A Patchwork Planet (1998)

This is one by Anne Tyler that seemed to me not so easy to get a bead on. On the one hand it's as compulsively readable as anything by her; I have now found myself twice rip-roaring through it in short order. Its first-person story of Barnaby Gaitlin the poor little rich boy and black sheep of a wealthy family of Baltimore philanthropists has all the usual Tyler hallmarks: quirky lovable characters who bring the pathos, a jumble of amiable incident, and a moderately surprise twist in its ending that satisfies more than not. Gaitlin has rejected his wealthy family nearly as much as they have rejected him, though all remain enmeshed with one another. After some serious problems as a teen, including a late graduation from high school and legal troubles involving burglary charges, he has spent all of his adult life working for Rent-a-Back, which provides manual labor services to the elderly. Gaitlin turns 30 as the novel begins. Divorced from a brief marriage, he has a 9-year-old daughter who lives with her mother and stepfather in Philadelphia. Gaitlin is a bit of a Holden Caulfield, reflexively rejecting anything he identifies as phony. He rents the basement of a home from a family with whom he must share a bathroom. The patriarchal side of his family believes that angels traditionally visit them at portentous points in their lives to deliver fateful messages. Gaitlin believes he may have found his angel in the person of Sophie, who he meets on a train ride between Baltimore and Philadelphia after watching her carry through on a good deed on an earlier train ride. But when they end up involved, Gaitlin is no longer as sure about that. Taken altogether, A Patchwork Planet notably has its oddities, perhaps none greater than Tyler's decision to tell the story first-person by Gaitlin. Over the duration of the novel he seemed to me less and less believable as a man, and indeed begins to come off like one of those Woody Allen characters—philosopher or TV comedy writer or documentary filmmaker—who only sounds like Woody Allen. Gaitlin sounds more and more like the typical garrulous, overfeeling Tyler female with an overlay of pro forma male characteristics, such as a certain degree of handiness with tools. Some of Gaitlin's plaintive declarations and assertions at points started to remind me of Jack Handey Deep Thoughts shtick ("If you go parachuting, and your parachute doesn’t open, and you friends are all watching you fall, I think a funny gag would be to pretend you were swimming"), which brought things dangerously close to capsizing under their own weight at various points. Yet this is also one of Tyler's more tightly constructed and symmetrical plots as well and certainly worth it for any fan.

In case it's not at the library.

Sleeping With the Past (1989)

This is the other Elton John album I pulled out of the slush pile the same day I picked up the Thom Bell set. It was officially the new one at the time, hailed by fast-talking PR types who called me on the phone as some kind of rapprochement and reunion of Elton and his long-time lyricist Bernie Taupin. Something about it certainly struck home for me as I played it quite a bit, used various tracks as staples on mix tapes I made for years ("Sacrifice," "Sleeping With the Past," "Club at the End of the Street"), and in general just had myself a real nice glowing Elton John renaissance over it. I don't hear much of that as clearly now—though the music has well-grooved associations with a momentous period of my life and so some value on that level. I had the whole thing on the side of a tape that I took with me on a trip to New York, playing it a lot on my walkman as I pounded the streets and stopped into stores such as the Strand bookstore, and it worked nicely in that context, surprisingly. But mostly it sounds ponderous and lumbering to me now, though with all the usual high production values and some occasional moments that whip themselves up to a fine spirit or to very lovely passages or both, much like virtually all of Elton John for 30 years or more. In the end, maybe Elton John has become a kind of Elvis Presley for me. I'm still mostly enamored with much of his early work and certainly all the hits when he exploded in the '70s. He has steadily ossified into nothing ever particularly surprising, let alone meaningful. "I'm Still Standing" indeed, career statement of purpose. I said before that people were grateful for his reworking of "Candle in the Wind" as an elegy for Princess Diana, but I wasn't actually one of them. On the other hand, I wanted to stand on a chair and cheer when he and Eminem pulled their little stunt. So I don't actually have anything against him or resent him his success the way I might some others. I'm glad he's around and still out there and it's even nice to hear this again once in awhile.

Psycho (1960)

USA, 109 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Joseph Stefano, Robert Bloch
Photography: John L. Russell
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editor: George Tomasini
Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam, John McIntire, Simon Oakland, Frank Albertson, Patricia Hitchcock, Mort Mills

Alfred Hitchcock’s full-tilt stab at horror must have come as something of a shock to those who had grown used to the technicolor antics and capers of all those sparkling Hollywood stars in Hitchcock’s ‘50s productions, whatever weird trails they might have gone down, such as Vertigo. But Psycho remains a classic horror show to this day, one of the pictures most associated with Hitchcock and one by which he may be best remembered. It came at the tail end of arguably his greatest run, after Vertigo and North by Northwest, and it heralded the dawn of the kandy-kolored tangerine dream decade that was to follow with the grit and harsh contrasts of a movie that was black and white on multiple levels to its core.

It takes a number of chances, most notably in the single-minded way it goes for the look and feel of a tawdry low-budget shocker as well as in the relatively brief screen time given to its female lead, Janet Leigh. In many ways, and in spite of its feature length, it operates as a particularly meticulous installment of his TV show, complete with story twists and surprises and a clumsy everything's-all-right-after-all coda, grounded in the reassuring avuncular tones of a professional psychiatrist. Because of those story twists and surprises, and how artfully the picture manages to husband its secrets, I feel obligated at this point to mention that spoilers are ahead.

The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

Even for someone without the formidable writing skills of Joan Didion there's a story of significant dimensions to be told here: A few days after Didion's daughter lapses into a coma for reasons not entirely clear, her husband of nearly 40 years, the writer John Gregory Dunne, suddenly suffers and dies from a cardiac event in their home, which Didion witnesses just as she's about to serve dinner. Her daughter's health remains precarious over the year that follows. Because of Didion's and Dunne's reputation, or even fame, there's an odd blending here of facile gossipy fascination and genuinely gripping story of human pathos. As we have seen, Didion has spent much of her career trafficking in highly personalized anxiety and dread, and here she is, out of a long life of evident privilege, suddenly confronted with samples of some her worst nightmares—some of the worst nightmares of anyone. I found my sympathies thus not entirely unmixed, though more often than not feeling for her, and achingly so. One doctor very early, shortly after the death of her husband—I mean literally in the few hours following—refers to her as "a pretty cool customer," which rings true in every way imaginable. Yet her life's nonfiction work, even as it maintains the pose, makes apparent that she is actually anything but. Acting as if she is "a pretty cool customer" is simply what she knows to do. Typically enough, for example, she reports, and with a good deal of lucidity, on how she is unable to throw away Dunne's shoes because he will need them when he comes back, even as she more than readily acknowledges how well she knows he is not coming back. Even at the end of the book, when she is writing a year and more out from the events, she notes in passing that she still has the shoes. Things like that make this finely observed work, to a remarkable degree. Sudden death, even long-expected death, does have a way of throwing one into such mindsets. The denial of reality is very clear in such moments. One may continue to function entirely as someone who has accepted reality, yet the denial rages on inside, consciously or not. Didion, thrown willy-nilly into the greatest extremities of her life, reports back with exactly the kind of poise and eye for the telling detail and sharply etched prose that we have come to expect from her in even the most dispassionate areas. It makes me suspect what a lifeline her work must be for her, and I find myself respecting her for it all the more.

In case it's not at the library.

The Complete Thom Bell Sessions (1977)

It may seem vaguely comical to label something that amounts to all of six songs totaling just 35 minutes of music "complete," but complete is complete, and the reference here is to an EP released in 1979 with just three of these tracks. This complete set, though recorded in 1977, didn't come along until the end of the '80s, well after Elton John had settled into the calcified glamour he has occupied so well over recent decades and producer Thom Bell had registered his greatest work with the Delfonics, Stylistics, and Spinners (who show up here singing background vocals). Those soul acts rank way high for me among those from the late '60s into the '70s and Elton John of course is a lifelong favorite, so this was a bit of a natural when I fished it out of a slush pile circa 1989. Yet it nevertheless came as a surprise as I had not been particularly aware of the EP and its associations with Bell and the Spinners. The truth is I was about done with Elton John by 1979, though now and then I took a chance on one of his albums, such as 21 at 33 (which usually proved disappointing). The general thrust is apparent just from scanning the titles, where the word "love" appears in four of the six, though not always without something of a bite: "Nice and Slow," "Country Love Song," "Shine on Through" (which showed up in different form on 1978's A Single Man), "Mama Can't Buy You Love," "Are You Ready for Love," and "Three Way Love Affair." Elton gets songwriting credit for three of them, and Bell also for three; the only one they collaborated on was "Nice and Slow," with Bernie Taupin chipping in lyrics. Two songs come in close to or over eight minutes, and the rest are about five minutes each, so there's some stretching out here but not to unruly lengths. To me there's a slightly muffled sound to the recording, as if the seals were fixed too tight and the oxygen depleting, which something could maybe be done about in a remastering, or perhaps that's the way Bell and John intended it. It's not that distracting—the main attraction is the late-disco sound verging on adult contemporary that moves so confidently through everything here. Those are a couple of genres where it's all too easy to go wrong and where so many before and since have wrecked. But there's something sweet and poignant about this set, a feeling that history waited too long but it's good to have at last, a feeling that persists. I still hear these songs as revelation and surprise, with some sadness I can't quite pin down, nonetheless inflected, enlivened, heartened, even redeemed by the joy they bear. It's one '70s set that seems likely to quietly endure a good long time.

The General (1926)

USA, 107 minutes
Directors: Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton
Writers: Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, Al Boasberg, Charles Henry Smith, William Pittenger, Paul Girard Smith
Photography: Bert Haines, Devereaux Jennings
Editors: Buster Keaton, Sherman Kell
Cast: Buster Keaton, Marion Mack

With the exception of Charlie Chaplin I have long tended to struggle with comedies of a certain vintage, those pratfall-driven productions usually headed up by various familiar names: Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, Harold Lloyd, the Keystone Kops, even the Marx Brothers all tend to be lost on me. And I'm quite sincere in my use of the word "lost"—I envy all those who get the kind of pleasure and solace out of them that I seem to find only with Chaplin. Even Woody Allen, at one point as important a filmmaker for me as anyone (hard to remember now sometimes!), has several times made his case for the Marx Brothers. But I have only barely glimpsed any of that for myself so far.

The Three Stooges, to briefly wander off on a tangent, is something of a different matter. They don't do much for me any more, but as a kid and for years into being an adult, I did find them very funny, particularly in the company of others—the sound effects, the silly ways they carried on, the fierce concentration on their various cruelties. I remember attending a ballgame once, it must have been in the '80s, where a Three Stooges clip was played between innings. I was struck, looking around, at how hard so many of the men were laughing, and at how cross so many of the women looked. There's something about the Three Stooges that really divides by gender.

Buster Keaton is often opposed to Charlie Chaplin in a kind of Beatles/Stones or Coke/Pepsi manner of systematic binary duality, and he is another one who seems lost on me for the most part, though my exposure to him even still remains fairly limited. But I will say that I have had an interesting experience with The General.

40. T. Rex, "Ballrooms of Mars" (1972)

(listen)

I know Marc Bolan almost surely qualifies as superstar to most, at least those of a certain age, but somehow I get the feeling he's been overlooked in the long decades since his death in 1977, by which point that star was certainly fading anyway. That's probably on me, coming rather late to the best of T. Rex, which to me are the matching pair of albums from the early '70s, Electric Warrior and The Slider. No one else sounds like this. They are studies in smoldering understatement, cool bravado, tempered joy, and a hedonism restrained only by unknown laws of comportment, strictly enforced, all of it burnished to a fine buff. "Ballrooms of Mars" comes from The Slider, which I like a little better—but only because it's the one I've ended up playing the most frequently—and it's a nearly perfect example of the things that Bolan could do so well. (I hasten to add that if you like this at all you shouldn't waste another minute about getting either or both of the albums. They are fine.) I particularly like how everything about it is so casually deliberate, from the studied name-dropping (Bob Dylan, Alan Freed, John Lennon) to the science-fiction setting implied in its name to the various fashion inventories to the hoary old call to "Rock!" Everything is as cool as can be even as it manages to build itself up to a colossal head of steam. By the time Bolan commands us to "Rock!" and sends the tune sprawling into nether regions of the solar system, tumbling and spinning slo-mo in a place absent all gravity—well, I really don't see how it's possible for anyone to do anything but exactly that.

41. Hole, "I Think That I Would Die" (1994)

(listen)

I have always been a sucker for a good drama, and among other things this delivers one of the great declarations of "Fuck you" in all of rock 'n' roll. This one's personal—well, they all are with Courtney Love, but you know what I mean—it rolls up all the grievances she forever nurses about feminist backlash and unfair and you wouldn't with anyone else and why me and low self-esteem and there should have been something about Olympia, Washington, and all the fans and sycophants not appreciative (read: ingratiating) enough, and football players, and John Cheever, and thick meat sandwiches with ketchup. The usual upchuck of association, sung calculatedly out of key. Mostly this is a locus for all the seething resentment she bore over the baby Bean and Child Protective Services and so-called friends who narc'ed her out and who knows what else. But that whole episode. On that level it's just about as authentic as I've ever heard her. That's, I believe, why the chant goes, "I want my baby / Where is the baby? / I want my baby / Who took my baby?" The mumbled, "It's / Not / Yours" before the great volcanic eruption. The point is it's cathartic, like the album, but with a particularly fine point, which somehow never seems to wear away. She really seems to mean it. For a few naked moments the self-centeredness is deliberately cast off—no doubt for self-serving motives, but done all the same. And there she is, with a great band at its peak churning away behind her, genuine: "There is no milk / There is no milk / There is no milk."