BOOKS:

Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind (20TH ANNIVERSARY RE-READ): I used to cherish this book, not as much as I cherished the movie, but I recalled liking most of it when I read it a couple decades ago after seeing the movie for the first time around Christmas 2005. Now that I’m older, its flaws are pretty damn glaring. First of all, Mitchell really struggles to be an adequate prose stylist. She isn’t outright shitty, but sometimes she just seems to be writing like a somewhat talented…mom. Lots and lots of elegiac passages about the good old days and describing the magnolias down South and the sky and the trees and the lovely dirt and fiddle-dee-dee. Some of this works, but she does too much of it, leading to the second flaw, the book’s length. If you didn’t know, it’s 1037 pages long, and probably 250 pages of it could have easily been cut. I would still want it to be long, due to the epic sweep of the story (which, admittedly, it still mostly has after all these years) but the excess length and repetitive filler (and good Lord, ALL the fight scenes between Rhett and Scarlett amount to pretty much the same thing!) turned it into a slog that I couldn’t wait to finish this time around. Finally, I’m very sorry to have to take a position like this regarding any work of art, but good Lord, RACISM. Sure, you could say the movie isn’t entirely sinless in this regard, but the worst of it on screen is Butterly McQueen getting slapped, and three minutes of Internet research will turn up how embarrassed everyone was to film that, even in 1939. The book? Truckloads of long, excruciatingly difficult-to-read paragraphs based around Mitchell’s painful attempts at writing slave dialect (“Ef’n Ah heer yous been talkin’ ter Mister Ashley,” etc.), icky political bitching about the Yankees wanting to free slaves that sound like Mitchell’s own voice rather than something she’s putting in her postbellum characters’ mouths for accuracy, constant comparisons of black people’s appearances to that of apes, and oh yeah, you remember when Rhett Butler is in jail in the secnod half of the movie? Here, he’s in jail for murdering a freed slave for being “uppity.” No way in hell do you have to be a woke-crybaby college brat to get tired of this stuff. I still don’t really dislike the book because its story still works, but a third reading of this when I’m in my 60s will not be happening, and it’s certainly nowhere near my list of favorite books any longer.

James Dickey, Deliverance: Back in 2006 I thought this was far better than the 1972 film adaptation, for sure. Since I found the movie dated and simplistic, I was stunned to find out that this book had not only made the Modern Library Top 100 20th Century novels list, but the TIME top 100 (1923-2005) as well, and that the guy who wrote it was a poet, albeit a very manly and outdoorsy one. Really? A poet? His book was made into the movie with the inbred retard playing the banjo and the hillbilly making Ned Beatty squeal like a pig? Intellectuals liked it? Reading it again 20 years later, I’m stunned at how unassuming it is–the plot is really simple, the book isn’t even 300 pages long, and the writing style is subtle and completely unsensational, even regarding all the violence and adventure that people know the story for. So most of my interest in re-reading it stems, predictably enough for me, from its place in chronology–this is, after all, a book from 1970, written while Vietnam (for which the story is often seen as an allegory) was still raging, and right at the start of a very “masculine” decade. Can you imagine if it had been written later? Like in the 80s, when Ronald Reagan was sending the Marines everywhere, or in the 90s, when some Chuck Palahniuk type probably would have rendered it gruesome and grungy? The centerpiece of the book, curiously enough, isn’t the rape or the escape from the hillbillies when one of the four protagonists (the one who wanted to go to the cops after one of the hillbillies gets killed with an arrow), it’s when the main character (Jon Voight in the movie) grabs ahold of a bow and arrow and injures himself trying to hunt down and kill the hillbilly who has been firing at the four guys as they try to escape, and he enters some crazy blood-simple primal-warrior frame of mind, from which he does manage to hunt down the hillbilly and come home safe, where he will be drawing from a well of masculine confidence for the rest of his life, even though one of his friends got, y’know, shot dead by a hillbilly. I…guess Dickey pulls this off pretty well, but even then, the “message” is a little weird–though again, it could’ve been far worse; Dickey does NOT beat you over the head with any “civilization has made men soft!” stuff, it’s just whisped about in the background. Conversely, I kind of wish more was done to condemn the character Burt Reynolds played in the movie, because he’s the one who wanted the river rafting trip the most, and he’s the one who flouts the stupid idea that the four protagonists are “lesser men” than the hillbillies. Instead, it just amounts to a few words said by the dead guy’s wife about what an idiot the Reynolds character is. I probably rated this a bit too highly 20 years ago, and I don’t know that I’d consider it any big favorite anymore, but just you go read it and see for yourself how it fits into the beginning of the 1970s.

Samuel R. Delany, Hogg: I never forgot this book, but it’s a little hard to forget any work of art that revolves this much around eating and drinking human waste for sexual pleasure. That being said, “hard to forget” isn’t the same thing as “good,” and of the four books I’ve read that revolve around filthy horrible atrocities happening over and over again (Blood Meridian, American Psycho, this, and Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird), this one will have to come out last. It’s about a nameless 11-year-old mixed-race kid (usually referred to as “Cocksucker”) who says nothing, and seems to want to do nothing in life but suck dick, drink piss and eat shit with whoever there is to do those things with, which in this book mostly refers to a gang of blood-thirsty, murdering, raping pedophile hit men led by a scatological truck driver named Franklin Hargus, or “Hogg” for short, who go around a nameless American state doing all of those terrible things and more. I read Hogg as a callow 23 year old who found it at the bottom of Larry McCaffery’s Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century list, which had Pale Fire at numero uno and consisted mostly of difficult/avant-garde/modernist/postmodernist lit-grad stuff (Dhalgren inlcluded), but had Hogg at #100 as “The most shocking book of the 20th century.” Indeed, I would still say it has the power to shock through its relentless graphic detail, as Delany does indeed possess a degree of literary grace that Bret Easton Ellis probably didn’t, but there’s almost no plot (except for one teenage member of the posse going on a random killing spree and killing about 30 innocent people, children included, after he loses his mind, presumably due to the pain he suffers after deliberately shoving a rusty nail through his own penis for pleasure; the rest of the gang has to find a way to help him get free). Hogg also is not really any “social commentary” on anything that was happening in 1969-73 when Delany wrote the book, nor is it some escalating, nastier-and-nastier “is he joking or isn’t he with this shit?” trick like _American Psycho; no, no, it’s completely depraved, pornographic and misanthropic from the very beginning. It’s also far too repetitive for me to really recommend to anybody, even for the reasons I might have done so when I first read it in 2006–“whoa, bro, you gotta check this out–it’s the most _disgusting, hideous book ever written!”…sorry, but I don’t feel like doing that in my 40s. So that’s three books in a row that I used to consider among my favorites that I can’t really rate so highly anymore. Guess I’m getting old…

MOVIES:

Seconds: This was released in 1966, which seems important, because it feels like the last movie of its kind before New Hollywood kicked in the following year....it’s in black and white and still has a 1950s/early 60s feel to it, and still seems to be adjacent to the Cheever-Updike-Yates death-of-the-suburban-dream thing, but it’s a science fiction story, one where some poor bored middle aged drone finds himself seeking a group of people who will turn him into a handsome younger artiste type like he’s always wanted to be. Then he finds out for various reasons what a bad idea that is, and learns a really brutal lesson at the end of the film. I found that ending a little too blunt and out-of-the-blue, but at least it maintains some horrific power. The movie doesn’t even seem to be trying to tell people to be happy with what they have to begin with, either–it really is just a bleak-ass message: “You’re gonna get old and fade away, and if you could magically turn yourself into someone amazing, you’d fuck that up too!” So that’s why there’s upwards of 150 external reviews of this film–it’s probably the bleakest movie of its time (replete with a really bleak musical score!) and it’s the last movie of its time, too. I would recommend it, but don’t have too much to drink first.

Sundown: This very little seen 2022 Tim Roth suspense-drama got me interested when a review on the Ebert site said it had a fascinating twist that it didn’t want to reveal, but that turned out to be a bait-and-switch. Roth plays some well-off middle aged guy on vacation who doesn’t seem to care about anything anymore, just drinking on the beach, hooking up with an occasional girl for meaningless sex, ignoring his family and business, and not giving a crap when he sees violence happening around him. Spoiler, some local thugs kill Roth’s sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg, whom the movie doesn’t tell you is his sister and not his wife until like a half hour in) in a badly botched robbery attempt, spoiler, he mistakenly gets arrested for it, spoiler, he doesn’t seem to care, spoiler spoiler, he has brain cancer, spoiler spoiler spoiler, he probably dies at the end as the final shot is just a shot of an empty chair on the beach. End of movie. It’s probably 80 minutes long, not that there’s any reason for it to be longer. It seems like it’s aiming for a sad, slow-burn emptiness, like a sort of middle-aged male Nomadland, but what you really get is a Sofia Coppola movie for dads. Yeah, like an older version of the heinous Somewhere. ICK. Avoid. I didn’t even feel like watching this one twice.

Billy Joel: And So It Goes: Probably only TonyV will discuss this with me, and in fact we already have, in a thread below. It doesn’t have any big overarching point or story arc, it’s just a good and thorough straightforward documentary. Since most of the content in it held my interest, the five hour runtime is fine–it doesn’t deserve comparison to those hideous Netflix documentaries that drag on forever. It’s also not a hagiography of Billy Joel nor a putdown, it lands right in the middle. I wouldn’t mind watching it again a few times, especially since I plan on doing the six Billy Joel albums I never heard before 2026 is over. For now, this is the best thing I’ve seen this year. Hey, maybe this’ll be a big “Billy Joel” year…

Mallrats: I’m really struggling to think of a reason why I didn’t just flat-out hate this movie–maybe I’m just one of those 90s kids after all. The only Kevin Smith thing I’ve ever liked was Clerks and that was mostly due to the vicious thrashing Generation X receives at the end of it. Here, there’s no thrashing, just two hours of very immature 90s twentysomethings gradually being rewarded for being immature 90s twentysomethings. That hasn’t aged well, has it? And yet, inevitably, things have been so bad since 9/11 that even this film–which tanked commercially and critically and which Kevin Smith, who has little to no taste in anything, apologized for it and called it his worst film–has found an audience nostalgic for that 90s feel. And even WORSE–he’s planning a fucking sequel, still slated for release soon. Has ANY filmmaker had a more pathetic fixation on their own “universe”? What was it I didn’t hate? That 90s feel? Jason Lee somehow getting away with giving a decent performance even though his character is a completely unlikeable, loudmouth douchebag? (Jonah Hill somehow got away with something similar in Superbad, a far better film than this.) Michael Rooker is pretty good, playing a villain. So there’s that. Maybe I just don’t have the energy to hate loud awful stuff anymore–stuff needs to bore me now for me to hate it. Or maybe I just wasted all my Kevin Smith hate on Dogma, a film I haven’t sat through since it came out.

ALBUMS:

Michael Jackson, Thriller: I take back what I said about Off The Wall–it does “point the way” to the style of Thriller. Sure, that’s clearly a late 70s album and Thriller is clearly an early 80s album, but I can still hear a small amount of late-70s disco-legacy ghostliness hanging over this album’s head. It doesn’t really affect my opinion of the album, though, which I always figure would align with Christgau’s perfect quote–“the world’s best-selling album was clearly a hits-plus-filler job from the beginning”–but Christgau still gave it an A, and I’m giving it the B that I figured it would never rise above. “Thriller,” “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” are still great and I’d never want Wacko Jacko’s post-1993 woes to make those songs go away. They can stay. But “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin”? All I like from that is the part at the end where the African chant shows up, and Jacko got sued for stealing that part! “Baby Be Mine” is acceptable filler, becuase I like the minor-key night-mood Jacko and Quincy came up with, and “P. Y. T.” actually sounds vibe-wise a lot like what Prince was going for a couple years later with stuff like “I Would Die 4 U,” even though I couldn’t find any review that shared this opinion. But the lost, minor-key “Carousel” is a better song than either of those, and should have been on the album to be a fourth highlight, replacing the one stinker–that’s right, the Paul McCartney song, which is just a lame pile of shit.

Chapterhouse, Whirlpool: It’s a tribute to how much and how easily I like shogeaze that I liked this alleged 1991 shoegaze classic at all, and it’s also a comment on how few classic albums the genre actually has if Whirlpool is actually considered, indeed, a “shoegaze classic.”” And sure enough, I did find myself basically enjoying most of the songs on it, just by virtue of them being shoegaze songs from the glory days, even if there aren’t many huge highlights (this is, by the way, on an extended version of the album that pads out to about 80 minutes.) It’s not doing a damned thing that Ride and Slowdive weren’t doing around the same time, let alone a certain other shoegaze band that will remain nameless, you know, the one who put out their magnum opus that same year and who is mentioned in every article, paragraph, sentence, and breath ever written or taken about shoegaze. But to be fair, Chapterhouse didn’t rip off that band, or really rip off the other big names–they just don’t have an outstanding style of their own. If anyone wants me to list highlights, the ones I’m most likely to revisit are “Something More” and “Sixteen Years,” but good luck if I could come up with an explanation as to why.

Bob Dylan, Slow Train Coming: This is best known for being the first of Bob Dylan’s Preachy Christian Trilogy, and usually thought of as the best of the three, but what I’m really going to remember this for is being Exhibit A in How To Get Away With Simple And/Or Recycled Melodies. I actually like damn near every song on here, even songs that some reviewers (WRC mostly) hated, like “When He Returns” and “I Believe In You.” Then Bob gets away with stuff like “Gotta Serve Somebody” (simple electric-piano-based 12 bar blues that incorporates Bob’s bemused take on the “you can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay” TV commercial from the era so as to make the preachy message go down all sugary!), “Man Gave Names To All The Animals” (what an effective mood, and it gets stuck in your head!!) and “Do Right To Me Baby (Do Unto Others)” (four minutes based around a surprisingly effective ultra-simplstic guitar/keyboard twang, the musical equivalent of a guy repeatedly raising his eyebrow.) I don’t like “Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking,” a very flat-footed song, but hell, “Precious Angel” is BEAUTIFUL, and I don’t think I found a review that agreed with me! Most liked “Slow Train,” at least, so I agree with that. I don’t know what it is with me and my Bob Dylan opinions–I seem to prefer his underrated albums to his overrated ones. Why?!? Because I’m just such a Dylan agnostic, only listening to these albums as a passing fan? Heh, I said “agnostic”…

Simple Minds, Real To Real Cacophony: Allegedly disappointed with their debut album Life In A Day (allegedly due mostly to the production of John Leckie), Simple Minds rushed their sophomore album out a few months later before the end of 1979, and it took me a pack of goodwill and about nine or ten listens to not write it off completely as not merely a sophomore slump, but an outright disastrous artistic failure. The band tried getting into weird artiness, tinny late-70s electronics and atmospherics, pseudo-disco late-70s drumbeats, and Kooky Karnival Rock. At first, it doesn’t seem like any of it works, particularly not the arty shit–in particular, the pathetic mid-album one-two punch of “Cacophony” (annoying yammering guitar riff + whiffling echoey atmospherics) and “Veldt” (dull African chanting, random voices and electronic noises and hums, and a dumb repetitive bass/piano riff) has me wondering if I hadn’t misjudged such art-turd Hall Of Fame candidates as, say, CCR’s “Rude Awakening #2,” or maybe Black Sabbath’s “FX,” and I certainly hope to God this band isn’t going to try artiness the further we get into the un-arty decade that was the 80s. However I will grudgingly admit some of the dance-rockers like “Premonition,” “Calling Your Name,” “Changeling” and Carnival (Shelter In A Suitcase)” sort of work, maybe because the band went for a minor key in most of them? If you don’t get into this particular Simple Minds sub-style, or can’t, then for the love of God avoid this album like the plague because these songs are the only thing that saved it from the abyss.

Van Morrison, His Band & The Street Choir: I had always meant to hear the rest of the 1968-74 Van classics after hearing Astral Weeks (still one of my 20 favorite albums!) and Moondance (which is good enough), but forgot all about this album until finding the CD for $3 at a garage sale. Street Choir came out the same year as Moondance, and while the stories about its making from the Wikipedia entry would indicate it wasn’t recorded as a rush job, it still basically amounts to diminishing returns from its predecessor’s commerically-friendly white R&B-pop style, sadly. If you think Moondance is a masterpiece (most people do), you’ll probably still muster up some love for this second helping (most reviews did); if you just think Moondance is okay (like me), then you’re probably going to have little use for its followup. One of the few weak reviews came from the eternally curmudgeonly Van himself, who claimed that the backing vocals ruined it; I myself just don’t think the songs are very good, based on obvious patterns and moon-June-spoon lyrical banality that Van’s voice cannot really save. “Domino” is a hit, sure, and “Street Choir” is a nice elegiac closer, but in between that…Christ, I dunno, maybe “Gypsy Queen” and “I’ll Be Your Lover, Too” are minor keepers? Maybe this one should go back to the garage sale.

The Pretty Things, Emotions: This is from 1967, and probably isn’t even one of the one hundred most-talked-about albums from that year; the band itself was going through terrible management/lineup problems at the time and pretty quickly distanced themselves from it, and you’ll find barely any reviews for it online not written by George Starostin. It’s no S. F. Sorrow, but if you like Kinks albums like Face To Face and Something Else By The Kinks, this is pretty close to those, albeit maybe a little less English (and nowhere near as concerned with social issues, though there’s actually a cover of “A House In The Country” here!) (It also will probably appeal to fans of the first two Love albums.) The two best songs are the lush ballads “House Of Ten” and “The Sun,” and I will be revisiting these songs in the future for sure. Elsewhere, there’s plenty of nice little strummy numbers like the opener “Death Of A Socialite” which will appeal to any fan of the Kinks’ “Party Line,” the horn-fests “Bright Lights Of The City,” “Progress” and “Out In The Night,” chugging rocker “There Will Never Be Another Day,” speed-pop “Photograph” (“phoooo-to-graph! Phoooo-to-graph!”), stomp-pop “Tripping” (“triptriptriptriptriptrippin’!”), ethereal-sunrise echoey-guitar pop “My Time,” and so on. More good songs than bad ones for sure–if you like S. F. Sorrow, it wasn’t too much of a leap from Emotions to that album. Check it out brahs, it’s underrated!

The Cardiacs, On Land And In The Sea: I hate it when I can’t get into an album that had this much work put into it it, but I’ve got a really sad sinking feeling that the Cardiacs’ CrAzY CaRnIvAl WoRlD style is just going to repeatedly get in the way of me really enjoying them very much. Apparently fans think this is absolutely one of their best, and I can see that the songs are stunningly complex, blowing from sub-part to sub-part and sub-style to sub-style with breathtaking speed all in the space of songs that aren’t even that long, giving Gentle Giant a serious run for its money in the watch-us-shift-time-signatures-seven-times-in-four-minutes department. But it’s barely a change in style from their first album, with me having a difficult time remembering which song is which, and worst of all, there’s no obvious way in like the easy-to-like, commercially friendly (for them!) “Is This The Life?” I think I liked “Baby Heart Dirt,” “Arnald,” “Mare’s Nest,” and maybe that eight-minute-plus closer, but I seriously doubt I’m going to revisit this much. It’s just too damn much for me musically and too damn little for me stylistically.

Frank Zappa, Zoot Allures: Yyyyyup, we got us another middling, pick-the-wheat-and-chuck-the-chaff 70s Zappa album, based around several of the usual Zappa sub-styles (Hard rock! Social commentary! Jazz instrumentals! Scatology! You know the drill!) nonsensically forced to share room on the same incoherent platter. I’m really, REALLY running out of things to say about these Zappa albums, but at least there’s two highlights here–the lovely jazz instrumental “Black Napkins” and the typical social-commentary track “Disco Boy” at the very end. Oh, and “Wind Up Workin’ In A Gas Station” at the beginning. I don’t know what to make of the ten minute filth-fest “The Torture Never Stops,” with a slow, grim mood and some woman making S&M screams the whole way through that start to sound a little like they aren’t being faked after awhile, but that’s probably the whole point. That track works as background music, but if I tried to pay close attention to it I’d probably get really sick of it really fast, and Zappa trying sound “evil” with his vocal part doesn’t help. I think I may have liked “Friendly Little Finger” too, but don’t quote me on that.