Real Life Rock (264 page)

4
Thomas Pynchon,
Inherent Vice
(Penguin)
In the late '60s and early '70s, people used to talk about the great hippie detective novel. About a dope deal, of course, with an outsider/outlaw version of Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer—and Roger Simon's Moses Wine, starting out in 1973 with
The Big Fix
and still on the case thirty years later, wasn't it. Hunter Thomson played the role well in
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
, and then dissolved in his own hype. Pynchon's Doc Sportello somehow realizes the fantasy.

There's lazy writing—the repeated use of the screenwriter's “a beat” to signal a pause, neologisms (“At the end of the day”) that weren't there then, set pieces lifted from the likes of
The Little Sister
or
The Chill
(the visit to the big mansion, the hero doped up in the locked room)—but Pynchon's affection for Sportello's time and place, Los Angeles circa 1970 with the shadow of the Manson murders still hanging in the air, is overwhelming, and it's this that powers the book. What's new is Pynchon's depiction of the economy of the hippie utopia as altogether heroin-driven; Sportello himself, a one-time skip tracer who's graduated into the world of the licensed PI, beach bum division, who at twenty-nine could be a former member of the Charlatans; and Sportello's nemesis, the infinitely manipulative LAPD homicide detective Bigfoot Bjornsen. “The whole field of homicide's being stood on its ear,” he says, “—bye-bye Black Dahlia, rest in peace Tom Ince, we've seen the last of those good old-time L.A. murder mysteries I'm afraid. We've found the gateway to hell, and it's asking far too much of your L.A. civilian not to want to go crowding through it, horny and giggling as always, looking for that latest thrill. Lots of overtime for me and the boys I guess, but it brings us all that
much closer to the end of the world”—and you can almost see Squeaky Fromme, not to mention generations of Los Angeles psychics and mystics, perched on his shoulder, smiling like the Mona Lisa. There is a line that in any other hands would be ridiculous but here feels exactly right—a line that to get off the ground needs a whole book behind it, that hits the note the book itself needs to lift off into the air. “He waited until he saw a dense patch of moving shadow, sighted it in, and fired, rolling away immediately, and the figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time”—a moment that fades into an ending nearly tragic in the gorgeousness of all that will soon pass away. Doc Sportello would be about seventy now—there's a whole series of stories behind him or, for Pynchon, ahead of him.

5
The White Ribbon
,
directed by Michael Haneke (Telluride Film Festival, September 5)
In 1913, a series of disasters overtakes a small German village, and the events come most starkly to life in two linked shots in this black-and-white film. A woman, a worker, has been killed in an accident. Haneke places the camera to take in a rough, crumbling room where her naked body has been set on a bed. The camera waits. The woman's husband walks into the room. He covers the body. He leaves the room. The camera eye remains in place; you wait. Not long after, two children are about to be caned by their father, the town minister. With the camera positioned to take in a carefully decorated hallway, the epitome of bourgeois propriety, they pass into the next room. The door is closed; the camera remains focused on the hallway. The camera waits; the viewer waits.

In both cases, with these long and stationary shots, the action, either on camera or off, ceases to matter. It is the places that come to life, that witness, that hear, and that translate what has occurred for the viewer, which is to say they lead the viewer to imagine what else these walls have seen—or, perhaps more particularly for Haneke, since the movie is a parable about the emergence of Nazism, what they will see. The dread and foreboding in these waiting images, with ambient sound, the sound of the rooms breathing—they are not only part of a greater drama, but visually its black holes—can load the same qualities into the seemingly more benign images from which they are so directly drawn: Walker Evans's 1936 photos of tenant family shacks in Hale County, Alabama.

6
Jean (Hans) Arp,
Birds in an Aquarium
,
c. 1920 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
In Richard Powers's 2003 novel
The Time of Our Singing,
Delia Daley, an African American pianist from Philadelphia, and David Strom, a German-Jewish refugee physicist from New York, meet in the crowd at Marian Anderson's 1939 performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. “The bird and the fish can fall in love,” is the line that runs through the book, “but where will they build their nest?” “The bird can make a nest on the water,” one reads on the last page. “The fish can fly.” With this small assemblage of wood cutouts—in beige and black, what could be a neolithic mother figure as background; in grey, two schematic bird goddesses on the figure's chest, a red heart in one, a black heart in the other; and at the base, or the belly, rolling waves in red, brown, and blue—Arp made the fable come true.

7
Mekons, “Thee Olde Trip to Jerusalem,” Great American Music Hall (San Francisco, July 28)
With his cadaverous sunken eyes, Lu Edmonds, who plays such ancient instruments as the saz, had the look of one of the seventeenth-century heretics the song is about: the look of one of them as he might have been then, and as he might be today if he'd never died. I thought I heard someone call out for “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” which in this context was “Free Bird.”

8
Deer Tick,
Born on Flag Day
(Partisan)
There's great depth here, rooted in folk tunes many generations older than the musicians. The way John McCauley can mock himself and still convince you he means every word he says lifts lines out of
the burgeoning Providence noise. “Smith Hill” is a sardonic song about nihilism so moving I had to stop it, then play it again to hear McCauley sing “I could drink myself to death tonight, I could stand and give a toast.” Perhaps best is “Friday XIII,” a duet with the Providence singer Liz Isenberg, whose readiness to find a laugh anywhere brings back Townes Van Zandt's “Waiting Around to Die”—without any death. “I can drink a lot better than I could in my teens,” the guy promises; “
oooooo
” goes the girl. Hidden track: “Goodnight Irene”—party version.

9
The Texas Sheiks
(Tradition & Moderne)
Even with shimmering cover art by Ed Ruscha, there's something inherently hokey about old-time old-time music mavens—led by Geoff Muldaur, who came out of the Club 47 in Cambridge nearly fifty years ago—going back to the well one more time. The bet is that the allure in tunes first recorded in the '20s and '30s—“The World Is Going Wrong,” “Poor Boy, Long Ways from Home,” “Traveling Riverside Blues”—remains a treasure to be found, no matter how many times you might have thought you touched it. It pays off most improbably in Johnny Nicholas's vocal for his revision of Skip James's 1931 “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues.” The imitation of James's growl, his cadence, the weight of a tramp wearing all the clothes he owns on his back—it's embarrassing, and then it's a trance. And then it's a sting, as Nicholas shows his hand and explicitly tips a song composed in the trough of one depression onto the edge of another one.

10
Richard Powers,
Generosity: An Enhancement
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
In this novel, a T-shirt:
DADA: IT'S NOT JUST FOR UMBRELLAS ANYMORE
.