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.

"The Man Who Went to the Moon—Twice" (1967)

Howard Rodman, who died in 1985, wrote screenplays for TV and movies. His best-known work includes Route 66, Naked City, Coogan's Bluff, and Charley Varrick. Harlan Ellison's introduction to the story discusses Ellison's intention to cast the net wide for this anthology, looking to writers outside of science fiction. Some names he mentions here that didn't make it in include Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, and Terry Southern. It's an interesting idea, as Rodman's odd story shows. Get outside of science fiction and you're liable to find something unexpected for science fiction. Certainly that's the case here, though it's not entirely unprecedented—Ray Bradbury, for one, covered territory like this. Our hero, who bears the strange name of Marshall Kiss, ends up in a runaway hot-air balloon at the age of 9. He says the balloon took him to the moon. His story is covered in local papers—it's an obvious kid's confabulation, but all the adults go along with it for human interest newspaper stories, as adults will (see also Santa Claus). Many years later, nearing the age of 90, Kiss is a lonely old man who has outlived his family and friends. To get attention, he makes up a story about going to the moon. But no one is interested because no one goes to the moon anymore. They're all going to Mars now. In his afterword, Rodman says his focus is on the tremendous amount of change in the world that people can see now in a single lifetime. It's a reasonably interesting point but a bit obvious, as there are approximately 7 billion people now living it out, and not like this. What I liked about the story more was seeing the visual focus and narrative rhythms of a screenwriter. For example, when Rodman describes the boy Kiss recounting his story for reporters, neighbors, and others, he adds this sentence: "A horse poked his head through the kitchen window, and a chicken hopped in and hid under the stove." Then, after the boy finishes telling the story, which naturally is full of charming and nostalgic detail: "The horse took his head out the window and went back to cropping grass in the yard. The hen hopped out the door again, leaving an egg behind under the stove." These animals remind me of Green Acres and other '60s television and give some idea of how this story works (or doesn't, as the case may be). It's not my idea of science fiction, but I like the hodgepodge White Album feel this story brings to the larger collection.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

Top 40

1. Serebro, "Пройдет" (3:34)
2. John Prine, "Summer's End" (3:29)
3. Dirty Disco feat. Celeda, "To the Dancefloor" (7:26)
4. Yuno, "No Going Back" (3:28)
5. U.S. Girls, "Pearly Gates" (4:02)
6. Anna von Hausswolff, "The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra" (6:08)
7. Gwenno, "Tir Ha Mor" (4:10)
8. Portugal. The Man, "Live in the Moment" (4:06)
9. Ashley Monroe, "Hands on You" (3:52)
10. XXXTENTACION, "Sad!" (2:46)
11. The Weeknd, "Call Out My Name" (3:48)
12. Carrie Underwood, "Cry Pretty" (4:06)
13. Calvin Harris & Dua Lipa, "One Kiss" (3:35)
14. Louisa Johnson, "Yes" (2:55)
15. Cardi B, "Be Careful" (3:30)
16. Javiera Mena, "Intuicion" (3:54)
17. Perfume, "Mugenmirai" (3:43)
18. Bhad Bhabie feat. Lil Yachty, "Gucci Flip Flops" (2:30)
19. Childish Gambino, "This Is America" (3:45)
20. Luis Damora, "L.A. Sunrise (Mendo & Danny Serrano Remix)" (7:35)
21. Seinabo Sey, "I Owe You Nothing" (2.59)
22. Goldberg Sisters, "Dear Mr. Nilsson" (3:37)
23. Blacktones, "The Key of Black (They Want Us Dead)" (6:09)
24. Nicki Minaj, "Chun-Li" (3:11)
25. Aya Nakamura, "Djadja" (2:50)
26. Troye Sivan, "Bloom" (3:42)
27. Aastha Gill, "Buzz" (3:13)
28. Ella Mai, "Boo'd Up" (4:16)
29. Khalid feat. Ty Dolla $ign & 6lack, "OTW" (4:23)
30. Nyssa, "Cowboy" (4:09)
31. Cowboy Rhythmbox, "Tanz Exotique (Red Axes Remix)" (7:22)
32. Years & Years, "If You're Over Me" (3:09)
33. Little Boots, "Eros" (4:20)
34. Christine & the Queens feat. Dam-Funk, "Girlfriend" (3:21)
35. Weezer, "Africa" (3:58)
36. Gorillaz, "Lake Zurich" (4:13)
37. SHINee, "From Now On" (4:44)
38. Becky G & Natti Natasha, "Sin Pijama" (3:08)
39. BlocBoy JB feat. Drake, "Look Alive" (3:01)
40. Tyga, "Taste" (3:53)

(thanx: Billboard, The Singles Jukebox [aggregates of 6.0+], Skip D. Expense, The Stranger, Chris Molanphy at random on Facebook, various happenstance, and once in a while the radio)

Better Living Through Criticism (2016)

A.O. Scott presently labors at the New York Times as a film critic, where he has worked since 2000. I liked his attempt here to define and defend the role of critics, a vocation (or avocation) that has existed for centuries—millennia—but always under a vague cloud of illegitimacy and forever on the verge of ending abruptly. Nazi types are one problem ("When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver," "Journalism is the enemy of the people"). Capitalism more generally doesn't like the critical enterprise much either. Newspapers and magazines carried the burden for a century or two but they were always folding and now the whole industry looks sketchy. Lately it's been the internet and digital and social media as a more likely source, but the amateurism there also makes it a threat to professionalism. I do share Scott's mistrust of IMDb and Amazon reviewers, bloggers, and other amateurs more or less giving away their work, even though I am precisely part of the problem there. But what do you do? We need the eggs, as the old joke has it. ("My brother thinks he's a chicken." ... "Thinks he's a chicken! Why don't you take him to a doctor?" h/t Woody Allen.) At any rate, one of the hardest parts for everyone is defining critics and criticism, which Scott gives a go. You can argue he fails at defining it precisely, but he certainly draws a large circle around everything it might be. His sources are fun to follow as he reaches back for Aristophanes, Samuel Johnson, Susan Sontag, Yvor Winters, and any number of formidable figures of the past who have engaged his questions. He even includes Socrates-style dialogues with himself in short intervening chapters. He looks for the popular image of critics in intriguing places, such as the movies All About Eve and Ratatouille. He boldly claims criticism as a creative endeavor coequal with all other arts. He suggests that art itself is a kind of critique of life, with the artist in the reviewer's position. Artist and critic both use their respective materials toward the ends of judgment, or discernment, and sharing experience. In spite of his wit and light touch, Scott seemed a little gloomy to me about the prospects for the 21st century. He makes a strong argument that as long as there has been print there have been critics. In fact, in some ways it's depressing how much criticism there is and always has been. Today's bloggers are yesteryear's ink-stained wretches writing bad reviews of Moby-Dick. But that's not entirely fair. All critics miss obvious things. Just a few weeks ago I was remembering the animus Rolling Stone used to have for Led Zeppelin. And, in fact, one of Scott's best sections here is called "How to Be Wrong," addressing the inevitability and perhaps even the necessity for error, in assessing the ongoing competitions between innovation and convention, the latest shiny new thing versus musty old reliables. Scott observes the widespread exasperation with critics and criticism—the truth is most critics feel that way about them too. But he knows well the siren call of it, that urge to share a profound experience with others, which often is legitimated by encountering criticism for the first time. Scott does a nice job of outlining the situation, both from the outside and the inside, and he makes a good case for the various utilities of criticism too.

In case it's not at the library.

Anti (2016)

Superstar Rihanna's eighth studio album is one more brick in a wall of hits for a career dating back to 2005. The album spawned four singles (three top 10s in the US, including the #1 "Work"), went triple-platinum and counting, and maintained Rihanna's status within the ranks of artists whose fans will follow them across the bewildering field of streaming services. But even so she remains an unknown quantity to me and I've had a hard time getting a bead on the 50-minute 16-track whole of this album. I suspect that's related to the fact that there are literally dozens of songwriters and producers represented here, each with their individualized baggage of musical influence. But even in spite of the unruly range the album is full of surprise pleasures, on shuffle, in mixes, and even straight through as given. I should say it's another album I came to by way of singles—it's wonderful what streaming services have done for organized listening nowadays, though I worry how problematic they are for artists. "Work" seemed to be aimed at and speaking for people in monotonous jobs, which might account for its popularity, but mostly it sounded monotonous to me, except where it turns into a Drake track. Two other singles, "Needed Me" and "Kiss It Better" (released on the same day), work a little better, more as mood pieces with sound effects. "Kiss It Better" notably benefits from an appearance by Extreme guitar player Nuno Bettencourt. But "Love on the Brain" was ultimately the big winner for me on Anti. I see it described as doo-wop quite often but if anything it reminds me of the doo-wop that turned into what Motown recorded in the early '60s—a slower, smokier Marvelettes, to put a fine point on it. But the Marvelettes, Rihanna, and doo-wop would make an interesting jumble on a Venn diagram, so all good. In sequencing, it's also the best part of the album, followed by "Higher," which takes it down the road in a slightly drunken direction (Rihanna was reportedly sipping whiskey for the song's session). Then the next song, "Close to You," also fits, though moving more in the directions of lounge. "Goodnight Gotham" returns to the downtempo precincts that more frequently populate the songs in this set. Some other good ones here include "Desperado," an admirable contribution to the "desperado" shelf of rock 'n' roll and its kin. "Same Ol' Mistakes" is by far the longest at 6:37, occasionally ambling and losing it way but its throbbing bass and bruised air are often lovely. It's probably best to keep focus on Anti at the level of individual songs. I've listened to it a dozen times or more, still don't have much sense of it as a whole album, and may never.

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

USA, 170 minutes
Director: William Wyler
Writers: Robert E. Sherwood, MacKinlay Kantor
Photography: Gregg Toland
Music: Hugo Friedhofer
Editor: Daniel Mandell
Cast: Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Dana Andrews, Virginia Mayo, Harold Russell, Cathy O'Donnell, Hoagy Carmichael, Gladys George, Roman Bohnen, Ray Collins, Ray Teal, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Gene Krupa, Michael Hall

At nearly three hours and with a large and impressive ensemble cast and three or more narrative threads intertwining and going simultaneously, The Best Years of Our Lives is ambitious, setting out to make a monumentally large statement in real time about the fallout and aftereffects of the end of World War II on the American home front. It might be the best American movie about World War II. It's set in a fictional medium-sized city named Boone City, which suggests the near-Midwest or border South region, Kentucky, Ohio, or Tennessee. But really it is Anytown. And the movie starts within months or weeks of the war's end, as three servicemen make their ways home: airman Fred Derry (Dana Andrews, one of the most familiar faces in '40s movies), disabled sailor Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), and middle-aged soldier Al Stephenson (Fredric March).

Not one of them is owner of a neat and tidy life. Fred is in a quickie wartime marriage fast going bad, Homer, whose hands were lost in the war and replaced by hooks, struggles with his disability, and Al is the most confusing character of all. He's a swank banker, a family man married 20 years with two nearly grown children. But he finds his identity more in his status as an army sergeant than in his big comfortable life, which he gave up to fight. He's also an alarming drunk by today's standards, and probably even then—regularly humiliating himself in what often appear to be blackout episodes. It gets even messier when the women are brought in. In short order Fred falls for Al's daughter Peggy (a brilliant Teresa Wright), Homer can't believe his girlfriend Wilma (Cathy O'Donnell) still wants to marry him so he avoids her, leaving her hanging, and Al drinks at every opportunity, maundering about soldierly camaraderie. His long-suffering wife Milly (a perfectly cast Myrna Loy) seems to have faith he will dry out on his own sooner or later. Maybe most amazing, The Best Years of Our Lives is a feel-good movie that actually makes you feel good.

"The Night That All Time Broke Out" (1967)

Brian W. Aldiss's story is almost more interesting for the circumstances of its appearance here. Harlan Ellison's introduction is weirdly restrained and formal and once again he turns part of it over to the story author, which Aldiss uses to brag about how he's managed to make a living as a science fiction writer, a theme that continues in his afterword. It's true that Aldiss was a key figure in the British and American New Wave of science fiction in the '60s and '70s, with Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny, Ellison himself, and others, and also that he wrote the story on which Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg based the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence. But this story has more flaws than good points. In the future, time itself has been found to exist in pockets underground—something like natural gas. As a product it is a utility, consumed like water or electricity routed directly into homes somehow. The effect is to return one to a happier time in the past—a day or two earlier or a month or more depending on the dose, which is carefully rationed. Until, that is, [see title]. Aldiss explains that death does not result from an overdose, but rather the user is hurtled back through the generations, men following the father's line and women the mother's. The story is about what happens when the system breaks down in an accident and too much time floods it. People begin to lose memory and understanding of technology. The main problem distracting me here was the ephemeral make-believe nature of time. Descriptions are never really attempted, which might be wise, but time is flooding everything yet there is no sense of what it is like to be there as it happens. It's all just kooky, and then when people start using Elizabethan and older English that's our clue for the severity. In the end they may have even lost language altogether. However, we already know these effects wear off eventually. How bad can it be? If the planet is now swamped with time, well, yeah, that sounds like a problem. But what does it look like? What does it feel like? Aldiss writes, "As they ran out into the darkness, high above them towered the great invisible plume of the time gusher, still blowing, blowing its doom about the world." It doesn't exactly paint the picture.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

Eighth Grade (2018)

Stand-up comic and actor Bo Burnham's first feature as director and screenwriter appears to be taking a notable risk in the #MeToo era, with a grown man making a movie about an 8th-grade girl's coming of age, graduating from middle school to high school. But Eighth Grade does more things right than wrong—it's warm, sharply observed, and often very funny. Though it's not afraid to hit the booming musical cues hard as it paints the picture of its main character, it is actually a quiet movie, eschewing all excesses but one that we've come to expect from typical teen fare. That one is cringing awkwardness—of a teen girl in the middle of growing up, of her many friends who are confused, shallow, and foolish, and of her helicopter single dad, forever hovering and trying not to do or say the wrong thing again. The one thing Eighth Grade has that is absolutely surefire is Elsie Fisher as the introverted Kayla, "the coolest girl in the world" (her words, in notes she addresses to herself). Kayla has acne, she's slightly overweight, and she never stands up straight, but she is authentic and winning. I thought Fisher, born in 2003, embodied the poise and insecurities of middle schoolers well and played the role naturally, with a lack of self-consciousness. Times being what they are, Kayla lives most of her life online. Her phone is her constant companion and escape even when she's with others. She also has her own YouTube channel where she offers advice to viewers—things like, be yourself, put yourself out there, act confident. It's these videos where Kayla's aspirations and the inarticulate speech of her heart swell into fullest and most tender life. She knows she is considered one of the quiet girls in school, but she also knows under that there is a vibrant, lively, talkative, charming girl becoming a woman, who anyone would be sure to find totally awesome and cool and love madly. It just hasn't happened yet, so she does things like make a to-do list about getting friends and then choosing a best friend from among them. Eighth Grade does traffic at will in teen movie stereotypes—there are nerds and mean girls here in full costume, and maybe some jocks away off in the distance. It even reaches back to '60s sitcoms for the old trope of the bachelor father and the missing mother (My Three Sons, Andy Griffith, Family Affair)—per the usual, we learn very little about the missing mother except she isn't there. But Kayla is all the way there, engaging with her life, reaching out through her phone, trying to understand the madness, and making this movie work.

The Way of All Flesh (1873-1884)

I really enjoyed Samuel Butler's posthumously published fictional account of his life, and if it took the fraud of landing on the Modern Library list of greatest 20th-century novels to get me there I guess that's OK. As influential as it might have been for 20th-century youths, however, it was written in the 19th century and it's about the 19th century. I know little else of Butler. I had him confused with Samuel Johnson and thought be belonged  more to the 18th century or something. "The way of all flesh" has a wonderful ring to it, riffing on the biblical line "the way of all the earth." "The way of all flesh" came to English by way of idiomatic Danish and German, but it feels Shakespearean and is now mostly associated with Butler. The Way of All Flesh is a big story of an arguably small man, spanning four generations and proceeding at a stately pace, setting out each generation by turn even as it gradually, almost imperceptibly, zooms in on our hero, Ernest Pontifex. We don't even see him in the first third of this novel. The story, which spends much of its time exploding Victorian hypocrisy in calculated assaults, is strikingly modern. In many ways it's about an individual identity, socially defined, in conflict with its environment. Butler was a lifelong bachelor and if he wasn't gay (a debated point) he certainly understood being an outsider. Ernest comes from a long line of clergy and that is the career expected of him. But Ernest is reflexively individual, a kind of intellectual gadfly contrarian by today's lights. The description of Ernest's treatment by his abusive father is less notable for the physical aspect, simply described as regular beatings, and much more for the detailed emotional stresses inflicted, aided and abetted by his mother. Today more and more we call it gaslighting. Nothing excuses such treatment, but Ernest's insistence on taking possession of his own destiny, with all the inevitable mistakes that entails, was obviously hard for everyone to deal with. In fact, it's the willful seizing of his own destiny that is likely more shocking and influential than his talent, which is modest. Ernest Pontifex is a genuine oddball, an intellectual true to his own self-determined principles. He is described late in this story as a "one book man," which would apply equally to Butler, author of the satirical utopia novel Erewhon and translator of Homer. Ironically, perhaps, Butler is still a one book man, but that book since his death has turned out to be this one, published according to his direction after his death, which came in 1902. The Way of All Flesh was important to A.A. Milne and George Orwell, among others. I had an idea while I was reading that it might have made an impression on James Joyce, who was also shaped by similarly pervasive church forces. Different churches, different cultures, so maybe not. The Way of All Flesh has really wonderful storytelling and a great story to tell. Ernest is strange and lovable in his perverse choices. Overton—Ernest's godfather and the ostensible author of this narrative—frequently refers to him as "my hero," which at first I took to mean the way he expressed "the hero of this story." But he uses it so often I got the impression he might have meant that Ernest was indeed a personal hero. He is for me too now I know his story.

In case it's not at the library.