BOOKS:

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (20th Anniversary RE-READ): I still think this is a classic book and I’d take it over Lolita and Ada but it does have one strike against it that I took special note of now that I’m 43: for all the interest that comes with the concept, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the actual details of Charles Kinbote’s bullshit-exegesis fall out of a lot of people’s heads once they’re done reading the book. I mean, this is my third time reading it, and it’s not even a particularly long book, but while reading it, I realized I’d forgotten just about all of it twice. I didn’t even remember that Kinbote was gay (and it’s not a buried theme!), or that Gradus was stupid and incompetent, or the actual details of what happens between Shade, Kinbote and Gradus at the very end of the book, to name but a few examples. I do not mean in the slightest to suggest that the book is a sort of glorified novelty, although I bet a lot of people do miss the big theme (immortality through art) and just read it as that way, a really cool proto-postmodern novelty book. Which it isn’t. But if I read it a fourth time, don’t be surprised if I admit to having forgotten what happens in it three times.

Arthur Koestler, Darkness At Noon (20th Anniversary RE-READ): While reading reviews of this anti-commie classic, I found out that all existing versions of it are based off of a hastily-done English translation by Koestler’s girlfriend; the “real” version was discovered hidden away somewhere in 2015. I read this in 2006, and it’s the same copy I read back then, so I guess I haven’t read the real book. Still, it must have made quite an impression in 1940–and Koestler himself was a German communist up until 1938, so his disillusion must have been a few years in the making! It’s a pretty great delineation of the mindset of a protagonist who followed the Communist way hook line and sinker, even getting his colleagues imprisoned and executed, but of course he starts having second thoughts once he’s imprisoned himself. All I really remembered from my 2006 reading was that he spends a lot of time tapping out messages on his prison walls with his pince-nez to his next door neighbors, but the book is still pretty quietly terrifying as he approaches execution. The final two sentences in particular struck me as being among the best depictions of death in any novel, even if they’re very similar to depictions in a lot of other books.

MOVIES:

Portnoy’s Complaint: The 1972 film version of the classic Philip Roth sex-a-thon, you’ve probably heard that this is terrible, and that’s if you’ve heard of it at all. Honestly, though, it’s not really that awful. It’s just that as a book, a guy relating a bunch of sexual misadventures and Jewish-identity anguish doesn’t translate all that well to screen. Richard Benjamin seems like a nice choice to play Portnoy–his manner is a bit subdued compared to the super-whiny Portnoy of the book, but otherwise he makes sense. Karen Black, however, as the dumb redneck “monkey” girlfriend, is such a sadly obvious casting choice that I’m starting to wonder if any other actress was ever even asked to play miserable floozies in the early 1970s. The character of Portnoy’s mother is an epic fail on screen compared to the book, though, and that’s going to have to be a pretty big strike against the film–I don’t think there’s a bigger Jewish Mother in fiction than Sophie Portnoy. The movie just ends up being kind of a generic 70s sex comedy after awhile. Only see if it you’re completely obsessed with the book, like I was. But it’s not awful.

The Odyssey: Yeah, sure, whatever. I already made a post about this, go find it, it’s not like I’ve changed my opinion in the last few weeks. If I were ranking the Nolan films this would probably be like eighth or ninth. The controversies surrounding it are completely stupid, but I’m not sure what I would point to in it that’s particularly amazing, and the Circe bit is really dumb.

The Basketball Diaries: More of that 1995 edginess that I missed out on the first time around....but this movie’s day in the sun really was quite a long time ago, and it stuck around less because Leonardo DiCaprio was in it (I mean, he was in Total Eclipse and Don’s Plum too, are people still talking about those?) than because of that notorious proto-Columbine dream sequence where he puts on a trenchcoat and shotguns a bunch of his classmates. Honestly, the young DiCaprio is the only particularly strong thing about this film anyway, and that’s just because of his ability to carry a film as a lead–who would ever believe a scrawny 20 year old who looks like he’s 12 and has twigs for arms as a basketball star anyway? Did Jim Carroll himself have twigs for arms? His acting isn’t bad though, except for a scene where he’s wacked out on drugs and breaks down crying in front of his mom; it’s reminiscent of that scene in Anchorman where Will Ferrell squalls in a phone booth that he’s in a glass cage of emotion. As for the rest of it…it seems to be taking place in the early 90s, even though the book was published in 1978 and would have taken place around fucking 1966! Oh, and Mark Wahlberg is really bad too, but it’s not like you couldn’t have guessed.

Hackers: 1995 strikes yet again…but this was a disappointment. I was hoping for it to be hilariously, miserably dated, and sadly, it’s really not. It seems pretty obvious that whoever wrote the screenplay didn’t know very much about computers and the director (he directed BackBeat, remember that?) just has lots of techspeak and people typing really fast to simulate hacking activities, but that’s par for the course with the movies. The 90s fashions, dialogue, and music haven’t aged as badly as most reviews of this film would have you believe. The hot young cast, though, could have been used better–Jonny Lee Miller’s American accent is shaky, Angelina Jolie was hot but didn’t indicate that much talent, and the best performance in the film somehow ends up being goofy old Fisher Stevens, playing the goateed hacker villain, “The Plague.” And the Neuromancer-derived trips through cyberspace? A bunch of cameras coursing through 3D cities with data crawling up the sides of “buildings,” like a 1995 version of TRON. A disappointment, I wanted some real cheese here and I didn’t get it.

ALBUMS:

Cardiacs, Sing To God: Well, this certainly was a pleasant surprise–since I’m not into this band’s kooky-carnival-prog style and had gotten increasingly diminishing returns out of their first three albums, I was all set to completely despise their big overblown double-album statement…but it’s actually likely to be the best thing the Cardiacs ever did. Why? Because the first half of the album isn’t just the best music I’ve heard from them so far, it’s also stunningly accessible and memorable. You’ve got memorable metallic riffage like “Eat It Up Worm Hero” and “Fiery Gun Hand,” GOOD carnival-prog stuff like “Insect Hoofs On Lassie” and “Dog-Like Sparky,” eerie Gentle Giant atmospherics like “Fairy Mary Mag”…really, the first half is nigh near spotless up until the two big nine-minute songs that mark the halfway point, “Wireless” and “Dirty Boy.” After the super-overblown conclusion of “Dirty Boy,” where the band drags things out for like three minutes…well, that should have been the end of the album actually (and sounds like it was originally intended to be!), because the second half of the album is distinctly, thoroughly inferior to the first. Which is about the most maddeningly predictable, cliched flaw any double album could ever have, is that. So I’m only giving this a moderate thumbs up, with the downside being a completely traditional and obvious reason, rather than the reasons I was planning on hating the album for. Isn’t life strange?

Michael Jackson, Dangerous: You know what the main kind of song on this album is? It’s a dark, minor-key, neon-tinged throbber based around those “boom, THOCK…boom-THOCK” beats (drum machine? electronic drums? should I ask?) with bitter lyrics. “Jam!,” “Why You Wanna Trip On Me,” “She Drives Me Wild,” “Remember The Time,” “In The Closet,” “Dangerous”…they’re all of a piece, it seems, and they comprise maybe 40-45 minutes of this miserably overlong, overstuffed 76 minute album that few people probably really consider to be a big epic masterpiece anymore, or ever did. I do sort of like those songs, though–they conjure up a post-80s vibe that I can muse over a bit, whereas Jacko’s Save The Children anthems all blow, blow, blow. “Heal The World” is a genuine zero-star fuckflop, sounding like a Simpsons or South Park parody, only if it were dead serious. Probably the worst Michael Jackson song ever, and probably one of the worst songs ever, period. “Will You Be There” meanwhile does this sort of rising-chord-sequence thing that I would have liked, but Wacko Jacko ruins it with his spoken-word confessional towards the end that is utter unintentional self-parody, like when Eddie Murphy imitated Jacko crying in Delirious. I sort of like the Slash song, I’m not sure, and “Black Or White” has a fun pop guitar riff that it sort of beats to death after a few minutes. The real weakness of the album really just amounts to its length; chop 25 minutes and we’d be in acceptable territory, as Dangerous is a more interesting statement about 1991-92 than Bad was about 1987…which brings me to what the album says about Michael Jackson himself. Namely, that he was paranoid as hell and starting to fall apart mentally due to the sheer strain of being The Most Famous Person Who Ever Lived, and you can go back and read the reviews from 1991-92, nearly every one of which mentions this facet of the album’s lyrics. I’m not surprised in retrospect that the kid scandal and the Super Bowl disaster happened the following year–those reviews prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that critics, and lots of the public at large, where getting their knives sharpened for Wacko Jacko, and the 1993 scandals simply popped the balloon.

Simple Minds, New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84): If you’re like me and were curious about Simple Minds because you’ve got some huge embarrassing nostalgic soft spot for that song they did from The Breakfast Club that everybody knows…well, this is probably where they started to sound like they were aiming for the John Hughes soundtrack era, abandoning the Euro-flavored dance-rock of their 1980-81 work for a stately pop-elegance that reminded me a bit, in terms of mentality, of XTC (albeit not sonically). They’ve got those early 80s synths alright–no way could anyone hear “Promised You A Miracle,” one of the better cuts, and not know right away that they’re somewhere between 1982 and 1985, or the sawing keyboards and drive of the excellent, anthemic title track, possibly their best song. “Glittering Prize” sticks out really well too, but most of it’s good, if a bit annoyingly drawn out (this was a problem with XTC in 1982 as well, but this album smokes English Settlement, if you ask me.) Looking up articles on the album reveals that Jim Kerr and company seem to consider this their best work, and I would be willing to recommend it as well.

Codeine, Frigid Stars LP: When I first heard this 1991 underground cult favorite (at least, I think it’s a cult favorite), I thought it was some sort of a Slint ripoff due to the slow, dead-sounding guitars, spoken-word vocals and general strung-out 3AM mood…but Frigid Stars actually predates Spiderland by about two months. And that album was “post-rock,” whereas this one is “slowcore”–very dead sounding and tired, without the creepy vibes of much of the Slint album. At any rate, it’s ultimately not-half-bad, albeit one you have to have a lot of patience for. The best tracks are the deathly “Pickup Song” and the pretty, major-key (but still really, really TIRED sounding) “New Year’s.” Maybe I should be a drug addict before trying to listen to it?

Bob Dylan, Shot Of Love: More like, “Shot Of POP.” Since Saved didn’t really have a single remotely catchy or memorable tune on it, Bob must have been paying enough attention to his terrible reviews of the day to try to get back on the radio, or something–I really do see some commercial potential in the first half of this album. Preach all you like, but “Property Of Jesus” is really catchy, and that’s one of the songs Bob got slagged for the most here. “Lenny Bruce” is sort of baffling lyrically (not the first time Bob penned an inexplicable ode to an odious character) but I like the vibe of it. “Shot Of Love,” “Heart Of Mine” and “Watered-Down Love” have their moments too. The album quickly falls apart with an unmemorable second half though, so it’s not like it’s a great or even particularly good album. And I’m not sure what to make of the final track, “Every Grain Of Sand,” which seems to be Bob trying for his classic elegiac album closers like “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands,” but that simple guitar arpeggio gets kinda tiresome before the end, doesn’t it?

Frank Zappa, Studio Tan: This fucking sucks. Probably the worst Zappa album I’ve ever heard, and not only am I slogging through this turd at a time when I’m starting to seriously wonder why I even bothered with his second-tier catalogue, but I’m not even a fan of some of the alleged classics, like Absolutely Free and Weasels Ripped My Flesh. And this? Well, it’s got a 21 minute shitfest called “The Adventures Of Greggary Peccary” which is the Zappa equivalent of Pink Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother,” a complete disaster of which not a single minute is good, and everything bad about Zappa comes to the forefront: inane “surreal humor” lyrics, boring complex instrumental sections that you can’t remember after hearing them 20 times, and those goddamn rococo vibraphones. The worst Zappa song ever. As for the rest, only “RDNZL” approaches good. I can’t find much of anybody who agrees with me, but why would I even care? Turd, turd, turd.

The Pretty Things, The Pretty Things: Their 1965 debut album. Meaning, it’s a British Invasion album from 1965. If you’ve heard any of the other British Invasion albums from 1965 that weren’t My Generation or Rubber Soul, then you don’t need to hear this one; it offers literally nothing that you couldn’t get on Kinda Kinks, Out Of Our Heads, The Magnificent Moodies, etc.; of the few reviews I could find, some claimed that Dick Taylor and company were being “harder-edged” than the other Invasion bands, but I’m not hearing it. Just the usual hastily-recorded truckload of tinny guitar-rave-ups and blues/R&B covers that you already know from all the other stuff. I already can’t remember a note of it; the best I can say for it is that isn’t painful to listen to, just really forgettable. But you all know my stance on “really forgettable” these days, right?

T. Rex, Bolan’s Zip Gun: Hilarious fun fact: this album didn’t even chart in the UK when it came out. Can you believe that? T. Rextasy was still going strong just two years earlier in 1973, when Marc Bolan released what is probably the last good T. Rex album, Tanx. And it took just two years for Bolan to fall off the charts like Spinal Tap? So trends back in the mid 1970s died just as fast as they do now in our “digital age”? Huh. If you’ve even heard of this album, you probably know it’s typically considered the weakest T. Rex album, and it vies with Zinc Alloy indeed for that title…but Marc Bolan probably couldn’t make a truly failed album if he tried, because 99 percent of what he wrote was catchy short pop-rock songs based on simple chord progressions. “Light Of Love,” “Token Of My Love” and “Zip Gun Boogie” are all decent, if you want song titles. But no, the odds of me listening to the full album ever again are pretty nil, and it’s indeed a weak album, if not a complete zero.