BOOKS:

Roger L. Ringer, Kansas Oddities: A brief (about 120 pages) little dime-store book that my mom bought me for Christmas and I choked it down real fast. It’s a bunch of pretty hastily assembled little entries, mostly about pre-World War II inventors, which my poor little state actually had a lot of back then. But they’re not that interesting to read about. The most interesting entry ends up being about a Kansas woman who married a Turkish prince. The final entry is about Kansas the rock band. This guy seems to have copied down a bunch of stuff from various websites. I bet somebody here could have written a book just as good. Nobody here is ever going to read this so let’s just move on.

MOVIES:

Shane: Not bad, but I wish it had more surprises. I wanted to say that it was beautifully shot but I lost track of how many times it seems like you see characters riding horses past that same epic looking mountain range. There’s a commentary on Western violence in there but it’s nothing all that fascinating, nothing that Unforgiven didn’t do better. Weirdly enough, the scenes that ended up fascinating me the most were the two huge fist fights in the film–first of all because they go on so endlessly that the participants would all have been dead if they were real fist fights. Secondly because the second fist fight involves the heroes pounding each other which for me was the most interesting thing in the plot. The Jack Palance performance was a bit overrated–sure, he projects menace and all, but I’d have switched him with Ben Johnson, who does better in the first brawl scene. Dock off a couple points as well for Brandon de Wilde as the little kid, who is now my pick for the most undeserving Oscar nominee of all time.

Priscilla: Yawn. Sofia Coppola already made this movie, it was called Marie Antoinette and it was far better than this sepia-toned bore. The chief difference this time is that having Priscilla Presley as your gilded-cage heroine means at least you get Elvis as the male failure in the movie instead of Jason Schwartzman, so that’s a plus, I guess. But the trademarks are all still there: quiet shots of the female lead staring lazily out a window, sulking around barefoot in her bedroom, and anachronistic punk/new wave songs on the soundtrack (they weren’t allowed to use any Elvis songs.) Little happens in the movie that you wouldn’t expect, except that Elvis always seems lurking in the shadows, and there’s no big obvious excoriation of him for grooming a 14 year old girl (Elvis seems to have been given more of a pass on this than a lot of people anyway.) Oh, and it’s not as weak as Somewhere, one of the worst films I’ve ever seen by a director who has made films that I like, so that’s good. Still, if this is all Sofia Coppola can do anymore then maybe she honestly should stop making films.

King Richard: The movie Will Smith won his Oscar for, though nobody’s going to remember that thanks to the slap incident. I s’pose he does well enough, I thought the character of Richard Williams was fairly well shaded enough between “batshit loco tennis dad” territory and “determined but still human.” Since that’s the core of the movie, I can’t write the film off. A lot of critics felt the movie (executive produced by Venus and Serena) made him look too good, but I didn’t. I don’t like watching tennis one bit, so all the scenes of people playing it can go to hell for all I care, but you do get lots of hilarious little bits where Venus and Serena are well-behaved winners while the rich white girls they go up against all act like poor sports after they lose. Ha!!!

Last Tango In Paris: If this were made today it’d be a quirky indie movie. As it stands, it’s still quirky. I’m only partially joking. I mean, the infamous butter-lube bit is directly followed by Brando and Maria Schneider listening to records on the floor and having a goofy conversation and not acting the least bit like an anal rape just happened, followed by Brando acting like a scatological college kid who doesn’t give a shit about anything at all for pretty much the rest of the movie, up until the final scene. The movie’s reputation (aside from people who mistakenly think it’s a porno) is a lot like Raging Bull–people are misremember how many nasty/painful/loud scenes there are; meanwhile, the act of watching it is closest to There Will Be Blood, where the whole thing hangs together on the power of the big scenes anyway, most of what happens in between (like, say, EVERY scene involving the dork from The 400 Blows as the filmmaker husband) isn’t really worth the bother. On the whole I’m pretty wavy-hand about the whole thing, mostly because the movie after the butter scene is just weird in a devil-may-care way, like it got tired of trying to be serious. Also, Pauline Kael’s review, yeesh, put your pants back on lady.

ALBUMS:

The Boo Radleys, Giant Steps: This 1993 double-album, which got pretty good notices at the time (albeit mostly from the British music press, so a grain of salt is welcome) started off my 2025 listening spree on a fairly strong note; the Holy Trinity of shoegaze albums is probably Loveless, Nowhere and Souvlaki but this one could perhaps make that into a quadrangle. It’s only partially “shoegaze” anyway; there’s 65 minutes of music across 17 songs from a band trying lots of little subgenres, and loud dreamy shoegaze guitars only appear on a few songs. The best is the Big Star-like “Best Lose The Fear” (one of the very best Big Star imitations I can think of, and I’ve heard quite a few!), the dreamy-introed “Thinking Of Ways,” the rococo, horn-laden “I’ve Lost The Reason,” and the sombre Beatles-chant closer “The White Noise Revisited.” Those last two point the way to Elephant 6 more than Britpop, and the lead singer, “Sice” (I forgot his real name) has a wimpy sad little voice just like Scott Miller or maybe Robert Schneider from Apples In Stereo. I liked about eight or nine other songs too, so I’ll probably have to purchase this someday and will consider doing the rest of the band’s discography (they broke up in 1999.) I’m always looking for more classics from this genre or anything like it and the early 90s in general, so I’m very glad I finally got around to hearing this album. It’s good!

Game Theory, Blaze Of Glory: This could have sounded a lot worse for something that Scott Miller pieced together in his garage (or whatever it was) and only got a thousand copies pressed, but I just didn’t get into the style very much. Miller’s voice, as I’ve already said in my Lolita Nation comments, is painfully twerpy and wispy and the band wasn’t doing “80s college rock” yet so much as homebrewed new wave, replete with terrible Revenge Of The Nerds theme-song synthesizers. I guess Miller’s melodies could have been salvaged from a thin soup of a sound like this, and he can write them, but I didn’t find the songs all that great anyway. The best is “The Girls Are Ready To Go” with its cheerleadery up-down up-down (“go GO go GO go GO go GO!”) chorus evoking a more sincere, more lovable Devo, and the meandering “Bad Year At UCLA,” but a lot of the rest of them just can’t get past that sound. Usually I’m more forgiving of this sort of thing, but I guess we’ll have to see with the rest of this band’s stuff.

Bob Dylan/The Band, The Basement Tapes: There are three types of songs on this compilation. One is The Band’s stuff, which I already heard as bonus tracks on the reissue of Music From Big Pink that I got for Christmas in fucking 2003. I didn’t need to hear those songs again at all and they weren’t that good to begin with. The second kind of song is the Dylan version of stuff he gave to other bands, like “Tears Of Rage,” “This Wheel’s On Fire” and “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” These were pretty good–I don’t think any of them beat the versions by the Byrds or The Band, but they can stand along side them, at least. The third kind is the Dylan stuff that didn’t show up elsewhere, the best of which was “Million Dollar Bash,” “Goin’ To Acapulco” (what a wonderfully yearning song this is) and “Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread.” There’s enough good stuff in the last two categories put together to make the Basement Tapes overall more good than bad, for which I am thankful. Not all of it is so hot though–“Ruben Remus”? Some of the critics REALLY overhyped this one, mind you (if there’s some lavish reissue, I would very much dread reading the obligatory fawning liner notes)–but I do agree that seeing Dylan be off-the-cuff and humorous can be pretty nice, regardless of who is backing him.

The Tubes, The Tubes: The 1975 debut album by a band who made a Todd Rundgren-produced masterpiece four years later (Remote Control). Despite two decades of listening to that wonderful, wonderful album (and trying to promote it here to little avail–it was a BABBLETRON album once!), I’ve barely heard any of their other stuff at all, but I’m finally getting around to it this year This band’s reputation was that of satire/parody songs and glammy shock rock at the same time, better at drumming up notoriety through their live show (where lead singer Fee Waybill played glam-rock caricature Quay Lewd surrounded by semi nude women) than sales. What they sound like on record is a slicker, glammier, smarmier American counterpart to 10cc, even going for a similarly diverse approach in terms of what they parody. None of the eight songs sound like one another and the band was full of talented players, so you get prog-miniature stuff like “Up From The Deep” and the Rundgren-ish “Haloes,” the latter of which is one of two classics here, the other being the sarcastic “What Do You Want From Life?” There’s also their “hit,” “White Punks On Dope,” which is pretty funny but a bit loud and obnoxious. A couple other songs here work, but I initially thought this disc was a bit better than it actually is; it’s still more good than bad, but alas, 10cc’s debut album is still the gold standard for anyone looking for that arch, lovingly-dated 70s-satire feel. One of the songs here is even a fucking mariachi classic, the song that played over the end cast credits of Kill Bill, Vol. 2. You don’t need to hear that one, though.

Longpigs, The Sun Is Often Out: Sometimes miserably derivative albums are actually good. This second-rate 1996 Britpop album is something I listened to on a lark while looking up reviews for other stuff because one of my old college summer roommates was obsessed with it and listened to it all the time and told ME to listen to it all the time, but I’m only just getting around to hearing it 20 years later. It sounds like a cross between Blur/Oasis and The Bends…but that’s a generic description. It’s anthemic Britpop, typical guitar bass drums vocals stuff. The first four songs–“Lost Myself,” “Far,” “She Said” and “On And On”, are all pretty wonderful actually, and I can name about four more from the 53-minute album that I liked, including “Over Our Bodies,” the band’s entry in the “Looking Glass”/”Fake Plastic Trees”/”Champagne Supernova” epic-ballad sweepstakes. Few reviews/essays are available, so it looks like this band has been mostly forgotten, but if you’ve heard of Richard Hawley, he was the guitar player. Chalk this up as a guilty pleasure.

Jimi Hendrix/Band Of Gypsys, Band Of Gypsys: Not much to say for this one. “Machine Gun” is fairly good–not masterful, IMO, just pretty good–but the rest of it just wastes Jimi’s talents on melodically generic (if not painful to listen to) soul-rocking tunes that I’ll probably never feel like hearing. Digging through the reviews and essays made it apparent that Jimi himself didn’t care much for this whole thing either, and I hadn’t heard much good about it going in anyhow.

Frank Zappa, Waka/Jawaka: Was the title supposed to be a porno-funk guitar noise? 36 minutes of jazz. “Big Swifty” is 17 minutes long, sounds pretty close to Soft Machine’s Third, and just like that album I can admire it while having an absolutely godawful time remembering how any of it went afterwards. The title track is 11 minutes long and has cool-enough horns in it to be listenable. The two shorter songs I’ve already forgotten. This gets a neutral rating but I can least admire the musicianship…but what Zappa album has poor musicianship? He always got SOMEBODY to play this ridiculously complicated crap, right? Burnt Weeny Sandwich still remains the best of Zappa’s classical/jazz-themed albums, IMO. Whether or not I’ll revisit W/J in the future, God only knows. I mean, I’ve revisited the Soft Machine album, but I still can’t remember it.

Pere Ubu, Story Of My Life: I’ve been putting off listening to the less-essential/notable parts of the Pere Ubu catalogue for far too long, and you know somebody’s got to stand up for a band whose fan base, for all I know, doesn’t even number in the five digits any more. It’s hard to imagine how I would explain the way this perennially super-underrated band appeals to me in a manner that would make other people want to listen to them, but I’ve always felt they sound like the soundtrack to a waacky drive across America, they always seem to evoke interstate roads and the Rust Belt regardless of what era you’re listening to. This particular record has David Thomas’ usual fat-clown vocals but Allen Ravenstine had left for good to become a pilot by this time so there’s no Atari-bloop synthesizers, but if you like Ray Gun Suitcase from two years later (and I’ve always loved most of that one) this does a decent, if slightly lesser, job of setting that one up, with one song (“Louisiana Train Wreck”) having its melody and lyrics recycled a bit for the great “Down By The River II.” There’s only one great song here–the two chord, power-pop-like “Kathleen,” but I’d also go to bat for “Wasted” (eerie death march), “Come Home” (primitive pounder), “Fedora Satellite II,” “Sleep Walk” and “Last Will And Testament.” A lot of this sounds a bit like a slightly inferior Pixies, and I think Ubu opened for Pixies once? Do you people care what I think? This album probably sold nine copies. Hey, you could be the tenth....!