Let’s Do It (2022)

Bob Stanley’s prequel to his ambitious, impressive Yeah Yeah Yeah is even more ambitious and impressive—and massive, weighing in at approximately 600 pages. Where Yeah Yeah Yeah covered developments of pop music in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st, largely from a UK perspective, Let’s Do It covers the first half of the 20th century, from 1900 into the 1970s. It always keeps an eye on the UK, but this time most of the action is from the US. Stanley—whose day job is playing keyboards and writing songs for the band St. Etienne—also charts out developments in technology, from wax cylinders and sheet music to the 78s, 33s (LPs), and 45s (7-inch singles) that would bear the music to the populace. He also charts out the entertainment modes and developments of musical theater, from vaudeville to Broadway to Hollywood. He has given himself so much to cover that it may feel a little rushed and compressed. Yet, as with Yeah Yeah Yeah, I see already that I have approximately one metric ton of music to check out. Building playlists starts tomorrow, one chapter at a time. I know I come with a rockist type of resistance to much of this fare. Take Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. Stanley adores them. I have grave lifelong reservations about both. Some Mel Torme and Gordon Jenkins pieces that Stanley endorses enthusiastically have already left me cold as too schmaltzy (note that my use of the term “schmaltz” is, as always, imprecise). So we’ll see. I loved an Irving Berlin playlist I tried, and am already inclined toward Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and many others he talks about, along with many more he mentions that I don’t know well. I’m looking forward to actually hearing more of the music and already feel reasonably confident of Let’s Do It as a guide, though my tastes may differ from Stanley’s. There’s also a history of jazz here, I should say. A thread I thought was intriguing but not developed enough was about pop music itself. What is “pop” and how does it work? He’s playing with the ideas but not entirely pulling them together. I almost think there needs to be a third volume in this series, explicitly exploring “pop” in more depth now that he has established such a useful architecture of the 20th century. I suspect I will be referring to this tome for weeks and months, if not years. Recommended.

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

“Hey, Look at Me!” (1962)

This ghost story by Jack Finney (author of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers novel) is another good one from the Playboy collection, which is worth chasing down. The story is set in the Bay Area, where rising costs, even in the early ‘60s, were driving people out of the cities and into cheaper exurban areas. Writers and other semi-supporting creatives could live well there with a working partner. Like most reasonable people, I’m leery of writers writing about writers and writing. The first-person narrator here, Peter, is one such, a book reviewer by trade. He befriends another writer, Max, a novelist, at their midafternoon breaks in the local coffeeshop, which is within walking distance. Sounds lovely! There’s some interesting tension between them as Max believes critics are not actually writers. He’s nice enough about it but it’s what he thinks. In some part this may be to compensate psychologically for his financial troubles. Peter gets by, not least because his wife works, whereas Max always seems to be struggling. Eventually, to help him, Max becomes a regular dinner guest. A year or two before they met, Peter reviewed Max’s first book and was lukewarm about it, though he did judge it “promising.” They never talk about that. Max is now hard at work on his second novel. But then he dies suddenly—an unexpected illness. Peter and his wife are on vacation at the time. Max is in the ground by the time they’re back and hear of it. Max was estranged from his family and left little behind. His grave is not even marked, as Peter discovers when he and his wife go to pay their respects. Then Peter starts seeing Max around, or a guy who looks like him. He wears uncharacteristically loud outfits, emblazoned with monograms in bright colors. His wife thinks Peter is nutty but then she sees him too. Max does little to acknowledge them when they see him, but Peter thinks he has an explanation. The short version is that manifesting this way uses up most of a ghost’s energy. There’s no time for distractions when there’s something to be done. And what is there to do? Well, that’s why we’re here. See title. It might sound a little silly in synopsis, but there’s a good insight at the center about writers and it’s all actually well done, never overdone, and the central themes hold together well. This is evidence there’s still a lot that could be done with a ghost story even in 1962.

The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Ray Russell
Story not available online.

Primal Scream, “Come Together (7" Mix Andrew Weatherall)” (1990)

[listen up!]

Primal Scream’s third album, Screamadelica, threw out the band’s original alt-indie style in favor of house techno dance approaches. DJ Andrew Weatherall gets producer credit with Hugo Nicolson on much of the album, including “Come Together,” which appears in multiple variations on the original single and on later deluxe packages of the album, with production also handled by Terry Farley and Hypnotone. The album has a veritable rainbow of producers, including the Orb on arguably the best track, “Higher Than the Sun,” and the somewhat unexpected classic-rock man Jimmy Miller, who produced the Rolling Stones’ great run from Beggars Banquet to Goat’s Head Soup, as well as work for Blind Faith, Spencer Davis, and Traffic. He doesn’t seem to have a direct hand in “Come Together,” but his influence is felt there when you compare the tracks he did produce, “Movin’ On Up” and “Damaged.” “Come Together” is just a song, but what a song. The approach is all soul all the time, with heavenly chorus. On the album, it runs over 10 minutes, but most of the variations are closer in size to this 4:26 version. It’s the groove that appeals to me in all of them, with a phalanx of singers, a pure dance drive (see also the cavorting in the official video), and enough maracas-and-bongo-style percussion to fill the studio to the ceiling. Bobby Gillespie’s whisper-perfect vocals take it home. Somehow, back in the day, I wound up with the single—I might still have it around here somewhere—and I never had a problem letting it all play through. It’s just that kind of song. Once it has insinuated into your brain and lifestyle, you’re not likely to mind hearing it on repeat.

Obsession (2025)

You’ve got to hand it to Obsession for being so arguably unoriginal, borrowing familiar ideas from all over the place and simply making them work. All credit to director and writer Curry Barker for fashioning a masterful piece of horror that is entertaining as often as it shocks (including, for example, one of the best calculated jump scare cuts I’ve ever seen). Much of what makes Obsession so great is the performance by Inde Navarrette, which is brilliant. She plays a young woman named Nikki on whom Bear (Michael Johnston) has a crush. But he is too stammeringly shy to do anything about it. One day he wanders into a mysterious antique shop. It’s not run by Keye Luke like the one in Gremlins, but it does sell a mysterious novelty product called One Wish Willow. The One Wish Willow is packaged up with warnings. They even have a phone number to call, though we learn later (in a chilling scene that ends deliciously over the top) the person answering only says nothing can be done. The One Wish Willow looks like something you would buy from Archie McPhee or Spencer Gifts. The idea is that you get one wish. If you’re thinking about the classic horror story by W.W. Jacobs now, “The Monkey’s Paw,” you are on the right track. These wishes come true, and they can’t be reversed, but they don’t come true the way they were intended. Bear, of course, impulsively makes the wish we’re all expecting: “I wish Nikki Freeman loved me more than anyone in the fucking world.” The wish comes true. Nikki and Bear have a brief honeymoon period before a nightmare of rom-comic proportions descends. Nikki, who only ever had feelings for Bear “in the friend zone,” soon becomes an even more psychotic version of Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) from Fatal Attraction. She wails about Bear leaving her even if he’s just going to the bathroom. She plasters the inside of his apartment door with duct tape attempting to keep him trapped in there. She pitches screaming fits constantly. Her ambition has always been to be a writer and she’s prone to going off on poetic soliloquies that scare everyone around her, such as an incestual version of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. You have to see this movie to believe how good it is. The ending is amazing. Put this Obsession up there with “The Monkey’s Paw,” Gremlins, and Fatal Attraction too. Nice to see a horror show that knows how to do it. It’s funny too.

A Bend in the River (1979)

V.S. Naipaul’s novel of postcolonial Africa is a portrait of a shifting mosaic of chaos alternating with brief periods of peace. Salim is the main character and first-person narrator. Much of the action and characters are abstracted, though it’s possible to speculate on real-life sources. As the novel begins, Salim has purchased “a shop” and moved from an eastern coastal region to a small town in the interior located, yes, at a bend in a river. We don’t learn what town, what river, or even what Salim peddles in the shop. I think the intent is to make this a generic postcolonial tale. The current president of the unnamed country is referred to only as “the President.” He is a pervasive, distant presence, attempting to work the politics and economy to the greater good of the country and its populace. But his administration is also riddled with corruption, of course. Salim is a smart survivor, able for the most part to avoid the troubles all around him even as they threaten to bring him down with others in his circle of friends and acquaintances. The novel takes place over many years, during which the government’s approach to improvements changes constantly. Salim has a number of contacts, including a servant, who all get their time in this story. Some readers have taken A Bend in the River as a defense of European colonialism but I don’t really see that. In many ways this colonialism introduced terrible political ideas to Africans even as it destroyed practically everything that could contribute to stability. It seems to me Naipaul is pretty clear about that. Colonialism provided some stability, arguably, but changed life in Africa much for the worse. The chaos that followed independence, in about the 1950s and 1960s, is artifact of the failure of colonialism. Naipaul is scrupulous about not raising emotions of outrage, though he easily could have with some of the things going on here. Some of the worst, toward the end, did reach me and I could feel the rage. Naipaul seems more intent on keeping the temperature cool, even slightly comic, which ultimately made this novel feel more credible to me. I don’t think there’s any question he is addressing the problems colonialism brought to Africa. It was still trying to recover in 1979. It’s still trying to recover now. Read this with exercises by Joseph Conrad and J.M. Coetzee.

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

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.

Listen to story online.

Beatles, “Come Together” (1969)

[listen up!]

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
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

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
Read story online (scroll down).
Listen to story online.

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
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.