Hyperion (1989)

The first in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos cycle of four novels won a Hugo and sits on many lists of best science fiction all-time. It did not entirely live up to the hype for me. I admit the structure is ambitious and even impressive. Lifting from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 15th-century Middle English Canterbury Tales (as noted often), it is about a group of pilgrims making a sojourn to the mysterious planet Hyperion on a specific mission. To pass the time on the long space voyage they take turns telling stories about their relations to Hyperion, whose features include the mostly unexplained but tantalizing and evocative “Time Tombs” as well as the god-like figure that appears to guard them, known as the Shrike. Along the way there is a lot of world-building about humanity in approximately the 28th century CE. Simmons has set himself a huge balancing act, between the states of technology and human politics against the background of a federation of hundreds of settled planets, on the one hand, along with many hundreds more designated for the “Outback,” i.e., not part of the so-called Hegemony, and, on the other hand, details about Hyperion and the pilgrims. The main story of the mission is barely here. The individual, novella-length stories of the pilgrims range from slightly better than humdrum all the way up to very good. Most reviewers seem to love the priest’s story best, and the scholar’s tale is also pretty good. Hyperion is stuffed with intriguing SF ideas, from time dilation to effects of faster-than-light travel to the Time Tombs and the Shrike. Little comes of the mission here, but I understand that’s covered in the next novel, The Fall of Hyperion. Some like it even more, but many others don’t, and no one seems to care much for the last two (Endymion and The Rise of Endymion). I am curious, however, to know what comes of the mission, so I may get to the second. I’ve read one of Simmons’s horror novels, Carrion Comfort, also from 1989 (he’s a bit of a prolific genre polyglot) and thought it was pretty good. Still, Hyperion came in as slightly disappointing for me—nicely done, but only half a job. This is part of my problem with series in general. Hyperion is not really finished in most ways, anticipating further novels. The setup is for a mission and we’re left hanging on that. The individual tales vary quite a bit in terms of quality. The people who say The Fall of Hyperion is good had better be right, that’s all I have to say.

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

Batman (1989)

USA / UK, 126 minutes

Director: Tim Burton

Writers: Bob Kane, Sam Hamm, Warren Skaaren

Photography: Roger Pratt

Music: Danny Elfman, Prince

Editor: Ray Lovejoy

Cast: Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Kim Basinger, Robert Wuhl, Pat Hingle, Billy Dee Williams, Michael Gough, Jack Palance, Jerry Hall, Tracey Walter, Lee Wallace, Hugo Blick

Director Tim Burton’s Batman was not the first Batman movie. Two were made in the 1940s and of course we can’t forget the 1966 extravaganza with Adam West, Burt Ward, Lee Meriwether, Cesar Romero, and all the rest. But this Batman was the first after Frank Miller’s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, which returned Batman to his vaguely sick and dark creature of the night origins, nursing traumas and taking retribution as he could out of the hides of criminals. Miller’s Batman was not vaguely sick. He was explicitly sick. He needed to be put away, old and bitter and beginning to fail physically, committed only to the vigilante ethic. Compare Marvel’s Punisher.

The Miller treatment turned out to be a big hit. When word came that a movie was being made, it was the kind of Batman we were hoping for. But I don’t believe anyone making a Batman movie has yet matched Miller’s vision. What, you want an NC-17 Batman? Full disclosure, yes, but that’s me and even I know how unlikely it is to happen. Burton was a good enough choice, with his own quirky style that often flirts with the dark side (Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Corpse Bride, etc.). The problem was that Burton’s instincts tend equally toward the cartoony and the loony (Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Ed Wood, Mars Attacks!, etc.). It’s not grim enough for the Batman a lot of us were looking for.

Oranges & Lemons (1989)

After these 50+ years I think we all find trying to define “psychedelic” like the six blind men and the elephant. XTC arguably hit their lysergic trails in the mid-‘80s, when principals Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding, and Dave Gregory formed a side band, the Dukes of Stratosphear, who released two albums in 1985 and 1987 (25 O’Clock and Psonic Psunspot). They found their sources in Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play” and Tomorrow’s “My White Bicycle,” the side of psychedelic with short songs, trippy lyrics, and child-like scenes. Because of the timing, it seems likely the Dukes were inspired at least in part by the ongoing so-called Paisley Underground, a California-based neo-psychedelic moment in the ‘80s featuring such acts as the Bangles, the Dream Syndicate, Green on Red, the Rain Parade, the Three O’Clock, and others. Between the two Dukes albums came XTC’s Skylarking, produced by Todd Rundgren, which is fairly classed as psychedelic itself. But Partridge and Rundgren reportedly chafed in the studio on that one—though it is considered by many to be the single best XTC album—and it’s possible Partridge & co. saw Oranges & Lemons as a kind of makeup corrective opportunity. Or maybe, as the band’s second double-LP after English Settlement, it’s a dumping ground at large for another of their bigger tranches of musical ideas. The album looks and sounds to me like Peter Max and the Beatles circa Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour. In a year that saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coming of Stone Roses, Oranges & Lemons fit, but it also felt more awkward and mannered. It’s explicitly the buoyant, colorful side of psychedelic. Not entirely innocent—album opener “Garden of Earthly Delights” winks broadly with the lines “Just don’t hurt nobody / ‘less of course they ask you.” But, in general, the word is: playful, thy name is Oranges & Lemons. It might have benefited from a trimmed-down 40-minute version (like some other or many other XTC releases), but it does have good stuff, and when it came my way at some point between the earthquake World Series and the Berlin Wall it was approximately just what the doctor ordered. Now it seems to me less psychedelic, when you take it closely song by song, and more just an XTC goof with the usual ups and downs and perhaps little agreement about which is which. So keep it shaggy and long—that’s psychedelic too. Some curious details here (scrutinizing synchronicity also psychedelic): three consecutive songs on the vinyl side 1 (bearing in mind I knew the album and I bet most do as an hour-long CD) put political offices in their titles: “Mayor of Simpleton,” “King for a Day,” and “Here Comes President Kill Again” (which, despite harking to LBJ and/or CIA black ops, still feels playful—paranoia as just another goof). Perhaps more strained, “Poor Skeleton Steps Out” and “Scarecrow People,” separated by “One of the Millions” on side 2, lend some vibe of Washington Irving and a cartoony version of an already cartoony 19th-century American horror. “Across This Antheap” has a notably solid groove. “Pink Thing” is another libertine note that makes me go hmmm. I seem to hear a lot of Beatles every time I play Oranges & Lemons lately, and it’s hit and miss, but, as with most XTC albums, there’s a lot to unpack here.

Dekalog (1989)

Poland / West Germany, 572 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz

Photography: Piotr Sobocinski, Witold Adamek, Jacek Blawut, Slawomir Idziak, Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz, Edward Klosinski, Dariusz Kuc, Krzysztof Pakulski, Wieslaw Zdort

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Ewa Smal
Cast: Artur Barcis, Olgierd Lukaszewicz, Olaf Lubaszenko, Aleksander Bardini, Krystyna Janda, Piotr Machalica, Jan Tesarz, Stanislaw Gawlik, Krzysztof Kumor, Katarzyna Piwowarczyk, Maciej Szary

Maybe the best thing director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski ever did—though admittedly it has stiff competition—Dekalog is more properly a TV miniseries, which aired in Poland in 1989. It consists of 10 episodes of about an hour each. Each one riffs on one of the 10 Commandments, in order. But don’t dwell too much on the biblical side of this, because apparently there are versioning problems even with the freaking 10 Commandments. In fact, most of their representations here are knotty oblique stories of moral imperatives and moral difficulties. They move slow and meditative, like a lot of European art cinema, but these characters and their situations tend to stick. The relation of each plotline to its likely respective Commandment is not always easy to make out. Though these dramas arguably weaken toward the later episodes, they are all the stuff of after-viewing pie and coffee discussion.

I should note that the cast list above only shows people who were in more than one episode, many in very minor parts, rather than the numerous stars of each, who are uniformly excellent. Among other things, Dekalog is an actor’s showcase with a lot of Polish players who are more familiar the more Polish cinema you’ve seen. I don’t have the space for them all—there are literally at least two or three great performances in each episode. Most of the people I listed above are more like the connective tissue of Dekalog, which frankly is not that strong. Glancing plot points resurface in other episodes, but they are scattered and often very slight. All the characters live in the same brutalist-style apartment complex in Warsaw. Occasionally others from another episode wander by or their story is directly if briefly retold. These stories, each one, are richly dense and it’s not hard to spend 10 days or two weeks or longer on Dekalog.

New York (1989)

Judging from Wikipedia and possibly faulty memory, the conventional wisdom on Lou Reed's 15th solo album is that the lyrics are brilliant and the accompanying music pro forma at best. "Reed's straightforward rock and roll sound on this album was unusual for the time and along with other releases such as Graham Parker's The Mona Lisa's Sister presaged a back-to-basics turn in mainstream rock music," the Wiki article notes, going on, "Conversely, the lyrics through the 14 songs are profuse and carefully woven, making New York Reed's most overtly conceptual album since the early 1970s." Strange comparisons abound—maybe someone with another view needs to chip in some further insights. The article also mentions John Cougar Mellencamp, of all people, scoffing that "it sounds like it was produced by an eighth grader," adding, "but I like it." While quick and dirty roundups of internet opinion don't seem to deride the music as much, they use the word "literary" much more frequently than I am used to seeing in album writeups. It is the continuing, dominating theme of reviews.

And it's basically the opposite of my own reaction, notably on the lyrics. For me, New York suffers a problem that is similar to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." If you listen carefully to the Springsteen song, it is sensitive and thoughtful on the plight of Vietnam veterans returning to the US. However, if you don't listen carefully, it sounds enough like jingoism that GOP politicians have had to be warned for years with cease-and-desist notices to keep it out of their rallies. In a similar way there are lots of lines and bits in New York that jump out at me as get-off-my-lawn stuff with all the easy carping: hitting with "the statue of bigotry" (which my brain keeps insisting is a mispronunciation, "Statue of Libitree," for some unclear effect, maybe dialect?), reaching for Moby-Dick gravitas on "Last Great American Whale" and finishing it with the old "stick a fork in them" gag, and just generally ripe with insights like "Spittin' in the wind comes back at ya twice as hard." The album closer, "Dime Store Mystery," seems to want to have a pie and coffee discussion about the movie The Last Temptation of Christ. The main track that lost me was "Dirty Blvd.," which was more or less the signifying "hit" of the album and which sounds to me—again on loose listening—like an old person complaining about young people and This City Has Gone to Hell.

Rules of Prey (1989)

I mostly enjoyed this police procedural thriller by John Sandford, another mass market paperback I had lying around, but I'm not about to start on the whole freaking series. They have been coming literally every year since this and I'm not even kidding: Shadow Prey, Eyes of Prey, Silent Prey, Winter Prey, Night Prey, Mind Prey, all the way to #31 in 2021, Ocean Prey, with #32 Righteous Prey scheduled for later this year. When you're on brand, stick with it. Ride this horse home. And why not? Sandford is good. It's standard thriller fare, with a rogue police investigator, a brilliantly methodical serial killer, and beautiful women of various body types. But Sandford—already a Pulitzer-winning journalist in the '80s as John Camp—is aces at putting one of these together. It'll keep you up all night, on the edge of your seat, page-turner, etc. I picked it up originally mostly for the scenery—it's set in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. The scenery is not bad, reminded me of home, but there could have been more. It made me think of reading J.A. Jance's hardboiled detective novels for the Seattle scenery. The scenery in Jance is better, but Sandford is better at writing a thriller. Rules of Prey is more focused on the case at hand, which is all neatly put together. The sexism along the way is as rote as it is ripe. You might like to think this kind of stuff didn't sell in 1989 but you would be wrong evidently. Our rogue investigator and star of the series Lucas Davenport is an inveterate wick dipper among his many other familiar manly attributes. The gals all eat it up in this hothouse fantasy. OK, is what it is, etc. I have more problem with the "copaganda" side, which dogs all police procedurals up to and including The Wire and beyond. Yes, a serial killer as heinous as this one—"maddog" by name, lowercase, which I like not least because it is "goddam" spelled backwards—does not particularly "deserve to live." Maybe yes, maybe no, but no matter how we feel about that, a cop has no right to decide the issue, as Davenport does here (oops, was that really a spoiler?), with many readers no doubt cheering along, including me to some degree. I mean, this is a real bad guy. But it's still playing for the cheap seats, no matter how skillfully the rest is put together, and that makes it copaganda and so does the incidental rapiness. If you can overlook those aspects, I can see where Sandford and the Prey series could become addictive.

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

Ball the Wall (1989)

This collection of pieces and excerpts by Nik Cohn seems just slightly ahead of its time from its subtitle, Nik Cohn in the Age of Rock, as few were prepared to see "the Age of Rock" as finite in 1989, or anyway I wasn't, more fool me. Cohn always did seem to be living a few years ahead of the rest of us—in some ways so far ahead of his time his parents haven't even met yet, as the old joke goes. Cohn is also an outrageous fabricator and this collection includes perhaps his greatest in "Another Saturday Night," published originally in New York magazine in 1976 as "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" and going on to serve as the basis for the movie Saturday Night Fever. Cohn made the whole thing up. He was living in the US by then (probably New York) but the story was based on his experience clubbing in London in the '60s. I struggled with most of the fiction here (explicitly fiction, that is) but I think that is more about the general inadequacy of novel excerpts, which are rarely satisfying as they are neither stories nor novels. The longest excerpt as such is from the formally nonfiction Rock From the Beginning (under the original Little Richard shout title, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom). There's some shrewd editing here to sharpen the pieces from that book and they are worth looking at even if you already know it. Elsewise, he has a great term for early '70s pop in "Pepsi," along with a great example in the B.J. Thomas "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" interlude in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. "Pepsi" is perfect for the early '70s. Cohn's British origins and age give him a particularly interesting view on "pop" specifically, a somewhat more old-fashioned view of it that transcended music and included fashion and arty movies and sports figures too. And I think no one else could go to New York in the '70s and decide to write about the street drag-racing and stock-car circuit there. There's an interesting long piece here about fashion too, "Today There Are No Gentlemen," which sorts out the clothing styles and how it all worked with the Mods and Rockers, basically Cohn's home turf (fictional or otherwise). Pretty good collection!

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

Heart-Shaped World (1989)

I've never been able to get a handle on Chris Isaak exactly. The bruised rootsy James Dean approach is generally palatable and even convincing enough, though sometimes perhaps too much so, verging on shtick. You can play this one too much. Revisiting Heart-Shaped World recently reminded me more than anything of time lost in coffeeshops with posers—Starbucks, specifically, where I believe I once purchased Isaak's next album San Francisco Days. Remember when Starbucks used to sell albums? What a franchise. Heart-Shaped World includes Isaak's biggest hit in "Wicked Game" (which topped out at #6 in 1991). An instrumental version made it into David Lynch's movie Wild at Heart and later Isaak got a plum role in Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me as FBI Special Agent Chester Desmond. My problem with "Wicked Game," which is suitably moody on the subject of unrequited love or something like it, starts with the way he chose to blur the word "love" in the chorus into the word "lust": "No, I don't wanna fall in luhh - sss / With you." It's just too cute by half, a big broad wink, as if the singer knows he's too good-looking ever to be rejected and desperately wants you to know it too. The longing hurt is just another pose in the coffeeshop after all. This guy doesn't fall in love, he falls in lust, passing sexual infatuation. It's the stoic and the agony of cool. Isaak almost has the chops to put as much ache into his vocal as Roy Orbison himself. But that's one way he comes up short of Orbison—there are enough tells to know his singer doesn't mean it. Isaak's brand of star appeal goes directly to Elvis Presley as much as James Dean or Orbison, of course. Men are hurt in love in Elvis songs too, you call tell by the trembling lip, but actually no, not really. Elvis, always, is above the mess—it's one of the things that made him fat. For these guys it's either about sex or mothers and Isaak sadly does not have that range, as his mother rarely if ever comes up. I'm carping a lot but Heart-Shaped World (and San Francisco Days too, for that matter) often plays sweet and easy and can give a room a glow. It's quite an attractive surface but maybe only a surface.

In a Sentimental Mood (1989)

I don't plan on making a habit of this, but I was back at the Amazon review salt mines to help get a bead on this Dr. John album from the late '80s. As an early version of a bona fide rock star taking on the Tin Pan Alley American songbook, with some reverence (I guess Willie Nelson was first? and then Linda Ronstadt?), this album has always basically won me over, ups, downs, and all. But I see I am out of step with many of the Amazon reviewers, who tend to single out the opening-track duet with Rickie Lee Jones, "Makin' Whoopee." The song later appeared in the movie Sleepless in Seattle, which even I can't believe I still haven't seen. But, in a word: No. For me, it's one of the bigger sequencing mistakes in album history, up there with Bruce Springsteen starting Born in the U.S.A. with that album's worst song. That case might be slightly worse because it's also the title song. But "Makin' Whoopee" is close, a cloying tribute to hammy 1920s innuendo that is approximately 90% cringe. Yes, OK, sentimental mood means nostalgia, and December is a good month for indulging sentimental music, but "Makin' Whoopee" is a rubicon I can't quite cross. You might feel the same here about, for example, "My Buddy" (like "Makin' Whoopee" a collaboration between songwriters Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson), a tender ballad that reliably works on me, especially when I think about cats and dogs I've known. I hope the point where we can all agree is in the mostly instrumental workups of "Love for Sale" and especially the title song, which remind us that the piano was Dr. John's main instrument when all is said and done, a student of Professor Longhair and master in his own right. He bangs it with finesse, restrained power, and joy, carrying the tracks to winning crescendos. The Duke Ellington collaboration "In a Sentimental Mood" is simply gorgeous, featuring the orchestral arrangements that dominate these tracks. I've always been more agnostic on strings than some of the naysayers of the '60s era—ultimately I was OK with B.B. King's turn to them, for example—but I note the pervasive presence on this album as it may be a deal breaker for many. Cole Porter's "Love for Sale," by contrast, has more of the uptempo boogie-woogie feel, which suits the song and Dr. John's bumptious play. The surging horn charts by Marty Paich on the bridge remind me weirdly of something I can't quite put my finger on from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. It might be "More Than a Woman" or some other song, but I think it's David Shire's "Manhattan Skyline." At least it's a good excuse to point to that oft-overlooked silky high point of the soundtrack album, and while I'm at it to encourage everyone sometime to get to Shire's masterpiece movie soundtrack, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, one of the best in the '70s and a pretty good gritty New York City crime movie too. Dr. John, In a Sentimental Mood—oh yes, where was I? Pretty good album if you can take the sucrose levels. High points, low points. This one's got it all. Enjoy with wine.

Divine Invasions (1989)

I probably should have gotten to Lawrence Sutin's biography of Philip K. Dick sooner, if only to help direct my little reading program. This biography appears to be well-researched and certainly has a good deal of sympathy and understanding for Dick's work. Dick is one of those artists like William Faulkner who was both so prolific and so consistent that no one really agrees on his single best, though a handful of titles show up regularly: The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, Ubik, you-pick, etc. I have been flailing around looking into any Dick titles I see endorsed by anyone, which led me to more arguably minor work, such as Dr. Bloodmoney or The Zap Gun or some of the stories. At the same time, I missed no fewer than four of the 11 titles Sutin says are essential, including VALIS (which I must admit I've foundered on a few times). I'll be trying to get to them eventually. As a biography, Divine Invasions performs the usual service of pinning down data points and clarifying the life and the work. Things I did not know: Dick hated his mother, was married four times, and never took hallucinogens much. In his relationships with women, in fact, he comes across as a creep—a contemptible one even. So it goes. Most biographies reveal feet of clay one way or another. On the other hand, it sounds like Dick was even more of a high-IQ genius than I thought, reading widely in modern and ancient texts, including in Latin and German. I was a little dismayed to find out how religious he was, even more or less conventionally Christian, though it wasn't entirely surprising, except maybe the Christianity. I was less interested in his psychology and ideas anyway, and more in his work strategies. There's plenty of everything in Sutin's biography, and I was particularly happy to extend my reading list as I came to implicitly trust Sutin. Then I went to the wilds of the internet to assay the opinion wilderness. It is particularly rich and confusing when it comes to Dick and not much less so on which of the half-dozen or so biographies are best. Dick had a way of reaching lots of people in lots of different ways. Sutin's book is invaluable at taking a crack at organizing it all and is generally acknowledged as the most encompassing, objective, and accurate. In a way, I'm still trying to figure out what appeals to me about Dick in the first place. I used to think it was the hallucinogenic weirdness and certainly that's part of it. But read enough Dick and that side starts to feel more mechanical, even rote. I found myself landing on The Man in the High Castle as my idea of the best—though it's marred slightly by too-busy weird elements, it's less so than many of his most lauded. The one thing I think everyone agrees on, including Sutin, is that no one has yet got to the bottom of Dick, and no one may ever. He is a moving target forever.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"Dog Heaven" (1989)

Read story by Stephanie Vaughn online.

Stephanie Vaughn's story is more along the lines of a reminiscence, but she makes it work by paradoxical yet resonant language and a fearless use of baldly sentimental figures. It's called "Dog Heaven" because a dog who is dead at the time of writing figures prominently. It's a childhood memory so obviously there are children too. The unnamed first-person narrator remembers 25 years earlier when she was in 7th grade. Her best friend is a boy named Sparky. They learn how to induce fainting as a game. They run for student government positions. It takes place on a military base in the '60s, when nuclear war was a fevered worry. The dog is named Duke and he's a big friendly guy, and smart too. I like the way Vaughn describes his barking, as during one of their fainting games: "Whenever I knocked out, I came to on the grass with the dog barking, yelping, crouching, crying for help. 'Wake up! Wake up!' he seemed to say. 'Do you know your name? Do you know your name? My name is Duke! My name is Duke!'" Vaughn somehow establishes an ironic distance yet indulges things like putting words in the mouths of animals. And somehow it works. My first time reading it I was mostly interested in the dog story, and found the strange locutions more something to push through. "Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again," the story starts. Going back through it again, they became more the points to linger on. We saw in Tess Gallagher's "The Lover of Horses" the idea that destiny chooses us, not the other way round, and there's a similar inside-out take going on here. The narrator is like a dream that her memories have. The memories are real. She is ethereal. Something like that. This works most for me with the dog, where the emotional pull is hardest. But I played a fainting game like she describes when I was in 7th grade too. And I know the sense of chapters in life now disappeared, but whose memories still haunt. I think that's something like what she is getting at here. It's remarkable for me how the story seems to unfold and deepen further every time I go through it.

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

"Rules of the Game" (1989)

Read story by Amy Tan online.

It has been a long time since I read Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club, which I recall as mostly a single long piece—actually, I remembered it as a memoir. But the real distinction appears to be between novel and collection of stories, in which case I remember it as a novel. But this is in a story anthology and apparently taken as a stand-alone, so OK. It's about a girl who learns at a young age that she has a gift for chess, and how that complicates her relationship with her mother, and her understanding of life as the daughter of first-generation Chinese immigrants growing up in San Francisco. I'm not sure how I would take "Rules of the Game" without knowing about The Joy Luck Club, but it felt to me like a fragment from something larger. The bigger point is the girl's relationship with her mother, which is touched on here but more peripherally. The story is told first-person by the daughter as a grown woman, and it's particularly good on the reveries of going deeply into a game. When a person has a knack for something, often the most important things occurring in the head, or the brain, don't translate well verbally. There's a learning process happening, but it's very hard to describe, and almost has to be approached indirectly. Here that is evoked wonderfully in the names of chess strategies she learns from an older Chinese man: the Double Attack From East and West Shores ... Throwing Stones on the Drowning Man ... the Sudden Meeting of the Clan ... the Surprise From the Sleeping General, and more. Tan's language is always clear and propulsive, a pleasure to read. But I recall the relationship with the narrator's mother as infinitely more developed than what's here, and even in stunted form it's by far the most interesting element in this story. But the story also has many other good points. The way Tan renders the mother's dialect is wonderful, sharp and evocative. The narrator's Americanized voice makes a good contrast. There's nothing so new or innovative about the story it tells of the rifts between generations in a family of immigrants. But it's done so well I want more—not least, because I know there is more. My recommendation is that you just go read The Joy Luck Club.

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

Tokyo Rose (1989)

More tall tales from the slush pile: Van Dyke Parks's fifth solo album came home with me in a stack of other undesirables from the office of an alternative newsweekly nearly 30 years ago. It has ended up sticking with me through the years in spite of the winsome highly orchestrated saccharine surface, which often makes it sound closer to a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. To be clear, I don't consider sounding like a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta to be a good thing—I've had lifelong problems with Nilsson for similar reasons (Harpers Bizarre too, but no one seems to care about them anymore). But I do like Tokyo Rose. For one thing, if it makes like Gilbert & Sullivan it also shrugs off nostalgia explicitly at many surprising points and goes for the sharply political instead, as in "Trade War," which namechecks Ronald Reagan as it addresses the absurdities in the '80s between Japan and the US: "As is mentioned in the Bible / Nations tend to what is tribal / Across the ocean white with foam / Spend your dollars here at home." In fact, Tokyo Rose, from title to final track, works the cross-cultural currents of Japan and the US at deepest levels, which is signaled in the album opener, the only song here not written by Parks, the patriotic chestnut "America" fitted out with Japanese musical strategies. (Parks leaves Madame Butterfly alone, whose earth had been so wonderfully scorched by Malcolm McLaren just a few years earlier.) Tokyo Rose closes on one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard about baseball, "One Home Run," which by contrast is practically nothing but nostalgia, even as it lands on one more unique connecting point between the nations. It bears suggestive remnants of "Casey at the Bat," Joe DiMaggio, Sadaharu Oh, and all the aesthetic satisfactions of the geometrically displayed game, including the crack of the bat. But what ultimately sells me on this set is the usual expedient of hooks: "Yankee Go Home" and "Cowboy," for example, swell to irresistible singalong moments as their titles emerge, and "White Chrysanthemum" is positively inspired with its lonely cornet. I came to know Tokyo Rose first by 20-minute album sides, but now even that seems a little concentrated and I enjoy it more sprinkled into mixes with other artists. Even then, the peculiar '60s commercial sound may take getting used to. What else can I say? Nobody else wanted it so I gave it a home.

"Wickedness" (1989)

Story by Ron Hansen not available online.

Ron Hansen's story is not a short story in any conventional sense but more a collection of anecdotes involving a terrible blizzard in Nebraska in 1888. He describes the way the storm intersects with many different people, each separated by a line break. It's powerful stuff and it's all in the details. Along the way he notices how the temperature falls from 30 degrees to 14-below in a matter of hours. So much snow falls that some people can leave their homes only via their roofs. Visibility grows so poor that one woman leaves her home, disappears, and is not discovered again until spring, only a few feet from her door. It's a wonderful and harrowing collection of incidents, many of them shedding acute light on the people attempting to deal with the storm. A teacher, for example, tries to lead two of her students to her home—they live too far to get to their own. But the three are lost even in the short distance to her home. They take shelter in a haystack, but the teacher can't save the children from dying of exposure. Her feet have been so badly frozen they must be amputated. She is so bitter about it that she lets her health get even worse, until finally the town takes up a collection to send her to Oakland, California, where she complains about Nebraska for the rest of her life. This is one of the longer anecdotes in the story, and one of the best examples of how sharply drawn so many of these characters are. The teacher responds heroically, because it is her only choice, and she pays for it with a daunting trauma. But her heart is hardly pure and her end is not that surprising. That's a lot of what makes this a really great story. The character portraits are necessarily pithy (some no longer than a paragraph or two) but they are rich and complex, finding human beings acting in all their manifold ways and with distinct motivations good and bad, even as the calamity descends: stoic, enduring, bearing horrific privations, with horrific results, nursing ancient resentments against one another, and experiencing unexpected joys. All of everything seems to be somehow packed into this. The story ends on a beautiful note of someone callow getting lucky on that day, after so many others found the opposite. For one incident in one place in one time—a momentous incident, it's true, a tremendous blizzard—this story grows to become at least as big as that storm, by simply piling on with the details. A great one.

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

Lullaby (1989)

At this point, perhaps, is where I can begin to remember how I come to tire of the many, many books in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain. Not that there's anything glaringly the matter with Lullaby, which might be exactly the problem. It's good enough—mostly one case, but with others percolating along as well, plus a good bit on Eileen Burke's personal life. If this were the first in the series that I'd read recently, rather than about the 31st, I might like it better. (It is #41 in the series.) Among his many strengths, McBain is good at constructing mystery plots. This one involves the murder and rape of a babysitter (with a knife still stuck in the body when it was discovered, of course) and the smothering death of the infant she was sitting. The detectives look here, the detectives look there. As usual, Steve Carella has the starring role, assisted this time by Meyer Meyer. Bert Kling also appears working on a case that involves drug gang dealings, featuring Jamaican, Chinese, and Colombian warlords. And I like (cautiously) the drift of the Eileen Burke thread, as she is attempting to recover from a rape on the job, detailed in the previous novel in the series, Tricks. I will probably continue saying until I decide to stop reading him again that I've had more than enough of the knives and the raping. The thudding repetitiousness of these elements is starting to make me feel a little like a dupe. I had to give up John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels for much the same reason. The depictions of the treatment of women and the violence and cruelty just get to be too pervasive. Sure, Travis McGee and most of the 87th Precinct detectives are upstanding men who would never do such things, but it's always happening around them, which finally leads you to conclude rather unpleasantly that the element in common to all this mayhem is the author of the books. But I'm not quite there yet, and McBain's strengths still outweigh enough the flaws. I love his chatty, free-flowing language, unspooling all the events but often charming with digressions and unexpected observations. The characters are comfortable like favorite old clothes, more than 30 years into the series. I noticed with some bemusement that he happened to mention Roger Havilland in passing here, a character who was killed off when the series was still new and it was the '50s. That's some depth of continuity, man.

In case it's not at the library.

Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989)

Barbara Ehrenreich's late-'80s meditations on the foibles of the American middle class from the '50s to the '80s is arguably badly dated now. In many ways it put me in a foul, depressed mood simply because so many of the worst trends she identified have only worsened, metastasized, in the 20+ years since it was published: irrational public policies toward poverty, work, money, family, and moral values, along with the ongoing debasement by right-wing politics. It's all here. Even income inequality, which she makes a good case was getting pretty bad in the late '80s, has only worsened by orders of magnitude. It's apparent that the American wealthy have been playing a very shrewd long game, and that they are still. It is so bad that it is tempting to say simply that they have won, that they have won and the rest of us can all go home now and accept our crumbs. But the Charlie Brown in me sees perpetual shoots and leaves in things such as last fall's election cycle, which in spite of everything was tremendously satisfying, however momentary. Back in 1989, Ehrenreich was getting into Nixon's politics of resentment. She doesn't call it that, but it's the familiar idea of siphoning away the blue-collar working class from the professional middle class and pitting the two groups against one another on culture-values issues such as welfare and feminism. The pendulum will swing back again, I'm convinced of that (provided we can survive as a species)—the pendulum always swings back. But the difference between now and the last time we were in such unbalanced circumstances, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, is that now we don't necessarily have the equivalents of fascists on the right and communists on the left to force cooperation from the wealthy. Sadly enough, it looks to me like we will now have to go all the way through all those gyrations again. And I'm probably too old now to witness it anyway. So the high point in my lifetime in terms of public policy is likely to remain approximately 1972. A book like this, which so carefully and artfully (and outdatedly) dissects how we approached that point and sailed through it and went on to ignore all the historical lessons that led up to it ... well, it's useful enough one way or another, I suppose. But it's also extremely painful. </craven self-pity>

In case it's not at the library.

The Little Mermaid (1989)

USA, 83 minutes
Directors: Ron Clements, John Musker
Writers: John Musker, Ron Clements, Hans Christian Andersen, Howard Ashman, Gerrit Graham, Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell
Art direction: Michael Peraza Jr., Donald Towns
Music: Alan Menken
Editor: Mark A. Hester
Cast/voices of: Jodi Benson, Pat Carroll, Samuel E. Wright, Buddy Hackett, Rene Auberjonois, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Paddi Edwards, Jason Marin, Kenneth Mars, Edie McClurg, Will Ryan, Ben Wright

The Little Mermaid is likely best known today as the picture that launched the Disney Renaissance, marking a return to form for the studio of a certain level of charm and brio. Following the deaths of co-founders Walt and Roy Disney in the '60s and '70s, the company had spent years wandering the deserts of mediocrity. After The Little Mermaid would come Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and many others through the '90s, most of them massive moneymakers. It may be tempting to locate the start of any such renaissance back one year, to the studio's collaboration with Steven Spielberg in 1988 on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In many ways, that's the picture that restored interest among mainstream audiences in feature-length animated entertainment (or semi-animated, as it mixes live action with the cartoons). But Roger Rabbit, for all its many impressive virtues, is hardly in the Disney style.

That would be the job of The Little Mermaid. No doubt there are volumes of behind-the-scenes corporate backstory to this movie, involving industry players, gutsy business calls, and various career-making and -breaking maneuvers. It's also easy enough to pick out various elements and call "formula"—yet another princess story based on yet another Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, yet another musical, and, as always, damnably cute more than 70% of the time. But in the end that's incidental to what ended up on the screen. In the watching, The Little Mermaid is one of those happy accidents where all pieces fall together and the result is something close to an ideal, achieved seemingly effortlessly.

Do the Right Thing (1989)

USA, 120 minutes
Director/writer: Spike Lee
Photography: Ernest R. Dickerson
Music: Bill Lee
Editor: Barry Alexander Brown
Cast: Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, John Turturro, Richard Edson, Rosie Perez, Joie Lee, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Giancarlo Esposito, Bill Nunn, Roger Guenveur Smith, John Savage, Samuel L. Jackson, Paul Benjamin, Frankie Faison, Robin Harris, Martin Lawrence, Frank Vincent

It's very possible that I overrate Spike Lee's third major feature. This makes the third time I've written about it one way or another for this blog in the past couple years and I haven't written about anything else by him and, in fact, I still need to see a lot of his pictures that people recommend. Somehow I keep coming back to this one and finding new things in it all the time, from the extraordinary work of its soundtrack, drawing on vast sources of African American music, to smaller pieces of it, such as the fluid court and spark occurring between Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) and The Mayor (Ossie Davis), or the powerful performance of Dee in the final scenes.

It remains what it intends to be first and foremost, with great power: a penetrating diagram of the development and execution of a race riot, which takes place on a baking hot day in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City, USA. A good deal of its power, in fact, derives purely from this laser focus. Seen again, it only becomes more apparent how carefully it is put together. All the myriad tiny factors that contribute to the conflagration at the end are systematically identified, defined, laid out, put on display: the simmering hot day with no relief, the brewing complexities of resentment among the characters, the sense of boredom and desperation and hopelessness. Yet it is always full of strange byways and surprises.

Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

#19: Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Van Sant, 1989)

Gus Van Sant has made a number of pictures worth seeing—certainly To Die For, Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester, and Elephant, which Phil already mentioned—along with a bunch of clunkers and interesting failures (the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho is among the most bizarre projects by anyone in the past 20 years). But Drugstore Cowboy remains my favorite and nothing else by him has ever come close. Maybe it's something about 1989—Spike Lee also released the only movie by him that I love without qualification that year, Do the Right Thing. Steven Soderbergh and Sex, Lies, and Videotape looked like another parallel until Soderbergh started getting his ship righted in the late '90s.

Drugstore Cowboy has a little something to offer everyone—nostalgia for the post-'60s hangover, a satisfying dramatic story, a nicely ambiguous ending, great language woven all through, and some fun caper turns—but what I like about it best is how it manages to be anti-drug without getting preachy and at the same time perfectly straightforward and convincing about the appeal of the life in the first place. For all the pathetic low-life qualities evinced in the clip at the link, everything you need to know about why anyone would get involved in a life of drugs is nicely detailed there.

The Mekons Rock 'n' Roll (1989)

When I say The Mekons Rock 'n' Roll is my favorite album by the Mekons, I should probably also mention there may be some wild-hair element in that of latent hometown boosterism, as the Twin/Tone label, gateway drug to Twin Cities '70s and '80s punk-rock and home of the Replacements, Suburbs, and Curtiss A, among others, had a hand in this getting out, "by arrangement with A&M Records, which continues to manufacture and distribute the CD." This came fourth in line for the label after it had put out a few earlier lesser efforts of the mid- and late '80s, such as Honky Tonkin' and Original Sin—the Mekons, as I feel like I keep saying, was not only at its peak in this period but incredibly prolific as well. And it was a particularly awesome experience to put this on, worried it might be the community-theater kind of effort of which any local label is capable (and no doubt already guilty as well), not to mention the Mekons by design lived and breathed imminent self-destruction, self-immolation, and/or melting down to the center of the earth, a point, sadly enough, if they only knew, the children, oh the children, that is fated to be achieved sooner or later just in the nature of things. And there and then in that moment had my socks knocked absolutely right off by the roar. Yeah, rock 'n' roll. Which only meant an interesting new type of same old element, because the punkism and the country were still there, only receded into a landscape getting impressively complex and just plain impressively impressive. If I didn't know better I would call this an unprecedented second crossroads album. It's a lot of the usual shambolics, verse-chorus-verse clinging to life by force of will and the band playing it that way too, but—and maybe this goes to the pervasive influence that the sensation Sonic Youth was causing at the time—there's a consciousness of a deliberate texturing of sound I had not heard before in the Mekons. Nothing overt, just things one hears in the way they play with suddenly so much more clarity, in the definition of the arrangements (or the recording) and band interactions, tighter and more choreographed and more satisfying on playing loud and listening levels. "Memphis, Egypt" is where it starts—that's the one that gets your attention at 29 seconds in—and "When Darkness Falls" ends it on a whimper. In between it is so much bruising bliss. The titles tell: "Club Mekon," "Only Darkness Has the Power," "Empire of the Senseless," totally epic in "Amnesia," all episodes of Heironymous Bosch drunker after hours in saloon. And so forth. I'm not saying the urge to be in a rock 'n' roll pantheon is the best impulse any rock 'n' roll band ever had. I'm saying the Mekons played and sweated and earned their way into it. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, are you getting this?