Real Life Rock (172 page)

6
Lucinda Williams, “Angels Laid Him Away,” on
Avalon Blues—A Tribute to the Music of Mississippi John Hurt
(Vanguard)
More proof that Williams has taken the fawning reviews of her
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
to heart, and is now ready to bestow her genius on anyone dead enough to keep quiet about it. Too bad Joe Meek isn't around to deal with this.

7–9
“Vermeer and the Delft School,” Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, closed May 27)
“The baddest painter since God's Jan Vermeer,” Jonathan Richman proclaimed on “Vincent Van Gogh.” (“Bompabompadomp ramalangadangdang bompabompadomp oo-wah-oo,” went the chorus.) A banner with those words should have hung over Vermeer's
The Procuress
(1656). On the right side of the large, florid painting is a man flipping a prostitute a gold coin while resting his other hand on her breast; on the left is a dandy, by consensus a Vermeer self-portrait, his eyes sparkling in a ravenously privileged male grin.

It's not characteristic. All through the Delft work, especially that of Vermeer (1632–75) and Pieter de Hooch (1629–84), there are quiet rooms, courtyards, streets. There is the emergence of bourgeois life as “a new idea in Europe” (as Saint-Just, at the height of the French Revolution, named happiness)—as a new idea of harmony, simplicity, domestic art, leisure, neoteny (children are dressed as miniature adults, but their faces are their own, and the faces of adults retain childlike features). There is a stillness, a peace of mind that rules even as tales of colonial adventure bring drama into the home. There is a complete absence of decadence or pretentiousness—or, most of the time, even anxiety. (Vermeer's 1662–63
Woman With a Lute
is a glaring anomaly: a girl with hollow eyes in a bird's face, her blonde hair receding as if she's suffering from malnutrition, could be a London punk in 1976.) A whole way of being can be summoned in the luminous possibilities of a single flower or a commonplace bowl.

If you'd left the exhibit and walked across the museum to the William Blake show, you'd have passed van Gogh's 1888
Madame Roulin and Her Baby
, which measures the real distance between the Netherlands in the 17th century and France in the 19th: between a new idea and an old one. The mother is on the right, her head downcast, her yellow face fading into the yellow background as she holds up her baby
with its ugly adult's face, with its grimace of one who has already apprehended and understood the ugliness of the world into which it has so recently been born. The mother's age can't be told from her face, but her hands are old and arthritic; she looks down in shame from her monster.

10
Soundbreak.com
, advertisement (Prince & Mulberry streets, New York, May 9)
Down the side of a building, the head of a pleasant-looking middle-aged man; your accountant, pharmacist, hardware store clerk. “Their music drowns out the evil voices in my head,” he's saying.

JUNE
11, 2001

1
Monkees,
Summer 1967—The Complete U.S. Concert Recordings
(Rhino)
Proof that the economy is still humming: market calculations indicate there remains enough disposable income to ensure a positive return on the release of a double live CD collecting, in their entirety, four shows consisting of the same 17 songs. Played in the same order. By the same people.

2
Advertisement for U.S. Trust
(
Los Angeles
magazine, June) & David Leonhardt, “If Richer Isn't Happier, What Is?”
(
New York Times
,
May 19)
This column does not credit the existence of political conspiracy or coordinated propaganda. Therefore the simultaneous appearance of a news story about how “money really cannot buy happiness” and how “even though income [has] risen dramatically since World War II, Americans say they are no happier” and an ad headed “Money Is Not the End of Worry. It Is the Beginning” can have nothing to do with deflecting resentment over the unprecedentedly regressive character of the recently passed tax bill. “You have more dependents, more possessions, more investments,” says copy under a stark painting of a 40-ish woman who looks like Daria without a sense of humor. “Yet you're still expected to fight your way through a zillion e-mails and voice mails each day, just trying to hang on to your sanity, your ideal weight, and your quality time with your family. How can you explain to other people the fear that your children might never need to work?” “Who would believe all that money could ever feel like a burden rather than a blessing?” the ad asks. It answers not just for U.S. Trust, but for the person idly reading along: “We would.” Wouldn't you?

3
Quasi,
The Sword of God
(Touch and Go)
Earnest playing, uninteresting singing—of a certain strain, indie music of absolute purity.

4
Nick Lowe,
The Convincer
(Yep Roc)
From the last of the rock 'n' roll pranksters, songs too dull even for parody.

5
Scott Miller & the Commonwealth,
Thus Always to Tyrants
(Sugar Hill)
Nothing here—not the cravenly self-conscious rewrite of Charles Frazier's
Cold Mountain
, especially not the even more cravenly self-conscious rewrite of the Band's “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”—suggests this
isn't
an homage to John Wilkes Booth. Except that Scott Miller's declamatory style isn't going to scare anyone.

6
Love, Janis: The Songs, the Letters, the Soul of Janis Joplin
(Columbia Legacy)
She didn't mean it. Whatever it was.