Cat People

Cat People (1942) (4.5/5)

Cat People begins like a traditional romance with a couple that meets cute at a local zoo. Having trouble sketching the likeness of a black panther, Irena keeps on throwing away her unsatisfactory attempts but each time misses the trash can. Another zoogoer, Oliver Reed. disposes of her trash and jokingly chastises her. But after they strike up a conversation, this Oliver fellow seems less concerned that one of Irena’s sketches, a badass image of a panther skewered on a sword, has slipped from her sketchbook and is left to muss up the city zoo. (This is before the EPA existed, so I guess people were a little looser about these things). Because we know this is a horror film, we also know that this relationship may not end well, and Cat People could be categorized as a horror-romance in the tradition of early gothic novels, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, or later horror films like The Fly or Let the Right One In.

Irena and Oliver strike up a romance and eventually get married. It’s not clear how long they were dating before marriage, but in the film it goes by quickly. It doesn’t seem as if Oliver knows much about his bride before marriage, except that she’s has a deep connection to her Serbian roots. In her apartment there’s a statue of “King John” regally atop a horse with his sword held straight up impaling a large cat-like creature. This isn’t Magna Carta King John, as Oliver first guesses; it’s actually Jovan Nenad, a sixteenth-century Serbian military commander who established the last independent Serbian state prior to the takeover by the Ottoman Empire. According to Irena, her village was captured by the Mamluk people, and soon after, the villagers started practicing witchcraft, which gave them the ability to turn into cat creatures. King John retook the village and killed those cat people who didn’t flee into the neighboring wilderness.

Although my knowledge of Eastern European history is hardly encyclopedic, you can probably guess from the description Irena gives us that the King John was a Christian who drove out the Muslim Mamluks. (In fact, the Mamluks were a slave warrior caste that likely inspired George RR Martin’s The Unsullied). Like plenty of horror stories, Cat People is about fear of contamination. Irena symbolizes the immigrant to the United States who may not be as white and Christian as you think. The mismatch between Irena and her husband is further highlighted by Oliver Reed’s absurdly Anglo sounding name.

Over time, Irena comes to fear that she herself is contaminated and may be one of the cat people. Another Serbian woman who bares a striking resemblance to a cat approaches Irena during her engagement dinner and speaks to her in her native tongue, calling her “sister.” According to legend, if a cat person kisses someone, she will transform into a cat and eat her mate. Cat People was made after the implementation of the Motion Picture Production Code, which established strict censorship over Hollywood cinema, so the film can’t say this in so many words, but for the audience it’s pretty clear what kissing means in this context. In fact, Oliver even says something along the lines of, “You know, it’s kind of weird we’re married and all and we haven’t ‘kissed’ yet.”

Here it becomes clear the film also embodies the fear of female sexuality as well as racial difference. Even after he marries Irena, Oliver keeps up a flirtatious friendship with his coworker, Alice Moore, who expresses doubt early on about the viability of Oliver’s marriage. Like early film star and sex symbol, Rudolph Valentino, Irena’s appeal comes from her darker complexion, which marks her as distinct from her blonde rival Alice. (Although he was Italian, Valentino also played Muslims, such as the title character in The Son of the Sheik). When Oliver, Irena, and Alice go on a museum trip, Alice should feel like the third wheel, but in fact Oliver suggests Irena explore other parts of the building because unlike him and Alice, she must be bored with these English ship models they’re looking at. The implication, of course, is that Irena is racially, religiously, and culturally unsuited for Oliver.

Irena starts to become concerned that Oliver and Alice are having an affair, and at first it appears that the film is setting up Irena to be a paranoiac. When Oliver’s having a late night at the office, she tracks down her husband only to find him having a meal with Alice. She later stalks Alice late at night down starkly lit streets. This scene in particular is masterfully crafted, juxtaposing the sound of Irena and Alice’s increasingly frantic footsteps and ratcheting up tension until it is broken by the sound of a bus arriving at its stop. Anyone who has watched a horror film is familiar with the scene where we expect the killer to jump out of the shadows, but instead a friendly character or a cat jumps out instead. The technique apparently dates back to Cat People and is known as the Lewton Bus after producer Val Lewton. There’s also a scene where Alice jumps into a pool in order to escape from a large cat she’s convinced is stalking her, and I’m pretty certain this moment in the film inspired a similar scene in the indie horror film It Follows.

But Irena isn’t as crazy as she’s initially made out to be. In fact, Oliver is planning to leave his wife for Alice, and even gets the advice to annul the marriage, which is another indicator that the marriage was never consummated. In all honesty, Oliver is kind of a dick. I mean, dude, you married this woman who you barely knew and then won’t step up when she’s clearly having a difficult time. What’s more, you’re ready to jump ship now that times are tough.

That’s not to say that Oliver doesn’t try to help out his wife, but he does so in arguably the wrong ways. He’s convinced that Irena’s cat person fears are only in her head, so he sends her to a psychiatrist. [Be warned. There are spoilers ahead]. When watching the film, I felt like there was something off about this psychiatrist dude. It turns out, like Irena’s cat people phobia, this wasn’t just in my head. The guy’s kind of a creep, and at the end of the film, he tries to kiss Irena, which I don’t think would be looked kindly on by the APA. Until this moment, we’re not quite certain whether Irena’s cat people fears are legitimate or not, but sure enough, she transforms into a leopard and mauls her therapist.

It’s easy to see why Cat People has become a horror film classic. First off, director Jacques Tourneur drapes the film in shadows, a technique he would use in the film noir classic, Out of the Past. (If you ever wanted to watch Robert Mitchum walk into a room and knock out some schlub with just one punch, then you really should watch Out of the Past). Oliver works for an architecture agency, so Tourneur makes great use of underlit drafting tables to create incredibly stark, nearly abstract chiaroscuro. Second, the film is thematically rich. From issues of hybridity, race, religion, immigration, science and medievalism, Cat People contains a whole host of themes in its brisk seventy-three minute running time.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to reduce Cat People down to a single message. While it certainly embodies America’s fear of the other as present in our anxiety over immigration, it also seems more sympathetic towards Irena than not. After all, the men in the film, her husband and therapist, ultimately fail her. She’s a monster, but she’s also the character who’s easiest to identify with. It’s not surprising that producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, both of whom are immigrants, would take the point of view of Irena, and it’s unfortunately not surprising that the film’s exploration of America’s fear of immigrants who come from the Muslim world remains timely nearly seventy-five years later.

Angel Olsen - My Woman

Angel Olsen - My Woman (4.5/5)

When I saw Angel Olsen in concert earlier this year, her entire backing band (five musicians in all) were decked out in blue, mid-60s suits while she sported a Beatnik inspired horizontally striped shirt. This stylish coterie looked like the perfect visual representation of Olsen’s latest album, My Woman. Olsen’s music has a buttoned up precision that’s periodically torn by the occasionally falsetto or guitar. It’s this tension between restraint and release that power Olsen’s latest.

My Woman cycles through an impressive array of genres, many of them plucked straight from the sixties. As much as she was pegged as a folkie early in her career, Olsen musical horizons aren’t so circumspect. In the album’s catchiest track, “Shut Up and Kiss Me,” she affects a pouty vamp for what’s essentially an early girl group R&B number. About a minute and a half into “Not Gonna Kill You,” the song shatters into a psychedelic Jefferson Starship song with Olsen doing her best Grace Slick impression.

Although Olsen clothes herself in different musical forms, her personality always breaks through. You can find snippets of 60s influence throughout My Woman, but they are integrated within Olsen’s songwriting rather than sublimating her own voice. For me, the nearly eight minute song “Sister” serves as the album’s highlight. The song starts off with a languid cadence but continues to build throughout. The song evokes the feeling of driving out West, past the flat prairies and parched deserts, until finally the Rockies burst upon the skyline. Olsen repeats the mantra “All my life I thought I’d change” in its final minutes, achieving some sort of transcendence.

The songs are helped by the simple fact that the album sounds pristine. You can hear each individual instrument in the mix, which gives Olsen enough backing for whenever she wants to lob her vocals into the cheap seats. The interplay between the players could only have been achieved by playing together and recording live by a talented backing band. My Woman is another entry into Olsen’s discography that showcases her interest in pushing her sound forward, often by churning over the past and making it sound new.

Hell or High Water

Hell or High Water (5/5)

Because of its ability to reflect many of America’s founding American myths, the Western genre has become inherently political. Whether it’s High Noon’s examination of civic duty and community or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’s look into the shaky line between judicial and extra-judicial violence, the Western seems to automatically circle back to questions of nationhood, politics, and economics. It’s clear early on that the bank bailout and Great Recession weighs on the mind of David Mackenzie, director of Hell or High Water, a modern day Western.

Hell or High Water begins with an impressive 360 degree pan of a small West Texas town, and we can make out some graffiti that says something along the lines of “Three tours in Iraq, where’s my bailout.” Mackenzie’s camera likes to linger along rusted out industry and those predatory advertisements for home loans you can find in depressed areas. The movie starts off with two bank robberies perpetrated by two brothers, Toby and Tanner Howard (Chris Pine expanding his career beyond summer spectacles and Ben Foster cementing himself as an important character actor). The two have been crossing the state robbing banks, only taking loose bills from the cashier till to make sure their gains are untraceable. They also rob only branches of Midlands banks.

You can probably piece together from this description that Midlands bank has screwed over the brothers’ family, and they’re extracting money in return. In this case, their late mother, suffering from some sort of illness, was forced into taking out a reverse mortgage under conditions she could not reasonably repay, which has delivered the family land into the hands of Midlands. The brothers plan on paying off their debt with the bank’s own money.

One of the many joys of the film is its refusal to bend to the familiar molds of the genre (which is only possible because screenwriter Taylor Sheridan is already minutely familiar with the heist and Western genres). For instance, of the two brothers, Tanner is clearly unhinged, but this doesn’t lead to the dissolution of their relationship or other obvious plot points. There’s an unspoken bond, or perhaps a bond spoken through the male language of quips and insults, that the two brothers will forgive each other for just about any slight or mistake.

This brotherly relationship is mirrored by the two Texas Rangers on their tale, Marcus and Alberto, played respectively by Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham. Bridges is as charismatic as ever, even if he has become less intelligible the more he stars in Westerns (in a few years expect him to turn in a performance composed entirely of grunts). Throughout Marcus chides Alberto, the insults themselves are usually aimed at his Comanche heritage. Just as with the brothers, these insults are a means to both cloak and convey affection. The film divides our loyalties evenly. We know we should side with the lawmen, but you can’t help and hope the brothers make it through with their plan.

One of the film’s centerpieces happens to be its dialogue. We’re given a few glimpses into the history of these characters, but their interactions with one another more clearly define these people than their backstories. (It’s become something of a lost art in film to develop characterization through choices and dialogue rather than a tragic backstory crammed into the story with the grace of a backhoe loader). The film is both confident enough to take little detours with side characters and yet eager enough to please to make these conversations fun for the audience. Some of the best lines of the film are actually given to two waitresses who have three scenes between them.

The politics of the film are clear, but there’s enough nuance here to make sure the message is more than window dressing. Hell and High Water is about banks screwing over the working class, but it’s also about intergenerational poverty and how streams of wealth flows away from the poor and working class. The film isn’t just about inequality; it’s about how inequality is produced by squeezing capital from those at the bottom into the maw of those at the top. During the course of the film we see the beautiful southwestern landscape alongside dried up towns, places where one character openly wonders how anyone makes a living there.

Hell and High Water delivers as an immensely entertaining genre flick in a year full of immensely entertaining genre flicks. (Those summer blockbusters may have let you down in 2016, but if you move down to low and mid-budget movies, then there have been some real treats). The film smartly handles the issues of inequality and the evaporating middle class, but even many years from now, when we live in a Star Trek-like utopia where money no longer exists, Hell and High Water will still entertain as a top tier modern day Western.

Please Be Honest by Guided by Voices

Please Be Honest by Guided by Voices (3.5/5)

How do you define Guided by Voices? Do you have to include members of the “classic lineup,” excluding everything after Under the Bushes Under the Stars (1996) and before the reunion albums (2012)? Is Guided by Voices even a “band” or is it just an outlet for Robert Pollard who decides to let other songwriters play in his sandbox now and again? Is it just a name? This leads us to a tautology: It’s a Guided by Voices album because it’s released under the Guided by Voices moniker. Robert Pollard, whose work has been released in a seemingly endless series of bands, seems to believe that an album is a Guided by Voices album simply because he has said so. Well, actually, he has said that the songs off the latest GBV release just felt like GBV songs, despite the fact that he handles all of the instruments on the recording.

I have to admit that while Pollard’s latest GBV album, Please Be Honest, put me into an ontological conundrum, he has a point about the songs feeling like GBV songs. I don’t think the latest GBV is up to the standards of the best of the reunion albums, but there’s enough here to satisfy those who don’t have the patience to sift through every Pollard-related album released in a year. And while Please Be Honest might be guilty of some of the common complaints about Pollard’s songwriting--unevenness and a lack of quality of control--it still offers up some great songs for GBV die hards like myself.

Please Be Honest opens with two killer tracks, “My Zodiac Companion” and “Kid on a Ladder.” The former builds out of a sparse guitar and off-key singing by Pollard but continues to layer on strings and drums until Pollard has fashioned a mini-epic in just over two minutes. Like the best of Pollard’s songwriting, “My Zodiac Companion” gives you just enough to want to return again and again. “Kid on a Ladder” is the first showcase of Pollard’s interest in playing around with drum machines, which make another appearance on “Unfinished Business” during the album’s second half. The former though is one of those perfectly crafted pop songs you can expect to appear at least once on any Pollard released album.

The rest of the album’s A-side is less successful. A fifteen-song album is short for Guided by Voices, which means you might have less patience for some of Pollard’s basement tapes noodling, especially when it comes to filler like “Sad Baby Eyes,” which might have worked on a masterpiece like Alien Lanes, but here just trips up the flow of the album. The exception is “The Grasshopper Eaters” (perhaps a play on the lotus eaters from The Odyssey). Here Pollard does a superb job of playing with atmosphere and tone, and the track is somewhat reminiscent of some of the best experimental work of another Ohio band, Pere Ubu.

Pollard hides some of the best songs on the album’s B-side. “Hotel X (Big Soap)” once again channels the Who by stuffing several musical movements inside of three minutes before a surprise ending made out of a sampled high school band. “Hotel X” is followed by two other major highlights, “I Think I’m a Telescope” and the title track. The album is capped by yet another great final track, which Pollard has become an expert in crafting at least since the 2012 reunion. (Each reunion album has ended in an appropriate blast of energy whereas earlier GBV albums often just sort of ended).

So the worst of my fears regarding Please Be Honest have not come to pass. Pollard did not just cynically use the GBV name to scare up some extra cash to buy Jose Cuervo and PBR. The album isn’t as strong as the last six under the GBV name, but it has its charms, and by whatever definition you choose to use, it at least “feels” like Guided by Voices.

X-Men: Apocalypse

X-Men: Apocalypse (3.5/5)

In order to enjoy the recent X-Men films, the first thing you have to do is completely ignore issues of continuity. These films don’t so much ask the audience to suspend disbelief when it comes to their fictional timeline as they ask you to wrestle your disbelief to the ground, lock it in a safe, and catapult it into the stratosphere. The same character reappears in different times at widely different ages, events from film to film are conveniently forgotten, and characters don’t seem to age over the course of decades. In X-Men; Apocalypse, for instance, Havok, who joined the X-Men twenty years prior in 1962, looks like he’s still in his mid-twenties. Maybe you can pass this off as some good genes, but then why does he have a brother, Scott Summers (Cyclops), who’s still in high school? You could go mad trying to diagram a timeline of the X-Men films.

But this wasn’t always the way. The X-Men movies are a fascinating example of how superhero films have evolved over the last fifteen years. Appearing after Blade but before Raimi’s Spider-Man, the original X-Men film attempted to take the sometimes goofy premise of the comics and ground it into something that resembles the world we live in. At the time this enraged the nerd community who were upset that Wolverine was too tall and the X-costumes were too drab. But it payed off handsomely with the general public and helped start off our current superhero obsession.

As time went on and people became used to the idea of people who had incredible powers and silly names and costumes to go with them, superhero films have embraced many of the elements that make superhero comic books unique. There’s less concern about grounding these movies in the “real world.” Currently, Marvel’s films are moving towards a match-up between its heroes and an evil man who sits in a throne in the middle of space collecting magic rocks. Likewise, the X-Men movies have embraced time travel and the idea that mutants had a massive impact on important historical events.

I’m all for increasing the insanity quotient in the modern superhero films because I think it’s what makes the genre unique. Sure, every now and again I want to watch a Nolanesque, semi-realistic representation of Batman, but when our characters can shoot beams of energy from their eyes, sometimes realism is overrated. So I don’t think Apocalypse would have worked as a villain in earlier iterations of the X-Men films, but an ancient mutant who convinces others to worship him as a God and transfers his consciousness from person to person to obtain immortality seems right at home sixteen years after the first X-Men movie debuted. Overall, X-Men: Apocalypse is overstuffed, overlong, convoluted, lumpy narratively, and the third act goes on for far too long. Which is to say, it’s a superhero film made in the past five years. Other than these common complaints, Apocalypse is an enjoyable ride that benefits from director Bryan Singer’s deft eye.

Subscribing to overt Darwinism, the film’s titular villain has an even more extremist view of human/mutant relations than Magneto, and he spends the film, naturally, threatening the extinction of all of humanity. For the film’s first half,Apocalypse gathers his “four horsemen,” soldiers who will aid him in his conquests. But as the film opens, we’re introduced to Apocalypse in ancient Egypt over five thousand years ago. This introduction plays like a little narrative itself, and one of the my favorite moments in the film is the first shot, which consists of a moving bird’s-eye shot that renders the Sahara Desert into abstract lines before the camera pans upwards to reveal massive pyramids. The intro ends with the betrayal of Apocalypse by his human worshipers who have devised a way to bury him deep in the ground. The events go by with few words, Singer preferring to tell the narrative visually.

Later in the film, Singer takes a meta-dig at the third X-Men movie, which was hastily directed by Brett Ratner. The well-crafted intro fully justifies Singer’s choice to throw some shade like a hip-hop MC. My suspicion is that of all the characters in all of the X-Men movies, Singer probably relates most to Quicksilver who had the showstopping moment in the previous entry, Days of Future Past, in which he moved so quickly that time appeared to crawl to a near stop. Once again, Quicksilver saves the day, this time from an explosion that tears apart the X-mansion. Sure, it’s a cover of an old favorite, but Singer manages to tweak the formula enough to make it just as fun and exciting as in the previous film. As a director, Singer also has similar control over the placement and movement of characters. Quicksilver is a representation of his near godlike power, a comment on the director’s mastery of the mise-en-scene.

Throughout the film, Singer brings a real director’s vision to the proceedings. As in Days of Future Past, he dabs splashes of primary colors in an homage to the film’s comic book origins. (Singer’s interest in use of light goes back to The Usual Suspects where he translated film noir’s chiaroscuro into expressionistic lighting). He also makes great use of both foreground and background. Nightcrawler, who like in X2 is a standout character, will often pop into the foreground of a frame disrupting the original focus of the shot. In one particular scene, Magneto confronts former coworkers who have outed him as a mutant only to be interrupted by Apocalypse. When Magento tells Apocalypse, who at this point he doesn’t know, not to try and stop him from killing these men for their betrayal, with the wave of a hand, Apocalypse simply melts these men into the floor. These victims who are slightly out of focus and in the background of the shot suddenly and unexpectedly fall to their death. The scene is visually surprising because it makes use of foreground and background and occurs in a single shot where another director would choose to cut. (The use of superpowers are particularly gruesome in this installment,)

While another 2016 superhero film, Captain America: Civil War, easily has a stronger script, there are times when Singer’s understanding of the visual language of cinema makes the Russo brothers look like they should go back to directing boring old television because they don’t quite have the chops to keep up. And about that script. The film is all over the place. There’s a moment where the newly recruited X-Men are captured by Stryker, the U.S. colonel responsible for Wolverine’s adamantium claws. This detour takes us away from the central conflict between Apocalypse and the X-Men, and in all honestly it seems like these events occur solely for a brief Wolverine cameo.

And while it would kill fourteen-year-old me if he heard me say this, Apocalypse just isn’t that interesting of a villain. When reading X-Men comics I thought he was a great villain because he looked cool and was incredibly powerful, but his motivations are mostly retreads of the more conflicted and thus more intriguing Magneto. And the only reason why Apocalypse apparently needs his four horsemen henchmen is because he’s named Apocalypse, which, come to think of it, was pretty much the same reason in the comics.

As the X-Men films have become more complicated, they have also become more unwieldy. But there’s still plenty to like about the latest X-installment. Sure, it doesn’t have the immediate hook of two generations meeting across time like Days of Future Past, but there’s enough to set the film apart from the current glut of superhero films that I’m curious to see where we go next.

I, Jedi by Michael A Stackpole

I, Jedi by Michael A. Stackpole (2/5)

It’s not clear whether the title of Michael A. Stackpole’s Star Wars novel, I, Jedi, is an allusion to Isaac Asimov’s short story collection, I, Robot, or Robert Grave’s work of historical fiction, I, Claudius. What’s more, I’m not sure which allusion would be more pretentious on the part of Stackpole, since the novel doesn’t come close to the quality of either work.

As a preteen devouring Star Wars novels, I always liked Stackpole’s X-Wing books the best. I vaguely remember his novels as great page turners that made something new out of the Star Wars Universe. I liked that only George Lucas’s perpetual survivor, Wedge Antilles, made his way from screen to page as a major character in Stackpole’s novels. After reading I, Jedi, I’ve come to think that perhaps twelve year old me may not have had great tastes in books. Either that or I, Jedi is a massive step down from Stackpole’s X-Wing series.

I, Jedi follows Corran Horn, a Rogue Squadron pilot who also served as the de facto protagonist of the X-Wing series. Here Stackpole writes in the first person as Horn, which was the first time a character not from the films was given a first person point of view. In the earlier novels, we learned that Horn is Force sensitive, but at the start of I, Jedi he has undergone no formal training. After returning from a mission with Rogue Squadron, he learns that his wife Mirax has been captured by pirates while on an undercover mission. Instead of rushing out to save her, Horn decides that he must first join Luke Skywalker’s newly founded Jedi Academy to cultivate his nascent Force powers.

The novel is split into two halves. During the first half, Horn trains with Luke and other Force sensitives at the new Jedi Academy on Yavin 4, the planet where the Rebellion launched its attack on the Death Star in A New Hope. This inaugural class, however, is tormented by the risen spirit of Exar Kun, an evil Sith Lord whose ghost has apparently been waiting thousands of years for the right time to pounce. (This subplot made me wonder why we haven’t gotten a full on Star Wars ghost story yet. Get on it, people!)

As I read this portion of the novel, something seemed off. It was as if sections of the narrative had been carved out of the novel, like we were only getting part of the story. One of the Jedi trainees, Kyp Durron, is seduced to the darkside by Kun and steals a superweapon called the Sun Crusher or some such nonsense. But none if this is all that well developed. Even the final confrontation with the big bad, Kun, occurs off stage.

A little dip into the internet makes it clear that these events are covered in The Jedi Academy Trilogy by Kevin J. Anderson. This section of the novel appears to require some familiarity with The Jedi Academy Trilogy in order to have any real impact on the reader. If anything, I, Jedi, is exhibit A for why Disney was right in wiping out the Expanded Universe. When a reader must be intimately familiar with the larger expanded web of Star Wars novels in order for the story to be satisfying, the author just hasn’t done his or her job. Sure, the idea of covering the same territory as another novel from a unique perspective has potential, but the execution is way off.

The second half of I, Jedi is more engaging. Horn goes undercover with the space pirates who have taken his wife and must infiltrate their ranks. It’s a well worn narrative, but it’s fun to see it applied to the world of Star Wars. The first half of the novel does deflate some of the story’s urgency. Why doesn’t Horn run out to rescue his wife the moment he finds that she’s missing? And it doesn’t seem like his time at the academy was all that well spent. Horn ultimately finds his Jedi training unsatisfying and gives Luke a kind of douchey speech about how he’s had tougher training before and he doesn’t really need the weak sauce that Luke is serving. It’s largely self-aggrandizing and makes Luke, who should be the galaxy’s preeminent expert in the Force, look like a fool.

In general, I found Horn to be an unlikeable character. There’s one aspect of the character that conspicuously pops up again and again: his goatee. The man is always thinking about his goatee. He’s stroking his goatee or dying his goatee or finding some way to insert his goatee into the story. The man is obsessed with his own facial hair. This does lead to one of my favorite lines in the book: “I laced my fingers together and pressed the index fingers against my moustache” (306). I don’t think I have ever read of a more seductive dance between digits and facial hair.

The obsession Stackpole has with Horn’s goatee seemed a bit odd. Sure, it might just date the novel to the 90s when this sort of outlandish facial hair was marginally more acceptable. But I had a feeling that Horn’s goatee signified something deeper. I googled Michael Stackpole and found his picture, and sure enough, there it was: a stupid-looking goatee clutching the author’s mouth and chin.

There’s a distinct Mary Sue quality to Horn, which is only aggravated by the novel’s first person point of view. For those who don’t know, a Mary Sue is a term for a character who is amazing at just about everything and is often the surrogate for the author. The most obvious example is Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Despite feigning difficulties here and there, in this novel Horn is just the best. He defeats Luke Skywalker in a duel and then lectures the Jedi Master on what he’s not doing right at his academy. Later, he’s so irresistible that the female leader of the space pirates tries to seduce him. But, you know Horn. He’s a standup guy, and, besides, he’s married. Also, he has killer facial hair.  

After spending over five hundred pages with this guy, I couldn’t wait to get away. The novel also made me think that Disney made the right choice. When it comes to the Expanded Universe, maybe they were right after all to burn it to the ground and let something else grow in its place.

Post Pop Depression by Iggy Pop

Post Pop Depression by Iggy Pop (4/5)

2016’s string of unexpected celebrity deaths has forced myself as well as much of America to think about our mortality, normally something most in this country studiously avoid. But because death is the only inevitability shared by all of humanity regardless of nationality, race, religion, and class, it’s a topic ripe for artists. From Cicero’s dictum that “to study philosophy is...to prepare one’s self to die” to Western art’s obsession with the pieta to Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, the topic of death seems to cut straight through time and circumstance. With this in mind, Iggy Pop’s latest, and perhaps last, album spends much of its nine songs staring into the unknowable while fighting his own obsolescence.

Pop’s career has always been interesting, even if it has been uneven. Sure, his work with the Stooges and David Bowie catapulted him into the pantheon of rock and roll gods, but his later work has been less certain. His recent (partly) French language cover album was an intriguing turn, but the less said about the Stooges reunion, the better. Pop’s always benefited from strong collaborators who can properly channel his creative impulses, which Pop himself seems to be aware of since he drafted Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme as his writing partner for his latest. The result on Post Pop Depression are nine dark and nimble songs that rank with some of Pop’s best.

Post Pop Depression doesn’t sound like a tired play for relevance like Pop’s unfortunately early aughts alliance with Sum 41. Instead, it’s a serious work unbound by musical trends. As someone staring down his seventies, the end is clearly on Pop’s mind. As a xylophone traipse over a rumbling bass on “American Valhalla,” he sings, “I’ve shot my gun / I’ve used my knife / It hasn’t been an easy life / I’m hoping for American Valhalla.” The conflation of sex and violence are a longtime career obsession, perhaps a version of Freud’s death drive. And of course Pop’s aggressive, violent live performances always seem like the work of a man aching for self destruction. Sex itself has long been associated with death, either as a means to avoid thinking about the big sleep or a means of seeking the end--la petite mort. At the very end of “American Valhalla,” Pop intones, “I’ve nothing but my name,” as the music drops out completely. This moment eerily foreshadows a time when Pop will have left us with his ghostly legacy.

There’s a larger reason why Pop is unleashing his inner dirty old man on an album that purposefully looks towards oblivion. Sex also reminds us that we are bags of meat--the soft machine as William S. Burroughs once wrote. “Gardenia” seems to borrow its themes from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” a nineteenth century lyric poem that appears to recall the night of Arnold’s honeymoon. But where Arnold’s narrator reflects on the ebb and flow of the water along the English shore of the channel to his new bride, Pop finds himself in a cheap hotel with a woman wearing a “Cheap purple baby doll dress.” The transformation of the muse and location speaks to Pop’s instinct to marry classic poetry with the skeezier landscapes of industrial Detroit.

At the close of the album’s final song, “Paraguay,” Pop begins to rant about technology, information, and those damn kids. He has transformed into full on “get off my lawn” mode. This diatribe questions whether technology has really helped us all that much. We can carry around a computer in our pocket, but in our lifetime we’ve seen a gradual disintegration of the middle class and ballooning wealth inequality. And as Pop points out, the same technology that we carry around with us can also be used to invade our privacy.  And yet the rant doubles as a representation of Pop’s fear of obsolescence. Where does he fit within this new world and will anyone remember him when he’s gone? I don’t think Iggy Pop has anything to worry about, especially if he can still produce an album this strong. He claims that Post Pop Depression will be the end of his recording career, but I hope that’s not the case. Judging by the album, it sounds like there’s still plenty of gas left in the tank.