Site Presented By
Monday, Oct 6, 2008
Britney Spears rockets through "SNL," U2's the Edge sings for Stephen Hawking and Clinton makes a connection between Republicans and Islamicists.
Feb 11, 2002 | 1) A.J. Albany, "Low Down," in Tin House (Winter 2002)
The music issue of this adventurous literary magazine leads off with the extraordinary memoir of a now 40-year-old woman who grew up as the daughter of Los Angeles jazz pianist Joe Albany ("Albany's jumbled, idiosyncratic sense of time is almost all his own, and his solos are cliff-hanger explorations," Richard Cook and Brian Morton write in "The Penguin Guide to Jazz") and Sheila Boucher ("She was responsible for some of the best parts in Howl, something Ginsberg confessed to my father years after the fact," Albany writes). Both were heroin addicts; Boucher was a prostitute who walked out when Albany was 6. "They were both bright and talented," Albany says in her first published writing, "but always competing to see who could fall the furthest and the fastest down the ladder to hell. I have a photo of myself at one and a half years old, with my very pregnant mother. When I asked her about the fate of the baby, she was dismissive and said that had definitely been some john's kid, who she ended up selling to a wealthy doctor and his wife in Bel Air." Out of this Albany recreates a landscape, that of her childhood and of the smalltime L.A. jazz junkie, where misery is a faraway sound floating above a voice speaking in tones of affection, terror, rage, love and, most of all, a hipster's defiance.
Not a word is pushed. Albany goes back to the fleabag hotel where she and her father lived when she was 7. Her best friend there was a 9-year-old named LaPrez. "One night LaPrez came to our room and asked my dad if he could give him some help with his mother. When he opened the door to the room, she was sitting straight up in her Murphy bed, eyes wide and staring at us, scarf still tied around her arm. She was blue, dead at least an hour. In the hotel lobby, there was a TV set that three of the resident rummies had total control over, twenty-four hours a day; usually horse races or cop shows were on, but for this one fucked-up night, they sat us down on their smelly old-man sofa and let us watch cartoons." Throughout, Albany pins her parents' crimes against her; when she forgives them, one by one -- or, really, brushes them off, with a gesture that seems to freeze in the air -- you believe her.
Nothing else in Tin House touches Albany, though in the course of a piece on Brian Wilson built around the l966 John Frankenheimer movie "Seconds" Andrew Hultkrans comes up with one of the two or three best lines in the history of rock criticism ("Nietzsche would have hated Pet Sounds") and Robert Politio's proposal that Bob Dylan's shadow career on bootlegs is richer than his official career on Columbia albums needs at least 100 pages, not 10 (the idea that the traditional ballads collected on the bootleg "Golden Vanity" might be more truly Dylan's music than, say, "Memphis Blues Again" is intriguing, but would anyone seek out Dylan's bottomless versions of "When First Unto This Country" or "Trail of the Buffalo" without having heard "Memphis Blues Again" first?). More characteristic are Shusha Guppy's deadly "La Chanson Frangaise" and Lawrence Joseph's "The Music Is: The Deep Roots of Detroit R&B," an unbelievably pedestrian essay that only occasionally rises to the level of soppiness. But unless Amy Jo Albany writes a book this is the only place you can hear her.
2) Britney Spears on "Saturday Night Live" (NBC, Feb. 2)
In her second turn as host she was smart, funny, shameless and fast -- a step ahead of anyone around her. Playing a Barbie daughter, the latest third of Gemini's Twin or a doper Hampshire College student who can hold smoke in her lungs for six and a half minutes, she was closer to Jean Harlow or Uma Thurman than the body-snatched performer the world has grown to love and fear; as her own musical guest her IQ seemed to drop 100 points as soon as she opened her mouth to sing.
3) Cat Power, "Come on in My Kitchen," on Sonic Youth curated "All Tomorrow's Parties 1.1" (ATP)
The Robert Johnson composition -- from 1936, not 1932, as it says here -- is one of the most delicate and unusual of all country blues pieces, and performers take it up at their peril ("The Best of Johnny Winter" includes a particularly ham-handed example from 1973). Chan Marshall sucks the song into her own drifting, solipsistic notion of the blues, and the tune emerges stripped of any association with the past, sounding more like a white, middle-class young woman embellishing her troubles in a very good writers-workshop story story than a story once told by an itinerant young black man. You can hear that as a travesty, or you can just get lost.
4) Katha Pollitt, "$hotgun Weddings," The Nation (Feb. 4)
After considering federal and state projects to push poor women with children into marriage -- everything from $100 a month welfare bonuses to propaganda campaigns to "huge funding of faith-based marriage preparation courses" to "fatherhood intervention programs" -- the colmnist and divorced single mother asks herself what it would take for her "to marry against my own inclination in order to make America great again." Answer: "If the government brings Otis Redding back to life and books him to sing at my wedding, I will marry the Devil himself. And if the Devil is unavailable, my ex-husband says he's ready."
Get Salon in your mailbox!