“Within the Walls of Tyre” (1978)

This story by Michael Bishop has its points, notably the treatment of ‘70s/’80s shopping malls and life, charting part of the US journey in the last century from cities to suburbs and exurbs. But starting with the title, it more like delivers an assault of intellectual pretension that annoyed me when it didn’t depress me. The internet tells me Tyre is “one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.... one of the earliest Phoenician metropolises and the legendary birthplace of Europa ... and Carthage's founder Dido (Elissa).” But the venerable ancient city figures in this story only metaphorically. More: the story basically turns on another strange word likely unfamiliar to most readers: “lithopedion.” I looked it up for you (to be fair, it’s also explained in the story): “a rare phenomenon which occurs most commonly when a fetus dies during an abdominal pregnancy, is too large to be reabsorbed by the body, and calcifies.” It’s also called a stone baby and again it’s very rare—even the woman in this story carrying one mentions how rare and unusual it is. But it’s certainly grotesque and could very well reach people as a type of body horror, although it seemed more strained to me than anything, or even just cheap shock, which wasn’t helped by the necessity of follow-up research. Between Tyre and lithopedion it felt like some preening on the part of Bishop, and cringy. But the story is good on its 1978 time and place, with both shopping malls and casual sex done well. The story is set at Christmastime but Bishop seems to have missed the oppressive omnipresence in shopping malls of seasonal music. But that’s just picking nits on my part. Bishop’s mall here is otherwise good in the way director and writer George A. Romero’s is in Dawn of the Dead (something in the air in 1978). The sex scene reminded me of the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood,” except in this case the lover man does not crawl off to sleep in the bath (and remember, it was really the ‘70s more than the ‘60s that memorialized the fine points of casual sex pre-AIDS). “Within the Walls of Tyre” devolves down to an unpleasant revenge tale, only made more lame by all the intellectual tarting-up. A rare misfire from editor David G. Hartwell’s otherwise extremely useful phonebook-sized anthology The Dark Descent.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Story not available online.

Days of Heaven (1978)

USA, 94 minutes

Director/writer: Terence Malick

Photography: Nestor Almendros, Haskell Wexler

Music: Ennio Morricone, Leo Kottke

Editor: Billy Weber
Cast: Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz, Robert J. Wilke, Jackie Shultis, Stuart Margolin

A number of big impressive names are associated with director and writer Terence Malick’s second feature—the last before his hiatus from filmmaking for nearly 20 years—starting with Malick himself, the mysterious master filmmaker who went away (and then came back). Cinematographer Nester Almendros (My Night at Maud’s, Sophie’s Choice) shot the picture, backstopped by Haskell Wexler (Medium Cool, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). Ennio Morricone (A Fistful of Dollars, Taxi Driver) provided the soundtrack, supported by Leo Kottke (acoustic guitarist extraordinaire). And there’s a big fancy-pants and utterly gorgeous sepia titles sequence to start it off.

That leaves the pretty faces to Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, and Sam Shepard, who are players with varying degrees of ability. Days of Heaven is no actor’s showcase, though everyone here at least is competent enough and following direction. More the point, as with much of Malick’s work, is the stunning beauty—of nature, mostly, but note that he and Almendros worked carefully to emulate masterpieces of Dutch landscape painters such as Peter Bruegel (the Elder) or Jan van Goyen and others such as Edward Hopper, Johannes Vermeer, and Andrew Wyeth. But not even these museum inspection tours, in this case, are the main point. I think it’s fair to say the strongest and most interesting feature of Days of Heaven is the simmering sordid story, which ultimately feels biblical in its scope. Well done!

Killer of Sheep (1978)

USA, 80 minutes

Director/writer/photography/editor: Charles Burnett
Music: Paul Robeson, Dinah Washington, Faye Adams, Arthur Crudup, Little Walter

Cast: Henry G. Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy, Angela Burnett, Eugene Cherry, Jack Drummond

Killer of Sheep was the first feature-length picture by one-man band director, writer, cinematographer, and editor Charles Burnett. It was made as Burnett’s master’s thesis for the UCLA School of Film. It’s relatively short and episodic, with little narrative arc or perhaps more accurate to say with many little narrative arcs, a probing look at life in Watts during the 1970s, when it was shot. Henry G. Sanders stars as Stan, Kaycee Moore is Stan’s unnamed wife, and Jack Drummond and Angela Burnett are their unnamed children. The picture won praise and appreciation when it was shown in film festivals in 1978 but, because the music rights had not been obtained, and the picture is full of music, it failed to get a wide release and languished for some 30 years.

Stan is a simple, decent, hardworking family man trying to get along in the obviously dire conditions of Watts. He applies himself patiently to life—fixing up his rundown house, in need of many repairs, and working a day job in a slaughterhouse. Which gets us to the nonmetaphorical implications of the title. Literally, Stan is a killer of sheep. But I suspect the sheep themselves bear metaphorical implications, not least because I think it would be more likely to run into cows and pigs in a slaughterhouse. Sheep are eaten too, of course, but are also raised—and kept alive—for their coats as a source of wool. The slaughterhouse scenes here can be unpleasant, explicit, and difficult to watch, notably one where the coats are being stripped off corpses impaled on hooks. But those scenes are only a small part of the picture.

“If Damon Comes” (1978)

Charles L. Grant was a prolific writer who is basically new to me. I found this story in The Dark Descent, where editor David G. Hartwell may have slightly oversold it in his intro piece. The story is good, but muddled. Damon is the strange son of Frank and Susan, whose marriage has hit the skids. Frank is not the best husband or father. Damon is 8 and has seen him kissing another woman. He hit Susan at least once when they were fighting. Susan wins custody, yet Damon seems abnormally attached to Frank. He’s never far from Frank’s sight, even when Frank is at work. Susan almost seems to be jealous. She makes it part of her reason for moving away with Damon after the divorce to “the city.” That’s New York, as the story is part of Grant’s Oxrun series, set in the fictional town of Oxrun Station, Connecticut. Damon is even more distant with Susan after the move. However, in the end things appear not to be as they appear. That is, Damon is attached to Frank because he hates him, evidently for various failings—kissing the strange woman, not trying very hard to find a lost cat. What’s more, Damon appears to be some sort of supernatural being (note his name). He suddenly dies, but he is still after Frank. There’s a nice mood and lots of great effects in this story, but I’m really not sure it adds up in any satisfying way. Frank, late in the story, realizes “Damon didn’t love him: Not since the night on the corner in the fog [kissing the other woman]; not since the night he had not really tried to locate a cat with a milk white face.” But we saw Frank looking for the cat at the beginning of the story—not as hard as he might have, perhaps, but he did make an effort. Have you ever gone looking for a missing cat? And, yes, in a drunken moment, presumably with a failing marriage, he kissed a strange woman. These are lapses, surely, but do they really merit a death sentence? It seems all out of proportion. Yes, suddenly Damon is evil and irrational and terrifying, but also, what? It seems we are falling back on the unfeeling universe once again, which seems nearly as tired here as tittering madness, even in 1978. Or no? Grant remains an interesting figure to me—I want to read more of his stuff. Besides writing scads of novels and stories he also edited the legendary Shadows anthologies through the late ‘70s and ‘80s. “If Damon Comes” has its points. Give it a B+.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Story not available online.

Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978)

The second novel by William Kennedy in his Albany cycle turns on a plot point I also noticed in Legs: kidnapping. I just didn’t realize it was so common. I thought the whole Lindbergh baby thing was kind of a one-off. In fact, this novel is based on an actual case, per Wikipedia an “attempted 1933 kidnapping of John O’Connell Jr., the nephew of Albany Democratic boss Daniel P. O’Connell.” The Wikipedia article also notes, “The kidnapping is the central point of the story, but Kennedy also details the everyday lives of the characters inhabiting Albany’s working class and poor neighborhoods.” Just so, Billy Phelan and Martin Daugherty, an Albany reporter, feel more like side characters, as does the kidnapping story. Albany itself is beginning to emerge as the main player. Kennedy must have already had a trilogy in mind when he wrote this. He says as much in an introduction to An Albany Trio, relating that he needed to tell the Legs Diamond story before this one, and this one before the next, Ironweed, which by itself you may recall won a lot of prizes and such. Legs felt like a self-contained fictionalized biography—and a highly entertaining one—but this felt more like setup and transition, made out of the Albany color in 1938. Which worked fine as such but also very much like a second part in many series, so busy laying groundwork and developing backstory that it practically forgets to include a main narrative arc. Billy Phelan’s career as a low-level gambling hustler bore some interest. Martin Daugherty’s story seemed more cliché as a slightly ignorant, slightly idealist columnist for a daily paper. I have no idea why Martin’s father’s story is here, nor for that matter Billy’s father’s story, which is also here but not at such length. For reasons, no doubt. More will be revealed. The usual things with series. None of it had much of anything to do with the kidnapping story either. Quibble, quibble. Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and Ironweed are short enough they can be contained in a single trade paperback of 600 pages. They are eminently readable and enjoyable even when they are confusing. Kennedy is just that good of a writer. This second one in the Albany series is probably informative for the bigger picture but not truly a stand-alone, the ways Legs is and Ironweed might be. But I’m happy to read on. I even have the fourth and fifth installments on hand (Quinn’s Book and Very Old Bones).

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.
William Kennedy, An Albany Trio

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

USA / Italy, 127 minutes

Director/writer/editor: George A. Romero

Photography: Michael Gornick

Music: Dario Argento, Goblin

Cast: David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross, Tom Savini, Michael Gornick, George A. Romero, approx. 233 zombies, a suburban mall

I was surprised when I went looking for all-purpose filmmaker George A. Romero’s original 1978 Dawn of the Dead to find it virtually unavailable on streaming, at least for the moment. It’s September so maybe that means they are holding it back for October, which I guess makes some sense. Instead, I kept running into Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake in search results, which reminded me I hadn’t seen that yet. I was thus forced to turn to my battered old VHS copy, acquired some years ago. My VCR remote is long gone, if it ever had one, which means watching a VHS has become something of an in-home drive-in experience: the picture and the sound are noticeably crappy, no English subtitles are available (often a necessity, sad to say), there’s no jumping back 10 or 30 seconds at a time to pick up dialogue and/or plot points I might have missed (I’m starting to miss this in theaters too), and my living room is full of the moral equivalent of randomly honking horns and flashing headlights.

Among other things, it means I may not have been able to give a fair chance to a movie I have always struggled with. Dawn of the Dead is one of those sequels many consider better than the original (see also Bride of Frankenstein, The Godfather Part II, and The Road Warrior) but for me all the best of the franchise and indeed the zombie project at large is in the 1968 Night of the Living Dead. This includes the invention of the modern zombie template as we understand it today. It’s frequently given various untoward reworking, as I would see in the Snyder remake (which I did get around to looking at, not least because it’s conveniently on streaming). Dawn of the Dead boasts a fair amount of visible growth in Romero’s filmmaking abilities but in general they are turned toward making an action / adventure / disaster picture as opposed to a horror. In this particular case I will say that tone added to my in-home drive-in ambience, as most of the relatively few drive-in movies I ever went to always seemed to be of the disaster ilk, e.g., The Poseidon Adventure.

The Deer Hunter (1978)

USA / UK, 183 minutes

Director: Michael Cimino

Writers: Michael Cimino, Deric Washburn, Louis Garfinkle, Quinn K. Redeker

Photography: Vilmos Zsigmond

Music: Stanley Myers

Editor: Peter Zinner

Cast: Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage, John Cazale, Meryl Streep, George Dzundza, Chuck Aspegren, Rutanya Alda

A lot of strengths and weaknesses can be found in this much-lauded movie, perhaps related to how long it is. There’s time for everything here. Set in the 1960s, the first hour is devoted to the build-up and then a highly traditional wedding in the small western Pennsylvania town of Clairton, south of Pittsburgh. Clairton is dependent on steel work and made up of a Slavic population large enough that some of its buildings have onion domes. The wedding and reception are huge affairs where we meet our main characters, three of whom have been drafted and are bound for the Vietnam War. Then the finish to The Deer Hunter is one of the best endings to any movie anywhere. After war, loss, and many changes, after a funeral and long night, the survivors gather around a kitchen table for breakfast and all they can do to console themselves is sing “God Bless America” in numbed tones. It’s haunting, powerful, and extraordinarily moving.

Between that start and finish, however, we find the Vietnam War, which director and cowriter Michael Cimino, with his merry band of cowriters, have turned into a hellscape of brutality, PTSD, and Russian roulette. Fair enough. But one of these things—namely, Russian roulette—has nothing to do with Vietnam or the war. It never happened, certainly not in the systematized way it is shown. I’m not saying it doesn’t work as a kind of metaphor for the US intervention in Vietnam in the first place—arrogant, blinkered, suicidal, foolish, all those things and more. Metaphorically, it may speak to the US experience in Vietnam. But practically it starts to seem very silly, as among other things it appears all anyone was doing in Vietnam according to this movie was pointing guns at their heads for money in craptacular rundown drinking joints and losing their lives approximately one in six times.

"Home" (1978)

Story by Jayne Anne Phillips not available online.

Jayne Anne Phillips tells another story, which like "The Heavenly Animal" is also from her third collection of stories, Black Tickets, about fractured relationships in a modern media world. The first-person narrator, who goes unnamed, is 23 years old and recently returned home to live with her mother for an unspecified time. "I ran out of money and I wasn't in love, so I came home to my mother," is how she explains the situation. They watch the evening news most nights and worry about the general health of Walter Cronkite. Her mother is a professional, an "educational administrator," who works during the day and comes home and knits in front of the TV at night. They watch a lot of TV and attempt in various ways to connect. And they do connect, but they are also separated by the daughter's interest in exploring her sexuality. It looks—and not only to her mother—as if she is sinking into a life of serial monogamy, forever bewildered by an inability to forge something lasting. For the mother, it's alarming and depressing to see her daughter going that direction. The daughter, for her part, thinks her mother is just an old square. Her mother and father are divorced and there's some sense the father is dead now—a ne'er-do-well at best, as there is also a vague and ambiguous suggestion of sexual abuse. The narrative basically turns on the daughter inviting an old boyfriend for a visit. For the sake of the mother they stay in separate rooms, but they meet later for sex, which wakens and distresses the mother. The visiting ex-boyfriend is obviously a terrible relationship for the daughter—he's in another relationship and just taking advantage of an opportunity, though he's also sympathetic in other ways. I'm tempted to call the story dated because in many ways it could only take place in the '70s, but there's something broader and more universal about it than just that. It's a great example of a major direction for the short story after the '60s, with stories of broken families in American suburbs and a certain spiritual malaise (not actually Jimmy Carter's turn of phrase, but close enough), which lingered into the Reagan years and well beyond: divorce, TV, meaningless sex, temporary living conditions, and a grinding generation gap are typical elements. Phillips makes a pretty good job of it here, much better I think than "The Heavenly Animal."

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

"Girl" (1978)

Read story by Jamaica Kincaid online.

Jamaica Kincaid's story is short enough to qualify as a "short short"—only two printed pages. One paragraph and a single long sentence, in fact, with its many clauses separated by semicolons. It is thus a kind of stunt, or experimental, whereas I think of short shorts as coming with some kind of hard twist against expectations. "Girl" has no surprises after you figure out what's going on. It is fragments of a lifelong dialogue between a mother and a daughter, with the mother doing all the talking: " ... this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming; this is how you iron your father's khaki shirt so that it doesn't have a crease; ... " And so on. It was published in the New Yorker in the '70s and bears the preoccupation of the time with feminism, exploring the ways that women themselves train each other into the various social expectations of their gender that have become so toxic and stifling. The mother may be wrong in her values but she is not unsympathetic. The implicit theme of sexuality comes up frequently in this strangely formal harangue, in the form of blatant slut-shaming, as we call it now. Despite the harsh tone, a bond plainly exists between the mother and the daughter, and large portions of this story, perhaps most of it, are fierce love. Yet the overt messages are so destructive, so soul-inhibiting, it's hard to see around them. The structure of the single long sentence with handfuls of semicolons implies a litany that went on for years, went on forever. It's all the mother, except for the title, which gives us the point of view and subtly reminds us that the harangue is directed at a person who is impossibly vulnerable, a child. The brevity of this story, and its bludgeoning punch, help us feel the rage that motivates it. It also explores the rage, which is almost intimidating, the result of a lifetime of growing up with lies, distortions, and oppression. The mother reminds me, in this day and age, of nothing so much as Fox News zombies, made angry by the lies fed them and yet beaten down themselves by a lifetime of unfair struggle against forces simply more powerful, who dictate the terms of reality to them, over and over, until they repeat them as if they are common sense. We're all in this boat now, it sometimes seems, a fact seen better, in the '70s, by women, gays, and people of color. Kincaid's story strikes very hard.

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

"Testimony of Pilot" (1978)

Story by Barry Hannah not available online.

This story by Barry Hannah, whose Airships collection was all the rage in 1978 as I recall, makes an interesting contrast to "Water Liars," which is in the collection edited by Raymond Carver. For one thing, it indicates the regard for Hannah that two different stories by him appear in two of the collections I'm looking at (so far, in this exercise, that has happened only with Ann Beattie and Carver). Even more interesting are the differences between the stories—"Water Liars" is short and dense with poetic effects whereas "Testimony of Pilot" (is that a New Testament pun?) is five times its size and possesses a powerful narrative current. Basically, "Testimony" is the study of an adolescent friendship whose reverberations have potential to last a lifetime. It's full of incidental detail expertly handled, notably the high school band to which the narrator and his friend, Arden Quadberry, are so dedicated. The narrator plays percussion and Quadberry plays the saxophone. As depicted, Quadberry is by far the best player in the band, and steps up in a crisis to help the school win a competition. Later he becomes a fighter pilot. Much of the friendship—or "connection" might be the better term, as the narrator and Quadberry are not friends for most of the story—is easily reduced to stereotypes of bullies and their victims. But Hannah hangs so much interesting detail over it that it's easily forgotten. Quadberry has a fierce dignity from his first appearance, and the narrator is dealt a harsh comeuppance, going deaf shortly after he graduates high school. In fact, he was already going deaf before that. But going deaf? Who thinks of that? There was something deeply affecting to me about the characters and their connection in this story, but I'm not sure I'm entirely on board yet with Hannah. It can feel like pro forma gothic Southern business with the biblical familiarities and grotesques and such. He seems to be working self-consciously as a Southern Writer, and with all my problems with Southern culture returning again here in the 21st century, maybe that's the rub. Be that as it may, this is a good story.

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

Airships by Barry Hannah

"Water Liars" (1978)

Read story by Barry Hannah online.

When a story is as short as this one by Barry Hannah—four pages—it's going to rely on various tricks to get over. There's not really time or space to develop a narrative or characters. "Water Liars" has a ringing, charming, and distinctive voice. The first sentence: "When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another." The sing-songy rhyming foreshadows and signifies the first-person narrator, who is impoverished and vaguely dissolute. His story here is that he is at loose ends since he and his wife belatedly exchanged sexual histories. He is unexplainably disturbed to realize his wife had lovers, affairs, and sex before she knew him. He knows it's indefensible, makes no rational sense—of course she knew others before she knew him. So that's the narrator. The "water liars" of the title, the old men on the pier who swap exaggerations, appear to be something like his analogue, an externalization of his interior. This looks even more likely when one of the old men tells a story that bothers everyone. "He'd told the truth," Hannah explains it. They are angry with him and want him to leave. Along the way in this very short story, the language is compact and glistening, broken out into short sections separated by line breaks, just a few paragraphs each. So the narrative is thus also shattered, literally and figuratively. It's a pretty good trick, making it a pleasure (if baffling) to read, but for me I think it's a little too tricky. It's more like a poem, an assembly of images within language that doesn't exactly yield up meaning, not least because it yields it up so many wanton ways, not one of them direct. The narrator is not likable, and the old guys feel more like talking symbols than people. A Greek chorus of some kind—Hannah is at pains to note the discontinuities of the people on the pier. "The lineup is always different, because they're always dying out or succumbing to constipation, etc." (which is only the second sentence in the story). It's probably a good classroom exercise, short enough that many will likely read it, and full of a hundred ambiguities you could chew over in the space of an hour. As much as I like the language—and the brevity—this story leaves me a little cold. It's too smug, and it's too hard. I suspect in my heart there's actually very little here.

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

Airships by Barry Hannah

"A Vintage Thunderbird" (1978)

Story by Ann Beattie not available online.

Ann Beattie explores lifestyles of the young, urban, and sexually active in this chilly story of the summertime of life. They are all in their late 20s or 30s. The fact that it's a little dated helps to blunt the assault, but not by much. It's appalling the way these friends treat each other. That's the point, of course, and it works. It's strong medicine, in fact. Nick is in love with Karen, who is a few years older, with whom he's had a poorly defined sexual relationship for seven years. "Open" seems to cover it, but nothing so blatant is ever discussed. Now she mostly sees older men and does a bit of treasure hunting. Nick is seeing a woman named Petra but they don't appear to like one another. But Petra gets mad, understandably, when Karen lures Nick away from one of their dates. A married couple, Sammy and Stephanie, have relocated to Virginia, but their disagreements about having a child moved with them. Suddenly Stephanie is pregnant, an accident. She's going to keep the child. Then she isn't. She needs to come up to New York to see Nick. It's a sad parade. These people can't sustain long-term friendships, and they tend to want instead to sexualize them. What they don't have is what they must have. What they do have is devalued by their having it. Everything is always a mess in their lives, though they are privileged enough that necessities of survival rarely impinge on their fugue states. They can throw fits of pique and disappear to the Bahamas for a week or two. At one point Nick tells Karen she is his oldest friend, which shocks her because they've only known each other seven years. So it goes. Even with total inabilities to make commitments, the people in this story are continually making commitments, usually to others they don't know well. They fail. They fail again. They keep trying because it's easier than trying to understand their own self-sabotage. They are not friends to one another so much as witnesses, who wish very much that they didn't have to look. It's dated, but as I say that's also a mercy.

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

The Basketball Diaries (1978)

Here's a good one for the shelf where you keep your disaffected beatnik literature. Based on diary entries Jim Carroll made from 1963 to 1966, it chronicles the life of a ne'er-do-well midcentury juvenile delinquent living off the streets of New York City. He was age 13 to 16 at the time of all these adventures, and even if they have been heavily edited he is still obviously a precociously gifted youth. I was figuratively still picking my nose and rubbing it on my pants leg at the same age he was doing heroin, making it with chicks, and winning basketball championships. Sometimes the callow youth you would expect shows up—in the early sections he's still not clear on whether it's heroin or marijuana that is dangerously addictive (that's all straightened out by the end of the book). I was struck by how there is no mention of either the JFK assassination or the coming of the Beatles, though Malcolm X (and his assassination) comes up more than once. It sprawls across great swaths of the city, starting on the Lower East Side and moving north, to the Bronx and environs. Carroll and his comrades live wild and free, laughing and winning basketball games and taking what they please. Not without consequence. Late in the book Carroll serves 31 days in jail, about which he says little, but seems to be brooding over a bad experience. Even later than that he is living the life of a heroin addict. The literary ambitions are there; he talks about them in places, mostly in terms of poetry. In some ways I'm sorry I came to him so late. He died in 2009 at the age of 60. At some point, in the late '70s, I acquired the single "People Who Died" by his Jim Carroll Band. I loved it for the nervous way it surged and spat out the name-checking. But I was never moved to go further than that (I don't even remember the B-side) until I thought of him again and was happy to find that my paperback edition of this (with Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover) had survived the purges of the past 10 years. Is it essential? I don't know. It's a memoir with great anecdotal storytelling and vivid detail of a most unusual life in a time and place that holds a good deal of interest for me. The language has little to recommend it beyond its clarity, but I'll take clarity on a bet over beauty any day—it just surprises me a little, given he evidently considered himself a poet more than any of the many other roles he played: sports star, rock star, and heroin addict. Not bad.

In case it's not at the library.

Patti Smith Group, "Because the Night" (1978)

May 13, 1978, #13
(listen)

I did not know or suspect for a long time that this is a Bruce Springsteen song, and now I have to wonder how I ever missed it. Recorded in 1977, it has the heroic thrust and optimistic face to the sun of his autopilot mode down to the thundering drums and tinkling circling piano intro. It's co-credited to Patti Smith because she reworked Springsteen's original lyric, though Wikipedia tells me he has also performed it over the years with his own lyric. I hope that doesn't mean tensions because I have long indulged a romantic sense that this was the result of a serendipitous connection between two New Jersey natives. Certainly their personas are simpatico here. Smith is a natural at the Springsteen swagger, which had to come from somewhere, and the tumbling surreal bent of her wordplay is part of what makes it work. I have to think the romantic view holds. They're playing and singing the hell out of it. The guitar solo from Lenny Kaye is a model of economy, a hallmark of its times (compare Iggy Pop with James Williamson, "I'm Bored"). And Springsteen had a way of insinuating himself into the greater New York City area elite, as remember also he showed up mumbling, "Well hey, man, that's just a lie" on Lou Reed's masterpiece title cut of Reed's Street Hassle LP. Springsteen was likely dealing with a fair amount of pent-up creative energy at the time, precluded from releasing anything while a legal battle with his former management was resolved. The dispute erupted shortly after he appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek, three years before. Problems, problems. And out of all that came this wonderful surprise hit song in the spring of 1978.

The Stand (1978)

I saw some list awhile back that ranked Stephen King's books—he's up to over 60 now. I was only a little surprised to see The Stand top the list, which did not specify an edition: either the ginormous edition originally published or the unexpurgated edition that added some 400 more pages to that, evidently after King had won the authorial clout to add back requested editorial cuts. I've only got the first version; I understand the longer version isn't that much of an improvement. I also happened to be watching Twin Peaks AND The Lord of the Rings at the time, so I had my hands full with fantastical showdowns between good and evil. King's mammoth novel starts with a super-flu virus that wipes out better than 99% of the human population on the planet. All in itself that qualifies as a staggering vision. The survivors sort themselves into Team Good (headed up by a centenarian African American woman known as Mother Abagail, who lives in Nebraska) and Team Evil, headed up by a demon known as Randall Flagg, the Walkin Dude. Team Evil is headquartered in Las Vegas (of course) and Team Good in Boulder, Colorado. The to-do list for the novel is giant, starting with wiping out most human beings. Thus a lot of the action is devoted to setting up the many, many pieces—there are dozens of significant characters—and putting them through their paces. It was a page-turning thrill ride my first time through but has been relatively more sedate since. In fact, I've only managed to get all the way through it again once (hence the real reason for my reluctance to go for the bigger version). As with all of the King I've read it's as compulsively readable as you'd ever want the first time. After that you start to see how he does it more—it's often a matter of repetition, stroking out the main points like brushing an animal. I have no quarrel whatsoever with calling him the master of horror literature for our times—also its best critic. King is good at striking the affable tone that draws you in and stands by all the way as your friend, alternating more secretly with the creep who will say and do anything to get a rise out of you. His imagination truly is fiendish and almost all of his stuff I know, not least The Stand, manages to unnerve me one way or another. The difference in The Stand is that it is on such an epic, colossal scale. If you don't know it yet, as the saying goes, I envy you. Try the big version.

In case it's not at the library.

This Year's Model (1978/1993)

(Also this.)

I guess it took me 15 years to fix on This Year's Model as Elvis Costello's best album and my stone favorite by him. That's partly because for many years there Costello pumped out product, fine product, like a crazy man, a regular dot-matrix printing machine churning through the reams. So I had good reasons for setting this album aside—Armed Forces, Get Happy!!, Taking Liberties, other stray singles, etc. As it turned out, however, This Year's Model improved immeasurably with the 1993 Rykodisc CD, which with a few deft moves and additions clarified so much. There always were version problems with this one. The original UK release had "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" and "Night Rally" instead of "Radio, Radio," likely the biggest difference between the two, and for me a huge one. So I am happy settling for that year's model—1993—over the original which I knew.

Gates of Heaven (1978)

USA, 85 minutes, documentary
Director/editor: Errol Morris
Photography: Ned Burgess

I had better note how strange it was to sit down to watch and write about Gates of Heaven, a documentary about pet cemeteries, within days of the death of a long-time pet cat. As I feared, the context tended to confirm my impression of the worst qualities of filmmaker Errol Morris, even here in my favorite film by him, his first. He can often come across as a shallow ironist, falling back continually on an unpleasant mocking element that curdles the best here. In many ways we are in David Byrne territory (before even David Byrne had arrived there), with an insulated and smug complacency that too often misses and obtrudes the point.

The themes Morris attempts to smother in jocularity often entirely resist that—themes of faith, love, responsibility, some of the most profound questions we ask. The result is hardly unflawed, a movie that appears to be having an argument with itself about something we don't understand, like a feuding couple at a dinner party. Yet, in terms of form and in terms of filmmaking strategy, it brought things to bear that we are still seeing released every month in new documentaries.

Ramones, "I Wanna Be Sedated" (1978)

(listen)

Any of dozens of Ramones songs heard most recently could constitute my one favorite and that's the truth. So let's just call this heard most recently, even as I go ahead and say it is my favorite Ramones song. From their fourth album, Road to Ruin, it has several of my favorite Ramones features: it's about grim mental illness in a light-hearted way (cf., "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment," "Teenage Lobotomy"), it's pro-drug in an anti-drug way (or maybe make that vice versa, viz., "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue," "Carbona Not Glue," and in general all mentions of glue, plus also "We're a Happy Family," which rhymes Queens, refried beans, magazines, and thorazines), and, more broadly, it rocks up the place in an unmistakable way—"1-2-3-4 clunk-LOUD," etc. Is there anyone anywhere who still denies that this groove is, as intended, a lot of F-U-N? No doubt. I recently heard that some now consider the Stooges and the Ramones as polar era choices, two sides of a coin but you have to pick one (you know, the way people pit the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Donovan, or the Sex Pistols and the Clash). That's one to think about! I still think "I Wanna Be Sedated" is about what top 40 radio should have sounded like, at least partly, from approximately 1976 to 1984: blasts of squalling attack out of which emerge lovely Brill Building verse-chorus-verse gestures, all lurching forward in a cosmic upside-down cake of Archie comics and teenage werewolf movies. The stovepipe jean legs, black leather, and hair in the eyes, that's just style. The most salient line here goes like this, approximately: "Bamp bamp, buh bamp, buh bamp bamp, buh bamp, I wanna be sedated." Sing with. You can do it.

Suburbs, "Chemistry Set" (1978)

(listen)

I think the Suburbs are now not so known outside of the Twin Cities of Minnesota. They flared up in the early '80s as a lively DOR act (dance-oriented rock, we were calling it), earned the distinction of a couple of Christgau reviews (an A- and a B-), and tried to find a way to wallow into the mainstream the weird pastiche that animated them of a supper-club Bryan Ferry (in the person of dapper pianist and tux-wearer Chan Poling) welded at the hip to a streaming-sweat Iggy Pop (in the person of Blaine John "Beej" Chaney, who often appeared in need of diapering). Eventually they were lost in the mid-'80s hoopla of Prince, the Replacements, and all that. Interestingly (or not) the Suburbs hailed from the suburbs where I grew up, in and around Hopkins and Minnetonka, west of Minneapolis. I went to high school with guitarist Bruce Allen (who died in 2009) and bassist Michael Halliday. Chan and Beej and I think drummer Hugo Klaers went to high school in another school district an easy bike ride from where I grew up. The nine-song 7-inch EP that climaxes with "Chemistry Set," The Suburbs, was the first-ever release by the indie label Twin/Tone in 1978. It was the band's showstopper for a long time, primitive, bone-headed, roaring simplicity, in all of 1:11. "I'm into chemistry and that's about it" is the lyric. Repeat as directed. Lazy blogger takes the easy way out of making and posting a YouTube of the song, found now on an excellent 2003 compilation, Chemistry Set, along with more of their greats, surprisingly many of which actually still are great (and some of which we will be getting to by and by). Instead, this time, I found a video from their performance at the Minneapolis M-80 festival in September 1979. Two points: 1) the lyric as noted above (it's not always intelligible in this version), and 2) ... I was there.

Here, My Dear (1978)

As a concept album, Here, My Dear has few peers. It's the product in part of Marvin Gaye's final divorce settlement from his first wife of some 13 years, Anna Gordy, who agreed to accept the advance and a portion of the earnings from his "next album." Gaye turned it into a double-LP meditation that roams all over the landscape of love lost, with as much bitterness and venom (that starts in the title) as sadness and grief. It's in his lush post-What's Going On style, full of aimless and dense mixes that find numerous ways to strike home at multiple levels. The tracks are pretty long, the majority clocking in at five or six minutes or more, and they tend to mush together across the relatively broad scope, though jarring points, such as "attorney's fees" or crazy saxophone solos are capable of emerging from the welter at any moment. I suspect a much sharper and more affecting work could have come from an effort to cut this approximately in half, but obviously other motivations had to be in play as well. Maybe he intended the bigger package as a gesture of generosity. Or, conversely, maybe he didn't want it to be that successful—at that point in his career a double-LP wasn't necessarily what his fan base was looking for. Even more likely, once he started on the thematics of this I can well imagine that it could have just started pouring out of him, leaving him with very little facility or perspective to cut and focus it. The best song here, "When Did You Stop Loving Me When Did I Stop Loving You" (which needs little further explanation beyond that title) gets three incarnations, one less than a minute as an outgoing coda but both of the other two over six minutes. All, even the shorty, are fairly well larded through with self-pity, but it's not hard to sympathize where he's coming from for anyone who's been through it, and this is one key point where he opens a memorable window to the pain. Addressing divorce is a dirty thankless job but someone's got to do it—or make that, do it well, cf., the recent picture Blue Valentine, because it isn't often done well. Here, My Dear doesn't necessarily do it well, certainly not consistently across its massive breadth. But factored in as it is so concretely to the divorce itself makes it uniquely interesting. And it is, after all, Marvin Gaye working in his most self-consciously chosen signature style. It may be one only for the fans—but it's fair enough to call it essential for those fans.