‘Does anybody know where we keep the self-destruct manual?’

I realize this is not the most earth-shaking cultural news at the moment, but over the weekend I watched the super-duper electric boogaloo DVD edition of the 1979 film Alien, and found that after three decades my opinion of it is unchanged: first half brilliant, thanks to the superbly creepy design work of Swiss artist H.R. Giger and the low-key acting that keeps everything grounded in believability; second half idiotic, thanks to the decision of scriptwriter Dan O’Bannon and director Ridley Scott to abandon the brainy atmosphere and turn the spaceship into an amusement park haunted-house ride. I also concluded, after watching the recut version with the famous ”Kill me!” scene restored, that Scott had been correct to remove it from the original theatrical release. Maybe it could have been used more artfully, earlier in the narrative, but during the climax it simply slows things up.

The trouble with potentially great movies that go bad is that they leave you thinking about pointless things, such as: Why design a spacegoing freighter with a self-destruct mechanism? At any given moment, the world’s oceans are being criss-crossed by carrier ships loaded with immensely valuable cargo, but they aren’t equipped with jumbo warheads that will blow them sky-high after a few minutes of notice. So why equip an ore carrier with a portable Armageddon machine? And why put the control panel a great distance from the escape ship? And why line the escape route with strobe lights, steam jets, blind corners and other funhouse paraphernalia that will only increase the likelihood that the crew members blow up along with the ship?

On the other hand, the director’s cut of the first sequel, Aliens, improves on an already exemplary action film. Not that anybody really needs to know this, but . . . you know . . . I just thought I’d share the joy.

Blue Monday

Maybe it’s because an R&B band named after one of his signature songs, The Kingsnakes, played at my wedding reception, but I’ve always been particularly fond of the music of John Lee Hooker. His style, which was frequently described as skeletal or primitive, was actually very fluid and idiosyncratic, which presented a problem for backup musicians trying to play standard-issue blues riffs. Check out the puzzled looks Hooker gives his players during this 1980 rendition of “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer”:

One of the many benefits of the American Folk Blues Festival tours of the 1960s was that they were filmed by European television crews, thereby giving us a chance to see bluesmen like Hooker in their prime. (It also gave us the chance to see other older performers, like Sonny Boy Williamson, who had never been filmed at all.) This is a performance of Hooker’s ”Hobo Blues” from the 1965 tour:

Here’s the man playing “Boom Boom,” another of his standards, a year later:

The riffle gallery

I never heard of fore-edge paintings on books until I saw these YouTube clips. Here’s an example from what I can only suspect is a hardcover edition of Moby-Dick:

 

Or this one, for the book Analysis of a Game of Chess:

This site devoted to fore-edge painting gives plenty of information, along with variations of what can be done.

Chilly scenes of winter

Movies don’t come any more hardboiled than Frozen River, even if virtually every scene of the film is  is covered with snow and ice. Courtney Hunt’s refreshingly blunt and unsentimental storyline centers on Ray (Melissa Leo),  a housewife abandoned by her husband and stranded with two young sons in a dead-end job at the Yankee Dollar. By chance she falls in with Lila (Misty Upham), a troubled young Mohawk woman who smuggles illegal immigrants across the frozen St. Lawrence River via tribal lands overlapping Quebec and the New York state line. As a Mohawk, Lila can travel with relative ease between the three worlds; as a white woman, Ray can avoid the attention of state troopers; as partners, they can make good, albeit sometimes highly dangerous, money.

Frozen River is artfully constructed beneath its plain facade: Hunt’s script (she also directed) conveys a great deal of information about each woman’s circumstances, even as it delivers a deceptively straightforward, often frighteningly intense story, and nothing is sugar-coated. Ray, while not a howling racist, is hardly enlightened in her views of other non-whites, and in one sequence she nearly loses our sympathies by letting prejudice lead her into a hasty decision with potentially horrifying consequences. She and Lila join forces more out of need than choice, but by the end of the film they have reached an understanding that points the way to survival, and even an oasis of  warmth and affection, in this cold, dog-eat-dog world.

Return to Earth

Boy, you can tell things are getting bad when even Bob Dylan and Howard Stern have to worry about getting laid off. Satellite radio always sounded like an interesting idea, and I enjoyed the bits of Theme Time Radio Hour with His Bobness that I heard, but once I’d gotten done paying all the usual monthly bills, I just wasn’t in the mood to write another check. Judging from the financial woes of Sirius XM, it appears I wasn’t the only one thinking that way.

Friday finds

For the past three decades, essayist and art critic Paul Virilio has been studying and photographing the approximately 1,500 abandoned bunkers that are the remnants of the World War II  ”Atlantic Wall,” built by the Germans in anticipation of an Allied landing on the coast of France. Virilio’s photographs of these forbidding, intriguing fortifications are in his book Bunker Archaeology, just returned to print by the Princeton Architectural Press.     

“If Michael Myers is my ‘star’ patient…and then he goes off and slaughters a whole town full of people…then I surely must be the worst f*cking doctor on Earth!”

You people look a little grouchy. Here’s some nice music to cheer you up.

Keep watching the skies! Dark comets are menacing the Earth! The solar system is full of mysteries!

This guy has a big idea. Writers of every stripe ought to be paying attention. And this writer has some words of encouragement you really ought to read. (Bird-dogged byJ.D. Rhoades.)

Chin up

Waking up before dawn, with the wind moaning around the corners of the house, I find the world a little too spooky and depressing to deal with — at least, until I made some stronger coffee. But then the sun came up and everything was different.

The wind was still blowing hard, but the air was warm enough for people to walk with their coats open and their heads back. Driving the Divine Miss T to kindergarten, I saw a young woman walking with her chin tilted up, hair streaming back as a warm gust made her coat flap open. That kind of sight can change your morning for the better.

I realize that February isn’t even half over, and March is waiting with a roll of icy quarters in each of its fists. But right now I’m thinking of spring, planning how I’ll take down the old swing set and lay out beds for a serious vegetable garden. It starts getting better now.

Seven steps

Joe talks about these seven tips for talking with a friend who’s been laid off. May you never need them.

Welsh-aid

Jeff, your go-to guy on all things Charlemagne, broadens out with this one-stop shopping guide to all things Welsh, including links on learning the language and getting a copy of The Mabinogion. All I can add is a plug for Evangeline Walton’s four outstanding Mabinogion-derived  novels, two of which — The Children of Llyr and The Song of Rhiannon — are overlooked classics of fantasy literature. Whatever uglies might be laid at Lin Carter’s door, his sponsorship of Walton’s late-career renaissance through the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series ensures his place in heaven.

The Wednesday Westie