BOOKS:

Bernard Malamud, The Assistant: A decent fable, this book about the Jewish-American experience in 1950s Brooklyn seems more notable for being one of the more brutally downcast and depressing books I’ve read–I don’t ever remember Philip Roth or Saul Bellow getting this bitter about life, probably because they were both too busy being funny. It’s about a failing Jewish grocer and his failing family, and he gets robbed and beaten only to have one of the robbers show up and try to get a job working for him. The ex-robber, who is Italian, then tries to romance the grocer’s daughter while at the same time stealing from the cash register. I suppose the ex-robber is one one of the more compellingly realistic and complex characters of his time, but the book sort of gets worse as it goes along, piling on punishing soap-opera plot twists and far too many embarrassing incidents, along with lots and lots and LOTS AND LOTS of whining about how bad life is. The final scene in the book seems to play like a brutal joke. I read this because it was short and made the TIME 20th century 100-best-novels list, without knowing much about Malamud to begin with (he wrote The Natural, if you didn’t know.) Malamud at least reads well, so if you’ve read his other major books, let me know if they’re good.

TELEVISION:

Saturday Night Live (Season 1, 1975-76): I can’t call this masterful, because I don’t think I would ever end up calling any season of SNL masterful; obviously some seasons/eras of SNL would be better than others, but it’s no shock that the inconsistency that has always been the show’s Achilles’ heel would be baked into its existence from the very beginning. These days, lame SNL filler sketches are likely to be the usual “somebody acts crazy at a family dinner”-type flop, or lame pop culture references; in 1975-76, the junk consisted of terrible bits involving the Muppets that were never once interesting, boring forgettable grainy films made by Gary Reis and Albert Brooks, and the low point, a hideously unfunny stand-up comedy spot for young Billy Crystal that consisted of him imitating a black guy and saying “can you dig it? I knew that you could” something like 20 times. The best bits are stuff I’d have already seen on video compilations–John Belushi doing Joe Cocker, “Samurai Delicatessen” and the Godfather at therapy, Dan Aykroyd’s “metric alphabet” bit, Andy Kaufman doing Mighty Mouse in the first episode, and Weekend Update. Be advised that even then they often only got a hit sketch right the first time; none of the other Samurai bits were as funny as that one, and Andy Kaufman’s other appearances were diminishing returns. Whatever the case, at least they seemed to be mostly aiming for adults; compare the bawdy sexual humor from 1975 to the gross-out juvenalia you’d get at any point in the last 35 years, and you probably won’t be surprised. I suppose the experimental see-what-sticks-to-the-wall approach helped a lot with making the lesser stuff go down by giving the show a revolutionary sense of historical importance, but it also might have helped that countless sketchs are about a minute long or less. It’s also weird that most episodes didn’t seem to be asking much of their hosts, one of whom was Gerald Ford’s press secretary. It’s well known that Chevy Chase was the big breakout star that first season, but I didn’t know that most of his schtick was punctuated by a lot of nervousness that he wouldn’t draw on later (certainly one would not have easily been able to tell that Chevy was a dick in real life; maybe he just wasn’t one yet.) I would be willing to watch the rest of the 1970s seasons all the way through; this was not mind-blowingly classic, but it was at least more bad than good.

MOVIES:

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues: As I said to Ken, I was the only one in the theater to see this. That’s depressing. More depressing than how old these guys are. Or that virtually nobody in the world is going to love this or think it’s a classic; some people have said that it played like a glorified DVD extra, which is amusing because This Is Spinal Tap has some of the best DVD extras ever. I liked the female drummer, at least. And I didn’t hate the movie. But if you’re going to go see it, it’s best to lower your expectations, for sure.

One-Eyed Jacks: Cult 1961 Western directed by Marlon Brando, who also directed it after he clashed with Stanley Kubrick who was fired. Sam Peckinpah also worked on the original screenplay. It’s about Brando and Karl Malden as two outlaws who try to commit a robbery and Malden more or less gives Brando away to end up in a Mexican prison; five years later he gets out and starts looking for vengeance, finds Malden as a sheriff in a new town, and starts an affair with his Mexican stepdaughter. Some of the cinematography in this is really nice, but Brando’s performance is inconsistent; he comes across as threatening in scenes such as when he beats up Timothy Carey in a bar, and he does his usual brooding, but he also blows mumbly pulp lines like “now get up, you stinkin’ tub o’guts.” The real stinkeroo with the film is its snail-paced 140 minute length, which was edited down from Brando’s original “vision” of five fucking hours, which makes it sound like poor ol’ Marlon didn’t really know what he was doing (in fact, a lot of people point to this as the point when Brando started to turn into a crazy crazy.) A few of the nastier scenes do have some bite, like when Malden crushes Brando’s hand in a public square, but the movie is mostly just really bland and overlong and I honestly don’t understand the cult surrounding it (the title is supposed to refer to duplicity and complex human nature, which doesn’t much come across.) The cult surrounding this movie can have it. Me, I just hope The Missouri Breaks is better.

Galveston: Another Ben Foster movie, directed by the blonde French girl from Inglorious Basterds and based on a book by True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto, who disowned this film. Foster is a hitman working for a gangster played by Beau Bridges, who double crosses him by sending him on a mission where he’s going to get ambushed, but he escapes and saves Elle Fanning in the process. Much bleakness and violence ensues. A grim little movie; I can’t dismiss it entirely, but you’re not in for very many surprises and it doesn’t look like much of a cult formed around this one.

Pavements: I’m convinced now that Pavement is slowly being forgotten, and I don’t think this movie helps. There are several scenes in this brand-new meta-movie that take place in a Pavement museum that opens near the end of the film, containing things like the handcuffs Malkmus attached to the microphone at the final concert in 1999, the mud-stained clothes from their 1995 Lollapalooza disaster where they walked off stage, and one of Gary Young’s toenails. Even though the whole thing is staged, it still depressed me a bit, because it seemed like only record nerds, rock critics and aging 90s kids still care about Pavement. Some of this is a fake document about actors trying to learn to play a dramatized version of Pavement, which mostly just results in a few lame scenes with Jason Schwartzman, or Joe Keery from Stranger Things playing Malkmus, or wandering around looking lost as he tries to figure out what to do. The point of these scenes only amount to an obvious parody of rock biopics and Method acting (though there is a funny scene where an actor overdoes an interpretation of Spiral Stairs flipping off the crowd, yelling “fuck you!!! fuck you!!” like his life depends on it.) Then there’s a Pavement musical full of dancers doing overly energetic takes on Pavement classics; it amounts to a couple of cute laughs at best. Most of the film is just a new pseudo-documentary about the real Pavement, which retreads a lot of stuff we already saw in Slow Century, which was a pretty slapdash documentary to begin with (and Lance Bangs, who directed it, is an executive producer here, not a good sign.) You get to see Spiral Stairs and Mark Ibold’s interview with Mark Prindle a second time, and footage of Gary Young acting up at the band’s live shows, and lots of annoying talk about the band’s poor relationship with its own fame, which has become the biggest dead horse with this band. Most depressing of all is Scott Kannberg–now a dead ringer for Ed O’Neill–telling someone that he was about to become a bus driver in Seattle because he had no more money, just before Pavement did a reunion tour. I didn’t quite hate this, but I will say I think it was sort of a disappointment, personally. Your mileage may vary.

ALBUMS:

The Soft Boys, A Can Of Bees: The album title is very appropriate: Robyn Hitchcock and company sound like they were having a lot of fun recording their 1979 debut album, but that’s just the problem–The Soft Boys don’t seem like they were taking themselves seriously much at all yet, recording a silly, off-the-cuff album just for the hell of it, not a comparatively serious statement like the far superior Underwater Moonlight, no sir. I’m reminded that the Soft Boys have been cited as an influence on the Replacements too–the attitude on display here (if not the musical style) is like a forebearer to Hootenanny. The first song, “Give It To The Soft Boys,” features Hitchcock deliberately ruining the song as ridiculously as possible with these off-key vocal caterwauls that would make Captain Beefheart do a double-take. “Leppo And The Grooves” has a cool angular riff, “Human Music” is relaxed in a way that may have influenced R. E. M., and “Sandra’s Having Her Brain Out” is an amusing goof. But it’s not much more than that; there’s no classics here. Hey, I never liked Hootenanny that much, either. But you know what I do like? Underwater Moonlight.

The Tubes, Love Bomb: The final album by the original Tubes lineup, this 1985 “flop” was produced by Todd Rundgren, which seems like a good sign because Rundgren produced the masterpiece Remote Control, the main reason I’ve ever taken any interest in The Tubes. But apparently the Tubes not only fought with Rundgren this time around, they also fought with their record label, who didn’t want to put out a new Tubes album concurrently with singer Fee Waybill’s solo album. Waybill ended up dumping the band after this and putting an end to their original run, and hated the album, though an Amazon comment says that most of the rest of the band loved it (and believe you me, Amazon comments are just about the only place anyone is saying anything about albums like this.) It’s glossy 1985 pop music alright, though with a lingering late-70s tinge (a good thing in this case, IMO.) I think the difference is by this point the Tubes weren’t doing “irony” anymore–these songs could be taken straight, like “they belong on the St. Elmo’s Fire soundtrack next to John Parr” straight. So hey, if you like “Break The Ice” from the opening credits of fuckin’ RAD, you’ll like “Piece By Piece,” the straining AOR non-hit that opens the album, as well as other glossy dinosaur-band-trying-to-get-on-MTV stuff like “Stella,” “Come As You Are,” “One Good Reason,” “Feel It” and the post-disco “Night People.” As usual, a lot of these songs feature choruses full of vocal overdubs that sound like they belong in cheesy TV commercials from the time. If it sounds like this is a “Trainwreckord” and that I’m making fun of it....well, actually I like this silly, dated album quite a bit, third after Remote Control and The Completion Backwards Principle. And hey, I like that song from Rad too–I really don’t see how the hooks in these songs (and I think they’re pretty good hooks, too!) are that different from the ones on Van Halen’s 1984. Later on the album, Rundgren gets into 80s Fairlight sampling schtick, resulting in stuff like “Say Hey,” which is simultaneously miserably dated and ahead of its time. Most of these tracks only last about a minute, though, so who am I to complain? Go listen to this flop of an album. I dare you!

Frank Zappa/The Mothers Of Invention, One Size Fits All: I’m really verging on losing my shit with Frank. I’m sorry, but his vast discography is yielding few winners in my mind–I’ve been listening to second-tier Zappa for a little under two years now and have yet to come up with a single disc that I think is better than “mid.”” And One Size Fits All? I liked it even less than Over-Nite Sensation and Apostrophe and I didn’t even like those as much as I was supposed to. Okay, yeah “Inca Roads” is pretty good, and maybe I could go for “Florentine Pogen” or “Andy” or “Sofa No. 2” but that’s pretty slim pickings for what is supposed to be one of his classics. And all these Zappa albums just…don’t…like, come up with their own identities very well…or something. I don’t know what I’m really trying to say here–it’s the usual stuff, some jazzy-proggy stuff, some stupid humor, some social commentary, the usual. Put it this way: I’m beginning to see why George didn’t give Zappa a 5/5 on “diversity,” saying “it’s all Zappa music, man” or something like that. Boy is it ever.

Jimi Hendrix, Valleys Of Neptune: You might remember this getting some press in 2010 for having some unreleased recordings, but you might not know that it’s had two sequels released in the last 15 years, meaning that in addition to listening to First Rays Of The New Rising Sun–the “fourth” Hendrix studio album–I’m now on my second of possibly four albums consisting of scraps from that purported platter. Yeesh. There’s a cool version of “Stone Free” that might top the original, and you get to hear a version of “Fire” with Noel Redding accenting the wrong word in the chorus, but the eight minute “Red House” is predictably boring. Come to think of it, Jimi didn’t have too many good “lengthy” tunes, did he? “Bleeding Heart” and “Hear My Train A Comin’” don’t do much for me either. The title track has a beautiful opening before turning into an okay “bouncy” song. “Ships Passing Through The Night” is a variation of some other song I’ve heard somewhere else, and it’s pretty good, but Jimi’s version of “Sunshine Of Your Love” is just nagging and silly. And seven minutes long. The two followups to this are Both Sides Of The Sky and People, Hell & Angels. Did you hear them? Are they good? I’m not finding much on these Hendrix outtakes compilations that I care for, myself.

Bob Dylan, Planet Waves: Known as either “the one with ‘Forever Young’ on it” or “the one where he was backed up by The Band.” It’s okay. “Going, Going, Gone” and “Dirge” are my picks for the two classics here, although the latter seems to be recycled from some other Dylan tune, the name of which escapes me at the moment. “Something There Is About You” and “On A Night Like This” are pretty good too, and I sort of chuckled at “Wedding Song” at the end, which seemed to piss off a lot of reviewers for being “stupid.” I guess I don’t really listen to him for the lyrics though? Is that weird? For some reason I just don’t notice when Bob’s lyrics “suck.” I don’t have that much to say about this album, The Band do pretty well as backup but I don’t think they stand out that much. I liked the “fast” “Forever Young” more than the slow one, and was somewhat amused at the idea of other bands doing a fast and slow version of the same song, one after the other on the album like that. Did anyone else ever try it?

Queens Of The Stone Age, Queens Of The Stone Age: The 1998 debut album, reissued with a few bonus tracks (and a different album cover, though the original has visible pubes and the reissue has bare breasts.) Josh Homme generally seemed to know what he was doing by the mid-1990s and already had a pretty good, laconic, “desert”-y sound for his band (he also plays most of the bass parts on the album; there was no Nick Oliveri, yet, though a phone message from him offering to join the band is actually incorporated into one song.) Most of the tracks in the first half of the album are pretty good, and I would indeed consider this a “metal” album unlike some of their later stuff, but it gets a bit wearying as it goes along. Make sure you hear “The Bronze,” which wasn’t on the original album but has been inserted into the middle of the reissue’s tracklisting; there’s also a bleak instrumental called “Spiders And Vinegaroons” that you shouldn’t miss. Elsewhere I liked “Regular John,” “Avon,” “You Can’t Quit Me Baby” and a few others. I don’t know if I’d buy it, though. It’s no Songs For The Deaf, but it’s a good start.

Pere Ubu & Sarah Jane Morris, Long Live Père Ubu: So few people gave a fuck about Pere Ubu that they could record a play and nobody would stop them. That’s what this is–an adpatation of Pere Ubu’s namesake, Ubu Roi, the bitterly satirical, anti-aristocratic Macbeth parody from late 19th century France. What it means is that you get Pere Ubu’s usual basic “avant-garage” (simple post-punk guitar lines, silly surrealism, squiggly synth burbles) with David Thomas and some British vocalist named Sarah Jane Morris doing silly voices on top of it. It’s about as mediocre overall as most latter-day Ubu albums, but I would recommend hearing the rocker “Road To Reason” and the eight-minute operatic bleak-fest “The Story So Far” as highlights, and once again Ubu never quite fall completely into crap; they just rarely seem to develop their ideas past simple, goofy-weird concepts. The version I listened to on Youtube had a different tracklisting than the Wikipedia entry, but I’m not going to be looking up the differences. The final track has some guy doing the most stupidly obvious “fruity gay guy” voice this side of Fred Schneider.