Run-DMC, “Slow and Low (Demo)” (1985)

[listen up!]

I was today years old (as people say) when I realized the Beastie Boys included a cover of this workup on their 1986 album Licensed to Ill. The Beasties found out Run-DMC were leaving it off their second album and went for it. Indeed, the Run-DMC version did not really come to light until the 2005 deluxe edition of King of Rock. Forward another 20 years or so and there I am sitting with the very self-same LP. You know those cheapie “Original Album Classics” packages? Five albums from the same artist, usually their first five, in rudimentary slipcase envelopes. I discovered that some of them, such as the Run-DMC set, include the deluxe versions with all the extras. So anyway, I’m sitting there listening, having myself a Run-DMC renaissance, and this comes up. And I can’t quite get over it. It is ridiculously stripped down to the rhythms. There’s big muffled thumping that is counterpointed with separate strains of lighter, higher-pitched clinking. It is quietly irresistible. The raps are the usual Run-DMC bellowing back and forth, but the recurring words of the chorus go directly to the point: “Let it flow, let yourself go / Slow and low, that is the tempo.” They could have sexualized it but they didn’t. They could have brought in electric guitar—King of Rock continues the experiment that would culminate in the Aerosmith collaboration—but they don’t do that either. Maybe they would have if they’d put it on the original album. But they didn’t, and the simplicity has a lot to do with what makes it so great. The verses do offer some taste of their tendency toward unfortunate cliche (“you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” “on The Gong Show I won’t get gonged,” etc.) but I could not care less about that. The point is the thumping and the clinking and the intricate interplay, with just the right sentiment: “Slow and low, that is the tempo.” It’s a kind of master class in its own right.

Vagabond (1985)

Sans toit ni loi, France / UK, 105 minutes

Director/writer: Agnes Varda

Photography: Patrick Blossier

Music: Joanna Bruzdowicz

Editors: Patricia Mazuy, Agnes Varda

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Meril, Stephane Freiss, Laurence Cortadellas, Marthe Jarnias, Yolande Moreau, Joel Fosse

In some ways it feels like director and writer Agnes Varda grew more carefree and even whimsical over the course of her career. In this century she made gentle, freewheeling, perpetually curious documentaries like The Gleaners & I and Faces Places. By contrast, 1962’s Cleo From 5 to 7 is about a young woman awaiting results of a biopsy. Vagabond, between them, is about Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), a runaway girl in rural France who finally dies of exposure—a sad and foredoomed story. Mona’s body is discovered at the beginning of the picture and the rest is flashback types of episodes. They follow the last months of her life as she hitchhiked from place to place, set up her tent, and lived her life as she could. These scenes are ostensibly based on journalistic interviews of those who interacted with and knew her—to the degree, of course, that anyone knew her. Varda’s instinct is often to go at least semi-documentary in tone.

We never see Mona in the home she ran away from. The picture is silent on her life before. We don’t hear from her family in these supposed interviews and we never hear why. Perhaps they just didn’t want to speak with interviewers, but it’s never explained. Varda is more interested purely in Mona’s life on her own and how she survives (and doesn’t) rather than potential details of domestic abuse and such. There is one scene here where it appears Mona is going to be assaulted at one of her campsites, but the picture quickly cuts away and we never hear anything of it again. It’s as if Varda wants us to know she’s aware of all the dangers of Mona’s life, but doesn’t want to dwell on them too much, doesn’t want the lurid details to distort what she wants us to see in Mona.

“The Forbidden” (1985)

This long story by Clive Barker is the source for the movie Candyman. As usual with Barker, it’s longer than it has to be, and it’s full of good ideas as well as overdone ideas. I like the ways Barker signals he is working within a tradition. The term “sweets to the sweet” recurs here, likely a reference to a famous story of that name by Robert Bloch. Interestingly, while there is a “Candyman” in this story, the name only shows up late and there is no business here about saying his name five times into a mirror. But much of the rest is Barker: the bees (more overplayed in the movie), the setting of a failing housing project, the academic research. I like making the main character a graduate student who is studying graffiti. It was plausible in 1985, in 1992, and it seems likely to remain so still, except in the 2021 movie the place has been gentrified, which I suppose makes sense after 30 years. The story of course goes off the rails and over the top with grotesque murders. There’s an uncertainty about the reality of these crimes that I like—it’s possible they are somehow just urban legends. Another classic source Barker draws on here is the campfire chestnut about the killer on lovers lane with a hook for a hand. Thus, “The Forbidden”—campfire ghost story, or urban legend? You decide. People living in the project talk about crimes for which there are no records in newspapers or police files. There’s a sense there’s no record of these crimes because no one particularly cares. It’s hard to tell, murky, and that’s a good tone. Helen Buchanan’s thesis is titled “Graffiti: The Semiotics of Urban Despair.” Now we’re talking, with faint suggestions of the ridiculousness of academic work, even as that “Urban Despair” lands hard. Candyman, however much of a spirit of retribution he may be, taking revenge on a world that spurned him, is a bit ridiculous himself, with that name and an epic image of him in graffiti painted on a doorway (and somewhat hard for me to imagine). He is clown-like, reminiscent of Stephen King’s Pennywise from It, which came out a year later. That’s especially true when you throw in the “Candyman” chant. In both movies and in the story too. All have flaws as well as strengths, though they are not necessarily the same.

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 5 kindle)
Listen to story online.

“The Inhuman Condition” (1985)

Most Clive Barker stories are a little too long, and this is no exception, but most Clive Barker stories also have ingenious premises and details, and this is no exception on that score either. It starts with a Clockwork Orange style beatdown by a gang of youths of a homeless old man they find urinating beside a tunnel. They’re doing it for the kicks. He has nothing of value but they make him empty his pockets anyway. The least malicious of the four youths, Karney—he usually gets the lookout duties on their escapades—finds a knotted length of rope among the debris. It turns out Karney is fascinated by knots the way others are by great historical enigmas or knitting. He keeps the rope with him and starts to worry one of the three knots obsessively. When he’s not doing that he’s thinking about doing that, and looking forward to getting back to it. I know this kind of obsessive fascination and am vulnerable to states like it over things like anagrams, the impossible (for me) Rubik’s Cube, some video games, and formerly jigsaw puzzles before I started living with cats. I’ve had some interest in knots too for that matter, but they frustrate me too quickly. Maybe these obsessions are common, or maybe not, but I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered them laid out so lucidly before. Of course it turns out the guy they were beating up (named Pope) is some kind of wizard or something, who has trapped monsters inside the knots. I know, hard to believe. They’re good monsters too. Barker has a knack for them. You wouldn’t think there could be so many. They are certainly original. Fresh? I’m not as sure about that, because as impressive as Barker’s visions are they too often seem to devolve into chase scenes and explanations. Too much service is paid to a narrative arc and setups for monsters on the loose in bad need of corralling. But I love things like focusing so intensely on a fascination with knots and a knotted length of rope. Barker may not be writing great or even good short stories, but he is writing great original horror all the same. It’s not hard to see how people like Stephen King got excited and started talking about Barker being the future of horror.

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 4 kindle)
Story not available online.

Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack (2015)

This 33-1/3 by Andrew Schartmann is one of the more offbeat and creative entries in the series. Schartmann tells us early that the totality of music on this “soundtrack album” for the video game Super Mario Bros. amounts to about three minutes—closer to 90 seconds if you are scrupulous about removing redundancies. That’s a pretty short album. The videos on youtube can run to three minutes each, but they obviously have all the redundancies and more. I quickly realized the only way to hear or experience the “album” really is by playing the game, which I’m pretty sure I never have. Schartmann dwells less on the game anyway, and more on the music, in highly technical ways. He discusses computer requirements in 1985, which didn’t leave much in the way of resources for game music. And he also talks about the music in terms of composition, chiefly, but also historical context. When going over the “Underwater” theme, for example, he has occasion to deliver a quick history on the waltz. Having never played the game, I found myself mostly at a loss, but nonetheless rarely less than fascinated. I presume Schartmann has at least played the game, if not obsessed over it for hours and hours as the best video games demand of us. My sense is his experience is much closer to the latter, as this text very much feels like the work of someone who has gone deep into the game. It’s as if the three minutes of original music has been absorbed at cellular level across the hours of exposure in varying game contexts. Most of this book is over my head—Schartmann is a professor and student of composition and theory presently at the New England Conservatory. The book is basically a novelty, comparable to John Darnielle’s short stories for Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality, and others in the series. You might even want to classify it as a stunt or gimmicky. But it is serious in its intent, however tongue in cheek it might seem. It’s a great place to think about what an album is and it’s a great chapter in the history of video games. Plus it has a nice bibliography with many tempting titles on the history and/or theory of video games. Put this one on your short list for the series.

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

“Professor Nobody’s Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror” (1985)

Let’s call this rut a groove and go with it, as we used to say at the old college paper. This very short story by Thomas Ligotti is similar to his “Notes on the Writing of Horror,” published the same year. They’re meta. Both “Notes” and “Little Lectures” feel like exercises involving writer’s block, perhaps. He is stuck on a story and, stymied perhaps for the moment, begins to think aloud about what he is doing. Instead of telling a story, he is turning over how things about horror fit together, speaking from a distance and somewhat ironically, about his chosen genre. “Notes” packed some narrative around the musings, while this one feels more abstracted and fragmented—like notes for lectures. The piece is short but it’s also dense, a quality that can be something of a hindrance reading Ligotti. He hits a lot of high points in all his stories I’ve read, but he is often difficult. Still, I like his mindfulness here and yes these are interesting thoughts, with sections labeled “The Eyes That Never Blink,” “On Morbidity,” and “Pessimism and Supernatural Horror” (multiple “lectures”). It’s interesting to a certain extent but also feels fragmentary and incomplete—even considered with “Notes.” Both pieces specifically notice how surprisingly hard it is to define horror and how it works. They can only nibble at the edges. That seems to be the point here. It spins off into philosophic realms on the uses of the supernatural in horror tales, which I have to admit had little interest for me beyond knowing such an inquiry exists. I’m less interested in knowing about horror and much more interested in the slippery business of feeling horror. Is it anti-intellectual to be into the pure sensations of things? Ligotti makes me feel a little that way. He may be too cerebral for me. I really want to call “Little Lectures” an essay, but I know it plainly has fictional elements—voice and point of view are aesthetic decisions. It’s playful. It’s interesting. It’s even fun. But it has little intent to scare or unsettle us at all and doesn’t really illuminate that much about horror either, with too many rational thoughts and ideas. It’s just a goof and a lark.

Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
Listen to story online.

“Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” (1985)

This story by Thomas Ligotti—a story is really the only thing you can call it—is fairly impressive in combining a critical voice with a fictional one, turning the latter practically into words from a madman. It may be a little too pleased with itself but it is also very well executed. The notes on the writing of horror err on the side of glib, an occupational hazard of the critic at all levels. But the story Ligotti creates for illustrative purposes and analysis (or “analysis”) is deceptively simple. It is strange and only stranger as you think of it, which you do as he brings it to your attention over and over until he finally finishes it off, kind of. It involves a malevolent pair of pants and a flat tire in the bad part of town. The preoccupations Ligotti can have with things that may not land the same way 40 years later do date this dazzling story a little. He often resorts to serial killers and even more often to a “bad part of town.” Ligotti—or whatever fictional persona may be making these notes—divides horror in various arbitrary ways, e.g., the realistic technique, the traditional gothic technique, and the experimental technique. I’d like to know more about how he wrote this story. It’s possible that the story outlined here was one Ligotti tried to write, as his maybe kinda sorta alter ego here, named Gerald K. Riggers (with variations), claims outright. “Frankly, I just couldn’t bring myself to go the distance with this one,” he writes. From the notes it seems likely he broke down the horror project the way he describes and couldn’t find one that worked and so tried to make a story out of that. Two-thirds along the way, he (whoever “he” is, I’m still going with Ligotti) is seized and the story wakes and comes alive as an incandescent fragment. It’s almost stunning. It doesn’t 100% work but the inspiration of it is 100% felt—the breakthrough, almost liberating moment is terrific. And the glib critical voice is a lot of fun too. The story feels somehow pivotal. It’s very good, for example, at being a realistic, traditional gothic, and experimental horror story. It might be one of the best, except I’m not really sure what to compare it to.

Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
Listen to story online.

“City of Glass” (1985)

The New York Trilogy
Under the Novels tab up there: For some years I have been working my way through a couple of lists of the 100 greatest English-language novels published in the 20th century. The first is the result of a 1998 survey of various literary hoity-toities by the Modern Library publishing empire. It’s somewhat predictable (Ulysses #1) but nonetheless has steered me to some great novels I might not have got to otherwise. The second is from Larry McCaffery, a literature professor now retired from San Diego University. I found his list on the internet early this century. McCaffery is more rooted in strains of the second half of the 20th century, unafraid of postmodernism and such, and he’s a little less predictable (Ulysses #2, after Pale Fire, the refreshing judgment that drew me to his list). These two lists share perhaps two dozen titles. Getting to the point, McCaffery’s list includes Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, published in 1987, and lists the three titles separately (“City of Glass,” “Ghosts,” and “The Locked Room”) although really they are closer to novellas than novels. “City of Glass” and “The Locked Room” top out around 120 pages each and “Ghosts” is even shorter. But I am following McCaffery’s lead and treating them separately, though I think Auster may have intended the three together to be taken as a single novel. But what do I know? They were published separately originally and only have a certain playfully mordant noir wit and the New York City setting in common. Is a trilogy of mostly unconnected novellas any less valid? I’m not even sure how to answer that. I can say all three are fun and a pleasure to read, though somewhat arch with their conceits.

I actually encountered “City of Glass” first in the 1994 graphic novel treatment by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, which I picked up on the strength of illustrator Mazzucchelli’s name. Mazzucchelli also provided his impressive work to some Batman and Daredevil comics written by Frank Miller. The “City of Glass” graphic novel is worth chasing down. I like the noirish tones of the story, but it is also very busy being literary and postmodern. There’s a character here named Paul Auster, for example. The narrator is a one-time rising literary star who turned to detective fiction for money and then to detective work for some kind of spiritual solace. His name is William Wilson. This ham-handed reach for an Edgar Allan Poe reference is somewhat mitigated when the narrator, a fan of the New York Mets, reminds us it’s also the proper name of centerfielder Mookie Wilson. “City of Glass” may be a bit of a lampoon of detective fiction, but it is affectionate about it even as it ropes in further literary references to Don Quixote, the biblical Tower of Babel, and more. I put up with the grandstanding because Auster is actually a beguiling and even engrossing writer. This is good stuff. The notes of absurdity are never far and the paragraphs are often big blocks of text. But Auster’s style is easy and lucid. In 2006 Lucy Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, wrote an introduction for The New York Trilogy. It’s not hard to see how it would appeal to her. “City of Glass” is based in a number of crucial ways on the geography of Manhattan. I don’t know it well myself so tended to glaze over the specific landmarks given. But “City of Glass” is an intriguing start to whatever Auster is up to here and the graphic novel is equally as good as this original text. Both are worth a shot.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
Story not available online.

The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy (2016)

The best part of Paula Mejia’s 33-1/3 volume has to be her enthusiasm for the band and album. That’s always there in these little books to some degree, but often it is kind of sublimated into the research or something. She had no luck getting one of the Reid brothers (William) to talk to her at all. She may not have cast the interview net very wide, or gotten a lot of good quotes, because that stuff is minimal here. It’s organized by song titles from the album, not in sequencing order but riffing on the ideas associated with them. Like Geeta Dayal’s meditation on Brian Eno’s Another Green World, it is more discursive and (free-) associational. There are fewer personal details too. It might be dense—she cites a lot of academic sources along the way. Or it may have been my mood. I was reading it slowly, a chapter or two at a time, and thinking it might be one of the weaker ones. But then something kind of strange and perhaps alchemical happened. I played the album and it sounded fabulous. Better than ever. Now Psychocandy is an album I’ve had my infatuations with. I didn’t really catch up to it until the 1990s but I had an intense few months with it when I did. But returning to it later—even preparing to read this—was often disappointing. Too much noise, not enough sweets (more or less the shoegaze formula, which more or less the Jesus and Mary Chain may have invented) (although don’t forget Husker Du). A couple points by Mejia definitely helped. How, for one thing, did I miss those girl group drum patterns? Anyway, I don’t think an album under consideration has ever sounded so good while reading one of these 33-1/3 books. One of the regular blurbs that shows up with them talks about liner notes, which, full disclosure, I rarely read. But that’s what the experience of this book came to feel like for me. I’d read some of the text and return to the glorious album. I did learn about the literal riots of their shows in the ‘80s, which I hadn’t known. I think comparisons to the Velvet Underground and Sex Pistols go too far in a general way, though of course they’re not entirely overstated. And the riffing on psychopathy and candy seemed more obvious than insightful. I mean, you can find something to complain about in anything. I’m just a little shocked she somehow found a way to make the album sound better than ever.

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

22. Meat Puppets, Up on the Sun (1985)

[2012 review of “Two Rivers” here.]

Surprise—it turns out the Meat Puppets have a much bigger catalog than I remembered, including the 1987 Huevos which I’m sure I owned at one time. I count at least six or seven albums before Kurt Cobain reached down and gave them a hand back up in the ‘90s. It’s possible I lost track because I never felt the need to go far beyond this album—in many ways beyond just the song “Two Rivers,” which hits like sunlight glinting on water. I can feel the heat of the desert and the glare makes me want to reach for sunglasses. Stepping back on more recent revisits it’s not hard to make out the psychedelic intentions across the length and breadth of Up on the Sun, starting with the cover art, reminiscent of pre-psychedelic visionary Van Gogh’s naked lunch style. A more recent video on youtube of the gentle, rambling title song, created by the Australian video artist SPOD, updates the vibe to this century (and emphasize the psychedelia). So you know, at the moment there’s a certain parade of Meat Puppets rereleases going on. Make Record Store Day special this year. If you’ve always been curious, now is the time. The Kirkwood brothers Curt and Cris, MP mainstays, hail from Phoenix, Arizona, but their hearts seem to lie in a canny blend of country strains ever so slightly inflected by hallucinogenic experience and distant memories of hardcore punk. They sing off-key, miss notes all the time, but the play of guitars is rich and intricate. The mood is somber and soaring at once, as if on a quest for a spirit animal. The songs are short like punk (their origin) but they warp at will as if the recording itself has a tremolo bar attached. I see this compared to the Byrds—sure, I’ll go along with that, but the country is more fully absorbed and the Byrds never had much punk in them. But this is equally the place, eight miles high, where the sights and the sounds may become overwhelming. Sometimes you sense the music is just a dim echo of the sources, of what was experienced. In this case, a dim echo might be as much as you need.

A City Solitary (1985)

I came to this mass market paperback novel by Nicolas Freeling in an unusual way. In the '80s I subscribed to The Armchair Detective, the crime fiction zine, in its Otto Penzler era. At some point it called for volunteer reader reviewers, which I signed on for. I enjoyed getting a handful of free books in the mail, but they were not generally very good and immediately started cutting into precious reading time. Honestly, I don't know how book reviewers do it. Probably the most interesting thing I ever got was Rock Critic Murders by Jesse Sublett, which was not bad hardboiled detective stuff but not up to anything like what I hoped for from the title. And I could never get through A City Solitary until I force-marched it recently. It's short but it's ponderous and self-important. As messes go, it has interesting points, but the key word is still mess. It's basically a stream of consciousness exercise and not many people here are likable. The main guy identifies himself as the last of some aristocratic line. His thoughts roam through European literature for analogies and comparisons. He lives in the country in France. The novel starts with a home invasion. His wife is out and he's home alone. It's three young adults, two men and a woman. They steal some of his stuff—he doesn't have much of value—and also kill his dog. But instead of wanting to bring them to justice, he sympathizes with them, especially the leader, even wanting to protect them. It gets fairly complicated through the murk of the narrative, but finally our guy is on a road trip with the leader, our guy's wife, and his recent new lover. They are attempting to escape to Belgium or the Netherlands. It doesn't make a lot of sense, the pace is slow, and the digressions, often pointless, are continual. When I looked up Freeling's biography it made a little more sense. He wrote this in his 50s but his main thing was crime novels with a continuing detective character named Van der Valk (and another named Henri Castang). It feels like Freeling is just blowing off steam here, branching out with something experimental. Nice try, I guess, but it's just fatally indulgent. At least (and at last!) now I have read it, discharged my duty to The Armchair Detective, and can give it away.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

House (1985)

There's a lot to like about this account of building a house—a specific house, in Amherst, Massachusetts, built from the ground up in six months in 1983. In one way it's like a million conversations we've all had about buying and dealing with real estate, but it goes to another level beyond mortgages and home improvement when the house is built from scratch. Tracy Kidder's great stroke is to focus on something so ordinary we almost take it for granted—the enormous complexity (even in 1983 when technology was simpler) of building a house for a nuclear family of four or so. Anyone who has ever purchased a house knows how insanely complicated it is with negotiation and managing details and cost. Designing and building one is magnitudes more complex and expensive. Kidder traipses along with the architect, owners, and builders for a look at how one house comes together. It's enjoyable to read and became famous as a type of journalism that flourished in the '70s and '80s, led by figures such as John McPhee. It has a friendly personal style, yet is researched and written with rigor, perhaps branching off from New Journalism. It was popular in reading groups. House does feel a little dated these three decades later. The real estate market has changed, though maybe not as much at this level. The people building this house are affluent, educated, and professional—they are still the people building houses today. And the builders, though arguably a dying breed of craftsman, certainly at mass levels, may still be around too, but I suspect in fewer numbers with these aesthetic ambitions. No doubt the difficulty of building a house is at least as imposing. It's a matter of degree. All the problems documented here are likely worse now—perhaps even enough that what we see here is vanishingly rare, and relatively easy. As the blurbers point out, the need for shelter is one of the most common and profound needs we share, even in the somewhat pedestrian context of modern life. Maybe what I'm missing is the element of climate change, which seems so pervasive in everything now and was mostly unknown in 1983 (as with cyberattacks and pandemics). True confession, I find swapping or listening to stories about real estate mostly tiresome. It dragged things down a bit for me here. You may feel differently. But the details of building a house, including the business side, are amply documented in House and often fascinating. It's a good example of this type of journalism, modest yet impressively done.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Fegmania! (1985)

Robyn Hitchcock's follow-on to I Often Dream of Trains was a kick in the season of Talking Heads' Little Creatures, Danny & Dusty's Lost Weekend, and the Knitters' first. For one thing Hitchcock was playing with a band again—the Egyptians, 60% of which actually used to be Soft Boys, so really kind of back to that, though I think Kimberly Rew must be missed because something is missing. Or, anyway, this gets close to the best of the Soft Boys only infrequently and in short bursts. Compared to Hitchcock's previous solo outing, it feels slightly muddied with rehearsal, collaboration, and group dynamics, erasing much of the sharp edge of Trains. It's still the zany Hitchcock eight-ball stream of conscious blab—note title, a made-up word—zinging out from realms and quarters of where the fuck. The song by which Fegmania! may be best known is "My Wife and My Dead Wife," which you should be able to tell right away is working the surrealism beat again. "My wife and my dead wife / Am I the only one that sees her?" he cries plaintively on the chorus. One theory is that he's in a relationship but haunted by another, so "metaphorical." Another is that he's insane, so "literal." And still another is that it's true and right in an inscrutably personal way, so "poetic." I'm opting for the third as a general safe bet for all best outcomes. The song is also funny because it's sung a bit like a predicament episode of some sitcom, with the feeling somewhere between Lars and the Real Girl and the heartrending episodes of The Walking Dead. But it must be said that it also flirts dangerously with an eerily disaffected misogyny. I thought the best songs were on the second side, the ones I put on tapes—still associate this one with vinyl and cassette tapes and such—"The Man With the Lightbulb Head," "Glass," and "Heaven," which veer from surreal radio theater slapstick horror to elysian fields and cloudy mountaintop spiritual vistas. "Glass" is suffused with sadness because it always breaks and "Heaven" approximates its namesake the best way a rock band can, by playing together so carefully and letting the song carry everything away. In fact, it's one of the better songs named "Heaven."

Back to the Future (1985)

USA, 116 minutes
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Writers: Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale
Photography: Dean Cundey
Music: Alan Silvestri
Editors: Harry Keramidas, Arthur Schmidt
Cast: Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Crispin Glover, Lea Thompson, Claudia Wells, Thomas F. Wilson, Huey Lewis, Frances Lee McCain, James Tolkan

Everything about Back to the Future is a little hectic. It was rushed to make an August release date in 1985 and when test screenings started to get standing O's it was rushed further to make an Independence Day release. It was getting standing O's in general release within some 10 weeks of the finish of shooting it. For a few months in 1985, its present-day events, dated quite precisely October 26 and November 5, were still in the future of viewers. Back to the Future turned out to be the #1 moneymaker of 1985 and now sits comfortably in IMDb's curious list of 250 Top Rated Movies, currently #43, just behind Terminator 2 and just ahead of Raiders of the Lost Ark. As movie entertainment goes, it's hard to deny Back to the Future. In retrospect it offers one of the purest examples of '80s teen comedy, complete with Michael J. Fox, designer jeans, feather haircuts, pulsing Huey Lewis soundtrack, and a bunch of good jokes.

But ultimately it defies categorizing—is it science fiction, romantic comedy, coming-of-age, period piece, action / thriller / suspense, or even ... musical? It sits in my head as science fiction, because it's a time travel story, but that's more in the vein of Groundhog Day or Peggy Sue Got Married, where the fantastic events are just the given premise and everything else is more or less about people. On the other hand Back to the Future is also one of those pictures so full of movie suspense rituals you really want to scream sometimes. Oh no! Another thing went wrong! At the worst possible moment! My annoyance probably speaks to the power of the movie to make us care about its characters and believe the situation—I really want to see Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) make it from 1955 back to 1985 in those climactic scenes. Credit much of this to the screenplay by Bob Gale and director Robert Zemeckis, which is funny and well put together. As can be seen here, Zemeckis is also one of the more gifted students of Steven Spielberg, an executive producer here. The script is tight and scrupulously fair about working through the characters and their motivations. They're integrated so neatly into the events that you don't notice or can forgive the ridiculously unexplainable. Speaking of hectic, the movie hits a pace of 88 miles per hour from the start and never lets it flag or really pads out much and the time goes by like it didn't happen, even when you have to snort at some of its conceits. And you do have to snort at some of its conceits.

Love Not Money (1985)

However Everything But the Girl may be regarded now—trip hop electronica, really? and key albums like Walking Wounded credited to Paul Oakenfold on Napster?!—it's probably useful to remember that the husband-and-wife duo has never been easy to pin down exactly. When they emerged in the '80s they bore labels like "smooth jazz," "lounge," and "sophisti-pop." From a distance, they resembled other pop duos of the time such as Yazoo, Eurythmics, and Soft Cell. They sounded like Sade filtered through Katrina & the Waves and seemed made for a world where Paul Weller presided as emperor. One feature of EBTG's career is this slight haze that constantly trails them, blurring precise definition. I didn't really come to Love Not Money until five years after the fact, when I started playing one or the other side of it in the mornings before work. They are both perfect 20-minute soundtracks for the beginning of a workday. Tracey Thorn's clarion voice is flooded with both sunshine and dark corners, despairing yet brimming with confidence—all right, just call it "soulful." The general attack is always snappy and horn charts, as they come along, are upbeat, even when it all goes to the doldrums somehow, as it often does. There's a sturdy depth to it—it became a morning album on and off for me for years. There's more to it than smoov novelty pop, though the songwriting and production tend in that direction—verse, chorus, bridge, along with the principles of melody, mood, arrangement (with many fine small points all over it, for example the bass on "Shoot Me Down"). It's altogether a good tension, a remarkable one. On the issue of the label, I think of Love Not Money as a new wave album and EBTG as a new wave act. I'll take the easy way out as usual on albums in the new wave branch and point to the choice of the one cover—in this case "Kid," the Chrissie Hynde song from the Pretenders' first album. It's a beautiful song, in the hands of either, about the awful, awesome weight and fragility of a new baby. The Pretenders sound nothing but happy about it, which does belie the words a little. Six years later, EBTG dragged it into their gorgeous morass with no further ado, slowing and stripping it down, transforming it almost into a dirge, which nonetheless releases in the most surprising ways, as on "All my sorrow, all my blues, all my sorrow." In the Pretenders version, the love for the kid really seems to transcend those feelings in the singer, but in the EBTG version the singer not only feels them but seems to sense they will only inevitably descend on the kid someday too. It's not as if she's bitter. She keeps a bright face—like you have to when you go to work. EBTG means everyone the best—or, as they say in "Are You Trying to Be Funny?": "May the bad things in life come in two and not threes."

Come and See (1985)

Idi i smotri, USSR, 142 minutes
Director: Elem Klimov
Writers: Ales Adamovich, Elem Klimov
Photography: Aleksei Rodionov
Music: Oleg Yanchenko
Editor: Valeriya Belova
Cast: Aleksey Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Liubomiras Laucevicius, Vladas Bagdonas, Viktor Lorents

There are at least two ways to approach this monumental World War II movie. First, in terms of ranking greatest war movies—my first sense was that goes by acclamation to Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion, but on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? I'm seeing the following movies ahead of the Renoir. They may not all exactly be war movies but close enough: Seven Samurai, Apocalypse Now, Battleship Potemkin, Andrei Rublev, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, and Blade Runner. Come and See may be closer to being a greatest World War II movie, but I'd still give The Human Condition the edge there, if only by imposing size.

A second way to look at Come and See is in terms of the pornography of hating Nazis, a theme I look forward to seeing revitalized in coming months and years. I'm sure it's just me but I find it hard to believe any "very fine people" are Nazis. Nazis, by definition, are the bad guys. That's how I was raised. If we need reminders about that, here's a good place to look. Come and See is a serious movie, one of the most serious movies I know. In the US we have spent the better part of a century looking at scenes, sanitized and otherwise, from the Pacific theater of WWII or the western front in Europe. Come and See is about the Russian front and it is not sanitized. The movie's country of origin is given as Soviet Russia, but it is set specifically in Belarus, which borders Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. Come and See details the campaign of terror waged by German armed forces as they swept east, torching hundreds of villages and killing most of the people who lived in them. And when I say it details this campaign, I mean that it is detailed.

Eight Black Horses (1985)

At this point—have I said this before?—I have to admit my heart falls a little whenever I start a book in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain and find it's a Deaf Man story. It's a little like realizing a Star Trek episode is about Q, or Lwaxana Troi. The Deaf Man books are giant comic book capers filled with exaggerated and unlikely event, your basic Riddler v. Batman scenario. In this one, traveling under the name Dennis Döve (and asking people to call him "Den" because "den döve" means "the deaf man" in Swedish), he sends confusing messages to the 87th Precinct detectives: images of nightsticks, badges, hats, wanted posters, all things with a vague police theme. The first is of eight black horses. What could this nefarious villain be planning now? Thanks to the omniscient narrator, we see the Deaf Man bed one woman, kill another, tell his henchmen to do this and that, all but cackle and rub his hands. What in the world is he up to? You'll find out soon enough if you just keep reading the book. And it's probably the only way you'll figure it out. Technically, that makes this "unfair" mystery story writing. Eight Black Horses is not an outright failure, but it's not that good and it's way too busy. At this point in the series the novels are about twice the size of the earlier ones. A lot of the extra space goes to understanding the characters better. We learn here, for example, that the reprehensible Andy Parker was married at one time, and how it contributes to his chronic bitterness and rage, which makes him a bad cop. Little is heard from Meyer Meyer, and even Steve Carella is more of a sideline character. No, this one is all about the Deaf Man, which is awkward given the omniscient narrator coupled with the need to disclose some but not all of what he is doing. McBain has painted himself into an odd way of telling the story, not to mention that it's as unbelievable as ever with this character. Once the orchestrated mayhem begins, it's all flash and sizzle, like nothing that ever happens anywhere. I'm willing to indulge McBain these exercises because I'm trying to read them all anyway, and his storytelling works pretty well even when it's for something silly. So if you're reading them all like me, whatever. The rest of you can move it to the back of the stack. Unless you like the Deaf Man stories, in which case knock yourself out.

In case it's not at the library.

"Talk of Heroes" (1985)

Story by Carol Bly not available online.

Carol Bly's short story does a pretty neat trick of tying together two kinds of 20th-century American fiction: the frame features a Cheever / Carver postwar focus on suburban life, while the long illustrative anecdote at its center is something Papa Hemingway himself might have called "very fine." Maybe that's one reason it ended up in two of the three collections I'm covering. In the frame story, Emily Anderson, a woman in her 50s or 60s, is responsible for introducing the speaker at that month's meeting of the Minnesota chapter of a national organization of Norwegian-American immigrants, Tusend Hjem, for which she volunteers. She is widowed or divorced, and at the time of the story her 24-year-old daughter is staying with her at her home in suburban St. Paul with a view of White Bear Lake. Her daughter is a therapist and her marriage appears to be foundering. As it happens, Emily knows the speaker at that night's Tusend Hjem meeting, which is one reason she was asked to introduce him. She's also one of the key volunteers in the organization. The speaker is named Willi Varig. He was a Norwegian war hero in World War II. Emily knew him when she lived in Oslo in the '50s. Varig, it turns out, is a lush—which is as Emily remembers him—and he is blind drunk that night. He can barely make coherent remarks ahead of a documentary to be shown about Norwegian war heroes on a 16-mm projector. But the projector malfunctions. And Varig has passed out. So it's up to Emily to go to the lectern and tell his story, which she does in very long paragraphs that occupy about a third of this story. It's a harrowing tale of enduring torture at the hands of Nazis, holding out as long as he had to in order to protect Norwegian resistance fighters fleeing the German-occupied country. It's more delicate about the torture than what we might expect these days, but we're given enough details to get the idea, and Varig's pitiful display of drunkenness completes the picture. There might be an argument about Bly's ambitions, but the Hemingway stoicism is actually more general to the whole story, and not just the war story, because it's more a feature of Emily's, who has more than just fond and indulgent regard for Varig. By the way she tells her story it's apparent how much respect she has for him. The multiple levels on which the title may be taken are thus affirmed, with Emily not just speaking about a hero, but also simply speaking. She is a hero too.

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

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

Shoah (1985)

France / UK, 566 minutes, documentary
Director/writer: Claude Lanzmann
Photography: Dominique Chapuis, Jimmy Glasberg, Phil Gries, William Lubtchansky
Editors: Ziva Postec, Anna Ruiz

As a quirk of history, December 7, 1941—a Sunday—is not only the day the Japanese attacked the US at Pearl Harbor. It is also the day the Germans formally adopted their policy of die Endlösung: the "final solution" for "the Jewish problem." In the scope of history, it's a stepping-off point. As historian Raul Hilbert caustically notes a few hours into this massive and elegiac documentary, everything the Nazis had done to that point to scapegoat, persecute, and oppress Jews in central Europe had already been used for centuries: harsh inheritance laws, intermarriage bans, badging, ghettoization—all of it. Now, with the formal policy, the Nazi bureaucrats were forced to invent, and create, and they did so the way most bureaucracies do—by irrational fits and starts, marked frequently by stupidity.

Shoah sets out to address one of the most maddening aspects of this part of German Nazi history, die Endlösung, which is the way it shrouds itself in decency and notions of taste (good and bad), making it hard to find out what happened. We know some 6 million Jews were systematically exterminated in death camps set up in Poland, that it involved gassing of some kind mostly (and something about showers), and that it was "horrible"—that has been taken more or less as all we need to know, and in a way it is. Yet as The Sorrow and the Pity began to disclose in 1969, the complicity and tacit knowledge and implicit acceptance actually ranged wide and didn't involve only Nazis or even only Germans. So what the hell, exactly, was going on? Who knew what, and when?

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985)

Oliver Sacks is a neurologist with a sharp sense for some of the stranger manifestations of brain injuries, bringing a literary flair to his write-ups of the cases he has worked on. Some critics have dubbed him "the man who mistook his patients for a literary career." It may or may not be true that he is an opportunist, but there's no question he's a good writer and storyteller. The some two dozen "clinical tales" featured in this one present all manner of bizarre results from brain injuries or conditions, often involving the right hemisphere of the brain. In the title piece, his patient suffers from an inability to assemble the visual details of physical objects into a wholeness that enables him to recognize them. Trying to figure out what a glove is, for example, he describes it as, "A continuous surface, infolded on itself. It appears to have five outpouchings." As to its purpose, his guess is that it is some kind of organizing change purse. In the incident that provides the title of the book, this patient looks at his wife in Sacks's office as they are preparing to leave. Some visual detail about her head—perhaps the roundness, or the color or texture of her hair—makes him believe it is his hat, which he attempts to grasp and lift to his head. Besides right hemisphere brain injuries, Sacks's cases also involve Korsakoff's syndrome (an inability to form new memories, the condition memorably riffed on in the movie Memento), a pair of illiterate autistic twins who play a numbers game and are able to identify very large prime numbers, and a drug-abusing student who suddenly finds himself in possession of an ultra-keen sense of smell. A lot of things combine to interest me about these cases and incidentally make me like this book very much. I have long been fascinated by stroke victims with impaired left hemispheres of the brain who have lost all their vocabulary except swear words. What is going on in that mysterious right hemisphere? Then there is the clinical way these reports go, like a police procedural, starting from the description of a disorder (or crime) and patiently sifting the clues and analyzing them. Yet often nothing is absolutely certain. Police procedurals tend to result in conundrums that are resolved satisfactorily one way or another (not always), but these brief case studies by Sacks are simply pieces of a puzzle, contributions to a methodical, larger understanding about how the brain works and doesn't work. We're still not there, 30 years after the publication of this book, and there is likely still a very long way to go. But as pop science books go, a favorite category of mine, this is a pleasure to read, much like well-crafted short stories or personal essays. It presents profound mysteries, even maybe helps to solve them a little. But more importantly it can leave one recharged with the wonderful sense of the strangeness of life. You can't ask much more from a pop science book.

In case it's not at the library.