The Chronic (1992)

I’m normally opposed to the very idea of “guilty pleasure,” which is usually about toxic social pressures and often involves hit pop songs—KISS fans secretly liking the Carpenters and Olivia Newton-John, stuff like that. In a natural development people have come to pride themselves on their guilty pleasures. But for me, in the case of Dr. Dre’s auspicious debut album, both parts of the term apply. I genuinely feel guilty about liking this set so much. Swearing a lot is just the start of it. All the N-words hamper singalongs. The sexism goes beyond mere sexism and proceeds directly to misogyny (“Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks,” etc.). Powerful automatic weapons, grotesque street violence, and swaggering Black-on-Black crime are frequent themes. The sex talk and scenes are so explicit they verge on revolting, viz., the “walnuts / chestnuts / deez nuts” skit. Speaking of skits—as I was just last month, complaining about them—they bust out all over here. I admit they have their moments even as my general objections to skits stand. One, “The $20 Sack Pyramid,” is nearly three minutes. “The Doctor’s Office” is a full minute and coarse as it can be. I worry about my neighbors when I start sneaking up the volume on The Chronic, which brings us to the “pleasure” side of the equation. I take it as entertainment so I can evade the problematics, as a full-on musical revue complete with comedy interludes. The only thing missing is a guy spinning plates at the top of sticks. I know it’s a tough balance here. The comedy may not land reliably, but “The $20 Sack Pyramid” is lacerating social critique. As for the songs, all team-written by Death Row principals, they just roll from one great one to the next, with fresh hooks and poised raps and melodic jams and no question about who they are or what they’re doing. You have to accept that to get to the wonders of, say, “A [N-word] Witta Gun,” with its ominous chorus “Who’s the man with the master plan?” Full disclosure, I mostly missed Dre until Eminem opened his catalog for me 10 years on. I was all over Snoop Doggy Dogg at last then too. But here I am squeamish to engage, or reproduce, the language featured on this album, which I find entertaining and even funny more often than I would think. It’s not hard for me to play the whole thing at once—mostly enjoyable, with its pitfalls, most of the way. Maybe a little long. They push the Death Row label constantly and attack with announcements like: “This should be played at high volume, preferably in a residential area.” You know what to do next, despite perhaps feeling guilty about it. P.S. I also admit, somewhat sheepishly, that I love the cannabis positivity. Inspirational line: “Make my bud the Chronic, I want to get fucked up.”

“The Poacher” (1992)

This interesting story by Ursula K. Le Guin rolls through fantasy all the way back to fairy tales, according to coeditor Terry Windling in her introduction in a Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology. “The Poacher” is fantastic and vaguely allegorical, with a mysterious forest, a castle, a sleeping princess (actually a sleeping everyone), and much more. The main character, out foraging for mushrooms and berries, discovers a hedge in the forest so dense and tall it’s impossible to see beyond it. Then he discovers it is encircling a space and he sets out to hack his way through it with tools he steals, or poaches—he is a poacher in many different ways. Even reaching this interior space takes him something close to two years. “The hedge grew unnaturally fast, in season and out, even in midwinter thick, pale shoots would grow across my passageway, and in summer I had to spend some time every day clearing out new growth, thorny green sprays full of stinging sap.” The story takes its time getting to its points—if it takes years to enter the space, what he finds inside is fully and amply described: a castle, a full household of masters and servants busy at their tasks, except—they are all sleeping and remain asleep for as long as the main character is there, which at story’s end is decades. He discovers a princess sleeping in her chambers, and somehow knows that all this is her dream, that even touching her will awaken her with wholly unknown results, potentially including the end of everything. He’s taking no chances. The food replenishes every day, the weather is beautiful, the place is wonderful. He stays. Le Guin’s writing is patient and lovely, in no hurry at all, and thus her revelations are unforced and somehow believable. It reminds me of a story by Robert Aickman called “The School Friend,” "The Same Dog," which also concerns a mysterious space in the deep woods with fairy tale appointments. Aickman’s story at least leaves something of a line tracing back to reality but that’s much less the case in “The Poacher,” which seems to exist unconnected from anything we would call reality. We are verging on pure magic here, which Le Guin somehow keeps within range of suspended disbelief as we read, as if casting spells herself.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Unlocking the Air and Other Stories
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

What Was the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Record? (1992)

I’m embarrassed to note it took me so long to get to this interesting music history, by Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, that a 30th anniversary edition has already been out for a few years. That’s the version I’m pointing to below. It’s probably even better than this original, adding forewords by Billy Vera and Dave Marsh, whose bio here asserts he is the dean of rock criticism, an interesting choice of words. As per the question in the title, the book is a densely researched list of 50 songs that are candidates for the honor, from “Blues, Part 2” by Jazz at the Philharmonic (1944) to “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley (1956). All the ones I might have nominated are here: “That’s All Right” by Big Boy Crudup and Elvis Presley, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” by Wynonie Harris & His All Stars, “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston With His Delta Cats, “Sixty Minute Man” by the Dominoes, “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Big Joe Turner, “Work With Me, Annie” by the Royals and the Midnighters, “Sh-Boom” by the Chords, and 41 more, including the correct answer (according to me) “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets. Each song is profiled in great detail, with chart positions, when and where recorded, release dates, interesting anecdotes, and more. Along the way a lot of industry currents are discussed, such as the stories of cover versions, the abuse of independent labels by the majors even as the indies marched on to further heights, and many of the interconnections between musicians, producers, and songwriters. Some of these songs I barely knew, such as “Blues, Part 2,” Arthur Smith’s “Guitar Boogie,” or Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man.” All were a pleasure to hear, even if I think some are barely rock ‘n’ roll. “Blues, Part 2,” for example, sounds much closer to me to free jazz, thanks to the wild, iconic tenor sax play by Illinois Jacquet. Maybe in some ways it prefigures the Stooges’ Fun House? It’s not on my streaming service, but I found it on youtube, posted by someone inspired by this book (likely 2nd ed.). It’s not just book and library research here. Dawson and Propes spoke to dozens of people involved with these records, including artists, producers, distributors, and many other industry figures. I was sad to reach “Heartbreak Hotel” because I cared less about answering the primary question and just wanted to keep hearing the stories of how great rock ‘n’ roll records came to be.

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

Batman Returns (1992)

USA, 126 minutes

Director: Tim Burton

Writers: Bob Kane, Daniel Waters, Sam Hamm

Photography: Stefan Czapsky

Music: Danny Elfman

Editors: Bob Badami, Chris Lebenzon

Cast: Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Michael Gough, Michael Murphy, Cristi Conaway, Pat Hingle, Paul Reubens, Andrew Bryniarsky

Director Tim Burton’s sequel to his first Batman movie makes it more obvious how much even that picture was attempting to split the difference between the campy ‘60s TV version and Frank Miller’s ‘80s reimagining of the caped crusader as a grizzled vigilante and sadistic mental case. The production design and some elements of the story lean hard into the latter but then there is Jack Nicholson taking top billing and slobbering all over the set in whooping cocaine-addled fugue states. Soundtrack by Prince. We might have thought the 1989 Batman worked, to the extent it did, because we wanted so badly the kind of Batman movie it took nearly 20 years to get. “We” meaning fans of the Frank Miller version, which I adored in the ‘80s.

Batman Returns is more like return of the camp. Casting Pee Wee Herman in the prologue as the Penguin’s father kind of gives away the game, as do casting Danny DeVito as the Penguin (who prefers to go by his given name, Oswald Cobblepot) and Christopher Walken (wearing a helmet of white hair) as Max Shreck, Gotham City’s power company tycoon implementing a dastardly scheme. Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle, who becomes the Catwoman, is another case. We’ll get to that. Early in the picture, when she is still a meek stammering secretary to Max, Batman rescues her from an assault. “Wow,” she says. “The Batman. Or is it just Batman?” The very question! So meta! “Batman” is in the tradition of the ‘50s and ‘60s comic book version leading into the TV show, whereas “the Batman” (subtle distinction!) is the original moniker for the creature of the night (including “the Bat-Man”) which Miller was trying to revive.

“The Premonition” (1992)

Here’s another remarkable story by Joyce Carol Oates from her Haunted collection. Kirkus Reviews called it the best of the bunch in a rave review from 1994. I’m more inclined to give that honor to the title story, but this one is awfully good too. It never outright tells us what it is at elaborate pains to make perfectly clear. A few days before Christmas, Whitney has a premonition about his older brother Quinn. He drives over to Quinn’s mansion to check on him. There is a rumor Quinn has started drinking again after 11 months of sullenly attending AA meetings under some type of intervention pressure. His wife and two daughters are often bruised or patched up. Quinn is the obvious culprit. He has been brazenly planning to spend the holidays in the Seychelles with a girlfriend. So it’s not surprising Whitney would have a bad feeling about Quinn any time he thought about him. He is trouble itself walking around. When Whitney gets to Quinn’s place Quinn is not there but his wife Ellen and the girls Molly and Trish are, all of them in strangely high spirits. Molly is 14 and Trish 11. The house is in some disarray, with half-packed boxes and trunks and suitcases all over the place. They don’t seem to know where Quinn is. He’s gone on business, and they say they’ll be hearing from him when he finishes his business trip, when they plan to meet in Europe. It’s all quite vague, but it’s obvious the traditional family Christmas is off for this year. Still, they are happy and excited to see Whitney, the girls’ “favorite uncle.” The clues become more obvious—by the shape and size of some of the boxes, and the bathtub has been recently scrubbed with kitchen cleanser. Oates establishes a narrative tempo that enables her to use misdirection skillfully. She never has to tell us what probably happened, and she never does. She just plants it in our heads, where it festers. It’s likely that the probable slaughter in its vivid details (as imagined) is what we will remember of this story, even though Oates refrains entirely from doing any more than suggesting it by implication. We learn enough about Quinn that we never lose sympathy for Ellen and the girls even as our certainty about what they did only grows. The story—the collection—is more evidence that Oates is one of the best writers of short horror we’ve got.

Joyce Carol Oates, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
Story not available online.

Bad Brains (1992)

I found Kathe Koja’s second novel enthusiastically recommended on booktube—note that it has nothing to do nor even seems familiar with any punk-rock band from D.C. Koja’s first, The Cipher, won a bunch of awards and, even though her story in The Weird (“Angels in Love”) did not impress me much, I decided to give Bad Brains a shot. The premise is that the impoverished main character, Austen, has an accident—takes a fall—and suffers serious brain damage. It is a kind of bravura performance here by Koja. It’s hard to tell how long Austen is in the hospital. It’s at least weeks, possibly months. He has multiple seizures every day until they are finally under control with drugs. These scenes in the hospital are confusing and alarming. Koja’s allusive, detailed prose is well-suited to the harrowing situation. Austen’s situation is close to dire even after he is stabilized. He is a bit of a sad sack, divorced two years but not yet over it. He’s a painter with some interesting ideas and a best friend who owns a gallery and encourages him. But mainly he is poor, sick, and spiraling down. He hits the road with a new friend who is almost as desperate. Things get strange as Austen’s spells of delusion and hallucination have a persistent element—something that is silver. Koja is flirting with one of the most dangerous elements in all fiction, a character who is insane. Because with insanity all bets are off and anything can happen. Don’t you know they’re C - R - A - Z - Y, after all. Koja manages the problem pretty well, with a context that feels real enough we can push against it. Keeping the narrative open to the ooky-spooky supernatural maintains a nice edge too. Her writing style can veer toward the fulsome and she lost me a few times, especially near the end. But the uncanny works well with the material, especially when it stays more in a naturalistic mode. It’s best on seizures and meds and the kind of poverty that forces you off health insurance when you need it most. And I’m glad the supernatural is here too. It helps the narrative fly free and makes its creepiness a good complement to the situation of the starving artist. When you’re teetering at a line between life and death, access to healthcare is more than a winning lifestyle choice. Bad Brains may have been oversold to me a little, raising my expectations too high. But it’s still pretty good, it won a Bram Stoker award, and a lot of people love it. It never scared me but it has good ideas and was never a slog.

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

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

France / USA, 134 minutes

Director: David Lynch

Writers: David Lynch, Robert Engels, Mark Frost

Photography: Ronald Victor Garcia

Music: Angelo Badalamenti

Editor: Mary Sweeney
Cast: Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Kyle MacLachlan, Chris Isaak, Kiefer Sutherland, David Lynch, Harry Dean Stanton, David Bowie, Miguel Ferrer, Grace Zabriskie, Phoebe Augustine, Eric DaRe, Heather Graham, Madchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, James Marshall, Julee Cruise, Lenny von Dohlen, Walter Olkewicz

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me has long been polarizing even for a David Lynch picture. It was widely dismissed at release. Halliwell’s makes the basic points: “Mystifyingly obscure and dull prequel to the TV series Twin Peaks, which tries one’s patience with its visions and precognitions.” In response, legions of David Lynch partisans have risen in fury, defending the pathos of the Laura Palmer story. It’s true that the picture comes with a full ration of Lynchian nonsense: The red room where people talk funny. The roadhouse on the edge of town that programs dream-pop and extremely hard rock. Heck, we don’t even see Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) until more than 30 minutes in. There’s a lot of things here that could go if you wanted to make this movie closer to 90 or 100 minutes, although I’m not sure it would be as effective. The nonsense kind of necessarily softens us for the harrowing reality behind it.

The story at the heart of Fire Walk With Me is not mystifyingly obscure at all, nor dull. It’s about child sexual abuse—what it looks like and how it feels for the victim. Laura is 17 and has been raped by her father (Ray Wise) since she was 12. Much of her behavior can be interpreted through this frame and it is not exotic or unusual. The picture is practically a clinical profile. What is happening to her is unthinkable, and therefore Laura tries to distance herself from it. She can’t believe it’s her father. The cognitive dissonance is too much. She displaces him with this “Bob” figure who creeps into her bedroom through the window. She disassociates. The result is an ongoing bundle of contradictions. She is a volunteer in bobby socks for Meals on Wheels as well as a hooker for rent out at the roadhouse. She uses sex, drugs, and the approval of others to cope, as solace. Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) sums her up: “She’s in high school. She is sexually active. She’s using drugs. She’s crying out for help.”

Lazer Guided Melodies (1992)

I wandered into the Spacemen 3 complex late, by way of their cover circa 1991 of Mudhoney’s “When Tomorrow Hits” (it'll hit you hard). I had known them before—I think everyone did, more or less—for their famous credo “taking drugs to make music to take drugs to.” They owned that Mudhoney track, brought out all its power on their way out the door. I listened to it a lot and think of it as a Spacemen 3 song. They splintered shortly after, but I followed or caught up on various spinoffs and side projects. Spiritualized, headed up by Jason Pierce (aka J. Spaceman), was probably the biggest, certainly the most enduring and commercially successful—1997’s Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space, got most of the attention. Some versions of that album were sold in a package that mimicked pharmaceutical blister packs, carrying on a familiar theme. And Pierce and an ever-shifting cast have hung in there all this time. Their 2018 album And Nothing Hurt and their 2022 album Everything Was Beautiful (hi, Kurt Vonnegut!) are both on Fat Possum, which suggests another Spiritualized theme has also continued, finding one thread of their arch roots in gospel and country blues. Lazer Guided Melodies is the first Spiritualized album, a quiet masterpiece that bears most of the seeds of what was to come. I’m still not convinced you need to go any further. It’s built in many ways on the grungy aesthetic of its time, alternating quiet parts with loud parts, but the dynamic is more working steadily across the length of the LP. The early songs are lulling and shorter, setting a meditative tone. My first impressions were more that they were vaporous but close attention discloses the strategy, setting up the longer, symphonic pieces to come, incrementally growing larger and larger until the album has become quite big by the time of “Step Into the Breeze” and, especially, ”Symphony Space” forward. Horns and strings show up just as if they belong and somehow they do. Principal songwriter Pierce checks his influences on the fourth track, “Run,” which is co-credited to J.J. Cale but plainly also paying reverence to the Velvet Underground, perhaps the single greatest influence. Another way to look at the structure of Lazer Guided Melodies, no doubt, is in terms of psychedelic drug use (with or without pharmaceutical enhancements). The first half of the album (sections designated as “Red” and “Green”) are in the reflective and tenuous mood of dropping and waiting to come on. A 15-minute swirling floating-in-space peak is delivered in the “Blue” section (“Take Your Time” and “Shine a Light”), and then the gospel-inflected coming-down aftermath of the “Black” section. It’s so understated in its totality that the effects may not even be detectable at first. Use once daily.

The Dogs of Riga (1992)

When I was reading the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö I kept seeing connections with Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series. Now that I'm reading the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell, I'm sometimes connecting the stories to Beck. For example, in the second book in that series, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke from 1966, the Swedish police detective Beck travels to Hungary, at the time a Soviet satellite, to investigate the disappearance of a journalist. In The Dogs of Riga, Swedish police detective Wallander travels to Latvia to investigate a drug-related double homicide. Latvia in 1992, of course, is vastly more unsettled than even Hungary in 1966, which provides a lot of the interest. When Mankell was working on this novel Germany had been reunified but the Soviet Union still existed. Mankell felt compelled to add an afterword shortly before publication to clarify some (not all) of the ambiguities in an environment of swiftly developing political events. For all that, this is not historical fiction, nor really even police procedural, but more on the order of a Ludlum-style thriller, at which it is very good. Mankell's mystery is well conceived and complex, and the air of late-Soviet paranoia feels perfect. In fact, by about halfway through, the shadowy world of Latvian law enforcement is far the most interesting thread. By the time of the climax it's all so well done it becomes a gripping stay-up-all-night raver. This was only the second Wallander I'd read, after Faceless Killers, and at first I was worried because Wallander was going two-for-two on falling in love inappropriately. As it turns out, the Latvian woman he meets here, Baiba Liepa, has a continuing presence in the series, and there aren't that many others. In general, Wallander's personal life is not that interesting anyway. Mankell figured that out quickly and mostly stuck close to his main skill, which was constructing interesting, satisfying mysteries out of topical social forces and doing it in unforced natural ways. He's not particularly hammering any point, just laying out intriguing situations. Here that involves relations between Sweden and NATO on the one hand, and Latvia and the USSR on the other, proxies in a way for capitalism and communism yet in either case populated by interesting individual people. The Latvian stuff may tend to run to some extremes, with a brave and noble underground fighting for human rights versus evil totalitarian bureaucrats (who torture people and otherwise destroy lives). Mankell does not let the West off the hook, but his views of those shortcomings are more subtle, more like seeing toxic banality supported by constant barrages of empty commercial sentiments tending to make citizens alienated and disaffected. Maybe not so original, but a big, fun, and sprawling story to read.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Violence (1992)

Richard Bausch's fifth novel has a slightly misleading title and is flawed in many small ways, yet it's also haunting and hard to put down. Charles Connally is married and his wife Carol is pregnant. It's her first child, but her second marriage, though both are in their 20s. Charles is still an undergraduate in college, a late starter, and they have problems related to anxiety about the baby and money. On a trip to Chicago to visit Charles's mother—Carol is meeting her for the first time, prompted by the pregnancy—they fight and worry. Charles's mother's apartment is not big enough so they are staying in a motel. One night, after quarreling with Carol, Charles goes out for a walk and wanders into a convenience store that becomes the scene of an out-of-control armed robbery. Four people die. Charles survives, helps save one person in the incident, and becomes a media hero. This is the only overt violence in the novel, but Carol and especially Charles also have violence lurking in their pasts. I think Bausch is attempting to portray violence as intrinsic to life in small ways and large. People not treating each other well is a kind of violence. So is a baby, in a way, intruding on the life of its parents. A lot of the details here struck me as overdetermined—Carol's background and the strange life of her parents, Carol's own history, even some of the people involved in the robbery. Yet Bausch's aging college student and struggling young marriage also feel on the mark, etched from experience, which makes the story absorbing and affecting. I don't exactly like many of these characters yet at the same time I kind of love them. I don't actually have this feeling of love often for fictional characters, so I hold Violence in a certain regard. Both times I've read it I've come away thinking it's got something, though it's distractingly easy to recognize and note the flaws—the self-involvement, the many small points that register wrong, the unnecessarily provocative title. The last time we saw Richard Bausch he was cutting down an 800-page novel to the size of a short story. There's no question of what he's able to do with sentences and paragraphs. Even when it maunders on in self-pity I think Violence remains insanely readable. I love it.

In case it's not at the library.

The Future (1992)

Leonard Cohen was back once and for all (more or less) with The Future, which followed 1988's I'm Your Man and a revival of interest in him. Now he was a fixture of popular culture, the crusty croaker and natty dresser in the suit and fedora hat. The poet from Canada. The '60s survivor. The man of Montreal, New York, and Los Angeles. It was a living. The movies were continuing to absorb and disseminate him, which is when you can start to feel like you've made it. Three songs here (the title song, "Waiting for the Miracle," and "Anthem") can be heard in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (a movie, full disclosure, I have never had much affection for). "Waiting for the Miracle" got a return engagement in Wonder Boys (a better movie, packed full of Cohen, Neil Young, Tim Hardin, and other usual suspects, with more Bob Dylan than anything). It's evident on The Future that Cohen has grown wise to the utility of surrounding himself with first-rate studio hands—the song lengths alone speak to the easy-rolling groove-making going on here, with four of the nine songs running over seven minutes and, for the first time, an instrumental (the sweet and stately album closer, "Tacoma Trailer"). Yes, the grooves lean toward adult contemporary, but they are grooves. And the best are full of irresistible little hooks too, often in the arrangements. The album has a number of undifferentiated producer credits—six names, including Rebecca de Mornay, Cohen's girlfriend at the time—so it's hard to know who to credit for the lovely clean and inviting sound, which can get busy with orchestral and choral accompaniments but never seems cluttered. Maybe Cohen himself—he's the first producer named. It's hard to believe he knew his way around a soundboard, but certainly he would get final approval, so OK. Sharon Robinson is here again, but only collaborating on "Waiting for the Miracle." As the title implies, The Future is probably most famous for contemplating the future in that particular present. Cohen was publicly absorbing the history going down around him, notably, in 1989, Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Democracy" ("is coming to the USA") jeers at the US's ability to cope with these world changes—that's been an easy position to take all my life, and has the benefit of making you look prescient later (at least in these particular terrible times). "Anthem" looks in another direction entirely, much beloved for its lines "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in." If that seems trite or saccharine, at least there's something weirdly satisfying about seeing Cohen as the pollyanna for once. I don't like the Irving Berlin cover, "Always," and it's the longest song here, so it's not like The Future can't be a bit of a bumpy road, especially if, like me, you are slightly skeptical about the Cohen project. But it never sounds bad either.

Law & Order, s3 (1992-1993)

The third season of Law & Order sees all its many potent strands continuing to come into sharp focus—it's practically at the top of its form now. The stories are fresh with news currents, and they are twisty, complicated, and satisfying—there's usually a dead person in the opening scene and always a court trial in the second half, but getting from here to there is never the same, nor are the results ever predictable. The casts and performances are great. It's not just the crimes and criminals that get attention. Sometimes they are dealt with perfunctorily while larger issues of justice and procedure are at stake. Notably, some of the hardest fought ones are still lost, a tendency that would fade some over the years as the show more and more accommodated the necessities of managing long-term hit TV. (Producer Dick Wolf and crew have succeeded at that too, as the inferior spinoff Special Victims Unit will match the longevity of the original if it's renewed this year.) The most important development in this season is the coming of Lenny Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), as the detective partner of Mike Logan (Chris Noth). After S. Epatha Merkerson and Sam Waterston, neither of whom has shown up yet (except Merkerson as someone other than her later character ... which happened with Orbach too for that matter) ... Lenny Briscoe would become the series' third most ubiquitous character, appearing across some 14 seasons. It's not hard to see the appeal. He just clicks in like he belongs. He is more recognizably New York City in his attitude and manner, with a memorable hangdog face, a bent for cynical quips, hints of a sad backstory, and something that is simply likable. Orbach was actually more of a Broadway song and dance man by trade but his aging face carried the new persona well, already used effectively for example by Woody Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors a few years earlier. Neither Paul Sorvino nor George Dzundza had been happy as Logan's earlier partners. The show didn't suit their styles, for different reasons (and though they were both fine), but Orbach owns the role of Lenny Briscoe from the first scenes.

More telling for the natural strengths of the show, perhaps, is the use made of Dr. Elizabeth Olivet (Carolyn McCormick), a forensic psychologist and regular character introduced in the previous season, which offered a sophisticated wrinkle to the police procedural, a skillful binding element to tie the two sides of the premise—"the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders"—even more tightly together. This closing of this dramatic loop of the justice system was the single greatest innovation of Law & Order. Yet in many ways, here in the third season, the fine points are still being figured out. Olivet sheds a lot of light on the procedures, consulting with detectives and prosecutors alike, offering many interesting angles around insanity, competence, social welfare, and other legal matters. But, in perhaps the single most famous episode in the 20-year run of the show, which occurs in this season (it certainly seemed to be shown all the time in reruns) they go pell-mell into a reckless place, making her a victim. The case involves a creepy gynecologist who amuses himself by molesting and raping his patients, under the cover of local anesthetics given ostensibly for procedures. No doubt it has antecedents in a real case or cases. It smacks of a certain flavor of '80s and '90s true crime. And it's an opportunity to air out issues of rape and the credibility of accusers, so with incidental acute relevance at the moment, notably in the way it resolves. I wouldn't say the show cheats on the gravity—in the last scene, Olivet is seen in therapy session beginning to deal with it. But it still seems a terrible abuse of a character, even if she is back in further episodes with minimal fallout. Perhaps because so. Sometimes, maybe, using the power to traumatize and even kill major characters in a continuing series might be a little oversold. See also Ed McBain and many of his women characters. Or maybe I've just seen that episode too often.

"Moonwalk" (1992)

Story by Susan Power not available online.

I thought this story by Susan Power had a lot of nice elements but somehow came out to less than the sum of them. Margaret Many Wounds is on her deathbed and her two daughters, Evie and Lydia, are attending her. Evie left the Indian reservation that is their home many years before this story and has traveled from Minneapolis to be with her (though it's never named, the reservation seems likely to be Pine Ridge). The story is mostly told from the point of view of Evie, who has always felt she is the least favorite of her mother. The father died five years earlier, at which time Lydia stopped speaking. All of this is taking place in July 1969, as astronauts reach the surface of the moon for the first time in history. It's a nice touch, at least in theory, but also seems like the last straw in terms of piling on, especially when Margaret's spirit, shortly after she dies in bed, appears on the moon on TV, dancing, and only her 5-year-old grandson notices. The story is strongest when it simply observes the deathwatch, the way that families squabble, laugh, and carry on the way they do as much when they're in crisis as not. The shadow of death passes over the living, but the living can't help being what they are. There was some sense of resolution, especially between Margaret and Evie, but too often this story goes vague when it most needs to be concrete and specific. So overall it doesn't work for me, but in its parts it comes so close. I wanted to know a lot more about the dynamics between these principals, the mother and her two daughters, but all we get are broad strokes. Evie's resentment and flight, Lydia's decision to be mute, and especially who and what Margaret was to them. We get some sense but it often feels familiar and almost trite, or predictable. The spirit dance on the lunar surface is likely intended to remedy some of that. But that merely seems fanciful, the kind of thing even the best writers can only occasionally manage. Wish this were better—the death scene particularly offers many possibilities not lived up to here.

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

"A White Horse" (1992)

Story by Thom Jones not available online.

Thom Jones's premise for this story is so strange that it takes some getting used to. "Ad Magic," the only name we have for the protagonist, finds himself on a guided tour of Mumbai (or Bombay, in the story), with his pockets stuffed full of cash and his body battered. We learn it's not uncommon for him to have fugue states and blackouts from which he often emerges thousands of miles from his home and life, as an advertising copywriter (he says) in North America. It's some kind of condition—he travels compulsively in these states. Something like the character in the movie Memento, he knows he has the condition and is desperately trying to manage it, even as he reacts immediately and unconditionally to his environment. Thus, when he "comes to" shortly after a tour bus accident, realizing he doesn't know his name and only barely knows the name of the hotel where he is staying, he becomes fixated on a dying horse he spots wandering the street, abandoned to die by a traveling circus. He recklessly produces his wads of cash, attempting to get someone to help the horse. The people he approaches don't even seem to understand what a veterinarian is, so he asks for a doctor, implying he needs one because of the accident he was in. The horse brings some pathos to this story—vulnerable animals often do in fiction—but the chaotic actions of Ad Magic make the horse appear even more vulnerable. The doctor comes and treats both Ad Magic and the horse, but it's not clear that this doctor is entirely on the up and up. We're always uncomfortably aware of the ostentatious way Ad Magic handles his cash, how much danger he might be putting himself in. The story might be comic but it's not funny, and it's almost perfectly mystifying. At one point I was reduced to quibbling about the use of the indefinite article "A" in the title. This white horse certainly seems specific to our hero. Certainly it's intended to be taken ironically on one level, for all the baggage as a symbol that horses (not to mention the color white) bear. But ultimately that seemed incidental too, and I had to agree that "The" would have been the wrong call in the title. The language has the post-Carver immediacy and clarity. It's compelling, weird, readable. I want to penetrate its mysteries. I know it's more than an amnesia story.

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

"The First Day" (1992)

Read story by Edward P. Jones online.

This story by Edward P. Jones is short enough that it bears mentioning—five printed pages, which probably makes it longer than a short short, but still notably compact. It takes the form of a somewhat elliptical reminiscence, told first-person, about a first day of kindergarten. Jones is an African-American, and many of his characters are identifiably so as well, but it's a universal experience and colorblind as related here in many ways. Yet it is also specifically about African-American experience. The narrator is an older girl or more likely a young woman, remembering. It's best on the complicated relationship between a child and parent, the turbulence of which is revealed here in the first sentence: "On an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother ... " The reasons for that shame don't have to be spelled out, because it's part of adolescent experience, but we see the 5-year-old seeing her mother in acute ways. Her mother has to ask for help filling out forms because she can't read or write. She takes her daughter to the wrong school—she has no sense for how school systems operate. She just shows up with her child and asks abrupt questions. The story even has a kind of muzzy sentimental flavor. I found myself thinking back to my own first day of school as I read this, which was rather different, having to take a bus for the first time and such. It was raining. But the feeling of time moving irrevocably on, the feeling of being plunged into something new—new sights, new sounds, new smells, new people—are strong in this story. Her mother is also a person to be feared, we learn, capable of lashing out at things she feels are wrong. There's an intriguing description of people here that is repeated, describing them as "out of the advertisements in Ebony." It's one place where race intrudes a little on the universal experience. I suspect, in some measure, that's intentional, both the specificity and the wider common experience. It's a very American scene and setting, a public school in a large city. I think it has no particular indictments to make—it's much less about race and much more about a parent and child and the transitions of their relationship. The specificity is about the fundamentals of short story writing. The concrete details tell. Just so, the parting of the two, the clumping of her mother's footsteps as she leaves the building and goes out of sight, is just right.

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

Kiss (1992)

Shocking, in a way. It's been more than 20 years since I have read from the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain, which means that even a book published in 1992 I have to take more or less as new, all further developments as yet unknown beyond a certain point in the late '80s. Typically enough, it runs well over 300 pages, but it is reasonably lean and swift, focusing largely on a plot about a wealthy investment banker who hires a hit man to murder his wife. This is interwoven with the soap opera storyline of Steve Carella, observing the trial of the man who killed his father. Kiss is not a best effort in many ways. Even the title turns out to be a hunk of nothing that simply molders there. The twist ending is too cute by half, stepping all over some otherwise intriguing plot points, offering up a kind of late-breaking Double Indemnity narrative line that I think would have been better developed in the light. The court case and Carella thread may or may not be slightly belabored (I think yes), but it's interesting to read now among other reasons because of its close proximity following the Rodney King case and preceding the OJ Simpson case. A snapshot of a certain historical moment in criminal justice, if you will. I also wonder how well McBain might have been familiar with Law & Order at that time, still in its early years but already excellent. McBain often rambles on in discursive fashion, as usual, and the sidebars are often as interesting as the investigations because they are all so skillfully integrated.

In case it's not at the library.

O(+> (1992)

Prince does not always make albums the length of feature films, but it does seem to be a default position. This so-called Love Symbol Album is another, featuring the lively New Power Generation band and road-testing his new "name" (the symbol reproduced emoticon style with O(+>). Part grand joke, part deranged reaction from a legal dispute with Warner Bros. over rights to the master recordings of his material, it's about as exasperating and hilarious as anything he has done. Talk about passive aggressive. Warner Bros. was forced to send floppy discs to all its media contacts with the custom font. Flailing for direction, PR and fans took to referring to him as "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince," "TAFKAP," "The Artist," or "glyph," all of which seemed infinitely more silly than anything yet. "My name is Prince," he announces in the first seconds of this album, on a song of exactly that name. I took that as meaning the issue of pronunciation had been reasonably clearly addressed. At any rate, it's a pretty good song, and it's followed with an even better song, "Sexy M.F." Early indications were thus that this would be a worthy follow-up to the preceding Diamonds and Pearls, which was very good. But O(+> soon wanders off into the great caverns of its 18 total tracks and some narrative "rock opera" concept that periodically surfaces, mostly in connection to the short and baffling (and annoying—please, everyone, stop these skits) spoken-word "segue" tracks. For what it's worth, Wikipedia reports that many more of the segue tracks, clarifying the story, were tossed in favor of a late addition, "I Wanna Melt With You." It's a good song and I applaud the decision to backbench the story. On recent visits, in fact, the more I hear of this album the more I like these songs, so take this if you will as a positive recommendation and not just a cautious one. It's a strong entry in his second tier. As is usually the case, I prefer the songs with more tempo over torchy turns at ballads, but it's all good. TAFKAP has always known what he's doing when it comes to the art and science of entertainment, and the pacing here is flawless. It's the case even on what most consider his weaker albums, such as Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, so easy to take for granted perhaps. But no one puts together a 75-minute album better than glyph.

Beautiful South, "We Are Each Other" (1992)

(listen)

I gave it a try, but never connected with the Housemartins, who sounded all right but nothing to do with me, maybe a bit narrowly British. So it did come as a surprise much later when this follow-on band with Paul Heaton and Dave Hemingway impressed so much with this song. I picked it off a promo CD incidentally selling vodka, Stolar Tracks Vol. 1, which in turn came from ... somewhere. I don't remember how I got it exactly. It is clearly flailing for a 1992 Now sound, with tracks from Arrested Development ("Tennessee," no less), EMF, Jesus and Mary Chain, Lush, Screaming Trees, etc., etc. I will point out that "We Are Each Other" is buried at #11 of 16 so it had to do some work to win the attention. It insinuates by pieces, and though it takes its time the pressure is steady. Mostly what I like is how it moves and sounds like just another poppy happy declaration of love (bearing also a certain production aesthetic of the '80s and '90s). As the details emerge and pile up, however, in the aggregate it somehow crosses a line into a notable case of bad boundaries, wandering into fields of the vaguely unsettling, sometimes almost alarming: "Closer than a sister to her baby brother / Closer than a cat to the child that she'll smother" in the chorus, "I shaved all my legs and you grew hairs upon your back" noted in a verse, for examples. But you wouldn't know any of that from just hearing the song blasting into the air somewhere. It can be almost annoyingly chipper. Thus it became a mix tape staple and I kept coming back to it, and come back to it still on occasion, looking for relief to this fascinating tension. But there's no relief.

Slanted and Enchanted (1992)

I saw Pavement in 1995 or thereabouts and I remember it was a very fine show—roaring loud, seductive, insinuating, with surprisingly powerful currents, and always interesting. I surged with the crowd and didn't want it to end, etc. I'm serious. I was still there pounding for more when the house lights went up. They were great. But shortly after that the mystery about the appeal of this quixotic unit ensued as if it had never been cleared up even for a moment. I find it hard to connect with the albums, even the consensus best, such as this debut. Or maybe I find myself forgetting how to. I've been puzzling over it again trying to figure out something to say about this album which I think meant so much to so many. At one time I felt like I was rotating between separate tribes devoted to My Bloody Valentine, Nirvana, and Pavement—blobs of adoration floating around out there and not intersecting much. On the Venn diagram it would be three distinct circles. They all participated to a certain extent, among many others, in a certain vogue of the time for elaborately disaffected song titles, so here: "Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era," "Zurich Is Stained," "Chesley's Little Wrists," "In the Mouth a Desert," "Summer Babe (Winter Version)," so on so forth, there are 14 songs here. There are certainly hooks, things to grab onto, as I just now noticed one welling up out of the end of "No Life Singed Her," but they don't seem to be occurring within the structure of songs as such. To me, at their best, when I think I might be getting it, they are album artists working in the broad 40-minute scope, with a ground of sound based on ramshackle 2 guitars bass drums+ interplay that's almost not sloppy, and from that emerges this little parade of surprises: a chanted chorus that takes on momentum, lots of guitar riffs finding a way, and often an evident willingness to simply let it all ride, or stop, with breaks for adjustments every two or three minutes, meaning that's how the tracks go by. You don't necessarily wait for a certain song but for moments that aren't always quite where you thought you remembered they'd be, but it's all right because there's something interesting coming along now you'd forgotten. It's never quite what you think it is. The cover art is not misleading, I'll put it that way. At the moment, "Two States" is my favorite song—because it's the one playing.

Unforgiven (1992)

USA, 131 minutes
Director: Clint Eastwood
Writer: David Webb Peoples
Photography: Jack N. Green
Music: Lennie Niehaus
Editor: Joel Cox
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris, Jaimz Woolvett, Saul Rubinek, Frances Fisher, Anna Thomson, David Mucci, Rob Campbell, Anthony James

Director Clint Eastwood so thoroughly gulled me with this self-serious and anachronistic meditation on women's issues and gun violence transposed to the 19th-century American frontier (1880 Wyoming, to be specific) that I took away a number of enduring misperceptions from it, chief among them that Eastwood embraced liberal/progressive values. It's fair enough to say I like Unforgiven in the same way and for much the same reasons that I like the Star Trek franchise, particularly The Next Generation—for the earnest way it supplants toxic old myths and replaces them with new and convincing models (to me, the eternal political naïf and social optimist). As propaganda, one might say, putting a less pleasant spin on it. It wasn't until the last presidential election cycle that I finally said something that caused a friend to disabuse me of my sense of Eastwood (imagine if it had been this year when he turned up talking to an empty chair in prime time—how embarrassing for me!).

Twenty years on, it's readily apparent that Unforgiven is more a picture about 1992 than 1880—or perhaps, more abstractly, about making Westerns in 1992 rather than 1939. The self-seriousness is written into practically every line and gesture. For all the sturdy structure and fine pacing and confidence of the storytelling, the two sets of values are so jarring in opposition to one another and our expectations—the look and feel of the rugged West where a man is a man vs. "c'mon people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try and love one another right now," etc.—that it often comes across as stilted and affected. Yet I have seen Unforgiven many times and it rarely fails to work on me.