Damien Jurado, “A.M. AM” (2016)

[listen up!]

I can tell, when I pay a little more attention to the words than the vibe, that this is a fairly straightforward love song. “I was yours all along” x4 in the chorus, etc. But the title mystifies me down to the pronunciation (I’m going with “ay em am”), as does the song’s instant potent sway on me. I’ve had periods where I felt compelled to play it a lot most days. I’m not that much of one for pulling songs out of movies and TV shows—if the music is going to have oversize impact on me usually I know it beforehand—but I heard this first in the 2018 Netflix documentary miniseries Wild Wild Country, which is about the Rajneeshee cult that caused various bizarre political problems in Oregon circa 1981. The song plays at the high-point ending of one episode, when it seemed for a few flashing moments that things could work out in Oregon. I was transfixed, transported. I sat and listened to it, stunned, with the Rajneeshee events sinking in. It feels like music that could come from the time, with touches of new wave and synth-pop and a plodding tempo that serves up the overarching Simple Minds melancholy. Yet it feels deeply, profoundly joyful too, sacred even, full of life, in and of it. Jurado is a prolific Seattle native, born in 1972. His homely vocal bears all the contradictions that make the song work for me: sadness and bliss all at once, knowingness and the burden of it. I’ve checked in with more of his stuff, notably the album that is home to this song, Visions of Us on the Land, but haven’t yet found anything that hits like “A.M. AM.” Thanks to the producers of Wild Wild Country, a great show! Don’t miss it if you can!

True Crime Addict (2016)

James Renner’s quasi-meta meditation on true-crime fascination generally, and specifically on the disappearance of Maura Murray in February 2004, is the most un-put-downable book I have read in some time. Renner personalizes his research and investigations, probing himself for the sources of his own interest. It sounds like this is not the first time he has done this. His first book, in 2006, Amy: My Search for Her Killer, is about the abduction and murder of Amy Mihaljevic in 1989 when she was 10. Renner is the same age as Mihaljevic and he was impressed with the case as a 10-year-old and has been ever since. The Maura Murray case is slightly different—a baffling disappearance that remains unsolved. True Crime Addict chronicles Renner’s efforts to solve it. I saw the episode of Disappeared about Murray (from that show’s first season) and was impressed and intrigued by the case. It’s tantalizing and mysterious in all kinds of ways. So among other things Renner’s book rekindled my interest in the case. And then Renner takes an interesting approach to his narrative—total transparency (seemingly). Because there are still so many unknowns to the case, Renner can’t structure it around a resolution. There is still not one, and many questions remain open. Renner works a day job as a college instructor, has extensive editorial experience, has written novels as well as nonfiction, and possesses the whole panoply of podcast(s), a blog, and a youtube channel. We learn of his personal experience with crime and abuse in the story of his predatory grandfather. In many ways Renner is on a righteous mission. He says confronting miscreants is one of his favorite parts of his work, allowing that that is also dangerous. We see a lot of doors slammed in his face and hear about a lot of messages he leaves that never get responses. He keeps the focus on the Murray case and pursues his avenues of information. I don’t know how far I’m going to go with this guy. I’m already checking out his podcast but that may not last long. I’m interested in another of his true-crime books and maybe even one of his novels. I really loved True Crime Addict.

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

Split (2016)

Here’s the second installment of director and writer M. Night Shyamalan’s superhero trilogy, Unbreakable. The first had the same name, Unbreakable, and came out in 2000, starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. The third was 2019’s Glass, with Willis and Jackson reprising their roles. Split is more of a supervillain movie. Superhero movies were not taken the way we understand them today until about 2008, with the release of The Dark Knight and Iron Man, but Unbreakable (the movie) has been discussed as an original forerunner, demonstrating the range possible with them. Fair enough. I saw Unbreakable when it was new, liked it, took the superhero element as a Shyamalan twist (set up by The Sixth Sense, I still look for brazen plot twists in all his pictures). Sixteen years is a long time to wait for a sequel and I must say I find all kinds of things about Split annoying. Start with the wanton use of the hoary old trope of multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder (DID). It was made famous at least as long ago as 1960’s Psycho (Norman Bates, recall, suffered from it) and made even more famous by a 1976 TV movie starring Sally Field, Sybil. Note the Split tagline: “Kevin has 23 distinct personalities. The 24th is about to be unleashed.” It’s so old hat it doesn’t even look like a hat anymore. I feel like I also need to mention that a “split personality” was once the way schizophrenia was discussed, not DID. There are no surprises in this movie, at least if you’re as cynical as me. James McAvoy gets the plum role of every actor’s dreams and he’s pretty good at being Kevin (the outer shell others see), Barry, Dennis, Patricia, Hedwig, and maybe up to 20 others, including Mr. 24, known as “The Beast.” No, he’s not the X-Men character known as “Beast” (no “the”) but he does climb up and down walls like Spiderman. Seriously, McAvoy is good juggling all these roles, and notably with a good deal of skillful nuance when they speak to each other. Betty Buckley is also good as his misguided therapist inclined to minimize his extreme aggression. So is Anya Taylor-Joy as one of his victims trying to get away. There’s great suspense too: got to get the ammo, for example, got to load the gun. Hurry, he’s almost here. Run, run, run. Et cetera—oh, I should have mentioned, “et cetera” is a phrase favored by many of the two dozen, known collectively as “the Horde.” As usual with Shyamalan movies it’s pretty good as long as you don’t think very hard about it. But it’s so full of poppycock concept you almost have to think about it to try and make sense. But stop that. Stop thinking about it. I probably should have taken the time to look at Unbreakable again. Not sure I have the interest for Glass. Whose idea was a trilogy anyway?

The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy (2016)

The best part of Paula Mejia’s 33-1/3 volume has to be her enthusiasm for the band and album. That’s always there in these little books to some degree, but often it is kind of sublimated into the research or something. She had no luck getting one of the Reid brothers (William) to talk to her at all. She may not have cast the interview net very wide, or gotten a lot of good quotes, because that stuff is minimal here. It’s organized by song titles from the album, not in sequencing order but riffing on the ideas associated with them. Like Geeta Dayal’s meditation on Brian Eno’s Another Green World, it is more discursive and (free-) associational. There are fewer personal details too. It might be dense—she cites a lot of academic sources along the way. Or it may have been my mood. I was reading it slowly, a chapter or two at a time, and thinking it might be one of the weaker ones. But then something kind of strange and perhaps alchemical happened. I played the album and it sounded fabulous. Better than ever. Now Psychocandy is an album I’ve had my infatuations with. I didn’t really catch up to it until the 1990s but I had an intense few months with it when I did. But returning to it later—even preparing to read this—was often disappointing. Too much noise, not enough sweets (more or less the shoegaze formula, which more or less the Jesus and Mary Chain may have invented) (although don’t forget Husker Du). A couple points by Mejia definitely helped. How, for one thing, did I miss those girl group drum patterns? Anyway, I don’t think an album under consideration has ever sounded so good while reading one of these 33-1/3 books. One of the regular blurbs that shows up with them talks about liner notes, which, full disclosure, I rarely read. But that’s what the experience of this book came to feel like for me. I’d read some of the text and return to the glorious album. I did learn about the literal riots of their shows in the ‘80s, which I hadn’t known. I think comparisons to the Velvet Underground and Sex Pistols go too far in a general way, though of course they’re not entirely overstated. And the riffing on psychopathy and candy seemed more obvious than insightful. I mean, you can find something to complain about in anything. I’m just a little shocked she somehow found a way to make the album sound better than ever.

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

Terrifier (2016)

USA, 85 minutes

Director / writer / editor: Damien Leone

Photography: George Steuber

Music: Paul Wiley

Cast: David Howard Thornton, Jenna Kanell, Samantha Scaffidi, Catherine Corcoran, Pooya Mohseni, Matt McAllister

My lifelong general policy on sequels—don’t ever, ever bother with them—does not help very much with franchises nowadays, arguably including the whole 16 years and counting Marvel universe. The Terrifier franchise, a canny mix of bitterly sardonic humor and extreme violence, is a good example. It starts with a 20-minute short from 2011, also called Terrifier and also featuring Art the Clown (and also available in the 2013 All Hallows’ Eve anthology picture by director and writer Damien Leone). That short provides a good overture and stake in the ground for what’s to come. Or so I presume because, full disclosure, my gorge rose basically as far as I could stand with this one and I invoked my sequel rules out of fear of what I’ll find in Terrifier 2 (2022, which got good reviews from people who like it better) and Terrifier 3 (2024 and now playing in theaters).

Art the Clown is not exactly a mime, but he never speaks. He is more like Charles Chaplin, using mincing gestures and exaggerated facial expressions to communicate—and, mostly, in his case, to terrify. Which he does quite effectively. He is terrifying and gross and powerful. His unsettling appearance pitches in to the melee with thick black lines of makeup and that stupid cockeyed hat. There is some uncertainty for most of this picture about whether he is just another fictional serial killer in the movies wearing a costume or something perhaps more supernatural. There is no uncertainty about his brutality. One particular scene here, more or less the centerpiece of the picture even though it occurs relatively early, really merits content warnings. Pay attention to them and to your limits because this movie can be very unpleasant.

Trouble Boys (2016)

The book we always thought had to be written about the Replacements has finally been written, and I have finally read it. Bob Mehr’s sensitive and meticulously researched biography might be one of the great rock biographies. It’s hard for me to judge. I was close to the action, a Twin Cities music journalist from 1982 to 1985. As someone scarred by alcoholism, my instinct was to keep my distance from such shenanigans. It wasn’t a big hilarious joke to me. But I saw my share of terrible shows and great shows and I heard a lot of the stories. Not all of them—there were some new ones for me in this book. I followed along with the albums, which got exponentially better from Stink through Let It Be and stayed pretty good even after that. All Shook Down is where it flattened out for me and never recovered. I was aware of the first Paul Westerberg solo album and of Tommy Stinson’s foray with his own band, Bash & Pop. I even knew Chris Mars’s solo album, on the brink of his painting career. I appreciated their potential to become a legendary great rock ‘n’ roll act—I appreciated that they were, to some extent, certainly on some nights. But Westerberg is the first to say they never scored a hit, a reasonable metric for any wannabe legendary rock ‘n’ roll act. In the end their underachieving and self-sabotage was a disappointment. I was disappointed—but check out their reactions here. There’s enough heartbreak to go around. I had to wince at some of their antics—setting per diem cash on fire, as one example. Drinking, drugging, defiantly playing their worst shows when it was important to be better, as when they knew the music industry was in the building. They often followed their terrible shows with great ones, coincidentally when they knew they didn’t need to make an impression on anyone. The greatest knock on them may have been their talent as consummate contrarians. The story of the Replacements is fun and exciting, full of laughs and great music, but it’s also sad, as illustrated by the fortunes of Bob Stinson (the soul of the band) and, later, his replacement Slim Dunlap. Tommy went on to become a real-life rock star, playing for years with Guns ‘N Roses. Even if he never had a hit, Westerberg wrote a handful or more of the best songs of the era, all of which should have been hits, as they say. It pained me to read how many of his song demos Westerberg has destroyed in fits of pique and self-doubt. But, well, it’s also the epitome of the Replacements too. All the glory and all the troubles are in this great biography.

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

The Wailing (2016)

The Wailing is a pretty good example of a Korean horror picture that simply piles on. See also I Saw the Devil. It’s long, at over two and a half hours, and more of a slow burn for the first hour. You have to be a little patient with it—and forgive some of its impulses toward broad humor, in the style of Jong Boon Ho. Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won), a police officer in a small village, investigates a number of strange and brutal murders along with some kind of epidemic that is turning locals mad in a rabid kind of way. Nothing is right and everything is wrong. The chief suspect is a Japanese man no one knows (Jun Kunimura), who moved to the village shortly before the incidents started. Then the behavior of the police officer’s young daughter changes. Hyo-jin (Hwan-hee Kim), perhaps 10 years old, grows moody, disrespectful, violent. The mother in this family, Jong-goo’s wife with no name (Jang So-yeon), gets on the case and decides calling in a shaman is what’s needed here. In short order this shaman (Hwang-Jung-min) finds a dead crow in the family’s barrel of soy sauce brewing in the backyard and even he is impressed with what they’re up against. Folk horror. Exorcism rituals are called for, which may be the best part of The Wailing. As with so many movies over two and a half hours there’s an argument that 30 or 40 minutes could be trimmed away here. The counterargument would be trying to figure out what to cut from a very busy, complicated script with lots of twists and turns. You would basically have to simplify the story and I think the complexity has a lot to do with what makes The Wailing work as well as it does. It’s immersive, with all its many plot points developed organically—again reminiscent of I Saw the Devil, continually overtopping itself. I counted at least two points where The Wailing felt like it was ending only to turn a corner into wider vistas and deeper complications. It has some pretty scary moments too, I must say, although I often wondered if I needed to fiddle with the contrast and brightness of my monitor because a lot of these scenes are too dark to pick out meaningful detail. I’m willing to take that as a device to keep us off balance as viewers—or maybe you can see it better on a big screen—but I don’t have to like it. It’s also another story that leans into its family beats and looks for a lot of dramatic juice there. Normally I think horror should shock and it should be scary and it is necessarily a little antidramatic, which is why it tends to work best in shorter movies and short stories. But horror can obviously be done at great length too, pivoting toward melodrama and/or high style. I like The Wailing even if ultimately it feels like two or three other movies stitched together. At least they have been stitched together artfully.

Moonlight (2016)

[First review here.]

USA, 111 minutes

Director: Barry Jenkins

Writers: Barry Jenkins, Tarell Alvin McCraney

Photography: James Laxton

Music: Nicholas Britell

Editors: Joi McMillon, Nat Sanders

Cast: Mahershala Ali, Alex R. Hibbert, Janelle Monae, Naomie Harris, Ashton Sanders, Jharrel Jerome, Andre Holland, Trevante Rhodes

My first review of Moonlight, five years ago when it was more like new, actually hits all the main points about this very potent movie. I'm revisiting it now to cover my formal reviews of the 21st-century list of best pictures at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, where it has presently ascended to #22. I remember feeling annoyed by the surge of interest in it, which seemed to me merely a token of anti-MAGA sentiment in opposition to La La Land, which was white but not actually very Trumpy (for that see The Greatest Showman from the following year, a favorite of the former president which I haven't been able to look at yet).

I admit the Oscars mix-up that year did have a Trumpy twang, not least because the US election in 2016 was itself part of a series of improbable pop culture historical events in that period which made it feel like we had been ejected into some far more unpleasant dimensional timeline. It started with the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series after more than a century, coming from behind, then the abomination of the US election results, and then the plainly freaky and traumatic Super Bowl win by the New England Patriots over the Atlanta Falcons, and finally the Oscars goof. Everyone thought it was going to be La La Land, which was at the root of what happened. But it turned out to be Moonlight, thus somehow making a serious, sensitive Black film #2 even at being #1. But enough about freaks of history. Let's talk about this movie.

Toni Erdmann (2016)

Germany / Austria / Monaco / Romania / France / Switzerland, 162 minutes

Director/writer: Maren Ade

Photography: Patrick Orth

Music: Whitney Houston karaoke, The Cure

Editor: Heike Parplies

Cast: Peter Simonischek, Sandra Huller, Thomas Loibl, Ingrid Bisu, Michael Wittenborn, Trystan Putter, Lucy Russell, Hadewych Minis, Vlad Ivanov

With money flowing in to finance it from six separate EU countries (even little Monaco by the sea), it's arguable that the point of Toni Erdmann is as an examination of the emptiness of neoliberalism. That's some rich irony there, but really the movie's strength is more on family issues, with another convincing heartache show (albeit black comedy too) about the difficulties parents and their grown children can have. Peter Simonischek is Winfried Conradi, a retired (and aging) father with a broad streak of dad humor, and Sandra Huller is his daughter Ines, a corporate creature in her 30s working formally as a consultant, a master of Microsoft Project and Microsoft Excel systematically working her way up by the book. Her dream is a position in Singapore.

Winfried is actually funny at least as often as he is annoying, and he can be quite annoying. He and Ines are locked in a long-term feedback loop of passive-aggressive hostility which escalates, eventually to absurd extremes, across the length of this rather long movie. Their rocky relations are intense, sometimes feeling closer to hatred, but also like normal family with all the frustrations of love and loved ones. When they are alone they can say terrible things to each other and deliberately misunderstand things. "Do you have any plans in life other than slipping fart cushions under people?" Ines asks him at one point. "I don't have a fart cushion," he says. Later, we see that he has acquired one and is using it in public to distract her.

Fleabag (2016-2019)

I finally caught up with this award-winning and much-acclaimed British comedy series by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and found it completely and 100% enjoyable and impressive. It deserves the hoopla. Based on a one-woman theatrical show Waller-Bridge first did in 2013, it ran for two 6-episode seasons (of 25-minute episodes) in 2016 and 2019. Waller-Bridge wrote, stars, and breaks the fourth wall until it disappears, as if on aesthetic principle. At times it feels almost athletic—she can say volumes with fleeting facial expressions—and it's one of the best and most interesting points about the show, much more than a gimmick. Her character is credited as "Fleabag" but no one ever calls her by name, let alone that, so I'm not about to start. Waller-Bridge has said it's her family's nickname for her, so make it Phoebe. She thus exists as a kind of abstracted brooding human spirit, half-narrator hovering above the scenes—dissociative, in practical terms. At the corporeal level, this particular human spirit loves sex and cannot make emotional commitments. Yes, that urban story again. This one is set in London, where she operates a shoestring cafe. Phoebe is a bit like Pigpen from the Peanuts comic strip—accompanied everywhere by irrational bouts of behavior that buzz in mad swirling patterns around her. She is like the eye of the hurricane but she is also the hurricane. No one knows exactly how, but they know it's her. They tell her to behave, knowing there's no point. Phoebe comes by her problems honestly enough. Her mother has been dead for some years. Her father (Bill Paterson) is a bumbling nebbish involved with her godmother (who is also her sister's godmother). This fairy godmother (Olivia Colman) is a narcissistic and commercially successful artist whose themes are sexual in various 1970s ways, and also one of the best characters on the show. Claire (Sian Clifford), Phoebe's sister, has coped by making herself a tormented overachiever, a success in her corporate work who has misplaced all her feelings along the way. "There she goes again" is the implicit refrain about Phoebe, and like classic I Love Lucy episodes a lot of this will necessarily be seen through your fingers, because you know the worst is coming and it's always surprising—Waller-Bridge is so good at writing these scenarios that all disasters can be discerned even when they are just specks on the horizon. Also your eyes will frequently pop—lot of activity around the eyeballs. It's hard to believe but too easy to believe the things these people say and do. Are they lovable and you forgive them anyway? That's the thing. They are not at all lovable and you can't really forgive some of it. But yes, I love them all, and every bit of this show.

American Honey (2016)

UK / USA, 163 minutes

Director / writer: Andrea Arnold

Photography: Robbie Ryan

Music: Rihanna, E-40, Juicy J, Rae Sremmurd, Carnage, etc.

Editor: Joe Bini

Cast: Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf, Riley Keough, McCaul Lombardi, Arielle Holmes, Crystal Ice, Johnny Pierce II, Shawna Rae Mosely

By its length, by its title, by its timing, director and writer Andrea Arnold's American Honey arrived boldly insisting it has something monumental to say about the way we live now in this country and oh, er, maybe "Obama's America" in an election year. It's one of those pictures that feels like an event more than just another day at the movies. It tells an ambitious story of booze, drugs, sex, and money, putting naïve teens and 20somethings on a road trip that wanders across the Great Plains and never ends. American Honey starts in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and travels through Kansas City, into Iowa, across the badlands of North Dakota, and through a giant blasting thunderstorm, among other points of Midwestern interest. These kids are not searching for themselves or America. This is not Easy Rider. They're out there conning white suburbanites into buying magazine subscriptions and, like a degraded version of the already degraded privileged kids in Risky Business, they just want to make money. A lot of money.

American Honey focuses on three characters: Star (Sasha Lane), an 18-year-old of mixed racial origins escaping her nowhere life going nowhere in Muskogee, Jake (Shia LaBeouf), a lothario from Bakersfield and the best seller on the crew, and Krystal (Riley Keough), who poses as a chippy ice goddess Southern beauty. Krystal is the corporate road manager assigned to running this show on the road, by name "Crew 071." But the crew itself is a brilliant fourth character, like a Greek chorus counterpoint, this scruffy half-drunken bunch of down-and-outers. They are like a traveling 24/7 party, heaving riotous fun wherever they go at kegger levels of loose. It's so mysterious, so revelatory, seeing them from a distance carrying on in parking lots like a circus gang. They are all hot and a little dirty, from all parts of the US like an old-fashioned World War II Army platoon. American Honey manages to have it both ways. It is and is not Simon & Garfunkel, all gone to look for America.

The Attention Merchants (2016)

Tim Wu is a New Yorker writer so it's not surprising that his history of advertising—or, more properly, the advertising model—was never less than entertaining and informative. He reaches back to the New York Sun in the 1830s for the birth of this economic model, which is confusingly captured in today's conventional wisdom about social media, "if you're not paying for the product then you are the product." That is, the New York Sun took the attention readers focused on the newspaper, and distracted it with messages bought and paid for by advertisers. You bought the newspaper for the news. Advertisers bought your inadvertent attention for their commercial messages. Wu traces this dynamic, through its eventual interaction with propaganda in public spaces, and on into the brave new worlds of commercial capitalist broadcast radio and TV, cable-TV, the internet, and smartphones. I thought I understood the history of broadcast media pretty well but Wu had some details that surprised me. I hadn't grasped what a phenomenon the Amos 'n' Andy radio show was in the late '20s and '30s, for example. Radio and the human voice and then TV and images added more layers of immersion than newsprint and the audience exploded. Wu is good on the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian approaches too, where the attention of large audiences was mandated by force, using in-home speakers, outdoor loudspeakers, neighborhood monitors, and a system of snitches who could rat you out. I'm not sure why the customer / product model in the West confuses me, but it does. Perhaps because I'm so steeped in it. It has ruled and still tries to rule radio and TV. I grew up conditioned to movies on TV being interrupted every 10 or 15 minutes, just like everything else. It used to seem normal.

The government-funded PBS and subscription cable channels like HBO eventually came to compete successfully for new ways of looking at TV, but still, about three or four minutes of content to one minute of advertising remains the rule on lots of TV yet. I have felt for some time that the advertising model fails and continues to fail on the internet. Wu seems to agree with that, pointing to aggressive, invasive, and worse forms of advertising online, which can actually harm computers. At best it is an annoyance that slows computer performance to a crawl. I use an ad-blocker now and skip the sites that scold me for it, though occasionally I relent for the sake of reading something, only to see an instant flood of dismaying clutter that must be cleared away (which isn't always easy). The situation is not getting better. Wu is best on illustrating how things like clickbait and eyeball-counting metrics (for the sake of ad rates) have done a lot to bring out the worst in us. He articulates the experience of going through a social media feed as a process of managing distraction, which helped me get my finger on that problem a little better (agreeable as the problem can be, which is another part of the problem). In the long run it has become very frustrating and obviously others on the internet are frustrated too. In this media world we have created there is always something new and shiny. One more thing to look at, click on, scan, react to, share, and forget, buried in public archives impossible to fathom but open to researchers. It sometimes feels as if we are literally losing our intelligence, our ability to be intelligent. The phenomena might be anything at this point, including something profound about human psychology, but I still want to blame the advertising model, which Wu traces from nearly two centuries back until the publication of his book in 2016. No doubt a good deal has happened even since then, but his book will update you to that point and it's fun to read.

In case it's not at the library.

On Bowie (2016)

I enjoyed Rob Sheffield's long eulogy to David Bowie, or short biography, or letter to the world. It made me think a lot about how much Bowie meant to me and it made me sad again when it came to the part where he dies. Although the book is poetically riddled with lines from Bowie songs in practically every paragraph, Sheffield still manages enough critical distance to judge him on the fine points. I didn't always agree—Sheffield has little use for the movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, or more generally for director Nicolas Roeg, whereas that picture ranks high among the more important inflection points for me, and Roeg has his place too. Sheffield thinks Labyrinth is Bowie's most enduring and significant movie—no. I appreciate that Sheffield acknowledges the long-term enduring Bowie haters as it's such a common experience, for example turning up a quote by Keith Richards from about 2009 ridiculing even the idea of taking Bowie seriously, as a musician or anything. That's a common view I've encountered all my life, from oldest friends to major rock critics. They're wrong, that's all. Sheffield stakes out some bold stances here, such as arguing for the album run from Station to Station to Scary Monsters as one of the all-time greatest. Maybe—it is really great. But so is The Man Who Sold the World to Aladdin Sane, and has the advantage of not including Station to Station. Sheffield's passionate case for the Thin White Duke phase did send me back to Station to Station, where the only song I connect with there remains "Golden Years" (admittedly, I love it) and it reminded me again the thing has only six tracks (a sure sign of bloat). (In fairness, I may be in the minority on the album, as Scott Miller was another vocal champion of it.) Mostly I liked On Bowie because there was something cathartic about reading it. It made me wish there were something like it on Prince—2016 was a tough year for losses of all kinds. Sheffield is just plain a Bowie fan and that's what does the trick. He loved Bowie for all the right reasons. He knows an amazing amount about him, not just the glory years 1970 to 1980 (he pushes that out to 1983 and Let's Dance but I can't agree), but also the fallow time, which he separates into a dreck phase (1984-1995) and a revival from the mid-'90s on. He's harder on the later '80s stuff than me and easier on the 21st-century stuff (except the last two, in a class by themselves as everyone seems to agree). He knows all those albums with one-word titles, like Hours, Heathen, and Reality. So I learned a lot reading On Bowie too, found plenty of tracks and YouTube clips well worth chasing down. Sheffield always feels fair to him—he's well aware, for example, of Bowie's lifelong "laughing gnome" problem (which is exactly where I put Labyrinth, by the way)—and he's fair to David Bowie fans too. In a way, On Bowie feels like a gift, a rare quality.

In case it's not at the library.

I Will Find You (2016)

The idea for this book, which probably counts as a memoir, is so intriguing that it never occurred to me how much I would dread reading it until it was sitting in my stack waiting for me. Joanna Connors was raped in Cleveland in 1984, shortly after she moved there for a job at the Cleveland Plain-Dealer newspaper. The rapist was caught in days, convicted, and imprisoned within the year. Nearly 20 years later, Connors decides to find and confront her attacker. The title reflects this mission as well as the words he used to attempt to intimidate her into not reporting the crime. What she finds almost immediately is a dead man. He died in prison in 2000. Nonetheless, partly for the sake of what she needs personally, and later because the newspaper is interested in the story, she pursues the story, finding out about his family and friends and looking them up, and visiting the places he lived, including the many prisons where he landed. What she finds is a nightmare of a life, the cycles of abuse spelled out as clearly as they can be. In many ways, he's as much a victim as he made her, the anonymous man of the system, lost in the machinery—not just the victim of a failing society in general terms, but more specifically of a monster father and then more abusive figures, almost certainly in prison. As Connors tells it, she hates what happened to her, but never managed the levels of hate reached by those around her. Her husband, for example, supported by her mother, looked into paying to have the attacker killed, a circumstance that actually had the effect of making the experience worse for Connors. In the end, years after the attacker's death, Connors and the man's grieving older sister seem to be the only ones left on the planet aware he even existed. Connors tracks him down all the way to his pitiful anonymous grave. "Well, Dave," she says, standing over it. "Charlene and I are the only ones who really thought about you after you died." This book, this quest, somehow feels really important for this moment. It's a tough one to get to, but well worth it.

In case it's not at the library.

Against Everything (2016)

Mark Greif is not nearly as disagreeable as the title of his collection of essays might make him sound. He's new to me but others likely know him from his connection since 2004 with the literary magazine n+1. Some of his pieces are formally against this or that: exercise, foodie values, "teen" porn. He's not always exactly against what he says he's against—exercise, for example (though some of his ideas on it did exercise me a little)—but rather with the social ideas and norms that cluster around them. He's always serious, even when his subjects seem most playful, and he ranges wide—from Radiohead, rap, and reality TV (yes, Donald Trump has a brief cameo) to the post-9/11 military miasma to the Occupy movement to police brutality. For his literary foundations he looks to Henry David Thoreau (Greif grew up in the Boston suburbs, not far from Walden Pond) and Gustave Flaubert, noting they lived at almost exactly the same time, born four years apart, and yet are rarely studied together. Rectifying that, Greif sees them as approximate avatars of two philosophical schools now generally derided and/or misunderstood—aestheticism (Flaubert) and perfectionism (Thoreau). Perhaps Greif's bravest piece here is a four-pronged attempt to articulate a critique of the meaning of life. But music may be where Greif is most interesting. I'm not so sure about his Radiohead discussion, but that's because I'm still not so sure about Radiohead. His piece on rap is insightful and interesting, built around his attempt to learn how to do it by trying to learn famous raps. Then there is a piece about punk-rock, which drifts back and gets very sharp on the Velvet Underground. Especially in his music writing I was acutely aware of our age difference—Greif was born in 1975, almost exactly 20 years younger than me (one more notch back, if it doesn't confuse the issue, would take us to Woody Allen, born in 1935). Interestingly enough, Greif identifies a fork in the road for himself in 1987 between postpunk and hip hop, and feels now he made the wrong choice going with postpunk. That's a feeling I know too. Some real good stuff here.

In case it's not at the library.

We Got It From Here ... Thank You 4 Your Service (2016)

I had to cram some attempting to get a bead on this last album from A Tribe Called Quest—the last because one of the three principals, Phife Dog, died before its release. It was also their first in 18 years. There is a whole VH1 story here—heyday in the early '90s, followed by bitterness, solo albums, public callouts on the solo albums, etc., until finally reconciliation, healing, reunion, etc. I know I'm really coming in late here. I was aware of them in the salad days but only from a distance, and among other things had to study up on The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders, which sounded to me like they always did, exercises out of the De La Soul branch of hip hop. Maybe that's We Got It From Here too—you can see I don't have much perspective on all this—but to me it feels like a much richer gravy on the stovetop, a stew that worked as tonic for me toward the end of the year (released November 11, 2016). It's another one I came to first via the singles, notably "We the People...," which rings with righteous authority and plainspoken truth, wrapped up tightly with an impish spirit that sweetens it just enough. "We don't believe you," it sails in with its stutter-step rhythm, "'cause we the people," later reminding us, "When we get hungry we eat the same ... food / The ramen noodle." Then it gets down to business with the lilting, chilling chorus, which spelt out the prospects at hand: "All you Black folks, you must go / All you Mexicans, you must go / And all you poor folks, you must go." I loved it for its clear-sighted view, and then "Dis Generation," a few months later, for that song's wonderful Musical Youth "Pass the Dutchie" sample whipped up into operatic storms. When I finally got to the album I found the usual ups, downs, and all-arounds of a one-hour 16-track long-player project. There's a raw guitar on some of the later tracks that can annoy. The songs can dither into aimlessness in spots. But more generally it's a surprisingly strong batch of good ones—often really good ones. I zeroed in on "Solid Wall of Sound" as one of the best examples of how they work with samples, a strong suit. This one is built off of two lines in Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets," a song I admit I have a weakness for. The Tribe track lives inside the lines "You're gonna hear electric music / Solid walls of sound," turning the second line into a figure that blows up and keeps blowing up to the size of a planet. It feels intuitively like zooming in on the fantasy concert itself in 1974 of Bennie and the Jets in a spaceship with a fluid camera, taking observations. "Solid wall of sound"—yes, computes. There are all kinds of surprises to this album and it seems to hold up well to lots of play too, usually as comfort.

Better Living Through Criticism (2016)

A.O. Scott presently labors at the New York Times as a film critic, where he has worked since 2000. I liked his attempt here to define and defend the role of critics, a vocation (or avocation) that has existed for centuries—millennia—but always under a vague cloud of illegitimacy and forever on the verge of ending abruptly. Nazi types are one problem ("When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver," "Journalism is the enemy of the people"). Capitalism more generally doesn't like the critical enterprise much either. Newspapers and magazines carried the burden for a century or two but they were always folding and now the whole industry looks sketchy. Lately it's been the internet and digital and social media as a more likely source, but the amateurism there also makes it a threat to professionalism. I do share Scott's mistrust of IMDb and Amazon reviewers, bloggers, and other amateurs more or less giving away their work, even though I am precisely part of the problem there. But what do you do? We need the eggs, as the old joke has it. ("My brother thinks he's a chicken." ... "Thinks he's a chicken! Why don't you take him to a doctor?" h/t Woody Allen.) At any rate, one of the hardest parts for everyone is defining critics and criticism, which Scott gives a go. You can argue he fails at defining it precisely, but he certainly draws a large circle around everything it might be. His sources are fun to follow as he reaches back for Aristophanes, Samuel Johnson, Susan Sontag, Yvor Winters, and any number of formidable figures of the past who have engaged his questions. He even includes Socrates-style dialogues with himself in short intervening chapters. He looks for the popular image of critics in intriguing places, such as the movies All About Eve and Ratatouille. He boldly claims criticism as a creative endeavor coequal with all other arts. He suggests that art itself is a kind of critique of life, with the artist in the reviewer's position. Artist and critic both use their respective materials toward the ends of judgment, or discernment, and sharing experience. In spite of his wit and light touch, Scott seemed a little gloomy to me about the prospects for the 21st century. He makes a strong argument that as long as there has been print there have been critics. In fact, in some ways it's depressing how much criticism there is and always has been. Today's bloggers are yesteryear's ink-stained wretches writing bad reviews of Moby-Dick. But that's not entirely fair. All critics miss obvious things. Just a few weeks ago I was remembering the animus Rolling Stone used to have for Led Zeppelin. And, in fact, one of Scott's best sections here is called "How to Be Wrong," addressing the inevitability and perhaps even the necessity for error, in assessing the ongoing competitions between innovation and convention, the latest shiny new thing versus musty old reliables. Scott observes the widespread exasperation with critics and criticism—the truth is most critics feel that way about them too. But he knows well the siren call of it, that urge to share a profound experience with others, which often is legitimated by encountering criticism for the first time. Scott does a nice job of outlining the situation, both from the outside and the inside, and he makes a good case for the various utilities of criticism too.

In case it's not at the library.

Anti (2016)

Superstar Rihanna's eighth studio album is one more brick in a wall of hits for a career dating back to 2005. The album spawned four singles (three top 10s in the US, including the #1 "Work"), went triple-platinum and counting, and maintained Rihanna's status within the ranks of artists whose fans will follow them across the bewildering field of streaming services. But even so she remains an unknown quantity to me and I've had a hard time getting a bead on the 50-minute 16-track whole of this album. I suspect that's related to the fact that there are literally dozens of songwriters and producers represented here, each with their individualized baggage of musical influence. But even in spite of the unruly range the album is full of surprise pleasures, on shuffle, in mixes, and even straight through as given. I should say it's another album I came to by way of singles—it's wonderful what streaming services have done for organized listening nowadays, though I worry how problematic they are for artists. "Work" seemed to be aimed at and speaking for people in monotonous jobs, which might account for its popularity, but mostly it sounded monotonous to me, except where it turns into a Drake track. Two other singles, "Needed Me" and "Kiss It Better" (released on the same day), work a little better, more as mood pieces with sound effects. "Kiss It Better" notably benefits from an appearance by Extreme guitar player Nuno Bettencourt. But "Love on the Brain" was ultimately the big winner for me on Anti. I see it described as doo-wop quite often but if anything it reminds me of the doo-wop that turned into what Motown recorded in the early '60s—a slower, smokier Marvelettes, to put a fine point on it. But the Marvelettes, Rihanna, and doo-wop would make an interesting jumble on a Venn diagram, so all good. In sequencing, it's also the best part of the album, followed by "Higher," which takes it down the road in a slightly drunken direction (Rihanna was reportedly sipping whiskey for the song's session). Then the next song, "Close to You," also fits, though moving more in the directions of lounge. "Goodnight Gotham" returns to the downtempo precincts that more frequently populate the songs in this set. Some other good ones here include "Desperado," an admirable contribution to the "desperado" shelf of rock 'n' roll and its kin. "Same Ol' Mistakes" is by far the longest at 6:37, occasionally ambling and losing it way but its throbbing bass and bruised air are often lovely. It's probably best to keep focus on Anti at the level of individual songs. I've listened to it a dozen times or more, still don't have much sense of it as a whole album, and may never.

SremmLife 2 (2016)

Whenever I'm drawn to an album in the first place by hit singles—in this case, "Swang" and especially "Black Beatles"—I can't be surprised if the whole thing doesn't necessarily add up to more than the sum of its parts. And SremmLife 2 does not, though most of these tunes have hooks and other redeeming qualities and at least one of the other singles and a few others distinguish themselves enough to make it worth throwing them into shuffle mixes. The duo of Slim Jxmmi and Swae Lee took the strange name Rae Sremmurd from the name of a former label, EarDrummers, spelled backward, sort of. They're from Tupelo, Mississippi. Co-producer and EarDrummers principal Mike Will is based out of Atlanta. They made the first single from SremmLife 2 "By Chance," which is a fairly aimless if insinuating exercise riffing off a piano figure reminiscent of one by the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti from the movie Eyes Wide Shut. "By Chance" never charted but I enjoyed the excuse to roam around the movie soundtrack another time. The big hit for Rae Sremmurd came with the third try from this album. "Black Beatles" turned out to be the monster, spending weeks in and out of the #1 spot. You probably know it for that reason, and know already what a blast of fresh free-floating energy it is (although I understand you might be tired of it now), with a rhythm pitched face-forward and moving like the lumbering Frankenstein monster around the edges of all the hairpin switch-ups. It's a dicey move to name check Liverpool's finest but when your pop instincts are this good no one can object. Some other songs I've learned to look forward to here include the sinuous "Do Yoga," describing a lifestyle of champions ("all my girls do yoga, then get high at night"), "Set the Roof," as in set it on fire, a rousing rave-up, and "Take It or Leave It," another sweet example of how far and easily they can slip over into pop confectioneries. "Swang" was a solid follow-up to "Black Beatles." I haven't caught up with their latest yet, but SremmLife 2 is already a big advance over the debut.

Skeleton Tree (2016)

Nick Cave has been a problem I've only worried infrequently and from a distance. I don't know the Birthday Party that well—everything I've ever heard has sounded generic to me within a narrow range of punk. Then his long Elvis / U.S. South phase with the Bad Seeds (from approximately The Firstborn Is Dead, and hitting a crashing crescendo with Murder Ballads) left me intrigued but usually unsatisfied. He seemed to have a head full of steam-powered notions, like Elvis as the slouching beast, but they never seemed to get traction. At least I found a new appreciation for the quiet in the original murder ballads—that's the power of them. Then, finally, as if learning the lesson himself, with The Boatman's Call Cave and band more latched on to something like a demented cross between lounge and hymnal music, with high-flown biblical language ("Into my arms, O Lord," "The ring is locked upon the finger," "It was the year I officially became the bride of Jesus," etc.) as he indulged spiritual yearnings in a suave, sinister, and somehow depraved context. It really works for me—maybe it's the widow's peak. At his best, Cave has an unaffected way of reaching back effortlessly to deepest cultural sources, like the Bible, for the most prized antiques. My favorite is No More Shall We Part, but others I've dipped into less intensely fit the bill too: The Boatman's Call, the double album Abbatoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus, and Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! I never caught up with the 2013 Push the Sky Away and decided I wanted to check in again with the latest, from two years ago, which came in the wake of the accidental death of Cave's son. It sounds much like more of the same to me, for better or worse. It's supercharged on one level with a somber air of grief and yet Cave as the singer is distanced and calculated. He often sounds like he is reading poetry, or mumbling to himself. He and the music drift into fields of ambience as if losing trains of thought, a neatly done mimic of a mind temporarily unmoored by passing circumstances. At these points his skill at scoring movies also shows (Wind River, Hell or High Water, The Road, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). At other times, as in "I Need You" (an iconic title he's renting from the Beatles, America, and LeAnn Rimes), the warbling position of faith could not be more clear or tender. An angel named Else Torp sits in on "Distant Sky." As for the Bad Seeds, it seems to be the second nature of Cave and these players to be nearly perfectly in synch after all this time playing together, notably Warren Ellis, cowriter with Cave of all these songs. The result might be classified as a slightly more literary version of Neil Young's Tonight's the Night. Not his best but worth a visit.