BOOKS:

Mike McGonigal, 33 1/3: Loveless: One of my ten favorite albums, and I was stupid enough to think there would be lots more great stories about it that I hadn’t delved into, but not many of them are in this book. Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher were having a relationship at the time of recording, which I knew, but I didn’t know that Bilinda had some psycho stalker ex-boyfriend, with whom she had a child. I knew that Colm O’Ciosoig’s drums had to be sampled and painstakingly programmed into the songs by Kevin Shields, but I didn’t know that Debbie Googe, the bassist, doesn’t actually play on Loveless either–Kevin Shields did all of her parts, and Bilinda Butcher’s contributions to the album are just vocals and about a third of the lyrics. So it’s damn near a Kevin Shields solo album. Oh well, not that it matters much, I should’ve known this already. The book didn’t shed much light on one of the stories I already was aware of, which is that the massive amount of money Creation Records spent on the album was mostly spent on day to day living and not Kevin Shields doing trillions of guitar overdubs. Ultimately this wasn’t really much worth reading. However, at least it’s better than…

Dai Griffiths, 33 1/3: OK Computer: ....this pile of shit. Most of this book is devoted to the supremely uninteresting subject of the difference between vinyl and CDs and how that influences the song lengths on OKC. There are also lots of other off-topic, or barely on-topic, bullshit detours in the book too. I don’t even think Ed O’Brien was mentioned in this book but that may be par for the course. Of the five 33 1/3 entries I read, this one’s the worst–a complete epitomization of pseudo-intellectual quasi-academic poorly-researched navel-gazing minutiae. You probably weren’t going to read it, but if you haven’t, don’t. At least Meeting People Is Easy had one or two musical moments in it that I liked, and I gave that a zero!

Matthew Stearns, 33 1/3: Daydream Nation: Barring an unlikely miracle, this will be the last of the 33 1/3 books I read. It’s not as weak as the previous two, but it’s still full of “Oh man, these guys RRRAWWWKK!” type fanboy sentiment and the “political subtext” doesn’t go deeper than predictable stuff like “Reagan was president, bruh!” and “New York City back then was like, filthy and punky and stuff!” At least I know now that there’s somebody out there who loves the drumming in “Rain King” as much as I do.

MOVIES:

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning: SPOILER WARNING!!! (Spoiler for spoiler warning: You shouldn’t care.) Ving Rhames dies, and it’s slightly sadder than Alec Baldwin’s meaningless death a few movies ago and maybe about as effective as Rebecca Ferguson eating it…one, two movies ago? I forget. Simon Pegg lives, but once again he does something on screen that would kill the real Simon Pegg about ten times over. Hayley Atwell is now just a Generic Female Lead. The two big action sequences involve 1)Cruise searching around a sunken submarine while it starts to rotate while rolling off an undersea cliff into an abyss, and 2)Cruise and Esai Morales battling it out in old biplanes while Cruise does his usual hanging-by-one-finger how-did-they-do-that stuff. The former ends with the worst moment in the movie (and probably the least believable moment in a franchise full of them), with Cruise floating semi-conscious in his underwear to the ocean surface through about two miles of freezing water and surviving because the movie needs him to live, and the latter ends with Esai Morales’ completely generic villain character cackling like an idiot before parachuting out of the plane, at which point he flies right into the plane’s tail and cracks his head open like an even bigger idiot. If you liked Henry Czerny from the first M:I film being brought back, you’ll LOVE that they brought back that nerdy guy with the glasses who found the knife in the CIA vault when Cruise dropped it while he was lowered in there on a rope while trying to hack into a computer. That guy (who is now bearded, older, and has a silent Eskimo wife) takes up a significant amount of the plot, for…some reason!! Cary Elwes is in the movie for a few seconds as some guy who I can’t tell is good or bad or anything at all. Nuclear war and Tom Cruise being dead are both mysteriously averted yet again. End SPOILERS, even though it’s meaningless to spoil these movies. The movie cost the usual ten jillion dollars and is far too long (a shade under three hours), and continues this soulless-but-watchable series’ diminishing returns, though the action scenes are still worth it, and that’s why you keep going, right? This is supposed to be the last M:I and it probably should be, but Cruise says he wants to do them until he’s 80 like Harrison Ford keeps doing Indiana Jones, a completely irony-free comment that mostly just tells me that Tom Cruise doesn’t watch other people’s movies. Don’t be surprised if we get a ninth, tenth, or umpteenth M:I.

Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal: Old GSN documentary (2003) about the 1984 episode of the game show Press Your Luck where, if you didn’t already know, a bearded ice cream truck fatass from Ohio named Michael Larsen figured out the patterns on the game board and succesfully “spun” 45 times in a row, thus cheating daytime television out of a couple hundred thousand bucks, only to lose most of the money through various schemes and theft and dying about 15 years later. I watched this because I plan on watching the new dramatic version, called The Luckiest Man In America and starring lovably clownish actor Paul Walter Hauser from I, Tonya as Larsen. It’s worth watching once, but doesn’t say much I wouldn’t have known from the many articles I’ve read about this story over the years, and I have already watched the full 1984 episode on Youtube anyway. That said, knowing that Larsen didn’t know what he was really doing still makes it amusing to watch, and at the end of the documentary, Peter Tomarken (who died three years later in a plane crash) raises a toast to Larsen for the memories, I s’pose. That’s what I’ll remember from this.

The Beguiled (1971): The least-watched of the three Clint Eastwood films from 1971, this flopped at the box office and was easily overshadowed by Dirty Harry, which was also directed by Don Siegel. If you didn’t know the story, it’s about a wounded Union soldier (Eastwood) in Confederate territory who is found by a little girl and taken to recover in an all-female boarding school, where he plots escape by playing off the lonely womens’ hearts and pitting them against each other, only to have it turn bad. I thought this was a pretty good film, with Clint playing a varmint for once and doing a surprisingly good job in the scenes where he has to mess with the women; this is some of his best “acting,” if you dislike Clint’s purported lack of range. The women themselves are well-drawn on screen too, with personalities ranging from prudent (Geraldine Page as the leader) to lonely and desperate (the perfectly cast Elizabeth Hartman as the teacher; there’s never been an older, more wretched-looking 27 year old woman on screen!) to no-nonsense (Mae Mercer as the lone black slave) to slutty (Jo An Harris as a teenage girl, whom Eastwood had an off-screen fling with at the time). As the suspense drags on, the movie gets ostentatious, with Clint’s scheme backfiring on him, leading to an amputation sequence of which your mileage may vary. It also has a crazy psychedelic-era dream sequence that shows the two older women sharing a lesbian kiss, and I don’t know if any film before 1971 did anything like that. The ending is a bit blunt, but for the most part I liked this film, which has been called Eastwood’s strangest, but I wouldn’t really know.

The Beguiled (2017): Don Siegel has said that the 1971 film was about the secret desire of women to castrate men, and God knows a remake in our more modern and supposedly enlightened times wouldn’t want to be about something so politically incorrect. Too bad the remake was directed by Sofia Coppola, who is instead predictably only interested in evoking a dreamy, predominantly-female atmosphere on screen, having seemingly forgotten that The Beguiled is a suspense story (she has stated that she considers this an adaptation of the 1966 novel and not a remake of the 1971 film, but that’s lamely splitting hairs; True Grit this ain’t.) The slave character from the original has been eliminated (for which Coppola took flack), raggedy old Geraldine Page has been replaced by prim, gorgeous Nicole Kidman, and a subdued, Irish-accent-using Colin Farrell takes Clint’s place, only to give an inferior performance to Clint despite being probably the better “actor.” As I said, there’s little to no suspense either; the story just plods along, the “amputation” scene is handled with no realism whatsoever, and whatever feminine atmosphere Coppola wanted to evoke is just a bunch of drab, barely-lit shots of the dark house where the story takes place. Kirsten Dunst is an okay choice to play the lonely teacher character, but neither Kidman nor Elle Fanning kick up much Southern dust as the other prominent females. Eventually, the movie just boringly ends, yet another failure from the once-vital Sofia Coppola, whom I’m starting to think of as a sort of nepo fluke. Did she really once direct The Virgin Suicides and Lost In Translation?

Serpico: Disappointing as hell. Al Pacino as Serpico gives a pretty nuanced, strong performance (he’s on screen in nearly every scene), but the on-screen happenings are somehow rarely interesting at all, which is a stunning thing to say about a supposedly gritty New Hollywood classic about NYC police corruption, directed by the guy who gave us 12 Angry Men and Prince Of The City, which was a better film than this. I dunno, the movie veers between scenes of Serpico’s personal life and scene after scene of Serpico finding out that seemingly everyone around him on screen is corrupt, corrupt, corrupt, and God knows what he’s going to do about it! Most of the supporting characters just turn into a seemingly interchangeable blur of corruption, and the movie goes from scene to scene incoherently until Serpico gets shot at the end, which is alluded to at the beginning. I’m not the only one who feels this way–I found a number of reviews on IMDb from people both nowadays and back in 1973 who said the same thing. I know people have said The French Connection is incoherent and dated too, but that film has a fascinatingly sick feel and nihilistic look at NYC circa 1971, and I eventually got into it after hating it the first time I saw it. This one, I’m not so sure. At least Pacino only yells a few times. I guess I could watch this again next year and see for sure.

ALBUMS:

Led Zeppelin, Coda: I had heard all eight of the songs on this at least once, but forgot to ever sit down and give it a full serious in-depth series of listens, something I probably should have done back around, oh, say, a quarter of a fucking century ago when I was still listening to Led Zeppelin all the time. It does count as their weakest studio release (I don’t want to use the word “album”), but that’s only because Presence still has “Achilles Last Stand,” and that’s one of the ten greatest songs ever recorded. If “Achilles” had been on Physical Graffiti in place of, say, “Black Country Woman,” “Bron-Yr-Aur” and five minutes of “In My Time Of Dying,” then Presence would be the weakest album and we could cut it out of the Zeppelin discography entirely, because the only other remotely good songs are “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” and “Hots On For Nowhere,” and even those are songs I could live without. But hey, similarly, if you dumped the shitty “Royal Orleans,” “For Your Life,” “Candy Store Rock” and “Tea For One” (a couple of those I relistened to just to be reminded of how their melodies went, and that they did in fact still suck–seriously, I’ve almost ONLY put Presence on to listen to “Achilles” in 25 years of owning the CD!) you could bump the album’s score up a point if you replaced those four songs with “Walter’s Walk,” “Ozone Baby” (the “ooo, my love!” hook sure is dumb, but it’s a hook!) “Wearing And Tearing” (huge energy!! Zeppelin’s “repsnose to hardcore punk”–maybe not, but huge energy!) and “Poor Tom” (kinda folky like Led Zeppelin III…and it’s from those sessions!). None of the four songs I liked on Coda are classics by any means, but they do save it from being worthless shite or an excuse for Jimmy Page to squeeze a few extra bucks from fans, which is what he was really doing when he put out a three-disc reissue of Coda in 2015, which I don’t have the time or patience for at all–they may have been the band that got me into rock music, but in addition to my lack of care for their classic-era live performances, their rarities just aren’t that interesting, and I haven’t spent much time poring through them! Hey, neither are R. E. M.’s....

Jimi Hendrix, First Rays Of The New Rising Sun: Mmmph, there’s so much great playing here, but also so much…slightly second-rate songwriting. Hendrix still had his youth and playing energy about him, so if you were new to this, you probably woulnd’t be able to tell how this is inferior to the three Experience albums. But really only “Angel” is a classic, and I’ve known that for decades. I guess I could keep “Ezy Rider,” “Stepping Stone,” “Hey Baby (New Rising Sun),” “Dolly Dagger,” the ballad “Drifting,” and a couple of others, and I certainly can accept this as the likely best possible release for the “fourth Hendrix album,” but I was hoping for a few more classics, and there’s seventeen friggin’ songs. If you like Hendrix you should probably check it out but it’s definitely NOT a lost masterpiece. I’m not even sure how to describe what it is he’s doing “wrong,” it’s just that most of these songs are…just…okay.

Bob Dylan, New Morning: I think this is really underrated–actually, it’s maybe even his fourth or fifth best album, that I know of! It’s short and unpretentious, but better handled than Nashville Skyline and not a big mess like Self-Portrait. “New Morning,” “Day Of The Locusts,” “If Not For You” and “Sign On The Window” are all classics IMO, especially “Sign On The Window,” Bob singing a great vocal melody over what sound like the kind of beautifully elegiac solo piano chords Elton John would be making half a career of in the years to come. There’s other good stuff like “Time Passes Slowly” and the Lebowski classic “The Man In Me,” too. I don’t have anything at ALL to say about the “meaning” of this album, just that it’s really underrated and a far better example of Bob’s post-motorcycle-crash-that-might-not-have-happened, “watch me humble myself and not be the voice of my generation anymore” thing than the two albums that precede it. Good job, Clobbert Billan!

The Tubes, Now: The band’s third album, from 1977. It’s more glitzy, show-tuney, arch stuff like Young And Rich, with maybe a little more “rock” in there. “Cathy’s Clone” is a nice dark tune with Re Styles (RIP!) singing lead. I also liked the pop tune “Golden Boy” and the Lee Hazelwood cover “This Town,” and the most memorable moment on the album is at the very end of the final song, when someone starts hammering on a piano in a manner that suggests a louder, glammier version of John Cale’s piano in “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” The big highlight of the album though is a weirdly successful, strummy cover of Captain Beefheart’s “My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains,” which took me a minute to recognize (it’s one of the few Beefheart tunes I like, too.) This album, like a lot of Tubes albums, is however only half successful and almost nobody is talking about it at all today (very, very few articles or reviews are available online, which is lowly even by Tubes standards–there wasn’t even an All Music Guide review!)

Pere Ubu, The Tenement Year: Very disappointing and very weak, I’d been looking for this album for years only to find out it kind of sucks, albeit not as much as really bad Ubu albums like The Art Of Walking. Ubu reformed with most of their classic members in 1987 after a five year hiatus, and with a more accessible sound (no godawful art experiments like they’d been doing before they broke up the first time), and there aren’t many surprises here since they more or less stuck with that general style for the rest of their career, but it doesn’t matter as there’s like three good songs here, and only “good,”; no classics whatsoever are to be found on The Tenement Year. Their names are “Rhythm King,” “Dream The Moon” and the pleasant closer “We Have The Technologie.” That’s if you care to hear them, but I think most people here are going to only bother with classic 1970s Ubu at best. They had some good albums later in their career, but this wasn’t one of them. And Good LORD is Allen Ravenstine’s EML synthesizer worthless on this album! I mean, it often is, but this time, he comes up with SQUAT!

Frank Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation: This is okay, but I was expecting better out of something that was said to be a more “accessible” mainstream-friendly version of the spoofy sound Frank had been going for on much of his Flo & Eddie-era stuff. It IS more “accessible,” but that just means Frank isn’t blowing 75 minutes on some failed film score or chaff-filled concept album; there’s no sounds on this album he hadn’t tried before. “Camarillo Brillo” and the anti-TV “I’m The Slime” are the best, and I didn’t mind “Dinah Moe-Humm“‘s chorus, at least; the parts where Frank seems to be getting into straight-up pornography with his lyrics had me thinking of that poor doomed feminist woman who came up with a completely valid argument against R. Crumb’s comics in Crumb. Also, I had no idea what is so great about “Montana,” one of the most acclaimed songs here. Anyone want to fill me in on that one? This gets an average rating.

Game Theory, Real Nighttime: Produced by Mitch Easter, who produced my all-time favorite album (Murmur), but all that means is that they eased up on the dorky 80s Casio keyboards a bit. The wimpy vocals and iffy songwriting are still both huge problems. I hate to tell you all this, but for all the acclaim this album got, I’m still not getting into Game Theory much at all. I only liked about three or four songs here, bonus tracks included–I think I’d be willing to keep “Waltz THe Halls Always,” maybe “Girl W/A Guitar” and a live version of “The Red Baron,” which was a nice studio song they did a couple years earlier. Elsewhere, I’ve noticed the sensitive Mr. Scott Miller has a penchant for blowing it with lots of weird covers–“Baker Street”? “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”? Big Star’s “You Can’t Have Me”? (How’d he fuck up THAT one? Game Theory are constantly and lamely compared to Big Star) Roxy Music’s “Re-Make/Re-Model”? “She’ll Be A Verb”? Nope, that last one’s not a cover–this band really did a song dorkily titled “She’ll Be A Verb,” and it’s not a clever one. Sorry guys, I don’t think this band’s for me–I’m pretty happy I only have one more album to go.