Oct. 4, 1999
1. Fred Eaglesmith “50-Odd Dollars” (Razor & Tie)
Opening with a backwoods ballad drunk on Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” a stolid-looking man says he knows his country when he sees it, especially in old cars. Listen to “Georgia Overdrive” and try to convince yourself that for two minutes you don’t want to be in the driver’s seat more than you want anything else.
2. Jay Mohr as Peter Dragon in “Action” (Fox, Sept. 16)
Desperate, the producer runs to the house of his whore/script consultant, where he finds her with a client, who is down on his knees and cleaning her floor. Despite the bustier and black mask the guy is wearing, Dragon recognizes him as a Disney executive; “My name is Andri,” the man insists. Dragon looks him in the eye: “My name is Luka,” he says. “I live on the second floor …” You can’t tell if the vicious glee in his face comes from having a rival where he wants him, or finally finding a use for the stupid lines that have been bouncing around in his head for more than 10 years.
3. Michael Ochs “1000 Record Covers” (Taschen)
At 7 inches by 5 inches and 768 pages, this dense object is not a typical album-cover-art book, where designs supposedly fashioned according to vision or genre are presented for your admiration. Opening with Hen Gates and His Gaters’ 1957 “Let’s Go Dancing to Rock and Roll” (happy white kids in red convertible, balding dad-like person at the wheel) and closing with Oasis’ 1994 “Definitely Maybe,” this is stuff — the sort of stuff you’d find flipping LPs in a vinyl emporium, sleeves warped, images scratched or faded or gleaming with an eagerness hiding the truth that the people you’re looking at are probably dead. Not looking at all dead, however, is the dead girlfriend on the cover of J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers’ 1964 “Last Kiss.” There’s been a car crash, but while her eyes are closed, her hair isn’t even mussed. “Rumor has it that first printings of this cover actually had blood dripping from the girl’s face but [it] was airbrushed out,” Ochs says — but that would have only made the fact that the girl’s arm resting on her skirt is plainly held there by still-functioning muscles even more weird. The boyfriend, in perfectly pomaded ducktail and gray business suit, looks at the girl’s face as if he can’t figure out why she’s playing dead. But he’s supposed to be about to bestow “our last kiss” — to act out the most convincing moment in the song. In 1964 and this year, with Pearl Jam’s stoic, anguished, unteenage version, the words are rushed — “I kissed her our last kiss.” It’s as if the singer can barely stand to remember what happened, and it catches you up. The burr in Eddie Vedder’s voice, the labor you can feel from gestures you can’t see, makes the quickness of the moment even more dramatic, almost secretly dramatic, than it was 35 years ago: You feel the moment, but you don’t necessarily register it. The sour guitar note that closes the record says both you and the band know this dumb old song is a joke, but nobody told the singer, and that’s why it’s a hit. As for the cover of the album Pearl Jam’s “Last Kiss” is on — “No Boundaries: A Benefit for the Kosovar Refugees” (Epic) — it shows a young man bent over, his hands gripping his neck, his whole body in a posture of despair. He’s already learned about last kisses — the kind there’s no time to give.
4. Tori Amos “To Venus and Back” (Atlantic)
Or rather the Twilight Zone. She walks through a deserted mansion, and there are mirrors everywhere: Everywhere, she sees her own reflection. And then she sees it even when there aren’t any mirrors.
5. Gino Washington “Out of This World” (Norton)
Detroit, early ’60s, a time when only grunge and ridiculousness (the Flares’ “Foot Stomping — Part 1,” Jimmy Soul’s “If You Wanna Be Happy”) made the radio bearable. Now a black teenager with a white band steps up to the mike for his song “Out of This World.” There’s a dull little “All right, now” business, and then the music leaps and it never comes down. Mediocrity is all over this collection: Life is hidden in the female backing singers, who sound like they were recruited out of the audience; in the way Washington loves his girl so much he actually doesn’t care how he looks; in the twist of “Romeo”: “Juliet was my first love / She won’t be my last.” And I’m not even mentioning what makes the set priceless.
6. David Johansen on soundtrack to “Burnzy’s Last Call” (Ripe & Ready/Celsium)
Johansen hasn’t simply put ironic scare quotes around his music since he gave up trying to be a real rock ‘n’ roll hero with the New York Dolls 70 years ago — he’s put scare quotes around the scare quotes, to make it seem like he was, you know, playing a role right from the start. So now his songs might as well have titles like “”"”Hi There, Sucker!”"”" I don’t care, and you probably don’t either, but when you’re paying for something else it’s creepy.
7. Nokia cell-phone ring menu
Cell phones are personal car alarms, and there’s a problem when out of 35 rings — which include long, elliptical segments from “Ode to Joy,” “The William Tell Overture” and Mozart — the least annoying choices are “Fly” and “Mosquito.” I know it’s not in the public domain, but I’d pay an extra buck for a “Louie Louie” option.
8. Goran Visnjic as Dr. Luka Kovac on “ER” (NBC, Sept. 30)
Incredibly handsome new “sub-doctor” from somewhere in Eastern Europe spies pouty little girl sitting alone in ambulance. “My name is Luka,” he says endearingly — and that’s all. What a letdown. But I’d bet money he’ll get to the next line before the season is over — or someone will throw it in his face.
9. Daniel Wolff “Elvis in the Dark” ( Threepenny Review, Fall 1999)
As a review of Peter Guralnick’s “Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley,” this is an almost physical summoning of the singer himself to make the critic’s argument against the biographer: that the singer was no innocent, but engaged throughout his career in a complex, cryptic argument with whoever might be listening to him. Wolff makes his case by taking the reader through a long, dizzyingly vivid walk through a song everybody who might care enough to read him will know: “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” The faithless woman in the song becomes the audience, but the penitent who begins the performance is not the same person who finishes it: That man, Wolff says, is much closer to the singer in Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” asking Mr. Jones if he knows what is happening, because he knows he doesn’t. “‘Fate,’ Presley told us in an earlier section of the song,” Wolff says, “had him ‘playing in love,’ just as fate made him an icon for millions of adoring fans. But it isn’t fate, now. We’ve struck a bargain with the singer: a whole, complicated tangle we’re not particularly willing to take apart.”
10. Peter Boswell, Bruce Jenkins, Joan Rothfuss “2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II” (Walker Art Center/D.A.P.)
This landmark show of work by the San Francisco artist opens Oct. 9 at the Walker in Minneapolis — but the catalogue of the same name is no fun. Read what Boswell and Jenkins have to say about Conner’s pre- (and for that matter post-) MTV song film for Toni Basil’s “Breakaway” (by 1982 she was No. 1 on the charts with “Mickey”). Basil is dancing through uncountable thousands of Conner cuts, forward and backward, in costumes and naked, and the writers sound like they’re taking her blood pressure and measuring her lung capacity. But turn to the very back of the book, where an impish editor or designer has given Basil and Conner the last word: four double-page frame enlargements of a woman saying, in essence, “You know something’s happening, and I just might tell you what it is.”
1. The Pale Orchestra conducted by David Thomas
“Mirror Man Act 1: Jack & the General” (Thirsty Ear)
The centerpiece of the 1998 Diastodrome! Festival in London, with impresario/composer/performer Thomas moonlighting from his band Pere Ubu: a live recording of what could have been called “Route 66,” because the journey the singers and musicians take across an America they’re afraid of forgetting is that expansive. What’s missing is that old Bobby Troup-Rolling Stones glee as the miles burn up and L.A. gleams in the distance. This is all backroads and, with Bob Holman’s increasingly frantic monologues about how, no, no, no, don’t you understand, that’s not it — he’s talking about gas prices and small towns and theme parks — panic. Then the tone shifts. A character something like Steve Martin’s corrupt, dreaming traveling song-salesman in “Pennies from Heaven” emerges: Thomas, ready to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, or whatever bridge takes you from here to there. He convinces you that he has the right to do it, because he doesn’t take the bridge for granted and you do. Suddenly you want to leave the house and get in the car and see if you can find the same country this company is finding — leaving the disc on while you’re gone.
2. Pere Ubu “Apocalypse Now” (Thirsty Ear)
A show from 1991, with David Thomas doing a stand-up comedy routine between songs (“I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that one of our members onstage said to me right then, ‘That was actually good’”) and whispering the secrets of the universe into the ears of the audience as the songs themselves are played. With melodies rising out of the clattering sound like the modal themes of old folk songs, the effect is stirring, Cleveland punks more than 15 years down the road with no lessening of their conviction that they have been chosen to change the world, laughing at how little they’ve been changed by it.
3. Anonymous: altered billboard
(Gilman Street at San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, Calif., Sept. 
A pair of red dice, one with a skull, and this message, in clean Times letters: “Just because you survived ______ doesn’t mean your children will.” The original word, still barely showing, was “drugs”; in the exact same typeface, it has been replaced by “Bush.”
4.Jonathan Lethem “Motherless Brooklyn” (Doubleday)
A detective story where the hero’s Tourette’s Syndrome (unending waterfalls of tics, from the man’s scrambled verbal outbursts to his fascinating need to straighten people’s clothing) shapes the tale — allowing a rhythm in which the frenetic almost hides the islands of quiet where thinking gets done. Tourette’s is a thing in itself here, a kind of invisible twin; thus Lethem (“Gun, With Occasional Music,” “Girl in Landscape,” “As She Climbed Across the Table”) writes in a double language, which opens up the mystery genre to the point that it’s almost erased. As the hero tries to keep himself awake for an all-night stakeout, he recognizes “insomnia [as] a variant of Tourette’s — the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist too, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance — as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.” His favorite song: Prince, “Kiss.”
5. Quickspace “Precious Falling” (Hidden Agenda/Parasol)
U.K. drone band derived from th faith healers. (Thee Headcoats won their “e” in a poker game, I think they said.) Not as demented as that great combo (their 1993 “Imaginary Friend” remains the most blithelessly extreme music of the decade), but with a neat trick: fast drone. Squealing and clicking in “Hadid,” they appear as naked people in a field regressing as you listen: regressing not to a pre-verbal childhood but to a previous species.
6. James Lee Burke
“Sunset Limited” (Island/Dell paperback)
“St. Peters Cemetery in ten minutes,” says a witness to cop Dave Robicheaux. “How will I recognize you?” “I’m the one that’s not dead.” Don’t let your mouth write checks your ass can’t cash, Robicheaux should say — but he doesn’t use profanity. He won’t even tolerate it unless it comes out of the mouth of his partner, Helen Soileau. (“I met Miss Pisspot of 1962 at the jail this morning,” she says of an FBI agent.) It’s not that he gives her a break because she’s a lesbian; somewhere in the literary archetype Leslie Fiedler set out in 1948 in “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” she’s playing Jim to Robicheaux’s Huck.
7. Glad bags commercial (A&E, Sept. 9)
A happy female gospel version of Mississippi bluesman Skip James’ brittle, miserabilist 1931 “I’m So Glad” (famously redone in 1967 by Cream), and a travesty: not because it’s being used to sell plastic bags, but because of the suggestion that it was originally used to sell God.
8. Vanity Fair/Neutrogena party at the Telluride Film Festival (Sept. 3)
The Neutrogena banner at the Skyline Guest Ranch was fairly modest, but against a backdrop of the Colorado Rockies, which were throwing up Matterhorns everywhere you looked, a big poster of the September Vanity Fair was like litter. It was the Bruce Weber shot of wistful, windblown, ridiculously blond Carolyn Bessette Kennedy — a face that, the setting revealed, was unmistakably slipping into camp, into that realm of the undead where “The Private Princess,” as the magazine named its cover girl, had already joined not Princess Di but “America’s people’s princess” — as Patsy Ramsey calls her late daughter, JonBenet.
9. Associated Press, “Music, the Universal Language,” Sept. 13
“After a week of chaos and terror in East Timor, Indonesia’s powerful military boss sang ‘Feelings’ yesterday to show why he can’t walk away from the independence-minded province.
“To cheers from retired military officers at a party, Defense Minister Gen. Wiranto dedicated the song to foreign journalists: ‘I hope you have the same feelings, like me, for East Timor.’
“His eyebrows arched in restrained emotion, Wiranto held the microphone in both hands and stood stiffly in a yellow batik shirt and crooned as a band played the l975 hit popularized by Paul Williams:
“‘Feelings, nothing more than feelings …’”
I can’t go on. This is just too sick. You always knew the song was rotten, but evil?
10. Fastbacks
“The Day That Didn’t Exist” (Spinart)
It’s scary that Seattle’s Fastbacks formed 20 years ago, that except for the drum spot the lineup has never changed, that they’ve never made it, that their music has never gotten better, only utterly failed to exhaust itself. Guitarist Kurt Bloch writes songs about the everyday that somehow contain the state of the union; bassist Kim Warnick sings them in a punk voice that’s flat until you hear it as a form of address, as real talk; guitarist Lulu Gargulio keeps the other two honest. Here, one of the days that didn’t exist can be found on “I Was Stolen”: “We tried to save the world last fall,” Warnick says in her high, girlish warble, as if nothing could be more obvious; when she follows with “You remember that we didn’t save anything at all,” the story seems to end before it’s had a chance to begin. But the story goes on, it gets interesting, full of fury and good works, and by the time the story is over you’re no longer convinced these people left the world as they found it — not 20 years ago, not last fall.
Sept. 7, 1999
1. The Best News of the Week: Denver Post, Aug. 22
“Universal Records has confirmed that Spin Doctors lead singer Chris Barron ['Little Miss Can't Be Wrong' etc.] has been diagnosed with a rare paralysis of his vocal cords. Barron is meeting with doctors who have indicated that he may never regain the full use of his voice. He now cannot speak above a whisper. All promotional activities for the band’s new CD, ‘Here Comes the Bride,’ are on hold.”
2. Trailer Bride “Whine de Lune” (Bloodshot)
A small cowboy combo that plays as if it’s not expecting more than the 10 people in the audience to show up, fronted by a woman who sings like she’s wondering who she has to fuck to get out of going through everything twice. As if anybody knows.
3. Alison Krauss “Forget About It” (Rounder)
For the title song, built around the way they say it and mean it not in mob-movie New York but in the rest of the country — not far from the way Bob Dylan said “Don’t think twice,” a whole lost world in three words. As always with Krauss, whose voice has the unsatisfiable yearning of her own bluegrass fiddle — unsatisfiable because the sound remembers a land of milk and honey — she needs hills and valleys in the melody to come to life, to pull away from the music and the listener, to get lost, then to come back just far enough to pull your string: to pull it right out of you. Songs on an even plain defeat her every time.
4. Marine Research “Sounds from the Gulf Stream” (K) and “Parallel Horizontal”/”Angel in the Snow”/”I Confess” (K single)
Moving from Talulah Gosh to Heavenly to her new five-piece, Amelia Fletcher of Oxford, England, has lost a step each time. The fatigue now drawing her voice back still doesn’t hide what makes that voice, all sweetness and worry, one of a kind.
5. Aspen Festival Orchestra, Kyoko Takezawa, soloist Elgar’s “Violin Concerto in B Minor” (Aspen Music Festival, Aug. 15)
In “Allegro” — deliriously romantic and ominous — the whole first movement seemed to resolve itself into chase, run. The piece was the apparent source of all the high-class, high-gloss film noir music of the ’40s (“Gilda,” “The Lady from Shanghai,” “Double Indemnity,” any production that could afford a real score) — so much so that the music, played now, isn’t merely familiar, it’s fabulously generic. You cannot attach, say, a certain gesture by Rita Hayworth or Orson Welles or Barbara Stanwyck to a given lift in the music, a particular door opening into a darkened room to a threatening slide on Takezawa’s special “Hammer” Strat — I mean, Strad, her 1707 “Hammer” Stradivarius. But moment to moment the piece, read back on the films that plundered it, gives up near-images that stop the soundtracks as they play in your head. The plot rushes forward, breaking over the hesitations of the actors, smearing all of them into one.
6. Robert McNamara at Elgar’s “Violin Concerto in B Minor”
“The Architect of the Vietnam War” — or, if we give that honor to McGeorge Bundy, “The Contractor.” “Do you remember Mr. McNamara?” said the woman next to me, who’d come in with McNamara, who was sitting next to her. “He’s had such a hard time lately, what with all the criticism,” she said, referring to the reception given Kennedy/Johnson Secretary of Defense’s recent I-Knew-It-Was-Folly-and-I-Wish-I’d-Mentioned-It-at-the-Time books. (“McNamara made a ‘bad guess’/ ‘Bad Guess’ chorused the Reporters?/ Yes, no more than a Bad Guess, in 1962/ ’8000 American Troops handle the/ Situation’,” Allen Ginsberg wrote in his great Vietnam poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra”: “Your magic errandboy’s/ Just made a bad guess again/ that’s lasted a whole decade.”) Now he looked old, fastidious, resolute: like an executioner-monk.
7. Howard Hampton e-mail report (Aug. 13)
“Wisecrack from the finale of ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000,’ a few minutes into ‘Danger: Diabolik,’ swinging ’60s Italian-cum-Modesty Blaise send-up/rip-off, as a bunch of leather-boy motorcycle cops swarm by: ‘If Hitler had won the war and hired Stu Sutcliffe as a fashion designer.’ Besides summing up the dream life of ‘Scorpio Rising,’ that line seems to have bottomless pop resonance, even if there are only six people in the world who got it, and I’m not even sure I’m one of them.”
8. Bob Dylan “Highlands,” Madison Square Garden, July 27 (www. bobdylan.com)
An audience tape of just the second performance of the song since it appeared at nearly 17 minutes on the 1997 “Time Out of Mind.” In this 10-minute version the tone shifts from the original bitter weariness to something much sharper: sly, sinister, the sound of a scary old man whispering from a doorway. He could be a prophet; he could be trying to sell you dope. Only one way to find out.
9. David Lynch, director “The Straight Story” (Disney)
In a bar where they’re the only patrons, two old men who have just met have told their awful stories of fighting Nazis in the Second World War — stories of what they saw, what they did, stories about their own guilt. Jo Stafford’s “Happy Times” plays in the air; the young bartender stands in the half-light, trying to fade into the woodwork, trying not to hear, not to invade the privacy of the men speaking in this public place, shamed by his own youth.
10. David Bohrer/Los Angeles Times news photo (Aug. 10)
The picture was carried in countless papers across the country: “Children from a Jewish Center in Los Angeles were escorted to safe ground yesterday by police officers after a gunman opened fire at the center,” in the New York Times’ caption. The shot was from above, with an officer in the middle of a line of 10 children, all holding hands; the curve in the line made it seem as if the police and the children were dancing. It was a rare instance of true dija vu. Framed by the photographer and then chosen by editors, by intent or by a common, silent memory, the shot was a match for the famous image from the end of Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 “The Seventh Seal”: men and women, holding hands, dancing off a hill, all led by Death.
August 23, 1999
1. Atmosphere “The Abusing of the Rib,” on “Stuck on AM — Live Performances on 770 Radio K” (No Alternative/www.radiok.org)
Drifting out of a studio at the University of Minnesota is a modest, unsettling, finally disturbing question: “What do you love?” The questioner is the earnest, smooth-voiced Slug, of the Minneapolis hip-hop collective Rhyme Sayers; off to the side is the gravelly, much older-sounding voice of Eyedea, a high school student. A piano runs a repeating, regretful line in the background, regretting that all questions were settled before the questioner arrived, but he doesn’t buy it. Life has put him on the spot; he means to put you there, too. Still, he makes a beautiful reverie, and you can fall into it and forget yourself, until the very end. Somehow gathering up all the menace of Bo Diddley’s “Who do you love” (God help you if it isn’t him) and none of the flash, Slug’s “What do you love?” becomes the hardest question he can ask. Now so much is at stake you can imagine that you or anyone might mumble, stammer, and then admit it: “Nothing.”
2. “lunapark 0, 10″ (Sub Rosa/www.subrosa.net)
Beginning with a ghostly, unbearably romantic minute from Apollinaire in 1912, then thunderbolts from Mayakovski in 1914 and 1920, avant-garde poets read the century, which seems to have finished prematurely; by about 1960 they’re mostly talking about themselves.
3. Ad for “Notting Hill” (your daily newspaper)
Snuggled next to Julia Roberts’, Hugh Grant’s face takes you right back to the silent era, when leading men like Wallace Reid (king of the racing picture — “The Roaring Road,” “Double Speed” — before he became addicted to morphine) burst from their posters in unthreateningly fruity grins, mugs dripping with lipstick, rouge and the eyeliner that with Grant makes his eyes look like they were cut out of a magazine and pasted on. That’s right, he’s not human. He’s not supposed to be.
4. Dusty Springfield “I Only Want to Be with You” (HBO, 9:30 p.m Sundays)
I have no idea why Springfield’s 35-year-old fluffy first hit is so thrilling as the kickoff to “Arli$$,” spreading warmth and delight over the montage of Robert Wuhl’s sports agent suffering Bill Bradley’s no-look hoop, Jesse Ventura’s choke hold, Katerina Witt’s kiss. Maybe it was just a perfect record; maybe the release is all in the editing.
5/6. Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band “Kandy Korn” on “Grow Fins
–rarities [1965-1982]” (Revenant) and “The Mirror Man Sessions” (Buddah)
An L.A. band’s guitar piece, live from 1968, from the studio the year before, in both cases arriving from a future still ahead of us, a future momentarily circling back to look for a spot in Mississippi in 1930, but missing.
7. Nik Cohn “Yes We Have No — Adventures in the Other England” (Knopf, 326 pages, $22)
In this map of secret cultures hidden in plain sight — anarchistic and seeking cultures made by solitaries (a man requesting official recognition as the antichrist; Johnny Edge, now an old West Indian London hipster, in 1962 the Christine Keeler boyfriend who “detonated the whole Profumo affair, blew Harold MacMillan out of office, and so gave the Anglo club a whack from which it never quite recovered”) and groups (ravers, Odin worshippers, Elvis worshippers, travelers, Rastas, squatters, every form of contemporary heretic) — the novelist and pop chronicler has rewritten “The Pursuit of the Millennium — Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages,” Norman Cohn’s soul-shaking 1957 study of medieval heretics. “The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one,” Norman Cohn wrote, “and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious”: what we call the present is a bridge over an ancient pit, a bridge built out of wishful thinking. Nik Cohn is more sanguine, but he is more than four decades farther from Hitler than his father was.
8. Old Time Relijun “Uterus and Fire” (K)
A punk trio that believes in the past — and that running headlong down a path naked will get you somewhere you want to be. “Jail” echoes both the thrash Descendents of Redondo Beach and Chicago bluesman Magic Sam: desperate, a confession, weird moments of reflection in the noise. “I have a lot of time on my hands,” the singer tells you. “I got a lot of good books to read.”
9. Magnetic Fields “69 Love Songs,” Vols. 1-3 (Merge)
Stephin Merritt of this and other bands is running this show — writing all the songs, singing most of them in his cloying, sub-Morrissey voice, listing 90 instruments he plays, including not merely “jug” but “Paul Revere jug,” which is to say that the preciousness of the project is all too apparent. (The voice is cloying on purpose, you fool.) But there’s something intriguingly tentative and random about the words and the music, in the stupid puns and often slow, counted cadences. Just when you’re ready to give up, a different singer will come in like someone on the street waving at the floats in a passing parade. You might find the radiant Shirley Simms hammering an old country vocal to a Bo Diddley beat on “I’m Sorry I Love You” (“It’s a phase I’m going through”– you ought to hear that on “Sex and the City” before the season is out) or Claudia Gonson on “Yeah! Oh Yeah!” — though the exclamation points are strictly postmodernist. A rough version of the guitar line from the Feelies’ “Raised Eyebrows” — itself the inheritor of every great guitar melody from “Wild Weekend” to “Layla” — kicks off a very up-to-date version of Paul and Paula’s horrid 1963 “First Quarrel.” Gonson is flagellating herself over the possibility that her marriage has always been a joke no one bothered to tell her: “Did you dread every phone call, could you not stand me from the start?” “Yeah, oh yeaaaaaaah,” Merritt moans in languid ecstasy. It’s clear this is how the husband gets off; for the wife you can’t tell, but I doubt it.
10. “The Bad Seed” with Patty McCormack (Castro Theater, San Francisco, July 16)
In 1956 a 10-year-old McCormack played an 8-year-old serial killer in blond pigtails named Rhoda; the role was so perverse and her performance so fierce she burned up a whole career in advance. This night, with McCormack appearing after a screening of the film, the theater was packed with raucous gay men, but once the movie started the hooting part of the crowd was often shushed by those who didn’t want to miss a word.
McCormack came out to be interviewed by Village Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto. Instead of the female female-impersonator you often get with half-forgotten mini-legends, she sat down as a fast, cool, completely alive woman in her 50s. She looked like a cross between Carol Lynley and Debbie Harry; Musto couldn’t keep up with her. On her Catholic mother refusing to let her do the 1959 shocker “Blue Denim”: “[At 14] I thought about that and understood: I was allowed to kill people as long as I didn’t sleep with them.” (Lynley ended up getting pregnant and almost having an abortion instead.) Patty’s little Rhoda dispatched whoever got in her way with whatever was handy — fire, blunt instruments, a staircase; the story’s conceit was that it was all in the genes, because her grandmother was a homicidal maniac. “Did you play Rhoda as pure evil, or as cursed?” Musto asked. “I played her as right,” McCormack said without a smile, and nobody made a sound.
August 7, 1999
1. Ga Va “Scarred for Life,” on “Slapp Happy” (V2)
Inside an empty Middle European cabaret Dagmar Krause is singing. She’s seen the whole of the century. She’s not opening the door.
2. She Mob “Cancel the Wedding” (Spinster Playtime Records, P.O. Box 170694, San Francisco, CA 94117)
As with such modest, cutting 1980s U.K. punk combos as Delta 5, women singing like people having real conversations. Increasingly funny, vehement, distracted conversations. For example, “Why did I become a teacher? Why did I become a teacher?” For all the right reasons, but –
3. James Marsh, director “Wisconsin Death Trip” (BBC Arena/Cinemax)
In 1973 historian Michael Lesy, working from an 1890s archive left by the town photographer of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, published a book of this name. It was a study of morbidity replacing vitality in the conduct of everyday life, a chronicle of seven plagues — childhood epidemics, murder, suicide, insanity, drought, tramp armies and economic ruin — and the story of how the Depression of the 1890s all but dissolved the assumption that is the bedrock of ordinary affairs: that tomorrow will be like today. Using unbearably intense frame-enlargements of family pictures, Lesy focused on disassociation in eyes, on horror around mouths. The time seemed very far away.
In James Marsh’s poetically cruel film — rumored to be set for its world premiere over Labor Day weekend at the Telluride Film Festival, which never announces its program in advance — the distance of then from now seems our conceit, and Marsh collapses it. Using a steely, low-contrast black and white for the 1890s, color for underplayed footage of Black River Falls in the 1990s, and working almost without faces, re-enacting incidents Lesy unearthed — the if-I-can’t-have-you-nobody-can killings that in our newspapers seem like weather reports and here appear as parables scripted by Jim Thompson, or a 125-year-old Wisconsin Susan Smith, peacefully waiting by the water after drowning her children — Marsh leaves only the quiet as an anomaly; salvation through vengeance seems not part of a time but part of the land.
Marsh uses very little music, and what he does use is extraordinary: At one point bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See that My Grave Is Kept Clean” from 1928, and, throughout, a variation of DJ Shadow’s “Stem/Long Stem,” the highlight of his epochal 1996 “Endtroducing …” Jefferson’s profound song is an argument with death; the singer surrenders, but as a guitarist the same man backs away, circles around, almost dances, the arcs of sound young, supple, a dare. Shadow’s piece — a purloined note layered until the theme constructed from it seems not made but found, always present, a reminder of something you just can’t catch — is calming, comforting. But in the reassurance of the repetition there is a suggestion of no way out, and before long the music is sinister before it is anything else. It’s always struck me as film noir — not film noir music, but a whole, generic film in the music itself — and now it is, with film noir backdated 50 years from the ’40s, and set in a small town in the Midwest.
4. Mark Pellington, director “Arlington Road” (Sony Pictures)
For the scene where Jeff Bridges’ Professor of Urban Terrorism stumbles into his terrorist neighbors’ backyard cookout — bizarre not just because he doesn’t even notice the Ruby Ridge Body Snatcher who murdered his FBI agent wife, or because the gathering is set up to match the closing ghoul-fest in “Rosemary’s Baby,” but for the music that’s playing. “Yes, after a hard day of smashing the state, we like to get down with the cool ’70s sound of KC and the Sunshine Band — don’t you?”
5. Bonnie “Prince” Billie “i see a darkness” (Palace)
Lots of people go back to the hills and say they’ve seen a darkness; Will Oldham of Louisville, who usually records as Palace, just asks you to trust him. He sings a lullaby that takes you to the edge of sleep, where you realize the music is saying you might not wake up. “Nomadic Reverie” is just that — until terrible voices begin to echo from the hills Oldham keeps in his back pocket. “Woo-woo, woo-woo” — it’s the sound Jeff Bridges can’t get out of his throat.
6. Jonathan Van Meter: “The Tyranny of the Hit Single: What’s a Record Exec to Do with Aimee Mann?” New York Times Magazine, July 11
Still whining after all these years, the former ‘Til Tuesday voice continues her Harold Stassen act: She had a hit in 1985. Given that her principal talent is for converting self-deprecation into self-celebration, with luck and a lot of critical support she could become the next Lucinda Williams.
7. Kristin Hersh “Sky Motel” (4 AD)
The former Throwing Muses singer presses on as well. Wan ballads in a thin voice, Appalachian standards, her own tunes, it all comes out the same: air conditioning.
8. Tentacles “Louie Louie Got Married” (K 7′ single)
He’d be 43, but the people at the wedding don’t sound a day over 17.
9. ELVIS at UCSF Medical Center (Nuclear Medicine, basement, 505 Parnassus, San Francisco)
A dirty white contraption in the middle of a corridor, 4 feet high, 3 feet wide — with a gorgeous black-and-white glossy of Elvis from “Loving You” laminated on the front. On the back is an Elvis tableau that, it turns out, changes with the holidays: On March 15 he’s a leprechaun — why not Julius Caesar? — for St. Patrick’s Day, an Easter bunny the next week. Signs on machine: “DO NOT BRING ELVIS INSIDE (CUDA) EVEN IF NOT WORKING” and “NO LAB SPECIMENS IN ELVIS.” Two yellow headlights on the front look like eyes.
A technician comes up and starts to press buttons. “What’s this?” he’s asked. “It’s a robot,” he starts to explain, when a doctor passing by indignantly corrects him: “It’s Elvis!” It turns out to be an autonomous refrigerated drug-delivery apparatus: i.e., it’s full of drugs. You program it, it navigates the hallways to its destination. The eyes register obstacles; bumpers around the bottom protect the walls when the eyes don’t work. You don’t have to pay it and it doesn’t get benefits.
ELVIS (“Some kind of acronym,” a pharmacist says. “Evasion/Sensory … I don’t know where the ‘L’ is”) took off down the corridor, eyes blinking. “Be careful he doesn’t hit you,” the pharmacist said to a woman in the hall. “He’s supposed to know better,” she said. “Elvis wouldn’t hit a woman.” It just missed a wall, then smoothly turned a corner and disappeared.
10. Department of Yeah, Right, Death Trip Division, Midwestern Subsection San Francisco Chronicle, July 27
“Heat advisories were posted yesterday from Kansas eastward through the Ohio Valley and over parts of the Southeast. Temperatures throughout the region hit the 90s and reached triple digits with the heat index.
“The weather was blamed on eight deaths in Cincinnati over the weekend, 11 deaths in Illinois in the past week and five in Missouri.”
much in the way that Elvis Presley’s own gold Cadillac was put on tour in the late 1950s, when Elvis himself was off serving in the Army in West Germany, there’s an art exhibition called “Elvis + Marilyn: 2 x Immortal” that’s been traveling through the U.S. the past couple of years. Oddly, rather than reaching an apotheosis in Memphis on Aug. 16, 1997, at the wake-cum-fair soon to convulse the town on the 20th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death (if truth be told, Marilyn is just along for the ride), the show recently closed in Honolulu — after turning up in Boston, Houston, Charlotte, N.C., Cleveland, New York, Tulsa, Okla., Columbus, Ohio, Nashville, Tenn., and San Jose, Calif. Nevertheless, “Elvis + Marilyn” says as much about the presence of the icon and the disappearance of the human being as anyone needs to hear.
“Elvis + Marilyn” is housed in museums, not amusement parks or county fairs, but it’s no less vulgar for that — vulgar in the sense of exploitative, morally cheap and emotionally false. Here the bad art puts a film of corruption over the good. A lot of the art looks like bad advertising, and as if it’s the artist who’s being advertised: As if playing around with a blank cultural symbol — or making it more blank, blanking it out in favor of the self-presentation of the artist over the muteness of the symbol — might be a good career move.
There’s a deep lack of empathy on the part of many of the artists here toward their putative subjects. The primary artists in question — Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe — are quickly disembodied and dehumanized. Whatever sense of them you might have as real people, as failed and conflicted individuals who once did remarkable things, seems to disappear as soon as you enter the museum galleries. Your own emotional responsiveness — what any work of art needs in order to be completed, to come to life — is frozen. The result is that not only do the artworks — paintings, photo montages, mass media appropriations, assemblages, constructions, murals — seem fake, as if they were produced not out of desire but on commission, so do the self-inventions of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe.
In this house of the dead, one piece stopped me cold, and for a long time: Joanne Stephens’ 1991 “Homage to Elvis.” On top of a gilded, full-sized television set, she has built the most Byzantine altar, it too all in gold and studded with jewels. Dressed in the raiment of an Arabian caliph, a young Elvis doll holds a guitar and a microphone; cherubim surround him. Doves perch over praying hands reaching toward the deity; a halo of gold 45s is topped by a star. The assemblage is beautiful, absurd, entrancing, its detail obsessive, its received, third-hand, automatic conception undeniable. In other words, the work is too obsessive to be fake and too received to be real; it is absolutely contradictory and it makes no sense. That’s what draws you in: Why would anyone work so long and hard, so lovingly and so carefully, on a parody?
Because, the work answers, this is not a parody, this is a setting. In Stephens’ piece, the altar contextualizes the heart of the work just as the exhibit as a whole contextualizes her piece, by providing a phony palace for a moment of life. It’s the TV set on which the altar rests that holds the drama.
Inside the screen, surrounded by wisps of white gossamer floss, is a diorama, in black and white, but mostly dulled brown. At its center is an image so small and colorless you can barely make it out: a cardboard cutout of the famous photo of Elvis in 1955 or ’56, dressed in the zoot-suit drapes of Memphis’ Beale Street, his body loosed, his head thrown back in ecstasy and abandon. His stage is dirt, his proscenium arch the gaping door of a barn and his audience — gathered at a respectful distance — is a rapt crowd of cows, pigs and chickens. The scene is uncanny in its stillness, without a hint of coyness or condescension; you get the feeling that something extraordinary is taking place in this silent concert. You lean forward, as if you could go through the screen, to take part.
There is the sense that this impossible concert actually happened — but only once. Or, perhaps, a thousand times, in Elvis’ own imagination, before he could allow himself to imagine a real audience, made up of human beings who might judge him. Still, as you look at the little cardboard figure, you can almost see him lifting off the ground and taking flight. You notice the altar first, look at it carefully, taken by its heedless elaboration, its visual noise, its shameless luxuria; after attending the concert taking place below the altar, you cannot return to the altar without a sense of revulsion, without wanting to run.
The problem is, both the barnyard singer and the singing potentate are equally real; you cannot gainsay one with the other. Today, you can’t have one without the other.
Come Aug. 16, facsimiles of the altar Elvis will be all over the television, your television, as tapes from Memphis showing crowds of caped and jumpsuited Vegas-era Elvises unwind across the globe. Watching, you might hear yourself saying, “My God! Those lucky cows! What wouldn’t I give to have been one, to have been there in the barnyard!” But as Stephens imagined it and made it, the barnyard is a true aesthetic place, and you can get there by listening to the rehearsal version of “That’s All Right” collected on “Elvis Presley Platinum: A Life In Music,” the four-CD set RCA has issued to mark the 20th anniversary of the death of the barnyard singer, to mark the 20th year of the reign of the angelic king.
Here you are listening to a first take of what would become Presley’s first single for Sun Records, before he had any audience at all. You are listening to music that, had things turned out as they could have, might never have led to a finished record, might never have been released in any form, might never have been heard. You are listening to the first chapter of a story that might never have been told. Here you are in the barnyard, a cow, a pig, a chicken as you choose, and your reaction, now, even as you live in a world changed by this story as it was told, as it was acted out, might be the same as any barnyard creature watching the skinny boy with the cool clothes dance in the dirt: “Who is this guy? What in the world does he think he’s doing?”
