Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV (2005)

I was impressed with Erik Davis’s exegesis of the great Led Zeppelin album for the 33-1/3 series. It seems to me it’s a certain model of how these books should be done. It starts with a behemoth of not just rock or the ‘70s but of popular culture itself, and it meets the album on its own terms. And on ours as well—his treatment of the fatigue now associated with hearing “Stairway to Heaven” yet again is one of the best parts of his analysis of the iconic classic rock radio staple and of the book at large. Led Zeppelin IV came out while I was in high school and immediately changed the landscape. I paid little attention to the rumored strains of Aleister Crowley and J.R.R. Tolkien or any of that—I thought that was just part of the hype, if anything. Davis makes a strong and vaguely comical case for taking the various mystical vapors into account. He is often gently making fun of the band’s various Spinal Tap elements, even allowing that ultimately he still embraces it all. There is some kind of unholy allure to Led Zeppelin IV, we must admit. Davis consults born-again Christians gravely worried for souls lost to the band. Individual band members are an important part of this story too, of course. Davis gives them their full due. I had no idea, for example, how important John Paul Jones was beyond playing bass. I appreciated Davis’s fealty to John Bonham as one of the great drummers. For me, Jimmy Page has always been kind of a gnomic figure, both with Led Zeppelin and as a guitar player (not to mention producer). I need to get to more Zeppelin literature, but Davis clarified a lot for me about Page. And Robert Plant too, who I’ve always taken as the face of the band, even knowing he’s just the singer, gets fleshed out for me further here too. Davis doesn’t feel the need for a chapter on his personal experience, which is a bit refreshing for this series. He compresses his ardor into every line, although come to think of it he does open with a humorous personal anecdote. He’s funny too, matching Led Zeppelin’s cringiest gestures (e.g., the lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven”) with his own self-conscious credulousness. I see now that I missed a lot of the faerie leitmotifs. But I never changed the station when any of the eight songs on Led Zeppelin IV played on the radio, at least until about 1977, when my responses were more sporadic than automatic. I mean, sometimes I changed the station. Led Zeppelin IV still holds up, as I saw the other day playing it through for the first time in a long while. I’m talking about even “Stairway to Heaven,” which Davis describes as less a song or a track and more a spell. Correct! And it can still work, although, yes, it is often plagued by the fatigue. I will say I got a little tired of Davis’s insistence on referring to the title as the four unpronounceable glyphs. But it’s all in the spirit. By any other name, the glorious Led Zeppelin IV!

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

Carole King’s Tapestry (2021)

Loren Glass is an English professor at the University of Iowa. Born approximately in the ‘60s he came to Carole King and Tapestry by way of hippie parents and stepparents. I think his appreciations are sincere but they felt a little too pious for my taste. He does a good job of locating King and the album within their contexts, rock ‘n’ roll close to the moment it became rock and of course the singer-songwriter tradition and feminism. Some things I hadn’t really known before: Carole King was born Carol Klein, and Tapestry is her third solo album, following her flight to the West Coast from New York in the ‘60s. I’ve never known those first two albums. Though Glass has ties to rock critics such as Ann Powers, for better or worse he has little of the spirit. Admittedly the spirit can often be loud-mouthed braying. But I felt Glass was circumspect and respectful to a fault. On the other hand it may be the best way to approach the album. It’s a favorite of mine (and a million others) for various personal reasons. I still consider “It’s Too Late” one of the greatest pop songs ever made. My biggest complaint about this 33-1/3 volume is that it overdoes the footnotes—nearly 200 of them, usually bare citations, and often not useful. This is not the first 33-1/3 I’ve seen with citations, but Glass may have set the record for sheer numbers. I’m just too easily distracted by them in this form, too inured to the chatty kind that has something to add. My favorite section was “Trilogy,” covering King’s first three solo albums, which she later called a trilogy. It’s a nice way of ambling into Tapestry itself and Glass provides a very neat analysis. He also—as one must—addresses her background as one of the great Brill Building songwriters of the early ‘60s. There’s a reason Glass is so solemn—King is genuinely a giant of the music industry, a rock ‘n’ roll and rock icon, and a singer-songwriter iconoclast out of Laurel Canyon. After more than 50 years she is still daunting to consider. I wish more of Glass’s passion came through and less of his inhibitions, but it’s still a useful primer on King and her greatest album. His best geeky rock critic point is about the “Album Era” of rock and the place of Tapestry in it. He dates this Album Era as from 1965 to 1975. I could quibble, but fair enough!

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

“Duel” (1971)

This story by Richard Matheson is a classic that served as the source for a TV movie directed by Steven Spielberg early in his career, which itself is considered a kind of classic. And it is pretty much for the same reasons as the story, which is that it only tells you what you have to know, and all the action is concrete, visual or easily describable, and almost unbearably tense. It’s in anthologies all over the place. I read it in Foundations of Fear, edited by David G. Hartwell, whose preface to the story says, “Without a hint of science fiction or an overt whiff of the supernatural, ‘Duel’ manages to invoke both the science fiction tradition of the menace of the intelligent machine and the monster tradition of the horror genre. It is a psychological monster story, subtly shocking, compelling, fantastic.” ISFDB confirms in a general way, classifying the story into its “non-genre” basement, but three voters and I have combined to rate it an 8.25 of 10. That means it’s good. It’s also very scary and induces feelings of frustration and helplessness. You probably know the story: a guy is driving a two-lane highway west to San Francisco for an important meeting that afternoon. He encounters a semitruck tanker with a trailer whose driver evidently gets mad when our guy passes him. He begins to toy with him and even threaten his life using the truck. Whenever our guy pulls off to let the truck get some miles down the road, he always finds the truck parked on the shoulder a mile or two down, waiting for him. Lots of strong elements showing Matheson at his best. The facelessness and anonymity of the truck driver makes it all seem more effective. The fact that so many of us know road rage from both sides is used well here (even if 1971 somehow seems early for road rage). Hartwell is right that Matheson makes the truck itself a terrible thing to see, though I was always aware there was a driver and he was the aggravating factor. I see the problem in calling this story horror, yet I think you have to. It raises profound anxiety and dread. In many ways that’s what horror is—all it is. This story is a prime exhibit in that argument. The human cruelty is tempered and deliberate, rather than a moment’s impulse. That also makes this story insanely creepy. Have to look at the movie again.

Foundations of Fear, ed. David G. Hartwell
The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
A Century of Horror 1970-1979, ed. David Drake
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Electric Warrior (1971)

Conventional wisdom gives this milestone T. Rex album a lot of credit for kicking off glam-rock in the ‘70s, which is a pretty big claim. It seems like overstatement now, but among other things Electric Warrior was the bestselling album of that year in the UK. It also contains the only hit T. Rex ever had in the US, the glorious “Bang a Gong (Get It On).” It’s more a milestone to me because it’s the turning point where main man Marc Bolan and producer Tony Visconti hit on the sound that would be perfected on The Slider. I should say I came to T. Rex late, well after Marc Bolan’s death in 1977. And full disclosure, little that I’ve heard by Tyrannosaurus Rex has ever held a candle to Electric Warrior or The Slider. Those first five (!) albums by the Tyrannosauruses are more like twee J.R.R. Tolkien hippie exercises full of wizards and dragons and such. T. Rex by contrast hits with sinuous, droning grooves, strange off-rhythms, menacing texture, and naïve electric guitar. Strings may be on hand for sweetening. It’s not Bolan’s sensibility that has changed as much as the musical context. The singer is routinely filled with awe by the sights and sounds around him. “Cosmic Dancer,” for one, showcases the still gentle priorities: “I was dancing when I was 12,” “I danced myself right out the womb,” “I danced myself into the tomb,” he warbles in his soft undertone. In a way he is still putting on Midsommar festivals, but the focus on dancing suggests a hedonism that is notably developed in the hit. “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” is a rock ‘n’ roll original, late-arriving, though with the wit to pay homage to a key source of glam, Chuck Berry, quoting “Little Queenie” as the song fades. There is a whole lot of essence of rock ‘n’ roll packed into it and sometimes catching it on the radio can even start to feel like an act of worship somehow. I have to say all my T. Rex favorites are on The Slider—“Metal Guru,” “Spaceball Ricochet,” all the second side in one big gulp—so I would have to recommend it first. But here's your second. Bang a gong. Get it on.

The French Connection (1971)

I don’t think I had caught up with this one since it was new, although I recall I was so smitten then I saw it a few times. It was the big car chase that kept me coming back, a total thrill at the time. The whole thing holds up pretty well, particularly if ‘70s action, car chases, and/or Gene Hackman are your thing. The Road Warrior spoiled me for car chase scenes ever since, but the epic one featured here, racing to keep up with a subway train on elevated tracks overhead, is at least as good as anything you might find on Rockford Files reruns (RIP Stuart Margolin btw, who played the extremely annoying Angel Martin and died last month). Hackman, of course, is always excellent, one of the best we’ve got, going all the way back to Bonnie and Clyde and at least through Unforgiven and maybe The Royal Tenenbaums. He’s a dirty cop here, and one thing that has changed for me since 1971 is that it doesn’t seem as heroic—his busts and investigations routinely go over the line and I have considerably less sympathy for him now. The narrative is somewhat hard to follow because of director William Friedkin’s frenzied and fractured style, which in many ways rivals the work of his peer Nicolas Roeg. It’s hard to follow, but basically all you need to know is there’s a big drug deal going down—a large shipment of heroin coming in from Marseille (which makes it the French connection, see). Popeye Doyle (Hackman) is on the case, working off his various insane hunches, which unfortunately for everyone often (not always) prove out. Owen Roizman’s camera is as restless and energizing as the New York streets he is shooting on. The edits are crackling sharp. The French Connection is gritty, it’s hard-school knocks, and it’s still reasonably entertaining. Also of note is a soundtrack by Don Ellis, which is edgy yet unobtrusive, fitting itself well into all the noise of this picture. The Three Degrees get a cameo performing in a club too and it is terrific. I didn’t remember it from seeing this when it was new, but now it seems almost worth the price of admission alone.

The Wild Boys (1971)

Time now for the novel that is not part of any trilogy I know of but was packaged with the first two novels of a William S. Burroughs trilogy in a book called Three Novels. Go figure. This Grove Press edition, which I picked up somewhere along the line, does mention The Ticket That Exploded in an “other works” list, which is the third novel in the trilogy. But never mind, Jake. The Wild Boys, perhaps not surprisingly, is full of homoerotics, rectal mucus, and locker-room smells. And, maybe surprisingly, it’s more lucid than much of the so-called Nova (and/or Cut-Up) trilogy. I think I’m settling on the “damaged genius” narrative for Burroughs. There’s enough good writing in any one of his generally slim novels (and/or collections of stories and/or installments of larger works) that they are almost worth reading. His focus on sensory details—colors, smells, textures—makes some passages extraordinarily vivid. But many other long passages make very little sense at all. I read him in a way that I read little else: with a kind of free-floating disengagement, trying to look at every word and absorb its significance, imagining scenes when I can. If it’s not working I just take it as opaque and move along (nothing to see here, folks). I’m sure I’m missing things but I’m also sure some of these passages are merely inscrutable. They consist of words, or down to letters in some cases, but they don’t seem to mean anything. Or you fill in the gaps yourself somehow, with something, which can be interesting. I’m not saying reading Burroughs doesn’t have its pleasures but it’s often frustrating too. Tantalizing and portentous images and scenes evaporate into nothing, melting into a meaningless block of words and then the scene changes, or a new paragraph starts. Formal disengagement is almost self-protective. It’s possible that reading more closely would reveal more. It’s also possible the whole thing is a put-on. In places, The Wild Boys seems almost sentimental about its manifold sexual connections. There are some vague SF elements. Lots of scattered great paragraphs and sentences. David Bowie cited it as his favorite by Burroughs, but I would still be careful about jumping in.

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

Black Sabbath's Master of Reality (2008)

Big YES to John Darnielle's treatment of Black Sabbath's third album in this 33-1/3 series title. It is one of the most creative from the series as it is technically fiction, which suggests a hundred ways to go wrong. But Darnielle, founder and sometimes sole member of the Mountain Goats, has since gone on to publish two novels, in the horror vein. But the novella or long story Black Sabbath's Master of Reality mixes up a resonant character voice with some very sharp yet plainspoken analysis of the music. The character is a teen institutionalized in a mental hospital. He is required to keep a journal, and thus our text, which often directly addresses his counselor or therapist, Gary. Our kid is furious because his walkman and tapes have been taken from him. Master of Reality is his favorite Black Sabbath album and Born Again (1983) is weirdly his second-favorite. He touches on the first two Black Sabbath albums and all the songs on Master of Reality. It turns out, by the way, that Master of Reality is another one of those things with weird versioning problems. Look it up sometime. The story here is divided into two parts, the first in 1985 when our kid is institutionalized and writing the journal, and the second in 1995, when he has decided to write a letter to Gary. Now he is 26 and works as a restaurant manager. He's still mad at Gary and defending Black Sabbath. My own story with Black Sabbath goes like this: I went for "Iron Man" in high school but the band scared me because of the burnouts they attracted, I ignored them until Born Again, which had a cover that scared me, and I was finally goaded into really listening to them after reading Joe Carducci's anti-pop screed in the '90s. Master of Reality was also Carducci's favorite, so that's the album I ended up with. It did not impress me very much either way, which was not helped by my bad attitude about Carducci. This book was helpful for finally seeing some light on the album. It's not as aggressive as the primal metal label (or "War Pigs") might lead one to believe (though my favorite song has a spooky title, "Children of the Grave"). This is another book in the 33-1/3 series that ranks with the best, although I'm not sure anyone else could ever try this fictional approach again. Or maybe they have! It's a big series now. I should also say the Mountain Goats have always been lost on me. My next move with Darnielle would probably be one of the novels. Don't miss this one if you're reading them.

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

The Abominable Man (1971)

In this case, policemen are being systematically killed. The first is a high-ranking official, Chief Inspector Nyman, with roots back to the military. His methods and conduct toward criminals were harsh. Mistakes by the police under him were covered up as a matter of unofficial policy. Nyman's brutal methods are described as "old school" and his own murder is equally brutal—a case of overkill. Police detective Martin Beck broods about the underlying social problems. He and most of the other detectives quickly settle on vengeance as the motive, which of course proves out. Even in this series the police are routinely credited with good instincts. Police procedures are then followed to uncover suspects. Some interesting character developments occur involving Lennart Kollberg, the closest Beck has to a friend on the police, and Gunvald Larsson, a blustering and violent man who nonetheless is possessed of the aforementioned good police instincts. Both Beck and Kollberg generally do not carry guns on principle and also for practical considerations, but Larsson scoffs at them as pacifists. As much as anything in the series so far, The Abominable Man is an action-packed thriller, with lots of shooting and clambering around dangerous places. There's even a helicopter crash. It was made into a popular Swedish movie in 1976 called The Man on the Roof. So that's all entertaining enough, but the more enduring appeal as usual is the portrait of a society in change. The police strategies of covering up mistakes and blundering about with powerful munitions are seen as having come home to roost. At the same time, many in the novel—and no doubt some of the readers as well—still believe the strength of the police is in its superior firepower. In many ways this is the freshest story in the series yet for our times, reflecting issues we have been addressing (or attempting to address) in recent years around police misconduct and the gray area between it and military methods (not to mention organized crime methods of summary execution). In The Abominable Man there is no clear right and wrong, in many instances, and when there is the right choice often seems all but impossible. As usual, the novel is pretty fair to all sides.

In case it's not at the library.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

USA, 120 minutes
Director: Robert Altman
Writers: Edmund Naughton, Robert Altman, Brian McKay
Photography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Music: Leonard Cohen
Editor: Lou Lombardo
Cast: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, Shelley Duvall, John Schuck, William Devane, Keith Carradine, Michael Murphy

DVD extras and featurettes on the 2016 Criterion edition of McCabe & Mrs. Miller seem to feel a critical question about this movie is whether or not it is a Western, and if so, what kind (meaning classic versus revisionist in its many labels, anti-, acid, neo-, spaghetti, etc.). So clearing that up from my view, yes, it's a Western. It's set in the Pacific Northwest at approximately the turn of the 20th century. It's very rainy and there's a snowstorm, which is typical of the PNW, but things like ranches, Indians, horses, mountains, six-shooters, and everything you need for a Western are well known in the little burgeoning mining town of Presbyterian Church, Washington—one of the best names I've ever heard for a Western town, by the way. The only thing that might be different, as director and cowriter Robert Altman joked while he was working on it, is that it's not a dusty Western.

I will also say McCabe & Mrs. Miller stands self-consciously in the shadow of directors Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah at least in terms of using an elaborate set piece of grotesque violence in the last third of the movie. This is seen in lots of Westerns from the late '60s and early '70s, from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Billy Jack, and including obviously all of Peckinpah's and Leone's work, where it wasn't even reserved so much for the last third but could go first. Look for slo-mo and echoing sound. That's not to say that the death of the only cowboy in McCabe & Mrs. Miller isn't a shocking and effective scene. In many ways the whole movie turns on it.

Tago Mago (1971)

There's no end of informative details and anecdotes about this classic so-called "krautrock" double LP by Can, straight out of the classic rock era. The obvious forebears are Bitches Brew and Ummagumma. Many argue for it as the influential band's best. The webzine Drowned in Sound once hailed it as the single most influential rock album ever made (doubtless aware of the Velvet Underground's banana album and brazenly challenging its accepted supremacy). Bobby Gillespie, of the Jesus and Mary Chain and later Primal Scream, characterized the album as "not American, not rock 'n' roll, but mysterious and European." It was recorded in a castle in Germany where the members of Can were living rent-free for a year. They discovered the first-time vocalist, Japanese national Damo Suzuki, busking on the streets. It's tempting to take it beyond European and label it Axis, but that's not fair. No doubt they are all democrats. Still, Aleister Crowley has something to do with Tago Mago, and the marshalled forces of light and darkness are referred to frequently in descriptions. Dreamy and grinding, with a heavy bottom, an unusual approach to vocals, and much space for air, this music is frankly hard to describe. The mood is stiff, Teutonic, bashing, yet capable of both laying in a groove and of floating free and weightless. There's a lead guitar (Michael Karoli) but it's generally on equal terms with the rhythm section. Off to the side is an erratic vocalist. Tago Mago is often marked by special effects of editing and splicing, Teo Macero style. "Oh Yeah" (7:22) starts with the vocal track running backward, and most of these pieces are stitched together from multiple sessions. There's well over an hour of music spread across seven tracks—two alone are whole album sides each and generally my favorites here because they so generously offer so much space in which to roam. "Halleluhwah" clarifies the powers of redundancy in rhythm, pushing Holger Czukay's bass and Jaki Liebezeit's pounding toms to the front—a piece of funk, studied and leaden in a way that paradoxically makes it work better. The other long one, "Aumgn," is much more instrumental and experimental, mysterious and full of strange sounds on which the mind easily projects: animals, wind, water, heavy machinery. Groaning. It's psychedelic in the dark vein pursued by Acid Mothers Temple—a head trip, sometimes making me slightly uneasy. These are good people, aren't they? They certainly have powers. On the matter of light versus darkness, the prevailing sense for me is that the first half (album/disc) is more of the former and the second more of the latter. Or, this works for me too, the potent churning rhythmic elements represent dark elemental forces of deep woods and jungles (at night with bonfires), with the pieces of melody and arrangements as innocent creatures of the realm in the light of day. Bucolic daytime woods scenes alternating with howling Witches' Sabbath bacchanalias at night. It must be winter in this album because there's generally more dark and it's cold. For all its freewheeling energy, it's clinical. Tago Mago is proof that anything can happen from a castle in Germany where you live rent-free.

"Murderers" (1971)

Read story by Leonard Michaels online.

Leonard Michaels is not a writer I know well. He's often compared with Philip Roth, who I know better. Michaels was born the same year as Roth and similarly interested in the experience of American Jews in 20th-century East Coast environs, notably New York. "Murderers" is a very short story, only about five printed pages, that has the feeling of an anecdote, or is built around an anecdote, and enlarged from there. Somehow it ended up in two of the anthologies I've been going through. In Brooklyn, a group of young adolescent boys has discovered that "the rabbi" and his wife often have afternoon sex with the windows open. The boys have naturally enough made a habit of spying on this activity, though it requires that they do so from a precarious perch on a water tank. The rabbi and his wife are mysterious, with unexplained details, perhaps the most notable of which is that the wife is bald-headed, and wears a variety of wigs. The unnamed first-person narrator is adult and sophisticated enough to describe what they spy on as, "In psychoanalysis, this is 'The Primal Scene.'" Yet nothing is made of the woman's baldness, which suggests a bizarre fetish, or more likely, the way we understand it now, cancer. Be that as it may, she and the rabbi are purely sexualized objects to the boys, and indeed, soon enough, one of them begins to masturbate, which doesn't seem to be taken as unusual by any of them. (I never had the circle-jerk experience and am always a little amazed when I hear accounts of them actually happening.) Then, however, there is a dreadful accident that leads to their discovery by the rabbi and eventually the life-changing punishment he inflicts on them. I say "life-changing" but it's little more traumatic than anything else about adolescence. It's a strange, violent, disconsolate story. There's an air of despondency and fatalism about it, like an English boarding school story. It is at pains to be comic—that's in the very conception of the accident at deepest levels—yet it's also not very funny at all. What's more, Michaels is clearly a witty and urbane writer. He's reminiscent of Roth stylistically as well as thematically. So it's a pretty neat trick he pulls in this short story, like a series of rabbit punches playing with your expectations. Spying on the sex of the long-married is ripe with comic potential. But wait, what? She's bald? The detail works like a bolt of anxiety, a tiny emotional shock to the system. Not to mention what happens to one of the boys—what happens to all of them, as a result. Overflowing with comic instincts, "Murderers" dares you to laugh.

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

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

Angle of Repose (1971)

Wallace Stegner's novel has a structurally complicated point of view, arcing across time and generations. I wanted to connect that with the title, but as a term "angle of repose" is less about a viewpoint and more about geology and landscape engineering. That's appropriate because the husband of the main character is a self-educated mining engineer (who also works on diversionary waterway construction, such as dams) in the 19th-century American West. The star of this show is Susan Burling Ward, who is based on the historical figure Mary Hallock Foote, an illustrator and writer who followed her civil engineering husband around the West, and sent back reports to the East. This is all news to me. The narrator is the grandson of this couple. He is also a 58-year-old academic historian confined to a wheelchair because he has lost a leg. He is working on a project based on his grandmother's letters. What I like most about Angle of Repose is the way it spins out stories of the Old West. Its particular angle of view is the self-made American man—one thing that eventually holds back Oliver Ward is that he has no formal college education—making things out of the land with his hands. Susan is even more resourceful in her way, especially working within the limitations of being a woman and an artist. The novel was published in 1971, and it's evident in some of the modern-day passages that "Women's Liberation" was still strange and unfamiliar. I didn't get the sense that Susan's role as the main character was in any way intended as a model of feminism—if anything, it's pulling in the other direction, locating her strength in her strong sense of tradition. Stegner might get a little cute with some of his conceits. The narrator is not just researching a book, but this is that book. Toward the end we see the narrator, Lyman Ward, musing over how he will title it "Angle of Repose." Ayup. It ends on a note out of a horror movie, which is as out of place as it is effectively done. I think on the whole I could have done without it. Without a doubt the best parts of the book, and most of it, take place in the distant past. The specificity of the places—Leadville, Mexico, Idaho—is vivid and wonderful. At the same time, the modern mind intrudes often on these scenes, as we are led down the garden path by the narrator into penetrating the interior lives of heroic and larger-than-life characters. The frame doesn't work, but the canvas is pretty impressive.

In case it's not at the library.

The Prisoner of Sex (1971)

It's fair to say this is one place where Norman Mailer really steps in it. The wide-scale rejection has been reasonably complete: the book is out of print, and used copies command low prices. At this writing it can be had for 25 cents plus postage. As someone sympathetic to Mailer—not so much for all his ideas as for his commitment to writing, and his abilities—I want to plead circumstances. Written in 1970, the year after he separated from his fourth wife, "women's liberation" was just then surging into popular consciousness, the place where Mailer made his living. The unfortunate result is this book, which adopts an unrelenting mocking tone. He seethes with a rage out of all proportion, giant and petty all at once. Here, for one thing, is where he obviously makes a point of using the word "lady" rather than "woman." And here is where some of his strangest ideas come to the fore, such as arguing masturbation as a kind of mortal sin against the soul. He veers dangerously close to Todd Akin territory, who, remember, told us in 2012, "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down"—"that whole thing" meaning pregnancy. Mailer dresses it up in his high-flown language, but take away the metaphorical conceits (which I tend to allow him for the poetry) and it's pretty much where you're at when he's on the sweet mystery of life. He spends most of this short book (at least it's short) in a one-sided boxing match with Kate Millet and her book Sexual Politics, though other key figures of the time are also arraigned at the dock, including Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Germaine Greer. He may or may not expose some shabby work on Millet's part here and there, and he makes a spirited defense of Henry Miller, a writer I've never connected with. He may be even more interesting here on D.H. Lawrence. But they are only excursions he goes on, as Mailer mainly struggles with women and their place. Mostly he seems to be working out his own unpleasant psychological issues, ambivalent feelings about his mother and such, without appearing to have a shred of self-awareness. Thus, it's often just embarrassing, with admixtures of aggravation. Mailer is of my father's generation, though he's not much like my Dad. I do see some commonalities: the sense of losing their marriages a little from the changes to fundamentals they had absorbed entirely, mostly about (not surprisingly) race, gender, and sexuality. So here is Mailer trying to let it all hang out, just let it rip as usual, but he keeps tripping over increasingly ludicrous assumptions, such as that the purpose of women is to bear children—the single purpose, if it has to be reduced to that. He's opposed to contraception too, on ridiculous poetical grounds, similar to his problem with masturbation: the tragedy of all those wriggling wasted sperm cells that could be impregnating eggs. Mailer and this book are a real ugly mess, in short, but interesting in their way, like the mythical geek at the traveling carnival. File this under I read it so you don't have to.

In case it's not at the library.

"1/3, 1/3, 1/3" (1971)

Read story by Richard Brautigan online.

Richard Brautigan was once an infatuation for me, around the time this story appeared in a 1971 collection, or shortly after. I think the appeal was his kind of gentle tone of hippie insouciance, which served his verbal absurdities reasonably well. It hasn't aged that well though, since even before his suicide in 1984. This very short story helps me remember the reasons for both liking him and abandoning him. The first-person narrator describes an invitation he has received to collaborate on a literary work. He will do the typing, the young woman inviting him on board will do the editing, and a middle-aged man living in a trailer nearby will write it. The proceeds will be split equally—"1/3, 1/3, 1/3," per title. The narrator is invited because he has a typewriter. Toward the end of the story a sample of the work is reproduced, and it is hardly even literate. Which is not surprising, given these characters. What surprises me is finding it in an anthology edited by Raymond Carver for an ambitious anthology in the '80s (American Short Story Masterpieces), intended as a response or addendum to another ambitious anthology, edited by Robert Penn Warren and released in 1954 (Short Story Masterpieces), which set out to chronicle the short story in the first half of the century. I do believe I detect some bias toward West Coast writers in the Carver collection, but I'm mostly OK with it. I'm even OK seeing Brautigan included, although I think his work does best isolated to its own whimsical contexts. Excerpts as poems, stories, and/or passages often suffer alone and in the open. The characters here read to me first as willful ignoramuses, and then finally as just ignoramuses. I have no idea what they think they are doing, even less what Brautigan intended by it. An incident reminiscent of the scenario actually happened to me once. An apartment building manager where I lived knew I was a writer and approached me one day, wanting to know if I was interested in reading a novel he had been working on, inspired by reading Stephen King's The Stand. A couple of weeks later he knocked on my door and presented me with two pages of single-spaced typewritten copy. It was a scene from the rooftop of our building, to which only he had access, overlooking downtown Seattle, ravaged by a plague. The narrator was a little disturbingly gleeful about the scene, and there was lots of random violence, as much as you could get into 900 words. I told him it was a good start and he should keep at it. It looked like a big story. He told me it was going to be even bigger than The Stand. It was not as illiterate as the manuscript in Brautigan's story, but close. If enough people have stories like mine, then "1/3, 1/3, 1/3" is really going to resonate.

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

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

I think there's still plenty to love in Hunter S. Thompson's epic—what? Novel? Tall tale? It's so Nonfiction Novel Creative Nonfiction New Journalism that we don't even know what to call it. But every time through, I have to say, makes it seem just a little more dated, a little more self-indulgent, quaint, and time-bound, a little more inconsequential. Echoes of another time (sing now: "the way we were"). Certainly the gender politics are dated and all wrong, and the Samoan business is tricky on race. This also happened to be my first time through since Thompson's death, incredibly already more than a decade ago. I couldn't help but notice certain words and terms he favors like tics: "hunker down," "brutal," "lash together," and of course "fear and loathing" (though not exactly pro forma in that case). The drug use is still quite comical. Ralph Steadman's art remains perhaps the best part of all—even my July 1989 trade paperback has pages with those wonderful ink blots sprayed across them like blood from backsplash. There's a kind of innocence to the faith shown in hallucinogenic drugs, to an implicit belief that the behavior reported is desperate and outrageous in some noble way, and to the idea that "the American dream" (as featured in the subtitle, "A Savage Journey to the Heart of  ...") is an abstraction worth pursuing. Or, perhaps, worth pretending to pursue. But Thompson was never a phony if he was anything. He was problematic. My reflexive hero-worship of him in the '70s was nonetheless put off and disappointed by his fascinations with firearms and other ordnance as well as some of the behavior, which even with all the high-spirited reporting often seems merely loutish. All that notwithstanding and not to be minimized, it was still a pleasure to spend a little time again with the good doctor of journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, aka Raoul Duke, Doctor Gonzo, etc. The Johnny Depp phase embarrassed me for all concerned and Thompson's death saddened me. If I was uncritically adoring in the '70s perhaps I have reached a point of equilibrium now. He was good at what he did, though what he did was weird—sailed off on drug-fueled madcap adventures with some big media backdrop, while keeping his head enough about himself to look long and hard at our very depressing world, analyzing it to the fine points. This is the purest distillation of the cartoon character he made of himself and one of the most fun books to read I know. I keep meaning to look into Campaign Trail '72 again, because I wonder how it stands up across all this time. I know there's a good book of newspaper columns too, at least one, and scattered other good stuff. But this is the classic vintage and pretty much the good stuff straight, such as it is.

In case it's not at the library.

A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971)

(Uncorrected short version here.)

A Tribute to Jack Johnson is a great example of "electric Miles," a late phase of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis's career begun in 1968 with In a Silent Way. Electric Miles not only wired and amped up his icy attitude and complex sound, but began looking to more contemporary sources as well, such as Sly Stone and James Brown, for the self-conscious explorations of identity that provide so much urgency here, still, for this and for so much of his work from the time, at once operating inside a tradition and yet feverishly innovating and expanding it. This album is well known, much loved, and there's not a lot I can add except to echo the sentiment that it's one of the greatest albums ever made, jazz or rock, and you should probably go listen to it right off.

Tapestry (1971)

(Somewhat addled previous review here. Somewhat more sensible review of the main song here.)

I wrote this piece for a fanzine in the '90s. The topic was something on the order of "first record," which you will see I was at pains to twist to my own ends. For better or worse I still own the album in vinyl, as described, perhaps a bit more aged now (and my turntable still needs replacing too).

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

UK / USA, 136 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Burgess
Photography: John Alcott
Music: Ludwig van Beethoven
Editor: Bill Butler
Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Warren Clarke, James Marcus, Michael Tarn, Patrick Magee, Adrienne Corri, Michael Bates, Sheila Raynor, Philip Stone, Anthony Sharp, Carl Duering, Michael Gover, Aubrey Morris, David Prowse, Clive Francis

There's nothing subtle about A Clockwork Orange. Its famous violence is obvious and programmatic: assault, robbery, rape, murder, the usual. In fairness, the picture does a reasonably good job of anticipating how ongoing societal breakdowns play out. And the solutions to the violence, arguably the point of this near-future fantasy, are also obvious and programmatic (see title metaphor, which belongs to the author of the original novel, Anthony Burgess). In the end, in an example of classic Stanley Kubrick cynicism, it appears that attempting to solve problems only makes them worse, and in unimaginable ways. We are left to try to live with the consequences. I suspect all the heavy-handed, clonking points are as much as anything the reason why I loved it so much as a teen. I do appreciate better now the horrors of the violence in the first 15 minutes alone—"the old ultra-violence," as voiceover narrator and main dude Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) insists on calling it. But I also still appreciate the energy, concision, and choreography that went into those early scenes, especially the gang fight, which is a case of pure infectious dynamics. And the Beethoven soundtrack only propels it.

In fact, much like the case with some Woody Allen movies, I now experience A Clockwork Orange at least partly as formative and already internalized, operating in a kind of twilight haze of nostalgia. Some of the language formations—the moronic "well well well well well well well" of one of the thugs, the use of "appy polly loggies" as a sarcastic way to apologize, "eggiwegs" and such for food, and Alex's occasional elaborately Shakespearian turns of phrase, such as "what didst thou in thy mind have?"—I still use, and am often surprised on revisits to this movie to find them waiting for me there. A Clockwork Orange is less than convincing in its ideas, bogged down in outdated Cold War gestures such as a youth slang pervaded by Russian (that was Burgess more than director / screenwriter Kubrick), or just simply smug about its ability to shock. But some of its individual elements nonetheless remain outstanding—a hallmark of Kubrick films, as we can see better all the time.

Doors, "The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)" (1971)

(listen)

I'm not sure I would call the very last album by the Doors, L.A. Woman, their best—for one thing, I'm nearly as tired of "Riders on the Storm" as I am of its peers "Stairway to Heaven" and "Maggie May." But I rank it pretty high. I liked this blues direction they were falling all over. It is also home to this strange and wonderful song, which raves and thunders, looking directly into the future (if not the sun) at psychobilly, the Burning Man festival, and other human impulses. A methodical pounding rhythm section provides the foundation for Jim Morrison's heavily reverbed vocal, as he sing-tells tales of goings-on in the wilderness at night. Or the evolution of the blues. Or something. The mood is stark and dramatic and effective. The song has hold of a mighty current. Catharsis, purgation, revelry, ecstasy—all these things quiver behind and within it, underscored by the vivid lyrical scenes, the back beats cool and slow with plenty of precision, the Negroes in the forest brightly feathered, the friends we have gathered together on a thin raft. Yes, it veers dangerously close to sing-songy nursery rhyme children's music at points (it's not much of a melody for sure, and "the loss of God" is pure cheese as phrased), but it's fantastical and alive. Music for visions. Note: Texas radio and big beats are touched on here but there is nothing specifically about any white Anglo-Saxon Protestants that I can detect, except by implication insofar as they populate regions under discussion (Texas and Virginia). Inspirational line: "Out here on the perimeter there are no stars / Out here we is stoned—immaculate."

Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here (1971)

The basic conceit of this volume in the 87th Precinct series by Ed McBain may feel just slightly belabored, but I like the gimmick anyway: a 24-hour ticktock from midnight to midnight following along with pretty much all the detectives of the 87th Precinct (hence the title, one presumes) as they go about their daily business. It's a short novel that basically breaks into two longish stories: "Nightshade" and "Daywatch" by names. It's a real jumble of police business, one of my favorite flavors of the procedural, perhaps best exemplified by the Jack Webb TV series Adam-12, which was less often one big case and more often several small threads of case work, some left unresolved. I have to say there's also some welcome relief for me that insane people with or without knife fetishes are missing from this one—they can be overworked. I think these somewhat more low-key efforts are where McBain really did his best work in this series. I wonder if part of that isn't the constraints of the gimmick, reminiscent of those great and strange crime novels of the '30s and '40s such as They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, The Big Clock, or Night of the Jabberwock, which among other things chipped in to an intensely creative time in the genre. In fact, Hail, Hail includes a ghost story in the nightshift section. There's a detective here, Kapek, who's not familiar to me. I realized, after I finished a burst of McBains toward the end of the year, that I didn't even get to very many of the titles from the '50s and '60s. I would think there are plenty of McBain partisans who might swear on either or both of those decades as his best, and I may yet include myself among them. Certainly the '90s and later seem weaker, and there are some continuing problems with the '80s. It's a lot of books, after all—some 54 novels plus miscellaneous. That reminds me, I need to catch up on Dragnet again. Look, I'm just nutty for police procedurals. My favorite TV show of all time is Law & Order. McBain is plain one of the masters.

In case it's not at the library.