Set the Twilight Reeling (1996)

Lou Reed’s 17th studio album was standard-issue for him at that point in his career—overarching fealty to the rock band 2 guitars bass drums array of sound, with generous bolts of feedback and other rude noise, Fernando Saunders on bass, homely vocals, and densely varying tones of lyrics. New York City references abound. The album opens on “Egg Cream” (“a cold beverage consisting of milk, carbonated water, and flavored syrup [typically chocolate or vanilla] ... [it] originated among Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York City”) and follows with “NYC Man,” rife with twists on cliches, e.g., “I'm a New York City man, blink your eyes and I'll be gone.” “Hookywooky” is just for the infectious fun. The live “Sex With Your Parents (Motherfucker) Part II” (whither Part I?!) has him riffing on the outrage of Republican Party hypocrisy. Pretty good for 1996. He’s cracking jokes but he’s mad too. “Riptide” clocks in at 7:47 replete with howling feedback. For me the centerpiece and center of gravity to this album is the song “Trade In,” where Reed’s much vaunted emotional honesty might be shading over into cruelty. The singer is formally addressing someone he used to be. Namely, at least the way I hear it, the singer in “Heavenly Arms,” which credits Reed’s second wife, Sylvia Morales, with his most heartfelt redemption, calling her by name in an agonizingly beautiful passage. That was 1980. In 1994 they divorced, and Reed by then was already involved with Laurie Anderson. In “Trade In,” he refers to Anderson as “a woman with a thousand faces / And I want to make her my wife.” They married in 2008. I don’t take the song as deliberately malicious, though it veers close. The song has many powerful points, notably when the guitar comes in full, but I think what makes it work to the extent it does is that the singer seems as confused about his romantic reversals as anyone. Maybe he’s trying to atone for “Heavenly Arms,” whose own powerful moment is a little reduced by the failure of the marriage. The singer in “Trade In” is rueful and self-deprecating, saying he wants a “fourteenth chance at this life,” suggesting awareness of many previous mistakes. What feel like attacks on his former lover, and spouse—Reed does characterize the target in this song as a former self, so maybe that’s actually what the song is about ... I’m just spitballing here—are more often result of his own self-lacerations: “A child that is raised by an idiot and that idiot then becomes you / How could I believe in a movie? How could I believe in a book?” Nevertheless, he is stubbornly sticking to his guns. He wants a trade in. Amazing song on a pretty good album.

“Travels With the Snow Queen” (1996)

This story by Kelly Link was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 1999 but ultimately lost to another of her stories, “The Specialist’s Hat.” “Travels With the Snow Queen” is one more example of a fairy tale retelling from the 1990s, a certifiable trend likely tracing back to Angela Carter’s work in the 1970s. But Link’s story is more having a go at what is expected of girls in fairy tales. The tone is jokey and ironic and there is a lot of broad winking about fairy tale tropes in general. It’s also told second-person present-tense, which I would have to count as a strike against it—“you do this,” “you see that,” etc. Seems gimmicky to me. YMMV. “You” is a girl on the move, barefoot and heading north. Perhaps the gist and important points of the story may be gleaned (in a way that I couldn’t) by way of the passages I found highlighted in my kindle edition of the Link collection. I realize I might be taking the easy way out for a story I didn’t entirely connect with, but here are three of those passages. “Where you are, where you are coming from, it is impossible to read a map made of paper. If it were that easy then everyone would be a traveler. You have heard of other travelers whose maps are bread-crumbs, whose maps are stones, whose maps are the four winds, whose maps are yellow bricks laid one after the other. You read your map with your foot, and behind you somewhere there must be another traveler whose map is the bloody footprints that you are leaving behind you” (54 readers highlighted). “You were going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover leaves her. It’s hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is hard on the heart, and you weren’t quite ready to give him up yet” (31 readers highlighted). “You’re sick and tired of traveling towards the happily ever after, whenever the fuck that is—you’d like the happily right now. Thank you very much” (32 readers highlighted). I don’t know the original Snow Queen fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, which no doubt put me at some disadvantage. Honestly I didn’t get much from this story. Someone on ISFDB gave it a 10 so maybe I am the one woefully off the mark here.

Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen
The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
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Pre-Millennium Tension (1996)

Tricky intended his second album as a departure from the “trip hop” label with which he was not only associated, but indeed tagged as inventor, going back to his work with Massive Attack. His claim was that he wanted to draw closer to punk-rock. I don’t hear much of that here, which maybe lands closer to postpunk as he stalks through welters of spooky sound with his filtered Spiderman vocals. The album bears some of the biggest hits of his career: “Christiansands,” “Tricky Kid” (trite confessions of celebrity by some lights), and the almost wistful “Makes Me Wanna Die.” I don’t think I like Pre-Millenium Tension as much as his first album, Maxinquaye, but it benefits from some spillover effects of that mighty debut. I’m in agreement with rock critic Robert Christgau that key collaborator Martina Topley-Bird tends to get short shrift in the Tricky annals. She’s there on the first four Tricky albums, and then gone, never to return, after their personal relationship ended. Weirdly, Wikipedia offers no songwriting credits for this album, but, according to a Discogs listing, Topley-Bird had no hand in writing any of the songs on Pre-Millennium Tension, and the same is true per Wikipedia for Maxinquaye. But she still has a lot to do with what makes Tricky’s early albums work. Her vocals are a clarion counterpoint to Tricky’s more prowling style, bringing home points of these songs in ways that make them work uniquely. While Tricky rumbles and spews on the lower rungs of the mix in “Christiansands,” for example, Topley-Bird floats in along the higher registers, enlarging the track. And she does that a lot all over the album. I do think Maxinquaye is the better set—the songs are more fully imagined, with the trip hop production that sculpts phantasms into the mix. But I still find enough to like on the follow-up—restrained and understated, it can recede uneasily to the background, reaching out at random with its various hooks and a mood that entirely suffuses any room where it plays, at practically any volume. Lower it, and conversation may still be possible, with lights turned down low. Yet you are never entirely free of it under any circumstances where it plays.

Crash (1996)

UK / Canada / USA, 100 minutes

Director: David Cronenberg

Writers: J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg

Photography: Peter Suschitzky

Music: Howard Shore

Editor: Ronald Sanders

Cast: Elias Koteas, James Spader, Holly Hunter, Deborah Kara Unger, Rosanna Arquette, Peter MacNeill

Director and screenwriter David Cronenberg arguably went off the rails after the ‘70s and ‘80s, as his various signature exercises in hilarious, insightful outrage (Rabid, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers) gave way to more literary ambitions. You could say it was already there, as The Dead Zone comes from a Stephen King novel, The Fly is from a famous midcentury horror story by George Langelaan, and Dead Ringers (believe it or not!) is based on real true-crime events (committed by a pair of identical twins who were gynecologists in New York City ... n.b., the tools are strictly under Cronenberg’s direction). As if stepping up to the literary plate and swinging for the fences, he next took on Naked Lunch (1992) by William Burroughs, Spider (2002) by Patrick McGrath, and, here, Crash by J.G. Ballard. I’m not sure, to continue the baseball metaphor, that he even gets the bat on the ball in these productions.

Full disclosure, I’m no fan yet of Ballard—or Burroughs, for that matter (except by fragments), though I’ve read and enjoyed a couple novels by McGrath. But I trust the taste of many of Ballard’s partisans and intend to try him again. For now I’ve read only Crash and some stories and haven’t got a lot from them. But the relative difficulty I had even getting a look at Cronenberg’s movie may speak at least in part to its dubious quality. It also has the dreaded NC-17 rating, which doesn’t help either. Our streaming world: I saw it was available a few weeks ago, via Amazon Prime I think, but when it came time to look at it the only way was with a Roku account. That left me with the adventure of an in-home VHS viewing and you know how that goes (see here). Crash (book and picture), to be perfectly reductive about it, concerns a group of polyamory- and BDSM-flavored folks who get off sexually on auto accidents. Quoth the cult leader Vaughan (Elias Koteas): “The car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event.”

Breaking the Waves (1996)

Denmark / Sweden / France / Netherlands / Norway / Iceland / Spain / UK, 159 minutes

Director: Lars von Trier

Writers: Lars von Trier, Peter Asmussen, David Pirie

Photography: Robby Muller

Music: Lars von Trier K-tel Collection

Editor: Anders Refn

Cast: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgard, Katrin Cartlidge, Adrian Rawlins, Sandra Voe, Jean-Marc Barr, Jonathan Hackett, Udo Kier

Breaking the Waves is laid out like a big fat 19th-century novel with parts and sections and chapters. It's set in the early 1970s, proclaimed both by the heavy sideburns on many of the men and by the soundtrack with Jethro Tull, Mott the Hoople, Procol Harum, Roxy Music, Rod Stewart, T. Rex, and others. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes and Emily Watson even got an Oscar nomination. It's director Lars von Trier's fourth feature-length movie, and possibly the one most responsible for setting his reputation as a transgressive bad boy of cinema, though later films have tended toward ever more fixated transgressions.

The challenges to propriety here are related to religion, mental illness, and gender roles—three of von Trier's favorite themes. Emily Watson is Bess McNeill, a young woman who lives in a small cloistered religious community in Scotland. The church is harsh and Calvinist. If you die unredeemed the funeral service includes reminders that you are now burning in hell. In Calvinism, as I understand it, only God knows whether you are redeemed, so the safe assumption seems to be that you aren't and it's appropriate to point that out as you are buried. Bess may or may not be mentally ill or developmentally challenged. It's hard to tell when the church has this much control over a person's life.

Law & Order, s7 (1996-1997)

Law & Order was well-primed for the mid-'90s surge of interest in true-crime, with the OJ Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey cases occurring bang-bang even as DNA and other forensic technology burgeoned. All of a sudden cases were being solved that had never been solved, innocents freed from prison, and everyone seemed to have detailed opinions about any given case. The show played to the interest simply by sticking resolutely to the formula that got it there, focusing on police and court roles in complicated cases more than characters, willy-nilly removing another mainstay the previous season in ADA Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy)—killing her off, in fact, which ended her tenure absolutely as this is one show that does not do flashbacks. She was replaced by ADA Jamie Ross (Carey Lowell), unfortunately introducing a bad habit of making that role a series of highly attractive women. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) annoyingly beds them all, or so we may surmise because at least the show tends to be reasonably subtle about it. To be sure, there are character arcs happening all over the peripheries: Detective Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) is a self-righteous religious conservative going through a separation from his wife. Detective Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) had an alcoholic relapse at the end of the previous season and now there's concern about his sobriety. Ross is divorced from her former law partner, a high-flying defense attorney who plays head games with her over custody of their daughter. One of the best episodes in this season is the finale, in which DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill) has to decide whether to pull the plug on his dying wife. But the primary focus remains the twisting, turning cases that confront the principals and viewers with each episode. There's usually a murder in the first scene before the titles but it can go anywhere from there. A number of episodes are more about legal principles than guilt or innocence in the specific cases at hand. I thought the prosecutors seemed to lose more often, or at best come up with mixed results, more so than I think would be the case later in the series, when they were regular winners, the New York Yankees of New York City jurisprudence. It's actually nice to see McCoy lose a few. This season does have perhaps the nadir of the whole franchise in a three-part arc that takes the crew to Los Angeles—not a very interesting case, and little point forcing in the West Coast setting, especially across the interminable, padded-out three episodes. To be scrupulously fair, as nadirs go it's still better than the high points of many other series. As always, the show attracted a good many obvious but unfamiliar talents from within the New York theatrical world, one of its great secrets. Various up-and-comers with later careers can also be spotted here, such as Edie Falco as a defense attorney, but there didn't seem to be as many in this season. The most tantalizing who-is-that-anyway for me was Reiko Aylesworth, whose face kept bothering me for a whole episode until I later recalled through the miracle of IMDb that she was Michelle Dessler on 24. In its seventh season Law & Order is all product, a juggernaut coming into its own ratings-wise with the dread spinoffs not many years away now. As product, it is A-1.

The Fifth Woman (1996)

I'm calling the sixth Kurt Wallander mystery by Henning Mankell one of the best in the series. As always, it's totally engrossing nearly from start to finish. And, also once again, there's more evidence for what a master of plot Mankell is. Some of the elements may rankle a little. The brutality of the crimes is first on that list—so grotesque here they finally begin to verge on parody. Especially when they start to eat at Wallander from the inside out, as they often do. As they would anyone, obviously, including many readers. Mankell does not exactly "play fair" in this one, tipping us early to who the killer is. We see some scenes from the killer's view, which also gives us information, but the specific identity of this culprit is not that important. If Wallander is a link between Martin Beck and Stieg Larsson's trilogy, and he might be, here is where the theme of misogyny and its various fruits first really shows up. For once I don't want to give too much away as the details of this one are there to be discovered. But the primary focus here is specifically on many of the ill ways men treat women, and they are never isolated cases. We should know it's going on constantly, as police officers are likely to know well themselves. In a way, Wallander represents a type of social complacency, a police detective who can still be shocked and deeply disturbed by what he witnesses, and yet is unable to generalize it somehow and so is never quite hardened to his job. He remains an interesting character for all his flaws and the increasing use of him as a superhero (the girl with the dragon tattoo herself, Lisbeth Salander, practically arrives as a superhero). This novel also includes significant developments in Wallander's life, which can be affecting even though more and more I think that kind of stuff only clutters up some of these narratives. Another thing I noticed here is how good Mankell is on time passing. We get a nice sense that we are seeing the life of a man as he passes through his 40s. This kind of keeping faith with real time is tricky business in any continuing series and among other things Mankell is doing much better at that than many others.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Fargo (1996)

USA / UK, 98 minutes

Directors / writers / editors: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Photography: Roger Deakins

Music: Carter Burwell

Cast: Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare, Harve Presnell, Kristin Rudrud, John Carroll Lynch, Steve Park, Jose Feliciano, Bruce Campbell, Petra Boden

Pretty much everyone I know likes Fargo, and I do too, but over the years you can't help noting a grumbling undercurrent or even animus from some quarters toward the Coen brothers, the directors, writers, and editors of the picture. At least into the 21st century, naysayers seemed to see everything by them only in terms of adolescent disrespect. It probably doesn't help that the Coens are obvious aesthetes of grotesque violence but the main point seems to be that they are making fun of ordinary normal people all the time in their movies—that, in fact, that's what their movies are about. At least with Fargo, I feel like I'm in a reasonably good position to judge, as I was born and raised in Minnesota and knew both Lundegaards and Gundersons. The point I feel may get lost too often is how good the Coens are at what they do. Before it is anything else, Fargo is superior neo-noir, with a headlong narrative of despair that constantly ratchets tension as greed and human foolishness conspire to ruin multiple lives all at once.

For the most part, I think the Coens get the Scandinavian kitsch of Minnesota pretty much right. Although the movie claims to be based on a true story and isn't, what the Coens are doing is closer to reporting, not mocking. Yes, there is some exaggeration. But not that much. The accents are not always this broad, and the people generally not as stupid as some of those here, such as a policeman who can't figure out basic facts about a crime scene. Or, an even smaller throwaway, a 'cake-and-steak cashier with a certain classic vacuous affect. You can feel the Coens leaning a little extra hard into the white-bread, horrifying evil of Jerry Lundegaard, who works as executive sales manager at an auto dealership owned by his father-in-law and needs a lot of money fast, thinking he can score a big business deal. But leaning into his evil is also a natural element of this story.

Portrait of My Body (1996)

After publishing his large (and essential) anthology of personal essays, Phillip Lopate went to work on his own third collection of them. This time, he says in the introduction, he thought he had to be more careful to include only personal essays—no "literary essays, film and architectural reviews, magazine articles about urbanism and travel, ephemeral 'relationship' pieces.... The dread of all publishing companies is to be caught publishing a random collection of pieces." Accordingly, some of the 13 pieces here are winsomely personal: about shushing in movie theaters, remembering Greenwich Village, and the title piece, equal parts candor and dry wit about his body parts. He likes his legs a lot, for example, because he likes being tall. Many of the pieces touch on his marriage and child. It's a grand joke in his circles that his first collection was called Bachelorhood. His second was Against Joie de Vivre, leading to conjecture this one would be called Against Bachelorhood, a kind of apologia. It may be somewhat awkward for him but I like the sound of the marriage and family here. Speaking of being against things, Lopate notes a theme of "resistance" that runs through these pieces. It's perhaps most explicit in "Resistance to the Holocaust," which is less a personal essay and more a personal opinion—or even polemic—but a useful and interesting one. That's not least because, writing in 1989, he has some air of authority and prescience on the topic. Essentially his argument is that by making the Holocaust a unique event in history, which cannot be compared with other genocides, it must be removed from history and the sphere of critical examination. Lopate is very careful to detach himself from deniers—as a Jew himself, he makes clear he understands all the stakes. It's a subtle point, his resistance. It's more about sentimentality and hagiography obscuring the truth. In some ways, in these various themes of resistance, Lopate comes across more like a basic contrarian, a position with which of course I have much sympathy. If so many people are for it, in the world of human psychology herd instinct, then how can it possibly be any good? At the most fundamental level, this is the attitude all good writers should bring to the party, not just personal essayists. Good stuff again.

In case it's not at the library.

Emancipation (1996)

I was never as offended as others by Prince's insistence on equating the contract difficulties he had at Warner Bros. with slavery, as it was literally a battle to control masters and Prince was the black person in the equation doing the work. But I understood the point. I thought it was a little strange to start his formal manumission with two albums totaling some six hours of music on six CDs, with very few singles emerging from the assault. File under "ambitious," after four albums in the previous two years. In other words, Emancipation, his first album out from under the major label, is typical Prince product. Unfortunately, I considered that a small problem at the time. Like a science experiment, I was saturated. I could not absorb any more. I never even bothered to buy the follow-on two years later (at least he gave us those two years), Crystal Ball, and thus began my slow drift from following him closely, though I picked up several more of his new albums over the years. So it was good to give myself the chance to return to Emancipation at last and finish the job of absorbing. In 1996 I had stalled on the first CD and the one song that distinguished itself (after the covers), "White Mansion," which put me in a Minnesota mood with a high lonesome sound. The other two discs, no surprise, are equal to the first or better, affording hours rewarded with the solid good stuff. He's still attempting to accommodate latter-day developments such as a couple of spotlights for rapper Scrap D. There's also a rave / techno workup, "The Human Body." And more worthwhile-to-special tracks have distinguished all through: nice guitar play in "We Gets Up," a disclosure of his favorite cereal in "Joint 2 Joint," name-checking for everyone in "Style," and of course lots of good grooves.

Now about those covers, which have always stood out to me most on casual listens. I take that as partly a matter of my attention to the radio over the years, though maybe it says something about the original material. But like many I'm often fascinated by covers, attempting to divine something about the two artists involved, only one by deliberate choice. They are declarations of identity in mysterious ways. Emancipation has four, two each on the first and third CDs, one each per CD of a soul classic and a ballad made famous by a woman: the Stylistics' "Betcha by Golly Wow," Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" (written by Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin), the Delfonics' "La-La-Means I Love You," and Joan Osborne's "One of Us" (written by Eric Bazilian). All titles rendered in Prince, natch. As always the image is of Prince alone in the studio, working this stuff out. The soul songs are impossibly sweet, even in their original forms, and the ballads are impossibly vulnerable. He's a little better I think at accessing the pith of the ballads—he's not afraid they might be maudlin or trite, and thus he makes sure they are not. He's notably brave taking on "One of Us," which had been a big hit earlier that year, much disdained in many quarters. I have always loved it but often still feel a little constrained to keep my mouth shut. I hate to use the term guilty pleasure. But Prince really brings it for this one, underlining the themes (yes, including "slave" for "slob") even as he makes it all soar. A liberating moment for me for sure. There are many others in this generous set too.

Ship Fever (1996)

I'm not sure I've read many stories quite like Andrea Barrett's in this collection. They're grounded in 19th-century scientific currents, influenced directly by ongoing research and developments. They are always engaging and often moving. Gregor Mendel makes an abstracted appearance in the first story, for example, "The Behavior of the Hawkweeds," which wraps details of the friar scientist's biography into the story of a proud Czech woman whose grandfather was mentored by him during years of Mendel's obscurity, when he was fruitlessly studying bees and hawkweeds. In fact, a whole family drama is indirectly told, using techniques we understand better from late 20th-century fiction. The Czech woman's grandfather is accused of murder in an accidental death that ultimately destroys his life. All the stories in this collection, a National Book Award winner for fiction in 1996, have an economy and clarity of language that's a pleasure. The title story is nearly a hundred pages, involving the historical event of the typhus epidemic of 1847 at Grosse Isle, Canada, which stemmed from a huge ongoing emigration from Ireland. The immigrants arrived on ships with appalling conditions. Barrett paints a vivid picture of the dead and sick who travel in the holds of ship after arriving ship. She also documents the prejudice in Canada and the US militating against Irish immigrants. Into this intricately (and horrifically) imagined setting, Barrett inserts a story that much fits its Bronte sisters time frame. A man, a doctor, has been in love with a woman since they were both young children. But now she is married to another, and they have remained friends. The agony of his unrequited love is the next best thing to exquisite. He's off to battle the plague. I like the Victorian flavor of the romance—Canada was more or less officially Victorian at the time, I believe, and focusing on plague in the New World just adds even more layers. And there's still more here, stories full of science, and research, and historical context, alongside efficient heartrending tales. Or at least affecting. But come on, this has to be some kind of genre unto itself, yes? What's it called—historical fiction? History-of-science fiction? Industrial?

In case it's not at the library.

Scream (1996)

USA, 111 minutes
Director: Wes Craven
Writer: Kevin Williamson
Photography: Mark Irwin
Music: Marco Beltrami
Editor: Patrick Lussier
Cast: Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Courteney Cox, Rose McGowan, David Arquette, Henry Winkler

It's easy enough to knock Scream for attempting to have its cake and eat it too, make a scary movie and at the same time be all smug and ironical about it. Certainly the entire franchise played out that way—is still playing out, with the late-arriving fourth installment from 2011 (which I haven't seen). Many, many such exercises have followed—The Cabin in the Woods, for example, is only one of the better ones. More broadly, the whole decade of the '90s is often dismissed as an especially poor time for horror, and Scream tends to be assigned the face of that, turning horror into little twee comedy skits with occasional shock cuts and gore, until finally Saw, Hostel, the zombie apocalypse, and a lurching army of reboots reintroduced us to the experience of actually being scared by movies again (if rather unpleasantly so, but being scared is always unpleasant after all).

Still, the first 13 minutes of Scream are so good I really think we might need to back up a little here. Wes Craven may be uneven before he is anything else, but the confidence and pure verve are unmistakable. The details are just right: a teen girl alone at home at night in a big comfortable suburban mansion, Jiffy Pop on the stovetop, and someone with a funny voice who keeps calling on the cordless and asking weird questions. "Do you like scary movies?" he says. Drew Barrymore is a perfect choice to play the victim, and even better (shades of Janet Leigh in Psycho) she's gone from the movie practically before it's begun. The strokes of development are swift—from flirtatious joking with the strange caller to outright terror as he suddenly seems to be close by, and seriously malevolent too—and finally you just have to accept the premise. It forces you to, even as the action grows more outlandish and convenient. This opener has some air of the showoff stunt, but no one is about to get up and walk out after that, even as the movie quickly settles into the snide and, yes, very witty nonsense that follows.

Fly Away Home (1996)

USA / Canada, 107 minutes
Director: Carroll Ballard
Writers: Bill Lishman, Robert Rodat, Vince McKewin
Photography: Caleb Deschanel
Music: Mark Isham
Editor: Nicholas C. Smith
Cast: Anna Paquin, Jeff Daniels, Dana Delany, Terry Kinney, Holter Graham, Jeremy Ratchford

Sometimes I think Fly Away Home may be something like my token selection out of the ghetto of G-rated movies. All the reviews seem to find a way to mention that rating very quickly and usually also include the phrase "family fare" too (so glad I got them both out of the way myself). There are things to say about this, as there are about the other extreme of this spectrum, the X or NC-17 or "unrated" rating, or whatever it is called now. Both are commercial curses—in the case of the G it tends to relegate to a narrow market where I suspect managing children and their parents are more the goals and everything else secondary. At the other extreme—what is the last movie released with one? Henry & June? Midnight Cowboy?

With Fly Away Home it's almost certainly director Carroll Ballard who is most important in making it such an extraordinarily effective story, whose thoughtful themes are rarely cheated on and, indeed, are front and center right in the title: flight, and home. He pulled off a similarly elegiac stunt involving animals and sad children nearly 20 years earlier with The Black Stallion. Fly Away Home is populated with stock figures and sequences for a G-rated picture— funnee aminals, tender and frolicsome music, approximately six kind persons and/or institutions for every malevolent one, etc.—but it hits very hard at the longings and experiences of people of all ages (there, I said that too).

Marilyn Manson, "Antichrist Superstar" (1996)

(listen)

Parents, lock up your children, it's Marilyn Manson, scourge of a nation. Probably I never would have given any of this a second thought—too much arch concept in the programmatic monster / monster names, to start—except someone sent me a copy of the first album, which was way better than I expected. By the time of this follow-up the band had become a first-rate performing act, which I attribute to the influence of Trent Reznor, traveling with Nine Inch Nails, and because Fort Lauderdale's finest, Brian Warner, has always been a decent songwriter. If I ever happen to make peace with the bombast of opera I believe it may be with Marilyn Manson pointing the way. Yes, this is formally and intentionally a rip on Jesus Christ Superstar, and no, rock opera is another beast altogether. The tiresome / predictable / sophomoric (thesaurus, don't fail me now) Nietzsche thread in the album for which this is the title song at least does the service of locating it all closer to Richard Wagner than Pete Townshend (speaking as one who happens to love Tommy). I think you're supposed to care about the stories in opera but I don't care about the story here. What I like is the dense wallop, with a bottom that reaches to the molten core of the earth, nothing at rest. Even quieter moments (for the dynamics, see), with say a warbling choral sound straight out of Diamanda Galas, impress more as teams of wraiths and infernal termite buzz, alternating with football cheers, demon vocals, stepping down the scale into tumult, and a heavy riff that's ultimately quite satisfying. When it achieves full roar it's hard for me to see how you can call it anything but magnificent.

tu-plang (1996)

The first album by Australian band Regurgitator came in the mail the last time anyone was bothering to send me free albums in the mail, so that should give some idea how long that's been. I flipped for it in a big way—it was a curiosity and the band was a mystery (intriguing cover art, eccentric information in small font only in the booklet, this music) that went into high rotation for a couple of months. Hard to figure out who they were, or what this was. I still don't know much about Regurgitator, but I see on Wikipedia they've had a whole career and are reasonably popular even. In fact, this album itself went to #3 Down Under and even yielded a top 40 hit in "Kong Foo Sing," which may indeed be the best song here. In fairness, nothing seems to have dented any other English-speaking or European or any other charts anywhere, beyond New Zealand. Insert usual that's a shame, because there are plenty of reasons to like this, starting with the determined career suicide gesture of opening your debut album with a song called "I Sucked a Lot of Cock to Get Where I Am." That pushed me toward a disposition in its favor, and they delivered with these feverish mash-ups of hip-hop, drum-and-bass attack, screwy PiL vocals, heavy bottoms, surf-rock flourishes, and gratuitous obscenity as it pleases them. It's Stranglers-style mood pieces for people in bad moods, all lined up in neat rows. It's surprisingly listenable, and surprising in any number of ways, with constant, vicious hooks, a wealth of ways to use the studio and unusual instruments, and whatever, to insinuate itself continually. It's capable of a good deal of very pure heaviosity and even willful menace, which probably would have scared me when I was about 14, if I'd happened to wake up to it in the middle of the night and it was playing. But since I was already 40 by the time I actually heard it, I registered the vein and kept moving. It's a real pleasure, and I was happy to find it remains so. As heavy as it makes out, it's always cheeky, and the momentum rarely flags.

Eels, "Your Lucky Day in Hell" (1996)

(listen)

The Eels is essentially a one-man project, the man in question being Mark Oliver Everett, aka "E" (hence, somehow, one presumes, the name of the band), who is the son of a quantum physicist. I don't know the Eels well—in fact, this song, third single from the first album, Beautiful Freak, is for me more on the order of another CMJ discovery (Vol. 38, October 1996, track 2) and subsequent handy mix tape staple. It's possible you know it from one of its movie appearances, in Scream 2, Grosse Pointe Blank, Dead Man on Campus, and Yes Man. I have the first three Eels albums on my hard drive but haven't sat down yet to study them properly. This song, which has more or less made a study of me, has so far been quite enough. How does anyone duplicate the experience of one great song anyway? Last week, when I happened to be having my own private series of lucky days in hell, I found out one of its best uses is as tonic. It is moody affectation from the start, slow and deliberate, with layers of chiming vibe chords and a whining guitar, and then reedy, pulpy keyboard fills fleshing it out. The first line, so strange, powerful, and evocative: "Mama gripped onto the milkman's hand / and then she finally gave birth." This song moves and feels like a bad mood, like an inescapable bad day bearing down, yet at the same time providing the escape. I guess the word I'm looking for is "cathartic," but it didn't start out that way. It insinuates first as shrewd, doomy, intelligent pop music self-consciously slumming, slightly distant and above-it. Then it moves in for the soothing kill. It seems to know where I live.

Trainspotting (1996)

UK, 94 minutes
Director: Danny Boyle
Writers: Irvine Welsh, John Hodge
Photography: Brian Tufano
Editor: Masahiro Hirakubo
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald, Peter Mullan, Irvine Welsh, Susan Vidler, Pauline Lynch

I'm not normally one to use dictionary definitions as an opening, but in this case it's reasonably useful. Thus, "trainspotting," according to Dictionary.com's 21st Century Lexicon: "n., the hobby of watching trains and noting their serial numbers, usu. for long periods of time; by extension, any hobby or obsession with a trivial pursuit." Trainspotting is not a movie about jotting down serial numbers of passing trains. The "hobby or obsession with a trivial pursuit" under the glass here is the acquisition and use of heroin. Why? As our humble narrator Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), a citizen of Edinburgh, Scotland, acknowledges early, after charting routes to that particular choice, "Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?"

As one of the great drug movies, Trainspotting is particularly good at the extremes—swiftly homing in on precise and persuasive reasons people use heroin, and doing that so effectively you might as well plan on a short period of wanting a hit yourself. And then of course there are the nightmare ends. Along the way it careens wildly, from unfortunate gross-out fest (at least one too many scenes involving human feces) to dazzling turns of fantasy to sublime soundtrack movie to deceptively casual morality plays embedded within a narrative arc borrowed from A Clockwork Orange and Drugstore Cowboy, where the people we like best start out bad, turn good, and then go bad again. Along the way it's all trainspotting: getting, using, and getting again, or as Renton says: "Pile misery upon misery, heap it up on a spoon and dissolve it with a drop of bile, then squirt it into a stinking, purulent vein, and do it all over again ... propelling ourselves with longing toward the day that it would all go wrong."

Beck, "Jack-Ass" (1996)

(listen)

Another album that largely escaped me: Odelay in 1996, the Imperial Bedroom of its era in terms of rock-critical falling in line, except this time Robert Christgau was on board too. In fact, he about nails my own reservations while at the same time generally liking it more than I do: "Not quite forbidding, it embeds its lyricism in soundscape, and only prolonged, well-intentioned exposure will enable outsiders to get inside its skilled flow and ramshackle sonic architecture." It left me cold, to be perfectly honest about it, though the wearying years have also had the evident effect of helping me warm to more of these insinuating little concoctions all the time, basically the ones that creased my attention as a result of being released as singles, "Where It's At," "Devils Haircut," "Sissyneck," and "The New Pollution." Except for "Jack-Ass," which peaked at #73 in the U.S. charts and instantly at #1 in my heart, always now and forevermore. I see at Wikipedia that it's based on a sample of a cover of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" recorded by Them in 1966, which until this moment I had not known. But yes, sure enough, checking now for myself (listen). That's where the trembly guitar figure that opens "Jack-Ass" comes from and is indeed one of its highlights. But Beck's falling-face-forward-from-a-chaise-longue melody is all his, as far as I can make out, and it's the main point here—sad, tentative, relentlessly feeling itself into existence. A real beauty. It also doesn't hurt that he ends it on a flourish straight out of Au hasard Balthazar, although I did not actually become familiar with the 1966 Bresson movie until years after Odelay came out. My favorite song by Beck by miles.

Grace of My Heart (1996)

#39: Grace of My Heart (Allison Anders, 1996)

Of all the many musicals that populate my list, this is probably the most conventional in terms of the classic Hollywood approach perfected in Singin' in the Rain (which Steven covered so well yesterday): viz., just a bunch of crazy kids trying to make it in showbiz. It takes that premise and mixes it up with what is for me a nigh irresistible wantonness trafficking in rock mythology. Grace of My Heart focuses on one of my favorite places and times in rock history, the New York Brill Building pop factories of the early '60s, telling the story of one Edna Buxton (later rechristened Denise Waverly by her manager), an heir to a Pittsburgh fortune who's dying to become a singer while everyone around her is more interested in her talents as a songwriter.

The songs here are uniformly pitch-perfect mimicry of the girl groups and bubblegum and soul acts and folk-rockers of the eras it touches on, and rooted deeply in the movements of the movie's narrative. All by themselves they are worth it. It's never showy about its inventiveness in this regard, but every last bit of music is carefully and lovingly done, and all of it sounds and feels authentic. The cast that director/screenwriter Anders assembles to deliver it is notably terrific as well: the underrated Illeana Douglas in perhaps her best role, Matt Dillon, Eric Stoltz, John Turturro, Bridget Fonda (as Shelley Fabares with a twist), and more.

Raise the Pressure (1996)

To my surprise I'm prepared to call this second Electronic album the better of the first two. It's a surprise because I was actually quite fond of that first one in its time, and dismissed this in its as something of a disappointment. But somewhere along the line it really got its hooks in. The songs that work most on me here, such as "Out of My League" and "Second Nature" and "Time Can Tell," were not necessarily the attempts to find a hit—generally this follow-up never did nearly as well as the first. I'm certainly fond of the kickoff track, "Forbidden City," which eked into the UK top 20 and sets the terms for much of what's to come: sparkling production, self-conscious mid-'90s electronica flourishes subordinated to soft mood and charged atmosphere, and the soaring finery of gifted songwriters who just happen to be clicking better than anyone, even themselves, probably could have suspected. No Neil Tennant this time, just Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner and their merry band of keyboardists (one of the latter, Karl Bartos, gets co-writing credit with Marr and Sumner on nearly half of the 13 tracks here). It's a long album, lasting over an hour, and came at a time when the traditional approaches to listening to an album were dying their last deaths. Thus it has always tended to work best for me on shuffle, where the sequencing is remarkably apt on the fly (the vacuous 44-second "Interlude" notwithstanding). In such fashion, it has wormed its way permanently into my heart. Listening to something like "Out of My League," floating in and out of its pleasures, with its plain-spun attack, its unfeigned innocence and aching joy, and its ability to insinuate so deeply, it's hard to connect back to the various alienations and disaffections of Joy Division and the Smiths, where these fine fellows find their origins. But there you have it. I have a lot of admiration and respect and love for that early groundbreaking work, of course, and in terms of iconoclasm it still has it all over the Electronic project. But I just view the Electronic project as more horizon-broadening, more wall-tearing-down, middle-aged perhaps but worthy in its own right. If this is selling out, I'm buying.