The Friday Article Roundup
No kings, of pop or otherwise, just the best pop culture writing of the week
This week, you will dethrone:
Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
Israel Daramola eviscerates Michael and its bad faith myth-making for Defector:
Many movies are bad. Sometimes badness is fun, but oftentimes it’s pretty boring. I could in theory deal with simple badness of Michael the same way I dealt with the badness of so many biopics that have come out the post-Bohemian Rhapsody music IP gold rush—laughing at the sorry attempts to sand the edges off of famously jagged stars, enjoying the singalong bits, and mostly just not really caring about these movies one way or the other. But significant portions of Michael are dedicated to Jackson’s love for his child fans, at which point the movie goes from not just bad but actively evil.
At The AV Club, Kayleigh Donaldson surveys the shoddy field of Animal Farm adaptations:
This ending [of the 1999 adaptation] is far more cowardly than that of the [1954] Halas and Batchelor version. At least in that one, the animals got to lead the change. Here, the message seems to be that the best thing to do is to wait for the fascists to tire themselves out or fall prey to their own stupidity. Then the animals can find nicer, more understanding humans and work with them for a happy ending. Who knew it was possible to do both-sides centrism with a George Orwell story?
For Metrograph, Nick Pinkerton interviews Lucrecia Martel about pushing back on state narratives:
So, allegedly, in a trial, what you do is search for the truth. Allegedly. But Argentinian history, this is something that was imposed upon us. So the search for truth can’t ever be an intelligent search. What cinema can do, though, is reveal how truth is fabricated. In this way, cinema is very powerful. Not just [because it can] tell a counternarrative, a narrative that is counter to the official history, but because it is able to reveal how truth is fabricated.
Philip Freeman considers at jazz (and former Rollins Band) bassist Melvin Gibbs’ new book, How Black Music Took Over The World:
What Gibbs offers is a mixture of autobiography; professional memoir; technical discussion of musical practice, and the specific characteristics of African and Caribbean musical forms which manifest in American music; physics, theoretical and otherwise; and cultural history. It bounces around a lot, taking you from almost textbook-style studies of musical patterns (including diagrams of Gibbs’ own design, to help readers like me who love music but can’t perform it to save our lives) to tales from the road to family lore and back around again.
At Letterboxd, Isaac Feldberg interviews Kiyoshi Kurosawa about his films’ unsettling endings:
Perhaps it is a little irresponsible for me to say this, but I do feel that there is no need for a film to have a very clear conclusion. In fact, I find it strange for a film to have that. Of course, what I am creating is fiction, but I think what a film is able to do is to say to an audience, “This kind of person exists, and this kind of person did these kinds of things. What do you think?”
And for Hearing Things, Andy Cush profiles folk singer Frank Hurricane as a bard of the people:
Think about Walt Whitman, “I Hear America Singing”—the regular sorts of people Whitman celebrated, whom few poets before him had considered worthy of tribute in verse: the mechanic, the shoemaker. Fast forward 166 years to the decaying America we live in today and you may begin to get a sense of Frank Hurricane’s subjects. He hears the vape store employee singing, and the nitrous fiend in the music festival parking lot.
Tags for this article
More articles by Dave Shutton
The Friday Article Roundup
Out of the mists of history, the best pop culture writing of the week.
The Friday Article Roundup
Hold the phone for the best pop culture writing of the week.
A reference outside the expected frame of reference that stares you in the face, demanding you deal with it
Year Of The Month
A stand against forgetting the fight against fascism, with the clarity and starkness of a rifle jammed into the snow.
The Friday Article Roundup
The best, most avant-garde pop culture writing of the week.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Four, Episode Fifteen, “No Surrender, No Retreat”
It’s amazing how well the Londo/G’Kar scene works here, and how much it depends on the actors. In theory, this whole emotional arc all show has been predictable – enemies to friends – but here, G’Kar is throwing up a shell of amour, and Londo is working so hard to get past it – to say, fighting is unnecessary, we’ve done so much for each other, we don’t need to have animosity. As the war escalates, Londo is trying to make peace.
And for once, the war plot really works for me. I like this particular way of escalating it, forcing other people to make the choice to join or not, revealing the heroism of people around him by matter of example, mutual respect, and willingness to lay his life on the line.
Ken Jenkins!
Bob’s Burgers, Season Four
This is where the show is getting really funny, with one liners that make me gasp with laughter. Favorite episode so far: “Turkey In The Can”. Though this does also point to the episodes being so predictable that I can guess the entire plot in the first two or three minutes; that says, it’s not formulaic, just predictable.
Hell yeah, Londo and G’Kar here. The war is obviously important but it’s Earth’s war, the Narn/Centauri war (such as it was) concluded and the alliance forged in the heat of that conflict is not something that needs to extend further, I think working through these kind of knotty relations is where Stracyzinski really excels when he lets himself.
The Luckiest Man in America
In the last act, this stretches itself a little bit too far—going for emotions and moments that feel outside of its purview, so to speak. But Paul Walter Hauser makes a great secretly calculating schlub, Walton Goggins (!) makes a great game show host (as we should all know from Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers) with the right hint of oiliness to his charm, David Straithairn gives great bleak panic as his career seems to be falling down around him, and Shamier Anderson (one of my favorite parts of Wynonna Earp, back when I watched that) should immediately get to play a private eye in everything.
Watching everyone scramble around behind the scenes to try to figure out what Larson’s doing and how they can respond to it is pretty great—the outrage about the reveal that there were only ever five patterns he needed to memorize is my favorite bit—and it’s cool that that develops into other strategies, especially with the wronged Chuck moving against his boss after being betrayed.
Taskmaster, “Lou Reed and the Wombles”
“Every cell in my body wants to chuck this in your face.”
“Oh, I sort of want you to as well.”
[throws water]
“Well, that is an unexpected erection.”
Who knew Shaggy and Sting made a Christmas album together?
Kumail naming his kebab-and-jam prize task “racial harmony” reaped unsurprisingly beautiful rewards, especially with his straight-faced, impassioned, faux-poignant plea during the scoring round:
“Two points to the kebab meat with jam on it.”
“Call it by its name.”
“Watching somebody sleeping is pretty boring, but I think for some people it can be very exciting. Like if they don’t know, that seems exciting. … Don’t put that in the show.”
“Armando, did seeing a mother of four smashing a £1500 sheep put your new book categorization system into perspective?”
“Yeah. It’s terrible, isn’t it? Because after I did that, I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve done really well.’”
I was so delighted by Amy’s spinning plank of wood’s naked lady reveal.
Joel not realizing how long it would take for Alex to count to 100 feels very on-brand.
“On the big screen, Kumail has played a genetically engineered, cosmic-powered, near-immortal superhero in a global franchise. He’s also spent twenty minutes doing this.”
“I’m not good at these ones.”
“I know.”
Clochetrophobic!
“I’m going to eat it together, because fuck you.”
This is how I learned that British mustard is much, much stronger than American mustard.
“I think I need to, like, seriously go back to school or something.” Oh, Joel, bless.
“Yeah, the shaking was a good strategy. You know what was a better strategy? Having you tell her the answer.”
“If you’d asked me what wasn’t under the cloche, I would have told you there was mustard and custard. Doesn’t matter.”
“Alex, you must fuck yourself.”
“Were you asked to say your name in the style of Roger Moore?”
“We’ve learnt there’s a lot of things I’m not good at. And spinning, I’m good at that.”
“Is this a task where we have to follow the rules?”
Task ownage: Joanna’s rampage, culminating with her smashing the sheep. Immediately catching Alex’s mistake in the custard-mustard task (and genuinely having a good strategy before that).
Reverse task ownage that still pays off: Armando eating a piece of banana peel to pretend it’s a yellow sweet, and Greg allowing it because it was the saddest thing he’d ever seen. Kumail’s reaction to this (“Why did you not take a piece of the actual banana? Why the only non-edible part?”) is also great. See also: Joel eating the wax seal in search of a red sweet.
Mind break: Greg waiving the rules for the sake of Joel’s spinning is sending Kumail into a full-on Ed Gamble-style meltdown, and I was on Ed’s side, and I’ll be on Kumail’s too.
Vera Cruz – During the Mexican Civil War, a mix of crooks and ex-American Civl War veterans are hired by Emperor Maximilian to escort a French countess from Mexico City to Vera Cruz so she get a ship home. But what the mercenaries don’t know (at first) is that she’s bringing a lot of gold with her to pay for arms and soldiers. Soon enough, the countess is plotting with our main characters, Gary Cooper as a CSA vet (and plantation owner) and Burt Lancaster as a smiling, menacing scroundel and killer. Robert Aldrich directs this early example of a revisionist western quite well, just barely acceding to Coop’s demand to play a decent upstanding man and not a anti-hero but otherwise trading in a lot of shades of gray. The movie is shot effectively in Mexico, and cast includes other stalwarts like Cesar Romero, Ernest Borgnine, and a young Charles Bronson. There is even a Black USA veteran who’s accepted into the group (even by Coop) played by Archie Savage, a pioneering Black choreographer (and we briefly get to see his moves). The only things that don’t quire work are how much Coop clearly having owned slaves is ignored, and a May-December romance between him and a 25 years Jurista that feels even worse than Coop and Audrey Hepburn. But worth watching for the cast, the scenery, some great action scenes, and seeing how this would influence Leone and Peckinpah.
Elementary, “Snow Angels” – A blizzard is bearing down on the city, accompanied by a blackout when a knocked over tree in Philly crashes the grid. And what seems like just the random murder of a security guard when some new phones are stolen turns out to be the first clue to a cunning plan to rob the place old money is sent to be shredded, using the storm as cover. The plot is very clever, and I have always wondered why we don’t get caper films set in storms more. But what adds to this is the decision by the producers to film during the blizzard of February 2013, which was probably a real pain for the actors but makes the episode a visual treat. Kudos to cinematographer Roy H. Wagner. And off to the side, we meet the show’s version of Mrs. Hudson, here a trans woman, autodidact, and accidental muse to creative men, played by Candis Cayne with the right mix of sweetness, humility, and OCD that leads her to be the closest thing to a housekeeper we will meet (though she only returns twice).
Hell yeah Vera Cruz! Wrote it up ages ago for Year of the Month: https://www.the-solute.com/year-of-the-month-miller-on-vera-cruz/ . An incredibly entertaining move and as you note, the action is top-rate. And Cooper and Lancaster are so much fun together in their contrasts. An alternate universe Parker and (especially Lancaster) Grofield?
Coop has the stoicism down, but would not be caught dead playing someone like Parker. (I will note that this is probably most I liked Coop in a while since most of the time he carries square jawed hero to a boring extreme, unless it’s something like Ball of Fire and a self-parody.)
Hellraiser – Such a messy movie, literally and figuratively (what is the giant sperm/fish demon? I dunno, just go with it, same with the choppy editing), and ultimately the power of the viscera and fluid overcome any concerns about a first-time director with a limited budget and some silly voice dubbing. More than ever, the Cenobites are great, ambiguous “villains”, reasonable in the same way many doms and submissives are; they have rules (they never tell Kristy that they’ll keep their end of the bargain, they say “maybe” they won’t take her), and a true belief in suffering and pain as transcendence. Julia and Frank are selfish and cruel in the way people can be, chasing hedonism at a cost, where the Cenobites have the luxury of the supernatural. They perform a task, “angels to some, demons to others.”
I like Julia and Frank a lot because of their selfish cruelty — not like as people, but as characters. No bullshit humanizing here, they’re just horrible horny monsters and the Cenobites are scary but also sort of just doing their job here, not making the choices Julia and Frank do. They’re a lot of evil fun and definitely watch Hellraiser 2, which starts slow (essentially replaying the first movie) before letting Clare Higgins completely off the chain.
Oh I love Hellraiser 2! “And to think…I hesitated.” And seconded, this is what the Cenobites DO, they are professionals. Hellraiser has a similar perspective at first as women’s fiction, taking on Julia’s POV for the first half, except she’s genuinely selfish and depressed in a way Mildred Pierce is not (the things you’ll do for good dick).
There’s such a witty cruelty to Clive Barker’s imagination and I love basically everything about this movie, from the weird “not quite UK, not quite US” vibes to the pacing to the absolutely incredible practical FX. In summary: HELLRAISER YEAH.
Hahahahaha, usually that “not quite UK, not quite US” vibe just means “filmed in Canada and pretending it wasn’t” (Orphan Black was very annoying in this regard) but you’re right, it’s a great off-putting atmosphere that sets up the uncanny to come.
Homicide: Life On The Street — well well well, look what our old pal Tubi coughed up! We burned through the first two seasons (13 total episodes) and it’s really interesting to look at this compared to its contemporary (and former Tubi watch for us until it got yanked) NYPD Blue. Blue is more clearly organized around David Caruso and later Jimmy Smits, despite its grotty crimes it looks sharper and it’s got a lot more sex, big surprise it was the breakout hit. Homicide has a more evenly distributed set of characters and arguably the most stacked cast of any TV show, certainly of the 90s, its camerawork is closer-held and uses jump cuts within conversations as its big stylistic signature (which takes a bit of getting used to) and has much more bullshitting about Lincoln assassination conspiracies than sex. So it is obviously the better show and man, just watching these folks bounce off each other is wonderful (Belzer’s Munch clearly loved by the writers already) and while the jump cuts are aggressive the camera also does great fluid work navigating the bullpen, building a Barn for The Shield later on. So of course in season 3, the producers kicked Jon Polito off for being too fat (besides the fact that Polito rules, did they not see Dennis Franz becoming America’s Sweetheart up the dial?) and replaced him with a woman (not bad) who immediately starts fucking one of the regular cast (ugh). So we’ll keep watching but not expecting to hit the highs of the early days. Although no one has hit the high of “Three Men And Adena,” an absolutely astonishing work that is inspiring thoughts to a TV column down the road.
“Three Men and Adena” is one of those pieces of media I have never, ever forgotten and I saw it two decades ago. I think it was what first came to mind for me when Braugher died (and the way he plays good cop in an insinuating, relaxed way, much more effective than the younger cop, but still can’t crack him).
It’s one of those things that I’ve heard talked up forever but never actually seen until now (and I think the talk implies the entire episode is just those three guys instead of it being the majority of the episode, we do get peeks at the rest of the cast which I was not expecting) and yeah, it is that good. Braugher is fucking satanic at one point, just astonishing in his enticement. And then Gunn fucking nails him at the end, first Braugher is looking at him with a “oh really?” attitude but after Gunn is finished there’s a cut back to Braugher, same angle, same facial expression, but you can see in his eyes that he has been owned. All-time stuff.
Live Music – local friend-band has had a line-up and name change, they were still playing the same songs but the expanded lineup seems to have breathed new life into them. Similarly the one support I’d seen before was a solo act who had added a few backing musicians and it made a huge difference, they knew when to hold back and let the songs breathe. One support that I hadn’t seen were very young and very energetic and it was kinda nice to see a band that still feel like maybe they could be stars, I’ve mostly settled into watching quirky weirdos who are happy with their sub-100 capacity venues at this point but fun to see a band with stars in their eyes. They did a pretty fun mash-up of RHCP and Taylor Swift that worked surprisingly well despite my lack of fondness for either of the original songs, and their keyboard player also played flute which gave them something unusual to add to their cheerful pop-rock songs. And the opener was a guy I’d met a few times but never seen make music, he’d taken about 10 years off from live performance and was dealing with some nerves but battled through and quickly won the crowd over with some witty songs that mixed electronic beats and samples with guitar. Fun evening!
Woooo live music! Wooooo local bands! Wooooo DENIED for RHCP/Swift cover.
Truly Anthony Kiedis was on to something when he said “Choose not a life of imitation”.
What did we read?
Ethics, Aristotle
Definitely my favorite Aristotle after Poetics. Legitimately concerned with being a good person with some interesting points. I particularly like Aristotle asserting that pleasure and morality are intricately linked; to him, happiness and pleasure are what you’re supposed to chase in order to be a good person, and it’s a minor repeated casual observation that this would mean different things for different people.
The translator uses the words “continent” and “incontinent” to describe his concept of people who take pleasure too far, which I hate but get the meaning of. Early on, he suggests happiness is a matter of finding the mean; not too much pleasure, bravery, etc but not too little. Which is to say, he says what Ayn Rand said two thousand years later, but in a much less stupid way.
I’m also amused at how Aristotle explicitly defines a self-sufficient individual not as someone who literally does everything for themselves – which he observes is both practically and emotionally impossible, given the need for friends taking up a whole chapter – but as someone who, effectively, doesn’t suck up all the energy in a room.
The Cabin At The End Of The World, Paul Tremblay
This was adapted into Knock At The Cabin by M Night Shyamalan, and it’s interesting because this feels like his kind of thing in some ways – a thriller with a potential supernatural explanation – and very much not – the clean and efficient dialogue and style. This is a gorgeous entry in the queer canon, where the queer aspect is at once all-important and secondary to the emotion; the plot is driven in part by Eric and especially Andrew assuming their attackers are homophobic and having strong reason to assume in the case of one of them, and it factors very heavily into how they both see the world, but this is also just the story of a family under attack and pulling together. Lauren and I have discussed how what we really want from queer fiction is, like, Rope but actually gay, or Bend It Like Beckham but actually gay, or Scrubs but actually gay, and this very neatly fits into that category. The tenderness of their love through the awful climax is palpable and moving and worth the price of admission alone.
This is also very much the story of a middle-class couple; the duo have the kind of histories, careers, and even styles I couldn’t conceive of and, it occurred to me, do not want (the way their cabin and home is described, it sounds like they’re very close to having a live laugh love sign up somewhere). It occurs to me that this interacts with the queer themes in that the middle class is defined, at least by my outside observation, by safety mixed with constant terror that it’ll all go away; the feeling that the barbarians are at the gates. Middle class queers like Andrew and Eric (and, to an extent, an adopted girl of colour like Wen, though she’s too young to articulate this) have very good reason to believe barbarians are at the gates, and the middle class home represents very real refuge from something. The horror here is surprising, but only in its motivation.
8 Bit Theater, Strips 0950-0980,
“It’s not easy to find trustworthy comrades.”
“Out of the way, Black Mage!”
“It’s not easy to find smart ones, either.”
“If we were to plot the distance between where you are right now and the nearest good idea, it would describe a line too big to fit inside the universe.”
“Here’s a tip: take out Fighter first. Not sure if it’s practical. I just hate the guy.”
“And that’s when I changed my mind.”
“I had no idea my neck could bend that way. Or that many times. Or that quickly.”
“Even if I wanted to give it to you, Sarda is going to jackass us away at any second.”
“What is a Sarda?”
“Seriously, jackass covers that one.”
“That was weirder than it had to be.”
“And yet, par for the course.”
This is still working through the weakest part of the comic; not to say it’s not entertaining, but there’s almost always a section of a story where the writer has basically run out of things to say. Dramas get away with it by, you know, being dramas – Breaking Bad burned through any satirical elements by season four, The Shield was coasting on this aspect (and no other) in its final two seasons – but comedy needs it to be more than a funny one liner. Which is funny, because it doesn’t need much of a philosophy or thought, just something to be more than enough style.
Knock at the Cabin is quite good and captures at least some of the feeling you’re describing here, though it’s my understanding–both from what I’ve heard about the book and what I’ve theorized about Tremblay after having read a different book of his–that bits of it eventually go in a different direction. Worth watching. Don’t know why Shyamalan ditched this title, which is far better.
I will have to read this, especially in light of what you say about it as queer fiction.
More of Herron’s The Secret Hours. Well written and entertaining it might be, but also a bit of a slow read. Interesting, I realized I am about halfway through, and so far not a lot has actually happened. I can see this easily being a six part followup to Slow Horses when they’re done with the Slough House books.
And having finished Marc Morris about the Anglo-Saxons, it’s on to Marc Morris on King John. He’s a good writer and a good researcher, if occasionally flawed. For some reason, he refers in a throwaway like to MacBeth as “murderous” when most historians are fairly well inclined to the real life king of Scotland. Surely Morris isn’t treating Shakespeare as history?
Lot of books! Almost done with two books, A Mystery of Mysteries about the death and life of Edgar Allen Poe. Poe, for all his many faults, is impossible not to feel sympathy for, especially when Dawidziak outlines how badly his foster father fucks him over, leaving him in poverty while Allen dies with a fortune. As an underemployed and often poor writer myself (with poor impulse control), I cringed at how often Poe is the victim of bad luck and simultaneously fucks himself over, alienating the wrong people and losing loved ones throughout his entire life.
Petersburg by Andrei Bely is a masterpiece and I’ve never read any novel that uses color so successfully to communicate tone, mood, and feeling. More next week.
Started The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception which is excellent and really insightful; an actual example of how the left may need to learn from it’s enemies, especially on how to keep undetected. My main quibble is that the CIA is famously incompetent and this feels like the agency cherry-picking it’s rare successes for public display.
I also started Brand New Cherry Flavor by Todd Grimson, another supernatural LA novel like Stainless. No thoughts yet as I’m 20 pages in.
This is my thing with the CIA — if you put your fingers in that many pies, you will eventually succeed at getting what you want but you will also just get pie shit all over your hands most of the time. They are bad at stuff! The Church Committee made this very clear!
Frontera by Lewis Shiner – A corporate sponsored mission to Mars is supposed to look for a lost colony but the corporation really wants a newly discovered technology. Other interested parties are on the way to Mars as well. A basic SF plot but Shiner creates intelligent conflict through the shifting viewpoints of the characters. He drops a breadcrumb of backstory, event or characterization creating mystery and questions in one pov and answers in another character’s pov. The novel often gets lumped in with cyberpunk. It has the cyberpunk fascination with depression and decline both on a human level and in its dystopias. The hero has a microchip implant causing emotional isolation and the loss of his humanity. All the world’s governments no longer exist, infrastructures are decaying and everything is run by competing corporations with their own private armies. But it owes a lot to PKD – his mysticism (the I Ching makes an appearance), Mars, drugs, benign mutants and heavy amounts of paranoia. Seriously, every character has a reason to be paranoid. The pacing develops to a fast clip in the second half as the competing corporate and personal interests all collide into each other. It was nominated for the PKD Award and the Nebula in 1985.
The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, by B. Traven — here is the top of page 2:
“Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn’t know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world.”
So from the very beginning Traven is cooking with gas, the same hard cynical bitterly funny gas that runs through and blows up The Death Ship. This is a classic of course and the movie is quite faithful for the most part (Leo Pointed at the page when the bandit chief does not need any stinkin badges) but it by necessity prunes away a fair amount of detail and especially the various side stories told along the way, of fortunes found and lost because of greed, and Traven is not exactly subtle about greed driving the finding as well. This isn’t the pure hell of The Death Ship’s economy and there is a lot of good stuff about work in general here, Traven somewhat romanticizes the Mestizos living simple lives but makes a strong case against everything else. Wonderfully paced and written in the descriptive but not flowery 30s style that is a rich, hearty contrast to thin clever minimalism, a grand read.
The Black Ice Score, by Richard Stark
On a storytelling level, Parker as a kind of heist consultant walking capable amateurs through how to execute their own plan is a cool idea that could have easily become a series in its own right: second career for a somewhat retired heister? I’d read that. It’s also interesting to see Stark broadening his scope here, bringing in a set of characters from a fictional African country and making this the only Parker novel to date with a significant Black supporting cast; he handles the characters pretty well, especially for a white author in 1965. Formutesca and Manado are pretty cool, and my favorite scene with them actually involves them as seen from the outside, as a woman who’s been begging for her life realizes too late that she’s been directing her pleas at the wrong man.
But it doesn’t quite get off the ground, maybe because it’s all a tad too busy and has a few too many moving pieces. Parker’s detour into first-person POV as he explains Claire’s kidnapping feels off on a technical level, too.
“Jackknife,” by Joe Hill
College professor Dennis Lange ruins his marriage and career by a sexting affair with a student, and then he ruins his life still further by pulling a jackknife out of a cursed tree. Whoops, turns out that was the only thing keeping the tree from a slow-moving but bloody rampage, you fuck! Fairly taut, creepy short story, but its best aspect is probably its character work, as Dennis both does and doesn’t realize his own monstrousness and does and doesn’t grow from that, all of which is dramatized in a satisfying and bloody fashion. Banger ending.
Pincher Martin, by William Golding
Brutal, bleak, hallucinatory, and as powerful as a sledgehammer to the face. It’s WWII, Christopher Martin’s ship is torpedoed, and he, the sole survivor, washes up on an unpleasant little spit of rock, where he gathers mussels, hopes for rescue, and tries to stay sane, but that’s also just the superficial veneer of the story, and what’s underneath–and is slowly revealed–is more existential and supernatural and primally philosophical. This is sort of like if you took some of the tenor of C.S. Lewis’s theological ideas in The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce and filtered them through Cormac McCarthy. Ravenous selfishness, purgatorial damnation, incredible images, and mind-peelingly good prose.
For all the awesome (in the traditional sense of the word) power of moments like the black lightning and Martin’s grasping lobster claws, my favorite part may actually be the flashback to when Martin is drafted. He’s slept with his producer’s wife, and his producer has taken some petty revenge in the past that’s left Martin largely unmoved, but now their conversation plays out in an entirely different key as the man calmly refuses to declare him too essential to go to war:
“I should be wasted in the Forces. You’ve seen my work.”
“I have, old man.”
“Well then–”
The look up under the eyebrows. The suppressed smile. The smile allowed to spread until the white teeth were reflected in the top of the desk.
“I’ve been waiting for something like this. That’s why I didn’t kick out before. I hope they mar your profile, old man. The good one.”
Lots of unsparingly brutal philosophy here from everyone, God included. Also the only book I’ve ever read where a man dismantles a life vest and uses the tubing to give himself an enema, so this truly has something for everyone. A magnificent work if any of this sounds good at all.
The Sour Lemon Score, by Richard Stark
This owns. One of my favorites of the series so far, even as it, like The Jugger, breaks or abandons a lot of what makes the other books satisfying.
I knew I was in for the best of good times when Uhl’s stage fright before the heist turns out to not be stage fright at all: “Another two hundred fifty dollars bye-bye,” Weiss said, and Uhl shot him in the head–what a marvel of a perfectly constructed sentence, with the lightness of the first part and then the calm transition into the unexpected wallop of the second. Uhl is my favorite Parker antagonist to date, scummy but capable and smart, and then he also brings in the tremendously brutal Matt Rosenstein and his lover Paul Brock as secondary antagonists who are very effective and dangerous as well. I like Brock flying under Parker’s radar as a threat at first, which allows Brock to drug him in his great coffee and homemade cookies.
The truth serum could easily be a bit much, but it’s not; it doesn’t work in an unrealistic way–just makes people usefully dopey and open, and that also leads to the dramatic payoff of Parker, to his immense irritation, finds that he can’t get himself to kill Uhl when Uhl’s all floppy and helpless. This feels right to me, with Parker’s disinterest in sadism narrowly winning out over his rational pragmatism: it tells me more about who Parker is but doesn’t make him too cuddly. (The fact that he then dispassionately breaks some of Uhl’s bones to keep him in traction a while is excellent.) He’s spent a lot of years developing an approach to lethal force that works for him both practically and preferentially, and he can’t overturn it on a moment’s notice, even if he knows he might regret it later.
A ton of top-notch character work in this. Even aside from everyone I’ve already mentioned, we have Weiss’s widow, shaken but still steely enough to insist on payment for her information; Uhl’s straight-and-narrow friend who pays for not having the self-awareness enough to appreciate sooner that the buddy he’s spicing up his square life with is actually trouble; Uhl’s petulant but very human ex-girlfriend, etc.
It’s amazing that this is a book where there’s a low-key opening heist that doesn’t net nearly as much as expected–only $8k per man for several weeks of work–and then that money is stolen and never recovered, so Parker spends even more time and money chasing after it to no avail, and then he doesn’t even kill any of the men who have inconvenienced him, and the novel still feels like non-stop ownage. It’s a little bit supporting character ownage, but really, it’s just Stark crafting something propulsive and surprising and top-notch. That being said, there’s a kind of perfect, practical win in Parker accepting the loss with equanimity once he knows it’s really gone. He won’t take a slap in the face from a man, but he’ll take it from the universe, and knowing the difference and accepting it without a fuss is part of what makes him such a great character.