Run-D.M.C. (1984)

I owned a copy of Run-DMC’s debut when it was new—blind squirrel finds a nut, OK sure, but I must admit it baffled me. It was so stripped down it seemed unfinished, and primitive, appealing to that side of my taste perhaps, a semi-mystifying pleasure when it played. But it didn’t play for long before I put it away. More than 40 years later it hits different. The groove is obviously in the beats and the beats are the hooks as the brain locks into them. It’s a blast to play. They were already on to the project of making room for a rock guitar, famously and influentially on the second track here, “Rock Box,” with Eddie Martinez playing the butt-simple but evocative electric guitar. What once puzzled me now thrills me. Time comes to all folks. The guitar is hard but the beats are harder and therein lies the greatness. That’s arguably the chief feature here—certainly it is already pointing the way to the Aerosmith collaboration—but there are other points of interest and pleasure as well, such as the fiercely swapping vocals. I try to pick one or the other and chant with it. It’s not easy. It’s nimble and surprising and would only get better (see “It’s Tricky” on their third album). The high-profile themes are hard life: “Hard Times” and “It’s Like That” were the first two singles, where their bitter poverty gibes are somewhat overplayed, viz., “Won’t you tell me the last time that love bought you clothes?” My riposte would be most (not all) of people’s childhoods, where providing clothes to children is considered at least a parental duty, more often than not performed out of love. Run-DMC would often traffic in less than inspired or muddled language, especially when trying to be sincere. I much prefer the playful braggadocio of “Jam-Master Jay,” “Jay’s Game,” and the Krush-Grooves, “Hollis Crew” and “Sucker M.C.’s” (note that I do not know any applicable backstories but may look into it). “Wake Up” and “30 Days” have interesting and fun (respectively) narrative conceits. But “Rock Box” along with the B-Boy Mix in the extras count as the continuing stars of this show, with a slow-but-sure deep synthesizer line counterpointing a wind-chime same in the upper registers plus the soaring, screaming guitar, fully under control, like a panther in a cage. But stick around for the whole album. It’s good stuff, and lately a reliable raver around here.

“Three Days” (1984)

[spoilers] I thought this story by Tanith Lee was pretty good—gothic more than supernatural, with a supremely messed-up family. In fact, one weak point is how extreme it is, with a sadistic father who loathes his children and humiliates them in public. Another weak point is too much explanation. But the narrative pull is strong, something I’m learning to appreciate for itself, as much horror tends to accord it less regard, if not dispensing with it altogether. The story focuses on Honorine, the only daughter of the father, the youngest and most vulnerable of his three children. When we first see her even the first-person narrator, a friend of one of the sons, is cruel in his description. “She was not ugly, but that is all that can be said. Indeed, had she been ugly, she would have possessed a greater advantage.” There’s more—he goes on about her for some time. The narrator has been invited along for the rituals of occasional humiliation of the children by the father. It so infuriates this narrator to be made witness that he breaks off with his friend. Next there’s a scene where the sister—Honorine—is seen by the narrator by chance. Now the impression she makes is much different: “... there truly was about her a gracefulness—of gesture, of attitude. And a strange air of laughter, mischievous and essentially womanly, that despite myself began to entice me to her vicinity.” The reason for this change is not entirely clear, but has something to do with an occultist group operating out of a bookstore. It could be that Honorine has come to believe she is the reincarnation of a persecuted woman who lived in an earlier century, or perhaps there are witches in the group and they are doing something, or some combination. Honorine seems to have had a boost in confidence by identifying with the woman. I could pretty much hang with all this, and I’m not sure what I’d do with the story myself, but at this point it starts to become more psychologically real and yet paradoxically less believable. The father, who verges on omniscient or has some excellent private detectives, finds out about the group and the woman and Honorine’s beliefs and attacks them directly, which shatters all the progress Honorine has made. Next stop suicide. I mean, OK, maybe. But it seems sad and pointless to make the story about this elaborate and unbelievable cruelty, mainly because it isn’t believable and lost me altogether. Still, Lee is a good storyteller and on balance it’s an enjoyable read.

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

“Soft” (1984)

I liked this story by F. Paul Wilson—another good one in The Weird, which may have its ups and downs, but the highs tend to be unusually high. Here the concept is a virus (and/or environmental toxin—they haven’t figured it out yet) which decomposes and liquefies bones, usually (but not always) from the feet up. The disaster is spreading widely. The story involves a father and daughter in a Manhattan apartment who have both mostly lost their legs. Like multiple sclerosis the progress of this thing is unpredictable. It can stop getting worse. Government-sponsored research is ongoing, but—eerily, as with Covid—people don’t trust the government, including the father in this story. There’s an interesting tension between the father and the daughter. She is a little worse off and wants to take advantage of the government programs. He thinks it will do them no good, at best they are experimenting on people with mixed results. A great detail here is that the bone deterioration is audible to the victim, “like someone gently crinkling cellophane inside your head.” The narrative arc is the father’s investigation into a neighbor across the street who has not been responding to his walkie-talkie for a few days. The journey there is an arduous one, walking on his knees. And really that’s about it. Brevity once again helps to make a story work. “Soft” freezes you and leaves you, establishing the condition and then the scope—worldwide, the entire human species, and moving fast. Prognosis negative, in other words. One thing that’s interesting here is that disintegration of bones does not appear to be painful. It just happens, and it is devastating, but there are few direct physical agonies associated with it, just that horrible crinkling sound. “Soft” is kind of like the Titanic story after the iceberg. Everything is ending—in relatively slow motion but ending certainly. Wilson does a good job of laying it out and a better one of letting it lay there: an apocalypse. It reminds me that way of Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life”—the same level of disaster as we enter. Strange and weird and horrible, science fiction but also horror because it is so utterly despairing in its implications. But its tone, by contrast, is more upbeat, plucky—the vibe of someone who wants to survive and means to but probably won’t but still wants to but won’t. Teetering right there. Good one.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.

“Son of Celluloid” (1984)

This might be the story that finally sold me on Clive Barker because it shows his impressive range with a variety of sources. It also has many of his flaws, for example starting slow with an arguably unnecessary overture piece. The story proper really starts when we get to the end of the night at a rundown repertory movie theater—the night’s show had been a spaghetti western double feature with Clint Eastwood. The only staff are Ricky the janitor, a big thinker and drug-taker, and Birdy the manager, who is 34 and overweight. A woman is waiting in the lobby for her date, who went to the restroom. Ricky goes to check on him and the Barker carnival whirs into existence. The restroom is not a restroom but has become a desert scene from a western movie and someone is firing gunshots at Ricky. The date has already been killed. Ricky has a very hard time getting back to the reality of the restroom and theater, and this is only the start of a phantasmagoric lunacy that unfolds as Ricky and Birdy try to close the theater for the night. There is a monster in there with them and it is so weird you really should get it from Barker in the story. It’s rooted in movie pop culture the way “New Murders in the Rue Morgue” is rooted in Edgar Allan Poe. But it is also all Barker. The gore proceeds logically, focusing on the organs with which we consume movies. Barker likes to go prolix—let him. He tends to close all open loops, which is good because he opens so many of them. I could complain about too much explaining, but not everything is explained and that’s good enough in that regard. The main thing, so often, is that you just don’t know where he’s going. You expect him to go for extremes, as the putative author of splatterpunk, but you can’t guess which ones. Sometimes it feels too loose and wild, but the appeal often remains wondering where he’s headed. I love this one because it doesn’t love just great cinema, but also the venues where it’s shown, or was once (the style of repertory theater I knew in the ‘70s and ‘80s is all but dead now). And what a monster this one has!

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 3 kindle)
Read story online.

“New Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1984)

[spoilers] This story is, of course, outlandish and beggars belief—well, that’s Clive Barker for you. What I like is the bold way it takes on the Edgar Allan Poe original, itself outlandish and beggaring belief. Barker is having some fun with Poe and his ridiculous ideas. Namely, the “Ourang-Outang” villain of Poe’s story along with other elements of it. It’s one of a few places where Poe is found inventing the detective story with his Parisian investigator, C. Auguste Dupin, a plain forerunner of Sherlock Holmes, but with even more ridiculous examples of those good old breathtaking and unbelievable feats of logic and deduction. Arthur Conan Doyle would prove more skillful at it. Sometimes you almost don’t notice how silly the amazing deductions can be. As in the original Poe, mysterious and violent murders have occurred in Paris. They turn out to be the work of a cleverly disguised primate. Poe may have been proceeding from the ignorance of the times when he was writing (circa 1841), but Barker has to know better in 1984. We all loved Koko the gorilla, who may or may not have been able to communicate with sign language, but no ape is going to shave and dress up in human garb, walk with mincing steps, and go on killing sprees. Come on. Barker bristles with imaginative weird ideas and tosses them with gore. There’s gore aplenty here, as usual, be warned—in both Rue Morgue stories, for that matter. This Ourang-Outang, or whatever it is—Barker just calls it an ape—uses a razor to kill. What’s the beef? Inhibitions of civilization, or just everyday psychopathy (ape style)? Who knows? We should never forget that Barker came originally from the theater (now he paints, writes, and directs movies too). He is over-the-top theatrical for exactly that reason. He writes VERY BIG as well as long. He’s literate and knows his chosen field, or is learning it in these Books of Blood stories as he writes. If “Skins of Our Fathers” (also in Vol. 2) reminded me of H.P. Lovecraft, “New Murders” is obviously riffing on Poe. Barker is certainly aware of his salient traditions. He's having fun but also acknowledging his sources. He basically writes the same story here that Poe did, copying the master as it were. Barker tips this in many ways, including by making his main character a descendant of one of the principals in Poe’s original. This one’s just for the fun of it. For best effect, read the two “Rue Morgue” stories together.

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 2 kindle)
Listen to story online.

“In the Hills, the Cities” (1984)

[spoilers?] Full disclosure, I remain dubious about the Clive Barker project at large, but Stephen King’s clarion blurb, “I have seen the future of horror,” still resonates enough for a fulsome career by Barker, the painter, theatrical impresario, baker, chef, chief bottle washer, and short story writer. Or, at least, short story writer is how he started when he made it to horror lit, specifically with the six-volume Books of Blood collection, before going on to write a bunch of novels, series, screenplays, etc. The slightly cringy Books of Blood credo goes, “Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.” The general sense I struggle with is that I’m not sure Barker is a good short-story writer and I still believe short stories are the soul of horror literature. With some exceptions Barker’s stories tend to be uniformly long, minimum page count 30 and ranging up to near 100. No problem there—H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Aickman frequently went long too. But Barker’s stories are also just a little saggy. There’s a lot going on, including extreme violence (dubbed “splatterpunk”), but it tends to run monotonous for me. On the other hand, the things Barker dreams up are uniformly weird, unexpected, crazy, startling, and original. He’s not borrowing from old traditions, though he harks to them, sometime quite explicitly, but rather he is more shooting to create his own. This much-anthologized oddball from the first volume of the Books of Blood set is as good a place as any to start. It is set in the Soviet-era Yugoslavia—Serbia and Kosovo, I believe—and the two main characters, the “English gentlemen,” Mick and Judd, are a gay couple on a honeymoon type of road trip through central Europe. Barker is normalizing gays in this story, not sensationalizing them, or using them to add some element of horror, which is refreshing. They just are what they are—a couple who bickers passive-aggressively the way couples do on travels and then later enjoys makeup sex.

Eventually we arrive at the story’s main conceit, which is kind of hard to explain, let alone believe. Is it a spoiler to reveal the ideas? For centuries, two neighboring cities of “tens of thousands” have perfected a way of fighting in which they strap themselves together—men, women, and children, Barker emphasizes—into lumbering humanoid forms that do battle with each other in hand-to-hand (so to speak) combat, rock ‘em sock ‘em style. Useful illustrations can be found on the internet. Barker has someone explain: “Ropes to tie them all together, flawlessly. Sinews ... ligaments ... There was food in its belly ... there were pipes from the loins, to take away the waste. The best-sighted sat in the eye-sockets, the best-voiced in the mouth and throat. You wouldn’t believe the engineering.” He has that right. I don’t believe it. Yes, there are certain faint echoes of the movie The Wicker Man and of Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery.” But in general it seems beyond ridiculous to me and it’s just getting started. I was constantly distracted by the impossibility of it. The soles of the feet, consider, are made up of the biggest, heaviest men, who are smashed to pulp dead. Lots of people die even on the victorious side. Apparently it is considered an honor. Mick and Judd wander into this strange battle and find the remains of the defeated city with literally thousands of corpses. Barker is enthusiastic and gets carried away with the concept, piling on with detail (babies replicate teeth inside the mouth, stuff like that). But for me he is plainly overdrawing on his suspension of disbelief account. Good start, good middle, protracted from there—it’s no way to write a story (but what do you do anyway with ideas like this?). But you better not take my word for it. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer give “In the Hills, the Cities” their stamp of approval by including it in their estimable and valuable anthology The Weird. Barker himself picked it for Masters of Darkness, an anthology where that’s the concept, writers picking their own stories and explaining why. "In the Hills, the Cities" is all over the place. The implication is that it’s a masterpiece. My strained credulity could well be a minority view.

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 1 kindle)
Masters of Darkness, ed. Dennis Etchison
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Listen to story online.

14. Robyn Hitchcock, I Often Dream of Trains (1984)

[2019 review here]

I have to admit most of the albums on this countdown list are flawed one way or another—bum tracks mainly, sometimes swamping the good stuff (see Donna Summer’s I Remember Yesterday, down at #47, where you’re better off just getting “I Feel Love” as a single). But Robyn Hitchcock’s third solo album I Often Dream of Trains may be the exception—a nearly perfect album start to finish, bracketed by the lovely piano instrumental “Nocturne” (“Prelude” and “Demise”). The album tends to stay within itself yet exceeds all goals. It probably belongs higher on this list but it’s too late for that now. Like Todd Rundgren on A Wizard, a True Star, the set finds one person alone in the studio with his thoughts. James Fletcher plays saxophone on one song (“Flavor of Night”), Chris Cox plays bass on one other (“Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus”). The rest is Hitchcock, often overdubbing intricate and beautiful harmonies on the vocals. The mood is far more austere and elegiac than Rundgren’s. Hitchcock’s piano and acoustic guitar are a simple, hushed accompaniment to his prolific casual flights of surreal lyrics, all packed up with semi-opaque psychotherapy-related meaning. Hitchcock’s weird scenes and people, his blurring the lines of mental illness and treating death candidly as an interesting sideshow, all of it somehow often hilariously funny—they are given center stage where they arguably belong in his work. Most of it has been accompanied by bands. I Often Dream of Trains is psychedelic in the way many of these songs can function as earworms, ringing in your brain for days, where the strange words enable the strange, chilly way of thinking to emerge. This music is filled with dread yet equally full of elfin and beguiling touches.

The ghost of perhaps even Sigmund Freud hovers over these proceedings, from the title forward. The novelty song “Uncorrected Personality Traits,” a 1:46 a cappella number, may be the single purest distillation here. But you must be prepared to endure an epic earworm of Kars 4 Kids proportions. It reminds me in many ways of Joni Mitchell’s “Twisted,” also an earworm. But it’s so twisted it makes “Twisted” look like a reusable drinking straw. Hit it, Robyn: “Uncorrected personality traits that seem whimsical in a child / May prove to be ugly in a fully grown adult / Lack of involvement with the father, or overinvolvement with the mother / Can result in lack of ability to relate to sexual peers.” The program for life is found in the bridge: “The spoiled baby grows into / The escapist teenager who’s / The adult alcoholic who’s / The middle-aged suicide. / (Oy!).” Extra points for prescience, recognizing and acknowledging transsexuality in various ways, tongue in cheek, daffy and gentle: “Even Marilyn Monroe was a man, but this tends to get overlooked / By our mother-fixated, overweight, sexist media.” Wut? That’s just one song on this original set of 14 so I’ll leave off about it now. “Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl” is another that hits similarly. Many more tracks here are warm evocations one way or another, such as “Cathedral” and “Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus” with their obvious gospel overtones. “Trams of Old London” indulges a wry nostalgia that feels like Dickens. I Often Dream of Trains is largely a comfortable album, standing up well to daily listens. The stranger songs are often the shortest, with longer songs that follow, letting your brain marinate, deceptively, as when “Uncorrected Personality Traits” is followed by “Sounds Great When You’re Dead.” As I say, some of the greatest pleasures here come hours and days later, when the album is only playing in your head. Hitchcock has made a good number of albums in a long career, but this one still sounds like the best to me. And even after all these years it still has new things to disclose too. Play in darkened rooms, in winter, with lava lamps.

The Terminator (1984)

UK / USA, 107 minutes

Director: James Cameron

Writers: James Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd, William Wisher

Photography: Adam Greenberg

Music: Brad Fiedel, Tryanglz

Editor: Mark Goldblatt

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Earl Boen, Bess Motta

It had been a long time since I’d seen a Terminator movie—and, full disclosure, I’ve only seen the first two (of six, not counting TV, video games, action figures, and other treatments)—so I wasn’t entirely sure what I would be getting into these 40 years later. As I recall, the first sequel, from 1991, was the better picture. And sure enough, this 1984 original puts an impossibly young Arnold Schwarzenegger into a thriller milieu that is at least 80% 1980s cheese. Even the projected dystopian future of 2029, a wrecked war zone with deadly purple rays and other high-tech war gadgetry going pew-pew-pew, seemed faintly rinky-dink. Meanwhile, in 1984, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and her big-hair best friend Ginger (Bess Motta) are grooving to walkmans and the relatively newfound portability of music. Can’t stop, won’t stop—which means they don’t always hear the dangers coming down. Let’s not even get into the rockin’ soundtrack by Tryanglz, whoever that is. Was 1984 the most ‘80s year of all? I know there’s a theory it was the best year all-time in pop music. Tryanglz is not evidence for it.

In spite of the many dated aspects, The Terminator remains relatively good entertainment (even if the sequel might be better). It has an intriguing science fiction / time travel premise, based on the oldest chestnut in the books, about going back in time to kill your grandfather. But that means—I couldn’t be alive—to kill him—he never died—so I was born, but— Don’t think about it too much because the paradoxes will make your brain hurt. Oh, wait, it’s a whole franchise later now, and the many zigs have profoundly zagged. The fact of the matter is that The Terminator is closer to Beverly Hills Cop and The French Connection, in terms of what it is, than to heady science fiction like Blade Runner or 2001. What it is is lots of gunplay, lots of car chases, and a light dusting of sci-fi. Action, baby. As a movie, The Terminator notably loves guns to the point of fetish. Everyone has different models of automatic weapons and shotguns, sawed-off and otherwise, with fancy laser attachments and such. Later there will be pipe bombs. Let the ordnance fly!

Stranger Than Paradise (1984)

USA / West Germany, 89 minutes

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Writers: Jim Jarmusch, John Lurie

Photography: Tom DiCillo

Music: John Lurie, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

Editors: Jim Jarmusch, Melody London

Cast: John Lurie, Eszter Balint, Richard Edson, Cecilia Stark, Tom DiCillo

It’s probably fair to call director and cowriter Jim Jarmusch an acquired taste but Stranger Than Paradise might be as good a place as any to start acquiring it. The picture has obvious affinities with and aspirations toward the work of director Jean-Luc Godard—slow, playful, quirky, mannered, pulpy in cerebral ways, low-budget, self-conscious cinema shot in a black and white that looks like it sat in the sun too long (leftover filmstock donated by Wim Wenders reportedly). The plot involves a threesome of hipsters—Willie (John Lurie), his Hungarian cousin Eva (Eszter Balint), and his best friend Eddie (Richard Edson). As the picture opens Willie hears from his Aunt Lotte (Cecilia Stark) in Cleveland that Eva, coming for a visit, will need to stay with him longer than one night because something has come up and she can’t put her up for another 10 days.

Willie lives in a small dirty apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In the first part of the picture, “The New World,” Willie and Eva make do with the situation. He snaps at her a lot and isn’t much of a host. They watch his tiny TV—football, which he tries to explain to her and she says is stupid, and late-night science fiction movies. They smoke a lot of Chesterfields. Willie’s style is porkpie hats indoors. He likes to sit with Eddie drinking beers and not talking. Eva wants to vacuum the place. He tells her in America vacuuming is called “choking the alligator.” She doesn’t believe him. The movie proceeds in a series of scenes with blackouts, skipping ahead in time randomly and without notice. Wikipedia notes these scenes are all single long takes but I should note I never particularly noticed the lack of cuts.

Winterkill (1984)

Craig Lesley’s first novel is a pretty good modern Western tale. I’m not sure there are that many of them anymore. Maybe it’s an obvious comparison, but it reminded me of Larry McMurtry, both in its low-key, unpretentious approach and in its interest in the lives of contemporary Westerners. It involves a middle-aged Native American man hanging on to a career on the rodeo circuit. When his ex-wife dies he reaches out to his 17-year-old son to finish raising him. There are interesting scenes from the rodeo life, which is a hard one, especially for a Native American. Danny is Nez Perce and we get a lot of interesting detail and lore about them, and an equally interesting sense of the Native American context more generally, with representatives of many tribal nations as well as the white world beyond them. Jack, the son, is a bit of a stock character. He’s rebellious like a teen but actually I expected a little more conflict between them, with the baggage from the divorce and so on. The narrative moves from Danny’s rodeo life to some cowboy scenes with Danny and Jack, and finally to a semi-mystical elk hunting trip. Lesley’s prose is always straightforward and plainspoken. He refuses to cater to white interpretations of Native American spirituality but keeps things within range of the known and plausible. I have found—somewhat to my surprise—that I very much enjoy fiction that involves outdoors adventures and this is a pretty good example. It’s best when the action is outdoors. But it’s also a sensitive and believable view of underclass life. We see problems like drinking, philandering, and questionable money management. They are not overly dramatic, just facts in these people’s lives. Winterkill never manages high levels of intensity, considering all it has going on, but it’s never less than interesting. The scenes in the hunt are strange, poignant, and evocative. In general, the novel is closer to a “slow burn” kind of story. Events feel even a little humdrum, but the story drew me on almost effortlessly. Although it ends on a sad note, Winterkill is always comforting somehow, full of intriguing, likable people. Pick it up for your outdoors shelf.

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

Meat Puppets II (1984)

At the time I thought the Roman numerals gambit in the title was strange, especially for a hardcore punk act on SST. Full disclosure, I was not aware of the Meat Puppets until this album but going back for a listen to the first like everyone else disclosed basically what everybody else also agreed: uninspired generic thrash (see also Land Speed Record and a thousand more). So maybe the Roman numerals signaled some kind of conscious reset, as these Arizona punks turned their blear-eyed gaze more in the direction of the Grateful Dead. That would not really see full fruition until the next album, Up on the Sun. Meat Puppets II is more like their Harry Smith phase—the vocals by the Kirkwood brothers are yelpy, mumbly, weird. They miss a lot of notes, which doesn't always work. Coming back to this album for the first time after many years was a shock to the system. I was not one who was ever impressed with their '90s work with Nirvana (indeed I was embarrassed for them in 1994) and it brought back memories of that. Later I remembered it was my experience the first time too in 1984. Meat Puppets II has a lot of enduring charm and surprises but it is an acquired taste. You might have to give it a couple tries. Or maybe it'll hit you right away. The production and guitar play are coiled and aggressive and often surprisingly beautiful but skittish, pulling up a lot just when they seem to be hitting something. Their punk instincts are still winning handily over their GD "country-rock" instincts and most of the songs are under three minutes, a couple under two (including a 1:21). They're not songs so much as they are essays at moods, fragments of rehearsal jams given ramshackle homes. The vocals are often a mess, smears and fat brush strokes like the cover painting and lots of mistakes—or "mistakes," but I think in this case there's no need for scare quotes. The glowing budding imposing guitar play is reflected in the cover painting too. The singing counterpoints the intuitive muscle of this oddball power trio band set free on these sprints. Some of the songs are instrumentals—good move. As usual with latter-day rereleases of albums (this one circa 2014), there are extra tracks of some interest now but nothing you couldn't live without. In 1984 SST seemed mad with instinct the way they were turning up bands.

Amadeus (1984)

USA / France / Czechoslovakia / Italy, 160 minutes

Director: Milos Forman

Writers: Peter Shaffer, Zdenek Mahler

Photography: Miroslav Ondricek

Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Editors: Michael Chandler, Nena Danevic

Cast: F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow, Roy Dotrice, Christine Ebersole, Jeffrey Jones, Cynthia Nixon

There is no break or intermission or anything like that in Amadeus—it's longer than 2001: A Space Odyssey, but by 1984 long movies rarely offered breaks anymore and I'd like to know why. But I had to flip my DVD over at about the 1:50 mark and I took the opportunity to make some popcorn and tidy up a little. Note that I watched the theatrical cut, because that's what I had on hand (director Milos Forman's 2002 edit is some 20 minutes longer). I noticed that in the first half of Amadeus Mozart was presented as a rock star more like 1999 Prince, brilliant, child-like, sexual, high on his own genius, and unshakably confident. In the second half, which is literally darker even if you're only talking about the lighting, Mozart has become more like such grizzled veterans just off their peaks as the Stones, Neil Young, David Bowie, or maybe Justin Bieber.

Giving in to these glammy rock star dynamics turns out to be as good a way as any for me into this one. Biopics don't interest me as a general rule, let alone about geniuses of the distant past, but I love Forman as a general rule so those two things balance out. But the focus on opera, while obviously well done and with tons of production value, tends to tilt it the other way for me. Then its obvious source as a stage production plus frankly the bonanza of a lot of Oscar hoopla (11 nominations, eight wins, including Best Picture), with all the follow-on generalized overrating (#84 on the IMDb big list), make me inclined toward suspicion. Tom Hulce as Mozart is unconvincing at best beyond a memorably irritating cackle. He's better in Fearless, possibly because it's a smaller role. But in the end, OK sure, all that genius—Mozart, Forman, Twyla Tharp again on choreography, Cynthia Nixon in a small part—weighs in and eventually you just have to give in. The movie is long but rarely less than entertaining.

Paris, Texas (1984)

West Germany / France / UK, 145 minutes

Director: Wim Wenders

Writers: L.M. Kit Carson, Sam Shepard, Walter Donohue

Photography: Robby Muller

Music: Ry Cooder

Editor: Peter Przygodda

Cast: Harry Dean Staoton, Dean Stockwell, Nastassja Kinski, Aurore Clement, Hunter Carson, Bernhard Wicki, Socorro Valdez, John Lurie

As advertised, this eccentric and lengthy but uneasily absorbing picture is set in Texas. We never actually make it to Paris itself, a small town on the Oklahoma border standing in as a psychological and literal starting point for Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton). He's a man on an incoherent mission. Instead we spend most of the movie in the wide open spaces and rugged terrain of West Texas. With its striking badlands scenery and a score by Ry Cooder, it's easy to think we are entering a Western as the picture begins. And it probably is a Western in some neo-Western sense. Wikipedia calls it a road movie, which is also fair, but to me it feels more like a theatrical domestic narrative, a strange surprising mix of affected dayglo hipster fare, wrenching human drama, and actor improv. Ultimately the cast and story are more important than all the flights of cinema that director Wim Wenders can throw at it—and Wenders throws some considerable ones.

I have to admit I don't know a lot about many of these principals—you could almost reverse-engineer this movie out of what I don't know—and I never got a look at it until the new century anyway. On Wenders, I didn't like Wings of Desire the one time I saw it and Until the End of the World just confused me for the nearly five hours of its director's cut. The American Friend and especially Kings of the Road are more like it and they are better harbingers of this, but I still don't feel like I really have a handle on him. For Harry Dean Stanton, it's the first time he's impressed me as anything more than someone who instinctively knows how to stay out of the way of his own evocative face. I keep wanting to make co-screenwriter Sam Shepard the significant contributor here.

Diamond Life (1984)

When Sade's first album arrived—technically it's a band, a sort of rock band even, named after the lead singer—it seemed to be part of the latest nostalgia product at the time, with something like a return to lounge music and glamour, performed in tails and glittery dresses under lights at keyboards. Candlelight, clinking glasses, smart fashion, murmuring conversation—never a threat to anyone's hearing. It seemed to belong with acts like late Roxy Music, Simply Red, Paul Weller and Style Council, Everything But the Girl etc. Later dubbed "sophisti-pop" and/or "smooth soul" by crews of categorizers (with soupcon of "quiet storm" and "smooth jazz"), intentions of irony were unclear but seemed likely. It felt more like the '80s than the '60s (early or late), more like Ronald Reagan (on this side of the Atlantic) than Stax—a slight put-on. But it is not. The Blue Note vibe of the cover design is true to the intentions, deftly mixing up jazz and melodic elements. Adopting the New Wave convention of a signifying cover song, Sade's choice was Timmy Thomas's 1972 "Why We Can't Live Together," closing the album with a version so faithful it is practically verbatim. That was my original hook, spooky alluring and haunting, and I would sit through the second side to get to it. Eventually the whole thing opened up but it still took some years to get closer to the bottom of it. There's something in this music that churns at deepest levels. It's never cheesy, not even when it names one of its tragic characters "Beans" (actually Vince, I looked it up, but I've always heard Beans). For me, surprisingly enough, Diamond Life turns out to be music about loss, or made for times of loss anyway, when I have found it most useful, soothing, dare I say healing. Eventually it turned into one of my upside-down albums, when I finally flipped it over and found the first side just as good. I mean, how did I miss "Smooth Operator" and "Hang on to Your Love"? To this day Diamond Life properly starts for me on "Cherry Pie" and finishes on "When Am I Going to Make a Living"—perfectly apt as a parting shot as my times of loss have also included loss of employment, which happened too often for too long. Sade knows well the kinds of things we're up against in this cold dirty world—Sade the band, and Sade the singer too, as she has a hand in writing all the songs except the cover. Desolation, bad cops, drug addiction, crashed relationships, abuse. Sade has seen it all. This Diamond Life is more like blood diamond life. But it is always achingly beautiful, no matter what. It's almost as if it's asserting dissonance as the copout. The real strength, the real beauty, is letting your light shine even against the ugliness, even when your light only exposes the unpleasant details of reality. There's so much poignant dignity here.

I Often Dream of Trains (1984)

When you hear all about the superiorities of analog versus digital recording, how the sound of analog is warmer, deeper, fuller, best heard on vinyl, I still don't put much credence in it. But somehow I suspect it might help explain Robyn Hitchcock's gem of a Freudian catharsis, a solo album in the Todd Rundgren and Prince sense, meaning that it's mostly just Hitchcock multi-tracking piano, acoustic guitar, and vocals. I'm skeptical about the analog/vinyl theory because, for example, I've been listening to I Often Dream of Trains on CD and other digital formats since the '90s, when my turntable went by the wayside. It always sounds warm, deep, and full. It's an album for winter, late night, a fire, a tab of acid, cocoa. The icy dignity of Hitchcock's piano chording and his high holy vocal harmonies—"Trams of Old London" so beautiful—are punctured by his typically loony word porridge, which is often less charming goofball free association and more slightly distressing vomitus from the unconscious. But wait, it's a joke, right? The uncertainty makes it work. Take "Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus," an impressive gospel-grounded number that works the same anti-irony approach musically as the Velvet Underground's "Jesus," posing on the one hand as a plaintive cry to God's mercy for your future hymnal consideration. But there's something off about the words: "Dyin' of starvation in the gutter ... / Or alcoholic poisoning, in the toilet of my choice ... / Fried to death in seconds by the Russians." Eventually it works up to: "If you believe in nothing, honey, it believes in you." This rage is not exactly the anti-irony approach to gospel of the Velvets.

Another thematic element is the sound of early-'70s John Lennon ("Flavour of Night" all but a Plastic Ono Band outtake) and it can also feel like Al Stewart's id on the loose. Hitchcock's weird words must be taken as surreal. I think there's a good deal of humor to them as well but the point where they turn from jokes into something more serious, those things out of the unconscious that surrealists are forever exploring, the lines are gray and blurred. Consider "Uncorrected Personality Traits," the terrible earworm and song you are likely doomed to live with inside your head for the rest of your life, along with the 1-877-Kars4Kids radio ad. It's just Hitchcock's voice, the insanely catchy nursery rhyme melody, and Freud truisms: "Lack of involvement with the father, or over-involvement with the mother / Can result in lack of ability to relate to sexual fears, and in homosexual / ... If you give in to them / Every time they cry / They will become little tyrants / But they won't remember why / ... The spoiled baby grows into / The escapist teenager who's / The adult alcoholic who's / The middle-aged suicide (oy)." And all together one more time: "Uncorrected personality traits that seem whimsical in a child may prove to / Be ugly in a fully grown adult." I love this song and hate it and grudgingly respect it and think it's brilliant all at the same time. Some of Hitchcock's riffs on sexuality, notably transsexuals ("even Marilyn Monroe was a man"), feel at least a little problematic now, if presciently open. This also applies to "Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl" (why the wish? "so I could ROOT myself in the shower," though the lyric sheet says "wreck" rather than "root" ... actually I don't know what it means either way but calling attention to pretty girls in the shower for no particular reason is I guess what's worrying me). There was always a sense with Hitchcock then, which I am still willing to extend to him now, that he's more like another daffy rolling wordsmith in debt to Bob Dylan and essentially harmless. But these songs don't always feel harmless, and that's one of the album's enduring strong points.

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Italy / USA, 229 minutes
Director: Sergio Leone
Writers: Harry Grey, Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, Sergio Leone, Stuart Kaminsky, Ernesto Gastaldi
Photography: Tonino Delli Colli
Music: Ennio Morricone
Editor: Nino Baragli
Cast: Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Treat Williams, Tuesday Weld, Burt Young, Danny Aiello, William Forsythe, Joe Pesci, Louise Fletcher, James Hayden, Darlanne Fluegel, Larry Rapp, Richard Bright, Jennifer Connelly, Scott Schutzman Tiler, Rusty Jacobs, Brian Bloom, Adrian Curran

Director and cowriter Sergio Leone's final film as a director (and his first in 13 years) initially looks like a departure from his earlier movies. In many ways Leone's whole career was about departures. He reinvented the Western in the '60s as an operatic, lugubrious, and explosive play of set pieces, composed as artfully as anything by Michelangelo Antonioni, and incidentally lending cinema history a title trope in Once Upon a Time in the West that hasn't been used up yet. Not only did Leone ape that title for this movie, but many others have used it since as well, with memorable "once upon a time" pictures for Mexico, Anatolia, Rio, Mumbai, China, and more (including next year, from Quentin Tarantino, Hollywood). I still haven't figured out what it signifies exactly, beyond a certain dreamy fairy tale yet cynically knowing epic nostalgia, with violence.

If Westerns are about the impulse to get further and further from civilization, about Huck Finn's eternal yen to light out for the Territory, then Once Upon a Time in America is about the first stop that immigrants from Europe made on the quixotic journey and the place where many of them pulled up and stayed, the teeming ghettoes of New York and other Eastern cities at the turn of the century. The story involves four youths who come of age with approximately Prohibition, three Jews and a Pole (approximately) who fight for social position in New York with Irish and Italians ahead of them in line and WASPs entirely out of reach (except, sometimes, their women). They commit petty crimes, battle for turf, and eventually graduate to bootlegging. It sounds like a typical gangster picture, and indeed as a marathon it sits comfortably next to the first two Godfather movies and Goodfellas. But it's a Leone picture and also strays at will into just plain weird stuff.

Various Positions (1984)

It occurred to me that Leonard Cohen's seventh album came out within a couple of months of VU, the Velvet Underground's surprise release of its remarkable collection of previously unreleased material. I thought I might be able to make something of that, 1960s New York City icons at the crossroads or some such, but I don't remember anyone thinking of both albums together at the time, and really they're very different from one another. VU is pure blast from the past. That's why it's so great. Whereas the Cohen—coming after a five-year hiatus, his longest to that point—is more tentative about entering the future, or at least keeping up with the present. So we get synthesizer keyboards, for example, in the opener, "Dance Me to the End of Love." For all that, it's still Cohen's same plodding tempo and doleful air, occasionally pierced by unexpected words. It's comfortable like an old armchair but I'm not necessarily trying to convert anyone to his cause. As always, he is something of a prickly pear—the poet bona fides often feel more like a kind of con, or joke, though his words can ring, as I say (the aforementioned "dance me to the end of love"). But I didn't go for Various Positions much in its time, or Leonard Cohen either for quite some time. So I was actually a little surprised coming back to find it's the home of "Hallelujah." That song has long struck me as a kind of miracle, not to push too hard on the religious note. I came to it, probably like a lot of people, by way of Jeff Buckley's remarkable cover many years after this album. I know there's a label for it—"secular hymn"—but I say it belongs with real hymns, e.g., "In the Garden" or, especially, "Amazing Grace," which is close to being my single favorite song of all time full stop. Some may consider it trite, maybe as a matter of overexposure, although I can't fathom that myself because I have never been tired of or unmoved by the song and I love to sing it too. It feels right. "Hallelujah" is in that ballpark. Unspeakably beautiful—Cohen's version, Buckley's version, Kate McKinnon's version of Hillary Clinton's version, my version, croaking along. Transcendent. The rest of the album is thus unfortunately left in an embarrassing position, sounding aimless and too casual by comparison. Some songs, like "The Captain," "Hunter's Lullaby," and "Heart With No Companion," are weaker when you notice the words, even wince-worthy. Some, like "If It Be Your Will" and "Hallelujah," make me straight off want to have a conversation with whoever coined the term "secular hymn." (Well, no, never mind, I actually hate those conversations.) I understand Cohen is attempting to have it both ways through the use of ironic distance, but no. No. You can't have it both ways. All you need is "Hallelujah."

Body Double (1984)

USA, 114 minutes
Director: Brian De Palma
Writers: Robert J. Avrech, Brian De Palma
Photography: Stephen H. Burum
Music: Pino Donaggio
Editors: Gerald B. Greenberg, Bill Pankow
Cast: Craig Wasson, Gregg Henry, Deborah Shelton, Melanie Griffith, Guy Boyd, Dennis Franz

Body Double has so many of the trademark preoccupations of director and cowriter Brian De Palma—liquid camera movement, swooning music, Playboy-style erotics, the ecosystem of cheesy low-budget moviemaking, and more than anything a fixation on Alfred Hitchcock movies—that it almost seems like it could be reverse-engineered out of them. In many ways it was, by De Palma himself. Yet, as a certain type of "watch what happens" picture, it stays interesting even when it's not making any sense, which is most of the time. Does that mean making sense is overrated? As a partisan of coherent narrative, I don't think so. I saw Body Double when it was new, though not since, and coming back was impressed all over with those preoccupations. All these years later it's still no problem watching Body Double through, though it still rarely adds up.

It's Los Angeles. A struggling young actor, Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), has just caught his girlfriend having sex with another man in their bed. Now he is at loose ends, angry, humiliated, and heartbroken, staying with friends, trying not to drink too much, and looking for work, anything, to take his mind off it. One thing leads to another and soon he finds himself with a nice housesitting gig by way of a friend of a friend, Sam Bouchard (Gregg Henry). The place is an amazing artifact of wealth, a saucer-shaped glass structure, like the cap of the Seattle Space Needle, propped against the side of a hill high above Los Angeles, with a view of everything. That includes a beautiful woman, seen through a spyglass telescope, who performs a striptease masturbation scene every night, "like clockwork," according to Sam, who makes sure to point that out to Jake before leaving.

"Lawns" (1984)

Read story by Mona Simpson online.

Mona Simpson's story turns out to be about a searing topical social issue at least as much as fictional technique, perhaps because the subject matter—incest—is so alarmingly vivid ("prejudicial," they would say in a courtroom). I can't tell from a quick perusal of Simpson's Wikipedia biography how much this might be rooted in real-life events. Not much, I suspect, though it was interesting to find out she and Steve Jobs were full siblings, unknown to anyone until both were full-grown. The first half of "Lawns," in fact, before the reveals start coming big time, is much more like a Carver episode. Jenny, the first-person narrator, is a high-strung chattering college girl, who seems a little neurotic but reasonably normal, even as she opens the story with various tell-tale symptoms. She's a kleptomaniac, working in the student post office part-time, stealing letters, cash, and cookies. It's bad enough that university officials have opened an investigation. Jenny knows she probably won't get caught if she stops now and never admits it to anyone. She is also a high achiever, attending Berkeley and making high marks. Gradually, her strange relationship with her father starts to clarify. It's masked by the chaotic times in her life, leaving home for the first time for college, by her mother's strange character, and more than anything by Jenny's continual minimizing and denying. As the details come out in the second half it's heartbreaking and sickening at once. It looks like an epiphany story but doesn't exactly behave like one, which creates a powerful tension. The plot hinges on her steps to detach permanently from her father, by going public and telling everyone. She loses a boyfriend, though her roommate steps up in significant ways. Her relationship with her mother undergoes the biggest change, in seemingly positive directions. Among other things, the news instantly ends that marriage. But Jenny is only starting to grasp the realities. There's so much we can see that she can't, and most of it hurts. We wouldn't be inclined to attempt to clue her in even if she existed in real life and were a friend. She still has so far to go. So this story is actually very powerful and well done. Yet the Lifetime movie flavor of it—or perhaps just the issue of incest itself—also works to undermine it a little. On one level it feels absurdly easy to reach for it to pump up the drama. On another level the story feels perfectly true to that issue and to reality both. Yet the extremity feels just a little reached for as a matter of effect. Dorothy Allison's "River of Dreams," from earlier in this volume, makes an interesting companion piece perhaps.

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

Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984)

After going big with The Executioner's Song and then indulging himself with Ancient Evenings, Norman Mailer trimmed back the metric word tonnage for this genre exercise, which at least is fun to read. It's basically hardboiled detective fiction. In this case the person doing the detecting is an amateur, Tim Madden, who is a marijuana grower and bartender. Naturally he is the prime suspect in a murder too. He is also a drunk and libertine and in general a lot like Mailer's ideal of manly. He is heartsick for a woman who has just left him and he is drinking hard. When Madden comes out of his latest blackout he finds blood all over the front seat of his car and the head of a blonde woman—only the head, no body in sight. So it goes. Crank up the lurid action and mysterious motives like a hurdy-gurdy coming to life. The setting is Provincetown in Cape Cod and there are lots of rich folks, who all seem to be terrified of being seduced by gay homosexuals. It quickly turns out to be the familiar anxiety panic states we know from previous Mailer fiction, perhaps most notably the previous book, Ancient Evenings. But this one also reminds me of an earlier novel, An American Dream, another febrile hallucination with all the Mailer trademarks. Tough Guys Don't Dance was a quickie to meet a contract, but it's clearly Mailer. Somehow so much keeps coming back to anal sex. One character here, an "Acting Chief of Police" with deep military background, is more or less officially put in charge of the homosexual panic. His fear and loathing is trembling on a hair trigger, and we all know what that means. Wait a minute—I'm not sure I do. In 1984, this kind of stuff still might have had some power to shock, and I note for the most part, without giving anything away, that the homophobes are generally on the losing side of things. Still, it's so strange that Mailer keeps coming back to this specter. It's like the gross-out effects in Frank Zappa's music—apparently baked in, and for reasons I'd rather not think about. As private eye stories go, think Ross Macdonald and the infinite complications of fracturing families. At that it's not too bad when Mailer gets out of his own way.

In 1987, a film version written and directed by Mailer came out. I remember the book but not the movie, at all, yet there it is, all legit-looking with Francis Coppola's name on it and Ryan O'Neal and Isabella Rossellini starring and music by Angelo Badalamenti. The film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum even includes it in his list of 1,000 favorite movies. But I had a hard time seeing past the painfully dated '80s production style. It is technically Mailer's fourth feature, but his filmmaking hand is tentative and distracted by effect, rudimentary at best using visual strategies to tell a story. I don't know his other movies. This one is professionally done, but the doomy literary pretensions are closer to Woody Allen phoning it in on a bad day than anything as raw and vital as, say, a John Cassavetes picture, which I would expect more to be Mailer's aim. Stick with the book if anything.

In case it's not at the library.