Real Life Rock (195 page)

8
Robert Warshow,
The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture
(Harvard)
War-show (1917–1955) was the popular culture man in the milieu of the postwar New York intellectuals, and this book, now augmented with eight previously uncollected essays and worshipful new commentaries from film critic David Denby and cultural theorist Stanley Cavell, is a legendary manifesto. Today it's also dull. Famous–by–reputation pieces such as the 1948 “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” which at seven pages smacks of get-it-over-with, may have had its influence on Pauline Kael's 1955 “The Glamour of Delinquency,” but only the latter still has any blood running through it. Much is made of Warshow's “immediate experience” credo—“A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man”—but there is no man in the seat in these pages. War-show pointedly rejects irony as a mode of both experience and criticism, but it is all too telling that his writing is littered with scare quotes—with countless crudely ironic references to the likes of “ ‘typical' American experience,” “the operation of ‘simple' and ‘American' virtues,” “a ‘typical' American town” where “all ‘real' Americans live.”
I am not fooled
, this man says, and critics have to be willing to be fooled. That is what being “that man” is all about.

9
Shocker of the Week (from “Lucinda Williams: What I've Learned,” interview with Brendan Vaughn,
Esquire,
April)
“Some of my best friends are music critics.”

10
“Enronomania!” (American Folk Art Museum, New York, opening April 1, 2009)
There's the short con, which is no more than claiming the 10 you gave the clerk was a 20, and then there's the long con, a true native art form. “Enron had its own myth-making machinery, recruiting employees as actors to fake out Wall Street analysts when they came to call,” Frank Rich wrote in the
New York Times
on March 2. “The hoax even extended to the building of a Hollywood-style ‘trading room' set in Enron's Houston skyscraper.” But a reading of linguist David W. Maurer's 1940
The Big Con
(republished in 1999 with an introduction by Luc Sante) makes plain that the Enron scam was merely a billion-dollar revival of “the rag,” a con Maurer traced to Cheyenne, Wyo., in 1867, when a three-card monte dealer named Ben Marks opened the Dollar Store, with trinkets in front to draw the marks to the barrels in the back. Not long after the turn of the century the innovation had led to the Big Store: the phony fight club, the phony horse-race parlor and then the rag—the sham brokerage.

“The victim first bets with money furnished by the con men, is then sent home for a large sum of money and is fleeced,” Maurer wrote. “For the rag the store depicts a broker's office complete with tickers, phone service, brokers, clerks and customers. The same board which did duty for the races is often turned over to reveal a set-up for recording stock prices.” The Big Stores were “manned and furnished” with such realism “that the victim does not realize that everything about them—including the patronage—is fake. In short, the modern big store is a carefully set up and skillfully managed theater where the victims act out an unwitting role in the most exciting of all underworld dramas. It is a triumph of the ingenuity of the criminal mind.” Or, really, of the American mind: “For mere money, a thing useless and meaningless in itself,” Jim Thompson wrote in 1963 of Cole Langley, the tragic hero of
The Grifters
, “he traded great hopes and a new perspective on life. And nothing was ever managed so that the frammis would show through for what it was. Always the people were left with hope and relief.”

APRIL
8, 2002

1
Cassandra Wilson,
Belly of the Sun
(Blue Note)
The great jazz singer recorded this album in a converted shack in her native Mississippi, not, as music business rumors have it, in a grave where a blues singer
whose name no one can remember was buried before he was temporarily exhumed to allow for Wilson's makeshift studio. The extraordinary range of material includes, along with Wilson's own compositions, covers of songs made famous by the Band, Fred McDowell, Glen Campbell, James Taylor, Bob Dylan and Robert Johnson. Wilson's way with these numbers recalls nothing so much as Narcissus, gazing into a pool of water and falling in love with his reflection, and the result is the same: falling in.

2
Heather Nova,
South
(V2)
Seven years on from the still unsettlingly frank “Walk This World,” there's a breathy shiver in Nova's voice, which otherwise is smooth enough for TV commercials, that shoots her into realms of uncertainty. The story she acts out is that of a woman who has constructed a life of propriety solely to allow her fantasies to take on flesh. As you pass her on the street, she knows you can't tell. Electricity comes off of her in waves, but you can't be sure she's where it's coming from. So you play the album again.

3
Puta-pons,
Return to Zero
(Vinahyde)
By way of Chicago in 2000, return to Liliput, anyway—which in punk terms (Zurich noise, 1978–83) may amount to the same thing. Except on the stunningly fast ride of Shelly Kurzynski Villaseñor's guitar solo in “(You Need a) Shot in the Arm,” which delivers it.

4–5
Eva Hesse,
Untitled 1970
,
in “Eva Hesse” (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through May 19; Weisbaden Museum, Germany, June 15–Oct. 13) and
Eva Hesse
,
edited by Elisabeth Sussman (SFMOMA/Yale)
Also known as
Seven Poles
, this work, coming at the very end of the exhibition, and of the German-American sculptor's short life, speaks in many voices. Seeming to bulge and swell, the yellowed, L-shaped wire-polyethylene-fiberglass constructions vary in height from 6 to 9 feet; they might have been inspired, Robin Clark writes in the catalog, by Olmec figurines or Jackson Pollock's 1952
Blue Poles
. As Elisabeth Sussman arranged it for the exhibition, working from photos of the piece in Hesse's studio, but not academically, allowing the poles their implicit freedom to move, the feet of most of the poles turn toward each other, and the thing looks like a version of Stonehenge, made out of Martians. Even as it played with eternity, it was laughing at itself.

6
Dickel Brothers,
The Recordings of the Dickel Brothers Volume Two
(Empty)
Fans of the
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
soundtrack and its
Down From the Mountain
live follow-up can test their affection for old-time Appalachian string band music played by new-time people against this quintet—who, unlike some of the
Brother/ Mountain
performers, honor tradition and laugh off piety with equal rigorousness. Performances of songs recorded in the 1920s and '30s by such masters as Charlie Poole, Riley Puckett, Gid Tanner & the Skillet Lickers, Dick Justice and Earl Johnson's Clodhoppers are reminiscent of the early versions, but not exactly remakes. They seem to come from somewhere else, a place of greater delight and less guilt: present-day Portland, Ore., or at least Portland a couple of years ago, when this record was made. The dead-cat-swinging invention of the sound is caught best in the group's own liner notes, in their Story of the Band, which is certainly better than the Ramones': “It's been three and a half years since Matt and Clancy Dickel realized they were brothers. They wagered there were probably more knowing how Pa Dickel was such a, how shall we say it, free spirit. It wasn't long before they unearthed three more just from looking up Dickel in the phone book . . .”