BOOKS:

Frank Herbert, Children Of Dune: Ten years ago when I first read the entire Dune series, I distinctly recall claiming this was “page for page” a better novel than the original Dune, possibly because I still found the original Dune to be a bit unwieldy. I no longer feel that way about the first book, but I can’t remember for the life of me why I said Children was better. What was I thinking? This is something of an admirable book artistically but by this point, Herbert’s subtleties and constant political-back-and-forths seem like they’re all just there to keep the book from being a 477-page long rant about why being a human demi-god and having “prescience” would be wrong (i.e., because life can’t be static, and being prescient would make it that way), whereas in the original Dune the subtleties at least had the effect of turning a story about a teenage boy who foils an evil plot and saves the world into a book adults could respect. And as I unfortunately predicted, they also make Children, at least this time around, into a slog to read. I guess then I just wasn’t paying enough attention in 2014; this time, I paid too much, and from what I can tell, there were things I kind of missed anyway. Certainly I had not remembered how the book gradually turns Leto II into a worm, or what political machinations set any of that up. Again, I’m not trying to say there’s no book there or that it’s bad, just one I kind of don’t enjoy much. Maybe give it another 10 years?

MOVIES:

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga: This will almost surely be the last Mad Max movie since it tanked quite horribly and George Miller is 79 years old, but I hope it doesn’t take the good will from Mad Max: Fury Road with it (probably not.) It’s an attempt at crafting an MM story that’s more character- and world-building-driven, with only one big action chase scene about halfway through, and a far more charismatic, theatrical villain (Chris Hemsworth) than before. And in doing so, it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mad Max is, and should be, about postapocalyptic action scenes, nothing more. That’s just I thought back when I mentioned that I really liked Fury Road but didn’t give a shit about any backstory or mythology or anything like that. Aside from that chase scene (which is well done, but itself fairly derivative of the excellent ones in Fury Road) there’s really nothing for me to go back to, and of course, the movie is a miserably overlong 147 minutes. Chris Hemsworth tries to be the first MM villain with any real substance, and he’s not a bad actor, but he’s just hamming it up and not all that memorably. I’m glad I didn’t go see this in theaters.

LaRoy, Texas: Mediocre Netflix comedy-thriller where John Magaro, playing a poor Texan schlub whose wife is cheating on him and whose family is going out of business, awkwardly teams up with Steve Zahn after he gets mistaken for a hitman (the real hitman is Dylan Baker, looking like an evil eighth-grade science teacher). Has a couple funny scenes, but nothing mind blowing. At least it’s better than Blood For Dust.

Chimp Crazy: This four-part HBO series is this year’s Tiger King, made by the same people and all, but Tonia Haddix, the chimp owner in question, just plain isn’t as entertaining OR as crazy as Joe Exotic; she’s just this fat middle-aged blonde Midwestern plastic-surgery-disaster who is trying to hold on to a pet chimp by lying about having it. This is four episodes long, and (you’ll never believe this!) could have easily said what it needed to say in two, and since almost nobody watching it will consider owning a chimp to be a very good idea, there’s not that much pith to the damn thing, aside from Tonia Haddix seemingly actually loving her chimps enough to the point where you can’t really call her insane, just sort of embarrassing.

Ingagi: Speaking of primates, this early exploitation “documentary” was a big lurid hit in its day–1930–before disappearing for years and years. It lured people in by offering to show human sacrifice and/or apes who eat poor innocent tribal women, but that’s only in a few moments at the end and you of course don’t see shit. Most of it is stolen point blank from an earlier 1915 film and what they didn’t steal involved filming “the jungle” in 1930 in California, borrowing animals from zoos and hiring local black women to pretend to be “tribal” people. That being said, all the hilarious stuff I could tell you about this farce of a movie is on paper; you certainly don’t need to watch it, as it’s little more than a boring African safari, for the most part. I myself only watched it once after seeing it hyped up in various places as some sort of a hilarious you-gotta-see-how-bad-this-is facepalm. It’s a facepalm alright, but a boring and useless one.

Free Time: A tossed-off Netflix comedy. A poor young bemustached nerd working in some crappy data-analysis office job because he wants to be young and alive then doesn’t know what to do and immediately wants his job back. 78 minutes later, he’s back at another office job. I know, right? There’s a couple mildly funny scenes in here, but the bits where the guy inspires a few other people to hopelessly quit their soulless jobs comes across like Office Space written by a college freshman. Come to think of it, this movie could have been written by damn near anybody. I don’t know what drives me to watch super-trite little Netflix comedies like this and I Used To Go Here, but I do.

ALBUMS

The Clash, Sandinista!: 36 songs and I detect about 20 or so of them are worth listening to. I tend to be positive about grading such things so I think I’d hand this an 11 out of 15 on George’s old rating scale–it is, yes, quite a bitch to sit through and there are certainly a lot of novelties and toss-offs that few people probably care about, but I’m sort of tempted to grade the whole thing higher than it mathematically deserves just because they got away with as much of it as they did. “The Magnificent Seven,” “Police On My Back,” “Somebody Got Murdered” and “Charlie Don’t Surf,” three of which are classically obvious Clash punk anthems, are the ones I’d say are great; if you like, I can list the other 15 or so songs I cared for, with the caveat that after “Version City” nothing is terribly good. Stylistically…there are probably more non-rock songs than there are, which is kind of amazing. It’s no London Calling, but in part because I was mostly listening to the whole damn album as background while browsing the Internet, I’m a supporter, if not a fanatic. Count this as sort of a pleasant surprise.

The National, Trouble Will Find Me: After a decade of inching their way up from mediocrity to greatness, The National finally hit a commercial-critical zenith with High Violet, then took their first step backwards with this okay, if not quite panned, 2013 follow-up. If it didn’t get bad reviews, it did seem like a lot of critics who had acclaimed the previous three albums got their knives out a bit, in stating that the National have kind of a limited (and dead serious) pallette. While the album isn’t in its entirety an express rehash of High Violet, I did detect one obvious rewrite (“Pink Rabbits” = “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks”), but all the same, I’m nowhere near getting tired of the National’s best trick, where they build up energy in an already intense song and climactically layer echo onto the vocals so that it sounds like Matt Berninger is sort of chanting something over the often driving/pummelling drums, ala “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” “Terrible Love” and “Afraid Of Everyone.” And yeah, the three best songs–“Sea Of Love,” “Graceless” and “Don’t Swallow The Cap”–are exactly that. Elsewhere, “Fireproof,” “Humiliated,” “Hard To Find” and “This Is The Last Time” round things out pretty nicely, so feel free to put this on the pile of “passable sequels to the big smash,” though I fear the National may end up being a slightly lesser Wilco, e.g. a mature, serious band that keeps putting out reliable albums even though everyone will always mention that their best work is behind them.

Nazareth, Nazareth: I picked this one out of a hat for two reasons: I still have Hair Of The Dog in my mind, and George Starostin handed this five stars and I think he said it was better than the first Zeppelin album, so I decided to try it before I forgot the other Nazareth album I’ve heard. It isn’t, but there’s sort of a delight in hearing a supposedly “dumb” hard-rock act perform a rather impressive bouquet of 1971 substyles, including simple white-soul balladry (“I Had A Dream,”), orchestrally epic rock (“Red Light Lady,”) piano pop (“Dear John”), and a cover of “Morning Dew,” already done by about as many people as “Hey Joe,” where the band’s bass guy plunks away for several minutes to turn the song into kind of an uptempo funk rocker epic. It’s not as good as Jeff Beck’s version, but I can see why the few reviews of this debut album I could even find singled it out as the big highlight. And if you want the dumb hard rock there’s the opener “Witchdoctor Woman” but I didn’t like that as much as George. Be sure not to skip the weird bonus track, “Friends.” Not bad for a debut but my adventures listening to Nazareth will likely end with this disc.

Frank Zappa, 200 Motels: This soundtrack is mostly panned, and I’m unlikely ever to watch the film, though “Lonesome Cowboy Burt” is good for Zappa’s usual asshole laughs, “Centerville” is a creepy putdown of the middle class and their dumb little towns, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy” is a cute pop tune, “Dental Hygiene Dilemma” is a funny parody of an actual band member leaving Zappa behind, and “What Will This Evening Bring Me This Morning,” despite the dumb title, is pretty cool too. That being said, these longer, less-discussed Zappa albums are starting to getting pretty wearying; I can keep picking wheat out of the chaff, but for all his talent and diversity, Zappa really did seem to kind of keep covering similar ground during these years, and it’s sort of a pain. I am grateful I got to hear the good tunes, though.

Bob Dylan, Nashville Skyline: Pretty trite stuff, IMO. Sorry. I get that Clobbert Billan wanted to get away from making grand sweeping statements and Being The Voice Of His Generation (which is not a pun on the goofy, unrecognizable voice he used here), but all I really got from this not-even-a-half-hour-long album was the Johnny Cash duet “Girl From The North Country” (which is beautiful, but which I already knew from, bleeeuurrgggh, Silver Linings Playbook), the odd hit “Lay Lady Lay,” and “Peggy Day,” which inspired “Holiday” by the Kinks. If I were being REALLY generous, “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Home With You” and “I Threw It All Away” (what a telling song title) are listenable while the album is playing but I likely won’t revisit them. It’s not a problem that he wanted to do country music or sing in a weird novelty voice, but honestly, I’m not into Bob Dylan enough to enjoy his toss-offs, even if they’re well meaning. Gimme John Wesley Harding over this any day.

Rainbow, Down To Earth: Ronnie James Dio was gone by this point (1979), replaced with Graham Bonnet, who had short hair and who sings generically and whose name I had to look up to remember. What I’ll certainly remember is one of the best songs I discovered this year, the masterful hard-power-pop hit “Since You Been Gone,” certainly my favorite Rainbow song and a deserving smash hit back in its day, a total piece of 1979 teen entertainment that I love with no shame whatsoever. The rest? “Eyes Of The World” isn’t bad, but this is just typical plain-vanilla late-70s street-metal for radio stations to gobble up; “Makin’ Love,” “All Night Long”…just look at the song titles, you can guess how these tunes go. Fneh. I doubt performing the songs live and stretching them out made them better, too.

Aerosmith, Nine Lives: I think I might pick this as the best of Aerosmith’s sell-out albums, but it’s still nothing classic and it’s not like anyone cares anyway. I have actually always liked a couple of the better known songs from the album–“Hole In My Soul” and “Pink”–but that’s because I used to listen to the mp3s on Winamp all the time in like 1999 or 2000, and all music from back then that I tried out is (rightfully or wrongfully, and possibly wrongfully) enshrined in my mind. There’s one other genuinely fine song here, “Ain’t That A Bitch.” Elsewhere…uh, “The Farm”? “Kiss Your Past Good-Bye,” maybe? Do ya care? I’m not even sure if I like this one better than the others mathematically, it just struck me as sonically and stylistically a little less annoying than the Alicia Silverstone album.