Sept. 17, 2001 |
1) Handsome Family, "Twilight" (Carrot Top)
As he sings the words Rennie Sparks has written, the fatalism in Bret Sparks' voice now comes in a deeper drone than ever before. He sits in a diner watching the crowds gather across the highway. He tells you why. It's a terrible story, but for the moment the way he's telling it is worse: Is he even alive? That one song later he turns up living in a park is no shock. But "I Know You Are There" is a shock. Enveloping the stalker in the lyrics, walking right over the suicide who's singing, is the voice of another singer, crawling out of the others and leaving their bodies by the road like old clothes: a man speaking in waltz time the way you might imagine a president late in the l9th century would deliver a patriotic address. It all feels right, clear, heroic, simple, everyday.
2/3) Terry Zwigoff, director, "Ghost World" (United Artists) & "Ghost World: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack" (Shanachie)
Clomping in her Doc Martens, Thora Birch as self-consciously outsider high school graduate Enid finds out what's on the other side of outside when she lets Steve Buscemi's old-timey culture fetishist Seymour sell her an LP at a garage sale. As the warped vinyl spins on her little box -- and you can pick up the whispery sound of the warp on the soundtrack album -- she hears Skip James' 1931 "Devil Got My Woman," hears the high, otherworldly voice from Mississippi promising "Nothing but the devil, change my baby's mind," believes it, and, lying back, staring at the ceiling, rises only to put the tone arm back on the same track, all night long.
Missing Britney Spears' "Oops! ... I Did It Again" and the Backstreet Boys as examples of the "horribly contrived commercial slop" Zwigoff couldn't afford ("I wanted this music to heighten the alienation and fit into the general feeling of paranoia and cynicism I was attempting to create"), the soundtrack offers surprises: Mohammed Rafi's "Jann Pehechaan Ho," the fabulous rock 'n' roll dance number from the 1965 Indian film "Gumnaam" that's running on Enid's TV as the movie opens, or "Pickin' Cotton Blues." In a sports bar, after a legendary ancient black bluesman has been ignored by the crowd, a young white trio comes on, announcing it's going to jam on the real authentic true-life Delta sound, then leaps into a ridiculous number written by Zwigoff, which doesn't come off as remotely so awful as it's supposed to.
What does: the end of the film, when, with both Enid's life and his in shreds, Seymour speaks earnestly to his therapist, hoping he's turned the corner, that he won't have to see her anymore. "Let's start with that next week," she says. He leaves, and as the therapist closes the door her face falls in disgust.
4) Bobbie Ann Mason, "Three-Wheeler," from "Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail" (Random House)
A woman has let two vaguely threatening young boys talk her into letting them clean up her yard; Mason slides her down the situation until it opens into what's really on her mind.
"'How much dirt have you boys moved? I'm not paying you for Sunday-school lessons.'
"'We need your riding mower to pull our wagon, so it'll be faster.'
"'That's silly.'
"'We can make twice as many loads.'
"The idea tempted her. She could get the mower out. She had filled it with gas before the yard-man's two-hour visit. A two-hour yard man ought to be twice as good as a sixty-minute man, she thought, remembering the raunchy old song. She always thought it should be the theme song for Sixty Minutes. Her mind was flying around loose."