BOOKS:

Frank Herbert, God Emperor Of Dune: Since I’m now lukewarm on Children Of Dune, this takes its place as the best Dune sequel, but I think that might as well have a huge asterisk next to it. This is the last time that Herbert’s “subtleties”–the constant political/psychological back-and-forth where every single character’s motives are being analyzed against every other’s, and the real meat of the series–could be said to have been worth a damn, before collapsing into unreadable who-gives-a-shit eggheadedness. Leto II is one of the better Dune characters for sure, but some astute commenter on Amazon said something to the effect that the Dune sequels read like Herbert had some terrible intellectual inferiority complex and larded down his books with too much meaningfulness, like he was ashamed of writing “science fiction.” That seems like it really could be true–I don’t deny that there is some meaning to the subtleties here, but a lot of the time it feels like it’s trying to cover up the obviousness of a 500 page rant about why it would be wrong to be a demigod. So while it’s the best Dune sequel, it’s still sort of a slog.

MOVIES:

Saturday Night: I’m a big fan of reading about Saturday Night Live’s history, so there’s small chance I wouldn’t at least generally like this film, and I certainly never would have skipped it, in spite of my having seen only one Jason Reitman film, the off-putting Juno. The best scenes here are definitely the two ugly fights, one between Chevy Chase and Milton Berle (J. K. Simmons, who I swear to God plays loathsome characters better than anyone), and one where Michael O’Donoghue tells off George Carlin (Matthew Rhys from The Americans, nailing it), which works probably because I’ve never liked Carlin. The kid from The Fabelmans makes a really good Lorne Michaels, too, in spite of being about a decade too young (but mercifully avoiding a terrible Canadian accent.) It’s no masterpiece though, and highly fictionalized (natch). It probably could have drummed up a bit more suspense.

Billy Bathgate: Sometimes it’s fun to go watch an expensive belly-flop of a movie for historical reasons, even a forgotten one, but those reasons have to be compelling, like Heaven’s Gate. In the case of this film (and it is very much forgotten–less than 30 external reviews on IMDb is never a good sign!) what happened is a combination of poor test screenings and Dustin Hoffman clashing with the director led to the film’s ending being wrecked. It’s about a poor kid (title character) who somehow ends up being the lieutenant of Dutch Schultz, and it’s all going along pretty swimmingly for a 1930s gangster movie, with nice production design and Dustin Hoffman being menacing enough despite not looking like Dutch Schultz at all and being 20 yeras too old to be playing him. Then along comes the ending, where Lucky Luciano (Stanley Tucci) comes along and ambushes Schultz and kills him, and then the title character is just sort of sent home unhurt, and that’s it. Poof, end of movie. Christ, not even Gangs Of New York had a more badly mauled final act. It pretty much takes the rest of the movie with it, too; the only thing anyone is likely to talk about in this day and age is a full frontal nude scene by 23 year old Nicole Kidman, but you’re not going to need to watch the whole damn thing to see it!

Zappa: The guy from Bill & Ted who isn’t Keanu Reeves directed this two-hour documentary, the biggest plus of which is that it’s neither a hagiography (thank God) nor too hard on Zappa for his flaws, which were numerous and certainly well-catalogued here: workaholic, sarcastic loudmouth jerk, didn’t care if his records sold, hard to work with, sort of distant father (the moment when you find out why “Valley Girl” was recorded at all is a real cringe–his daughter just wanted to spend time with him!) and certainly an awful husband, openly and shamelessly discussing cheating on his saint of a wife with groupies even though he hypocritically trashed the rock & roll lifestyle all the time. As for the content, it’s pretty much the greatest hits–early postwar childhood, early career arrest, Freak Out!, We’re Only In It For The Money, Flo & Eddie, SNL, “Dancin’ Fool,” “Valley Girl,” synclavier, PMRC, ambassador to Czechoslovakia, cancer, dead. Oh, and a final shot that references Y Tu Mama Tambien nicely. Although you’d really need a miniseries to cover the guy, this will have to do for now.

The Pit And The Pendulum: The 1961 Roger Corman film. I’m not an expert on Corman, star Vincent Price, or for that matter Edgar Allen Poe (written or filmed) but I have read some things by the screenwriter, Richard Matheson, and I don’t think he’s a plus here. Poe’s story is too short for its own movie, so Matheson fleshed it out with a Gothic soap-opera plot involving Price going more and more mad throughout the film, with a lame plot twist involving two lesser characters and a terrible looking fake skeleton jump-scare. It’s somehow both overwrought and trite; Price, meanwhile, starts out okay but gets hammier and hammier until the last 10 minutes have to come in and save the whole movie, because that’s when the actual pit and pendulum show up. This is actually a really good suspense sequence all by itself, with creepy lighting and cool set design and sick Spanish Inquisition figures painted on the torture-chamber walls and the big-ass pendulum making a tympani “thoomp” every time it swings. It’s really the only reason to see the film, and unless someone changes my mind, I’ll pass on watching any of the other Corman-Price Poe adaptations, of which there are so many that they form a cycle.

Late Night With The Devil: The sick-faced character actor David Dastmalchian has finally scored an onscreen lead role, and it’s, of all things, having to play a friendly talk-show host (albeit a very fake one, so it’s okay.) He’s the best thing here, for sure. The movie also does a pretty good job of recreating 1970s late-night talk show atmosphere (there are two characters based off of Uri Geller and the Amazing Randi, which is nice considering that few younger viewers will know anything about that) although at this point there have been so many recreations of the 1970s on film that I’m convinced it’s not all that hard to do that. What’s not so cool is the horror in the film, which involves shamelessly stealing every jump scare (except Reagan playing with that crucifix) from _The Exorcist, an already over-referenced film to begin with. The reveal near the end of why all the horror is happening is also pretty weak. Still, good for David Dastmalchian. I guess.

ALBUMS:

The National, Sleep Well Beast: It’s become a pretty awful cliche for a well-established band to avoid stagnation by gradually introducing electronics into its previously non-electronic sound, but all that means for The National is that a few of the songs have pulsing synth loops under them, nothing too heavy, except for the second-best track “I’ll Still Destroy You” erupting into a big fat explosion of beats and synths near the end. So yeah, this turned out a bit better than when the Arcade Fire tried it. I hate to pick the hideously titled “The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness” (some sort of Philip K Dick reference?) as the album’s one real classic, because it’s The National’s pizza–a driving anthem that gradually crests into emotionally cathartic chanting while the drummer gets faster and more martial–and by “pizza” I mean that even when it’s lesser, it’s still pretty good. Elsewhere, I’d save the electronic-heavy title track and “Empire Line,” the metallic rocker “Turtleneck,” and “Day I Die,” just a typical National anthem. So as usual, about half of this good (I do this way too much) but the rest is just typical stuff to pad out the obligatory 57 minute running time. Hopefully The National will end up as the new Wilco, maintaining a consistency while never quite jettisoning their formula entirely.

Aerosmith, Just Push Play: I don’t know how this happened, but I can never quite bring myself to hate these corporate-trash Aerosmith platters; in fact, I think this one might be the most consistent of them all, even with Joe Perry trashing the album and rumors that they got into stupid circa-2000 trends. I dunno–“Sunshine” is a really good mixture of psychedelic and typical corporate rock & roll, and I was stunned to not hate revisiting “Jaded”–the chorus is still a bit overwrought but the riff is actually pretty good! I didn’t even really hate the rewrites–the title track is a dumb shit “Love In An Elevator” type song but I didn’t mind it, and “Fly Away From Here” isn’t terribly different from other ballads they’ve done…but…look, I don’t know, I just couldn’t get myself to hate it. It’s no classic AT ALL–I just was sort of pleasantly surprised. It’s also not as overbearing as Get A Grip. Somehow. Don’t ask me to defend how. I really don’t know what I’m blubbering about, here.

The Clash, Combat Rock: This was their highest-charting album? This? Their biggest commercial success was a couple MTV pop hits and a bunch of weird arty/atmospheric stuff, while the band members were all at each others’ throats? I guess. Opinions of this album are all over the map, but basically everyone agrees that “Rock The Casbah,” “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” and “Straight To Hell” are the three best songs, and I have no problem with that assessment. So really the only interesting thing to discuss about the album is what one’s favorite tracks from the weird set are. I’d say I didn’t mind hearing the Clash do post-disco (“Overpowered By Funk”), cutesy stuff (“Car Jammin’“) or weirdo atmospheric background music (“Sean Flynn” or “Inoculated City”), but I’m not surprised after hearing Sandinista! that the Clash would try these things, merely that their biggest commercial success is padded out with them. I also listened to The People’s Hall, an an entire album’s worth of bonus tracks from around the same time, and that truly is a bunch of Clash novelty music, though I did like “The Beautiful People Are Ugly Too,” “Midnight To Stevens” and “This Is Radio Clash.” One bad song: “Know Your Rights” is just a bad ugly proto-industrial joke. It’s also the only “punk” song on the entire album.

Talking Heads, Naked: Talking Heads my ass, their final album from 1988 sounds so little like them that I had to look it up to be sure I wasn’t just listening to a David Byrne solo album that some record exec demanded be released with the “Talking Heads” moniker on the album cover. It’s an overlong, gloppy art-rock mess, with the best song (“Sax & Violins”) not actually part of the album proper, a bonus track from three years later that counts as the final Talking Heads recording and based around a lovely little synthesizer break that is also seemingly recycled from the last song on the 1983 Genesis self-titled album. If I ever think of this album again, the first songs that will pop into my mind (and there aren’t many to choose from) will probably be the chilly “Bill” and the dark electronic-robotic “The Facts Of Life.” I’m not even sure how much I like them–that’s just what I’ll remember. “Mommy Daddy You & I” and “The Democratic Circus” aren’t bad either, but I have no idea what was so good about the single “Nothing But Flowers.” Anyway, it’s their weakest album and kind of a mess, with any of the identity of the other band members swallowed up and minimized by David Byrne’s smug art-rock express. Nobody ever talks about it either, so I can’t feel too bad about not caring for it.

Blur, Leisure: I know Blur didn’t really have much identity of their own when they started and that this album is generally disliked (particularly by Damon Albarn himself) because it was a bunch of trend-hopping Madchester stuff, but half of it is still worth salvaging. “She’s So High” is a real trip back to when the dawn of the 90s seemed like it was on the verge of something great, I love that tinkling synthesizer that I hadn’t heard before. Yeah, it’s a dumb song, and so are the two that follow it–“Bang” just shamelessly rips off the latter part of “I Am The Resurrection” and “Slow Down” is a bunch of obvious alt-rock sugar-chords, but I happily scarfed up both songs. There are a couple of nice experimental tracks here too, “Repetition” and “Sing,” just to prove that Blur could do “art” in 1991 too, and I’m stunned I didn’t hate “Birthday,” but there you have it. The song that mystifies me is “There’s No Other Way”–I can’t even tell what stands out about this tune. The rest is kinda forgettable, but I actually plan on relistening to those first three songs a lot in the future, so I’m glad I heard it.
NOTE: I had never heard the term “baggy” used as the name of a music subgenre before reading reviews of this album.

Rainbow, Difficult To Cure: At least their previous album had “Since You Been Gone” on it. There are no wonderful power pop classics here, just a load of boring, generic, immediately forgettable late-70s/early-80s dinosaur-band street-metal. There aren’t even any cheesy Blue Oyster Cult-type disasters to make fun of. I’ve already forgotten every song title, the lead singer’s name, and what the lead singer sounded like. Geez, where’s Dio when you need him–oh right, he was off doing The Mob Rules, which is still better than this album. I’m really glad to be finishing with this band soon.

Frank Zappa/The Mothers Of Invention, Fillmore East - June 1971: Well, there’s a funny, loud version of the Turtles’ “Happy Together” here, I know that much. It was in that documentary, too. Appropriate that Flo & Eddie were around to sing it. Elsewhere, shortened, watered-down versions of art-rock epics like “Peaches En Regalia” and “The Little House I Used To Live In” pale miserably in comparison to the real thing. Sound quality isn’t too bad, but this album just doesn’t seem like anything terribly essential.