Real Life Rock (318 page)

9
Conference at Night
(2012), directed by Valérie Mréjen, in “Hopper Drawing: A Painter's Process,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (March 13–June 20)
The late '40s in the United States were a kind of great exhaling: after holding its breath through sixteen years of depression and war, around 1948 the country finally began to breathe again. A new excitement, a sense of release; blasphemy, and possibility changed the way people walked and talked. It came out over the next years as “Howl,”
On the Road
, the music that would take the name “The Birth of the Cool,”
A Streetcar Named Desire
, Jackson Pollock's Paleolithic splatter paintings,
In a Lonely Place
. But there was also a great letdown, as the country returned to ordinary life, without the hero stories of the war or the horror stories of the Depression, and the letdown is what Hopper painted in 1949 in
Conference at Night
—or it's what, more than six decades later, a French director and three French actors saw in the painting, and caught in a four-minute-and-fifty-four-second film. After all the great adventures, three people talk dispiritedly, but insistently, as if they are trying to convince themselves that something actually depends on them doing something one way as opposed to another way, or doing it at all as opposed to not doing it at all, and about the maintenance strategies, memos, meetings, and accumulation of files, all to be dealt with tomorrow, that will be needed to keep the conversation going. It's
Office Space
, generations away, in the flick of an eyelash.

10
Bob Dylan in the '80s: Volume One: A Tribute to '80s Dylan
(ATO)
Aren't tribute albums terrible? Sure. But they're not usually a threat.

Thanks as always to Barbara
Shelley and Andrew Keir

SEPTEMBER
2014

1
Lana Del Rey,
Ultraviolence
(Polydor/Interscope)
The best that could happen to this whirlpool of an album—freezing up only with its last number, “The Other
Woman,” a torch song written by Jessie Mae Robinson and a hit for Sarah Vaughan in 1955, which is structured, which is obvious, and which compared to everything else here sounds artificial and fake—is for it to sell its requisite five million copies and then be completely forgotten. Erased from public memory, so that generations from now, when someone opens a closet and finds—along with the Lana Del Rey hologram projector and the Lana Del Rey Barbie—a CD and an old box to play it on, that person will wonder what it is, and hear it at least as clearly as anyone living now, but in a world where our frame of reference is completely gone. Everything I've read about this record is about its words, literal-minded, Philistine readings that assume that the
I
in any song is a real person, and the same real person:
What is Lana Del Rey telling us about herself?
But no good song—no good creative work of any kind—is literal. Even if the artist starts out thinking she knows exactly what she means to say, the rich text, as I once read, resists not only the reader but the writer as well, and intent vanishes into the swirl of the songs. The music is gorgeous, and uncanny—words matter only when they play a musical role. You can hear the singer fall in love with the staircase she makes out of the repetition of “I fucked my way up to the top . . . fucked my way up to the top”—it's not a confession; it's a rhythm. Again and again, a chord comes down, breaks like a wave, flows back, and you keep listening for that moment to repeat itself, but it never quite does. Lana Del Rey knows how to wait out a song, and this album may know how to wait out its time.

2
Cyndi Lauper,
She's So Unusual: A 30th Anniversary Celebration
(Portrait/Epic/Legacy)
The first disc is the original album, with the four top-ten hits. The second is out-takes, and the first of them, an “early guitar demo” of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” opens back into a career that might never have happened. The recording is stunning—and also dark, doom-struck, absolutely negative, frantic, panicky, the girl all dressed up to have fun taking one last look in the mirror and reeling from what she sees.

3
Cabaret
,
directed by Sam Mendes, the Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54, New York (June 13)
Cecily Marcus reports from New York: “At the end, Nazism has seeped in everywhere. Alan Cumming's Emcee comes back to center stage, wearing the same black leather trench coat that started the show. He starts undoing the buttons, sort of suggestively, but not really. If you saw the movie, you expect him to be just another Nazi. But in a move that is both a total shock and suddenly makes absolute sense, the Emcee is wasted, standing there dressed in concentration camp pajamas with a yellow star and a pink triangle. It's not a costume; it's not entertaining. It's horrifying and real and makes you wonder why you never understood this story before, no matter how many times you have heard it.”

4
Amanda Petrusich,
Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records
(Scribner)
Mostly focusing on discs from the 1920s and '30s on the Paramount label, this book is so alive to its subject, to the grail of the music, that it pulls the reader through the author's speculations about Collector's Neurosis or her scuba-dive into the mud of the Milwaukee River in search of records discarded there the better part of a century ago. “But the more I thought about why” collectors gave up their lives to the rare, the arcane, the unfindable, Petrusich writes, “the less I cared,” and that's the key to her sensibility: she wants to get inside the music she's writing about, and she does. Her best writing is about listening, rooted in her “base, possibly shameful desire to hear someone so overcome by emotion that they could no longer maintain any guise of dignity or restraint,” and as she listens the mask drops from her face as well: “I wanted to crack it into bits and use them as bones,” she says of Mississippi John Hurt's 1928 “Big Leg Blues”—you don't know if she means the shellac or the song. She quotes James Weldon Johnson's “O Black and Unknown Bards” to catch the breath of Geeshie
Wiley's 1930 “Last Kind Words Blues”: “How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?” Charley Patton's sound translates itself into a single image: “Some goon waiting outside.” She watches the collector Joe Bussard as he pulls a record from his shelves and puts it on his turntable, listening to him listen, to the way as the record spins he can't hold still: “At times it was as if he could not physically stand how beautiful music was.” Petrusich will make you desperate not only to hear the records she's writing about—though only single copies of the actual discs may survive, you can hear everything on YouTube—but to feel the way they make her feel, to feel the mask dissolve on your own face.

5
Dave Hickey,
Pirates and Farmers
(Ridinghouse)
In a world divided between pirates and farmers, Hickey makes sure you know what he is—but any posturing dissolves when he homes in on Jackson Pollock's
Autumn Rhythm
as a “disobedient object” or pulls the plug on the Hunter Thompson cult (“I found myself, for the first time, feeling sympathy for Johnny Depp”). There's a lot of re-reading in this collection of pieces from 1999 to the present, and it explodes when Hickey goes back to Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
. It's 2007, the book's fiftieth anniversary, and Hickey tells you he read it exactly fifty years before, “when I was in my early teens”; that he bought it “off the rack, in hardcover, because we were a transient family and the title,
On the Road
, seemed to promise some insight into that peculiar gift and affliction”—he wasn't falling for any best-seller hype, no way. OK, cool. But his account of reading it again twenty years later, after finding himself embarrassed by re-reading Sartre or Hesse or Rilke, isn't cool: “It was like being hit by a truck. It was so much better than I ever would have imagined that I wanted to cry.” It's that high-art swoon, so you aren't ready for him to argue that the book's closest cultural kin might be
This Is Spinal Tap
: “They both get sadder every time. . . . With each subsequent experience the truth gets tougher; there is more rage in the lunacy and outrageousness. The folly of vanity and demented hope becomes more excruciating.” But that's not all that lasts. “No story in Dickens or Kerouac is so abject that you do not feel the joy of the author who is writing it,” Hickey says, and that holds true for him, too.