Last Sunday, Tua Tagovailoa, quarterback of the Miami Dolphins, threw for 469 years and six touchdowns to defeat Jeff Smith’s Baltimore Ravens 42-38.
The Buffalo Bills, 4 and 1/2 point favorites today in Miami, just announced they lost their All-Pro Safety, Micah Hyde, for the season with a neck injury. That’s not good news for a secondary that’s going to struggle to cover Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle. The number of injuries the Bills and other NFL teams are contending with after only two games is disconcerting. How will your favorite NFL team perform today?
I first read Greil Marcus’s work in Rolling Stone in 1969. Over the years, I’ve read Marcus’s books on Bob Dylan–Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, and Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010–and his history of rock & roll, Mystery Train. Over decades, Marcus wrote a column about Rock Music, novels, and movies. Those columns have been collected in two thick volumes and I just finished reading them.
The best way to describe these books is to give you some samples of what you would find amid the 1000+ reviews of albums, the hundreds of book reviews, and dozens of movie reviews.
Madona, “Blond Ambition Tour” (Oakland Coliseum Aren, May 20, 1990) It doesn’t matter how cooly are: this great production showcases gestures as shocking now as any Elvis Presley put on televisions in 1956 and its a prissy myth that only those who disapproved of Elvis were shocked. Here, the interracial hermaphroditic porn of “Like a Virgin: was merely a warm up for the blasphemies of “Like a Prayer,” with as a dance raised the must to the level of Foreigner’s “I want to Know What Love Is,” cut in with Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” “This,” Madonna said on May 31 in Toronto, when police arrived with an order that she alter her performance, “is certainly a cause for which I am willing to be arrested.” (p. 63)
Nick Hornby, How to BeGood (Riverhead) The narrator tells her husband of 20 years she’s “been seeing someone.” “I’m presuming that you’ll be moving out in the next couple days,” he says.
“The affair’s over, she says. “As of this minute.”
“I don’t know about that,” he says. “But I do know that no one asks Elvis Presley to play for nothing.” (p. 262)
The same method and format continues in More Real Life Rock:
William Bell, This is Where I Live (Stax) Starting with “You Don’t Miss Your Water” in 1961, Bell had many hits on the R&B charts with Stax into the ’70s. This feels like the album he should have made in 1967 but wasn’t ready for: with every smoothly delivered lesson about satisfaction and pain, you sense how hard each one was to learn, and how finding the right words–the right tone to make what you have to say mean anything–is much harder. With the most delicate, modes, contemplative soul guitar: in 1967 it would have been Curtis Mayfield, but it’s producer John Leventhal, who does the same for Rosanne Cash. Can’t Leventhal have Cash and Bell make their next album together? (p. 80-81)
Elliott Chaze,Black Wings Has My Angel (1953, republished by NYRB Classics, 2016) Loves on the run after the big score, with a line a many named Peter Greenbaum could have written: “I was too stinking rich and bloody and scared to listen to my real name.” (p. 261)
Bruce Springsteen, Letter to You (Columbia) An eighties or even seventies Springsteen album with a decades-older self-questioning voice–the best of both worlds. (p. 288)
I’ve enjoyed all of Greil Marcus’s works that I’ve read. If you want to check out the running commentary in the Rock world from 1986 to 2021, here’s where you’ll find out what was going on. GRADE: A (for both)
TABLE OF CONTENTS: Real Life Rock: The Complete Top Ten Columns, 1986-2014
Introduction — ix
The Village Voice, 1986-1990 — 1
Artforum, 1990-1998 — 69
Salon, 1999-2003 — 165
City Pages, 2003-2004 — 341
Interview, 2006-2007 — 377
The Believer, 2008-2014 — 393
Acknowledgements — 523
Credits — 525
Index of Names and Titles — 527
TABLE OF CONTENTS: More Real Life Rock: The Wilderness Years, 2014-2021
There is no The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction, 21st Series. Instead, Edward L. Ferman assembled this The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: A Special 25th Anniversary Anthology (1974) featuring stories from the special Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction first six special one-author issues.
The one-author issues started in early 1960s with Theodore Sturgeon (September 1962) followed by Ray Bradbury (May 1963) then Isaac Asimov (October 1966), Fritz Leiber (July 1969), Poul Anderson (April 1971), and James Blish (April 1972).
In his Introduction, Ferman gives credit to Joe Ferman, then the publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for the idea of one-author issues and the format: a major new work of fiction by the author, accompanied by a profile, critical appreciation, and bibliography.
If you’re a fan of Sturgeon, Bradbury, Asimov, Leiber, Anderson, and Blish this anthology should be a fixture in your library. Great stories! And I enjoyed reading the critical appreciations by Judith Merril, William F. Nolan, L. Sprague de Camp, Gordon R. Dickson, and Robert A. W. Lowndes. GRADE: A
Between the Covers (2006) is a compilation of classic songs covered by a mix of performers whose net proceeds supported the T. J. Martell Foundation’s research efforts for research and treatments for cancer and AIDS.
I included the original singer/group and the year the song was a hit after the song titles above. Quite a variety of years!
My favorite cover song on Between the Covers is Maxwell’s version of Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work.” Do you remember these songs? Have you heard these cover versions? Any favorites? GRADE: B+
COVER ARTWORK “THE QUICK AND THE UNDEAD” BY TRAVIS J. ELSTON
In his Introduction to Deadman’s Road, Joe R. Lansdale lays out the genesis of his violent Reverend and his crusade against the undead and other deadly supernatural entities. If you set The Walking Dead about 150 years ago, you’d be in the same world as Deadman’s Road.
Lansdale cites Jonah Hex as a prime inspiration for his own Reverend. But, wait, there’s more: Jesse JamesMeets Frankenstein’s Daughter and Billy the Kid Meets Dracula. Clearly, Lansdale loves weird Westerns!
Deadman’s Road certainly qualifies as a weird Western. In “Dead in the West” the doctor in the small town the Reverend visits just happens to have a copy of The Necronomicon on his bookshelf. And, an ancient curse animates the corpses of the unlucky and sends them to inflect carnage on the guilty.
If you’re looking for action, gruesome fights, and supernatural horror in Western settings, Deadman’s Road is the book for you! GRADE: B
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION: THE REVEREND RIDES AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN By Joe R. Lansdale — 3
Based loosely on Gregory McDonald’s Confess, Fletch mystery novel from 1976, this movie opens with Fletch (Jon Hamm) finding the body of a murdered woman in his rental apartment. Fletch just returned from Rome where he’s involved in recovering stolen masterpiece paintings worth millions, the kidnapping of the painting’s owner, and juggling his love life between the daughter of the owner and the owner’s seductive wife.
Fletch uses his skills honed as an investigative reporter to discover where the stolen paintings are stashed, who killed the woman in his apartment, and what the women in his life really want from him.
I liked the first Fletch (1985) comedy thriller starring Chevy Chase and directed by Michael Ritchie and written by Andrew Bergman. Confess, Fletch, directed by Greg Mottla, and written by Zev Borow struggles to advance the plot. The “comic” dialogue falls flat too often. Jon Hamm never really convinced me that he was Fletch. He seemed more like Jon Hamm in a Progressive Insurance commercial. And this 98-minute film mostly sags like a bad episode of a cable TV Hallmark mystery-of-the-week movie. GRADE: D
After the Thursday Night Football beatdown of the Super Bowl Champion LA Rams by the Buffalo Bills 31-10, the Monday Night Football game tonight features the Tennessee Titans who have defeated the Bills in 2020 and 2021. The Titans got beaten by the mighty NY Giants last Sunday, so they’ll be fired up for this game. The Bills are favored by 10 points…but I suspect the score will be closer than that!
Week One of the 2022 NFL season shocked many people (especially bettors on FanDuel and DraftKings). As I predicted, the New York Giants–with former Offensive Coordinator of the Buffalo Bills, Brian Daboll, now Giants’ Head Coach–played above their station and beat the Tennessee Titans 21-20 on a gutsy 2-point conversion call.
Deb’s New Orleans Saints stole a victory over the unlucky Atlanta Falcons 27-26 after trailing most of the game. And, projected Super Bowl bound Dallas Cowboys lost their Quarterback, Dak Prescott, for 8 weeks because of a thumb injury. Meanwhile, another Super Bowl bound team, the Green Bay Packers, got slammed in Minneapolis during BOUCHERCON by the suddenly powerful Vikings, 23-7.
Death and the Conjuror: A Locked Room Mystery for Fans of Golden Age Crime Fiction by Tom Mead takes readers back to the 1930s where a locked room murder in London baffles police. But, a magician named Jospeh Spector starts to unravel the cunning crime.
The victim is celebrity psychiatrist Anselm Rees. His body is discovered in his locked office. His throat had been cut. The list of possible “Persons of Interest” leads Tom Mead to provide a handy “Dramatic Personae” to help us keep track of the many suspects.
And, just as Golden Age Crime Fiction liked to do, Mead includes a Reader’s Challenge on p. 227 to solve the murder because all the clues had been revealed.
If you enjoy Locked Room mysteries in the John Dickson Carr and Edward D. Hoch tradition, you’ll enjoy Death and the Conjuror. GRADE: B
“As the series went on and on and as I became more secure with the voicing and with my apparent ability to circumvent surface and not get fired, Wuliff came crazier and crazier.” (p. 9)
Barry N. Malzberg (aka, “Mike Barry”) wrote The Lone Wolf series in the white heat of the drug-addled Seventies–16 volumes so this new Stark House omnibus takes us halfway through this bloody and violent saga. Burt Wulff, avenging the death of his fiancé, launches an international mission to Peru. In the Hotel Crillon in Lima, Wulff is approached to deliver several million dollars worth of heroin to the USA.
A Nazi, who knows who Wulff is, promises Wulff an out for the trap he’s in–as long as Wulff does what he wants. Deception and double-crosses result.
Los Angeles Holocaust begins with Wulff aboard a hijacked helicopter returning to El Paso from Peru. Wulff has millions of dollars worth of heroin in a bag. Wulff connects with Williams, his former partner on the NYPD, who was stabbed in Chicago Slaughter. Williams leaves his pregnant wife in New York, buys a U-Haul full of weapons from a Harlem priest, kills a couple of carjackers in Nebraska, and arrives in L.A. ready to do battle.
The stage is set for an epic battle fueled by the heroin worth millions and Wulff’s lust for vengeance. Drug cartels, Mafia dons, illegal drugs galore mixed with sudden death and carnage: The Lone Wolf series takes the reader on a guided tour of the modern Circles of Hell. GRADE: B+ (for both)
