Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

One of the interesting side points of slave narratives is parsing the politics behind them. They were intended in part as an element of information campaigns and picked and chose what they did and did not disclose. Much as today's white US population refuses to believe that unwarranted police abuses happen regularly, let alone disproportionately to African Americans, so back then most whites refused to believe in the worst aspects of slavery. Harriet Jacobs, writing originally as Linda Brent, was unusually clear about the abuses suffered by women, whose children if they became pregnant were the property of their masters—and valuable property. The perverse incentives to rape come in many forms, but siring your own crop of slaves for profit has to be one of the more compelling ones. Jacobs also goes into more detail than usual about how slaves were treated and the punishments they endured. In many cases they were murdered, on purpose or by accident, and buried in unmarked graves. Her narrative is also in line with others as the 19th century went along in terms of more and more rejecting white Christianity as hypocritical. She professes her own faith, influenced by her grandmother, who mostly raised her. In the Library of America collection Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of the longest and most detailed narratives, and probably the single best one, though they all deserve to be read, of course. But this might be the one to read if it's only going to be one. Another continuing theme is how hard the laws make it to do anything. Slaves were property and couldn't testify in court any more than domesticated animals. Another perverse incentive—a slave can never testify against you. This narrative has many good stories and lots of description of the way slaves lived and got along. It's the best one yet on the impact of the Fugitive Slave Law, a huge setback for abolitionists in 1850. And it has powerful feminist themes. Jacobs is a deeply moral person but makes no apology for becoming pregnant, given her circumstances. Indeed, as much as anything choosing the father was a way to assert herself with her master, who was determined to have her body and soul. The sad and ridiculous way it plays out after his death is only one more example of how depraved slavery was. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of our great books, whose best counterpart might be Anne Frank's diary.

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

The Big Sleep (1946)

USA, 114 minutes
Director: Howard Hawks
Writers: William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, Raymond Chandler
Photography: Sidney Hickox
Music: Max Steiner
Editor: Christian Nyby
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Martha Vickers, John Ridgely, Dorothy Malone, Regis Toomey, Charles Waldron, Charles D. Brown, Elisha Cook Jr., Louis Jean Heydt, Bob Steele, Peggy Knudsen, Sonia Darrin, Joy Barlow, Tommy Rafferty

In my period of infatuation with Humphrey Bogart, late teens or so, The Big Sleep always gave me a bad case of cognitive dissonance. I could see that Bogart's turn at the Philip Marlowe private detective created by Raymond Chandler belongs with his best, his best being Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, probably The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, probably High Sierra, and maybe The African Queen (still too young for In a Lonely Place, which was not even in my sights). The Big Sleep also benefits from palpable chemistry between Bogart and Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Rutledge, the quasi-femme fatale and romantic interest. Bogart and Bacall were single when the picture started shooting but married to each other for the rest of their lives by the time it came out. They had been good in director Howard Hawks's 1944 cover of Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, which was Bacall's first picture. They were even better here.

But The Big Sleep so completely confounds clarity that I resented it, even if Bogart was in every damn scene. The fact that no one, including Chandler, could say who committed one of its murders outraged me. Not that I was noticing specific plot holes—I wasn't even sure I was tracking basic through-lines half the time, especially with new characters still arriving even into the last third. Also, it never helped that anyone discussing the picture always cheerfully mentioned its incomprehensibility. The point of the mystery genre is to create narratives that are not a mystery any longer at the end, I insisted. The Big Sleep was breaking these rules and what was worse everyone seemed to admire that as much as anything else about it.

"The Jigsaw Man" (1967)

Larry Niven is most famous now for his Ringworld series of novels, the first of which came in 1970. In 1967, when Harlan Elllison approached him to contribute to Dangerous Visions, Niven was still a bit of a novice. "The Jigsaw Man" is based on the advances of organ transplants, taken to the point where they promise virtually eternal life for recipients wealthy enough to afford them. Then some corrupt individual in government somewhere, at some time, realizes that death-row prisoners would make ideal organ donors. "Organleggers" is the term Niven coins for people in the illicit business that develops. It is taken to absurd extremes. My skepticism is less about a society that would devolve to such a depraved state (after all, look at our president, along with the prospect of two sex criminals on the Supreme Court) and more about a writer who thinks certain specific things are plausible. I'm never going to argue against the perversities of people acting en masse in large groups. But Niven undermines the idea by imagining such an eccentric extreme, focusing narrowly on a ridiculous legal system loophole. In the end we see people getting the death penalty for things like multiple traffic infractions. I can go along with people reduced to using others this way—it's easy enough to live with ongoing intentional death, after all, thinking of the death penalty and continuous war. And the promise of eternal life for any victims who might be innocent ("let God sort them out") can help get you over the hump of genocide. But if you're down to misdemeanors as your rationale your society already has the kinds of problems that should be tearing it to shreds. Consider the Holocaust, and remember that German Nazis went to extraordinary lengths to hide what they were doing. The scale of atrocity in this story is arguably way beyond that, let alone Brett Kavanaugh. At the same time the story is absolutely silent on issues like race and class—presumably this is a future that has evolved beyond such things, though that would make these abuses of a death penalty that much more unlikely. It is thus missing a big piece of the most likely ways that something like systematic organ harvesting of humans would go down. (Somehow I was not surprised when I checked into Niven's biography to find he's a long-time conservative and was an adviser to Ronald Reagan on the "star wars" antimissile initiative.) I totally buy the idea of organ transplants developing a black market where all bets are off for what people actually do (see also the urban legend about waking up in a bathtub in Mexico with a huge wound in your side). As dangerous visions go, that's not bad. It's just hard to believe it would look anything like the death penalty for too many speeding tickets.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

Complicated Fun (2017)

This nicely done oral history of the Minneapolis (and St. Paul) pop / punk / hardcore / alternative music scene really brought me back. I was only on the fringes for most of the '70s, even though a few of the bands breaking out of it included people I knew and was friendly with. As I learned here, a tremendous amount happened before I finally circled back in about 1979. It sounds like such great times, with the Suicide Commandos and Flamingo ruling the Longhorn nightclub that gave birth to so much of it. The Suburbs, the Wallets, NNB, the Hypstrz, and Curtiss A were not far behind, and it's arguable all that paved the way for Husker Du and the Replacements in the '80s. Cyn Collins has done a great job of figuring out who to talk to, and then of getting them to talk. Conspicuous in his absence is Prince, who was a respected but distant figure in all this. It was probably wise. The worlds of Prince and the axis of the Longhorn, Oar Folkjokeopus record store, and Twin/Tone indie label were always separate and distinct. The scope of Prince's talent quickly put him in another class entirely, with Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and the world. The great pleasure of this oral history, as with most oral histories, is the mix of distinctive voices. It's full of great stories of things happening by chance, things going wrong, and things you almost can't imagine. It's best on the Suicide Commandos, Suburbs, and NNB, but that might be because I knew some of them and liked those bands best. It scrubs out a lot of ugly details—petty squabbles that became long-term fractures—which again is wise. Why raise old ghosts? By the '80s that's a little tougher to do because bands had ambitions and expectations by then that didn't always bear out, and it's harder to gloss over some ill feelings that are perhaps still operative. Nothing is heard from any of the principals of Husker Du or the Replacements, who have had their own biographies and memoirs in recent years, and there aren't as many stories about them here in general. I wished for a little more there but I know it is adequately documented elsewhere. But the period of 1974 to 1979—a New York Dolls performance at the Minnesota State Fair in 1974 is given as the figurative ground zero—has certainly been underrepresented until now. Complicated Fun is detailed, informative, always fun, and fleshes out the story of Twin Cities music in key ways. Essential, certainly if you grew up there at the time.

In case it's not at the library.

Time Bomb (2017)

I don't keep careful track of such things, but surely the 39 years that passed between the first album by the Suicide Commandos and this second one must be some statistical record. Even Paul McCartney and Santana came up short of 30 years between top 10 hits ("Spies Like Us" and "FourFive Seconds" for the one and "Black Magic Woman" and "Smooth" for the other). At this point I know it's mandatory to mention whether it was worth the wait, but as far as I'm concerned, like the 2015 This Is the Sonics, I'm just happy they did it—"rage against the dying of the light," you know. The fact that Time Bomb is a pretty good album is a bonus. The Suicide Commandos, the Minneapolis mid-'70s punk-rock standard-bearers (accept no substitutes), were matched in 1978 with Cleveland's finest, Pere Ubu, on the Mercury subsidiary label Blank (not to be confused with Glenn Danzig's original Misfits project). That first Commandos album, Make a Record, was released simultaneously with Pere Ubu's first, The Modern Dance. Pere Ubu went on to the more illustrious career, and the truth is in 1978 the Commandos were close to calling it quits for almost two decades. Make a Record was a pretty good album too—packed with great, classic songs from their set list—but it was unfortunately dogged by a poor recording. That problem has certainly been addressed on Time Bomb, which is as explosive as the title suggests, crackling with energy, power, and clarity. A more nebulous problem has also been fixed: the three principals—drummer Dave Ahl, bassist Steve Almaas, and guitarist Chris Osgood—seem to like each other more than they did in 1978. The humor is still intact too, based on misspent youth watching trashy movies and playing Monkees records, and they generally rock the house with authority all night from track to track.

If the album consists mostly of solo songwriting credits, the attack of the band is as sharp as ever, updated to beyond middle age, for a seamless batch that's nice to play a lot. And there are a couple of formal collaborations, including one of the best songs here, "If I Can't Make You Love Me," with a monster riff straight from the '70s (is that Bad Company? Thin Lizzy? Aerosmith? I know I should know it) and garbled adolescent sentiments ("you're an idiot, shitty-it, itty-bitty fitty-it," innit?). All my favorites have big riffs and hark to classic-rock or even, dare I say it, boogie. If I had to pick a single favorite it would probably be Osgood's "Pool Palace Cigar," a devil's riff by way of ZZ Top paired with a narrative about traveling through small towns trying to act cool and getting drunk—perfect. His "Boogie's Coldest Acre" is another good one, complete with a classic Osgood riff. This time the boogie mainly exists in the title. The song appears to be about a dangerous situation that needs to be defused. It comes in versions with and without swearing—"put that thing down" versus "put that fucking thing down"—and for some reason (maybe because I'm 39 years older now too) I like the one without swearing more. "Cocktail Shaker" is by Ahl and works more swampy boogie rhythms, with a sinuous guitar line and a way of moving, stopping, and starting that is propulsive. "Depth charge rock" I wrote in a note. All together: "Shake!" Ahl likes his trash culture and Osgood tended to favor the story song, whereas Almaas (full disclosure, a high school friend) has long seemed more rooted in the Buddy Holly / Beatles / Byrds schools of country-inflected pop. A few of his songs here—notably "Try Again," "For Such a Mean Time" (Byrds strained through Cyril Jordan Flamin' Groovies), and "The Wrong Time"—tend to be the ones that make me happiest coming back to the album regularly. His "When I Do It, It's OK" comes out of the same high-velocity kick as the Beatles' "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" and other '50s covers. Time Bomb: Play loud. All of it.

Notorious (1946)

USA, 101 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Ben Hecht, Alfred Hitchcock, John Taintor Foote, Clifford Odets
Photography: Ted Tetzlaff
Music: Roy Webb
Editor: Theron Warth
Cast: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Louis Calhern, Leopoldine Konstantin, Reinhold Schunzel, Ivan Triesault, E.A. Krumschmidt

I count Notorious as one of director and cowriter Alfred Hitchcock's best, though time has marred it some for rancid attitudes. It's another movie from 1946 that is not entirely sure World War II is over, and still measuring the effects. It's a spy story but full of Hitchcock's ingenious tricks, with a nicely matched pair of glamorous performances in Ingrid Bergman as Alicia Huberman, the disgraced daughter of a German-American Nazi given a chance to redeem herself on an undercover assignment—she is this movie's alarming drunk—and Cary Grant as Devlin, her handler. They are on the track of Nazis who are hiding out in South America and unnaturally fascinated with uranium. (As a matter of historical interest, the American CIA did not exist until 1948, when it was created under the direction of former Nazis by President Truman.)

But this movie and the US spy agency in it are from 1946, and if things are murky in terms of the ongoing perceived threat from German Nazis, they are perfectly clear in terms of doing right things. Alicia Huberman drinks like a fish and pretends to be cynical about everything, but secret recordings reveal that she despised her father's Nazi sympathies and treasonous actions and she actually loves America—loves it fiercely. Devlin shows up shortly after her father is found guilty and sentenced to prison, at the beginning of the picture, and recruits her for the assignment. At first all they know is that it is in Rio de Janeiro. While they wait for the specific details, of course they have a beautiful romance. But then comes the assignment.

"Faith of Our Fathers" (1967)

Philip K. Dick's contribution to Dangerous Visions went on to get a nomination for a Hugo Award, more bounty for the reputation of Harlan Ellison's collection. There is also more interesting material here to speculate on the dynamics between Ellison and these writers. We have already seen Ellison request a specific story from Robert Bloch and then write his own version of it. For this one Ellison asked Dick to write it "about, and under the influence of (if possible) LSD." I can only wonder what Dick thought. I don't know his biography or writing habits well enough to even guess. In 1967 Dick was beginning to come into his own publicly yet with much of his work done. What he came up with is typical of his inversions. In this story, everyone is continually high on a mild hallucinogen. It's in the drinking water, administered by Communists who have come to worldwide power. China appears to have won the Cold War. TVs in the home monitor activity—that old schizophrenic chestnut—and citizens are required to be present in front of the screens with their eyes open for political speeches. The illicit drug that commands prices on the black market is phenothiazine, which counteracts hallucinogens. (Phenothiazine is "highly bioactive," it says in Wikipedia, and is the source of thorazine.) Political resistance forces spread the drug to enable people to experience actual reality. However, when it is used during the mandatory televised speeches something strange seems to be happening. The mysterious leader of the world government, known as the Absolute Benefactor, takes on many different appearances according to the phenothiazine users. Of course, someone from the government is out there classifying them (it wouldn't be a Dick story without such natural bureaucrats): the Clanker (a hideous machine), the Gulper (a hideous whale), the Bird, the Climbing Tube, etc. So the story is about solving these various mysteries, including the nature of reality and hallucination, and it also roams into inspired areas of religion. Dick is obviously trying harder here—everyone is, under Ellison's wheedling and pushing—and this story ends up in some pretty amazing places. It's a classic Dick story and maybe one of his best. It's also one for the tally of stories in this collection that rise to the level of dangerous, though it is dangerous in a way that is hard to describe exactly. Better to read it. Or consider this, from Dick's afterword, quoting a 9th-century Irish theologian and poet in the court of Charles the Bold named John Scotus Erigena (Wikipedia corroborates he is real): "We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being." A mic drop if ever there was one. It might actually be the most dangerous (religious) line in the whole book.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

Nico, 1988 (2017)

Nico, 1988 suffers from the usual limitations of biopics—a certain inevitable self-satisfaction, and if you know anything about the subject you already know where it's all headed. But credit where due: director and screenwriter Susanna Nicchiarelli has stitched together a lot of effective elements, focusing on the end of the line for Nico (born Christa Paffgen), who died in 1988. Trine Dyrholm delivers a convincing and affecting Nico, there's some nice support from John Gordon Sinclair (Gregory in Gregory's Girl) and Karina Fernandez (Happy-Go-Lucky, Another Year), and the band—an Italian post-rock outfit called Gatto Ciliegia contro il Grande Freddo—is much better than the treatment Nico is shown giving them. Indeed, it is perhaps better than the actual thing, in the way biopics exaggerate and heighten for effect. I seem to know a lot of people who saw Nico on her endless tour in the '80s and the reports are never good, telling tales of a disgruntled middle-aged heroin addict making music with strange uneven powers who couldn't accept that her moment came and went when she played a tambourine and sang with the Velvet Underground (there's a great moment here when someone seems to have her confused with Marianne Faithfull or Anita Pallenberg).  My turn was at Duffy's in Minneapolis in something like 1982. She was pumping at a harmonium on her own while people catcalled for songs they had to know she couldn't do, like "Heroin." That show did not last long, cut off when she left the stage abruptly, angry about something. I think we got five songs. In this movie, the shows are short too. But the high point of the picture is one of them, a mysterious show in Prague in 1986. It's cut short by the appearance of Soviet Czechoslovakian police to hassle the promoter. Nico and at least one other member of the band are suffering withdrawal symptoms because they could not bring heroin across the border and haven't been able to find any there. Nico takes to the stage shaky and coated in a thin film of sweat. They play one song, "My Heart Is Empty," before they have to flee the hall altogether. It is an amazing, roaring performance—I wish I could look at it over and over again tonight. (It has not yet made it to YouTube, but there's a snippet.) Otherwise, Nico, 1988 explores Nico's experience in Berlin as a girl at the end of World War II for general purposes of psychological motivation, and does a bit of dancing around with her white supremacist ways, though not enough. There's also some stuff about her son and her death in 1988, at 49. I wish there had been more of that band.

The Gospel According to the Son (1997)

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

In case it's not at the library.

My Darling Clementine (1946)

USA, 97 minutes
Director: John Ford
Writers: Samuel G. Engel, Winston Miller, Sam Hellman, Stuart N. Lake
Photography: Joseph MacDonald
Music: Cyril J. Mockridge
Editor: Dorothy Spencer
Cast: Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Walter Brennan, Linda Darnell, Cathy Downs, Ward Bond, Tim Holt, Alan Mowbray, John Ireland, Jane Darwell

By force of will, director John Ford turned Monument Valley into the very image of pioneer America, but really it's practically the harshest environment most of them ever could have faced, let alone tried to settle. Unlike the Great Plains which were mistaken for the "Great American Desert" until well beyond the Civil War, Monument Valley, occupying the Arizona and Utah border regions, is really desert land—perhaps not as intense as Death Valley, but desert: dry, hot, forbidding, mostly barren, with sand and rocks and ancient outcroppings left over from when it was an inland sea. Plus skilled and hostile natives. Into this hell Ford regularly sent his pilgrims, who faithfully sing "Shall We Gather at the River" every chance they get, which isn't that often, only maybe once per movie, because they are otherwise busy trying to survive by their wits and their unrelenting Puritan work ethic.

I suspect the reason My Darling Clementine is my favorite John Ford picture is because it is so much more obviously made-up fictional legend instead of the manly midcentury hard reality Ford more often essays. The Wyatt Earp story and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral are concoctions mostly dreamed up by Earp himself after he moved to Hollywood in the 20th century. There's some historical veracity to pull out of this movie if you are so inclined—Doc Holliday really had tuberculosis, for example—but when you get into the details of the main events it was actually a lot of grubbing around and low behavior. The shootout, such as it was, didn't even happen at the O.K. Corral. Mostly the story as we understand it now, from this movie and many others based on Stuart N. Lake's version, more properly belongs with tales of Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan, Tinker Bell and Peter Pan—stories that comfort and encourage us to be our best.