“The Lodger” (1993)

Fred Chappell’s story is very clever and enjoyable exactly for that reason. I found it in a Year’s Best anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and what’s more it also won a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction too. Clearly a lot of people have enjoyed it. But I think it’s closer to literary satire than fantasy, let alone horror. The clear target is postmodernism. At the same time it certainly has affinities with the bookish surrealism of Jorge Luis Borges, so give it that too. “The Lodger” manages to eat its cake and have it too in many ways. Chappell namechecks Alfred Hitchcock (whose 1920s silent movie supplies the title) and Edgar Allan Poe. The main character, Robert Ackley, is a low-level librarian in a university with a modest collection (by the tone) of 2 million volumes. He spends his evenings plunged into the strange finds he makes by day in the library. He likes the weird and elusive and obscure. He may be living in the right universe for it because this is a strange one. It’s much like our own but with certain key differences, such as, apparently, no Allen Ginsberg or Howl. Instead, there is Gerald Grayforth and Squall, which has obvious fragments from Howl and affords Chappell the opportunity to unleash, in 1993, some no doubt long-simmering mockery of the beats. There are other targets I recognized here as well and many more I suspected. Basically Chappell is making a party out of it. Everyone’s invited. One evening Ackley is reading an obscure poet from Cleveland, Lyman Scoresby—something to do with Hart Crane—and picks up Scoresby’s spirit, who then lives in Ackley’s head and begins to systematically take him over. The story then becomes a contest of wills between them and a good time is had by all. I like it because I am open to this assessment of the po-mo project. As someone who loves Ginsberg and Howl, however, I also got a glimpse of what highbrow condescension looks like coming from a vanity-damaged specimen like Scoresby, in which case I’m afraid Chappell, by extension and presumption, looks merely smug. So perhaps he and I are both smug about postmodernism, if you follow me. It stands to reason. And the story remains entertaining on balance, an intriguing piece of intellectual stunt work, especially in the way it resolves.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

Tennessee Ernie Ford, “The Shotgun Boogie” (1950)

[listen up!]

Tennessee Ernie Ford had a big hit with this entertaining story-song in 1950, which sat for 14 weeks atop the Rockabilly & Western Swing chart. It hits with a rollicking piano, hip-wrigglin’ boogie bass figure, and upbeat nimble tempo. Our narrator is a good old boy living off the fat of his land with his shotgun standing in the corner. In the first part, he is out hunting. “The big fat rabbits are jumpin' in the grass / Wait 'til they hear my old shotgun blast.” Said blast is replicated throughout the song by hard hits on the snare drum, probably my favorite part of the song and its most ingenious. It sounds right purely by context. “Look out bushy tails, tonight you'll be in the pot.” In the second part, he meets a Daisy Mae type of beautiful backwoods gal. Among other things, of course, she is a deadly shot with her own shotgun. He is instantly smitten. “I looked her up and down, said, ‘Boy, this is love.’” But the usual complications soon prevail. “I sat down on a log, took her on my lap / She said wait a minute, bud, you gotta see my pap / ... He don't like a man that's gonna trifle.” And so our guy follows the script. “Well, I called on her pap like a gentleman oughter / He said, ‘No brush hunter's gonna get my daughter.’" And raising his shotgun, fires. No worries, our guy gets the drift and outruns the shot. “I wanted weddin' bells / I'll be back little gal, when your pappy runs out of shells.” Ford’s voice is homely and flat, especially on the long notes, but it’s all part of the charm.

“The Bride” (2020)

This story by Shaenon K. Garrity is another good one from Black Static magazine, which unfortunately closed down operations in 2023 after 30 years. Garrity’s bio says she is a cartoonist, and maybe some of that accounts for the vivid imagery here, but really this is more compelling on a meta-textual level, at once riffing on the Frankenstein mythos and addressing the reader in chanting, taunting, hypnotic ways. It opens: “As you drive south, the heat rushes up to greet you like your name is in the guestbook and it has your room prepared.” It’s set in the early 1930s insofar as it has a time setting, which suggests some affinity with the Universal movie franchise. But it is wild and cold and sophisticated more like Mary Shelley herself. It’s not Bride of Frankenstein but it’s in the neighborhood. This Frankenstein’s monster is made from the corpse of a beautiful young woman by a “Doctor” to be his mate. It is in the form of an animated dead girl. She smells bad. She falls apart easily and must be put back together with wax and other adherents. Radium as well as electricity was involved in animating her, so she is also radioactive. Her vision is x-ray and she sees and hears with her entire body. The relationship between the Doctor and the dead girl is, of course, fraught and desperate. Eventually she leaves her rotting body behind entirely and exists as a kind of energy vortex, dimly seen but in the shape of a woman. Meanwhile there is another narrative thread going on in second-person that has us driving and searching for something that appears to be the end of the story? It’s still not finished at the end, leaving us in limbo, even though it certainly seems to finish the story of the bride, but implies it hasn’t to keep us going? Maybe. It’s actually a pretty neat trick, a kind of narrative moebius loop. It’s one of the best stories I’ve read in a while, contemporary or otherwise. It is splashed with bolts of color. The language is blunt. It may be coy about its Mary Shelley and other Frankenstein sources, but they are there. Garrity even slips in an ”It’s alive!” But I like even more how she pushes beyond that, into a next phase of “the Bride” as a glimmering energy vortex. It wasn’t just life that was created in this experiment, but something more profound. And it’s irresistible! (Note: I see there is a movie called The Bride! set to be released this March. It sounds like it has a similar premise and shares elements with this story, but I don’t see Garrity’s name anywhere associated with it. Credit for direction and screenplay goes solely to Maggie Gyllenhaal, so maybe it’s just one of those “something in the air” coincidences. Obviously, I haven’t seen it yet, but plan to.)

Black Static #77
Story not available online.

So Beautiful or So What (2011)

In the ‘70s I was a dedicated fan of Paul Simon, maybe even more than I ever was of Simon & Garfunkel, who had some songs I liked but not many I loved (mostly on Sounds of Silence). All of Simon’s three solo albums in that decade—Paul Simon, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, and Still Crazy After All These Years—are good. I thought they verged on pop song masterpieces, especially the first. I even liked his 1983 album, Hearts and Bones, but by then he was turning into more of a slightly guilty pleasure. He definitively lost me in 1986, once and for all, with Graceland, which among other things was where I started to notice I was tired of his voice. Fast-forward 25 years to So Beautiful or So What, which reunited him with Rhymin’ and Still Crazy producer Phil Ramone. High production values is very much the name of the game here, as it always has been with Simon. So Beautiful is experimental in many ways, with ubiquitous bells and heavy samples, but it’s always “tasty.” He’s playing with exotic global music as he was on Graceland (and perhaps since?)—West African electric guitar blues, Indian percussion, the samples, and more. The personnel cited on Wikipedia runs to the dozens. So Beautiful seems to me to integrate its elements better than Graceland but it’s still a little too ostentatious to not be troublesome on the cultural appropriation tip. I notice the first song, the Christmas song (“Getting Ready for Christmas Day”), as I appreciate when artists try to create their own Christmas standards. But even that song and all that follows fade too quickly into the background, perhaps victim of the production values. When I remember to listen closely I hear a lot of craft going into it. But it’s not that interesting and rarely keeps my attention for long, not least from being tired of his voice now in the first place. I don’t seem to be able to shake that. Lots of establishment rock critics went for So Beautiful (Robert Christgau, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Jon Pareles), hailing it enthusiastically as Simon’s best in decades. Maybe—I don’t know anything after Graceland and sought this one out perhaps based on these reviews. In many ways Simon’s contributions, his voice and his songs, are simply not necessary. I think it’s cool that he listens widely, but I think we’d all be better off if he did something like David Byrne and put together anthology albums.

Addams Family Values (1993)

USA, 94 minutes

Director: Barry Sonnenfeld

Writers: Charles Addams, Paul Rudnick

Photography: Donald Peterman

Music: Marc Shaiman

Editors: Jim Miller, Arthur Schmidt

Cast: Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia, Christopher Lloyd, Joan Cusack, Christina Ricci, Carol Kane, Jimmy Workman, Carel Struycken, David Krumholtz, Christopher Hart, Kristin Hooper, Dana Ivey, Peter MacNicol, Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon, Peter Graves

My principled stance is that I avoid most movie sequels. Certainly there have been some that are winners—Bride of Frankenstein, The Dark Knight, Evil Dead II, The Road Warrior, Terminator 2. And, yeah, beyond that some noisy consensus on others I don’t like nearly as much as the originals: The Godfather Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens. Then there are sequels like Addams Family Values, which may be better than the originals but are just too lightweight and/or marketing-driven in the first place to take seriously. If you want to laugh, however, you could do worse than Addams Family Values.

Director Barry Sonnenfeld absorbed the lessons of the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams, who pumped up the gag volume in their Airplane!, Naked Gun, and other parody franchises. The pace of Addams Family Values is not as frenetic but the rhythm of punchlines and sight gags is reliably steady. Sonnenfeld’s IMDb known-fors include two Men in Black movies, which are comparable comedies for a sense of his style. He also did Wild Wild West and the original Addams Family adaptation from 1991 (which is not as good as this sequel). While you can argue that none of it amounts to much, the all-star cast and the overall vibe here indicate at least that people wanted to work with Sonnenfeld. They bring a lot of infectious we’re-having-a-ball chemistry to Paul Rudnick’s rapid-fire screenplay. It’s the director as popular guy, a tradition that goes all the way up the line to Howard Hawks.

Deep Purple, “Smoke on the Water” (1972)

[listen up!]

Lately I’ve been listening to an old high school favorite, Deep Purple’s Machine Head. The bluesy groove “Lazy” was always my favorite on the album, although I have found greater appreciation for “Highway Star,” “Space Truckin’,” and, for possibly the first time, “Smoke on the Water,” a ubiquitous #4 hit in 1973 in a shortened version. My perhaps grammar nazi beef was the line “Some stupid with a flare gun (/ Burned the place to the ground”). I couldn’t get past it. It’s so stupid itself, when, for example, the word “fool” would scan just as well and not feel so dumb. The good news is I’ve been able to set that aside and at last just let the heavy riff come to me—one of the best in classic-rock annals, so much so you may well be exhausted with it at this point. But, suddenly, I’m not. In the 5:42 that it lasts, the riff rolls through three times before wandering off in the somewhat protracted finish. The first appearance is the start of the song, of course, establishing it by basic elements—played twice on the electric guitar (Ritchie Blackmore), then drums come in (Ian Paice), then the bass revs up (Roger Glover), pushing it wide across the field of vision like someone flinging open double doors. Then the singer (Ian Gillan), the name-checking (“Frank Zappa and the Mothers”), and the terrible line. Now I’m staying with it. Jon Lord’s Hammond organ has joined the party. A verse or two, a chorus, and the riff returns, the band now fully engaged and moving like a freight train coming up to speed (the “official video” for once does little harm to the song, leaning into the down-the-road-in-a-heavy-machine vibe with cartoon animation). More verses, the chorus again, and back to the riff, taking on its own life. A guitar solo starts, not particularly inspired until ... return of the riff. The guitar suddenly finds its voice against the heavy momentum. At about 3:39 it turns into something glorious and sublime.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

The seventh feature film in the Alien franchise was directed and cowritten by Fede Alvarez. Alvarez, 47, has proved himself in the horror realm (Don’t Breathe) and inserting himself into ongoing franchises (the 2013 Evil Dead). So maybe he was a natural for making the best Alien movie in nearly 40 years. In fact, part of his shtick here is drawing skillfully on the first two movies even as he gleefully careens around a barrage of excellent original SF predicaments. He uses the spooky confines of decrepit spaceware floating in space, as in the first picture, and he composes a closeup shot of our hero Rain (Cailee Spaeny) confronting one of the creatures in profile, as in the second. Rain’s android friend Andy (David Jonsson) saves her from one attack saying, “Get away from her. You bitch.” But my favorite hark to the past is reviving Ian Holm from the first picture as the android Ash. They had to obtain permission from the estate of Holm, who died in 2020, to use his likeness (from the Lord of the Rings shoot). The rest is busy-busy special effects. It closes a neat circle in the larger enterprise. Ash is just as deceptive and manipulative here as he was in 1979. Romulus also gives us a new word for the alien (or at least new to me), mostly replacing “xenomorph” with “parisitoid.” Whatever. The picture runs nearly a full two hours but rarely flags. Romulus is intense and can be scary and it was a relief that Alvarez never goes jokey on us, which would probably not be hard with this “perfect organism” we know so well now that we could likely pass a pop quiz with ease on its properties: the face-hugger stage, the chest-bursting stage, the unstoppable acid for blood, the speed and cunning. There might be a little more biology to Romulus, as some cross-breeding happens between alien and human, which I’m pretty sure is new. The result is suitably horrifying, though weirdly too reminiscent of Terminator CGI to truly enjoy. I liked Romulus nearly as much as the first two pictures in the franchise, Alien and Aliens, which is not a low bar. Forget 3, Resurrection, Prometheus, and Covenant. Romulus should be your next stop after the first two.

The Shrinking Man (1956)

Richard Matheson’s next novel after I Am Legend went on to become one of the great 1950s science fiction movies, huffing up the title to The Incredible Shrinking Man. Matheson wrote the screenplay and, in fact, improves the story by making it much more straightforward in time. This novel is constantly hopping all over the place, from when the main guy, the shrinking man, is trapped in the cellar, missing and presumed dead by his family, to sections labeled by his height: 68”, 35”, etc. It feels similarly unfocused by perspective. Sometimes things seem larger or smaller than they should from descriptions in the same passage. I could also do without the masculine panic as he goes from 6’2” to subatomic, which reminds me of another complaint, this thing about shrinking proportionally at the rate of 1/7” per day. WTF is 1/7”? Just say an inch per week and leave the rest of the math to us. On the other hand most of this takes place in the previous week, so maybe that’s what you have to do. Another point that worried me is the sense that the structure of the novel by definition makes the timeline 74 weeks, from 74 inches to nil. It wasn’t that clear and I had the sense more time was elapsing, maybe even years, but maybe Matheson was true to the concept after all. The Shrinking Man is thus disorienting but not necessarily in good ways. Maybe I’m not the one to ask. I didn’t go much for I Am Legend either. Matheson is a good, active writer and still highly readable even when he can feel a little lost here. There are too many Hemingwayesque issues with masculinity and it is too easily read in contexts that developed after 1956 as panic about losing positions of power men had previously dominated. To be clear, I don’t think Matheson thought of it consciously that way at all, but that’s where his imagination went. He liked the possibilities of steady shrinkage (as George Costanza once yelped) and somehow it became something about satisfying women (that is, pacifying them). Matheson is famous for an ugly imagination. His vampire stories are particularly hard for me to read. This one manages to evade a lot of that, but I take the movie, with its own flaws, as Matheson’s second draft, with improvements. Hard to talk about fears of sexual inadequacy in a 1950s movie, which also helps.

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

The Band (1969)

I like the second album from the Band (or “The Band”) more than the first. It’s definitely a big-brother album in my life, in this case the big brother of a neighborhood friend. I felt pressure to like it even as I never connected much with it. In the aftermath of 1968, a lot of the counterculture-oriented groups seemed to be seeking a kind of downhome comfort-rock. Sometimes it works. It’s easy enough to just play the album and try to let it come to you, though it’s often boring. Sometimes it hits in spite of my larger misgivings about the project. I have never liked the song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” for example, not by Joan Baez, not by the Band. It was written by Robbie Robertson—within the confines of the copyright disputes among the Bandmates—and always struck me as unattractive pretend-old stoic warbling. I’ve cringed though it so much I can’t even tell you. At one time you could not get away from it. The Baez version went to #3 in 1971 and I’ve had friends and read the critics who are into the whole Bob Dylan / Band industrial complex and made it part of the air we breathe. Yet the last time I played through The Band I found myself singing along with “Dixie.” Go figure. It might mean I’m in denial about liking it or it might mean I sing to cope when I should be just using the skip button. I’m not sure why I have so much resistance to skipping songs when I listen to albums. Somehow it feels like cheating. Anyway, the only song I actively like here is “Up on Cripple Creek” (a #25 hit in 1969), another good singalong, but even then it’s not like I love it. I give it maybe a 7 of 10. “Jawbone” is another song I like enough to notice; specifically I like its deliberateness. But most of the rest of The Band just passes me by like wallpaper. I will say one of the most interesting things about the Band is the range of strong lead vocals, provided on different songs by three of the five players, working and interweaving distinctly but within a range. Only Garth Hudson (my favorite) and Robbie Robertson abstain from singing (or yowling, as the occasion warrants). Last point: In recent years I’ve seen the album referred to as the “Brown Album” (presumably because it’s self-titled in the middle of their career like the Beatles’ White Album or a crayola rainbow of self-titled releases from Weezer). Maybe The Band has always been the Brown Album, but I have never in my life heard anyone refer to it that way. Brown like the loamy earth, I’m going to guess, not brown like shit.

Another Woman (1988)

USA, 81 minutes

Director/writer: Woody Allen

Photography: Sven Nykvist

Music: Erik Satie, Woody Allen’s record collection

Editor: Susan E. Morse

Cast: Gena Rowlands, Ian Holm, Gene Hackman, Sandy Dennis, Mia Farrow, Blythe Danner, Betty Buckley, Martha Plimpton, John Houseman, Harris Yulin, Frances Conroy

Director and writer Woody Allen’s movie about the bourgeois in New York City entering their 50s is surprisingly very good. I suspect a good deal of that, especially nowadays with his reputation in shreds, is because this is one of his rare movies in which he does not appear. It doesn’t hurt that the cast is stellar: Gena Rowlands and Gene Hackman are excellent, as usual. Others—Betty Buckley, Sandy Dennis, John Houseman—have small roles but make the most of them. I also got a kick out of seeing a youthful Frances Conroy, who went on to the TV series Six Feet Under more than 10 years later.

It's still a Woody Allen movie, specifically in his “serious” key, aping the greats of European cinema, usually Ingmar Bergman. For Another Woman he hired cinematographer Sven Nykvist, hailing from the Bergman stable (Scenes From a Marriage, Fanny and Alexander, Cries & Whispers). He throws a coat of brown / golden / sepia over the proceedings, which gives the picture an aura of something from the past. This was their first collaboration, but Woody and Nykvist ended up working on a few more films together. Another Woman draws on the reminiscing structure and wistful, nostalgic notes of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries with an interestingly complicated scenario. Gena Rowlands is Marion Post, a tenured professor of German philosophy who reads Rilke for pleasure. Her life has reached a point where it suddenly falls apart.