew liquor. The arc of the story feels like it’s headed toward an enemies-to-lovers romance narrative. But this is Sam Raimi so that’s not going to happen, and besides, the difference between Linda and Preston is stark: she is likable in spite of everything. He is not. There are occasional eruptions of extreme violence in Send Help but for the most part they come somehow with a light touch. McAdams often plays it broadly but she’s good in this more or less loser tomboy role. O’Brien has little more to do than be an asshole and that’s what he does. Lots of elements here feel familiar because we have seen them elsewhere—Triangle of Sadness may be the most obvious source they are lifting from. Still, it’s reasonably entertaining all the way. McAdams has everything she needs to pull off her role effectively. It’s satisfying to see her turn the tables on the bro culture. Is it even remotely realistic? Well, that’s another question. But it’s always entertaining enough.

“Vintage Season” (1946)

[spoilers] On ISFDB this long story is credited to C.L. Moore and her husband and frequent collaborator Henry Kuttner, but the Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthology where I found it credits only Moore. Wikipedia says it’s mainly Moore. Both Moore and Kuttner won kudos for their work in horror and/or weird literature, together and apart, so it’s all the same to me. I’ve read some great stories by Kuttner and want to get to more by Moore. This one involves foreigners with indeterminate accents. They show up in New York City and want to rent a room in the main character’s place for the month of May. Others show up who want to buy it outright and name a way overvalued price. These are unusual tourists who say the attraction is to the fine spring weather. They turn out to be time travelers and disaster tourists, attending “vintage seasons” on vacation. They are coming from 14th-century Canterbury and headed next to 10th-century Rome. The story takes its time arriving at its points. For much of it the visitors are simply mysterious to the host and his girlfriend, who scheme to find a way to get the first group out and sell the place to the second. As I’ve already spoiled that part of the story—it’s absolutely done well enough that it remains worth reading for its own sake, and if you object to spoilers please stop reading now and look up the story—I will also mention the disaster the time travelers are there to witness is a meteor strike on the city, which destroys it. The reason for the popularity of our guy’s place is that the historical record showed it survived intact. There are enough clues here that I was pretty sure about the time travel aspect before it was revealed, or maybe I remembered it from reading the story as a kid, but I completely forgot and never saw coming a meteor strike, though I knew it was going to be something big. The foreshadowing is basically definitive that way. As with any time travel story, don’t think it through or everything starts to come apart. If time travel and disaster tourism were a thing, for example, you would expect to see a lot more people than this handful showing up for the target date. But never mind. It otherwise works spectacularly well, with a methodical build-up, intriguing ideas and tension, and a late-shot last sentence that defines the scope by unexpectedly enlarging it to vast proportions. Did I mention Moore and Kuttner specialized in cosmic horror?

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, ed. Robert Arthur
Listen to story online.

All I Really Want to Do (1965)

Cher’s first album was produced by her then-partner Sonny Bono. It got a chance mostly on the strength of their hit “I Got You Babe,” though Sonny’s industry associations with Phil Spector and hosts of ace session musicians didn’t hurt. That said, the production here in general is far more lackluster than sparkling. Cher, or both, not to mention the whole world, were in thrall to Bob Dylan at the time. The album produced a top 20 hit in the title song, a Dylan cover, which the Byrds also released as a single that autumn. Cher’s version did better and it’s the best thing on the album, emphasizing her confident clarion vocals to good effect. Two more Dylan covers (“Don’t Think Twice” and “Blowin’ in the Wind”) are part of the makeup of the rest of the album. The album bears the same familiar formula of the times: 1 hit, 11 covers, 32 minutes. Perhaps because of the Dylan influence, notable strains of folk here are mixed in with the pop, such as “The Bells of Rhymney,” a song by Idris Davies and Pete Seeger. “See See Rider” is credited as traditional but I think of it more as rock in the superior hands of the Animals and Mitch Ryder. Producer Sonny had a hand in two songs, “Needles and Pins” cowritten with Jack Nitzsche and a hit for the Searchers (and, much later, Tom Petty with Stevie Nicks) and “Dream Baby” (not to be confused with Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream”). I suspect there was a lot of snickering in the studio while the Chris Andrews song “Girl Don’t Come” was recorded, but maybe that’s just me having an AI hallucination. This is another album I acquired through the Columbia Record Club. I liked the title song a whole bunch, although, I’m sorry to say, it’s a little worn out for me now after all these years, abetted by oldies radio, but still good when I can sit still and hear it. I liked pretty much everything by Sonny & Cher in the ‘60s, and then the overheated Cher solo in the ‘70s of course. But the drab production on All I Really Want to Do and the too often underwhelming singer and/or band performance—a terrible version of “I Go to Sleep” is Exhibit A—meant it was never particularly in heavy rotation. Approach with caution.

Hunger (2008)

UK / Ireland, 96 minutes

Director: Steve McQueen

Writers: Enda Walsh, Steve McQueen

Photography: Sean Bobbitt

Music: Lee Abrahams, David Holmes

Editor: Joe Walker

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Brian Milligan, Stuart Graham, Liam McMahon, Helena Bereen, Helen Madden, Des McAleer

Director and cowriter Steve McQueen (not that one) took a bit of a risk with his first feature-length picture, making a “based on real events” show, which is often the kiss of death for me in Hollywood hands. McQueen solves the problems, to the extent that he does (problems of believability chiefly, but also of a sort of pious woodenness), by electing to take the story in the direction of an art film. The setting is Northern Ireland in 1981, the heart of “the Troubles,” and the prison where Irish political prisoners were housed. Labeled terrorists, often convicted of violent political crimes, as prisoners they staged no-wash and hunger strike protests.

Specifically, Hunger is about the second such protest. The first began in 1976, when the prisoners were reclassified from “prisoner of war” status to “criminal.” “No-wash” protests involved refusals to bathe and, in at least this case, smearing excrement on cell walls. Hunger strikes of course are refusals to eat. The second protest, in 1981, escalated into a mounting PR confrontation with prime minister Margaret Thatcher, doing her iron dame thing and reminding me anyway of why she was so reviled. She’s often heard in voiceover here from archival sources. In many ways she is rightly a main target of this picture.

“The School Friend” (1964)

This longish story by Robert Aickman is another of his many good ones—bland and straightforward on the surface, with churning undercurrents. Often, as here, somehow in the last third of his stories I feel like I’m in a dream. This one is about two women who became friends as young teens. Sally is precociously brilliant, raised by her father, who is an academic of some kind. Mel is the first-person narrator, gifted herself—a novelist, we learn, though presently, in her 40s, financially reduced to living with her parents again. There is a subtle but strong suggestion (she understands the illustrations in an edition of Petronius) that Sally has been sexually assaulted by her father. Even if that’s not the case, she’s under her father’s iron will, forced to spend her time doing housework or studying and little else. Sally and Mel go their own ways in their 20s and 30s. Mel follows Sally’s successful career from afar. Now in their 40s, they reconnect. Mel is living with her parents again and Sally’s father has recently died. Sally sends a postcard to Mel to invite her for a visit, even though they live within steps of each other. The picture on the postcard is Mitylene. I had to look into it to find out that Mitylene is the capital of the Greek island of Lesbos—another strong note of sexuality, submerged. Meeting again is a fraught moment in both their lives, at onset of encroaching middle age and perhaps predictable life crises. Then Sally has an accident which lands her in the hospital. She calls on Mel to check on her house and get things for her. It is Mel’s first time in Sally’s house, another strange note in this strange story. In the neighborhood where I grew up there was only one house I never entered. I was a little afraid of the matron who wouldn’t allow entry even to friends of her kids. It feels like something like that is going on in this story. Mel takes advantage of being in the house by herself to thoroughly explore it. All the things she discovers and what she and we the readers can make of them constitute the rest of this excellent story. Only Robert Aickman can make a situation like this work on so many levels at once. Something about this story is chilling and deeply unsettling, though it’s hard to put one’s finger directly on whatever that might be. In other words, it’s another great Aickman story.

Robert Aickman, Dark Entries
Story not available online.

Run-DMC, “Slow and Low (Demo)” (1985)

[listen up!]

I was today years old (as people say) when I realized the Beastie Boys included a cover of this workup on their 1986 album Licensed to Ill. The Beasties found out Run-DMC were leaving it off their second album and went for it. Indeed, the Run-DMC version did not really come to light until the 2005 deluxe edition of King of Rock. Forward another 20 years or so and there I am sitting with the very self-same LP. You know those cheapie “Original Album Classics” packages? Five albums from the same artist, usually their first five, in rudimentary slipcase envelopes. I discovered that some of them, such as the Run-DMC set, include the deluxe versions with all the extras. So anyway, I’m sitting there listening, having myself a Run-DMC renaissance, and this comes up. And I can’t quite get over it. It is ridiculously stripped down to the rhythms. There’s big muffled thumping that is counterpointed with separate strains of lighter, higher-pitched clinking. It is quietly irresistible. The raps are the usual Run-DMC bellowing back and forth, but the recurring words of the chorus go directly to the point: “Let it flow, let yourself go / Slow and low, that is the tempo.” They could have sexualized it but they didn’t. They could have brought in electric guitar—King of Rock continues the experiment that would culminate in the Aerosmith collaboration—but they don’t do that either. Maybe they would have if they’d put it on the original album. But they didn’t, and the simplicity has a lot to do with what makes it so great. The verses do offer some taste of their tendency toward unfortunate cliche (“you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” “on The Gong Show I won’t get gonged,” etc.) but I could not care less about that. The point is the thumping and the clinking and the intricate interplay, with just the right sentiment: “Slow and low, that is the tempo.” It’s a kind of master class in its own right.

The Big Time (1958)

Fritz Leiber has a big reputation in horror and science fiction circles, but I haven’t read enough yet perhaps to be impressed myself. This very short mess of a novel (about 100 pages, a length sometimes considered a novella) won a Hugo (for “Best Novel or Novelette”). Wikipedia says it a nice way: “The Big Time is a story involving only a few characters, but with a vast, cosmic backstory.” That backstory is basically time travel, which can change history and erase people (who can then be “resurrected” somehow). It’s an interesting concept but explanatory exposition is scant here. These characters are similarly in a place, called “a Place,” which requires explanation. But, again, in medias res, baby. Catch the clues and keep up. It started to feel make-believe in childish ways. The Place, by the way, has affinities with Samuel Beckett’s let’s call it universe. It’s possible that reading The Big Time again, knowing what I learned the first time, might open it up more impressively for me. People see something in it. It won a Hugo and is included in a Library of America anthology of science fiction novels. There are some gems among the nine novels gathered there—notably Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination and Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man—but more often they felt slight to me and poorly done. The Big Time could maybe have been bigger and more descriptive, which I hate to say in this era of bloat—big novels part of big series. It was kind of refreshing to see a novel coming in at 100 pages. But it is dense and work to fathom. For about the first 20 pages I could barely make out what was even happening. There’s something that stinks a little of the MENSA mentality going on here, the arrogance and contempt. I’ve seen it in science fiction before. Maybe it’s a tradition. I’m thinking here of Philip Jose Farmer, to name names. And maybe Fritz Leiber too. All I can say about what I’ve read of Leiber is that it usually leaves me cold, but I’m thinking I should give it or him another try. All that love. There has to be something to it. But tastes in genre can often be stubbornly individual, I guess. Ramsey Campbell is another even more extreme example of my lack of understanding.

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

The Wall (1979)

The other day I saw a social media post asking about albums worth listening to in their entirety, from beginning to end. I was surprised to find this double-LP behemoth among the most frequently mentioned, not least because I had spent the summer playing it that way and found myself crawling up the walls, so to speak. “Dreary blob of audio,” I noted one day. The other odd factor for me was that I never had listened to it that way in the first place—I never owned it (nor Tusk by Fleetwood Mac, for that matter, the other big burger from that autumn). I liked “Another Brick in the Wall” and “Comfortably Numb” enough that I did not turn them away when they came up on the radio. In retrospect this is where the Roger Waters takeover was complete. Pink Floyd had looked to me like a bloat job anyway since at least Dark Side of the Moon, though I’ve since found some (not a lot of) interest in Wish You Were Here and Animals. Waters wrote every bit of the music on The Wall and also scripted the freaking 1982 movie directed by Alan Parker (Midnight Express, The Commitments). I saw it when it was new and it left me, er, uncomfortably numb from the assault of bleak paranoia. The grit felt ground into grime. The album is just a lot of weak sauce. I wonder if anyone mentioned to Waters that “Goodbye Blue Sky” scans way too close to “Goodbye Ruby Tuesday” in the clinch of the chorus. But the song also has some effective moments of tension, so all right. “Vera” harks to Vera Lynn, the iconic World War II UK singer who hit with “White Cliffs of Dover” and especially “We’ll Meet Again,” for a weird-toned moment of genuine nostalgia (I think) in this mess. “The Trial” strains for the Kurt Weill note. And I don’t know about you, let alone Waters, but I do not find children singing “We don’t need no education” to be at all a comforting sentiment. The only saving grace about this puffed-up operatic strudel may be that the libretto is essentially incoherent (except the occasional lines and dramatic readings about public school failings). You have to study The Wall, including a look at the movie, to get the heavy bring-down vibe. My recommendation is don’t study it. In fact, I think you can skip it altogether—I know, 50 years too late again. The one bright spot musically is David Gilmour who steps in, seemingly only when Waters allows it, and chips in some very enjoyable guitar solos and the best music here.

Jeff Buckley, “Forget Her” (1993)

[listen up!]

Word is that Jeff Buckley specifically wanted this song left off of what turned out to be his only album, the 1994 Grace. “Forget Her” is a bittersweet breakup song, plurality of emphasis on the bitter, and Buckley wanted to stay friends with his former and presumably worried she would not react well to it. But I’m glad it finally made it out. It’s too good not to release. Anyone who’s had a broken heart (viz., everyone) is likely to feel this down deep. “Don’t fool yourself / She was heartache from the moment that you met her,” he wails. The dramatic scene is that he’s walking the streets, walkin’ after midnight so to speak, to stop his weeping. It’s the terrible moments at the first of the break, when eating and sleeping is self-denied and a kind of catatonic state descends. No appetite, no stopping the brain. On the Kubler-Ross scale of grief, the singer is flitting between anger and bargaining. Indeed, a case can be made that choosing to leave the song off the album was itself a bargaining ploy. None of that is my business or has much to do with why and how this song goes right through me. I have my own history, of course, and this song opens up some of my own darkest, saddest days. It’s cathartic, in a way—certainly I’ve had my daily infatuations with it. It has often stolen up on me unexpectedly one way or another. More than that, at this point, it’s a reminder I survived, made it past, and found happy places for myself that are reasonably free of grudges and resentment. I hope Buckley got there himself before his sad, untimely end. He was obviously a sensitive soul in many ways on many levels and deserved the peace. This beautiful song is one example of what was lost.

Project Hail Mary (2026)

I usually try to avoid comparisons between novels and the movies based on them, not for any particular noble motives but because I don’t often get to books before I see the movies (indeed, if I ever even get to them, looking your way Traumnovelle). This case is an exception—I know Andy Weir’s third novel is reviled by a certain cohort of SF cognoscenti and equally beloved of other readers who may favor entertainment in SF over heavy themes. I can understand how Weir’s jokey, heavily online voice can put off people looking for intellectual heft, but a friend pressed Project Hail Mary on me earlier this year and it turned out to be just what I needed at the time—funny and entertaining yet satisfyingly full of scientifically plausible and complex ideas. Alas, the movie, even at its punishing length near three hours, necessarily simplifies a lot of what is easily the greatest strength of the novel. A mysterious space algae has begun to consume energy directly from the sun, in enough quantity that it will affect the climate on Earth, cooling it to a degree that will likely wipe out human life if not all life. A whole region of the Milky Way has been affected, except for one star about 11 light-years away. A suicide mission is slapped together, sending Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) with two others to investigate and report back—report back via smaller probe ships, that is, because there’s only enough fuel for a one-way trip. There Grace encounters another ship on the same mission. The two throw in together—ultimately Project Hail Mary is a first contact story approximately cubed—and accomplish the mission, though not without many bumps in the road. The movie keeps its explanations lucid but truncated—I have a sense the people who will get the most out of the movie will come into it having already read the book. That’s what I suggest, noting that the movie is not really necessary. You’re probably better off reading the book again, but there’s enough Hollywood magic going on here to make it worth your time. Gosling is just plain good, as always, even in these obvious paycheck blockbusters he’s inclined to do. The story is fun but also realistic about scientific possibility and quite creative and imaginative in addressing the limitations. I mean, that’s mostly Weir, and it’s mostly better in the novel. But if you like movies you’re sure to have a good time here if you already know and like the book. Good with popcorn.

Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste (2003)

This Lester Bangs collection, edited by John Morthland, was intended as a nonredundant companion to the collection edited by Greil Marcus and published in 1987, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Altogether that’s about 800 pages of the original gonzo rock critic. As a general rule the Marcus collection contains most of the hits—including the famous faceoff with Lou Reed and the previously unpublished piece in which Bangs disinters Elvis Presley’s body and reaches into his guts for undigested pharmaceuticals—whereas this later collection more documents the workaday product of the rock critic: scads of record reviews, including one of Bob Dylan’s Desire in which he takes Dylan to task for making shit up. It’s kind of refreshing to see (see also Dylan’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech), but we should remember Bangs regularly made shit up himself, albeit with qualitative differences from what Dylan does. There is a sympathetic meditation on Sid Vicious and his ugly end. We find out much more about Bangs’s status as a jazzbo. There is a great feature piece and interview with Captain Beefheart. In many ways, somewhat surprisingly, Bangs is a stern moralist, although it is sadly somewhat undercut by his life as an alcoholic and drug addict, his death in 1982 at the age of 33 the result of a Darvon overdose. It’s been long enough now that another factor has come into play. I wonder a lot about what he would make of subsequent developments, even about the artists he knew like Lou Reed and Miles Davis, and certainly all kinds of things since then. His literary tastes strike me now as wrong, elevating Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs above all others. He even slags Allen Ginsberg (but not Jack Kerouac). This is all wrong according to me. Some of Bangs’s experimental writing is found here, but not as much as in Carburetor Dung. Full disclosure, that’s a good thing by my lights. That stuff has generally not aged well. But Lester Bangs remains in spirit an important model for anyone considering the commitment to being a rock critic. He’s cheerful enough often enough about being out of touch or at odds with the mainstream, acknowledging his own “bad taste.” You could do worse on primers about how to rock critic.

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

The Great Dictator (1940)

USA, 125 minutes

Director / writer: Charles Chaplin

Photography: Karl Struss, Roland Totheroh

Music: Charles Chaplin, Meredith Wilson

Editors: Willard Nico, Harold Rice

Cast: Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie, Reginald Gardiner, Henry Daniell, Billy Gilbert, Maurice Moscovitch

Getting back to this movie after decades, I was reminded of the old chestnut that “history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes” when a character named Epstein showed up. He’s Jewish and a powerful financier who must be turned to for assistance by the fascist and openly antisemitic regime of Tomainia, which is basically Germany in director and writer Charles Chaplin’s clonking sendup. Chaplin is Adenoid Hynkel, the Phooey (Fuhrer) of Tomainia, which happens to be in an uneasy alliance with Bacteria (Italy). The Tomainian swastika is two X’s, called the double cross. You can tell Chaplin was not holding back here (though an editor or collaborator might have come in handy). For a 1940 Hollywood picture it’s unusually blunt about its points, which is not to say always inspired. Chaplin also plays a Jewish barber and veteran of World War I who lives in the ghetto of an unspecified Tomainian city (he probably couldn’t think of a Warsaw gag ... where are Mad magazine writers when you need them?). The Jewish barber must endure the problems you would expect.

The picture is bloated at over two hours, ham-handed to an infinite degree (did I mention Rome here is called Aroma?), and so self-righteous it verges on chest-pounding narcissism, which are reasons I haven’t been back to it in a long time. In retrospect, this is the beginning of the end for Chaplin. I hated to see it and all that followed—some, admittedly, with bright moments, but it was also the period when he ruined The Gold Rush by trying to add sound. Still, nevertheless, I could not deny that The Great Dictator hits different in 2026. That’s what made the details of a relatively background character named Epstein so eerily remarkable.

“The Erl-King” (1993)

Elizabeth Hand offers some interesting ideas in her long story, such as reaching for Andy Warhol and his Factory clan, featuring a sort of glitter-era rock star figure who seems to exist somewhere between Robert Fripp and the Moody Blues. I wasn’t much persuaded by it, or more often felt vaguely embarrassed it was even being attempted. But there are also lots of things to like, including, paradoxically, that someone is making the attempt at all. The magic is positively Merlinesque. The rock star’s name is Lie Vagal—“Lie” from Elijah and no idea about the last name, though it’s a pretty good rock star name overall. His neighbor, or tenant—it’s complicated—is Aurora Dawn (another good name), a hanger-on Lie knew back in the day, now washed up, middle-aged, and drunken. Think Nico in the ‘80s. Exotic animals populate the story, as rock stars are wont to go for, which draws Aurora’s daughter Linette and her best friend Haley, staying with her for the summer, to Lie. As the plot develops it becomes silly with reveals that are only unlikely, if not entirely unexpected. Lots of details are planted as foreshadowing for what’s to come. The structure of the story tends to make everything feel obvious or hard to believe or both. Did I mention Vagal is mentally ill? Sounds like schizophrenia. He hallucinates and thinks he sees, or is actually able to see, mythical creatures such as fairies and this Erl-King. This stuff is basically not for me, except maybe the rock star part, a theme Hand has also pursued elsewhere. Hand seems to be reasonably well regarded, winning her share of awards and nominations. This story veers closer to fantasy than horror for my taste but I suspect I will be running into her stuff again. “The Erl-King” does have some nice girl power elements, which is always good to see, though perhaps faint praise on my part. I would label it as a kind of “classy” horror, closer to gothic but not as skilled as the best gothic. Just evoking a sort of semi-contemplative mood. But I always appreciate the attempt to bring decadent rock culture into the horror mix.

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

Spike Jones & His City Slickers, “William Tell Overture” (1948)

[listen up!]

In my Dad’s bachelor days after World War II he became a record collector. Instead of the 33-1/3 10-inch and (mainly) 12-inch LP he more favored a different type of album, boxed sets of three seven-inch 45s. With six songs these albums were closer to what we would now call EPs. I wish I could remember more of the artists (George Shearing was one) but as a kid the one that caught me up was the bandleader and novelty specialist Spike Jones—who, remember, in their song “Up on Cripple Creek,” even the Band seemed to endorse. Jones’s version of Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” is pure controlled chaos, starting from the usual trademark razor-sharp performance by Jones and orchestra—no multitracking or overdubs were available in 1948 recording studios, it had to be played, flawlessly, the way you hear it. That is combined with ... a horserace?! Yes, and in the running are horses named Cabbage (“leading by a head”), Girdle (“in the stretch”), Banana (“coming up through the bunch”), Mother-in-Law (“nagging in the rear”). Apartment House (“with plenty of room”), and, of course, Beetlebaum. My appreciation of this whack job actually started with my appreciation for the “William Tell Overture.” I was never particularly into the Lone Ranger TV show, for example, but tuned in whenever I could for the theme song. Eventually my siblings fell in with me on playing and overplaying this, shrieking at the various gags, and bellowing, at top volume, “Beetlebaum” (eventual winner of the race, spoilers). No doubt it annoyed the hell out of my parents. In addition to the Rossini and the horserace, the song features barking dogs, clanging kitchen utensils, thunderclaps, mellow chirping birds, cowbell, bicycle horns, crashing objects falling down, a man gargling a sappy melody, horse whinnying, and more. “It’ll either be a photo finish or an oil painting.” In its way it is exhausting.

Dune (1965)

I had a nice time finally getting to Frank Herbert’s massive worldview of desert planet Arrakis, the first and rather large installment in the Dune franchise—six novels by Frank, a dozen or more by his son Brian with Kevin J. Anderson, a handful of short stories by these three, and who knows what-all out there in the fan fiction wilderness. It must rival Cthulhu by now for world-building impact. I was most impressed by the complexity of the vision, which drills and drills into Arrakis, with visions of a future social order writ large. Depressingly feudal, yet plausible enough. Powerful economic and political forces colliding in slow motion over the planet’s primary export, a “geriatric” drug called “spice,” created by monstrous sandworms the size of whales and dinosaurs. Somewhat prescient for 1965 perhaps, the conceit of spice is as a metaphor for oil, hence in part the heavy and intriguing touches of Arabic and Muslim culture. Then there is the main character, Paul Muad’Dib, who harks to T.E. Lawrence up to and including the epic 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia. I’ve heard it both ways on this first Dune novel all my life. Even those most positive about it tend to acknowledge you have to get through the first hundred pages, and refer to the handy (or, in the case of the kindle product, not so handy, boo hiss) glossary. I saw what they meant, relied on context, and plodded along. It picks up momentum eventually—before much action can occur it has a lot to tell us about the history and ways of Arrakis. I’m not surprised Herbert the elder had five more finished novels and more planned. Dune comes as some kind of inflection point when the classic SF of the ‘40s and ‘50s began giving way to the SF New Wave. The sources of Dune are closer to the classic SF mode, in a way, but the vision was every bit as big or even bigger than what we’d got from Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, or Robert Heinlein. I liked Dune and got the impression it would reward rereading. I’m probably going to try the next novel in the series, Dune Messiah, and see about the rest from there. I do hear of people giving up before they get to the sixth. I’m quite late to Dune, on which it’s likely you know already where you stand. But I’ll still recommend reading it. You’re likely to get something out of it, and probably it makes the movies more legible too.

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

Zombies, “Maybe After He’s Gone” (1968)

[listen up!]

The Zombies’ second album, Odessey and Oracle (with one of the most famous misspellings in rock), sputtered out of the gate but eventually became an acclaimed must-hear album of the ‘60s. Its reputation is as a classic of psychedelia (note cover). Multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Rod Argent is likely the most famous member, going on to the band Argent and a top 5 hit with “Hold Your Head Up" in 1972, and then a solo career (as if “Argent” wasn’t already that). He wrote just under half the songs on Odessey, including the album’s one hit, “Time of the Season,” a signature song for the Zombies which reached #3 in 1969. Bass player Chris White wrote the rest of the songs and, while they go many places and are uniformly good, some are not remotely psychedelic. “Maybe After He’s Gone” is one such, pretty much standard unrequited love business on its face. The lyrical frame and song arrangement somehow elevate it to an impossible poignancy. The singer is really into his girlfriend: “She told me she loved me / With words as soft as morning rain.” Unfortunately, she is done with him and has left for another. The singer, in a swelling chorus, finds pathetic solace in unlikely hopes: “Maybe after he’s gone / She’ll come back, love me again.” We have all been there and know how it goes. You almost have to fight yourself not to tell him, or try to tell him. The chances are good he wouldn’t listen anyway. He would probably even hold it against you. “Maybe After He’s Gone” captures an indelible moment of pathos that cannot be faked, is not soon forgotten, and can leave listeners just a little uncomfortable. It’s beautiful.

Eno (2024)

This odd documentary about Brian Eno is billed as “generative” (as opposed, they say, to AI), which means, according to the PR, there are some 52 quintillion distinct random versions—“no viewing is the same twice.” I don’t know how this technology works. Are there 52 quintillion possibilities in physical media or on streaming platforms? The Criterion Channel seems to have answered that for the moment: no. What they’re doing instead is posting a new version every month (for as long as it’s there and I don’t know how long that is). If you look carefully, there’s a credit in the picture for Criterion and the month. I looked at the June, July, and August versions, and it’s perfectly possible I will make a monthly habit of it for as long as I can. The three I saw, each running about 80 minutes, were indeed distinctly different. I’d guess less than half the scenes I saw in any one of them were in more than one. Roxy Music, for example, was severely underplayed in the July version. Eno’s love of Fela Kuti and a brief scene where he gives his full name (Brian Peter George St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle Eno) were in all three. Also discussions of the Oblique Strategies deck of cards, though they varied. Some recurring scenes occur at different points in the picture. Thus among other things it all seems to be unpredictable by design. It’s refreshing and obviously it fits with Eno’s cybernetic ambient aesthetic in a wry sort of way, but I do have some concerns. It’s clear there is a good more than 80 minutes’ worth of material it can plug in, likely much more. How much goes unseen? How many viewings are recommended for a fuller sense? What are they doing at the Criterion Channel—hitting the scramble button and taking the first version given, or screening more than one to help sort out the better from the good enough? I think it’s safe to say Eno is primarily for Eno fans who already know his work and biography. In fact, there’s a 2011 documentary, Brian Eno – 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell to Earth, that’s probably worth checking into first. While it only covers the ‘70s it is over two and half hours and full of great music and useful information. I suspect the more you know about Eno the more you are likely to enjoy this peculiar exercise—and seeing multiple versions is arguably important too. The interviews are great and so is the music but I found myself missing things I saw only once, such as an anecdote involving Joni Mitchell. Eno may be for fans only, but fans will likely be gratified, especially if they see more than one version. For me, it’s on to September.

“I Do Not Hear You, Sir” (1958)

Avram Davidson was a prolific oddball midcentury genre writer and satirist who specialized in science fiction and fantasy and perhaps most notably the spaces between. He worked in the early ‘60s as editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This story from an Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthology is a good example of the way science fiction often intruded on horror in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Like Cornell Woolrich’s “Someone on the Phone” from 1949 or Robert Aickman’s “Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen” from 1953, it’s also dependent on a certain uncanniness associated with communicating intimately by voice across great distances. Telephones and radio still had the potential to be unsettling—and do to this day, in some cases, as the mysterious ham radio numbers / letters broadcasts attest. But this story is more along the lines of gimmicky and preposterous, like a Twilight Zone episode that can’t quite find its groove. First there’s a convoluted frame story that has the main character in desperate straits for money. He’s defrauded the wrong person and needs to make it good. Even if he can he’s still likely to be murdered. Then there’s something about an inheritance that isn’t worth enough. But there is this mysterious box he hasn’t really figured out yet. It turns out to be a telephone into the 18th century and he’s able to call people like George Washington (who doesn’t sound like any George Washington I’ve ever heard of). But he can call each person only once. How in the world this is supposed to help him I have no idea, but he gets busy calling Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, and others. Really what’s needed here—and I’m not sure there’s anything that can save this story—is some of that H.P. Lovecraft tempo and detail. What is this machine? Why do American Revolution elites have it? Is this something about masons? Unknown, unknown, unknown. In the end they can’t help our hero and all’s not well that doesn’t end well. This story is a weird mix of brash ‘50s cynicism with schoolbookish American history. I do not understand. It does not compute. It may be more the type of story I claim to like—with little explanation—but in this case I must reserve the right to change my mind.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories My Mother Never Told Me, ed. Robert Arthur
Story not available online.

35 Shots of Rum (2008)

35 rhums, France / Germany, 100 minutes

Director: Claire Denis

Writers: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau

Photography: Agnes Godard

Music: Tindersticks

Editor: Guy Lecorne

Cast: Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue, Gregoire Colin, Julieth Mars Toussaint, Adele Ado, Jean-Christophe Folly

I’ve seen a handful or so of pictures by director and cowriter Claire Denis and have to admit they often leave me mystified. That is notably the case with Beau Travail, a much-acclaimed picture I see turning up on all kinds of best-ever lists, though it left me cold. For all its allusive beauty it is ultimately a French Foreign Legion picture with most of the cliches intact, just more gritty and beautiful. Trouble Every Day was an oddly unpleasant vampire show that did not live up to advance billing. On the other hand, I love White Material and its examination of postcolonial Africa, playing it like tense horror. 35 Shots of Rum, by contrast to all the foregoing (she gets around), is set in suburban Paris and far more domestic and meditative, observing bonds of a fractured family and work group and apartment building community as things inevitably shift and change. Time, life, all that.

Lionel (Alex Descas) is a widower in his 50s who works the commuter trains, riding the complexities of the rail lines which we see in hypnotic shots from his view, tangling and disentangling. He lives with his grown daughter, Josephine (Mati Diop), who has an advanced degree in anthropology. It’s unclear when or how her mother, his wife, died but it feels like it’s many years in the past. They still feel her loss, as a road trip to visit her grave late in the picture shows. Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) is a neighbor who drives a cab for a living. She and Lionel have a history and she still has feelings for him, and motherly feelings for Josephine too. Tensions exist between them, but a good deal of sincere affection too. Rounding out the main four in 35 Shots is the brooding, somewhat standoffish and self-mysterious young man Noe (Gregoire Colin), who also lives in the building.

“The Delicate” (1994)

[spoilers] Here’s what Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, editors of the anthology The Weird, have to say about this story by Jeffrey Ford: “Although his fiction comes at the weird sideways, some of his stories, like ‘The Delicate’ (1994), enter the weird with complete abandon. It’s a short, sharp shock of the grotesque.” It is definitely short, only three pages, a riffing free-form assault by some life form called “The Delicate” (which, by the way, appears to have nothing to do with any Michelle Shocked album). The description is compressed and vividly effective, which at least is more than you get from various masters of the weird. “He comes in the latter days of afternoon, through blowing snow, dressed in black, while Schubert’s ‘Eighth’ plays magically in the background.” I like the Schubert detail, but come on. Still, I have to admit there is something inspired in this brief screed. Ford’s imagination is on fire and his voice mostly in control. It could be a vampire, this Delicate. Blood-sucking seems to be involved. The woman he “ingests,” however, has something in her—perhaps taken deliberately?—that turns him into a dog. This all happens in a place called Absentia. Next comes Pharsalus, the hunter, “in from the wilderness.” Absentia sounds like the last outpost of civilization before the North Pole. Pharsalus adopts the dog that used to be or still is the Delicate. Demons are a danger in the wilderness. Winter seems to be called Night and spring Morning. We spend relatively a lot of time with Pharsalus. The Delicate becomes a human-like dog and fights with Pharsalus, who loses and dies but wounds the Delicate, who is soon on a rampage, ingesting townspeople two at a time. I’m enjoying the story more rereading it slowly and somewhat reassembling it here. The army is sent in to get him. What army? Unclear. It all feels Roman to me in a way. “They collect the creature into a plastic bag and freeze-dry him. His remains are taken to Spire City in the Sunbelt where they are stored for the edification of future generations. The funding never comes through to study the crumbs of the Delicate, so he lies in a bag on a shelf and waits.” That’s how it ends. A wild ride but doesn’t add up to much more than that last image maybe.

Jeffrey Ford, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant: And Other Stories
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Listen to story online.

Paloma Faith, “Crybaby” (2017)

[listen up!]

Paloma Faith’s first single from her fourth album kept reminding me of “The Boy Is Mine” by Brandy & Monica, which I see (hear) from a side-by-side listen is about the arpeggiated figure (if I’ve got the term right) played on what sounds like a harp, or maybe some keyboard—glistening, spidery, quite lovely. Listening more closely, I must admit I found the misspelling of the title setting off frustrated copy editor peeves. It should be and by the usage it is “Cry, Baby,” with or without a comma (author’s choice). I looked up a “lyrics video” to clarify, and things got more confusing as I found it given there as “Oh go on and cry baby, crybaby,” as if the singer is encouraging the display of emotion but also mocking the tearfulness and the crier. But that doesn’t fit with the tone of the song and I’m willing to call more misspellings on the part of the video too. The song, according to Wikipedia and it seems plausible enough because why not, is about toxic masculinity. Says Faith, it’s "a conversation between a man and I, and the song questions whether global conflicts would cease to exist if men successfully dealt with their feelings.” OK, whatever, I don’t hear it that way, but I see the point and it’s fair enough to call the whole thing a muddle. The main point is that it’s a catchy, beautiful, and endearing pop song with the harp figure going and Faith churning it out in full warm clarion voice. I think I’m on board with the general sentiments too but as I say that’s a little muddled. Who cares anyway? A message is not often the point of pop music.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Shirley Jackson’s last novel is often called a masterpiece and that’s fair enough, except I’m more inclined to think of Jackson as a short-story writer and “The Lottery” as her masterpiece. ISFDB relegates this short novel to “non-genre” and Wikipedia classifies it as a mystery. No one seems to know what to do with it, including me, though I have no objection to the masterpiece label. It’s about a family with many dark secrets. The darkest may be the one kept by Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood, age 18, the first-person narrator. The Blackwoods have long been resented by the locals for being rich and aloof. A few years before the time of this story someone poisoned the entire family with arsenic in the sugar bowl. Only three survived: Merricat and her sister Constance, who didn’t take sugar with the berries that were served, and Uncle Julian, who barely survived the poisoning and is now disabled and in a wheelchair, with mild encroaching dementia. Merricat is the one most able to go into town twice a week for groceries, but she has to be careful or the townspeople will hassle her. I’m not going to give it away but it’s not hard to figure out who did the poisoning, which is readily revealed at about the beginning of the last third of the novel. Constance was charged with the crime but acquitted, leaving the Blackwoods more isolated and reviled than ever. One day their unpleasant cousin Charles shows up and makes an attempt to take over the family. He’s mostly interested in their money. Merricat can’t stand him and wants him to leave, but he intends to stay. Eventually the conflict leads to the house catching fire, destroying the upper floors. Firefighters—who also hate the Blackwoods—arrive to put out the blaze and the rest of the town shows up to watch and catcall. “Let it burn,” is their sentiment. After the fire is under control a riot breaks out. The townspeople enter the home and destroy everything in it that they can. The fire and the riot are amazing, vivid, painful scenes. The entire novel is suffused with intense tensions. In some ways it’s hard to know why We Have Always Lived in the Castle even exists, it is so full of hate and rage and pointless fury. But it’s also powerful and unforgettable—as good as any reasons to exist.

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

A Session With Gary Lewis & the Playboys (1965)

Around the time I was 11 I got a paper route and joined the Columbia Record Club for the usual deal: a dozen or so albums upfront for almost nothing and then an expensive commitment that never seemed to end (I had a round 2 in the CD era). The club did not have much to offer by way of the Beatles, my main interest, but I got the US version of the Hard Day’s Night soundtrack and an Alvin & the Chipmunks album of all Beatles covers. I also got albums by Cher, Jay & the Americans, Gene Pitney, Johnny Rivers, and more. Sometimes it wasn’t easy even picking out enough freebies. I would say now that the prize of the pack was Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, an album I voluntarily return to that still holds up and then some. But in 1966 I might have pointed to Gary Lewis & the Playboys. I got all three of their first albums (all released in 1965, all clocking in under 30 minutes each) and I listened to them quite a bit. The formula, hardly unique to this band, tended to be two or three hits and/or original songs otherwise matched, to get to the mandatory dozen, with rock ‘n’ roll covers of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s: Chuck Berry, the Coasters, Bobby Darin, the Kinks, Bobby Rydell, the Searchers, Bobby Vee, so on so forth, giving me an oldies education foundation. And the originals, many of which became top 10 hits, were good: “This Diamond Ring” (cowritten by Al Kooper and intended originally for the Drifters), ”Count Me In,” “Everybody Loves a Clown” (written by Lewis, Leon Russell, and producer Snuff Garrett), “She’s Just My Style” (also written by Lewis, Russell, and Garrett, with Al Capps), and “Sure Gonna Miss Her.”

The one exception now, the one big hit I have the hardest time calling good, is “Save Your Heart for Me,” a knockoff of the much better “See You in September.” “Save Your Heart” seems ultra-dippy to the max to me now, but the fact is it was one of the first three singles I ever bought (as I think I’ve noted elsewhere the other two on that momentous occasion were Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” and the Beatles’ “Help!” b/w “I’m Down”). Yes, liking “Save Your Heart for Me” that much embarrasses me now, though I also admit I don’t really mind hearing the song. And of course it also embarrasses me that I was so nutty for Gary Lewis & the Playboys in the first place, but honesty is the best policy around here. Here we have an example of the original “guilty pleasure” problem, though now the pleasure is chiefly nostalgic I suppose. My esteem did not have anything to do consciously with Gary’s famous father (which probably did have something to do with their big showbiz success). Jerry Lewis has never appealed to me much. In fairness, however, I should note I was also into superstar kid group Dino, Desi & Billy at the time (respectively, son of Dean Martin, son of Desi Arnaz, and neighbor kid), who had top 30 hits in 1965 with “I’m a Fool” and “Not the Lovin’ Kind.” It’s possible I was starstruck and don’t remember it that way. By all rights, I should have been embarrassed about any enterprise using the word “playboy” in 1965 but it’s perfectly possible that it was an appeal for me anyway and I have suppressed that memory.

In the ‘90s I picked up a Gary Lewis & the Playboys greatest-hits anthology on CD. They had more and better hits than I remembered, but still only maybe a third of that collection is worth revisiting. I haven’t been near the original albums in decades, an opportunity streaming has afforded me. So, right, I would not remotely call A Session With Gary Lewis & the Playboys—their second LP and the most successful by chart standards—a great album or even a particularly good one. But it’s not terrible. “Count Me In” is one of their best singles, “Without a Word of Warning” is a pretty good original (written by Lewis, Russell, and Garrett). “Little Miss Go-Go” is another original (written by Russell, Garrett, and Louis Yule Brown) but more of a blatant Beach Boys ripoff. “Voodoo Woman,” written by Bobby Goldsboro (!), is very silly but maybe, because it is so silly, the best example of a very silly theme that runs through whole swaths of rock. The covers include Ricky Nelson (“Travelin’ Man”), Everly Brothers (“Walk Right Back”), the Yardbirds (“For Your Love”), Freddy Cannon (“Palisades Park”), and Del Shannon (“Runaway”), five solid lessons in rock ‘n’ roll. They are nowhere near the originals, but if Gary Lewis & the Playboys were only a gateway to the greater glories, well, that will just have to do.

Kesha, “Praying” (2017)

[listen up!]

Curmudgeon incoming: my problems with the pop warbling mode started with Whitney Houston and accelerated in the new century with the coming of TV’s performance competition reality show American Idol, which prized vocal technique and histrionic stagecraft above melody and arrangement. It was deeply alienating for someone reared on the Beatles and Tommy James and, I firmly believe, it’s a misnomer to call it pop music. But by 2017 I was making or trying to make my accommodations and sufficiently softened by then that “Praying” could reach me. It was Kesha’s first single in something like four years. It starts exactly as what I don’t like, all full of its own faux humbleness, with churchy piano chords and Kesha sneaking in at low volume, low energy, laying the ground for the wall of emo to come. I don’t know Kesha’s other work well, but Wikipedia tells me this lead single from her third album can be taken as a departure (from her “dive bar party anthems,” per Vox’s Caroline Framke). Some even characterize “Praying” as a comeback. The high pitch of drama—even the idea that prayer is the recommended necessity for the situation at hand, whatever that somewhat murky situation is exactly—somehow wears down my innate objections, as the overwhelming attack kicks in and washes over me like redemption. When the drums come in full at about 2:25 the song is fully ablaze and roaring. Kesha says it is about forgiving our trespassers. Others hear the calls for forgiveness more as cold brushoff, the moral equivalent of saying “thank you with a capital F.” I mean: “I hope you find your peace / Falling on your knees.” Me, I just get lost in the sweltering gospel texture and hope it works out right for everyone involved. Pray for it, even.