Live at the Apollo (1963)

[2010 review here]

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

“If There Were No Benny Cemoli” (1963)

This story by Philip K. Dick is more like a paranoid dystopia all dressed up in sci-fi trappings. Aliens from Proxima Centauri have arrived to investigate, 10 years later, an all-out atomic war that occurred on Earth and led to massive destruction. There are a lot of levels and much complexity to the investigation and indeed to the story, with a Phildickian take on media coverage and distribution that he has used elsewhere and I’ve never quite understood, called “homeopapes.” Whatever it is exactly, it’s how news information gets around in this slice of the PKD universe. The group responsible for the war is still at large and they have taken control of the “cephalon” of the homeopape. My online dictionary defines “cephalon” as “(in some arthropods, especially trilobites) the region of the head, composed of fused segments.” So a somewhat distractingly precise way of saying brain or central processing unit. Maybe it’s me but I’m not sure Dick always gives us enough context. Anyway, the spy-craft villains are using the homeopapes to set up a more or less fictional character (albeit a real person, or patsy), one Benny Cemoli, to be framed for starting the war. They’re pretty sure they can outwit the alien investigators. This story is more short on Dick’s high concepts and works mostly as a kind of bitter, cynical spy story in a dystopic world. I’m turning to the internet for help on homeopapes. They also appeared in Ubik and I’m getting the definition “An automated device that produces a newspaper without human assistance.” In today’s parlance, a news feed made out of algorithms. So more of a production idea than distribution, presumably accessed via personal electronic devices, although who knows what Dick might have been thinking of in 1963. The subterfuge / propaganda work is only moderately compelling now. It feels like it’s been done a lot—start with Nineteen Eighty-Four—but maybe it felt more fresh in 1963. Sometimes it’s more evident than others that speed was basically Dick’s drug of choice. Paranoia gets to be a prime mode of thinking and then, in that frame of mind, the intricacies of betrayal and getting over can seem almost heroic, even though often they are not.

Philip K. Dick, The Preserving Machine
Story not available online.

Please Please Me (1963)

I’m still surprised when I hear people refer to early Beatles music as “bubblegum,” partly because the term never came into use until about 1967, when the Ohio Express had hits with songs like “Yummy Yummy Yummy” and “Chewy Chewy,” and partly because I think even these early Beatles have it over most bubblegum (a term that has since been abused anyway practically unto meaninglessness). Sure, you can retcon early Beatles into the definition of bubblegum as “pop music in a catchy and upbeat style that is marketed for children and adolescents” (Wikipedia). I still find it fascinating that most 5-year-olds respond positively to the Beatles, notably the early stuff—just as a lot of 14-year-olds seem to go by instinct for Nirvana. There’s something age-specific going on here, but Please Please Me nonetheless is an album for everyone except Beatles grinches. It’s their first album, released in the UK and subsequently mangled and/or sat on in the US. It’s a reasonably typical pop album for 1963, released first in mono and later in stereo, and with covers making up nearly half the songs. That’s actually a low ratio for pop albums in 1963, which were more often affairs of one or two hits and the rest covers. Please Please Me also has a handful of classic Beatles standards—“I Saw Her Standing There,” the title song “Please Please Me,” “Love Me Do,” and “Twist and Shout” (an Isley Brothers cover they made their own), along with two of my favorite Beatles singalongs, “P.S. I Love You” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret.” But the somewhat freakish choice of covers also has a lot to do with what makes this such an interesting album: “Chains,” a 1962 hit by the Cookies, “Anna (Go to Him),” a 1962 hit written and recorded by soul singer Arthur Alexander, “Boys,” a 1960 Shirelles B-side, and, perhaps most remarkable, “A Taste of Honey” and “Baby It’s You,” which would be hits later for Herb Alpert (1965) and Smith (1969), respectively. The Shirelles also got a hit with “Baby It’s You” in 1961. Meanwhile, “Misery” is a Lennon / McCartney original, but I happen to know the song better as covered by the Flamin’ Groovies on Shake Some Action. There’s a lot of pure pleasure in this set of 14 songs, a worthy start to an iconic career. On the question of early Beatles, I don’t think Please Please Me is nearly up to the stellar highs of A Hard Day’s Night, but I like it more than either With the Beatles or Beatles for Sale.

“The Witch’s Bone” (1963)

William Croft Dickinson, born in 1897, was a Scottish historian who wrote ghost stories on the side. This one, a tidy if somewhat predictable tale with a dash of voodoo, was written when he was in his 60s. He certainly had the craft down. “The Witch’s Bone” feels old-fashioned somehow, riffing on scientific sources in anthropology and expeditions abroad to mysterious destinations. Michael Elliott, a doctor and man of many credentials (“MA, LLD, FSA,” etc.), has something called a witch’s bone which can be used to throw curses on others in a somewhat elaborate and somewhat inconsistent ritual involving a doll created from sealing wax that is mistreated, pierced with pins. It’s a lot like voodoo dolls even though the word “voodoo” is never used. Elliott was presenting his witch’s bone and discussing it in a meeting of an Antiquarian Society. But another member—Mackenzie Grant, a self-appointed foe of Elliott—stands up and interrupts and ridicules him. It’s not the first time Grant has embarrassed Elliott this way, although, in fairness, Grant has not necessarily singled out Elliott. He’s just that way and does it a lot, not only with Elliott. Foolish mortal, questioning beyond his ken. Elliott is fed up with it. He goes home and, in a pique, throws a curse. Within 24 hours Grant has died a horrible death, an auto accident in which “practically every bone in his body was broken.” Now Elliott feels guilty and fearful of the power. Meanwhile, a museum has requested the loan of the witch’s bone for an exhibition it is putting together on “Folk Beliefs and Customs.” The witch’s bone is from another county in Scotland. Elliott fears what could happen but has no rational reason to decline, and so another terrible death is ultimately in the offing. The story is predictable, but brutally imagined and coldly worked out, with a power to cast a chill that obscures its various faults. Dickinson evokes the horrors well. There’s a good detail about how the bone gives up a death rattle when the person of interest has died their horrible death, sort of like a cell phone on vibrate going off. It’s all a bit mechanical, sure, but also nicely thought through and it reads more like something from the 1930s than the 1960s, a virtue in its way, at least in this case.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Listen to story online.

“The Other Side of the Mountain” (1963)

This long story by the French writer Michel Bernanos is pretty good, another quality yarn turned up by editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer in The Weird anthology. It is taken as a novel by many, maybe because of its ambitious scope. It starts as a wild and harrowing seagoing adventure and then turns into more classic weird in the second half. It reminded me some of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” both for the size of its vision and for its original take on lost world stories. There’s a lot of stuff in this story I’ve never seen or heard of before. It’s one of those where the greatest temptation is to tell people to just go read it. Things like the trees worshipping the mountain before dawn, in an unexplained eerie light, or the feel of a mouth and lips made of sand at the bottom of a river, are there to be discovered in the full pleasures of their contexts. The sea tale has almost nothing to do with the lost world we end up in, but it’s a rip-roaring way into the bigger story and I wouldn’t be without it. You get mutiny, madness, cannibalism, and more. The central relationship in this story is between an 18-year-old youth tricked into the voyage and the much older ship’s cook, a familiar setup for adventuring, protector/mentor and protege, grounding these strange events into a welcome human frame as things go along. Make no mistake, this story amounts to approximately weirdness squared. Yet it moves quickly and nimbly. It never lingers overlong on anything, perhaps because it knows well how many surprises it has around so many corners. Another touchpoint with the long Lovecraft are the strange statues found everywhere on the island (or continent, whatever it is), reminiscent of the intricate carvings in Lovecraft’s place. This is definitely world-building stuff, but the style of language is never ponderous, the way Lovecraft and much fantasy can be. This story tends to strip out a lot that’s ultimately unnecessary—we never learn anything about how the youth was tricked onto the voyage, other than that it happened that way—and keeps the narrative nicely propelled. Description necessarily gets dense on the island, but even there, generally, we’re only told what we need to know to keep the story moving in its intended direction, as per the title. I admit I struggle in some cases with the VanderMeers’ tastes, but they do have a real nose for the good ones.

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

City of Night (1963)

I really liked John Rechy's novel of the "hustler" life circa the late '50s and early '60s. It counts as a novel officially, but obviously has connections to autobiography and memoir, telling Rechy's stories and experiences as an anonymous "youngman" traveling from New York to Los Angeles to San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, and points elsewhere. I learned a lot I had never known about hustling, from a time when LGBTQ+-related activity was necessarily underground if not outright against the law. Rechy does a nice job of going directly to the soul of many of the characters he meets—the queens, fairies, nellies, hustlers, and other figures populating the scene, including lots of weird johns. Maybe the big lesson again is that this community is an enduring part of the human experience and won't be denied. The only choice for anyone once they have figured it out is to be themselves, and if that means sexuality out of the mainstream that makes their courage then at least as great as it is now, when society still does not want to accept their reality and must be confronted. The novel is episodic and anecdotal and the best part may be Rechy's writing, terse and colorful. He occasionally veers off into beat styles that don't always work, but they often do and they always set an effective tone of urgency. I love all the stories and memorable characters—trans folks insisting on their realities, hustlers insisting (faintly ridiculously) on their hetero normativity, men who sought to escape themselves by marrying and having children and now wander in and out of the scene with desperation and sadness. All the rules people have in this self-enclosed world, the pettiness that erupts among them and the solidarity too, are fascinating in many different ways. City of Night served as one source for director Gus Van Sant's movie My Own Private Idaho. Like the movie, the novel is much more than a litany of lurid stories—in fact, they're not really lurid at all, given the subject, but more a series of portraits of souls in agony, attempting to find and accept themselves. That might sound pretentious, but City of Night is anything but that. It's actually one of the more profound things I've read in a while.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"The Snake" (1963)

[Original review of Johnny Rivers recording here. Version of "The Snake" by Oscar Brown Jr. here, version by Al Wilson here. My video of the Johnny Rivers version here. Version by Donald Trump here.]

[swear words] Out on the social media beat: I started my own YouTube channel (I know it's comical that I even have one) because, several years ago when I was much better about doing regular 300-word write-ups of individual songs, I would occasionally run across one that somehow wasn't on YouTube yet. So I'd make a video and upload it, giving me something to point to in my review and enabling people, at least in theory, to hear the song. All the song videos on my channel, such as they are all 17 of them, represent the rock-bottom production value type of video, made from a music file of the song with a decent bitrate and for visuals using a static image, usually the cover of an album that houses the song. This is also from back in the days when I kept music files by the gigabyte on my hard drive. Mostly these videos just sit there, accruing modest levels of views. Five digits is big traffic for them. Most are obscure one way or another, just things I love and have written about: Jonathan Richman's "That Summer Feeling," Percy Mayfield's "The River's Invitation," Boss Hog's "Ski Bunny," etc. Inevitably they attract the kind of comments every YouTube song video attracts. After newspaper sites, YouTube comments are well known for being the most rancid on a per capita basis. They also contain significant portions of vacuousness.

Once in a while someone files a complaint and then a video is banned in certain countries, or everywhere, usually for commercial reasons. It's not always permanent, and I can't always tell when it changes because the videos are always visible to me (thanks YouTube!). But some do appear to go live more widely on and off, judging by view count patterns. Just this month, someone complained about the Angry Samoans video for "They Saved Hitler's Cock." Honestly, I'm so chickenshit I didn't even use the expletive, labeling the video simply "They Saved Hitlers" to avoid problems (for which, just last month, someone else came along and mocked me ... for that matter, I ducked a similar way in my write-up). In this case, though possibly it was the usual copyright protectionism, I suspect the problem was not the word "cock" like I worried about originally but the word "Hitler." The song uses the name lightly, making him the usual symbol of bottomless evil but more playing it for a joke. I happen to think it's a pretty good joke, which is why I was writing it up in the first place. But in the current historical moment I have much less problem with putting it out of sight. If people are going to be idiots about it, I prefer seeing Hitler and his ideas shunned categorically and the more aggressively the better.

In terms of the Johnny Rivers song, that's a different matter, posing a quandary I have been wrestling with for some time. I posted the video on November 8, 2012 (I must say I'm a little chilled by the fact that it was two days after the 2012 US presidential election and exactly four years before the next). I wrote about it because I think Johnny Rivers is generally underrated and I wanted to say some things about that, because I like the song (and, more exactly, I like the album that it is the first song on), and because I felt nostalgic about the album. My judgment when I wrote it up was that the song plays way too loose with misogyny—it's dated—and the whole story of the snake is trite. My misogyny angle was confirmed in a way by the first comment that came in, not so long after posting it (by the way, I'm sure all or most of these comments are from people finding the video on YouTube or the internet and very few if any via my blog posts, at least I hope so): "all cunts are snakes!" (three years later someone replied "PIG!"). Now I'm going to talk about YouTube comments.

Ten Plus One (1963)

This entry in Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series is a single "big case" mystery with most of its essentials as if filched from an Agatha Christie cozy. It doesn't really play fair either way. As a cozy, it does not give us anything like a reasonable chance to figure it out. As a police procedural, it's just a little unbelievable. A sniper is on the loose in the 87th Precinct, which means our usual gang of detectives is responsible for the case, including all the murders that follow. There's also a Nancy Drew character on hand, Cindy Forrest, who later becomes a love interest for Bert Kling. At first the detectives think it's a serial killer—it's 1963 so the term wasn't yet common, making him a "nut" or a "madman." Working at the problem assiduously, the detectives finally find the link among the victims and counting, and then the tiresome business of playing out follows. This isn't one of the best, I must say. It's just the one case, which is rarely believable at any point, and the personal asides are minimal. At the same time it's a little longer than earlier volumes, so the result is it also feels padded, riding on the sensationalism of the Deadly Sniper. Minneapolis is mentioned, which might have some interest for anyone who's lived there, though the city itself is all off-stage. The year 1963 marks a low point in McBain's productivity on the series, along with 1962, which may or may not be explained by his working on movies such as Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and Akira Kurosawa's High and Low. This one mostly feels like McBain is phoning it in. The resolution turns on an astonishing presumption of both depravity and prudery, removing it definitively from the cozy realm. Across the arc of the story, once the sniper gets to snipin', that's when it really goes off the rails. Which covers the broad majority of action here. You can hold off on this one awhile.

In case it's not at the library.

The Leopard (1963)

Il gattopardo, Italy / France, 185 minutes
Director: Luchino Visconti
Writers: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Enrico Medioli, Massimo Franciosa, Luchino Visconti
Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Music: Nino Rota
Editor: Mario Serandrei
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon, Paolo Stoppa, Serge Reggiani, Leslie French, Terence Hill, Lucilla Morlacchi

Whole warehouses of imposing magnificence are packed into director and cowriter Luchino Visconti's treatment of fictional 19th-century Sicilian aristocrat Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (Burt Lancaster), based on the highly regarded novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (which I don't know). It's the historical eve of the Italian aristocracy's demise, in 1860, and the prince is coming to terms with the coming of modern ways, "after 25 centuries," as he puts it. Civil war rages outside his very doors—the corpse of a royalist soldier is found in his garden in the first scene—and he really has no other choice but to let go of the past. The magnificence comes by the bale: The Leopard boasts one of Nino Rota's best scores, its production design and costuming vibrate with sumptuous wealth, and its original running time pushed closer to four hours than three. In the movies, long running times have stood in for self-evident seriousness since at least Gone With the Wind, if not Intolerance.

In fact, The Leopard is another one of those highly acclaimed movies found on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? that comes with its own tortured version history, joining The Magnificent Ambersons, Metropolis, The Rules of the Game, and too many others to exist now in compromised twilight versions, living in the shadow of variously unknowable originals. The Leopard started at 205 minutes but after it got a lot of bad reviews the American distributor took out 40 minutes or so. Later it all evened out with a 185-minute Italian-language version, found in the Criterion package, based on Visconti's preferred cut (there was also a 195-minute version that played at Cannes). Just for kicks, or for those in a hurry, the Criterion edition also includes the 161-minute American cut. Both Lancaster and the magnificent Claudia Cardinale are dubbed in the Italian version, but Lancaster's voice can be heard in the short version.

The Presidential Papers (1963)

Those, like myself, pitiful enough to appreciate the high-flown improvisations of philosophical substance and walking the high wire of egotism in essay form found in Advertisements for Myself can get more where that came from in this and two more collections that followed (Cannibals and Christians from 1966 and Pieces and Pontifications from 1982), which I won't otherwise deal with in this series, except to note he's not normally so pointlessly alliterative. But they are nearly as good. I am weak for Mailer's riffing the way others might be for similar exercises by Lester Bangs or Pauline Kael. He is something of their literary counterpart, and half the fun is watching him dazzle, when he does. Here he worries to death the words "existentialism" and "totalitarianism," whose definitions he seems to want to bend to his will, and otherwise engages in bratty exegeses on scatology, boxing, Cuba, etc. It's very much of its time, explicitly addressing itself to John Kennedy and his administration. One of the best pieces here, in fact, is Mailer's coverage for Esquire of the 1960 political conventions. There's also an interesting interview with First Lady Jackie. Speaking of ladies, you should also know it's painfully dated in its sexual politics, which Mailer only makes worse with his own specifically. For example, it's possible he never uses the word "woman" but rather only "lady," "girl," or "female"—it seems like him to do so deliberately, though I don't recall it as an issue of usage until the '70s. At any rate, prepare for wincing. I still like the way Mailer thinks, however, the way his mind moves and flits and lands on things and flies off again. His attempts here to argue implicitly that existence itself comes with a bent toward totalitarianism, all mixed up with his own loutishness, redeemed by a sense of searching honestly under it all, is fun to ride along with. That's not least perhaps because those problems of those times can seem almost quaint now. He does cover the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, with an interesting sense of what it felt like. Interestingly, the book was published before the John Kennedy assassination. I appreciate that because it affords a view into Kennedy and those times that is somewhat at variance with the conventional half-dollar man-on-the-moon narratives that came after—a refreshing view of him mired down politically, unable to get things done, and with unhappy people around him on every side.

In case it's not at the library.

The Great Escape (1963)

USA, 172 minutes
Director: John Sturges
Writers: Paul Brickhill, James Clavell, W.R. Burnett
Photography: Daniel L. Fapp
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Editor: Ferris Webster
Cast: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, James Donald, Charles Bronson, Donald Pleasence, James Coburn, David McCallum, Gordon Jackson, John Leyton, Nigel Stock

Yes, I admit, a certain comfort level probably went into choosing this for my 1963 Movie of the Year—in many ways The Great Escape is exactly that, a great escape, perfect with popcorn and on family holiday occasions. It concerns World War II and evil Nazis, and more or less the triumph of good over evil, though not exactly. It's set in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp with cross-sections of population representing many nations of vigorous Allied troops, who never say die and never stop thwarting damn Nazis. It is packed full of young movie stars, notably Steve McQueen. At nearly three hours (and could / should have been closer to two) it's typical of the Hollywood bloat of these times. And perhaps because of the generally overlighted and unimaginative way it is blocked and staged, it often feels like a TV production—Hogan's Heroes, to be specific, which lifted plenty off it. Even the chirpy, tootling music sounds the same.

But for an easy bloat job, I think The Great Escape is actually pretty good. It's all narrative, a giant caper movie—with the usual "true story" disclaimers out front to handicap the excesses (the explanatory note calls them "compressions")—telling the story of an attempt to break no fewer than 250 POWs out of the camp at once, with the basic idea of providing a disrupting influence in the war even from within the formal borders of Germany. I don't go for caper movies normally, but I like this one, which is so efficient about laying out and executing its plot elements. Of course, the Nazis aren't as witless here as they were in Hogan's Heroes, though their brand of evil is represented on simplest levels, making them look more like petty tyrant bureaucrats than ruthless cannibalizing monsters. No need to worry for the little ones, in other words. It works fine as family fare. These Nazis are not as smart as any of their prisoners and we all know how the war turned out anyway. If anything it's triumphalism with a side dish of indomitable American exceptionalism that is what's for dinner here.

Now Wait for Last Year (1963)

Time travel via taking drugs is a strange idea, although it's maybe not so strange that Philip K. Dick would take it on. (What's strange to me is that Daphne du Maurier tried it too.) As usual, there is a lot going on here. Earth is involved in an interstellar war in which Terrans (so-called) have an uneasy alliance with Lilistar, who are genetic cousins. But it appears likely their common enemy, an alien insect race, might make the better partner. Leaders of nations and captains of industry clash with mixed motivations. It's not actually a very interesting story. But Dick has a way about him. Here he introduces parallel universes as well as time-travel paradoxes—or more accurately, perhaps, uses the one to explain the other, as convenient—and quickly lets the implications run to infinity. So a wise leader of Earth has spent years yanking in counterparts of himself to serve various roles, dipping in as needed to alternative time streams and/or parallel universes. In the present time and space of most of the novel the leader, Gino Molinari aka "The Mole," has a perplexing medical condition in which he continually contracts fatal diseases from which he always mysteriously recovers. This is never exactly explained. But there is one very funny scene in which he stalls for time in a delicate political negotiation by lapsing into a severe medical condition that requires immediate major surgery. What this "ploy" accomplishes is explained a little better—the political gamesmanship. But many other things happen that make little sense. Eventually the drug JJ-180 appears and something like a plot clanks into view. The ideas are interesting in flashes, not unusual, but here I'm not otherwise very satisfied with the clinical way Dick sets up his pieces and moves them about—a doctor and his wife, an antique dealer, have a bad marriage. The Moles spins and pirouettes to a tune only he can hear, evidently successful at minimizing risk and danger to Terrans—a hero. People take JJ-180 and move about in time. There are questions about why some go forward and some go back. There are questions about moving physical objects between time streams, and of course there are the usual questions about various time travel paradoxes. Questions, questions, questions. I want some answers!

In case it's not at the library.

Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1963)

Fun facts to know and tell: The publication date for Dr. Bloodmoney is 1965, the subtitle is "or How We Got Along After the Bomb," and the scenario is a post-apocalypse Earth wrecked by nuclear war. Yet Philip K. Dick's novel was actually written prior to the release of Stanley Kubrick's movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (the first test screening for which, as an entirely gratuitous aside, was November 22, 1963), Thus, the tie-in is more likely the inspiration of an editor with an eye cocked on the market, as reported in Wikipedia. Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano called Dr. Bloodmoney a masterpiece, but I'm not so sure. Certainly it has many of the wholly unexpected and wonderfully weird hallmarks of Dick: a pair of emotionally symbiotic twins, one living inside the other ... an astronaut stuck in orbit reading Of Human Bondage to the survivors below ... mutant strains of animals and humans from the radiation ... and not one but two devastating nuclear events. Mental illness once again tends to reflect deeper understanding. And all of it is related in straightforward, unadorned fashion. I'm just not sure it altogether works. There is a fairly startling lack of any sense of trauma and/or dread among the survivors. They worry about a lot of weird little things, but the basic situation is so calmly accepted by one and all, less than 10 years after ruinous nuclear incidents, that it becomes hard to believe and a little dull for that. Even Dr. Strangelove, a comedy, strikes notes that put its events into perspective. On the other hand, Dr. Bloodmoney, which doesn't seem to me particularly comic in its intent, can be funny. Reading Of Human Bondage aloud from space, for example. One of Dick's canniest strategies always is the simplicity of his language, which can set the strange ideas into evocative context, but here it more often felt banal. There was not a single character I cared much of anything about—and in general there are way too many of them, with no obvious purpose except to square up narrative circles. I suppose there's something useful suggested by the banality, and even the smallest of Dick's ideas can open up wide. But this feels so emotionally disconnected from its own realities as to approach a kind of disassociativeness in its own right, which I appreciate. But to what end? Compared to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, for example, this too often feels like a kindergarten make-believe to me.

In case it's not at the library.

Impressions, "It's All Right" (1963)

Oct. 12, 1963, #4
(listen)

Here's the biggest single for the Impressions and for lead singer and songwriter Curtis Mayfield too, at least until his solo career got underway in the '70s and he matched the chart performance with "Freddie's Dead." But that was 1972 and this is 1963 and therein lies all the difference. In many ways you wouldn't even know it's the same artist. That was the year that gave us "Be My Baby," "Blowin' in the Wind," "Guantanamera," "In My Room," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Louie Louie," "Ring of Fire," and "Surfin' Bird," so it's easy to lose track of "It's All Right" in the shuffle. Built for comfort, it moves slow—"When lights are low / When you move it slow / It sounds like a motor," as the song explains—powered by luminous harmonies and inflected by a nagging guitar upstroke and the kindest horn section you may ever hear. It is at once earthly and celestial. "When you wake up early in the morning / Feeling sad like so many of us do," you will know just what to do, now that you are reminded of the existence of this song. It's pitched at such a simple level that when the handclaps start near the end they are amazingly effective—the rousing moral equivalent of a guitar solo. And there is always hope, that is what this song is here to tell us. It's about enduring. "Someday I'll find me a woman / Who will love and treat me real nice / Then my woe's got to go / And my love, she will know / From morning, noon, and night ... / ... whoa, it's all right." Aw yeah.

The Grifters (1963)

It's true I have misgivings about a few of Jim Thompson's most highly regarded novels, such as The Killer Inside Me and After Dark, My Sweet. Nothing major, just a little underwhelmed for one reason or another. For all its strengths, I think I might have to put The Grifters in that category too. It's obviously significant in terms of the rehabilitation of Thompson's reputation that came after his death, providing the source for a 1990 neo-noir movie with John Cusack, Angelica Huston, and Annette Bening, directed by Stephen Frears, produced by Martin Scorsese. And Thompson obviously went to a good deal of effort to research the con artist and his many tricks. But it only seems to provide distracting shape and underpinning to his more typical impulses (incest, alcoholism, gambling, etc.). The explanations of the tricks inevitably bear a certain pedantic tone, and though the tricky tricks remain interesting it's not exactly why we read Jim Thompson novels. (If it's con games you're after, see linguist David Maurer's 1940 The Big Con.) Yes, the Thompson elements are classic: a seamy Freudian tale of the relationship between con man Roy Dillon and his mother Lilly, who was 13 when she had him, further complicated by Roy having a girlfriend, Moira. There's a hot nurse named Carol too, a concentration camp survivor. As always, it is more or less about the rot that creeps into human relationships, a sickness unto death, with a thousand and one identical faces. Lilly is a monster and all the women here seem to have that potential. But it also feels just slightly artificial, as if Thompson has donned a girdle. It often feels programmed: a few tidy details on the intricacies of "short" and "long" cons here, some all-in-a-day torture with a cigarette there, and lots of lascivious blurp all over the place. The writing does feel more fresh and urgent than in many of his '50s novels, which saves it. Between the research and the writing, The Grifters is pretty good Thompson, even as it attempts to slot into some commercial format of popular taste. I won't argue with anyone who calls it essential. It's good enough, and you don't want to miss it if you're reading him.

In case it's not at the library.

Contempt (1963)

Le mepris, France/Italy, 102 minutes
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Jean-Luc Godard, Alberto Moravia
Photography: Raoul Cotard
Music: Georges Delerue (Piero Piccioni, Italian/Spanish version)
Editors: Agnes Guillemot, Lila Lakshmanan
Cast: Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang, Giorgia Moll, Jean-Luc Godard

The first thing that always surprises me about Contempt is how beautiful it is. That's a natural enough result of setting much of it in the daylight of Rome and Capri, casting Brigitte Bardot, and shooting in color—magnificent color. In fact, according to the consensus view revealed at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, it's now considered director Jean-Luc Godard's best after Breathless. I know Contempt was the Godard that left me most impressed walking out of the theater after seeing it for the first time (in a '90s rerelease). But the more I look at it the more frozen in stasis it seems to become, immobilized, inert, dare I say impotent, like the classical statuary on which it loves to linger.

It's a lot less playful than most Godard I know from the '60s, for one thing. In fact, it's almost stately, pitched at a snail's-crawl pace with Georges Delerue's remarkable score swelling like ripened fruit, intruding at will across anything in our field of vision. More money seems to be involved with this project too. The early '60s was a heroic era of art film, remember, one of those periods when money materializes for all kinds of crazy things. Godard and producer Carlo Ponti were kicking around names like Kim Novak, Frank Sinatra, Sophia Loren, and Marcello Mastroianni before settling on Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. Jack Palance plays a leering, smacking American movie producer. And really, any movie that's about making a movie and has the wherewithal to cast Fritz Lang as Fritz Lang definitely has something going for it.

Cat's Cradle (1963)

It had actually been awhile since I read this, widely considered Kurt Vonnegut's best or close to it. I couldn't help realizing that when I came across a scene that reminded me of 9/11 and then, less than 10 pages later, another that reminded me of Jonestown. Cat's Cradle was published decades before either event so I don't know how anyone can get too far from the idea of and the word "prescience." But there's more: it's extremely short, some 191 pages in my ancient mass-market edition, addresses itself to the end of the world, and gleefully riffs off Moby-Dick every chance it gets. First sentence: "Call me Jonah." No chapter any longer than three pages (thus, 127 chapters in a compact 191-page book). And cetacean imagery and language everywhere he can make it fit, and a few places where he can't. It's also really funny. It's true I generally have a taste for things that go under the label "black comedy," which fits here fine, but it's not often I find myself actually laughing very hard at some of this stuff. There's a lot of plot here, which gets a bit tiresome. It's much more fun when it dwells on its invented religion, Bokononism, and even more when the narrator (Jonah, which name, by the way, you never encounter again after the first page) enters into high moral dudgeons, with the rest of the players—and there are a lot of them here—standing around blinking and wondering what he's all of a sudden going on about. Those Bokononist terms and concepts—wampeter, foma, granfalloons, and all of it—would come to permeate Vonnegut's work time and again until they veered close to rancid from overuse. But this is not nearly as cutesy and Peanutsy as Vonnegut would wander off into with commercial success (compare Charles Schulz). With The Sirens of Titan, Welcome to the Monkey House, and Slaughterhouse-Five, this is where you find Vonnegut working as if everything mattered and rarely indulging himself. Everything that's funny here, such as the capital punishment in the banana republic where the action concludes and the way that people talk about it, is equally terrifying. Nothing is intuitive. It's all by design. And deserves the label "prescient" a hundred times over.

In case it's not at the library.

The Sinatra Christmas Album (1963)

I am convinced that the cool calm of January February is the proper time to assess Christmas music—my story, I'm sticking to it. Released originally in 1957 as A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra, I came to know this on vinyl with the cover pictured above, the rerelease in the early '60s. I pulled it out of a cutout bin in the late '70s. I think it's now considered a classic of the seasonal fare. I don't normally go for Sinatra much—a great voice and a singer with superb technical chops, but I've never been able to get far past the general soullessness. But I've really become attached to this over the years. I was surprised the first time I heard it by the goofy, swingin', hepcat "J-I-N-G-L-E / B-E-double-L-S" treatment that "Jingle Bells" endures here (never one of the great Xmas songs anyway, of course, but kids like it because it's easy to play and sing, or anyway I did), and I'm surprised still that the second side, from "The First Noel" to "Silent Night," is all devoted to religious fare. Different times, different times. I became infatuated with it when I was working nightshifts in a nursing home. The dayroom for the nursing station I tended was decked out for the holidays in the kind of sad and shabby fashion that's not hard to imagine. The album was part of the little collection of records gathered there and in the darkest deeps of the night that December, along about the two o'clock or three o'clock hours, I used to wander down to the dayroom and turn on the colored lights and play it on the crappy thrift store record player someone had brought in. I sat there in one of the rickety rocking chairs, playing it soft and rocking and thinking about things like my future and my past and where everything was headed. It was deliciously sad start to finish under the circumstances, notably the woeful "I'll Be Home for Christmas" and "The Christmas Waltz," with Sinatra's sad little "Merry Christmas!" right at the end of it. If I was in the mood sometimes I flipped it over and played the church songs. More often I just played the first side once or twice, or three times. All those associations are buried in it for me still, even sitting in front of my computer all this time later playing it on iTunes. Sometimes, with everything, it's so complex and so beautiful all at once that it's almost too much. I think that's the kind of thing Christmas does to you.

8½ (1963)

Italy/France, 138 minutes
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi
Photography: Gianni Di Venanzo
Music: Nino Rota
Editor: Leo Cattozzo
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, Rossella Falk, Barbara Steele, Madeleine Lebeau, Caterina Boratto, Eddra Gale, Guido Alberti, Jean Rougeul

Italian director Federico Fellini's 8.5th film (after seven features and a short, though IMDb would seem to count it a little differently) is a great big shaggy dog of a movie and arguably a critical point where consensus art film starts to lose any chance for a broader audience. I recall the first time I saw it finding myself completely impatient with it—it just seemed like so much meandering self-indulgent crap. More recently I'm more forgiving. I still think it's meandering self-indulgent crap, but observing it repeatedly and closely discloses how carefully crafted it is to be exactly that.

The story: an attempt in media res to make a film, a production bogged down in chaos. Director Guido Anselmi (played by a brooding, pained, masterfully controlled Marcello Mastroianni, by all appearances standing in for Fellini) has become increasingly lost in the details and his own messy personal life. A man generally introduced throughout as "the author" (played by Jean Rougeul), a writer brought in to help salvage the project and a kind of one-man Greek chorus, lays it out in the first 10 minutes: "You want to talk about the film?" he snidely says to Guido, above the pumping strains of Beethoven. "On first reading it's evident that the film lacks a problematic or philosophical premise, making the film a series of gratuitous episodes, perhaps amusing for their ambiguous realism. One wonders what the authors are trying to say. Are they trying to make us think? To scare us? From the start, the action reveals a poverty of poetic inspiration. Forgive me, but this might be the definitive proof that cinema is 50 years behind all the other arts. The subject doesn't even have the merits of an 'avant garde' film, but it has all the shortcomings."

Thus, you can't say you weren't warned.

"Surfin' Bird" (1963)

26. Trashmen, "Surfin' Bird" (Dec. 28, 1963, #4)

Well, you would have to classify this as a novelty, right? It slots well enough into a flavor of surf-rock, cross-pollinated with early proto-garage, but that pegged vocal performance, which sounds like the mic has been parked deep inside the throat of the vocalist, along with the bizarre lyrical preoccupations, put it in a realm all its own. It's not entirely clear who that vocalist is—drummer Steve Wahrer hatched the idea of carpetbagging the Rivingtons songs in the first place ("Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow" and "The Bird's the Word"), and he appears the most likely candidate, though guitarists Troy Andreason and Dal Winslow are normally identified as the band's singers. Whoever sang it, and however you want to characterize it, there is something considerably enduring about it, though it lasts only a brief time. The tempo is ridiculously fast, as if the band were attempting to squeak it all out in the moments before the onset of nuclear war, and the grotesque, lopsided focus on the vocal bends and contorts and distorts all time-space around it. It's almost impossible to hold still while this plays, particularly as the volume appears to rise higher and higher (oh, was that you turning it up?), and it's not much easier to listen to it just once at a time. The message is a simple one, thoroughly absorbed: "everybody knows that the bird is the word." Yet utterly inscrutable at the same time. Good for the car, good in the movies and on TV, good in the grocery store, good in the middle of a forest camping. It works anywhere. The Trashmen are from Minneapolis, playing surf-rock. That means that approximately anything is possible in the 2:21 that this lasts.