Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Forward into the past: Special election edition!
Oct 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' "The Shape of Things to Come." From the 1968 AIP trash classic "Wild in the Streets" -- produced by Mike Curb, with a never-known 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" (DreamWorks)
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."
"American studies.""How'd you pick that?" I said.
"Same as anyone." But of the other couple hundred students who had graduated with that degree, I doubt a single one would have given the same reason Kate did. "I love this country," she said. I thought at first she was being disingenuous, but she got a look in her eye then which I have never forgotten. It was a look of highly intensified complacency -- if that's possible -- which I was sure no feast or threat of famine would ever shake.
