Real Life Rock (233 page)

9
Arthur Moore,
Security Service Individually Watermarked
(Maverick)
A letter accompanying this pre-release CD stated that for security reasons the object in question could not itself carry the information that (1) Arthur Moore was in fact Alanis Morissette, (2)
Security Service
was really an album titled
So Called Chaos
, (3) “By accepting this CD” one was agreeing not to copy it, play it in a computer, put it on the internet, lend it to anyone, or play it for anyone, and (4) that any such use of the object in question could somehow be traced. So I can't tell you anything about it. Or wouldn't be able to even if I had listened to it, which I was much too scared to do.

10
Sarah Vowell reports from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (Dec. 21)
“Went to visit the
Arizona
this morning. What really got me was the little marker to the lower left of the wall of names: the vets who survived but wanted their ashes sprinkled in with those of their comrades. Two of them died just this year. Then I took the bus up to the North Shore
to watch the surfers. My sister and I always had a thing for surfer movies. There was one called
North Shore
that came out when we were teenagers in Montana about a kid from Arizona who learned to surf in a wave pool and moved to Oahu where the real surfers looked down on him but then he won them over and got the cute Hawaiian girl.

“Off to watch the sunset and listen to Warren Zevon. Last night I was doing that and the sun dropped below the horizon line just as his version of ‘Knockin' on Heaven's Door' was ending, thereby proving that if there is a God, he directs really hack videos.”

FEBRUARY
11, 2004

1
Electrelane,
The Power Out
(Too Pure)
In 2001 these British women released the almost all-instrumental
Rock It to the Moon
, and you couldn't begin to say what it was. This time, working with professional reprobate Steve Albini, the result is almost a narrative: a series of embarrassing misfires and experiments (a poem by Siegfried Sassoon done with a choir) followed by a long, long chase. With “Take the Bit Between Your Teeth,” the band does: it's an all-stops-out grunge jam, about nothing but getting through the forest to the clearing—or the feeling of not caring if you ever get anywhere else. “This Deed” is very European film music, very sexy, very where's-the-gun; “Love Builds Up” is syncopated in a way that's all suspense. Cheap organ and drifting voices have made their own place, as unlikely as the Pre-Raphaelite party of Donovan's “Bert's Blues” or the locked room of Joy Division's “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and no less irresistible. This is as rich a record as you'll hear this year, and almost certainly the least obvious.

2
Butchies,
Make Yr Life
(Yep Rock)
These three punk musicians will probably call their next album
The L Word
, which will be to the TV show as the homemade PRADA T-shirt one of them is wearing here is to the trademarked version. For the moment what they're after is pop craft—from echoes of Elizabeth Elmore's Reputation to a doo-wop guitar figure running through a love song.

3
David Denby, “Living in America,”
New Yorker
(Jan. 12)
Last fall, Denby, a film critic for the
New Yorker
, published “My Life as a Paulette,” as in an acolyte of the late
New Yorker
movie critic Pauline Kael. It was his exorcism of the spell the witch cast on him even in death: an account of how Kael befriended him, encouraged him, praised him, and one day called to tell him he wasn't really a writer and that he ought to do something else with his life. Well, he showed her—he got her job!—but as a critic Denby remains dead weight. His style is the equivalent of someone clearing his throat. On those rare occasions when he assays an argument, it's indisputable that nothing will ever rescue him from mediocrity.

In “Living in America,” pumped by his liberation from Kael and at the same time helplessly but perversely imitating Kael's sense of herself as an American writer, Denby takes on Vadim Perelman, the Russian/Canadian director of
House of Sand and Fog
, Jane Campion, the New Zealander director of
In the Cut
, and Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican director of
21 Grams
. These people should not be making movies for American audiences, Denby says: “They don't really get America right . . . they miss the colloquial ease and humor, the ruffled surfaces of American life.” They insist on the ugliness, horror, obsessiveness, and vengeance in American life (like Denby's hero, the Clint Eastwood of
Mystic River
, which apparently also pulses with the ruffled potato chips of American life, though I must have slept through those parts), but they “may be complacent in their own ways. Perhaps they accept tragedy too easily . . . Dolorousness”—yes, Denby is free; that's not a word Kael would have used at gunpoint—“is becoming a curse in the more ambitious movies made in America by foreign-born directors.” “We don't need other people's despair,” Denby concludes;
plainly, foreigners can get down with it like John Woo or they can shut up. Kael didn't know the half of it.

4
Townes van Zandt, “Coo Coo,” on
Acoustic Blue
(Tomato)
A 1994 concert version from the late country songwriter: never has “Coo Coo”—or “The Cuckoo,” or “The Coo Coo Bird,” or “Jack o' Diamonds”—taken on such detail, such melodrama. Two minutes in and it's not a song at all, it's a western.

5
Barry Gifford,
Brando Rides Alone
(North Atlantic Books)
A very short account of the 1961
One-Eyed Jacks
, the only movie Marlon Brando ever directed. You can squint trying to find more than attitude in Gifford's critical method and confuse yourself trying to figure out why that's all he needs.

6
Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer, “Hillbillies,” from
Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty
(Verse Press)
“Hillbillies” is only the most notable of the 19 often improvised poems included here, all of them recorded on the spot in clubs, on roadsides, in front of signs, etc. It instantly elevates Beckman and Rohrer—a Huey-Dewey-and-Louie duo of New York tourists—to the top of whatever chart it is that ranks artists who should be shot.