Saturday, Jul 5, 2008
Nov 1, 1999 | 1) Sally Timms "Cowboy Sally's Twilight Laments for Lost Buckaroos" (Bloodshot)
Ever since she strolled coolly, coldly through "Millionaire" on "I HEART Mekons," Timms has been the last country singer you'd want to go up against in a staring contest. Her touch is light, and deceptive; her reserves of depth seem bottomless. But nothing she's done before suggests the exquisite balance of this disc, the way she makes both Robbie Fulks' "In Bristol Town One Bright Day" (which could be an ancient English ballad known through a 1928 recording by Buell Kazee of Kentucky) and Johnny Cash's ditty "Cry Cry Cry" (the flip side of his first single, cut for Sun Records of Memphis in 1956) seem like old family stories: tales Timms might not have quite believed when she first heard them as a girl, but which, to her surprise, as a grown woman, she found she had herself lived out.
2) Pet Shop Boys "Nightlife" (Sire)
Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe's "Very" and their remake of the Village People's "Go West" were the best album and single of 1993. In the years since it's been as if those records took all the two had to give. Here the group could be starting over from the beginning, in an '80s nightclub, dancing to the drum machine, all possibilities of love and fear present in the way your partner looks you in the eye or over your shoulder.
3) Bruce Bernard, editor "Century" (Phaidon)
Of all the summing-up volumes currently clogging the bookstores, this 1,119-page, 25-pound, $50 photo collection is infinitely the most powerful. The brief captions (printed faintly, so you can ignore them and confront the pictures directly) sum up Bernard's response to the times: a sardonic face, held until it falls apart in horror and disgust. That happens even though Bernard's atrocity shots -- even "Perhaps the worst photograph of all" (Page 421) -- are, formally, mild. A little girl abandoned on the street in Berlin in 1920 is not bleeding; she is merely the void into which she has fallen, and she pulls you in. So for the single image from Bernard's century I would use to blot out all the others, I choose "Lily Brik, girlfriend of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky," photographed by the great Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko in 1924, an image later made into a still-famous Soviet propaganda poster. With the photo here a thing in itself, though, you can hear what the happy woman with her hand cupped to her shouting mouth is saying: "Calling out around the world/ Are you ready for a brand new beat?" And the world answered: Yes, but not yours. Stalin walks across the facing page; turn it and Hitler is waiting.
4) Peter Lely "Portrait of Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth," 1671/74 (Getty Museum, Los Angeles)
Spy for Louis XIV, mistress of Charles II and a dead ringer for Rose McGowan -- for the unsurprisable face she assumes in "Going All the Way," stripping as the Orioles float through "It's Too Soon to Know."
5) Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg & Eminem on "Saturday Night Live" (Oct. 23)
Despite the two CDs of "Saturday Night Live: The Musical Performances" now in the racks, musicians rarely explode on the SNL stage: In all these years I count only Squeeze with "Annie Get Your Gun," Jackson Browne with "Running on Empty" and Snoop Dogg's first appearance (back when he had "Doggy" in the middle of his name). Rap summit meetings too often settle for self-celebration. But as Dre led the others through two segments, this was otherworldly from the start. With Snoop Dogg as gangly bodily as he was lithe verbally -- he spoke the language as if he invented it -- Dre provided drama, pathos, silence between the words, a preacher to Snoop Dogg's trickster. Finally the whole, possessed by the reach for abstraction that drives Snoop Dogg's best moments, seemed on the verge of swirling off into the sky. Half an hour later, when without a trace of black tongue Eminem began snapping off his syllables, piling each on the one before it, until his sound was a staircase he was too busy, too outraged to climb, Dre embodied experience and stoicism. He wasn't countering the younger man's impatience with the knowledge that this too shall pass away, but with the advice to save your strength: It'll be back. If a black man and a white man could make the Rodney King videotape into art, this was it.
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