Big Iron’s Honkey-Tonk Holidays (1997)

This anthology from the Big Iron label offers a festive mess of Texas, Xmas, and booze. Original tunes are mixed with a motley of holiday chestnuts, usually of the more lighthearted variety: “Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy,” etc. Leading the way on the freewheeling irreverent front is “Alcoholidays” by the Sutcliffs, generally the first song that jumps out, with its memorable chorus of “Old Grand-Dad, Budweiser / It’s good to be drunk again.” True confession, they are sentiments I have lived in holiday seasons past. But the rollicking Honkey-Tonk Holidays is not all western swing mockery and drunkenness. The Sutcliffs may complain that “Little Drummer Boy” is giving them a headache, but Andy Owens & Druha Trava cover it later. There’s room for many points of view here, with sweet country (and/or “alt-country” if we must), a very nice blues or two, and traditional / religious stuff as well, driven by lovely arrangements with horns, a fiddle as needed, and lots of rockin’ good guitar. There’s even an Elvis impersonator to round things off. The Mutineers play “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” like a Halloween fright-fest, with the dark “oh-wee-oh wee-ohhh-oh” chant that signifies the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz at home in her castle safehold—it’s Santa Claus as Satan Claus. You better be good. Cowboys & Indians takes jolly St. Nick a more conventional way on “Santa, Santa,” pleading with him to bring his baby back. “I got cookies, milk, whatever you need.” “Christmas Made for Two” by Mark David Manders & Nuevo Tejas is just beautiful. And the Old 97’s—the only act here I even sort of know—demonstrate as countless others before them that it is virtually impossible to ruin the tender wartime ballad “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” It always sounds good. I suppose you could give it the Roseanne Barr treatment, but please don’t. Honkey-Tonk Holidays is a terrific little Christmas set. I don’t even remember now how I came to acquire it, but I happen to know my brother owns a copy too and I assumed it was in the generally wide currency of things these days. When I came to write it up, however, I discovered how obscure it has become. Apologies! But you really have to hear it once if you can. Happy holidays all!

“A Visit to Santa Claus” (1957)

[spoilers?] The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) sniffs at this story by Richard Matheson as “non-genre,” which, OK, fair enough. Call it a crime thriller story then. Either way it’s reasonably good for December, though it is soulless conte cruel in a way that Matheson and only a few others can do. It works quite well as suspense, though it trucks in the familiar midcentury trope of the homicidal marriage. This husband and wife have been together maybe 10 years, with a boy of 5, who still believes in Santa Claus. It’s December. They’re out shopping at a mall. They are tired. The kid won’t stop nagging them to see “Sanna Claus.” They have finished shopping and are at their car loading in purchases, when the husband decides he wants to humor the kid after all. They had been promising him he would see Santa on Tuesday. Now the husband says he’ll take the kid in, the wife can wait there, they won’t be long. It’s not hard to see something is off here. Why leave her waiting in the car on a cold winter night? As things unfold, we learn it's part of a nefarious plan. The husband has hired a hitman to kill his wife and this is when it’s going down. There’s a lot of business with the car keys—the wife wants them so she can pull the car up to get them when they come back out again. It’s a sensible plan, but the husband pretends he doesn’t hear her. When he drops the keys for the hitman to pick up the kid notices and calls it to his attention. Handing off the keys thus becomes a substantial part of the story, and it’s more and more apparent it’s all a harebrained scheme, hatched with a guy the husband met in a bar, and further confirmed when we learn the terms: $100 up front, $900 later. It’s not the way these things are done, as we know from movies and such—harder to say perhaps whether people were as sophisticated about murders for hire in 1957 as we are now. Matheson skillfully makes his own plot holes work for him, by making the scheme so painfully elaborate and amateurish. All kinds of complications keep coming along even as Matheson is revealing more about the plot. The kid is a perfect uncontrollable element. Yes, ISFDB, it has no supernatural or fantasy elements. It’s just an incident in December. But if it’s Matheson you can count on getting hooked and then getting a ride. This story goes to a bleak place, of course, with a twist of a twist of an ending, but that’s all just the usual drill. Get it on your kindle and read it at the food circus in your mall while taking a break from shopping.

The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Story not available online.

Fools’ Gold (1958)

This novel by Dolores Hitchens is one of the best in the Women Crime Writers Library of America collections, second only to Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief. Sadly, a lot of these short novels seemed way off the standards of the LOA’s American Noir series, which is essential. Fools’ Gold is the source novel for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 movie Band of Outsiders. It’s a movie worth seeing—Quentin Tarantino’s favorite Godard, I’ve heard—but not a good representation of the novel, a taut thriller that is all business about a heist going very, very wrong. The characters here are stock types but Hitchens somehow makes them lively, interesting, and believable. There is a hilarious sendup of Southern California Alcoholics Anonymous culture, apparently already in place in 1958—a mix of seeing the light of spiritual epiphany, on the one hand, and knocking elbows with the richies and celebs on the other. Skip is a cocky young dude of 21 who has learned via a girl he meets in a typing class, Karen, about a house where a man from Las Vegas is storing cash for some reason. Karen lives in it. She thinks there’s as much as a million dollars there. Skip’s plan is to waltz in and take it. Only Karen and an old woman, Mrs. Havermann, live there. Mrs. Havermann felt to me created with Miss Havisham in mind from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations because they share many traits. Karen is Mrs. Havermann’s “ward” (whatever that means) and mistreated by her as a servant. Skip’s Uncle Willy—an ex-con who attends an AA meeting to establish an alibi and ultimately see the light—gets word of the job and brings in some serious heavies to help, like “Big Tom.” Hitchens’s bad guys are bad in many different ways. Skip is a manipulative weasel, for example. Big Tom is violent, physically powerful, and scary, like some of the worst in Elmore Leonard novels. Uncle Willy is shrewd but weak. Karen means well but she is naïve and easily manipulated. The story of the owner of the house and the cash, Stolz, basically spells doom for this caper but no one in this story figures it out until too late. That’s another thing I like about it. It’s mostly downbeat, but there is one very nice story of redemption. Fools’ Gold is well balanced in general, ranging from the suspense promised in the series title (and too rarely delivered on in the series) to some very funny scenes, rooted believably in these characters Hitchens has created, this great cast. Very good one at the very end of this series.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Uncut Gems (2019)

USA, 135 minutes

Directors: Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie

Writers: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie

Photography: Darius Khondji

Music: Daniel Lopatin

Editors: Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie

Cast: Adam Sandler, Julia Fox, LaKeith Stanfield, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian, Mike Francesca, Judd Hirsch, The Weeknd, Tilda Swinton, Natasha Lyonne

Adam Sandler appears to be one of those actors—Sylvester Stallone and John Travolta might be two others—who have a surprising amount of ability to perform when they are motivated but seem to be more often satisfied to run the paces of uninspired but potentially boffo payday productions. Every now and then something seems to get into them—some hunger for respect in their chosen craft, or maybe they just want an Oscar after all—and they take on roles that demand the best from them. By my admittedly biased and perhaps ignorant count (set me straight, please), Sandler has made two of them: the highly eccentric Punch-Drunk Love from 2002, and this relentless, over-the-top thriller directed and cowritten by the Safdie brothers Benny and Josh. Sandler is better-known (per IMDb) for the comedies Big Daddy (1999), Little Nicky (2000), The Waterboy (1998), and The Wedding Singer (1998). Due to mostly peer pressure, I have seen Shakes the Clown (1991), Happy Gilmore (1996), and Hubie Halloween (2020), all of which have their dim pleasures and may be best seen with someone already prone to like them. Shakes the Clown is the best and I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that I don’t remember Sandler in it.

As for the Safdie brothers, I was impressed enough with Uncut Gems to go back and check out the thriller Good Time (2017), which I thought was also pretty good. Uncut Gems bristles with kinetic energy and a stream of unfortunate events as New York City jewelry merchant and gambling addict Howard Ratner (Sandler) attempts to square all the various debts in his high-flying, heedless life, dealing with underworld creditors as well as his embittered estranged wife. He has a hot love affair going on the side with Julia (Julia Fox) but spends most of his time wheeling and dealing and trying to get down exotic parlay bets. A brief establishing sequence introduces us to a rock the size of a large russet potato, obtained illicitly from a mine in Ethiopia and massively embedded with opals. Then the picture starts on live footage from a colonoscopy camera, wends its way through a concert by The Weeknd, and finishes on a basketball game on TV—proving, once again, that gambling simply makes everything more intense. Here we see what is purported to be a live game 7 between the Boston Celtics featuring Kevin Garnett and the Philadelphia 76ers. There’s a lot riding on it, and we are content to spend most of the last 30 minutes or so of Uncut Gems watching this game with Ratner.

Priscilla (2023)

My moviegoing habits have changed since the pandemic and are still out of focus. I finally went back into theaters earlier this year. My first preference is this newfangled 10 a.m. Tuesday matinee at the multiplexes, although the choices are not as good as at the local art house. I’ve seen a bunch of morning movies with only one or two others in attendance or even by myself. So I was a little set back to find my 11 a.m. matinee of Sofia Coppola’s latest just simply packed. Yes, it was the opening week, but come on. They all looked like retired biker outlaws. I guess that figures, given it’s an Elvis Presley movie, based on Priscilla Presley’s outrageously entertaining 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me. These days the seating in my multiplexes is all assigned and I was thoroughly nonplussed to find one such outlaw and his chick taking seats right next to me and carrying on for the duration as if they were sitting in their living room. They would remember things like that RCA was Elvis’s major label after Sun. Save it for later! I was further nonplussed to recall that I still hadn’t seen Baz Luhrmann’s much-celebrated Elvis from a year or two ago. It seemed to me in this bad moment that I really should have looked at it before seeing Priscilla. But you can’t do everything and I made what I could of the picture at hand: Cailee Spaeny is effective playing the title role low-key, Jacob Elordi did not impress much as an Elvis impersonator, and in general it is faithful to the book but the book is better, for example in bringing out the bizarre sexual tensions of their early relationship. I chalk up the feeling of restrained veracity to Priscilla Presley’s role on the picture as an executive producer. Priscilla is worth seeing for Elvis and/or Sofia Coppola completists. It’s all a bit wooden, but, as always, Coppola’s soundtrack choices are intriguing and often startlingly appropriate, including the Ramones’ cover of “Baby, I Love You” under the titles, “Crimson and Clover” during the late ‘50s period, Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothin’s,” and a bunch of hip-hop that worked when you might think it wouldn’t. No word on that from the couple sitting next to me.

I couldn’t shake my self-accusatory mood of being a lazy underachiever, so I hurried home after the credits started to roll and took a look at Elvis online. Yes, my heart sank when I saw it was almost three hours long, but it turned out to be entertaining and a lot more lively than Priscilla. Of course, Priscilla has the advantage of being far closer to the truth. I have already filed director Baz Luhrmann under unrepentant fantasist, for better or worse—The Great Gatsby no, Moulin Rouge maybe, and in general he’s one of those “from the mind of” guys. Austin Butler as Elvis has been oversold, I think, but he is good and has a few moments where he is almost transcendent. Tom Hanks in prosthetics, I believe (or is it CGI?), plays Colonel Tom Parker as a simpering manipulative huckster—he’s not bad, but the script is. Elvis is more telling the story of Parker, not Elvis. And it’s basically just riffing on the legend and known facts: Elvis, under Parker’s management, blazed onto the scene in 1956 and got in trouble for his lewd stage moves. He was drafted and served his time. He spent much of the ‘60s making bad movies. He had a big comeback TV special in 1968 and then became a star in amber in Las Vegas. He took a lot of pharmaceuticals and eventually died from them. It's all dutifully here, but the motivations offered are insane, or at least depart from what I thought I knew. He’s explicitly forced into the Army to get him off the stage, for example. He is defiant toward Colonel Parker, notably in the TV special, whereas I’ve always heard he was absolutely deferential to Parker (he certainly is in Priscilla). I take it that these things “made narrative sense” to Luhrmann and his cowriters Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce because they aren’t the way I understand Elvis’s career or even his legend exactly. On the other hand, looking up the song “Trouble,” I see that it was indeed written in 1958 by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. But I’m pretty sure Elvis never used it to stir up a riot at a show in the South circa 1957 where he was closely watched by authorities. “Trouble” is more famous for being Elvis’s opening number on the TV special. But OK, fine, never mind. Elvis can be vastly entertaining even as it mangles my sense of history (which might be wrong?). Priscilla looks and feels closer to the truth, but it’s not as exciting. Still, it’s a great double feature, and I swear too that I saw them in the right order.

Poor Cedric’s Almanac (1952)

I had a blast revisiting this collection of column fragments by Cedric Adams, a Minneapolis-based journalist who also had a career on radio. Arthur Godfrey wrote an introduction and Bob Hope kicked in a postscript, so you can tell Adams had some profile in 1952, if you’ve never heard of him. It was a book my parents had that I took down off the shelf and read and loved when I was 9 or 10 or 11. It has a lot of the breezy gossip columnist style, with boldface type and such, but the topics are less about celebrities and more like a parade of what we now call factoids. Reading is more like browsing a strange collection of trivia. It’s culled from Adams’s column writing in the 1930s and 1940s and breaks down into topics like the weather, health, children, etc. The section labeled “S - E - X” is not once ever about s-e-x but only marriage and dating. I’m not exactly nostalgic for stuff this coy and chaste but I will say it’s refreshing. A lot of the nostalgia that is there comes from finding some of the items of my conventional wisdom which have stuck. For example, Adams writes that scientists have determined—scientists have determined lots of things here but nothing is sourced (it’s a chatty newspaper lifestyle column, Jake)—that humans respond more quickly to green lights than to reds and thus ideally they should be reversed in traffic lights. But of course it’s too late now or even in the 1940s. Absolutely trivial things like that have stayed with me all this time. If you are inclined to read it you should be prepared for a full blast of midcentury values, for better and worse. Race is utterly invisible, and gender is pretty much hopeless. Most of the advice for women is about housework. There is a syrupy father-and-son heart-to-heart thing that recurs frequently. It has a fair amount of Minneapolis and Minnesota detail and lore that appealed to me then and still. I think a lot of my appreciation for trivia may have started here. The publication date is 1952 but the material is older than that, extending back into the 1930s. Among other things it is familiar with WPA projects, so it’s even a little bit older than it appears. I instinctively reject most of Adams’s obviously well-intended advice and also have to admit to regular wincing. But I can’t deny Poor Cedric’s Almanac is very charming and a lot of fun.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

USA, 14 minutes

Directors: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid

Writer: Maya Deren

Photography: Alexander Hammid

Editor: Maya Deren

Cast: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid

I warmed up for writing about this 14-minute experimental film by looking at the 103-minute 2002 documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren. I had seen Meshes of the Afternoon previously, via youtube videos of varying quality with and without a soundtrack, and not had much patience for it. I particularly did not like the nun-like figure with a mirror for a face, which reminded me too much of Luis Bunuel and his work, notably Un Chien Andalou, although it is L'Age d'Or where he really starts getting carried away with nuns. And it’s not really exactly a nun here anyway, but never mind. In the Mirror covers all of Deren’s abbreviated career (she died in 1961 at the age of 44) and her six or so movies. Deren was another beneficiary of last year’s Sight & Sound poll, ultimately elevating Meshes of the Afternoon from #277 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? up to #99, though she does not appear again in the list of 1,000. I suspect other pictures by her may be better, but Meshes also has depths that are remarkable for a little 14-minute cinema play. In fairness, it is merely her very first film whereas especially the footage she shot in Haiti, clips seen in In the Mirror, looks more interesting to me. I thus still had some bias against Meshes of the Afternoon going in again. Then I had a hard time getting comfortable at first with the “intentional silence,” enforced by Deren with intentional markers of sound such as a record-player playing a record. But I came to like it for that, especially when I peeked in on a youtube version with music. Meshes is mostly a dream story, and the dream stories we have at night after all are mostly silent. Meshes is rooted in feminist anxiety, if I’m reading it right, but with its own internal logic as dream narrative more or less, with potent symbols and/or artifacts of the mundane day—the flower, the key, the knife.

It has the inexplicable physical forces and dislocations of dreams too when the dreamer within the dream (Deren) is blown down a staircase, and later when she is edited down and up the same staircase after an unsettling encounter. It is randomly erotic. There is a lot of clarity to how the scenes are staged and shot, and the use of repetition is skillful. Even so, for all the force of Deren’s vision, it often feels much like what it is, some fooling around with a motion-picture camera in the glintingly bright sunshine and etched shadows of California, albeit at the same time admittedly visionary somehow. I found the more I looked at Meshes the better it seemed to get. I have some trouble, I must admit, adjusting to such a purely visual experience as this little 14-minute workout delivers. All of Deren’s films are on youtube, as far as I could see, even a 52-minute 1985 documentary which appears to be the only way to see her Haiti footage. It’s called Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, put together by Cherel and Teiji Ito, finally released eight years later. Teiji Ito was Deren’s second husband, 18 years her junior, married when they were 43 and 25. The youtube video is typically frustrating, with burnt-in Spanish (Portuguese?) subtitles and footage obviously decayed by iterations of duplication. But Deren’s seeming rapport and intimacy with these Haitians gave her amazing access to some remarkable rituals and wonderful, mesmerizing music and dance, which generally come through fine. Voiceovers by John Genke and Joan Pape provide some useful information when they are not sounding like educational films for classrooms. Maya Deren—start with Meshes of the Afternoon, I suppose, fair enough, and then proceed.

“The Old Portrait” (1890)

I thought it was unusual to find this Hume Nisbet story in the Vampire Tales anthology for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the second Nisbet story in the volume. Not many other writers here—which includes most of the public domain greats—get that treatment, and it is a large volume. Then, even though both stories are dated incorrectly—both as 1900, whereas ISFDB has both as 1890—they are separated by other stories. I know this anthology was put together by a person or people taking advantage of the ease of scraping online public domain material, and probably doing it in a hurry, but generally they seem to know what they’re doing. Just so, both “The Old Portrait” and “The Vampire Maid” are pretty good. “The Old Portrait” is Nisbet’s first published story, per ISFDB, and the better of the two. Nisbet (not to be confused with E. Nesbit) may be worth seeking out further. “The Old Portrait” is very short, with a somewhat strained yet intriguing premise. Our first-person narrator has a hobby and keen interest in picture frames and framing, which is how we get to “the old portrait” he has acquired for the frame on a December day. Picture and frame are so dirty none of the details of the image or woodwork can be made out. On Christmas Eve, our guy goes to work gently with soap and hot water and eventually finds an image that “asserted its awful crudeness, vile drawing, and intense vulgarity.” Good thing he bought it just for the frame! But hark, it turns out the vile portrait of some publican and his jewelry was actually painted over something else, which in turn our guy goes to work industriously removing. After midnight, he finds the image of a woman, and then the image begins to hypnotize him. He describes the woman in increasing detail, in effusive and poetic terms. We can see even through this that she looks like a corpse. Well, after all, I suppose this is why we find it in an anthology called Vampire Tales (to be fair, it could also fit in Christmas-themed anthologies). These stories often involve things more accurately described as wannabe vampires. It gets to be part of their charm, and you have to classify this story as one such. The vampire lives inside the painting under a coat of paint and another of dirt. Even the ever-loving frame is now revealed as corrupt: “what had before looked like scrollwork of flowers and fruit were loathsome snake-like worms twined amongst charnel-house bones.” More developments: “I thought the frame was still on the easel with the canvas, but the woman had stepped from them and was approaching me with a floating motion.” This is another vampire story where (spoiler) the victim somehow lives to tell the tale. I like the way it takes on its vampire via the medium of painting and manages to pull it off.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

“The Tarn” (1923)

What I liked best about this story by Hugh Walpole were the descriptive passages and especially the way he used color: “October is a wonderful month in the English Lakes, golden, rich, and perfumed, slow suns moving through apricot-tinted skies to ruby evening glories; the shadows lie then thick about that beautiful country, in dark purple patches of silver gauze, in thick splotches of amber and grey.” I also like the theme of professional jealousy between two writers, or at least by our first-person narrator here for his friend of 20 years. While understandable on one level—the successful one is also shallow and obtuse—it’s bitchy and petty. But it makes the story more entertaining. I had already checked with the kindle dictionary but eventually the story gets around to telling us what a tarn is: “... a miniature lake, a pool of water lying in the lap of the hill. Very quiet, lovely, silent. Some of them are immensely deep.” I found this story in The Weird, where we can see that editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer are drawn to the most elemental aspects of reality crumbling into irrational unknowability (Jeff VanderMeer also wrote the source novel for the movie Annihilation). Hey, who can’t get on board with that? The one excerpt that appears in the anthology, from Alfred Kubin’s 1908 novel The Other Side, holds visions of breakdown in biological systems and even at the level of molecular structure. Here it’s just water. Push a guy into the tarn to kill him (he can’t swim, it’s late, and the water is cold), then wait and see what happens in your dreams: “He sat up higher in bed, and then saw that down the wallpaper beneath the window water was undoubtedly trickling. He could see it lurch to the projecting wood of the sill, pause, and then slip, slither down the incline.” Water with malevolent agency, defying gravity—not bad! And supported nicely by Walpole’s effusive language. It’s just, alas, not at all believable. The story veers about from crystalline description to backbiting resentments and murder and into the soggy nightmare which may or may not have “really happened.” It’s hard to say and I feel a little whipsawed by it all. Walpole has some reputation but nothing of his has really knocked me out yet. In the end, this story is a little too fanciful for my taste, but it has its points. Maybe he’s got some better stuff somewhere.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Listen to story online.

The World of Apu (1959)

Apur Sansar, India, 105 minutes
Director: Satyajit Ray

Writers: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray

Photography: Subrata Mitra

Music: Ravi Shankar

Editor: Dulal Dutta

Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Alok Chakravarty, Swapan Mukherjee, Dhiresh, Majumdar, Sefalika Devi, Dhiren Ghosh

The first two movies in director and cowriter Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, Pather Panchali and Aparajito, were made consecutively in two years—Ray’s very first movies. Three years and a couple of other movies intervened before Ray finished this trilogy with The World of Apu. In that time Ray’s stature as a filmmaker grew, enabling more funding, perhaps attracting better players, and certainly simply getting better at making movies. All the Apu movies are based on autobiographical novels by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, but Ray had absorbed even more of his Western influences by 1959. The World of Apu, the best of them, thus has affinities with and even stands as equal to such monumental landmarks as Fellini’s La Strada or Truffaut’s 400 Blows, rich with life and wisdom. Where Ray may have leaned somewhat mechanically into Freudian conceits in Aparajito, in The World of Apu it is Shakespeare that he turns to, much more skillfully, for its greatest resonance.

Apu has lost all his family in the first two movies of the trilogy—older sister, father, and mother—and he is alone in the world now in The World of Apu. Poverty is all he has ever known, but whereas, in Aparajito, he pursues more practical studies in science and engineering as a way out, at the beginning of The World of Apu he is unable to finish his education because he has run out of money. His interests have shifted too, from engineering to more of the literary pursuits of his father. And he appears to be good—we see, as he is leaving school, an instructor encourage him to continue writing, and we also see that a story of his has been accepted for publication. His best friend Pulu (Swapan Mukherjee) believes in him too. But Apu is among the most luckless of all movie or literary characters and the worst is yet to come—but not until after the best.