“The End of the Garden” (1991)

I thought this short story by Czech author Michael Ajvaz was charming and fun. As the editors Ann & Jeff VanderMeer say in their introduction to it in the anthology The Weird, “Ajvaz comes by the ‘weirdness’ in his fiction through dark humor and absurdity.” Some credit may also need to go to translator James Naughton. There’s a precise use here of “monitor lizards,” which are better known to us (or me) as “Komodo dragons”—a big lizard species (possibly multiple species). I don’t think about them much, but yes, now that my attention is drawn to them, they’re pretty weird. Something goes off in my own lizard brain. The repetition of the term “monitor lizard” does a lot of work here, and effectively. They are at once a dream element and a point of humor, used almost rhythmically. They are all over this story, starting with a cry for help our first-person narrator hears on the street. When he enters an apartment to respond he finds a woman wrestling on the floor with a monitor lizard. He rushes to assist her until he realizes it is the monitor lizard calling for help. In the dilemma facing him—which of them to help—he invokes the philosophers Kant and Hegel. I would probably be wondering how the monitor lizard could talk, but that’s me. Ajvaz’s voice puts the story over. The narrator is some kind of innocent, but also intellectual, a kind of affable absent-minded professor raconteur. His story is interesting and we want to hear more. He goes dithering off on questions of philosophy and always returns to monitor lizards. He separates the woman from the fight. She goes to her bookcase “holding neatly arranged rows of adventure novels by Alexandre Dumas pere and Paul Feval pere,” pulls out a volume—and it is At the End of the Garden, authored by the narrator. “I have never written a book in my life,” he says. Among other things this story is a great dream tale. Absurdity is handled remarkably well, with a light and playful touch. Too often it can be thunderingly obvious. So I really liked this story. Would I like more from Ajvaz? It’s hard to say but I’m inclined to think I would because his voice and the humor are so good here. Will I seek him out? Hey, I’ve got a lot on my plate. I’d certainly be interested if more fell my way.

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

5. P.M. Dawn, Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience (1991)

[2006 review here]

The “utopian experience” on this studio-groove and sample-heavy debut album by P.M. Dawn (aka rapper Prince Be and producer DJ Minutemix) is suffused with an unmistakable melancholy, which makes it a strange and more personal trip. A brief intro yields to a faceful at full force in this laidback landscape, with “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine” setting the tone. It’s more about heartbreak and mourning a time when reality was better, but the double-jointed words lead to the alternate realities lead to the heavenly visions lead to the utopian experience. “Chase the blues away,” Prince Be raps gently. “Take your mind off reality and leave her alone.” Exalted but frequently sad, as the next track “Paper Doll” points up with its sample of “Angola, Louisiana” by Gil-Scott Heron & Brian Jackson and a deepening sadness. It is gorgeous, delivered in bruised purple tones of unknown, secret agony. It also made it to #28 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992 as a follow-on to the freak #1 “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” buried near the back of the album sequentially. “To Serenade a Rainbow,” with its whipcrack sample of Hugh Masakela, is more workmanlike than “Paper Doll,” which in this context may feel more upbeat (“Think I’m gonna fly away / I think I’m gonna fly away,” goes a refrain). It is still a declaration of love that somehow feels futile, and it is followed by “Comatose,” which takes some time getting up to speed and then proceeds like a slow-motion cartoon ambulance, with low-key samples of Sly & the Family Stone and Dr. John squawks and hollers. P.M. Dawn were connoisseurs of the vinyl crates for sure. The first half of this album resolves finally into the first single, “A Watcher’s Point of View (Don’t ‘Cha Think),” which embraces the Doobie Brothers. It goes like that all over this lovely set, occasionally escaping the gloom tinge but never getting too far from it. The biggest hit, of course, was “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” which made it to #1 for a glorious week, sampling Spandau Ballet’s “True” so boldly that it feels more like augmentation of the song than sample or cover. By this point in the album, track 9 of 13, we are deep inside the head of Prince Be and/or his fictional narrator. Our guy, in “Set Adrift,” is tripping exactly on hearing the Spandau Ballet song, which sets him spinning off on memory associations. I know how this goes—it’s a vivid experience that can still occur for me with pop music radio hits. Of the Heart, unwieldy long title and all, has always hit me as psychedelic, maybe just because the person at the center of it feels both real and disconnected from reality, set adrift in his own world. The lofty ambition of the title is absurd but sincere and thus affecting. The anguish is here but measured and precise, funneled into the flow of a larger utopian experience, which somehow feels all the more real for being so unreal, inside this guy’s head.

6. Primal Scream, Screamadelica (1991)

[2022 review here]

Hey, I am on vacation! (figuratively speaking)! But I wrote the long piece linked above just two years ago and it has approximately all I have to say about the classic, delectable psychedelic album by Primal Scream. See you next time for the start of the top 5! Yowza wowza, so on so forth.

My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless (2006)

In many ways Mike McGonigal’s entry in the 33-1/3 series feels like a template for how to do it, but I’m not sure I can put my finger on why exactly. For one thing Loveless is not so obviously a classic album, at least within the boomer frame that is inevitably a big part of this series and my own perceptions (by default if nothing else—boomer albums have just had more time to grow classic). McGonigal mixes up the structure so many of these authors take: 1) a history of the artist, and 2) the album track by track. His rundown of the songs is fast and high-level, for example, showing up in the second chapter of 17. The rest of the book does involve a history, specifically of how the album was recorded, why it took so long, and why nothing else (at the time the book was published in 2006), or very little, had been recorded and released by My Bloody Valentine since. I never saw MBV but I owned Loveless in the early ‘90s, which struck me itself as a certain template for shoegaze and maybe some aspects of grunge: a thundering bottom, on top of which floated lovely melody in the high register, ghostly, ethereal, and often quite striking, heard through cacophonies of distortion. I played it a lot. Listening again with more perspective, it’s apparent MBV was something unusual and special. It was as if they took the dynamics formulas and smeared them sideways slightly, like fingerpainting. McGonigal gets into MBV principal Kevin Shields’s use of the guitar tremolo bar, an auditory concept Shields applied to every part of the project. The lyrics are swallowed up and work more like rorschach if you’re inclined to pay attention to lyrics. The band was legendary for deafeningly loud concerts. Some of the effects McGonigal and others have described veer alarmingly close to physical damage. It often sounds like evidence of tinnitus but at the same time with spiritual overtones. I especially like the way McGonigal deals with this aspect of the album and band. He’s not overtly claiming spiritual experiences but read between the lines. He circles the album and its impact, somehow managing to keep it all straightforward, lucid, and compelling. I didn’t necessarily recognize it at the time, but there’s little question now of the status of Loveless as classic. McGonigal was among the many faithful. He almost casually, deceptively makes the case for how the album works, which is remarkable given that most words simply fall short in this kind of heady realm. This book is not necessarily as classic as the album, but it comes closer than you might think it could.

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

Slint’s Spiderland (2010)

With this title in the 33-1/3 series I was at something of a disadvantage because I didn’t know the album until about the time I read the book. In my little 33-1/3 project, I started with some of the most obvious titles and eventually settled into polling the internet at large with google searches on a periodic basis. This one by Scott Tennent has a reputation for being well-researched and written, which is true. Tennent has no Wikipedia article, but publisher Bloomsbury’s bio puts him at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a senior writer who runs a blog on the side, now apparently defunct (Pretty Goes With Pretty). Lots of names associated with Slint and Spiderland were well familiar to me: Steve Albini, Gerard Cosloy, Homestead, Touch and Go. The ‘80s indie scene in Chicago reached out and interacted with Slint’s hometown Louisville as well as mine in Minneapolis. A lot of Tennent’s work is the story of how Slint came together, by luck and happenstance in the middle of a vibrant time for, uh, post-rock. All the members of Slint played with lots of different bands, and for that matter their two albums don’t entirely even sound like the same band. They were together more or less for no more than three years, made two albums, flew apart, attempted reunions, flew apart again, made more reunions. Slint has roots in punk-rock by way of altern-America at large but they’re far more musicianly than I’d ever been led to understand. In a lot of ways it’s hard for me to believe that Albini went for this so much. Tennent does a good job telling how the band and album came together, and makes a respectable turn when he goes through the album track by track. I’m less inclined to believe him when he gets to the importance and influence of Spiderland, but maybe he's right. He uses the word “scene” a lot like I do above for small groups of people interacting obscurely, but again, this could all be true. If you’re already inclined like me to accept Albini and Husker Du and many of the other figures here as key players, then you likely know Slint and this album and how you think it all rates. I’m still trying to figure it out and appreciate a lot of the information I picked up here.

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

Screamadelica (1991)

I wandered almost sideways into one of my favorite albums of 1991, pulling Primal Scream's “Come Together” single out of a newspaper office slush pile. I was attracted by the Boomer-bait of a song that might be related to the Beatles and another, “Loaded,” that might have something to do with the Velvet Underground. As it turns out the latter has something to do with a Peter Fonda / Nancy Sinatra movie directed by Roger Corman, The Wild Angels (with Bruce Dern! Diane Ladd! Michael J. Pollard!). Mudhoney got to the quoted sample first, a few years earlier on the track “In ‘n’ Out of Grace” from their Superfuzz Bigmuff EP. “Just what is it that you want to do?” a square preacher-man is heard asking. “We wanna be free!” says Fonda. “We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that's what we're gonna do.” It’s a pretty good setup, whether you follow it with the sublime grunge squall of Mudhoney or the Manchester soul vamp of Primal Scream, decked out with a gleaming dense unassailable titanium bottom. That maxi-single was generous, with two versions of “Come Together” and three of “Loaded” and two other tracks besides. But even though “Come Together” and “Loaded” were the first two singles from the Screamadelica album at large, I would not call the horns and soul singer treatment of those tracks typical of the album, which I was introduced to later by an evangelist of all things UK. Not that there’s anything particularly typical to this album, which ranges far and wide. Or, as the totality of my notes on recent forays into Screamadelica put it: THIS ALBUM IS A JOURNEY.

It’s the third by Primal Scream but a stark turn into house and techno, led by Bobby Gillespie, who was the drummer for the Jesus and Mary Chain on Psychocandy. The third single, “Higher Than the Sun” (which also gets an eight-minute dub treatment toward the end of the album), is more the right speed here. It spends half its 3:38 on a spacewalk, free floating, with Gillespie taking the binky out to coo and warble awhile on cosmic matters. Then the drugs kick in at about the 1:48 mark and, true to the Spacemen 3 ambition of making music for the purpose, it warps into a squelching psychedelic recreation of unique proportions and pleasure. See you on the other side. In fact, “Higher Than the Sun” is a culmination of the album’s opening suite, four or five songs taking the time to set a mood, perhaps best captured in the title of the one that goes seven minutes, “Don’t Fight It, Feel It.” There’s also a remarkably evocative cover of the 13th Floor Elevators’ “Slip Inside This House.” Credit to producer Andrew Weatherall for much of these soundscapes, and credit to Gillespie for handing the reins over to him, though other producers are involved here as well: Hugo Nicolson, The Orb, Hypnotone, and (yes) Jimmy Miller. “Come Together” and “Loaded” ground the album in soul and “Damaged” has tentacles reaching into peak Rolling Stones, mainly by way of Jimmy Miller’s production. But Gillespie sounds amazingly at home there as well. The album, which clocks in well over an hour, returns to outer space for the finish. Is it the rave experience or intended to be? I don’t know, but I know I feel wrung out in all the best ways when I take the time to play the album all the way through. Stone classic.

The Double Life of Veronique (1991)

La double vie de Véronique, France / Poland / Norway, 98 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz

Photography: Slawomir Idziak

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Jacques Witta

Cast: Irene Jacob, Halina Gryglaszewska, Kalina Jedrusik, Aleksandr Bardini, Wladyslaw Kowalski, Jerzy Gudejko, Philippe Volter

The Double Life of Veronique is ultimately a bit of a puzzle box movie, but I was so smitten with it when I saw it for the first time 10 years ago that I ranked it #3 for 1991 (after Dogfight and Hearts of Darkness, see here). I thought then it could become my favorite for 1991, perhaps because it's so beloved by critics, but a recent revisit did not make me as high. I felt compelled to dive into DVD extras to get a handle on it, even reading the Jonathan Romney essay, "Through the Looking Glass," written circa 2006. I was happy to find him arguing, amidst all the rapture, that it "endure[s] as a spellbinding experience, as well as a perplexing one." Romney also quotes another critic, Nigel Andrews, who wrote: "I believe we are being hypnotized in The Double Life of Veronique.... How else to explain the ability of a French-Polish film with a nonsensical plot premise ... to enthrall and enchant us like no European film in recent history?"

The nonsensical plot premise is more or less a doppelganger story, but it spans great unknowable distances. There are two of her: Weronika in Poland, and Veronique in France, both played with zest and charisma by Irene Jacob, a glowing presence. Both of their lives are wrapped up in music one way or another and there are other parallels. Veronique actually happens to take a photo of Weronika on a trip to central Europe but never notices the photo until many years later. When one of them dies the other feels a powerful unexplained sadness. Director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski tries to explain by saying the picture "was difficult ... because it deals with things you can't name. If you do, they seem trivial and stupid"—and just so with plot summaries.

Friendly Fa$cism (1991)

Consolidated was a two-man-plus-parts consortium, a white hip-hop act headed up by Adam Sherburne and Mark Pistel out of the Bay Area in the late '80s and early '90s. They conducted open-microphone message confrontation exercises in performance. They also wrote a bunch of good songs, preaching and all, and made a few great albums or parts of albums. Their messages tend toward eco-friendly warnings with a harsh edge of impatience for stupidity, focusing often on the political and economic arguments for veganism and animal rights. Friendly Fa$cism came to my attention when it was new, and I liked the follow-up album Play More Music almost as much. The in-your-face confrontation style, along with Consolidated's surprising musicality in the melodies, beats, and production and a general air of futile self-deprecating arrogance, often remind me of Frank Zappa. The album has hilarious episodes, as audience members at the live shows get the microphone to share views and make a lot of choice comments. Sometimes they nail Consolidated for various hypocrisies and stupidities of their own, but more often they are richly making fools of themselves. One woman attempts to quote the Bible at them, saying, "The Lord God said thou shalt have dominion over the animals of the earth, he didn't say say thou shalt have dominion over a big wad of tofu." Sherburne (or maybe Pistel?) comes back, "He also said the men shall have dominion over the women, so do you believe that, do you buy that line too?" A distant voice in the crowd: "You're goddamn right!" Sherburne: "Thank you brother, you're on the next record already." These breaks are lively and entertaining and often what people remember most from hearing the album. But Friendly Fa$cism is just full of great stuff, and don't let the titles fool you. These are great songs: "Unity of Oppression," "Typical Male," "The Sexual Politics of Meat," "White American Male '91 (The Truth Hurts) Part 2," and "Music Has No Meaning" among others in a long, solid album. "College Radio" is a terrific, caustic sendup of alt-rock at the very dawn of its brief commercial domination. The fact that Friendly Fa$cism mostly still sounds so fresh is paradoxically the most depressing thing about it. It was a little early for climate change, in 1991, but we can see most of Consolidated's issues are relevant to that discussion, such as wantonly cutting down forests in South America to create grazing land for beef cattle. As usual, the hippies and all their heirs are right about everything, and as usual they are ignored. What was an issue of economics in 1991 is an issue of existence on this planet in 2021, but the back and forth sounds exactly the same. Still, you can dance your rage to Friendly Fa$cism and sing along, if so inclined, and it's often funny in a miserabilism kind of way. Check it out.

Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion I and II (2006)

Eric Weisbard's turn at the 33-1/3 plate is often fun to read but a bit too rock critic insider even for me. This essay is personal, ambitious, and ambitiously personal. His professed obsession with the mammoth mediocre Guns N' Roses drop of 1991 is eccentric and nuanced, though it's questionable whether the band or album merits that. As Weisbard sets the table and describes himself bopping across the rock critic landscape of the 1990s and 2000s, it's apparent he has specific intentions with words like "pop," "punk," and "metal." Not surprisingly, perhaps, he tends to disdain metal as beneath him even as he rushes to embrace punk. What Weisbard seems to like about GN'R and specifically Axl Rose and his various incoherent dramas is something energizing that he calls punk. I think celebrity might be the better word. As a conceit, most of this short book is specifically written before Weisbard has listened to the album again for the first time in years (as opposed to my way, spending two months with it in my shuffle playlist, where oh my brothers and sisters, it chafes). The book closes out with brief track-by-track notes on the behemoth. It's a strange way to approach an album, but then a strange way to approach is one thing the 33-1/3 series specializes in. I bet this one sounded good in proposal, a kind of memory / perception exercise. Weisbard's relationship with both the band and the album(s) is complicated—by class, by education, by the uncertainties of taste. Inevitably this book is more about Weisbard than anything else. After that it is more about celebrity than anything else, as that was the predicate for the whole Use Your Illusion ad infinitum in the first place—practically the last GN'R album, as it turned out. Weisbard is informative talking about the blockbuster album model. He seems to put the origin at Thriller whereas I would say Rumours or Tapestry, but he discusses how these albums attack commercially with a cascading array of singles, one after the other, producing hit streams (this has metastasized ludicrously on today's Billboard charts, where a new Drake album, for example, automatically earns him 15 or so spots in the Hot 100 for a week or two). However, hit streams and a blockbuster album did not really happen here. "Don't Cry" made #10 in 1991 and "November Rain" #3 in 1992. "Live and Let Die" crawled up to #33. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" did well around the world but not in the US. End of story, 30 tracks and three hours later. With the exception of the Dylan cover and maybe a few others (on all of which I am merely lukewarm) I don't care anything for this big bloated album. I admit I went to see the spectacle live in an arena in 1991—Axl got mad and ended the show early, so I got my GN'R money's worth at least. As for this 33-1/3 title I'm dutybound to say others in the series deserve to be read before it. It's working on 90% inspiration and you just can't win 'em all.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

A Brighter Summer Day (1991)

Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian, Taiwan, 237 minutes
Director: Edward Yang

Writers: Hung Hung, Mingtang Lai, Alex Yang, Edward Yang

Photography: Hui Kung Chang, Longyu Zhang

Music: Hongda Zhang

Editor: Po-Wen Chen

Cast: Chen Chang, Lisa Yang, Kuo-Chu Chang, Elaine Jin, Chuan Wang, Han Chang, Chi-tsan Wang, Lawrence Ko, Chih-Kang Tan, Alex Yang, Hung-Ming Lin

Speaking of Peak Elvis, this much-acclaimed four-hour picture from director and cowriter Edward Yang is haunted by the popular culture ghost of Elvis Presley, even taking its title from an Elvis song popular in its time setting, and incidentally one of his worst, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" The time is 1960 and 1961 and the place is Taiwan, the Chinese bastion of capitalism protected and maintained by the US since World War II. That has been basically for anti-Communist propaganda purposes, though there's a fair case for humanitarian grounds as well. It's a Westernized scene in Taiwan, as Yang has explored deeply in A Brighter Summer Day, which often feels like West Side Story with its complicated but colorful swaggering youth gang juvenile delinquent dynamics. Various individuals are going through various crises of individualism, rugged and otherwise. 

A Brighter Summer Day is also based on a sensational true-crime story from Taiwan of the time, in which a teen boy murdered a teen girl out of misplaced motivations and misogyny. So there is a lot going on here, and four hours may or may not actually be sufficient unto it, particularly given Yang's slow, methodical, and organic approach to staging his scenes and confrontations. I must say, full disclosure (and Martin Scorsese's support notwithstanding), I have never managed to connect with this movie, even if its relatively high placement on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (currently #121) has meant I've now spent about 12 hours trying. I guess everyone has a few movies like that. In fairness, I've never liked West Side Story either.

Dead Elvis (1991)

I circled back to this Greil Marcus cogitation because Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles reminded me of it. On the surface, both are similarly focused on key figures who came to an ending—Elvis died and the Beatles broke up—which amounted to little more than blips in their continuing careers. They only got bigger. Well, maybe—it's true enough on a certain level. Sheffield's book is much more recent, but more than 25 years later now it's easier to question the premise of Dead Elvis. Is Elvis finally dead now? Well, maybe—it's true enough on a certain level. In retrospect, after the rush to the 10-year anniversary of his death in 1987, Elvis mania was starting to peter out in about 1991. I'm someone who is always late to everything and thus, as evidence, I offer that I promoted my first book in 1993 by hiring two (2) Elvis Presley impersonators to accompany me to a book signing as bodyguards. I admit it was under influence of Dead Elvis. And Marcus still remains a lurking factor in the way I approach and think about cultural issues. His best work is usually about Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, or the Sex Pistols, whatever else he may formally be writing about (which is often simply them, as here). In a way, it feels like he somehow asserts critical propriety over certain artists—Lana Del Rey is shaping up to be his 21st-century project. Much of the heat I encountered my first time through Dead Elvis, when it was new, has cooled considerably. It seems more a product of its time, the late '80s, which may be approximately Peak Elvis. The book's visual exhibits all seem to come from 1988. As always Marcus's ideas are fun to grasp and toss around and he's always a good writer. If some of his insights are closer to weird, others are dead-on. This time I especially appreciated the attempt to take down Albert Goldman's biography. It was already a bestseller, but Marcus does a lot of heavy lifting for why Goldman's exercise is wrong in ways that are harmful to all of us, not just Elvis. Mostly Dead Elvis is a book about other books—on the music of Elvis, Marcus is still best in Mystery Train. But Dead Elvis can be a lot of fun too. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it feels a little more authoritative and thoughtful on Elvis than Dreaming the Beatles does on the Beatles. But they are two rather different projects after all.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Stairway to Hell (1991 / 1998)

Chuck Eddy's list of the 500 best heavy metal albums ("in the Universe," it says) is a monumental undertaking by any definition. Five hundred is a lot of anything—600, actually, because this second edition I've got updates the original list with 100 more albums released after the first edition, more or less. On one hand the book is a stone clinic in writing album reviews—from the materials of hustling freelance gigs for a dime and working zines for the outlet, this book honed Eddy's album review writing into an art form unto itself. He likely got the book contract in the first place because he'd spent much of the previous 10 years as one of the most tireless, prolific, and unique jukebox fountainheads in the annals of rock critic journalism. There was just one slight problem here. While Eddy's rampaging consumption of music made him an eclectic sponge for pop and rock music of many stripes, his taste in fact stands somewhat athwart of actual heavy metal currents. It made and still makes for some strange results, perhaps most famously putting a Teena Marie album (Emerald City) audaciously into the top 10, albeit at a judiciously modest #9, while entirely shutting out Iron Maiden and Judas Priest (from a list of 500!). The problem is not made better by Eddy's various terse put-downs and constant baiting, gleefully and cavalierly dissing hippie shibboleths as well as the intelligence of many of his review subjects and their fans too at alarmingly high rates. He's a bit of Moe to the rest of us Larry and Curly. It's no wonder they're mad in places like Amazon reviews and metal forums. He makes me mad too once in a while. He says, for example, the only worthwhile Jimi Hendrix album is one of those label-dictated cannibalized best-of jobs, but then proceeds to include most of the rest of Hendrix's catalog, including posthumous titles and albums even I don't like, though often with glancing insults. Hey man, which is it? Do you like Jimi Hendrix or not? (We know now, from a later book, that Eddy had little or no budget for this one and had to work basically with what he had on hand, which likely explains the Iron Maiden and Judas Priest MIAs. He wouldn't have liked them anyway, because he already doesn't like a lot of the albums he includes here.)

Still, if you take Eddy and Stairway to Hell on their own listy album-review terms, it's pretty impressive, mostly coherent, and often a gas to breeze through. He's plunged well into the physical pleasures of sonic assault and writes about it vividly, almost always with made-up words, e.g., "kaboomeration," that instantly make more sense than anything that overpraised lavender-suited nitwit Lewis Carroll ever came up with (as Eddy himself might observe of the British children's author). He's translating aural experience into words as well or better than anyone has ever danced about architecture. And anyone who's ever tried to be a rock critic can tell you one of the hardest parts of the job is describing the music and the experience of hearing it. He's often making it look effortless here. The book and all its referents are older now—there are lots of titles I just don't know and likely never will at this point (especially the cassette and EP releases). But as far as the eccentric picks I knew go, I had little problem with them. Prince's Purple Rain, for example, isn't only metal but it's certainly also metal. Ditto the Miles Davis picks Agharta, Pangaea, and Jack Johnson. On taste Eddy and I are widely separated, which has always been generally true. In this realm I like Motorhead, Slayer, Judas Priest, and Black Sabbath. He likes AC/DC, Def Leppard, Poison, and Guns N' Roses. He really doesn't like some of mine. I really don't like some of his. To each their own—the truth is that metal probably has about the same priority for both of us, which is not high. Stairway to Hell may be a little sour and constricted in some ways, but it can also be a blast, honestly laugh-out-loud funny like the best Three Stooges episodes, and full of amazing surges of writing.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Faceless Killers (1991)

[False start here.]

Full disclosure, my blog is littered with abandoned projects. One I've been gnawing at for some time is the police procedural, mainly in fiction but some on TV and at the movies too. Early on, because 10 years ago they were everywhere you looked, I flailed at Nordic noir in the form of Stieg Larsson's so-called (so-translated) Girl With the Dragon Tattoo novels (the first two, never made it to the third), and then the false start at Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels. Wallander is a police detective in a small city in southern Sweden, his stories set mostly in the '90s. Then an Amazon deal opened up most of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series to me in a convenient way. When I remembered the influence McBain had on Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the path to Nordic noir became more clear. As a curious aside, I saw an interview with Maj Sjöwall from about 2014 (as I recall), in which she stated flatly that she found Henning Mankell boring. I worried about that, circling back to Faceless Killers again to consider going through Mankell's 11 or so Kurt Wallander tomes. But I did not find it boring at all—in fact, it was even more interesting with its themes of immigrant tensions and hostilities. It features vigilante white nationalist groups killing immigrants, especially immigrants of color, for the sake of terror. It seemed far away and imaginary when I wrote my 2012 review and so much more starkly real now. Faceless Killers might be the one to read if you only read one. So my plan now is on to the rest of them. As a meandering point of interest, other police procedural-related items I would like to get to from there include finishing the Dragon Tattoo trilogy and its TV and movie productions, continuing with the Law & Order seasons, maybe Hill Street Blues, and eventually the Jack Webb empire, including especially Adam-12. We'll see how far I get.

In case it's not at the library.

A Scene at the Sea (1991)

Ano natsu, ichiban shizukana umi, Japan, 101 minutes
Director / writer / editor: Takeshi Kitano
Photography: Katsumi Yanagijima
Music: Joe Hisaishi
Cast: Claude Maki, Hiroko Oshima, Sabu Kawahara

For a movie that is so self-consciously about silence, A Scene at the Sea has a notably beautiful soundtrack. Director, writer, and editor Takeshi "Beat" Kitano makes the music an integral part of it. Composer Joe Hisaishi had already established himself with animated films from Studio Ghibli (My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Ponyo, and many others). With A Scene at the Sea he began a fruitful collaboration with Kitano as well (including soundtracks for Sonatine, Fireworks, and Kikujiro). It is moody keyboard synthesizer music in A Scene at the Sea, occasionally reminiscent of the Pet Shop Boys, overflowing with emotional tug points but at the same time cool and distant, like the sea vistas themselves that populate this movie so constantly. As much as anything A Scene at the Sea is a movie about watching. We spend a lot of time watching people who are watching other things, as often as not the sea itself.

Formally, it's because the two main characters—Shigeru (Claude Maki) and Takako (Hiroko Oshima)—are deaf, a boyfriend and girlfriend in their 20s who are living in a world with only visual and tactile cues. The music works as a kind of analog of their feelings. Shigeru is a garbage collector who decides one day that he wants to be a surfer. That's the narrative arc and chief point of clarity. Much of the rest of it, including what happens to them in the end, is shrouded or at least obscured by silence. No one has much to say, in other words. Kitano, who can be prone anyway to cinematic stunts inserted like fits of expressive joy, emphasizes the situation by borrowing heavily from the aesthetics of silent film. Title cards could cover all the dialogue in this movie. The way A Scene at the Sea stops and starts and moves sideways and returns again to its through-lines is like nothing so much as Sunrise or Man With a Movie Camera, luxuriating in the simplest pulses of a love story, and even more, in the pure visual.

If You Can't Live Without Me, Why Aren't You Dead Yet?! (1991)

I was sorry to hear about Cynthia Heimel's death at the age of 70 earlier this year because I'd just rescued my copy of this from a box going out the door. Purging exercises have become a regular thing for me for several years now. Heimel's book is a collection of very short pieces, most of which ran in Playboy in the late '80s and alas are not as cackling funny as I remember them. Out on the internet now Heimel is known for the titles of her books. And now I'm doing what all her reviewers do, but I'd quickly like to mention that this and Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I'm Kissing You Goodbye are my favorites. In many ways the persona that Heimel created has to be credited as a primary source for the Carrie Bradshaw character on TV's Sex and the City. I like Heimel's pondering candor about feminism, sex, and realities, but the conservative pressures of the late '80s were not easy for anyone to resist, so she is often torn in many directions as she sorts through her conflicting impulses around monogamy, family, career, and sexuality. Individual sections are devoted to "The Times," "Women," "Men," "Women and Men," and "The Writer's Life." It's not only about sex, love and relationships, but it's mostly about sex, love, and relationships. Unfortunately, it already seems a little dated if only for carrying the flag so valiantly for baby boomers. It was still arguably the flag for youth at the time, but since publication of this book the baby boomers have not acquitted themselves so well (I say this as one of them). In the leadership realm, for example, it has been Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Technically, Barack Obama is also a baby boomer, but like most of them born after 1960 he has more in common with the Gen-X crew (exemplified for me, always, in the movie Risky Business). Anyway, we're starting to know better that classifying people by such labels is divisive and we need to cut it out. I think I still felt pretty good about my generation in the late '80s too so I shouldn't hold it against her. But some of these reports, maybe even most of them, feel like details of another planet and way of life. Who are these people and what made them the way they are? For example, the two pieces about porn. In one Heimel invites a group of her guy friends over to watch porn on video. Then she does the same thing with a group of her girlfriends. My first question, which I think should be obvious, is why would anyone think watching porn is a social occasion? Even more disturbing, the guys fall in and act like it is one. They talk about it and notice points of style like it was sports. One was a self-declared blowjob connoisseur and dubbing the tapes as they watched. What in the motherfucking hell? Did such things really go on? I happen to know they are corroborated in Joe Matt's comic books but until now I had been pretty sure he was just making it all up. Live and learn. Godspeed Cynthia Heimel!

In case it's not at the library.

Harlot's Ghost (1991)

The last words in Norman Mailer's massive CIA novel are "to be continued." In many ways Harlot's Ghost does feel like just half the tale, covering activities in "the Company" from 1955 to 1963. The main focus is the Kennedy administration, primarily Cuba, the Bay of Pigs, and its aftermath. The Kennedy assassination is a convenient milestone on which to end it. But the career of the young narrator—Herrick Hubbard, though he goes by many different names—is just starting as the novel ends. Mailer had certainly figured out big tome dynamics with The Executioner's Song, and Harlot's Ghost is actually a remarkably quick and easy read. It patiently develops the skills of spying, called tradecraft, by showing Hubbard's education and work in action. Slowly, the novel turns and points into history, as the cast grows to include all manner of real people: E. Howard Hunt, Allen Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover, Marilyn Monroe, "Jack" Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Fidel Castro, William Harvey. All and more have speaking parts (if only, some of them, gleaned via surveillance transcripts). Hunt probably even qualifies as a semi-major character. By the time they show up, Mailer has established a level of authorial credibility and we accept them as all else. Hubbard goes to school, and then on to assignments in D.C., Berlin, Uruguay for several years, and ultimately (in terms of the novel) Miami and Cuba. The account of the Bay of Pigs mission is detailed and vivid, though from an unexpectedly insulated point of view. In many ways it's fair to call the novel epistolary, built primarily on correspondence and documents. Hubbard is always the author and never pretends to knowing more than he can provide evidence for. But he has lots of evidence to provide. He's often in the right place at the right time (or wrong, depending on your view), but again, Mailer establishes the ground early and well. There's a corny romance and ham-handed philosophical conceits woven inextricably into the narrative, the usual we've come to expect from Mailer in those realms. I don't know how far he made it with a second volume, if anywhere at all, but I wanted to read it right away after I finished Harlot's Ghost. That's a measure of the kind of spell he is able to cast with this great novel.

In case it's not at the library.

Law & Order, s2 (1991-1992)

If the first season of Law & Order was a little better than I expected, the second season was a little worse. I'm sure part of it is that these episodes are so well-worn now, replayed over and over in the earliest flush that dominated the rerun circuit for many years—the way I've seen most of Law & Order. They are still working to make the pieces fit in the second season. In the first episode, Max Greevey (George Dzundza) is summarily assassinated and it's hello to Phil Cerreta (Paul Sorvino) as the new partner for Mike Logan (Chris Noth). It's also hello to Dr. Elizabeth Olivet (Carolyn McCormick), who works with Logan on his grief issues and then sticks around for another 86 episodes as the resident forensic psychology consultant. There's still a lot of churn going on, casting adjustments and other trial and error shots (prosecutors Ben Stone and Paul Robinette have a vicious tennis rivalry in one episode), but the main departure from what I expected is that the themes have shifted from the explosively topical and more into clockwork studies of the procedures, especially on the legal side. Intricacies of plea bargaining and other deal-making to work the system to mutual advantages (among at least prosecutors, defendants, victims, and the press) are often on display in the episodes of this season. For the district attorney's office, the defense attorneys, and often the criminals too, the wheeling and dealing is all part of business as usual.

Again, using New York on location as the setting is pitch-perfect—so much rich character from so many different directions. Also again—and true for most of the run of the series—the incidental casting can make for entertaining rounds of face spotting, as you never know who will show up. Some people I saw (all making good): Lewis Black as a pornographer, Allison Janney, Jerry Orbach as a defense attorney, Sam Rockwell, and Eli Wallach. Both of George Costanza's parents show up, in separate episodes (Jerry Stiller and Estelle Harris). Other parts of the formula are starting to lock in. The blackout-like sequence before the titles, usually the reveal of a crime, usually ending on a snappy hard-bitten line, e.g., "Education. It's a wonderful thing." Cragen (Dann Florek), who supervises the detectives, gets lots of great lines too. Or the ritual arrest and reading of the rights at the midway point, followed by an arraignment after the break. The plots are starting to get more twisty. You're not always sure where a case is headed, or what crime the trial will end up being about, as investigations develop. They're already unafraid to go to some wild places. The topicality may be toned down, but it's still there, if not yet as crisp and sharp as it will become—or was, in the first season. The show is still in a process of becoming in this season, and has a ways to go. It's still solid TV with its ultimate strengths already self-evident: classic police procedural extending the form by wedding it to its natural mate, the courtroom drama. This season includes the first episode I ever happened to see, or the last 20 minutes of it (I had tuned in way late, flipping around the channels). It's about a serial killer (creepy James Rebhorn), with Barbara Barrie, Allen Garfield, and an outstanding performance by Rutanya Alda (The Deer Hunter, Mommie Dearest). The plot is a bit convoluted, I can see now, but with a typically riveting way of plodding forward. Strewn with great lines, as they all are. Ben Stone: "He wants a slap on the wrist." Adam Schiff (Steven Hill, yet another of the show's trademark players): "So start slapping."

Mystery Dance (1991)

This look at the evolution of human sexuality is a bit of a family affair. Lynn Margulis was an evolutionary theorist and science author and educator, whose pot-smoking husband stayed up all night looking at the sky (Carl Sagan, not involved after the one DNA contribution). Dorion Sagan is their son, described here as "a writer and sleight-of-hand magician." The book is substantive, grounded in scientific research, but playfully organized as a so-called evolutionary striptease, traveling backward in time, making clever use all along of the delicate nature of its revelations. It starts with sperm competition, which explains big dicks. Then it looks at, or entertains explanations of, the biological adaptations of women having orgasms and men having nipples. Back further, it pays a visit to the primates and their own complex sexual play, which often survives in us. Going back further, we finally arrive at the lizard brainstem, my favorite, from which likely comes jealousy and the most inexplicable fetishes. You wouldn't believe what the beasts out there are doing. This book goes all the way back, in fact, to bacteria, which have inhabited Earth for 80% of the planet's existence. Beat that, cockroaches! The gendering and reproduction habits of bacteria are richly polymorphously polygamous. Heironymous Bosch is a boy scout compared to these characters. It's a strange world after all—really strange. There's a lot more on bacteria in a previous collaboration between Margulis and Sagan, Microcosmos. This volume stays on sexuality: what it is, where it comes from, and why it exists. As to the latter, they conclude, with Samuel Beckett, "'The sun, having no alternative, rose this morning.'" They write, "Animals and plants—sexually reproducing organisms from their inception—remain sexual because they must develop from embryos into animals and plants." Mystery Dance is fun to read and full of strange facts, such as a species of lizard with no males, only females, that somehow auto-reproduces, at the same time the lizards act out male / female sexual play in their interactions. The text is lively and jokey—perhaps the only way to make it palatable, since it's also so candid about all the amazing and often repulsive ways sex has occurred across the countless millennia it has existed on this planet. Good one for the beach.

In case it's not at the library.

"Emergency" (1991)

Read story by Denis Johnson online.

Denis Johnson's story takes place, loosely speaking, in a hospital emergency room, where the orderly and ward clerk on duty steal drugs, enter Hunter Thompson mental states, and carry on. The ward clerk is also the first-person narrator (unnamed). You feel reverberations of Ken Kesey in the setting, and of Thompson in the drug effects. The nurse on duty ("Nurse") is a better person that Nurse Ratched, but not by much. The doctors are busy and officious. The emergency room is generally slow, there's not much happening, which makes it seem more unlikely and closer to metaphorical, and that might weaken it a little. I would be surprised if this isn't based on Johnson's life experience—the hospital setting feels right in many ways. But then come emergencies that feel suspiciously like urban legends. A man shows up with a knife plunged to the hilt into his head above one eye. He says his vision is not affected but he can't make a fist. His and everyone's thought is brain damage. But the anecdote turns out to be little more than another joke about Georgie, the orderly, who is as close as this episodic story gets to a main character. He's high as a naked jaybird and hallucinating, operating on instincts which comically prove out. I liked the story a little more when it left the hospital. The events it recounts are not believable, but I hung with the suspension of disbelief, and was rewarded by indulgent images and flights that somehow work, such as coming upon a drive-in theater in a winter storm, where the movie plays to no one. In his collection that includes this story, Jesus' Son, Johnson is like the Nick Tosches of fiction writers; or maybe that should be that Tosches is the Denis Johnson of rock critics. He's erratic. He's wild. His punches often miss. But when they land they make a serious impact—life-changing, in small fragmented ways, but life-changing. With this particular story, for me, it's more the art. It's small-scale in impact, but real too. I think there's better in Jesus' Son. Yet for every cooptation of Kesey or Hunter Thompson, there's language that surpasses even what they did, with an imagination fiercer and more enveloping. Raymond Carver is another obvious source. It's the details that tell, not the lunacy. It's the getting lost, not the drugs. The hospital is there because it has to be a hospital, because of the necessity of grounding Georgie's closing declaration in something tangible. A hitchhiker they have picked up asks Georgie what he does. "I save lives," he says. It's a joke but it's also true. And it's true in many different ways—just as it's also untrue in many different ways.

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

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

Soapdish (1991)

USA, 97 minutes
Director: Michael Hoffman
Writers: Robert Harling, Andrew Bergman
Photography: Ueli Steiger
Music: Alan Silvestri
Editor: Garth Craven
Cast: Sally Field, Kevin Kline, Elisabeth Shue, Robert Downey Jr., Whoopi Goldberg, Cathy Moriarty, Garry Marshall, Leeza Gibbons, Teri Hatcher, Ben Stein, Carrie Fisher, Paul Johansson, John Tesh, Willie Garson

Sally Field started her career in television on Gidget and The Flying Nun, and capped the proudest moment of her life—a second Best Actress Oscar—with a famous declaration to the Academy at large, or perhaps the world, that "You like me, you really like me." All entertainment involving her may safely be categorized as light (in spite of the Oscars for serious dramatic roles in Norma Rae and Places in the Heart). The strength of Soapdish is exactly in this lightness. It's a chiffon of bubble bath foam erupting over the side of a hot-air balloon in a Rock Hudson vehicle. This is signaled from the beginning with the kodachrome titles reminiscent of all light '60s entertainment, Dobie Gillis, Where the Boys Are, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, My Three Sons, etc.

Fortunately for us, Soapdish is not quite as corny or factory-formed as any of that, though it is both corny and factory-formed. It's a satire of the soap opera industry, although even that is left behind by plot developments arriving at regular intervals from left field. Sally Field plays Celeste Talbert, a soap opera star who wins the soap opera equivalent of Emmys on a monotonous basis and has been in the business since she was a teen. Elisabeth Shue is Lori Craven, a temp worker who yearns to act and will do anything to break into the business. Kevin Kline is Jeffrey Anderson, a preening buffoon who puffs up holding court on the craft of acting. Robert Downey Jr. is—look, did I mention this is a star-studded cavalcade?