In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Christopher Tradowsky’s novel Midnight at the Cinema Palace is a mesmerizing debut, an effervescent love letter to mid-’90s San Francisco.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Young movie lovers discover friendship, glamour, and heartache in 1990s San Francisco… Tradowsky’s ornate novel is a love letter to a foggy, analog metropolis lit up with nightlife and art, queer friendship and desire, movie houses and day jobs, and 20-somethings aching to define themselves.”
In his own words, here is Christopher Tradowsky’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Midnight at the Cinema Palace:
Midnight at the Cinema Palace follows film-obsessed Walter Simmering, who over the course of the novel finds his people and falls in love in and with 1990s San Francisco. It is chockfull of film references, SF and Gen-X easter eggs, and more music than you can splice onto a Maxell UD C120. In the ‘80s, when mixed tapes were ascendant, my friends and I loved to make what we called “culture shock” compilations, in which Eurythmics and Carmina Burana and Nat King Cole might all wind up on one freewheeling, warped cassette. I think of this hyper-eclectic aesthetic as particularly Gen-X. At the time, it represented a breach of decorum, in the way that my Boomer mother had fashion rules I couldn’t comprehend, which were mostly injunctions against mixing things: never pair a dress shirt with jeans, or a suit with white tube socks, that sort of thing. Midnight carries the torch of ‘80s eclecticism, especially in its indiscriminate love for cultural objects low and high, pop and posh. Naturally this had to be a culture shock playlist, as barely coherent and deliciously vexing as a ‘90s Asian fusion/tapas menu.
Nino Rota, “Amarcord”
This is the main theme from Federico Fellini’s vivacious memory play, the movie a masterclass in making nostalgia feel vibrant and timeless. It appears on page three of Midnight, when protagonist Walter gets Nino Rota’s lush earworm stuck in his head all night, inspiring a dream of a peacock in a snowstorm, from the film’s most unforgettable shot. As earworms go, it’s among the hardest to shake, and it reprises at one of the novel’s climaxes. Walter and Sasha slow dance to a version performed by a jazz band at Bimbo’s nightclub in North Beach. For that scene, I tried to match the carnivalesque mood of Rota’s melody: hooky and ravishing, but so repetitious it might drive you insane. “The melody spun them in a tight circle. It was lovely but so repetitive, mesmerizing and slightly demented, the wailing of a mystic carnival.”
Opus III, “It’s a Fine Day”
More than any other song, this one has the power to beam me directly to San Francisco in 1993. In an early chapter, when Walter is adrift and searching for his people, this is the (unnamed) dreamy anthem that plays at the legendary after-hours club, the EndUp. I have always loved dream pop, and while a techno banger (with the bass turned up) this track owes as much to Lush as to Black Box. Thirty years later, house music seems antique, full of corny effects, but “It’s a Fine Day” can still awaken within me a sense of newness and futurity, of technological sophistication paired with wistful, hypnotic vocals, a lullaby—or siren song—sung by a robot.
Django Reinhardt, “Nuages”
Walter’s fortunes change when he meets Cary Menuhin, a suave dandy and aspiring musician. Cary quite literally idolizes the Belgian-Romani jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt; she keeps candles and incense burning upon a shrine to him beside her hollow-body Gretsch guitar. “Nuages,” with its irresistible jazz manouche energy, is my favorite of Reinhardt’s compositions, and his virtuosity is on full display. Cary gets it: Django is a vibe. She loves his look as much as his music. Django is hot jazz. Django is brilliantine and a pencil mustache. Above all, Django is bedroom eyes. For style-obsessed Cary, Django is style incarnate.
Plastic Bertrand, “Ca Plane Pour Moi”
“Ugh, this song is so annoying, and for some reason I hear it everywhere,” says Walter, and I’m inclined to agree with him. Who likes this song? OK, OK, I must admit it’s amusing, and catchy as hell. A French language parody of punk rock, shouted by a blond Belgian twunk with smoke-stained teeth, it has the maniacal, overcompensating energy of a novelty song. One person who certainly loved it was the DJ at “Baby Judy’s,” a glorious but short-lived queer club night at the Casanova Lounge in the mid-90s. An entire chapter of Midnight unfolds in this setting, where the DJ set was culture-shock eclectic, and Walter and Cary were as likely to encounter Serge Gainsborough as Stereolab, Hüsker Dü, the B-52s, Joy Division, or 50-Foot-Queen of the ‘90s, PJ Harvey.
PJ Harvey, “50 Foot Queenie”
…Speaking of which. In San Francisco in the ‘90s, certain records became the de facto “album of the year,” in that you couldn’t go anywhere in public without hearing them (e.g., Walking Wounded in 1996; Buena Vista Social Club in 1997). The soundtrack of 1993 was PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me. At the time living in SF felt like having unwittingly joined the cult of Polly Jean, and I, for one, welcomed our glamazon overlord. A woman who could out-rock the Sub Pop sad boys, who was smarter and edgier than all of them, and the scarlet-lipped Gen-X answer to Patti Smith? Sign me the fuck up. In the novel, Walter and Cary start meeting in cafés to collaborate on a screenplay called—you guessed it—Midnight at the Cinema Palace. Music follows them from one venue to the next, and “50 Foot Queenie” is what I had in mind when I invoked “…the howl of PJ Harvey stalking them like a she-wolf wherever they traveled.”
Ute Lemper, “Alabama Song”
Here’s a Gen-X truism: the least cool thing is in fact the coolest. When everyone else is busy freaking out about the latest release by Nirvana or Soundgarden, the actual coolest thing is to become obsessed with a German cabaret singer, with a keening voice that slides all over the sexy-scary spectrum, who specializes in thinly veiled Marxist-allegorical oompah music from seventy years ago. This Kurt Weill classic is one of two songs Cary sings as she, Walter, and a bottle of whiskey get lost one night in the thickening fog atop Twin Peaks. Incidentally, no one rolls their r’s like Ute; I’d trade my firstborn to be able to roll my r’s like that—so I guess it’s just as well I don’t have one to trade. What Angela Carter once said of Marlene Dietrich applies equally to Ute Lemper: “She looks as if she ate men whole, for breakfast, possibly on toast.”
S’Express, “Twinkle (Step into My Mind)”
Later in the novel, the three main characters, Walter, Cary, and Sasha, go out dancing—for an entire year. I envisioned this section as one of those nightlife montages in a golden-age Hollywood musical, flashing neon signs parading over frothing champagne bowls, as fancy-free revelers dance and dance. I always imagined my trio dancing to this gleeful house track from 1991. The lyrics describe lovers cosplaying as director and starlet; thematically they’re perfectly matched to Midnight: “…‘Cause you move me, my director/ so move closer, baby… You’re my Cocteau, my Fellini/ you’re my Godard baby…” I love the groovy, propulsive bassline, and DJ Sonique’s contralto, which is so inscrutably androgynous that for many years I couldn’t tell if the singer was male or female. I had to look it up. I was happier not knowing. (This one’s not on Spotify, but some kindly acid house tweaker posted it on YouTube.)
Jorge Ben Jor, “Ponta de Lanca Africano”
Then the music in the dance montage morphs and goes south—way south—to Brazil, as our intrepid heroes dance the night away at “…the Cat’s Alley, where DJ Javier spun a whiplash-inducing mix of Britpop, post-punk, and indie dance, with sprinklings of funk and Tropicália.” Merciless DJ Javier would spin this track back-to-back with Ohio Player’s “Love Rollercoaster,” and if funk could kill, no one would have escaped the Cat’s Alley. “Ponta de Lanca Africano” is so slow, and infectious, and groovy, and funky, it compels you not simply to dance, but to dance with your entire body, every inch of it, tiptoes to fingertips, head heart hips—never mind your two left feet—wave your hands, shake your ass, and dance like your life depends on it because, for these three minutes and fifty-two seconds, it does. If this song doesn’t make you want to move, I don’t know what to tell you. Check your pulse. Your heart might have stopped.
Camera Obscura, “Careless Love”
As a rule, I don’t believe you have to be in a particular mood to write that mood well. Imagine if you had to feel anxious in order to write a tense scene, or rapturous (or horny) in order to represent characters in ecstasy. How exhausting! Even so, in the second half of my novel Walter falls in love, and over the months it took me to write an intensifying romance, (and considering that the majority of daily life is flagrantly unromantic), I found that certain music helped me sustain the mood. If I needed a shot of romance, this song always delivered, not least because Tracyanne Campell’s Glaswegian lilt could make a jingle for laundry soap sound lovesick. It’s one of those songs that seems much longer than it is, because the production is so lavish, the wall of sound so expansive. It is, in a word, cinematic. I agree with the Pitchfork reviewer who wrote of the string arrangement: “…check out the deliriously up-swirling end of ‘Careless Love.’ It’s as if George Gershwin stormed the studio.”
Jeff Buckley and Elizabeth Fraser, “All Flowers in Time Bend Towards the Sun”
My other go-to when I needed a shot of romance—this one may count as mainlining. Achingly bittersweet, this is less a complete song than a demo teasing all that might have been. Jeff Buckley and goth/dreampop diva Elizabeth Fraser wrote and recorded this when they were briefly dating, sometime in ’94 or ’95. They never finished it, and never released it, you can hear Fraser laughing and dunking on their efforts (Oh gawd!) at the end of the leaked track. To be sure, it shouldn’t work: two of the most idiosyncratic voices of any era should not even fit into the same recording studio. And yet, something alchemical resulted from the melding of their otherworldly, twinned-banshee weirdness. The prosy lyrics are a balm for incorrigible, self-proclaimed unlovable nerds: “I know you say that there’s no one for you…here is one!” As far as I know the two never wrote or recorded anything else. They parted ways, and within two years Buckley met a tragic end, drowning in Wolf River Harbor in Memphis, singing as he drowned. This track is a shooting star caught on film—so beautiful—and nothing more than its blazing disappearance. Though not available on Spotify, when I need to bump up my faith in humanity, I will visit an unlikely corner: the user comments on YouTube, where the outpouring of love for this song, and these two singers, is overwhelming.
Ella Fitzgerald, “Embraceable You”
Midnight is loaded with references to the Great American Songbook, and this single track will have to stand for the whole. Speaking of George Gershwin storming the studio, no one wrote melodies like he did, and while it’s as childish as naming a favorite color, if I were forced at gunpoint to name a favorite melody, this would be it. There are a couple references in Midnight to the jukebox at the Orbit Room bar, which had a spectacular jazz collection, a canon in a chrome-plated console. In the penultimate chapter, Walter and Sasha wind up at the Orbit Room, where “…the jukebox roulette spun out ‘Embraceable You,’ Ella Fitzgerald vying for the Guinness World Record for most romantic version of the most romantic song.” This is not hyperbole. This rendition is almost unbearably slow, which only intensifies the spell of the over-the-top strings and Fitzgerald’s mesmeric voice. To be safe, do not listen to this with anyone you aren’t already very partial to. It’s the sonic equivalent of a love potion from Shakespeare and could leave you wandering through a kitschy faerie grotto all night, pining away for some random jackass. Did Walter and Sasha succumb? Read the book.
Christopher Tradowsky is a writer, artist, and art historian. He was awarded the 2023 J. Michael Samuel Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Midnight at the Cinema Palace is his debut novel.