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

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

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

Blur, “Song 2” (1997)

[listen up!]

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

Notes From Underground (1864)

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

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

Paisan (1946)

Paisa’, Italy, 126 minutes

Director: Roberto Rossellini

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

Photography: Otello Martelli

Music: Renzo Rossellini

Editor: Eraldo Da Roma

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

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

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

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

[listen up!]

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

The Bride! (2026)

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

Batman: Year One (1987)

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

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

Vampyr (1932)

Germany / France, 75 minutes

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

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

Photography: Rudolph Mate, Louis Nee

Music: Wolfgang Zeller

Editor: Tonka Taldy

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

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

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

“The End of the Garden” (1991)

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

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

[listen up!]

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

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

Bring Her Back (2025)

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

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

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

Harlan Ellison, Greatest Hits
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Run-D.M.C. (1984)

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

The Great Beauty (2013)

La grande bellezza, Italy / France, 141 minutes

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Writers: Paulo Sorrentino, Umberto Contarello

Photography: Luca Bigazzi

Music: Lele Marchitelli

Editor: Cristiano Travaglioli

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

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

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

Small Faces, “Itchycoo Park” (1967)

[listen up!]

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

Who? (1958)

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

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

So Tough (1993)

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

La Notte (1961)

Italy / France, 122 minutes

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra

Photography: Gianni Di Venanzo

Music: Giorgio Gaslini

Editor: Eraldo Da Roma

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

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

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

“The Woman in the Painting” (1993)

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

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

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

[listen up!]

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