Twelve Years a Slave (1853)

Now a major motion picture—or two, if you count the PBS TV movie from 1984, Solomon Northup's Odyssey, directed by Gordon Parks and starring Avery Brooks (which I haven't seen yet). Let me be clear that I believe every word—if anything, it's the happy ending that's hardest to get past here. It all makes perfect sense when you consider the attitudes that were common in that period of American history. The prices of slaves alone makes apparent how valuable they were in terms of property. So it makes sense that free blacks in the North would be in danger of kidnapping, or even systematic kidnapping rings. It's the same perverse incentive that produces chop shops today. Solomon Northup in that regard is not such an unusual example, he was just unlucky. As with most slave narratives, particularly so close to the Civil War, this also has a political point to make. Northup writes about issues familiar to this genre of activist literature: the cruel treatment and punishments, the specter of white masters out of control beneath a thick crust of rationalization (the Bible says it's OK, it's the law, Africans are obviously inferior, etc.), and of course no legal standing whatsoever. On winning his freedom, after yes 12 years, Northup's first order of business is to return to Washington, D.C., to press charges against his kidnappers. But the laws in D.C. don't grant him the legal status to testify. If you've seen the 2013 movie most of this story will feel familiar. The movie is actually quite faithful to the narrative, though excising some scenes such as the trial in Washington. Northup is plainspoken and explicit about his years as a slave, notably on the punishments. This book was part of the abolitionist movement gaining momentum in the 1850s, published just the year after the iconic Uncle Tom's Cabin (not a slave narrative but well-researched on the realities of American slavery). Twelve Years a Slave was reprinted once after the Civil War, in 1869, and then languished for nearly a century, when renewed interest in African American life and literature restored it to consideration. All of the slave narratives I've read are good, but this is one of the best. Northup's skill at storytelling is exceptional and his story is long, interesting, and horrific. Somehow, his voice is mostly filled more with love and patience, though his rage gets the better of him sometimes. Amazing book.

In case it's not at the library.

Led Zeppelin III (1970)

As it happens, Led Zeppelin III is the only album by the band I never did own, which makes it slightly exotic (a friend had a copy so I had played with the turn-a-wheel cover design). Of course I know the one hit it spawned, the gloriously ridiculous "Immigrant Song," which peaked at #16 late in 1970. In case you were wondering, the subject of the song is not the immigrants that Donald Trump's ponyboys and ponygirls whinny about. No, they're white. They come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow. Among other things, more than 30 years later, "Immigrant Song" was the lunch theme when I worked with a notably rambunctious office crew. We piled into the car and snapped it on. Ahh-ahh AHHHHH-HHH ah! The Clash's "Know Your Rights" was the other mainstay staple of those lunch trips. Heads wildly bobbing to be sure. We were way too old for such behavior, but we were temps of a certain age. More recently, in an impossibly gorgeous song by Craig Finn, "God in Chicago," the soundtrack for a road trip is given as Prince's 1999 and Led Zeppelin III (on a wobbly tape deck). That also sounds about right. So, giving III some badly needed attention nigh 50 years on, I find it's a great companion, warm, rolling, easygoing, like a boat rocking down the slow river. In 1970, Rolling Stone magazine still did not like Led Zeppelin. This is back when things like "selling out" mattered like poison for RS, so they could and did shrug at leviathan sales. It's a little different now. This isn't your father's Perry Como Republican Party. Only Bridge Over Troubled Waters sold better than Led Zeppelin II in 1970. Lester Bangs got the honors for the takedown this time. He wanted to like them, yes, really wanted to like them, and even did like one song on III very much ("That's the Way"). But more generally he found the band "doesn't challenge anybody's intelligence or sensibilities." I would suggest that, in 1968 and even still, "Dazed and Confused," for one, poses challenges to intelligence and sensibilities. In fairness to Bangs and other contemporary naysayers, another big player at that moment (though sales did not match Zepp's) was Grand Funk Railroad with a I-II-III of On Time, Grand Funk, and Closer to Home. If you squint, it might look like all the same thing.

And I do think this is the weakest of Led Zeppelin's first three albums. It's not the one for newcomers—just slightly lazy, it presumes on previous good will to some extent. "Immigrant Song," for all its charm, does not match "Whole Lotta Love" or the aforementioned "Dazed and Confused" (or "Stairway to Heaven" or "Kashmir") as an album tent pole. But Led Zeppelin III is also a place where Robert Plant takes his shtick up another notch as a tireless unself-conscous imp and Jimmy Page gets to show off guitar chops maybe even more than purloined hooks. I just go by the numbers and tend to gravitate most to "Since I've Been Loving You" because it's the longest, at 7:25, an all-night slow burner for sure. Page's playing is lyrical in the showcase portion (the greatest guitar solo of all time, some on the internet will tell you), and then, finally, it wilts into a tender weeping number. And Bangs is right about "That's the Way"—also quite beautiful. Yes, it's a certain apotheosis of cock rock, but as an aural object it does not necessarily have to be toxic (aside from the personalities of band members, if they can be separated, which maybe they can't, I know). See again the Craig Finn song. And think of the Vikings. "Always sweep with, with threshing oar / Our only goal will be the western shore." Ahh-ahh AHHHHH-HHH ah!

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Italy / USA, 229 minutes
Director: Sergio Leone
Writers: Harry Grey, Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, Sergio Leone, Stuart Kaminsky, Ernesto Gastaldi
Photography: Tonino Delli Colli
Music: Ennio Morricone
Editor: Nino Baragli
Cast: Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Treat Williams, Tuesday Weld, Burt Young, Danny Aiello, William Forsythe, Joe Pesci, Louise Fletcher, James Hayden, Darlanne Fluegel, Larry Rapp, Richard Bright, Jennifer Connelly, Scott Schutzman Tiler, Rusty Jacobs, Brian Bloom, Adrian Curran

Director and cowriter Sergio Leone's final film as a director (and his first in 13 years) initially looks like a departure from his earlier movies. In many ways Leone's whole career was about departures. He reinvented the Western in the '60s as an operatic, lugubrious, and explosive play of set pieces, composed as artfully as anything by Michelangelo Antonioni, and incidentally lending cinema history a title trope in Once Upon a Time in the West that hasn't been used up yet. Not only did Leone ape that title for this movie, but many others have used it since as well, with memorable "once upon a time" pictures for Mexico, Anatolia, Rio, Mumbai, China, and more (including next year, from Quentin Tarantino, Hollywood). I still haven't figured out what it signifies exactly, beyond a certain dreamy fairy tale yet cynically knowing epic nostalgia, with violence.

If Westerns are about the impulse to get further and further from civilization, about Huck Finn's eternal yen to light out for the Territory, then Once Upon a Time in America is about the first stop that immigrants from Europe made on the quixotic journey and the place where many of them pulled up and stayed, the teeming ghettoes of New York and other Eastern cities at the turn of the century. The story involves four youths who come of age with approximately Prohibition, three Jews and a Pole (approximately) who fight for social position in New York with Irish and Italians ahead of them in line and WASPs entirely out of reach (except, sometimes, their women). They commit petty crimes, battle for turf, and eventually graduate to bootlegging. It sounds like a typical gangster picture, and indeed as a marathon it sits comfortably next to the first two Godfather movies and Goodfellas. But it's a Leone picture and also strays at will into just plain weird stuff.

"The Day After the Day the Martians Came" (1967)

Frederik Pohl's story has a good point to make. It may seem painfully obvious, and really I want to dismiss it for its obviousness, but a lot of people these days are obviously in need of this obvious point. It's about immigrants and how we—Americans—treat them. In the future, a mission to Mars has discovered Martians! They are on their way back to Earth with specimens. No one knows anything about them yet, such as whether they are intelligent or what their skills are, except what is known of their appearance, which is "like a sad dachshund with elongated seal flippers for limbs." It appears they might be crying. The story takes place in a Florida motel, where journalists are booked two to a room for the chance to see them in person when the Mars crew makes it back. For the most part they are staying up all night in the motel bar, playing poker, and telling jokes. I'm not sure how the bar stays open, but never mind. The jokes, which at first I thought were an obnoxious element of the story, turn out to be pretty much the point of the story. You'll recognize them right away. Here's one: "Why doesn't a Martian swim in the ocean? Because he'd leave a ring around it." Likely we've all heard these witless putdown jokes where the target IDs are interchangeable: polacks, N-words, faggots, etc. Pohl was a son of German immigrants, born in 1919 (so in his late 40s when he wrote this story). It's not hard to imagine how German immigrants were treated, at least until after World War II, when they became white along with the Irish and with Italians not far behind. I'm not sure how this story would have registered in 1967, let alone in this "dangerous visions" context—as tediously relevant, perhaps, a certain attribute of some entertainment that was only incidentally entertaining, like Billy Jack or The Mod Squad setting out to "rap" with teens and young adults about ongoing unprecedented social unrest. I don't remember this particular story from the first time I read the collection but suspect I would have found it a little square. And that's what it is indeed, making a self-obvious point with thundering self-righteousness. But the people who need to understand it can't seem to understand it, while the rest of us yawn. Same as it ever was, amirite?

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

First Reformed (2017)

In First Reformed, director and writer Paul Schrader turns again to both American Calvinism and to the heroic era of European art cinema. What he comes away with is one of his richest and yet most characteristic pictures. It's kind of a knockout, in fact, though a bit lumpy and with some corners cut. I haven't followed Schrader since about Light Sleeper and Affliction. Maybe I've been missing out, or maybe I'm just excited at the moment, but First Reformed feels like it might deserve a place with Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Patty Hearst—with his best. Ethan Hawke deserves a lot of the credit too. In a quiet but electrifying performance as the Reverend Ernst Toller, who is suffering unto sickness from modern-day life, he manages a poise and calm that is anything but poise and calm, an inner coiled tension of tremendous anguish. If Calvinism gets its due here so does Schrader's cinema hero Robert Bresson. Toller is a Protestant pastor in a Calvinist First Reformed church that dates back to pre-Revolutionary times in upstate New York, but much of the action in this picture is propelled literally by his diary. If that's not enough, there's also a bicycle shot straight out of Bresson's 1951 Diary of a Country Priest. We could do this all day—there are also obvious elements in First Reformed of Ingmar Bergman (notably Winter Light), Andrei Tarkovsky, Carl Dreyer, and other usual suspects. But what I like best about First Reformed is its straightforward commitment to meaning in life and/or the lack of it. An intense scene occurs early, when Toller attempts to counsel a young environmental activist, Michael (Philip Ettinger), whose wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) is pregnant. Michael doesn't want her to have the baby. Speaking with Toller, he lays out an eloquent vision of the likely future of the planet in the next 33 years. It is devastating and convincing—to me, to Toller, to anyone who is environmentally aware. The people who deny climate change are also in this movie, running big corporations and footing hefty portions of the bills for the megachurch corporation Toller reports to up the chain—the movie is also about the ongoing corporatization of religion in America. These people believe talking about the reality of climate change is rude in social situations. It is "being political" and they object to it. As they are paying the bills they feel they have the right to dictate terms to some extent. "No politics." So it goes. Toller cannot accept what is happening in the world. He cannot live with it. He lingers over the question Michael posed to him, "Can God forgive us for what we've done to his creation?" Toller doesn't know what he can do. The case for despair is so convincing here—in fact, despair is all they are talking about and living through in this movie. Then Schrader reaches back for some of the apocalyptic elements of Travis Bickle's war on the scum of the earth to effectively charge events in First Reformed to a thriller pitch. In the final third, the picture goes to some pretty strange places, including the final images. It's not realism at all but a kind of inspired hallucination of spirituality made visible. Like Bresson, Schrader's goal is to film the soul imprisoned in the flesh. Like Toller, and John Calvin, he wants to save those souls. Good luck with that to all of us.

Zodiac (1986)

My interest flared up again in the Zodiac killings when David Fincher's movie came out about 10 years ago, but soon enough went on the wane again. The iconic serial killer represents a tantalizing dark mystery but everything still leads to dead ends. The most persistent questions—who was he, what was his motive, and how did he evade capture?—will likely never be answered definitively, or worse, may be disappointing when they are. Compare the BTK case (talk about the banality of evil). I realize I'm judging sensational crime in terms of entertainment, when these are overwhelming tragedies at the core, but it's all in a day's work for true-crime literature, often a kind of voyeurism. I'm not even sure Robert Graysmith's book is the place to go on Zodiac. As the editorial cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle who famously became obsessed with the case—Jake Gyllenhaal plays him in the movie—he's not exactly objective or even in the best position to tell the story. It's as if he knew the material too well when he finally sat down to write his books (there's a sequel to this I doubt I will get to). He alternates between rote mood-setting and rushing to get us up to speed on the details. Then, when he feels we're sufficiently briefed, he can sail off into virtual fugues about what it means and how it almost adds up. He calls attention to details that don't seem that significant, such as astrology, or harks to the weird coincidences like he is telling a campfire story. I feel for him, in a way. I think he just wants to know what happened. He's made it his life's work, and it may not get anywhere. Published originally in 1986, extensively revised in the '90s, my urgent red, black, and yellow mass market paperback version includes a late section about the movie, with notes from the set. He sounds a little dazzled by Hollywood, writing, "It's an odd feeling to have the finest actor of his generation play yourself in a major motion picture." Since Gyllenhaal is not even the finest actor of his generation in that movie it made me trust Graysmith's judgment a little less. Still, he has assembled all the Zodiac facts here along with doing a fair amount of original research, and he's often lucid when discussing the many strange twists in the case. The Zodiac killer has his antecedents, of course—Jack the Ripper is the original model, including taunting notes to police and newspapers. Later, Son of Sam, BTK, and others took whirls. The Zodiac murders are chilling and horrific but there are times I wonder if Zodiac committed any of them and instead only took credit. But a handful anyway seem certain. It's an odd chapter in history, no doubt, crime or otherwise.

In case it's not at the library.

"Flies" (1967)

Former Harlan Ellison roommate Robert Silverberg bats second in the Dangerous Visions lineup, as Ellison perhaps seems to be paying back favors a bit. On the other hand, Silverberg would go on to write at least one great novel, Dying Inside. His story for this collection, like Lester del Rey's, pits mankind against superior beings, but this time it doesn't go as well. Silverberg's are called "the golden ones." They have found a severely wounded Cassiday drifting in space after a spaceship accident. They take what's left of him and regenerate him to full health, with some modifications, and then send him home to Earth. The golden ones want to know more about our species, specifically our emotions (I don't believe Gene Roddenberry has anything particular to do with this story, though in some ways it sounds like him). They set up monitoring technology and reprogram Cassiday's brain slightly. Can you guess which emotions the golden ones are interested in? That's right, grief and despair. There's no way this ends well, and indeed, for better or worse, it all comes down to Silverberg's ability to conceive cruel and sadistic scenarios. He manages it pretty well three separate times, and four if you count the ending. In his afterword Silverberg says he was thinking of vampires and their ability to control others, as their immortal lives go along with breaks for feeding. But we don't really see the golden ones feeding on Cassiday and the people in Cassiday's life as much as playing with them out of a genuine if cold curiosity. It's not so different from what humans do to animals and one another. You'd like to think the more technologically advanced civilization would know better, but we don't, so why should they, amirite? The story is mostly an exercise in sadistic fantasy, but it can be justified by rabbits and cosmetics, so all right: Dangerous. In fairness, the experience of reading it is harrowing enough to make it dangerous—it can certainly be unpleasant—so give Silverberg that too. It's nicely put together, with a tidy hatful of literary tricks and a source in Shakespeare's King Lear. "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport." Bravo. But the story also leaves a bitter aftertaste.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)

Marlon James's breakthrough third novel is actually not brief, at some 700 pages, nor is it particularly about seven killings, although I may have lost track in the blizzards of surging language and exploding violence. It's a sprawling and slippery mass. Its broad sections revolve around five separate specific dates in Jamaica and in New York City (December 2, 1976, etc.), populated by a babbling cacophony of a competing cast of characters like voices from the lake of fire: Jamaican gangsters and their women, CIA men, a rock critic who reads like a road never taken by Cameron Crowe, and many more. James, like Jonathan Lethem or Jonathan Franzen, bears certain sublimated rock critic impulses, but also like the Jonathans evinces a greater gift for fiction and novels. The narrative is rich with potent allusion. Much of the larger story revolves around the assassination attempt on Bob Marley that took place in December 1976, connecting it to the later epidemic of crack cocaine in New York in the '80s, and the shared fortunes that followed for Jamaica and the US. The first two sections of Brief History, nearly half the book, are dedicated to the day before and the day of the attempt on Marley's life. In terms of the in-your-face style of telling the story, probably the most obvious comparison is with William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. They both use short chapters written first-person by multiple characters, but Faulkner's book is compact and weak sister next to this, which is a hothouse of febrile voice, Jamaican patois, and homicidal fantasies even by the fragments. I got the sense that James wrote and wrote and wrote, then condensed and chopped, and then wrote and wrote and wrote some more. I wouldn't be surprised if the final version represents only a fraction of all that could have gone in. James here feels like Thomas Wolfe in the passionate throes of erupting great novels. A Brief History dwells in streams of consciousness, flowing deep into the heads of even incidental characters, but also feels as if it were written almost unconsciously, by a medium catching vibrations from the air. Reading it for the first time, I often lost the thread through its lush trails but it never really lets you go. It is usually deep inside heads or briskly moving the action along, and sometimes the edges blur. It's hallucinatory, with static bursts of writing as vivid as William Burroughs at his most fiendish, some of the scenes sticking with me still. James has done an impressive job of telling the story of Jamaica and the US, specifically from the '70s to the '90s, but the scope is tremendous historically and the ambition almost limitless. I can't wait to try this monster again.

In case it's not at the library.

Closer (1980)

I have a distinct memory of someone somewhere writing about Joy Division and, when it came to their second and last album, portentously remarking, "The only question now was, closer to what?" It's a good question, as the album came out after Ian Curtis's suicide and bore further alarming and eloquent evidence of his state of mind. In many ways the titles by themselves paint the picture (though all songs are jointly credited to Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, and Bernard Sumner): "Atrocity Exhibition" (the album opener, featuring a tractor and Curtis repeating, "This is the way, step inside"). Then "Isolation," "Passover"—really, I'm just giving you the album sequence here. "Colony" is fourth. In a word association game, at this point, I would be saying "Kafka." It goes on. The prevailing vanity—it's not just Curtis, everyone is pitching in to make this work—is of the meditated gaze into the abyss (or "The Eternal," second-last song). "Closer to what?" indeed. At the same time, ever since I read some other wag asking how to pronounce the title, my brain has consistently flipped to the version with the "z" sound, as in "the last part of a performance, collection, or series" (and not "a person who is skilled at bringing a business transaction to a satisfactory conclusion"). We can make some guesses about how far these folks would have gone with Curtis—and we can make some guesses about how far Curtis could have ever gone—but somehow the history of what actually happened is about as far as I can imagine it. This feels like a signoff, a denouement, a finale—a closer, even if it's really just the end of the overture. The music and songs are dramatic but not sentimental in the same way as Unknown Pleasures. And it's not surprising that a band identity this close to the void could end up with someone swallowed into it.

Here's another weird thing for me about this album. You might think I am overly interested in morbid things, and that the death of an artist would find me plunging into the catalog, but in fact I tend to go the other way. I might spend a few days listening to music or inevitably hearing it via media in the gyrations of the moment, but generally I put things away after the event for a long time, and don't always get back to them. So it went with Closer. I finally got a copy at some point but rarely listened. I never thought it was that good, too lackluster or mannered or something, but also I felt uncomfortable listening to it. This went on so long I finally decided I must just not like it as much as Unknown Pleasures. But going back one more time turned out to be the charm as the album has finally sparked up for me pretty good. Once again it's a stacked concept product. The band is steadily improving—that's heard better on the live shows included in the later editions. Producer Martin Hannett is at the helm again and gives it a similar claustrophobic from-the-bottom-of-a-well buff. The cover art lives just as squarely in the humanities vein. Where Unknown Pleasures had looked to science, a vast universe, and the Enlightenment with its graphic representation of a pulsar, Closer ushers us into an Italian tomb, suggesting medieval darkness, with a potent grace emerging from the composition of the photo and sculptures. One album is looking up at the night sky, the other is looking into the moldy earth. One album is black, the other is white. There are a lot of binaries here—and a lot of balance as well. The vision is consistent. So is the quality. Again, it may be hard to imagine listening to them habitually, but both Unknown Pleasures and Closer are great albums.

A Separation (2011)

Jodaeiye Nader az Simin, Iran / France, 123 minutes
Director/writer: Asghar Farhadi
Photography: Mahmoud Kalari
Editor: Hayedeh Safiyari
Cast: Payman Maadi, Leila Hatami, Sareh Bayat, Shahab Hosseini, Sarina Farhadi, Ali-Asghar Shahbazi

A Separation is a domestic drama, as sharp and edgy as it gets, about conservative religious values in conflict. It is set in modern-day theocratic Iran but could as easily, with a few changes of garb, involve Old World Roman Catholics, Pennsylvania Amish, New York City patrician liberals, Indian Hindus, or anywhere people make serious commitments to their faith and a moral life. In the framing story, Simin (Leila Hatami) has obtained a visa to leave Iran but she has only a biblical 40 days to act on it. She wants a better life for her 11-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi)—Simin is about the only person here who approximates a liberal. Simin's husband, Nader (Payman Maadi), is sympathetic to the view but refuses to leave because his elderly father has dementia and still needs his care. ("Does he even realize you are his son?" Simin argues. "I know he is my father," Nader responds.) Termeh seems inclined to stay with Nader. The situation appears unresolvable. Simin says she will file for divorce and, as the movie begins, leaves Nader to live with her parents in the meanwhile.

Because Simin was a primary caretaker of Nader's father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi)—a hulking brute who barely speaks from inside his dim fog, a rarely sympathetic onerous responsibility made leaden flesh—now the family's life becomes even more complex. Nader finds a woman, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), to come in days to care for the old man. As it happens, Razieh is an even more conservative Muslim. And there are other complications. The job pays little and she has to commute a long way to get there. She cannot arrive early enough to see Nader before he goes to work in the morning. She has to bring her young daughter with her. She is pregnant. Nader's father has begun to soil himself and Razieh must consult religious authorities about whether it is a sin to help him clean up and change his clothes. She hides details of the job from her own husband, Hojjat (Shahab Hosseini), because she knows what his opinion would be about whether it is a sin. Things only get worse from this point. The story is tightly wound, as events transpire organically, growing into a drama so intense that the movie can dispense entirely with musical cues. The narrative carries it.