Real Life Rock (301 page)

7
Michael Robbins,
Alien Vs. Predator
(Penguin, 2012)
Robbins's poetry is quick as thought, as Constance Rourke might have put it, if he'd been around in 1931 for Rourke to include him in her
American Humor: A Study of the National Character
. With Davy Crockett–Mike Fink brags brought up to date (“I clear the jungle with the edge of my hand. / I make love to an ATM. I enrich uranium,” followed by the perfect capper: “I'm uninsured”) and pop songs bouncing off a nineteenth-century novel (in “Self-Titled,” I can't tell if I like “This is Uncle Tom to Ground Control” more than “I just died in my arms tonight”), it might be more true to say Robbins's poetry is thought, or rather a mind alive but not thinking at all, a jumble of memory and stimuli and distractions and it's-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue, never mind, a roaring in the head of someone talking to someone else while what he's really doing is talking to himself, but barely listening, and having the time of his life.

8
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis Present
Lawless
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
(Sony Classical)
On covers of Link Wray's 1971 “Fire and Brimstone” and the Velvet Underground's 1968 “White Light/White Heat,” Mark Lanegan, leader of the 1990s Seattle band Screaming Trees, might be acting out the titles. He dives headlong over words, chords, rhythm changes as if speed is its own reward—and for a 2012 bootlegging movie set in the 1920s, music from forty years later couldn't hit harder. On the other hand, the bluegrass icon Ralph Stanley was born in the Virginia mountains where the movie is set, in the '20s, when the music that later made his name was already old—and his covers of the same songs sound like shtick, because he's a shtick singer.

9
On the Road,
directed by Walter Salles, written by Jose Rivera (IFC)
Jack Kerouac was casting the movie of his novel before it was published (he would star); finally, fifty-five years later, with the book still selling 100,000 copies a year and Kerouac dead since 1969, here it is. Except for Kirsten Dunst, who has nothing to do but act pissed off, the women—Amy Adams, Elisabeth Moss, Kristen Stewart—hold the screen, even if they have only walk-through parts. The men flop. Sam Riley, so fierce as Ian Curtis in
Control
and Pinkie in
Brighton Rock
, is vague and scattered as Sal Paradise (Kerouac); Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty tries hard, throwing himself at the story, but his features are too soft and rounded to give even a hint of why Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg couldn't take their eyes off Neal Cassady. There is one killing scene, at the end. In New York, Moriarty comes out of the night, approaching Paradise, who's dressed in a coat and tie and surrounded by friends; they haven't seen each
other for a long time. Hedlund reaches out, but he seems addled, damaged; you can almost smell his desperation, his loneliness, and you can see Riley smell it too, and step back. “Duke Ellington won't wait,” says a voice behind Riley, and he turns away. “I love you as always,” Hedlund says, and he's left in the shadows, like Paul Muni at the end of
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
, slipping into the dark after seeing his onetime lover Helen for the last time. “How do you live?” she asks him. “I steal,” he says.

10
Rick Perlstein, “The Long Con: Mail-Order Conservatism,” the
Baffler
#21 (Fall 2012)
“It's time, in other words, to consider whether Romney's fluidity with the truth is, in fact, a feature and not a bug: a constituent part of his appeal to conservatives. The point here is not just that he lies when he says conservative things, even if he believes something different in his heart of hearts—but that lying is what makes you sound the way a conservative is supposed to sound, in pretty much the same way that curlicuing all around the note makes you sound like a contestant on
American Idol
is supposed to sound.”

Thanks to Allison Kirkland

MARCH-APRIL
2013

1
Amy Winehouse, “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” from
At the BBC
(Republic)
A DVD traces her 2006 appearance at the Other Voices festival in the remote Irish town Dingle: a set of exquisite performances, Winehouse singing in a church, tiny under her bouffant, dressed in black jeans, trainers, a low-cut sleeveless top, two face studs, and her tattoos, accompanied only by bass and guitar. In interview footage intercut between songs she talks earnestly about the people from whom she learned to sing—Mahalia Jackson, the Shangri-Las, Ray Charles, Dinah Washington, Carleen Anderson, Sarah Vaughn, and Thelonious Monk, and the film lets you watch them as Winehouse might have. A CD collects fourteen BBC performances, most of them live, and as she moves through her own songs “Back to Black,” “In My Bed,” “You Know I'm No Good,” and “Tears Dry on Their Own,” and the torch singer Julie London's 1955 “I Should Care,” you're pulled into the impeccably edited and lit black and white film noir she acted out on the two albums she made while she was still alive. And then, on the last track, after you've admired her sense of style, her commitment to craft, the way her professionalism was inseparable from her fandom, comes the heartbreaker: a 2006 radio-station cover of the first record by the Teddy Bears, with Phil Spector on guitar and contributing the song, a vocal trio that came out of Fairfax High School in Los Angeles to score a number one hit in 1958. Then it was simpering, pious: Spector never failed to mention that he took the title phrase from his father's grave (“From the words on my grave,” he once said before correcting himself). Now it's full, rich, gorgeous, and slow, with a step from one word, one idea, to the next, the journey of a lifetime, which neither the singer nor the listener is willing to see end.

2
Kanye West at 12-12-12: The Concert for Sandy Relief (New York, Madison Square Garden, December 12, 2012)
Emerging from a sea of sludge—the critic and musician Tom Kipp's term for the way rote rock riffs and gestures, in this case uncountable raised arms, brandished guitars, and drawn-out finales, can accumulate until the entire form can seem like the aesthetic equivalent of landfill—the only hip-hop performer to have been called a “jackass” by President Obama and coincidentally the only hip-hop performer on the bill broke the night open. First high-stepping, then bending low and all but tiptoeing, he made a drama of assault and stealth, upending the parade of stars for twenty solid minutes, raging through parts of twelve songs—from “Clique” and “Jesus Walks” to his lines in Jay-Z's “Run This Town” and Rihanna's “Diamonds”—he brought down the storm everybody else was
only talking about. Suddenly, there was a doubling, art and jeopardy facing off as enemies and leaving arm in arm.

3
George Bellows,
Preaching (Billy Sunday),
in “George Bellows” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 15, 2012–February 18, 2013; Royal Academy of Arts, London, March 16–June 9, 2013)
Bellows is best known for his 1909 boxing painting
Stag at Sharkey's
, where the bodies of the two fighters seem to stretch beyond themselves. This 1915 pen-and-ink drawing is even more extreme. The evangelist Billy Sunday started out as a major-league outfielder, and you can see that here. Addressing a huge crowd in an enormous hall—the high roof supported by wooden pillars that look like trees, giving the impression of a camp meeting, though person to person the well-dressed crowd is appreciative, ecstatic, stony-faced, despairing—Sunday stands on top of a jerry-built pine platform, his legs spread, his right arm shooting out, his index finger pointing like a knife, his left arm cocked with his hand in a tight fist, his body so tensed it's as if he's physically daring the whole world to doubt a word he's saying. The picture is thrilling, frightening: an unparalleled portrait of American movement. And seated at Sunday's feet on the platform are four clerks, carefully writing down his words, or entering figures.