Clear (1969)

An early expedition into fractured fickle completism on my part ended here—as I recall, I bought Clear as a used record the same day I bought the first Spirit album (also used), and I effectively bailed on Spirit here, their third album and the last produced by Lou Adler. I never got to know Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, an album I often see hailed as a high point of Spirit's catalog. OK fine, there are still some Spooky Tooth and Wishbone Ash albums I'm hoping to get to too. I finally gave Twelve Dreams a listen a few days ago and didn't find it much better than Clear, so now as then this is my proximate stopping point with Spirit. Maybe I should have tried harder. In fact, I don't think I listened to Clear much at all even back then, because it was mostly unfamiliar to me when I got to it whereas I recognized the first two quite readily—used to play them a lot. To get to the point, Clear strikes me as very generic 1969 rock. It might be better than the first three Grand Funk Railroad records but sadly not by that much. Another touchpoint might be the Savoy Brown album Looking In (which might overall be better). I like a lot of this stuff but even so these are not high compliments, and so it must be said about Spirit and Clear. It kicks off with "Dark-eyed woman on a hot summer's night" accompanied by heavy riffing and that's about where it stops too. The songwriting is just not there. It's uninspired and feels labored and obvious. They're hacking up lungs trying to pull it together. "Ground Hog," especially when it gets into its "old man winter" jive, is verging on Spinal Tap for ludicrous self-parody. "I'm Truckin'" speaks for itself. For once the extras deliver up the prize: a 1969 radio ad for the album tacked on to the end of the track "Coral." It starts with an eerily prescient (I admit) voice montage of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Then the hip doleful voice guy enters: "Many sounds don't make sense," he intones. "But one thing is clear: Spirit." Sound of belabored rock song stirring to half-life. This message approved, no doubt, by Lou Adler.

Things to Come (1936)

UK, 100 minutes

Director: William Cameron Menzies

Writer: H.G. Wells

Photography: Georges Perinal

Music: Arthur Bliss

Editors: Charles Crichton, Francis D. Lyon

Cast: Raymond Massey, Edward Chapman, Ralph Richardson, Margaretta Scott, Cedric Hardwicke, Sophie Stewart, Derrick de Marney, John Clements, George Sanders

From the distance of nearly a century, the 1930s looks like a period of constant historical reckoning. Two of the most interesting movies in 1936 and one in 1937—Modern Times, Things to Come, and Make Way for Tomorrow—thought very hard about where things were going after most of a decade in a persistent economic depression and with fascism strutting around and acting ever more aggressive. None of them really "got it right" about the future (Make Way for Tomorrow comes closest by keeping its ambition in check), but getting it right happens so rarely in futuristic tales that we can't stop talking about it when they do. Consider Network. And remember there were still phonebooths in 2001: A Space Odyssey (just as there were in 2001, though they were gone by 2010, nor have we seen anything remotely like commercial space travel, the Musk & Bezos clown shows notwithstanding).

Thus, in Things to Come, a worthy science fiction heir of Metropolis, the coming war with fascism was seen quite clearly, and it starts in 1940, which is pretty dang accurate for a UK film although maybe not that hard to predict in 1936. Director William Cameron Menzies and writer H.G. Wells work it up as a 30-year grinding death-fest that makes the Great War look like a picnic with Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo. Pay attention, class! The war in Things to Come ends in the late '60s and is followed by an epidemic of "the wandering sickness," which weirdly looks like zombies without all the scabs or gore. It's certainly some kind of prescience. From that point it all becomes a figment of H.G. Wells's imagination, which was prodigious but also a little unfocused and wrong. The movie ends circa 2036 (so as yet still in the future for us) with the coming of space exploration that looks nothing like space exploration as we know it.

"Seaton's Aunt" (1922)

Walter de la Mare has been something of an acquired taste for me—this story might be the place where I acquired it. It's good enough I'm going to go back and look at some of the others again. Nothing overtly supernatural happens, nor anything cruel beyond a certain cold haughtiness, yet it is charged with uncanny tension and malevolence. It feels in many ways like a dry run for Robert Aickman's later style of "strange" story. It halfway feels like a dream much of the time, the kind where you can't remember all the parts or how things changed. Arthur Seaton is a classmate of the first-person narrator, both of them in early adolescence at the beginning and for much of the story. Seaton is a sickly outcast at school, vaguely ethnic. The racial note is another point of unease. He is orphaned as well, and in line when he comes of age to acquire the mansion his aunt now inhabits (and has all her life). The narrator befriends Seaton out of pity as much as anything. When Seaton invites him home on a break from school he accepts for no apparent reason. Things like that just seem to happen in "strange" stories. Seaton's aunt is a woman of great appetite and poise, with a very large head and imperious manner. She needles everyone in her orbit, including our narrator the hapless houseguest, whose name she can never get right. It's Withers, which is provocative itself in this context, but she more often calls him Wither or Smithers. The story is often funny in a way but the aunt is also casually monstrous. She's terrible but it's never personal. She is like some greater being dwelling among us—amused by us. She might be using up and/or killing people but it's hard to say. There's no evidence, beyond her vaguely sinister manner and oversize head. People are dying, as they do, but it's not clear she has anything to do with it. It just feels like she does. Lots of poetical turns in the language and unsettling asides along the way, which is typical of de la Mare, who can be allusive almost unto vaporous, but here every sentence, every word practically, is effective and it leaves a chill.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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Love's Forever Changes (2003)

Andrew Hultkrans's 33-1/3 book is only the second in the entire series, which is presently up to some 157 titles, so among other things it must be regarded as a pioneering effort. Hultkrans, a Brooklyn-based writer at large and one-time editor of Bookforum, focuses more on the context of Arthur Lee and Love's classic album in tumultuous late-'60s Los Angeles, basically all library-style research—lots of quotes from books, virtually none from original interviews. It's one way to do it and not a bad way either. But too often this one reads like an industrious term paper, although at least we are spared the heavy footnoting of other 33-1/3 volumes. The Love album is a famously tough nut to crack. My experience with it is much like Hultkrans: drawn to it (late) by its reputation, underwhelmed, until finally finding a way in, when it becomes indelible. Hultkrans says the only other album he's had a similar experience with is Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. That insight comes early and the good news and bad news is that it's one of the most original in the whole thing. There is definitely some kind of psychic connection between those two albums. Anyway, most of the book is focused on California in the late '60s, mostly Los Angeles, and don't think we're going to get out of this without hearing about Charles Manson. It only makes sense, even beyond time and place, because it appears someone with a glancing involvement with Love was later associated with Manson. Joan Didion naturally gets some attention too, as the reigning Los Angeles essay poet of dread, but the person Hultkrans turns to most often is political activist Todd Gitlin. I think we may have the perspective now to see that the overly familiar and much ballyhooed underside of the hippie experience—Charles Manson and Altamont, with a side dish of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago—has been grossly exaggerated as equal to the values of peace, love, civil rights, and respect for the environment. Yes, stuff like the Weathermen happened. And actually a book about Forever Changes is not a bad place to bring it all up again and air it out. Even so, Arthur Lee was alive in 2003 and we miss hearing from him here, understanding that he was an exceedingly tough interview to get. It's hard to say whether that would have improved the book but it might have helped put the focus more where it belongs. It is more intensely trained on context, and in many ways unfortunately the band and the album too are relegated to the background. You can't blame Hultkrans because Forever Changes is a notoriously difficult album to nail down properly anyway. But the result in this 33-1/3 entry is a bit like the joke about losing your keys in the alley but looking for them under the streetlight because the light is better there.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Family That Plays Together (1968)

The second album by Spirit is actually the first one I purchased (circa 1971, used from the Wax Museum on Lake Street in Minneapolis for $1.90) so it's the one album of theirs that still has the most sentimental attractions for me. It also has their one and only top 40 hit in the album opener, "I Got a Line on You," which made it to #25 in March 1969. I don't remember ever hearing it on the radio, but among other things it's a big showcase for guitarist Randy California and the ongoing purity of his tone, describing the abstracted geometrical two-dimensional line they got on you. It's probably their best song. I understand now that California's instantly identifiable tone may have been an effect of double-tracking. Streaming does a disservice to the first four songs on the album, which connected seamlessly on the original vinyl but are separated on streaming like ordinary tracks with brief silences, which destroys the effect. Spirit fans should not feel singled out because even the second-side suite of Abbey Road suffers the same problem. These first four songs—"I Got a Line on You," "It Shall Be," "Poor Richard," and "Silky Sam"—seem intended to show off their musical range across a fancy 13-minute suite, with '60s three-minute pop, jazz, and "hard rock" too. Lou Adler is producing again. "Poor Richard" and "Silky Sam" are closer to precious whimsy, recalling songs (the Beatles again) like "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Rocky Raccoon." In fairness to Spirit, The Family That Plays Together came out well before Abbey Road and was coincident with the White Album. The title comes from the peculiar setup of the band—drummer Ed Cassidy (45 in 1968 and way past the legal hippie age limit of 30) was Randy California's stepfather. No word on allowance or disciplinary arrangements. The band also mostly lived together family style in a shared house in Topanga Canyon with Dr. Demento, who produced their first demos. Two other members of the original Spirit lineup—singer Jay Ferguson and bassist Mark Andes—are also significant because they broke away in the early '70s to form Jo Jo Gunne, which was more of a straightforward rock act with intimations of glam and looking forward to the coming of pub-rock. In terms of songwriting, lead singer Ferguson was always fully coequal with California, both of them writing separately with contributions on some songs from other members. Although I have my nostalgic attachments to it there is some dreadful stuff on this album, like "Drunkard," which appears to be their "Eleanor Rigby" bid (again the Beatles), and "Darlin' If," which may be prescient but only for doleful rock balladry by way of John Sebastian, not really a great development. "Jewish" is so weird I don't even know what to say about it. I don't think you can call it klezmer but it does have recognizable Jewish musical stylings. It was written by California who was Jewish. I'm not sure whether he's keeping the faith or reaching for exotic novelty sounds (perhaps under influence of Demento) but it's certainly off the beaten track.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

USA, 110 minutes

Director: Wes Anderson

Writers: Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson

Photography: Robert D. Yeoman

Music: Mark Mothersbaugh, Wes Anderson K-tel Collection

Editor: Dylan Tichenor

Cast: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Danny Glover, Bill Murray, Seymour Cassel, Kumar Pallana, Alec Baldwin

I knew the earlier films Bottle Rocket and Rushmore by director and cowriter Wes Anderson when I first saw The Royal Tenenbaums. I liked Bottle Rocket more than Rushmore but I knew people who were nutty for Rushmore and the soundtrack was notably good so I had nothing in particular against Anderson. But I had a bad reaction on this one—The Royal Tenenbaums hit me as precious and ironic to a fault, with a pointlessly colorful palette and other empty ornate flourishes, way too many trendy stars in the cast, and a ludicrous story about selfishness and redemption in a dysfunctional family I just couldn't buy—any of it. It has since colored my whole attitude toward Anderson pictures. Basically I like only his animated stuff (Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs) although under peer pressure I've ended up checking in with most of the rest.

Seeing The Royal Tenenbaums again finally for a second time and braced for the worst, I thought it was more deftly entertaining than I recalled. I wouldn't say it's motivating me to go back and revisit the catalog, but I am a little more willing to consider it. Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) is a New Yorker, a terrible father, and not much of a businessman either—your basic rat. Now he seems to want to make amends with his unusually brilliant family of prodigies: ex-wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston), sons Chas (Ben Stiller) and Richie (Luke Wilson), adopted daughter Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), and all their various friends and hangers-on (Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Danny Glover, etc.). It's not an ensemble piece so much as everybody, in their colorful outfits, gets a turn being the main also-ran of passing interest.

Wormwood (2017)

For the most part I have been out of step with many fans of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who directed this Netflix miniseries in typical fashion for him. His breakthrough picture for most—The Thin Blue Line (1988)—also happens to be where he lost me, though his previous films (Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida) certainly had their own problems. With The Thin Blue Line, Morris adopted a more sincere, crusading journalist approach even as he indulged various arty cinematic impulses, which have dogged his work (and apparently impressed the critics) ever since. Wormwood is a great example of both. On the journalist side, he takes on the case of Frank Olson, a CIA scientist specializing in biological warfare who died under mysterious, unexplained circumstances in 1953. Morris works with Olson's son Eric, who was a young boy at the time of his father's death and has spent much of his life trying to get to the bottom of it. In many ways Morris even shows up the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who once called the Olsons the most "uncurious" family he'd ever heard of for accepting the CIA's first account of the death, which is that Olson "fell or jumped" from a 10th-floor hotel room in some kind of terrible accident, smashing the window on his way out. Hersh made his observation of the Olsons in 1975, when a second version of the story came out. Now we were told that Olson had been surreptitiously dosed with LSD in a CIA experiment, subsequently suffered a mental breakdown, and now his death was called a suicide. This is the story that a curiously uncurious Hersh believed until circa 2014, when Eric Olson personally challenged him with his own theory that the CIA murdered his father. This had somehow never occurred to Hersh, who checked with a source and within 48 hours could confirm the murder, though he could not give any more detail than that for fear of burning his source. In many ways, Morris the journalist is thus able to paint himself as superior even to Hersh, who does not come across well in this documentary.

On the cinema side, meanwhile, Wormwood is Morris at his best or worst, depending on your view. It's full of art and cinema: slo-mo reenactments with Hollywood stars, brooding layers of text and images, fancy transitions, clips from practically every movie anyone mentions, some pretty good pop music, a whole treatment of Hamlet (from which the title among other things), etc., etc. It took me until the last episode to notice the clock in the room where the lengthy interview with Eric Olson took place is stopped at 2:35—the time his father died in 1953. That's all clever and good, but at four hours this six-part epic miniseries is just way too long, and a lot of it is padding. As a reviewer says on IMDb, there's an excellent 90-minute documentary here lost in the caverns of overproduction. Eric gets to make a pretty good case that his father was killed by the CIA, but Morris's intention seems to be more along the lines of wondering what we can ever really know for sure. Certainly this is one of those cases where it seems likely we will never know the whole story. At least, perhaps, Eric got the chance to argue convincingly for murder, in what has turned out to consume his whole life. He may have got some closure or satisfaction with this version of the story (certainly in regard to Hersh), but sadly, Wormwood is mostly more of a wasted opportunity.

The News From Paraguay (2004)

I went into this novel by Lily Tuck cold, thinking vaguely about a project involving National Book Award winners, and didn't suspect it was historical fiction until its events started to grow ridiculously improbable and I had to look them up to verify because they are so astonishing. You know, they say, truth is stranger... The News From Paraguay is basically about the disastrous war waged by the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano Lopez on Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in the mid-19th century. Franco is a main character and the other is Ella Lynch, his Irish mistress. He meets Lynch when he is in Europe for education and training with the Napoleonic army. The novel is fragmented and full of vignettes, composed of scenes in Paraguay and Paris intermixed with Lynch's correspondence and diary entries. Everyone involved is extravagantly foolish and many are very cruel. Franco, for example, routinely throws his political enemies and suspects in prison and tortures them. And he's probably more humanitarian than his father, except for that war, which reduced the Paraguayan population by half or more. As barbaric as they may be the events in this novel feel modern because they are objectively so absurd, rendered from such a distance. It's that brutally violent way of conducting politics and wielding power, with all the calculation and abstractions of dissociation. Aborigines are in the mix too, woven into the fabric of Paraguay society (mostly as servants, but with their language preserved). Lynch has five boys by Franco, plus a girl who dies as an infant, and always is regarded merely as his courtesan. His sisters and family won't recognize her or Franco's sons. Tuck's note at the end reminds us that the novel is historical fiction—some of these events more or less happened the way they're told. Others are wholly the invention of Tuck. That's the way it can go with historical fiction and the reason The News From Paraguay is cataloged as a novel. It starts out fine, funny and intriguing and strange, then lost some steam for me in the second half once it arrives at the terrible war. Ella Lynch is by far the most interesting character, though Franco's pathologies bear interest too and so do their children. And there are many wonderful minor characters with indelible little scenes. Definitely worth a look.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Spirit (1968)

Lou Adler was a fixture of 1960s Southern California pop music shading into rock, represented loosely (and only in part) by John Turturro's Joel Milner in the movie Grace of My Heart. He worked as a manager for Jan & Dean before founding the Dunhill label, then became a producer and occasional songwriter for the Grass Roots and the Mamas & the Papas, largely presiding over their runs of hits. In 1967 he sold Dunhill and founded Ode, which is approximately where Spirit enters the picture, along with Carole King (Adler produced Tapestry), Cheech & Chong, Scott McKenzie, and the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. I mention this as context for Spirit's odd appeal. Like the Doors and Jefferson Airplane, it was a band still working basically in the mode of 12 three-minute songs per album and focused on making it into the charts. But also, the times they were a-changin'. Coming in that strange golden period between Revolver and Let It Be a lot of rules were uniformly disregarded, e.g., Make one song real heavy and longer than seven minutes. Think about jazz. Don't forget production stunts. Wail, guitar man, wail! And so on. Albums could do well with no real singles action. Spirit made it to #31 on the Billboard albums chart with virtually no singles support. Five of the 11 tracks on this album are under three minutes, but there's also an 11-minute jazzy "Elijah" to finish it off.

There are actually a lot of moving parts in Spirit, so I'll start with what drew me into what turned out to be one of my first projects as a consumer of used records in the early '70s. The guitar man in this case was a guy who went by the name of Randy California, dubbed thus by Jimi Hendrix. He was playing in New York as part of Hendrix's Jimmy James & the Blue Flames and there was another Randy in the band Hendrix called Randy Texas. Again like the Doors or Jefferson Airplane, or Hendrix, Spirit (and producer Adler) threaded the needle between pop song formalities and gestures of unrestrained hippie bacchanalia. I loved California for the purity of his tone, a clean tubular sound that was probably achieved in some simple technical way, like maybe plugging the guitar directly into the soundboard. His real showcase here for me is the five-minute "Mechanical World," the only single (amazed it wasn't "Fresh Garbage" but maybe taste makers had a problem with that title?). "Mechanical World" is the corollary of course to Hendrix's "White-collared conservative flashing down the street, / Pointing their plastic finger at me." The song has an odd stilted quality, like many Spirit songs, but California's solos in the breaks are simple and effective, consisting largely of holding single beautiful notes for a long time, even as Adler sends coteries of string-players in to sneak behind him and sweeten it up. Good, good stuff. Note that the song was written by singer Jay Ferguson (the band's most prolific songwriter) with bassist Mark Andes. These two would later break away from Spirit and form Jo Jo Gunne.

Randy California's guitar legend may be most attached now to "Taurus," which he wrote, and which sounds suspiciously enough in part like Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" to produce lawsuits against our favorite hapless plagiarists Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. California died in a drowning accident in 1997 but his estate was still pursuing legal action as recently as just last year. I'm agnostic on this one—"Taurus" is more an example to me of Adler's overproduction and over-sweetening here, a mostly uninteresting instrumental (with harpsichord even). But yes, it's not hard to hear the similarity to the Zepp classic, plus Spirit toured with Led Zeppelin so Page and Plant knew the material. Spirit is probably the one album to hear by Spirit as their albums tend toward diminishing returns and even this one has ups and downs. But it has more good songs than any other and there's an interesting tension for me in Adler's pop instincts as they collide with jazzbo rock band instincts in the era of—as Frank Zappa put it—"I will love everyone / ... I will go to a house / That's – that's what I will do / I will go to a house / Where there's a rock and roll band / Because the groups all live together."

"The Aleph" (1945)

I haven't read that much by Jorge Luis Borges so I don't know how typical "The Aleph" may be, but it's pretty good. Much of the story is spent on the first-person narrator (named "Borges") and his awkward relationship with a mediocre poet who is also the cousin of a woman he (the narrator) loved deeply and ridiculously. She is dead at the time of the story. The narrator gives examples of the poet's work along with the poet's own analyses. He's mocking how the poet dotes on his own work. It does seem mediocre, although of course he is celebrated and beloved by the story's end. The word "Aleph" does not even appear until well into the story. An Aleph is a very strange thing. The poet claims there is one in his basement. By this point the narrator has decided the poet is merely a nut, but he forces the issue on the Aleph and says he's coming over to see it. It's a lot of setup and foreshadowing and while it pays off for me I'm not sure it would for everyone. An Aleph, as Borges describes it, "is one of the points in space that contains all other points." Borges describes its physical presence as little more than an inch in diameter, so about the size of a ping-pong ball. His willingness and ability to attempt describing the sensation of seeing everything in the universe at once is what makes this story, along with all the effortless transitions from the mundane to the exalted and back again. The narrator's precious moments with the Aleph have imposing religious implications—experiences like this are what change lives and start churches. It's comical in a way how little it seems to affect the narrator. He won't even give the poet the satisfaction of admitting he saw it. But he saw it—he can't help but give us, anyway, the satisfaction of a narrative account. He saw it and his life has been changed by it. Borges is not generally considered a genre writer but he has obvious parallels with M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, and other bibliophile types. They are all notably fascinated by obscure texts, old books in libraries, and the study of literature, all the way down to the minutia of scholarship and citations. Borges feels a little sardonic here about the poet's fine points of erudition whereas Lovecraft is generally more focused on pumping up the cosmic wonder. What's really great about this story are the contrasts, from the petty lives of the narrator and his cousin to the trippy ecstasies of the little portal to everything. Borges doesn't tease the Aleph hard at all, beyond the title, but holds it back to the last third, and it's about perfect that way.

The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
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