The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil was an okay movie,
suitable for watching on a plane or drunk in a hotel room.
It claims to be based on a true story but I would bet
that almost all of it is made up. The premise is that there's a serial killer going around
serial killing people. And there's a hot-headed young cop who
simply won't do what his boss tells him to do! And then there's
a crime boss whose power is being tested, teetering on the brink
of a turf war. At just about the worst possible time—just like the kidnaping
in Kurosawa's High and Low—the serial killer attacks
the gangster, thinking he's just another random guy of the
sort he likes to serial kill. But, whoops, gangster guy is tough, fights back,
both are injured, and now the cop has the only survivor
and witness to this mass murdering psycho. The hospitalization of the gangster weakens his position
in the crime scene and makes him vulnerable to attack from
his power-hungry rivals. (Peter Rabe could have done something
good with this premise, and sort of already did with Kill the
Boss Goodbye.) The cop wants the gangster to help him catch the serial killer
but the cop and the gangster hate each other and the gangster
is interested in handling it his own way and isn't really interested
in the legal niceties. And believe it or not, nobody believes the cop that there even is
a serial killer! Bottom line is that it's not actually that exciting,
despite being smartly filmed with nice use of color, having
a decent score, and deft handling of action scenes. The story isn't much and the characters are less. The serial
killer is a walking plot device and the police officer is more
annoying than anything else. Without Ma Dong-seok in the role of the gangster, it wouldn't
be worth watching. He has an intensity and a presence that enliven
every scene he's in. Lucky for us, he's in a lot of scenes, and
joins the ranks of great fictional gangsters such as Bob Hoskins
in the The Long Good Friday or James Gandolfini's
Tony Soprano.
2020 February 26 • Wednesday
These two long stories or short novels
are among the most riveting things I've ever read and
Elizabeth Engstrom is one of the most unsettling and powerful
writers I've ever come across. I don't suppose
that everything under the Paperbacks from Hell
banner is going to be up to this level, but it's shocking
that she isn't better known.
The pace, economy, strength and horror of both texts are intense. This is the kind of writing that grabs you and sweeps you along. There are no dead spots, no inefficiencies. As a child Engstrom was reportedly a dedicated admirer of Shirley Jackson, and there is a similar perfection to be found here.
There are really only two minor faults that I can think of. One is the titles, which are not strongly connected to the stories, though they do appear in both of them, spoken by a character in one, thought by a character in another.
The other slight imperfection would be the endings. One of these stories ends so abruptly, after generating such incredible interest and suspense, that I turned the page and was genuinely baffled to discover that there wasn't more. That it was over. That's it? The ending of the other story comes at the right time, everything having built inexorably to a conclusion, but the ending itself was a bit of a disappointment. Engstrom is so good that I expected a heavier, more solid, more rigorous conclusion.
Also, this cover is stupid and has nothing to do with the book.
But no matter. This books is one of the most bizarre and exciting I've ever read and I look forward to reading more of her work.
"When Darkness Loves Us" is about a pregnant teenager who gets trapped underground and lost in a maze of tunnels and caverns. With the help of either the ghost or hallucination of her dead boyfriend, she has her baby and makes a life for herself down there in the darkness, where there is no light at all.
Her son grows up there and is quite content in his blind world. He doesn't believe in another world, in sunlight, in the outside, in his father or anything else. His mother thinks she must share this with him.
And all of that is just in the first dozen pages or so. She takes this idea and runs far with it. It's extraordinarily creepy and brilliantly crafted.
"Beauty Is …" goes back and forth between two timelines. In one, a developmentally disabled middle-aged woman named Martha attempts to navigate life on her own after her parents die.
She comprehends little and can communicate less but she can bake bread and feed the chickens and can go into town to buy the supplies she needs to survive.
On one such visit she attracts the attention of some cruel, violent and bored young men, who decide to make her the target of various impulses.
Sadly, this is based on a true story.
The other timeline begins in the past and tells the story of Martha's parents, particularly her mother, how they met and came to the farm in Morgan, Illinois, how her mother discovered that she had supernatural healing powers—deftly and persuasively handled by Engstrom, understatedly and convincingly presented—and how Martha was born and came to suffer a mysterious life-changing trauma.
This earlier timeline ends where the story begins, giving the story an elegant structure and shape.
The first line of "When Darkness Loves Us" is "Sally Ann Hixson, full with the blush of spring and gleeful playfulness as only sixteen-year-olds know it, hid around the side of the huge tree at the edge of the woods as the great tractor drove past her" and the first line of "Beauty Is …" is "Martha Mannes was forty-seven years old when her parents died".
2020 February 24 • Monday
Happy birthday!
Then there's the lovely, tender "Kate's Theme", no doubt
a love them, a very nice melody with harp and a lush and unhurried feel. "Robbery!" closes Side A and despite the exclamation mark, it's
a mostly quiet piece that features the bassoon and has lots of space that's
sporadically occupied by snare drume and some other winds and percussion.
It eventually builds to an action climax.
The B side kicks off with an uptempo jazzy number in 3/4
called "Breaking into the Mail Van". It's really fast with
a lot of tough blaring horns and especially good work from the rhythm section.
This tune is reprised soon after as "Passing the Mail Bags". Beautiful harp playing starts "Robinson—Portrait of a Loser",
another break in the action that gets a lot of melodic input
from the flute and has a leisurely and pastoral feel. "Gang's Arrest" is a surprisingly cheerful number,
an instrumental version of "Born To Lose", in fact.
(Was Born To Lose the original title?) I guess
it's a happy ending because the criminals get caught.
I've seen this movie but I don't remember. The record ends with "Paul's Goodbye and Main Theme",
reprises of "Kate's Theme" and "Born To Lose".
2020 February 21 • Friday
It's almost always rewarding when enthusiams collide. I love harp records
and Hawaiian music and hear they are together!
The music is lush and very relaxed. The accompaniment
is limited mostly to brushes on the snare, upright bass
and flute on a few of the numbers. It's absolutely charming an soothing.
2020 February 19 • Wednesday
The Murder of the U.S.A. by Murray Leinster under the
pen name Will F. Jenkins, is a short, quick read.
It begins with atomic war. An unknown enemy launches hundreds of
missiles at the United States, wiping out every city and every
other place of significance. When the Secretary of Agriculture,
the only surviving cabinet member, foolishly signals his location,
declaring it to be the new national capital, a missile immediately
strikes there. The survivors are almost all in one of numerous Burrows, underground
missile launching stations designed for complete self-sufficiency. You
could live down there forever. Enough food is grown there, there are shops
and even tennis courts. And of course there are missiles, lots of missiles,
for retaliatory strike against any nation that launches such a strike
first against the US. The other countries of the world had also agreed to retaliate
on behalf of the United States. But retaliate against whom?
Nobody knows who perpetrated the attack. And in the other cities of the world, fear of another such
attack has cause panic and hysteria, resulting in massive destruction
and the deaths of hundred of thousands of people scramblng for
escape. So in a sense, as our heroes attempt to discover, from
their underground sanctuary in Burrow 89, the identity of
the mass murderer, The Murder of the U.S.A. is
an extreme example of an armchair detective mystery. Time is a factor as well. The Burrows are also being targeted
and destroyed as the enemy discovers their locations,
through networks of spies. Burrow 89 does not remain a secret
and while they ingeniously fend off the first attack, they
won't be able to repel every such offensive action. Add to this the coming of the Perseid meteors, which
can provide interference and noise for their detection
technology, and excellent cover for incoming bombs and missiles... A decent read, nothing great, but certainly unusual in concept,
presumable originally published complete in one issue of
a science fiction magazine, The Murder of the U.S.A. is
dedicated by its author to the writer and editor John Campbell. The first line is "More than a third of the people of the United
States never knew anything about the war—not even that it had
happened".
2020 February 17 • Monday
Who knew that Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones
did soundtrack work? Not me but I do now! His music for
Scream for Help is the 609th
Soundtrack of the Week!
Side A closes with "Crackback", in which Jones is joined by
Jimmy Page again and also Graham Ward on drums. This is a very
Zeppeliny track, reminiscent of "Black Dog" and "Dancing Days". It's
pretty cool. Side B opens with "Chilli Sauce", a very '80s electropop instrumental
with Jones playing everything.
On "Take It or Leave It" Madeline Bell joins the one-man Jones
band to sing a love song which starts with an unusually sinuous
line before getting into a jumpy sort of poppy new wave disco groove.
"You always thought you were out of danger / Well I'm here to say /
It's your turn to pay / And get what's coming to you." Jon Anderson returns to sing on "Christie", which also has Colin
Green on guitar. It's a piano ballad love song and I guess it might
be on the cheesy side but I like it. "When You Fall in Love" has Graham Ward on drums
again as well as John Renbourne on guitar with Jones
once again adding vocals to the various instruments he plays
here. This one is really kind of swinging and haunting and
has a feel like, I don't know, "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)"
or something like that. The record closes out with "Here I Am", featuring Madeline Bell,
Colin Green and Graham Ward with Jones. It's a slow 3/4 song
with piano, brushes on the snare, and a laidback, late-night jazzy
feel with Bell singing about "Watching the clock tick away /
Not sure if it's night or day / Wishing my sadness away".
2020 February 14 • Friday
Did The B-52's ever hear
"Can't Get Through to You" by The Honeycombs?
It seems like the kind of thing they would have heard and liked
and, you know, maybe been inspired by, "Rock Lobster"-wise.
2020 February 12 • Wednesday
Happy birthday! If we haven't written much about beer here lately, it's because
we just amble over to Other Half anytime we want some. They're our
favorites and probably account for 90% of the beer we consumer
here at Gutbrain. Other Half always has really nice can designs, but they outdid
themselves recently with their witty TV Dinner double IPA.
In real life it contains Vic Secret, Mosaic Cryo, Mosaic Incognito,
Nelson Sauvin, Citra Cryo, Citra and Sabro.
And it's delicious!
2020 February 10 • Monday
For
Soundtrack of the Week #607 we offer
a record that we bought in Chicago, at Dusty Groove, of course:
Themes and Cues for Movies and Television composed
by legendary trombonist J.J. Johnson.
After this comes "Mr. M", a peppy vocal number that's actually
a cigarette commercial, Mr. M being Mr. Menthol. This track
does sound very much like an audition. I don't think Mr. Menthol
was a real thing but this piece could be easily tailored
for any menthol cigarette brand. "The Hugger" uses hand percussion, electric bass and wind instruments
to create a tense action cue that's reminiscent of some of the 1960s
soundtrack work of Laurie Johnson and Peter Thomas. There's also a nice
subtle use of vibraphone.
Then we're back in Mancini-ish easy listening and lounge territory
with "Cosmetics", which reminded me of the song from The Party. "Chox" is a fairly strange number, perky, upbeat and sunny,
almost aggressively so, with some weird electronic sounds bubbling
up here and there. If the point is to show a wide range of different musical
ideas, the these audition recordings succeed. "Five/Four Opus"
is indeed in 5/4, very short, and featuring electric harpsichord.
It ends on a fade out much too quickly. But there's not much
of a melody, just a great groove and cool sound. Things get much more underscore-like with "The Zeroids",
which sounds like it could get dropped into an episode of UFO.
It also fades out very quickly. Then we're back in killer funk groove land with "Hot Flash",
which has some subtle weird sounds peeking out from behind
devastatingly deep rhythmic playing. There's even an unexpected
drop out and back in. Can Mr. Johnson write some music appropriate for westerns?
They were all the rage on TV in the '50s and '60s. Sure, why not?
"Sun Country" is about a minute of that kind of sweeping, galloping
across the scenery score. "Mistoso" is suspenseful and dramatic and tinged with
exotica. Breaking into a safe at the Swedish embassy in Algeria?
This is the music you need. Out of nowhere comes "Moog Rock", a demented collection
of woozy electronic sounds over a simple beat. Catchy and kooky. Side A wraps up, appropriately enough, with "Finale", which
is an orchestral number that has some similarities with the famous music for
2001 (the one that everyone knows and I can't be bothered
to look up; not the Blue Danube waltz). The B Side begins with "Percussion Chatter: intro to main title
from Across 110th Street", perhaps Johnson's best known score. Then there's a suite of music from Top of the Heap. First up there's a title song: "Freedom's just a word that gives you
the right to be wrong". It's a really catchy, groovy, hard-hitting soul number. The rest of the tunes are more or less what the titles suggest,
though with a generous helping of wah-wah guitar and hand percussion
and other staples
of the early 1970s "Blaxploitation" soundtrack. You get "Suspense",
"Melodic", "Agitato" and a "Chase". These are all pretty classic. "Melodic" is actually one that could be from any number of
different movies, a string-led, pensive, wistful sort of piece. The last cue from Top of the Heap is called "Angry
Astronaut", an interesting tune with lots of space in it,
through which loat fuzz guitar, snare, vibes and some other,
harder to indentify sounds. "Better Days", from a movie called Man & Boy, a western-tinged
(harmonica melody) piece that's haunting and groovy at the smae time,
concludes the record.
2020 February 07 • Friday
The Larry Sanders Show might
be our favorite TV show. It's certainly one of the best
TV shows ever made. And so we were interested to read It's Garry Shandling's Book,
a hybrid of Shandling biography and oral history with copious
amounts of photographs and pages from Shandling's handwritten journals.
It's edited by Judd Apatow, a friend, fan and colleague
of Shandling's, who also put together the two part Zen Diaries
of Garry Shandling, pretty much the same thing as this book
but presented as a documentary film. The book seemed more focused and more sympathetic to me than the movie,
but both are essential for anybody interested in Garry Shandling's life
and work. Shandling's journal entries can be a slog at times and he appears to be
writing the same things about the same struggles for decades. The oral history
contributions of people who knew him are especially valuable. Best of all
are the examples given of Shandling's jokes. They are brilliant and timeless. How much did Garry Shandling stress about his work? Consider how he
marked up his script here for his part of the voice of Verne the
turtle in the animated children's movie Over the Hedge.
My first thought was that this was insane. But then it occurred to me
that maybe it was actually just the opposite. Instead of somebody
doing a bullshit job in a bullshit way for money, every creative
activity is another opportunity to explore the depths of
emotion and psychology, of what it means to be human, of motivations
and desires, another chance to dig deeper into vulnerability
and authenticity. This is what Shandling's life work truly was, apart from
the products of that work. The first line is "When Garry died suddenly we were all lost".
2020 February 05 • Wednesday
Reactions to the book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA,
and the Secret History of the Sixties, written by
Tom O'Neill with Dan Piepenbring, seem to be very
divided. People love it or hate it and not much in between.
It's not the kind of book I normally read. Urged by a friend
many years ago
to read Ed Sanders's The Family—he lent me his copy—
I did so, and that was more than enough Manson for me. The subtitle is of a sort that made me feel presumptively fatigued.
I'm not interested in going down rabbit holes. And yet, a brief recommendation of Chaos by a TLS contributor
who selected it as his Book of the Year made me curious enough to pick it up.
And once I started reading it I didn't want to put it down. Some of the disappointment voiced by the book's detractors seems
to stem from the fact that Chaos raises questions that it
cannot answer. But the existence of these questions themselves, often based on
real evidence of crimes committed by our society's law enforcement
officers, should be enough for investigation at the highest
possible levels. These same questions also involve CIA mind-control experiments and
the dreaded JFK assassination and investigation. O'Neill is very aware
that he puts his credibility on the line as he pursues the lines
of inquiry that lead him into these areas. And that's the real story of Chaos. This is not a book
about Charles Manson, who plays a relatively small part here,
managing to be somehow central and peripheral at the same time. The real subject is an investigation and an investigator: a journalist
who asks some questions that lead him to more questions
that lead him to more questions. By the time he's
gathered everything into a book, he's spent twenty
years following a trail that involves threats, lawsuits, huge
amounts of debt and immeasurable sacrifice and ends in the demolition of most of
what we always thought we knew about the Manson Family. O'Neill can't replace the old picture with a new one.
If it had been possible, I believe that he would have done it. His sources are often the FBI and CIA's own files as well
as agents' testimony at congressional investigations. In other words,
the least impeachable evidence you could ask for. It was a horrible time. You could violate the Geneva Conventions in
Vietnam, then go home, transfer from the military to law enforcement
and violate due process. After that you get into politics and you
stay there for the next several decades doing God knows what. Consider one of the threads O'Neill follows, one of the shorter
and less tangled ones. You'd think these projects wouldn't have left much free time, but
Herrmann piled on even more work, taking leaves of absence from the
LAPD to pursue side gigs with defense firms. These had opaque, generic
names like Electro-Dash Optical Systems, System Development Corp.,
and Control Data Corp. This last, a weapons manufacturer in Minneapolis,
relied on Herrmann's services for ten years, from 1961 to '71 —
or so Herrmann told the FBI. When the Burea went to Control Data Corp.
for a background check, the company claimed that Herrmann never worked for
them. O'Neill suspects CIA involvement but the agency responds to his Freedom
of Information Act request by refusing to confirm or deny any connection
with Herrmann. Herrmann also spent time in Vietnam and O'Neill notes that
everything about him and the dates he was there "made it abundantly
likely that he was working for a CIA project called Pheonix". What was Phoenix? In the CIA's own words, it was "a set of programs
that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure
of the Viet Cong". During the Senate hearings, a number of Phoenix operatives
admitted to massacring civilians and making it appear that
the atrocities were the work of the Viet Cong.
Their attempts were sometimes even more unhinged. In 1968,
CIA scientists at the Bien Hoa Prison outside Saigon surgically
opened the skulls of three prisoners, implanted electrodes on their
brains, gave them daggers, and left them alone in a room. They wanted
to shock the prisoners into killing one another. When the effort
failed, the prisoners were shot and their bodies buried. When Herrmann comes back from Vietnam, he quits his job with
the Los Angeles Police Department and accepts Governor
Ronald Reagan's offer to take charge of a newly created
Riots and Disorders Task Force. At the same time the FBI's
COINTELPRO program and the CIA's CHAOS program were
attempting to attack dissidents and activists from the inside,
as well as conduct illegal surveillance on thousands of
American citizens. What does any of this have to do with Manson? This and many
other operations and people like Herrmann, are shown
in this book to be extremely close to Manson, and Manson
himself bafflingly immune from arrest or punishment for parole
violations. Almost as if powerful people wanted him left alone. It probably sounds crazy. But there's no easy way of just
saying it or even suggesting it. That's why O'Neill spent
two decades slogging through thousands of documents and
thousands of hours of interviews and countless hours
of work and travel and frustration and, well, chaos. The first line is: "Vincent Bugliosi was on another tirade".
The most promising but frustrating of my inquiries concerned an
LAPD officer named William W. Herrmann. … Concurrent with
his time in the LAPD, he'd worked under contract for a dizzying
list of American intelligence and military agencies: the air force,
the Secret Service, the Treasury Department, the President's Office
of Science and Technology, the Institute for Defense Analysis,
the Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office, and the Defense
Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency.
According to a 1971 congressional investigation, the program violated
the codes of the Geneva Conventions and rivaled the Viet Cong's own
terrorism in its mercilessness.
2020 February 03 • Monday
The 606th
Soundtrack of the Week is Ennio Morricone's
groovy score for
Slalom!
Combo of guitar, organ, vibes, bass and drums with brushes give us
the laidback late-night sound of "Un Caffè Sulla Banchina". The guitar
sound is exquisite. A Middle Eastern sound gets introduced for "Un Agente in Egitto",
presumably because the action moves to Egypt. A John Barry Bond
influence also becomes so noticeable here that it must be intentionally
trying to call our attention to it. Things get a little odder with "Assassinio Nella Sciovia", in which
a low drone is accompanied by sharp percussion with heavy reverb
and some irregular statements by horns and strings and some eerie organ playing. After that long and unusual track, we slide into some medium-tempo
easy-listening small-combo jazz, "Una Sera in Albergo". It's a very
pleasant West Coast-style tune with some nice clarinet playing. But then there's "Un Omicidio Misterioso", a short piece
mostly for horns, mildly tense. After that we're back in small jazz combo territory with
"Sul Treno", a tune that could have been slipped into an episode
of Peter Gunn without most people noticing. Side A wraps up with "Corsa Nel Deserto",
a percussion piece that particularly features the cuíca. After "Incontro Magico II", Side B gets Middle Eastern
again with "Sperduto A El Cairo I", which begins with
solo wooden flute that's eventually joined by other
instruments that sound like they're geographically appropriate.
There's a "Sperduto A El Cairo II" a little bit later on, as
well as an "Incontro Magico III". After the two alternative versions of "Sestriere" and
"Slalom"—they both have some additional percussion, I think—comes
a combination jazz/lounge/airy sort of cue, "Paseggiata Nella
Neve", which also reprises the melody from "Un Caffè Sulla Banchina". After revisiting "Sperduto A El Ciaro" and "Incontro Magico", we
get to the end, a reprise of the "Sestriere" cue. It's a really fun record and a gem from one of Morricone's
most exciting periods!
