Modern Lovers, “I’m Straight” (1973)

[listen up!]

This curiosity was not part of the original Modern Lovers album by Jonathan Richman & co., home of “Roadrunner.” Most of that now-classic LP was produced by John Cale in 1971 and 1972. “I’m Straight” comes from sessions in 1973 organized, overseen, and/or produced by the notorious Kim Fowley. It has been appended as a bonus track on reissues of the album since the Rhino release in 1986. In many ways the song hasn’t aged well. The term “straight” now refers more often to sexual orientation or secondarily an inclination toward the conventional. A third sense is honesty. The sense of it as drug-free, which Richman is on about here, has faded since the ‘70s; “clean” and “sober” are more the favored terms now. Richman was still accessing an aggressive persona derived in part no doubt from his heroes the Velvet Underground. But his own variations are all him. The singer in this song is so shy he keeps hanging up before completing a phone call to a woman he wants. But it’s a kind of calculated assault too because he knows she already has a boyfriend—Hippie Johnny by name—and he won’t respect it. “He’s always stoned, he’s never straight,” is his point. If I had to guess, the drug in question here is most likely cannabis—marijuana, weed, tea, whatever. That’s what “stoned” (and “dope”) usually referred to, at least in my circles in 1973. The singer is surprisingly aggressive: “Now look, I like him too, I like / Hippie Johnny / But I'm straight / And I want to take his place.” His voice is deep, growling. It sounds like the microphone is inside his mouth. And it is full-on unapologetic in its judgment of the stoner lifestyle. At the time, that put the singer arguably rowing against the current. Call him an iconoclast. Sometimes I object to the situation it describes, stealing girlfriends and the preening rejection of weed. It’s certainly unusual, but that can be said about much of Richman’s catalog.

Touki Bouki (1973)

Senegal, 85 minutes

Director/writer: Djibril Diop Mambety

Photography: Georges Bracher

Music: Josephine Baker, Mado Robin

Editor: Siro Asteni

Cast: Magaye Niang, Myriam Niang, Christoph Colomb, Moustapha Toure, Aminata Fall, Ousseynou Diop

In Wolof, the language spoken in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa, “Touki Bouki” translates as “The Journey of the Hyena,” which helps to clarify things. The picture can roughly be described as a kind of Bonnie and Clyde story crossed with the classic Western story of dissatisfied young folks in the provinces—or, in this case, an African colony of France—trying to make it to the capital—not Dakar, note, but Paris. A lighthearted Josephine Baker song, “Paris Paris Paris,” underlines the point, coming up on the soundtrack whenever Mory (Magaye Niang) and Anta (Myriam Niang) feel the great city and European cultural capital is within their grasp.

Mory owns a motorcycle on which he has mounted a long-horned cow skull. Life in this remote region is mostly about cattle ranching and Mory gets by working as a cowherd. It’s not what he wants to do with his life—that’s more along the lines of being a bohemian. But early scenes in a slaughterhouse set the tone and foreshadow his more likely doom. Though not a large part of the movie, these scenes are almost the first thing we see. They are intensely disturbing, as we witness pathetic cattle as they realize the danger late and fight helplessly. There’s nothing they can do. Touki Bouki is a low-budget affair and these scenes are not simulations, showing actual livestock slaughterhouse deaths (decapitated and bled out) in a little too much detail for me. But it certainly establishes, however playful events shown here may become, that there is always a desperate deadly seriousness behind the impulse to get away.

Rendezvous With Rama (1973)

I had a good time with this much-honored award winner by Arthur C. Clarke (Hugo, Nebula, etc.). It involves a cigar-shaped asteroid, dubbed Rama, which comes sailing into the inner solar system circa 2130. Humans have settled a handful or so of solar system planets and satellites under a “United Planets” (U.P.) governing structure. Rendezvous With Rama is a first contact novel, a very quiet, mysterious, and ultimately powerful one built on observing things that are hard to explain. The asteroid is hollow. A crew is dispatched to investigate. I don’t really have anything close to an engineer’s imagination, so a lot of the descriptions and explanations were lost on me a little, which was frustrating. Some diagrams might have helped. The asteroid / vessel, caked in a kilometer of rock, is 20 kilometers wide by 50 long, spinning on its long axis to create an artificial gravity that is strongest at the inner edges of the cylinder. There is an enormous sea in there and many, many wonders to be discovered. The science is basically straightforward and understandable and often creative. Various mysteries are never resolved, but in the end that amounts to more a strength of this novel. In the late ‘80s and ‘90s Clarke returned to Rama for three more novels so there’s still more to be discovered. I remain generally dubious about sequels so I’m in no hurry to get to them, not least because of the time lag, but maybe I will. For now I enjoyed the opportunity to dip a little more into Clarke, one of the titans of classic midcentury sci-fi. Somehow I always think of him as US (with Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, Simak) but Clarke is British. His novels, the ones I know, are always evenhanded and paced well, with lots of interesting futuristic ideas and a strong sense of the science driving them. Much here, for better or worse, has vaguely the wooden tones of 1950s SF—literature and movies. I like it because I associate a certain wooden feeling with the nerds and geeks of SF, living in dreams of the future. As a first contact novel, Rendezvous With Rama somehow has the kind of veracity that makes it feel like it really happened. Some wonderful moments here.

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

18. Todd Rundgren, A Wizard, a True Star (1973)

[2007 review here.]

You could probably argue that my favorite album by Todd Rundgren is psychedelic only because the production purposefully jams many of these songs and fragments seamlessly together, each one blurring into the next across a range of styles. Among other things that makes it hard to listen to it on CDs or via streaming, which routinely insert a couple of annoying seconds between all tracks. The album reminds me structurally of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, stringing together a series of songs (or fragments) under 2:00 at one point, or their White Album, with its wide and seemingly senseless assortments of rock or pop song style. Yes, Wizard has annoying throwaways—I could do without the 1:08 “Dogfight Giggle,” for sure. And it is now unfortunately dated with the crypto-homophobic ditties “Rock & Roll Pussy” (1:11) and “You Don’t Have to Camp Around” (1:06 and still lovely). Fair enough. It also has songs in Rundgren’s achingly beautiful and friendly (if slightly tinged with ‘70s self-help vibes) pop song mode (“Sometimes I Don’t Know What to Feel.” “I Don’t Want to Tie You Down,” “Does Anybody Love You?”). It has more songs that are intended to be inspirational in a heroic juveniles-against-the-world mode (“Zen Archer,” “Just One Victory,” “When the Shit Hits the Fan / Sunset Blvd.”). Perhaps most surprising—though also looking forward to the mistakes of his overly faithful Faithful covers LP a few years later—is an 11-minute soul medley featuring the Impressions’ “I’m So Proud,” Smokey Robinson’s “Ooh Baby Baby,” the Delfonics’ “La-La Means I Love You,” and the Capitols’ “Cool Jerk.” The last is the only clinker in that bunch. The first three are gorgeous and moving versions. Thus, much like the cover art suggests, we are set adrift here inside Todd Rundgren’s tender octagonal die-cut elfin musical world, which moves through its 55 minutes of material with masterful ease. I’m not sure Todd Rundgren ever had an imperial phase but, if he did, this album was part of it. He was producing one substantial album after another in the early ‘70s, with Runt; Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren; Something / Anything?; A Wizard, a True Star; Todd; and Initiation (plus his Utopia project). He stayed close to his pop instincts bleeding into prog and/or thrashing heavy rock on all of them. A Wizard, a True Star is his psychedelic phase.

“The Door” (1973)

This story by UK horror writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes is reasonably effective, but it’s not hard to see an argument for it being faintly ridiculous. It’s a haunted house type of story, except it’s just one door that is haunted. William Seaton, a writer, found it in a specialty shop and reworked his study to make it the door for his writing supplies cupboard. It is antique and ornate, from an estate recently liquidated. The door is out of place there, much too majestic for a cupboard and entirely too massive, but Seaton likes to look at it while he writes. Well, one night—he likes to write at night—he finds himself gazing at the door and letting his thoughts drift, but these thoughts soon become vivid and intense. He imagines himself in the grand room for which the door once served as portal. It’s the beginning of an obsession. Soon he is chasing this experience and he is eating and writing less. His wife Rosemary thinks it has something to do with the door. They talk about the door a lot and research its history. There’s a certain confusion about his dreamy experiences. We’re not always sure where he is during these interludes or what is going on exactly. I sometimes had the nagging feeling Chetwynd-Hayes did not know himself. Toward the end of the story Seaton finds a journal in the room beyond the door and reads it. “An Experiment in Darkness,” the fragment is titled. And while it is also doing some of the tedious work of exposition it is quite effective at setting a desperate supernatural mood. I call the exposition tedious because the story is often at pains to rationalize itself, which can undercut the horrors even as it clarifies. So this story has explanations and also a happy ending. I was a little disappointed with myself for being disappointed about a happy ending. After all, is an unhappy ending any less mechanical? And what am I looking for in horror anyway—miserablism? Perhaps. I appreciate the various terrors here, which are often well done. As a portal that might lead anywhere, doors (and windows too) are a good element to focus on. Finding something ruthless on the other side is good stuff too. But overcoming them in time for a hearty breakfast? Maybe not so much.

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

Crash (1973)

I struggled some with this J.G. Ballard novel, which doesn’t have much in terms of characters or story. It earns any outrageous reputation it may have for its premise, conflating sex and auto accidents, actively repulsive in its wanton fetish breeding. I thought I might have detected echoes of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Crowd,” which is similarly unnaturally fixated on auto accidents. Like the David Cronenberg movie that came of Ballard’s novel in 1996 (not to be confused with a 2004 movie of the same name), Crash the novel is weird and unsettling. But it is also now unfortunately dated in a couple ways. First the OPEC oil embargo circa 1973 changed a lot of attitudes about car culture. Then climate change has made these kinds of fetishes more taboo. When Ballard was writing he was exaggerating but it felt more in the realm of possibility. It’s much less the case now. Crash feels to me inert, wallowing in depravities and extremes of masochism, e.g., wounds are equated to sexual apertures. Male organs and the cum are flying. I’m not sure which was harder to deal with, the lugubrious pace or the endless coarse sexualizing. It feels closer in spirit to Tom Wolfe’s celebration of customized cars in the ‘60s than SF. But I do appreciate the single-mindedness here. Ballard takes his meditation on cars and sex a good distance down the road. Another nice detail is setting it in and around the airport section of London. The architecture of the setting does much to get at the themes even better than all the weird sex. It’s pavement and roadways and curling bridges and vehicles on land and in the air, all screaming machinery and petroleum. The novel is mercifully short, just over 200 pages. My copy had an introduction written by Ballard in 1974 which has some good points but also feels a little empty on science fiction. Is Crash even science fiction? It’s not much like anything else I’ve ever seen, save only perhaps the 2021 movie Titane, which is more clearly science fiction and should not be missed btw. Ballard’s near future is very near, or was in 1973, and the speculative elements are more about currents in perversion. But let’s not oversimplify trying to escape the implications. At base it’s a novel about the relationship of humans and the machines they build, intended not just as tools but literally as extensions of ourselves. Sexuality just comes along for the ride. It’s a good idea and Ballard attacks it and grinds it to dust as he goes. I never caught much momentum to the narrative, which made it sloggy. But there are some pretty big ideas in here at the same time. Don’t read this when you’re going through a breakup. That’s probably my best advice.

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

"They're Not Your Husband" (1973)

This is one of Raymond Carver's stories that Robert Altman adapted for the Short Cuts movie. It's quite recognizable as the couple, Earl and Doreen, are played memorably by Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin. The movie characters had some details that came from elsewhere, not necessarily Carver, but this is the one where Earl sees his wife, working as a waitress, being ogled and commented on by men who don't know he's her husband. The moment is more poignant in the movie the way Waits plays it with Buck Henry and Huey Lewis, and in the story Doreen is more grotesquely ugly. The story is full of great Carver touches—the waitressing work, Earl's unemployment, the uneasy marriage—but it's also a little harsh and verges on unpleasant in Earl's treatment of Doreen, which is not really comical at all except in sardonic ways. Earl is "between jobs" and has a couple of interviews in this story, which don't seem to pan out (but you never know). His days are empty. His pushy insistence that Doreen lose weight, buying a scale and making blunt remarks to her, and his obvious shame about her appearance, are not in the movie as much and it makes the story edgy and nervous. In a later scene Earl is more of a creep at the restaurant, trying to egg remarks about Doreen out of a man who's not inclined to talk to him. With another waitress he acts like he doesn't know Doreen. The final scene is a moment of withering humiliation. On balance Earl and Doreen seem largely benign but I get some sense Carver has it in for them somehow, Doreen for her looks (much like Earl, in fact) and Earl as a pathetic nebbish. In Carol Sklenicka's excellent biography, Raymond Carver, there's a great comment from one fellow writer and/or student along the way. He says Carver is writing about working-class characters but really they're all graduate students—that's what Carver knew. I see some of that here in Earl, scrounging for generic work, chronically poor, depending on a partner to support him, but capable of attacking a problem like weight loss systematically, buying the scale, keeping track of the numbers, and analyzing and mulling them over—and doing it all to right a very minor perceived wrong. This one sports another great story title too.

Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From (Library of America)

"Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes" (1973)

I like the title of this story by Raymond Carver, which feels typically brusque and to the point. It almost looks like a kind of outline for the points he wants the story to cover, a little list to guide the drafting. More affecting is the event that erupts almost accidentally, certainly unexpectedly: a fistfight between two fathers about a conflict between their sons. One man has been trying to quit smoking for two days, so he's already on edge. The other man seems ready to take a swing at anyone who criticizes his boy. The story takes places in some rundown precinct of the American suburban sprawl, where young families in startup homes summon one another to address mutual problems of their children. The provoking incident here is the disappearance of one boy's bicycle. He thinks these two other boys did it and so his mother sends for the parents to straighten it all out. The dialogue with the fathers grows increasingly hostile and suddenly they are moving out to the yard and going at it. The mother hastily postpones any decisions and the meeting ends with the fight. The story has Carver's usual strangely jaunty voice but it stirs deep reactions. The fight, though in retrospect easy to see coming, is still disturbing, as all sudden fights like it are. It reminded me of one time when I saw two guys fighting next to an auto accident as I drove by. It bothered me for days. I still remember the shock and the feeling that nothing was in control. Those feelings are captured well here, especially the way it makes the boys cry after it's all over. Their shame and confusion is palpable, their own sudden sense that nothing is in control. Folding the nicotine addiction into it is inspired. Even in 1973 quitting smoking was becoming an adult rite of passage and it's well known how it frays nerves in the early days. At a stroke it makes this unlikely fight that much more believable. These things happen. You hear about them. Carver's great idea is simply to show it and somehow it is as vivid as if it happened. He has everything just about right here. It's quick, and it lands like a blow.

Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From (Library of America)

Badlands (1973)

USA, 94 minutes

Director/writer: Terrence Malick

Photography: Tak Fujimoto, Stevan Larner, Brian Probyn

Music: George Aliceson Tipton, Mickey & Sylvia

Editors: Robert Estrin, Billy Weber

Cast: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates, Ramon Bieri, Alan Vint, Gary Littlejohn

I haven't kept up much with director and writer Terrence Malick since The Tree of Life, which was way too muddled, Christianist, and overrated for me. He has been at least as productive in the past 10 years as any other stretch of his career: To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015, about a tarot card I understand), Song to Song (2017, sez "play loud" but the music is buried in the mix with everything else), and A Hidden Life (2019). Song to Song is the one I've seen, just a few weeks ago, and had a bad reaction. If you despaired of the Sean Penn sequences in The Tree of Life, that's basically all Song to Song is for over two hours. Also, in the past year or two, I paid a revisit to the 1978 Days of Heaven and came away decidedly unravished. I think in the '70s I might have even called it better than Badlands, but now I am more inclined to compare Days of Heaven unfavorably with Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff.

So I wasn't sure what I was going to get with a return to Malick's auspicious 1973 debut, the kinda-sorta story of Charlie Starkweather and girlfriend Carol Ann Fugate on a 1958 Midwestern killing spree, Bonnie and Clyde style, Gun Crazy style—one of the 20th century's favorite stories (Raymond Pettibon's version by way of Sonic Youth: "I stole my sister's boyfriend. It was all whirlwind, heat, and flash. Within a week we killed my parents and hit the road"—I know, a reference to the Moors murders, but same diff). As it turns out, I should not have worried. Badlands is as lean and effective as I remembered it, a smoldering explosive mood piece, with Martin Sheen preening as Kit, a 25-year-old James Dean lookalike lost in the backwoods sticks of South Dakota, and Sissy Spacek as 15-year-old Holly, whose voiceover narration is full of the profound stillness and wisdom of Carson McCullers characters. In its quiet unassuming way, Badlands is close to perfect.

Mean Streets (1973)

USA, 112 minutes

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writers: Martin Scorsese, Mardik Martin

Photography: Kent L. Wakeford

Music: Martin Scorsese's vinyl collection

Editor: Sidney Levin

Cast: Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, Amy Robinson, Richard Romanus, David Proval, Cesare Danova, David Carradine, Robert Carradine

Mean Streets is a landmark film in many ways, big and small—a powerful early picture by director and cowriter Martin Scorsese, a tale of New York street life and low-level gangsters, a sneaky coiling script, and a certain model of early jukebox movie, rolling out yet another way to do it, with The Graduate, Easy Rider, and American Graffiti advancing their own theories on the matter. And it may have been harder for me to see earlier through the welter of noise and violence, but Mean Streets is also the work of a self-conscious student of film, with self-conscious inflections as it barrels along toward the work of Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Francois Truffaut.

Mean Streets opens on a black screen and Harvey Keitel murmuring about sin and salvation (two years later Patti Smith would turn it upside down with "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" on her cover of "Gloria"). Then the drum hits and kicks from the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" go off and the song blares in all majesty for the titles, playing loud. Turn it up anyway—it's still one of the most inspired and thrilling mashups of song and images ever stitched together, and it's followed not long after with a red-light barroom scene to the tune of the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man" that's not far behind. There are other pop music high points like these (and some opera too)—for me, notably, "Rubber Biscuit"—but within 10 minutes Mean Streets already felt vastly different from anything I'd seen before.

Don't Look Now (1973)

UK / Italy, 110 minutes

Director: Nicolas Roeg

Writers: Daphne Du Maurier, Allan Scott, Chris Bryant

Photography: Anthony B. Richmond

Music: Pino Donaggio

Editor: Graeme Clifford

Cast: Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania, Massimo Serato, Adelina Poerio, Renato Scarpa

The Daphne Du Maurier story on which this Nicolas Roeg picture is based was published originally in Ladies' Home Journal, which seems strangely appropriate to this enigmatic piece of gothic horror. Du Maurier, author of the novel Rebecca and the short story "The Birds" (Alfred Hitchcock obviously a long-time fan), as well as the peculiar time travel science fiction novel The House on the Strand (in which the journeys are induced with chemicals), remains her own intriguing problem. But glossy women's magazine fiction is just right for this deceptively low-key picture, set in Venice, where a sad young bourgeois couple repairs to recover from the unexpected death of their daughter Christine, who may or may not have died for their sins.

In tone, Don't Look Now veers from half-generic travelogue piece to soft-core pornography—persistent rumors claim that a tender scene of John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) making love actually involved Sutherland and Christie having sex on the set. Sounds right anyway for the early '70s, for director Nicola Roeg, for the soapy score by Pino Donaggio, and for all involved. John and Laura are also art historian restoration experts and it is ostensibly their work that takes them to Venice. John is bringing an ancient church back to glory. But Venice is more than just a convenience for making your movie look classy. Anytime you want a story that suggests drowning in repressed emotion, experts agree you should set it in Venice. See also the long story "The Aspern Papers" by Henry James, or Patricia Highsmith's Talented Mr.Ripley, or many other examples.

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

El espíritu de la colmena, Spain, 98 minutes
Director: Victor Erice
Writers: Angel Fernandez Santos, Victor Erice
Photography: Luis Cuadrado
Music: Luis de Pablo
Editor: Pablo G. del Amo
Cast: Ana Torrent, Isabel Telleria, Fernando Fernan Gomez, Teresa Gimpera, Juan Margallo, Jose Villasante

The Spirit of the Beehive announces itself almost right away as a fairy tale. "Once upon a time..." says an early title card illustrated by a child's crayon drawing. "Somewhere on the Castilian plain, around 1940," says the next. That puts us in Spain shortly after the Spanish Civil War, so already the extremes of the fairy tale spectrum have been laid out, from a drawing you can put on your refrigerator to the brutalities of midcentury war. In fact, The Spirit of the Beehive has much the feel of a desperate Depression-era novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice minus the sexual charge, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, The Grapes of Wrath, I Married a Dead Man, The Day of the Locust. But it's one that's told mostly from the point of view of a 7-year-old girl, at knee-high level, like a cartoon about cats and dogs. There is much about the world of grown-ups that is caught only in flashes, at random. Adults are confusing and hard to understand.

Early on, the small religious village, isolated in the country, welcomes the arrival of a new movie with much excitement and interest—the original 1931 Frankenstein, evidently nine years late. The theater is a makeshift venue with folding chairs and the feel of blankets covering windows, but the movie is well attended, including the 7-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent) with her older sister Isabel (Isabel Telleria). Isabel is a typical jealous older sibling, devoting too much of her energy to belittling her younger sister. The Spirit of the Beehive actually enters the theater during the show and spends a few minutes letting us watch the scenes from Frankenstein where the monster meets the little girl by the water and discovers the joys of flowers. We also see some of the scenes after the little girl is found dead. Ana can't make sense of it. She asks Isabel the two questions by which The Spirit of the Beehive is essentially defined, or haunted: Why did the monster kill the girl? Why did the people kill the monster?

"The Story of a Scar" (1973)

Story by James Alan McPherson not available online.

This story by James Alan McPherson has a bit of a tricky setup in its frame. Told first-person and set in a doctor's waiting room, the story's narrator is the listener more than the teller. The other person in the waiting room is a woman with a dramatic scar across her face. Somewhat rudely, because the two are strangers, the narrator asks her how she got it. In fact, he asks her a couple of times before she responds. Then she unloads it on him, brooking no interruption. It's a story that pulls against expectations, a romantic dispute between two men with her in the middle. It's a little horrifying but never less than interesting. Many obvious expectations are thwarted along the way. I liked this story—it flies once the narrative momentum sets in, which is early. But it has elements that confuse me. I don't know what to make of the narrator. By story's end his intention seems to be to take advantage of her sexually. She recognizes something creepy in him. "Black guys like you with them funny eyeglasses are a real trip," she says early. "You got to know everything. You sit in corners and watch people." Her sense of him seems confirmed at the end, after her story is finished. The violence and abuse in her story is harrowing. The narrator momentarily sounds like he wants to get away from her as fast as he can. But then: "And then I remembered the most important question, without which the entire exchange would have been wasted. I turned to the woman, now drawn together in the red plastic chair, as if struggling to sleep in a cold bed. 'Sister,' I said, careful to maintain a casual air. 'Sister ... what is your name?'" This finish is the least ambiguous evidence there's something off about him, but it's not isolated. His abrupt focus on the scar is almost insolent, as well as his own story that he is at the clinic to treat a broken nose caused by an accident during sex—insolent and unsettling. He gives away these things about himself, but not much about what he wants, or expects to get. Maybe she's right and he wants to sit in corners and know everything. Whatever it is he takes it as understood. But it's not, exactly. And that leaves me feeling somehow not comfortable with where we are left. I understand that makes this an effective story—and it is, in more ways than one—but it left me with more anxiety than I bargained for. It just doesn't turn out any specific way. It leaves you hanging.

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

Marilyn: A Biography (1973)

Norman Mailer's meditation on the life of Marilyn Monroe turned out to be one of his most successful books commercially, second only to The Naked and the Dead. That was partly because of its subject—it started life as, and was mainly, a collection of photographs of Monroe—and partly because of Mailer's fanciful suggestion that government agents had something to do with her death. Mailer's text is mostly a kind of book report on three previous biographies, though he also conducted some original research with a dozen or more interviews. The first section is titled "A Novel Biographer," but thankfully he does not borrow any more from The Armies of the Night, with its talk of the Novelist and the Historian. For me, Marilyn is a useful enough primer on the arc of Monroe's career and life. I've never read a biography of her, though most of the basic points were familiar. I know I read portions of this when excerpts were published in Rolling Stone in the '70s. I've been mostly bemused by Monroe and have no particular stake in her reputation. Particularly her turn in Some Like It Hot, where she is often zombie-like, has had some fascination / repulsion for me. More recently, I'm willing to give her her due for much better performances elsewhere  (Bus Stop, The Misfits, and a lot of her early comedy roles such as in Monkey Business). But I was still surprised to learn how highly regarded she was by Lee Strasberg and his many disciples of the Method school of acting. Knowing this, I can see it, but even in her best roles I think she's often hit and miss from scene to scene. Mailer's text is a little lacking in the kindle version without the photos, which can have a vivid impact. Probably better to look at a print version that has them. Mailer is dogged about telling her whole story, relating it anecdotally but at the same time searching for the patterns and larger meaning. So it's good on the basic points, even if they are secondhand from the other biographers. It's a useful way, perhaps, to start thinking about the themes of her life and death. It was taken as controversial in its time for all the suggestions of government malfeasance of some kind surrounding her death. They didn't strike me as particularly out of line, but rather more just as Mailer being Mailer. Pugnacious to a fault (literally) and always willing to entertain conspiracy theories, as far as he thinks he can take them. The liaisons (alleged?) with the Kennedys are woefully under-documented, the best I can tell, and so Mailer's speculations about CIA and/or FBI dirty tricks seem built on frailest reeds. At the same time, I remembered it's J. Edgar Hoover he was talking about with the FBI. I wouldn't put anything past that guy. An interesting read.

In case it's not at the library.

The New Journalism (1973)

I first read Tom Wolfe's polemic-as-anthology (or should that be anthology-as-polemic?) when it was much newer, in the mid-'70s. I checked it out of the library, read it, mostly forgot it after a few years, and never owned it until recently, when it came to my attention that Robert Christgau has a piece in it alongside such usual suspect luminaries of the time as Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Hunter Thompson (twice), and many others. Michael Herr is also in it—another name I did not know until later. The collection is packed full of good and even some great pieces, including an early chapter in Wolfe's inchoate fulminations against the state of the novel and fiction, a hobbyhorse he would rock and rock again—though my dwindling interest in him finally evaporated for good when he attempted schooling us with 800-page novels of his own. Let me be clear that I believe in "the New Journalism" as much as ever—both in the sense that journalism remains one of the most direct and effective routes to greater truth, and in the idea that giving up the journalist's pretend game of objectivity remains valid and useful. In fact, Wolfe admirably argues for what he calls "reporting"—talking to people and writing down what they say. New Journalism then was criticized for its recklessness in embracing the subjectivity of reporting. I never had much problem with that, as it seemed a matter of common sense, not to mention fundamentally more honest, to acknowledge that every reporter has a personal point of view. Today, more and more, the word for reporting has turned into "access," a PR term, and most journalists in major reporting venues (broadcast and cable-TV news, and nationally distributed print news outlets such as Time, USA Today, and the New York Times) are practicing PR much more than they are journalism. That's the newer journalism, since some point in the '80s. On the other hand, in fairness, and for better or worse, it must be said that this book weirdly comes with an unexpected aura of those "Best American" volumes which also came from the '80s. I was particularly impressed with the journalism in the Best American Crime Writing series, for example, many of whose pieces (though not all) could sit alongside the pieces here as very good examples of New Journalism. Like disco, it was never that new and it never really went away. It was just called other things. Some of the best and earliest examples are here.

In case it's not at the library.

Amarcord (1973)

"I Remember," Italy / France, 123 minutes
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Gene Luotto
Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Music: Nino Rota
Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Cast: Luigi Rossi, Bruno Zanin, Pupella Maggio, Armando Brancia, Magali Noel, Stefano Proietti, Ciccio Ingrassia, Giuseppe Ianigro, Josiane Tanzilli, Maria Antonietta Beluzzi, Gennaro Ombra

For the most part, director Federico Fellini's work after the 1950s is an acquired taste that I have not yet acquired. I've complained about and/or danced around this previously (see 8½, La Dolce Vita). I like specific scenes, sometimes very much, but the loose and instinctual way Fellini executes his pictures tends to leave me impatient for a more to hang onto. After a couple tries, I recently found more than usual to like in Amarcord. It's in his characteristic later style, but that somehow works better here. "Amarcord" is a phonetic spelling of a term in the relevant Italian dialect that translates as "I remember." It thus announces itself as a memoir film, episodic, random, and idealized by definition, built from the stuff of memories, and childhood memories at that, of a specific time and place.

That time and place, however, happens to be 1930s Fascist Italy. You can't help reacting when you first see whimsy and nostalgia slathered on an era so reviled now. But Fellini is not doing any kind of gloss job here, which helps make the picture work. Mussolini and his followers tend to be ridiculous, but they are also clearly menacing (think Donald Trump rallies), and more than one long scene is devoted to reckless depredations of Fascist Party authorities in the era. Il Duce himself even makes an appearance at one point, largely as a buffoon. Fellini's artistry is notably evident in his skillful use all through the movie of mists, fog, road dust, gas fumes, and other visual obscurities functioning like impaired memory, a subtly effective way to remind us that this is a film of memories and that memory is unreliable.

A Scanner Darkly (1973)

I have to admit I was a little surprised when I reached the Author Note at the end of this novel by Philip K. Dick, which threw the whole thing into another context, or perhaps confirmed an unsettling undertow of mood and themes. There Dick tersely discusses the ravages and casualties of drug use before a list of the names of friends and loved ones and their dispositions: "Gaylene, deceased; Ray, deceased; Francy, permanent psychosis; Kathy, permanent brain damage," etc. There's even a "Phil, permanent pancreatic damage," which appears to be him. Thus it clearly has a more sober intent than usual. It is still trippy, Dick is always trippy, riffing on ideas of the bicameral brain producing separate consciousnesses coexisting within a skull. It's at least as paranoid as ever—probably more. In fact, written in the earliest years of Richard Nixon's enduring gift to us, the War on Drugs, the novel in many ways is a chronicle of paranoia exactly, with its deeply embedded network of undercover narcs. At the time it was published, 1977, we were hard at work rolling back some of those surveillance excesses, so it may have even read as exaggerated paranoia once. In our post-9/11 world it feels more like journalism than speculative fiction, and mundane journalism at that. That's just a measure of how good Dick was at imagining the future in certain ways. It is set in 1994, so the world he imagined was actually still 10 more years out, but that's a good call notwithstanding. There's a pall of depression that hangs over this, and not necessarily in a good way. The usual strong points are weak. There's a drug intriguingly called Substance D, for example, but it doesn't seem to do much more than create desperate addicts. Undercover agents wear "scramble suits" to disguise themselves from one another (to avoid blowing covers, I guess) but the description of the technology is way too complicated for the incidental role it plays in the narrative.

That's handled better in the movie directed by Richard Linklater from 2006, where it works as a pleasantly puzzling visual element. The movie loses a key thread in the story of the fanciful suggestion of a competing left-brain / right-brain foundation for mental breakdowns, but it's otherwise less gloomy than the book, energized by a madly riffing all-star cast of Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder, among others, rotoscoped to good effect. The rotoscoping somehow gives it exactly the look and texture of a Dick narrative, cartoony, trembling in and out of existence, impossibly plastic. For that reason it has to be counted with the class of Dick-based movies, with Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Total Recall. I still give the edge to Total Recall, which seems to me best at capturing the core of Dick, his orchestrations of multiple realities interacting. But none of them is better at the look and feel of Dick than Linklater's picture. But it does verge on being a dreary affair—the book, I mean. There's a kind of 12-step recovery tone to that Author Note. A Scanner Darkly is weird, Dick is always weird, but it is also sad, and troubling. There's definitely a sense of soul-searching, as if Dick were losing interest in his greatest themes and capabilities even as we watch along. Addiction used to be an incidental side product of drug experience. Now it is the drug experience. From here on out, his work more and more began to entertain religious ideas I've never been able to connect with. But there's an amazing amount of his best work, most of it written in the '60s.

In case it's not at the library.

Al Wilson, "Show and Tell" (1973)

Nov. 24, 1973, #1
(listen)

Here's a sentimental favorite, a sweet and gorgeous ballad by Al Wilson, his only hit. Wilson was a big-barreled singer out of Mississippi, covering a Jerry Fuller song Johnny Mathis had already recorded (Peabo Bryson, much later, in 1989, recorded another version, which went high on R&B charts). Wilson brings a certain classic gravitas to it, a sense of a grown man grappling with love, in aching confusion at least as much as wonder at the splendor and so forth. In fact, the song is about his confusion. He's uncertain of his status and it causes pain. Does he dare speak? How will she respond? The woman may not even know him, or anyway may not be aware of his feelings. Inability to communicate seems to be the major theme. He's afraid to speak. He wants a sign. "Can'tcha see I'm tryin' to show love is right." There is desperation in it but it also has a kind of workingman dignity and poignancy—it resorts to strings but uses them well. Wilson inhabits every syllable. The band is fine. It's a song of great hope even as it works familiar steps of love. It insinuates slowly but methodically. I don't remember hearing it for the first time, or having any opinion or thoughts on it much at all, until I heard it early one dark cold morning on the way to work and suddenly I loved it and at the same time felt grown-up. I was working at a nursing home job while I waited for a vo-tech class I was taking in the spring to start. No looking back since. Inspirational background vocal: "do-do-do-do-do."

Bobby (Boris) Pickett & the Crypt-Kickers, "Monster Mash" (1962 / 1973)

Sept. 15, 1962, #1 (2 wks.) / June 30, 1973, #10
(listen)

"Monster Mash" is one of those rare hits that managed to hit twice (see also "The Twist," "Stand by Me," and perhaps others too ... anyone?). "Monster Mash" is a novelty song, basically a girl group vamp, which appropriately hit first within the Halloween time frame in 1962. The summer 1973 hit is a bit more mysterious (there was also a Hot 100 appearance in August 1970), but we'll get to that. On the original release in 1962, the BBC banned the song as "too morbid." In 1973 it was rereleased in the UK, where it peaked at #3 in October. But how it became a hit in the US just before that, well out of the Halloween time frame, is the mystery. I remember it on the radio that summer, and I remember enjoying it with others, in the car and such, because it really is a wonderful little thing, but I was puzzled also that it was a hit. Maybe somebody out there knows that story too. Anyway, it is a delicious toss-off relic of its first era, the NYC / Brill Building pop factory good times, specifically division of Twist. It is indeed a "monster mash" of time-bound parodies: the Mashed Potato dance craze (a variety of the Twist) paired with Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, themselves a craze because of the arrival on late-night TV of the Universal monster movies of the '30s. Total 100% formula, perhaps the very definition of a novelty song, and yet for me it entirely transcends the label. I like to think it has something to do with the presence of Leon Russell, but some sources say he was late for the session and only appeared on the b-side song. It's goofy funny with the Lugosi impersonation and sound effects and all, but what brings me back is the conviction of the backup singers and the pleasing way it rolls along. It gets to some good places.

Brighter Side of Darkness, "Love Jones" (1973)

Jan. 16, 1973, #16 
(listen)

There are a lot of reasons "Love Jones" might seem to have been lost down the memory hole. The most obvious is that it was quickly obscured in the celebrity glare of the Cheech & Chong parody that followed within the year, "Basketball Jones," which featured George Harrison, Carole King, Darlene Love, and Michelle Phillips (among others) and was actually a slightly bigger hit, peaking at #15 in September 1973. Brighter Side of Darkness (what a name) are pure generic one-hit wonder, '70s version, never to be heard of again after a self-titled album that accompanied their sole chart appearance. The lead singer, Darryl Lamont, was 12 years old. Based out of Chicago, the group came up with a song that is a dense stew of the proto-disco black pop music of the time. It is powered by a majestic bottom and propped up by staccato horns over which strings swirl and glide like frosting. It takes its time. When the singing / speaking starts, it is so sincere and innocent in its ways as to be almost embarrassing, but ultimately irresistibly endearing. Lamont's voice has broken but not the callowness, attempting to get over, softly murmuring: " ... you see, darling / It's about time for me to / Get real serious about you / Because / If someone was / To rip me off of you / I couldn't account for / My actions." The theme, the mood, the song is all love, love, love, the sweetly painful kind from the years of hard teenage crushes, couched in tuff terms: "I need you / And the need is so strong / It's almost like that of a junkie." Different times, different times, that such a sentiment could coexist so neatly inside this beautiful sweet confection.