BOOKS:

Scott Tennant, Spiderland (33 1/3 series): I have now consumed three separate accounts of the brief life of young Kentucky proto-post-rock legends Slint. The first was a documentary directed by Lance Bangs from 2014 that was included as part of a deluxe rerelease of the album; the second was a very lengthy (but very high quality, actually) Rolling Stone article called “Kids Being Kids” or something like that, and now this 120-page book, my first 33 1/3 book that I’ve ever read and the earliest of the three accounts. Most of the first part of the book is a detailing of the history of the Louisville, KY punk scene where they came from and is of reasonable interest (a precursor of Slint met Glenn Danzig, who acted like a high school psycho); the second part is an in-depth look at all the songs on Spiderland and just reads like a really long, moderately academic AMG essay, and the third part details how the band broke up. I think I’d rank this the weakest of the three Slint accounts. What Tennant has to say about the actual songs isn’t anything you couldn’t figure out on your own, and the account of the breakup was better in the RS article. I guess this would be okay if you hadn’t read anything else about Slint.

J. Niimi, Murmur (33 1/3 series): This got through the early history of R. E. M. pretty fast, then detailed the band’s time making the album and little essays on each Murmur song, then wasted my time with a long, boring, who-gives-a-fuck load of academic slop detailing the connection between Michael Stipe’s weird indecipherable lyrics and some article Michael Stipe cited written by Walker Percy about language and meaning and perception. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. At least I now know that some of the guitars on Murmur were Mitch Easter, and that someone is playing an electric sitar on “Shaking Through.” Oh, and what “cassette culture” was like at malls in the 1980s, and the author also cites Wire’s “The 15th,” which is sorta cool.

MOVIES:

The Wild One: Is Marlon Brando the most overhyped and overrated actor of all time? His reputation as a great actor seems to hinge mostly on three movies for sure (A Streetcar Named Desire, On The Waterfront, and The Godfather), a fourth that has been hailed as great acting but also has been tainted publicly due to Brando basically being accused of rape (Last Tango In Paris), and a fifth that lots of people like but lots of other people think he ruins the movie (Apocalypse Now.) He had no hit movies in the 1960s and disappeared for an entire decade of the 1980s before re-emerging to appear at his dumbass son’s murder trial, then he was famous for being a huge washed up fatass who lived on an island and gave bizarre interviews that everyone made fun of, and ruined what few movies he was still allowed to be in, like Dr. Moreau. He ended his life by working for Michael Jackson. Everything else is cult favorites. This film has an iconic image of Brando wearing his cap and leather jacket and bike and the iconic “What are you rebelling against? –> Whaddya got?” line, and Brando does well in it (especially considering he was far too old to be playing a rebellious youth like this) but the actual movie barely even musters a plot, let alone anything that would be considered edgy today. Really, I couldn’t find a single contemporary review of the film that was impressed with it. If you haven’t seen it, I don’t even recommend bothering.

Boudu Saved From Drowning: A 1932 Jean Renoir comedy in the Criterion Collection, this film’s plot was hijacked 50 years later for Down And Out In Beverly Hills, where a well-off Parisian family rescues a bum from drowning only to have him assholishly ruin everything. I agree that having Boudu the bum act like a dick before he’s rescued, while he’s rescued, and after he’s rescued all the way through the end of the movie, makes for an interesting plot conceit, but bear in mind there’s a scene where he basically rapes the rich guy’s wife and it is played for laughs. I guess the French weren’t so politically correct in 1932, eh? The actual film is worth watching at least once, but it’s no Grand Illusion or anything.

The Bling Ring: ZERO STARS. Five completely worthless, shallow, pretty Los Angeles teenagers whose parents educate them by reading The Secret and who are obsessed with taking selfies, social media, and reading about people like Paris Hilton online eventually decide to break into celebrity homes and steal their stuff all while partying and muttering “oh my GAWD” and “totally” over and over and over. 85 minutes later, the movie ends. It’s a pretty safe bet that any book or film or TV show meant to satirize vapid pop culture and obsessions with rich celebrities will itself end up seeming vapid because it’s too easy and obvious to satirize those things, but Sofia Coppola could have made this movie in less time than it takes to watch it. It’s stunning enough that Coppola managed to make an even shittier, more obvious movie than the coma-inducing Somewhere, but did she really have to beat the previous record holder for “most obnoxiously vapid celebrity-culture satire ever,”” Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama? I’d seriously rather read that again than watch this (thank GOD there’s no movie of it, either–IYKYK), and that book nearly made me want to hunt Ellis down and beat him with a sack of nickels. At least that had a couple of good jokes. There is literally only one moment in this entire movie worth watching, and it’s where the kids break into a home while Can’s “Halleluhwah” plays on the soundtrack, around the part where the tribal drums kick in. Cripes.

The Vanishing (1988 Dutch original): This was something of a disappointment–it has a stellar critical reputation and no less than Stanley Kubrick cited it as his pick for the scariest thriller ever made (the actress who plays the lost girlfriend in this movie, Johanna Ter Steege, was going to star in the Holocaust movie that Kubrick cancelled because of Schindler’s List.) I found it a bit pokey, not really that “suspenseful” at all. The infamous ending is yes, rather horrific to think about, but also undercut by the hero just seeming like a fucking idiot for doing what he does, and the whole thing hinges on him doing it just because he can’t scratch the itch of his girlfriend’s memory from his head. He also yells weird lines while his fate kicks in. Then there’s the villain, a puffy faced sociopath whom the movie spends way too much time analyzing (this hurts the much vaunted “suspense,” IMO). I confess the ending was sort of spoiled for me, but even with that, this should have kicked up more suspense than it did. As you all probably know, there was a godawful 1993 Hollywood remake of this film that featured A-list stars and a happy Hollywood ending, but you may not have known that it was directed by George Sluizer, who also directed....this.

Scent Of A Woman: I don’t agree that Pacino in this film is the worst acting ever by an acclaimed actor, but I do agree that only one of his big scenes really works (the near suicide/fight scene.) The tango scene and the dinner-brawl scene are both underwhelming and the big prep-school trial thing at the end that everyone parodied for years (“I’M JUST GETTIN WAHMED UP!!!!”) is a frankly horrible scene, mostly because any smart viewer will, by the end of the film, agree that the Chris O’Donnell character would have hardly been wrong to snitch on Philip Seymour Hoffman. (Hoffman, BTW, is the only interesting thing about the prep-school subplot at all, giving his first good performance here, far better than the wooden O’Donnell, whose dull work here serves as the inspiration for every wimpy performance Tobey Maguire ever gave.) My biggest problem with the film doesn’t even concern the acting or the plot, but rather that this fucking thing is somehow 156 minutes long. WHY?!?!? For Pacino devotees only.

ALBUMS:

The Soft Boys, Underwater Moonlight: So far, this is the front runner for the best album I’ve heard in 2025. Although I’m still not sure what “neo-psychedelic” really means (this is probably closer to “power pop”), this does evoke a fun 1960s rock-n-roll album’s feel more than anything by Echo and the Bunnymen or the Psychedelic Furs. Some of the reasons for the album’s acclaim mystify me; I didn’t much pay attention to Robyn Hitchcock’s sexual-embarrassment lyrics, and lots of reviews cited a Syd Barrett influence, but even with a cover of “Vegetable Man” in the bonus tracks, I didn’t think of Barrett once on my own. There’s also the alleged Soft Boys influence on R. E. M. and other upcoming college rock, but the only time I heard jangly guitar arpeggios here was “Queen Of Eyes,” which wasn’t one of the better songs. This thing is squarely in the punk/post-punk era, 60s influence be damned. “I Wanna Destroy You,” “Kingdom Of Love,” “Tonight” and the title track are the biggest highlights and there’s no duffers. From the bonus tracks…criminitley, there’s a lot. “Have A Heart Betty,” “There’s Nobody Like You,” “He’s A Reptile,” “Dreams,” “Where The Prawns”…lots of stuff that could have made the album. Good stuff! I will try to hear A Can Of Bees soon.

Bob Dylan, Self Portrait: If it’s difficult for any younger listener today to grasp what was so amazing about Bob Dylan “going electric” at the Newport Festival, then it’s probably damn near impossible for newer listeners to understand the “uproar” when Bob “dissed” his audience by putting this out in 1970. (Certainly Greil Marcus’ labyrinth of a Rolling Stone review doesn’t help, if any of them are going to look that up.) If it were released today, it’d just be “A-list musician tries a hodgepodge of old timey styles and old covers for the hell of it,” not some epic middle finger. And that’s really all I’m hearing here–old-timey songs from a guy who didn’t want to be “voice of his generation” any longer. Since Bob had already tried his hand at traditions as early as his first album, to me the album never stood a chance at being particularly offensive. Granted, I only count one classic, “Copper Kettle,” which was beautiful to me (it’s not usually cited as a highlight), but even if 24 songs is obviously far too many, liking 9 or 10 of them like I did means it wasn’t a painful experience. I guess his contemporary covers, like “The Boxer,” are nothing special, but “Belle Isle,” “Wigwam,” “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know,” “Let It Be Me,” “It Hurts Me Too”…I sorta liked some of ‘em. Approach this album like you’d approach The Basement Tapes, as a willing mess instead of an epic statement, and you probably won’t mind it in 2025.

Frank Zappa/Mothers, The Grand Wazoo: This runs about neck and neck with Waka/Jawaka. One has more guitar, the other has more electric piano, I don’t count any particularly wonderful tracks on either album, and both sound to some extent like that third Soft Machine album. “Cleetus Awreetus-Awrightus” conjures up a cool dank, weird mood, but I wish it did more with it, like, say, Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “Sanctuary.” “Blessed Relief” is usually seen as the highlight and it is. Both longer tracks on Waka were better than the title track here. Dunno that it matters much though, because I didn’t really dig either album.

The Tubes, Young & Rich: Having done something like a big fat snide 10cc-style album of pastiches for their 1975 debut, the Tubes now move into loud glitzy rock-opera territory, coming up with something theatrical like an American equivalent of, say, Supertramp’s Crime Of The Century. The debut album was definitely better; all I really liked here was the cover “Don’t Touch Me There” sung by guest female band member Re Styles, and the overblown, harmonized opener “Tubes World Tour.” Oh, and a chuckle at “Madam, I’m Adam.” Har, har. These guys had their fair share of instrumental talent, an urge to parody and a lot of nerve, but needed someone like, oh I don’t know, TODD RUNDGREN to reign in their excesses. But that wouldn’t happen for three years. Not a very good album, this. I hope they’d get better soon, because I thought I’d really forgotten something by waiting 20 years to do the rest of their discography after falling in love with Remote Control (that’s the one with Rundgren.)

Pere Ubu, Why I Hate Women: Although Ubu leader David Thomas (RIP!), who had something of a big mouth (that seemingly no one ever paid attention to) really did make a few misogynistic statements about women in rock (he said that they couldn’t hide their “foreignness” or something, and yet there’s a female bassist playing on this, and other, Ubu albums!), the title of this album was actually meant to evoke Jim Thompson-type noir novels. The album is fairly noir itself, with a few rockers but mostly conjuring up bleak/dark/mumbly minor-key moods, something Ubu have done wonderfully from time to time on some of their best/most classic songs (“Humor Me,” “Dub Housing,” “Codex,” “Silent Spring,” “Ray Gun Suitcase”) but I think mostly this album was meant to be an entire album similar to the second half of 2002’s St. Arkansas, if anyone here can remember how that album went from being rocking and bright in its first half to darker in its second. The best songs are rockers–“Caroleen,” “Two Girls (One Bar)” (the opening song, I hope it’s not a reference to you know what!) and the closer “Texas Overture.” Sometimes the darker stuff works, like “Blue Velvet,” “Stolen Cadillac” and “Love Song,” but I wouldn’t say any of it matches the classic Ubu songs I mentioned earlier. David Thomas’ piggy pig pig voice isn’t for everybody, either, and the synthesizer guy has long run out of ways to make those blooping Atari noises and squigglies interesting. This album is okay. Stunning, really–you’d think Ubu would have lost it long before.

Jimi Hendrix, South Saturn Delta: Random odds and ends from various later points in Hendrix’s not-terribly-long career. There’s two versions of “Angel,” which is a pretty great song, and only one of them is called “Angel,” the other is erroneously listed as being an unreleased early version of “Little Wing”! The two best songs are “Tax Free” and “Midnight,” which I downloaded the mp3s for ages ago. They’re still pretty good. “Pali Gap” opens with some odd gooey guitar noises that are pretty cool, so I’m glad I heard that one. “Look Over Yonder” and “Here He Comes (Lover Man)” kick up some energy but neither are really masterful songs. I dunno what to tell you. Didn’t see the big deal about “The Stars Play With Laughing Sam’s Dice”. Nor did I see the big deal about most of this album, if there really was one (I guess people don’t talk about it that much.) There are several other messy, random Hendrix odds-and-ends albums out there, like Valleys Of Neptune and after having a lukewarm experience with this I’m wondering if I should even bother with them. Weren’t a lot of them just lame cash-ins put out by his family?

Game Theory, Pointed Accounts Of People You Know EP and Distortion EP: Two EPs from 1983 and 1984, respectively. The former has “37th Day,” a moody, dank R. E. M.-ish piece written by bassist Fred Juhos and not leader Scott Miller. It also has nerdy badly dated new wave keyboard shit like “I Wanna Get Hit By A Car” and “Life In July” and God do this band’s keyboards suck. The latter…well, I couldn’t find the allegedly bad song “Kid Convenience” (written by that bassist again!) so technically I haven’t even heard the whole Distortion EP, but I don’t mind. It does have a good Scott Miller weepy song, “The Red Baron,” which is the kind of thing I was hoping for from this cute, wimpy little band. A lot of these songs were compiled on albums called things like Dead Center and Distortion Of Glory but sorting that shit out’s a mess and I don’t really like the band much anyway. A disappointing ride with Game Theory continues. Sigh.