Hazy Moon

Silently waiting
Mist crosses her silver face
Like Buñuel's razor

Paris 1919 by John Cale

OK, it’s fair to say that this album is not quite what I was expecting from the founder of the legendary Velvet Underground. It opens with some perfectly fine 70s arty pop, but the lyrics pretty soon take off into surreal flights of fancy with references to murdered oranges, singing elephants and a glam rock stomp about Macbeth. The title track, a Beatles-esque reference to the post-WWI Treaty of Versailles, is probably the highlight, even if it’s an unlikely subject for a pop song.

The reason for all of the random whimsy quickly becomes clear on the second disc of this deluxe edition with a series of demos and outtakes that openly reference the prodigious amounts of cocaine that Cale was evidently doing during the recording with much sniffing and odd bits of studio chatter.

Probably not going to listen to this one more than once, to be honest.

Down, Geese

The hunter took aim
Squeezed the trigger, feathers flew
"Goose down" he muttered

She's So Unusual by Cyndi Lauper

Cyndi Lauper was a breath of fresh air back in the early 80s. The initial impression was of a squeaky voiced, diminutive bundle of energy with multi-coloured hair exploding in all directions. Her biggest hit, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, was a cover of a by-the-numbers 1979 post-punk track by Robert Hazard. Lauper filled it with proto-girl power pep and a New Wave sensibility that immediately improved it by several orders of magnitude. 

The rest of the album is equally good, showing an impressive range to her vocals going from a very creditable 1920s style Betty Boop impression on He’s So Unusual to a heart breaking soaring performance on Time After Time. 

Definitely one of the best and most underrated performers of the 80s, I think.

Boogie Nights

OK, so not quite an Oscar winner but a respectable three nominations which is not bad for a film whose subject matter includes sex, drugs and the rise and fall the West Coast porn industry of the 1970s.

It opens with a naive young man called Eddie (played by Mark Wahlburg) who is discovered by Burt Reynolds’ sleazy movie mogul Jack Horner washing dishes in the back room of a nightclub. He is swiftly inducted into the world of pornographic movies and the associated hedonistic LA lifestyle of drugs and pool parties. He adopts the soubriquet of Dirk Diggler and builds his reputation mainly based on the prodigious size of his penis.

The film veers between humour at the expense of the shoddily made porno films with badly acted, wafer thin plots and tediously mechanical sex, watched by slack jawed men, and the grim consequences of drug overdoses and the degrading nature of the work.

As the hedonistic 70s give way to the greed is good 80s with the switch to cheap home video, Dirk’s career inevitably starts to wane as he is edged out by younger performers and finds that his, ahem, performance has been severely affected by the drugs he has taken. An ill advised attempt at a career as a singer goes nowhere and things take a dark turn with more drugs and violence.

Will our hero get a happy ending? (fnarr, fnarr)

As a whole, the film captures the sleazy seventies with a great soundtrack and attention to detail in the fashions and home decor.

New Leaves, Ghost

Recording her life
She turned over a new leaf
Ghost written memoir

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

I watched the 1946 adaptation of this a few weeks ago and finished the original novel after getting somewhat bogged down in the plot about halfway through.

The film turns out to be pretty faithful to the book, albeit with some changes of emphasis. In the book Marlowe does not really have a romance with Vivian, other than to try to get to the truth of what happened to her estranged husband Rusty Regan (a deliberate change from the original). I suspect that the screenplay was skewed to give more time to the Bogart and Bacall pairing.

Other elements of the story have somewhat more bite too. The bookseller Geiger turns out to be running a pornography lending library out of the back room of his shop, and it also turns out he was in a same sex relationship with a young man (giving them more of a reason for them to shoot Brody in a mistaken act of revenge). The compromising photos of Carmen are definitely much more explicit here - Marlowe discovers her naked and heavily drugged in Geiger’s house - something that would never have made it past the 1946 film censors.

She was wearing a pair of long jade earrings. They were nice earrings and had probably cost a couple of hundred dollars. She wasn’t wearing anything else.

The plot is even more complicated, with several convincing theories of the case being proposed and reworked as the story progresses. As mentioned above, the story seems to come to a grinding halt half way through, with the photos recovered and the mystery of Geiger’s death solved. Case closed, right?

I had concealed a murder and suppressed evidence for twenty-four hours, but I was still at large and had a five-hundred-dollar cheque coming. The smart thing for me to do was to take another drink and forget the whole mess.

However, Marlowe seems determined to keep digging into the case of the missing Rusty and how that ties in with gangster Eddie Mars, his missing wife and the libidinous Carmen. Reading the wiki page, it seems that Chandler stitched together elements of this story from two other short stories with similar set ups (distressed fathers and wayward children).

The final conclusion is a satisfying explanation, but the real joy is in Chandler’s laconic and evocative prose, with Marlowe being the cynical and dogged anti-hero determined to get to the truth, for his own satisfaction if no one else’s.

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that.