Gimme Danger (2016)

All Stooges fans will want to report immediately to this Jim Jarmusch documentary. Iggy Pop (nee James Osterberg, and "Jim" to a few of his old friends here) is featured prominently, of course, but there's very little about his solo career—David Bowie is just a glancing figure around the time of Raw Power, for example. Gimme Danger may contain a key clip from Velvet Goldmine, but it's a Stooges movie. And it's not bad. It's a reasonably thorough-going history of the band, going back to their origins as the Psychedelic Stooges and even before. It plumbs all their musical sources and influences—Harry Partsch was important, along with the Velvet Underground, John Coltrane, and others. Many of the people associated with the band have passed on now, some even while the film was being made: Dave Alexander, the original bassist, in 1975, both Asheton brothers more recently, and Steve Mackay too. Gimme Danger thus often feels like an elegy, and sad. I was hoping for more uninterrupted music, but even the steady nervous barrage of clips and images in and around talking heads interviews was often satisfying. I love these people and am interested in all they have to say. I had a feeling that the agenda of director and writer Jarmusch included making a case for Raw Power as the pinnacle. That's an argument I'm open to, though I'm more of a Fun House partisan. And I thought the shrift for Fun House was a little short overall here. But the famous scene of Iggy stair-stepping across the hands of fans at a show from that era is included, an iconic moment I always enjoy seeing. There's a long leap in the picture from Kill City, which came out circa '77, to the Stooges reunification (a term Iggy prefers to "reunion") in 2003 at Coachella. Fun fact you might know already: razor-sharp guitar player and producer James Williamson, Iggy's late Stooges collaborator, went on to make a career for himself in software in Silicon Valley after leaving the band. Stepping in for Ron Asheton at reunification appearances after Ron died in 2009 involved Williamson picking up a guitar for the first time in decades. This movie is full of great anecdotes, great pictures, and great music. It may possibly only be for Iggy and/or Stooges fans, but I liked it a lot in spite of my grumbling. I'm only grumbling because I want more. Do things like this ever come in "long" versions, with, like, extended concert footage? Fingers crossed for the DVD.

"Water Liars" (1978)

Read story by Barry Hannah online.

When a story is as short as this one by Barry Hannah—four pages—it's going to rely on various tricks to get over. There's not really time or space to develop a narrative or characters. "Water Liars" has a ringing, charming, and distinctive voice. The first sentence: "When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another." The sing-songy rhyming foreshadows and signifies the first-person narrator, who is impoverished and vaguely dissolute. His story here is that he is at loose ends since he and his wife belatedly exchanged sexual histories. He is unexplainably disturbed to realize his wife had lovers, affairs, and sex before she knew him. He knows it's indefensible, makes no rational sense—of course she knew others before she knew him. So that's the narrator. The "water liars" of the title, the old men on the pier who swap exaggerations, appear to be something like his analogue, an externalization of his interior. This looks even more likely when one of the old men tells a story that bothers everyone. "He'd told the truth," Hannah explains it. They are angry with him and want him to leave. Along the way in this very short story, the language is compact and glistening, broken out into short sections separated by line breaks, just a few paragraphs each. So the narrative is thus also shattered, literally and figuratively. It's a pretty good trick, making it a pleasure (if baffling) to read, but for me I think it's a little too tricky. It's more like a poem, an assembly of images within language that doesn't exactly yield up meaning, not least because it yields it up so many wanton ways, not one of them direct. The narrator is not likable, and the old guys feel more like talking symbols than people. A Greek chorus of some kind—Hannah is at pains to note the discontinuities of the people on the pier. "The lineup is always different, because they're always dying out or succumbing to constipation, etc." (which is only the second sentence in the story). It's probably a good classroom exercise, short enough that many will likely read it, and full of a hundred ambiguities you could chew over in the space of an hour. As much as I like the language—and the brevity—this story leaves me a little cold. It's too smug, and it's too hard. I suspect in my heart there's actually very little here.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

Airships by Barry Hannah

Silver Bullets (2015)

My association with the Chills, a New Zealand band headed by Martin Phillips since the '80s, is mainly limited to two albums from the early '90s, Submarine Bells and Soft Bomb (one wonders what the recurring SB initials are about ... other Chills releases include Sunburnt, Somewhere Beautiful, Sketch Book, Secret Box, and Stand By). Submarine Bells and Soft Bomb are not only great albums but also filled with luminous pop songs of such certain purity they can be broken off, in mix tapes and such, and lived with individually, for years in some cases (their greatest hit by my lights is still the deeply insular "Song for Randy Newman, Etc.," a kind of theme song for living). Phillips is the only constant across the years of the Chills and he has always been the chief songwriter. Sometimes I suspect the band name has something to do with the similarity with his last name. All songs on Silver Bullets are by him, as usual, and along with many other of these recent surprise returns (David Bowie and the Sonics come to mind right away, and even the Rolling Stones might be getting in on it now), the consistent high quality is the most pleasant part of the surprise. Phillips was still up to moderate rock 'n' roll heroics in Submarine Bells—he's the guitar player, after all—but he was already tending toward primacies of mood and atmosphere. Soft Bomb was more of that and Silver Bullets, even across a gap of over 20 years, is even more. The songs on Silver Bullets shimmer and glow, throwing up fragments of lyrics that clarify through repetition, yet remain stubbornly enigmatic: "warm waves," "silver bullets," "America says hello," "when the poor can reach the moon," "aurora corona," "tomboy," "molten gold." The song about the poor and the moon runs over eight minutes, which anyone would have to call long, with a kind of prog structure that shifts from theme to theme. Most of the songs are a little long (or short) for pure pop music, in other words, but then that's not exactly what Phillips is doing any more. This is probably for fans only, but all fans will want to hear it.

Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002)

Tiexi Qu, China / Netherlands, 551 minutes, documentary
Director / photography: Bing Wang
Editors: Bing Wang, Adam Kerdy

I'm going to go slightly off the tracks here first, because I think the basic fact of stupefying long movies is seeing them at all. I'm not even talking about the commercial availability of Tie Xi Qu, which is another matter entirely. This is a nine-hour movie. It doesn't matter what it's about. You have to figure out a plan for seeing it. In the current TV glut, viewers at least enjoy the utility of the formal breaks of episodes. A season of The Walking Dead, say, may last 688 minutes (16 episodes of 43 minutes each). Yet somehow that seems easier to take on than, for example, Satantango, even though The Walking Dead season in its totality is some four hours longer. A lot of TV show time is taken up with specific familiar rhythms: "previously on" recaps, formal titles and theme songs, closing credits, and usually mini-climaxes engineered every 12 to 15 minutes.

Movies like Tie Xi Qu are in a different category. You see it in the resistance everyone instinctively has to them as "too long," even by people who will watch hours on end of sports and TV shows on a daily basis. I would count Lav Diaz's Melancholia (450 minutes), the aforementioned Satantango (420 minutes), and above all Shoah (566 minutes)—as well as puny by comparison Frederick Wiseman titles such as Near Death (358 minutes) and Belfast, Maine (245 minutes)—as movies that form more of a basis for comparing and judging Tie Xi Qu. They work better in terms of the experience of seeing the film than categories such as documentaries, or modern Chinese and/or industrial history. Other comparable movies might include Dekalog (572 minutes), The Human Condition (579 minutes), The Lord of the Rings extended versions (659 minutes), and Berlin Alexanderplatz (930 minutes). But they also just bring more categorizing problems. The first three are arguably compilations of separate films, and Berlin Alexanderplatz is much closer to a typical TV season than a narrative film, except maybe for the three-hour finale. Of course, there are many more of these movies (start with Out 1 and/or more Wiseman titles), but these are the ones I've seen.

"The Ledge" (1959)

Read story by Lawrence Sargent Hall online.

This story is a classic in the vein of "man vs. nature," done extraordinarily well. It also helped me identify a little better the peculiar rhythms of so many stories. All fiction attempts to start strong, with memorable or intriguing first sentences and paragraphs, but they also have serious set-up to get out of the way as well. Novels are one thing but short stories have even less space for that. Thus, as often happens, "The Ledge" starts out slow, as it lays out the premise. It's Christmas, and an experienced fisherman is taking his son and nephew out to hunt sea ducks. The setting appears to be New England though it's never specified. They are hunting in a place that is dependent on dispositions of the tide. It's dangerous, and the fisherman's wife wishes he wouldn't go, but he is experienced and the boys want to do it. They have new guns they got as gifts for Christmas. The fisherman is gruff, short-tempered, and harsh with others when he is under stress. We see this when he realizes he has forgotten to bring his tobacco with him on the day-long venture. In fact, he's not that likable, except that with the boys you sense some depth of commitment. All this in the first third or half of the story makes it slow going. Yet then, when they are suddenly in danger, all the explanation starts to pay off. We grasp the emotional realities as they suddenly unfold in all their complexity—and the physical realities too, of course. There are plainly manipulative aspects going on here. It's Christmas, it's generational male bonding, there's even a sad aging dog. But they have been introduced so deliberately and so slyly we hardly question them. They just work on us, and are there when it becomes a riveting passage of high drama. The fact that it's Christmas is mentioned in the first sentence, along with a lot of boring baggage about Christmas and the fisherman's family and the fisherman—all useful information for later, it turns out. The dog turns up as they are setting out on the hunt, a minor element of warmth and then mostly forgotten. Fiction's problem of the tedious set-up—"you have to stick with it a little bit even if it seems slow"—reminds me a little of the bromide about music that you "have to listen to it a few times" (never mind re: movies). There are very good stories, short and long, that can be instantly memorable (especially with novels, where there is more room to work in the set-up), but it doesn't happen often. Once we realize a story's greatness we may forget the slow going in the beginning. This could be a matter of personal taste. Hall's language is always clean and straightforward, and writers like that can be more captivating for me from the start. This is a good one.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

La La Land (2016)

Movie musicals in one of the classic Hollywood modes are so rare nowadays, and at the same so daunting—you have to dedicate time to wondering if each one can really be any good—they almost always give me pause when they do come along (say, Chicago, Sweeney Todd, or the very odd Les Miserables). What's more, La La Land is also an obvious piece of Oscar bait, an attempt to enter the great Los Angeles movie sweepstakes (with The Big Sleep, Sunset Blvd., Chinatown, Blade Runner, Short Cuts, L.A. Confidential, Mulholland Dr., etc., etc.), and by the way distinctly reminiscent of Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You. That could be because I've been looking at lesser Woody Allen movies lately, but Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are also actually singing and dancing here, just like Edward Norton, Tim Roth, Natalie Portman, Alan Alda, etc. It's classic musical fare on its face, with a winsome story about two crazy mixed-up kids trying to make it in the heartless world of showbiz. He is a jazzbo purist (Gosling), she is a struggling writer and actor (Stone). They meet sweet, and meet sweet again, always in the vicinity of well-known Los Angeles landmarks. Cue music. Dancers. The opening number is an exuberant stunner, set in a Los Angeles traffic jam, but unlike what I expected from previews, the whole thing turns out to be somewhat less a musical and somewhat more just another modern romantic comedy. There's a promise it will go soaring on wings of musical fantasy, with tasteful stunts and special effects. And while it does manage that a couple times, notably in that first number and also a planetarium scene, its feet too often come back to the ground and too often those feet are clay. It too often retreats to sorting out tiresome relationship troubles in conversation. Could these two maybe after all be just a couple of pretentious young urbanistas at large in Tinseltown? Maybe. I don't know Emma Stone well but she seems almost not up to the role somehow, though she's always appealing. Ryan Gosling was surprising again as I'm learning he often can be—he's very good at that whole disappearing into the reinvention thing that lots of great performers do. However, the chemistry between Gosling and Stone is minimal. Maybe that's the problem. La La Land is directed and written by Damien Chazelle, with a screenplay he's been shopping around all decade. He finally got the chance to make it when Whiplash (which he directed and wrote) hauled in some money and drew attention a couple of years ago. Chazelle also wrote the screenplay for 10 Cloverfield Lane, released earlier this year. They are not movies I like, so maybe I just don't like something about the way he makes movies. But I can't imagine La La Land holding much interest after about March this year. I might be wrong. Maybe it's a classic.

The Spoils of Poynton (1896)

For once, my rooting around in all these obscure Henry James novels has paid off. Caveats: Well, first, I'm not sure how obscure The Spoils of Poynton counts as being. I recall it being assigned in an undergraduate class, in a volume that paired it with another short James novel, The Aspern Papers, an interesting tale in its own right (and which might equally have been the assigned reading). I want to say the difference between The Spoils of Poynton and others I've been reading and mildly carping about lately (The Other House, The Tragic Muse, The Reverberator, The Princess Casamassima, The Bostonians) is that James appears to have finally given up his quest for topicality, either with issues of the day or flirtations with genre and/or theater. He's just hammering out a little thing here with all the stuff he likes: European customs (again, it's pretty much all British characters), the appreciation of collecting and collections and all attendant matters of taste, and one Fleda Vetch, who wanders into the action to become Mrs. Gereth's sidekick. The conflict is between Mrs. Gereth and her son Owen, over the furniture and art she has amassed and must now give up, because he is about to marry a woman who insists that it all "goes with the house." Owen inherited the house when his father died (some years ago in the story), contingent upon his marriage, an eventuality that has arrived. It's a great symbol James has struck on here with the furniture and bric-a-brac, better captured I think in his original title, The Old Things. Fleda Vetch is the best part, a wonderful apparition, stepping out of the pages of a Jane Austen novel as the impoverished cousin with exquisite manners and taste and her feet on the ground. The tensions get to a nice fever pitch when it appears Fleda and Owen have fallen in love with each other. I don't like the ending, but that's only because I like these three characters so much: Mrs. Gereth, Owen, and Fleda Vetch. The whole thing is handled with authority, confidence, and humor. It may not be James at his "greatest" but I hazard to say it's James at his best.

"interlocutor" count = 6 / 256 pages (includes "interlocutress")

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

"Minor Heroism" (1974)

Story by Allan Gurganus not available online.

Allan Gurganus's story is dense with weighty significance. It has a subtitle ("Something About My Father"), a dedication (to William Maxwell), and three subsections that are numbered and titled: "1. At War, at Home," "2. My Elder Son," and "3. Addendum." The three sections alternate narrators: two are by the oldest son, Brian, at different time periods, and the middle section is narrated by the father. All this is in service of a story of the midcentury generation gap. The father is a war hero (World War II) who was photographed with Betty Grable and involved in the fire-bombing of Dresden. By contrast, the father's oldest son is gay. It's a lot of fancy footwork for a point that now seems almost trite: the militarist father with a gay son and the father can't stand the shame. In turn, the son hates the father in a deeply conflicted way. I did like the way the second section moved. There was a lot of tiresome set-up work in the first, but maybe it pays off with the second. Part of my problem really is that I never have much sympathy for these fathers, and here I don't think we're even supposed to. The story title itself belittles the father's glories, and Dresden is the giveaway. At the time the story was written and published (five years after Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five), Dresden had become a symbol for the mistakes in the war made by the Allies—or the barbarities, as there are probably people who continue to defend Dresden. When we arrive inside the father's head in the second section, his self-pity and aggrieved tone don't make him any more sympathetic, but it feels authentic. You get a sense of his bewildered confusion about what the world turned into after the war. And Brian is done perhaps as well as anyone of the time could. There is a palpable discomfort with his sexuality, however, with so many clichés of the caustic homosexual queen attached to him. It makes the story itself feel strangely imbued with shame. At this point, the interest for me is more social-historical than anything. I don't know Gurganus at all beyond this, but there's an interesting anecdote about the story. In 1974, Gurganus was studying with John Cheever at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Cheever submitted the story to the New Yorker without Gurganus's knowledge. It was his first published story. It's not exactly Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but nice way to start a career.

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

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)

I've said it before, but I'm really not that much into the fantasy genre, especially when it comes in the form of a movie fitted out for sequels extending into the future beyond the looming Trump administration (which at the moment looks like eternity). J.K. Rowling is the creative force here, coproducing and writing the screenplay, somehow fitting it into her Harry Potter universe. I admired that series from a distance—that is, I read The Philosopher's Stone and recognized I would have loved it as a kid, a need fulfilled for me at the time by Edward Eager, Norton Juster, and science fiction. In the late '90s, I had no need to read further, and full disclosure, I have never seen a Harry Potter movie. And on top of everything I don't like Eddie Redmayne that much either—his choice of roles maybe. He's obviously competent. I checked out Fantastic Beasts during Christmas week at a matinee full of families, hoping that might work some magic. And it did, a little. The movie is cute and generally wholesome and immaculately done. It really wowed a girl sitting near me. In concept it reminded me of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, imagining a world where magic is heavily entwined with political intrigue and power. Not everything here is for kids—there's an X-Men mutants vibe working hard on the edges. Clarke's book, by the way, was published in 2004 but she started it in 1993, four years before the first Harry Potter novel, so all this British publishing magic appears to be a case of serendipity. What Fantastic Beasts reminded me of most was a DC Comics storyline from the '60s, "Dial H for Hero." In this ridiculous series (which has since been revived multiple times, as recently as 2012), our hero, a bicycle-riding tween named Robby Reed, finds a detached rotary dial (yes, that's right, a detached rotary dial), which, when dialed H - E - R - O, turned him into a random new superhero. He always had to take time to figure out what his new superpower was, which was never convenient when he was in a real jam. So this movie is pretty much as billed, focus on the "fantastic beasts," with all their many assorted names and powers. The "where to find them" is an extra dimension more or less inside the traveling case of Newt Scamander (Redmayne) as he visits New York City to collect a few that escaped. He has to keep the rest secured, a few of which are always trying to escape. You get the idea. This all takes place in the 1920s for no apparent reason, but the period detail is charming. Lots of political issues about magic and magic beasts and such. Oh it's going to be big. Wait until you see who shows up at the end. This is a pretty good time, especially with easily impressed and vocal youngsters. Maybe you know a few.

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899)

I was surprised on checking in again with Mark Twain's great long story to find out he was in his 60s when he wrote it. It has all the acid of an old man, that's for sure, but it proceeds with the clarity of a child's tale. That does make it a little programmatic on one level, yet the implicit faith in the corruption of the human soul is so complete as to render that a feeble objection. Twain simply sets up the ten-pins of the pious hypocrites and throws stones down the alley at them. Of course they fall—all of them. That's the fun of this. Another detail I like is that we never learn the original offense that motivates "the stranger" to his elaborate revenge. This story has some parallel in Poe's "Cask of Amontillado," which similarly presents a daydream of revenge. I call them daydreams because they go so perfectly, as if honed and burnished by a feverish mind over weeks and years of imagining them. In Twain's story, there are some hiccups. One family of hypocrites is spared through the secret actions of the Reverend Burgess, who bears his own stain as sinner. Yet even this resolves ultimately to the satisfaction of the revenger, more evidence for the daydream. I am always impressed by how boldly and neatly the man in the title accomplishes the corruption. One or two swift actions takes care of it. (Compare Osama bin Laden and 9/11.) It depends on a base but simple understanding of human psychology, along with the devilishly clever plot. I see by Wikipedia that some have attempted to connect the story with a real-life incident involving Twain and the town of Oberlin, Ohio. It might be so—didn't Stephen King do something similar, perhaps with obnoxious fans generally, in Misery? It would not surprise me at all to find there was a town in Ohio that resembled Hadleyburg. But it's also a little reductionist, and even beside the point. The reason this story is still read today—and should be!—has more to do with its take on human nature than any real town in the past. Yes, it's something of a harsh story, and makes me a little sad for the sense of Twain's growing bitterness toward the end of his life. At the same time it reminds me of the joke about not being depressed means you're not paying attention. I have sympathy—and at the very least the story shows again what an extraordinary writer Twain was.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)