The Shangri-Las’ Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las (2019)

With this 33-1/3 volume I had the impression author Ada Wolin was more interested in researching and writing about girl groups generally, and the Shangri-Las specifically, than anything about any album. One expectation or hope I brought with me is that a best-of in this series would address the ongoing simmering controversy about the validity of best-of collections versus more intentional or “authentic” album releases. Instead, and this surprised me, I found myself once again hearing out arguments about rockism and poptimism. Well, OK, I guess. Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las has the distinction of being the first of many Shangri-Las collections, released in 1966 and marking (amazingly) the de facto end of their career. As Wolin points out, many of them were not even 20 yet in 1966. Golden Hits also has the advantage of being succinct: 32 minutes, 12 songs, not even that many of them genuine top 40 hits. The Shangri-Las are a decidedly strange beast—a girl group, yes, of course, but distinct and apart, somehow anticipating punk-rock convulsions years before impact. Wolin has a number of bones to pick with narrative history and consequences (as do we all, at least those of us suffering under material contrarian instincts). I thought some of those bones contradicted one another. She objects, for example, to the performers in girl groups getting attention only behind the songwriters and producers. More specifically she objects to Shadow Morton getting so much credit for the Shangri-Las. She cites critics—and by name: Saul Austerlitz, Ted Gioia, and others—on their quick dismissals of performers in favor of producers. Yet elsewhere she gives Morton his due, which is not negligible. “Leader of the Pack” was a staple of radio and commercials for decades and even has a certain amount of fatigue attached to it now. “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” and some of the others I know well and still enjoy for various details. The one I love best is the domestic drama “I Can Never Go Home Anymore.” Wolin keeps her distance from it and seems reluctant to credit it as more than sentimental and manipulative, which may be fair enough but left me not entirely trusting her views. But she’s out there fighting for the legitimacy of the Shangri-Las and that’s the good fight.

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

Masculine Feminine (1966)

Masculin féminin, France / Sweden, 103 minutes

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Writers: Jean-Luc Godard, Guy de Maupassant

Photography: Willy Kurant

Music: Jean-Jacques Debout

Editors: Agnes Guillemot, Marguerite Renoir

Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Chantal Goya, Marlene Jobert, Catherine-Isabelle Duport, Michel Debord, Elsa Leroy, Evabritt Strandberg, Brigitte Bardot, Francoise Hardy

Guy de Maupassant gets a cowriting credit on Masculine Feminine because the rights to two of his stories, “The Signal” and “Paul’s Mistress,” were acquired for the production. But director Jean-Luc Godard barely used them in the picture, which instead is more typical of his shattered approach to filmmaking in the 1960s, with quick setups and improvisation (see also Alphaville, Band of Outsiders, Breathless, The Little Soldier, Pierrot le fou, Vivre Sa Vie, Weekend, etc., etc.). Ostensibly broken up into “15 concise parts,” the picture mixes up cryptic textual statements on title cards (“The mole has no consciousness, yet it burrows in a specific direction”) with scenes of the lovely principals bantering and living their Pepsi-Cola Generation lives (or, more accurately, as it were, their ANTI-Pepsi-Cola Generation lives).

Masculine Feminine is only murky about the revolution. It’s a little late for Communism and a little early for Women’s Liberation, which hit harder in the next decade, although Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had been published by then and birth control pills were more and more widely available. That’s about the depth of the sexual politics, which are otherwise more libertine. Jean-Pierre Leaud plays Paul, a 21-year-old political activist and revolutionary, who acquires his own little maybe only emotional harem, with the polyamory playing out as it will, kind of more on the sidelines if anything, off-camera. There’s ye-ye singer Chantal Goya as Madeleine, an aspiring singer. Goya’s songs fill the soundtrack. And there are her two roommates Elisabeth (Marlene Jobert) and Catherine-Isabelle (Catherine-Isabelle Duport). As much as anything it’s a movie about the Sexual Revolution—no one under 18 was permitted to see it in France—but more than anything it is a freewheeling half-improvised and half-baked intellectualized Godard exercise. I’m hard put for a synopsis. That’s about as good as I can do. Random observations follow.

Daisies (1966)

Sedmikrásky, Czechoslovakia, 75 minutes

Director: Vera Chytilova

Writers: Vera Chytilova, Pavel Juracek, Ester Krumbachova, Jaroslav Kucera, Zdenek Blaha, Vaclav Nyvit, Bohumil Smida, Ladislav Fikar

Photography: Jaroslav Kucera

Music: Jiri Slitr, Jiri Sust

Editor: Miroslav Hajek

Cast: Ivana Karbanova, Jitka Cerhova, Julius Albert, Ester Krumbachova, Marie Ceskova

Taking the US-centric view, it’s tempting to connect this tidy little experimental art film from the Soviet-era Czechoslovakia to the famous Daisy ad that Lyndon Johnson used against Barry Goldwater two years earlier in the 1964 presidential contest. That 60-second spot—aired only once—involved a 3-year-old girl, a daisy flower, and a mushroom cloud. Daisies similarly features images of warfare and bombing and one way or another seems to be about destruction. It's admittedly a tenuous connection—I’m not even sure Daisies includes a mushroom cloud.

Most of the screen time of Daisies is devoted to a Betty and Veronica pair of young women—ID’d as Marie I (Jitka Cerhova, the brunette) and Marie II (Ivana Karbanova, the blonde). Marie II wears a garland of daisies in most of her scenes. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that no one associated with this picture had any idea who Barry Goldwater was, let alone anything about whether or why the Daisy ad existed in the first place. In many ways the vibe in Daisies points in another direction altogether for me, reminiscent of the 1974 Celine and Julie Go Boating, which is much longer but similarly features two happy-go-lucky young women and their various randomized hallucinatory adventures.

It’s likely there are many more Czechoslovakian pictures I don’t know providing a context for Daisies, which hits me as pretty weird, challenging and seemingly out of nowhere. It is colorful and dazzling enough even to be considered psychedelic in places, but I’m not sure that’s what director and cowriter Vera Chytilova (with a team of seven more credited as writers) was going for. In fact, I’m not sure what she was going for.

“The Wine-Dark Sea” (1966)

My introduction to Robert Aickman: I impulsively picked up the collection for which this is the title story because I kept noticing Aickman’s name coming up. The story is reasonably representative of him, certainly in its rather longer length of about 50 pages. It reminded me quite a bit of John Fowles’s novel The Magus, also set among the islands of Greece. The Magus was published in 1965, so conceivably it was of some direct influence here. Both seem to feel they can hear the footfalls of ancient Olympian gods beyond the mist of the modern-day Greek islands. “The Wine-Dark Sea” is the story of a man, Grigg, who steals a boat to visit a small island off the coast of a much larger island where he is vacationing. Grigg is drawn to the small island first by the strange and unexplained hostility of the people living on the larger island. No one will take him there and no one will really explain why. They won’t even rent him a boat if that’s where he’s going. So he steals one—later he’s told he would be “torn to pieces” if he tried to return it. On the island are three beautiful women—Lek, Tal, and Vin—who tell him they are sorceresses. They bear an equally hostile attitude toward “Greeks,” though they often seem to be talking more about the ancient variety. There’s a lot of interesting undercurrent to all this, mixing in elements of ancient mythology, not just sirens but gods and alchemies of earth, fire, air, and water. It resolves in apocalyptic fashion, with a stupefying revelation of what lies beneath the island, and with just enough explanation to make it almost perfectly, mysteriously resonant. Until then the horror, the weird, the strange, such as it is, is barely there, but something nags at you. The story casts a spell, reminding me in some ways of experiences on LambdaMOO, the one-time online collaborative creative space, gentle, daffy, but with hard edges glinting out of the murk that might slice you. “The Wine-Dark Sea,” intimations of Homer and all, is ultimately a kind of tragedy, but so removed we can’t entirely feel it. It works slowly, at the deeper levels I’ve come to know of Aickman. It’s a great way to start with him.

Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea
Story not available online.

The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (2005)

Jim Fusilli’s little 33-1/3 book raised the bar for me in terms of these authors liking, appreciating, respecting, and/or loving their albums under consideration. I assumed they all liked them but here is where I have felt it the most yet. Fusilli, who also writes detective fiction and used to be a house rock critic at the Wall Street Journal, is an unapologetic boomer. I am more of an apologetic one, but it may be the generational affinities that are reaching me here. My experience with the Beach Boys (and inevitably the Beatles) is different from Fusilli’s, certainly, but he’s only two years older than me and I always feel like I know where he’s coming from. He was raised in New Jersey, for example, and me in the Midwest, but I know very well his version of California as the perfect place. I was up on all the Beach Boys hits starting with “California Girls,” a little later than Fusilli. I had no sense of Pet Sounds really until the ’80s, aside from the many hits, and then I had mixed feelings about it. It took me a long time to come to really love it. It came to Fusilli a lot more quickly but he understands it basically the way I do, which meant some of his assessments felt so true they almost hurt. It reminded me all over again of the album’s uncanny strengths, now evocative even by title alone: “Sloop John B.,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Caroline No.” Fusilli does spend a good deal of time discussing technical aspects such as chord changes, which as usual are mostly lost on me, but in this case confirm my sense of how carefully constructed and rendered these songs are. The movie Love & Mercy, which came out nine years after publication of this book, is another good place to go for exciting portraits of Brian Wilson the studio original in action. Fusilli also talks about the hits and albums before and after Pet Sounds and has some interesting thoughts. He seems to have a good deal of loathing for “Barbara Ann,” a song I have come to like less and less myself over the years. But I must say I adored it when I was 12, even then understanding in the Beach Boys catalog it was one of those things not like the others. I suspect the taint of boomer may be on Fusilli for many readers. When he compares Mike Love to Eddie Haskell it feels as true as a poem, but perhaps too highly specific. So caveats. Also, Pet Sounds haters are unlikely to be convinced by Fusilli, technical points and all. That’s my hunch. For me, somehow—since approximately Love & Mercy—all encounters with the Beach Boys tend to make me insanely happy. This was just another one.

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

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966)

The second Martin Beck novel takes a different tack from the first, in terms of the character of the victim. It's still based on established investigative technique, etc. But whereas the victim in Roseanna was a perhaps troubled but fundamentally innocent person, here it's someone who is a bit of a rat, a drunkard, a womanizer, and worse, as we come to find out. Alf Mattson is also a talented journalist. When he disappears on assignment in Hungary, Beck is called in to work the case unofficially. I'm not sure I understand this "unofficial" point. Hungary was rather different in 1966. The Cold War was on and it was in the Soviet sphere—maybe that explains it. At any rate, Beck goes there and pokes around a bit, accomplishing nothing. When he finally contacts the Budapest police, at first unwillingly, then the case slowly starts to crack open. Mattson had traveled to Hungary on assignment. He'd reported from there before, but this time he disappeared almost as soon as he arrived and nothing was heard from him since. This case gets a bit complicated as both the crime and investigation require a lot of subterfuge, with passport and visa manipulation, black market activities, and generally a high level of paranoia. Authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were not as good at spy stories, so this suffers a little in that regard. But it's police technique that solves it: a close analysis of descriptions of the victim's clothes compared with what was found in his abandoned traveling case and his closet at home in Stockholm. The most interesting point is the description of Budapest and Hungarian life, which of course in many ways is no different from Swedish life. I'm sure that was much of the intended point then, but it's lost a little in these post-Cold War times when it's harder to remember how real the divisions were. Only 10 years before publication of this novel Soviet tanks had rolled through Hungary asserting Soviet authority. Martin Beck's dour yet dogged personality is developed further, and we start to see a little more of the complex and interesting characters around him, such as Lennart Kollberg. As in Roseanna, Beck befriends a police investigator beyond Stockholm, who similarly just wants to use established technique to haul in the bad guys. It's a short novel too, perfect for an easy day.

In case it's not at the library.

Blow-Up (1966)

UK / Italy / USA, 111 minutes
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Julio Cortazar, Tonino Guerra, Edward Bond
Photography: Carlo Di Palma
Music: Herbie Hancock, Yardbirds, Lovin' Spoonful
Editor: Frank Clarke
Cast: David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, John Castle, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Sarah Miles, Yardbirds

Somehow it always seems to slip my mind that Blow-Up—the front end of a great double feature with Blow Out—is a movie by director Michelangelo Antonioni. All the evidence is there in the strange way it moves and refrains from meaning, of course, notably at the ending, yet Blow-Up is so steeped in the "Swinging London" version of the day-glo '60s that it seems qualitatively set apart from his earlier monochrome exercises such as L'Avventura and L'Eclisse. In fact, Blow-Up would pair equally with any movie that takes on the '60s as we understand them now—Midnight Cowboy, for example, or Repulsion. The Yardbirds famously show up in a can't-miss cameo, even if they are only called on to ape the Who.

But the maddening elusive ambiguities, along with the wondrously strange and beautiful imagery, are there as they always are in an Antonioni picture. In Blow-Up, as one example of his meticulous aesthetic, Antonioni relied on a strict color palette that required some repainting—including of roadways— to get things to the right shades and hues. Between Blow-Up and L'Avventura, the most obvious trait in common is Antonioni's misleading approach to mystery. His ideas about mystery are more on the lines of philosophy—e.g., what is the meaning of this existence we are in?—and less about whodunits and capers. Yet both pictures focus on crimes (or at least a reasonable likelihood of crimes) which by intent are then never resolved. If that's your thing, come and get it.

"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1966)

Read story by Joyce Carol Oates online.

It's hard to imagine this strange, disturbing, and wonderfully exhausting story by Joyce Carol Oates coming from any other time than the 1960s—and it's also interesting to note, in passing, how few stories in this survey (only six of 125) are from the tumultuous period. In fact, though this story appears in two of the anthologies I'm looking at, it's the only '60s story in either of them published later than 1964. It's perfectly straightforward about what it is, a story about a girl of 15, coming into her sexuality but still easily manipulated by more experienced adults. Her name is Connie and she is just learning she can break away from her parents and conduct a life of her own. On the day of this story, she has declined to accompany her father, mother, and older sister on a daylong jaunt to the town picnic, which leaves her alone in the house, luxuriating in her freedom and solitude. But before long a car pulls up in the driveway with two strange men who want to talk to her. They are Arnold Friend, who does most of the talking, and Ellie, who listens to a transistor radio held to his ear and occasionally asks alarming questions such as, "You want me to pull out the phone?" They are obviously up to no good and they are bent on luring her out of the house and into their car for a ride. Arnold knows all kinds of things about Connie: her name, that she is alone there for the day, and other details. Very little is explained. We simply follow the strange and persevering conversation as it presses forward. Our minds begin to spin in different directions. Are they going to rape her and turn her out? Is it possible it's all innocent somehow? Except: "You want me to pull out the phone?" Oates herself seemed to have thrill killers in mind, as she said the story was inspired by an Arizona serial killer, Charles Schmid. The story is also dedicated to Bob Dylan, which Oates has said was because of his song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." It's a slightly jarring element in an otherwise nearly flawless story about predators in action—based on imagination more than research, I suspect, which unmoors it slightly. Yet at the same time that makes it more fevered and unnerving. Bob Dylan may have felt right in 1966 but now I think her story belongs more to, say, Roy Orbison. (I'm sure that has everything to do with Smooth Talk, the intriguing 1985 movie version of this story, directed by Joyce Chopra, with Treat Williams and Laura Dern.) I've never got far with attempts to read Oates—I'm not even sure why exactly—but this story is great, gnawingly worrisome to read, provoking anxiety hours and days later. You want to know more about these people, not least what happened. But you never can. It's genuinely haunting.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

La battaglia di Algeri, Italy / Algeria, 121 minutes
Director: Gillo Pontecorvo
Writers: Gillo Pontecorvo, Franco Solinas
Photography: Marcello Gatti
Music: Ennio Morricone, Gillo Pontecorvo
Editors: Mario Morra, Mario Serandrei
Cast: Brahim Hadjadj, Jean Martin, Yacef Saadi, Tomasso Neri, Samia Kerbash, Ugo Paletti

Don't look now, but The Battle of Algiers just got one more turn of the screw more complex with the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. In this movie, as it happens, the French are not so sympathetic, and the Eiffel Tower is more a symbol of oppression than of liberated humanity. Which maybe just goes to show that the more things change the more they stay the same. A war against terrorism cannot be fought until the oppressions stop. That's a matter of common sense, or should be. Terrorism is and always has been and will be only a resort of desperate people. You can't fight a war against a tactic—that's been noted before. You have to make peace. The Battle of Algiers is what the opposite of that looks like.

It's tempting to say, for historical context, that Algeria was France's Vietnam, except Vietnam had already proved to be its Vietnam (after which it became our Vietnam). The career of France, as a colonial power, does appear a little hapless, which perhaps redounds to its credit—but don't miss the impulse in the first place. The events documented in this movie are the rump-end of 130 years of colonial occupation of Algeria by France. The Battle of Algiers is not antiwar, it is anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism. And it is especially good at observing the actions and motivations of both sides in this kind of war—the kind fought now in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—as the situation escalates and spirals inevitably toward disaster. Life is cheap when you're in a revolution, or a police action. It seems to be the one thing both sides understand.

Ubik (1966)

Ubik is difficult to summarize inasmuch as it is a maze contraption built out of tentative interdependencies of conceits, concepts, and metaphors. Pronounced "YOU-bick" because it derives from the word "ubiquitous," here is the first problem. What is Ubik? I don't know. It appears to be a manufactured product. In the world of Ubik, corporations are everything and corporatism is a way of life. That vision is as deeply embedded into the proceedings as any. So Ubik is a product—it is a miracle product—literally a miracle product. It is 1992 (the book was written in 1966, published in 1969) and society appears to be organized along two axes: corporations which fight for control of markets (in everything, including an afterlife of specific tiny proportions) and a spectrum of human psychic capability. At one end of this spectrum are mind readers, future seers, spoon benders, and such. At the other are "inertials," who obstruct the psychic abilities of others. Inertials are organized into "prudence" corporate entities—a flavor of insurance company with a pronounced security component, analogous to the Pinkertons of another era. In Ubik, people are generally paranoid about the advantages enjoyed by psychics, reacting with fear and hostility. Inertials can help to control that. This is at the macro level. Down on the human scale, as always, people in Dick novels are just trying to get along, make a living, live their lives, and stay out of trouble. Which is not easy when one is hectored all the time by marketers. Not only phones but refrigerators and even doors are coin-operated in this world. There's definitely a noticeable and strange kind of religiosity beginning to enter into Dick's writing here, with the afterlife hedged a bit as fading electric discharges from carefully preserved brains. In fact, in the end the novel appears to be a story exactly about that afterlife, though it's not information to which the characters, much less the reader, are particularly privy. So really weird things happen here—I mean really weird—such as at one point the entire time frame itself pulls up stakes and begins to lurch and lumber uncertainly into the past. Calculations about travel require consideration for the expected level of technology upon arrival, such as for example whether the internal combustion engine will be available for use. Really weird and really well done. I'm tempted to turn around right now and go through it again.

In case it's not at the library.

"We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966)

Philip K. Dick's 1966 short story provides the source material for the 1990 Schwarzenegger picture directed by Paul Verhoeven, Total Recall. Perhaps because of its brevity the story feels less Dickian than either "The Minority Report" (half again bigger) or the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (He sure could pack the words into some of these titles!) What's interesting to me is that, of the three movies that originally came of these properties, Total Recall comes closest to sustaining the way a Dick story moves. Blade Runner and Minority Report, by comparison, feel more like the work of their directors (Ridley Scott and Steven Spielberg, respectively) fitted out with "Dick touches." It may not really be so surprising that producer Ronald Shusett and screenwriter Dan O'Bannon had fastened on the story so long ago they purchased the rights while Dick was still alive. Shusett and O'Bannon were also principals on the original Alien movie. The Dick story is a simple riff on false memory medical procedures around which a slightly unsavory cottage industry has sprung, like tanning salons in strip malls, offering "realistic" memories of nice vacations, which is both less expensive than the cost of traveling and also saves time for convenience. The medical procedure is reminiscent of the one in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. To make this story a blockbuster movie they riffed on a theme Dick only suggests in the story, turning it into an elaborate and bewildering spy / adventure / paranoid / surreal tale that barely makes sense even when you're keeping up. Lots of things, such as the Johnny Cab, feel like Dick but are not—the Johnny Cab is also extraordinarily prescient even for 1990. This suggests to me that Shusett and O'Bannon brought a sense of Dick with remarkable clarity to the picture. It couldn't have hurt that they were able to work with one of the largest budgets yet at the time for a movie. The thing thrills with money—spectacular effects and very big explosions. Way too much violence and gore, in fact, or "action," would have to count as one of the picture's weaknesses. But a lot of thought went into spinning this little story into a full-blown feature movie that was true to Dick—"inspired by" Dick and his story, as they put it in the titles. If it veers dangerously close to meat-headed action—the money, again, which among other things paid for Arnold Schwarzenegger—it's always so full of tricks and surprises that it never really lets you go. Which is equally true for Dick literary properties, come to think of it, except the "meat-headed action," for which swap in ... I don't know. Time travel slipstream alternate-reality paradoxes? It's a good blend. Go directly to the movie.

In case it's not at the library (and in other anthologies).

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1966)

This is the novel by Philip K. Dick that served as the starting point and majority framework for the movie Blade Runner. Presenting another version of the story—the first, obviously—it only muddies already muddy waters further. The question of Rick Deckard as unknowing android is much more clear—it's a point explicitly raised and not altogether dismissed. The heroic and tragic android Roy Baty is not nearly so clear-cut a character here. He's no more moral than Deckard anyway, where he is clearly the greater man (being) in the movie. In fact, Dick's whole point about empathy and lack of it is only donned as a somewhat minor plot point in the movie—technobabble explanation for administering the detection test—whereas late in the novel Dick goes off on a horrific scene with a spider to show us exactly what lack of empathy looks like, and it does not reflect well on the androids at all (at the same time it's Dick's way of demonstrating to us our own humanity). It is interesting to see for once Dick's legend eclipsed by arguably an even greater legend in Blade Runner, but it remains a solid Dick novel, from the period he was really entering into his own. Humans have never been "good" to androids, but that doesn't mean they are not a menace to humans, a point Dick weaves in and around quite expertly. There is a wonderful, classic Dick dislocation when it is revealed that the androids are secretly operating a phony alternate police force within San Francisco (not Los Angeles, note). Indeed, the androids are quite sinister and have made much further inroads against humans in Dick's novel. It doesn't look at all good for the humans in the end. As for the androids, due to technical difficulties (not nefarious human programming, note), they are limited to four-year lifespans, a casual but compelling existential conception. Otherwise, as in the movie, they just want what everybody wants—life and more of it, with all its pleasure and love and fulfillment. To summarize: Do Androids? is a very fine Dick novel, and Blade Runner is a very fine movie. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

In case it's not at the library.

Eighty Million Eyes (1966)

I got the impression that this installment of the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain came under some influence of the upchuck of commentary occasioned by the Kitty Genovese murder in New York City, which occurred in 1964 and was generally taken as a key signpost of apocalyptic end times. From my point of view, and I think McBain's too if I’m reading this right, the event had much more to do with sociology and human psychology. Both of the main cases in this novel involve many witnesses to assault and murder, who may see the crime but are otherwise powerless to act, for different reasons. In the one case a man dies of poisoning on live TV (estimated audience 20 million households, one couple per household, which gets us to the title). In the other, a supervillain stalks and ultimately assaults a woman, along with various others who get in his way, including a somewhat hapless patrolman. That's the case Bert Kling is on, with McBain continuing to work his unfortunate love life—the woman in question, Cindy Forrest, immediately becomes a love interest for him, typically enough. The ridiculous spectacular TV celebrity murder case is handled by Steve Carella and Meyer Meyer, but there's not much going on there besides the case. Except for the increasingly unpleasant penchant for knife work, McBain generally keeps things believable. I thought he was running a little close to the line with this one, though it resolves satisfactorily enough for a mystery novel, and is enjoyable to read. Still, most of the energy seems to surround issues of witnesses of crimes and the difficulty for anyone really to know what to do in extreme circumstances, too easily assuming someone else, someone with more expertise, will do something about it—or more probably already has. In the case of the supervillain sadist, everyone thought getting a cop was the thing to do, right up until the cop was savagely beaten. Then they had good reason to be fearful. Still, this Kitty Genovese connection is all guesswork, so take as you will.

In case it's not at the library.

Eric Burdon & the Animals, "See See Rider" (1966)

Oct. 1, 1966, #10
(listen)

Eric Burdon & the Animals had to go to the back of a long line in terms of getting their bite at this song, written by Ma Rainey in 1924 and recorded over the decades by LaVern Baker, Wee Bea Booze, Big Bill Broonzy, Lightnin' Hopkins, Mississippi John Hurt, Lead Belly, Peggy Lee, Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, Sonny Til & the Orioles, and Chuck Willis (who had a #12 pop hit with it in 1957 as "C.C. Rider"). It is so old it has sprouted a garden of alternative titles: "See See Rider Blues," "Easy Rider," "C.C. Rider." The theme is old too: look out for the faithless sexual wanton woman, aka "easy rider," 'cos she's wrecking marriages. Everything else is a play on that—the "C.C.," for example, is said to stand for "country circuit" preachers, who carried the good word and that old time religion on horseback from town to town. Nevertheless, not understanding any of that, I liked the Animals version so much that for many years I kept reflexively including it on short lists of my favorite songs, remembering the giddy heights it sent me to whenever it came leaping out of the radio, too infrequently. I love the surging, high-stepping thrust of it, the headlong tempo, the ballsy confidence. The band is in great form. The Animals were initially my favorite of the British Invasion bands of the time (after the Beatles, always after the Beatles). "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" was my first exposure, but it wasn't long before I caught up with the shivery-good "House of the Rising Sun" and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." "See See Rider" is a strong point in a strong run, which also included "It's My Life," "Don't Bring Me Down," "When I Was Young," and I stuck around even for the San Francisco-addled period, which I still enjoy too, and beyond.

Byrds, "Eight Miles High" (1966)

April 30, 1966, #14
(listen)

Wikipedia can just be priceless, as in this wonderful sentence: "Although commercial airliners fly at an altitude of six to seven miles, it was felt that 'eight miles high' sounded more poetic than six and also recalled the title of the Beatles' song 'Eight Days a Week.'" Because right, the song, credited jointly to Gene Clark, David Crosby, and Roger McGuinn, is about airplane rides. But that's not fair—already the article had talked about the strong and obvious drug connotations that the song bears. Me, I find the Byrds something of a blind spot in my own canon, part of a discernible pattern when you note the Everly Brothers and R.E.M. are two more. I have always respected the Byrds, had many friends gaga about them in various ways, and I understand the excitement on some levels. Yet for the most part I remain unmoved by the reality of hearing the music, except for random exceptions such as Sweetheart of the Rodeo and this strange plant that somehow took root in the top 40. I remember it freaked me out a little to hear it on the radio, that's part of its enduring appeal, especially late at night on scratchy AM radio stations. It comes sounding a little scratchy itself—prickly and rumbling, thudding, physical and awkward yet somehow insubstantial too, like cotton candy. Nothing else I'd heard felt remotely like it. Not so different from being high on hallucinogens in a way—and not so different from airplane rides either, for that matter. Wikipedia also identifies a source for this song that had never occurred to me before: John Coltrane. Oh yeah, that works—and the Byrds (which Elvis Presley would sardonically pronounce as "beards" two years later) had a hit with it. God bless them.

Beach Boys, "God Only Knows" (1966)

Sept. 17, 1966, #39 
(listen)

Leave it to Brian Wilson to turn a figure of speech into a prayer and back again in the conventional space of some 2:54. We are listening to the hosannas still, and I come to deliver another. "God Only Knows" was the b-side to the top 10 hit "Wouldn't it Be Nice" and somehow, from that position, managed to crawl into the top 40 on its own, reaching #39 (I guess jukebox play or something had to be a factor). The various accolades are quite colossal at this time: Paul McCartney's favorite song of all time, #25 on a Rolling Stone list (500 Greatest Songs of All Time), and perhaps most unbelievably #1 on a Pitchfork list (Greatest Songs of the 1960s). I like "God Only Knows" because I like the sound of everything that came of the Pet Sounds sessions: the brilliant harmonies, and the songs, inflected equally with rock 'n' roll and European pop song, earnest entreaties to a heartless universe, a touching faith and its incipient erosion. Here it is plain as can be in the shrewd choice of phrase to lean on, so plaintive and heartfelt in the stained-glass cathedrals of the harmonies: "God only knows ... God only knows ... God only knows." What I'd be without you, to complete the thought. But the real energy here, always, is more on the order of agape—even as it is not entirely clear that it's not the girl herself who might be God. In which case, that's creepy. But of a piece with the sense we have of Brian Wilson's complexes, which include among other things a certain compulsive need to worship. He breaks that off pretty clean here, and produces a song that is endlessly beautiful, not to say exalted.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Italy / Spain / West Germany, 161 minutes
Director: Sergio Leone
Writers: Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Leone, Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Mickey Knox
Photography: Tonino Delli Colli
Music: Ennio Morricone
Editors: Eugene Alabiso, Nino Baragli
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Luigi Pistilli, Rada Rassimov, Antonio Casas

Eli Wallach's teeth are too good—and that goes for Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef too. Gleaming white and straight and lined up just the way modern-day dentists like them. At some point—I think usually around the time Tuco (aka "the Ugly," Wallach) has brought Blondie (aka "the Good," Eastwood) to a monastery to recover from a bad time in the desert—I notice how well tended those teeth are and I am taken temporarily out of the action. My last complaint. That's the niggling level of my criticism about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is otherwise practically flawless.

It is, as the mystifying phrase we like to use now has it, what it is, and makes no bones about it. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a cartoon-level Western trafficking in existentialism, with extra fine shooting and a bone-simple story of revenge and greed animating the three principals, as the divertissement, cutting across history and causing it to fall away: the Civil War, the railroads, horses and guns and broad brim hats and brown liquor downed straight. All the familiar elements are here, but merely to serve as feeble context for these three gods striding through and defining the action, straight out of a deck of tarot cards—the two angels of heaven and hell, and the trickster fool with the sad, sad story.

Cream, "I'm So Glad" (1966)

(listen)

I don't hear much about Cream these days. Maybe I'm traveling in the wrong circles. As a key prototype for the super-session super-group at least, it seems they might come up more often. Maybe people want to forget that. Not to mention authors of "White Room" and some other nice '60s moods. Not to mention "Eric Clapton is God"—that idea came and went fast. "I'm So Glad" is from the debut album Fresh Cream, which I got to almost last. It's a good tuneful album, before they started stretching out and making rote long live tracks a big part of the albums. The "Cream" trio had a big reputation to live up to, after all, but I'm more indifferent to the playing now, as the nine-minute live version of "I'm So Glad" from Goodbye quickly reminded me (and yes, it also makes me mostly indifferent to Cream too). What I like most about "I'm So Glad" are things like Jack Bruce's vocal, which was always a little underrated, the long-face, ringing harmonies they reach in the climax, with all the rest dropping out, and the loopy way they play off the lyric. Written and recorded originally by Skip James in 1931, Cream treats the song less as a blues and more as a music hall entertainment, with little instrumental gestures and flourishes. Bruce's carnival barking of the title, the basic lyric, does indeed sound glad in its monotonous way but also mocking, turning the song in a funny direction. I always think of it as a short pop song, but it is nearly four minutes, stretched out by the break and a typically lyrical guitar solo taken by Eric Clapton midway, which routes it back into the Cream mainline momentarily. Something for everyone.

Pet Sounds (1966)

(Previous shenanigans and assays here and here.)

Over the years I have come to think of this more as some obscure object of cult adoration, maybe on the order of Forever Changes or Secret Life of Harpers Bizarre or Five Leaves Left, a secret I share with maybe only a few thousand others on the planet. A delusion, in any case (and with all of them), but why do I think this? Fallout from the Smile debacle, maybe a little, which legend of course claimed as their Sgt. Pepper (which would then make this their Revolver, yes? So what's the problem?). Pet Sounds did spawn four top 40 hits, remember (counting the Brian Wilson solo, "Caroline, No"), two of them top 10s. But I don't know—I still have the impression that this familiar pantheon selection has been marginalized some, maybe more than it deserves. Or maybe not. It's hard to tell. It's an odd one, no denying that.

Au hasard Balthazar (1966)

France/Sweden, 95 minutes
Director/writer: Robert Bresson
Photography: Ghislain Cloquet
Music: Jean Wiener, Franz Schubert
Editor: Raymond Lamy
Models: Balthazar, Anne Wiazemsky, Walter Green, François Lafarge, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Philippe Asselin, Pierre Klossowski, Nathalie Joyaut

I have a great fondness for Robert Bresson's donkey movie, which is typically enough fractured, allusive, and blunt, helped in great measure by a basic narrative element barely in Bresson's control, if it is in his control at all. Back in film appreciation classes, I was given to understand that the somewhat stultifying Diary of a Country Priest was Bresson's essential go-to masterpiece so it's interesting to me that Balthazar is now ranked highest among the canonizers at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, followed by Pickpocket (my other favorite Bresson), A Man Escaped, Mouchette, L'Argent, and then finally Country Priest at #196. Despite that apparent fall in favor by Country Priest, a total of six titles in that list's top 200 clearly signals a regard for Bresson that may be higher than ever.

The element barely under control, of course, is Balthazar, who is an enigma in the way of all animals we may come to know, a blank slate as such, one that as viewers (and/or caretakers) we may be quick to fill in. Bresson artfully matches his usual bent for ambiguity—as always, the intent appears to be to film the ineffable—with the manifest reality of the donkey, which I think is what makes this movie work so well. However abstracted anything around it might seem to become, it remains the story of a life from beginning to end, "Balthazar, told by random incident" (more or less the translation of the title).