Real Life Rock (154 page)

7
Tom Perrotta,
Joe College
(St. Martin's)
After the perfect-pitch
Election
(forget the bludgeoning movie version), this coming-of-age novel, set in 1982, is a trifle—and no novelist, no matter what age he's coming of, can be allowed to present “If Ted and Nancy were a plausible couple, why not Polly and I?” as if it were English. Still, there are moments when the reflections of the working-class Jersey-Yalie narrator turn him into someone you'd like to meet: “I remember watching the debate between Reagan and Carter and feeling a huge abyss open up at my feet when the commentators began declaring Reagan the winner, even though he'd seemed to me to have performed a fairly plausible imitation of a twinkly-eyed village idiot. I wondered if it was Yale that had made me such a stranger to my own country or having smoked too much pot as
a teenager. In any case, it was unnerving to find myself dwelling in a separate reality from the majority of my fellow citizens, my parents included. I was enough of a believer in democracy—or maybe just safety in numbers—to not be able to derive much comfort from the stubborn conviction that they were wrong and I was right.”

8
Hooverphonic,
The Magnificent Tree
(Epic)
The insinuating, vaguely diseased moods that singer Lieske Sadonius brought this Belgian techno-exotica combo caught the nervousness that lay beneath the earliest Paris new wave movies. With Geike Arnaert in front, they've moved on to catch the very essence of the cheesiest
La Dolce Vita
knockoffs, which is to say Italian vacation films.

9
®™ARK,
Biotaylorism
,
at “Picturing the Genetic Revolution” (as above)
A hilariously detailed, deadpan video heralding the application of Frederick Taylor's principles of modern industrial organization to bioengineering—but ending with a brief prescription for sabotage, notably sneaking into toy stores and attaching warning labels to Barbie dolls regarding the cosmetic and genetic surgery those adopting a Barbie selfimage might face somewhere down the line.

10
Speaking of “Yazoo Street Scandal,” a correspondent writes:
“I was playing some music for my 9-year-old daughter the other day: ‘Lo and Behold,' ‘Yazoo Street Scandal,' a few other lo-fifavorites. ‘These sound like they were recorded in somebody's house,' she said. ‘Yes,' I told her. ‘A pink house. On a tape recorder. In the basement.' She pondered this and said, ‘This music sounds so good. Why does Britney Spears spend so much money getting everything perfect-sounding in the studio?' ”

OCTOBER
30, 2000

1
Pere Ubu 25th Anniversary Tour (Knitting Factory, New York, Oct. 14)
Too cool: not the homemade theremins, or the feedback apron singer David Thomas wore, or the dedications (“A song written for men going through their midlife crises, who have punk roots. If there's ever a time for punk, it's when men have their midlife crises”—a dedication followed, a few minutes into the song, with “the pogo section,” with the enormous Thomas moving to the beat less like Sid Vicious than Sidney Greenstreet), but the fanfare music the band used to set itself up for a night of confusion: Max Frost and the Troopers' “Shape of Things to Come.” From the 1968 AIP trash classic
Wild in the Streets
—produced by Mike Curb, with a neverknown Billy Elder impersonating youth Führer Max Frost (in the movie, would-be James Dean Christopher Jones)—it was a song that 32 years ago somehow sounded as stirring as it did embarrassing, just as it did three weeks before the nation was to go into its booth to decide the shape of things to come. Which, the song reminded everyone, “nothing can stop.” More next column.

2
Richard Pryor, . . .
And It's Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968–1992)
(Rhino)
A big box of CDs of a black man onstage turning everyday life upside down. You listen and think, “How, why, was this voice silenced? What, how much, was lost?” Among other things, the voice of the white square, squared: our next president.

3
Telluride Film Festival Diary,
Turbulent,
Shirin Neshat, director (Telluride, Colo., Labor Day Weekend)
Should you have the chance, do not pass up even the most inconvenient fringe-festival, museum or cable opportunity to see this shocking short film. No sex, no violence, just, in present-day Iran, a man—co-producer Shoja Azari—singing to an all-male audience. He turns his back; his tone is full, rich, but infinitely supple. There are no affectations; sound is everything. And as he shows he can go anywhere he seems to be holding something back. And then the film cuts to Sussan Deyhim, a woman singing, but this time facing the seats—of an empty auditorium. She could be singing in five voices at once; the
untrained ear hears overdubs, but in fact it's what Yoko Ono always thought she sounded like, doubled, tripled, with a musicality you can't translate not because Deyhim is singing in Farsi but because she is singing over your head, hitting some notes only certain human beings can hear, which is to say whoever might be excluded from her illegal concert: in Iran, everyone.

4
Randy Newman, “A Fool in Love,” “Poor Me,” “Got My Mojo Working,” from the soundtrack to
Meet the Parents
(Dream-Works)
The one-time “King of the Suburban Blues” offers a typically craven movie song, a dead cover of a Fats Domino tune and the sort of paint-by-numbers white-boy blues bash that in other hands was already a national skin crawler in 1967, the year before Newman issued his first album, . . .
Creates Something New Under the Sun
, which he did. The nadir of his career.

5
Caitlin Macy,
The Fundamentals of Play
(Random House)
A frighteningly expert first novel—set a decade back, a rewrite of
The Great Gatsby
as filtered through a Whit Stillman lens. Here irony is the essence of all human life, only the gross, vulgar Gatsby character doesn't know it, which makes him less than human. But then how do you decipher the Daisy character, who except for this exchange is so insulated she barely lives on the page? “At some point,” says the male narrator, “I made another brilliant contribution to the conversation by asking what she had majored in. Still, I was curious to know.”