The Thing (1982)

USA, 109 minutes

Director: John Carpenter

Writers: Bill Lancaster, John W. Campbell Jr.

Photography: Dean Cundey

Music: Ennio Morricone

Editor: Todd C. Ramsay

Cast: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, T.K. Carter, David Clennon, Richard Dysart, Richard Masur, Keith David, Charles Hallahan, Peter Maloney, Donald Moffat, Adrienne Barbeau

I see my Halliwell’s film guide falls decidedly on the side of the 1951 original of this picture, which gets two stars to John Carpenter’s 1982 remake’s none: “filled with revolting detail which alienated most audiences,” it tut-tuts. That’s funny because most audiences I know are united on preferring the Carpenter version (billed fore and aft in the titles as John Carpenter’s The Thing so file under J). That includes me, both thumbs wildly up, Howard Hawks or no. I’m not always on the side of, well, let’s call them modernists. I think, for example, many of them might also prefer Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the 1956 original directed by Don Siegel. I definitely prefer the original in that case.

My problems with The Thing as a franchise may start with the original 1938 story by John W. Campbell, Jr., “Who Goes There?” I found it deeply pulpy and dull but a reread may be in order at some point. There is no denying its place as a pioneering landmark of horror SF, with aliens from outer space that have an unusual ability to mimic other species biologically. Even Halliwell’s noticed that the 1951 movie, widely rumored to have been directed by Howard Hawks, dropped the conceit, noting it contains “the first space monster on film, and is quite nimbly made, though it fails to use the central gimmick from the original story.” It is actually exactly that central gimmick that makes Carpenter’s version superior in my mind, along with a bigger budget, a few decades of special effects technology improvements, and a commitment to the visceral. Some other time for nimble direction.

“The Thing in the Weeds” (1913)

William Hope Hodgson’s story of troubles at sea on a dark night of the soul appears in his Sargasso Sea Stories collection, which unfortunately seems to be hard to find at the moment. Not even Project Gutenberg has it online. There are some cheapie kindle products that carry this story, a Delphi kindle collection for Hodgson which includes practically everything he wrote, and a “megapack” that is not as ambitious. In “The Thing in the Weeds” a ship at sea plies relatively uncharted sectors of the northern Atlantic Ocean. It has been pushed there by unusual conditions of the winds and currents. The troubles start with a bad smell after dark one night, as heavy, impenetrable fog creeps in. Then the attacks by ... something ... begin. The second section of the story, the following day, is more where the impulse for rational explanations is indulged, as it turns out to be a giant squid. This story could still fall within realms of the fantastic and/or weird—maybe squids don’t get this big or this aggressive. I don’t know. Maybe they don’t smell this bad. It feels plausible enough, maybe, for people to believe it in 1913. Still, in this case, just to be a second-guessing bitch, I think I’d have preferred less explanation and more ongoing bad news. When attacks occur at night at sea, and a dark monster of some kind is referred to as a “thing”—well, then, you know you’ve got real trouble. Monsters and other horrible stuff at sea was one of Hodgson’s specialties, as the original collection would suggest. The best of his seagoing stories at large is likely “The Voice in the Night”—the “thing” in that one is an inevitably encroaching fungus that tastes good when you’re starving at sea but has unfortunate effects. “You don’t want to know what happens to them,” as cartoon characters often warn one another. I would classify “The Thing in the Weeds” as reasonably good “night of terror” stuff as well as a perfectly competent seagoing tale. But ultimately it is too concerned for me with explanation, which renders it more of an adventure story. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—and Hodgson was always good at whatever he applied himself to—but adventure, lost world, and mostly or entirely invisible monster stories are not really what I’m looking for.

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Beatles, “Come Together” (1969)

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This song was paired on the first single from Abbey Road with Frank Sinatra’s favorite Beatles song, the George Harrison-penned “Something.” For what it’s worth, my Billboard book says “Come Together” peaked at #1 for a week whereas “Something” stalled at #3 for two weeks. Not sure how that works, now or in 1969. I’m just reporting the facts. “Come Together” is credited to Lennon / McCartney according to their longstanding tradition, but it’s obviously a John Lennon song. In 1969, “Come Together” and Abbey Road more generally—and certainly the nearly eight minutes of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” when I finally got to it—represented a ne plus ultra to me of rock music. I was listening to “Come Together” on AM but they were also playing it on FM. But I don’t hear it that way so much anymore. Beatles forays into rock, as such and as found for example all over the White Album, seem more peculiar, insular, and separate. No one did rock quite like the Beatles. I would look now more to, say, Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys, recorded January 1, 1970, as a standard of rock at that time, for better or worse. But the appeal of “Come Together” is enduring, among other things capable of evoking acute memories of the time for me. The words are heavy but nonsensical, insinuating ineffable, slightly menacing vapors the way Lennon could (see also “I Am the Walrus” or “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”). The Beatles’ “Come Together” is a stone classic and even it it’s possible I’ve heard it too much in my life it can still reach me unexpectedly. I also like the 2015 video on youtube, swirling in urgent shades of yellow, red, and orange, with the familiar kooky psychedelic animated style the Beatles adopted, as in Yellow Submarine, but wearing the costumes featured on the Abbey Road album cover, John all in white, Paul barefoot with dark jacket, etc. Good stuff.

Faces of Death (2026)

Although the original 1978 Faces of Death turned out to be mostly a put-up job (see also Cannibal Holocaust) it did include some of its main selling point, that is, actual footage of deaths, accidents, and corpses. I want to be clear I never went for it, nor for Mondo Cane or a similar series in the ‘90s whose name escapes me and appears to be forgotten even by the internet. I realized my limits with these exercises—plain images of death too real do not work for me as entertainment or in any other way. This so-called “reimagining” of Faces of Death is more my speed, all fiction and special effects, though sadly it does not have anything in particular to recommend it. Barbie Ferreira plays Margot Romero (Romero, wink-wink), who works for a social media company reviewing videos that have been reported by users. She approves some, disapproves others—her choices can be a funny commentary on this crazy world we live in today and may be the single best part of the picture. She runs across a series of videos made by the same content creator re-creating some of the mayhem and specific deaths in the original Faces of Death. Margot has her own sad history with gonzo internet content creation which we find more about in piecemeal fashion. She’s on the case but no one, of course, will listen. This Faces of Death relies on all kinds of familiar tropes such as only one character who can see the truth and is unable to convince anyone else, including police. Also, victims tend to make terrible decisions, as seen in countless other horror movies. Viewers often speak aloud to the screen, saying, “No, please, don’t do that.” Or wait, that was just me sitting by myself in my room. The motto of this picture: “The first rule of content creation is give the people what they want.” And we know well, in this day and age, all the things that can mean: conflict, violence, gore, and mean comments. Charli XCX has a part as one of Margot’s coworkers. Dacre Montgomery is the terrible killer, Arthur Spevak. You might recognize him from the TV series Stranger Things. I had hopes this Faces of Death would be better than it is, but it’s competent enough—and Ferreira is good enough in the main role—it’s probably worth putting toward the back end of some weekend double feature or horror fest.

“The Uncharted Isle” (1930)

I thought this story by Clark Ashton Smith was pretty darn good—sometimes, in the wastelands of horror fiction, a good story gives me relief and gratitude. So imagine my surprise and chagrin to find it ranked 4 (below average) and 6 (slightly above average) on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB), where, admittedly, the rankings are scanty. I overcompensated with a 9 (very good but not quite perfect), which should maybe be an 8 (good; recommended)—present standings with my vote: 6.33. But come on. Sure, there’s maybe not much original about the premise. A man, the first-person narrator, is lost at sea, adrift in a small boat after a terrible fire on his ship. He washes up on an island where nothing is right. He doesn’t recognize the vegetation. He doesn’t even recognize the stars at night. Things only get more weird from there. The obvious interpretation is that he is still on the boat at sea, dreaming, or perhaps raving mad. It doesn’t feel like a dream, however. I haven’t read enough Smith yet to know whether he’s even good at dreams, but I don’t think it’s what he’s trying for here. What makes the story work for me is how real it feels, in spite of its fantastic details. Indeed, the details are crazy good and unnerving. He spends a day or so recovering with fresh water, strange fruit, and rest, then explores the island interior. He discovers a community on the other side. He wanders in and finds people there of an unknown ethnicity. He is unable to communicate with them. He appears to be like a ghost, walking unseen among them. They are preoccupied with something that seems to be of great concern. “At first I couldn’t make out what they were doing, or trying to do; but plainly they were much in earnest about it. Some were looking at the sea or the sun, and then at long scrolls of a paper-like material which they held in their hands; and many were grouped on a stone platform around a large, intricate metal apparatus resembling an armillary.” The strong implication, as the story goes along, is that they too are in a wrong place, or something has gone wrong with what they know. The vegetation and the sky may not be theirs either. It feels like interdimensional membranes have grown thin, or something equally out of Algernon Blackwood. It’s a very simple story—in then out of whatever this reality is. What makes it work is that this “other” place is so well and fully imagined. The details are precise and weird, even if the ostensible explanation—it was all the dream of a man adrift at sea for “days and days”—is lame. You come away feeling it could not possibly be just a dream.

Clark Ashton Smith, The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies
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Something Else by the Kinks (1967)

By 1967 the Kinks were well into their hiatus from inventing rock (“You Really Got Me,” “Who’ll Be the Next in Line,” etc.) and on to the semi-twee songwriting exercises of the Davies brothers Ray and Dave, chiefly Ray. Music hall and other home sources were increasingly turned to for so-called “baroque pop,” with, for example, the nearly perfect scanning of “A Well Respected Man,” or the lesser-known “Most Exclusive Residence for Sale,” both of which are from their previous LP Face to Face. Something Else is the album where Ray took over from signature producer Shel Talmy, for better or worse. That’s a close call, as Talmy has impressive credentials just with the Kinks, let alone with the Who (“My Generation”), the Easybeats (“Friday on My Mind”), Roy Harper (Folkjokeopus), and many others. Arguably Something Else comes on as dreary and slow but the merits of all its songs eventually disclose, at least that’s how it has worked for me. The big hit here, though it missed the top 40 in the US, is “Waterloo Sunset,” perhaps the single most highly rated song by the Kinks at large critically. Rock critic Robert Christgau called it “the most beautiful song in the English language,” many others have explicitly agreed, and the 2021 Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list lodged it at #14. I like it too, but for this era of Ray Davies’s songwriting still prefer “A Well Respected Man” and “Sunny Afternoon,” perhaps from the exposure, as they did make the US top 40. I had to work at Something Else a little, as I’ve said. The deluxe versions do little to improve it, with too many stereo / mono duplications that don’t do much for me. Dave’s contributions (“Love Me Til the Sun Shines,” “Funny Face,” and cowriting “Death of a Clown”) evoke some of the band’s rock inclinations to good effect, lending a nice bolt of it to the proceedings. There’s some interesting sense or awareness of the sun here. “Love Me Til the Sun Shines” is followed by “Lazy Old Sun,” which is a bit too droll for me, as is its follow-up, “Afternoon Tea,” even though I’m still singing along. “Funny Face” sets things right again at that point, rock-wise. I feel like I have ended up liking Something Else almost against my will, an unsettling sensation. But I’ll probably play it again one of these days soon.

The Intruder (2004)

L'Intrus, France, 119 minutes

Director: Claire Denis

Writers: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, Jean-Luc Nancy

Photography: Agnes Godard

Music: Stuart Staples

Editor: Nelly Quettier

Cast: Michel Subor, Gregoire Colin, Yekaterina Golubeva, Beatrice Dalle, Florence Loiret Caille, Alex Descas, Bambou, Lolita Chammah

Not surprisingly, perhaps, director and cowriter Claire Denis likely intends many different things by the title of this ponderous and obscure but enrapturingly beautiful picture. Based on an essay by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, it’s the story of a one-time mercenary, Louis Trebor (Michel Subor), in search of literally a new heart and thereby somehow his long-estranged son. The heart is thus an intrusion into his body, he wants desperately to intrude on his son’s life, and the movie itself is an intrusion into the essay (which I don’t know). Early in the show, living in a cabin on an isolated mountain of the western Alps, Louis kills and disposes of the body of a random nighttime intruder into his cabin. So on so forth. The knife is an intrusion on that body. Scraping electric guitar music by Tindersticks principal Stuart Staples.

In fact, thinking of it some more, the title can be taken as an intrusion into cinema history. It’s stupefyingly generic. There are other movies or TV miniseries called The Intruder from 1933, 1953, 1962, 1975, 1979, 1981, 1999, 2005, 2010, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2024, and 2025. I don’t think I’ve seen any of them. The most famous might be the 1962, directed by Roger Corman and starring William Shatner, Frank Maxwell, and Beverly Lunsford. The 2019 horror show gets pride of place in the IMDb search returns. I’m not saying all these intrusions are conscious on Denis’s part, especially not the other pictures. But I bet a bunch of them are. It’s just the way she rolls.

“The Black, Dead Thing” (1933)

Frank Belknap Long’s original title for this story, as published in the edition of Weird Tales pictured above, is a nice artifact of the H.P. Lovecraft era in horror, heaving up with many a gasping shudder “The Black, Dead Thing”—you can positively feel the quivering in that comma. Long was among Lovecraft’s best-known correspondents. “Second Night Out,” the way I found this story in an Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthology and the way it mostly appears in reprints now, is quite a bit more reserved, focused on a key point in an oceangoing journey as I understand it: getting one’s “sea legs” after a day or two of nausea from the pitching rolls of the deep sea. I like the ambiguity, which is in the story but not the original title, that the incident at hand could as well be a delusion while sick. On the other hand, in many ways the story does seem to be focused on erasing any possibility of mistake. Long’s story reminded me of F. Marion Crawford’s classic 1885 “The Upper Berth,” with its creepy corporeal ghost onboard a ship at sea. This thing, like that thing, smells bad. Coming into contact with it, in the dark of course, it feels like a writhing eel. That’s colorful. Our guy’s vacation probably never had a chance and we’re told he spent a long time saving the money for it. I will mention that the black, dead thing is thankfully not racism (you have to worry about that in 1933) but rather something more on the cosmic order, ancient and eternal. Long attacks with blunt instruments, shocking us with darkness and sensory details, attempting somewhat successfully to numb us by evoking a massive featureless face of evil. Whoever changed the title might have done Long and all of us a favor, more lulling us into what becomes a brutal inexplicable life-or-death confrontation. And this, whatever it is, we learn, always seems to happen to someone on the second night out of this voyage. I wouldn’t call this story a classic—so far Long looks to me like one of the more minor figures in Lovecraft’s personal coterie—but I must say I appreciated getting to the eel thing on my own within the story, rather than shrieked at me from the title.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, ed. Robert Arthur
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Brian Eno With Kevin Shields, “The Weight of History” (2018)

[listen up! (9:12)]

Here’s one of those special Record Store Day products that’s definitely worth a listen. Full disclosure, I still have not made a Record Store Day purchase. This lengthy track was released as one side of a so-called double-A-sided 12-inch single. It comes of a collaboration between ambient meister Brian Eno and My Bloody Valentine principal Kevin Shields, an association that feels so natural it also feels overdue for 2018. The other side of the 12-inch, “Only Once Away My Son,” was recorded in 2017, but that’s not much better. As a dirge, “The Weight of History” feels haunted, with foghorn bottoms, unexpected crackling textures, winsome melody, and moaning. In many ways it seems most like just another artifact in Eno’s ambient gallery. But if there’s one thing Eno is good at (and actually there are many) it’s collaborating. Shields and MBV had a reputation for making the loudest music anyone had ever heard in concert, and the albums were decked out with dense layers of feedback and other churning, vibrating noise as setting for delicate melodies. Eno provides the gently lilting tape loops here while Shields works his gentled tremolo-based distortions. Google AI, which sounds like a fan, lets it rip (sourced to Wikipedia and GuitarGangsters.net): “Shields scales back the aggressive, wall-shaking volume of My Bloody Valentine in favor of micro-textured ambient architecture. He swaps explosive distortion for subtle, process-driven soundfields that lock into Brian Eno's generative and tape-loop aesthetics.... Instead of aggressive whammy-bar chord sweeps, Shields applies his signature pitch-bending tremolo control to sustain string whines and single-note drones, keeping the pitch gently drifting and ‘out of tune’ by micro-intervals.” All I can add is: Yup. No wonder people get hooked on using our future robot overlords to help write.

The Secret Glory (1922)

Here’s another novel by Arthur Machen casually hailed here and there as a masterpiece. He spent several years on it at the turn of the 20th century, but it was not published until 1922. In a preface, Machen notes an encounter with an old teacher and mentor. “I am just finishing a book,” Machen says, “a book that everybody will hate.” It’s a fair assessment. I had a good deal of trouble getting through it, though it’s not without its merits. I loved his sardonic take on public school sports and the cruelties of adolescents in bunches. The main character, Ambrose Meyrick, is obviously autobiographical, a dreamer and intellect with no aptitude for physical play. He’s at the school because his uncle is a master, who unfortunately abuses him. An early (and lengthy) caning of Ambrose is notably vivid and sadistic. Ambrose is a reject but he’s on to bigger things in the scheme of life and death, namely, as near as I can tell, the Holy Grail itself. Machen’s speculation on how it got to Wales has something to do with Romans and/or the Roman Catholic Church. As an interesting side note, Protestants are much reviled here. The story makes a kind of sense but only the maddest kind. Ambrose never finishes school and eventually escapes the small Welsh town and his uncle. His father, now dead, was a certified mystic so Ambrose comes by it honestly. His uncle, a cleric as well as instructor, is all materialist with earthly ambitions. Machen is acid on him. Eventually scenes out of Rabelais intrude the narrative. Ambrose is a fan and speaks to his girlfriend about Panurge, Pantagruel, and such. Mostly bewildering for me, but it does make me want to read Rabelais. There is a grail here. It seems likely to be the Holy Grail, from the way it’s described and by its hypnotizing colors. Ambrose is bohemian in lifestyle, traveling to London with his girlfriend and living with her there (and reading Rabelais). I don’t, contra Machen, hate The Secret Glory, but it was a slog for me. It seemed like a lot of work for very little. It also seemed to promise more, perhaps, with a slower, more thoughtful reread, but I’m not sure I will ever get to that.

In case the library is closed due to AI assault, which is not happening.

True Colours (1980)

Split Enz started as an art-rock unit in the ‘70s, based in New Zealand and under heavy influence of Roxy Music. As the Finn brothers, Tim and Neil, came to the fore of the outfit via band changes and fortunes they morphed toward pop music. True Colours is a certain ideal of the late-‘70s new wave version of pop, a complete package, all decked out in primary colors. Your choice for the cover scheme: yellow and blue, red and green, purple and yellow, or blue and orange. More combos were added later and the vinyl itself was laser-etched with the triangles, squares, and rectangles featured on the cover. It was a complete package because, in terms of the music, there’s not one clinker on this album. Most were written by Tim Finn. Two—“Double Happy” written by Eddie Rayner and the LP closer “The Choral Sea” written by the band—are instrumentals, which suggests to me a band so enraptured in love with what they can create they simply shed them like sparks. They are high points. Compare “Space Invader” on The Pretenders. On the rest of the set, the simple verse-chorus-bridge attacks with guitar breaks and vocal harmonies are classic pop music to my brain. A few weeks ago I was complaining about the Whitney Houston / American Idol warbling that now occupies swaths of the pop music landscape (e.g., Kesha), but this Split Enz album is more like it for me. Beatlesque at its most abstract, never specifically evoking them. The songs range from the high-spirited romp of “Shark Attack” to the near-operatics of “I Hope I Never,” so sweetly sad. “Poor Boy” is stately, almost majestic, with a hypnotic tinkling hook. “How Can I Resist Her” sports a great, zooming, synthy instrumental break. Part of the secret brew to new wave and True Colours is an openness to synthesizers and keyboards for textures and light futuristic touches. It was a good direction for pop music and endured for much of the ‘80s (Whitney Houston was released in 1985 and the rest is history there). I’m not sure why, but, as much as I loved this album in its time and still (and earlier efforts such as Dizrythmia too), I never followed closely the further adventures of the Finn brothers, including Crowded House, which I don’t know well though generally like what I’ve heard. None of it has ever sounded as good to me as True Colours. It is a quintessential new wave landmark, with Drums and Wires, Fear of Music, The Pretenders, and 154. One of the best.

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

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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.