Real Life Rock (286 page)

4
James Gavin,
Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker
(Chicago Review Press)
Across a lifetime of ruin, the persistence of “My Funny Valentine.”

5
Veronica Falls,
Veronica Falls
(Slumberland)
Maybe out of season, this is warm-weather driving music, airy and determined, with more than a hint of the Jamies' “Summertime, Summertime,” as it plays in James Toback's 1978
Fingers
, with Harvey Keitel in a café with his boom box playing when a man at the next table complains. “Do you believe this?” Keitel says. “This is the Jamies, man! ‘Summertime, Summertime'—the most musically inventive song of 1958!”

6
Percival Everett,
Assumption
(Gray-wolf Press)
“I was tired of being a good guy,” says small-town New Mexico deputy sheriff Ogden Walker, not quite all there in the three detective stories that make up this book. Coming at the end of the last one, this simple line sends you back, mentally rewriting the ones that preceded it to try to make them work out differently, but they are not quite all there either. These are murder mysteries where the holes in the plot undermine all the apparent facts.

7
Michael Pisaro,
asleep, street, pipes, tones
(Gravity Wave)
Pisaro is a minimalist composer whose music—here, a more than hour-long piece—reaches for what can feel like nearly absolute abstraction. The abstraction, though, is so complete that you soon begin to feel at home with it. It begins to feel like a landscape, and you begin to inhabit it, to feel your way through it, to recognize features, even to remember landmarks. What begins as a kind of industrial noise turns into industrial wind, and you have the feeling of being taken into a vast desert, which after a long traverse opens up onto a city, one of Anselm Kiefer's abandoned, after-the-apocalypse ruins, and you can imagine yourself living there. Or, as the title implies, at least sleeping there.

8
Alan Jackson, Norah Jones, Patty Loveless, Jack White, et al.,
The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams
(Egyptian)
Aren't tribute albums terrible? Yes, and for a collection of Hank Williams lyrics now set to music, Lucinda Williams goes so far around the bend of her own mannerisms she vaporizes like the Wicked Witch of the West. Everyone else is merely earnest and competent, except for Jakob Dylan, whose “Oh, Mama, Come Home” finds a quick beat, then slows the song behind it, then looks past it. Two-line verses, a four-line chorus: you feel someone walking a circle around his day, trying to find a way out, then not caring if he does, in love with the rhythm of his loneliness. It's the most modest track on the
album, the only one with nothing to prove, and you could play it all day long.

9
Steven Green house, “Examining a Labor Hero's Death: Letter Emerges in 1915 Case against Joe Hill
(
New York Times,
August 26)
“A new biography makes the strongest case yet that Hill . . . executed by a Utah firing squad in 1915 . . . was wrongfully convicted of murdering a local grocer, the charge that led to his execution at age 36. . . . The book's author, William M. Adler, argues that Hill was a victim of authorities and a jury eager to deal a blow to his radical labor union, as well as his own desire to protect the identity of his sweetheart.”

There was powerful if circumstantial evidence against Hill: on January 10, 1914, the same night John G. Morrison and his son were shot to death in their grocery, Hill, an organizer and songwriter for the IWW, the “one big union” which before 1920 was spreading like fire among the miners and loggers in the west, was himself shot in the chest. Prosecutors argued Hill had been hit by a shot Morrison's son had gotten off before dying, and though Hill had supposedly mentioned a woman and a jealous suitor to the doctor who treated him, at his trial he refused to say anything at all. But for his book
The Man Who Never Died
, Greenhouse went on, Adler found a “long-forgotten letter from Hill's sweetheart that said he had been shot by a rival for his affections”—and, Greenhouse reported, Adler had been inspired to dig up the bones of the case “ after reading Bob Dylan's
Chronicles
, which argued that the Hill case was a miscarriage of justice.”

In 1968, Dylan based “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” on the old labor song “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” (“Alive as you or me,” it went; “ ‘I never died,' said he”). “The more I thought about it,” Dylan says in the three pages in
Chronicles
he devotes to Hill and the question of the protest song, “ ‘Long Black Veil' seemed like it could have been a song written by Joe Hill himself, his last very last one”—but who knew that wasn't poetry but detective work?

10
Brighton Rock,
written and directed by Rowan Joffe (IFC)
On the Brighton pier in 1964, at a “Make a Record of Your Own Voice” booth, Pinkie Brown—played by a terrifying Sam Riley, who four years ago in
Control
gave a shattered performance as Ian Curtis of Joy Division—cuts the first punk 45. Luckily, the stuff they use for the discs is really cheap.

JANUARY
2012

1
Yael Bartana,
Entartete Kunst lebt!
(
Degenerate Art Lives!),
as part of “Germany Is Your America,” curated by Michael Brace-well and Anke Kempkes (Broadway 1602, September 13–December 15, 2011)
An animated five-minute 16 mm film—which ought to be playing now not solely in galleries but as an art-house short, a film-festival gem, an online sensation—derived from Otto Dix's still-shocking 1920 painting
War Cripples
, which was seized and shown by the Nazis at the 1937 Munich Degenerate Art exhibition. Bartana begins with silhouettes in a hobbled march across a dim screen, which is soon filled by an ever-increasing parade of four hideously maimed war veterans from Dix's picture, figures that in Bartana's hands turn into countless different people. In a parade of wooden legs and prostheses, all are in uniform, each one is seemingly more cut-up than the last, with the sound hammering and clattering from the tap dance of the artificial limbs to the screech and cranks of mechanical jaws and other body parts, until the centerpiece seems to become the jaunty man with dark glasses and a cigarette and no arms or legs, being pushed in a cart. More and more and more of them, sometimes shot from above, so you see only massed lines of hats—by the end spelling out the title of the piece like a college marching band as led by Leni Riefen-stahl. What's most striking is the image of
happiness
on the faces of the men—not pride, really, but smugness: “Look at what
I
gave for the Fatherland.”