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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Mar 25, 2002 | 1) Pink, "Don't Let Me Get Me" (Arista)
This is a heartbreaker, and it makes every one of the male loser hits of the last decade -- Radiohead's "Creep," Offspring's "Self Esteem," Beck's "Loser" -- come off like pickup lines. The snap of Pink's rhythm sense makes you almost certain the woman whose story this is will get out of it -- out of her own skin -- but around every sharp turn is the voice of self-hate, the only thing her parents ever taught her, and then you just don't know.
2) Reputation, 924 Gilman, Berkeley (March 15)
Elizabeth Elmore led the tough, self-lacerating punk combo Sarge in the second half of the '90s; her new group, playing ahead of the April release of "The Reputation" (Initial Records), Elmore's strongest recording, was fourth on a five-act bill. You don't expect an opening band to have it all, to make the territory of a small, foreign club their own, to blow off the setting and make you see only them, but Elmore burns the stage -- she singes it, she doesn't burn it down. There's fright behind the determination in her warbling voice, and she plays lead guitar like Elvis Costello: rhythm, then a lift that suggests rather than describes, then back to rhythm, as if the theme that suddenly shifted the song was an illusion. Watching this woman in her mid-20s, on a year's leave from law school at Northwestern, fronting three men who seemed either distinctly older or younger than she is, I wondered what sort of lawyer she'd make. Her performance carried an atmosphere of ordinary life; it was as easy to imagine her as a 40-year-old bandleader as to see her as a 30-year-old attorney. What the two would have in common might be someone who knows how to focus, to bear down, someone as hard on her client as on the other side, someone you wouldn't hire lightly.
3) Steve Almond, "My Life in Heavy Metal" (Grove)
Most of the stories in this first collection originally appeared in such prestigious quarterlies as Missouri Review, Ploughshares and New England Review; that the two best, the title piece and "How to Love a Republican," were first published in Playboy is no accident. "This, it would turn out, is the main thing we had in common: a susceptibility to the brassy escapism of myth," says the narrator in "Run Away, My Pale Love." Almond's first-person narrators are always saying embarrassingly arty things like that. Though they're not the same people, they talk as if they are, one character after another indulging in the same effete verbal tics ("taking" lunch or "supper" rather than eating it, the implicit entitlement in the phrase not fitting the people talking). Almond can't write dialogue by instinct, and he doesn't think his language through. When the narrator of "The Body in Extremis" describes a woman with "Behind this posed sangfroid, of course, was the inner panic nurtured by ambitious immigrant families," Almond doesn't seem to realize that his "of course" turns what's supposed to be a character into a type, and that he's just dismissed the person who's going to have to carry the story. But "My Life in Heavy Metal," the memoir of a cheating love affair carried on by a newspaper rock critic in El Paso, is always alive ("Jo looked like she'd been struck in the back of the head with an eel," he says of his girlfriend at a Mötley Crüe concert), and "How to Love a Republican" starts off creepy and only gets worse. It's 2000, and a bearded liberal working for Citizen Action meets a blond McCain volunteer who works for the Heritage Foundation. She takes him to hear George Will speak on "the deracination of moral authority" and to meet her mentor ("It occurred to me that Trent had served in the Armed Forces," the narrator says of shaking hands with the guy, "possibly all four of them"). She ends up in the Bush camp; he votes for Nader. What happens next may stand as one of the truest nightmares of the post-election, when sex dissolves into events and lovers into the public choices they thought they could keep separate from their private lives. For the only time in the book, Almond pulls no punches. He comes to life as a writer, not as an orchestrator of attitudes and skits, and the reader goes down with his hero.
4) Rosalie Howarth, back-announcing "Friday I'm in Love" (KFOG-FM, San Francisco, March 1)
"The Cure! The Antidepressant Years!"
