August (But Really Summer) Top Ten

1. Christopher Saint Booth and Philip Adrian Booth,"Ulterior Motives," from Angels of Passion (Jerome Bronson, 1986); Who's Who with Christopher Saint: Ulterior Motives (The Lost Album) (Spooked Music Releasing). I don't believe in coincidences. But at the very least, this story should prove instructive. On April 28th, a group of NYC porn scholars, including myself, met for a happy hour and discussed, among many other things, the imperative to remove the stigma of researching, teaching, and enjoying pornography. That very evening, one of the holy grails of lostwave was finally found. In 2021, someone uploaded a snippet of an absurdly catchy new wave song "from an old DVD backup" (?) to WatZatSong. When pressed for more information, the user disappeared. After years of dead ends and impressive recreations, a Redditor discovered that the song was composed by two brothers for a hardcore sex scene in the X-rated film Angels of Passion. Clearly what happened was that the guy who uploaded the song was too embarrassed to state simply that it came from a porno. In a world with no stigma around the pleasures of pornography, the song would never have entered the annals of lostwave. Then again, the discovery was a joyous occasion indeed. And it compelled the Brit-Canadian Booth brothers to locate the master tapes and release an entire album of contemporary tracks. Most of it comes off as tepid Scritti Politti. But "Ulterior Motives" remains a (coughs) banger awaiting karaoke glory.

2. Jacqueline Susann: Yargo (1956; published posthumously in 1979) Susann wrote this a full decade before Valley of the Dolls became one of the best-selling books in the history of publishing. And as with Dolls, a turgid read starts to reveal a burgeoning feminist consciousness. Not particularly excited to be soon married, a young New Jersey woman gets abducted by a typically uber-rational alien race who introduce her to a world free of gender roles. After much resistance and many didactic discussions on the pitfalls of emotion, she opts to stay with the aliens and compels their leader, reportedly patterned after Yul Brynner, to fall in love with her. Along the way, she gets abducted again, this time by a race of 25-foot-tall bees. One harrowing scene finds her narrowly escaping a forced breeding with a snarling beeman. It’s all done up in an overly earnest style that bespeaks a longing to break out of one’s constrictions, a harbinger of the topsy turvy decade to come. 

3. Michel Tournier: The Erl-King (Le Roi des aulnes) (Éditions Gallimard, 1970); The Ogre (Volker Schlöndorff, 1996). I read non-fiction pretty quickly which stokes my sense of accomplishment whereas I've been trudging through, say, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep for years now. So Tournier's 1967 Friday (Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique) skyrocketed into my top ten favorite novels list because it's as much a work of philosophy as fiction. He intended to "correct" for the relative paucity of story in Friday by injecting more narrative sway into The Erl-King, his follow-up, and the result is a slog. At the dawn of WWII, Frenchman Abel Tiffauges is wrongfully imprisoned for inappropriateness with a young girl (although he evinces a decided attraction to children) but soon gets conscripted into the army. After Germany invades France, he becomes a prisoner of war but soon rises within the ranks of the Nazi party to the point where he accompanies Göring on hunting expeditions and is tasked with recruiting ever-younger children to enter combat as the war draws to a close. Tournier is after more than a simple equation of Nazism with pedophilia, linking it instead to a drive to conquer every aspect of human existence. As such, it could be read productively with Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. But the dance between concept and story puts a strain on the novel that Tournier fails to successfully navigate. Schlöndorff's film version (starring a miscast John Malkovich as Tiffauges) breezes through much of the backstory. But it necessarily misses the interiority Tournier has etched for Tiffauges, who is as prone to philosophizing as Crusoe is in Friday, rendering the film a bit simple-minded. So I'll be putting off Tournier's third novel, Gemini, for the time being. 

4. Pierre Christin and Olivier Balez: Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City (Nobrow, 2014). As for non-fiction struggles, I'm still making my way through The Power Broker and I assumed this graphic novel condensation would help speed me along. But boy is the publishing company well named because it's a hilariously awful retelling which skips over crucial information and focuses on bizarrely inconsequential moments as one can glean from the pic below. Perhaps there were translation problems from the French original. But even there, the obsession with naming designers in this scene is baffling. 

5. Joël Legendre performing "M'en revenant de Sainte-Hélène" on Soirée Canadienne (1978). Legendre is gay and you can instantly feel his queer spin on this folk song performed for a television show dedicated to the preservation and celebration of Québecois music. He went on to do voice work (he's Leonardo DiCaprio in the Québec versions of his films). And yes, a few years back, he was arrested and fined for exposing himself in a Montréal park which gets a handshake from me. But this number is just so ebullient and disarming - fabulousness incarnate. One of the refrains is "ferme donc ta boîte, laisse moi donc chanter" which means "shut your mouth, let me sing." So let him! Watch here. 

6. Beyoncé featuring Shaboozey: "Sweet ★ Honey ★ Buckiin'" from Cowboy Carter (Parkwood/Columbia). Renaissance romps all over this still generally terrific follow-up. But "Sweet ★ Honey ★ Buckiin'" epitomizes what Beyoncé has become for bohos like me - an eccentric keeper of songs and disseminator of weird sounds. I still can't catalogue everything I'm hearing here. What's that gospelly glossolalia that accompanies Bey's interpolation of "I Fall to Pieces" at the start? What are those Oval-style record skips that kick in during the last third? She makes time for Shaboozey to do his jaunty party shtick, for a doo-wop section to sweeten the pot, for herself to vocalize in soul, rap, and wha? modes as the entire edifice gallops off with your brain sizzled into ceviche. After "Countdown," her greatest track.

7. Post Malone featuring Morgan Wallen: "I Had Some Help" (Republic/Mercury). Billboard has deemed this song of the summer, a sobering thought for those of us enjoying a gal pop Renaissance (see next entry). Spirited number. But who the funk would date either of these knuckle draggers after lines like "I only hit the curb 'cause you made me" or "Don't act like you ain't help me pull that bottle off the shelf"? Instead of two men ganging up on a woman (or Women), what would have made it work is if Malone enlisted one of the myriad female country artists who have been outclassing their male counterparts over the last decade-plus. Carly Pearce, for one, could set Malone's truck on fire for blaming his alcoholism on her.

8.  Chappell Roan: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (Amusement/Island, 2023); Sabrina Carpenter: Short n' Sweet (Island). This is a lesson in the merciless temporality of pop success. Rise and Fall is the best album of 2024 and the damn thing came out almost exactly a year ago. A 2017 EP on Atlantic went nowhere and, as the graph below traces, her rise to pop aristocracy has been sleepy indeed. But because her album is so me (vivid, eager to please, brash, funny, going for and ripping out the pop jugular, oddly reminiscent of one of my fave Neil Young albums, Living With War, etc.), I want to focus more on my surprising adoration for Short n' Sweet. I was on flagship single "Espresso" early and found it a fluffy bauble, nothing more. An entire album of similar baby-voiced (cf. Pouty's tough but taxing Forgot About Me), attenuated dance cuts promised little. Turns out Short n' Sweet is Carpenter's sixth [sic] album which, if you didn't know that, places you, with me, in what Carl Wilson deems in his terrific Slate piece the first and lowest circle of Carpenter consciousness (click through for Wilson's useful take on Carpenter's even tardier rise to stardom). Turns out also that the thin production houses intricate pop constructions that are super easy to obsess on and the baby voice sings lyrics that evince an acute country wit albeit one too filthy for Nashville. Every single track comes with one or more quotables but the most trenchant is stated sedately in "Lie to Girls": “You don’t have to lie to girls/ If they like you, they’ll just lie to themselves/Like you, they’ll just lie to themselves.” That restatement of "like you" refusing to let guys off the overemotional hook is genius worthy of Dolly and, in pop, it matters not a whit if it derived from Carpenter, producer Jack Antonoff, or songwriter Amy Allen (profiled here in the New York Times for more tales of tardiness). Now the trick is to tame temporality in order to stay on top. If she can inject some of Roan's spritz into her beach-read sound, she might be riding her very own Come on Over next time out. What's Mutt Lange up to nowadays?

9. Doechii: Alligator Bites Never Heal (Capitol/Top Dawg). "Yucky Blucky Fruitcake" will likely end up as one of my top ten singles of the decade. But it's difficult to fill an entire album of such perfect discharges unless you're the New Pornographers of Mass Romantic (and even they couldn't sustain the mania, e.g., final and worst track "Breakin' the Law"). While albums aren't exactly narratives, many of the songs that comprise them occupy what literary theorist Peter Brooks calls the "dilatory space" of stories - moments of necessarily muted delay between opening salvos, bracing twists, and slam-bang climaxes. On her first official full-length, Doechii lets too many of the tracks slip into that space in order to create the kind of gestalt that makes popists like me grow impatient. Strong album, though. Discharge fans should proceed directly to "Denial is a River," a giddy check-in that toys with the distinction between rapping and talking and ends with a rhythmic breathing exercise. And stick around for "Fireflies" which charts the supposedly unchartable female orgasm.

10. Apple Music. I've gone over to the dark side. Yes, it's despicable what they pay artists. No, I'll not stop amassing my beloved 320s. No, not everything is there, an impossibility anyway; compilations especially are difficult to come by. But apart from mere convenience and the ability to hear an album the nanosecond it's released, the best aspect is clicking on the three dots next to a song to reveal credits and the lyrics, the latter extremely useful to someone like me who flunked Lyric Deciphering in Rock Criticism 101. As a consequence, I've been listening to more music than ever. What am I listening to next? You tell me.

Monthly Top Ten: May 2022

1. Chunky. Now I know why various internet dorks were ripping on me for preferring to read comic books on pdf. I had been unzipping my cbz/cbr files and scratching my head about what to do with the resulting jpgs, often opting to turn them into pdfs. So Chunky, an app for reading comic books on cbz/cbr, has been a revelation. It's reacquainted me with old favorites like Julie Doucet's eternal Dirty Plotte (can you imagine what Muratova or Żuławski could have accomplished in adapting her work?!?) and introduced me to some new favorites such as...

2. Yuichi Yokoyama: Iceland (Retrofit, 2017). Retrofit calls Yokoyama "the creator of neo manga" which here means a slice of indigestible avant-garderie. At 92 pages, the story is no such thing, a sci-fi-I-guess concatenation of disconnected narrative beats. Gawky close-ups and jagged lines flatten the space into one long scream. It seems like a found thing, a energy pulse from the future awaiting a consumption that may never come. 

3. Blutch: Peplum (New York Review Comics, 2016). In his helpful introduction to this reissue of the 1998 Cornélius French original, Edward Gauvin likens Peplum to a remix of Fellini's Satyricon, itself a remix of Petronius' Satyricon. Blutch (né Christian Hincker) follows a group of bandits as they drag a cumbersome frozen woman around the Roman Empire. Tony Shakespearean dialogue (including a straight-forward retelling of the murder of Julius Caesar near the beginning) clashes with coarse outbursts ("Will you shut up?!"). The picaresque narrative throws up a never-ending supply of barely explained dangers. In a sense, Peplum is all clash, with characters, all of whom seem either dead or on the brink of dying, fucking and fighting one another in splotchy environs. An extremely disturbing epilogue does nothing to tie up loose ends. The authorial voice mimics an infant's inability to transition between tones, laughing or bawling within a moment's notice. But a fever-ridden infant. And one with a working knowledge of Roman culture.

4. The Big Gay Comic Book: Volumes 1 and  2 (Bluewater, 2014). Quite the opposite of the two titles above, The Big Gay Comic Book recalls the infamous Rock 'N' Roll Comics from the late 1980s/early 1990s - cheesy pre-Wikipedia biographies of popular musical icons. Here Madonna, Tom Daley, Kathy Griffin, Anderson Cooper, RuPaul, Keith Haring, Lady Gaga, etc. get the same treatment. Poking through the cheese are some bizarre moments as when Robbie Williams breaks the fourth wall in the Kylie Minogue entry or when the Cher title begins with what one presumes to be a stalker claiming intimate knowledge of Cher only to be revealed at the end as Chaz Bono (!). 

5. Vanessa Bayer and Jane Treacy’s Must Haves (QVC, 2022). Do watch Showtime's choking-on-your-tongue hilarious I Love That For You, a half-hour comedy about Joanna Gold (Vanessa Bayer), a woman who fakes a cancer diagnosis and becomes a star on a home shopping network. After you've downed a few episodes, there's a mind-bendingly meta treat for you streaming on QVC. In order to promote the show she co-created, Bayer occupied QVC for an hour with longtime host Treacy selling clothes and jewelry including a herringbone bracelet with a lobster clasp which plays a key role on I Love That For You. You find yourself laughing at nothing in particular, just the crazy fact that this exists. The most disorienting instance of the contradictory pleasures of capitalism since the Oil of Olay musical The Road to Glow.

6. Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977). The incomparable Gena Rowlands (92 in a few days!) stars as Myrtle Gordon, an actress who changes the play in which she's starring because she sees no hope in the fiftysomething main character, a situation that may reflect her own life as a feted professional of a certain age. As a portrait of the difficulty women experience in controlling their own destinies, Opening Night is peerless. And even on a strictly narrative level, where Cassavetes is supposedly deficient, the film keeps you on the edge as you fear opening night may never happen. But Cassavetes clearly didn't know what to do with Sarah Goode (Joan Blondell, 47 years out from her film debut, one year away from her role in Grease, and two years away from her Christmas 1979 death), the playwright whose words Gordon changes. One presumes this is because as an even older woman, Goode has accepted her lot and internalized whatever disappointments have come her way. But that is a truth worth telling too, one we glean in fits and starts from previous rehearsals of her play, and her apparent acceptance of Gordon's changes at the very end of the film feels false. Then again, applying standards of realism to Cassavetes is always a fool's game, no matter how raw his films come across. Instead, it'd prove more fruitful to put Opening Night in conversation with two subsequent films, (the first awful, the other one of the finest films of this century), it may have influenced - Noises Off (Peter Bogdanovich [who shows up in a brief cameo at the end of Opening Night], 1992) and Esther Kahn (Arnaud Desplechin, 2000).

7. A Night in Heaven (John G. Avildsen, 1983). A good movie is lurking somewhere within this Joan Tewkesbury-penned mess about a community college professor (Lesley Ann Warren) who discovers a student (Christopher Atkins, angelic) she flunked in Public Speaking is a stripper. But it was clearly mangled on the way to theatres. At times, it feels like you're watching the sui generis omnibus train wreck Night Train to Terror (Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, 1985). Several scenes lead into narrative dead ends. Basic story information is either needlessly elaborated or given little air. One crucial conversation plays out in a master shot as if no coverage was available or the editor neglected to use any of it. Still, like the "Special Fan Edition" of Empire Records (Allan Moyle, 1995), the phantom good movie within would be less fascinating than the tattered corpse before us here. At the very least, it's an excellent teaching tool to convey the difficulty of telling even the simplest story with cinema. 

 8. Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986). Criminally boring. Upped a notch for not just the too-short volleyball scene but for Maverick deciding that jeans would be appropriate attire for beach sports. D-minus. Just for the record. 

 9. U.S. Marines Pride Month tweet. Hi, gay! Happy Pride Month! Astonishingly tone-deaf in the wake of the murders in Uvalde (and Buffalo and...), the U.S. Marines have color coded six bullets to resemble the rainbow flag for this most gay of months. Someone somewhere must be proud, probably Adorno in his Super Egotistical way. 

10. The criticism of Kieran Press-Reynolds. You couldn't ask for a better tour guide through what we'll (and he'll) call internet music - the fly-by sounds you hear on TikTok, Roblox, YouTube, Soundcloud, the like. Hyper, long-winded, pockmarked with links, chuffed to create new genres, his essays replicate the amped-up one moment, luded-out the next tenor of the Euphoria generation. His newest piece is on Swedish collective Drain Gang and their de facto pope Bladee whose music "has become constitutional for a rising swarm of offbeat internet artists shooting off in a plethora of directions and shaping the future of music, even if some washed purists whine that it all sounds like liquid ass." You don't want to be one of those people, now do you? So read up. Here's hoping he avoids the path of his daddy Simon who lost his pioneering spirit once he turned 40 and/or had a baby.