Peace Love Death Metal (2004)

I was drawn to the Eagles of Death Metal by the name, of course, which sets out to locate its sound at the intersection of "Peaceful Easy Feeling" and Celtic Frost. Who doesn't like that? But the deal was really sealed for me by the participation of Josh Homme, which brought me on board in the first place. Homme's other project, the Queens of the Stone Age, had won me over big-time with a great show in 2000 that made me a fan for life. Jesse Hughes, the other principal in EDM, has the presence to match up against the formidable QOTSA strains Homme brings and turn them in another direction entirely. You may not even be aware how well you already know this album yourself, as it managed to make itself something of a licensing paradise in the middle of last decade, used in television commercials for Ask.com, Budweiser, Comcast, Nissan, Payless ShoeSource, Pontiac, and Wendy's, as well as in movies (Grindhouse, Thank You for Smoking) and video games and more (thank you, Wikipedia). Through the welter of nicknames printed in the accompanying materials and spoken in the tracks—"the Devil," "J. Devil Huge," "Mr. Boogie Man," "Carlo von Sexron," "Baby Duck"—it's a lot of whipping-hard throbbing three-minute grooves crisscrossed with strange aching moments of balladry, 14 songs altogether in 42 minutes. In retrospect, not much "death metal" here after all, but lots of little surprises: Hughes's Al Wilson wannabe falsetto, the open spaces and textures of the rhythm section, which pound but paradoxically do so with a light touch. In many ways it's all there in the New Wave style inclination toward the one defining cover, in this case Stealers Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle," which they redub "Stuck in the Metal." Hughes also brings a lot of elfin energy to the enterprise, in his coy asides ("I am so lucky to be playing with this drummer right now!") and the furrowed-brow seriousness that seems to attend him. Formally it's just the two of them, but when they perform they make a point of rounding it up to the usual 2 guitars bass drums. For his part, Homme appears happy playing the supporting role for Hughes, whose personality rattles all through everything here. Homme's guitar is the glorious instrument he has always made of it, a beast poised for one's throat. Maybe better get those feet moving, pardner.

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

USA, 130 minutes
Director: Frank Capra
Writers: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, Jo Swerling, Philip Van Doren Stern, Michael Wilson
Photography: Joseph F. Biroc, Joseph Walker, Victor Milner
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin
Editor: William Hornbeck
Cast: James Stewart, Henry Travers, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, Beulah Bondi, Frank Faylen, Ward Bond, Gloria Grahame, H.B. Warner, Frank Albertson, Samuel S. Hinds, Mary Treen, Sheldon Leonard

Since coming to terms with how much I like and admire and value the cornball object known as It's a Wonderful Life, I have maintained that it's because the picture is essentially fearless, and not just "for its times," about going right at human depravity. For every saccharine declaration that, "Every time you hear a bell ring, it means that some angel's just got his wings," there's someone mean and surly like Sheldon Leonard standing there saying, "Hey, look, mister, we serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast, and we don't need any characters around to give the joint atmosphere." It's almost like the call and response in gospel music, these extremes between whitest whites and blackest blacks, and it's one of the best things I know, short of The Wizard of Oz and Blue Velvet, at sharpening such contrasts and making you feel them viscerally.

I came to it late, finally catching a TV broadcast from beginning to end at some point in the late '80s. I was surprised by how dark it is, even the photography, which verges on pure noir in some sequences, and Universal-style horror in others. It's not just that it's a story about a man who has decided suicide is his best option (nor that it's unafraid to use the word "suicide" plain). The fact is it's just good all through, with a screenplay that expertly juggles its many extremities, and top-notch performances. It boldly rears back and lets loose a story in excruciating detail of lifelong frustration and disappointment, the story of George Bailey (played brilliantly by James Stewart in one of his greatest performances), who keeps seeing his dream denied of escaping the small upstate New York town in which he was born and has lived all his life, that dream so systematically denied that his interior life shrivels to the point where, in a moment of uncalculated despair, he can cry out to his wife, "You call this a happy family? Why do we have to have all these kids?"

Mott the Hoople, "I Wish I Was Your Mother" (1973)

(listen)

Sometimes I get the feeling this song might have fit just as neatly on Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde—Ian Hunter clearly was a student, and this is pretty well imbued with various familiar Dylan tricks and stylings, such as the phrasing, and the way he pushes the vocal from just below his throat, giving it a strained and exhausted feeling, not to mention of course the whole upside-down, inside-out, and vaguely surreal thrust of the lyrics, which effectively free-associate off a theme that would seem to trace back most directly to classic Freudian preoccupations (I'm not sure how often Dylan actually went Freudian quite this explicitly, but set that aside for the moment). Most of all, as I realized the other day walking around with the tune stuck in my head but not sure for a few minutes what it was, it sneaks up on you in the form of a gentle lullaby, inflected by gorgeous mandolin textures. That's at least disconcerting in the context of the album it comes from, Mott, an extended, determinedly narcissistic meditation on the foibles of glam-rock and maybe, by extension, a wider rock 'n' roll lifestyle then extant. Hotel rooms, airports, 'ludes, your instrument, and the notebook you write in. It's a perfect ending to a very good album, reaching deep and offering parallels in the most unexpected places. Today it occurred to me that, in a way, it throws a spotlight on Lillian Gish in Intolerance (and, later, in The Night of the Hunter), rocking the cradles of history and longing and human foolishness on the porch of time, suffering the pains and secret joys only parents know truly. The rest of us, like Hunter, can only gape in yearning, and maybe someday write a song as complex, profound, and beautiful as this.

Run Lola Run (1998)

#40: Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998)

Run Lola Run tends to get dismissed in some quarters as being little more than a music video. It's true that it's saturated with garish New Wave primary colors and a pulsing techno soundtrack. But director/soundtrack man Tom Tykwer deploys his frenetics well, and if it's a music video (which I doubt, because I don't like music videos), it's also one that offers an audaciously profound meditation on time, death, love, and morality. The sheer kinetics of it sometimes seem capable of carrying off positively anything as we find ourselves running alongside the Lola of the title (played with neat economy in a great performance by Franka Potente), whose moped has been stolen and whose boyfriend needs saving.

Everything here comes in twos and threes, as a kind of three-part mini-Groundhog Day suite unfolds across parallel time streams. It reads like a comic book narrative in many ways (and I mean that as a good thing), proceeding panel by panel. Practically every person and every event seen once will be seen again—incidental characters and their ultimate fates appear very differently as their individualized contexts are constructed and unpacked and played out repeatedly, glancing off like figurative rays of light even as the central 20-minute arc moves through its paces.

Faceless Killers (1991)

If the Stieg Larsson trilogy counts as a police procedural, and it might as well, that would make this the second such Swedish exercise I have sampled recently charting the plodding and tedious processes of police investigation contrasted with the lurid and horrific crimes under investigation. It's basic genre work, with a formula and variations that work any number of places, from "Dragnet" to Ed McBain to "Law and Order." You like that kind of thing or you don't, and if you do, you will probably like this. Both Larsson and Henning Mankell also put me in mind of the old Martin Beck series by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, which I enjoyed quite a bit in the '80s. Faceless Killers is the first of Mankell's series featuring the Swedish detective Kurt Wallander, and if there aren't too many surprises, mostly just the usual by-the-numbers police routines, it's still a nice night's read. The case: An old couple who live in an isolated rural location is brutally murdered—overkilled. Investigator Wallander working the case is amiably competent, for the most part, though his life is a big interesting mess. Hard to know how well he will wear over several novels but he's an interesting preliminary character study here, part pig and part Sherlock Holmes. He and his peers chase down the clues and leads and try to figure it all out. There's a wee bit of danger here and there along the way. The most interesting part, aside from the central mystery, is its treatment of the "immigrant problem" in Sweden at the time, the early '90s (a "problem" that could well be even worse now for all I know). Certainly all the most familiar strains of the issue are there—20 years later, in the United States, it feels a little prescient, most notably in the ugly, harsh, and violent response by nativists to the arrival of immigrants, with all their contradictory promises of cheap labor and perceived threat to "water down" the dominant culture. The tale doesn't have much to say beyond any of that, just notes the outlines and basic dynamics of the conflict as part of the context of the mystery. But it's a nice theme to find interwoven in. I am curious to see how these and some of the other themes here may or may not be developed across the larger series.

In case it's not at the library.

Argybargy (1980)

Are you a Squeeze fan? I was infatuated with them in the early '80s. Argybargy was the first of their albums I knew and seems to be the place I turn when I'm in the mood, though it's arguable at least that East Side Story might be their best. The typical label applied is New Wave, and that's fair enough—it's basically primary colors, three-minute pop songs, and loose-jointed shuffle-dancing. This is the British flavor of New Wave, so there's a certain amount of bluesy pub-rock affinities lurking about as well (most concentrated in the person of keyboardist Jools Holland, whose only song here is "Wrong Side of the Moon"). Principal songwriters Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook reportedly worked out an eccentric strategy for concocting their tunes: Difford wrote the lyrics on his own—in the middle of the night, if I recall, later slipping them under Tilbrook's door (this started when they were roommates, evidently). Tilbrook then made the music. That probably accounts for the strange moods and travels of these songs, which do hit verse-chorus-verse marks but come across perhaps most forcefully as strange and gnomic, almost suffocating in a way. Consider "I Think I’m Go Go," which makes a hash of its arch ambience and musical gestures, finally turning into something that plays like a solo barbershop quartet part written for a zombie. Maybe that's not the best example—it's practically the novelty here, calling attention to itself by its dense and cheeky manner. I think I like it but I can see how someone might shrink from it. So consider the more obvious first single, which kicks off the first side, "Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)." It's tuneful, fun to yelp with as you pick up the words; even as it moves about restlessly from one musical idea to the next some infectiousness keeps you faithfully in its tow. But pay a visit to its Wikipedia page and what do you find? Nineteen footnotes citing a dozen or more critics talking about an "observation of the British working class," clarifying that it's Difford's memories from a British holiday camp, pointing out that "pulling mussels" "is British slang for sexual intercourse." That seems to be an awful lot of exegesis for a #44 on the UK charts, but maybe that's just me. As pop music it dwells in a cerebral place. And I still can't figure out how much I like it or not—maybe that's exhaustion. It was in very high rotation at one point.

Friends With Money (2006)

USA, 88 minutes
Director/writer: Nicole Holofcener
Photography: Terry Stacey
Music: Rickie Lee Jones, Craig Richey
Editor: Robert Frazen
Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, Greg Germann, Catherine Keener, Jason Isaacs, Frances McDormand, Simon McBurney, Scott Caan, Bob Stephenson

It's possible that Friends With Money is the best movie Nicole Holofcener has made but I wouldn't bet my last dime on it. In the first place, they're all pretty good, each one feeling like the best even as you watch it (and in the second place, she's not done yet). They tend toward gentle ensemble pieces with familiar players and something of a TV-sitcom feel, sharply observed human foible centered around, goofing off of, revealing, departing from, working variations on its characters, who look and act like real people behind the deceptively easygoing streams of jokes, gags, and uneventful scenes. The always impressive Catherine Keener assumes her usual role as Holofcener's alter ego. It could well be my appreciation for Woody Allen (and/or the collected stories of Chekhov) that is at the heart of what I like so much about Holofcener's scenes and characters, oblique and pungent at once.

The TV-sitcom feel doesn't come from nowhere. A lot of television credentials are in play here. It's the kind of "small" relationship movie that plays well on a TV. Holofcener has directed episodes of "Sex and the City," "Six Feet Under," and "Parks and Recreation." Jennifer Aniston's background is well known, and I hasten to add (or admit) that she could be the single element for me that vaults Friends With Money over the rest of Holofcener's pictures (all of which, I say again, eminently worth seeing): Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing, and Please Give.

Terry Lee Hale, "The Boys Are Waiting" (1988)

(listen)

Terry Lee Hale is a singer/songwriter I recall scratching around the various edges of Seattle music in the late '80s—a track of his appeared on the 1988 Sub Pop 200 compilation, "Dead Is Dead," which is as fine an introduction to him as any. I happened to see a lot of him one way or another in the summer of 1989, at pick-me-up festivals and opening for bands around town. "The Boys Are Waiting" is the song I remember best. Probably the version I really want to hear is one of those performances, never recorded. I also knew it from a 1988 cassette-only release—Fools Like Me, I believe it was called. I don't seem to have that tape any longer and for all I know this 1993 version, which appeared on his first album for the Germany-based Normal label, is the same track, though I think it's at least been sweetened some, with the cello. It sounds pretty good anyway; it will do. Hale cultivated his own personal mythology, imparted in anecdotes from the stage: brave hard-working single parent chasing his music dream, putting one foot in front of the other, but not immune to the opportunities as they came for intoxicants and philandering. Thus, the dour anguish in this song is very real, and comes from places of personal experience. He knows he is complicit in his own anxiety. His attempts to set the context are what made it so memorable for me—a little of the tenor of that can be heard here when he gulps as an aside in momentary panic about the phone calls his 12-year-old daughter is starting to receive, "... and how deep their voices are." With the Walkabouts, Hale managed to transfer his entire base of operations from Seattle to Europe starting in the mid-'90s, so it has been a long time since I've seen him perform or indeed even followed him closely. But I still love this song a lot.

Before Sunset (2004)

#41: Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)

This is probably a fantasy of the way relationships work (I'm hardly one to say), but it's as fine and heartrending a romance as I know, not least perhaps because the sputtering front end of it, Linklater's 1995 Before Sunrise, is so fatally slight. But in this inspired sequel, the three principals—director Linklater and stars Julie Delpy (Celine) and Ethan Hawke (Jesse), who all collaborated on the screenplay—are nine years older, with that much more experience under their belts and showing in the lines on their faces and the circumstances of their (fictional) lives.

The premise of both pictures is practically identical: Celine and Jesse, who barely know one another yet experience a mutual and profound connection, are irresistibly drawn together. In Sunrise, they get off a train and spend a night prowling Vienna, talking and talking and talking. That movie ends with solemn promises to meet again six months later. In Sunset, it's nine years later, and they are meeting again for the first time since that night. It starts at a reading for Jesse's novel (the book based on their night together), and it's as unplanned in its way as their first meeting—he has no idea she will be there, she has no idea how it will go. Almost immediately they fall in again, and spend the afternoon prowling Paris, talking and talking and talking. The warp and woof of their conversation is continually intruded on by their mutual bewilderment, even resentment, at the feelings they share toward one another.

Best American Crime Writing 2002

In the past few weeks commenter jcdevildog has tracked down Otto Penzler (see comments), apparently via a Facebook page, who confirmed that the Best American Crime Writing/Reporting series is indeed finished for the time being, after nine volumes. Thanks to jcdevildog for doing the legwork on this one (I never heard anything from the publisher, either via email or in response to a letter I sent). I think many of us were hoping for some kind of delay or temporary postponement, but the series does appear to be done. This is a shame, of course, for anyone like me who followed it regularly over the years—but the nine books produced remain very good, suffer surprisingly little from age, and are well worth looking into. It's also somewhat heartening to remember that the series simply collects what's already out there. That means it's still probably out there, if you're willing to sift and look to individual magazines for it, and incidentally the series also uncovered some of the best magazine sources for true-crime journalism, which aren't always obvious: "The Atlantic Monthly," "Esquire," "GQ," "The New Yorker," and "Vanity Fair" were among the most reliable contributors to this series.

As for the individual volumes, they are all good, but this first one remains among the very best. Penzler, Thomas H. Cook, and crew may or may not have yet ironed out all the processes involved in making these books, but certainly they are putting their collective best foot forward with this inaugural edition, and it shows. It's one of the biggest in the series, at over 400 pages, with such stars and journeymen of the form on board as Charles Bowden, Skip Hollandsworth, David McClintick, and Alex Prud'homme. The guest editor is Nicholas Pileggi, whose film credits as writer or producer or both include GoodFellas, Casino, and American Gangster. Offenses documented within these pages range among cockfighting, liquor store robberies, drug smuggling, bad cops, murder, fraud, and, of course, 9/11, which occurred when this collection was nearing completion, obviously forcing a rethink of the choices. Penzler and Cook, in their foreword, argue for the Biblical story of Abel and Cain as the first example of true-crime journalism—it's easy, but, well, all right. In Pat Jordan's "The Outcast," from "The New Yorker," one of the figures most critical to the rise of popularity in true-crime journalism, none other than O.J. Simpson himself, may be observed attempting to live with the heavy sentences handed down to him by the court of popular opinion. He is at once loathsome and sympathetic (he has also, by the way, been in prison on armed robbery charges since 2008). Physician essayist Atul Gawande, a frequent contributor to the Best American Essays series, takes on the issue of the veracity of eyewitness reports in "Under Suspicion," also from "The New Yorker"; eyewitness testimony has long been considered nearly sacrosanct by law enforcement and prosecutors but remains highly questionable when looked at carefully and systematically. And David McClintick, in "Fatal Bondage," from "Vanity Fair," looks at the lurid and shocking story of the crimes of businessman J.R. Robinson, a con man, sadist, and serial killer who operated out of Kansas in the '80s and '90s, eventually expanding his base of operations to the Internet. If you watch true-crime TV you have probably seen the story of the case: sadomasochism, missing lonely-hearts women, and foul-smelling barrels found in storage spaces are the points on which it turns, with the added spice of outrage in that he was caught and imprisoned once, only to be released and start up again. I'll call it my favorite piece here, if only because it's so deliciously over the top. As with all the best true-crime journalism the operant term remains, "You can't make this stuff up." That's one of the things this series was so good at. It will be missed.

In case it's not at the library.