BOOKS:

Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia: Le Guin’s final novel, from 2008, isn’t science fiction at all–it’s a retelling of Vergil’s Aeneid (the poem the Trojan horse story actually comes from, if you didn’t know) from the point of view of Lavinia, whom Aeneas takes as his bride. Not a bad read, especially since one would think that the “tell a classic story from the point of view of a neglected or minor character” thing has been played out by now; she also works Vergil himself into the story, and admits in an afterword that the book is hardly real historical fiction. Be advised that this reads far closer to Margaret Atwood stylistically than any of the old Le Guin sci-fi stuff I’ve read, and indeed, Atwood herself had done the same thing three years earlier with her own Penelopiad. Beyond that, I don’t have much to say about it, but it is worth reading (and no, it isn’t some feminist harangue.)

J. G. Ballard, Empire Of The Sun (RE-READ): This is my first RE-READ in a series I’ll probably doing for much of the rest of 2026, in which I revisit books I haven’t read since I first started routinely reading them outside of class in 2006 (used to try for 50 pages a day). I have long championed the 1987 film as Spielberg’s best, the missing link between E. T. and Schindler’s List, but that film is very much a wide-eyed Spielbergization; the book, though it is very visual, is sort of dryly hallucinatory and significantly heavier on the bleakness and death in telling its story of the author being uprooted from his Shanghai opulence as a 12 year old and hauled off to the Lunghua prison camp in 1941. The movie’s big flaw is that the midsection felt like a series of scenes that could’ve been told in any order; the book’s big flaw is similar, but that the midsection grows a bit repetitive (and almost hard to believe that the main character survived it all.) Still, since I’d forgotten most details of the book aside from its eerie opening and closing, it was very much worth re-reading–I’d always thought it was one of the best books I’d read. I feel it’s sort of being forgotten in favor of other Ballard stuff like Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition…but then I remember that the movie was never critically acclaimed nor a hit, and maybe Ballard himself isn’t all that popular anymore anyway (how often do YOU hear about him?) Still, if you haven’t read it, give it a try, it’s good.

MOVIES:

The Luckiest Man In America: It’s good that Paul Walter Hauser gets to be a leading man now, but this fictionalization of the Michael Larsen Press Your Luck scandal of 1984 (in which ice-cream-truck-driving beardo Larsen videotaped episodes of the game show until he had memorized the patterns on the board so he could cheat his way to a couple hundred thousand dollars) just comes across as weird, with Larsen shown as leaving the game show set to go appear on a neighboring talk show, and a tonally strange ending too. It also doesn’t seem to be making much of an interesting point about the whole ordeal. Hauser does well, but aside from him, there isn’t much to recommend; you’d be better off just watching the old clips of the show, or reading an article/watching a documentary about it. A disappointment.

Fletch: I didn’t hate this, but I’d be hard pressed to think of many things I liked about it. The Totally Eighties feel, I guess? I can’t say Chevy Chase is really a problem, but there aren’t many funny jokes in the film, the “he has a bunch of weird identities and funny costumes” conceit barely amounts to anything, it certainly isn’t a good mystery (this is supposed to have been a strength of the book series it’s based on, but anyone who can’t tell that the Tim Matheson character is a villain right away is a fucking idiot), the supporting characters don’t add up to much, and the ending is blunt. The theme song (Stephanie Mills’ “Bit By Bit,” written by Harald Faltermeyer) is a fucking BANGER, though–I listen to it on long walks now!

One Battle After Another: It would be nice for Paul Thomas Anderson to win Best Picture and Best Director but I think I’d prefer him to win for something else. I read quite a few major reviews of this film and I still have little idea of what the acclaim is all about. It’s a depiction of the breakup of an Antifa-type revolutionary group followed by Leonardo DiCaprio’s mixed-race daughter trying to get away from Thomas Pynchonian military cartoon-character Sean Penn, while DiCaprio himself (plus Benicio Del Toro as a wasted sidekick) bumbles around Lebowski-style trying to save her. I have no idea how that adds up to a 161-minute marathon, let alone one that cost “$130-175 million dollars,” which you sure as fuck don’t see on screen (and if they really gave DiCaprio $25 million to play this character, then it’s time to do away with movie stars altogether). I don’t think it has many great scenes; Teyana Taylor has a strong presence in her early scenes but disappears from the film shortly thereafter, Del Toro is useless, and I guess Penn does better here than the last time he played a military psycho in Casualties Of War…but I liked pretty much every other PT Anderson film better. Is it the politics or something? What am I missing here?

The Fugitive Kind: From 1960, Sidney Lumet directs Marlon Brando in a lesser-regarded Tennessee Williams adaptation (Williams reworked the play as Orpheus Descending after his earlier version, written when he was young, flopped.) You’d think that a pedigree like that would result in a pretty good film, but there’s little to acclaim here. I watched this because it was in the Criterion Collection and wanted to get one last Brando film in before 2025 became 2026, but Brando here is just playing an older and more boring version of his Wild One character, and the plot is just “rebel wanders into a tense Southern town where he isn’t wanted and gets caught between two lusty women” (Joanne Woodward and Anna Magnani). I guess the gritty realism of Lumet and the lurid stage-slop of Williams don’t mesh well together; I watched this twice and damn near fell asleep twice.

A Complete Unknown: This is the best film I saw in 2025, which isn’t really saying much–it still only rates about a B, and I think I’m just sick of films in general. You know why this turned out to be a better rock/music biopic than most? Because like 30-45 percent of it is live performances. That means there’s less time for the film to indulge in all the cliches that Walk Hard made fun of 20 years ago (and reading the reviews for this, it was heartwarming to find out how well remembered Walk Hard is, as countless reviews name-checked it.) No surprise that the worst scenes in the movie are easily the 1965 scenes when Bob shows up with his frizzy hair and shades and acts like a ironic “dick” and gets his lights punched out–there’s no way this film was going to do these scenes better than Don’t Look Back or the Cate Blanchett scenes in I’m Not There, but it could have been a little less obvious than it was. The Newport Folk Festival brouahah almost made me laugh–I guess there really were laughable fistfights backstage, but I had no idea that so few people were actually there–the crowd looks like about the size of a Midwestern county talent show! Did I love any scenes? Yes, actually–for some reason, even though I’ve never been wild about this song before, I adored the rendition of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by Pete Seeger, played by Edward Norton, who now looks like Mister Rogers. Chalamet is good enough as Bob, but Cate Blanchett hilariously remains the best Bob we’ve had on screen, even though people had basically forgotten that film before this one showed up to remind them of it.

ALBUMS:

Slowdive, Pygmalion (RELISTEN/PURCHASE): I once wrote that just as William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalomn was said to mark the dividing line between modernism and postmodernism, here is the album that marks the dividing line between shoegaze (Slowdive’s old genre) and post-rock (which they were clearly moving towards here.) What I have to say about it now that I’ve bought it is, that like a number of old post-rock records I’ve revisited, (like the first two Tortoise albums, yikes) it’s not very good. The two songs I’d revisited in the last 10 years–the eerie “Trellisaze” with its plinking-bottles percussion and underwater vocals, and the lovely drone-ballad “Blue Skied An’Clear,” are the two classics; the rest of this is a repetitive snooze. “Rutti,” the 10 minute opener, now strikes me as a pathetic rip-off of the main verses of Talk Talk’s post-rock predictor “The Rainbow,” but without a hint of that song’s lustrous beauty. Then there’s shit like “Miranda,” which drearily retreads about four songs at once from Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand, and “Crazy For You,” which beats a pretty guitar loop to death. If you didn’t know this already, this album was a total flop when it came out and Slowdive lost their record contract. I really like Souvlaki and their 2017 reunion album, but this was a very disappointing revisit.

The Notwist, Shrink: This band’s 2002 critical favorite Neon Golden was one of the better relistens that I’ve had in some time, so I purchased this blind in a record store after seeing it for $5. It’s from 1998, and it’s got a lot of bleak German moods and skittery electronic percussion like Radiohead would get into later, but it’s still just an iffy warmup for Neon Golden. There’s one big standout track, “Your Signs,” which crosses a typical bleak Notwist mood with this catchy chorus where this horn section shows up and does something out of a 1970s movie soundtrack, calling to mind The French Connection or something. That’s pretty cool! Some of the rest of this is okay, but the final track is just a bunch of synth-plonks, and still…I think I should have listened to something these Germans did after Neon Golden and not before. Man, these old post-rock albums just aren’t holding up, are they?

The Apples In Stereo, The Discovery Of A World Inside The Moone: This 2000 album is alright, but it seems like I’ve long since heard, purchased, and repeatedly listened to the best Apples in Stereo albums, Tone Soul Evolution and New Magnetic Wonder. The former took a very long time to become my favorite, so who knows, maybe I could revisit this one a zillion times until I like it as much, but it’s sort of hard to tell with these la-la-la twee Elephant 6 albums, y’know? “Submarine Dream,” with its oogy synth twirls, was the lone classic; elsewhere I liked “Go,” “Stream Running Over,” “Stay Gold,” and a few others.

The Apples In Stereo, Velocity Of Sound: That previous album marked the beginning of the Apples getting into cute synthesizers; for whatever reason, they immediately dropped that in favor of loud distorted yammering eighth-note guitars, apparently aiming to be like Weezer–unfortunately, they didn’t end up emulating the 1994-96 Weezer, but rather, of all things, the mostly shitty 2001-05 Weezer, and even bad albums like Maladroit had more classics than Velocity Of Sound, where I only liked “Rainfall,” sung by the band’s female drummer who would later divorce leader (and future math teacher) Robert Schneider, and “Baroque.” Given that the album is only about 27 minutes long anyway, that’s a pathetically low yield; this is easily the worst Apples album, and even George could barely muster three paragraphs for it. Woof. I’ll probably never listen to this again.

The Apples In Stereo, Travellers In Space And Time: This is just a diminishing-returns sequel to the band’s wonderful ELO-styled 2007 album New Magnetic Wonder, but I’ll take that over a bad Weezer imitation any day. (It should be noted that I didn’t really realize it was ELO they were going for on these albums, because they’re going for the synth-disco-era ELO, and I’ve only heard the 1971-76 ELO albums.) The burbling electronic “C. P. U.” and the piano-hooked “It’s All Right” are the two classics; most of the rest of it is pretty easy to like on top of that, though stuff like “Dream About The Future” amounts to a rewrite of “Energy” from New Magnetic Wonder, and while this is an adequate album, it might be for the best that Schneider dropped the band while they were still ahead to go study math–a third album in this style probably wouldn’t have been necessary.

Love, Four Sail: I’ll make this brief: you don’t hear much about the post-Forever Changes Love albums for a reason, and it’s not just that Arthur Lee replaced most of the band a couple of times, it’s that he sadly shot his wad as a songwriter with Forever Changes, and was only capable of second-rate pleasantries from here on out. I don’t detect too many rewrites or embarrassments on these albums, and there’s a decent amount of diversity to the proceedings, but the only classic here is “Singing Cowboy,” and even that’s not gonna beat “Alone Again Or” or “She Comes In Colours.” I could name other passable tunes like “August” or “Your Friend And Mine–Neil’s Song,” but are you gonna go listen to them? You don’t really need to.

Love, Out Here: There shouldn’t be anything in the world sadder than a big sprawling diverse double album from the glory days that belly flops and misses the mark because it’s full of drug-addled indulgences and second-rate experiments, but believe it or not, this big fat failure still contains the greatest density of decent post-Forever Changes Love material. Of what little has been written about it, most of the boos are reserved for the two lengthy songs, “Doggone” (which drops a pleasant ballad, “Moonchild”-style, after a few minutes in favor of a boring drum solo) and “Love Is More Than Words Or Better Late Than Never,” which answers the question nobody was asking, “What if Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Third Stone From The Sun’ was twice as long and one-eighth as good?” Ignore those and there’s some strong short-length material–I laughed at the military novelty “Discharged,” but don’t skip the strong “I’m Down,” the quizzical-sounding “Willow Willow,” McCartney-esque bounce “Run To The Top” or the somber album closer “Gather ‘Round.” With some trimming this could’ve been adequate, as it stands, it’s probably going to be revisited, let alone glorified, by few.

Love, False Start: If you know anything about this 1970 album at all it’s that Jimi Hendrix appears on the first song, “The Everlasting First,” but the song’s just okay. As in, “not much better than the best Hendrix songs from 1969-70,” which I spent far too much of last year digging through. “Gimi A Little Break,” “Stand Out,” and “Feel Daddy Feel Good” (what a shit song title) aren’t bad either…I wanted to point out that Arthur Lee was trying to rock harder on these albums, but that’d be wasting your time, these albums are just second-rate platters full of yer typical 1969-70 rock music.

Love, Reel To Real: This album, from 1974, isn’t the final Love album–that’d actually be 2012’s Black Beauty, which was (I think) supposed to be an Arthur Lee solo album, but got shelved until later. I don’t really feel like listening to that, nor Lee’s solo album Vindicator from 1972, but I did listen to this, and it’s probably the weakest thing with Love’s name on it. If Arthur Lee lost it after Forever Changes and did generic 60s rock for most of the next three albums, here he’s gotten into generic 1970s styles, like funk-rock and R&B balladry. One big plus is the final song, “Everybody’s Gotta Live,” a bitter little stomper which is definitely the best song on all four of the albums I reviewed here. “Who Are You” and “With A Little Energy” aren’t bad either, but “pleasantly mediocre” is all I can come up with for the 1967-74 Love. There’s bonus tracks on some lavish reissue that God knows who paid money for, but I’m too Loved out to listen to them.

Queens Of The Stone Age, Lullabies To Paralyze: I was a big fan of Songs For The Deaf when it came out and I still think it’s pretty great, but I missed out on this one at the time, only catching the SNL performance of “Little Sister” where Will Ferrell joined them on stage as the “more cowbell” guy. That’s the best song here, followed by the pummelling “In My Head.” The midsection is fairly strong–“Everybody Knows That You Are Insane” (probably about Nick Oliveri), “I Never Came,” “Burn The Witch,” “Tangled Up In Plaid.” That’s where it ends–sadly, I think that this is probably otherwise the weakest QOTSA album. Most reviews (which were still generally laudatory) noted Oliveri’s absence as a big factor (hell, pretty much everything written about QOTSA since 2002, period, mentions that) but the real problem, aside from predictable end-of-the-CD-era overlength, is that the album is not all that stylistically interesting to me compared to QOTSA’s others, probably due to an over-reliance on yammering eighth-note guitar lines. I have seen this album described as particularly “dark” and “personal,” but I’m not seeing it. It’s the one QOTSA disc I’d consider subpar.

Queens Of The Stone Age, Villains: They branched out into artiness and balladry on Like Clockwork, then went back to a kind of hipster-groove dance-metal for this relatively streamlined album, aided by some major-name producer whose name I’ve forgotten and don’t know much about. Well, whatever–dance we shall, even if I’m not as much into that style as most of QOTSA’s others. They do it pretty well for the most part–I only really loved the eerie “Hideaway,” but just about every song here barring “The Evil Has Landed” has something to offer. I don’t know how to talk about it much–it’s just a generally strong album all the way through, their third best after Deaf and Clockwork. Anyone else?

Queens Of The Stone Age, In Times New Roman…: From 2023, the now middle-aged kings of “desert stoner metal” or whatever you want to call it are now in their Wilco stage where critics are writing less about them (18 Metacritic reviews, as opposed to 35 for Lullabies To Paralyze) because they’ve totally run out of things to say about the music, so they just comment on Josh Homme’s nasty personal life (deaths of close friends, nasty split with Brody Dalle followed by a custody battle where they both snarled at each other in the press, drug problems, cancer scare). To be fair, I can’t say much about the music either–six years have passed since Villains but this is still mostly just ironic hipster “dance-metal.” The creepy “Time & Place” is a standout with a mood reminiscent of Radiohead’s “Bodysnatchers,” and the lauded “Emotion Sickness” has a 70s-style feel-good vocal-harmonies chorus hook that sounds like something off the Boogie Nights soundtrack, and “Sicily” has a monstrous haunted-house hook. This hits a couple higher highs than Villains but is slightly less quality overall. Still, QOTSA remain reliable, and if Homme can overcome all this midlife crisis shit and find a new style, I remain hopeful for this band (hey, Wilco are still reliable too, though their lineup has been more stable in recent years.)

Pere Ubu, The Long Goodbye: Most Pere Ubu albums from 2006 onward are about the same level of “mediocre, but you might find something if you dig into them, and God knows how the band is still able to be any good at all, and who the fuck is even listening to this stuff anyway?” They also all affect a 1950s-noir atmosphere in places, it’s not just the album titles y’know! The first four songs on this, like “Marlowe” and “What I Heard On The Pop Radio,” are fairly notable; after that, it’s pretty weak, I’m afraid. Perhaps this is the worst of the latter-day Ubu albums, but you’re not going to listen to them anyway, so who am I even talking to?

Pere Ubu, Trouble On Big Beat Street: This is the final Pere Ubu album to be released while David Thomas was still alive, but I’ve been told he did some material before his death that may still be released postmortem. Neither this nor The Long Goodbye have Wikipedia entries, and this one didn’t even get an AMG review–a sadly telling sign, considering that if anybody is going to bother to say anything about Ubu in this day and age, it’s critics…oh wait, they don’t exist anymore. God this is sad. The album is pleasantly mediocre–“Love Is Like Gravity” and “Satan’s Hamster” are standouts, but watch out for “Worried Man Blues,” whose lyrics are exactly like those dumb “bar stories” posts E used to do on this board in like 2001 or so.