Saturday, Jul 5, 2008
Dec 13, 1999 | Dec. 13, 1999
1) Beck "Midnite Vultures" (Interscope)
This is embarrassing.
2) Gayl Jones "Corregidora" (Beacon Press reprint)
Jones' first novel from 1975 about a blues singer singing a song no one's exactly heard before. "'Songs are devils. It's your own destruction you're singing. The voice is a devil.' 'Naw, Mama. You don't understand. Where did you get that?' 'Unless your voice is raised up to the glory of God ... Where did you get those songs?' 'I got them from you.' 'I didn't hear the words.' Then let me give witness the only way I can. I'll make a fetus out of grounds of coffee to rub inside my eyes." On the other hand, Henry Louis Gates recently claimed the real significance of the book was that it introduced oral sex into fiction by black women.
3) Metallica "S&M" (Elektra)
Recorded in April at the Berkeley Community Theater with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Kamen, and glorious. On "Bleeding Me," Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" comes into view, but it's a mirage: The real vision in the music is far more desperate, Ronald Colman clawing his way back to Shangri-La in the last shots of "Lost Horizon." Across two discs, the band isn't lost for a second; they sound like they're on top of the mountain.
4) Dolly Parton "The Grass Is Blue" (Sugar Hill)
This is the best album Parton has made since "My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy" in 1969, and the killer is "Silver Dagger" -- the pristine Appalachian ballad that in 1960 led off Joan Baez's first LP. Baez rarely again opened herself to a song so fully; Parton follows Baez like a girl following her mother through a field, wandering off the path, circling back, then disappearing into the woods. But now it's nightfall, everyone in town is searching and some people are already talking about haunts and ghosts. How it ends: The fiddler, Stuart Duncan, finds her.
5) Martha Rosler "Positions in the Life World" (retrospective at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona)
In the 1967-72 series "Bringing the War Home," Rosler made John Heartfield-like photocollages of disfigured Vietnamese waiting patiently on suburban patios; the images were disconcerting, but immediately obvious. At the end of the string, though, was "First Lady," and real art: Pat Nixon posing proudly in a full-length formal gold gown, while over her shoulder in a gilt-framed mirror, Faye Dunaway was being shot to pieces at the end of "Bonnie and Clyde." Not many thought that was a Vietnam movie when they walked out of the theaters, but, like Rosler, a lot of people knew.
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