Yes, it’s called The Triplets of Tennerton and it’ll be released on May 29.
What a sec – wasn’t Moore Hollow a standalone novel?
When it came out back in 2015, yes, that was the plan. Since its release, however, I had several people ask about writing a sequel. I didn’t really plan to do one, but I came across a real-life inspiration that made realize I could tell some more stories set in that world.
Good grief, you’re not doing another trilogy, are you?
No, not this time. This series is going to be open ended, with each book basically being a standalone adventure. Characters and references will build from book to book, but there won’t be one overarching story that’s driving to a particular conclusion. You can pick up any book in the series and enjoy it without knowing what came before.
So it’s just going to end one day?
That’s possible. I do have a pretty good idea of a story to tell to “end” it, but I’ll jump off that bridge when I come to it.
What’s the setup for this new series? How does it tie into Moore Hollow?
Ben Potter, the main character, has decided to relocate permanently from London to West Virginia. He’s bought a home in Sutton and set up a website called Paranormal Appalachia, where he’ll investigate various local beasties, legends, and other strange goings on.
Hold up – isn’t Paranormal Appalachia the name of this series?
Indeed! It’s what Frank Zappa called “conceptual continuity.”
There are bizarre musical references in this one, aren’t there?
A couple. Ben’s very much like me with regard to his taste in music.
No wonder he’s single.
Anyway, think of Moore Hollow as the movie that set up this world and Triplets (and later stories) as the TV series spun off from it.
In what way?
In the sense that there are several new characters in Triplets that will have a recurring role throughout the rest of the stories.
Such as?
The main one is a local lawyer, Grace, who actually comes out of my first successful NaNoWriMo novel (that nonetheless will never see the light of day). She was an Assistant Federal Public Defender who got a case that dipped into UFOs and whatnot and has developed a reputation for dealing with “weird” cases and clients.
I’m guessing that Ben gets wrapped up in one of those weird cases?
Yup. A old guy named Sid Grimaldi is charged with burning down his home decades before, resulting in the deaths of his infant triplet daughters. Grace takes the case and hires Ben to do some of her investigating.
Naturally, Sid didn’t do it.
That’s what he says, but there’s more.
Oh?
Sid says he knows his girls are still alive, that they didn’t die in that fire.
That sounds impossible.
Did I mention that Ben investigated paranormal and other weird things? Impossible is just the start of it.
Was there an inspiration for that case?
Yes, I’ll be talking about it more in a couple of weeks.
What else is there to look forward to in the coming month?
In addition to a post about the inspiration for this story there will be a couple of excerpts. Then it’ll be release day!
I guess that means it’s time for details.
Right. The new book is called The Triplets of Tennerton and it’s coming out May 29.
The original Moore Hollow has also been revamped to make it part of the Paranormal Appalachia franchise. Get yours now so you’ll be ready for Triplets when it lands on May 29.
I’ve been delinquent with the blog posts the past couple of weeks. Partly that was due to some business travel related to my day job, but more so it was due to having a few different irons in the fire I thought I’d tell you about.
First, you’ll recall my newest project, that I started during NaNoWriMo last year. As I said in December, although I’d “won” by hitting the 50,000-word target for the month, the first draft wasn’t finished. It wound up not actually getting finished, for a couple of reasons. One of them was that a second main character kind of appeared in my brain and inserted herself into the story in a way that shifted things a bit and made finishing the originally conceived first draft kind of pointless. Long story short, I’m now working on the second version of that first draft, polishing and adapting what’s already been done and weaving in my new character. I’m really excited to see how it comes together.
Second, you’ll also recall that I have a sequel to Moore Hollow in the works. I’m also doing the final prep on that to get it ready for release this summer. Part of that includes rebranding Moore Hollow as the first book in a new series, ParanormalAppalachia. Part of that is a new cover. I don’t want to share it, yet, but here’s some idea of the imagery in it:
The new book finally has a title, The Triplets of Tennerton. More details in the coming months!
So, for the next few weeks, I’m going to buckle down and work on that stuff. Back here in May, I imagine. Until then . . .
Director Peter Bogdanovich has a new podcast, One Handshake Away. The setup is he gets together with a current director to talk about the work of a classic director – one who Bogdanovich happens to have recorded interviews with. It’s a neat idea. A recent episode featured Rian Johnson and focused on Orson Welles and, perhaps inevitably, Citizen Kane. Listening to it sent me on a deeper dive that got me thinking about Kane’s parallels with another iconic debut – In the Court of the Crimson King.
My journey to Citizen Kane is an odd, if not unique, one. I really dove into movies, even “cinema,” in college and particularly in law school. It didn’t take long to have Kane pop up here and there, often near or at the tops of lists of the best movies ever made, but for some reason I didn’t feel compelled to seek it out. It’s not because it was old or in black and white – I devoured movies by Fritz Lang and Akira Kurosawa. Maybe because it had been placed on such a pedestal I thought it was too good for my growing cinephile brain?
Regardless, what really drew my attention to Kane was the story around the movie and the lengths William Randolph Hearst went to squash it. I’m not sure whether I stumbled into that via The Battle Over Citizen Cane, a 1996 PBS documentary, or RKO 281, the 1999 HBO movie based on it. Both tell how the character of Charles Foster Kane became a stand in for Hearst (even though he was based on several different magnates of the age) and how the publisher marshalled all his considerable resources to kill the film (in the process, of course, bringing extra attention to the whole thing – a proto Streisand Effect, if you will). Regardless, Kane became one of the those works, like Brazil, that I was attracted to because of the story behind it more than the work itself.
All that said, when I first saw Kane I was not overwhelmed. It was good, don’t get me wrong, and I liked the flashback structure and the “Rosebud” MacGuffin. Still, it did not necessarily scream out at me that this was the greatest film ever made. My opinion ticked up somewhat when I watched it again with Roger Ebert’s commentary. He pointed out all the myriad ways that Welles was breaking new ground in terms of how shots were composed, how the very medium of the movies was changing in his hands. It made all the praise easier to understand. After repeated viewings I easily called Kane a classic, even if it’s not necessarily at the top of my list of favorite movies ever.
On the heels of listening to the Bogdanovich and Johnson discussion, I found an episode of The Ringer’s Big Picture podcast on the legacy of Citizen Kane in the lead up to the release of David Fincher’s Mank, which takes on the writing of the screenplay (among other things). In that discussion, critic and author Adam Nayman made an interesting observation. Contrary to Ebert’s commentary, or at least what I took away from it, Nayman argues that Welles didn’t really break any new ground himself, but combined a lot of recent innovations in one place with a sense of skill that hadn’t been seen before. He was, in other words, making the best refinements of breakthroughs that had come before, in the process giving birth to a lot of the visual language of modern movies.
I immediately thought of In the Court of the Crimson King.
As evergreen as the “what is progressive rock?” debate has been over the decades, the “what was the first prog album?” debate is equally well worn. For broader audiences King Crimson’s 1969 debut is usually cited. But the truth is that there are several other candidates that predate it, at least for certain elements of what would come to define “progressive rock”:
The Beatles, along with the Beach Boys, helped transition the album from just a collection of singles to something that is a cohesive work (Sgt. Pepper in 1967 and Pet Sounds in 1966). The Beatles even threw in what amounts to a side-long suite on Abbey Road (1969).
The Moody Blues took the concept album idea (which dates back to at least the 1940s) and layered it over with symphonic grandeur on Days of Future Passed (1967).
The Nice were doing the side-long suite thing and adapting classical (and related) pieces for a rock setting before Keith Emerson left for Emerson, Lake, and Palmer on albums like Ars Vita Longa Brevis (1968).
Then there’s Frank Zappa, who by 1969 had done albums covering fun-house pop/rock/blues music, orchestral stuff, jazz fusion, music concrete, and just plain weirdness.
Given all that, does In the Court . . . still have a valid claim to the title of “first” prog album? I think so, because, as with Citizen Kane, it took a lot of different things that were happening in the musical culture at the time and seamlessly wound them together into a single, cohesive work. It wasn’t the first drip of the prog rains, but it was the deluge that nobody could ignore. Once In the Court . . . was released the era of progressive rock was upon us.
There’s another similarity I see between Kane and Crim – its creators would never again reach the same heights, at least in terms of the popular zeitgeist. Yes, Welles made more movies, some of which are very good, but none can lay claim to being the best film ever made. As for Crimson – it wasn’t took long after In The Court . . . came out that the band became, effectively, a Robert Fripp project (he’s the only common member for the rest of the band’s history). And while they, too, made some great albums over the years, none punctured the culture the same way In the Court . . . did. Being first is important, in a way, but it’s not the only thing. Welles may have been borrowing from other ground breakers, just as Fripp and company were synthesizing a lot of things that were in the rock music atmosphere at the time. Doesn’t make their accomplishments any less mind blowing. Sometimes it’s best to come just behind the pioneers.
Last year I wrote some about how the ending of Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World, which I had just read, had been changed in pretty big ways for the film adaptation, Knock at the Cabin, directed by M. Night Shyamalan. At the time I hadn’t seen the movie for myself, and now that I have I wanted to circle back on the matter.
To recap (in spoiler-filled fashion), the book and movie are both about a family – two dads and their young daughter – who are beset in the titular cabin by a group of people who claim that the apocalypse is imminent and the only way to stop it is for one of the family members to kill another (suicide won’t work). The family refuses the bargain and the tension creeps up as it appears that, just maybe, the end of the world is nigh.
As I said last year:
Here’s where things part ways, significantly, between book and movie. In the book there is a struggle over a gun that leaves the little girl dead. Eventually the dads escape (all the intruders die) and they confront the question of sacrificing one of themselves just in case the world is really ending (one is now more of a believer than the other). Ultimately they decide not to, essentially concluding that any kind of God that would require such a thing isn’t worth obeying, and they walk off into a brewing storm that may or may not just be a storm. In the movie, by contrast, the girl is not shot and one of the dads decides to sacrifice himself to save the world on her behalf. The girl and her remaining father leave and find evidence that the sacrifice really is stopping the world from ending.
In that earlier post I was focused on the question of which ending was better described as a “happy” ending – the one where characters refuse to play the game of an abusive deity or the one where they sacrifice for the greater good. Both are a choice and neither is wrong in any kind of a normative sense – one will work better for some, the other for others. Nonetheless why the choice was made is kind of fascinating.
Having seen the movie I did my usual post-viewing due diligence (reading reviews and such) and came across this article which goes into why the ending for the movie was changed:
Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, who wrote the screenplay with Shyamalan, agreed the book’s original, grim ending had to be changed for film.
“We adapted it slightly different than the book, and then [Shyamalan] had a whole new vision for what the ending could be,” Desmond and Sherman told Variety at the “Knock at the Cabin” premiere. “The book is the book, and the movie is the movie, and we think they both were exceptional mediums. This is a big, wide release movie that is meant for a very large audience. There are some decisions that the book made that were pretty dark and may have been a little too much for a broader audience. That was a decision that [Shyamalan] immediately recognized. It’s a great ending now.”
Now, without a doubt, more people saw Knock at the Cabin than read The Cabin at the End of the World. That’s true of any book turned into a movie or TV show (alas). Is that a good reason to change an ending? It feels kind of chickenshit to me to decide the masses can’t handle the ambiguity of the original and decide to spoon feed them a “happier” ending. It’s one thing to imagine that you’re just improving on it from an artistic standpoint (Shyamalan, at least, appears to lean more this way in terms of his outlook on the world), but to admit to dumbing it down feels cheap.
It should be clear by now that I prefer the book’s ending. The entire story, for me, is all about ambiguity: Is what these people are saying about the world ending real? Is it a hoax? Are they honest, but mentally ill, believers? It also gets at an issue that’s frequently lost in popular discussion about the existence of one god or the other – that even if some being like that exists it might not be worthy of worship or obeisance. The book leaves you much more to chew on than the movie does. I may be in the minority, but that’s OK.
Endings are hard. They’re harder still if you’re engaging in some kind of triangulation in an attempt to find the “right” ending for a particular audience, be it broad or narrow casted. Find the ending you think works best for the story. If it puts off some people, well, that sucks. You can’t please all the people all the time – and most of the time it’s a folly to even try.
I hate thinking about who my “favorite” band is. It varies from day to day, depending on my mood and what speaks to me most at any particular time. That said, even if I couldn’t label them as my favorite right now, my first favorite band was, without a doubt, Rush. I think that was largely because when I was coming of musical age in the 1980s they were still kicking all kinds of ass when the big progressive rock bands of the 1970s were watering down their sound. There was no question I’d read Geddy Lee’s memoir when it came out.
The question is, if you’re not a Rush fan, or at least interested in the lives of musicians, is this book worth reading? Large parts of it probably aren’t. Rush was the biggest part of Lee’s life for decades and so the band’s rise and longevity is a big part of his story. Lots of the details along the way are fascinating, but even I’ll admit that the album-by-album pattern and scattering of stories from the road wore a little thin in the end. Part of that may be down to be being most interested in those details when I’m actually listening to the albums (hard to do when you’re listening to the audio version of the book!).
One fascinating episode that did stand out to me was the detailed story of how the band’s comeback album, Vapor Trails, wound up sounding so shitty. It started with some demos that the band was particularly happy with but weren’t recorded very well (with the intention that they’d never see the light of day). The more they relied on the original demos the more that compromised the ultimate mixing and mastering, resulting in an overly compressed sound. Interesting example of how something great in the very beginning of the creative process can lead to problems in the end (something to keep in mind).
Beyond the music stuff there are two, much heavier, areas where Lee’s book shines.
The first involves his family. Lee’s parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland who emigrated to Canada after the Second World War. He spends a lengthy chapter detailing their story (and those of other relations caught up in the Holocaust) and how he, personally, has dealt with their legacy during his life. One of the threads that runs through the book, then, is Lee’s commitment to his identity as a Jew even though, religiously, he’s an atheist (spurred by discovering his father sneaking off to eat bacon & eggs during a downtown shopping trip). It’s a fascinating dynamic well explored.
The other area is near the end of the book, when Lee deals with the unexpected (to the rest of the world) death of Rush drummer/lyricist Neal Peart. Peart had been the main force slowing down the band’s touring schedule in later years, partly due to wanting to spend more time with his family, having remarried after a pair of tragedies (his daughter and first wife died within months of each other), but also partly due to the physical toll of being a drummer. The band’s final tour was a little tense, with Peart easing toward retirement in a way that Lee, in particular, wasn’t really ready for (guitarist Alex Lifeson kind of fell in between). It was after the band’s last show that Peart learned he had a brain tumor and began deteriorating. Lee’s chronicle of this, of keeping the diagnosis a secret for the famously private Peart and watching as the band’s wordsmith began to slip up when speaking, is heartbreaking.
My Effin’ Life is definitely worth the read if you’re a fan of Rush or rock music in general. Lee is a thoughtful and observant guy, even if he’s not a sterling wordsmith (not for nothing that Peart wrote the lyrics, right?). If don’t fall into that category, I’d recommend starting with the documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, which covers the band’s history up to 2010 or so and really gives a sense of the bond Lee, Lifeson, and Peart forged over the years. Add in the early chapters of Lee’s book for the family stuff and the last few to cover the time since 2010 and you’re good to go.
Can’t let this pass without some tunes, of course . . .
First, I’m very happy to have a story in the debut volume of Old Bones, the new annual literary journal of Henlo Press.
The story is called “To the Sound of Birds.” It’s about a guy setting up to sell used pulp paperbacks at a swap meet in a high school parking lot when he starts to hear odd noises from the mountain across the highway. Naturally he investigates and discovers something beyond his wildest imagination.
For what it’s worth the inspiration for the story was just that – the high school parking lot where my local SCCA chapter used to autocross was across the highway from a pretty sizeable mountain and, one day, I heard something weird from over there. Didn’t check it out, though, so I suppose we’ll have to let my imagination run wild, right?
You can get a physical copy of Old Bones by clicking here or a Kindle version here.
Or, if you want not just a physical copy but a signed copy, you can come see me! On February 25 I’ll be at Henlo’s first Writers’ Block event at the community center in Barboursville, WV. Things kick off at noon and readings by some of the authors start about 12:45 – maybe you’ll get a chance to hear a chapter from my forthcoming Moore Hollow sequel. It all leads up to the launch of 304 Monsters by Stephen Bias, which looks pretty cool if you’re into the weird West Virginia thing (and who isn’t?). I’ll also have all my other books there, too, if you need to stock up.
New Music!
It’s been a couple of years since I put any new music up, but I’m finally getting around to finishing some of the bits and pieces that have piled up since. The genesis of this one actually dates back to the year of the plague, but I didn’t start to really develop it until recently. It’s called “Chihuahua Junk Pixies.” I don’t remember specifically where the name came from, but I’m sure it had something to do with these two:
It’s bouncy and fun, at least in parts, and, if I may say so, kind of catchy. Enjoy!
I thought if anyone is qualified to answer this question it might just be the guy who is both a public defender and a writer of fantasy (with horror overtones in spots). So, what of it – can that vampire cop enter your house against your will?
Let’s start with the assumption that we’re talking about an American vampire cop here, so they’d have to comply with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits “unreasonable” searches and seizures. It also requires a warrant to execute a search of a home. An arrest warrant will also allow police to enter a home, if they have the necessary suspicion that the person named in the warrant lives there.
A search warrant has to be based on probable cause that evidence of a crime is present in the place to be searched. It’s not a particularly high standard, not even up to the level of “preponderance of the evidence” used in civil proceedings (essentially 51% certainty) and a far cry from the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard needed to convict someone of a crime. Warrants must be particular as to the things to be seized and the places to be searched. That’s supposed to prevent exploratory rummaging of the kind that occurred under “general” warrants in the pre-Revolutionary era. The application of all this in particular cases is tricky and what keeps me employed, but the basic concepts are easy to grasp.
Perhaps not quite so much for vampires, since their lore varies from telling to telling of particular stories. Nonetheless, there does seem to be a consensus that vampires require permission before they can enter a home. According to this article it dates back to at least the 17th Century and a Greek theologian who stated that a way to be safe from vampires was to stay at home, as they couldn’t enter without being invited. But why? One explanation is that the rule “reflects the idea that evil, represented by vampires, can’t harm you unless you allow it to. It’s a choice, an act of free will.” Tough shit if you get taken in by a slick talking blood sucker then!
With that said, let’s set the scene – Detective Angel and Lieutenant Louis show up at your home. As vampires they cannot come in uninvited. Fun fact – as cops, they can’t either! Except, of course, they have a search warrant, which they do (it allows them to search for any and all implements relating to killing the undead). Does the warrant let them in even if you don’t invite them?
The basic answer, I think, is “no.” The law is the law, but the rule that vampires can only enter with an invitation operates more like a law of nature. Police could no more get a warrant to stop the tides or keep the sun from rising than they could to allow a vampire entrance to a home without an invitation. Nor are warrants commands to someone to allow police into your home – they are permission for the police to enter using any means necessary, hence SWAT teams and knocking down doors in the middle of the night.
But the basic answer is not the only answer. For one thing, if we’re assuming a world with vampires – vampires who are police, no less – then presumably the law has made some accommodation for this. Can a court, as part of issuing a search warrant, compel a homeowner to give permission for the vampire police to enter? I don’t see why not. Courts frequently order people to do things they otherwise don’t want to do, including things like provide blood samples and fingerprints. This doesn’t feel any different and doesn’t lean into that kind of acquiescence that might trigger Fifth Amendment self-incrimination concerns (like giving up the password to your phone).
For another, who gets to give consent to enter and how much consent is enough? Many years ago the Supreme Court decided a case where police showed up to a home in response to a domestic dispute. They asked for permission to search the home – the husband denied it, the wife consented. Police searched the home and found drug paraphernalia. The Supreme Court ultimately held that the search was invalid because so long as one person present when the request for consent was made objected to the search, it didn’t matter what anybody else said. In such situations, police had to go get a warrant.
So what if, when our vampire police walk up with their warrant, you’re willing to invite them in but your significant other who also lives there is not? Does the Supreme Court’s rule for the Fourth Amendment carry over to vampire invitations? Or is it a one-person-to-a-home situation? I’m leaning towards the latter, since, as I understand it, once a vampire is invited into a home it is forever invited, implying that consensus among the occupants isn’t necessary.
What makes the question fun to ponder is the clash of what seems like two absolutes – a warrant permits entry versus a vampire’s need to be invited. But that rests on the presumption that the law wouldn’t evolve to account for the fact that (a) vampires were real and (b) they worked in law enforcement. The Founders didn’t imagine automobiles, but the Supreme Court figured out how the Fourth Amendment interacted with them. Same with cell phones. I have no doubt that a legal system that’s been in a constant state of evolution since at least the Magna Carta would figure out how to deal with vampire detectives.
But until then? Ask to see the warrant, then keep your mouth shut, unless you’re asking for your lawyer.
I’ve said before that book titles can be tricky, particularly for non-fiction, since they act as a kind of “promise, a declaration of what kind of book the reader is getting into). That said, Susan Wels’ An Assassin In Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder makes a hell of a promise. Pity it doesn’t come close to fulfilling it.
The sex cult in question is the Oneida Community, initially founded in New York in 1848 and persisting, in various forms, for the next three decades. The dead president in question is James Garfield, who perished after being shot only six months after taking office in 1881. What purportedly brings these two things together is Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau, who had a couple of brief stints as a member of the Oneida Community.
It’s a pretty slender thread to tie together a book and, to be fair, Wels doesn’t really try too hard. As I said, Guiteau spent some time at Oneida, but given his particular mental quirks and psychopathy you can’t say what he learned there caused him to shoot Garfield (he couldn’t even get laid in a commune devoted to an early version of “free love”!). Rather, she collects stray historical anecdotes that cover several decades while Oneida was in operation and Garfield found his way to the White House. Many of them are interesting in their own right, but they don’t feel cohesive.
Which is a shame, because I would have loved more detail on the Oneida Community itself. Born from forward-thinking social ideas, and eventually infused with ideals of political socialism, Oneida was one of the first of many utopian communities that popped up in the United States in that period. That is descended into a typical sex cult, where a few leaders (old men all) decided who slept with who and, of course, who slept with them. Minors are raped, too, in the name of whatever ideals the leaders dreamed up, a pattern that echoes down through the succeeding generations.
Indeed, Oneida disappears entirely from the narrative once the focus turns to Garfield’s election (and surprise nomination in the first place) and assassination. Wels covers that briskly, but the shooting, and Garfield’s lingering as doctors probed his wounds until he died, is covered more thoroughly (and interestingly) in Candice Millard’s The Destiny of the Republic: A Tale Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. As I said way back when:
While Millard spends a great amount of time (particularly in the book’s second half) on Garfield’s lingering death, the first half of the book is spent setting up not only the lives of Garfield and Guiteau up to that point, but the world in which they lived. It’s a fascinating snapshot, showing both how different the United States of the 1870s-1880s is compared to today, and how disappointingly similar the two eras are.
***
In the end, where the book really shines is in the contrast of Garfield and Guiteau, two men swept into their fatal confrontation by things beyond their control. It’s ironic that Garfield, who never really wanted to be president, is the kind of person who we should want to become president – educated and inquisitive, a voracious reader, and apparently a genuinely decent guy. And yet, even as part of a very select club of assassinated presidents, he’s pretty much forgotten these days. Of course, Guiteau is not exactly a household name, either.
If you’ve never dived into this period of American history, or the Garfield assassination, this book is a reasonable start. Beyond that, The Destiny of the Republic does better on the assassination itself and there’s probably a more thorough treatment of the Oneida Community out there, too (which I might have to seek out).
My mother passed away this past weekend. It wasn’t unexpected, but it still came as a shock. Naturally, I’ve been doing a lot of remembering in the past few days and I pulled a story out of my brain involving my mother and the ultimate development of my bizarro musical tastes.
My musical tastes were shaped by two main forces inside my family. The first was my brothers, who are 10 and 13 years older than I am. I say that not to call them old (we’re all old now!), but to point out that just when I was old enough to start thinking about popular music they were old enough to have established tastes and preferences. It’s why, in spite of going through junior high and high school in the 1980s my musical likes lagged by about ten years. It’s through my brothers that I discovered progressive rock – they introduced me to Yes, Genesis, Zappa, etc.
The other force inside my family was my parents. They were my introduction to the world of “serious” music – the symphony, opera (my father is a huge opera fan), musical theater. I never jumped into that stuff quite as much as I did prog, but its influence definitely contributed to that. In addition, both my parents were singers, having been in the WV Symphony Chorus for years. They were big fans of vocal harmony groups like The Hi-Los and the Swingle Singers. I can draw a direct line from hearing that sort of stuff to bands like Gentle Giant, echolyn, and Moon Safari that feature exquisite vocal harmonies.
With that said, my first music collection was mostly cassettes recorded from albums my brothers had (they each had, over time, bitchin’ stereos, while I made due with a boom box). At one point, probably because they were about to move out, I made a more concerted effort to make cassette copies of some albums that I didn’t necessarily love but figured I should have anyway.
Enter Relayer.
The seventh Yes album, the first and only with Swiss keyboard player Patrick Moraz. I was aware of it at the time, but not really familiar with it. But it was Yes and I was a fan, so I needed a copy.
One day I was the only person in the house and decided that would be a good time to record and listen. See, kids – back in those days if you wanted to record something onto cassette it took as long as the album lasted, so you might as well listen as you went. I wasn’t trying to be clandestine, just considerate.
My parents came home at some point. I’m not sure what attracted my mother, whether the music itself or the cover, but she took a look at the track list on the back of the LP cover.
As you can see, side one is one long piece called “The Gates of Delirium.” My mother was convinced that this twenty minutes of progressive rock madness could only be about one thing – drugs. For whatever reason, she decided to put her foot down and stop me from listening to/recording any of it. I still don’t know why – my house growing up was not exactly censorial and I got exposed to a lot of stuff I was too young to understand, from George Carlin to Monty Python (remember, two older brothers!) and, as I mentioned, Frank Zappa! None of this was an issue with my mother but, for some reason, “The Gates of Delirium,” that great ode to the power of drugs, was a bridge too far.
I didn’t argue with her. As I said, Relayer didn’t mean much to me at the time and I couldn’t mount a credible defense for “The Gates of Delirium,” anyway. Jon Anderson’s lyrics were always what you might call “opaque” – I read somewhere that he was more interested in how words sounded than in what they meant – and I didn’t know, at the time, what it was really about. So I put Relayer away and got on with whatever album was next.
I only later learned what “The Gates of Delirium” was really about – War and Peace. That’s right, in typical prog fashion, Anderson had decided to whittle down a 1200+ page classic of world literature into one side of an album. While I’m certain drugs were involved in the creative process, it isn’t actually about that, much less a celebration of it (as the lyrics make fairly clear – as clear than Anderson typically gets, anyway).
You’d think after all that I’d bear some grudge against my mother for denying me this masterpiece for so long. You’d be wrong! See, the thing is that all of Relayer, and large chunks of “The Gates of Delirium,” are by far the weirdest, most aggressive things Yes ever did and at the time I was trying to record it I didn’t really like it much. When came back to it in college or law school I’d started listening to way weirder stuff and so Relayer didn’t strike me as “too much.” Rather, it hit just the right sweet spot. That it was, in some minor sense, “forbidden” probably didn’t hurt. If I’d lived with it for years by that point, I’d probably just shrugged it off as not for me.
So thanks, Mom, for letting that rarely used overly protective streak come out in this particular instance. It probably led to this becoming one of my favorite bits of Yes music ever.
Let’s talk about the past year on screens – big, small, and phone.
MOVIES
As has become the norm, I didn’t see a lot of new movies this year, although my wife and I did venture out to theaters a couple of times. One of those was to see the movie that I thought was the best of the year, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
I don’t have a lot more to say about that movie, as it’s been reviewed and discussed to death since it came out. I will not say it is my favorite of Nolan’s films (I have a soft spot for The Prestige and always will), but it may be the most impressive. I thought James Camerson did well wringing drama out of a shipwreck we all knew about going in, but the tension developed during the scene with the Trinity test was another level.
The other 2023 movie I wanted to highlight was very different, a documentary called The Mission.
You may remember in 2018 when a missionary named John Chau decided he should try and convert a remote, isolated tribe on an Indian Ocean island and wound up being killed for his troubles. The Mission tells that story, based largely on Chau’s own diaries, along with letters from his father to the filmmakers. It uses animation to fill in the visuals, along with some talking heads that cover broader issues of missionary work and whether it’s more of a plague than a blessing. What really got to me is how Chau’s father watched helplessly as his son became more and more devout, captured by an evangelistic spirit, and charged headlong to his death.
As for the “new to me” class, it turns out that I spent 2023 getting caught up on a lot of good stuff from 2022. The first two are a pair of very different horror(ish) flicks, The Menu and Men.
The Menu is another in the recently popular “eat the rich” genre, this time skewering the wealthy and aloof via a snooty, high-end restaurant with the world’s worst customer service (or best, depending on your point of view). It’s darkly funny and enjoyable in a sick, twisted way. As for Men . . . well, it’s bizarre. A woman who suffered a recent tragic loss departs to a small English village as a retreat, only to find that it’s entirely populated by men (and boys, even more creepily) who all look alike (all played by Rory Kinnear, who’s a good enough reason to watch just about anything). It goes from unsettling, past creepy, into confusingly disgusting by the end, but it really stuck with me. It was the high point of several folk-horror movies I saw last year.
For something completely different, the absolute funniest thing I saw last year was Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
It’s a biopic of Weird Al Yankovic’s life, only it really isn’t. Instead, it skewers biopic tropes and pokes fun at Al’s own image and history. I watched it on a plane on the way to the UK last year and there were a couple of times I drew stares for laughing so hard.
TELEVISION
The watchword for television in 2023 was “endings,” as several excellent series came to an end, most notably Succession. Don’t sleep on the final outings of the gang at Archer, though. That was a show that had no business running as long as it did and continuing to be that funny. I wanted to highlight another couple of excellent shows that wrapped things up last year, however.
The first is Reservation Dogs, the Native American-led dramedy from FX (or Hulu, whichever).
Set largely on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma, the show was about four young adults trying to make sense of their world and culture in the wake of their best friend’s suicide. It was often funny (the recurring presence of one character’s spirit guide in particular), but also quite moving. And while I would have loved to have gotten more of it, the series wrapped up in a very satisfactory way.
The other ending I wanted to note was also a return, and of a show I knew nothing about before its return, Happy Valley.
The ironically named series is set in Yorkshire and follows the tribulations of a woman who is both a police officer and stand-in mother to her grandson, the product of a rape that led her daughter to kill herself. It’s pretty rough stuff and, plotting wise, I have some issues with how they keep the father/rapist around as the series bogeyman, but the whole thing is held together by an amazing performance by NAME as the officer/grandmother. Very glad I stumbled into it on BBC America.
A pair of new shows really caught my attention, too. Each could have additional seasons, I suppose, but they work well as standalone experiences, too.
One is Scavengers Reign, an impressive sci-fi series from HBO (or Max or whatever the hell they’re calling themselves these days).
The setup is really simple – the crew of a deep-space flight crash land on an alien planet and struggle to survive. That’s really it for plot, which is slight, but that’s not the point of this show. Rather, the creators use the flexibility of animation to conjure a world that is truly and utterly alien, both amazing and terrifying in equal measure. In a way it reminded me of 2001 in the way it takes complete advantage of its medium. A trip well worth taking.
By contrast I wouldn’t recommend the trip taken by most of the people involved in Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God (another Max offering), much less the titular mother herself.
On the one hand, this documentary is part of the current boom in docs about cults. What sets this apart is that so much of it is populated with video taken by the members itself as their leader goes from somewhat inspirational spiritualist to complete crank wasting away from overdoses of colloidal silver. It’s three episodes and there’s a part in the second where people say things that are just so stereotypically culty that you have to laugh. Then it becomes more clear is what we’re watching is a woman who surrounded herself with true believers that, once she needed help, weren’t able to provide it because they had gone so deep down this particular rabbit hole. It winds up being very tragic.
PODCASTS
I am not what you’d call a devout podcast listening (in spite of hosting one), but I do have a couple of favorites from the last year that I really enjoyed.
The first has been around since the early days of the pandemic, but I hadn’t highlighted it before – The Album Years.
Hosted by musicians Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness (who’ve worked together as No-Man, in addition to a host of other projects), each episode takes a particular year and works through albums from that year that stood out to them. The idea is to leave the obvious choices to the side and feature some lesser known, or perhaps lesser loved, work. Wilson and Bowness are literate in the area and have enough overlap in tastes that they can talk about a lot, but have enough areas of disagreement to keep things interesting.
The other was new for 2023 – If Books Could Kill.
Hosted by journalist Michael Hobbes and lawyer Peter Shamshiri, the tagline says it all: “The airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds.” For each episode one of them (only one, usually) reads the featured book and they walk through the clichés, spurious claims, and just plain weirdness that infests pop psychology, self-help, and popular political/economics books. It’s funny, and often deeply sarcastic, but the work is kind of serious – we lap up a lot of bullshit as a society, often packaged in innocuous ways, so it’s good to call it out every now and then.
JD Byrne 