A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Naughty sock puppets debut on MTV; "Cybill" finale RECENTLY IN ENTERTAINMENT Small Soldiers Reviewed by Scott Rosenberg How much mayhem can a bunch of foot-high action figures incite? Plenty (07/10/98) Madeline Reviewed by Fiona Morgan "Madeline": The kid's got spunk (07/09/98) The son also rises By Dawn Eden After a lifetime of disappointments, Julian Lennon is finally doing it his way (07/08/98) Sharps & Flats Reviews of the latest recordings from the Cowboy Junkies, The B-52s, Calexico, Komeda, Patty Griffin and Alvin Youngblood Hart (07/08/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor Summery, sensuous fun: "High Season" and "Rough Magic" (07/07/98) BROWSE THE SARAH VOWELL ARCHIVES

[ A M E R I C A N _.S Q U I R M__B Y__S A R A H_.V O W E L L ] Jennifer Lopez isn't the only one who thinks cruising criminals is fun. So I'm standing in an art gallery looking at a photograph of a man. A very tall man, a handsome man. He's decked out in this jaunty, crumpled, double-breasted trench coat. He stares at the camera dead-on with that vague scowl of the brooding pin-up. There is another guy in uniform grasping a bayonet at the edge of the frame, but I don't notice him at first. The handsome man is reaching into his pocket, like Cary Grant pulling out his monogrammed cigarette case to offer you a smoke. In short, the handsome man is so handsome that I look down at the text panel as if to ask, "Who's that?" At which point I learn that Mr. Hubba Hubba was one of the co-conspirators with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. How would you feel learning you'd just been swooning over a guy who helped do away with America's most treasured leader? You'd feel shallow. Shallow and dirty. Normally, I don't believe in guilty pleasures -- at least not where most pop culture is concerned, i.e., I don't feel bad about owning the Hanson Christmas album, which I truly enjoy. But at the photography exhibition "Police Pictures," which was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and which I saw last week at New York University's Grey Art Gallery, all I got was pleasure -- and all I felt was guilt. I went to the show in search of the grisly. And though there's plenty of blood and guts and evil derring-do, this is easily the most glamorous art show I've seen in years. Curated by SFMOMA's Sandra Phillips, "Police Pictures" aims to track the development of photography as a scientific tool for criminologists. There's a nice mix of images: the quack, racist 19th century investigations of biology as destiny; gangland photos of the '30s; wild West outlaws; French murder victims; scenes of crimes. The viewer arrives at two distinct conclusions from this mishmash of lawbreakers: a reaffirmation of the power and beauty of black-and-white photography as a medium and, contrary to the theories of post-Darwinian geneticists, the observation that criminals are a good-looking lot. I mean, they didn't call Charles Floyd "Pretty Boy" for nothing. I'll admit that one of the things I like about this show (which you can see almost in its entirety in the exhibition catalog jointly published by SFMOMA and Chronicle Books) is that it preys on my predilection to locate crime -- and organized crime especially -- in the past. Just as some pop music fans' record collections span from mid-'50s rockabilly and stop dead with the Stones, when I think about criminals I think '30s, I think '40s, I think clichés of fedoras and the word "moll" and art deco rooms. I may live in the Chicago of now, but my lawbreakers have Al Capone's face. Sometimes I even go out of my way to see movies at the Biograph Theater for the sole, silly reason that John Dillinger was shot there. I walk past the corner dealers on my block. I know that crime's not dead, that it comes in full color. I read the newspaper. But I have too many detective novels in my head, too many viewings of "The Godfather" rattling around my psyche. In fact, unlike a lot of more sophisticated film buffs who prefer "The Godfather Part II" because of the way it reveals the evils and brutality of the Corleone family, I still prefer the first one precisely because it idealizes their virtues. It is, simply, a prettier picture. Phillips has chosen one pretty picture after another. There is a soft-focus image of a hand from 1893 that is so delicate and lovely that you can't imagine what it's doing here amid the corpses and criminals. What a shocker to read that this little flower of a thing, this bouquet of digits, is actually the hand of a strangler. In her catalog essay, Phillips writes of the last century's social scientists' conviction that "it was easy to identify a criminal because, it was believed, he or she looked like one." What, really, is the hand of a strangler supposed to look like? Would it be hairy and gnarled? A mangled mass of veins and blood blisters? That would be easier. That such pretty hands could reach around another person's throat and choke the life from him is somehow still startling. In "Police Pictures" this disturbing ambiguity is felt over and over: In the famous sexy shot of Bonnie Parker leaning on a getaway car with a cigar in her mouth, in George "Machine Gun" Kelly's beautiful eyes, in the seductive nude backside of Eugene Atget's anonymous prostitute. Time and again, I kept feeling like the Jennifer Lopez character in "Out of Sight." She's supposed to be a federal officer, an enemy of those who would defy law and order. She's supposed to be a tough, unsentimental agent of justice. But every time she locks eyes with dreamboat con George Clooney, all she does is drool. "Police Pictures" doesn't just showcase the movie-star good looks of Bonnie Parker (who would be played by Faye Dunaway), it makes every last drop of blood, every dead body, equally attractive. Phillips maintains, "Early evidence pictures of scenes of murder often convey a sense of great and inexplicable beauty approaching the sacred. Perhaps because death is the obverse of life, beautiful pictures of death possess a strange, transformative power, becoming a sort of substantiation, an affirmation of the power and mystery of irrationality and brutality." In that passage, Phillips is calling these images religious art. And what is religion -- the supernatural -- if not the breaking of laws, the laws of nature. Gods defy gravity and mortality just as Bonnie and Clyde defied the law of the land. Which isn't as bad as it sounds. The curious thing about human beings is that no matter how much they admire gods -- or criminals -- eventually, they kill off the really bad ones. God is dead and so is Bonnie Parker. Phillips adds, "We need criminals because they are not us." That's why we need movie stars, too. Is that the reason so many movies portray outlaws, and portray them so sympathetically? Intellectually, I know the whole point of Phillips' show is to shed light on documentary photography, on the photograph as "evidence." But emotionally, I only see them as film stills, as art. I'm programmed to: One of the most jarring moments walking through the exhibit is stopping at the 1953 photo of the Sing Sing death chamber; it's the stock picture Andy Warhol appropriated for his electric chair series of paintings. And even though I'm staring at the real thing, the original sad, cold document, my brain is secretly silk-screening it pink. You can see what Warhol saw: Fab design! SALON | July 13, 1998 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PHOTOGRAPHS: LEWIS PAYNE, LINCOLN CONSPIRATOR (LEFT); HAND OF CHING SEE FOO, THE CHINESE STRANGLER SHOT IN FRISCO IN 1893 (RIGHT) FROM "POLICE PICTURES".