Real Life Rock (266 page)

8
Coen Brothers,
A Serious Man
(Focus Features)
The scene where the ancient rabbi quotes from the Jefferson Airplane's “Somebody to Love” as if the lyrics came straight from the Talmud is its own double take. But why does the song sound so terrible on the soundtrack?

9
Kay West,
People.com
(September 21, 2009)
“Before a packed house of 1,500 fans and a balcony filled with invited guests, Grammy-winning rock-folk singer Lucinda Williams said, ‘I do,' to her boyfriend and manager Tom Overby on Friday. The couple, who have been together for three years, tied the knot onstage at First Avenue, a music club in Minneapolis. The audience was in the dark about the pending nuptials until Williams, at the end of her performance, told the crowd that like country legend Hank Williams, she was going to share her happiness and her wedding with fans. Hank Williams married his second wife onstage in New Orleans.” Ken Tucker comments: “Williams also announced that she'd recently decided she wants to be referred to hereafter as ‘the daughter Hank never knew he had,' rather than as ‘the daughter of poet Miller Williams,' because ‘the whole poetry angle really isn't working out for me anymore now that folks have actually examined my lyrics.' ”

10
Josh Lieb,
I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President
(Razorbill)
This first novel, featuring twelve-year-old Oliver Watson, a fat Captain Beef-heart fan who rules the world but not his Omaha middle school, seems powered by the same malignant spirits that fester in Fletcher Hanks's completely unhinged comic strips of the late '30s and early '40s, lately collected by Fantagraphics as
You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation!
and
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!
This is funnier, because you can usually forget that the story would actually be worse if it you took it as Oliver's fantasy instead of his real life.

FEBRUARY
2010

1
Kelly Clarkson, “Already Gone” (from
All I Ever Wanted,
Sony BMG)
Sometimes you want singers to wear their hearts on their sleeves. Especially when they sound like Sarah McLachlan.

2
The Missing Person
,
written and directed by Noah Buschel (The 7th Floor)
Matching its center of gravity—the way that with every scowl directed outward at the
world Michael Shannon's private eye pulls more deeply into himself, as if he can make himself his own black hole—the movie itself is dark and muffled. It's hard to see and hard to hear. The plot is full of dead ends. But there is one moment of clarity, so full of unguarded warmth it seems to be from another film altogether, or another life: the detective and a woman who's picked him up in a bar dancing in a crummy Los Angeles hotel room as the radio plays the Jive Five's 1961 “My True Story.” “But we must cry, cry, cry,” Eugene Pitt sings, going up high, turning the swamp of the past into at least a hint of a future, and you think, yes, tell
this
story—while at the same time you're wondering, OK, a thirty-five-year old Jive Five fan, he's from New York, I can believe that, but how did he find a doo-wop station in California?

3
Punk shoes from Giovanna Zanella (Castello 5641, Calle Carminati, Venice)
Six-inch heels on black pumps with a Doc Martens sole and a red Mohawk that looks more like a weapon than a haircut coming out of the back.

4
Herbert Bayer,
Design for a Multimedia Building,
in “Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity” (Museum of Modern Art, New York, through January 25)
It's all Regina all the time: on one face of the rectangular box, a film projected from inside showing Ms. R. pulling her lips apart in a happy if brainless smile; on another, a huge gramophone horn protruding, broadcasting the new hit “Regina.” On the roof, a smoke hole emitting small black clouds that spell out . . . you guessed it. To the side of the horn, under an overhang, a man exiting, while the diagram helpfully indicates the In and Out. The whole looks like a valentine from Bayer to his girlfriend Regina, a modernist treehouse, or a De Stijl–influenced mock-up of an ad for a freestanding one-woman brothel. The playfulness and glee of the design perfectly catches the thrust of the exhibition as a whole: the story of adventurous, questing, ambitious people with their lives and a world to change before them, about to be crushed.

5
Jenny Diski,
The Sixties
(Picador)
If you liked
An Education
and were wondering what happened next . . .

6–7
Bob Dylan
and
Dion, United Palace Theater (New York, November 17, 2009)
The stage was pure House of Blue lights before Dylan came on: deep velvet background, upside-down electric candles ringing the top of the stage. In that setting “Beyond Here Lies Nothin,' ” from
Together Through Life
last spring, was a sultry vamp from a '40s supper club. Clearly the song was still opening itself up to Dylan; he sang with heart, as if looking to find how much it might tell him. “Dedicated to our troops,” Dion had said earlier, for “Abraham, Martin and John,” and the mood Dylan was creating was already too fine for “Masters of War”; instead he sang the mom-sends-son-off-to-glory-and-then-he-comes-back folk song “John Brown” in a hard-boiled voice, the Continental Op running down the murders in
Red Harvest
. Most striking of all was “Ballad of a Thin Man.” In Todd Haynes's film
I'm Not There,
Cate Blanchett, as Dylan in London in 1966, acts out the song standing alone behind a mic stand like a nightclub singer, no protection of a guitar between performer and audience. It was something Bob Dylan had never done, but that was precisely the posture he assumed now, as if the movie had taught him something new about his own song: how to make it more intimate, more direct, so that it was the audience, not the singer, that was left more naked, more defenseless.