Real Life Rock (147 page)

6
“The Life Casts of Cynthia Plaster Caster: 1968–2000,” Thread Waxing Space, New York City (through July 29)
New York Eye reports: “Though I've never liked the word ‘groupie' and am not inclined to embrace my inner slut, I am a rock 'n' roll girl and it's not as if I don't appreciate wanting to sleep with rock stars. But up until a couple of weeks ago, I was only vaguely aware that there had been a Cynthia Plaster Caster—I didn't know her name or even if she was fact or fancy—so I was delighted to discover that not only is she real, so were her casts, and I could go see them. It seemed like a cause for celebration, that in the midst of ubiquitous
Behind the Music
marathons, reissues, box sets, exposés, redolent praise and idealized recapitulation, autobiographies, celebrity gossip and endless reruns of
Rock and Roll Jeopardy
, there was this little show that simply and without fluffy fanfare was exhibiting 67 actual rock people's plaster-casted cocks. I invited all my friends.

“Cynthia Plaster Caster never stopped casting, and many of the rigs are recent
casts, but I think it's fair to say that the absolutely weirdest and most titillating among them—and they're all weird and titillating—must be the balls-attached, slightly off-kilter monument of Jimi Hendrix. Fun facts: Jimi, we're told, was uncommonly able to sustain his erection for longer than the required 60 seconds, and Cynthia, exuberant and impatient, prematurely burst open the mold, causing it to break apart. (It was later glued back together.)

“A guy friend asked if ‘The Life Casts' was a fair sampling and I'd say it was. Identified and unadorned, often hilarious, perfectly plain white plaster penises belonging to people we know or know of, listen to and watch—it was fun and it was art. I'm going back.”

7
John Hiatt, “I Wanna Be Sedated” (KFOG-FM, San Francisco, July 16)
The singersongwriter who usually doesn't trust rock 'n' roll, weird clothes or showmanship, from a 1996 live broadcast, just acoustic guitar, pounding, audience handclaps and a gleefully demented old-codger vocal. If he put this out he might not have to do those earnest PBS musician-interviews anymore—or get away with them.

8
Fall Time,
directed by Paul Warner (Live Entertainment Video, 1993)
So obscure it's not even in Leonard Maltin: a sub-Coen Bros./Murphy's Law crime drama set in a small Wisconsin town in 1957, with Mickey Rourke, Stephen Baldwin, and David Arquette, but the point is Sheryl Lee as a mousy bank employee who turns out to be the only one with brains, and the only winner. Here as elsewhere, from
Twin Peaks
to
This World, Then the Fireworks
, but perhaps most expansively here, Lee's more of a silent movie actor than anyone else of her time. “We had faces then”—and they knew what to do with them, how to act from inside the face, and so does Lee. She says everything about doubt, longing, lust or worry in a single look, a look you can't read to the bottom; the only thing she can't do, hopping a freight with the money, leaving four bodies behind in a shack, is wistful. Probably because that was the one thing the director was able to tell her to do.

9
Lillian Gish and Robert Mitchum, “Leaning,” on
Oxford American Southern Sampler 2000
(included with the July/August issue of
Oxford American
)
A gospel song from the end of the 1955
Night of the Hunter
, and the ultimate battle of the bands: good vs. evil.

10
Slobberbone,
Everything You Thought Was Right Was Wrong Today
(New West)
Cover: Photo of “Dust storm approaching Spearman, Texas, April 14, 1935,” and it's too late to run. That's the spirit of everything good from this Texas quartet: the big, loser blues of “Josephine,” the title “Placemat Blues” (a protest song: “Where's the place at the table for folks like us?”) and especially the back-country “Gimme Back My Dog.” Feedback, a simple count on a banjo, a light sound except for the rough growl of Brent Best asking for his dog back. Then the stops come loose from the music: the dog, it turns out, is the singer's true self, there's almost nothing of it left after the years he's spent with the woman he's talking to, and the only way he can get it back, the only way he can look in the mirror and see anything at all, is to beg. Meaning every word, he never goes too far; he never says anything he can't take back. And no, he doesn't get his dog back either.

AUGUST
7, 2000

1
Forever Mine
,
written and directed by Paul Schrader (Telluride Film Festival, Sept. 1–4)
In this deliriously romantic version of
The Count of Monte Cristo
, it's 1973 at a glamorous Florida resort. Catching a glimpse of Gretchen Mol stepping out of the surf like Botticelli's Venus—all she's missing is the shell—cabana boy Joseph Fiennes knows his life will never be real without her. Soon he's talked her into bed, and it was like the discovery of gold for both of them, but she's only been married eight months and the pain of what she's done is ripping her apart. “Stop talking like an
adult,” Fiennes says oddly. “Tell me why.” “Why what?” Mol says. “What do you think?” Fiennes says. “Why do birds sing so gay? Why does the rain fall from up above?
Why
did you get married?”—and the old words from Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers' “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” slip in and out of Fiennes' speech as if he thought up the words on the spot. Because of many kinds of misfortune, the film is slated for a Nov. 4 showing on the Starz cable channel rather than a theatrical release; until distribution catches up with the picture the Telluride screenings will be the only chance to see it on a screen as big as its reach.

2
Trailer Bride at the Great American Music Hall (San Francisco, July 28)
At the head of America's least obvious country band, Melissa Swingle could have escaped from a 1936 Walker Evans photograph; she doesn't make eye contact. For that matter, she looks at the floor, as if she has something to say but doesn't want to have to stand up in front of people to get it across. In tune with her sardonic, self-effacing waitress'
I get off at 10 and then I go home
drawl, she offers a few splayed-leg dance steps in lieu of arm gestures or head fakes.
Whine de Lune
, the band called its album; that's the sound Swingle, who plays everything but drums and bass, gets from a saw while guitarist Scott Goolsby, carrying what could be 8 inches of pompadour, puts hard, dead-cowboy notes in the air and then makes them dissolve, so slowly it's as if you could watch it happen, and so definitively it's hard to believe you heard what you heard.

3
MasterCard commercial
Cognitive dissonance sighting, as reported by Charlie Largent: “Various ‘Priceless' descriptions of family bonding (‘For everything else there's MasterCard'), all set to the tune of ‘Lolita's Theme' from the 1962 Kubrick film . . .”