Greetings From Timbuk3 (1986)

Timbuk3 was a husband and wife act straight outta Madison, Wisconsin—Pat and Barbara K. MacDonald—augmented by a drum machine for the pseudo-trio designation. Their instincts pointed them in rootsy directions, but they had a surprise top 20 hit in 1986 with “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.” It’s basically skinny tie and shades new wave, but the country blues inflections combined with the nuclear anxiety at high levels then (due to Chernobyl and Ronald Reagan joking about releasing bombs) produced something everyone wanted to hear for a few weeks. It was a pretty good joke too. The singer is in college, getting good grades, studying nuclear science. His teacher wears dark glasses, presumably for the intense flash of light that accompanies A-bomb detonation, and now the singer is wearing them too. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find coming back to this album—in memory the hit seemed more like a novelty and most of the rest of the album (except the closer) a lot of half-songs that never much cohered. But my memory was faulty—Greetings From Timbuk3 is way better than I expected. The songs are shaggy and shambolic but they are good. There’s a continuing theme of the brave young couple very much in love and facing down the cruel world together. With barrels of love. Many years later, after moving to Austin and releasing six more albums, they divorced. So it goes. It does not make them any less brave in 1986. Some cynical, vaguely lefty politics are involved too. “Hairstyles and Attitudes” sells the cynicism with homely wisdom and a brief screeching guitar. “Shame on You” is the longest song here at 5:04 and the only one where Barbara K. gets a writing credit. It’s a rap song, the rap is Barbara K.’s, and it’s not bad, with all due disclaimers. The secret gem to Greetings From Timbuk3 is the last song, “I Love You in the Strangest Way,” featuring more updates from the brave couple. But this song has always hit me in the strangest way, so to speak, it's one made for howling along with at night in various states of drunkenness and/or sadness. I wonder how they felt about it then and feel about it now. The whole album is worth checking out—and now, maybe, I will look into the rest of their catalog too.

“Strangers on Paradise” (1986)

Noting that the more popular alternate title for this Damon Knight story is “Strangers in Paradise,” which ISFDB insists on. That’s fine but Knight himself preferred “on,” the way it shows up in the Masters of Darkness anthology edited by Dennis Etchison. In this anthology, Etchison gave writers free rein to pick one of their stories they felt never got the attention it deserved. As anthologies go, the results are perhaps predictably more on the dismal side, suggesting once again that writers may have little perspective on their own work. I mean, some of them are self-acknowledged trunk stories. Knight’s story is not bad as far as it goes, at least until the weak and cliched resolution. It’s the kind of story that doesn’t easily lend itself to a good resolution, but I think Knight could have done better. Another problem—though not as bad as I’ve seen it—is the attempt by the genre writer to do literary. The baggage around literary pretensions that can emerge is often terribly embarrassing. But that element is also at the heart of this story, making it difficult to write around. It’s about a literary scholar traveling to the planet Paradise to study the work of a poet who emigrated there. Quite an interesting place—there’s lots of SF stuff about the planet and space travel to get there that I enjoyed. And the mystery of the poet is also a very good element here. In the last 10 years of her life, we are told, she “went silent.” The story is an object lesson in the tragic foolishness of humans and their attempts, nearly as foolish, to learn lessons from experience. I mean, it’s all very easy and cynical, I know, but I’m feeling pretty glum myself about our prospects at the moment, so I shouldn’t fault Knight for taking the easy way out. What we’re talking about here is something along the lines of Charlton Heston pounding the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes, beholding the ruin of the Statue of Liberty. “Strangers on Paradise” is not quite as obvious—what could be?—but it’s pretty obvious. Still, it’s good enough that I’m thinking I’d like to read more of Knight down the road.

Masters of Darkness, ed. Dennis Etchison
Story not available online.

“The Locked Room” (1986)

The New York Trilogy
The third piece in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy makes a strong case that it is indeed a trilogy, with shared themes and tone. Auster also distributed various details across it—a detective and/or writer named Quinn, a red notebook, a character named Stillman, and more—that give it a somewhat deceptive sense of unity. I’m not entirely convinced Auster is that good at endings, but he’s certainly good at most of the rest. This is an even better mystery story than the first piece in the trilogy, “City of Glass,” though both go similarly off the rails. It seems to promise a locked-room mystery, a staple of the mystery / detective genre, but it is not a locked-room mystery at all. A locked room only appears near the end. Instead, this is another staple of the genre I like even more, when done well, which is the missing-person case, a disappearance. As with the rest of this trilogy it turns all questions into existential mysteries we can only ponder, never solve. The pondering is the solution. Thus, Fanshawe, the narrator’s childhood friend (I don’t believe we get a name for this first-person narrator?). Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind a wife, a son, and manuscripts that fill two suitcases. It’s hard to say why he has vanished. We do learn it is his own decision, not some crime. His manuscripts are popular and launch him into some upper realm of literary regard. The narrator marries Fanshawe’s widow—the public story is that Fanshawe is missing, presumed dead—and essentially enjoys all the fruits of Fanshawe’s work, including substantial royalties. But when publishers want him to write a Fanshawe biography and he gets a big contract his life starts to fall apart. Auster does not succeed in steering the genre everywhere he wants to take it, but he’s such a good writer, and can work so acutely well with the conventions, that he is rarely less than a pleasure to read. All three pieces in The New York Trilogy are perfectly enjoyable, even if the endings seem a bit muddled. Auster takes the genre conventions and works them well, exaggerating certain points absurdly, such as the vigils of shadowing suspects, adding whole new dimensions to the mystery story. It’s all arch and ironic and deserves all the “scare quotes” you can muster up. But it’s fun too and the kind of thing you might be inclined to gobble up in one or two sittings.

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

“Ghosts” (1986)

The New York Trilogy
“Ghosts” is the second piece in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, a meditation on or perhaps a novel about detective fiction and New York City. It’s the shortest in the so-called trilogy, too short to call a novel itself, at 60 pages even shorter than Animal Farm or Heart of Darkness. But it is dense, compulsively readable, and eventually almost haunting. It starts with some obscure riffing: “First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown.” Let me explain. All the characters in this story are named for colors. The action (such as it is) takes place on Orange St. I don’t think Auster was making fun of Travis McGee novels, but it’s possible. Anyway, the opening has it right. The main character is a detective named Blue. A man named White (who may be disguised, wearing pancake makeup) hires him to follow a man named Black. In fact, White has already rented an apartment across the street from Black, where Blue can keep an eye on him directly. But mostly all Black does it sit at a table and write or, less frequently, read Walden. Black leaves his place once in a while for groceries or on other errands. The vigil is much like the one that ends the first entry in the trilogy, “City of Glass,” although this one is more comfortable. It lasts more than a year, and along the way Blue abandons a girlfriend without meaning to. It’s nearly as confusing as one of the unusual episodes with Black, where Blue witnesses what appears to be a breakup scene. But we get no further information about that. Or about why Blue abandons his girlfriend, for that matter. The tail job is very boring for Blue, but somehow fascinating for us as readers, much like “City of Glass.” I kept waiting for Auster’s deadpan style to slip into open mockery, but the color scheme of the character names is about as close as he gets to treating it like a joke. He does get at a certain emptiness, not just in detective fiction but extensible to all life, which is a pretty neat trick for something that has many earmarks of arch po-mo business. But there’s also an unmistakable sincerity to what Auster is doing here that carries it off well (unless he has actually fooled me). Also, perhaps most importantly, Auster is a good writer, slightly obsessed but lucid, and a pleasure to read.

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

Aliens (1986)

UK / USA, 137 minutes

Director: James Cameron

Writers: James Cameron, David Giler, Walter Hill, Dan O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett

Photography: Adrian Biddle

Music: James Horner

Editor: Ray Lovejoy

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, William Hope, Jenette Goldstein

Now that it’s Christmas week and all time has stopped making sense, consider catching up on one or two or three of your favorite movie series. In the case of the Alien franchise, do as I say not as I do, because I haven’t even seen Alien: Romulus yet (soon!) or any of the TV treatments or Predator crossovers. The first two—Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986)—are classics that are worth multiple looks and basically after that you are on your own, except remember: Christmas week is a generous time for mediocre movies so don’t hesitate to go for three or more movies a day. On the other hand, no one will blame you if you don’t get far past this one. Aliens is rather a different movie from Alien but it’s nearly as good in its own way. Where Alien is a monster horror picture with trappings of science fiction and lots of suspense, Aliens is more science fiction action / adventure with trappings of horror and also lots of suspense. Aliens also has Sigourney Weaver and wholesome girl power all over it—even on the alien side. What’s not to like?

Now that you mention it, and speaking as someone dedicated to not liking sequels, yes, there are things not to like about Aliens: director and cowriter James Cameron, the unctuous sitcom star Paul Reiser (albeit six years before Mad About You), a generally slow start, an overly militarist mindset (albeit 15 years before 9/11), and even some noticeable cribbing from Steven Spielberg’s style. Aliens rationalizes all the shock of the Alien revelations into a systematic universe with a known sequence of so-called “xenomorph” malevolence: the face-hugger, the chest-buster, the blood that is an incredibly corrosive acid. In many ways this alien life form is the perfect terrifying monster. Except—is it my imagination or are they a little inconsistent about the whole alien-blood-is-acid thing? Sometimes it seems much less corrosive than others.

Writing Down the Bones (1986)

The subtitle of this slim little lively one-of-a-kind tome by Natalie Goldberg is Freeing the Writer Within, which suggests it is pop psychology self-help at least as much as writing manual. Or it suggested that to me anyway. As such, though I have long been attracted to writing manuals as a kind of guilty pleasure (Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, Stephen King’s On Writing, Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, etc., etc.), I tended to ignore Writing Down the Bones. The Zen Buddhism aspect of it did not help. But finally, 15 years after its publication, at a time when I was stuck in the doldrums of full-time work, I happened to pick it up out of curiosity and nothing else to read in a host’s home when I was traveling. And I was instantly smitten, consuming it in a day or two. Goldberg plugs into the simple joys of creative pursuit without any pretensions and has practical help on nearly every page for breaking down resistance to doing it, which basically plagues everyone who wants to write, as far as I can tell. It’s fashionable for writers to moan and groan about their work and lot in life and how hard it all is, but Goldberg is true to the original creative impulse and counsels us to stay close too. Writing Down the Bones was a big hit and a bestseller but don’t hold that against it. Her approach, at least externally, is not much different from others, basically calling for writing every day and offering a wide range of exercises, including readings. The liberation stems from her attacks on the strictures themselves. For me as for many, writing every day implied dedication to a single project, presumably a novel or memoir or larger work of some kind with respectability and money attached. But Goldberg sees that as turned around and I needed to hear it. The daily writing should be an indulgence or celebration purely of the craft. You can do it in 15 minutes. It can be focused on a project, but the project should emerge from the daily practice. There’s an unkind argument that Goldberg herself only produced this one excellent book in all her efforts—she has more than a dozen to her credit, fiction, memoir, and further writing manuals, and I’ve been through a few. But I think that’s sort of seeing it the wrong way. She wrote an excellent, memorable book that can be returned to over and over. How many produce even one book like that? You should see the condition of my copy. There’s another unkind argument that Goldberg’s book never did me much good, considering the perhaps forlorn state of my own “professional” career as a blogger and all that. On the other hand, she opened me up to the simple pleasures of writing, to organizing, exploring, and expressing thoughts and feelings as a daily practice, which ultimately turned me into someone who does write most days. Blogging may not be considered one of the higher pursuits, but I can say it gives me everything Goldberg ever promised. My suggestion for Writing Down the Bones is first to read it like a novel. Then go back and read it slowly and do every single dang suggestion for writing exercises, no matter how silly it might seem. I think there’s a good chance you will find it liberating too.

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

Lifes Rich Pageant (1986)

In software development circles, a "1.0 person" is someone who likes to be in on the start of a project. To be a 1.0 person is a badge of honor. You are an innovator or inventor, creating the future. By contrast, I have found I am more of a "4.0 person"—my term for preferring to wait to work with something until it has had the bugs thoroughly worked out but is not yet bloatware. A 4.0 person is no badge of honor, of course, but it saves me a lot of glitchy beta-testing headaches. I know I can take this to extremes—it took me 10 years to get wi-fi, and I only recently finally got a smartphone, which technically I think makes me more like a 13.0 person. I mention this because I noticed Lifes Rich Pageant is the fourth album by R.E.M., a band I've never been entirely easy with. But I certainly loved this album more than any of their others. They perfected a certain R.E.M. look and feel here. I hasten to say the 1.0 / 4.0 thing falls apart a bit when you consider I did like "Radio Free Europe" and the Chronic Town EP quite a bit. Murmur was where I fell out of step on this journey although I have since made my peace with that album—not bad! But the next two seemed weak and weaker and I thought I was done with R.E.M. when Lifes Rich Pageant came along. Wikipedia declares it a bridge between R.E.M.'s alt-rock origins and their later commercial fortunes as the wise old alt-men of the '90s. I'm not even sure how I came to own Lifes Rich Pageant, but once it was in my house it was on all the time for months. It starts a bit slow but with the third track, "Fall on Me," it takes off into open-hearted soulful regions they had never really embraced before, though you can hear the origins of it in "So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry)" from Reckoning. I really loved that song too and then used it up until Lifes Rich Pageant came along, which I went ahead and used up too. I mean, it was nice to revisit it a few more times recently, but it hasn't changed much in the years since I played it lot. It's one of those things that seem smaller with time, perhaps, like your old grade school. Stipe's singing and the songwriting let loose in nice big ways that had seemed small and guarded before. It felt liberating and revelatory at the time. It's easier to make out the words, and they're more heartfelt: "Don't FAA-AAALLL on meeee" and "CuyahOOOga" and "Eye YAM Superman." It's a groove album—most of the songs are basically in the same one—and if I can only hear memories now of what I used to love at least I've got, etc. For a year or two, until Document, I could feel more onboard with the legions of fans who adore and still adore this odd classic rock band.

The Professor and the Prostitute (1986)

Note the subtitle, And Other True Tales of Murder and Madness, as this is a collection of nine short true-crime pieces by Linda Wolfe. She notes here that her specific interest in crime focuses on the middle class. I was disappointed at first that the book is smaller pieces, but they turned out to be very good—interesting cases, and interesting journalistic ways of chasing down the stories. She talks to lots of people, but she's also thoughtful and informed when she probes into the psychological aspects. I found out about it originally from Bill James's book on true-crime literature, Popular Crime (basically worth reading itself). These pieces reminded me how good those Year's Best annuals on true-crime used to be, for as long as they went in the 2000s. The title piece here is the longest. The most interesting to me now was a case that involved twin gynecologists who both died at age 45 in strange circumstances. The case served as an obvious inspiration for director and writer David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers movie from 1988 with Jeremy Irons playing both twins. The real-life version did not invent strange and disturbing gynecology tools like in the movie, but they were similarly innovative researchers who had some reputation before going weird. An amazing amount of the movie comes right from the case, which makes the case even more creepy. Wolfe, who died in 2020 at 87, had a good nose for true-crime cases that can haunt—maybe because she does keep the focus on the middle class, which makes them familiar to me in subtly uncanny ways. My copy is a lurid mass market paperback from the mid-'80s, part of my intermittent downsizing project. I felt a little trashy seeing it laying around but I liked it in some nostalgic way for that reason too. Wolfe was more self-deprecating than warranted in her introduction and throughout. I liked her straightforward way of getting at these cases. She has a lot of insight into the people and the incidents and how they all add up. A lot of books look like this one, but not many of them are this good. It was over too soon. I wanted more.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Zodiac (1986)

My interest flared up again in the Zodiac killings when David Fincher's movie came out about 10 years ago, but soon enough went on the wane again. The iconic serial killer represents a tantalizing dark mystery but everything still leads to dead ends. The most persistent questions—who was he, what was his motive, and how did he evade capture?—will likely never be answered definitively, or worse, may be disappointing when they are. Compare the BTK case (talk about the banality of evil). I realize I'm judging sensational crime in terms of entertainment, when these are overwhelming tragedies at the core, but it's all in a day's work for true-crime literature, often a kind of voyeurism. I'm not even sure Robert Graysmith's book is the place to go on Zodiac. As the editorial cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle who famously became obsessed with the case—Jake Gyllenhaal plays him in the movie—he's not exactly objective or even in the best position to tell the story. It's as if he knew the material too well when he finally sat down to write his books (there's a sequel to this I doubt I will get to). He alternates between rote mood-setting and rushing to get us up to speed on the details. Then, when he feels we're sufficiently briefed, he can sail off into virtual fugues about what it means and how it almost adds up. He calls attention to details that don't seem that significant, such as astrology, or harks to the weird coincidences like he is telling a campfire story. I feel for him, in a way. I think he just wants to know what happened. He's made it his life's work, and it may not get anywhere. Published originally in 1986, extensively revised in the '90s, my urgent red, black, and yellow mass market paperback version includes a late section about the movie, with notes from the set. He sounds a little dazzled by Hollywood, writing, "It's an odd feeling to have the finest actor of his generation play yourself in a major motion picture." Since Gyllenhaal is not even the finest actor of his generation in that movie it made me trust Graysmith's judgment a little less. Still, he has assembled all the Zodiac facts here along with doing a fair amount of original research, and he's often lucid when discussing the many strange twists in the case. The Zodiac killer has his antecedents, of course—Jack the Ripper is the original model, including taunting notes to police and newspapers. Later, Son of Sam, BTK, and others took whirls. The Zodiac murders are chilling and horrific but there are times I wonder if Zodiac committed any of them and instead only took credit. But a handful anyway seem certain. It's an odd chapter in history, no doubt, crime or otherwise.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Things They Carried" (1986)

Read story by Tim O'Brien online.

Tim O'Brien's story was evidently conceived as the first story in a cycle of stories going by the same name, The Things They Carried, published in 1990. Wikipedia calls it a novel, but this story reads more like a stand-alone than, for example, Dorothy Allison's "River of Names," which is also from the collection edited by Tobias Wolff. At the same time, O'Brien's story is sounding big themes, suitable for later enlargement. The art of this particular story is that it works pretty well either way—as a story, or as an overture to a novel. Literally the objects of the title are scrutinized. The small outfit of American soldiers on patrol duty in Vietnam is described as carrying rifles, radios, food, camping equipment, and other necessary (and unnecessary) items. They all carry peculiar keepsakes, letters from home and such. As a group, they "carried themselves with poise." And they carry internal burdens. The stand-alone narrative—which might well be developed further in a larger novel—is about a soldier killed by a sniper while the band is on patrol. It is a shocking incident for all, and a crisis for the leader, 24-year-old Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. They respond in ways we've been trained to expect by Vietnam War stories, in this case by burning down a village. It's good powerful stuff, delivered with a sure grim tone and a lot of insight into private and personal pains. If they sometimes feel like clichés now, that's not exactly O'Brien's faults. He was among the first to use them with Going After Cacciato in 1978, before they were clichés. O'Brien feels a little in the literary war lineage of Ernest Hemingway and Normal Mailer. Cacciato was ripe with literary conceit, saturated through with O'Brien's remarkable eye for the Vietnam War experience. We know these stories so well now it's easy to miss the precision of the execution. I have a strong hunch, for example—not knowing the full-length Things They Carried—that our Lieutenant Cross is a candidate for fragging. Certainly more than one of the characters we meet in this story, not just the one killed here, will come to a sad wartime end. I'm not averse to reading more. The story is fine. But I find myself orienting the same way I do with any genre literature. On certain obvious levels you're never going to be surprised.

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

"Men Under Water" (1986)

Story by Ralph Lombreglia not available online.

Ralph Lombreglia's story is reasonably witty. It comes before Quentin Tarantino but after Jim Jarmusch. It is self-consciously ironic, distanced, referential. It's set in Cleveland, at some point in recent history after the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. The first-person narrator is Reggie, a handyman who works for the unscrupulous landlord Gunther. Gunther believes he is destined to make it as a film director. He's actually more interested in Reggie for his skills as a screenplay collaborator. Reggie is just trying to get by. It's a strange job he has as Gunther's assistant. He has to haul Gunther out of bed most mornings and take him to breakfast before their workday can begin. Gunther is an obese hairless pig who cuts corners every way he can as a landlord. Reggie seems to consider him a necessary if annoying evil. Reggie's wife Tina thinks Gunther is taking advantage of him and he should quit. Every time Reggie tries to, however, Gunther gives him a raise—one of the most improbable plot points in a story full of them. I'm willing to look at the publication date of this story and credit Lombreglia for being on the front lines of various postmodern developments: Cleveland, the monoculture of cinema immersion, and of course good old disaffected irony. Gunther is a sort of id of '80s American capitalism—later in the story it appears he gets his break with a meeting with an actual money man. Reggie is the impotent hipster stand-by yet he is the one to save the pitch meeting from Gunther's paralyzed collapse. At the end of the story is a strange scene that is also the best thing here (hence the title, I take it). Reggie and Gunther are scuba diving in Gunther's pool and must share the breathing apparatus. Reggie is out of his depth in the water, prone to panic. He and Gunther bump and entangle the equipment underwater, and their gestures and movements take on specific meaning: "You really saved me up there." "I know I did, you huge oaf." Here, underwater, somehow—at least according to this fanciful writer, whom we have no particular reason to credit—Reggie and Gunther are capable of sensitive intimate exchanges. Both have been yearning. And it's a really beautiful exchange. But I don't believe a word of it for one second. Then I wonder if that isn't exactly the intent. An odd one, for sure.

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

"The Lover of Horses" (1986)

Read story by Tess Gallagher online.

Tess Gallagher's story is less a narrative than a brooding meditation on death—well, on life too. The life and death belong primarily to the lover of horses of the title, the first-person narrator's great-grandfather, by reputation a horse "whisperer." But it's also about her father, related to her great-grandfather only by marriage. As she sees it, they share a similar experience, swept up by life, chosen by something outside of and greater than themselves. "[H]e was in all likelihood a man who had been stolen by a horse," she writes of her great-grandfather's abandonment of his family at the age of 52 to join a circus. Thus, she reasons, the impulse to make oneself an outsider was not just an influence but a positive factor in all their decisions. In the case of her father the lack of bloodlines might make it something of a stretch, but OK. Her father loved to play cards, or more accurately gamble. Near the end of his life, in his 70s, he finds a game and has an extraordinary run of luck. It is a high point of his life, and highly meaningful—or anyway that's how his daughter, the first-person narrator, sees it. On some level it's rationalizing, but the story seems to believe it and even manages to dignify it, like a good Joni Mitchell song. Gallagher was more a writer of poetry, and in many ways that's how this story feels. Everything is pointed toward an idea that, at least in some cases, things choose us and not the other way round, as we usually see them. Horses chose her great-grandfather, gambling chose her father, presumably writing, or maybe love for her father or family, has chosen this writer. I'm not sure there's much ambiguity here, except perhaps that grief has affected her, distorted her view, which seems unlikely. And I'm not sure there's much more to the story than that. It seems slight in some ways—the easy argument is that these men are failures. But the narrator wants us to look beyond that. For example, at the joy of her father finally encountering his long-sought streak of good luck. She wants us to see joy where we might be inclined to see obsession, or something similarly unhealthy. Maybe so, maybe so. But hard to say.

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

Blue Velvet (1986)

USA, 120 minutes
Director/writer: David Lynch
Photography: Frederick Elmes
Music: Angelo Badalamenti
Editor: Duwayne Dunham
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern, George Dickerson, Hope Lange, Dean Stockwell, Jack Nance, Frances Bay, Fred Pickler

I wrote about Blue Velvet a few years ago for a group project countdown of favorite movies (see here) and tried to cover the basic points then: the shattering experience of seeing it totally unprepared, and its basic dynamic of shuttling between extremes, which I compared somewhere else in that series with It's a Wonderful Life and The Wizard of Oz. Inevitably, 30 years of popular culture grinding away at norms of decorum have worked to make even Blue Velvet seem slightly tame and a little buffoonish now. Still, a recent look convinced me that its powers to shock, unnerve, and move me remain nearly as powerful as ever, and I still think few other films have managed its extraordinary dynamics quite so well. Or, as they like to say in the movie, "It's a strange world, isn't it?"

I'm writing it up again because it's in the top 100 of the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, and among other things I'd like to call attention to the fact that director and writer David Lynch's Mulholland Dr., currently #66, has surpassed Blue Velvet, currently #75, in the esteem of critics at large. This happened about five years ago, when Mulholland Dr. surged from #276, with Blue Velvet at #102, shortly after the wave of 2000s best-of lists. To be sure, Blue Velvet has also benefited from the general updraft in Lynch's critical reputation at that time. But I'm thinking we might have a bit of a Taxi Driver and Raging Bull situation on our hands here with Lynch's two masterpieces.

Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop (1986)

This treatment of the UK's early-'80s resurgence in pop music—known in the US as the "second British invasion"—encompasses so-called New Pop, focusing mostly on Culture Club, but also Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, and many others. It's written by Dave Rimmer, then of Smash Hits. Interesting trivia: another Smash Hits editor, Neil Tennant, served as agent in getting the book deal. I should explain my use of scare quotes and "so-called," because it largely explains my indifference to the book and its many insights. British pop of the early '80s wasn't that important to me. I loved (and still do) ABC, the Human League, and Culture Club, but have little use for Adam & the Ants, Duran Duran, and most of the others, with occasional exceptions for specific songs. I was convinced by my experience of it in the '70s (later confirmed in books such as Fredric Dannen's Hit Men) that pop radio had essentially become a fraud, controlled and manipulated by corporate interests. The "second British invasion" seems to me still little more than stuffing the charts in an attempt to recreate more lucrative times. The mass of "New Pop" does not stand up to the mass of the '60s British pop, nor are its highs comparable to the earlier highs. It doesn't mean there wasn't great music in the '80s too, and I was grateful Rimmer's focus was Culture Club when it could have been Duran Duran. At the same time Rimmer is explicitly constrained by his relationship with Boy George O'Dowd, Jon Moss, and the others, and altogether too focused on his "New Pop" thesis, supported by too much extraneous chart analysis, to get to the real story there, as I see it, which is the person and the persona of O'Dowd. O'Dowd's affair with Moss remains a tantalizing mystery and I get the feeling it's the best way in to the Culture Club story. There's no way Rimmer was going to write that story in 1986—not without a lot of unpleasant fallout likely—and it really was never what he intended. Just so, from my view, I think the title needs to be adjusted slightly: Like 1968 Never Happened.

In case it's not at the library.

Timbuk3, "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades" (1986)

Nov. 22, 1986, #19
(listen)

In retrospect, Chernobyl likely had everything to do with turning this into a hit for Timbuk3 toward the end of 1986—that and a wonderful turn of phrase, the kind of forehead-smacking verbal point you wonder no one ever thought of before. Timbuk3 was married couple Pat and Barbara MacDonald out of Madison, Wisconsin, folkies by inclination but with a lot of electronic gear in tow for the beats and such. This song is how they're known and leads off their debut album, Greetings From Timbuk3, with which I was briefly infatuated (notably for the song "I Love You in the Strangest Way," a haunting moaner that ended up on a disproportionate number of mixtapes). "Future's So Bright" is a funny blend of styles, a thumping rhythm section hard-rock attack with a soaring blues harp and wonderful country harmonies in the vocal, underpinning an '80s wiseass new wave puppy cynicism. You gotta wear shades for all the nuclear radiation, is of course the basic idea, though even that is approached in an odd way. The singer is kind of desperately normal, on an ordinary yuppie track, going to college and studying marketable skills. "I'm doing all right, getting good grades," the singer reassures himself. It's the nuclear science teacher who is worrisome, wearing dark glasses in the classroom. Presumably he knows something the rest us don't. The cheerful optimism never flags, nor the overburdened irony, and there is an admirable tension between them maintained to the end. Plus Chernobyl happened that year. Also: this wonderfully evocative note in Wikipedia: "The former members of Timbuk3 have refused to license the song for commercials, including a $900,000 offer from AT&T and offers from Ford, the U.S. Army, and Bausch & Lomb for their Ray-Ban sunglasses." Kudos, MacDonalds.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

USA, 83 minutes
Director: John McNaughton
Writers: Richard Fire, John McNaughton
Photography: Charlie Lieberman
Music: Ken Hale, Steven A. Jones, Robert McNaughton
Editor: Elena Maganini
Cast: Michael Rooker, Tom Towles, Tracy Arnold

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is based on the career of one of the more puzzling serial killers in the annals of crime, Henry Lee Lucas, who though he was a murderer eventually turned out to be more of a serial confessionalist than serial killer. At any rate, the picture is not any kind of documentary work, nor, according to director and co-writer John McNaughton, was it ever intended to be. Various crucial plot points, notably the presence of a camcorder, confirm that. Thus, whoever may ultimately be considered authors of this story—screenwriter Richard Fire and McNaughton, the corrupt Texas officials who brought their open cases to Lucas, or Lucas himself—it's more fiction than fact. But the story remains fascinating, and terrifying, for exactly that reason: because someone imagined it we somehow like to think a creature like him could exist. Because he could. Couldn't he?

With the possible exception of zombies, most of the monsters we associate with horror pictures find their sources in the 19th century, whether it's science gone dreadfully wrong (Frankenstein, 1818), dissociative personality disorders (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886), vampires (Dracula, 1897), or even the specific shapes of all those messes with ghosts and haunted houses (various entries from Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Edgar Allen Poe). This is true as well in the case of serial killers, with Jack the Ripper (and, somewhat less, Lizzie Borden). But I get the feeling that the serial killer subgenre is slightly more disreputable among horror aficionados, perhaps because the source is factual and historical rather than literary, involving much more real trauma than imagination.

Watchmen (1986-1987)

I found out about Watchmen in, of all places, a fanzine for mystery enthusiasts called The Armchair Detective, for which I briefly wrote book reviews in return for free books in the late '80s (such as Rock Critic Murders by Jesse Sublett, which they sent me but I never managed to finish, not because it isn't done well). The Watchmen review was buried in a column I read there regularly, "J'accuse!" by William L. DeAndrea. He was an interesting writer with wide-ranging interests, but it was unusual for anyone connected with the magazine to acknowledge a comic book, let alone discuss one, let alone rave enthusiastically about it. By the time I read the column the comic book run was over and it had been gathered into the graphic novel most of us know it by now, truly one of the great comic books (or graphic novels, if I must) we will have for a very long time. As promised by DeAndrea's review, Watchmen is a huge one. Writer Alan Moore (it somehow seems insufficient to call him just the writer, but there you go) takes the same psychological starting point as the book's virtual companion in comic book history, which preceded it by about seven months, Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns. But where Miller's Batman is a near-future tale, Moore sets Watchmen back in the "golden age" of comic books, to the very point of the original imagining, circa 1937, and reimagines it as if it all really happened, a fad of the transitional times from the Great Depression to World War II when real people dressed up in colorful costumes and "fought crime." As Miller did, Moore also wonders what kind of people they would be, and comes to essentially the same (obvious) conclusion: damaged human beings, revenge-driven psychopaths, and such. Only one character in Moore's pantheon here has super-powers, a Silver-Surfer-like figure produced as a matter of nuclear technology in the mid-'40s who is practically omnipotent. Otherwise they are well-meaning thugs or insecure but handy dweebs with maximum brain power. Moore's storytelling style is allusive and fastidiously detailed, supplying backstory via appendices to the early sections, staged as excerpts from an autobiography, published histories, odd critical exegeses, police files, and so forth. It may be a little awkward, in terms of comic-book storytelling, but it provides necessary context, and one welcomes it. I welcomed it. Also—and I think everybody talks about this sooner or later, but it's still remarkable—Dave Gibbons's illustrations are deceptively generic. By the midpoint the style becomes uncannily appropriate to the story, down to sizing and sequencing the panels. I understand that Moore has much to do with this, that he is obsessive about storyboarding every panel down to the tiniest detail. That may be so, but Gibbons is nonetheless a great choice. Watchmen is a little slow and confusing in the beginning—it's a very big story. But it doesn't take long to see it's in the hands of people who know what they're doing. Not many are better than Moore at exploiting the punctuated rhythms of comic book panels. Rhythms and visual puns are on practically every page, even as they advance the massive plot inexorably. A masterpiece for one and all. Essential.

In case it's not at the library.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986)

It's more important than ever nowadays to keep your Dark Knights straight so here's a way to help you remember. This is the original and this is the best. No other comic book, let alone any movie, touches it. You don't have to think about anything else but this. When you have finished it, go ahead and try some of the others. If you start to feel confused again, return immediately to this one. It's really as simple as that. All those post-'60s-TV-show attempts to salvage Batman from the insipid pop culture mainstream that catapulted him to exactly the wrong renown (such attempts usually signaled by a heavy-handed insistence on the definite article, e.g. "Looks like trouble, we'd better get the Batman") came to naught—as worthy as they were, notably when Neal Adams started illustrating them—until Miller definitively reimagined the strangely enduring figure as a washed-up, middle-aged, has-been alcoholic, suffering the aches and pains of too many late-night fistfights, too many bone-crushing falls of failed acrobatics, and way too much boozing. The Robin in this adventure is a punk-rock chick with various problems. The Joker is a stone-cold psychopath. Superman is a contemptible do-gooder. And our old friend Bruce Wayne is slow, angry, thickened up in the middle, and not always thinking straight. At a stroke, Miller returned the Batman to everything people used to claim he should be. I was skeptical going in, I had heard this before, but this graphic novel is practically guaranteed to change the way people think, and it worked for me. Miller followed this up with Batman: Year One, which reimagined the origin story with equal potency and locked in the modern conception of our favorite superhero with no superpowers. Everybody since then has just been trying to keep up, whether that's Tim Burton or Christopher Nolan in the movies, or the rafts of writers and artists for the comic book and its rejuvenated potential for spinoffs. In this conception, likely best known now from the Nolan movie adaptations, Batman has become more of a psychopath himself, albeit one ostensibly for our side, a loner and vigilante who never recovered from the trauma of seeing his parents killed in a street stick-up, who comes most alive at night attacking prowlers and other bad guys. He's not fun, but he's often impressive, awe-inspiring even, which can get to be just about as good as fun. Miller's story and art (with inks by Klaus Janson, his future partner on the Daredevil franchise for Marvel) are never less than compelling, with their bleak, unified, and nearly perfectly realized vision of a media-saturated Gotham City in decline, and the scary grizzled drunk in cape and cowl who has appointed himself judge and jury of the place after nightfall.

In case it's not at the library.

Strong Persuader (1986)

By consensus, by acclimation, by the rule of all that is obvious, Robert Cray's breakthrough fifth album (counting Showdown!) is his best. You can almost measure and compare the love Cray fans have for it by how many other albums by him they have had occasion to own (on that scale I am at about a 6). But I have never yet known anyone to claim another by him as better. The template for everything that makes him great is here in these 10 songs, where in retrospect he is clearly about the business of taking down low-hanging fruit. As a guitar player, he's perfectly adequate, even given to moments of brilliance; as a singer it's about the same, though closer to merely adequate. What's most interesting about Robert Cray to me is his songwriting, and more generally and broader than that, the way he builds songs, the story elements he uses. So many of these songs are practically literary, a voice carrying on with a story but somehow also conveying a broader context that often belies, or undercuts, or sometimes emphasizes what the singer is carrying on about. In "Guess I Showed Here," a guy is crowing to himself about all the pain he is causing his woman by leaving her, because he thinks she is having an affair. But he sounds less and less convinced, mulling in the last verse, "Now she can have the house / And she can keep the car / I'm just satisfied / Staying in this funky, little old motel / I'm so mad / Well I can't stand it." In "Right Next Door (Because of Me)," even more starkly, the singer hears the woman he has seduced fighting with her man in the apartment next door (more here). Another element of Cray's songwriting becomes evident comparing the two. He does not have just one persona, nor just a single story, to tell. There's a multiplicity to these songs—which may not have a single story to tell, but ultimately all tend to connect one way or another around deceit in matters of love—that reminds me of a parallel multiplicity to mid-'60s albums by the Beatles. In those songs it is puppy love whereas Cray's are sophisticated and cynical, but the same shifting viewpoints across horizons of experience within the stories of the songs is there. So one result for me is that, as I return to Strong Persuader now and then, I notice that different songs step out differently from the others, or rub against each other in new and different ways, and I identify with these narrators in different ways. It still can seem new when I come back to it. One constant always, of course, is that these songs are excellent blues jam workups within the verse-chorus-verse structure and a perfect pleasure to let just play.

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

USA, 103 minutes
Director/writer: Woody Allen
Photography: Carlo Di Palma
Editor: Susan E. Morse
Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest, Michael Caine, Carrie Fisher, Barbara Hershey, Maureen O'Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Max von Sydow, Daniel Stern, Sam Waterston, Tony Roberts, Julie Kavner, Lewis Black, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Turturro, Richard Jenkins, Joanna Gleason

One of the best formulations I know of the appeal of the Marx Brothers is found late in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, his best movie of the '80s. In an implausible scene of suicide considered and averted (a Woody Allen staple even then), he makes the familiar case for Groucho and crew—inspired zaniness equated to life affirmation, that sort of thing. It is of a piece with the usual accolades for the Marx Brothers, and others such as Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Martin and Lewis, all that comedy of bygone times lost on me beyond certain undeniable quaint charms (e.g., Laurel and Hardy music). What's interesting to me, perhaps because I can't appreciate the Marx Brothers the way Woody Allen and so many others do, is how well it stands in as approximation of the way I feel about Woody Allen movies, and nearly as much as ever.

Even the bad ones validate ideals I hold dear—may even have learned in part absorbing Woody Allen's '70s movies—an irresistible vision of an urban lifestyle constructed around cultural markers and cityscapes, and at deeper levels identity, and ultimately alienation. Life, this self-absorbed and conflicted Woody Allen view seems to tell us, is about emotional connections, the rejection of commerce, and privilege, in about equal proportions. Or, as he puts it in Annie Hall, the world can be divided into the horrible and the miserable, and the best any of us can hope for is to be among the miserable. Which, in turn, is itself eternally belied by the easygoing roll and tumble of Woody Allen's jokes and situations, second nature by the time of Hannah and Her Sisters, enabling him in fact to pull off the rather remarkable stunt that I think distinguishes it.