Death and Rock in Seattle: "The Gits" (2005) and "Kurt & Courtney" (1998)

Seattle was the center of the music universe in the early 1990s. The scene led to maybe the most profound paradigm shift in mainstream rock and roll since the British invasion of the 1960s. Having the words "Seattle band" come before your name could almost guarantee you a record deal. Bands from the scene (most famously Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Nirvana, but also groups like TAD, Screaming Trees, and the Melvins) repurposed the fury of punk and combined it with the groove of heavy metal to create something new and seemingly vital and, for a short time at least, filling a much-needed void. The musicians were snarly girls with dreadlocks and nose rings and angry guys with stringy hair and goatees. They wore flannel, Converses and torn T-shirts, and they uniformly rejected the lip-gloss-and-leather-pants excess of 1980s cock rock. Bands like Poison and Warrant and Nelson and Winger spasmodically went the way of the Dodo. Earnestness and "authenticity" were fashionable again.

And then it all fell apart.

Two violent events, occurring within about a year of each other, brought about the near immediate death of the scene. The first was the brutal rape and murder of Mia Zapata, lead singer of The Gits, in 1993. The second was the suicide by shotgun of Kurt Cobain, the closest Generation X had to a genuine John Lennon figure.

A pair of critically acclaimed documentaries chronicle these two events. Nick Broomfield's Kurt & Courtney came out in 1998, when the wounds were still pretty raw. Kerri O'Kane's The Gits appeared in 2005, long after the dust had settled.

The Gits is a pretty standard rockumentary tribute to Zapata, combining archival concert footage, photos, and talking heads spouting platitudes about how influential the band was and how amazing a person and singer she was. It's too bad the movie isn't more adventurous, because the subject matter is fascinating. The Gits were one of Seattle's best undiscovered gems, right on the verge of cracking the mainstream, when Zapata was killed. They were a pretty straight-forward hardcore punk band and weren't really part of the adjacent (and largely rival) grunge scene. Zapata's skill as a singer was truly astonishing. She was sort of a snarlier and bluesier Patti Smith, and her powerhouse talent and her generous support of the bands that came in her wake helped give birth to the Riot Grrrl movement (which included celebrated girl punk bands like L7, Bikini Kill, and the direct Gits-disciples 7 Year Bitch).

The first half of the documentary follows the band's rise, from their early days at Antioch College in Ohio to their dominance of Seattle's punk scene. Her former band members expound on Zapata's brilliance, and the musicians from the other scene bands like 7 Year Bitch and DC Beggars talk at length about her influence. It's all fairly banal stuff, with a few amusing anecdotes thrown in (the most charming moment is a clever montage of her various friends lovingly impersonating her gravelly voice). But it's the concert footage that shows the truth of her abilities. I'm sorry, but the woman could sing.

The story takes it's unfortunate turn at Zapata's murder. Zapata was walking home from a bar after spending the night hanging out with members of 7 Year Bitch when she was accosted, beaten, raped, and strangled. The police searched for nearly a decade for the killer, operating on the assumption that it had to have been somebody she knew. Men from all over the punk scene were interrogated, and the women walked around in fear, not knowing if the killer moved amongst them. The camaraderie of the scene was shattered, and -- as one interviewee said -- almost all the bands broke up within a year of her death. The magic, as they say, was gone.

I wanted O'Kane to really dig into the psychology of that dark time, but -- as is the case in the first half of the film -- she's content to just skip over the surface. The only real emotion we see is from Zapata's father (who seems like the best and most loving dad a hardcore punk girl from Kentucky could ask for) and from 7 Year Bitch singer Selene Vigil, who -- years after the tragedy -- seems still shaken by the death of her friend and mentor. But O'Kane just keeps pumping out the platitudes about how awesome Zapata was, and after awhile you're left with the sense that she must have been the Mother Teresa of Seattle's punk scene. No one has a single unkind or complicating thing to say ab out her. I'm sure she was as lovely a person as everyone says she was, but O'Kane never really finds a way to humanize her. She leaves her as a martyr and an idol, not a person.

There's a happy ending, of sorts, when the police finally make an arrest using DNA evidence 10 years after her murder, but the impact of that final turn is muted by the fact that O'Kane never really brings home the pain of her loss.

Still, with all its flaws, The Gits is worth a watch if you have even a passing interest in the subject. As I said, the concert footage alone is worth it.

Nick Broomfield's Kurt & Courtney is the much more stylish film. Broomfield has a much stronger sense of cinematic language, and he largely eschews the conventions of the talking-head documentary. He moves the camera, for one thing, and rather than just showing us the interviews he gives us all the awkwardness of the first meetings and introductions (my favorite is Kurt Cobain's old high school teacher, who yells at the filmmakers as if they're tardy students before finally settling down and agreeing to the interview). This gives the film a lived in, organic feel and adds to the sense of verisimilitude ... which is important considering that Broomfield's film is less a tribute and more a piece of conspiracy-theory agitprop.

"I didn't have an angle on the story," Broomfield says in what has to be one of the most stupendously disingenuous statements in the history of documentary filmmaking. "I was just trying to find my way through it." Yeah. Right. I call bullshit on that one.

Broomfield is an excellent craftsman and he knows how to structure a narrative. In Kurt * Courtney he tells three stories simultaneously: that of Kurt Cobain's rise and fall, that of the Courtney Love's alleged involvement in his death, and that of himself -- the poor camera-wielding David versus the Goliath that is Courtney Love and the Hollywood media machine -- battling to get his film made.

Broomfield's main thesis (although he denies it) is that Courtney Love had Kurt Cobain killed to protect her financial and professional interests. To prove his point, he travels the country (okay, the West Coast) and interviews a bunch of crackpots and junkies, each of whom has his or her own story to tell. The most fascinating are Cobain's clearly drugged-out best friend (who may have been in on the plot, Broomfield slyly suggests), Courtney Love's estranged father (who is convinced she had him killed and is apparently making as much money as he can off the accusations), and -- of course -- Eldon Hoke, otherwise known as "El Duce." Hoke was the lead singer of the notorious "rape rock" band The Mentors (they made GWAR look like a Disney attraction), and he claimed that Love offered him $50,000 to kill Cobain. He lived a squalid, hillbilly existence out in Riverside, CA, and at the time of his interview he looked to be about 39 going on 60. It's not hard to believe this guy could have killed someone, even if his story stinks like a rotting fish in the noon sun. At one point Broomfield asks Hoke how Love had suggested he commit the deed. "Blow his fucking head off!" Hoke shouts, clearly giddy at the idea. "That's the way it's done!"

Interestingly, Hoke was struck and killed by a train just a few days after his interview, which of course threw a whole mess of gasoline on the already raging conspiracy-theory fire.

To be fair to Broomfield, he doesn't really try to convince us that these people are anything but crackpots and junkies, and he gets a lot of narrative mileage out of the growing uncertainty surrounding his quest. "I no longer knew whether anything anyone was telling me was true," he says at one point, and you can just about hear the thunderclap going off on the soundtrack. The only person who seems unquestionably honest is Cobain's beloved aunt Mary, an ever-smiling and hyper religious woman who seems so homespun and saintly as to be almost creepy. I wondered if maybe she had wandered in from a forgotten episode of Twin Peaks.

Broomfield is cut from the same cinematic cloth as fellow agitprop documentarians Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, and he knows the benefit of having a good villain. When Broomfield finally confronts Love at a swanky ACLU dinner in Los Angeles, it's impossible not to think of Moore raging at GM chairman Roger Smith at the end of Roger & Me. Like most of Moore's movies, this film is shamelessly manipulative, embarrassingly narcissistic ... and pretty damn effective. By never outright stating that he thinks Love killed Cobain and by allowing himself to (on camera, at least) question the veracity of the evidence like a true journalist, he manages to create a pretty convincing argument that, at the very least, the question itself isn't completely insane. He uncovers enough genuinely weird stuff to make one wonder.

And, whether or not she actually had Cobain killed, Love is unquestionably the villain of this movie. Broomfield's idea seems to be that, at the very least, she probably drove him to suicide (another former lover of hers pretty much says as much). No one is going to walk away from this movie mistaking her for a nice person.

Whether or not you believe the conspiracy theories, Broomfield's documentary is pretty interesting and, in its way, genuinely thought provoking. But, please, take it with a grain of salt.

The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009)

There's been a lot of hype about the upcoming American adaptation of Swedish author Stieg Larsson's international bestseller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The film is based on a bonafide literary phenomenon, set in an exotic location (Sweden), and sports an A-list director (David Fincher), a solid movie star (Daniel Craig), and -- now -- a mostly unknown actress (Rooney Mara) thrust into a virtuoso role that has become a feminist icon worldwide.

So -- as all the book's fans go apeshit, both pro and con, about what Fincher may or may not do with this material -- it's easy to forget that these movies have already been made. And been made pretty damn well, at that. The Swedish movie version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is already a major smash worldwide (with over $100 million in box office) and has received a ton of critical acclaim.

The sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire has just been released in the U.S. and the final, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest will come out in the fall.

I liked The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo well enough, but nowhere near as much as I liked the book. The filmmakers did about as good a job as they could have condensing the massive story into a single film. It was gorgeously shot, well acted, and solidly directed. But it kept me at arm's length in a way that the novel didn't. Somehow I didn't quite connect to the characters the way I wanted to. The whole thing fell just a little bit flat to me.

The Girl Who Played With Fire is an even more ungainly book to try to turn into a film. It has a lot more action, sure, but it's all wrapped up in an absurdly convoluted plot with what seems to be an entire platoon of brand new characters to wrap your head around. Where Tattoo was at heart sort of a standard locked-room mystery, Fire spans all of Sweden and features about eight different storylines all bashing into each other like a massive game of bumper cars.

Don't get me wrong; I absolutely love the book for all its flaws. But I wasn't entirely clear how exactly it could make the jump to the big screen. I was pretty nervous about how it would work.

So it's with a sigh of relief that I can report that not only is Fire a much stronger film than its predecessor, but it's actually an improvement in many ways over the original novel.

The key to the success of both the novels and the films are the two leads: Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a crusading journalist and ladies' man (and obviously an idealized version of Larsson himself), and Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a brooding anarcho-punk computer hacker with the iron will of a Roman Centurian and the social skills of a bar napkin. Tattoo was about introducting these two opposites so that they could solve a twisted decades-old murder mystery and, eventually, fall into bed together. They make one of of the most compelling crime-fighting duos since Holmes and Watson, Fraser and Diefenbaker, and Simon and Simon.

Where Tattoo was about bringing Blomkvist and Salander together, Fire is about keeping them apart. Salander's on the run after falsely being accused of murder, and Blomkvist must desperately try to clear her name. Meanwhile, there's a bunch of stuff about sex trafficking, Russian double agents, a lecherous lawyer with a secret, a Swedish biker gang, cops being led down the wrong path, and -- at the center of everything -- a murderous blond giant who can't feel pain and who beats people to death with his bare hands.

Rapace is far prettier and much more voluptuous than Salander is described in the books, and in Tattoo that threw me a bit. Lisbeth is described at being so slight that she's often mistaken for a boy. Seeing the statuesque Rapace fill the role felt a bit like watching Angelina Jolie try to play Hermione or something. That took some getting used to.

Nyqvist looks more the role, but the first time around he just sort of disappeared for me. His Blomkvist in the first movie felt a bit like a sketch rather than a fully developed character, and the heat and eventual deep bond that develops between him and Salander just never quite rang true for me the way it did in the book. And without that bond, there's not much else to hang your hat on.

Fire features a different screenwriter and director (Jonas Frykberg and Daniel Alfredson), and I think they deserve credit for digging deeper and finding that heat that lives at the heart of these stories, which is even more impressive considering that in this film Blomkvist and Salander share a total of about two minutes of screen time together. Nyqvist finally seems to settle into the role, finding the complexities that exist in the books and pushing past Blomkvist's too-cool exterior to the troubled firebrand underneath. He captures both Blomkvist's unyielding sense of integrity as well as his at times alarming and even dangerous well of arrogance.

Rapace is the real revelation, however. She did a fine job in Tattoo, but I had a hard time getting past her beauty, and her makeup and wardrobe felt like a glamour photographer's interpretation of what an anarcho-punk computer hacker should look like. She's just as beautiful in Fire, but Alfredson wisely dresses her down for much of the movie, giving her a stringy mop of hair rather than the hipster coif from the first film, keeping the Goth makeup to a minimum, and generally clothing her in baggy T-shirts and sweatpants. This gives Rapace room to scratch past the surface of the character, cracking through Salander's snarling exterior and showing the aching vulnerability and the deep loneliness that lurks beneath. For the first time, I felt like I was actually watching the Lisbeth I had fallen in love with in the books.

And I have to say I was very pleased with the casting of German actor Mikael Spreitz as Niederman, the aforementioned murderous blond giant who it turns out is much more deeply connected to Salander than anyone could imagine (dah dah DUM!). Nierderman is an absolutely terrifying character in the book, but he could have easily become a cartoon in the film. Spreitz manages to capture not only Niederman's brute physicality, but his viciousness, his intelligence, and his oddly childlike vacantness as well, and all with a bare minimum of dialogue to work with. He turns in a truly towering (pun definitely intended) performance.

But about that lumbering plot?

Larsson wasn't really a master plotter. In Fire in particular, he relied way too heavily on coincidence and narrative convenience. Frykberg and Alfredson do a really stunning job of streamlining his unwieldy text and actually make some very noticeable improvements to the material. They trim the fat and restructure the story subtly so that it feels almost plausible. They establish the many side characters through action and behavior rather than exposition and backstory (until the end, when the backstory becomes crucial to the plot). It's a still a fairly ludicrous story, but at least this time you spend less time thinking about how ludicrous the story is.

Some fans are inevitably going to howl that the film merely skates over the surface of the material and offers a sort of Cliffs Notes version of what Larsson was trying to get at. The film is certainly far less concerned with the political and social commentary that compelled Larsson (an avowed leftist and anti-misogynist) to write the books in the first place. This is to the film's advantage, however, because Larsson's biggest weakness (aside from his at times lazy plotting) was his tendency to launch into eye-roll-inducing speeches to make his points. All that substance remains in the film, but Frykberg and Alfredson simply choose not to bash us over the head with it.

It's hard to know how, if you have only a passing knowledge of the books or the first film, you might respond to this movie. My dad saw both movies without reading the books, and he seemed to enjoy them quite a bit. But I have a feeling many people will be left somewhat cold without the foundation of the books to guide you through all the different characters and the serpentine plot. But I'd say give it a shot, and then go back and read the books for all the cool stuff you missed.

Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple (2006)

"My wife died in my arms, and my dead baby son was in her arms, and I held her and I said 'I love you, I love you, I love you' because it was all I could say...She died in my arms, man."

"I never believed in Heaven in my whole life, you know, that's not the way I operated. But when I think of Guyana, when I watched the sun rise and stuff, I actually thought there was a Heaven on earth. And now I can't believe in Heaven anymore."

"I ain't never used the term suicide, and I'm not never gonna use the term suicide. That man was killing us."

All three of those quotes are from the closing minutes of Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple, and all come from survivors of the Jonestown massacre, where 900 people commited mass suicide (if you can call it that) at the behest of one of modern history's most infamous and diabolical cult leaders.

Stanley Nelson's 2006 documentary on the subject is pretty standard fare in many ways: lots of archival footage and photos, juxtaposed with lots of people talking. It could have been made by Ken Burns.

It's still likely to be among the most horrifying movies you'll ever see. The film takes us through Jones's life, from his beginnings as the cat-murdering, hyper-religious son of an itinerant alcoholic up through his early days as a pentacostal preacher, to the founding of the Peoples Temple and its subsequent relocation from Indiana to Northern California. Along the way Jones transforms himself from a pretty typical revival-tent preacher to a political powerhouse holding court with San Francisco's liberal power elite to something markedly and diabolically different.

What the film accomplishes so well is providing the context for Jones's rise and fall. He was a product of the Civil Rights movement, and the Peoples Temple at first seemed to be a progressive, integrationist utopia. Jones welcomed everyone: black, white, young, old, clean, sober. But as the years went on and Jones's megalomania, paranoia, drug abuse, and personal depravity began to take over, the Peoples Temple became a world unto itself, a little mini North Korea, belligerent and obsessed with their perceived victimization. When San Francisco's major newspaper finally prepared an exposé of the many abuses taking place within the church, Jones uprooted his followers and shipped off to Guyana, where they went about trying to create a true Communist utopia in the jungles and completely went insane.

We all know what happened next. California Congressman Leo Ryan -- accompanied by a bevy of aides and news reporters -- made a trip to Jonestown at the behest of Concerned Relatives, a group of former Peoples Temple members who still had family caught in Jones's spiral of psychosis. Jones and his followers put on a good show for the congressman, singing and dancing and praising Jones, but when people started passing notes to his aides indicating that they wanted to leave, the shit hit the fan. Ryan was stabbed and then he and several others were gunned down on a dirt airstrip while trying to make their escape. That night Jones compelled his followers to drink the Kool-Aid.

The bare facts of the case are terrible enough, but Nelson managed to unearth a treasure trove of never-before-seen archival footage of Jones and his followers (much of which had been classified by the CIA), and he secured interviews with a number of former Peoples Temple members and survivors of the massacre itself. Their matter-of-fact analysis of what happened -- what drew them into the Temple to begin with, and how it all went wrong -- will make your heart ache and your skin crawl. Jones was a charming but truly depraved individual, and some of the details of what he and his most hardcore followers perpetrated -- both at Jonestown and before -- are absolutely gut-wrenching to hear.

The footage of Ryan's visit and his subsequent murder is equally riveting, and the way Nelson assembles it you'll feel almost as though you're watching the events unfold in real time. After the Jonestown inhabitants throw a massive (show) festival for his delegation on his first (and only night) in Guyana, Ryan addresses the crowd with a big politician's smile and tells them that, from what he has seen, Jonestown appears to be the best thing that has ever happened for them. The crowd erupts in spontaneous cheers and applause that builds in intensity until it resembles one of Hitler's rallies at Nuremberg. Ryan stands there with that smile still plastered as his face, waiting for the din to die down, and the look of horror that slowly fills his eyes the true insanity of what he is witnessing sinks home is absolutely chilling.

The true show-stopper -- and the thing that will likely keep you awake at night -- are the never-before-released audio recordings of the suicide itself. I think most of us probably always assumed that Jones's followers went placidly and lemming-like to their deaths. This couldn't be further from the truth. Many were compelled to do so at gunpoint, and those who resisted were either shot or had the poison injected directly into their mouths.

Really, you don't know horror until you have heard 900 dying people (including children) screaming and crying as Jones intones "Please, please, die with a degree of dignity. Quickly! Quickly! Quickly! Quickly!"

This is the second time I've seen this documentary, and what struck me this time is how skillfully Jones -- an avowed Communist who admitted towards the end that he was using the trappings of religion solely to suck people in -- went about creating a true Stalinist dystopia. Like Orwell's Animal Farm, you could view the rise and fall of The Peoples Temple as a little microcosm of the Soviet Union. His methods -- the literal cult of personality, the purges, the eventual forced collectivisation and church (state) controlled production of goods, the culture of paranoia, and Jones's increasingly militant public broadcasts -- were taken directly from Mao/Pol Pot/Kim Il-Sung playbook.

Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple is a truly disquieting look at how one charismatic psychopath can turn nearly 1,000 people's good intentions into a slaughterhouse.

New blog

Hey guys. If you're interested, I'm starting up another blog where I'll be periodically posting some of my short stories, both new and old. Some of these stories go back more than fifteen years!

I've got about thirty old shorts sitting on my computer. I'll probably try to post about one a week.

The blog is called "Dead People Talking," and you can read the first post by clicking the scary dude below:

Top 5 horror movies (you've probably never seen)

Okay, so it might be a little harder to avoid zombies on this list. But I'm gonna try.

The Changeling (1980)

Directed by Peter Medak
Starring George C. Scott, TrishVan Devere



A classic, atmospheric, and almost bloodless ghost story that carries hints of 70s political thriller, The Changeling stars George C. Scott as a celebrated composer who relocates to Seattle after the death of his wife and daughter in an auto accident. He leases a mansion from the local historical society and...yep...discovers that his new house is haunted.

There's nothing strikingly original about this movie, but what sets it apart is the level of craft that went into making it. Director Medak knows how to milk a quiet beat for all its worth, and he knows how to pull some real dread out of the simplest images. Even a rubber ball bouncing down the stairs is turned into one of the scariest shots you'll ever see. Trust me.

And if you try to tell me later that you didn't leak a few drops into your undies during the seance scene, I'm going to call bullshit on you. Liar.

Exorcist III (1990)

Directed by William Peter Blatty
Starring George C. Scott, Brad Dourif



Wow, another George C. Scott movie. I could just make this list my top 5 horror movies starring George C. Scott.

On second thought, I'd be compelled to mention Firestarter and none of us wants that.

Anyway, I can smell your skepticism coming at me through your computer screen like a wet fart. Trust me, this is a good movie. It was written and directed by the original author, and it's connection to the first film is tangential at best.

What Blatty does so well here is not shy away from the long take or the extended monologue and/or dialogue scene...two things you almost NEVER see in horror movies anymore.

And this is the film that cemented Brad Dourif as one of my all time favorite actors. Just check this shit out:



That's the stuff right there.

John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (1987)

Directed by John Carpenter
Starring Jameson Parker, Donald Pleasance



The second in Carpenter's so-called "apocalypse trilogy" (falling in between 1982's The Thing and 1995's In The Mouth Of Madness), Prince of Darkness is generally considered the weakest of the three (although Mouth certainly has its detractors).

And generally I'd agree. A lot of this movie doesn't work. For one, casting one of the Simons from Simon & Simon as your lead is, in retrospect, a good way to date your movie. And much of the plot is simply confounding.

But Carpenter lands on enough solid ideas and images here to make it worth a watch. It will definitely get under your skin, even if you don't have any idea what the hell is going on. And it's about as successful as updating Lovecraft -- in spirit if not in fact -- for the modern era as any other film I can think of.

And, besides, it has Alice Cooper in it. So how bad can it be?

Parents (1989)

Directed by Bob Balaban
Starring Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt



You read that right. This movie was directed by Bob Balaban.

And yes, I mean this Bob Balaban:



If that's not enough to intrigue you, then hopefully the concept of a young boy in the 1950s discovering that his perfect suburban parents are, in fact, cannibals, will do it.

You'd be forgiven if, reading the above plot description and looking at the movie poster, you'd think that this was Balaban slumming while doing some Troma-style splatterfest. You'd be forgiven, but you'd also be wrong. This movie is damn near an arthouse film. It's slow, understated, and it very effectively puts you inside the subjective reality of a little kid who may or may not have an overactive imagination. And it's actually pretty damn creepy.

Good luck finding it, though. I saw it once about 15 years ago when a friend and I rented a worn out VHS copy up in Paonia Colorado. I think it was out of print even then, and it never made the jump to DVD.

Martin (1977)

Directed by George A. Romero
Starring John Amplas, Tom Savini



Hey look, I made it all the way to the end without including a zombie movie!

However, this masterful vampire flick was written and directed by the godfather of all zombie movies, George A. Romero. he made this one between 1968's Night of the Living Dead and 1979's Dawn of the Dead.

Like Parents, Martin is a surprisingly understated movie, more rooted in psychological drama than straight-out horror. Martin (Amplas) is an awkward young(?) man who believes himself to be an 84 year old vampire. He's been sent to Pittsburgh to live with his Old-World cousin (Elyane Nadeau), who has taken it upon himself to save Martin's soul before killing him.

We never really know for sure if Martin is, in fact, a vampire. It doesn't matter. The unknown Amplas manages to maintain our sympathy, even when he see him killing people and then "doing the sexy stuff" with them after.

What Romero gives us here is a delicately realized character study of a damaged and psychotic man, whether he be an immortal bloodsucking fiend or just a troubled youth from one of the world's most royally fucked-up families.



Honorable Mentions

Carnival of Souls (1962)
The Signal (2008)
Jack Be Nimble (1993)
Session 9 (2001)
The Brood (1979)

Top 5 horror novels (you've probably never heard of)

Picking up where I left off with my last post, here's my list (in no particular order) of the top five horror novels you've probably never heard of.

Again, no zombies.

Thomas M. Disch - The M.D. (1991)

If John Irving ever decided to write horror, he might come up with something like this.

Thomas M. Disch started his career as a fairly celebrated author of "outsider" science fiction back in the 1960s (The Genocides and Camp Concentration being his two most well-known books) before switching to horror in the 1980s and 1990s and penning an equally celebrated quadrilogy of novels set in his native Minnesota.

The Businessman (1984) is the first and probably the best known of these, but he really hit his stride with The M.D.. It's a bizarre Magnificent Ambersons by way of Stephen King sort of book that follows a young boy named Billy Michaels from his Kindergarten days up through his teen years and ending with his massive success (and downfall) as a celebrity doctor.

Early on, Billy meets a figure that appears to him as Santa Claus but later reveals himself to be the Greek god Mercury. Mercury gives Billy a caduceus -- a twig wrapped in snakelike vine, with a mummified bird tied to the top -- that grants him the power to heal. The catch is that for ever person he heals, Billy has to recharge the caduceus by causing someone else harm.

The M.D. is at once epic and deeply intimate, and the details of Billy's life and his eccentric, dysfunctional family are finely drawn. It's also a viciously cynical book that alternates between some truly disturbing images and ideas, unexpected pathos for the characters, and Disch's razor-sharp and sometimes cruel sense of humor. The inevitable tragedy in the last third of the book is Shakespearean in proportion, but you never lose the sense that Disch is cackling all the way to the last page.

Ramsey Campbell - The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976)

Campbell is a British writer who is absolutely revered by horror fans and virtually unknown by everyone else. The Doll Who Ate His Mother is his first novel, and not his best. But there's something about the youthful naivete behind the prose that is fascinating and more than a little disturbing. Campbell comes up with some pretty squalid ideas and images here, and he doesn't quite seem to realize it. I don't know why, but there's a certain charm in that for me.

The story concerns a young Liverpudlian woman, Clare, who is involved in a terrible car accident. Her brother is killed, and a mysterious figure runs off into the night with his severed arm.

Later, a sleazy true crime writer who believes the arm snatcher to be a former childhood friend of his aproaches Clare and enlists her help in tracking the man down.

This story is structured more like a mystery, but there's something weird and feverish about the prose that elevates it to the realm of dark fantasy, and the details as we learn them grow increasingly nasty, definitely tipping the scales toward horror. This isn't a particularly gory or violent book, but there's something pervasively icky about it all the way through. "Quiet depravity" is the best phrase I can think of to describe it.

Jack Ketchum - The Girl Next Door (1989)

I don't usually recommend this book, for fear that people will lay siege to my house with pitchforks and torches.

A fictional retelling of the Sylvia Likens story, The Girl Next Door is one of the most brutal, violent, and harrowing books I've ever read. It's like American Psycho if Patrick Bateman was a 12-year-old kid and without all that business about expensive shampoo, fancy restaurants, and Whitney Houston.

What makes this novel so effective, however, isn't the depravity (which Ketchum actually toned down a bit from the true story) but the seething sense of outrage that boils beneath Ketchum's matter-of-fact prose. Ketchum explained in the forward to the novel's reissue that he rarely writes supernatural horror because people are what scare him, and that his response to being scared is to get mad. When you read The Girl Next Door, you'll believe it. As vicious as it is, there's nothing exploitive about it. And when -- preceeding a particularly nasty bit of violence -- the narrator breaks the fourth wall and tells us that he simply can't bring himself to describe what happened, you get the sense that it's Ketchum addressing us, not the character.

Phil Rickman - Curfew (1993)

Known as Crybbe in the UK (I guess the publishers thought American audiences wouldn't go for a book titled with some strange Welsh word), Curfew is one of those pretty classic "strange shit happens in a rural town with dark secrets" sort of stories that horror novelists have been milking at least since the days of H.P. Lovecraft.

Crybbe is a little Welsh backwater nestled mere kilometers from the English border. The only distinguishing features are the Tump, a prehistoric man-made mound of indeterminate purpose, and the odd ritual of ringing the bell in the church tower every night to signal an ancient curfew.

Max Goff is a ruthless and impossibly rich record producer from London who descends upon the town with two ambitions: to resurrect the ancient standing stones that have been methodically removed over the centuries and to stage a huge, kickass rock concert celebrating the spirit of the Earth or some other such New Age bullshit.

Goff hires a local dowser to find the original locations of the standing stones. When the dowser is killed in a mysterious car accident near the Tump, he proceeds undeterred. The townspeople grow more and more nervous as the concert date approaches.

And then, of course, hijinks ensue.

What sets this book apart from all the others like it is the way Rickman, a truly masterful writer, evocatively draws us into the world of the Welsh/English borderlands and lets us get to know its many dour inhabitants before ever-so-slowly ratcheting up the creep factor to near excruciating levels. This is one of those long, rich books that you can just live inside of for weeks.

T.E.D. Klein - The Ceremonies (1984)

T.E.D. Klein is a semi-mysterious and somewhat legendary figure in the horror world. He is strikingly non-prolific, having published only two books, The Ceremonies in 1984 and a collection of novellas titled Dark Gods the following year. He's also really, really, really damn good.

I actually prefer Dark Gods to this book, so if you're interested check it out here. Regardless, The Ceremonies stands tall as one of the few unacknowledged masterpieces of "literary" horror.

The book is split into two parallel stories. The first follows Jeremy, a graduate student in literature who moves to a seemingly idyllic town in New Jersey dominated by a strange religious cult to work on his thesis. The second concerns Carole, a naive young woman trying to make her way in New York City. Both characters are linked by an odd and menacing little old man named Mr. "Rosie" Rosebottom.

Over the course of more than 500 pages, the two stories gradually (excruciatingly so, some might say) converge as we come to learn more about Rosie's demonic agenda for both Jeremy and Carol.

Klein is a deliberate and understated writer whose work echoes not only Lovecraft, but the classic dark fiction of authors like M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood. If you're looking for quick and cheap scares, this isn't the book for you. But Klein's prose has a way of burrowing slowly and surely under your skin. The only other writer I can think of who does this better is Patrick McGrath. You'll find, as you turn the pages, that it's the smallest little details that make your skin crawl, and it's the accumulation of these details that eventually builds into a surprisingly affecting novel that is bound to stick with you.

So long as you stay with it, that is.

Honorable Mentions:

Thomas Tryon - Harvest Home
Fritz Leiber - Our Lady of Darkness
Poppy Z. Brite - Drawing Blood
Thomas Tessier - Rapture
Kim Newman - Jago
John Skipp and Craig Spector - The Scream
Joe R. Lansdale - The Nightrunners
Dan Simmons - Carrion Comfort
Bari Wood - Doll's Eyes
Robert Marasco - Burnt Offerings

Top 5 horror stories (that don't have any zombies in them)

Seriously, can we stop with the zombies already?

Don't get me wrong. I love zombies. Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead are my two favorite movies. But -- somewhere between 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead -- zombies became the "it" horror movie monster and the stories lost most of the gritty, apocalyptic power that animated the genre.

That's not to say I hate everything new that's zombie related. Shaun of the Dead is brilliant. Zombieland was pretty fun, even if it did reduce my beloved carnivorous undead to a silly gimmick in what's essentially a teen nerd comedy. And, of course, I enjoy A Modern Girl's Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse, an always funny blog written by some friends of mine (look for the TV version soon).

But, exceptions aside, I want it to stop.

The zombie plague has not only infected our cinemas and TV screens, but our bookstore shelves as well. I stopped at Borders earlier today and decided to peruse the horror section. It's been awhile since I've done so, and I was dismayed to discover that virtually every new book that wasn't a Stephen King or Dean Koontz reprint was some variant on a zombie story.

I picked one up -- a zombie-themed short story anthology with absurdly cheap-looking cover art -- and thumbed through it.

Here's the first sentence that my eyes landed upon: "The thing advanced slowly and she screamed loudly."

Really? Two adverbs in one sentence, one of which is completely redundant. I groaned and put the book back on the shelf.

So in the interest of trying to stem the zombie (and terrible writing) tide, my next three blog posts are going to be about the type of horror that I want to see make a resurgence. I'm going to follow this one up with my lists of the top five horror novels you've probably never heard of and the top five horror movies you've probably never seen. You didn't ask for it, but I'm gonna give it to you anyway.

But first, the short stories.

Most of my sensibilities as a writer grew from reading classic horror short stories as a kid, most of which were written between roughly 1940 and the mid 1980s. That's around when the splatterpunks took over and horror fiction became about shoving as much fucked up shit into as small a space as possible.

I have nothing against sex, gore, or fucked up shit, but to me the best horror stories should cut like a scalpel rather than bludgeon like a hammer. As Stephen King once said, if a novel is like long love affair a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.

So, in reverse chronological order, here's my list of my top five favorite horror short stories, none of which feature zombies:

Stephen King - "You Know They Got A Hell Of A Band"

Where you can find it: Nightmares and Dreamscapes (1992)

I'm cheating a bit here, because the two Stephen King stories that actually spooked me the most are "Children of the Corn" (in Night Shift) and "Gramma" (in Skeleton Crew). But I'm going with this one, because it's the most unlikely.

A variation on King's oft-explored "weird little town" genre (see "Children..." and "Rainy Season"), "You Know They Got A Hell Of A Band" follows a bickering married couple as they make their way through rural Oregon on their way up to Seattle. They take a wrong turn, stumble on a bad patch of road, and then find themselves in a picaresque, Rockwell-esque little town called Rock and Roll Heaven.

They stop at a local diner, where they meet a waitress who passes a note telling them to get out while they still can. The proprietor of the place happens to look just like Janis Joplin. The cook's a dead ringer for Ricky Nelson. Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly pop in for a bite.

And then things get really weird.

This is a strange and potentially silly setup for a horror story, but King plays it straight and puts his thumb right on the demonic and otherworldly quality that defines our rock and roll stars. And, in so doing, he takes us through a version of Hell that you'd probably never considered before.

And I will never be able look at a picture of Buddy Holly again without imagining his eyes filling with blood.

Clive Barker - "In The Hills, The Cities"

Where you can find it: The Books of Blood: Volume One (1984)

Clive Barker gets a lot of the credit (or the blame) for kicking off the splatterpunk genre in the mid 80s. And it's true, his earliest short stories (compiled in the Books of Blood series) were pretty transgressive for their time. But the rawness of his imagination outdid that of any of the imitators that followed.

"In the Hills, the Cities" is another one of those weird little town stories (this town happens to be in Yugoslavia), but it manages to be one of the strangest short stories I've ever read. The less I say about the plot the better, but rest assured the central concept is so strikingly bizarre that dozens if not hundreds of horror writers have been trying to top it ever since.

And the fact that the two main characters are a gay couple -- presented realistically and without caricature -- was far more daring for its time than any of the gore or weird sex that you'll find throughout the rest of the books.

Richard Matheson - "Born of Man and Woman" (originally published 1950)

Where you can find it: here.

"This day when it had light mother called me retch. You retch she said. I saw in her eyes the anger. I wonder what it is a retch."

Richard Matheson went on to write I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Stir of Echoes, and about a million screenplays and Twilight Zone episodes, including "Terror at 20,000 Feet" and "Duel."

But he started his career with the words I quoted above. It's the opening paragraph to his first published short story, a horrid little gem called "Born of Man and Woman." The story is brilliant in its simplicity. It's also about a page and a half long.

Read it and see if you don't get a shiver up your spine.

Theodore Sturgeon - "The Professor's Teddy Bear" (originally published in Weird Tales, 1948)

Where you can find it: good luck

I really wish I could remember more about this one. I used to have it in some cheapo compilation I picked up at Waldenbooks or something way back when I was in high school, and I remember that (second only to "In the Hills, the Cities") it was just about the weirdest thing I had ever read. It was also very spooky and made me look at my teddy bear (yes, I still had a teddy bear in high school, fuck you) with suspicious eyes.

I lost the book years ago, and I've been looking for the story ever since. If anyone has ever run across it, please let me know.

H.P. Lovecraft - "Pickman's Model" (originally published in Weird Tales, 1927)

Where you can find it: probably just about any of the hundreds of Lovecraft compilations out there.

You can't make a list like this without talking about H.P. Lovecraft (although I almost did...I was sorely tempted to go with Daphne Du Maurier's "The Birds" or "Don't Look Now"), and you could just about pick any one of his stories at random.

I considered "At the Mountains of Madness," which is my personal favorite. But it's really more of a novella than a short story. So "Pickman's Model" it is.

"Pickman's Model" tells the story-within-a-story of Richard Upton Pickman, a half-mad artist in Boston whose paintings are so graphic and horrifying that he has been shunned by the art community. He leads the narrator on a tour of his gallery and shows him a particular painting of a strange humanoid creature eating what appears to be a person.

Then there's a weird noise ... and I guess you probably know where this is going.

"Pickman's Model" isn't really one of Lovecraft's more famous cosmic horror stories. It falls more in line with what I'd call the "subterranean horror" of something like "The Rats in the Walls." These were always my favorites. They're grittier, slimier, pulpier, and far less concerned with making you wonder what's out beyond the stars than in making you afraid of what might dwell in the hidden caverns under your feet.

And Lovecraft is helped by his stylistic experimentation here. By framing the story as a casual conversation between the narrator and the unnamed listener (us), he avoids the sometimes impenetrable excess that characterizes so many of his other stories.

Honorable Mentions

"The Book of Irrational Numbers" by Michael Marshall Smith
"Children of the Corn" by Stephen King
"Nadelman's God" by T.E.D. Klein
"The White People" by Arthur Machen
"The Night They Missed the Horror Show" by Joe R. Lansdale

Inception (2010)

Warning: Mild Spoilers

I had to think about this one for awhile before I wrote about it.

Say what you want about Christopher Nolan's new epic Inception. Bloated, sure. Confusing, absolutely. Overcooked, probably. Does it all work? No.

But you can't deny the ambition behind it. It's a film that was clearly made by an intellectually curious mind genuinely trying to discover something new. For a Hollywood summer blockbuster with a budget topping out at $160 million in this age of megastupid crap like G.I. Joe and Transformers, that's damn near miraculous.

I'm not even going to try to sum up the plot, because to do so would be an act of pure futility. Most of you, if you haven't seen it, probably already know the basics: Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a Man With A Past who makes a dubious living hacking into the dreams of corporate scions and stealing information. This heist-of-the-subconscious is called "extraction." But then he's made an Offer He Can't Refuse by a Japanese energy tycoon (Ken Watanabe) and assembles a team to do the seeming impossible: hack into the dreams of the heir (Cillian Murphy) to a rival corporation and plant an idea rather than to take one. This is called, predictably enough, "inception." So Cobb hires an architect (Ellen Page) to design the dream, and a bunch of other dudes to do some other stuff. And we're off to the races.

Nifty idea, right? And kind of unworkable, when you get right down to it. In the hands of a lesser talent (say, oh, I don't know, Michael Bay), it would have been a big steaming mess. But going in I knew that if anyone could make sense of this, it would be Christopher Nolan.

Rather than try to dissect what this movie's doing or make sense of it (which, until I see it about eight more times, would be pretty much impossible), I'm just going to list what I thought worked and didn't work.

1. Dream Reality

Some critics are knocking this movie for not really pulling off the "dream logic." I think this is kind of a bullshit criticism, to be honest. Dreams are inherently impossible to capture within a narrative, filmic context. As soon as the imagery is made literal by a camera, the whole thing falls apart. The only two films I can really think of that come close to capturing the sheer insanity of what a dream actually is are Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder and David Lynch's Lost Highway. All the other attempts I can think of have always felt overly schematic to me.

Nolan -- as schematic a filmmaker as has ever existed -- knows this, I think she he's not really going to try. Inception doesn't attempt to capture the chaos, absurdity, surrealism, and naked emotional force of our most powerful dreams. Rather, he presents an off-kilter constructed reality more similar to what we get in The Matrix. And this is the point. These aren't "dreams" as we're accustomed to thinking of them. They are created, by the characters and for a very specific purpose. We are given levels within levels within levels of reality, one inside the other like those Russian nesting dolls, as we descend deeper into Murphy's (and, simultaneously, DiCaprio's) subconscious.

It's no accident that the whole concept of "architecture" plays a major thematic and narrative role here, and the constant imagery of stairs and elevators reinforces this. It's not about experiencing a dream-state, but rather deconstructing the very idea of reality, time and perception, and in an analytical way. This has been Nolan's obsession (even in the Batman films) since he began making movies. Go back and rewatch Following if you disagree.

2. Story Structure

This is where Nolan really lives and breath, and in that sense the screenplay to Inception is meticulously crafted. It's not really a puzzle movie the way Memento is, but it's incredibly dense and has about a million moving parts to keep track of. It's pretty amazing how clear Nolan is able to keep everything. Unfortunately, the only way he seems to be able to do this is to resort to a nearly constant stream of exposition. But whatever. Like he himself said recently in an interview, heist films are the only types of movies where the excitement itself comes from the exposition. It's about knowing the details of how everything's supposed to work, and then seeing it all fall apart. And at it's heart, Inception really is a heist movie.

3. Character Development

I -- and many others -- have always said that this is Nolan's weakness. A Christopher Nolan film is all about the ideas, and the characters sort of exist to further those ideas. As such, they are often only half-alive. In Inception DiCaprio's main personal motivation mirrors that of Leonard (Guy Pierce) in Memento. Each man is trying to deal with the grief and the guilt of losing his wife (Jorja Fox in Memento, Marion Cotillard here). In both films, the emotional resonance of the personal tragedy is subsumed by the need to use the tragedy to propel the plot.

Personally, I'm okay with that. I give Nolan a bit of a pass here. I don't go to one of his films expecting to have my heart strings plucked. His movies are about the head and not so much about the heart.

What saves him is his ability to attract top-notch actors who manage to pull what heart they can out of the thin writing. Pierce managed to turn in a pretty devastating performance in Memento that builds slowly over the course of the film. I'm always surprised every time I watch it how affecting it actually is.

The same is true here. DiCaprio doesn't have the light touch Pierce did. He broods, Christian Bale-style, pretty much from the first frame, whereas Pierce made the more interesting choice to play laconically against Leonard's inner turmoil, thereby making the moments of intensit, where the turmoil manifests itself pop that much more. But DiCaprio brings an intensity to his best work that can be utterly gripping (see The Departed and Blood Diamond), if a little one-note. I would have preferred something a little less scowly -- less Marlon Brando and more Robert Mitchum -- but overall I'd say it mostly works.

Cotillard, in the thankless role of the dead wife who exists only in Cobb's mind, manages to be incandescent in every scene, and with very little to do. I have to admit I fell in love with her a bit myself here. It's because of her that this movie is as powerful as it is.

I also have to give a shout-out to the future Mrs. Scotty Milder, i.e. Ellen Page. I've pined for her pretty much since Juno (I know, I know. At least I didn't say Hard Candy). Her character here is pure plot, but she still provides that light touch that is so sorely missing from DiCaprio's performance. Long story short, I love her. The end.

Everyone else is uniformly strong, particularly Tom Hardy (Bronson) as the most roguishly charming of DiCaprio's fellow dream hackers. The only disappointment for me was Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He's okay, but I've become so accustomed to him being great in things like Brick and The Lookout that he underwhelmed me.

4. The Special Effects

What can I say? The Dark Knight really established Nolan as a A-list action director, and it did so with a refreshing dirth of "look at me Ma!" CGI. There's more in Inception, but Nolan wisely keeps it to a minimum. Many of the most impressive set pieces -- the fight in the rotating hallway, the van plunging into the water, the avalanche -- were done practically.

When Nolan does go for the big CGI sequence, he goes all out. We've all seen that shot of Paris folding up on itself in the trailer (which is too bad, really, because it kind of takes away from the "wow" factor when you actually see the movie). The ruined city-scape toward the end is truly mind blowing. And there's one shot involving a train (if you've seen it you know what I'm talking about) that actually made me recoil in my seat. But he uses this stuff only when he has to. Nolan has proven himself to be a real visual stylist, and he knows how to use his big bag of tools effectively and sparingly, to propel his ideas rather than simply show off.

5. The Music

I'm usually not a fan of huge crashing soundtracks. I may be the only person on earth who kind of can't stand John Williams' score for Star Wars. So I was surprised by how effective I found James Horner's work here. Once the movie really gets going the music never lets up, which normally would drive me batshit, but for some reason it actually added to the experience here. I can't really say why. I have a feeling, though, that it might irritate me on repeat viewings.

So that's my very broad take on Inception. I don't think it's the ground-breaking, awe-inspiring masterpiece that so many people claim it is. I also don't take the contrarian view that it's an overblown piece of shit (sorry Dusty). In the end, if I was to grade it, I guess I'd give it an A-, with several points added for the sheer balls it took to get it made in this environment. This is a huge summer movie that you can actually talk about once it's over. I'll give my kudos for that every time.

Top 11 songs about heartbreak

I was in Los Angeles about a week ago and I rented a car. I forgot to bring my auxiliary cable for my iPod, so until I was able to make it up from Culver City to the Radio Shack in Hollywood, I was stuck listening to LA radio.

Whoever had the car before me left it on some hip-hop/R&B station. I don't remember much about the song, but suffice it to say that it featured an Usher clone going on and on about how he wanted some girl back who he had screwed around on. The song was so syrupy, sophomoric, and overproduced as to be laughable, and it reminded me of this:

NSFW due to David Cross ass at the end, among other things


I giggled all the way up La Cienega to 3rd Street, at which point Kanye came on and I shut the radio off. But that song -- along with my earlier post about the five albums that changed my life and my newly rekindled obsession with Jim Croce -- got me thinking about hearbreak songs, and how hard they are to do well. No genre of popular music is more susceptible to cliché and unintentional hilarity.

Occasionally, however, a musician manages to find that nerve and work it like a boxer working a kidney. You try to resist, but by the end you're reduced to a blubbering mess.

So here, in no particular order, is my list of the heartbreak songs that actually kinda work:

Jim Croce - "Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels)"

I already talked at length about Croce in my last post, so I'll try to keep this short. What makes this song so effective is the specificity of the story. It's just a guy talking to a telephone operator and wanting to place a call to his ex-girlfriend. We don't know anything about their relationship, other than that she ran off with his "best old ex-friend Ray." We don't know what happened or who was at fault, so we're able to imprint our own experiences onto the back story. Meanwhile, we're just left with this guy, standing in a phone booth and trying to talk himself into making a call that, deep down, he knows he doesn't want to make. He wants to wish her well, let bygones be bygones, but he just can't do it.

"Operator, can you help me place this call? Because I can't read the number that you just gave me," he says. "There's something in my eyes, you know it happens every time."

We've all been there, in some fashion, I would guess.

In the end, he tells the operator to forget it. "You can keep the dime," he says. No lyric has ever summed up the resigned defeat that follows a nasty breakup better than that.

Johnny Cash - "If You Could Read My Mind"

Sometimes it's really not the song itself, but rather the person singing it and what their own story brings.

Just before he died, Johnny Cash recorded this cover of Gordon Lightfoot's...uh...classic from the early 1970s. The lyrics are interesting, but are the sort of abstract singer-songwriter stuff you found a lot of in that time.

But if you listen to this and remind yourself that Cash was nearly blind and bedridden when he recorded it, a broken man who was still mourning the death of his wife of 35 years, June Carter Cash...well, worlds open up.

The delicate guitar, the plaintive strain of his haggard, old man voice ... Don't tell me that when he sings "But stories always end/And if you read between the lines/You'll know that I'm just trying to undersand" he's not thinking about June and his own imminent death.

The Ramones - "The KKK Took My Baby Away"

And now for a change of pace.

This is another one where the song itself is really secondary to the back story. Anyone who knows anything about the Ramones knows that uber-leftie Joey and super-rightie Johnny really, really, REALLY hated each other. They hated each other pretty much from the start, but things only got worse after Johnny stole Joey's girlfriend. So Joey wrote this song out of revenge. And Johnny knew it. And they stayed in the band together for years afterwards.

This isn't one that's likely to make you misty eyed. But imagine these guys onstage at CBGBs doing this song and staring daggers at each other, and at the very least it should make you pretty uncomfortable.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Still In Love"

This is the second creepiest song that's going to be on this list (wait for the next one). It starts with a mournful, tinkling piano and a droning guitar, and then Cave comes in with this:

"The cops are hanging around the house/ Cars outside look like they've got the blues/ The moon don't know if it's day or night/ Everybody's creeping around with plastic covers on their shoes..."

Um, what?

The song goes on for awhile, and then we get to the chorus -- "you might think I'm crazy/ but I'm still in love with you" -- and that's when you realize the song is about a murder-suicide.

And then you go take a hot shower.

Moving on...

Pink Floyd - "Don't Leave Me Now"

If that last one didn't give you the shivers, this one (off of "The Wall") is bound to.

Coming after the shrieking rock-star freakout of "One Of My Turns," we find Pink (Bob Geldoff in the movie, probably Syd Barrett in real life) begging his girlfriend (or wife, maybe) not to leave him.

The music drones and drones and drones, and Roger Water' warbles lines like "Oh babe...don't leave me now...how could you go...when you know how I need you...to beat to a pulp on a Saturday night...OH BABE...WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AWAY?"

I can't think of another song that feels like a more thorough portrait of insanity. I'm guessing that Mel Gibson can relate.

Brenda Lee - "I'm Sorry"

This one is kind of hard to explain. It's definitely schmaltzy. But something about the combination of her voice, the crooning chorus behind her, and the melancholy violins just sort of plucks at my heart strings. What can I say?

I also find it interesting that it's pretty clear in the subtext that it's about how she screwed around on somebody. That seems kind of daring for a pop song of that era.

Lefty Frizzell - "Long Black Veil"

Country music offers some of the worst offenders in the cheesy/clichéd heartbreak genre. It almost seems as though a secret cabal in Nashville issued a decree sometime around 1953 that no songs would be allowed that didn't involve a cowboy crying into his beer and/or moaning about how his woman done him wrong. All other ideas are penned up and shipped off to the musical equivalent of Siberia.

But occasionally a good one kind of sneaks in under the fence and makes a break for it.

The neat trick of this one is that it's a ghost story, and the heartbreak isn't the narrator's (he's dead), but rather belongs to the woman he left behind. He looks on from up above (or from down below...he did screw his best friend's wife, after all) and relates the story with a cool, wistful detachment that somehow makes the tragedy hit home that much harder.

It's Frizzell's laconic delivery that makes the song work. I've heard covers -- even Johnny Cash's -- which play toward the melodrama rather than against it. Frizzell just gives us the facts, and in doing so he manages to craft a song that is both creepy and strangely powerful.

Charley Pride - "Does My Ring Hurt Your Finger"

Here's another one, like the Jim Croce song, where the simplicity of the story really works in this song's favor. And, like Frizzell, Pride's uninflected vocal performance gives it a weary, almost cynical edge that plays nicely against the minefield of clichés that accompanies all of these country ballads.

The National - "Sorrow"

"Sorry's my body on the waves/ Sorrow's a girl inside my cave/ I live in a city sorrow built/ It's in my honey, in my milk..."

That kind of achingly twee sentiment could have made this song go horribly awry, but when coupled with the minimalistic approach to the music and singer Matt Berninger's softly rumbling baritone, the feeling the song evokes is of the quiet hollowness that accompanies heartbreak rather than the drama of the heartbreak itself.

The central idea is summed up in the chorus -- "I don't want to get over you" -- and the music builds to just enough of a swirl around it to drive that sense of loss home, while keeping restrained and staying just a few steps shy of sentimentality.

Altogether, this is one of the most beautifully rendered sonic portraits of a man lost in the sea of his own regrets that I can remember.

The Beatles - "Rocky Raccoon"

This may seem an odd choice. I think most people look at this song as a gentle parody of the type of cheeseball country ballad I was lamenting before.

But, like the Brenda Lee song, there's just something about McCartney's voice and the simple, melancholy guitar that makes this one resonate for me in a way that even McCartney himself probably didn't intend. He pretty much drops the satire as soon as he stops aping Merle Haggard after the first few verses and slides effortlessly back into his trademark falsetto. As goofy as it is, this manages to be a weirdly affecting song about a poor kid who tries to stand up for the woman he loves and gets a bullet in the side for his trouble.

The Pogues - "Fairytale of New York"

I don't think I even need to say anything about this song. It's essentially perfect. I could listen to this, and only this, for the rest of my life and be perfectly happy.

In Memoriam: Edwin Houston Harrison, 1908-2010

Hey, guys. I hope you'll indulge me a little bit here.

My grandfather, Edwin Houston Harrison, passed away last night at the age of 102.

I kind of wanted to say a few things about him. Okay, a lot of things. This is sort of a weird venue, I guess, but it's the only one I have. So here goes.

Like most people, I imagine, I didn't really know that much about my grampa when I was a kid. He had lived several lifetimes before I was a speck on anyone's horizon. By the time I came along he was retired and motoring around the country with my grandma in their old silver pickup truck and travel trailer. The earliest memory I have of him is being up at Vallecito Lake outside of Durango, Colorado. He was talking to my brother (who was probably 13 or 14 at the time; I might have been two or three) while loading fishing poles into the back of the truck. I didn't even really know what the poles were for, but I knew it had something to do with fish and I remember being really mad because I couldn't go with them.

My grampa was the strong and silent type. Grandma was as vivacious and bubbly as could be. She talked a mile a minute, usually at top volume, and she had an infectious laugh that rolled out of her like the tide. So Grampa probably just figured he'd let her do most of the talking and keep himself to himself.

Consequently, I never really heard all that much about him or what had gone on in his life before I showed up. I knew he had been born on a farm in Oklahoma, and that his first wife had died shortly after giving birth to my Uncle Eddie in the 1930s, and that somehow he and my grandma had ended up in Los Alamos during WWII and that he had something to do with building the roads.

That was about it. To me he was just my grampa.


I don't know why I'm making that face

He was 16 years older than my grandma, so when she passed away back in 2006 I think he was more shocked than anybody. That was the first and last time I ever saw my grandpa cry. It was also, incidentally, the only time I remember him telling me that he loved me. I didn't mind. He wasn't a demonstrative guy, and I guess it had always been understood.

After Grandma died I decided I wanted to get to know Grampa a little better. So I borrowed a camera from a friend and I recorded about seven hours of interviews with him about his life.

Grampa's earliest memory, he told me, was living in a half-dugout on his parents' farm outside of Olustee, Oklahoma. His dad was a homesteader. They had 160 acres that they had to make workable ("proved up," as my grampa said) before they could own it outright. In the meantime, they lived in a one-room cabin, half dug out of the ground, with wooden planks for walls, thatch for a roof, and blankets and old newspaper for insulation.

One winter, when my grampa was about two, they had a nasty blizzard and his dad had to bring the chickens and one of their calves into the dugout so they wouldn't freeze to death. Grampa -- who was about 98 at the time he told me the story -- said he clearly remembered the icicles hanging from the calf's eyelashes.


That's him on the right.

Grampa was the oldest of nine kids (all but his youngest sister Johnny have passed away). He had the misfortune of trying to go into farming himself just as the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression hit. He married his high school sweetheart, Verna, rented a tractor and a plot of land south of Olustee, and got to work.

But it was no good.

"I made good crops down there, but you just couldn’t sell them," he told me. "I sold cotton for six cents a pound and wheat for 31 cents a bushel. That doesn’t even pay to harvest it. I had to give that up.”

in 1933 Verna gave birth to one son, Jimmy Dean, who died at birth. My uncle Eddie was born in 1936. The (possibly apocryphal) story my grandma told me when I was a kid was that two weeks after the baby was born Grampa went into town to buy her a pair of slippers. He came back to find her dead, probably of a blood clot.

I tried to ask Grampa about that when I interviewed him. He just grimaced a little and said "I don't really want to talk about that." So we moved on.

The farm went belly up, and Grampa bounced around for a long time looking for work. His family took in Eddie while he was out on the road. He started with construction in Oklahoma, mostly on roads, and before long this took him all over the Southwest doing contracts, mostly for the military, as the country geared up to enter WWII. He worked in Roswell for awhile, and El Paso, and in 1940 he found himself in Gallup building concrete "igloos" for the armory.

One day, during his lunch break, he met a pretty young waitress at the local Greek restaurant named Paula "Polly" Gonzales. She was 18. He was 34.

Grandma and Grampa both told me the story of their meeting about a year or so before she died. Unfortunately this was before I had the idea to put this stuff on film, so I don't remember all the details. The one thing I do remember was thinking that it sure sounded like he was dating someone else at the time. Grandma called this mysterious other woman his "friend".

When I pressed them on it, they just kind of gave each other a sly little look and laughed.

At any rate, they were married a few short months later on December 9, 1941, two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.


Grandma and Grampa with my Uncle Ron


And years later

My Uncle Ron was born in Gallup. The three of them moved around for awhile, landing again in Roswell, then moving onto Hobbs, Ft. Sumter, back to Oklahoma. They were living in Albuquerque when a friend of his from his time in El Paso told him about a mysterious new government job up in a place north of Santa Fe.

There wasn't a lot of housing up in Los Alamos at the time, so Grampa went into a bank in Santa Fe and got a loan for $1,500 to buy a travel trailer. They towed it up the hill in their Buick sedan, and they lived in that trailer for several years.

Grampa was one of the first eleven civilians to work in Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. He started in the auto pool as a mechanic.

I asked him what he thought the Trinity test and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did he have any inkling of what was brewing up there?

He didn't seem to understand the question. "Didn't think anything of it," he said. "We all just did our jobs."

Los Alamos ended up being the place where they would stay. After the war my Grandma gave birth to my mom (they were still living in the trailer at the time). They sent for Uncle Eddie, got themselves a house, and Grampa started working with the Zia Company building the roads all throughout town. He retired in 1973 as Superintendent of Roads, Labor and Mechanics.



Once retired, he and Grandma bought themselves another travel trailer and hit the road for about fifteen years or so. I came along in 1977. By then they had pretty much decided that Vallecito Lake was their favorite spot, and in the mid 1980s they sold the travel trailer, bought a mobile home in a little retirement community near the lake, and settled there permanently.

I've never talked to my brother or my cousins about this, but I would hazard a guess that my experience with my grandparents was very different from theirs. I'm the youngest. They're all sort of clumped together in age, and I was a late comer by about a decade. Grandma and Grandpa were traveling a lot when they were kids, and since there were so many of them they had to share.

By the time I wasn't still peeing my pants or eating the Play-Doh, they were pretty much settled in Colorado. I sort of had them to myself.


Yep, that's me again

I used to go up there for a few weeks every summer, either with my parents or by myself. I remember how cool it was, even in July, surrounded by all those pine trees. I remember the sound of the birds, always there, and how I used to sleep out on their covered porch and lay awake at night and watch for raccoons.

My grandma used to take me to Bingo with her once a week down at the little community center in the trailer park. I won $5 once. I think that was the happiest moment of my life up to that point.

I remember that they used to have a drag show once a year, believe it or not. I only saw it once, I think. All the old timers would borrow their wives' dresses and scarves and gloves, throw on a wig and put on stockings and rouge and ruby red lipstick, and then go strutting their stuff on the catwalk. The old ladies would hoot and holler and throw things and generally laugh themselves silly.

When my grampa came out from the back, wearing a purple dress and a long blond wig and two bright dangly clip-on earings, my eyes were the size of cookie tins and my jaw hung wide and loose like a trap door. This was my grampa, after all. A man's man through and through. I knew he was supposed to be part of the show, but I don't think I believed it until I saw it.

Grampa saw me sitting there in my grandma's lap, my face agog and full of naked wonder, and he smiled a crooked little smile that let me in on the joke. "Can you believe I'm up here in this ridiculous get up?" that smile seemed to say.

And then he tipped me a wink. I just about died of laughter.



Mostly, though, I remember the fishing.

Yep, I finally made it out there on the lake with him. By this point my brother was off at college or maybe living in Albuquerque, so it was usually just the two of us. He'd wake me up unceremoniously well before dawn. I'd groan, then smell the eggs or the toast that my grandma had made for me, pull myself out of bed, wipe the sleep from my eyes, and stumble into the kitchen to have a mostly silent breakfast with the two of them. Then my grampa would say something like "best get to it now," and my grandma would give me a thermos with hot chocolate when I was younger, coffee when I got a little older, and a plastic baggie full of her homemade chocolate chip cookies (the best I've ever had, let me tell you) and banana bread.

Then I'd pull on my shoes and trudge out after him to that old silver truck and we'd drive the couple miles or so down to the lake, neither of us talking much but Grampa occasionally singing a little bit under his breath. I'd sit next to him and yawn happily and watch as the sun started to peek its head up over the rim of the mountains.

We would get to the wharf, and Grampa would josh a little with the guys there, and one of them (usually a kid) would go out there and tow his boat back to the dock. We'd climb in, and I'd always be a little bit scared when I'd put my foot onto the bottom of the boat and feel it rock a little on the water. But Grampa always put a thick hand on my shoulder to steady me, so that was all right.

Then we'd charge out to the middle of the lake, and when he decided we were far enough out we'd let our lines out. I'd stare at the reel as the line unspooled into the water, making a soft and reassuring whir-whir-whir sound as it went. It was lead line, color coded by the number of feet. First blue, then red. When it would get to the yellow I'd thumb the catch and it would stop.

Grampa would shut off the motor and we'd sit there waiting. And waiting. And waiting. He always let me sit up at the front of the boat, so I'd lean back in my seat and put my feet up on the middle bench and just watch the line as it twitched a little, teased by a twig or maybe a slow current under the glasslike surface that I couldn't see.

After awhile, Grampa might start singing a little. I usually couldn't understand what he was saying. His Okie accent was so thick as to be almost a caricature, and whenever he sang he'd exaggerate it a little. But I loved the sound of his voice.

Sometimes we'd talk a little bit. He'd tell me about the different kinds of fish: Coconi salmon, rainbow, brown trout, the occasional pike near the shore that could cut your line with their sharp little teeth. He'd tell me how the fish got there, and how he knew what part of the lake to go to each morning to get the maximum number of bites.

Sometimes he'd tell me stories. I think it was out there on the lake when he first told me about Monkeyjack and Rawhide and Bloody Bones -- who came to snatch little boys out of their beds when they're bad -- thereby scaring the bejeezus out of me but also probably inadvertently helping spur my lifelong love of monster stories.

One day he taught me how to yodel. There was no one else out there, so there was nobody we could bother. We sat there, shouting "yodel-i-oh-i-oh" at the mountains, daring each other with each yell to be just a little bit louder...a little bit louder...and hearing our voices rocket back at us across the water. I remember thinking it was kind of like magic.

Then we'd get a bite. "Heyup!" Grampa would say, and I'd bounce up and down in my seat, full of excitement and always for the first few seconds not quite remembering what to do, and then I'd grab my pole and start to reel in. Grampa would coach me, tell me to ease up when I needed to and let that sucker think he was gonna get away, tell me when to pull and when to let him swim. I'd watch the line change from yellow to red and finally back to blue, and then the clear leader would emerge with the shiny spinning lures (Grampa called them "twizzlers"), and after that, by golly, there'd be a daggum fish!

"There it is!" I'd shout, and Grampa would grab the net and I'd try with all my might to fight that thing up to the surface. Sometimes the fish would get away. But usually not. Usually Grampa would just scoop it up and drop it to the floor of the boat, and we'd watch it flop around there for a bit before throwing it into the cooler. Then Grampa would fix my bait and fire up the engine, and we'd let the line out and do it all over again.

Let me tell you one of life's great secrets: Nothing tastes better than a fresh fish you pulled out of the water yourself.

Eventually, as the years went on, it got harder and harder for them to stay up in Colorado. The closest hospital was over in Bayfield, which was twenty minutes away. Grampa fell off the roof one winter while clearing snow and banged himself up pretty good. He wasn't seriously hurt, but I think that was what convinced him and it wasn't too long after that they decided to sell the trailer and head back to Los Alamos. My Mom and Uncle Ron bought a little house for them.

Without a lake nearby, he was pretty much done with fishing. So he took to doing work on the house instead. He was in his late 80s or early 90s when he built the back patio, mostly by himself (Uncle Ron and my cousin Kenny helped with the roof). He was losing a lot of his strength by then, so he devised a system of pulleys and levers to help lift and move things. That still blows my mind.

After the patio was done he got to work on his garden. He was in his mid 90s, I think, when he really tackled it in earnest. When we were preparing his 100th birthday party two years ago, I put together a little video slideshow to show to the guests. The only picture he cared about was this one:


That's the patio he built

When my Grandma died, it was a shock to all of us. She had been in great health, still walked a mile every day, and seemed to be bouncing back nicely after surgery on her knee.

This is the story that I remember hearing. I might not have all the details right, but I think I got the gyst.

Early one morning, while it was still dark, Grandma woke complaining of a strange pain and a feeling of heat in her shoulders. She and Grampa discussed what they should do, whether they should call the ambulance or maybe call my Mom to take her to the hospital. But they decided they didn't want to bother anyone. Grandma drank a ginger ale, thinking that would make her feel better, and they went back to bed.

When my Grampa woke up later, Grandma was in the bathroom. Grampa went into the kitchen, fixed himself something to eat, and talked to my Uncle Ron (who was by then living in St. George, Utah) on the phone for a bit. After getting off the phone it occurred to him that Grandma had been in the bathroom for an awful long time.

He went to check on her and found her slumped against the door, blocking it so that he couldn't get it open.

He called my mom, said something to the effect of: "Your mama fell down in the bathroom and I think she's dead."

I was interning at LionsGate in Los Angeles at the time. My dad called me and told me what happened, that my Grandma Polly had passed away. It sounded like a heart attack. This didn't seem possible; before I left two months earlier she had seemed as bubbly and vivacious as ever. I immediately booked a flight home.

When I made it up to my grandparents' house the whole family was there. Grampa came into the living room from kitchen, tottering on his increasingly unstable legs. His eyes and cheeks were wet with tears.

"How're you doing, Grampa?" I asked. I had no idea what else to say.

"Not too good, Scott," he said, and he grasped my hand and squeezed as hard as he could. His voice was thick and shaky. "Not too good at all."

We sat there for awhile, all of us, numb, not talking about much in particular.

Finally, as I was getting ready to go, I went to him and put my arms around him and kissed him on the forehead. "Bye, Grampa," I said.

"Bye, Scott," he said. Then: "I love you."

After Grandma was gone, the burden of caring for him for the next few years fell mostly to my mother and my cousin Kenny. Grampa insisted on staying in his house and -- for a guy edging out of his 90s -- did remarkably well for himself. But he was getting weak, and none of us trusted his legs.

Eventually Kenny moved in with him and helped care for him. I have to say, I think my cousin acquitted himself heroically. I don't know if I could have done it.

Grampa continued to get weaker and weaker, and before long he wasn't able to do much with his garden. So he mostly sat and watched sports (on mute, because he didn't give a wit what the announcers had to say, he could follow it just fine, thank you very much), did his crosswords, and listened to his religious shows on the radio. It was during this time I got it in my head to interview him on camera.

Finally, about a year ago, he went to live with my aunt and uncle in Utah. Kenny was preparing to get married, and it was getting too hard for my mom to be there all the time without living with him.

After Grampa left, I didn't talk to him much. He was almost impossible to understand on the phone, for one thing. But, to be honest, I just didn't really know what to say.


Grampa with my mom on his 102nd birthday in Utah

About a month ago he developed pneumonia. He had had a lot of trouble breathing for years, and at his age the strain was just too much. His throat was full of phlegm and he could hardly swallow, so it became next to impossible for him to eat. My mom told me about the only thing he could keep down was one bottle of Ensure a day.

My mom and I talked to him on the phone this past Sunday.

"How're you doing, Grampa?" I asked.

"Not too good, Scott," was the reply.

As always, it was hard to understand him. But we talked for a bit, and he was delighted to hear that I got a job teaching. He wished me luck.

"Take care of yourself, Grampa," I said when we signed off. I didn't understand what he said in return.

That was the last time I talked to him.

It was only later that I realized what I forgot to say. So I'm going to say it now.

I love you, Grampa.

I hope you're well wherever you are, and that there are plenty of fish to catch and flowers to tend to.

I love you.

And I miss you.

Goodbye.