“Dead Air” (1988)

There’s not much information online about Gregory Nicoll, author of this longish story, which has intriguing points—namely, rock ‘n’ roll and Jack the Ripper—in a fast-moving tale set in an isolated broadcasting building late at night. The DJ, Mary Clark, is new to the job but seems to be pretty good at it. It’s a classic rock station, so she’s playing things like a Blue Oyster Cult “superset” (we’re told that means at least four songs). The DJ from the previous night was named Mary Kelly, which is close to Mary Jane Kelly, the last victim of Jack the Ripper. The Ripper connection is strained. Really, the whole thing barely hangs together. Time dilates and a lot can happen in the space of a minute or two. The DJ and indeed the story are busy with incident and motion, not entirely believable. It’s influenced by a lot of Stephen King tricks designed to scare or thrill, lots of action and anxious interior dialogue. On the rock ‘n’ roll side it’s attempting to bring in Screaming Lord Sutch, a self-consciously outrageous British rocker of the early ‘60s under direct influence of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Among other things Sutch wrote a song called “Jack the Ripper” and also adopted a stage persona as Jack the Ripper. Here the song is referred to as “The Hands of Jack the Ripper” and it’s nearly 10 minutes long, which does not appear to be factual. This is thus another story suggesting that Jack the Ripper is some kind of immortal being. It appears that the radio station manager, Bert, is him, even as the story reaches its screaming climax. I like a lot of the elements here, but somehow the whole misfires for me. I was distracted by its strange sense of time, which felt like Nicoll trying to pack too much action into too little time more than an intentional effect. I wasn’t convinced the story knew what it wanted from rock ‘n’ roll or Jack the Ripper, except to invoke them for effect. They are there not so much to scare as to give the story a modern-day gloss. But I might be complaining too much. The story has flaws, it may not all add up, but it’s still a fun one to read.

The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII, ed. Karl Edward Wagner
Story not available online.

Galaxie 500, “Tugboat” (1988)

[listen up!]

Even as metaphor I’m not sure at all what this song is about, so I take it at face value. The singer doesn’t want to be at your party, he doesn’t want to talk to your friends, he doesn’t want to vote for your president. He just wants to be your tugboat captain. It’s a place he’d like to be, x12. It’s a place he’d be happy, x4. The internet tells me it’s all a reference to the Velvet Underground’s guitarist, Sterling Morrison, who worked on and captained tugboats in Houston in the ‘70s and ‘80s, while studying for his PhD in medieval literature, specializing in the work of the 9th-century poet Cynewulf. Maybe—1988 was a certain peak time to glorify the VU. But now we have gone well afield of this mystifying and strangely alluring Galaxie 500 track. The singer’s words make little sense, but they flash with feeling. He really seems to mean it. Pressure from a souring relationship? That has usually been when I don’t want to be at their party, talk with their friends, vote for their president. At nearly four minutes “Tugboat” affords room for the meditative noise the Galaxie 500 trio specialized in. The second-half jam may be the part of the song to pay the most attention to. It’s certainly one to drift through. From a softly strummed acoustic guitar to the plaintive and beautiful notes picked out of an electric guitar and then the yelping, “Tugboat” sets out on the oceanic currents of its own creation. Dean Wareham’s lead guitar steps away from the melodic hook, withdrawing into its own thoughts as the volume level slowly rises and the mush of the gentle noise envelops us, with the moody singer’s quixotic declarations still ringing figuratively in our ears.

Quinn’s Book (1988)

The fourth novel in William Kennedy’s Albany cycle is fairly called a doozy. The opening scene, which describes a natural disaster, is insanely vivid and the tale at hand proceeds from there, with drowning victims recovered and a resurrection scene so over the top all you can really do is laugh. Daniel Quinn is there as a young teenager and he saves Maud Fallon, equally young, from drowning. She begs him to steal her away from her guardian, a sex worker and stage performer and her aunt with her own oddball retinue in tow. The rest of the novel never quite lives up to this amazing opening, but the glow lasts all the way. The incident takes place in 1849 and we stay with this motley group for about a year, before the novel shifts into the wartime future of 1864, with a brief stop in 1858, mostly in flashback. I was 100% on the side of Quinn and Maud but alas things don’t always go the way you’d like or expect. Some tantalizing details, such as a mysterious shiny disc recovered from its concealment at the bottom of a birdcage, never seem to amount to anything. Maybe this disc appears elsewhere and is explained in the cycle? For that matter, as familiar as the name Quinn is from the first three novels (Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and Ironweed) I don’t remember the circumstances and couldn’t find anything on the internet about him. Ironweed won all the awards and attention for Kennedy and his Albany cycle of novels, but I liked Legs more and Quinn’s Book might be even better. Kennedy is one of those writers who loves language and writing and his own voice, so he tends to be a pleasure to read no matter what. He’s even making up words my kindle dictionary doesn’t know, though their meanings are always plain from context. In many ways this feels like what you’d get if J.D. Salinger wrote Blood Meridian. I love the 19th-century setting—including, of course, as it must, the Civil War—even though the sensibility driving it is thoroughly late 20th century. I was worried for Fenimore Cooper’s stultifying voice, given his tales could well have taken place in upstate New York. But Quinn’s Book is way better than any Cooper I know. My advice, if you like Kennedy, is don’t stop with Ironweed.

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

Another Woman (1988)

USA, 81 minutes

Director/writer: Woody Allen

Photography: Sven Nykvist

Music: Erik Satie, Woody Allen’s record collection

Editor: Susan E. Morse

Cast: Gena Rowlands, Ian Holm, Gene Hackman, Sandy Dennis, Mia Farrow, Blythe Danner, Betty Buckley, Martha Plimpton, John Houseman, Harris Yulin, Frances Conroy

Director and writer Woody Allen’s movie about the bourgeois in New York City entering their 50s is surprisingly very good. I suspect a good deal of that, especially nowadays with his reputation in shreds, is because this is one of his rare movies in which he does not appear. It doesn’t hurt that the cast is stellar: Gena Rowlands and Gene Hackman are excellent, as usual. Others—Betty Buckley, Sandy Dennis, John Houseman—have small roles but make the most of them. I also got a kick out of seeing a youthful Frances Conroy, who went on to the TV series Six Feet Under more than 10 years later.

It's still a Woody Allen movie, specifically in his “serious” key, aping the greats of European cinema, usually Ingmar Bergman. For Another Woman he hired cinematographer Sven Nykvist, hailing from the Bergman stable (Scenes From a Marriage, Fanny and Alexander, Cries & Whispers). He throws a coat of brown / golden / sepia over the proceedings, which gives the picture an aura of something from the past. This was their first collaboration, but Woody and Nykvist ended up working on a few more films together. Another Woman draws on the reminiscing structure and wistful, nostalgic notes of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries with an interestingly complicated scenario. Gena Rowlands is Marion Post, a tenured professor of German philosophy who reads Rilke for pleasure. Her life has reached a point where it suddenly falls apart.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

Tonari no Totoro, Japan, 86 minutes

Director/writer: Hayao Miyazaki

Photography: Mark Henley (English version), Hisao Shirai

Music: Joe Hisaishi

Editor: Takeshi Seyama

Cast/voices (English version): Dakota Fanning, Elle Fanning, Tim Daly, Pat Carroll, Lea Salonga, Frank Walker, Paul Butcher

My Neighbor Totoro, a Studio Ghibli production written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke), has been steadily growing in critical regard over the nearly 40 years since its release. Entering the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? in the lower echelons of the top 500, My Neighbor Totoro has risen steadily since then to its present position at #161. It is well ahead of another Ghibli movie released the same year, Grave of the Fireflies, which is presently at #462. That’s nearly that movie’s high point on the list, when it leapt up from #750. I think Grave of the Fireflies is the better picture overall—I tend to give extra points to movies that make me cry as hard as it does—but it's easy enough to see why Totoro is the more beloved picture.

I’m not even sure Grave of the Fireflies is entirely suitable for kids in the first place, whereas Totoro most assuredly is. It’s a gentle fantasy that focuses on two sisters, Satsuki age 10 and Mei age 4, and it’s emotionally grounded the way old ‘60s US sitcoms used to do it—the mother is mostly offstage, either dead or, as in this case, in the hospital with an unexplained, long-term, and possibly life-threatening condition. She’s supposed to be home soon, but this family has heard that before. The father is an archeology professor who moves the family to the country to be closer to the hospital. He’s a great Dad, always in a good mood and trying to help his kids any way he can, but his job is demanding even without the single-parent pressures. Fortunately, the neighbors in their new digs are supportive, helpful—and unusual.

“The Great God Pan” (1988)

M. John Harrison is an out-there horror writer worth reading but this story is unfortunately way too coy about any relationship it has to Arthur Machen’s original of the same title. The connection appears to be more metaphorical, but in both stories we find people are fooling around with forces of nature they don’t understand (and/or underestimate) and they get hurt. How exactly they are hurt, at least in this story, is less clear. I had my problems with the Machen the first time I read it, which of course has a reputation as one of the greatest horror stories ever written. That is less the case for Harrison and this story, though Harrison has an exemplary reputation of his own to sustain. Too much is hinted at here for my taste and not enough explained (I know I also complain about too much explanation in other stories). The primary special effect—a vision in the passageway near a kitchen—is not bad but it’s not enough. I’m filing this under the “restrained horror” label but that might not be the right term. Reading between the lines, extraordinary things are happening here. I just wish more of it was in the lines. What we know: it’s present-day (late ‘80s) and a group of four are still feeling the effects of an experiment they conducted 20 years earlier, in the late ‘60s. They’re all basically PTSD one way or another. Harrison quite likely might have talked about it more if PTSD had been more current then, or maybe it was and he was being subtle. My problem with this story is that it’s too subtle—all background setting, no foreground action. In horror, nibbling at the edges is often considered a way of implying enormity and vast unknowns. Machen’s original is where I coined the term “furniture-moving” for stories that position large and simple plot points consecutively. See also H.P. Lovecraft. Another feature of horror is that people often “go mad” from the things they’ve seen and experienced. Harrison is doing these things and trying to be artful about it. Instead it comes out too often as vague. Though Harrison has denied it as such, his story is critically dependent on familiarity with the Machen story and exists as a kind of homage. Take away that title—Pan is silent and invisible in this story, not even his name appearing—and work with what we have here and we’d have to call it something like “These Things That Happen” (from Harrison’s collection titled Things That Never Happen) or maybe “Ann’s Story,” after the character who loses her mind. I’m not trying very hard here, but the point is that the Machen story illuminates this one, which in turn, to be fair, illuminates the Machen, albeit feebly. E.F. Benson, M.R. James, and Saki have better Pan stories, something of a fad among horror publishers at the turn of the 20th century. They are vividly immediate, which may be the quality most lacking here. It gets to some nice details and images and suggestions of ideas, but it probably needed to work a little more closely with the furniture-moving model. I mean, I just wish Harrison had given us more information.

The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII, ed. Karl Edward Wagner (out of print)
Story not available online.

“Fruiting Bodies” (1988)

Brian Lumley’s effectively unpleasant story is first one up in a Year’s Best anthology edited by Karl Edward Wagner. The steady and patient way the story unfolds reminds me in many ways of Wagner’s own stories (such as the rightly famous “Sticks”)—and even more of work by H.P. Lovecraft, using a version of his dense language to ratchet tensions slowly and deliberately. I also see a connection to Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla,” with ships bringing in the horror somehow from overseas (in this case, of course, Haiti, source of all that is terrifying in the European imagination). Lumley has some fanciful ideas about dry rot, which I don’t think have much to do with reality. But that’s OK. The story is mainly set atop the cliffs of an English seaside town that is crumbling away. The cliffs have been giving way slowly for decades to the steady pounding of the ocean, losing ground at the rate of six or seven feet per year on average. The town is almost entirely gone now, with only a few decrepit shacks remaining, along with a lonely and strange old man still living there. The kind of decay described, along with Lumley’s take on dry rot, contribute to a mood of grinding despair, ultimately making it a nice piece in the world-building self-consciously “weird” vein. A churchyard cemetery is being taken by the ocean after the church itself. The garrulous old man is a widower with his own obsession about dry rot. His wife died as part of the town’s own death. The “fruiting bodies,” which we get to in due time, are part of the process of decay. It’s suitably repulsive when finally encountered. This dry rot “thing,” which appears to grow like a cross between mushrooms and brambles, is classified here as fungus, an element of nature with lots of weird biological properties when you look into it. (William Hope Hodgson, another likely influence, also wrote a good story about fungus, “The Voice in the Night.”) The old guy explains some of the situation. But he’s not exactly reliable either. This strange character might be the most obvious element lifted from Lovecraft in a tale that moves slowly but comes to life with a slow-burn vengeance. “Fruiting Bodies” first appeared in a late-‘80s incarnation of the venerated Weird Tales magazine. It has the Weird Tales world views locked in. Lumley is a worthy inheritor of the Lovecraft style, and this story might be as good a place as any to start with him.

The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII, ed. Karl Edward Wagner (out of print)
Listen to story online.

Libra (1988)

I was hoping to like Don DeLillo’s 10th novel (and nominee for a National Book Award) more than I actually did. It reminded me of three things that all came later: director and cowriter Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, Norman Mailer’s lengthy journalistic account of Lee Harvey Oswald in his 1995 Oswald’s Tale, and Stephen King’s 2011 science fiction novel 11/22/63. In all cases the author (or auteur) marinated for years or decades in JFK assassination lore, with all its tantalizing red herrings, and then regurgitated a unified field theory of just what happened, more or less. Libra is among the early versions of this exercise, favoring the sinister CIA bloc of theorists. It’s early enough that it predates what has evolved into the before and after debunking of Gerald Posner’s Case Closed in 1993, which I still haven’t read. I know it says something about me that I know the others and not that one. DeLillo focuses more on Oswald, tracking his youth and his time in Russia and after. His assassination attempt on conservative activist Edwin Walker is here, his marriage to the Russian Marina, his travels from Dallas to New Orleans back and forth, his mysterious street activities. George de Mohrenschildt. David Ferrie. Guy Banister. All here. Jack Ruby too. And finally November 22. Such strange characters populating this murky submerged historical scene. I probably should have read Libra sooner. I’m sure it was revelatory in its time and fascinating as one of the first and best of its kind (the overheated paranoid kind). It has lost some of that by now, and honestly that’s probably more me than the novel. Although I will say, having previously slogged through Underworld, it may simply be that I don’t get along well with DeLillo’s writing, which is discursive and suggestive unto the death. I would recommend it as part of any plunge into the JFK assassination mythos, maybe even one place to start. Of the four I’m talking about here, I like Oswald’s Tale best and then 11/22/63. I haven’t seen Stone’s JFK since it was new. I suspect it might grate more now but I remember it as entertaining and think it could well be so still. As for Libra, I think it gets Oswald right, which would have been harder to do without the KGB transcripts Mailer had access to. But Libra, at this juncture, even as fiction, might be a little too open to amorphous conspiracy theories.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

7. Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation (1988)

[2007 review here]

I agree Daydream Nation only makes it by the skin of its teeth into a countdown of psychedelic albums. No one, not even Jim DeRogatis, seems to see Sonic Youth that way. Wikipedia as usual flails with the shotgun approach: noise rock, alternative rock, avant-rock, indie rock, art punk, postpunk (each term with an article defining it). Fair enough! I’ll opt for postpunk for the sake of convention, but don’t miss the extreme, mind-bending counterpoints of this album. That’s what makes it psychedelic for me. The music is churning and raw—may take some getting used to—but the cover, the painting Candle (Kerze) by the German painter Gerhard Richter, is suitable for propping up against the wall for meditation sessions when you’re out of candles. It’s one of the most peaceful album covers I’ve ever seen and it is what drew me to it in the first place (after giving up on the band circa 1985). The title offers another arching spectrum, suggesting on the one hand the qualities of the strange tunings, the electric guitar acoustics studies, and the distanced furies in “Daydream,” but even more importantly suggesting, in “Nation,” the oceanic currents in which this band willfully loses itself. But this is an odd kind of postpunk ocean, perhaps more like a vast and unexpected inland sea. Daydream Nation works best for me—works extremely well—in limited, regular doses. The double-LP vinyl release was how I knew it and I generally took it one side at a time. I wouldn’t want to call them suites. This is not Tales From Topographic Oceans by Yes, which never worked for me let alone as oceanic. Yet in a way that is how Daydream Nation operates. These little sets and blasts of electric guitars to the brain alternate vocalists / lyricists among Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo (who sounds so much like Moore in a slightly different register that I didn’t notice for years, sort of like Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins). I took the album one side at a time. Or on the headphones for walking, picking it up and putting it down most days. The CD generally proved too long for me to go all at one gulp, even with shuffle—it tends to fight too much with other albums, for one thing. Lately I have listened to it on repeat, 30 to 50 minutes at a time, picking up where I left off, and that works well too. Like the candle on the cover that burns with steady flame, there is something very still at the center of Daydream Nation—within the lengthier tracks themselves (“Teen Age Riot,” 6:57; “’Cross the Breeze,” 7:00; “Total Trash,” 7:33) or in the album taken as a whole with some of its shorter pieces. Though I loved all the sides it was side 3 that called to me most often and still does, with nothing longer than 5:00. The two Ranaldo songs (all music on all tracks credited to the band collectively), “Hey Joni” and “Rain King,” are showcases for the way the band itself can feel like it has turned into a lurching monster rearing up across a cityscape, destroying buildings. Thurston Moore’s “Candle” bids to be the soul of the album. The 2:41 “Providence” is a montage of random low-fi piano tinkling, an amplifier humming, and answering machine messages from Mike Watt, which altogether suggest, among other things, that drugs were involved with the making of this album. Really, the whole thing, you know I have to say it: PLAY LOUD.

Slow Turning (1988)

The Wikipedia article for John Hiatt’s ninth album offers such a basic and even admirably composed microcosm of his career that I am taking the easy way out and quoting at length: “[Slow Turning] provided Hiatt's only significant radio hit with the title track [although it didn’t make any Billboard Top 40]. The single ‘Slow Turning’ was also featured in the 2002 motion picture drama The Rookie which starred Dennis Quaid. ‘Feels Like Rain’ was later covered by Buddy Guy on an album of the same name and was featured in the 2004 Kate Hudson movie Raising Helen. Aaron Neville also covered ‘Feels Like Rain’ on his 1991 album Warm Your Heart. ‘Drive South’ became a No. 2 country hit for Suzy Bogguss in early 1993. ‘Icy Blue Heart’ was covered by Emmylou Harris on her 1989 album Bluebird, with backing vocals by Bonnie Raitt, and was covered later by Linda Ronstadt on her 1998 album We Ran. Ilse DeLange recorded ‘It'll Come To You’ and ‘Feels Like Rain’ on her live album Dear John. During the barroom scene in the film Thelma and Louise, the band is playing ‘Tennessee Plates’ (Charlie Sexton recorded the song for the soundtrack album).” Hiatt has made a career of writing songs that others record and once in a while having small hits with his own recordings of them. The album closer on Slow Turning, “Feels Like Rain,” comes up a lot in the list above and was my favorite on recent visits, moody and beautiful and introspective. But the whole album was a pleasure for me in 1988 and it still is. The album opener “Drive South” is a great start to a road trip and the whole album is a good soundtrack for one too. Take it all the way. I used to go back and forth with a friend over which Hiatt album was best, Slow Turning or Bring the Family. I stumped for Bring the Family, and would still, but there’s no question Slow Turning is another great set and one I have ended up spending significant time with. Half the songs at least have pedigrees of being covered by artists we know, as you can see, and/or finding their way into movies we also know. Don’t be surprised. If you’re going to buy any two John Hiatt albums, make Slow Turning your second. Or let me know if you’ve got any more good ones.

"What Dreams May Come" (1988)

I like this story by Brad Strickland quite a bit. I thought of Robert Aickman, who often turns to the dream aether and is not above carnival settings either. The story trucks in a lot of tried and true elements of dreamland that often devolve into cliché. Why did this one work on me? Is it really a matter of mood? I don't think so, but that's one of those general things I would like to figure out. A man is standing at a roller-coaster ride waiting for his daughter and her friend. Another man approaches him and they have a bizarre conversation. "Do you dream?" the strange man says. "Dream of pleasant things?" The father has a compulsion to talk to him about dreams. They talk briefly and it feels portentous, especially when the stranger touches him, taking his shoulder briefly. The father appears to be divorced, or separated from his wife, though they are both still involved as parents. Then it's August, the following month, when the father's terrible dreams begin. In the dream he finds himself committing a despicable crime. The next day he feels sick when he learns the friend of his daughter at the roller-coaster has been murdered in her bed by an intruder. The crime sounds like his dream, but he was in another city at the time. It couldn't have been him. And so it goes. He keeps having bad dreams and they keep happening in real life and it's always impossible for him to have done them. A lot of stuff is handled just right in this story, such as the touch on the shoulder in the original encounter. In a careful throwaway aside, we learn the man who touched him probably committed suicide some time after. Thus the horrible way forward appears to be that you can pass the curse on to another, but you're never entirely free of it psychologically, something like the ruling conceit in the movie It Follows. I love how simple this story is: bad dreams. That's it. Yet so dreadful are they that the only rational response may be suicide. In the haunted father's interior dialogue, he imagines he is responsible for the murders even though it is impossible. He imagines it is a demon inside him that escapes at night. That might be it too, but the genius of this story is that it really doesn't matter what it is. Simply that it exists, whatever it is, is the terrible thing.

The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII, ed. Karl Edward Wagner (out of print)
Story not available online.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

USA / UK, 104 minutes

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Writers: Gary K. Wolf, Jeffrey Price, Peter S. Seaman, Ted Osborne, Ali Taliaferro

Photography: Dean Cundey

Music: Alan Silvestri

Editor: Arthur Schmidt

Cast: Bob Hoskins, Charles Fleischer, Kathleen Turner, Stubby Kaye, Christopher Lloyd, Joanna Cassidy, Amy Irving, Lou Hirsch, Mel Blanc, June Foray

Who Framed Roger Rabbit deserves a fair amount of credit along with Studio Ghibli for launching this golden age of animated feature movies in which we now live. No point going into the doldrums that animation suffered from the 1960s on, when cost-cutting and merchandising to the death was the name of the game. Whatever anyone thinks of its entertainment value now—my take is that it holds up remarkably well—Roger Rabbit came along and shook things up, making the case an animated or mixed live action picture could do bank and win Oscars. In the name of nostalgia as much as anything it loaded up with vintage greats, from Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny to Donald and Daffy Duck, along with Betty Boop, Yosemite Sam, Droopy Dog, Woody Woodpecker, and many others. They're all part of the extravaganza—for once, money was no object in making an animated picture.

I am also struck by how it works an idea that Frank Miller and Alan Moore were playing with over in the comic book world at about the same time: what if, in the 1930s and 1940s, superheroes were real—what would they be like? Just so, Roger Rabbit imagines a world where a "toon" is a life form with specific properties living in the world with us. Because of what cartoons are and can do, the result is infinitely more surreal than anything anyone got to in the comic books with superheroes. Roger Rabbit can be surprisingly disturbing right down on the profound levels, like the best surrealism, particularly Toontown proper, a neighborhood in Los Angeles. It doesn't hurt, of course, that executive producer Steven Spielberg was on board this project with his production company, which in turn brought in one of Spielberg's most gifted proteges to direct, Robert Zemeckis, a special effects aficionado with a knack for making his movies work like finely tuned clocks (Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future).

Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 (1988)

I chronically associate the "supergroup" idea with albums featuring long jams by players such as Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. But Wikipedia sez those guys are merely the source of the term when they made an album in 1968 with Stephen Stills called Super Session. The crowd-sourced encyclopedia goes on to list examples of supergroups: Cream, Led Zeppelin (!), Crosby, Stills (him again), Nash & Young, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, etc., etc., all the way unto SSAK3 last year. Fair enough, fair enough. The supergroup that the Traveling Wilburys most resembles to me is Blind Faith, with a consortium of mostly well-established if disparate players and one amazing album. I know the Wilburys have a second album, called Vol. 3 (to baffle the completists, hyuk-hyuk), but stick with me.

My instinctive resistance to supergroup projects was locked in by 1988. From the outside this looked like the usual half-baked collision of over-the-hill celebrity and tender egos and my inclination was to skip it. But at some point I saw it for cheap somewhere and thought I really oughta. The album hit me like the work of supergroups in the other sense of the term (e.g., the Beatles and the Stones) and I have been a partisan ever since. The experience was reminiscent for me, and remains so, speaking of those supergroups, of bringing Beatles albums home for the first time back in the wayback. The first sensation is pure pleasure followed by playing it a lot. In the first days and weeks with these albums you don't even particularly sort out what's good and what's better and why, you just listen to them every day, sometimes multiple times, cramming it all the way down to the brainstem until you can hear the beginnings of the next songs in the endings of the previous. As with the Beatles, you can try picking apart the constituent elements of the Traveling Wilburys but it never seems to help much.

Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998)

France, 267 minutes, documentary
Director / writer / editor / narrator: Jean-Luc Godard
Photography: Pierre Binggeli, Hervé Duhamel
With: Alain Cuny, Sabine Azema, Serge Daney, Julie Delpy, Juliette Binoche

Probably the first thing to decide about director / everything Jean-Luc Godard's epic and deeply personal TV miniseries documentary is how you're going to look at it. It's another long one in total—four and a half hours. The first of eight parts is 52 minutes and was broadcast in 1988. The second is 42 minutes, broadcast in 1989. The next two parts, under 30 minutes each, were broadcast in 1997, and the last four in 1998. All of those are also under 30 minutes, except the eighth and last, which is 38 minutes. I don't recommend taking 10 years to look at it, to replicate the original. In fact, the way I did it the first time, a few years ago, now seems better: stick the first of two discs in the machine one day, hit "Play All," and let it roll for over two hours. Do it again the next day with the second disc. That way it's more trippy, undulating, and immersive. I could never even pick apart the individual episodes. Thinking that was somehow wrong, I wanted to be a little more rigorous for this write-up. I tried to get some sense of the integrity (or even specific point) of each episode, noted the titles and confusing numbering system, and avoided "Play All," spreading the eight pieces across three days.

That first time I saw Histoire(s) du cinéma I was surprised and delighted by the saturation of classic film clips, with memorable scenes from The Searchers, The Night of the Hunter, Bicycle Thieves, Nosferatu, etc., including a few from Godard's own pictures. They are recognizable, and often recognizable as wonderful, even as they may also be lost in the gloomy welter of other images, a muttering voiceover, floating words, clacking typewriter sounds, and editing effects such as flashing dissolves. In fact, the profusion of clips is all I remembered about it the first time. I thought that's what it mostly was. This second time I was more aware what a churning internal cerebral explosion it is, a kind of stroke event, personal and thus incoherent. I came away with the sense there was little point in even trying to separate the episodes, and this time the clips felt drowned in the rest, which actively resists understanding, a cacophony of words, literally words, and images, photographs, film clips, and some shots of Godard at work. Toward the end of Histoire(s) du cinéma, in the eighth part, Godard articulates his aesthetic in a throwaway line. It has actually been a constant across much of his career: "This is what I like about cinema, generally speaking," he grumbles like Henry Kissinger. "A saturation of wonderful signs, that swim in the light of their lack of explanation."

Generation of Swine (1988)

I read a lot of Hunter Thompson in the '70s but that changed in the '80s. He never seemed as effective after the ascent of Ronald Reagan. In fact, a critical turning point is even documented here. As far as the "Gonzo Papers" go, Generation of Swine is not as ambitious or strong as The Great Shark Hunt, but I have a lot of regard for it anyway. It's a collection of syndicated op-ed columns he wrote for the San Francisco Examiner during Reagan's second term. As such, the pieces are of a uniform length, and pretty short—I'd guess a little short of 1,000 words each. What I like is how he manages to compress his persona down to size, preserving his maniac shtick (I know I know, everyone says it was real), but sometimes working almost poetically with the form itself of the newspaper op-ed. The first piece, for example, is covering his assistant ("Maria") getting a tattoo, obviously an exotic activity in the mid-'80s. Even in its short space you're not sure where it's going, until you do, and then it's over, though the headlong momentum lingers. Mostly Thompson is covering politics in these pieces and unfortunately for all of us he's somewhat less than prescient. At one point he predicts the Reagan Revolution would be a dim memory in 2000. Instead it was more virulent than ever—still is, in the demented Bizarro orange form. So some of Thompson's projections, 30 years later, look more like wishing. The usual vocabulary is in place—"savage," "bull fruit" (a prison term I had forgotten), "depravity," "pimps," etc.—as well as the gray area between his joking and reality. He drops Ed Bradley's name quite frequently, but I'm sure Bradley never said most of those things. I feel sad when I read Thompson nowadays. Everything has gotten so much worse than even he seemed able to imagine. The period covered here is a funny little backwater, though it contains at least one key moment, as Thompson charts it, and that is the overnight conversion of Oliver North in 1987. First he was a skulking criminal (there's another Thompson term) about to take the Reagan administration down in scandal and then he became a hero of popular culture, simply by using his testimony to Congress to throw the now-familiar entitled white guy tantrum. See also Brett Kavanaugh. (North and everybody also had some strategic help in the ultimate cover-up of Iran-Contra by none other than Bill Barr, but I digress.) It's even possible to say North invented the tactic in a way. Fox News was not even around then. Better days, better days. But rapidly going bad. Thompson's account of hanging around in a bar watching TV news, as was his wont, seems poignant now when he realizes the yahoo salt-of-the-earths he's sousing with are on North's side. Generation of Swine has about 100 individual bursts of rapid-fire typing and some solid numbers and analysis about the period. But it certainly comes from another time than the one we live in now, and last time through I thought nostalgia was mostly what this book had to offer.

In case it's not at the library.

Patty Hearst (1988)

UK / USA, 108 minutes
Director: Paul Schrader
Writers: Patricia Hearst, Alvin Moscow, Nicholas Kazan
Photography: Bojan Bazelli
Music: Scott Johnson
Editor: Michael R. Miller
Cast: Natasha Richardson, Ving Rhames, William Forsythe, Frances Fisher, Jodi Long, Peter Kowanko, Tom O'Rourke, Gerald Gordon

The Patty Hearst story is always going to be interesting, like the Jonbenet Ramsey murder, JFK assassination, and Lizzie Borden crimes, because of a continuing sense we still don't even know exactly what happened—that it might be impossible to know, it's so slathered over now with distortions of celebrity and passing time. The crusading prosecutor in director and cowriter Paul Schrader's formally fictional treatment of Patty Hearst puts it this way: "America wants to know. Did she or didn't she? Was she or wasn't she?" The scene is a conference between lawyers, late in the movie, after the fugitive Patty Hearst has been run to ground with the remaining members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a year and a half after the kidnapping.

F. Lee Bailey and his team, representing Hearst, cannot believe prosecutors are thinking of taking the case to trial, arguing it would be an open-and-shut case of coercion in a military setting. After Bailey realizes they are serious he makes the speech that defines the problem of Patty Hearst: "How are you gonna get a fair jury? In the '60s, every parent sent their nice normal kid off to college, and bingo! It was like the kid got kidnapped by the counterculture. Turned into a commie and said screw you to society and his parents. Lived in a commune and had free sex with Negroes and homosexuals. They think Patty did the same thing." To which the crusading prosecutor (Tom O'Rourke) responds: "Didn't she?"

"A Romantic Weekend" (1988)

Story by Mary Gaitskill not available online.

This story comes from Mary Gaitskill's first collection, Bad Behavior, and it's more overt about the sexual kink she often writes about, BDSM, a complicated acronym you should look up for further tediously detailed discussion. Told third-person omniscient, "A Romantic Weekend" goes inside the heads of both its characters, an unnamed man who calls himself a sadist, and Beth, his mistress for the time being (he is married), who calls herself a masochist. Among other things, the story has a firm grip on the terrible foibles of these relationships, which come of projection, incoherence, and other poor interpersonal skills. "What do you want to do?" Beth asks the man during their all-night flight on the weekend trip in question. "I can't just come out and tell you," he says. "It would ruin it." And therein lies a primary rub of sexual relationships, not just BDSM. We want our partners to just know. Explaining things spoils it all. At the same time, the reports Gaitskill makes from inside the man's head point to what Beth finally realizes. He is a dangerous moron. He wants to beat her, torture her—he feels like an overprivileged 14-year-old. He doesn't appear to derive any pleasure, for the most part, and what he consciously seeks is closer to a porny fantasy of snuff: "With other women whom he had been with in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that had made it easy for him to get inside them and, once there, smear himself all over their innermost territory until it was no longer theirs but his." This is a remarkable formulation of at least one projected mindset of the sadist, or top, or dom, but it's off. (All definitions are off a little in this realm.) The story seems to be straining after something much more dangerous as well, the mindset of a serial killer say, or at least sociopath. But this character's translation of it, perhaps exactly because of the malevolence, is also infantile and silly, closer to the kind of dominating that literally an infant would exert (see also: Donald Trump), which in turn is based on the humoring goodwill of its caretaker. You see how quickly it becomes so complicated. The man in this story is mostly unpleasant, particularly in his actions, and it's not long before he has completely alienated Beth. In fairness, Beth has some strange ideas herself about masochism (as do we all, ultimately, and the other way too). Neither one of these characters is very good at this. The story is not so much about BDSM but more about the treacheries of forging sexual relationships, the many places where compromise fatally undermines them. The problem of stating needs becomes an endless tiresome matter of negotiation, which ruins it. All the ways that sex comes up short, and love with it. It's not bad, but I think Gaitskill has done better elsewhere.

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

"River of Names" (1988)

Read story by Dorothy Allison online.

This story feels less like a conventional story and more like a conventional, if allusive and powerful, overture to a memoir. The title is not misleading, as the first-person narrator broods and remembers, recalling isolated incidents and people from her family of origin. There are a lot of names here. Impoverished white Southerners, they are—Allison reportedly was motivated to this and the larger work it's part of, a collection of stories called Trash, by disparaging remarks she found in a review of a book by a writer she admired. They are telling tales from lives of horror stories: incest, abuse, drunkenness, and way too many children. We know these elements well, not least in part because of work such as this, which stood up and insisted on the existence of reality. That was necessary once—it's always necessary, but was much more urgent even 30 years ago (though in this election year, it must be said, it could once again become urgent). Another element in this story, which was first drafted many years before it was published in 1988, is Allison declaring her lesbian sexuality, which is accomplished by shifts in the narrative to an ongoing intimate conversation with her partner Jesse about her past. Jesse has enjoyed a more privileged life, and is just slightly callous about the narrator's experience. The narrator is never named, which also contributes to the feeling of a memoir, where such information is a given (and not a device). The open declaration of her sexuality feels a little dated too. We know better, not well enough yet but better, that these things happen: both the abuses, and the grappling with sexuality. In the '80s, they were still very nearly taboo topics, so Allison's story was doing other work, attempting to break down barriers that have to be broken down. More than anything the story makes me sad, for the events and vulnerabilities disclosed in the narrative, and for the necessity of such a blunt approach. You can feel Allison, the writer, struggling to redeem herself through the shame of her experience. The shame is what's felt most viscerally here. The experiences were horrible and had to be horrible to live through—that's there in the severity and multiplicity of the horrible events she recounts, or refers to, and all those many names. Allison is glancing and flitting across the surface of a vast ocean of pain. And there's so much surface to it, stretching all the way to the horizon, the myriads of detail, she's not even concerned much yet with the depths that must lie below. It's a fathomless story this set of fragments implies, a place that can drown you.

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

Trash by Dorothy Allison

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

Hotaru no haka, Japan, 89 minutes
Director: Isao Takahata
Writers: Akiyuki Nosaka, Isao Takahata
Production design: Ryoichi Sato
Art direction: Nizou Yamamoto
Music: Michio Mamiya
Editor: Takeshi Seyama
Cast/voices (English version): Rhoda Chrosite, J. Robert Spencer, Amy Jones, Veronica Taylor

Currently ranked at #110 on the user-voted list of the IMDb Top 250, with an average rating of 8.3/10 as of this writing, I suspect Grave of the Fireflies needs little introduction. Conceived originally as the historical/educational half of a double feature and paired with another early and popular effort from Studio Ghibli, My Neighbor Totoro—yes, the two could only be seen in the company of one another in their original release—Grave of the Fireflies has since gone on to occupy its unique position in cinema and animation history as one of the saddest and most powerful features of its kind. Nothing comes close unless you start to consider live-action pictures and even there it stacks up pretty well.

I like it too. The temptation always is simply to erupt with superlatives, but in terms of its cultural impact I'm not sure it can be overstated. Without Grave of the Fireflies you don't get the incinerator scene in Toy Story 3, for one example (or, also from Pixar, the first 10 minutes of Up). The closest analogue might be Art Spiegelman's Maus, which similarly took a vastly underestimated medium (comic books, as opposed to cartoon features) and made practically unprecedented strides in legitimizing it once and for all. Interestingly, they both accomplished this feat by grounding their stories in that great legitimizer of the 20th century, World War II.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1988)

Robert Cray's follow-up to Strong Persuader is a pretty good album, and the follow-up to that, 1990's Midnight Stroll, is not bad either, though I admit that's about where I stopped following along so closely. It's arguable that the public at large did not and does not think any such thing. In fact, nothing ever again came close to the success of Strong Persuader, which even produced a #22 hit in 1987 with "Smoking Gun." More than anything, that says something depressing about the commercial prospects of blues beyond an occasional novelty breakthrough, but that's not news to anyone at this point. Taken purely as product, I think Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is about nearly as good as it gets. There's a lot of work to do here but it's getting done: the vocals are adequate, the guitar playing is good—often outstanding, perhaps even better at its heights than Strong Persuader (the rave-up on "Across the Line," say). Most important, the songwriting is fine, still overwhelmingly concerned with lies, pain, and motel rooms, in interesting verse-chorus-verse forms and Memphis-tinged arrangements with horns. But, yeah, if I think about it enough, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is a shade off Strong Persuader, I suppose. The stories aren't quite as interesting, swinging wild too often, lurid and unlikely. The vocal lines tend to blur off into the background that they occupy in most songs, seductive chanting and melody with no particular thing to say. "Your Secret's Safe With Me," for example, starts from the narrative strains Cray can be so good at, but feels a little lazy, ultimately settling for a B-movie blackmail trope that enters territories of distractingly unpleasant. So that's a shame. But at worst these are just problems of degree. The unique strengths of Strong Persuader are what make it good—and unique. After that it's just a matter of deciding where and how comfortable you are with Cray. For me he can fit like old shoes. I keep a Cray playlist and just let it rip on occasions, and that's how I know him best now. The songs from Strong Persuader often stand out, but they aren't the only ones, and not a few of the others are located here: "I Can't Go Home," "Night Patrol, "Laugh Out Loud." Some real winners here.