Real Life Rock (294 page)

7
Julyan Davis, “Dark Corners: The Appalachian Ballad—Paintings of the South” (Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina, through July 1; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia, opening September 1)
Davis's talents are those of an illustrator—his faces have no life and his bodies have no movement. But he can see places—and in two paintings in this series of images he's attempted to draw out of the likes of “ Little Maggie” and “Barbara Allen,” he sees places no one has seen before. For “Pretty Polly,” instead of the hills and valleys of the murder ballad it's a huge, ruined barn, covered with the wreckage of abandoned artwork, as if vandals broke in and destroyed the place with buckets of paint, canvases, stretchers, and unfinished images; the place looks dangerous, and you don't need to see the woman inside or the man approaching from outside to feel that. With “Darling Corey,” the tale of a faithless lover, there's a pastoral scene, a Currier and Ives print: winding dirt road, bare trees, melting snow, spring about to burst, and, in the distance, set in a meadow at the foot of a mountain, a family home, with smoke that at first comes into the landscape like fog billowing out of the windows, the hint of red so faint that at first, as you come up the lane singing, “Wake up, wake up, Darlin' Corey, what makes you sleep so sound?” you might think everything's all right.

8
DJ Shadow,
The Less You Know, the Better
(Island)
What made the sampling artist's 1996
Endtroducing
. . . and
The Private Press
, from 2002, so spooky—what let the person born Josh Davis live up to his
chosen name—was a mood of clandestinity, of subterranean communication, the way he could make you feel as if you were listening in on a conversation you were never meant to hear. On
The Less You Know, the Better
, that happens only once, with “Give Me Back the Nights.” Shadow wraps film-noir tones around “The Night,” a frantic, all-but-suicidal lost-love rant by one C. E. Rabinowitz that Davis found in a thrift store—a 45? From an LP? In the least readable credits sheet I've ever seen, he doesn't say—until the singer loses his performer's body and becomes a figment of anyone's nightmare. And that's better than thinking that the singer's nightmare is still going on. You can wake up; with Shadow pressing down on him, you know he can't.

9
Black Clock
no. 15 (CalArts)
A special issue of this adventurous literary quarterly on imaginary cinema, filled with clumsily executed posters for, say,
Casablanca
starring Ronald Reagan and Hedy Lamarr, who were up for Rick and Ilsa;
Intolerance
remade by Baz Luhrmann and starring Sasha Grey;
Kill Bill
directed by Russ Meyer and featuring Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Dorothy Daindridge, Natalie Wood, Takashi Shimura, and Machiko Kyô, and each one all the more frustrating because the pictures were never made. The highlights might be Michael Ventura's “Lou 'n' Charlie,” the story of an eighteen-year-old Louise Brooks's affair with Charlie Chaplin in the form of a memoir by Brooks's lesbian roommate, and Howard Hampton's “Breakaway: Summer of '69,” a scholarly piece about how the San Francisco avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner took over
Easy Rider
when Dennis Hopper abandoned the project, complete with footnotes to nonexistent passages in real books, and so convincing that even the last paragraph, referencing “the McGovern interregnum and the Reagan backlash” and a final, post-credits mini-sequence where “a television announcer is heard introducing a car dealer (‘and now here's Cal Worthington and his dog Spot') as Conner injects
Un chien andalou
's famous scene of a straight razor slicing a human eye,” rolls by without a blink. And both seem modest next to Anthony Miller's “A History of the Cinema 1920–2014,” first in a ten-page chronology ranging from
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari
to an all-female remake of
The Maltese Falcon
starring Lindsay Lohan as “Sam(antha) Spade” and Patricia Clarkson as Kasper Gutman, and then ranging in pop-ups through the journal's more than 190 pages, in which all of film history revolves around successive biopics on the late-Victorian adventurer Richard Burton (Lon Chaney plays him in
The Mecca Masquerade
, Harry Reemes in
Dick Burton's Kama Sutra
) and the infinitesimally slow emergence, over nearly one hundred years, of an underground pseudo-masterpiece called, at least at first,
The Zoo
, “a work of undetermined length and origin by a filmmaker known only as ‘Darc' (sometimes misidentified in studies of early film as ‘D' arc').”

10
Van Morrison, “Sweet Thing,” in
The Five-Year Engagement,
dir. Nicholas Stoller (Apatow Productions)
If you're going to fall in love at first sight to a song, nothing could be more complete than the Richard Davis bass pattern that opens this one: a lifetime unfolding in fifteen seconds flat.

SEPTEMBER
2012

1
Corin Tucker Band,
Kill My Blues
(Kill Rock Stars)
Starting at nineteen with Heavens to Betsy in Olympia, Washington, moving on with Sleater-Kinney in Portland, Oregon, for more than twenty years Corin Tucker has been ripping up the pop landscape with the hurricane of her voice—a hurricane of subtlety, pauses, a sense of thinking it all over inside the maelstrom. On Tucker's second album under her own name, the music is so fast out of the box, so relentless and fierce, that the doubt hiding in the sound—
This way, that way, now, not now, never?
—might not surface right away. Sooner or later it will, and the music will take shape less as sound than drama. And
then, if you're pulled back to the avalanche that begins with “Neskowin,” the third number, and only lets you go two songs later, at the end of the fifth, with Tucker's banging the signature riff of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as if her own “Constance” simply told her that was what it wanted, you may wonder how anyone could hold her breath as long as Tucker seems to.

2
“State of Disconnect” (State Farm)
Thirty-second spot: State Farm agent on the phone, selling, in a clipped tone: “You name it, we're here, anytime, anywhere, any way you want it.” Customer, in his kitchen, flatly: “That's the way I need it.” “Any way you want it?” “All night?” “All night.” “Every night?” “Any way you want it.” “That's the way I need it,” the customer says, then pausing, as if replaying the conversation in his head: “We just had ourselves a little Journey moment,” he says. “Yep,” says the agent. “Saw them in '83 in Fresno,” the customer says. “Place was crawling with chicks.” His wife comes into focus at the other end of the kitchen and gives him a dirty look. “I gotta go”—and as much as I loathe Journey, this was a perfectly crafted little fiction about pop music as real life. The agent and the customer aren't proud or embarrassed or fannish, but kind of weirdly stoic:
We're fated to share this stuff to the end
.

3
God Bless America,
directed by Bob Goldthwait (Darko Entertainment)
A middle-aged man facing oblivion and his
Juno
-hating Ellen Page-like teenage sidekick saving the country from itself, one bullet through the head at a time, starting off with a reality-show star complaining about the car she got for her sixteenth birthday, loudmouths in a movie theater (“Thanks for not talking during the feature. Thanks for not using your cell phone,” says the man to the lone survivor. “You're welcome,” she says, as if she's just learned a valuable lesson). With Tea Party thugs beating up a man with Parkinson's because he supports the Affordable Care Act, it's American culture as a madhouse, a lot broader and a lot more convincing than
Nashville
, bodies everywhere, blood all over, with the whole show ending with a staging of the “Eat Flaming Death, Fascist Media Pigs” section of the Firesign Theatre's
In the Next World, You're on Your Own
, scored to the Kinks' “I'm Not Like Everybody Else.” That's taste.