It’s a Wonderful Life (2006)

The 2006 version of Chris Stamey’s first solo album is what’s on offer on the internet today and that seems to be fine with Stamey, who remixed a couple of the songs from his curious 1982 release (the cover image above is from the ’82 LP), included three of the four songs from his 1984 Instant Excitement EP (minus the John Lennon cover, maybe a licensing issue), and for good measure added two alternate mixes of Wonderful Life songs and another from his 1991 LP Fireworks, “Something Came Over Me.” I was infatuated with the first version of It’s a Wonderful Life in the early ‘80s. Later my LP went missing and I never turned it up again. Thus, from memory, I must note that the remix of “Never Enters My Mind” seems inferior to the original, at least on first listens. I have no problem with the other remix from the original, “Face of the Crowd,” and, indeed, I’m already getting used to the new “Never Enters My Mind.” This 2006 release, which I somehow missed, is a reasonable approximation of a most peculiar solo album with a bunch of extra stuff. Stamey had gone from a sideman with Alex Chilton in the late ‘70s to playing in the band Sneakers with Mitch Easter to a principal with Peter Holsapple in the dBs, co-author of that band’s great first two albums. Stamey seemed to be working—and generally has all along—in a certain indie alternative pop mode where melody and the three-minute song are prized with smidges of feedback and noise (and sometimes smidges of sentiment, as on his Christmas albums). It’s a Wonderful Life—I think it’s just him overdubbing himself—suggests Stamey may have been more the force for racket in the dBs. It clunks and sprawls at slow pace like a New Orleans parade going down the line, with Stamey’s variously agonized vocals declaiming over it. The drumkit squats over it all, thundering. The album was early efforts by Stamey at production (the album is credited as “directed” by Stamey and recorded by Mitch Easter), so perhaps there’s some beginner’s luck at making all this work in almost a hypnotic way. You listen to it a few times and it gets to you. Stamey’s gift for melody does not fail him, as “Never Enters My Mind” (new and old), “Depth of Field,” and the title song are absolutely top of the line. I want to complain about “Get a Job,” which is not the Silhouettes 1957 sha-na-na hit but instead a cover of “Tobacco Road.” I’m still too scarred by too recently hearing the “Tobacco Road” cover by War with Eric Burdon. Points for prescience of a kind on “Brushfire in Hoboken,” where immigrants are blamed for a fire. The extra extras in the 2006 release are nice to have, notably the “Violin Version” of the title song with sawing and extra-added robot rhythms that somehow remind me of Harry Smith songs. I think it’s the shades of inexpertness. It’s a Wonderful Life—extremely odd, perhaps for fans only, but I found it worth the reunion revisit.

The King of Comedy (1982)

USA, 109 minutes

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writer: Paul D. Zimmerman

Photography: Fred Schuler

Music: Robbie Robertson, Ray Charles

Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker

Cast: Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Diahnne Abbott, Sandra Bernhard, Ed Herlihy, Shelley Hack, Tony Randall, Martin Scorsese, Margo Winkler, Dr. Joyce Brothers

Director Martin Scorsese is famous for making great movies, but his best arguably fall into various types. This may be the last, for example, after Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, of his pictures featuring Robert De Niro as an unbalanced madman representing Social Decay. Another type is seen (at its best) in Goodfellas and Casino. The King of Comedy adroitly takes on celebrity culture and media criticism and does not feel 42 years old. One of the most surprising parts is that it was made decades before smartphones and social media, which now feel strangely missing from the action here. Another surprising and impressive part was snagging Jerry Lewis, who practically sold the movie on name recognition (to the limited extent it sold). He plays Jerry Langford, a late-night TV host modeled on Johnny Carson. And he is good, extremely low-key and self-contained. There’s no mugging or pratfalls, no loony voices. But you keep halfway expecting them, which creates an interesting tension.

Langford, like Johnny Carson, like any celebrity, has a lot of problems with fans and wannabes who won’t leave him alone. De Niro plays a wannabe named Rupert Pupkin. It’s an interesting role for De Niro because his signature rage is more subsumed under a slimy façade of someone who thinks he knows his way around show business. He wears natty suits with bold patterns and color schemes. He is soft-spoken and almost gentle. But the rage is there and so is the lunacy, once we get down to the basement of his mother’s place in New Jersey, where Pupkin lives. Everyone, including his mother (the bawling off-screen voice of Scorsese’s mother Catherine), plainly thinks he is a grating, pathetic loser. He wants to be famous and show everybody. The idea he comes up with to break through is to kidnap Langford and force him to let him do his standup in a prime spot on the show. In order to accomplish this Pupkin must enlist the aid of Sandra Bernhard as Masha, who proceeds to steal the whole show.

13. Dream Syndicate, The Days of Wine and Roses (1982)

[2006 review here]

It took me a little while to appreciate the squalls of this album again. My first time playing it recently made me wonder what I ever saw in it, but I was too focused then on the songs I never liked very much. For one thing, this was always more of a one-sided album—I mean, the title song is fine, with excellent shots of wailing feedback on the solo, and the vocal showcase for bass player Kendra Smith on “Too Little, Too Late” is good stuff too. But “Tell Me When It’s Over,” “That’s What You Always Say,” and of course “Halloween” were the main places I lived on The Days of Wine and Roses, sufficient unto the day. “Tell Me When It’s Over” hits with a bang and nags with a wheedling guitar figure, bearing an ominous mood of doom that almost instantly sets the day in shades of grayscale. Steve Wynn’s vocal sounds like it was recorded by Flesh Eater Chris D. to emphasize the aping of Lou Reed. The drums pound it up like fanfare for the turns and transitions, achieving shambolic glory. Already the album sounds exhausted by all experience, reporting in from some other-dimensional afterlife. Those not inclined to skipping songs may then sit through “Definitely Clean”—the drummer doesn’t seem to know what to do here and the tune’s little journeys up and down the scale are not much inspired. Never mind. “That’s What You Always Say” starts up next, once again entangling us in this exquisite gnawing mood of doom, grinding and insinuating into brain recesses. Chief songwriter, singer, and guitar player Wynn—enamored of feedback fillips that swirl all over the album like bats around the head in a cave—is not that much (at least here) on the electric guitar as anything other than a blunt instrument. But he knows where the guitar solos belong and that can be half the battle in these 2 guitars bass drums configurations. “Always Say” opens up a dark road. Traveling it is irresistible. “Then She Remembers” follows with some good fast loud energy and then it’s on to the main attraction, “Halloween.” Everyone involved seems to know perfectly well what they have with this one, a certain majesty of straightforward attack and rolling fierce flattening force. It’s so big, this final apotheosis of the doomed spirit on The Days of Wine and Roses, that they chose to fade it in, raising it up from wherever it came, let it cajole and roar for six minutes, and faded it out again, as if the beast had to be approached carefully from all sides. It’s perfect for Halloween too—not because there’s anything particularly ooky-spooky about it, but because it knows winter is coming. Play loud—there’s a possibility I will be saying this a lot from here on.

English Settlement (1982)

XTC’s fifth album is another that unfortunately presents versioning problems. Released originally in the UK as a double LP (the band’s first), it was bowdlerized for the US and elsewhere into a single album, removing five songs and reordering the sequence. I came to it late, never knew it well in its time, so for this exercise I stuck with the original, which I assume is closer to what XTC and not the marketing arm of the label intended. English Settlement clocks in over 70 minutes, barely fitting onto a single CD. But it was the beginning of XTC stretching out for longer sets. Lost in the intricate patterns of studio construction, hobbled in a way by the worsening stage-fright incidents of principal Andy Partridge, on English Settlement XTC seems to be finding its way with songcraft developed to the furthest abstracted reaches. Sometimes the hooks are so mechanical they are more like barbs caught uncomfortably in the lip, as with “Melt the Guns,” which feels robotic even with its pro-humanist theme, or the caterwauling “Leisure.” The album has a kind of learning curve for me if I’ve been away from it too long. Just so, I had to play it through a few times before I caught on to its pleasures again. Even then I noticed I was only good for maybe seven songs at a time before I started to flag a little and zone out. I tried it on shuffle, which produced the same effect but at least convinced me it wasn’t just the first seven songs that are good. “It’s Nearly Africa,” “Knuckle Down,” “Down in the Cockpit,” and “Snowman” all improved a good deal under this system of listening. You can’t hold it against an album if there are too many songs to easily assimilate. Who listens to double-LP albums all together in one big gulp anyway? Wikipedia says English Settlement “marked a turn towards the more pastoral pop songs that would dominate later XTC releases.” That sounds right. “Senses Working Overtime” reminded me of Drums and Wires songs but considerably toned down in terms of the attack—slower tempo, milder assault, almost introspective. “Ball and Chain” even has interludes that remind me of the Genesis double-LP The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, antithetical in a way to the larger punk-rock / new wave project on which XTC was launched. It would not be a far step from here to the cartoonish psychedelics they would begin entertaining with Skylarking (perhaps their most popular album), Oranges & Lemons, and the Dukes of Stratosphear. It took me a while to get into English Settlement again, but I’m not sure I’m done with it yet—it’s sticky.

Liquid Sky (1982)

USA, 112 minutes

Director: Slava Tsukerman

Writers: Slave Tsukerman, Anne Carlisle, Nina V. Kerova

Photography: Yuri Neyman

Music: Brenda I. Hutchinson, Clive Smith, Slave Tsukerman

Editors: Sharyn L. Ross, Slave Tsukerman

Cast: Anne Carlisle, Paula E. Sheppard, Bob Brady, Susan Doukas, Elaine C. Grove, Stanley Knapp, Jack Adalist, Otto von Wernherr

I have to wonder what I would think of Liquid Sky now if I were seeing it for the first time. I loved it then for its New York City fashion and punk-rock swagger, its acerbic but predictable squalls against the square and the conventional, and altogether its monumental strangeness. Released in the era of Blade Runner, Diva, The Thing, and Videodrome, they are all of a piece: loud, irritating, in your face. Liquid Sky hits with a saturated keyboard soundtrack, psychedelic special effects, and a narrative that is allusive and obvious by turns like a silent picture. It’s about aliens from outer space—tiny aliens from outer space—who feed on human brain chemicals released during orgasm and heroin intoxication. Anne Carlisle plays both the lead, Margaret, and also one of her fashion rivals, Jimmy. Margaret is bisexual and involved with ‘60s hip liberal college professor and her former teacher, Owen (Bob Brady, who is also the casting director in this low-budget all-hands effort), and also with Adrian (Paula E. Sheppard), a downtown performance artist and drug dealer. Margaret is from Connecticut and still trying to live it down.

No one here is very good at acting nor is director/writer/composer/editor Slava Tsukerman, a Soviet émigré, much of a hand at directing them. They’re self-conscious and hammy by turns and lots of scenes feel like first takes from different movies. Even technical issues like audio volumes are out of whack. The picture is overlong and feels bloated, clunky, and slow-moving. It has too many plot threads and too much awkward cross-cutting, and it’s often unpleasant too, with rape scenes and other spasms and eruptions of violence. The scenes with alien points of view are more often just confusing, though here is where the psychedelics kick in. The most significant detail about Liquid Sky may be that no one associated with it has gone on to anything. In 2014 Tsukerman and Carlisle announced that a sequel was in the works, but no further word since. I can’t defend the whole thing, but there are still parts of it I love.

"Where I'm Calling From" (1982)

Here we find Raymond Carver moving into the recovery phase of his writing (and life), acknowledging not only the realities of alcoholism but possibilities for the road back. He seems to understand the pitfalls well. This story is set in a treatment center ("drying-out facility"), with the first-person narrator there for a second round of rehab. Carver captures the best features of 12-step recovery while avoiding most of the worst. He notices without comment, for example, the coffee and sugar cookies. On the inevitable war stories he notes, "We'd all done things just as bad and crazy, so, sure, that's why we laughed." In fact, this story is mostly about their storytelling, specifically between the first-person narrator and another patient. They tell stories about broken relationships and bad mistakes. I feel sorry for these tellers more often than repulsed (which is often my reaction when 12-steppers start winding up into their stories). But they are still damaged and thus unsafe people. I appreciate the distance of only reading about them. Carver is so blunt and straightforward about these disasters that he is disarming. I don't think I'd care to meet either of these characters but their stories are absorbing and poignant. "Where I'm calling from" in this story is the treatment center—the narrator needs to talk to both his wife and his girlfriend but doesn't seem to be able to reach them. Carver was obviously fond of the story and its title, including it in Cathedral as well as in his last collection, which bears its name. Perhaps it represents his sense of both connection and distance, both at once. The treatment center is a place of connection, but many there are wounded and deeply flawed. Carver also parachutes Jack London into all this, name-checking both The Call of the Wild and "To Build a Fire," the latter given an interesting synopsis by the narrator. The story feels a bit mechanical but I think it works too. What's best is how the Carver voice carries on as usual even in a treatment center, a place that more often in fiction is overdone or underdone or done awkwardly, too piously. There is nothing like that here, and it is finally a great meditation on wreckage.

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

Sundown (1982)

You may not know it yet, but we've just about come full circle on Rank and File, the so-called cowpunk project of Kinman brothers Chip and Tony (straight outta Carlsbad in San Diego County by way of San Francisco). Before the Kinmans put together Rank and File in Austin, Texas, they were a proto-hardcore act in the '70s called the Dils ("I Hate the Rich," "Class War") and last year the Dils reformed for a couple of performances in Southern California. Rank and File are listed on Wikipedia as active from 1981 to 1987. Sundown is their best, the only album by them I ever connected with. We know now that the secret ingredient may have been Alejandro Escovedo, who cowrote a song ("Rank and File," one of the best on the album), played guitar, and sang, and has never really looked back. But the Kinman brothers make a pretty good show themselves, with their barbed wire rolling tumbleweed western style mixing up instincts for the Everly Brothers, James Burton, and maybe a little Dick Dale. I loved Sundown in 1982 when I pulled it out of an office slush pile. The thing jumped out at me right away. Really the whole first side is terrific. "Amanda Ruth" sets the tone with its buggy-ride tempos and soaring harmonies. "(Glad I'm) Not in Love" delivers some tasty guitar flourishes. "Rank and File" mounts a heroic attack in service to labor (I think) and in any case presents an earworm somehow always welcome when it comes ringing through my head in the shower once again. And "The Conductor Wore Black" deals classic western mythos themes like it's a card game. The flip's not bad either. How the Kinmans get from the Dils to this is not easy to see, but I feel Sundown is more naturally where their hearts are. Nearly 40 years later, well, OK, the album is short and has become a hodge-podge of versions, maybe overall a bit contrived, maybe too sweetened in the production, arguably derivative and maybe even missing its targets entirely, the way people take the movie Nashville as missing the point of country music. Wikipedia files Sundown with the aforementioned "cowpunk" and also "new wave," which is probably accurate. It may have lost some of its allure but I still sit up and pay attention to the high points.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

USA, 115 minutes
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writer: Melissa Mathison
Photography: Allen Daviau
Music: John Williams
Editor: Carol Littleton
Cast: Henry Thomas, Dee Wallace, Peter Coyote, Robert MacNaughton, Drew Barrymore, K.C. Martel, Sean Frye, C. Thomas Howell, Debra Winger

Director Steven Spielberg was already big time in 1982, complete with a certified flop and the oomph to slog on through (1941, which I still haven't seen, though it is presently at #236 in my Netflix queue so I'm getting there). He had shown he could do horror (Duel, Jaws), science fiction (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), big budget action adventure (Raiders of the Lost Ark), and even desperate crazy kids relationship romance (The Sugarland Express). But a movie intended expressly to make you cry, well, even if it's all tarted up with science fiction trimmings or whatever, that seemed like a stretch for popular culture and for me, at least at the time. Eventually—it started slow as blockbusters go—E.T. turned out to be a giant smash, overtaking Star Wars in 1983 as the highest-grossing film of all time. It still sits at #4 on the all-time list adjusted for inflation at Box Office Mojo, behind only Gone With the Wind, Star Wars (resurgent doubtless under the weight of its endless rereleases), and The Sound of Music. It's just ahead of Titanic, DeMille's second Ten Commandments, and Jaws—Spielberg is the only director in the top 10 with more than one movie.

I finally did see E.T. the summer it was released, and I cried at all the right parts I'm sure, but it felt a little porny, and feels even more so now. The movie's rise to popularity suggests an interesting trajectory—it holds top 10 box office records for ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th weekends, but is much lower for earlier weekends. Is that repeat viewers, or word of mouth, or some combination? Anyway, the idea of going to see a movie because it would make you cry was new and exotic, though I later realized of course it's one of the oldest traditions of storytelling there is. My first experience had been a TV broadcast of The Wizard of Oz I happened to sit down to watch by myself when I was 21. It was disconcerting to find myself overwhelmed by emotion over things like Kansas, ruby slippers, and no place like home, but there I was, and it wasn't altogether unpleasant, once the tears and tender convulsions stopped—kind of cathartic. Now I'm old and sentimental and cry at anything that resembles kindness, from great moments in film and literature all the way down to soft drink and auto insurance commercials. I use it as a certain indicator. If it can make me cry I want to know why, even the commercials—especially the commercials. That's how I've decided it's generally kindness that sets me off, and we can all benefit from more of that.

"The Wedding" (1982)

Story by Joy Williams not available online.

This Joy Williams story left me a little cold. It seemed too typical of a certain post-Carver mold, both in terms of its focus on vaguely underclass losers and its self-conscious minimalist aesthetics. The two characters who marry in this story, Elizabeth and Sam, are full-grown adults with previous failed relationships. She is 30 and has a 5-year-old daughter. He seems a little older, in his 40s, married three times. He's also likely an alcoholic. It feels like a marriage they are both settling for, don't exactly want, though Elizabeth campaigns for it and Sam goes along, popping the question not long after his third divorce has become final. Formally the story is on the order of a shattered narrative, with line breaks and new scenes every few paragraphs. The narrator is third-person mostly omniscient, mostly looking from Elizabeth's view. It seems to be about exercising the quixotic nature of the search for love as it existed in the early '80s. Except for certain details of ambience (such as prevailing technology) it could happen 100 years ago or 100 years from now. What seems unique might only be the itinerant nature of so many people's love lives, set free within this still relatively new liberated era of marrying for love and pleasure. In that context, in many ways the story focuses on the trauma of divorce. Both Elizabeth and Sam actively want to be married. That's the primary objective—that sense of security that comes from being cocooned with someone, fortified against the world somehow. But it seems unlikely this marriage will last either. They don't seem to know each other very well. Obviously neither means any harm. They are just two confused people, with a 5-year-old in tow. They feel hollow, without centers. I suspect that's the point. And it might have felt fresh or compelling in the early '80s, but now feels like we've been over the ground a few thousand times, like Vietnam.

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

"Shiloh" (1982)

Read story by Bobbie Ann Mason online.

Bobbie Ann Mason reads like another writer in the second half of the 20th century who was influenced by Raymond Carver. She does with her native Western Kentucky much as Carver did with his native Pacific Northwest. "Shiloh" is about the end of the marriage of Leroy and Norma Jean. It's filled with poignant detail and the routines of busy lives attempting not to deal with important issues. Leroy, a long-haul trucker, has recently been laid up by a serious accident on the job. Now he is afraid to drive again, but he doesn't know how to be useful. He takes up an assortment of hobbies while he convalesces, and eventually decides he wants to build a log cabin by hand for his family, almost as if that's just another hobby. Norma Jean is having none of it. She treats him as if he is going through a phase—isn't he? Her mother, Mabel, also thinks it's a ridiculous idea. She was raised in a log cabin. "It's no picnic, let me tell you," she says, trying to steer him away from the idea. Norma Jean works at the cosmetics counter in a drugstore, and spends a lot of her time exercising, trying to tone her arms. Leroy and Norma Jean had a child many years earlier who died of crib death, and no children since. Mabel wants them to visit the Shiloh battlefield nearby. Mabel went there for her honeymoon and perhaps she thinks it will do their marriage good. They finally go there for a heavily freighted and symbolic visit, the time and place Norma Jean chooses to tell Leroy she is planning to leave him. In this civil war, Leroy represents the union, and Norma Jean is seceding. Neither character is unsympathetic, though both have annoying points. The early '80s is about the time divorce was slipping into widespread acceptance, starting to become just what people did, the way staying together used to be. It's a sad scene. Marriages become the mass victims the way the soldiers were at Shiloh. There are no tears or recriminations when Norma Jean makes her announcement there. There's only a depressing sense of finality—depressing, but not consuming, because life goes on. It's too soon to want for death as the way out. There's little sense anyone in this story has changed or will change by the end. Just sad resignation, squaring shoulders, and forward into the future. It's how we live now, still.

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

"Rock Springs" (1982)

Read story by Richard Ford online.

Richard Ford's excellent and well-known short story is right out of the Raymond Carver school of damaged lives from the white underclass. It's told first-person by Earl Middleton of Kalispell, Montana, who has decided to move his family, such as it is—his daughter Cheryl, their dog Little Duke, and Edna, who is separated from a violent husband and has been with Earl for eight months. Earl happens to be looking at serious jail time for passing bad checks and needs to get out of the state. Though an edge of desperation is always in his voice, he tries to front an optimistic attitude. He steals a cranberry-colored Mercedes Benz from an ophthalmologist and plans (dreams) of a luxury ride all the way to Florida. But about 30 miles outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming, an engine warning light starts to show on the dashboard. The car is disabled even before they reach the town, and Earl has to come up with a Plan B. For the most part the story goes rollicking along as a kind of unusual road trip adventure. Edna and Cheryl are often bored, restless, and peevish. Yet there's a sense of inevitable ongoing collapse, even as Earl soldiers on. The fights between Earl and Cheryl are about old things. Those between Earl and Edna are about old things getting fitted to new partners. When Edna complains about how much danger they are in, Earl offers to buy her a bus ticket back to Kalispell. Later, when Edna tries to take him up on the offer, it's as if the floor (the flimsy floor) of Earl's life has vanished under his feet. He tries to keep it all elaborately upbeat, but he is seething with resentment, stung to his core. The ending is a wonderful model of ambiguity. Earl can't sleep, and leaves the motel room to prowl the parking lot, obviously thinking of stealing a car. But then what? Will he abandon his daughter, who is no older than 10? It seems likely. We realize at that moment that we really don't know Earl well. We know he is a criminal, without compunction, and we have seen how hard he works to keep himself on an even keel for the sake of others. We sense the furies underneath that—we sense that he is dangerous. But we have no idea where the lines and triggers are, what could happen. Along the way, the symbology is rich and strange: a terrible story of a monkey, a gold mine company town setting, and the desperate sweaty voice of Earl, with a great big have a good day smile on his puss. Chilling and pathetic at once, perhaps even reminiscent a little of Jim Thompson.

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

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

The Gunslinger (1982)

In a foreword to the first volume of The Dark Tower series, even Stephen King acknowledges The Gunslinger is a bit of a minor effort. "All too often I heard myself apologizing for it," he writes, "and telling people that if they persevered, they would find the story really found its voice in The Drawing of the Three [the second in the seven-volume series]." It's true enough, as far as I know. Everything in The Gunslinger appears to be elaborate foreshadowing, laying out the concept, and/or banging on symbolic notes of portent, with the familiar feature of a long walk through troubled lands. I will take the word of Stephen King (and a host of Amazon reviewers) that it's worth trying the second novel. And, to be sure, even though it's a slog, The Gunslinger is also mercifully short. I don't often go for these things. I liked Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell when I read it a few years ago, but I was mostly indifferent to The Lord of the Rings when I read it as a teen, and otherwise I've mostly steered clear of fantasy, especially anything specifically involving the word "quest." I will admit a weakness for the Dungeons and Dragons game, at least in electronic versions, but I think that might be beside the point really, a different animal. The only thing encouraging me to stick with the series one more round is because it's Stephen King, mainly, and then because he has claimed The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as a primary source. The potential for an epic fiction, by Stephen King, riffing on that movie is just too appealing. I also hope to get a sense for whether it's even necessary to read this first book at all. No Amazon reviewer that I could see even entertained the idea of skipping it, so maybe it's necessary. We are introduced to what I suspect are the main figures in Roland (aka the gunslinger), "the man in black" (who may or may not end up with a name, but doesn't have one yet here), and Jake Chambers, a young boy who becomes Roland's sidekick, Robin to his Batman. They are walking and walking and walking. There's a lot of that. There are some promising monsters in the "Slow Mutants," reminiscent of the zombie style now, tormented homicidal slow-moving creatures. I think we have seen the basic good / evil dynamic from King already in The Stand, and I'm not sure how interested I even am in that. But I'll take the advice, given the benefit of the doubt, and try the second one. See how that goes.

In case it's not at the library.

Cadillac Jack (1982)

(Requested by reader C.A.)

Larry McMurtry is a writer much beloved in Hollywood circles and for good reason, reminiscent of the careers enjoyed by Elmore Leonard or Willam Goldman. Various of McMurtry's novels have provided the basis for the movies Hud, The Last Picture Show, and Terms of Endearment, plus he wrote the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. His biggest achievement, literally, may be Lonesome Dove, which sprawls across 800+ pages and was made into a TV miniseries of 6+ hours. Cadillac Jack may or may not be among his best (I've only read Lonesome Dove besides this) but it has many of his most familiar themes, even if it didn't become a movie, and it's well done. McMurtry has always been basically a writer of Westerns, the genre trappings are familiar, but with the great idea of updating the tone and stories to the 20th century and beyond. Accordingly, Cadillac Jack is set mostly in the Washington, D.C., of Ronald Reagan's first term. The times, contemporaneous with the writing, are reflected partly in the free and easy sexual charge that accompanies much of the action. Jack McGriff has earned the sobriquet of the title by his outsize personality and by the "pearl-colored" Cadillac he drives around in. Formerly a rodeo performer, he is now a savvy antiques dealer with a natural talent for it. He's 33, with two ex-wives and many more former girlfriends (a few of which are made in the span of the novel)—a kind of lost soul, but not really, and in any event amiable and easygoing enough about it. Not a lot of plot to this one, but novels and stories where not a lot happens are high on my list, and plot isn't McMurtry's strong point anyway, which is more on the order of mood. Just so, Cadillac Jack is pretty good about casting its spells. McGriff hangs around D.C., sleeps with some women and lusts after others, takes time for feeling sad about things now and then, and sorts out his life's work piecemeal. In some ways, it's a kind of post-Western crossed with the classic novel of manners; there's some sense McGriff is searching for a wife. Everyone is interesting or intriguing, more or less, and there are various shades of maneuver in pursuing who he will march down the aisle for the third time, if indeed he's going to march anyone. McMurtry was in his mid-40s at the time he wrote this, and that's how McGriff feels too. I thought he was a little bit unbelievable as a 33-year-old (a distractingly fraught age in fiction). It's a novel about a midlife crisis essentially. McGriff is likable and that redeems most of the minor misfires. McMurtry is also a very quiet and poised writer, and it's that quality that makes this novel worth looking into, even as it reminds me again that I really need to get to some more of his stuff.

In case it's not at the library.

Soft Cell, "Tainted Love" (1982)

May 22, 1982, #8
(listen)

"Tainted Love" started life as a swaggering, uptempo '60s post-Motown pop soul number, recorded by Gloria Jones, written by Ed Cobb (also involved in writing "Dirty Water" and "Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White" for the Standells, among others for others), released on Champion, and going nowhere fast. Or slowly. In the early '80s the Soft Cell duo of Marc Almond and David Ball ran it through the Gary Numanizer for the biggest hit of their (and the song's) careers, spending most of a full year bouncing around the Billboard Hot 100. OK, maybe it's the mix I'm pointing to that has the Gary Numan qualities (or maybe not). Later Marilyn Manson had a turn with "Tainted Love" too, so the thing has been around the block, 50 years and counting. Its resilience has to be counted as a given at this point. I was more relieved than surprised to get the detail on its pedigree, because at some point in the years since it was a hit I had relocated it in my memory all the way back to the '60s. I made someone show it to me in a book that it came from the '80s. As such, perhaps, I think of it now as one of those infinitely malleable songs. I have almost entirely lost track of the "original" Soft Cell version in all the welter of mixes (extended and otherwise), covers, live (clonking) rave-ups, and whatnot. It's a very silly song in many ways, with robot beats and a whole swollen narrative embedded in use of the word "tainted"—very silly but too often a stone winner in the clutch to be written off. Close the loop. Look for the versions that work the Supremes song in, "Where Did Our Love Go," which start with the earliest.

Poltergeist (1982)

USA, 114 minutes
Director: Tobe Hooper
Writers: Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, Mark Victor
Photography: Matthew F. Leonetti
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Editor: Michael Kahn
Cast: JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Dominique Dunne, Oliver Robbins, Heather O'Rourke, Zelda Rubinstein

Let's stipulate right off that Poltergeist is silly and unscary, except (maybe) for a couple of scenes jammed in the middle. The funny thing ha ha about this movie is how wrong it gets everything, even basic stuff, with paranormal investigators who are easily spooked, anachronistic science fiction effects, a proto-Big Chill couple smokin' dope in the bedroom, and seeming endless out-of-context hokum about "the light." It tries very hard to appear to know what it is talking about but it is obviously empty: "Poltergeists are usually associated with individuals. Hauntings seem to be connected with an area," explains our head paranormal investigator at one point, who wraps herself in a motherly shawl (Beatrice Straight). She is only reading lines from a script by Steven Spielberg in which he is merrily making shit up to fortify the special effects. He is the only poltergeist anywhere around here.

Therein lies the rub, of course—there's an exciting credit in director Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), but the script is by Spielberg, the first words we see at the end are "A STEVEN SPIELBERG PRODUCTION," and it is, by all indications, Spielberg in full flush of working on Raiders of the Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial wanting to take on a horror project. By all indications, Hooper was there for the cred to get the deal done. By all indications, it was dollar signs on eyeballs (not least Hooper's) that wrecked this. And by all indications, it worked, a sideshow in the big summer of Steven Spielberg, with E.T. released just a week after it. Cha-ching, baby. E.T. is still high on the list of all-time earners, currently #9 between Shrek 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. But Poltergeist is not doing so shabby itself—#800 all-time.

Modern English, "I Melt With You" (1982)

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Modern English came along early enough that Wikipedia labels it a New Wave rather than a New Romantic act, but it was at least harbinger of the "second British Invasion" and an adequate standard of the times too: not just in the lush, soft, breathless, keyboardy way it proceeds but in the nuclear anxiety it embraces, as "melting with you" turns out to be dying in the arms of a lover at the onset of the final conflagration. Dinner by candlelight and long walks on the beach. Holding hands and no need for words. Mushroom cloud and out. At the time, we knew that was on the way (the TV movie The Day After became something of a media saturation event early in 1983, which may have been the peak for that). More fitting, I think, that "I Melt With You" served as soaring montage music in the teen movie Valley Girl, with Deborah Foreman and an 18-year-old Nicolas Cage. The churchy stained-glass tones of the song filter the empty-headed cheese just enough to make the moment romantic and energized, although remember also this is a Nicolas Cage performance we are talking about. One worth seeing nonetheless. Modern English plays it feather-light and deadly serious, with no evidence of a real thought of consequence in its pretty head. We hear "I Melt With You" everywhere nowadays, don't we? Shopping malls, laundromats, elevators, waiting rooms. Or is that my imagination? I keep looking in my Billboard book for the chart information but it is never there. I keep thinking if Spandau Ballet and Simple Minds managed to score top 10 hits this should have at least cracked the 40. Am I crazy?

Elvis Costello & the Attractions, "Man Out of Time" (1982)

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"Man Out of Time" is one more gorgeous mess buried between the vaporizing screams in the middle of Imperial Bedroom, an album that I recall reviewed as Elvis Costello's "Cole Porter album" (or "George Gershwin," or "Tin Pan Alley"). It was also dissed contrarian-wise by Robert Christgau in a year when it stormed to the head of the annual Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll. Maybe Christgau was right—not sure who would be willing to go full-throated on it anymore. It always struck me if anything as more Costello's shot at Sgt. Pepper or Abbey Road (Parke Puterbaugh got that right in Rolling Stone)—because of the choice of producer Geoff Emerick, who engineered those Beatles albums, but also because of its ambition and how studio-focused and tricked-up it can be. It was the first Costello album that seemed to require study (and they all did for me after this). I remain suspicious of this self-training to like things—"you have to listen to it a few times, man"—but at any rate the judgment stuck. "Man Out of Time" still seems a terrific wounded cry of the soul, absolutely stunning at about the time of the title phrase, and definitely recommended for singing along. The words are typically fussy and cute: "'Cos the high heel he used to be has been ground down / And he listens for the footsteps that would follow him around," for example. It doesn't say that much and the attention to the foot-related activities is distracting and beside the point. But whatever, he gets a pass because his pop instincts remain so true. I really am not sure what this song is about, but it's obvious it comes from a profoundly felt place, one I naturally feel and respond to. That's good enough for me.

Lou Reed, "Heavenly Arms" (1982)

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It's none of my business, but I still miss Sylvia. In retrospect, maybe Lou Reed was more in love with something she helped him find in himself than with her—though who can say that isn't the reason most of us are in love in the first place anyway? Not my business, as I said, and beside the point anyway. I can go visit her any time I like in this song (or, if not her, then what I miss, because obviously I don't know her). It's the song Reed used to climax The Blue Mask, his first great album of yet another reascendant period, the early '80s. And that's no coincidence, because among other things the (carefully incidental) priority is on the lines of a heterosexual agenda. "I love women, I think they're great," he says in the song "Women." Everywhere you look on that album it is women, women, women. So if it's going to be a torch song at the end the ground is laid. But it's laid with other elements too: this amazing band he assembled, with Robert Quine on guitar, Fernando Saunders on an aching soulful bass, and rock-solid drummer Doane Perry. The birth of 2 guitars bass drum as self-conscious ethos buoys this. Not to mention something about emotional recovery, the details hazy but the feeling of assessing and owning up strong here. It all comes to a bracing head in "Heavenly Arms," one of Reed's most nakedly revealing songs. The heavenly arms of the title belong to Sylvia, of course, called out by name. Not just called out, but implored, beseeched, howled for, from as vulnerable a point as may ever have been recorded, more or less. A bellow of love. It's fair enough to call it calculating—it's Lou Reed, after all, and I've outlined the case above. But that doesn't mean it won't move you, over and over again.

Fanny and Alexander (1982)

Fanny och Alexander, Sweden/France/West Germany, 312 minutes
Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman
Photography: Sven Nykvist
Music: Daniel Bell
Editor: Sylvia Ingemarsson
Cast: Pernilla Allwin, Bertil Guve, Gunn Wallgren, Allan Edwall, Jarl Kulle, Borje Ahlstedt, Ewa Froling, Christina Schollin, Mona Malm, Jan Malmsjo, Erland Josephson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Kerstin Tidelius, Emelie Werko, Marianne Aminoff, Lena Olin, Pernilla August, Harriet Andersson

Ingmar Bergman's announced final film—he would actually make many more movies for Swedish television, including Saraband in 2003—is a colossal formal banquet of a movie, with many courses and a fine table. The long version (the one to see) rambles at its ease between the church, streets, theater, and homes of Uppsala, a small but growing Swedish city in 1907. Across winter and summer holidays, Bergman's deeply complex stories and film penetrate the tormented and banal lives it observes easily and naturally. Riffing on the profile of a bourgeois extended northern European family, much in the vein of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks for an earlier era, it is plainly the work of a master, a clinic in how to turn many sharply observed small elements into a fine movie.

Interestingly, it's not even the first time Bergman released a very good long picture theatrically, with a far superior and even longer version in the wings just behind it (in the U.S., at any rate). The first was Scenes From a Marriage, from 1973, which I think is even better than Fanny and Alexander. But Fanny and Alexander is the one that gets pride of place in surveys such as the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, where it presently sits at #57 (compared with #360 for Scenes). I suspect this is because Fanny and Alexander is more overtly and even self-consciously literary in its ambitions, applying itself equally to sumptuous Christmas celebrations, familiar rotting church-inflected corruptions of the soul, and plain old ghost stories, Henry James style. Potential spoilers ahead.

Angry Samoans, "They Saved Hitler's NSFW" (1982)

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Because I love "They Saved Hitler's Cock" as much for the words as anything, I will start there. It clocks in at only 1:40 but a lot is packed in, though it wanders a bit: "They saved Hitler's cock, They hid it under a rock. / I discovered it, last night. I couldn't even, believe my eyes. / If Hitler's cock could start to talk, it would say: To kill today. / If Hitler's cock could choose its mate, it would ask, for Sharon Tate!" There's more—offensive, vulgar, corny, slapped together, fucked up on so many levels it's hard to know where to start. A cheap shot at movies so bad they're good, or maybe a play for that audience, then much in thrall to They Saved Hitler's Brain and Plan 9 From Outer Space. And they could have saved Hitler's anything but they choose his cock, which is incoherent. They hid it under a rock, presumably because that rhymes. Later they go too far, as the Angry Samoans will. They have to make it erect, they have to drop the name of the Resnais documentary, so on so forth, but it doesn't matter because the song is over and done so fast. This is the Angry Samoans way—fast, raw, and funny. Somehow it works. I particularly like the way Hitler's cock is endowed with a personality. It seems to be a bit of a Sid Vicious kind of character—loutish, vaguely stupid, totally committed, and somehow charismatic. Of course, to "choose its mate, it would ask, for Sharon Tate!" And, of course, if it "could talk, it would say: To kill today." It's Hitler's cock, for Pete's sake! What do you think, it's going to stick a flower stem in your gun barrel?