BOOKS:

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (20th anniversary re-read): “Her brown rose tasted of blood.” BLEH!!!!!!! How did I forget something so disgusting was IN this book?!? You can use black magic to reanimate Gilbert Gottfried’s corpse and give him a microphone and put him three inches from my left ear and have him scream every single bloody death and violation in Blood Meridian, The Painted Bird, Hogg and American Psycho on an endless loop and none of it would sicken me as much as “her brown rose tasted of blood.” Good lord, were censors in 1955 just STUPID? I know the book got in trouble, but…uh, never mind. This book isn’t as long as I remembered, but I still kind of found myself scanning every single page a second or third time after reading it, lest I missed something in those dense thickets of tricky language. Not that I had a problem with that–Nabokov really was that good, and reading his English prose is engaging enough that I didn’t care that the plot isn’t all that deep and was perfectly happy overall to re-read the book. Let someone else discuss the meaning–I never thought that was a head-scratcher, either. Not that I’m bragging–I should have known even when I was 23 that the plot was never the point of this book. Now, for Pale Fire, which I already know doesn’t have any brown roses in it…

Nathanael West, The Dream Life Of Balso Snell (20th anniversary re-read): A shit-slinging satire of surrealistic/symbolic literature, or perhaps Art in General, this would seem to have few comparisons to much else in the literary landscape upon its publication in 1931, unless someone here knows better than me. It’s also a scattershot and badly unfocused rant written by a 27-year-old who would only get more and more bitter in the decade to come, a cynical decade he almost fittingly didn’t survive (West died in 1940, apparently on the way either to or from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s funeral!) Fortunately, West kind of knows when to shut up (this is only about 60 pages long) just before Balso Snell fully turns into the sort of self-indulgent thing it was lampooning–but I said “fully.” Innovative, yes, but not all that great in and of itself.

Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (20th anniversary re-read): Another brief read; this doesn’t count as a “rant” per se, but in terms of its purpose and execution it might as well be one, as well as resembling what would happen if Mad Men had been around in the 1930s (office setting, everybody cheating on everybody else, hero alienated from purpose in life, abortions, etc.) The ending rivals The Wages Of Fear and French Connection II as the most blunt ending I’ve ever seen in any work of art in any format. A good read if you’re in a really foul mood and feel like the human race is about to fail and go to shit, which I often do feel like, but no more.

Nathanael West, A Cool Million (20th anniversary re-read): The bitter-est, sour-est, douchebaggiest, and most cynical book to be published in 1934 AD, and I’m NOT forgetting Tropic Of Cancer; hey, Henry Miller may have told God off and indulged in misogyny and misanthropy in down-and-out Paris, but at least he didn’t play off having a plucky teenage girl being gang-raped, abused and sold into Chinese slavery as a big fat laugh, huh? Good ole Natty West sure did. This is a satire of Horatio Alger, with its young rube of a hero, Lemuel Pitkin, haplessly trying to save his mother and his farm, but simply getting “hilariously” exploited, trounced, beaten and eventually killed by virtually everyone else in the book, including the ex-President Shagpoke Whipple, to gruesome effect. I actually like this book a lot, and did laugh at much of it; it’s the best of West’s four works, in spite of how douchey and hateful it is; it’s also the one West work where I actually remembered what the hell happened in it after 20 years. I guess maybe just by being so douchey and pornographic, the book aged well into our time? Who knows.

Nathanael West, The Day Of The Locust (20th anniversary re-read): West’s final book, written on the eve of World War II (God knows how West would have reacted to that–but he was on the eve of his own death too, unknowingly), is also his longest book (160 pages!), his most well-known and well-regarded book, and finally, his weakest book, because next to nothing actually happens in it, at least not before the end. And it’s not the good kind of “nothing actually happens,” either, like, say, The Sun Also Rises–it’s just meandering and drab and forgettable (and boy, did I ever forget it starting around 2006 or so), up until the big bloody Hollywood riot that serves as its grand finale. That part is pretty memorable, but in order to get there you have to sit through the dull adventures of a love triangle consisting of Faye Greener, a beautiful but vapid 17 year old Hollywood starlet-wannabe; Tod Hackett, a dull failed artist; and the appropriately named Homer Simpson, an emotionally crippled Midwestern dumbass who would never stand a chance with Faye in the real world, but in this book, he’s somehow actually considered as a love interest. My other problem with the book is that it’s thought of as the quintesssential “Hollywood satire,” drawing from West’s years as a failed screenwriter, but it barely takes place in Hollywood; I know it’s part of the point that the three main characters are pathetic losers who barely stood a chance in Hollywood to begin with, but that’s a satire of losers, not “Hollywood.” Stick to the West-inspired Barton Fink instead; at least I, y’know, cared about Barton.

Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (20th anniversary re-read): This is one of the seven or eight novels I’ve had the pleasure of reading in my life that I actually adored; in 2006, I got into it so much that I read the entire thing over the course of about two days, which is about five days shorter than I spent on it this time. Its power over me has perhaps diminished slightly in two decades; it is, admittedly, a little bit one-note and repetitive, sustaining a single whiny ranting tone over the course of 274 pages; there’s also the matter that I read Roth’s 2008 novel Indignation some years back, which was also about a young Jewish man trying to navigate a WASP-y world (and WASP-y girls) that he is often at odds with, and, while it wasn’t a better book than Portnoy’s, it’s admittedly kind of a deeper one. But I digress. The book is still a hilarious five-star classic, even if all I picked up in this reading that I didn’t in any previous instance is that I paid closer attention to the part at the end where Portnoy goes to Israel to “bathe with the happy Jews,” because…well, read the headlines.

Aldous Huxley, Brief Candles (20th anniversary re-read): Sometimes there is a perverse pleasure to be found in reading books that are totally dated and that nobody cares about or has much reason to read these days. Huxley wrote a jillion books, many of them full of dated topical essays on various subjects, and God knows who’s still reading all of them. This one is three short stories and a novella. “Chawdron” is two guys having a conversation about a dead capitalist, trying to remember what he was really like. Eghn. “The Rest Cure” is about a neglected wife who goes on an affair with an Italian. Ehhh. “The Claxtons,” which I liked the best, is about a bohemian, liberal family of the period who care about art and being sensitive and don’t want to beat their kids, and their kids turn into monsters because of it. Cool! The novella is “After The Fireworks,” about 200 pages of back and forth between a persnickety, self-absorbed 50 year old intellectual and a 20 year old woman who is a pseudo-intellectual by comparison, but ultimately comes out looking like the better human being. It’s okay, but I kind of sped through it. Periodically, Huxley’s dated and egg-headed (but admittedly somewhat charming) writing style will engage the reader enough to keep the book afloat above its own time period, but only periodically. Look, I won’t lie to you people–the reason I read this book in the first place was a compulsive one: it’s because it shares its title with a Zombies song that I like.

Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (20th anniversary re-read): This book is egg-headed and stuck in its time period too, and I’d completely forgotten what happened in it, but it’s still sort of charming and funny, and at least looking around the Internet I can tell that a few people are still, y’know, reading it. It’s actually Huxley’s very first novel, written when he was 26 and published in 1921; it takes a pathetic sensitive young poet for a hero (who of course has no idea what to do with his life, and still won’t by the time the book is over) and sends him to the titular mansion, so that Huxley can parody English country-manor novels of the era, as well as the leisure-class intellectuals and dilettantes that occupy them, and their ideas. One of those ideas, as explained by a character who is probably supposed to be Bertrand Russell, is a dystopian future where the government will just breed people into certain classes and save us all time…hey, somebody should tell Aldous Huxley about that idea! Of course, the book is pretty lightweight and by no means a must-read, but it’s harmless and cute. I probably won’t ever read it a third time, though.

MOVIES:

The Central Park Five: 2012 documentary by Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah, and some other guy whose name I’ve forgotten, this details the heinous 1989 Central Park rape/near-murder of a 28 year old female jogger and the subsequent failure of the justice system, as everybody tries to find a way to blame five minority youths for the crime, which it turned out they probably didn’t commit. If you know anything about the crime beyond that, what you probably know is that our beloved God-sident took out a full page ad screaming for the five youths to be lynched (the victim, thank God, recovered and has no memory of what happened to her), and that his current supporters often still claim that the five youths committed the crime. Pretty awful. Good documentary, albeit very painful and bleak.

Lolita (1997): Adrian Lyne’s costly adaptation of the classic book ended up airing on Showtime due not only to the icky subject matter but his slightly steamy interpretation of it. Don’t tell me that this movie’s camera doesn’t spend a LOT of time leering at pretty young actress Dominique Swain (who actually, believe it or not, does a better job of playing Dolores Haze than Sue Lyon did for Kubrick!) and indeed, I found myself looking over my shoulder to make sure nobody saw me watching this for precisely that reason. It’s not a bad film though, in spite of that embarrassment, and it actually gets one thing right that the Kubrick film didn’t–it’s better at conveying the sadness of the whole situation, and isn’t that very sadness something that isn’t always discussed when people discuss the novel? Too bad that in spite of that effective sadness, the strong cinematography and the good acting from Jeremy Irons (an even more ideal Humbert than James Mason), the whole thing crash lands in the final act, where Lolita is awkwardly yanked away by Clare Quilty, the narrative fractures, the scenes with Irons charging into the hospital looking for her are pathetic, and then the last 15 minutes with Frank Langella playing Quilty are just ridiculous and weird, handled far worse than the sitcommy scenes with Peter Sellers in the original. A mixed bag, but better than I was expecting.

Disclosure Day: Swing and a miss, Spielberg. Sorry, but there’s few surprises here–yeah, old man Steven can still direct a summer movie, and older man John Williams can still score it, and…uh, Emily Blunt does pretty well, I guess…but it’s just an anachronistic X-Files chase leading up to a corny retread of Close Encounters’ “awe-inspiring” ending. Chintzy “message,” too. Not worth $115 million for its budget and not worth whatever I paid for the movie ticket and my “Bello Yellow” soda, which was themed for a different movie. I still plan on watching some of the Spielbergs I’ve missed since Lincoln this year, and rewatching some others, but this isn’t going to go down as a classic.

The Day Of The Locust: John Schlesinger’s 1975 film adaptation of the aforementioned Nathanael West novel could serve as Exhibit A in the case against the New Hollywood-auteur era, if anybody in the world actually wanted to make such a case (you shouldn’t, but if you wanted to…); it had a name director (Schlesinger), a name writer (Waldo Salt), big 70s names in the cast (Donald Sutherland, Karen Black), it had a big budget and great set work and costumes and cinematography to do a wonderful job of evoking the 1930s, and it does. But it makes the book’s flaws worse. If the book was short at 160 pages, but lacked a strong narrative, the movie, at 144 minutes, is even worse. There’s a cool scene involving the violent collapse of a Revolutionary War movie set that wasn’t in the book, and Schlesinger gets the end riot more or less right (watch Donald Sutherland gorily stomp an androgynous kid played by Jackie Earle Haley until you hear his bones crunch, gawd), but the movie wastes even more time than the book, and Sutherland’s portrayal of Homer Simpson makes him seem even more like Frankenstein’s monster than West did, and not in a good way. It also still isn’t really about Hollywood, thought it’s a bit more about that than the book is. Still, my eyes were glazing over watching this.

ALBUMS:

Michael Jackson, Bad: I guess it only makes perfect sense that Wacko Jacko (and yes, by 1987 he was already pretty well that–a LOT of the weird rumors about the guy seem to have started up in the five year gap between Thriller and Bad) would follow up the best selling album of all time by trying to Become An Artist, going for a diversity of substyles throughout the album’s running time and trying to write most of it himself, as well as marshalling the best production 1987 could afford…but Thriller is still better, because Bad is even worse (no Weird Al pun intended) than Thriller was about being a “hits plus filler” job. “The Way You Make Me Feel” is the catchiest and best song, with a hint of psychedelia in the vocal harmonies; I also got into “Smooth Criminal,” “Man In The Mirror” and maybe the title track, although the chorus sounds weirdly tinny and lifeless now, but I do like the build up with those electric piano chords. But the only one of the filler tracks I liked was the curious “Speed Demon,” and if I’m being really generous, the Stevie Wonder bit “Just Good Friends.” FUCK “Dirty Diana”–bad lyrics, lame guitars, shitty song. “Beat It” you ain’t. Not wild about “I Can’t Stop Loving You“‘s melodrama either, and the album sadly isn’t an interesting look back at 1987 production styles, either; for that, you’ll have to look to Sign O’ The Times, which, as overrated as I find that album, is still a bit better than poor ol’ Bad.

Tame Impala, Currents: So far, this is my front-runner for the best album I’ve come across in 2026; it’s all of a piece stylistically, and I’ve been told it was a stylistic change for Tame Impala and that I wasn’t supposed to start with it, but I did, and I can remember lots of individual melodies from the album despite “all of it sounding the same.” Every review says that Kevin Parker sounds like John Lennon but I’m not hearing it, I’m hearing Jack Tatum from Wild Nothing atop a bunch of retro VHS-era sounding synthesizers. I pick the short “Disciples” as the best track (and where have I HEARD it before? I know that I’ve heard it somewhere!), but “The Less I Know The Better” and most of the eight minute “Let It Happen” aren’t far behind. Really though I liked, to varying degrees, just about every song barring “Love/Paranoia”–it’s a cool sound, one I found easy to like. So it looks like I will do the rest of this band’s catalogue–five albums? A couple EPs? Shouldn’t take too long. Good stuff, even if I missed it in 2015 (but saw that cool cover art so many times that I knew I was missing something!)

Pretty Things, Silk Torpedo: This is from 1974, and by this time almost all vestiges of the 1960s that once adorned this British Invasion band were gone, leaving a slightly faceless but still entertaining (and very underrated) early 70s AOR act in its place. Ever heard “Bridge Of God”? It goes “cross, the bridge-of-God, cross the bridge!” and it’s really catchy and fun. So are “Maybe You Tried” and the epic closer “Belfast Cowboys,” as well as, lemme get my list, “Dream/Joey,” “Is It Only Love,” “Come Home Mamma” and the wonderfully titled “Singapore Silk Torpedo.” It’s not formulaic, either–these guys get into a few different styles within that 70s AOR framework. Sure, you’d have no idea they were the S. F. Sorrow guys, or any other guys at all, just “70s guys”–but still, this album was really good and it sucks that only good old Georgiy Sergeyevich Starostin bothered to defend it. Go check it out, it’s seriously underrated bros!!!!

Bob Dylan, Saved: Whelp…uh, since I love “Final Theme” and “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and don’t love anything on this album…yeah, this would be the worst Bob Dylan album, all right. Or at least that I’ve heard so far. Hell, I probably loved about as much of Dylan from 1973, and that has an even worse reputation than Saved. “Covenant Woman,” “What Can I Do For You?,” “Pressing On” and “In The Garden” are sort of okay while they’re playing, but there are no classic songs on the album, and…well, really, these just sound like Bob Dylan singing a bunch of melodically-generic gospel songs. Not something painful to listen to at all, mind you, but hey, neither was Jethro Tull’s Rock Island. I also can’t think of anything interesting to say about Saved at all, which is fitting, because few major music magazines of the time reviewed it either. Moving on?

Simple Minds, Empires And Dance: This is actually kind of good–it’s actually a concept album too, albeit one few people seem to have noticed from its era (1980). The cover art has a statue of a Soviet general crossing his arms, and the title uses backwards letters like the Cyrillic alphabet, and indeed the sound of this album IS “empires and dance,” as in a combination of rock with “dance” (not necessarily “disco”) rhythms, and chord sequences and sounds meant to evoke, indeed, Russia, or at least Eastern Europe. It’s not bad!! Go check out “Thirty Frames A Second” for the one big classic from the album, but if you like that, by all means, there’s about six or seven other songs here that do something similar! It’s no masterpiece and gets a bit numbing after awhile, but I can’t think of much of anything else that sounded like it. Have you people heard this album? It sounds like it should have a bigger reputation than it does.

Cardiacs, Heaven Born And Ever Bright: From 1992, this third Cardiacs album has been discussed by just about nobody (George aside), probably because it’s not terribly good; the only changes Tim Smith and company were making to their KoOkY CaRnIvAl post-punk prog-rock sound was to add layers of hammering chugging metallic guitars onto some songs. Oh, and a choir on the opening epic, “The Alphabet Business Concern.” I slightly liked that song, as well as the second to last song, “Day Is Gone,” and a track called “Anything I Can’t Eat,” which is good despite being very hard to tell apart from about four other songs on this album that all do kind of the same thing. And I’m still not getting into that kooky carnival sound much, either. Inexplcably, Wikipedia says Tim Smith thought this was their best album. Why?

T. Rex, Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow: Despite my huge love for T. Rex (and Tyrannosaurus Rex!), it’s been 20 years since I got into them and during that time I simply never bothered with Bolan’s final four albums, released between 1974 and 1977 and almost always written off as inferior to the glam-rock glory years of 1971-73. Well, those non-accolades have proven to be pretty much true, if this 1974 album is any indication–if Tanx was Marc Bolan and Tony Visconti responding to charges that T. Rex were just silly variations on the same boogie rocker and wide-eyed ballad over and over again by incorporation cool new ideas and instruments into the typical T. Rex sound, Zinc Alloy is…well, what Tanx would be if it was really weak and lame and gasping for ideas. And that’s it–“gasping,” if not quite “dead.” Who cares, Marc, if you’re going to get this cool new phased guitar tone if you’re just going to do an obvious rewrite of the “Thunderwing” strut with it (“Nameless Wildness”)? And yeah, this really is just more glam rock–if you read anything about the album (and there’s not much written about it) you’re going to read that Bolan claimed glam rock was over with and that he wanted to try some sort of new black funk-soul sound....but he failed miserably, like an alcoholic who couldn’t put the glam bottle away. “Venus Loon,” the spacy “Galaxy,” the dead-eyed ballad “The Leopards” and (I guess) the “hit,” “Teenage Dream” are memorable, though that last one is just “Rabbit Fighter” crossed with “Left Hand Luke”–see what I mean? Oh, and that slow descending chord sequence that Bolan’s already tried 300 times by now? He does that about seven or eight times on this album, too. Bolan’s marriage broke up (he instead married his backup singer Gloria Jones, who provides very annoying vocals on some of these songs as opposed to the good ones Bolan gout of the Exile On Main Street girls), he got into drugs and drinking, he got fat from eating junk food and chicken instead of veggies, he moved to Monte Carlo where nobody apparently knew who he was, he got bad reviews for this album, the album didn’t sell, he stopped releasing T Rex albums in America (right?), he split with Tony Visconti…all around this time, an even worse meltdown than what the Kinks were going through in the same era, but you never hear about it with Bolan, because nobody cares about this album, and neither do I.

Frank Zappa, Sleep Dirt: Not bad jazzy/instrumental stuff, it was supposed to be called Hot Rats III but it’s actually better than Hot Rats, IMO–there’s nothing as good as “Peaches En Regalia” here, but there’s also nothing as boring as “Willie The Pimp” or “Gumbo Variations.” “Filthy Habits,” “Flambay,” “Regyptian Strut” and the 13 minute “Ocean Is the Ultimate Solution” all have enough good moments to make more than half this album an interesting listen, albeit not a mind blower. I don’t know how much I’ll revisit it–it’s just okay–but given how sick I am of mediocre 70s Zappa album after mediocre 70s Zappa album in the last couple of years, this was sort of a pleasant surprise.