L’Argent (1983)

France / Switzerland, 85 minutes

Director: Robert Bresson

Writers: Leo Tolstoy, Robert Bresson

Photography: Pasqualino De Santis, Emmanuel Machuel

Music: J.S. Bach

Editor: Jean-Francois Naudon

Cast: Christian Patey, Sylvia Van den Elsen, Michel Briguet, Caroline Lang

Director and screenwriter Robert Bresson adapted a long tale by Leo Tolstoy as the basis for his last picture (translated as “The Counterfeit Bills” or “The Forged Coupon”). The result, L’Argent, is perhaps less about the evils of money (“l’argent” in French) and more a kind of practical thought experiment in the chaos theory butterfly effect, which holds that a butterfly flapping its wings can lead by circumstances to events as devastating as tornados, or as wonderful as an unexpected windfall. Anything might happen when it comes to cause and effect. It’s hard to say why the title was not translated for English-speaking countries. In Spain and Mexico, for example, it was released as El dinero. Perhaps calling it “Money” would imply too much about the intended evils thereof? But then what are people supposed to think anywhere else?

This story starts with adolescents in need of spending money who forge counterfeit bills and pass them to a camera shop. The camera shop manager, realizing later that he has been bilked, decides to pass the bills himself and does so the next day, paying a delivery driver, Yvon (Christian Patey), who accepts them without question. It’s the beginning of the end for Yvon. His superiors catch the counterfeits, but Yvon’s story does not hold up when the camera shop staff denies even knowing him. This seems a little unlikely given the way these things are tracked, with invoices and receipts and such, but maybe it was different in 1983 in France. Yvon goes to trial for the crime. He’s convicted and given three years, and then things only get worse. His child dies while he’s in prison and his wife leaves him for a new life. He keeps getting in trouble and fights with other inmates. His imprisonment is extended. He’s all the way into a terrible downward spiral.

Ironweed (1983)

Even after the first two novels in William Kennedy’s series based in Albany, New York—Legs and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game—I wasn’t entirely ready for the plunge into alcoholism that Ironweed delivers. It’s almost certainly the most famous in the series, which spans eight novels published between 1975 and 2012. Kennedy is still alive too, so there could be more, although note he is now 96 years old. Ironweed won a Pulitzer and other awards and ended up on multiple lists of the greatest novels of the 20th century. You may, like me, have heard of it but not known it was part of a series. Kennedy is a very good writer and storyteller—I’m not sure Ironweed is my favorite of the first three, but it’s the least shaggy, a very short but fully packed novel that reaches severe depths as well as heights. It tells the story of the return to Albany after 22 years of Francis Phelan, Billy’s runaway father. He ran because he dropped his third baby, which caused its death. He ran because he had a career as a professional baseball player, a third baseman who could hit and field too. Perhaps most of all he ran because he was and is an alcoholic, a certifiable bum at story’s start and finish. For various reasons stories of profound alcoholism tend to trigger me to contempt and despair. I barely survived the movies Barfly and Leaving Las Vegas, for example. So I struggled with a lot of the events recounted among these down-and-outers and their very hard lives. There’s a beautiful scene where Francis returns home and is welcomed and many wounds healed—and nothing goes wrong. After I finished the book and looked it up on Wikipedia I found it has a structural resemblance to Dante’s Inferno. An opening headnote from that source might have alerted me. I love how Kennedy loves Albany (more than I think I could ever love Albany), with prose that sings across vernaculars, from the argot of gangsters to the poetics of literature. With Dante’s underworld journey supplying its spine, Ironweed becomes a little more pretentious. And yet—it’s one I am more tempted to revisit to trace through its sources more carefully. The novel felt strangely episodic as I read, but now I see there may be larger patterns at play in its background. Lots of meat for such a slender volume.

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

R.E.M.’s Murmur (2005)

J. Niimi’s 33-1/3 entry departs in some interesting ways from the usual in this series. His track-by-track rundown is more abbreviated and his history of the band is a bit of a rush job. Murmur is R.E.M.’s first full-length album, though they had already hit by then with a first single in 1981 (“Radio Free Europe,” an alternative version of which kicks off Murmur) and followed it with an equally auspicious EP in 1982, Chronic Town. The album was thus eagerly anticipated and for many fulfilled all expectations. Niimi sprinkles in some personal details of buying it when he was a young teen and how much it meant to him. He bought the cassette tape from a store in greater Chicagoland. But he seems more interested in exploring the lyrical strategies of the album, the singer, and the band. Full disclosure, Murmur has always been mostly lost on me though I’ve come to make my peace with it. In this book, written around 2004, I wish Niimi would have written more about what followed for R.E.M., because what interests him most about the album—the (enduring) mystery of its indeterminacy—is something that changed across the band’s career. Niimi passes along, with a straight face, a story about how the title Murmur was chosen because someone in the band (I think it was singer Michael Stipe) read somewhere that it’s one of the easiest words in the English language to pronounce. Fair enough, and ha ha ha, but let’s also look at a dictionary definition: “a soft, indistinct sound made by a person” (Encyclopedia.com, emphasis mine). The indeterminacy of the lyrics is mostly what Niimi is focused on here. He’s read reasonably widely in semiotics and such and has the wit to pull in both David Johansen and Wire as influences on either side of Stipe in terms of lyrics. I’m generally dubious about the project of focusing on lyrics over anything else in rock music. Niimi has some balance and perspective, but the mystery of the lyrics remains his defining quest with Murmur. I more hear an interesting variation on Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September Song” or the Cocteau Twins, who came after R.E.M. All those syllables come across to me like blank slates on which to project. Nearly as often they sound like people who ran out of time or inclination to say anything distinctly. I like Murmur now, but it has never sounded or felt profound to me. If you feel another way about it then this book might be just what the doctor ordered.

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

Scarface (1983)

USA, 170 minutes

Director: Brian De Palma

Writers: Oliver Stone, Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht, Armitage Trail

Photography: John A. Alonzo

Music: Giorgio Moroder

Editors: Gerald B. Greenberg, David Ray

Cast: Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Robert Loggia, Paul Shenar, Harris Yulin, F. Murray Abraham, Miriam Colon, Richard Belzer, Dennis Holahan, Michael Alldredge, Mark Margolis

I was surprised, perhaps 25 years ago, when I noticed that director Brian De Palma’s 1983 homage to Hollywood gangster cinema had a lot of fans. Scarface appeared to be significant for bro wannabe gangsters, no surprise—but also cineastes of various stripes. Glenn Kenny just published a book about it, for example. For a long time I wondered how they could all be so wrong. My first impression was not a good one. My takeaways (and pretty much all I focused on) were a gruesome early scene involving a chainsaw in a motel shower, and then the last hour of a picture that runs nearly three, where the operatics and scenery-chewing reach various spectacular yet ludicrous climaxes. Yes, this includes Tony Montana (Al Pacino) sitting in his monogrammed chair at his desk piled with a mound of cocaine, into which he periodically bobs his head and comes up with a frosty powdery nose-tip. The emptiness of gangster life, as always, is appalling. But making it so buffoonish is something else again. Hoo-yah!

It took me this long to get back to Scarface, such was my recoiling reaction, even given that I might be a little more indulgent of De Palma’s prolific work than some others I know. But a lot of serious people continue to have a lot of serious things to say about Scarface, so I made a point of looking again. And yeah, it’s not bad—certainly stands up to gangster pictures of the ‘70s and ‘80s as well as the originals from the ‘30s. Not that, full disclosure, I really like gangster pictures as such that much—it seems to be kind of an overachieving genre. But Scarface fits, it belongs—it’s the story of a rise and fall, with the usual self-serving moral qualms. The chainsaw scene now seems more like the kind of wanton ultraviolence we are more used to as entertainment. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, and I am saying it’s still hard to watch, but the scene does what it’s supposed to do in this movie, in terms of plot and character development. And the last hour—well, we’ll get to the last hour.

23. Echo & the Bunnymen, Porcupine (1983)

[2021 review here.]

Once again a previous review says a lot of what I want to say (it’s the same album, after all, and it’s still me). I don’t plan to make a habit of this, but still: the weirdly titled Porcupine “arguably tends more toward the cerebral side of psychedelia, full of trippy climax and those thrumming string contributions from L. Shankar [no relation to Ravi].... these woozy dim images playing from wake-up movies, tarted up with exotic Eastern elements and a dense and sludgy production that bursts at will into clarity. The trademark dread of the Bunnymen lurks constantly. They're afraid of something. What is it?” (No, I don’t know what I meant by “wake-up movies” either.) Though Porcupine is now considered an album in good standing in the Bunnymen canon, in 1983 it got a fair amount of bad press. The knock, mainly from the UK, was that the band was already, with their third album, starting to go stale and recycle themselves. I have never heard Porcupine that way. For one thing it has two of their best songs in “The Cutter” (quite possibly their single best) and “The Back of Love.” It’s my favorite by them, and it's not just the exotic Eastern flourishes, but equally that creeping, gnawing sense of anxiety. Certainly on the druggy side of psychedelic experience dread and anxiety are usually there. Consider a first trip, or any. waiting to come on. Everyone is a little nervous and conversation is hard to focus. This is probably also the place for me to mention that, while I don’t consciously participate on either side of any rivalry between Ian McCulloch of Echo & the Bunnymen and Julian Cope of the Teardrop Explodes, I certainly have a preference. Cope if anything has pursued more determinedly psychedelic avenues but I couldn’t connect with any of his solo stuff lately, at least not on first listens (of Peggy Suicide and Interpreter), nor have I ever cared much for the T.E. But when I reached for the first four albums by Echo & the Bunnymen they all sounded at least as good as ever. And this still sounded best, as psychedelia or otherwise.

Riding With the King (1983)

See Wikipedia for details on John Hiatt’s checkered career. It says there his first big break came in 1974 when he wrote a #16 hit song for Three Dog Night, “Sure as I’m Sittin’ Here,” which I don’t actually recall and I thought I was still listening to the radio in 1974. Never mind, skip ahead to Riding With the King, his fifth album and maybe second change of persona (or maybe third?). I first heard this album as a backfill purchase when I was in thrall to Bring the Family. It’s probably not fair and a little too easy to file the Hiatt of Riding With the King under Elvis Costello/Graham Parker soundalikes, which were lining up behind This Year’s Model and Squeezing Out Sparks. But does it help if I say Hiatt is one of the better ones and this is one of the better albums of its kind? Does it help if I note that Nick Lowe participates and produces half the songs, with further support from Martin Belmont and Paul Carrack? Hiatt’s main claim to fame really started all those years ago with Three Dog Night. He writes songs that others cover and sometimes turn into hits, though he’s never had one himself as a performer, e.g., Bonnie Raitt doing “Thing Called Love” (from Bring the Family) or B.B. King and doofus-god Eric Clapton teaming to cover “Riding With the King,” to get back to this album. Hiatt’s heartland white soul—he’s a native of Indianapolis from a large Catholic family, later a recovering alcoholic—may be wearing the Costello mask in this period, but his gift for melody, straightforward songwriting chops, and Nashville appreciation for musicianship just never let him down here. His boyish enthusiasms are there, peeking out, and can turn it in directions that read today a little like incel messaging, for example “She Loves the Jerk” and “Girl on a String” (incel vibe a Costello feature of course) The album notably comes alive on the second side with the pub-rock crew, hitting first with the title song’s fantasy of swinging with the King’s crew. Dad jokes, a staple of Hiatt’s performance, follow with “You May Already Be a Winner,” a song about romance as junk mail. The album by then is a winner itself. The next three songs all include the word “love” and its derivations in their titles (as do two on the first side, for a total of 5 of 12), and the whole thing finishes on a lively nervous rave-up called “Falling Up.” In the brief time I was infatuated with this album I tended to play both sides, and loved it maybe because it ends on such a strong and high note. But there’s good stuff all over this, puns and dad jokes notwithstanding. Worth looking up.

Porcupine (1983)

My favorite album by Echo & the Bunnymen arguably tends more toward the cerebral side of psychedelia, full of trippy climax and those thrumming string contributions from L. Shankar. But in memory it remains a soundtrack for bleary mind-groping post-midnight party scenes, playing very loud. It's head trip music that fills your head up and is heady too, these woozy dim images playing from wake-up movies, tarted up with exotic Eastern elements and a dense and sludgy production that bursts at will into clarity. The trademark dread of the Bunnymen lurks constantly. They're afraid of something. What is it? A fair argument points out the album attacks with its best, the two singles, "The Cutter" and "The Back of Love," and steps down from there song by song. Maybe—but the mood is consistent, stirring, dramatic, mysterious, infinitely exciting from moment to moment, about to turn another corner. All my favorite adjectives apply. And why not put your best out front? "The Cutter" enters already on a high point like exhausted caravansary entertainment at the encore, functioning on automatic yet with precision and impact, writhing string figures, sharp guitar chord on the upbeat, whammy bar touch, the song wandering yet building, until at 1:45 when it opens like glorious landscape and soars. It was their biggest hit. "The Back of Love" follows with nervous tempo and martial pounding on the drumkit. It seems to be scoffing at love and it never lets up, elevating after the chorus like a jet taking off, until finally it goes flying into colorful cloud-like scenes of meditation and yelping in a certain David Byrne mode. "The White Devil" involves John Webster and follows in a minor key, with thrilling xylophone. The title song (porcupine WTF) turns a great wisdom of the hallucinogen into magnificent soporific chant: "There is no comparison / Between things about to have been." Which translates approximately to "the past looks different in the future." Or perhaps not—proposed as another discussion point for the wee comedown hours. "Heads Will Roll" starts with a Love quote on acoustic guitar, shortly to be intruded upon by Bunnymen anxiety and Shankar's amazing strings again. The 2003 CD tacks on bonus tracks that run the whole thing close to 80 minutes, mostly alternate versions mostly unnecessary. The original is still the best. Put it on after midnight at your very next party. I mean, after the pandemic is over. I don't give parties or go to them much anymore myself.

Zelig (1983)

USA, 79 minutes

Director/writer: Woody Allen

Photography: Gordon Willis

Music: Dick Hyman

Editor: Susan E. Morse

Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Patrick Horgan, John Buckwater, Marvin Chatinover, Stanley Swerdlow, Paul Nevens, Howard Erskine, Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow

Zelig is not the world's first mockumentary—given Take the Money and Run, it's not even director and writer Woody Allen's first mockumentary. But with its use of a photo and film manipulation technology that was virtually state-of-the-art for the early '80s, Zelig is a significant inflection point, looking forward to Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump tour de force (trite as it may be) as well as to a surge of mockumentaries that accompanied the commercial swelling of legitimate documentaries. This Is Spinal Tap contributed to the momentum the very next year. I've always had mixed feelings about Zelig—I admired the technical ingenuity and general novelty, while at the same time feeling like Allen too often phones in the jokes from about 1958.

In fact, on that "general novelty" point, I hadn't really given the embedded documentary premise itself enough credit. It's fairly insightful and even profound. I finally saw that better when I was reading Chekhov's short story "The Darling," which has much the same premise. Let's call the character trait "impressionable." Or let's call it what today's psychologists call it, "environmental dependency syndrome," "Zelig syndrome," or "Zelig-like syndrome" (per Wikipedia), "a syndrome where the affected individual relies on environmental cues in order to accomplish goals or tasks." Anyone who has ever had to survive office politics (thus, everyone) knows instinctively how this works, adjusting behavior based on what one's superiors and/or peers prefer or demand. We are all a little affected by Zelig syndrome. We are never 100% ourselves in our public lives, only fractions of it, depending on what we know is expected of us. Some of us just have a harder time letting go—let's call that "dissociative." But this simple insight, at its heart, is what makes Zelig almost profound.

Sports (1983)

Some years ago I was reading along in the 2006 installment of the Da Capo Best Music Writing series, with selections in that volume by guest editor Mary Gaitskill, when I first encountered Katy St. Clair's remarkable story for SF Weekly, "A Very Special Concert." As the deck on the original piece suggests, it's about "the enduring bond between Huey Lewis [& the News] and the developmentally disabled," a sensitive consideration of an unusual, somewhat surprising, and cheering phenomenon. St. Clair writes, "Whatever the reason—the catchy tunes, the goofball charisma, or maybe those slapstick videos—developmentally disabled people see something significant and tender in Huey Lewis. He makes them happy." The piece goes on to detail how they have made him their own rock star, with the same kind of uncanny abilities to charm and weave spells that Tom Jones, Morrissey, Bruce Springsteen and many other superstars have for others.

It reminded me of a dilemma I faced early in my so-called career as a rock critic, perhaps for the first time, which is the matter of trusting your gut. We know now how overrated it is as a quality for the US Commander in Chief, but it comes in pretty handy for critics. In fact, it's one of their most important qualities, if they have it—an ability to step back and judge, not exactly impartially but with clarity or honesty and a willingness to stand by their responses. I never got the hang of it and, in fairness to me, it's not an uncommon problem. Revisiting most newspaper and other reviews from years gone by, distinguished by being written in the heat of the moment, often uncovers views of conventional wisdom that no longer make sense, viz., Led Zeppelin is terrible commercial hokum, Yoko Ono wrecked the Beatles, David Bowie is poncy, disco sucks, punk-rock is anti-life. Those are just from the '70s and incomplete. There's much more. Most people are convinced that critics are terrible idiots and in many ways they are right.

Sans Soleil (1983)

France, 100 minutes, documentary
Director/writer/photography/music/editor: Chris Marker
With: Alexandra Stewart, Arielle Dombasle, Kim Novak, James Stewart, Deep Purple

I wouldn't exactly call Sans Soleil a difficult picture, but no documentary so preoccupied with memory, veracity, and the general problem of inattentiveness is ever going to be easy. Typically, the documentaries that make it into the top 100 of the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? usually seem to have something a little extreme about them. Man With a Movie Camera is extremely exuberant, and Close-Up is extremely weird (and I think we decided it wasn't a documentary anyway). Shoah is extremely long. Sans Soleil is extremely opaque—or make that gnomic, cryptic, elliptical, or make that just personal, deeply. So personal it's hard to parse, as intended. "Sans soleil" is French for "sunless," meaning darkness, like fading memory. It's a one-man show of a veritable stream of consciousness free associating for 100 minutes, and if you can't make out a point, there's your point: sunless.

That doesn't mean it isn't enjoyable. Once past the expectation of narrative (leaping eagerly at scraps and anecdotes for the through thread), once over impatience to get on with it (very important), once you remember (again) you're looking at a movie, then it can be surprising, beautiful, witty, acerbic, very sharp, in small delicious bites. The one man is filmmaker Chris Marker, director, writer, cinematographer, and editor. He even wrote and/or performed much of the soundtrack. Marker traveled the world widely and filmed wherever he went. He had a gifted eye and a formidable intellect. The images are the best part of Sans Soleil, compelling, seductive, random, strained through filters and effects. They almost seem to edit themselves, while the words attempt to keep up. These images include film shot by others, such as a horrific scene of a giraffe being hunted and killed, or scenes from the Alfred Hitchcock movie Vertigo (in fact, Marker's critical treatment of Vertigo is one of the best parts in a movie pebbly full of very good very small parts). In short, Sans Soleil is a compressed history of the eye of Chris Marker, as he recalls it, in parts.

Ancient Evenings (1983)

In the world of international heterosexual stereotyping, where the British have fixations on schoolmarms and the French want to put everything in their mouths, I always thought Greeks were into anal and Egyptians necrophilia. Come to find, in this doorstop of a novel, there was a good deal of nuance to all that, at least if we can trust Norman Mailer's version, and I'm sure we can't. Wikipedia is good on this one: Ancient Evenings, it says, "deals with the lives of two protagonists, one young, one old, in a very alien Ancient Egypt marked by journeys by the dead, reincarnation, and violent and hyper-sexual gods and mortals in a complex combination of historical fiction, allegory, poetic flight, confession, and spiritual meditation." Ayup, that about covers it. It's hard to separate the concept from the history, so to be safe I assumed it was all concept. There are pharaohs and other historical figures but also gods and magic and such. It's very dim at the start but there is a payoff in the first half with a great battle story that is vintage Mailer storytelling, the Battle of Kadesh, an actual historical event that happened in 1274 BCE. At points like this the novel feels reasonably accurate, but that could be because I saw the same Ancient Egypt movies on TV that Mailer saw in theaters. Starting in Advertisements for Myself, nearly 25 years earlier, Mailer often mentioned in passing that he was at work on a great big novel set in Ancient Egypt. This is obviously that book, though he dates the writing as 1972 to 1982, which suggests a long gestation. He had found the key to writing very long in his previous book, The Executioner's Song, and in many ways Ancient Evenings feels like hard-won wisdom applied to a project too long stewed over. (It also feels like a book contract he was able to secure in return for the success of The Executioner's Song.) At least he got it out of his system because he then became very good indeed at very long narratives, both fiction and nonfiction. Ancient Evenings is an interesting curiosity but way too long and weird to read casually. The sex is embarrassing for what it reveals of Mailer's own preoccupations, but I guess by that token you can also say it's very brave. You could probably take it apart in a good all-night book reading group session and really have some high old drunken times. Or you can file it under I read it so you don't have to.

In case it's not at the library.

Risky Business (1983)

USA, 99 minutes
Director/writer: Paul Brickman
Photography: Bruce Surtees, Reynaldo Villalobos
Music: Tangerine Dream
Editor: Richard Chew
Cast: Tom Cruise, Rebecca de Mornay, Joe Pantoliano, Bronson Pinchot, Curtis Armstrong, Nicholas Pryor, Janet Carroll, Richard Masur

My Halliwell's film guide—the strange 2008 edition with Spiderman on the cover—briskly dismisses Risky Business, which it ranks as mediocre, with zero stars: "Would-be outrageous teenage comedy which is pretty well made but soon wears out its welcome." On the other hand, I still remember the byword of a friend on Risky Business at the time: "the thinking man's mindless entertainment." I have always loved it, for bad reasons and good. Lust for Rebecca de Mornay covers most of the bad reasons. But that grudging "pretty well made" from Halliwell's is damn well faint praise for a screenplay this carefully constructed, and so strewn with great lines from scene to scene, with s convincing coming-of-age story along for the ride. Coming of age? In certain lights, Risky Business looks like a journey to wisdom.

The whole thing is premised on something we all know: the utility and the danger of saying, "What the fuck." That's the core of director and writer Paul Brickman's picture, around which he has packed a good many elements, only some of which work though all are at least intriguing: Tom Cruise, Tangerine Dream, Chicagoland, an artsy-fartsy glass egg, Bob Seger, and the Porsche auto brand, to name a few that occur immediately. Tom Cruise plays Joel Goodsen (an easy entry in the obvious name sweepstakes even if it's misspelled), who is an upper-middle-class white boy and high school senior consumed by anxiety about his future. He just doesn't want to make a mistake. He's so afraid of making a mistake that he tries as much as possible to do nothing at all, because he calculates that doing things is when problems start.

Ice (1983)

Here's a novel that's typical of the '80s for the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain. Over 300 pages, with a single-word title whose metaphorical possibilities are worked over methodically (compare Tricks, the best of them). So it is set in February, involves cocaine, and also a theatrical-world scam known as "ice" (a term I'd never heard before, though I knew the scalping technique). There are also diamonds—you knew there were going to be diamonds—which are hidden inside ice-cube trays. Brrr. The killer is a cold motherfucker too, though I know many criminals in fiction are cold. As usual, except lately, it's a decent mystery story, keeps you guessing, and plays fair, for the most part. I've heard a new term going around: "rapey," which unfortunately often applies to McBain's work. A variation I haven't heard yet applies even more to him: "knifey." Ice is rapey and it is knifey too, though mostly (not always) they are off to the side, in the developing relationship between sad sack turned bad cop Bert Kling (just divorced from his model wife Augusta, who starred in Heat, set in August) and rape decoy specialist Eileen Burks. Ah ha—did the light just go on for you too? That's where all the rapey stuff goes in this one, and a lot of the knifey stuff too. And McBain is really treading risky territory here, attempting to make Eileen a hot sexy redheaded bombshell who has a complicated rape fantasy in her sexuality. Not in her police work, thank God. But I'm not really sure that makes it any better. It feels uncomfortably like McBain's complicated rape fantasy in a way that is annoying at best, or icky and worse. So that's unfortunate. All the personal development is basically with Kling and Eileen. Cotton Hawes and Andy Parker are absent. Meyer Meyer, Arthur Brown, and of course Steve Carella are present. Teddy makes a brief appearance. This one is big but it's mostly about the case, which is mostly about the metaphor conceit. I like setting it in February, as in many ways it's the cruelest month of the winter—still dark and bleak and cold, but now with phony make-believe holidays, Valentine's Day and Presidents' Day, neither one of which anybody ever knows where to put the apostrophes. McBain works those holidays pretty well here. There's a comical phony priest who reminds me a little of Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction. I realize I'm grasping at straws now. OK, it's not one of his best either.

In case it's not at the library.

"Cathedral" (1983)

Read story by Raymond Carver online.

The collection this story headlines was something of a breakthrough for Raymond Carver, and the story is one of his most anthologized. It feels more worked over and literary than the raw naturalism of "Fever," for example. It's a strange story in many ways, with strange people doing strange things, but it has real power. It's told in the first person by a man whose wife has invited an old friend of hers, a blind man who recently lost his wife, to visit and stay with them. The narrator does not like this. He is more or less candid about his discomfort with the man's disability, a theme he keeps coming back to until inevitably his discomfort has made us uncomfortable with his attitude. The blind man, Robert—the husband / narrator and wife remain unnamed—is loose and balanced, able to roll with the situation. Or maybe he has some agenda? It's hard to tell. He calls the narrator "bub," which the narrator doesn't know exactly how to take. They stay up late the first night. Robert is not tired, or doesn't know how to take a hint. Then the story becomes very strange. The wife leaves to change into nightclothes, comes back to the living room, and soon falls asleep. The television is on in the room. Robert says he doesn't mind. The narrator produces some marijuana to smoke. For Robert it's his first time. On the TV is a documentary about European history. Presently it begins to discuss and show historical cathedrals. The narrator seizes on this as a way to relate to Robert. "Something has occurred to me," he says. "Do you have any idea what a cathedral is? What they look like, that is? Do you follow me? If somebody says cathedral to you, do you have any notion what they're talking about?" Robert dryly responds with recitations of facts they have both just heard. The narrator seems impossibly selfish and self-centered. He cannot see Robert as a valid person, and he can't hide it from Robert any better than he has from us. In fact, he is so candid in his narration about his prejudices and ignorance that it brings you up a little short as the reader. He tragically believes himself a solid man of common sense, and easygoing and humorous too. He is an everyman we have all met. He is the cast of Seinfeld, including supporting players. Carver puts him into the middle of a cunningly conceived situation—a blind man who calls him "bub"!—winds him up and lets him go. What follows is remarkable, when the blind man presses the issue of what a cathedral looks like.

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

Cathedral by Raymond Carver

"Fever" (1983)

Story by Raymond Carver not available online.

Raymond Carver puts on a clinic in modern short story fiction writing with this story from his Cathedral collection. "Fever" is less often anthologized than other stories in Cathedral, which also includes the title story, "Where I'm Calling From," "Vitamins," and others. But Carver made it his contribution to the anthology American Short Story Masterpieces, which he edited with Tom Jenks in 1987. That might indicate some feeling he had for it. In many ways it's typical of Carver, focused on a family at the moment it crumbles and full of incidents that are just out of control, like bad dreams. The first-person narrator, Carlyle, is a high school art teacher. He tells how his wife Eileen unexpectedly left him and their two children at the end of the previous school year, in early June. Now it's September, the start of the new school year, and his life is in total disarray. He has spent the summer attempting to come to terms with the loss, which he believes is only temporary. Eileen has left him to live with a former colleague of his. The school year is starting but Carlyle still has not made arrangements for day care of the children. At the last minute, he hires the first person he finds, a "fat girl" named Debbie who is 19. A few days later he comes home to find his children unattended on the front lawn, except by a dangerous-looking dog. Inside the house, Debbie is partying with three teenage boys. So it goes. Carlyle still talks to Eileen but he is beginning to hate her. She is full of nonsensical touchy-feely recovery talk. Eileen sends greetings from Carlyle'a former colleague every time they talk. There's more, with the same extremes of ups and downs, as coping proceeds. It's hard to convey the feeling of reading it—it's so immediate, so vivid. Carver was expert at plumbing these emotional pivot points inside people. No one, not even Debbie, is entirely unsympathetic, and everyone is capable of turning inward and doing the right thing. And the wrong thing. The pathos and confusions of the situation—a divorce, with young children involved—are captured well. There's even a nice and simple revelation that powers the story, as Carlyle shifts from believing his marriage can be saved and isn't over, to accepting that it is. This is a great example of what makes Carver so good.

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

Cathedral by Raymond Carver

"All the Way in Flagstaff, Arizona" (1983)

Story by Richard Bausch not available online.

By legend, Richard Bausch's remarkable story of alcoholism and the dissolution of a marriage is the result of hacking down an 800-page novel. It is built within the frame of its main character, Walter, a middle-aged man, sitting in the back pew of a church by himself in Flagstaff, Arizona, remembering the incidents of a picnic with his family two years earlier, on Long Island. That's the day "when Irene came out on the porch and told him she couldn't make it be enough anymore." The story really is not dreary, even though it is about problem drinking and the end of a marriage. It's especially sharp on family dynamics, especially with the kids. There are five of them and two are quite distinct: William, the oldest at 14, has recently decided he wants to become a priest and is annoying everyone by loudly and piously praying for them, most often for Walter, whose point of view largely informs the story. It's actually his story in the end, a bottoming-out tale. Susan, the next oldest, copes by mocking and belittling William's sanctimony, taunting him with her ambition to become the first married woman priest to become pope. The most sharply observed passages are the family squabbles which continually erupt at the picnic. These encounters are fresh like wounds yet pass with an easy familiarity. All families have these fits of pain, though perhaps not to all these extremes. The former long novel is suggested by the dense compression between the day of the picnic and the day in the church in Flagstaff. A lot of that information is necessary to close the primary narrative arc, which is about the drinking. The day in Flagstaff is the day he stops, which is an important day for every alcoholic. Still, I think the best part of this story is what actually occupies most of it: the lacerating day of the picnic, and the personalities and interactions of Walter and his family, especially the kids. This is a pretty good one.

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

Echo & the Bunnymen, "The Cutter" (1983)

(listen)

As with many of the non-charting songs I have picked to write about these last couple years (though it turned out a few actually had crossed the rubicon into the top 40, d'oh!), "The Cutter" is here mostly representing the album it comes from, in this case the third Echo & the Bunnymen album Porcupine, which is fine. In fact, all of their first four albums start at worthwhile and move toward essential. The general appeal is most often characterized as shades of neo-psychedelia in a postpunk frame. Wikipedia, for example, is quick to drag in the obligatory Sgt. Pepper-era Beatles on the matter of the thickly textured strings in this song. Fair enough, but I also want to call attention to Ian McCulloch's vocal, which had always displayed enough twitchy anxiety to get over on New Wave terms. For me, I had to hear the Bunnymen covers of Doors and Velvet Underground songs found on the box set to clarify just how good (and how ambitious) McCulloch always was. There is also the deceptively easy and unpretentious way the band has of packing in so much drama to so many of their songs. The stakes always feel high and so it is with "The Cutter." It thrums with a bottom vibrating at deepest levels even as the keyboard hooks elegantly stair-step across scales at the song's highest pitch, holding in place for its greatest effects. It's dread and atmosphere and yet light and frolicsome even, and always propulsive. It starts on a high note and builds to a glorious crescendo, like death and then heaven. I'm not even sure what it is exactly, let alone what it is about. And I don't know who or what "the cutter" is supposed to be but I don't think I want any part of it either.

Making History (1983)

Linton Kwesi Johnson's great moment—or at least the one I happen to know best—is out of print now and looks to have become a pricy collector's item, so I recommend the Independant Intavenshan anthology, which contains all of the tracks from Making History and 28 more besides. Absolutely worth it. Widely characterized as a "dub poet," which is close enough—the musical accompaniment is heavily atmospheric strains of Jamaica and Johnson is a highly regarded poet (published in the Penguin Modern Classics collection). This is another album, I have since figured out, that we all seemed to have found out about from the "A" Robert Christgau gave it, so credit due thatwise. It actually bears a fair amount of musical variety across its seven tracks—including one, "Reggae Fi Radni," that sounds plucked from parts of Nino Rota's soundtrack for the Godfather movies. The last track ("New Crass Massahkah") settles into unaccompanied vocal recitation, spacing out its simple musical statements. The first four songs, which are as good as it gets, work lively, satisfying strains on uptempo grooves. On all of them Johnson steps in reciting polemic in a thick, deep patois, which can be heard as musical itself, blending in nicely, but is difficult to understand. Certain fragments swim up unmistakably: "Di eagle an' di bear people livin' in fear of impending nuclear war fear," "From England to Poland / Every step across di ocean / The ruling class is dem is in a mess, oh yes / Di capitalist system are regress / But di Soviet system nah progress / So which one of dem yuh think is best," and "it was in april nineteen eighty wan / doun inna di ghetto of Brixtan" (the latter available in full at The Poetry Archive). Well, we already knew the drift from the song titles: "Di Eagle an di Bear," "Wat About di Workin' Class?," "Di Great Insohreckshan." And we knew the level of ambition from the title of the album. What was harder to guess was how musically it would be delivered. Until that last track, this thing moves with propulsive force. Perhaps some drag to the vocal, it can be rumbling and monotonous, but the charge of the words as they clarify counterbalances that well, for me at least, and there is an amazing force to the album sustained surprisingly well.

Videodrome (1983)

Canada, 87 minutes
Director/writer: David Cronenberg
Photography: Mark Irwin
Music: Howard Shore
Editor: Ronald Sanders
Cast: James Woods, Deborah Harry, Sonja Smits, Peter Dvorsky, Lynne Gorman, Jack Creley, Leslie Carlson, Sam Melkin

I'm pretty sure I've seen Videodrome in the theater, but the first time I saw it and the greatest impressions it has made on me have tended to come out of the semi-degraded VHS tape versions. Back in the day, a friend of mine always seemed to know how to put his hands on them early. Of course, seeing a DVD version now one quickly notes how the whole look and feel is slanted in exactly that direction. For much of the movie, in fact, we are either watching "television," or we are watching people watching televisions. One thing it gets surprisingly right still is the sense of intimate connection that develops between people and televisions—or monitors, I guess I had better say.

In many ways indeed Videodrome appears remarkably prescient now, certainly in terms of today's Internet culture, which is at least as bewitching and entrancing as anything on TV in Videodrome. It also correctly imagined the casual acceptance of pornography we see nowadays. "Got any porno?" says Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry), picking through the videotapes of Max Renn (James Woods), back at his place at the end of their first date. No embarrassment, no self-consciousness. But Videodrome is way more than a science fiction film that happened to get a few guesses right about the future—and quite a bit more ambitious than that too.

Lou Reed, "Bottoming Out" (1983)

(listen)

"One of the greatest songs written about alcoholism, spousal abuse and suicide ever!" says a YouTube comment at the video at the link. You have to give it up to that person. Setting aside how many songs are written about alcoholism, spousal abuse, and suicide in the first place, it's not far wrong, although it's not the alcoholism, spousal abuse, and suicide that make it one of the greatest songs written ever. A lot of the credit has to go to bass player Fernando Saunders, whose soaring, loping playing style provides one of the most important dynamics to Lou Reed's band in this period, one of his best, and this is one of his best showcases. The Blue Mask and Legendary Hearts, which is the home of this track, both feature Saunders, guitar player Robert Quine, and Reed in one of his best songwriting periods. "Bottoming Out" is told from the point of view of a person an awful lot like Lou Reed at the time, but not exactly, into discipline and control but weakened and tortured by addiction and a deep hunger for redemption, a drunk by the sound of it, with a searing drama about a terrible night and a bad accident, a relationship and bitter fights and making up and calling it love all over again, etc. Personal growth on public display, and it's bracing enough on that level, kudos to Reed of course. But I have to bring it back around again to Saunders. Because the way he lives inside this song, and the best of all these songs, the way he feels for the big moments in the tawdry rubble of Reed's stories, it's really something. Gorgeous. He makes it positively heroic. Alcoholism, spousal abuse, and suicide. Also a chopper, child bride, and open road "drunk but my vision's good"—straightforward bottoming out style. You don't forget it.