BOOKS:

Neal Stephenson, Terminaton Shock: Neal’s most recent full-length novel, from 2021, gathers a motley crew from many walks of life (a Dutch princess, an Indian martial artist, a mixed-race pig hunter from Texas) to come together behind a goofball fast-food billionaire, who hatches a plan to shoot loads and loads of sulfur particles into the atmosphere to stop climate change, with plenty of disastrous side effects. This is mostly entertaining for the tangents and digressions Stephenson goes on; even when they barely have anything to do with anything, they’re readable. The main plot gradually just turns into an attempt to stop the Indian martial-artist guy, with Stephenson sadly forced to admit what most people are already admitting about climate change: there’s probably no way to stop it, even when some forward-thinkingm, ballsy, libertarian-zillionaire hero tries something crazy; sure, Neal seems to be saying, that’s “taking action” instead of just being some pathetic ineffectual hippie protester, but the solution would end up being worse than the problem. A reasonably entertaining book (and mercifully a couple hundred pages shorter than usual for Stephenson, clocking it at only 706 pages) but still a depressing one if you’re still thinking about it 10 minutes after you finish it. Come to think of it, I can’t easily think of another Stephenson book that depressed me, and ten years ago he wrote a book where the world ends.

Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: This 2019 doorstop, on the other hand, is probably Stephenson’s worst book ever, possibly surpassing his messy out-of-print 1984 debut The Big U, which he only brought back into print because people were paying hundreds of dollars for it on eBay. At least that isn’t 883 pages long; with Termination Shock, I was knocking out 50 pages a day and read it in a couple weeks, whereas here I stalled at around page 350 at the beginning of January (I was trying to get all these Stephenson books finished before the end of 2024) and could barely pick it back up afterwards. The plot concerns the hero of Stephenson’s 2011 Reamde, a reclusive video-game-company billionaire, dying during a routine operation only to have another tech billionaire scan his brain and upload it into what turns out to be a sort of digital afterlife. Before I reached the point where I stalled, this is fairly typical of Stephenson, lots of tech talk and digressions and a colorful cast of characters going on various adventures, but once we rejoin the hero in the digital afterlife, it’s just Stephenson doing his own riff on the Old Testament, with fallen angels, creation mythology, Adam and Eve, and then, eventually, an LOTR-style adventure. And all of it just gets worse and worse as it goes along, and it’s like the last 500 pages of the book. There is far, FAR too much explanation and description and place names and supporting characters to remember, coupled with a completely cold, all-encompassing lack of human resonance to the whole thing (it’s similar to the second part of Seveneves, only even worse.) I could barely follow it to save my life; never before has Stephenson’s style come across more as “typing, not writing.” Sadly, it got his usual good reviews, but I’ve never been happier to be finished with one of his books.

MOVIES:

Stalker: The Tarkovsky sci-fi classic. At a whopping 161 minutes, this is one of the slowest, emptiest, bleakest, dreariest films ever made, and yet perversely enough, the dreary qualities actually seemed to make the film better (I can appreciate Andrei Rublev and Solaris, but I was kind of grinding my teeth to get through them.) The film is not bullshit on a philosophical level–the three characters’ ruminations on how or why they, or anyone else, wouldn’t or shouldn’t get what they want out of life (especially in a world as dreary as the Soviet-era doldrums they were living in) is genuinely thought-provoking and emotionally affecting. But it’s that atmosphere that I really cherished–if there was ever a film counterpart to those minor-key Pink Floyd epics of the mid-1970s (like “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” or “Dogs” or “Careful With That Axe, Eugene”) it’s this, and indeed, what little musical score there is in the film sounded a bit like Pink Floyd. The film is very strong visually; the dilapidated Estonian industrial landscape the characters traverse is surely one of the most stunning examples in existence of a director getting an amazing amount of mileage out of a natural setting (too bad that Tarkovsky and several others who worked on the film probably developed cancer and died because of all the poisonous shit they were around!) A very slow and challenging film, but a very rewarding and memorable one because of it, this was probably the best film I saw in 2024.

Mirror: This is Tarkovsky too, but it seemed pretty clearly to me to the runt of his litter. I watched it three times, to be sure, but not much of it ever really clicked, and I can’t help but notice that there are only 80 IMDb external reviews for this; Andrei Rublev, Solaris and Stalker all have twice that (this is admittedly a goofy way to gauge a movie’s popularity, but still.) On my first viewing, I figured that the movie’s non-linear narrative had something to do with it being a dream sequence or distorted childhood memories, and I was actually pretty grateful to find out afterwards, while reading those reviews, that Tarkovsky made no secret of the fact that his intentions with Mirror had nothing to do with symbolism because he didn’t do symbolism, and that he felt that kids understood the movie better than adults! Still, subsequent viewings only marginally improved things; I just decided to sit back and let the imagery wash over me, and only a handful of images really ended up washing over me, like fire or a Bruegel homage. I wish I could get into this one like all the critics did, but turns out I’ll probably just have to stick with Stalker.

Sleepaway Camp: This isn’t really quite an MST3K movie, or any sort of camp classic like The Room or ‘Manos’ the Hands of Fate; it’s got a lot of “WTF!!!” moments, but it belongs in kind of a different category. Sure, it’s a low-budget early 1980s teen-slasher movie full of lurid violence and extreme kills and bad acting, but what it really is, is a bizarre failure of tone. One review claimed that what’s weird about the film is that it seems like the director was using the slasher genre to exorcise himself of some sort of childhood trauma but was completely tone-deaf in doing so. WTF moments include a creepy fat cook guy making a disgusting crack about kids being “baldies,” then later screaming for about five minutes after the killer burns him with a pot of boiling water; a completely gross implied-teen-death involving hot-curling-iron insertion; a girl having an affair with the gross old guy who runs the camp, who reacts to her death in a completely unrealistic fashion; short-shorts on virtually every male in the movie (but no female nudity whatsoever); loud, blaring music playing over the opening credits; a bizarre campy performance by some actress I’ve never seen before playing the main character’s aunt; a cop with a real mustache in some scenes and a different mustache that’s obviously been painted on in others; and the “freaky” twist ending, which involves a girl’s face freezing while you hear growling and screaming sounds on the soundtrack that suggest the film’s foley editor wanted to recreate Linda Blair being possessed in The Exorcist but only had about $7 to work with. A memorable-enough piece of filth, I’d say. I’d never tell anybody not to watch it. Hey, at least the kids in the film weren’t 29 year olds wearing lettermen jackets…

ALBUMS:

Roger Waters, The Pros And Cons Of Hitch Hiking: I was expecting this album to suck, and it did, but the reasons why it sucked weren’t anything I would have been able to predict at all. It’s essentially just a really boring, unmemorable album–I’m probably never going to voluntarily revisit a single track from it except to laugh at the end of “Sexual Revolution” (“....BREAD!” followed by the bread-crunching noise Prindle used to mockingly reference all the time)–and I’ve already forgotten most of the rest of it aside from that and the title track (which is marred by cheesy backing vocalists, anyway.) To make matters worse, whenever Roger wants to cut the boredom by getting loud and dramatic, he just ends up rehashing the big moments on The Final Cut, which themselves were stylistically rehashed from The Wall. BUT–see, the thing of it is, my opinion of Roger Waters has evolved in strange ways since high school. I went from thinking as a teenager that Roger was a genius, then soured on him when I found out that The Wall was really him feeling sorry for himself and read all those stories about him being a dictator and pissing off the rest of Pink Floyd, then decided after I turned 30 and finally heard The Final Cut and rewatched the movie of The Wall that he was strangely resonant again, and now this…where he makes the worst album he’d made up until that point by trying to be low-key and humble, and failing horribly. Pros and Cons is NOT a “pretentious” album at all–it’s barely 40 minutes long and the lyrics are just lightweight surrealism and deal with boring marital infidelity! (There’s also the presence of Eric Clapton, who achieves little effect at all; certainly, his soloing here isn’t intrusive.) It’s like Roger has to be a big, pompous, excessive, operatic, dictatorial, self-absorbed rock star or else we end up with forgettable crap! Who woulda thunk it?

The National, First Two Pages Of Frankenstein: I’m Nationaled out. I really love some of these guys’ songs and they have at least one masterpiece album (High Violet) but by this point they were just going slow and filling up an overlong album with loads and loads of glossy production and heartfelt lyrics to hide boring four-chord melodies. I listened to The National more than any other band in 2024, but I kind of hope they call it quits if they’re going to be this devoid of energy from here on out, especially when they’re wasting a kick-ass drummer (Bryan Devendorf) in doing so. Ther’es a Taylor Swift collaboration here too but who cares. No classic songs. Their worst album.

Blur, The Ballad Of Darren: Running a mere 10 songs and 38 minutes, this is certainly the humblest and coziest of all Blur platters, and somewhat predictably, it’s the mellowest thing they’ve ever done, with only one or two songs, like the guitar-heavy “St. Charles Square” conjuring up any rowdy Britpop youth. I count two great songs, the weird-chorded, underrated “Avalon” and the Bowie-ish beauty “The Narcissist.” The rest of it is mostly ballads, per the title, resulting in what I guess could be Blur’s “dad-rock” album, to use a very hoary term that gets thrown at virtually all middle-aged rock bands. I wouldn’t say they sound old or out of touch here but I will say that I didn’t really realize it was a “good” album until like the seventh or eighth listen. Only “Russian Strings” and “The Everglades (For Leonard)” struck me as weaker tunes–every other song manages a hook, they just reveal themselves slowly. I can’t tell at all if this album was any sort of a “big deal”–it got good reviews, but when was the last time what was left of the “rock press” was hard on a reunion album, or any other sort of latter-day album, by any band that was considered heroes at any point in their career? If you like Blur I can’t see you disliking this.

The Jam, The Gift: “Town Called Malice” is obviously the best song on the Jam’s swan song, which is funny considering how shamelessly stolen it is (not to mention that the playlist I used on Youtube to hear The Gift amusingly misplaced it at the beginning of the tracklisting–it’s actually like second to last!) But hey, it has that energy, doesn’t it? I don’t have any problem with The Jam doing soul/R&B-rock–I adore their “Heat Wave” cover–but “Town Called Malice” overshadows much of the rest of it, resulting in a decent album but definitely a notch below the big 1977-1980 discs. “Ghosts,” “Precious,” “Carnation,” “Just Who Is the Five-O-Clock Hero,” “Happy Together,” maybe? Don’t know how much I’m going to listen to this in comparison to the songs I got re-addicted to doing all these Jam relistens, but it doesn’t sound too bad while it’s playing. Eghn. I can’t think of much to say about this album. It’s good enough.

The Jam, Beat Surrender EP: More soul stuff, this is probably been just tacked on to some reissue of theirs as bonus tracks, but of the five songs, only their perfunctory cover of “War” doesn’t work. “Beat Surrender” and “Move On Up” are good energetic soul tunes, “Shopping” is an amusingly laid-back, ambling tune that maybe Paul McCartney or Elvis Costello would have liked, and “Stoned Outta My Mind” is actually pretty great as far as these guys’ covers go. Four good songs out of five, hey, maybe this is an “essential” Jam “album” huh? Couldn’t find very many reviews of it, anyway…

The Clash, Super Black Market Clash: A junk-drawer album, and not a very “essential” one at all, if you ask me. 21 songs, and I think I only cared for about seven of them–mostly just passable second-tier punk tunes like “1977,” “Gates Of The West,” “Groovy Times,” “City Of The Dead,” “1-2 Crush On You,” “Stop The World” maybe…but even these would, at best, served as replacements for some of the lesser tunes on actual Clash albums, which were already overstuffed to begin with. Some of this I’ve already heard anyway, like the songs that were on The People’s Hall, the stuff they were doing around the time of Combat Rock, and that’s a far more interesting “lost” Clash listen than this stuff is. Oh well, at least it’s better than R. E. M’s Dead Letter Office!

Aerosmith, Music From Another Dimension!: How the hell did Aerosmith pull this off?!? They’re all in their mid-60s, the album is overproduced and slick as usual, it’s 70 minutes long, it doesn’t do ANYTHING they haven’t done before, it’s got several obvious rewrites on it, there’s a lame Carrie Underwood collaboration that does neither them nor her any favors, and yet…it’s honestly no worse than any of Aerosmith’s other dinosaur sell-out corporate money-grab albums. I loved the psychedelic “Beautiful” and “Something,” for two, and liked “Lover Alot,” “We All Fall Down,” “Another Last Goodbye,” “What Could Have Been Love”…just schlock rockers and their usual ballads…but God help me, I couldn’t bring myself to hate this album while it was playing. I know I’ve said this about a lot of albums and movies in these review posts over the last couple of years, but I’ll say it again: I respect this thing almost just for not sucking complete ass. It’s still a mediocre album, but a painless one, and for that I kind of feel like being nice to it. That being said, let’s hope it really is the end of Aerosmith, a decent but rarely great band who I’d probably just fill up a good 90 minute compilation of rather than buying their albums.

Rainbow, Bent Out Of Shape: Do me a favor and don’t listen to the entire discographies of dinosaur bands just to see what happened. Most of you don’t do this anyway, but the only real lesson I’ve learned from doing this, aside from simply not to do it, is that albums where you forget every song afterwards are worse than albums that are painful embarrassments, and that’s what most AOR bands’ latter day albums are. Completely faceless hard-rock here verging on AOR, that’s what this is. Maybe “Fool For The Night” might make it into my playlists later, but that’s it, and probably not even that.

Rainbow, Stranger In Us All: Do me a favor and don’t listen to reunion albums by dinosaur bands just to see what happened. Most of you don’t do this anyway, but the lesson here is the same as the other lesson I already just mentioned. There’s a passable tune here called “Hunting Humans (Insatiable)” and I guess the opener “Wolf To The Moon” has some energy, but the best song is “Still I’m Sad” at the end, and that’s a re-recording of something they already did. Aside from “Since You Been Gone,” you can skip everything Rainbow did after Dio left. For one million dollars, name the bassist, drummer or vocalist on this album. Can you do it?