“Some Strange Desire” (1993)

More weird sex: this story by Ian McDonald is another longish, exotic, sexualized (not erotic) fantasy. Something must have been in the air? This one riffs on evolution, gender, and ancient vampire-like secret societies. It was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in the Short Fiction category in 1994. It seems that a mutant form of homo sapiens has lived among us for centuries. They embody both (or all) genders and can physically transform into them at will. And there are humans who get off sexually on them. What could possibly go wrong? The mutants are mostly just surviving, with little interest sexually in humans. Anyone annoyed by confusing pronouns will be annoyed here too, as the mutants are all referred to as “he” even when they are in female form, even as family bonds are referred to as “sister,” “daughter,” and “mother.” I don’t miss that the story was published in 1993, which is reasonably early for the kind of sophisticated LGBTQIA+ discourse given here. So points for vision, though of course Samuel Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin were basically already there and had been for years. The story is dense with concept, giving hurry-up explanation that must be parsed as we go, with a narrative that is perhaps necessarily butt-simple: one of the mutants is dying and unfortunately a human must be sacrificed for it to live. I never managed to get into this story. I understand the difficulty of what it’s trying to do—maybe it should have been a novel? That would have given the ideas here more room to breathe. The ideas are interesting but we are breaking down things like mutant terminology most of the way through, which thwarts narrative momentum. The story has so much concept to pack in that it really shorts character and story value. The concept could well be exactly what people like so much about this story, but I found myself getting impatient quickly with the slow pace and spoon-feeding of the ideas, however necessary. As I say, it probably just should have been longer to do that concept justice. Contrary to popular writing advice, everything doesn’t have to be showing. You can just tell us some things. It’s often quicker and more efficient—part of what the old-fashioned framing stories were doing.

Edited By, ed. Ellen Datlow
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Read story online.

Greetings From Timbuk3 (1986)

Timbuk3 was a husband and wife act straight outta Madison, Wisconsin—Pat and Barbara K. MacDonald—augmented by a drum machine for the pseudo-trio designation. Their instincts pointed them in rootsy directions, but they had a surprise top 20 hit in 1986 with “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.” It’s basically skinny tie and shades new wave, but the country blues inflections combined with the nuclear anxiety at high levels then (due to Chernobyl and Ronald Reagan joking about releasing bombs) produced something everyone wanted to hear for a few weeks. It was a pretty good joke too. The singer is in college, getting good grades, studying nuclear science. His teacher wears dark glasses, presumably for the intense flash of light that accompanies A-bomb detonation, and now the singer is wearing them too. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find coming back to this album—in memory the hit seemed more like a novelty and most of the rest of the album (except the closer) a lot of half-songs that never much cohered. But my memory was faulty—Greetings From Timbuk3 is way better than I expected. The songs are shaggy and shambolic but they are good. There’s a continuing theme of the brave young couple very much in love and facing down the cruel world together. With barrels of love. Many years later, after moving to Austin and releasing six more albums, they divorced. So it goes. It does not make them any less brave in 1986. Some cynical, vaguely lefty politics are involved too. “Hairstyles and Attitudes” sells the cynicism with homely wisdom and a brief screeching guitar. “Shame on You” is the longest song here at 5:04 and the only one where Barbara K. gets a writing credit. It’s a rap song, the rap is Barbara K.’s, and it’s not bad, with all due disclaimers. The secret gem to Greetings From Timbuk3 is the last song, “I Love You in the Strangest Way,” featuring more updates from the brave couple. But this song has always hit me in the strangest way, so to speak, it's one made for howling along with at night in various states of drunkenness and/or sadness. I wonder how they felt about it then and feel about it now. The whole album is worth checking out—and now, maybe, I will look into the rest of their catalog too.

The Green Ripper (1979)

I was sure I could randomly pick up any Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald and find unpleasant scenes of diabolical sexual assault and murder, because that was my experience when I was reading them in the ‘80s. But this was my second in recent times where it didn’t happen. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong or maybe I’m tougher or maybe this is related somehow to my “best travis mcgee novels” google search? I might try a couple more and see how it goes. I’m not unhappy with this result. MacDonald and his McGee novels are very popular among fans of mystery and detective fiction and with good reason. MacDonald is good at doing this. But the rapey qualities drove me away so I’m enjoying what I have while I’ve got it. This one starts with a girlfriend dying suddenly. It’s another of MacDonald’s glowing Man and Woman relationships. One shtick in the series is that McGee is a bit of a white knight for the ladies. It’s typically heroic heterosexual sex out of the Hugh Hefner mold. I have no idea whether Gretel appears in previous novels. McGee gets around. In his defense, he may feel a little smarmy, but he always seems to deliver the noble sex of dignity and gentle care. I’ve heard these affairs described as the “sexual healing” part of the story. No raping for McGee though he lives in a world full of it. But revenge—that’s another story. Revenge he will do. Once he finds out Gretel was murdered by poison, not done in by disease, he is on the case. It leads down byzantine corridors until he finds himself in a training camp for Christian terrorists. “The Green Ripper” is a private joke with Gretel, a mangling of “the Grim Reaper.” It is here solely to get the color word into the title for the series’ ridiculous titling scheme. This is the 18th McGee novel of 21, so it’s near the end, which came with MacDonald’s death in 1986. The Green Ripper is a bit rote but pulls us right along, with few slow patches and little to distract by way of plausibility, although that’s more a personal call. I didn’t miss the various plot conveniences, but I didn’t mind them either. YMMV. A lot depends on what you think of MacDonald. I know he’s got nasty stuff out there, it just wasn’t in the two I looked at. He’s good enough I may read on. But I don’t trust him yet either.

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

Pale Gray for Guilt (1968)

I wanted to revisit a Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald partly to test myself. Admittedly, MacDonald is a good mystery writer in the hard-boiled vein and McGee is a certain classic. I read a half-dozen or so of them some years ago but finally had to give them up. They almost always included scenes that triggered me, usually women being mistreated or assaulted in ways that left me sick. I had the impression MacDonald enjoyed writing them. Someone once described his style as rabbit-punching and that clarified it for me. But the people blurbing and praising him remain big names: Lee Child (who wrote an introduction for my 2012 edition), Donald Westlake, Roger Ebert, Sue Grafton, etc., etc. As it turns out, I can say “almost always” because—happily—no such scene occurs here. It has all the stuff I remembered: a senseless title that is there to name a color, the brooding loner on a Florida houseboat Travis McGee, a revenge story, a sting, various beautiful women, and me thinking her? Is she the one who gets it? But nothing, or very little. I’m going to try another and see how it goes. I picked this from a generic google search (“best travis mcgee novels”). Later I found it at #13 on a ranked list of all 21 and nowhere near any rando top 5. What up, google? Maybe people like those terrible scenes? As usual, damsels in distress are all over Pale Gray for Guilt, as well as many shades of gray (literal, not figurative). But MacDonald is just good at pulling you into his crazy storylines. Here a friend of McGee’s is murdered, which isn’t clear at first because it was elaborately staged as a grotesque suicide. That leaves behind a widow in distress and a thirst for cold as you can stand it revenge in McGee. It all comes to revolve around a stock swindle, which gets complicated and I got lost. But you can see it works by the way the bad guys yelp and carry on and somehow MacDonald makes even that satisfying. Pale Gray for Guilt (ninth in the series btw, which don’t really need to be read in order) also has a poignant love story that runs parallel to the main mystery story, with an affecting, bittersweet ending. Still, there’s always a little more Hugh Hefner than I like in MacDonald. A lot of things about Travis McGee have not aged well—but all the bigs love him.

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

Pontypool (2008)

Canada, 93 minutes

Director: Bruce McDonald

Writer: Tony Burgess

Photography: Miroslaw Baszak

Music: Claude Foisy

Editor: Jeremiah Munce

Cast: Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly, Rick Roberts, Hrant Alianak

In most of the zombie movies from the George Romero era (since Night of the Living Dead in 1968), foundational explanations have tended toward viruses, environmental toxins including radiation, and/or other pathogens. Pontypool—which I never think of as a zombie movie, even though I have to admit they're all over the place in the last third—runs instead with an exceedingly high-concept twist, claiming that the virus is carried by and communicable through language and meaning. It's trippy stuff, especially in our slightly more informed pandemic era, and it's not the only place this movie shows a willingness to go wide.

It's basically a one-set piece, virtually all of it taking place in the broadcasting studio of a radio station in the fictional small town of Pontypool in Ontario, Canada. Stephen McHattie is Grant Mazzy, a washed-up talk-radio shock jock who has landed in this outpost. It's Valentine's Day, when folks in the northlands are exhausted by winter and starting to show snappish cabin fever symptoms. We know it's a cold bleak exterior out there, but we never see much of it. From inside this church basement radio station, we learn that some kind of bizarre outbreak has begun in Pontypool, with incidents of random and extreme violence as yet unexplained. Mazzy and his producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) and crew work with the scanty updates coming in from the wires and other reports to try to make sense of what's going on for themselves and their listeners and us.

Revolution in the Head (1994)

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

In case it's not at the library.

Timbuk3, "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades" (1986)

Nov. 22, 1986, #19
(listen)

In retrospect, Chernobyl likely had everything to do with turning this into a hit for Timbuk3 toward the end of 1986—that and a wonderful turn of phrase, the kind of forehead-smacking verbal point you wonder no one ever thought of before. Timbuk3 was married couple Pat and Barbara MacDonald out of Madison, Wisconsin, folkies by inclination but with a lot of electronic gear in tow for the beats and such. This song is how they're known and leads off their debut album, Greetings From Timbuk3, with which I was briefly infatuated (notably for the song "I Love You in the Strangest Way," a haunting moaner that ended up on a disproportionate number of mixtapes). "Future's So Bright" is a funny blend of styles, a thumping rhythm section hard-rock attack with a soaring blues harp and wonderful country harmonies in the vocal, underpinning an '80s wiseass new wave puppy cynicism. You gotta wear shades for all the nuclear radiation, is of course the basic idea, though even that is approached in an odd way. The singer is kind of desperately normal, on an ordinary yuppie track, going to college and studying marketable skills. "I'm doing all right, getting good grades," the singer reassures himself. It's the nuclear science teacher who is worrisome, wearing dark glasses in the classroom. Presumably he knows something the rest us don't. The cheerful optimism never flags, nor the overburdened irony, and there is an admirable tension between them maintained to the end. Plus Chernobyl happened that year. Also: this wonderfully evocative note in Wikipedia: "The former members of Timbuk3 have refused to license the song for commercials, including a $900,000 offer from AT&T and offers from Ford, the U.S. Army, and Bausch & Lomb for their Ray-Ban sunglasses." Kudos, MacDonalds.