BOOKS:

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand Of Darkness (RE-READ): This was a weird re-read. The first half seems to have most of the world-building in it: a foreign planet (Gethen) full of strange names, rules, places, kingdoms, conflicts, and most famously, the “ambisexuality” of its residents. The second half involves the main character’s prison escape, his team-up with the main Gethenian character and their voyage across an icy terrain to survival. The weird part was that I found the second half more readable, and what’s weird is not just that it’s the easier part to read, but that all the stuff built up in the first half seems to fall a bit by the wayside in the second. The “ambisexuality” doesn’t turn out to be as much of a plot factor as I thought it would, and the main character’s quest (to get Gethen to join an interplanetary federation) doesn’t seem to weigh on the reader (or just me?) as much as the reader would think. (The main philosophical idea in the book–the “uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question”–proposed by the main character’s visit to a religious sect, struck me as more interesting than all the talk of “kemmer.”) So I’m not really done with the book–a second re-read will be necessary because I can’t tell if I’m right about what I just said, or if I need to read it even more closely than I did (hey, I didn’t give a rat’s ass for Blade Runner the first time I saw it, y’know!) I will say though that LeGuin was writing at a pretty high, intellectual level for the genre in 1969 and obviously many ideas in the book are ahead of its time, which is also-obviously why it has survived so well. But I’m not done with the book–as I said in a previous post, I think I’m going to need to read some more of the major LeGuin stuff, then go back to this one.

MOVIES:

Wet Hot American Summer: I liked this well enough, though probably not as much as its very-devoted fanbase did; it flopped in 2001 and got absolutely terrible reviews, but the cult around it was loud enough to get the creators to do a couple of Netflix sequels 15 years later. If you didn’t know, it’s set around 1981 and parodies horny-teen summer-camp films, which is weird to me because I just watched Sleepaway Camp, which isn’t a comedy (at least not intentionally.) It blows through its characters at a rapid pace and there are so many of them that the movie is straining to find room for all of them in a 90 minute film, but I laughed at enough jokes (“I need you to go to town and get me some lube!…for my pussy!”) to save it. Be advised that the style of humor predates the cycle of Judd Apatow comedies that would start a couple of years later; I don’t know much people here like that sort of stuff, but I do, so I had no problem with this film.

A Time To Kill: This is at least watchable as a thriller, I guess, and with Joel Schumacher directing it’s kind of a miracle that it’s not flat-out terrible, but the book, long-winded as it was, was still better at putting you in its Southern setting, and the worst parts of the movie are the worst parts of the book, so the book wins (the movie, 150 minutes long, is also long-winded.) It’s got a really good cast and one can easily see why Matthew McConaughey became a big star–for an untested actor who got the part on a total fluke, he handles things stunningly well. The scenes of racial tension and violence kind of work too, ham-fisted though they threaten to be. But the bit with the paralyzed security guard going ahead and accepting the Samuel L. Jackson character’s apology and supporting him on the stand still reeks of bullshit, and frankly, so does the Jackson character being acquitted at the end of the film, a total Hollywood fantasy. So it’s not a surprise that this movie isn’t terribly popular anymore (only about 50 external reviews on IMDb), with its main legacy being the “yes they deserved to die, and I hope they burn in hell!” line…but that might be because of Dave Chappelle.

The Survivor: Barry Levinson directs Ben Foster (him again) in the role of Harry Haft, a Holocaust survivor who survived by pounding his fellow concentration camp inmates in the ring for the amusement of sicko Nazis. Fairly harrowing, and once again Foster–king of the Oscar-nominated performances that don’t actually get nominated for Oscars, only noticed by critics–goes all out, looking starved in the black-and-white concentration camp scenes and pumped in the later years when he has to fight Rocky Marciano. This is okay, but probably not something I, or very many other people, will revisit–the movie might as well have ended 45 minutes earlier than it did, for starters.

Everything Everywhere All At Once: The experience of watching this film is probably best compared to, of all things, El Topo: at first, you’re stunned at what seems like a very auteurist, lively, surreal vision, but the effect of the film starts to wear off halfway through, leaving it as a half-satisfying experience overall. In the case of El Topo, I remember growing bored with the violence and gore of the whole thing halfway through, and in the case of 2022’s Best Picture winner, I grew bored with constant Matrix style fight scenes and scatological humor, and of course trying to “make sense” of how all these multiverses and “jumping” works is something I wouldn’t have had the energy to do in 2005, let alone now. Michelle Yeoh has clearly been put through the ringer here, covering a stunning range of emotions and character traits; she probably deserved her Best Actress Oscar; Ke Huy Quan might have deserved his as well (seeing him go from nebbish to badass is mostly only amusing in the first half of the film), but Jamie Lee Curtis, I’m afraid not. Then there’s the whole humanitarian/existential message of the whole thing, which, while not completely trite, is mostly only memorable for its depiction of oblivion in the form of an “everything bagel”; the only scene in the second half of the film I’d really ever care to watch again is the scene between the two rocks.

ALBUMS:

Queens Of The Stone Age, …Like Clockwork: Very good, pretty strong all the way through. I’d definitely rank it over Era Vulgaris, and like that album, I’m not sure what they were doing here even counts as “desert metal” or even “metal” any longer, more of a combination of laconic, slightly stoner-y rockers and Goth-friendly sad balladry, most of which features Josh Homme doing a lot of seductive, falsetto-laden vocalizing. The former would include “Keep Your Eyes Peeled,” “I Sat By The Ocean,” “My God Is The Sun,” “If I Had A Tail” and “I Appear Missing,” all of which worked for me, and the latter would include “The Vampyre Of Time And Memory” and the stunning title track, a sad piano number I didn’t think Josh Homme could pull off at all, but he did. It competes with the one fish-out-of-water song on the album, “Kalopsia”–a Reznor-featuring major-key ambient synthesizer piece based around an updated 1970s mood and Homme singing lullingly–for the title of the album’s best song. Homme should do more songs like this! I didn’t get into “Fairweather Friends,” which features Elton John, though I’d have to be a dog to hear him. Really glad this was as good as it was–I always sort of worried that I wasn’t going to like any QOTSA album as much as Songs For The Deaf.

Blue Cheer, Vincebus Eruptum: I can give this a very shaky thumbs up–I should have heard it in high school (we all should have heard it in high school), when its dumbass fuzzed-out stoned-teenager mood would have struck me as something more profound, but that very same mood is what gives the album a sort of historical importance, making the Stooges sound like Van Der Graaf Generator by comparison. The two hit covers that open the album, “Summertime Blues” and “Rock Me Baby,” are actually the weakest songs (and now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever been wild about ANY version of “Summertime Blues.”) The four fuzz-fests after that were all better, and the riff for “Doctor Please” is so slack and crude and dead sounding due to the fuzz that it’s…well, we all got sick of this sort of description, but it’s “like a grunge song in 1968, man!” But yeah–if you know anything about this album at all, you know about its reputation as one of the most famous “proto metal” albums, and its reputation as one of the biggest “stupid rock” albums, too, so get out that joint–oh, to be a dumb fucking 16 year old boy in San Francisco in 1968!

Bob Dylan, Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid soundtrack: Mostly shit. “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” is still classic, obviously, and kudos to George Starostin for sticking up for the lovely, flute-assisted “Final Theme,” which I can’t wait to hear in the movie if I ever get around to rewatching it like I should. The rest of this? Simplistic strummy forgettable slop, a junk-drawer of third-rate Dylan even more forgettable than Dylan. I didn’t even come close to finding any of it memorable. You couldn’t convince me otherwise, either. This is definitely the weakest Dylan album I’ve heard so far, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that nobody ever talks about it aside from its big hit. That being said, I’m not really bashing Bob personally much for this one–much like his performance in the film, I’m getting the impression he wasn’t even trying to turn this album into a “major effort.”

Jimi Hendrix, Live At Woodstock: Well, we all like hearing Jimi fuck up the national anthem, don’t we? Sure, it’s nice to hear, even though to me personally it’s a glorified novelty. I also recalled sort of liking a very hard rocking version of “Izabella,” and “Fire” too even though Noel Redding’s silly backing vocals aren’t there. The rest? I think you had to be there, and I think you had to be on substances; for all its historic importance, this frankly bored the shit out of me. I’m sorry, even if he is the most talented guitarist who ever lived (sure! why not?), the jamming here just…I can’t. I don’t know what it is, but this is all just too long and too boring, and I don’t smoke weed or drop acid or whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing to like this, or any other live album where classic rockers solo on and on forever (Led Zeppelin inlcuded, y’know!) I couldn’t get into the 15-minute studio “Voodoo Chile,” and the 15 minute version of “Slight Return” here probably bores me even more.

The Tubes, Outside Inside: Passable, though a step down from the surprisingly good 1981 album Completion Backwards Principle. It’s got their “big” MTV hit “She’s A Beauty,” which would only save The Tubes for a couple more years, but it’s likeable enough. The best song is “No Not Again,” a very catchy rolling power-pop/AOR number, and I guess I could keep “Glass House,” “Tip Of My Tongue” and “Fantastic Delusion” too, but you can skip the dumb Sammy Hagar-ish “Wild Women of Wongo.” At this point, whatever arch 10cc-ish irony the band were going for might as well not be there–this is just a mainstream AOR pop-rock album from 1983, though given that 1983 was the peak of cheesy Casio synthesizer-ridden aerobics music and cheesier stadium rock/heavy metal, it’s stunningly tasteful.

Pere Ubu, Lady From Shanghai: A 2013 effort from David Thomas and whoever the fuck else he could get to play on these things (I wanted to say for the umpteenth that I have no idea who even buys all these Pere Ubu albums, but there were 25 Metacritic reviews for it, which is three times as many as there were for the album fucking Wilco put out four years ago), he’s described this, pretentiously, as “dance music done right.” I guess there is a bit of a beat underpinning some of these songs, but who cares–there’s no “Ubu Dance Party” to be found here. Hell, there’s no great songs at all, and one particularly bad one (the ugly, repetitive “Mandy,” dragging on for seven excruciating minutes and becoming perhaps the worst Ubu song I know of, which is saying something!) though you can check out “Feuksley Ma’am, The Hearing,” “Free White” and “Lampshade Man” if you want to hear the ones that at least sort of worked.

Frank Zappa/The Mothers Of Invention, Just Another Band From L. A.: Probably a must-listen for any serious Zappa devotee simply because it contains stuff that aren’t on his studio albums…but one of those things is the 24 minute “Billy The Mountain,” a typical Zappa mess of fuck which vacillates painfully between musical passages of actual depth and utterly stupid sing-songy Flo-and-Eddie “humorous” garbage. Due to being the mess of fuck that it is, maybe it’s the “quintessential” Zappa song! Other than that, I guess I kind of liked “Eddie, Are You Kidding?” which is stunning, because it too is sing-songy Flo-and-Eddie stuff. I have no idea if “Call Any Vegetable” was better on this album or the overrated Absolutely Free and I don’t care to find out. Another month, another messy Zappa album. Lather rinse repeat.