by Greil Marcus
6 “The Life Casts of Cynthia Plaster Caster: 1968–2000,” Thread Waxing Space, New York City (through July 29) New York Eye reports: “Though I’ve never liked the word ‘groupie’ and am not inclined to embrace my inner slut, I am a rock ’n’ roll girl and it’s not as if I don’t appreciate wanting to sleep with rock stars. But up until a couple of weeks ago, I was only vaguely aware that there had been a Cynthia Plaster Caster—I didn’t know her name or even if she was fact or fancy—so I was delighted to discover that not only is she real, so were her casts, and I could go see them. It seemed like a cause for celebration, that in the midst of ubiquitous Behind the Music marathons, reissues, box sets, exposés, redolent praise and idealized recapitulation, autobiographies, celebrity gossip and endless reruns of Rock and Roll Jeopardy, there was this little show that simply and without fluffy fanfare was exhibiting 67 actual rock people’s plaster-casted cocks. I invited all my friends.
“Cynthia Plaster Caster never stopped casting, and many of the rigs are recent casts, but I think it’s fair to say that the absolutely weirdest and most titillating among them—and they’re all weird and titillating—must be the balls-attached, slightly off-kilter monument of Jimi Hendrix. Fun facts: Jimi, we’re told, was uncommonly able to sustain his erection for longer than the required 60 seconds, and Cynthia, exuberant and impatient, prematurely burst open the mold, causing it to break apart. (It was later glued back together.)
“A guy friend asked if ‘The Life Casts’ was a fair sampling and I’d say it was. Identified and unadorned, often hilarious, perfectly plain white plaster penises belonging to people we know or know of, listen to and watch—it was fun and it was art. I’m going back.”
7 John Hiatt, “I Wanna Be Sedated” (KFOG-FM, San Francisco, July 16) The singersongwriter who usually doesn’t trust rock ’n’ roll, weird clothes or showmanship, from a 1996 live broadcast, just acoustic guitar, pounding, audience handclaps and a gleefully demented old-codger vocal. If he put this out he might not have to do those earnest PBS musician-interviews anymore—or get away with them.
8 Fall Time, directed by Paul Warner (Live Entertainment Video, 1993) So obscure it’s not even in Leonard Maltin: a sub-Coen Bros./Murphy’s Law crime drama set in a small Wisconsin town in 1957, with Mickey Rourke, Stephen Baldwin, and David Arquette, but the point is Sheryl Lee as a mousy bank employee who turns out to be the only one with brains, and the only winner. Here as elsewhere, from Twin Peaks to This World, Then the Fireworks, but perhaps most expansively here, Lee’s more of a silent movie actor than anyone else of her time. “We had faces then”—and they knew what to do with them, how to act from inside the face, and so does Lee. She says everything about doubt, longing, lust or worry in a single look, a look you can’t read to the bottom; the only thing she can’t do, hopping a freight with the money, leaving four bodies behind in a shack, is wistful. Probably because that was the one thing the director was able to tell her to do.
9 Lillian Gish and Robert Mitchum, “Leaning,” on Oxford American Southern Sampler 2000 (included with the July/August issue of Oxford American) A gospel song from the end of the 1955 Night of the Hunter, and the ultimate battle of the bands: good vs. evil.
10 Slobberbone, Everything You Thought Was Right Was Wrong Today (New West) Cover: Photo of “Dust storm approaching Spearman, Texas, April 14, 1935,” and it’s too late to run. That’s the spirit of everything good from this Texas quartet: the big, loser blues of “Josephine,” the title “Placemat Blues” (a protest song: “Where’s the place at the table for folks like us?”) and especially the back-country “Gimme Back My Dog.” Feedback, a simple count on a banjo, a light sound except for the rough growl of Brent Best asking for his dog back. Then the stops come loose from the music: the dog, it turns out, is the singer’s true self, there’s almost nothing of it left after the years he’s spent with the woman he’s talking to, and the only way he can get it back, the only way he can look in the mirror and see anything at all, is to beg. Meaning every word, he never goes too far; he never says anything he can’t take back. And no, he doesn’t get his dog back either.
AUGUST 7, 2000
1 Forever Mine, written and directed by Paul Schrader (Telluride Film Festival, Sept. 1–4) In this deliriously romantic version of The Count of Monte Cristo, it’s 1973 at a glamorous Florida resort. Catching a glimpse of Gretchen Mol stepping out of the surf like Botticelli’s Venus—all she’s missing is the shell—cabana boy Joseph Fiennes knows his life will never be real without her. Soon he’s talked her into bed, and it was like the discovery of gold for both of them, but she’s only been married eight months and the pain of what she’s done is ripping her apart. “Stop talking like an adult,” Fiennes says oddly. “Tell me why.” “Why what?” Mol says. “What do you think?” Fiennes says. “Why do birds sing so gay? Why does the rain fall from up above? Why did you get married?”—and the old words from Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers’ “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” slip in and out of Fiennes’ speech as if he thought up the words on the spot. Because of many kinds of misfortune, the film is slated for a Nov. 4 showing on the Starz cable channel rather than a theatrical release; until distribution catches up with the picture the Telluride screenings will be the only chance to see it on a screen as big as its reach.
2 Trailer Bride at the Great American Music Hall (San Francisco, July 28) At the head of America’s least obvious country band, Melissa Swingle could have escaped from a 1936 Walker Evans photograph; she doesn’t make eye contact. For that matter, she looks at the floor, as if she has something to say but doesn’t want to have to stand up in front of people to get it across. In tune with her sardonic, self-effacing waitress’ I get off at 10 and then I go home drawl, she offers a few splayed-leg dance steps in lieu of arm gestures or head fakes. Whine de Lune, the band called its album; that’s the sound Swingle, who plays everything but drums and bass, gets from a saw while guitarist Scott Goolsby, carrying what could be 8 inches of pompadour, puts hard, dead-cowboy notes in the air and then makes them dissolve, so slowly it’s as if you could watch it happen, and so definitively it’s hard to believe you heard what you heard.
3 MasterCard commercial Cognitive dissonance sighting, as reported by Charlie Largent: “Various ‘Priceless’ descriptions of family bonding (‘For everything else there’s MasterCard’), all set to the tune of ‘Lolita’s Theme’ from the 1962 Kubrick film . . .”
4 Salon Table Talk (July 27) Hazel Shade: “I keep thinking that Lorillard and Brown & Williamson, et al., should simply start a cigarette campaign like the Apple and the Gap khaki ads. Think of it, a sexy picture of every interesting person since the inception of photography: ‘Bob Dylan smoked.’ ‘FDR smoked.’ ‘Albert Einstein smoked.’ ‘Greta Garbo smoked.’ ‘Miles Davis smoked.’ ‘Albert Camus smoked.’ Wouldn’t it be great?”
William Ham: “A few years ago, I wanted to pitch the American Psychiatric Association an ad featuring that classic picture of Lou Reed with the Iron Crosses shaved into his tonsure with the legend ‘Lou Reed Had Shock Treatment.’ I really think it could have touched off an electrode re nais sance.”
5 CBS Radio News (July 27) For a spot on Federal District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel’s decision, later stayed, mandating suspension of Napster operations, an interviewer found guitarist G. E. Smith, late of the Saturday Night Live band and Bob Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour” and famed for his ability to combine obsequiousness with self-glorification: “It costs money to get our product out there,” Smith said, then complaining that people take it off the Net for nothing and “it’s not fair.” As if anyone would pay money for a record because his name was on it—with Napster he might get heard by accident. So score one for the judge.
6 René Magritte, La lectrice soumise (The Subjugated Reader), 1928, in “Magritte” (San Francisco Museum of Art, through Sept. 5) Very vulgar, with heavy lines and none of the stylized stillness of a typical Magritte: a woman with dark hair, brown eyes, thick eyebrows, yellowish skin, gray
sweater, black skirt, seated against a blue background and holding a book. The shock and horror on her face, her bugged-out eyes, make you wonder: why didn’t Alfred Hitchcock buy this and use it as his logo?
7 Onedia, Steel Rod EP (Jagjaguwar) A Brooklyn combo with an avant-garde rep leaves no hint of it here, and leaves little enough of an impression with the five songs listed. It’s the untitled hidden track, which pops up less than a minute after the official program ends, that pulls you in: a trash rehearsal, a 15-minute organ riff the rest of the band takes up as the meaning of life for lack of any better suggestion. Not the sort of thing one can publicly release these days, and not in any way distinctive, just what thousands of bands have done for 50 years when a lack of inspiration struck them, as complete a version of What Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time as you’ll find anywhere.
8–9 John Fahey, How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life (Drag City Books) and The Essential Bill Monroe & the Monroe Brothers (RCA) In his recent collection of stories the experimental guitarist recalls the day in the mid-’50s that a record on the radio changed—or, maybe, took—his life: “Then I heard this horrible, crazy sound. And I felt this insane, mad feeling . . . I went limp. I almost fell off the sofa. My mouth fell open. My eyes widened and expanded. I found myself hyperventilating. When it was over I tried to get up and go and get a paper bag to restore the correct balance of power between oxygen and carbon monoxide. I screamed for help but nobody was around and nobody came. I was drenched with sweat. It was like I had woken up to a new and thrilling and exciting horror movie.” The disc that occasioned this response—and Fahey is just warming up; wait ’til he gets to the record store—was Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys’ 1941 cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ 1930 “Blue Yodel No. 7.” Play it now: can you hear what a teenager heard one day when he, oh, had the flu or something, if he isn’t making the whole thing up? Enough to keep you listening. There’s something off about the rhythm, something somehow not right.
10 Bob Dylan: The American Troubadour, directed by Stephen Crisman, written by Ben Robbins (A&E, Aug. 13) This two-hour documentary is a thrilling exercise in the legal doctrine of fair use. With no permissions forthcoming for any material controlled by its subject, let alone a contemporary interview, the drama proceeds according to occasional fragments of old recorded Q&A’s, enough panning of still photos to make you think the career in question predated the invention of motion pictures, never more than a single chorus of any given song and a great deal of time devoted to the pronouncements of not very many talking heads, during which Todd Gitlin, in the ’60s a head of Students for a Democratic Society and currently a sociology professor at NYU, emerges as his generation’s David Halberstam. Around the edges are traces of an untold story: a circa-1958 tape of Dylan’s Hibbing, Minn., high-school combo the Golden Chords harmonizing on a piece of original doo-wop (“I’ll be true, I love you, yes I do”—after a moment it sounds more like Fargo’s Bobby Vee’s earliest Buddy Holly imitations) is really not that far from the 1967 Basement Tapes Dylan tune “Dontcha Tell Henry” as performed now by Levon Helm of the Band. At 60 he’s been through cancer and looks it. He sounds it: his barely audible rasp, mandolin clutched to his chest, calls up a simple music that will outlive its singers, not that people like Helm or Dylan seem likely to grant that death’s mortgage on their bodies ought to take priority over the music’s lien on their souls.
AUGUST 21, 2000
1 Walter Ruttmann, Weekend Remix (Intermedium) Tricky, tricky, tricky. In 1930 filmmaker Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941) premiered an 11-minute, 10-second radio play: a sound collage depicting an ordinary Berlin weekend. Ruttmann used street sounds, speeches, a cat meowing and children playing, and what he got were changes in mood and meaning every time you listen. Heard now, the cadences of men engaging in public address inescapably call up the cadences we know from Hitler: that was the time, and those were the rhythms of that time’s speech. So doom and portent are coded into the piece after the fact, and you can’t get rid of them. Simultaneously, though, you hear people out for a good time: you hear free time. The work is absorbed by the history that followed it; then it escapes that history, and your own sense of what happened, the knowledge you bring to the work that it doesn’t have, sucks you in. You are listening to what life was like in one place before that place would force a change in what life was like, all over the world.
Barbara Schäfer and Herbert Kapfer of Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich—a radio station responsible for the most ambitious and inventive radio plays being produced today—invited six contemporary sound artists to take on “Weekend,” lost until its rediscovery in New York in 1978. Here, bits of sound that are peripheral on the original may come to the center; bits of contemporary songs weave in and out of tones and mechanics that are undeniably far away; new rhythms are made with the sound of cellphones and computers at work. DJ Spooky and John Oswald achieve the most extreme displacement—a sense that we remain right where Ruttmann found his century, 70 years ago. Or should have. Or could have.
2 Jason Starr, Nothing Personal (Four Walls Eight Windows) Crime fiction: panic as a complete version of ordinary life. No special effects. Plus, a happy ending, if only for the least deserving characters.
3 Submarine, Skin Diving (Kinetic/Reprise) In demeanor, tone and the way they rush a phrase or a beat, this London trio catches a genre-scrambling but timespecific combination: ’60s Italian go-go movies where nothing can go wrong and late-’50s French new-wave movies where nothing can go right. For the first few numbers—“Sunbeam,” “Heartfailure”—singer Adaesi Ukairo, drummer Richard Jeffrey and guitarist Al Boyd are in the imaginary Europe conjured up not long ago by Hooverphonic of Belgium. A high, female voice working through a simple techno structure suggests a new world that never appeared, not 40 years ago and not five: what makes this world so alluring is also what leaves you stranded. After that, the band loses focus—but the opening cuts may bring you back again, certain you are missing something, which I’m sure I am. In a perfect world the press release would be the liner notes: the anonymous writer reports that while Boyd, listed as an M.D. as well as a guitar player, “ceased any meaningful dialogue with other humans at about the age of seven when he first heard Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling,’ ” the band as a whole is so fixated on da Vinci’s The Last Supper that “in 1999 they launched a (so far unsuccessful) campaign to have a reproduction of the painting mounted in every public access building in England and Wales.”
4 Jill Scott, Who Is Jill Scott?—Words and Sounds Vol. 1 (Hidden Beach) You’re supposed to say, “No one will have to ask after this,” and this debut by the writer who has worked with the ambitious hip-hop group the Roots is utterly expert and assured: soul nouveau without received mannerisms or borrowed style. It’s also as self-congratulatory as a magazine piece by Wendy Wasserstein or an obituary by Christopher Hitchens.
5 Joan Osborne, Righteous Love (Interscope) Finally, after five years, a follow-up to Joan Osborne and “One of Us.” What’s new: every ’80s neo-hippie Hollywood studio cliché known to humankind (you can see the tie-dye on the walls), plus some no one ever thought of before—as neat a trick as Osborne’s vocal attack, a unique combination of bombastic and coy. What’s strange: a cover of Bob Dylan’s bombastic “To Make You Feel My Love,” the one atrocity on his 1997 Time Out of Mind. Osborne sings it in a small voice, with no flourishes, no big gestures, so that even the most pretentious phrases (“the highway of regret”) sound like something someone might actually say.
6 Quills, directed by Philip Kaufman (Telluride Film Festival, Sept. 1–4) It’s in the last 45 minutes or so of this blazing fiction about the end of the Marquis de Sade—due for general release in November—when the film begins to move like a piece of music, gathering its rhythms and concentrating them into a force that takes on a life of its own. In the Charenton asylum, Geoffrey Rush’s Sade has been stripped of his pen and paper, but he can’t not create stories. From his barren cell he begins to shout a new tale th
rough the walls, each sentence carried by a bucket brigade of inmates and workers until, garbled but not lost, the words reach Kate Winslet’s laundress, the devoted reader who writes each fragment down—and then all hell breaks loose. After that there is only madness on all sides, libertines and censors, lunatics and doctors. It’s no small irony that Sade’s nemesis, Michael Caine’s Dr. Royer-Collard, was famous as the leader of the Doctrinaires, who were not the first French doo-wop group but should have been. The result is a horror movie about the rights of man.
7 Kim Gordon, Ikue Mori & DJ Olive (SYR) A Kim Gordon noise project, with its strength in her singing. At times Gordon’s meandering lines are just finger painting; more often there are hints of trouble her band Sonic Youth hasn’t touched in years.
8 Sally Timms & Jon Langford, Songs of False Hope and High Values (Bloodshot) On leave from the Mekons, why are they wasting their precious time with Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” or Dolly Parton’s “Down in Dover” when they have songs of their own as fragile as “I Picked Up the Pieces” to play?
9 Elvis Costello, “Brilliant Disguise” (Warner Bros., 1996) “A demo for George Strait,” the DJ said of this extra track from Elvis Costello’s “It’s Time” single. (Thoughtful of him to be pitching Bruce Springsteen copyrights rather than his own, but never mind.) With Costello’s acoustic guitar leading and bare bass and drums muffled in the background, the number comes across as a folk ballad, leaving the original overstated and unsure of itself. This seems to go on and on, as if it were “Barbara Allen,” and you can hear how subtle the song really is, if it is.
10 Keith Bradshaw, “G.M. Has High Hopes for Vehicle Truly Meant for Road Warriors” (New York Times, Aug. 6.) A clarion call for the George W. Bush era, at least up to Nov. 7 (reading the Times’ political coverage, you’d think he’d been elected months ago): “The rugged individualists,” says division manager Michael DiGiovanni on the marketing of the H1 model of the Hummer, the latest in personal tanks—guaranteed higher pollution, lower gas mileage, greater visibility obstruction and higher other-to-self roadkill ratio—“are people who really seek out peer approval.”
