“The Delicate” (1994)

[spoilers] Here’s what Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, editors of the anthology The Weird, have to say about this story by Jeffrey Ford: “Although his fiction comes at the weird sideways, some of his stories, like ‘The Delicate’ (1994), enter the weird with complete abandon. It’s a short, sharp shock of the grotesque.” It is definitely short, only three pages, a riffing free-form assault by some life form called “The Delicate” (which, by the way, appears to have nothing to do with any Michelle Shocked album). The description is compressed and vividly effective, which at least is more than you get from various masters of the weird. “He comes in the latter days of afternoon, through blowing snow, dressed in black, while Schubert’s ‘Eighth’ plays magically in the background.” I like the Schubert detail, but come on. Still, I have to admit there is something inspired in this brief screed. Ford’s imagination is on fire and his voice mostly in control. It could be a vampire, this Delicate. Blood-sucking seems to be involved. The woman he “ingests,” however, has something in her—perhaps taken deliberately?—that turns him into a dog. This all happens in a place called Absentia. Next comes Pharsalus, the hunter, “in from the wilderness.” Absentia sounds like the last outpost of civilization before the North Pole. Pharsalus adopts the dog that used to be or still is the Delicate. Demons are a danger in the wilderness. Winter seems to be called Night and spring Morning. We spend relatively a lot of time with Pharsalus. The Delicate becomes a human-like dog and fights with Pharsalus, who loses and dies but wounds the Delicate, who is soon on a rampage, ingesting townspeople two at a time. I’m enjoying the story more rereading it slowly and somewhat reassembling it here. The army is sent in to get him. What army? Unclear. It all feels Roman to me in a way. “They collect the creature into a plastic bag and freeze-dry him. His remains are taken to Spire City in the Sunbelt where they are stored for the edification of future generations. The funding never comes through to study the crumbs of the Delicate, so he lies in a bag on a shelf and waits.” That’s how it ends. A wild ride but doesn’t add up to much more than that last image maybe.

Jeffrey Ford, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant: And Other Stories
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Listen to story online.

“The Man in the Black Suit” (1994)

I was excited to see a story by Stephen King in The Weird. I didn’t think editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer could leave him out but I guess I forgot about him by the time the chronologically ordered anthology got to Clive Barker in the ‘80s. This story is an interesting choice—a self-conscious reimagining by King of the kind of 19th-century American Puritan horror practiced by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving. The story takes place in the deep woods of New England where a boy has gone fishing. He encounters the figure in the title, who is there to steal his soul or some such. It’s all pretty traditional business in many ways. Not much is particularly original but some of the details are good. The man’s eyes are described as red and orange, for example, windows into his burning soul. The story was published originally in the New Yorker, which speaks to the status of King’s career in 1994. He would win some kind of lifetime honor from some reputable literary group circa 2002 or 2003, which I always think of as the moment when he was accepted and embraced by the literary mainstream. With this story from the New Yorker he was on his way to that fuller, wider recognition. It does feel like King might be trying a little too hard here. He comes by his New England bona fides honestly enough—born and raised there—but he has never felt remotely part of Puritan traditions. Well, maybe remotely. But his style is all 20th-century contemporary and his horror is catholic, my feeble pun indicating his stuff is all over the place in terms of its sources. The woods and soul-stealing do as well for King as sacred Indian burial grounds, cosmic horror, vampires, werewolves, and/or zombies. And more. The guy is so prolific he almost couldn’t help having tried everything by the mid-‘90s. I used to find him insanely readable and wish now I’d read more of him then. Or maybe I reached my point of exhaustion after a few thousand pages (still only a fraction, I know). At any rate, I respect what I understand he’s doing here—getting the Puritan phobias about woods and the devil into the mix. Hey, that’s horror pure as much as anything else, up to and including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

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

“Posthumous” (1994)

I came here ready to complain about this very short story by Joyce Carol Oates. Then I saw that it was published originally in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, in 1994, and somehow it became instantly more intriguing. What was she doing in Ellery Queen? Was she a regular? How did a story like this fit with the magazine’s usual fare? I never read it much but knew it as a competitor and sort of counterpoint to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. “Posthumous” is less than three printed pages. It is told from the point of view of a corpse, in a 21-gun salute to Edgar Allan Poe (10 years later, in 2004, she would publish a different and much longer story with a variant title of “Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House”). But maybe I am being hasty and she is a near-dead victim of violence, her own or another’s. She doesn’t seem to be able to move or speak. Police are forcing entry. Italicized passages suggest a home invasion. The police are shocked by her appearance but the twist of the story, as such, seems to be that there is worse in another room, presumably her husband. Did she do it or are they both victims? Unclear. It’s a horrific scene, like a tableau caught in the flash of a camera. It seems extreme to me for Ellery Queen, but perhaps not for 1994, which I remember as particularly lurid—Tonya Harding, Kurt Cobain, OJ Simpson, etc. I like that Oates had outlets for a lot of things like this that are experimental. Sometimes I am impatient with her female victimology, which she turns to a lot. But then, females are frequently victims. I like the Poe touch, if that’s what it is, and I guess I appreciate the ambiguity too of the murky situation. So I come out liking this one after some consideration. I believe Oates may have been at least a semi-regular in Ellery Queen but I would have to verify that. The way she uses the police is great and the point of view of the woman or corpse is perfect as they force their way in, vivid and sensory. And it’s really short, accomplished at near light-speed. The mayhem is gratuitous maybe? I was inclined to complain about that. But in many ways I think mayhem might be Oates’s most natural mode.

Joyce Carol Oates, The Collector of Hearts
Story not available online.

Chungking Express (1994)

Chung Hing sam lam, Hong Kong, 102 minutes

Director/writer: Wong Kar-Wai

Photography: Christopher Doyle, Wai Keung Lau

Music: Frankie Chan, Michael Galasso, Roel A. Garcia, Faye Wong

Editors: William Chang, Kit-Wai Kai, Chi-Leung Kwong

Cast: Brigitte Lin, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Faye Wong, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Valerie Chow, Piggy Chan

Director and writer Wong Kar-Wai does not entirely fit with my conception of a Hong Kong filmmaker of the ‘90s, benighted as that might be. My expectations are still more along the lines of extravagant action set-pieces and outrageous settings and setups—Jackie Chan and John Woo kinds of things. There’s much less of that in Kar-wai pictures, of course, but he has perhaps outdone the others with his dazzling style and unusually pure commitment to romance, which only seems to go over better every year. I am astonished to see that In the Mood for Love has now reached the top 20 of the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (#17 to be specific). Chungking Express is next on the list, at a perhaps more sedate #159. But it has also seen a steady rise over the years from the lower echelons of the top 500.

For me, it is Kar-wai’s deeply romantic vision that wins me over, augmented as it is with the stunning cinematography and canny soundtrack choices. It is a full-on package of sensation. Chungking Express splits across two mostly distinct narratives. The first is a ridiculous young policeman, known as Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who is trying to grasp the reality of a failing relationship. He has just been dumped. He calls her family members and acts like everything is fine, hoping they will be his allies. He buys cans of pineapple, her favorite food, looking for expiration dates of May 1 because she broke up with him on April 1, because May 1 is his birthday (turning 25), because the young woman’s name is May, or perhaps more than anything because he believes it will somehow help his cause. It’s somewhat murky and hovers close to silly—among other things he takes up with a drug-dealing spy who wears a wig, sunglasses, and trenchcoat—but it’s a useful overture, familiarizing us with Kar-wai’s style and approach for what is to come in the second narrative.

Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (2018)

This 33-1/3 volume by Brooklyn-based writer Ronen Givony was something of a disorienting experience for me. I know so little about Jawbreaker and its milieu that it felt like reading about an imaginary band, like Spinal Tap. I did know contemporaneous Jawbox enough to realize I may have been mixing up the two acts, who are associated in various odd ways beyond the first syllable, including a split-single release in 1991. Both are considered “post-hardcore” but Jawbreaker leans decidedly more toward “emo,” a category I have long instinctively avoided. Not surprisingly, I’m not much into 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, which sounds to me like fairly uninspired, uh, post-hardcore. But Givony makes a reasonable case for it, delving into the lyrics at will. I take it as given that the album is important to an audience, although I must also note that Givony says it had sold only 70,000 copies by 2018, nearly 25 years after its release. Of more interest to me here was the narrative of punk-rock authenticity in the Bay Area, based around the fanzine Maximum Rocknroll and the Berkeley all-ages club on Gilman St. In that scene, signing to a major label was considered heretical and the price for doing so was banishment (“canceled,” it’s called today). Again, this is a corner of rock—“pop-punk” is another label—I just don’t know well. Green Day is probably the most famous example. They were banished. So was Jawbreaker, who not only signed with a major label, but also committed the sin of touring with Nirvana. It’s a tough world out there. Most purist impulses tend to be bullshit, but also I don’t hear that much of merit in the band or album, just between you and me. I can hear the Husker Du influence, and I was interested to learn what a landmark act Husker Du is for emo. It makes sense. Givony spends a lot of time on the mostly unintelligible lyrics, reaching for literary comparisons like John Milton. Well, maybe. The Wikipedia article even says their influence “has led some critics to label Jawbreaker as the best punk-rock band of the 1990s.” To me that’s ridiculous, but Givony makes a good case that the album is important and sincerely embraced by at least 70,000 people, so maybe so. I’ll just call it one more blind spot on my part.

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

Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese (2011)

This title from the 33-1/3 series had some surprises for me. First, it’s an album and even band I knew little about going in—had not even heard of the album. Then it turned out my old college paper editor, Dave Ayers, who has gone on to an impressive career in the industry, is heavily involved. He signed Ween to Twin/Tone in the early ‘90s or so and was the band’s manager still for this 1994 album. Other bands he’s associated with include the Jayhawks, Soul Asylum, Babes in Toyland, the Uncle Tupelo / Wilco / Son Volt axis, Helmet, Sparklehorse, Vic Chesnutt, the Jesus Lizard, and Robbie Williams, among others, not to mention working closely with Yoko Ono on her 1995 album Rising. Good going, Dave! And Ween. I was only dimly aware of them as some kind of smarty-pants lo-fi act. As it turns out, that is accurate, but Chocolate and Cheese is a transitional album, when the two principals—Gene Ween (Aaron Freeman) and Dean Ween (Mickey Melchiondo)—started to make more conscious use of studio technology and became a kind of psychedelic landmark jam band act. The first thing that impressed me about the album, in fact—and it’s a pretty good album—was the high production values and general levels of musicality. Hal Shteamer wrote this book about it. I don’t know the name but he put in a lot of years at Rolling Stone (“senior editor”) and elsewhere. He’s also a musician. The book seems solid to me, bearing in mind I am a total Ween neophyte. But I took Shteamer as pretty good getting me up to speed. I’ve learned Gene and Dean don’t like the comparison, but they remind me a lot of early-‘70s Frank Zappa, the period after the Turtles vocalists had come on board. An unusual point in this book is that, in the song-by-song rundown, Shteamer discusses them out of sequencing order, writing, “Rather than discuss the songs in their actual running order, I’ve chosen a sequence that seemed most relevant to the themes dealt with in this book.” Does that mean they are stack-ranked? Is 1994 when digital programmability took over? It didn’t work for me perhaps because all things Ween are still so new to me. For the most part, these books are intended for fans who have already absorbed most of the basics, such as opinions about each of the 16 tracks on the 55-minute album. It might be the right call on Shteamer’s part. I must say I also appreciated that he spent some time and research effort on the arresting Chocolate and Cheese cover art. How in the world did it take me 30 years to get to Ween?

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

Three Colors: Red (1994)

Trois couleurs: Rouge, France / Switzerland / Poland, 99 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Edward Klosinski, Marcin Latallo

Photography: Piotr Sobocinski

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Jacques Witta

Cast: Irene Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean-Pierre Lorit, Frederique Feder

Based on the French flag colors of the “blue, white, and red,” Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy wraps up with Red and a story of fraternity (as opposed to the liberty themes of Blue and equality themes of White). Although Red was the first of the trilogy I saw when it was new, and my favorite, it feels now more like a winding-down, even pale feel-good exercise, with some air of mystery, a kinda sorta heartening redemption story, and ham-handed cameos from the first two movies. Human bonds are forged, here as in life, via family ties, sometimes. But more often by random chance. Who can account for why we have made the friends we have?

In a way Red has Kieslowski’s biggest star yet in Jean-Louis Trintignant, who died just last year. He’s an art film hero and veteran whose roles date back to 1955 and include My Night at Maud’s, The Conformist, and, much later, Amour (not to mention the spaghetti western The Great Silence). In Red he plays a retired judge who spies on people and feels embittered and alone. Irene Jacob previously appeared in Kieslowski’s 1992 movie The Double Life of Veronique and once again, as Valentine here, is a kindly, wide-eyed soul of goodness. In a moment of distracted driving she runs over the judge’s German Shepherd dog Rita, who is pregnant. No dogs are harmed in the making of this film but they do have their trials in the narrative. Rita, who has the face of a saint, is injured only with scrapes and bruises. She recovers, but the judge doesn’t care.

Three Colors: White (1994)

Trois couleurs: Blanc, Switzerland / France / Poland, 92 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Edward Klosinski, Marcin Latallo

Photography: Edward Klosinski

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Urszula Lesiak

Cast: Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy, Janusz Gajos, Jerzy Stuhr

Director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski positively seems to love the dense, evocative, confounding narratives he constructs based on abstractions and ironical moral precepts. His best movie—if you want to call a 10-hour TV miniseries a movie, and I do—was Dekalog, which worked with the biblical 10 Commandments, one at a time, with a double handful of masterpieces. His breakthrough Three Colors trilogy, the last movies he made—he died in 1996 at the age of 54—is similarly focused on the colors of the French flag, the “blue, white, and red,” typically radicalizing their meanings of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” (respectively). We have already seen the radical liberty, in Three Colors: Blue, of a woman who has lost everything. Now we encounter the radical equality of a bitter failing marriage in Paris between a Polish immigrant, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), and a French woman, Dominique (Julie Delpy).

Dominique is divorcing Karol because he has never been able to consummate the marriage, as she announces in open court, one more way she can humiliate him. It’s something of a preoccupation of hers. She has a cruel streak a mile deep—her name hammers that point home (while his has intimations of femininity and submission). Karol tries to explain himself at the hearing but the divorce is granted, which ruins him. He is homeless, penniless, begging on the street. Eventually he befriends a Polish national in Paris who helps him find his way back home by wedging him into a suitcase for the flight.

Jeff Buckley’s Grace (2005)

Daphne Brooks’s entry in the 33-1/3 series is more along the lines of an academic monograph, with dozens of footnotes for each chapter. I’m not fond of this approach—too much compulsive checking only to find “Ibid.” or its moral equivalent—but it’s a sign I appreciate of how much writers are really allowed by the series editors to do these treatises any old way they want. Brooks is an actual academic too, currently with a position at Yale. Her encounters with Jeff Buckley and his only album took place when she was a graduate student at UCLA. Her various experiences bring a nice personal touch to an intense meditation on Buckley and his sources. Buckley and Grace have mostly eluded me beyond the cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which exists on a plane unto itself and is basically as much of the album as I’ve known. Brooks identifies Buckley’s sources as including Ray Charles, Judy Garland, Mahalia Jackson, Nusret Fateh Ali Khan, Led Zeppelin, Edith Piaf, Nina Simone, and others. She frequently attempts to make a case for Jeff Buckley’s “punk-rock soul,” which I’m not buying. She describes a formative period for him in New York in the early ‘90s when he regularly played solo coffeehouse gigs. That sounds more like a beat to me. The book has opened up the album for me more, though I remain dubious—not about his great talent, which is much apparent, but about whether it’s for me. I must say it sounds better to me now, studying it with her, but nothing is close to “Hallelujah,” which in spite of my other doubts I have always heard as one of the most beautiful tracks ever recorded by anyone, a kind of miracle. Brooks does not get to it until the very end of her monograph and then does not have much to say about it compared to the rest. She wisely seems to assume it speaks for itself. But I would say the rest of the album benefits from her explications and heartfelt support. I also learned a lot of things I didn’t know, clearing up some misconceptions I had. His father Tim Buckley died when Jeff was 8 or 9 and Jeff remembered meeting him only twice. It's really amazing given how much the two have in common in terms of their music. Certainly Jeff had opportunity to study Tim closely, though it could not have been without pain. But Brooks makes a more convincing argument that Jeff charted his own way, and remains altogether an interesting figure himself.

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

Forrest Gump (1994)

USA, 142 minutes

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Writers: Winston Groom, Eric Roth

Photography: Don Burgess

Music: Alan Silvestri

Editor: Arthur Schmidt

Cast: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, Sally Field, Mykelti Williamson, Michael Conner Humphreys, Hanna Hall, Haley Joel Osment, numerous archival holograms

As of this writing, Forrest Gump ranks #11 on the IMDb Top 250 Movies list. As voted on by millions of IMDb users, it’s one of the most distinctly unusual lists for movie fans, a popularity contest like few others. Citizen Kane is humbled down at #94 and, in the #1 position (which it has held for a long time), stands The Shawshank Redemption. At this point, Forrest Gump is also one of the most successful money-makers in movie history, ranking #72 for lifetime grosses (according to Box Office Mojo). I would have been disappointed to learn all this about Forrest Gump in 1994 when I walked out of the theater after seeing it, but even the critics seem to be on board with the general assessment. The picture recently moved into the top 500 greatest movies of all time in the aggregated big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Full disclosure, Forrest Gump is a movie I despise. I threw a 4 out of 10 at it in the IMDb poll years ago and didn’t see it a second time for 28 years. (Note: As a corrective to this intemperate display, see list below.)

Compare Shawshank, which I gave a 6 for being more generally good-hearted. You may say Forrest Gump is good-hearted—certainly Tom Hanks playing the title character is known for a good-hearted persona—but honestly the point of this movie escaped me, beyond the special effects, especially when you get into the details of the screenplay. Valorizing a “simple” Southern man whose IQ is 75 is commendable in a way, but what are we supposed to get out of it? He sits on a bench in Savannah, Georgia, with his box of chocolates, telling his precious, long-winded backstory to people waiting for buses. He’s boring. They ignore him as deranged but probably (hopefully) harmless. His stories are mostly matters of luck—good and bad, it’s all the same to Gump, he just carries on. Other continuing themes involve running—literally running—and a feckless love interest kinda sorta girlfriend, Jenny (Robin Wright), who is presented as a victim of hackneyed liberal ‘60s values. I didn’t know why this movie exists at all, let alone has achieved such lasting massive popularity.

Haunted (1994)

I keep meaning to address the subject of duds in story collections and anthologies. I'm so used to finding them in every one I read that I almost suspect it might be a matter of mood and/or just comes with the territory. This is the first collection I've read by Joyce Carol Oates, and it seemed to me almost perfect—nearly every story very good or better, and some, such as the title story, among the best I know. Two other collections of hers I've looked at since don't come close so maybe I had something like beginner's luck here. It does have weaker pieces, and at least one ("The Model") that doesn't seem like horror at all. Oates is very good at writing short stories and seems well aware of the range offered by horror. She includes an afterword specifically on horror that spells it out, as if she is explicitly committing to it. It feels like she can effortlessly access the fears all women know and live with and incorporate them naturally into her stories. They feature ghosts, monsters, haunted houses, serial killers, maybe even a vampire or werewolf or two. But behind all of it are the anxieties of being a woman in this society—taken for granted, fearful of violence, and struggling to be enough. It's not just sexual assault (a given in the worlds of these stories) but all the unfair and conflicting expectations to be strong, nurturing, submissive, and successful, along with the fears of failing to live up to any of these expectations. You can learn a tremendous amount from these stories, I suspect, about what it's like being a woman at the turn of the 21st century. Best of the best here include the title story, which deftly serves up a stew of simmering anxiety from haunted house to serial killer to irrational gnawing guilt and shame, followed by "The Doll," a munge of self-imposed you-can-do-it-all ambition with classic doll story elements done exceptionally well. I also liked seeing Oates dedicate the collection to editor-at-large Ellen Datlow, who I'm just coming to know via her vast production of anthologies over the past 30 years or so. Haunted is remarkably good, not least because the stories, each one, are so consistently so good.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Portishead's Dummy (2011)

This entry by R.J. Wheaton in the 33-1/3 series is nearly twice as long as most of them. At first it annoyed me a little because one of the best things about these books is their brevity. Longer than even a long album review they are still short enough to be over before you know it. I don't know much about Wheaton but he felt like a studio hand. That might have been the research, which is deep. He dissects the songs down to the second, calling attention to this at 0:12 and that at 1:21. There's a lot of information about the recording of this album, which was an intricate process, so eventually I made my peace with the length. Wheaton is not exactly prolix but he often seems to be thinking out loud, in sentence fragments, as if orienting himself. Then he sprints into description. But it's a hard album for most to write about—exotic, mysterious, alien, unique. Wheaton has the sense of it as a generational marker and sees himself square in the right place. His older (UK) brothers and sisters listened to The Stone Roses, Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches, and Screamadelica. But perhaps Wheaton's best point about Portishead and Dummy has nothing to do with generations: "It is not music that we hear and say 'I want to be part of that'; instead: 'that music is part of me.'" I was 39 when Dummy came out and that's what I heard too. There's nothing else quite like Portishead. Wheaton's other great insight is what drives most of the book: "the album was built—built, not recorded" (his italics). There's a lot of good detail on the construction and a fair sense of the music, along with more glancing insights that can be surprising in their penetration. "[T]he music is only a pretext for the non-communication, the solitude, and the silence imposed by the sound volume," he writes, discussing the intimacies and alienations of live music. "Loud music makes us strangers to ourselves, intimates to others. It becomes a social lubricant." But I must say I am suspicious when these little books run to 100 or more footnotes and this one pushes toward 300. Goodness. Most of the time, as in this case, a bibliography should take care of it. Perhaps the most interesting fact about the album, and I learned it here, is that it was a big hit commercially, selling some 3.6 million units by 2011. So multiplatinum, yet it also flatters our indie underground impulses—win-win. This book's a good one for fans of the album and/or Portishead.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Man Who Smiled (1994)

This is still an early-ish novel in Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series, fourth or fifth of 12 depending on how you count them. I can see how it might not be considered up to some of the others. It spends a lot of time on Wallander's personal life. He's interesting, but I'm more interested in the police procedures and the social realism. It also has some tendency to drop into action / thriller / suspense modes, which too often start to feel unpleasantly like Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum commercial fare. These kinds of stories don't work so well for me. But it's still a pretty interesting case and one of Mankell's strong suits remains putting together a satisfyingly complex mystery story. He's maybe not as interested in actual police procedures as me, but he knows how to use them to get a plot from one point to the next. That said, The Man Who Smiled has some flaws. The danger in which Wallander and crew find themselves, for example, is sometimes extraordinarily high, as early when Wallander computes there is a bomb in the gas tank of the car he is driving, with only moments to pull over and get far away from it. At the same time these police officers are often just as extraordinarily unconcerned about the dangers. Still, I'd call the miscues more like quibbles. Mankell is good and the novel is enjoyable. As always, he works some social justice into the story—this time Wallander is going after a corporate tycoon. Interestingly, nowadays we accept and even embrace the idea that corporate tycoons are deceitful and manipulative. Our sick president is only an extreme example. But in Sweden in 1994 there is not only the instinctive deference to wealth, but also positive affirmation of its moral good standing, if not superiority. Wallander's immediate supervisor is very troubled that the tycoon is even a suspect. For the rest of us, cynics, we can see clearly how people are cut down everywhere this tycoon goes. It's ultimately little surprise to find out he's operating in the black market for human body parts. Compare the Larry Niven story, "The Jigsaw Man," from Dangerous Visions. Mankell's version is more the way you would expect this type of market to work, from top to bottom. In some ways our villain Alfred Harderberg looks forward to the vast evils of Stieg Larsson's Dragon Tattoo series, though he is little like the sadistic misogynists found there. But he's pretty bad. Something about this series that baffles me: Wallander's father's painting business. He paints exactly the same landscape scene over and over, sometimes with a grouse in the foreground. I know it's a joke, especially that he makes a living from it, but it's so weird. Sweden can't possibly be the kitschiest place on the planet. Can it?

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Law & Order, s5 (1994-1995)

In 1994, before cable and then streaming sent it all sprawling (disruption, baby, it's a virtue now), it was still critically important for any TV series to reach a fifth season because that opened the door to rerun syndication Valhalla, extending into perpetuity (The Simpsons, for example, is still going and so is its rerun industry, post-10th-season naysayers notwithstanding). That year, 1994, was also important in the annals of broadcast crime and true-crime because in June O.J. Simpson allegedly committed the double homicide for which he was acquitted, and the whole riveting debacle—from the slow-motion police chase on live TV to the reading of the verdict 16 months later—radically changed lots of things about crime and broadcast and celebrity. The coming of DNA evidence as indisputable arbiter was another big part of the change, resulting in a resurgence in the popular appetite for crime fare, especially true-crime fare, propelled on a daily basis in large part by the ongoing O.J. case (and then into the maw of the JonBenet Ramsey mystery, where it appears to have consumed itself in a way, though leaving an entire true-crime industry behind still visible on multiple cable channels). Law & Order was well positioned to take advantage of these currents, even as it receded some next to the flood of documentaries in the Bill Kurtis style. But that didn't matter much because now Law & Order reruns were always there waiting for you on the A&E channel when you were done with the cold-case files or whatnot.

With the arrival of Sam Waterston as ADA Jack McCoy, who would never leave the show from that point on, Law & Order took more of a cautious running-in-place kind of approach. There are still episodes in the "ripped from the headlines" mode (and always would be, at varying degrees of intensity season to season), but a couple of other themes are starting to creep more into prominence. One is a familiar conventional safe approach to a TV series, focusing on the ensemble nature of the cast and devoting time to personal character development. For example, there's an episode this season where Captain Anita Van Buren (S. Epatha Merkerson) shoots and kills an assailant off-hours and finds herself in deep dutch when the evidence doesn't match her story. Or, almost immediately, McCoy begins an affair with his assistant Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy). This affair is particularly weak sauce in the flagship show (though stuff like it would be more like the staple in the spinoffs), but at least it never dominates. In fact, the affair between McCoy and Kincaid was virtually invisible to me as I first encountered the show and watched it for years mostly in reruns, and it was only when I was going through this season systematically that I saw the subtle hints of chumminess between them for what they are. So lawyerly, so professional, so icky now.

Revolution in the Head (1994)

It's no exaggeration to call Ian MacDonald's work here monumental, cataloging practically every Beatles recording that matters while arguing persuasively for the profound consequence of both the '60s and the Beatles. The argument is first sounded in the overture and frame of the opening essay, "Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade," claiming a distinct Before & After in terms of the Beatles, the '60s, and—well, MacDonald wants to make it big—so let's say world history ... make that human evolution. MacDonald is not sure how big it is, he still can't see all the edges, but he knows it's big. Yet he keeps it grounded in the concrete at the same time—the Beatles were revolutionary for the chords and chord changes they used in their music, for their innovations in verse-chorus-bridge song structures, for finding ways (usually with George Martin) to bend a sound studio (usually Abbey Road) to their will. MacDonald skillfully shapes his many judgments and arguments, and it's fun to walk down memory lane with him too, song by song. He reminded me how earthshakingly good "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was in 1964. I have always been partial to 1965 in the Beatles trajectory, especially the US version of Rubber Soul, but I see better now how Revolver—UK version, please—is the real pinnacle. MacDonald redeemed "Penny Lane" for me. He incidentally affirmed my sense that "She's Leaving Home" ranks with the best of a certain type of '60s sad pop song, with Glen Campbell's "Dreams of the Everyday Housewife" and Mary Hopkin's "Those Were the Days." He even redeemed Sgt. Pepper a little for me, though I still think it's a weak album. But in terms of what might have been! MacDonald casually mentions the industry convention in 1967 that singles already released were considered a cheat to include on new albums. Thus, in my speculations, if Sgt. Pepper could have been conceived to include "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane" it might have been as great an album as Revolver. MacDonald is also very busy, in the original 1994 edition of this book and the two that followed, one of them posthumous, about the work of restoring Paul McCartney's standing in the project, especially vis a vis John Lennon. Sometimes MacDonald comes down a little too overcompensatingly partisan for me—I don't like "Honey Pie" or "Martha My Dear" or "The Long and Winding Road" nearly as much as he does. But it's still a useful corrective to the long-term Lennon overvaluations, which I suspect mainly came of cementing in views with the grief at the time of his death. MacDonald may have made me like one of my favorites, Abbey Road, a little less, because the circumstances of its recording are so sad and disturbing. Small price to pay. Bravo to this book, excellent in every way.

In case it's not at the library.

And All Through the House (1994)

This odd little book was published originally as a longish story in Playboy in December 1984 and then repackaged 10 years later as this novelty gift or collector's item in a children's storybook format. There's not much to it, only 40 pages. How long is a kid's storybook? Wikipedia refers to it as a novella. Lovely scratchy illustrations by Victor Juhasz generously populate the pages. Aside from the random cover art, which can vary widely, Juhasz's illustrations are perhaps the best images we have of Steve Carella, Cotton Hawes, Meyer Meyer, Bert Kling, and a few others, outside our own heads. I thought his Carella was best, and Hawes somehow seemed all wrong. It's a great story, albeit a bit of a joke with punchline. One of the enduring strengths of the 87th Precinct series was Ed McBain's sense of season and time of year, which went beyond weather reports and set pungent moods for the investigations and action. This is a good example, taking place on a snowy Christmas Eve. It's set in the precinct station house, like a Barney Miller episode or the scene in the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York." One by one the detectives show up with various miscreants in tow. I started to get suspicious when one was a boy with a sheep he had stolen from the city zoo, saying he wanted to give it to his sister as a Christmas present. Yes, sure enough, spoilers spoilers spoilers before long a gritty big city nativity scene is assembled. Yes, it's ridiculous, and certainly it's muddled—are the detectives the Romans here, or what?—but it's saved by how well McBain can evoke the feeling of Christmas at a workplace. Sure, it's work, and no one wants to be there, but the pervasive spirit of the holiday can also be there, softening and making things better. McBain famously quarreled publicly (or at least in a passage in one of his novels) with Hill Street Blues about taking ideas from him but this is a lot like a Barney Miller episode, whose run had ended only a year or two earlier. "Good artists borrow, great artists steal," amirite? Merry Christmas all! For McBain fans, I can say the little book was a nice last treat for me, analogous to "Her Majesty" on Abbey Road, because it turned out (only partly by design on my part) to be the last 87th Precinct book in the series that I read. It's always possible something more from the series could surface, of course, but this was a nice way to finish.

In case it's not at the library.

File Under: Easy Listening (1994)

During the great grunge apotheosis of 1994 I seemed to be spending most of my time listening to the Pet Shop Boys, for what that's worth, to accompany all the crises of the time, personal and otherwise. But the noisy rock albums were well piled around as well. How could they not be? If I never quite caught all the way up with F.U.E.L. (and/or FU:EL, the alternative titles for this alternative album by one of alternative's favorite sons, Bob Mould), I plead undue fascination with the Sugar EP of the year before when I was in the mood for Mould blasts, Beaster, plus my certain (if passing) exhaustion at that point with aural sludge. Checking in with the internet now, I see the album is regarded in some quarters as the single best by Sugar, with hosannas for the scrubbed cudgel of Mould's production and the surprising tunefulness at the center of the welter, a well-known Mould feature. I mean, wasn't he a key part of inventing exactly thatt? Some hailed FU:EL as a rare species of true power pop. Others noted Mould's appreciation of My Bloody Valentine's dynamics of pummeling attack and winsome melodies. (In turn, MBV have to be counted as acolytes of Husker Du in the first place.) I pass these points along by way of context and general interest. Sometimes, for me, the much vaunted tunefulness here is little more than a kind of sing-songy monotony ("Your Favorite Thing," "Gee Angel," "Believe What You're Saying"). But I can't deny how often it works on me even so, especially with regular exposure, as things in this set continually reveal themselves—in the guitar play, in the hooks, in the mix, in the words, in whatever worked. Take the lift from David Bowie's "Heroes" for "What You Want It to Be," for example (sans Fripp's part unfortunately), which once recognized is almost as audacious and shocking as it is apt. Because actually it is apt—Bowie and the hulking grungers (and the hardcorers before them) were equally outsider freaks, and the best understood the point of melody. But also, however you want to argue it, there's nothing new going on here either—nothing new to power pop, or to Bob Mould, or even to putting pretty music inside roaring music. In that way, F.U.E.L. is a little conservative, more a summation than innovation, which you probably already knew. It's worth spending time with too, if you didn't.

Satantango (1994)

(Requested by reader Phil.)

Satan's Tango, Hungary / Germany / Switzerland, 420 minutes
Director: Bela Tarr
Writers: Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Mihaly Vig, Peter Dobai, Barna Mihok, Bela Tarr
Photography: Gabor Medvigy
Music: Mihaly Vig
Editor: Agnes Hranitzky
Cast: Peter Berling, Janos Derzsi, Miklos Szekely B., Erzsebet Gaal, Mihaly Vig, Putyi Horvath, Laszlo feLugossy, Eva Almassy Albert, Erika Bok

Fair warning and common sense alert: It takes some mental preparation and internal letting go to get inside and all the way through this picture—Satantango is not a movie to see on a whim. For one thing, it just doesn't behave much like many other films, except perhaps parts of the rest of Hungarian director and co-writer Bela Tarr's catalog, which is infrequent yet can be equally prolific, lean, and densely massive. The pamphlet that comes with the Facets DVD box bears the important message, "A Cinema of Patience." Take note. Coming in 1994 out of a former Soviet satellite state, that sentiment bears the weight of multiple connotations about this film, and a dreadful burden.

At seven hours, the running time likely remains the most salient feature of Satantango, certainly the primary factor one must negotiate. The movie comes with its own sense of time. It's not just slow, with its long meditative takes, but it also forces accommodation of time in new and strange ways. The narrative—not easy to make out (partly exactly because it is so long and slow), and which is perhaps best taken as extended post-Soviet phantasmagoria—tends to stop, retreat, and loop back on itself, creating knots. Meanwhile, long lines and vectors of themes and plot points cross each other at angles acute and obtuse. An eerie synthesizer keyboard soundtrack sounds like the organ in Sunset Blvd. The tone is deadening somber, but it is also an absurdist black comedy, and often very funny. Satantango is playful as only a bludgeoning seven-hour tour de force of long slow takes can be. It is equally often harrowing and desolate, and always deliciously paranoid. It contains depictions of human cruelty you may never forget. It is fantastical and naturalistic at once.

The Stand (1994)

USA, 366 minutes, ABC TV miniseries
Director: Mick Garris
Writer: Stephen King
Photography: Edward J. Pei
Music: W.G. Snuffy Walden
Editor: Patrick McMahon
Cast: Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Jamey Sheridan, Laura San Giacomo, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Rob Lowe, Miguel Ferrer, Ray Walston, Corin Nemec, Matt Frewer, Adam Storke, Kellie Overbey, Bill Fagerbakke, Rick Aviles, Stephen King, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, John Landis, Sam Raimi, Ed Harris

Stephen King's heavy participation in this TV miniseries, which aired on ABC during the sweeps month of May 1994 (and won some Emmy Awards and nominations), complicates any assessment. He makes about three cameos too many, gets a credit as executive producer, and most importantly owns sole credit for the script. It seems safe to assume King had sufficient clout by 1994 to get his way—or maybe not. Not always sure how these things work. But the miniseries bears his imprimatur. He approved this message. Too bad, because it's weak sauce compared to the original novel (which I know only in its first-published shorter form). We're talking about a six-hour production here. If nothing else, for once and for all, this should retire the debate on the natural narrative scope of feature movies, which is much closer to short stories than novels. Let alone a mammoth novel such as The Stand. Let alone any fiction so explicitly grounded in the voice of the author. I don't think I had actually realized until now how important King's distinctive voice is to what he does. Somehow it makes all the disjointed claptrap that occupies these six hours cohere and work. This miniseries is to King's novel as David Lynch's Dune is to Frank Herbert's. The good points: the continuity of King, a lot of goodwill, a decent cast, a reasonable budget. Sure, more money might have helped. It never feels remotely like the end of the world, for one problem (whereas feeling exactly like the end of the world is one of the novel's great strengths). But special effects is not the problem. The relative compression of the miniseries ("compression," recalling that it is six hours) paradoxically just exposes all the flaws of the novel. It's the titanic showdown we know between Good and Evil—a ground that is terribly fraught with pitfalls already, yet managed well in the novel—suddenly reduced to a series of skits and dramatic reenactments of famous scenes from the novel. Sometimes things seem to be here just so we can hear the line, or see the visual. The rock 'n' roll soundtrack is lame too. The dynamic finally is on the order of Bugs Bunny (aka Good) and Daffy Duck (aka Evil). We know who wins that one. And we know who wins this one. Because that's the other thing—I can't see it makes any sense without bringing familiarity with the novel to it. All that said, if it's OK with King, and with at least a plurality of his fans (as judged by comments on IMDb.com, and skipping that nothing should ever be judged by comments on IMDb.com), then who am I? Inevitably, in today's moviemaking climate, another film version of The Stand is in the works—sounds like King will have less involvement, though his status as 800-lb. gorilla has to be more imposing than ever. If it makes any difference. Whatever. I can't help thinking it's bound to look approximately as meager as this. For me, the whole thing is a no-brainer. Read the book.

Hoop Dreams (1994)

USA, 170 minutes, documentary
Director: Steve James
Writers: Steve James, Frederick Marx
Photography: Peter Gilbert
Music: Ben Sidran
Editors: William Haugse, Steve James, Frederick Marx
With: William Gates, Arthur Agee, Steve James, Emma Gates, Curtis Gates, Sheila Agee, Arthur "Bo" Agee, Earl Smith, Gene Pingatore

A couple of things about Hoop Dreams: First, perhaps most remarkably, it hasn't dated much for a documentary that somehow is already 20 years old. The story of two Chicago youths with a knack for playing basketball and dreams of turning that into their ticket to better lives remains, if anything, more poignant, compelling, and relevant than ever. This is accomplished partly by its willingness to slip into the syntax of classic Hollywood sports tales—for me, Breaking Away and Hoosiers come to mind immediately. Some of the best parts emerge directly out of the drama of important games with high stakes. Even more, it's accomplished by director and co-producer Steve James's willingness to settle on a story and follow it down its tortuous path. It's the story of any sports career. It's the story of any life.

Make that two stories: Arthur Agee and William Gates. The second remarkable point about Hoop Dreams is how short and incomplete it feels, even at nearly three hours. It focuses on Agee and Gates from when they are 14 and looking to use basketball as a leg up and a way in, both with talent enough to receive financial assistance from a Chicago private high school with a successful basketball program, St. Joseph. The picture follows the twists and turns of their high school careers and suddenly leaves us with only a few clues about their subsequent college careers. It's up to us to rush to Wikipedia to fill in what has happened with their lives since then, including whether or not they ever made it to the NBA. Hoop Dreams is so good at what it does it's virtually guaranteed most people seeing it will take the time to poke around for that information.