Real Life Rock (124 page)

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)
Jo-hansen 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 1966 “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.”

OCTOBER
18, 1999

1
Stan Ridgway,
Anatomy
(Ultra Modern/New West)
Coming out of the old L.A. punk scene with Wall of Voodoo, Ridgway has always peeked around corners as a kind of detective (“of the heart,” I think you're supposed to add). Here the liner art plays off the '50s moderne credits of the 1959 movie
Anatomy of a Murder
. But unlike other detectives, Ridgway has all the time in the world. He's not going anywhere; he doesn't solve anything; he just takes notes. The slowness in his singing is like the slowness in the way Dwight Yoakam's trucker moves in
Red Rock West
. He misses nothing and he keeps his mouth shut. That's a hard trick for a singer, but that's the feeling you get: in Ridgway's songs, not a word is spoken out loud. They all take place in his thoughts as he tries to figure out what he's seen. The music is muscular, but all restraint: you
don't raise your voice if you're not really using it. “Wrong, so wrong, we're wrong,” Ridgway says in “Mission Bell”; he winds the words around each other until the song they cast back to, a 20-year-old Elvis Presley's “I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone,” has risen up without ever announcing it's there at all.

2
Heather Duby,
Post to Wire
(Sub Pop)
Seattle 25-year-old with a deeper voice than you'd put to her Juliette Binoche haircut pursues interesting project: take outsider cool and early-'80s synth bumps and echoes into Sarah McLachlan territory. It's a seductive journey, even though she may never get back.