BOOKS:

William Faulkner, The Sound And The Fury (20th Anniversary RE-READ): My memories of reading this in 2006 are so vague and ephemeral as to be genuinely ghostly. I wish I could go back in time and re-read my brain as it experiences the confusion of reading such a difficult book for the first time. As I recall, I decided to go ahead and read the book twice in a row per Brian’s advice and I think I used a guide to get through the first two parts of it. It’s very difficult to remember what that was really like…but the book either took on the second or third read-through and I planned on re-reading it every year, but I only think I read it maybe four times back in the day. Here’s what I forgot as a result of not re-reading the book for about 15 years:
-Benjy’s section: That Benjy was responsible for his family finding out about his uncle Maury having an affair because he…misdelivered a letter or something?
-Quentin’s section: That Quentin finds a little lost Italian girl and tries to return her, only to get beaten up by her family. That he tried to convince his miserable drunkdard of a father that he actually had had incest with Caddy.
-Jason’s section: That Jason has a mistress, and that Miss Quentin ran off with a sum of his money that would be astronomical today, if adjusted for inflation it’d be tens of thousands of dollars.
-The final section: The bit with Jason getting into a fight with a guy at a…carnival, was it? The book’s ending isn’t really the strongest part of it.
-2026: I think I’d pick Quentin’s section as the best of the four now; in the past, it was probably Jason’s, just because he was such a memorable asshole, and while Benjy’s section is the hardest to read, it’s mostly just about setup. All the modernist trickery and stream of consciousness and POV-shifting really is necessary to help make this a great book; slowly figuring out what’s really going on with the Compsons and piecing the story together obviously makes it a far deeper and more rewarding book than if Faulkner hadn’t tried any of that stuff, and in the hands of a lesser writer, the Quentin section, for example, might even seem stupid–when you think about it, what he kills himself over is pretty pathetic and stupid. But Faulkner elevates it. (Another thing that could have been a disaster was the depiction of the Compson parents, both of whom would be cartoon characters in the hands of a lesser writer.) I don’t know if this will be the last time I read this book but it remains one of the handful of five-star classics I’ve absorbed and mercifully always will.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (20th Anniversary RE-READ): This is my third time reading this; I didn’t care much for it the first time and recalled liking it even less the second time a few years later, in part because I found several other Vonnegut books that were far, far better. This time around I couldn’t much work up the nerve to really dislike it, but it’s still plainly obvious to me that Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast Of Champions, Mother Night, Welcome To The Monkey House and The Sirens Of Titan, to name a few, are all better. The “so it goes” gag gets tiresome far before the end of what isn’t even a very long book anyway (and I get that that’s probably part of the point, but still); the scenes of heartless wartime death and catastrophe (the obvious soul of the book) have been done better elsewhere, and the “unstuck in time” stuff simply means that you get the aforementioned carnage awkwardly bouncing back and forth with the main character’s silly adventures with a pornstar on an alien planet. These are the complains I’ve always had about the book, and a lot of its content simply doesn’t stick in the mind anyway (I didn’t even remember after two other readings that the main character–who isn’t interesting at all in and of himself, BTW–had kids and a pathetic wife.) I plan on re-reading Cat’s Cradle next year, which was his best, but that’s far more certain to hold up than this.

MOVIES:

Bridge Of Spies: I’m going to clear out some post-Lincoln Spielberg movies before the end of 2026. It starts out compellingly, with Tom Hanks having to be his usual liberal-guy-who-stands-up-for-justice as he deals with the slings and arrows of having to defend an alleged Communist spy, and that’s more compelling than the later parts of the movie, like when Hanks goes to East Germany. The most effective scene in the movie is an action scene, of all things–Spielberg using CGI to stage Francis Gary Powers bailing out of the U2 plane as it’s shot down. Breathtaking, but feels like it belongs in a different movie. This is not bad for what it is, but it’s not likely to be something I revisit much.

The Sound And The Fury: Made by James Franco–who I wouldn’t write off completely, because he’s done stuff like The Disaster Artist which was really good–in 2014, when he was in the middle of his half-assed arty phase where he directed Southern Gothic literary adaptations and films based on missing scenes from William Friedkin’s Cruising, wrote a novel, cohosted the Oscars, got photographed sleeping through his classes while going for a Ph.D, appeared on General Hospital…pretty much a negative evil twin of Matthew McConaughey’s “McConnaissance.” As I recall, nobody respected him for much of any of this stuff, so my expectations for this film were low, but I had to satisfy my curiosity. Actually, this starts off decently, with Franco himself playing Benjy and doing a lot of the book’s time-shifts better than you’d think, and setting up a good story. Then there’s the Quentin section, where a not-very-good actor playing Quentin proves me right when I was talking about the book earlier in this post, that Quentin’s problems look like the 1910 equivalent of emo teen bullshit if not pulled off correctly. The Jason sections are just boring and the movie, which actually could have been good, limps to its end. You probably didn’t see this–for all I know, the number of people who did see it isn’t even in the six figures–but you don’t have to.

Kids: The last of the “lost edgy 1995 movies” that I plan on watching this year. I have very little to say about it; only three things really come to mind:
1)The main character, played by that kid who went on to play the white junkie on The Wire, looks so much like McLovin from Superbad_that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that that’s how the McLovin actor got the job in that movie. Seriously, they’re like the EXACT same person, except for McLovin wearing glasses.
2)I don’t care for this film much, really, but people who revile it often seemed to be reacting to the reaction to the movie, rather than the movie itself. Or their own disgust for movie critics. There was a pretty thriving indie scene in 1995, but I wonder what the first movie to have this problem really was.
3)I have always had two big criticisms about teen films–one is that they cast photogenic 27 year olds as high schoolers, the other is that screenwriters write dialogue that makes kids far too wordy and literate to be actual kids. This movie has neither problem, but the dialogue, by barely-out-of-high-school-himself Harmony Korine, was so repetitive and dumb and primitive that it has me _wishing the movie had committed the Hollywood sin of making kids too verbose; now I see why movies have to do that shit.

ALBUMS:

Tame Impala, Lonerism: This band’s sophomore effort was produced by Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann, and between the falsetto vocals, vintage 1970s/80s synthesizer fixation, and general la-la-land feel, its like Kevin Parker was waiting for the Flaming Lips to drop the torch so he could pick it up? (The Lips weren’t done yet–The Terror came out a year after this, and that’s a terrific album…but if Tame Impala were aping the Lips here, it’s telling that the best Lips song after 2013–“How?,” from 2016–sounds suspiciously like the Lips aping Tame Impala!) But really, working backwards through their catalogue, this is just Currents before Parker dropped the guitars, and even then, there aren’t that many guitars any way and the synths are still clearly the front-and-center of their sound. It’s a pretty good album, too–“Making Mischief” and “Why Won’t They Talk To Me?” are the classics, but I’d also go to bat for “Endors Toi,” “Apocalypse Dreams,” “Feels LIke We Only Go Backwards,” “Keep On Lying,” and the dark piano of the closing track, “Sun’s Coming Up.” Perversely, the most guitar-driven track, “Elephant,” struck me as one of the weakest, though most critics loved it; most critics also think Parker sounds like John Lennon, but he doesn’t sound like Lennon to me much at all. They also keep saying that Tame Impala sounds “60s,” but they’re even more 70s-aping than the Flaming Lips! Hell, “Endors Toi” sounds like friggin’ Todd Rundgren 70s synth stuff like “Spark Of Life” or “Flamingo,” and Rundgren apparently even turned up to remix a song for these guys! So far these guys are 2 for 2 with me; I hope to finish their discography by the end of 2026.

Michael Jackson, HIStory: The Super Bowl halftime show had bombed, the child-molesting allegations had begun, the Jarvis Cocker public mockery happened. Michael Jackson, as a human being, might as well have been done by 1995, but I guess he wasn’t entirely finished as a musician. This is overlong and his save-the-world ballads are even worse than usual, but I can’t really truly write it off–honestly, it’s just more Dangerous-type stuff, a bit long in tooth for the mid-90s (what, was Wacko Jacko supposed to go industrial metal on us?) but not as bad as it should have been. I confess to liking “Scream,” “Money,” “This Time Around,” “Stranger In Moscow” (stunningly mature ballad!), the bombastic ending of “Earth Song,” the bombastic entirety of “HIStory,” and the novelty of Michael Jackson singing Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile.” There’s still plenty of questionable material–“D. S.” should be good, but what’s with that hideous, clipped, “I Can’t Dance”-era Genesis-style guitar riff doing there? “Come Together” is one of the worst Beatles cover ever, and apparently dates to 1986…why now, Jacko? “Childhood,” the R. Kelly collaboration “You Are Not Alone” (how terrific is it that the world forgot about these two sexual deviants working together?), the icky “Little Susie,” and…well, you know. Historically, this pretty marks the end of the run for Wacko Jacko and unlike his others it doesn’t seem to have a song that the public still digs up to play for future generations…

T. Rex, Futuristic Dragon: This album not only has no business being as good as it is, it had no business being good at all: not only was Marc Bolan washed up, bloated, drugged, and rocketing to the bottom of the charts, but he wasn’t even bothering to try and progress his sound anymore; sonically, this is interchangeable with the 1971-73 hit albums. But he still came up with lots of second-tier hooks, this is like one of the best “album full of second tier songs” albums I can think of. The weird-chorded soul-rocker “Ride My Wheels” is a genuine small classic from Mr. Bolan and I’ll also list “Jupiter Liar,” “Laser Love,” “Life’s An Elevator,” “Sensation Boulevard,” “New York City,” “Chrome Sitar,” “Theme For A Dragon”…who knows when I’ll listen to any of these songs again, but they’re all pleasant while the album’s playing, and far better than the two post-Tanx bombs that preceded it. I really must love Marc Bolan for this album not to be a pile of shit, but it’s not.

Bob Dylan, Infidels: If you know anything about this 1983 Bob album you probably know that 1)it has a “rediscovering Judaism” theme with references to Israel and Zion, 2)Mick Taylor and Mark Knopfler play the guitars on it, and 3)it’s one of the most notorious examples of great songs being recorded for an album and then being left off the album. “Jokerman,” “Sweetheart Like You,” “I And I” and the critically reviled Israel tune “Neighborhood Bully” are the ones I liked, but the dark and beautiful “Blind Willie McTell” easily beats them all. Maybe the album closer is good too, I seem to have this thing with Bob’s album closers and not being sure how much I like them or not. Put “McTell” on the album and it’d easily go up a point or even two. As it is, it’s just another middling, listenable Bob album that I can’t think that many people own or talk about anymore. NOTE: some reviews, like George’s, viciously trashed the production, as if Bob had gotten into a bunch of 1983 drum machines and Casio aerobics synthesizers. It sounds a little plastic, but hardly like Bob was getting into bad trends. These people have the fever!

Simple Minds, Sons And Fascination/Sister Feeling Call: A confusingly-issued/titled “double album” from 1981, with various releases including Sister Feelings Call as a sort of second disc, and some without. All of it was recorded at the same time, though, so whatever. It’s a dance-rock hybrid just like Empires And Dance was, but without that album’s Eastern European-sounding chord sequences and allusions to communism. I really liked those Eastern Europeanisms, though, so this isn’t as good an album as that one, and now the “dance” aspects mostly amount to pulsing/sawing synths, like a Euro version of ZZ Top’s Eliminator synths. Seriously, it’s not that far off! It’s also a wearying album–17 songs done in this style can get pretty damn old after awhile, though they do manage a pretty good batting average for most of the first half. The big highlights are the stadium-ready “Love Song,” the queasy “Sweat In Bullet” (most songs on this album have hideously awkward titles, except “Love Song,” duhhrrr) and later on, the tense “Wonderful In Young Life.” There’s a few other good ones, but they hardly needed a double album, so this would have to have about 30 minutes trimmed out of it in order to not be a mediocrity. Sadly, they didn’t really do that.

Cardiacs, Guns: Dammit. They blew it. Just when I was starting to like these guys, they followup their overblown half-great double album epic with…a plain-vanilla Cardiacs album that doesn’t seem to have any stylistic progression from before, so it’s about as weak as Heaven Born And Ever Bright, which also didn’t progress. There’s one great song, the surging “Signs,” so it’s not all weak, but elsewhere, only two or three songs stuck out of the usual morass to me. A particular failure is the awful 7 minute “Jitterbug (Junior Is A),” which drags on into a seemingly endless go-nowhere atmospheric swamp. And what’s with the stupid Van Der Graaf Generator song titles? This band pisses me off, bruh.

The Pretty Things, Get The Picture?: The Pretties’ second album of 1965 is actually a significant improvement over the forgettable “1965 formula” of the first. They actually expanded their sound, and fast! “You Don’t Believe Me,” “Can’t Stand The Pain,” “You’ll Never Do It, Baby,” “I Had A Dream,” and “I Want Your Love” are all pretty good, worthy of The Who Sings My Generation. Alas, it’s still not a great album by any means, just surprising for 1965. If you hunt this one down, make sure that you listen to the bonus tracked version, so that you don’t miss “Midnight To Six Man” and “L. S. D.,” with the “L” replaced with the British currency symbol to keep the band out of trouble.

Frank Zappa, Orchestral Favorites: Pret-ty lame, Milhouse. I sort of liked “Duke Of Prunes” but that was already on Absolutely Free, an album I don’t like anymore. And I don’t even remember if I like this version better than the old one. “Bogus Pomp” doesn’t work, and that’s 13 minutes of your time, right there. Another one of Zappa’s really weak throwaways. Man I’m getting sick of this stuff.