Word: paranoia
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...times ahead," crooned Elvis Costello in a raspy, tortured voice on his last album. Costello--the little guy in the seedy suit and black plastic glasses--sounds worried himself on his latest release. He's always powered his songs with two emotions, woman-hating sexual frustration and corporate paranoia. On Armed Forces, the paranoia takes over and twists his music into some very strange, chilly shapes and sounds...
...unsettling way Costello at times seemed gleefully to accept and participate in the paranoia. The cover of This Year's Model featured him peering like a suspicious, hurt little boy from behind a movie camera trained on you. In "Night Rally," a song from the British edition of This Year's Model which Columbia removed from the domestic release (I wonder why?), he sings...
...began life under the name "Emotional Fascism." The old title is a perfect epithet for Elvis Costello's obsessions, but he had to bow to the commercial wisdom that would advise against that title. Costello hasn't completely given up on womankind, but his misogyny makes way for the paranoia here, and the music reflects the change. It's less straightforward, a bit less dynamic, and relies heavily on the work of studio whiz Nick Lowe...
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Why bother? This remake has the critics rolling their eyes, extravagantly praising it, and finding in it all sorts of social commentary about '70s paranoia. The cast is competent and the direction by Philip Kaufman is skillful if opportunistic, but this is routine horror, not science-fiction or social statement. Donald Sutherland is bloodless as the health inspector who catches on to the massive eggplants which are infesting California, and it's a relief when he finally gets and eggplant of his own and becomes one of them. It's obvious that Leonard Nimoy...
...Evidence emerged last week that the U.S. State Department had been given ample warning of the impending catastrophe at Jonestown but had not acted decisively. Deborah Layton Blakey, sister of Larry Layton, the commune's alleged executioner, sent the department an eleven-page statement detailing Jones' paranoia and brutality, the suicide drills, the weapons present in the camp, the malnutrition and sickness that were rampant, and the state of fear in which most of the inhabitants lived. She claims that the commune had three days' warning that a representative of the U.S. embassy in Georgetown was about...