Spike Jones & His City Slickers, “William Tell Overture” (1948)

[listen up!]

In my Dad’s bachelor days after World War II he became a record collector. Instead of the 33-1/3 10-inch and (mainly) 12-inch LP he more favored a different type of album, boxed sets of three seven-inch 45s. With six songs these albums were closer to what we would now call EPs. I wish I could remember more of the artists (George Shearing was one) but as a kid the one that caught me up was the bandleader and novelty specialist Spike Jones—who, remember, in their song “Up on Cripple Creek,” even the Band seemed to endorse. Jones’s version of Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” is pure controlled chaos, starting from the usual trademark razor-sharp performance by Jones and orchestra—no multitracking or overdubs were available in 1948 recording studios, it had to be played, flawlessly, the way you hear it. That is combined with ... a horserace?! Yes, and in the running are horses named Cabbage (“leading by a head”), Girdle (“in the stretch”), Banana (“coming up through the bunch”), Mother-in-Law (“nagging in the rear”). Apartment House (“with plenty of room”), and, of course, Beetlebaum. My appreciation of this whack job actually started with my appreciation for the “William Tell Overture.” I was never particularly into the Lone Ranger TV show, for example, but tuned in whenever I could for the theme song. Eventually my siblings fell in with me on playing and overplaying this, shrieking at the various gags, and bellowing, at top volume, “Beetlebaum” (eventual winner of the race, spoilers). No doubt it annoyed the hell out of my parents. In addition to the Rossini and the horserace, the song features barking dogs, clanging kitchen utensils, thunderclaps, mellow chirping birds, cowbell, bicycle horns, crashing objects falling down, a man gargling a sappy melody, horse whinnying, and more. “It’ll either be a photo finish or an oil painting.” In its way it is exhausting.

From Here to Eternity (1951)

I would be lying to you if I said this didn't sometimes feel like the most aptly named novel ever. My recurring question—how many more miles to eternity?—was probably not helped by reading a version with all the original excisions restored (mainly swearing and sex). It's not really a war novel, though it's set in Hawaii and includes the Pearl Harbor attack in a chapter near the end, but more a novel of the Great Depression. The cast of characters is a roundup of officers, noncommissioned officers, enlisted men, and their various women. There's a kind of manly unadorned style of language that is simple and clean, and rarely ornate, but often strays into self-consciously clunky. James Jones is not a skilled storyteller any more than a gifted stylist, by this novel. So it goes on for a long time. I like the way it's fully committed to the underdog, but honestly, a lot of these underdogs are not that sympathetic, even if we get how they got that way. From Here to Eternity has much more in common with Catch-22 than The Naked and the Dead, focused fiercely on the stultifying bureaucracy that was day-to-day life in the prewar military. Most of the characters, even the women, are hard drinkers. As usual, women and non-white people get the worst of everything. There are prostitutes and the usual related issues (hearts of gold, "I don't have to pay for it!" etc.). As a sheltered white boomer from the suburbs I have to say this kind of thing is mostly lost on me. Not only were prostitutes never any kind of formative experience for me, they were never even a factor at all. These lives look dreary and suffocating, going ridiculously flinty no harm no foul on all kinds of severely questionable behavior. I've also spent my life repelled by the kind of drinking reported here. The novel seemed most interesting to me in the section on the stockade. Our main hero (of two or three), Prewitt, was played by Montgomery Clift in the movie. He's a bit of a '50s antihero type, self-destructive and poetical, but that side of him (seen in his bugle playing, for example) is not very convincing, though Jones is often trying hard. Another important character, Sgt. Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster), is a similar case but with a slightly different flavoring as a noncommissioned officer. Another, Sgt. Maylon Stark (George Reeves, but the character was mostly written out of the movie), is more of same. Arguably a fourth, Angelo Maggio (Frank Sinatra), is yet more of the same. From Here to Eternity is an interesting big mess in many ways, but I'm still not sure it's really worth the time, let alone one of the 20th century's best novels.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Solved! (1987)

Richard Glyn Jones is a busy anthologist who might be best known for "Mammoth Book" collections: The Mammoth Book of True Murder, The Mammoth Book of Killer Women, and The Mammoth Book of Women Who Kill are three of his. I don't know them—the only place it seemed like I ever saw those Mammoth Books was at Half Price Books and I haven't been there in a while. I found out about Solved! in Bill James's book on true-crime literature. It's a sequel of sorts to another Jones collection (Unsolved!, natch). The idea is famous writers writing about famous crime cases, with or without conjecture about whodunit. It's a bit misleading that way—the last piece here, for example, is Harlan Ellison's short story about Jack the Ripper set in the future. Jack the Ripper is not a solved case and we don't know that he was transported to the future. Still, for the most part they are interesting cases, interesting treatments, or both. In his introduction Jones says the collection is built around the three longest pieces, by Arthur Conan Doyle, Damon Runyon, and Erle Stanley Gardner: "the tripartite core of this collection and [showing] the writer as detective, reporter and judge." Again, yes and no. Doyle's piece does more to clarify the gap between mystery fiction writers and crime investigation. He might have guessed right about the solution to an open case, but he doesn't seem that credible and the police ignored him completely, though at least that was likely self-serving. Doyle's piece is best at showing how police have been self-serving for a long time. Damon Runyon's series of newspaper reports on a sensational murder of the 1920s has some intrinsic interest, but reads like someone typing in a hurry. Erle Stanley Gardner's treatment of Argosy magazine's so-called "Court of Last Resort"—a kind of early Innocence Project—is good stuff, though the case itself doesn't hold that much interest, alas. Robert Graves writes about the poisoning of the Roman emperor Claudius. Other writers appearing here include Ellery Queen, John D. MacDonald, and Edgar Wallace. Jones shows up with excited headnotes for some of the pieces, not all. The book has more than its share of typos and other printing errors. The result is that it feels like a hurry-up job rushed to market. A lot like those Mammoth Books at Half Price Books always looked, in fact. But I like the scope of this and its literary ambitions, however misplaced. And as true-crime, it's perfectly adequate for the most part. As each writer settles into relating the facts of a case, or most of them, I soon feel the reveries of reading true-crime overcome me. Not bad.

In case it's not at the library.

"A White Horse" (1992)

Story by Thom Jones not available online.

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

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

"The First Day" (1992)

Read story by Edward P. Jones online.

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

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

Keeping Up With the Joneses (2016)

Director Greg Mottola has made a few movies worth tracking down for one reason or another—Paul, Adventureland, Superbad, and all the way back to The Daytrippers 20 years ago, on the indie circuit. His warm and gentle low-key style focuses on character quirks as the natural source of laughs and character motivation. It's most obvious when he also writes the screenplays (Adventureland and The Daytrippers), but it's always there. He did not write Keeping Up With the Joneses, which perhaps explains this movie's very strong desire to be a sexy spy and action movie. As a matter of tone, it keeps intruding until finally it takes over the picture altogether. Tim and Natalie Jones (Jon Hamm and Gal Godot) are the new neighbors in the cul-de-sac on Maple Circle, in an upscale Atlanta suburb. We learn from a chatty realtor in the first scene that the Joneses paid for the house with cash, without ever looking at it in person, so it's obvious they are no ordinary suburban couple. Jeff and Karen Gaffney, however (Zach Galifianakis and Isla Fisher), put out the old welcome mat for these exotics anyway, and Tim is grateful—because actually he is a spy who wants information about the corporation where Jeff works in HR. Soon enough, they have a bromance going, and Karen is warming to Natalie too. Then the movie starts to spring various surprises, so I'll leave off here on the plot summary. (Comedies aren't normally subject to spoiler rules, are they? At least I'm not sure I can think of one. I have to be forgetting something.) There are a few bright moments, most of them involving Galifianakis. Fisher and Godot have a couple good scenes too. But then familiar action routines start up, with car chases and firefights and such. This movie is not that funny, and I can't imagine it cuts the mustard as an action picture either.

What about this? In my town, the movie choices are basically a couple of multiplexes, plus a decent arthouse. The multiplex I tend to favor is presently undergoing renovations, switching over to a reserved seating system. Has this been going on for a while? You have to pick your seat when you buy your ticket. The seats are double-deluxe, overstuffed padding with wide armrests and a button to tilt back and shove up a leg-rest like a barcalounger. It's kind of like a dentist's chair. I'm not sure I understand the business strategy here, because now there seem to be fewer of these expensive seats in each theater. I suppose that means the prices are going up, but is this something people want? The aisles are wide and my worry is next they're going to try serving food in there or something insane like that. I've been going to the other multiplex a lot lately. Maybe I shouldn't worry so much.

Free State of Jones (2016)

Free State of Jones was better than I expected—more historical veracity, and bearing a certain moral compass you can't help agreeing with. But I thought it suffered from the same kind of problem that dogs Schindler's List, attempting to make a very likable movie out of very unlikable events. Looking for and finding the seed of goodness in a field of unrelenting evil. And maybe get an Oscar out of it too. Et cetera. I count it as good that movies have started showing more realities of American slavery and 19th-century Southern politics. But there's little more here than that. It does go beyond race and into class and economic realities, discussing and showing how poor whites were treated nearly as badly as slaves because they were poor and others were rich. That's an interesting and useful angle into American history. The story itself—look out, "based on true events"—strains credulity. Matthew McConaughey plays Newton Knight, a Confederate conscript who deserts when he has seen too much death in the Civil War. He must hide because as a deserter he will be hanged if caught. Thanks to divine inspiration, or something, he is suddenly endowed with great spiritual enlightenment, forging out of a literal swamp an integrated and diverse community which can defend itself against Confederate Army depredations such as stealing their crops, their livestock, and their young men. By a third of the way in I was mostly looking forward to the scenes of cathartic violence, when Knight (usually) served righteous come-uppance. That was my clue it's not such a great movie. The cathartic violence did not happen often enough, and it was rarely harsh enough, which told me I was being manipulated, even if from time to time I was happy about it for the moment. This movie also has the problem of most historical dramas in trying to stick to historical facts and still keep them interesting to modern sensibilities. I don't know anything about this strange community in the middle of Mississippi in the middle of the Civil War, but the dramatics of the picture felt pumped up for effect. So the premise is more or less interesting but mostly plays out in uninteresting ways. It's not quite honest enough about the material, and not quite badass enough about Knight and his crew and their vengeance. Notwithstanding, I'm glad someone made this movie.

Hitchcock / Truffaut (2015)

Being literal-minded, I halfway expected this documentary to be reenactments of passages from the book first published in 1966, which was composed of a memorable and influential series of interviews conducted by Francois Truffaut in 1962 of Alfred Hitchcock. Well, this movie is about the book, but mostly only as an excuse for director, cowriter, and film maven Kent Jones to work up wonderful appreciations of their work as filmmakers (mostly Hitchcock). My favorite parts were the long sections on Vertigo and Psycho, carried by an army of usual-suspects talking heads: Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Olivier Assayas, Richard Linklater, David Fincher, Paul Schrader, etc., etc. I loved it, especially on Vertigo, where it affirms for me again how strange and powerful that particular movie is—how hard it is even to describe what it is. A woman's picture? This documentary sets up a wonderful clip of the Vertigo reveal shot, glowing in the green of the hotel's neon sign, and it's fun to feel like you're seeing it in the company of people at least as gobsmacked. There are clips from all eras of Hitchcock pictures, from the silent and early talkies into his late failures. It's essay filmmaking in my favorite form—about filmmaking. The clips are great, nicely picked and used. The interview subjects are great too, sympathetic and knowledgeable. The Truffaut book and connection is interesting as well. There are some nice clips from The 400 Blows and other Truffaut pictures. There's also audio from the week-long interview sessions, which were conducted via a translator. All-day sessions must mean there are hours of audio. What we hear is often through the muddled filter of both subtitles and the translator. Reviewing it all must have been a herculean task, though it's exciting to hear both of their recognizable voices. The audio clips tend to be overly set up with heartwarming tales of the connection and lasting bond between the two (which at least have the advantage of being apparently true). Sometimes it starts to feel like a celebration at one remove—a celebration of Truffaut's celebration of Hitchcock—and sometimes it tramples Truffaut a little getting to Hitchcock. That's probably the way it should be, and a straightforward appreciation of Hitchcock might not have had as much of a pitch intrigue for producers as something to do with the book: the friendship that came of the interview, the sad proximity of their deaths, only four years apart, though Truffaut was a much younger man, their shared preoccupations with movies and moviemaking. Well, why not? I'll take those good sections any way I can get them because they're just about perfect. It also does a nice job on some of the Hitchcock titles from the '30s, such as the original Man Who Knew Too Much, which this picture calls the first true Hitchcock movie. There's also a nice discussion of The Wrong Man, another strong outing from the '50s. This is a great show.

I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (2002)

USA, 92 minutes, documentary
Director: Sam Jones
Photography: Matthew Clark, Dave Colitre, Matthew J. Curry, Paul Hughen, Sam Jones, Joe Kessler, Dan Larkin, Jim Matlosz, Keith Pokorski, David Rudd, Alan Thatcher
Music: Wilco
Editor: Erin Nordstrom
With: Jeff Tweedy, John Stirratt, Glenn Kotche, Jay Bennett, Leroy Bach

As seems to happen so often in the history of making documentaries, a bunch of fortuitous stuff happened shortly after filmmaker Sam Jones turned on his many cameras for this strangely haunting rockumentary about alternative rock band Wilco and their album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. First, poised on the verge of commercial breakthrough (albeit poised in that position for approximately the previous four years), the band's record label unceremoniously dropped them on receiving the album. That wasn't supposed to happen—this movie was probably intended to be about the commercial breakthrough. And then relations with one member of the band, Jay Bennett, imploded, and he was kicked out. That wasn't supposed to happen either.

It says something about the weird power of this compact black and white picture that these incidents, which in the normal course of things would have to count as something like "documentary gold," are instead the least of it, in terms of surprise or news value anyway. They even look a little like convenient scripted turns of event, for how neatly they are tied off and resolved by the end. It's not the music either, which has alternately thrilled me (when I first saw it) and sometimes (more recently) kind of embarrassed me for its diligent underachievement. On balance, I'd have to say I like the music a fair amount, though it is also a matter of mood. You have to have a taste for the kind of skronky, druggy exercises they indulge to "deconstruct" their workaday alt-country fare, not to mention for the workaday alt-country fare itself. No, I think it's something else that's getting to me here.

Brighter Side of Darkness, "Love Jones" (1973)

Jan. 16, 1973, #16 
(listen)

There are a lot of reasons "Love Jones" might seem to have been lost down the memory hole. The most obvious is that it was quickly obscured in the celebrity glare of the Cheech & Chong parody that followed within the year, "Basketball Jones," which featured George Harrison, Carole King, Darlene Love, and Michelle Phillips (among others) and was actually a slightly bigger hit, peaking at #15 in September 1973. Brighter Side of Darkness (what a name) are pure generic one-hit wonder, '70s version, never to be heard of again after a self-titled album that accompanied their sole chart appearance. The lead singer, Darryl Lamont, was 12 years old. Based out of Chicago, the group came up with a song that is a dense stew of the proto-disco black pop music of the time. It is powered by a majestic bottom and propped up by staccato horns over which strings swirl and glide like frosting. It takes its time. When the singing / speaking starts, it is so sincere and innocent in its ways as to be almost embarrassing, but ultimately irresistibly endearing. Lamont's voice has broken but not the callowness, attempting to get over, softly murmuring: " ... you see, darling / It's about time for me to / Get real serious about you / Because / If someone was / To rip me off of you / I couldn't account for / My actions." The theme, the mood, the song is all love, love, love, the sweetly painful kind from the years of hard teenage crushes, couched in tuff terms: "I need you / And the need is so strong / It's almost like that of a junkie." Different times, different times, that such a sentiment could coexist so neatly inside this beautiful sweet confection.

19. Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man" (1965)

(listen)

The fact is I could have taken any song from Highway 61 Revisited and put it approximately here, or spread them all up and down this list—it's my favorite album and has been for as long as I can remember and somehow it stays fresh and bracing every time I come back to it, even broken down to constituent parts. But this is the song that I recall amazing me first and most, doing things I didn't know could be done in a song or anything like it. It proceeds like a dream, a nightmare of powerlessness from the point of view of the tormentor, existing languidly within the smoky music of that remarkable session. It's at once funny and caustic. I laughed at parts of it like it was a stand-up routine: "And you say 'What does this mean?' and he screams back 'You're a cow / 'Give me some milk or else go home.'" And I gulped at others, recognizing myself in Mr. Jones nearly as much as I recognized myself (or the desire for it to be myself) in the ultra-cool uber-hip insider singing the song. One has only to see Dylan's treatment of Donovan in the D.A. Pennebaker documentary Don't Look Back to realize that a good deal of the time, at this point in his career, he was trading in the kind of alienating clique-mongering that's more appropriate to junior-high kids (and there are any number of reasonable explanations for that, given the totality of his experience at the time). Yet "Ballad of a Thin Man" is as seductive a portrait of the impulse as can be found anywhere, and a fine example of the pure blasts of dazzling language that populate that album too. It still amazes me—even knowing that I have become someone, like Mr. Jones, who has been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books.

"Me and Mrs. Jones" (1972)

85. Billy Paul, "Me and Mrs. Jones" (Nov. 18, 1972, #1, 3 wks.)

I guess there are love songs more beautiful, but not many, and none certainly about illicit carryings-on between married folks or bearing so forlornly the freight of its own certain doom. I credit much of the gut punch it manages to deliver first to the lush strings that vibrate with an almost sour tension, alternately swooping to accent the soft high notes. Second to Billy Paul's voice, which is clarion clear but with tender places, like bruises. And third to the pining guilt that inextricably undergirds the small drama. The singer of this song is not getting away with anything and he knows it, all denials to the contrary notwithstanding. The whole thing might be just his fantasy, in fact. The song never appears to consider the pain that might be caused to others, even if "we both know it's wrong." But at the same time it's so deliciously full of the knowledge of doom, the guilt and lust that lights such matters all aflame, turning them into useless little holocausts of passion, and some sense as well of the humiliation to which they've been reduced, meeting everyday at the same café. "We've got to be extra careful, we can't afford to build our hopes up too high." The innocence of it, in the telling, can be positively touching: "Holding hands and making all kinds of special plans." Who are these people? Even the named "Mrs. Jones" is obviously an alias. How did they meet? Where did they come from and where are they headed? No answers, even fewer clues. These are people living life one day at a time. The rest of us heard enough in it to make it #1 for three weeks.