Blur, “Song 2” (1997)

[listen up!]

I used to hear this song on the radio and wonder who it was—it never seemed to be announced, or I didn’t notice if it was. At 2:02 it doesn’t last long, a flashing blast over and done before you know it, but utterly perfect in its way. It’s an irresistible banger practically by definition and in 1997 it was also easy to hear it as grunge, or perhaps a parody of grunge, with the studied soft / loud dynamics. “I feel heavy metal” indeed. I was surprised when I finally found out it was Blur. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing they would do. I had them slotted in my mind with XTC and generally cerebral new wave. Of course, if it’s a conscious parody of grunge the departure in style makes a certain sort of sense. Word is the band intended it originally as a prank on the record company, but wouldn’t you know, they liked it and set about making plans to release it as a single. And then, wouldn’t you know, it became a UK and MTV hit, winning awards and attention. Never a top 40 hit in the US, it didn’t fit on classic rock stations either. Alternative rock radio is where I heard it played a lot, living at the time in Seattle, land of the grunge. I never took it as a goof, or if so an inspired one. I admit the song has lost some of its impact for me over the years from overexposure—I can recognize it now even just by the opening drumkit. Ain’t that the way, but if it hits me somewhere by surprise it can still be rousing. If you haven’t worn this one out yet for yourself, get to it and knock yourself out. I envy you for that. Play loud, of course.

OK Computer (1997)

I’m hardly out of step with majority views when I declare straight out that this is my favorite Radiohead album. But the nagging problems I have with this band and their product persist, even in the face of the deafening adulation out there. I see even my notes can contradict themselves. On one listen I praised “the spidery shivery mood of album opener ‘Airbag,’” going on to laud the next song too, “Paranoid Android”—“oh it can be beautiful.” But on another listen I note that “Paranoid Android,” the first of five singles from the album (though not one cracked the top 40), is “shivery beautiful. Where the album starts for me, if it’s going to start.” I’m telling on myself caught using the same words even, but note that now “Airbag” has somehow lost its luster (don’t worry, it had it again when I listened to the album yesterday). Really, the key term here is “if it’s going to start,” because the inconsistency of my response remains my main takeaway to this and all their albums. There’s an interesting sense of potent drama to their music and it can be thrilling, albeit on and off. Even at their best, it often seems to be only parts of songs that directly work. One obvious problem is that Thom Yorke’s vocals tend to put me off. As far as I can tell it’s his main contribution and in many ways I see he is the face of the band, hence a natural ambivalence on my part. But most of the songs on OK Computer have parts that I like and some that I like a lot. The one track here that I think is plainly a mistake is the shorty “Fitter Happier,” which is a computer voice running through suggestions for health and mental balance lifestyle choices in an implied Brave New World world. It speaks to a point of view shared by me and likely most of the Radiohead audience but it’s also suffocating heavy-handed irony and little more. It sits in the middle of the set, track 7 of 12. I briefly had a theory that the first half of the album, before “Fitter Happier,” was better but continuing listens only confused me further. “Climbing Up the Walls” has some glorious guitar chaos. “No Surprises” is excellent too, if it catches you in the right mood. But generally I think the best stuff is up-front (or maybe I get tired of listening to Radiohead after 25 or 30 minutes?). There’s a spooky good vibe on “Subterranean Homesick Alien” as well as the cheeky salute to Bob Dylan. “Karma Police” can be nagging and eerie. “Exit Music (For a Film)” is downright glum. It may be because it’s where I started with Radiohead, but I think OK Computer is the place to go for any Radiohead virgins who may be out there interested in venturing in.

#63 on the Pop Thruster Best 1,000 Albums Ever list

Law & Order, s8 (1997-1998)

The Law & Order franchise continues its twisty ways in the eighth season. There is some increasingly ongoing misbegotten attempt to humanize the principals. Detective Curtis’s wife is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and begins to deteriorate. Lt. Van Buren files a lawsuit alleging discrimination when she was passed over for a promotion. Lennie’s daughter is in trouble with the law over drugs. These threads are random, sideline themes advanced even as single throwaway lines in an episode. They feel mechanical but they can be affecting—or I am a ridiculous softy. On the other hand, we are explicitly left hanging on all of them. Interested to see whether and if so how they are resolved in the next season. There’s a two-part tie-in episode here with Homicide—the first part is a Law & Order episode and the second a Homicide, with all the orange-filtered jittery japing style of a show I never cared much for. Some of the Law & Order episodes in this season I could recognize from the very first scenes and sometimes even knew the line on which the plot turned, such as one where Lt. Van Buren turns to a key suspect in a murder and says, “Hello, my brother.” Another, starting in a rooftop parking lot, involves clitoridectomies—surgical removal of the clitoris, an ancient barbaric practice in some cultures. It’s feeling ripped from the headlines, as usual. You can tell because, in the more sensitive ones, the disclaimer is the first thing you see. Other episodes I was not even sure I had seen before. They must not have appeared as much in reruns, because I faithfully watched them for years. Dr. Emil Skoda (J.K. Simmons) is introduced as the new forensic psychologist, a hard-ass replacing the more touchy-feely Elizabeth Olivet. Trump gets name-checked occasionally. In one case involving real estate shenanigans, Curtis says, “If the other owners jump on the bandwagon, Donald Trump Jr. goes right down the tube.” For the record, Lennie, as usual, bites off the best and most bitter observations about the human condition. “I guess the macarena wasn’t exciting enough for them,” he says one time, reminding us this series arguably had its heyday in the ‘90s. But the formula stands up—about 20 minutes of police procedure and 20 minutes of a trial, with lots of variation involving plea bargains and other legal maneuvering. It stands up and would keep me loyal to the show for years. But I would never be as happy again with the casting decisions and other developments. From now on Jack McCoy is a fixture and all of his assistants will be beautiful babes he may or may not bed. I think Claire Kincaid is the only we’re sure of? He’s still losing (a minority of) his cases. As the show went on he would tend to win them all. We have probably reached the ceiling of Law & Order by this point in the franchise, but it also has a surprisingly durable, high floor. It may be starting to feel somewhat stale, but the scripts remain zippy and the cases complex and interesting. You could do worse with a 20th-century crime show—say, Homicide.

Boogie Nights (1997)

USA, 155 minutes

Director/writer: Paul Thomas Anderson

Photography: Robert Elswit

Music: Michael Penn, Emotions, Apollo 100, Melanie, Three Dog Night, Eric Burdon & War, Elvin Bishop, Hot Chocolate, KC & the Sunshine Band, Sniff ‘n the Tears, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, Brook Benton, Roberta Flack, Rick Springfield, Beach Boys, Electric Light Orchestra

Editor: Dylan Tichenor

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Heather Graham, Luis Guzman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Alfred Molina, Don Cheadle, Robert Ridgely, Philip Baker Hall, John Doe, Joanna Gleason, Laurel Holloman, Thomas Jane, Lil’ Cinderella, Melora Walters

I like director and writer Paul Thomas Anderson’s treatment of what Wikipedia calls “The Golden Age of Porn,” 1969 to 1984. Boogie Nights starts at the halfway point, in 1977, a kind of high-water mark from the look of it here, where the work is fun and the living in Southern California is easy. The picture bounds with bottomless energy and a rollicking jukebox soundtrack that rarely stops or slows. It is a basic rise and fall movie—of one Dirk Diggler nee Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg), porn star with a legendary cock. Dirk prefers the term “actor.” He is prone in his exuberance to throwing spontaneous kung fu moves all over the place. He is 17, 18, 19, and in love with his body.

There are problems in Boogie Nights as it moves from the high points of its characters’ lives to the lows, but they are relatively minor. It is one of those long movies that feels short. Scanning the credits, you might think it was Oscar-bait. Most of these players were just starting their careers at the time. Burt Reynolds is one exception, playing porn producer and director Jack Horner, who has ideas about being an artist. At the time, I recall, it was taken as attempting what John Travolta had managed with Pulp Fiction—a “comeback” role that redefined him ironically. Philip Baker Hall is another exception, playing porn industry titan Floyd Gondolli. Hall may be the only one who could deliver the classic line, “I like simple pleasures, like butter in my ass and lollipops in my mouth.”

Lost Highway (1997)

France / USA, 134 minutes

Director: David Lynch

Writers: David Lynch, Barry Gifford

Photography: Peter Deming

Music: Angelo Badalamenti, David Bowie, Rammstein, Marilyn Manson

Editor: Mary Sweeney

Cast: Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Robert Blake, Robert Loggia, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Richard Pryor, Gary Busey, Jack Nance, Marilyn Manson, Henry Rollins

I don’t like director and cowriter David Lynch’s Lost Highway as much as Blue Velvet or Mulholland Dr., but I like it more than Inland Empire, which came nearly 10 years later. They have much the same basic problem for me. They start with profoundly intriguing premises which are later swamped by inexplicable turns in the movie. Lost Highway cracks in half nearly an hour in and becomes another story entirely, though obscure connecting points—such as Patricia Arquette appearing in both as different characters—make the viewer feel tantalizingly close to making sense of it. In previous viewings I have tried to make them work together. This time I tried to let go and just enjoy the parade of great moments that go rolling by in the second part.

The first part involves jazz saxophonist (and boy does he blow) (I mean that in the good sense of “blow,” the way Bruce Springsteen meant it in instructions to Clarence Clemons), Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), and his disaffected wife who might be cheating on him, Renee (Arquette). They’ve got a nice mansion in Los Angeles and lately unmarked packages with unmarked videotapes have begun to appear on their doorstep. When they play them, they show images of their home. Renee assumes it’s some kind of realtor promotion, but a second tape shows the camera operator entering their home and taking shots of them sleeping in their bed. This is soon explained (I should use scare quotes: “explained”) in one of Lynch’s single greatest scenes.

Big Iron’s Honkey-Tonk Holidays (1997)

This anthology from the Big Iron label offers a festive mess of Texas, Xmas, and booze. Original tunes are mixed with a motley of holiday chestnuts, usually of the more lighthearted variety: “Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy,” etc. Leading the way on the freewheeling irreverent front is “Alcoholidays” by the Sutcliffs, generally the first song that jumps out, with its memorable chorus of “Old Grand-Dad, Budweiser / It’s good to be drunk again.” True confession, they are sentiments I have lived in holiday seasons past. But the rollicking Honkey-Tonk Holidays is not all western swing mockery and drunkenness. The Sutcliffs may complain that “Little Drummer Boy” is giving them a headache, but Andy Owens & Druha Trava cover it later. There’s room for many points of view here, with sweet country (and/or “alt-country” if we must), a very nice blues or two, and traditional / religious stuff as well, driven by lovely arrangements with horns, a fiddle as needed, and lots of rockin’ good guitar. There’s even an Elvis impersonator to round things off. The Mutineers play “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” like a Halloween fright-fest, with the dark “oh-wee-oh wee-ohhh-oh” chant that signifies the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz at home in her castle safehold—it’s Santa Claus as Satan Claus. You better be good. Cowboys & Indians takes jolly St. Nick a more conventional way on “Santa, Santa,” pleading with him to bring his baby back. “I got cookies, milk, whatever you need.” “Christmas Made for Two” by Mark David Manders & Nuevo Tejas is just beautiful. And the Old 97’s—the only act here I even sort of know—demonstrate as countless others before them that it is virtually impossible to ruin the tender wartime ballad “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” It always sounds good. I suppose you could give it the Roseanne Barr treatment, but please don’t. Honkey-Tonk Holidays is a terrific little Christmas set. I don’t even remember now how I came to acquire it, but I happen to know my brother owns a copy too and I assumed it was in the generally wide currency of things these days. When I came to write it up, however, I discovered how obscure it has become. Apologies! But you really have to hear it once if you can. Happy holidays all!

Contact (1997)

USA, 150 minutes

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Writers: James V. Hart, Michael Goldenberg, Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan

Photography: Don Burgess

Music: Alan Silvestri

Editor: Arthur Schmidt

Cast: Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Angela Bassett, Rob Lowe, David Morse, William Fichtner, Jake Busey, Larry King

I had to start by asking myself what kind of a nut am I for movies about UFOs and first contact with aliens from outer space? Some kind of a nut anyway, as I tallied the titles from a generic “best first contact movies” search of the internet: The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind are favorites I have looked at over and over, as it happens, with others I have at least appreciated (Arrival, Interstellar, E.T., even The Abyss). Contact is high on a lot of those lists too, although I hadn’t seen it since it was new. I liked it then but, more than 25 years later, I felt some trepidation about approaching it again.

Part of the reason I’ve been working at a roundup of movies by director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, and I probably should have got to Romancing the Stone) was exactly about that trepidation, hoping to get some perspective on the intriguing Zemeckis before I returned to Contact. On that point, I think now that Zemeckis’s strongest period was in the late ‘80s, with Roger Rabbit and the respectably resolved (and family-friendly!) complexities of his Back to the Future trilogy. Forrest Gump was a kind of crucible from which Zemeckis may never have fully recovered, leaning into flashy distracting special effects by rote, for their own sake, and putting narrative coherence into the backseat. There’s a lot of that in Contact. Start with the ridiculously repurposed footage of Bill Clinton, which has not aged well.

Perfect Blue (1997)

Director Satashi Kon’s first feature is old enough now (25 years!) that, in the story, the internet is still a novelty that must be explained to people. The story concerns a singer who is successful in a J-pop singing trio. She decides under influence of ambition to break away from the singing she has been trained for (against the advice of some in her management) and try her luck at an acting career. The movie is even too old to be about Destiny’s Child and Beyonce, let alone Lady Gaga, but it’s a classic story, with old roots and echoes of A Star Is Born. Or maybe Phantom of the Opera in a kind of sideways manner. Mima Kirigoe (voiced by Junko Iwao) is stalked by an obsessive fan, forced to do sexualized scenes as an actor, and haunted by an image of herself as a pop singer who shows up and taunts her. It’s a thin line, as the old song goes, between love and hate, but in this movie it’s also a thin line between reality and hallucination. Mima is breaking down in front of us but she has other problems as well. In addition, Kon has a strange way of telling a story, which would be more perfected in Paprika, from 2006, as well as a 2004 TV miniseries, Paranoia Agent. I didn’t get a lot out of the various backstage dramatics in Perfect Blue, which are never very original, nor out of the tensions of the stalking thread either, which is more merely pro forma. Kon’s strange narrative style, however—somewhat in the manner of manga, with surprising tactics and approaches—is both engaging and intriguing and keeps everything moving along at good pace. Perfect Blue is also geared to work at the level of horror, earning an R rating with surprisingly graphic scenes of violence and fetishy sexualizing of its main character in somewhat wanton and unpleasant ways. It all serves the story, little here feels gratuitous, but Mima’s hard life is never shrunk away from and not easy to watch, even if she is supposed to be a glamorous star of pop music and, later, TV and film. Perfect Blue flirts with cliché in any number of ways but has many hooks to counter that. It is always strange and interesting, if slightly underdone. Paprika and Paranoia Agent remain the go-to work in Kon’s sadly abbreviated career but Perfect Blue, with its connections to Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream and to Madonna’s “What It Feels Like for a Girl,” remains worth a look.

Best American Essays 1997

I read these annuals regularly from the '90s into the 2000s, even picking up the older editions back to the start in 1986. And it's still going—still under the oversight of Robert Atwan working with a different guest editor every year. This one is Ian Frazier, for example, who produced a collection that stood out to me as different from the rest. That's partly because it's one of the shortest of them all, with Frazier favoring quicker five-page pieces. He also favors humor more than most of the other editors in the series—humor always a tricky business in any literature. Not that there aren't serious pieces here—a shocking, oddly toned, and longer true-crime personal essay ("creative nonfiction") piece by Jo Ann Beard, a bitter story of gang violence by Debra Dickerson, an assessment by Susan Sontag of the state of cinema after a century, and more. My complaint about the series and the reason I finally abandoned it is that the "Best" came to seem suspect year in and year out, with a cast of too many returning writers. Frazier pointed it in a different and more interesting direction in 1997. Even though it has some of the usuals (Hilton Als, Richard Ford, Cynthia Ozick) there are lots of nice pieces that seem noticeably different from the usual fare. The first time I read this anthology, it was Beard's piece, "The Fourth State of Matter," that jumped out at me. It's still effective and quite well done, so vivid I still remembered it and thus the element of surprise was gone, and missed, alas. Luc Sante has an interesting piece about growing up in a bilingual household, with interesting details of his family history. I remember 1997 as a time when I was really taken with the personal essay. More of that view is ultimately what I think Frazier brought to his anthology. Frank Gannon's "Rat Patrol: A Saga" is an evocative memoir piece that morphs into a funny cautionary tale for parents. Dickerson's hard memories in "Who Shot Johnny?" are measured by personal grief. Lauren Slater's "Black Swans" traces her fascinating experiences with antidepressants. I want to say, to be clear, that all the Best American Essays annuals had redeeming and interesting essays that ranged broadly, as essays should—in tone, in theme, in language and style. The only difference here is that the proportion was higher for me, and there was not much I actively disliked, as could happen. Start here!

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

One Step Behind (1997)

Here's another really good one from the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell. Some of the devices may be growing somewhat threadbare—another climax with Wallander in grave mortal peril, more health problems, brooding attacks of doubt, new friends. It's a thriller series more than police procedural let alone hardboiled detective so action-packed scenes are inevitable. Mankell's plotting is as good as ever. It relies on some shaky premises but the case remains intriguingly mysterious for a long time. Another repetition: the most heinous crimes ever seen in the region. That has already been used at least twice before in the series (One Step Behind is seventh of 12). At first I thought this was going to be a mass murder variation, but no, in due course it turns out to be another serial killer. The love for serial killers obviously reached Sweden in the '90s too. But I can forgive these miscues because this one is just so cracking good most of the way. A group of college-age kids disappears in early summer. They are believed to be traveling, as their parents receive postcards from points in Europe, but one mother is convinced they are forged and it's not her daughter's handwriting. Then one of the police detective Kurt Wallander's colleagues, Svedberg, is found brutally murdered. He had been working unofficially and in secret on the disappearance. Now I have to admit Svedberg never made that much impression on me in the series. In fact, sometimes I'm sure I'm confused a little about Wallander's and Martin Beck's coworkers. Anyway, a lot of interesting revelations about him come to light in the investigation. One of Wallander's new friends is a postman who delivers mail by boat in an island area of Sweden. He's more of a plot device here but looks like he might be around for the future. The other is a preening new prosecutor who doubts Wallander's abilities. Baiba Liepa has been summarily dismissed from the series, it appears—they broke up between the last novel and this one. I like that Mankell did that and I also like that he did it offstage. There is also not much in this one about Wallander's daughter, Linda, and I like that too. Maybe what I like is that a lot of the clutter of Wallander's personal life has been cleared away and we mostly focus on the case. Overall this is one of the best. The elements may be familiar, but Mankell is still getting more skillful working with them.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Accidental Evolution of Rock 'n' Roll (1997)

My sense from rock critic Chuck Eddy's fans is that this treatise is a favorite in terms of either a kind of freewheeling zine aesthetic of come-what-may bricolage popular culture interpretation, or a unified field theory of pop music, or both. Or a man going mad. At its best the big think piece is a penetrating meditation on songcraft and all the incidental fragments that go into it. The subtitle, A Misguided Tour Through Popular Music, clarifies that the scope extends beyond the rock era as well as astride it. In places it reminded me of Charlie Gillett, whose Sound of the City may still be the best breakdown of '50s rock 'n' roll, and in other places it reminded me of Nik Cohn's Rock From the Beginning, which thrilled me when I was 15. More often it reminded me of Richard Meltzer's Aesthetics of Rock, which mystifies almost as much as annoys. I like the idea of iconoclastic debunkeration and the puncturing of conventional wisdom as much as the next guy, but inevitably some of the accompanying contempt for norms can splash around too much. In this case, the index (a work of art in itself, I must say) enables quick ways to them, e.g., Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Bruce Springsteen. I have some sense where the animus is coming from but it's wearing. Even when I'm on his side in terms of taste—his spirited defense of disco, notably, which really needed it in 1997—I'm not always comfortable with the regular dismissals of people as dorks, morons, and nitwits. He's still got the Moe thing going but it might not be as funny as it was in Stairway to Hell. Sometimes it works—I like "incomprehensible French discourse doofus Michel Foucault." But more often it chafes, especially when it's your objects of love. I know, it's just a joke, don't take it personally. 

Chuck Eddy and I came up the same way at the same time, college paper rock critics in the early '80s, though I'm a few years older and he's much better (full disclosure, he contributed to my zine in the '90s). We were privy to sizable stores of free record company dross for many years and a lot of it was better than you'd think, though quite spotty. The center of gravity of the industry remains the star system, however (Beatles, Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift, etc.), and you can't fight City Hall. One interview with Beyonce is worth 27 erudite record reviews, even if the tunes are kooky irresistible fun and you'd be surprised. But Chuck is here to fight City Hall. In many ways his tastes run to a certain mainstream themselves, John Cougar Mellencamp and Axl Rose and country music, but the deconstruction / reinvention project at hand here involves hyphenated adjectival parts of speech and the approximations of music representing them, such as "-punk-," "-bubble-," "-country-," and of course "-disco-." Square that up in your mind, remembering they are often treated as somewhat interchangeable, and there is a big four-dimensional cube to fill of cross-section categories like "country-bubble-pop" and such. Chuck Eddy the force of nature and encyclopedic sponge of just-miss pop music goes to work connecting the dots of B product. It's an impressive high-wire act. I'm not sure it succeeds, but kudos to him for getting up there and doing it. He can work up some pretty funny bits with this material and make some surprising connections, though too many of the referents were unfortunately unknown to me. Apparently our 40 acres of obscure promos didn't have that much intersection. Accidental Evolution goes trailing down some weird byways of pop music. I believe there are still bins of dollar vinyl albums out there. You could do worse than this as a guide.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Gospel According to the Son (1997)

There's a significant temptation here to make fun of Norman Mailer for choosing to tell the Jesus story in the first person—colossal ego, overweening self-aggrandizement, etc. Perhaps not surprisingly, Satan is the most vivid and interesting character in the whole slender thing, which is about the size of a book of the Bible. He is more interesting than Jesus, God, and all the disciples. And Joseph and Mary too. I have to admit Mailer is probably better than anyone else who ever told this story on Jesus' carpentry, which after all is what he spent most of his life doing. Curiouser and curiouser. Between Ancient Evenings and this it's apparent Mailer had a reasonably informed interest in the ancient world. He also had some batty and/or stimulating ideas about good and evil, and God and Satan, which he interjected into much of what he wrote willy-nilly along the way. The Gospel According to the Son is almost pure willy and nilly. It's brief and easy to read—you'll recognize most of the story if you ever went to Sunday school—but as with Ancient Evenings I'm not sure why it exists. As it turns out, Mailer's Jesus is a lot like Mailer, an improv artist on a mission he doesn't understand himself, though his faith is strong. This version includes the miracles—water into wine, fishes and loaves, walking on the water, etc.—so it's one of "those" gospels. This Jesus is aware of and has quarrels with the few gospel writers who made it into the New Testament (namely, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). According to this Jesus they all got parts of the story way wrong. Jesus' feelings toward them sound like an aggrieved novelist pouting about bad reviews. That's pretty funny, but I'm not sure Mailer intended any of this to be funny. There's an air of sanctimony and self-seriousness to it too (which is also funny, so he seems to be having it both ways a lot with this one). This Jesus is telling the story from centuries beyond the grave (such as it is)—in the 20th century, to put a date on it. This Jesus is no hippie, nor warrior for the Second Amendment. He's steely in some ways, unfocused and wishy-washy in others. Come to think of it, in our culture it might actually make sense for everyone to write their own gospel, except that would require mandatory Sunday school in every child's life and that's probably going too far. The title is wrong, of course. This is the gospel according to Mailer, albeit told from the point of view of Jesus. So it's Norman Mailer wearing a Jesus mask, if you can imagine. Still, as long as something as fundamental as our system of counting time still revolves around Jesus, we probably need new gospels like this all the time. So I take it back about not knowing why it exists. In fact, it's amazing to me that there aren't more of these.

In case it's not at the library.

When I Was Born for the 7th Time (1997)

I'm trying to remember how Cornershop's rare stew of pop music and electronica inside the context of British-South Asian culture made its way into my home. Rock critic Robert Christgau gave it an A so that might be it—I remember I found it in a used record store in Vancouver. When I Was Born for the 7th Time is the band's third album. I tried a couple of others but they didn't nearly hit the same sweet spot for me. Coming back to it many years later I still like it quite a bit, but Christgau's assessment of a void at its center may be true enough, a point I hadn't noticed as much in the earlier throes. I've never been that impressed with the cover of "Norwegian Wood," except as gesture—I'm an originalist on that particular song. But it's interesting, again as Christgau points out, how it has to be taken as a kind of moebius strip reclamation project "for the land of the sitar." Which, to be clear, and strictly speaking, is not the land of Cornershop's nearly last man standing chief singer / songwriter / guitarist Tjinder Singh. He's a British citizen, born in Wolverhampton (I can't speak to whether it was actually for the seventh time). So maybe it's curious then, or maybe no surprise at all, that my favorite track on recent visits has been "Good to Be on the Road Back Home," which I had assumed until this minute was a cover of a country classic but is actually a Singh original. Obviously, on some level, it is working in the shadow of Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again" (and Jimmy Webb's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," and others). It's a great song and a great production, but in many ways what makes it is the guest vocalist, Paula Frazer (straight outta alt-country San Francisco), who somehow elevates it to impossible heights. "Make way for a lady," as Singh introduces her. But make no mistake—the album is a heady, nearly dizzying pastiche of styles (in fact, there's not much more country). Let it play and they will come to you. Its real calling card is the song "Brimful of Asha," an ode to the 45 single, which became a #1 hit in the UK after Norman Cook (better known as Fatboy Slim) gave it a remix. It comes on with acoustic chords and rhythm courtesy of the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane," hunching and lurching with Singh's glottal Indian tones swallowing the mic, and working up to its grand sentiment: "Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow, everybody needs a bosom / Mine's on the 45." Fatboy Slim took it and revved up the tempo, decked it out with more electronica flourishes, and the rest is history. Either version is fine by me but I know the original on the album better. Lots of surprises on this one and still pretty good. Inspirational line (from "What Is Happening?"): "Turkey gravy."

Nocturne (1997)

Nocturne may not feel as tired as other late entries in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain—as tired, I say. It's still tired compared to titles before about 1980. The mystery story is complicated too, and gets hard to follow. One of McBain's favorite jokes here—he goes to it at least three times—involves people talking about that movie Alfred Hitchcock wrote called The Birds. Then other characters say they don't think Hitchcock wrote it. In fact, of course, McBain wrote it 35 years earlier under his Evan Hunter pseudonym. Another running joke starts with the death of the primary victim, gunned down point-blank with two shots to the heart. Most times this comes up someone says they saw that movie, and someone else says they don't think that's what it was called. It sounds like the reference is to One From the Heart, which was 15 years old at the time, but who knows? Happens in passing and never explained. The main case involves an old woman who is shot to death along with her cat. Steve Carella and Cotton Hawes are on the case, and yes, once again, Fat Ollie Weeks shows up working a case that might be related. He's not that offensive this time. Mostly he just works his case. The old woman was formerly a celebrated concert pianist brought low by arthritis and nagging hearing problems. Her granddaughter is also a pianist, but not as talented and more in the cocktail lounge style. The more I summarize the plot points the more contrived it looks. Cruel high school football players—or psychotic, really—are also on the town, preying on the vulnerable, though it's mostly played for laughs. That's the case Fat Ollie is working. Step away from McBain's storytelling voice and the jokes are not funny at all. Maybe that's a continuing problem, especially with these later ones. What once seemed dark and sardonic humor inflecting the action has turned steadily into easy cynicism, with exaggerations. People are bad enough. You don't have to exaggerate that. Save this for later, or read the series in order. Either way, this one can wait.

In case it's not at the library.

Underworld (1997)

Although it was published very near the end of the 20th century, in 1997, Don DeLillo's Underworld has already earned outsize acclaim as one of the great novels of that century. It's big, it's mythic, it's—as Wikipedia puts it—"a non-linear narrative that has many intertwined themes": nuclear proliferation, baseball, the Bronx, and a general sense of desperation and despair. It might add up, but I thought it was too much work to confirm. In fact, its willfully counterintuitive strategy of isolated incidents recounted the wrong way in time too often annoyed. There are flashes of brilliance scattered everywhere—and that's not just a pun on the mushroom clouds populating it (or should that be depopulating it?). But nuclear anxiety under the shadow of twin towers of superpowers already feels like a painfully dated trope, and the constant resort to it here is reflexive and rote. (What's weird is the original cover design, which shows a church in the foreground behind which looms a World Trade Center tower with a small airplane approaching, but that's more likely a designer Scribner's hired than DeLillo, right?) Underworld swims the waters of Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon, remote and befuddling. It reminds me most of Coover's The Public Burning, especially when historical figures such as J. Edgar Hoover start showing up and we are afforded speculative interior views. Lenny Bruce also appears in nightclub scenes that read as built off verbatim transcripts. I guess, with Libra alone, DeLillo has already shown this bent, which admittedly can be vivid and evocative, of setting documentary passages into "fictional" context. I will say, understanding it amounts to damning with faint praise, there's no denying DeLillo's ability to craft fine sentences, with a really nice ear for the gaps and strange leaps of intimate dialogue. So maybe that's a net plus overall because it's what kept me going, and make no mistake, it is a book of over 800 pages and it can be a slog. That's the level where he reminds me of Pynchon, another craftsman of wondrous sentences that unfortunately do little to elucidate the confusing action. Where Pynchon goes to slapstick and broad humor, DeLillo pretty much stays close to the paranoiac anxiety. There's a lot of everything here except narrative momentum, which I missed.

In case it's not at the library.

Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love (2007)

I like the original subtitle for Carl Wilson's book about Celine Dion and Wilson's revulsion for her: "A Journey to the End of Taste," which in many ways is how I felt reading it. The fact that the book started life as an entry in the 33⅓ series of monographs on individual albums (in this case, ostensibly, Dion's Let's Talk About Love, from 1997) only makes a weird and wonderful book even weirder. He dislikes Celine Dion at least as much as I do and most of the people I discuss issues of taste with too. That I now feel warmly toward her as a person after reading Wilson's book is further weirdness. Wilson finds a dozen ways to shame himself and the rest of us for our loathing: the unaffected sincerity of her fans ... Dion's own humble origins ... sources of immigrant culture, pride, and adaptation lurking in music otherwise casually dismissed as "schmaltz" (including a nicely researched capsule of its long tangled history in North American music) ... and a very affecting anecdote about Elliott Smith's encounter with her at the Oscars ceremony in 1998 and Smith's subsequent lifelong defense of Dion as a person. I even found a way in to appreciating Dion more on a personal level, reading Wilson's account of her origins in rural Quebec from a family of 14 children, recalling my North Dakota extended family (with a grand total of 16 siblings in my mother's family, 11 of whom made it to adulthood) and their affection for Lawrence Welk and the Lennon Sisters. Yet nothing makes a dent in the abhorrence for Celine Dion's music, for me or for Wilson either. Wilson's formal position of directly addressing this hatred as a matter of taste is absurd on one level; he knows it and he knows we have to know it too. But as he pushes on with the thought experiment he finally uncovers a whole new way of looking at the issue, new to me anyway, when he gets into sociological studies demonstrating that taste is likely in large part a social construction, a subconscious choice about material satisfaction and perceived gain. A ringing explication of what until now I have only muttered to myself and others incoherently about as "junior high bullshit"—which it seems more obvious than ever to me now is exactly what worries most matters of taste. Wilson even gets into it explicitly by brand name: "cool." Wilson's book (and its original subtitle), along with Daniel Levitin's look at the neuroscience of music, This Is Your Brain on Music, are leading me to view the good old question, "What have you been listening to lately?" in what feels like all new ways. In a world where all taste is equal, there may be no taste at all, replaced only by interpersonal connection and alliances, which are affirmed by the music (and other connecting points) in a feedback loop, or "virtuous cycle." The more you like your friends the more you like the music you share—and more importantly, the sharing. That's all it is. This is at once terrifying and exhilarating to anyone with a stake in the critical enterprise, which I think is finally the great big kick of Wilson's book. Really, it's one not to be missed.

In case it's not at the library.

A History of Violence (1997)

I guess it makes sense that my favorite part of this graphic novel is the art by Vince Locke. The story didn't much impress me in the movie version by David Cronenberg and it doesn't much here either. I understand the temptation to go to the device of New York City Italian-American organized crime as the most heinous evil the mind can conceive, but it's old now, so old. Can we please have another brand of monolithic evil please? The story here goes well over the top to a much greater degree even than the movie, into areas that are frankly unbelievable, such as holding a hostage for 20 years and torturing said hostage all that time. With blowtorches, pliers, crowbars, etc. For 20 years? Man, that's harsh. Locke's illustration style feels scratchy and sketchy and rushed, black and white, and some very serious cross-hatching, but I came to like it a great deal. On the downside, his skill level with portraiture is so weak I had a hard time separating characters from one another, which was really a critical lack at some junctures. I liked the ways he compensated it, establishing certain elements, such as cars, by their shapes, and then varying the angles of view from close-up to medium to long and back and all around, recognizable by the shape. Lots of great interiors, some really nice cityscapes, and a solid sense for propelling a story. That could as well have been writer John Wagner, of course. I don't know much about him—I was slightly familiar with Judge Dredd in the '80s, which never made much impression though I liked the premise a lot. In the nuts and bolts of this graphic novel the storytelling is perfectly fine. I'm just tired of some of the things I've already mentioned and others: the Mafia, children in danger, sadism pushed into farce, the Ethan Edwards who's got what it takes, and similar nonsense. In conclusion, I'm not sure whether or not I can recommend it, and I suppose that means I am actually not recommending it at all. But hey, YMMV.

In case it's not at the library.

The Game (1997)

USA, 129 minutes
Director: David Fincher
Writers: John D. Brancato, Michael Ferris
Photography: Harris Savides
Music: Howard Shore
Editor: James Haygood
Cast: Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, Deborah Kara Unger, James Rebhorn, Peter Donat, Carroll Baker, Anna Katarina, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Daniel Schorr, Spike Jonze

In the '90s, as director David Fincher worked on branching away from the music videos (notably with Madonna) that helped make him, he drifted a lot into tricksy and self-consciously "dark" projects—Fight Club, which I don't like, may be most famous, but Alien 3, Se7en, and The Game all fit the profile too. Though later, especially with Zodiac and The Social Network, Fincher found more useful ways to sublimate the impulse, much of that early work is burdened by relentless piling on with excess of excess.

That's true enough of The Game, which presents us a thriller wrapped around a puzzle box inside of a new-age bubble (which Todd Haynes had exploited far better in Safe). But the big concept of The Game remains irresistible: a company named Consumer Recreation Services sells a mysterious product known as "the game." Conrad Van Orton (Sean Penn) gives one to his brother Nicholas (Michael Douglas) for his birthday. The result is a pretty wild ride, especially the first time the movie is seen. Trying to be very careful with spoilers on this one.

Please Kill Me (1997)

This is approximately exactly as advertised, an uncensored oral history of '70s New York punk-rock, reaching back for its origins to the Doors, Velvet Underground, and Stooges, and proceeding directly from there. The copious drug use and sexual practices account for the "uncensored" appellation, though in its totality few are spared the judgments of one another on account of discretion, so in that way it's kind of gossipy too—but always fascinating and there is likely plenty for many to learn. Me, I was surprised to encounter some of the people in the thick of it, such as Todd Rundgren, and to gain some proportionality of impact on my own heroes of the time, Lou Reed (huge), Iggy Pop (colossal), and David Bowie (marginal). It was good to see so much attention paid to Richard Hell and the Voidoids, though I could have done without so much on the Dead Boys. Talking Heads are all but missing in action, except for one glancing mention of yuppies, which just goes to show the rest of us ... something. Once again I am forced to consider the New York Dolls, who never meant much to me. Guess you had to be there—the shows sound awesome. My blind spot extends to Johnny Thunders as well, on whom there is a good deal here. He's one of the giants striding all through it. The Ramones also figure large, of course, and unfortunately many of their stories are sad ones. They should have been superstars, I still think that. Blondie gets treated nicely too, which surprised me given the approach to Talking Heads. Lots of voices are heard here, from the obscure to the famous, but a few are missing. I don't think there are any (or many anyway) quotes from Tom Verlaine. It's great on the cross-pollinating relations between New York and British punk-rock, funny and interesting to see the view from the inside as the whole thing is virtually carpetbagged out of New York by Malcolm McLaren after an inspiring visit, incidentally earning him a lion's share of credit for punk-rock, with the Sex Pistols (McLaren again), the Clash, and all the rest. They're here too, of course—but mostly only in appropriately marginalized roles. This one's fast and fun to read.

In case it's not at the library.

The Conet Project (1997)

Jeff Tweedy's inspiration for various facets of the Wilco album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—including the title—provided a fascination for many. I understand it was even a bit of a fad some 10 or 12 years ago, used in the Vanilla Sky movie and championed generally by the likes of Tweedy, Devendra Banhart, so on so forth. Now I've had my own infatuation with it. Released as a 4-CD set, with something in the neighborhood of 150 separate tracks, it's culled from hours and hours (and hours) of tape recordings of the mysterious broadcasts on so-called numbers stations (Wikipedia: "shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin believed to be operated by government agencies to communicate with spies 'in the field'"). Most often it's just voices, speaking in many different languages, saying numbers (usually, though not always, one voice and one language per broadcast), in any number of accents. Sometimes it is letters of the alphabet, or words. All kinds of voices, young and old. Sometimes there is music. Sometimes there is only music. Various beeps and tones flutter around in peripheral audio. Some of the electronic ambient noises remind me of Sonic Youth breaks (or Wilco's, for that matter). It's raw, hot, unfiltered, staticky, and riveting. For me, the attraction is how unsettling it all is as documented reality. They sound like broadcasts because they are broadasts, they sound like humans because they are humans, but they also sound unhuman and meaningless in the totality (achieved in seconds of play) of the bland recitations, which nonetheless proceed with purpose. There's a sense of a thousand people hearing, a hundred thousand, a million, but few who understand. At this point, as classified intelligence, no doubt the value is nil—on a par with most email or motel registries from 20 years ago. Yet its power to exclude remains strong. One always feels on the outside; it must tap directly into a portion of the brain that directs paranoid thinking. The conspiracy feeling is strong with these. It's just hard to know what to make of them, but for a long period I compulsively kept coming back to hear more, and I still love hearing them emerge out of the shuffle stream. They have the sound quality of late-night AM radio between the stations, fading in and out, cutting in and out, hissing—which I suppose is a nostalgic pleasure for me there. But there's a weird and undeniable urgency to it too. Here.