Pages tagged “issue 15”

It was the best of times, it was most assuredly the worst of times.

Initially, 2001 looked like a banner year for peppy techno-rock quartet Garbage. Still swooning from the alterna-chart success of its eponymous 1995 debut and punkier ’98 followup “Version 2.0,” the band—comprised of three brainiac producer/ prodigies and a Scottish siren named Shirley Manson—believed the release of its third salvo Beautiful Garbage would be a career-topping cakewalk. But Dickens himself couldn’t have scripted a more disastrous downfall.

Trouble began almost as soon as the set hit the street. First 9/11 shattered the group’s once-tranquil universe. The subsequent vice-tightened airport security made touring the globe quite difficult, recalls Garbage mastermind Butch Vig, who’d cemented his studio-whiz reputation back in ’91 with Nirvana’s Nevermind. “The world had changed dramatically since when we started the band,” says the Madison, Wis., native, over an afternoon beer in his new part-time home of Hollywood. “We also started going places, only to find that people there really hated Americans. And when you live in a world like that, it can’t help but start to seep into the music.”

But Garbage’s gauntlet had just begun. As the (not so) “Beautiful” tour continued, percussionist Vig contracted hepatitis and was forced to hire a replacement drummer while he flew home to recuperate. By the time the juggernaut hit Russia, it was on its last legs. Manson discovered “something seriously, seriously wrong,” she recollects. “We were headlining a lot of huge European festivals, and my voice started disappearing on me after 30 seconds of being onstage. And I’d never had any vocal problems my entire career.” Now she did. The Bolshoi hospital’s diagnosis: A vocal-cord cyst, sighs the flame-haired, workout-trim diva, who’s also been residing in L.A. “At first I was really excited about going to the Bolshoi, because this specialist I saw had treated all sorts of famous operatic singers in Russia,” she shudders, rubbing her slender throat. “But I went in and … and … I can’t even put it into words …

“There was a woman in overalls there, like an old washer-woman, with a stick with a piece of cloth tied to the bottom of it, cleaning blood off the floor. And they sterilized the instruments they used to go down my throat with a naked flame. I was really freaked out. The national health care service of the United Kingdom was beautiful by comparison.” An operation was eventually performed at Mount Sinai in the States, sidelining Garbage again. And the former Angelfish crooner (whom Vig discovered, as legend has it, fronting her old combo on MTV late one Wisconsin night) couldn’t speak for a week. “Which doesn’t sound like much,” she allows, in her still-briar-bristly voice. “But I’m really verbal, so not saying a word for seven days was quite disturbing, really bizarre.”

Bespectacled guitarist/keyboardist (and comedic Manson foil) Steve Marker pats his pal on her delicate shoulder, lets out a long sigh, then picks up the tragic tale. “So we soldiered on, got through all that, then got to the studio thinking ‘Whew—we made it through!’” he scowls, shaking his clean-shaven head. “But it turns out we hadn’t, because it just went downhill even farther after that.” Long-simmering dissent erupted into full-blown bickering. No one, not even silent, sagelike axeman Duke Erikson, could agree on the proper musical direction for album number four. “Panic had set in, the panic of not being able to come up with ideas,” Erikson says. To make matters worse, lyricist Manson was beset by a writer’s block so blackening, it often reduced her to tears in the studio.

That’s when Vig made his fateful decision. Instead of reconnoitering for another unproductive session, he phoned each member and requested individual meetings. He gave everyone the same bulletin: Garbage wasn’t necessarily broken up, but it was going on indefinite hiatus. Today, Vig chortles, eyes twinkling mischievously behind his yellow-lensed wraparound shades, “Folks probably think Garbage is all washed up.”

Manson chuckles along with her chum. The irony is not lost on her. Although she is, by all glowing fan-site accounts, probably one of the most gorgeous women in rockdom, she’s diagnosed herself with another ailment: mild body dysmorphia, wherein she’s never quite satisfied with the reflection she sees in the mirror. She’s gradually overcoming the handicap, thanks to her personal trainer, who’s prescribed a heavy exercise regimen that includes boxing. “It’s scary, because I’ve never had anybody come at me, punching for 10, 15 minutes straight,” she swears. “But my trainer says I was a born boxer, because I was born Scottish.” And her first step to Garbage recovery? Seeing Catherine Hardwicke’s film Thirteen one creepy night, Manson says. The shocking junior-high tailspin of author/actress Nikki Reed felt déjà vu spooky, like her own turbulent experiences at that age. The writer’s block melted away. She went home and promptly penned the words to “Bleed Like Me,” what would become the title ballad of her band’s barnstorming new comeback for Geffen.

Bleed Like Me feels like one of those suckerpunch TKO’s a boxer never sees coming. From the opening jawbreaker “Bad Boyfriend” (propelled by the primal wallop of Dave Grohl his badself), the album never lets up, coursing through New Order-ish sugarpop (“Run Baby Run”), frantic proto-punk (the kickoff single “Why Do You Love Me”), scathing anti-Bush discourse (“Metal Heart”) and perfectly-sculpted power ballads (“Happy Home,” “It’s All Over But The Crying”). It’s songwriting on a grand, brilliantly inventive scale; One cut, “Right Between The Eyes,” even dares to insert its clever hook inside the screaming guitar lead that follows the chorus. Hey, Vig shrugs, sometimes you have to lose your own plot in order to find it again.

Buster Keaton’s genius is both obviously apparent and exquisitely subtle. Born Joseph Francis Keaton, Jr. in 1895, he was performing in his family’s vaudeville act by age four. He was given his famous moniker by Harry Houdini, when as a young lad he fell down some stairs. Urged on by his mentor, the great Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Keaton made the transition to movies in 1917, performing in a series of comic two-reelers. But his true talent blossomed in the ’20s when he started directing and starring in his own movies.

His short film, One Week, illustrates his combination of classic vaudeville slapstick and brilliant sight gags. Keaton, along with his newly married bride (Sybil Seely), attempts to put together a prefab house. But a rival suitor has intentionally mis-numbered the boxes, and Keaton’s attempt to follow the directions leads to anarchy, with the front door on the second floor and the house balanced on a point. The making of the house is hilarious, as Keaton is continually flummoxed by his creation. It leads to one of his most famous stunts—where he’s about to be crushed by a falling wall, only to be saved by a perfectly placed window (a stunt repeated later in Steamboat Bill, Jr.). But what Keaton and Seely do inside their house is even better (a clever bathroom scene reveals Keaton’s understanding of the “meta” aspects of cinema), and the climax involving two different train tracks is one of the greatest sight gags in Keaton’s oeuvre.

It’s hard to imagine contemporary comedies without Keaton’s influence. Check out his short, Our Hospitality, which features a truly spectacular stunt over a waterfall that is frequently echoed by Jackie Chan’s work. Or watch The Playhouse, where Keaton plays every character in a theater, and you realize where Being John Malkovich got one of its best scenes. And every comic with a gadget must pay homage to Keaton’s obsession with electricity and props, which reaches its pinnacle in The Electric House.

Keaton’s feature films tend to be richer in characters and drama, though less humorous with fewer gags-per-minute. Still, The General is widely recognized as one of the finest comedies ever, and you can’t go wrong with The Cameraman, College or Seven Chances. Even The Navigator, not considered one of his best, has perhaps my favorite Keaton moment, when his leading lady uses Keaton as a canoe.

Unfortunately, the transition to sound and the economics of Hollywood in the ’30s dimmed Keaton’s star, and he was reduced to playing bit parts in uninspired films. But his body of work from 1920-1928, almost all of which is available on DVD, is one of the finest of any filmmaker.

When a record this hyped comes along, I’m instantly skeptical. But with production/songwriting team West and Legend’s overwhelmingly tasteful arrangements—priceless guitar- and-piano hooks, ethereal strings, cascading Philly-soul harp and silky, Mariana Trench-deep grooves—Get Lifted has as much in common with the classic funk and soul of Isaac Hayes, Stevie Wonder and The Delfonics as it does with today’s best R&B, hip-hop and neo-soul.

The only misstep—and it breaks my heart that such juvenile lyrical spew made this masterful record’s final cut—is West’s track-debasing rap on the otherwise stellar “Number One,” during which he (I’m not kidding) has a conversation with his penis. But with Legend’s subtly beautiful piano and soulful vocals breathing life into these soon-to-be standards, you’ll forgive this one cringe-worthy blunder.

Calling from Los Angeles, Deana Carter—in her unabashedly Southern accent—politely asks me to hold on.

“I’m comin’ out of the car wash,” she laughs. “This bird crapped on my car.”

Lately, she’s become an expert at multitasking—this interview being no exception. In the last two years, she found a new man in filmmaker Chris Hickey, had baby Gray Hayes Hickey not long after, and signed with indie label Vanguard. Now she’s releasing her label debut, The Story of My Life—a surprising, sincere collection of Southern-fried folk rock sure to cause some double-takes in Nashville. While “twirling so many plates,” especially a seven-month-old, the music must have been affected.

“What music!?” she asks playfully. “I have a life? I have a career? I forgot. The only thing I’m struggling with now is trying to keep it all together. I just didn’t realize how easy I had it when it was just me by myself.”

During that less hectic time, Carter torched the industry, selling five-million copies of her debut, 1995’s Did I Shave My Legs For This? Spawning three number-one singles, including coming-of-age stunner “Strawberry Wine,” Carter became a household name in country music. But after a decade of creative differences and label shuffling, she found it dif?cult to duplicate Legs’ success both commercially and artistically. Her search for a new label was out of pure creative necessity.

“Vanguard was like ‘We want you for who you are. We want you to make the record you want to make. We want you to produce it and write the music,’” she says. “I was, like, oh my God, how can I say no to that? It’s my dream.” With what sounds like a sigh of relief, she admits “It was perfect.” Finally, writing or co-writing all of Life’s 11 songs, Carter’s made a record that completely mirrors her heart.

“Ordinary,” one of the many standout tracks, explores the struggle to carve a niche in the world. Even as an accomplished singer/songwriter, Carter still feels the pressure. “I am so afraid of being lumped in and not remembered that I just freak out about that,” she says. “Whatever it is, I just want to be memorable. I want to affect people in a good way.”

Pondering her “place,” Carter revels in a few simple words of wisdom. “My grandma used to say ‘You either make dust or you eat dust.’ There’s no in between.”

Jack Johnson briefly considers the functionality of metaphors in “Never Know,” one of several insidiously catchy tracks on In Between Dreams, before concluding, “I wanna give this imagery back.”

Johnson is the most plainspoken of singer/songwriters; he never resorts to metaphor if straight talk will do. Listening to the surfer/artist’s third album is like sitting on a barstool alongside a good friend, knocking back pints and rappin’ it down about, y’know, life and whatever.

Among the weightier topics Johnson ponders this time are the nocturnal struggle between worry and sleep (“No Other Way”), screwing up as a vicious cycle (“Staple It Together”) and coming to terms with the death of a friend (“If I Could”). As always, the sparest of arrangements surround his gentle vocals, appropriately paralleling his down-to-earth lyrical style. The opening and penultimate songs, “Better Together” and “Do You Remember,” conversationally celebrate Johnson’s relationship with his wife, and they’re all the more touching for their guilelessness. In the latter, he reflects on the day they met, singing, “I was crazy ’bout you then / And now for the craziest thing of all / Over 10 years have gone by / You’re still mine / Locked in time / Let’s rewind.”

Johnson’s songs contain little catharsis (riding waves apparently takes care of that), instead offering the soft-spoken assertion that, even in this imperfect world, life is worth living, if only for its beautiful minutiae—love, friendship, banana pancakes and a sizable swell on a sunny California afternoon.

Free HBO
by Arye Dworken

Poor Moby. Lord knows it’s not easy being bald, vegan and sensitive. He wears glasses, drinks tea (even has his own line of herbal beverages), and endures routine verbal attacks for no apparent reason other than being Moby. But the man born Richard Melville Hall has always acknowledged his inner-wimp faster than you can say, “How much will I get paid exactly if my tune scores your commercial?” In a January 30 blog entry, Moby reminds readers he’s “the first to admit that I’m not a tough guy.” His newest release, Hotel, hinges on the deadly accuracy of this statement.

This 14-song outing kicks off with the melancholic “Raining Again,” continues with an ethereal cover of New Order’s “Temptation” and ends with “Homeward Angel,” a funereal-sounding number. Eschewing his trademark blues-flavored samples in favor of his own vocals, Moby composed the entire record from scratch—a truly bold move for the veteran New York DJ. And while his singing voice wouldn’t likely earn him much favor before an American Idol judging panel, he compensates with earnestness and authenticity. Your vegan-bashing, bald-hating, coffee-snob friends may find plenty to ridicule about Melville’s latest, but Moby means well. He wants nothing more than to move the citizens of our war-mongering world, and that, my friend, is a worthy pursuit.

Smells Like B.O.
by Jeff Leven

I don’t even know where to start. This disc lost me at hello and only got worse. I could deal with it being an underpowered, technically regressive, lazily assembled turd of an album and not lose my cool. I could deal with this album being lyrically hackneyed and conceptually pointless. I could even chuckle at the smarmy hubris of including a full extra disc of dentist-office, stale-and-sterile “ambient” music (how this differs much from the main disc is something I’m still working out). But the syrupy blasphemy of Moby’s godawful attack on New Order’s classic “Temptation” got me fighting mad. Dammit.

Hotel, with its consistently limp tempos, ignores almost all the collagist techniques and sonic innovations in electronica (if you can still use that term to describe Moby’s music) since, oh, about 1994. But here’s what galls me the most: if anyone less famous than Moby mailed this CD out as a demo it would become a coaster (or ad hoc ashtray) in seconds flat. Even if you’re one of those misguided folks who thought Play was something special, you’ve got to admit that whatever slack its popularity earned Moby doesn’t begin to justify the ham-fisted pop crappery he’s been slavering on us ever since. I’m checking out of this Hotel before someone tells me I can never leave.

Reader's Poll Results

Free HBO (aka, I dig it!): 42%
Smells Like B.O. (Moby, please stop making records!): 58%

Reading a translated work often involves figuring out where the author is coming from. Why do the characters behave the way they do? Is it a French thing? Maybe they had it translated by a poor grad student delirious with hunger. Whatever causes my unease with a foreign work, at root I know there’s something I just don’t get. International writing always has something to do with crossing cultural borders, with negotiating limits and lines. The experience can be baffling, intimidating—just plain overwhelming.

But international comic art is an altogether different affair—seemingly accessible because (if nothing else) comics must be sequential, as Will Eisner termed it. I may not understand one panel, but if I keep moving, chances are a picture will emerge from the whole. And generally speaking, comic art invites me along for the ride. Not a Kiwi? That’s cool—I can still get it. Not Japanese? No problem. In a time when international tourism is a serious, sometimes dangerous prospect, international comics can operate as a passport for the postmodern subject.

As touring destinations go, Iran doesn’t top the U.S. Department of State’s list. And from the first page of Marjane Satrapi’s comic memoir Persepolis: A Story of a Childhood and her follow-up, Persepolis II: A Story of a Return, I found myself right in the middle of a presumably hostile environment. By the last panel, I felt punched in the gut. How did this happen?

Satrapi uses a disarmingly simple black-and-white style as she relates the history of her life lived inside, outside and in response to late-20th-century Iran. Such technique is crucial, as many of her Western readers may be less than enthusiastic toward Iranians and what little they know of Iranian history. Nothing makes the reader feel quite so much like an insider—with all the connotations of confinement—as the frequent scenes of Satrapi’s family sitting around the living room, shades drawn to foil would-be informants, while they talk casually and frankly about problems with the Iranian government and society. These tales don’t incite anger and hatred toward Iran and Iranians; if anything, they inspire empathy. Persepolis is about being an outsider when inside and vice versa—having a split national and cultural identity.

As an American male, I anticipated I’d have a difficult time finding a way into Satrapi’s story. But instead, an intensely proud, educated woman close to my own age shares experiences at-once cosmopolitan and completely personal—and rather than being rebuffed or offended, I see her as she sees herself. Satrapi invites the reader into her interior world, and it’s irresistible.

Far more forbidding to visitors is the world of Spanish author Juan Diaz Canales and artist Juanjo Guarnido’s detective comic Blacksad. Their characters are animals, thereby essentializing a 1940s-inspired noir world. It’s Max Ernst meets Sam Spade. At moments, the titular John Blacksad re?ects on what it means to be a cat: how sense of smell affects his impressions of people, for example. Yet many details resist hard-and-fast animal characterization. Apart from such obvious absurdities as a polar bear marrying a housecat (who then has two kittens), characters have mostly human bodies (including hands) and walk upright. Where does personality end and species trait begin? In Blacksad, boundaries are permeable and help create the unease so typical of noir tales—nothing is as it seems, except when it is. Nowhere does this concept have greater effect than in Blacksad 2: Arctic Nation, in which the life-and-death choices racism fosters boil down to the color of one’s fur.

Sometimes we’re outcasts from the start, if our fur isn’t the right color or if we look—or are—Middle Eastern. In contrast, the residents of Dylan Horrocks’ Hicksville find themselves at the dead-center of all things comic (even if the town is situated in New Zealand). Opening with a comic nod toward Griffin and Sabine, Hicksville is a kind of just-so story about comic artists, styled much like the more recent Jasper Fforde novels of literary detective work; interpolated throughout the main investigative plot are allegorical tales of exploration. Hicksville plays with the boundary between truth and fantasy, between here and elsewhere, using a metaphor of exploration. Maps, directions, time and their role in dramatizing the importance of personal choice and integrity make this book an anthem for comic artists. The fictional Hicksville is not so much a boundary line as it is a terminus: an Avalon for the kings of comics.

The more I look, the more I find that international comics go beyond political borders to make themes of both boundaries and their transgression. Comics like David B.’s Epileptic—with the author’s attempt to untangle epilepsy from madness and guilt from freedom; Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub, about a samurai treading a path between honor and damnation; and even Hergé’s Tintin, its boy reporter oblivious to borders in the grand imperial style—underscore this emphasis on dividing lines. Central characters stand at the border between events or lives, and as liminal ?gures, provide gateways allowing readers to pass from one realm to the next. How the authors construct this balance at the intersection of two perspectives is absolutely central to their artistic choices—and it’s what makes the stories so rewarding. Perhaps that’s the ultimate lesson of international comics: every place or text I discover—country, ?lm, book or comic—represents an articulation of home for someone. But what comics allow us to do is visit these lands as a welcome guest. I come back—sometimes saddened, often exhilarated—but always with a greater sense of what it means to be human elsewhere. That, in turn, lends humanity to our own lives. Perhaps comics can do for us now what the 18th century’s Grand Tour supposedly did for those privileged enough to enjoy it: season them, temper them and—most importantly—elevate their appreciation for fellow human beings.

When legendary artists like B.B. King or James Brown grow old and start resting on their laurels, it’s easy to forgive them. After all, they’ve long since earned the right to sit back, enjoy life and let the new kids pick up the slack. But, even at 64 years old, Solomon Burke refuses to go through the motions.

The sound here is nothing new, but on Make Do With What You Got—the follow-up to Burke’s subdued 2002 masterpiece Don’t Give Up On Me—he does just that, using his roof-raising, gospel-tinged belting to make classic ’60s- and- ’70s-style soul seem right at home in the information age. Aided by producer Don Was, and a supporting cast of studio cats who’ve backed everyone from Ray Charles and Marvin Gaye to Elvis Presley and Willie Nelson, Burke turns out a big-sounding record that plays like a Stax Revue. Even ’80s R&B icon Ray Parker, Jr., drops in on the action, lending some tasteful guitar fills, and believe you me, this ain’t no “Ghostbusters.”

From the Keith Richards rhythm guitar and “Angel of Harlem” horn section on “I Need Your Love In My Life” to the Sunday-morning rendition of Hank Williams’ “Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul,” Burke cranks up the volume. And the album’s song selection is nearly as impeccable as its predecessor. With moving takes on The Band, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison and Dr. John, Burke further cements his reputation as one of the greatest living song interpreters in American music.

The singer rose to prominence during Atlantic Records’ soul-stirring ’60s heyday, albeit in the shadow of folks like Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. Though Burke had plenty of R&B hits, he never had the crossover success of his contemporaries, but that didn’t stop him from influencing ’60s rockers like the Stones. Early on, Mick, Keith and company covered two Burke tunes—“Everybody Needs Somebody To Love” and “Cry To Me.”

Now, with Burke’s cover of the Sticky Fingers gem “I Got The Blues,” his connection to the Stones comes full circle. With sweltering Hammond organ, bursting horns and steady-as-she-goes guitar picking, the former child preacher rides a slow-cresting sonic wave to the song’s gospel-choir chorus. The music builds to a rave-up crescendo and Burke starts screaming sermon-like ad-libs from his pulpit of heartache—“I got the blues for you! I won’t tell ya! Look what you doing to me baby! I cut off all my hair! I don’t know which way to turn! I can’t watch TV! I can’t watch The Late Show! Find myself three o’clock in the morning cryin’! Baby, you somewhere watching the Rolling Stones! I’m laying here in this bed of blues all alone!”

With all the soul-music luminaries who’ve passed on, fallen from grace or faded into obscurity, Burke is now the genre’s torchbearer, and Make Do With What You Got is proof he still has the mojo to deliver the goods.

The Blind Boys of Alabama are probably the world’s hippest septuagenarians. Not only did they take a song suggestion from Tom Waits (the traditional “Old Blind Barnabus”), but they’re also joined by rapper Gift of Gab on a version of Fatboy Slim and Macy Gray’s “Demons.” Atom Bomb draws from traditional gospel themes: “I Know I’ve Been Converted” would’ve fit snugly on the soundtrack to last year’s The Ladykillers, and “Talk About Suffering” talks about, well, suffering.

Most notable, though, is the album’s title track, a cover of a 1950s Soul Stirrers song that buries concerns about the A-bomb beneath a toe-tapping melody and layered vocals. “Atom Bomb” is like a soul version of the perennial “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”: if history is destined to repeat itself, maybe it takes musicians wise as the Blind Boys to remind us we’ve been here before.

It’s not every day that your first film wins an Academy Award. Of course, not everybody is setting out to change the way people think about an entire region of the country, either.

A Southerner, from the tip of his drawl to the toe of his cowboy boots, Ray McKinnon is the opposite of the bad-ass film characters he usually plays. He speaks so softly I have to strain to hear him. He’s polite. And when I gush about Chrystal, his first feature film—which moved me, as both a critic and a Southerner—he is humble and gracious.

McKinnon’s first short, The Accountant, won the 2001 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. No stranger to the industry, however, he has appeared in dozens of films, including O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Apollo 13 and The Missing. He starred as the Rev. H.W. Smith on the acclaimed HBO series Deadwood. And he’ll continue to act, but he’s definitely found a vocation on the other side of the camera.

Chrystal received a standing ovation when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2004. It went on to be selected by other major festivals around the country and Europe, including the Stockholm International Film Festival where Lisa Blount won the Best Actress Award for her performance as the female lead.

Like The Accountant, Chrystal tells a dramatic story about Southerners that’s both funny and tragic. It’s a skill to effectively combine the two, but McKinnon warns against too many literal interpretations, especially with Chrystal—something that’s bound to irritate certain critics. “We’re losing the ability to tell stories,” he explains, his voice filled with passion. “We’re getting so used to this literal explanation that we can’t see parables anymore. Even our television shows are reality-based. We’re losing our myths and our legends.”

Blount, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for her 1982 performance in An Officer and a Gentleman, plays Chrystal, a woman who has waited 16 years for her husband to return from prison. When Joe (Billy Bob Thornton) finally does come home, he finds an emotional wreck of a wife—a woman so devastated by the car accident that killed her child and sent her husband to prison that she’s searching for answers with teenage boys. Rather than despising Chrystal, however, we sympathize with her. She’s in terrible pain—physically, from the broken neck she suffered in the accident, and mentally, because she’s never been able to move beyond the trauma of her lost child. But she loves Joe, and she’s been waiting for him.

Before prison, Joe earned his living growing marijuana, which is why he drove them all off the side of a hill trying to outrun the cops. Now, the local kingpin is Snake (McKinnon), a stringy-haired addict with an ego bigger than his pickup truck. Snake wants Joe to pony up the pot, but Joe isn’t interested, so Snake takes things into his own hands.

Set in a hollow near Eureka Springs in the Ozark Mountains of Northwest Arkansas, Chrystal’s cinematography is as beautiful as the land’s lush, rolling hills. The score—so central to the film’s tone it’s almost a character—boasts an a capella rendition of Roscoe Holcomb’s “Moonshiner,” Clarence Ashley’s “Coo Coo Bird” and a song by Harry Dean Stanton. Blount also sings a bluegrass number called “Sugar Babe.” “We wanted the score to not only reflect the heaviness of Chrystal and Joe’s world, but also the beauty that could be mined from that sweet sadness,” McKinnon says. “I wasn’t interested in the standard ‘hillbilly score.’ I wanted something more classical that would truly underscore the story.”

The story of Chrystal definitely stands out. Watching it, film festival audiences have howled with laughter and cried, McKinnon says. But not everyone has grasped what he’s trying to do. “Back in L.A., people just didn’t get the film, so we took it down South. And whether or not it was their kind of story, Southern critics say it’s real,” McKinnon declares, with no small amount of satisfaction.

Unlike most “Southern” movies, which are swathed in mythical moonlight and magnolias, Chrystal deals with real people—and real accents. Thornton was raised in Arkansas, and almost all the other actors are from the South, too. This wasn’t the initial plan, but became necessary when many non-Southerners showed up at the auditions using accents as far from the real thing as New Coke from Classic. “There’s a long tradition of Southern writers, and well-respected Southern writers,” McKinnon says. “And yet, for whatever reason, Hollywood has been very unwilling to let Southern filmmakers film Southern stories. Therefore, we get these hackneyed, badly-done Southern movies. Most of them don’t go beyond the surface of the Southern thing.”

It’s the reason McKinnon formed his own production company. Together with Blount, his co-star and wife of eight years, and Walton Goggins, who plays Chrystal’s cousin in the film, McKinnon formed Ginny Mule Pictures prior to making The Accountant. Their goal is to create top-quality films that present an accurate portrait of the South. “Part of our vision is a response to seeing too many Southern-themed films being made by people who didn’t know what they were doing,” says Blount, who co-produced the film with her husband and Goggins.

McKinnon echoes the sentiment. “In those films, I don’t recognize the characters as real people,” he says. “They feel slightly removed or almost real, like Southern Shakespeare—replete with British actors, no less. Who talks like that, anyway? Not anybody I know.” We grouse for awhile, about all the films that are supposed to be Southern but instead give us migraines from rolling our eyes so much, and I can hear the same frustration in McKinnon’s voice that I’ve heard from so many Southerners. “We’re talking about half a continent,” McKinnon says. “It’s not like it’s this small-genre movie type.”

When I ask him why he often plays evil characters, he sighs and enlightens me about the realities of the acting profession. “To pay my insurance and the mortgage, I’ve had to play some stereotypical Southern guys in my career,” he admits. “Generally they’re one-dimensional, and generally they’re bad guys, because that’s what you play as a character actor. You don’t get to play the hero.”

He saw Snake, on the other hand, as an entirely different kind of character. “I was interested in taking an archetype like Snake and making him really smart,” McKinnon says, “three dimensional. He’s an evil S.O.B., but a smart S.O.B. I also wondered what makes a guy like him tick, and it’s this huge ego. It was fun being able to play an egomaniac unapologetically.”

McKinnon laughs. “There were two ways I could go with his character. I could go against the stereotype of the hillbilly or just ratchet it up about ten notches, put him in overalls and get him steeped up on speed,” he says. “Snake’s partly making fun of the stereotype of his people. He understands that—he’s not a fool.”

In one memorable scene, Joe challenges Snake to a fight. “Just come on outside, after you get finished kissing on your sister,” Joe says. “You and I have business.” Instead of standing and raising his fists, Snake laughs. It’s a brilliant stroke of acting and directing that speaks volumes about McKinnon’s filmmaking. “Oh, yeah,” he says, agreeing that it lets everyone in on the joke. “So often you see Southern characters that don’t have a sense of humor. They’re the butt of someone else’s joke, but they don’t have their own sense of humor. And that’s a real putdown, to say that they aren’t bright enough to have a sense of humor about who they are, what they are and where they are.”

At the Academy Awards ceremony in 2001, McKinnon showed some of the feisty spirit that inspires so many independent filmmakers in his acceptance speech. “We’d like to thank the Academy for this wonderful honor in a category that still allows for a person who is just burning to make a movie, to load the camera in the back of his daddy’s old truck, gather up some talented dreamers and do it,” he said, holding up the golden statue. “And if the stars align and the fates conspire, that person might find themselves standing right here at the Good God Almighty Academy Awards.”

As someone who’s always wanted to reverse the cinematic stereotype about the South, Ray McKinnon is certainly answering the call.

Picaresque is the consummate Decemberists album title: It means “pertaining to rogues or rascals,” a propensity of Colin Meloy’s loquacious, theatrical pop narratives (see the nine-minute klezmer epic “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” for a sterling example). More specifically, it refers to a fiction of Spanish origin with a rakish anti-hero as its protagonist. It also sums up Meloy’s favorite songwriting devices—arcane language, idiosyncratic narrative fiction, archetypal characters, and the exotic whiff of foreign lands and bygone eras—in one deft musical stroke.

The Decemberists’ first two records—Castaways and Cutouts and Her Majesty (both in 2003)—felt a touch spotty. The same mania for colorful fictive detail that made them unique inadvertently skewed toward the overly precious. At times you could imagine a certain lyric being used not because it suited the song, but simply because it rhymed with “joie de vivre.” Picaresque trumps them both by dint of its focus, consistency and restraint. Meloy’s melodies no longer meander; they unspool in taut lines, and his lyrical borders are more tightly cropped than ever before. “We Both Go Down Together” subtly echoes R.E.M.’s “The One I Love,” memorializing the suicide of two lovers separated by a class divide in suitably grand, bittersweet tones. One infinitely hummable tune, “The Engine Driver” cycles its perspective between various emotionally captive narrators, while Meloy’s most winsome melodic phrasing graces “At the Bus Mall,” a tale of runaway prostitutes.

Meloy’s songs once depicted an international history of stevedores and legionnaires without much rhyme or reason, but on Picaresque he zeroes in on characters—usually those struggling in the throes of concealed, unrequited or otherwise ill-fated love—before shifting his focus to setting. “The Infanta,” all galloping guitars and pounding drums, contrasts the ornate coronation of a Portuguese princess with the placid simplicity of her dreams. The quiet lament “Eli, the Barrow Boy” relates the tale of a heartbroken ghost—Sisyphus in corduroy pushing his barrow in eternal penance. Meloy even ventures into an American present as outlandish as his imagined past. “The Sporting Life”—which interleaves a swinging, jaunty beat with swelling organ flourishes—relates the humiliation of an injured soccer player who fails to fulfill his father’s athletic aspirations, and the shimmering, upbeat stomp of “Sixteen Military Wives” conflates the American invasion of Iraq with the Academy Awards ceremony in what is—for the antiquarian Decemberists—an unusually timely statement.

Meloy’s appropriation of antique yarns shares some aesthetic space with oft-cited influence Neutral Milk Hotel, but his affinity with the reedy yowl and meticulously sculpted songs of John Vanderslice is more striking. Vanderslice claims fiction writer Steven Millhauser as a guiding influence for his concept records about child prodigies and other gifted pariahs. And Millhauser’s predilection for quaint characters and highly specific period pieces—as well as his knack for locating the seam where sweetness and darkness dovetail—resonates through The Decemberists’ songs even more than Vanderslice’s.

As The Decemberists hone their musical prose, they’re upping the bar for “literate” songcraft: It’s no longer sufficient to leaf through Kafka in the aisle at Barnes & Noble; to keep apace with Meloy, you can start by enrolling in a post-graduate lit course. At an Ivy League university of your choice.

Something is happening out there in the hinterlands. A generation of young roots musicians are digging deeper than rockabilly, deeper than honky-tonk, deeper than bluegrass, all the way down to old-time string-band music. Bands like The Duhks, The Mammals, Old Crow Medicine Show, The Be Good Tanyas, The Foghorn Stringband, The Carrie Fridley Band, The Wailin’ Jennys, The Redstick Ramblers and Jim & Jennie & the Pinetops are attacking this pre-Pearl Harbor, rural-Southern music as if they’d just discovered the Klondike gold vein. And they have.

To understand why these 20-something pickers have jumped on the old-time bandwagon, all you have to do is listen to the late-’20s and early-’30s recordings by their heroes Charlie Poole, Gid Tanner, Dock Boggs, Clarence Ashley and Gus Cannon. These men didn’t showcase virtuoso solos like their bluegrass heirs; they didn’t spotlight honeyed singers voicing universal sentiments like their honky-tonk descendants. In their string bands, everyone played at once with barely constrained energy, and the lyrics favored the surrealist, absurdist worldview of the 19th-century folk songs they often recycled.

It hasn’t always been easy to find this music, which goes in and out of print in irregular cycles. But Poole, Tanner, Boggs, Ashley and Cannon are all represented on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, the 1997 reissue that kicked off the current old-time revival. And now Columbia is releasing You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music, a three-CD, 72-track box set that not only collects the 43 best numbers of Poole’s short recording career, but also offers 29 tunes by fellow old-time acts who either influenced Poole or were influenced by him.

This is an unusual approach, but compiler Harry Sapoznik argues convincingly that you can’t understand an artist's work unless you also understand its context. Thus we hear Poole’s 1925 hit, “The Girl I Left in Sunny Tennessee,” followed by the Floyd County Ramblers’ 1930 remake and Doc Walsh’s 1925 parody version, “The Bulldog Down in Sunny Tennessee.” And we hear the original 1906 recording of the New York vaudeville number, “Monkey on a String,” followed by Poole’s 1926 hillbilly version. Then we hear both Poole and Tanner taking a whack at 1901 minstrel tune “Goodbye Booze” in competing 1926 versions.

These juxtapositions evoke a scene not of innocent farmers sitting on their front-porch rocking chairs and singing their grandfathers’ tunes, but of professional entertainers raiding each other’s repertoire and putting a novel twist on each song in search of a hit. By and large, these were working-class men in their 20s who relied on the fame of their 78s to draw crowds to their schoolhouse concerts as they traveled from Georgia to Virginia and from North Carolina to Tennessee. These men would do almost anything to escape working in a textile mill or a tobacco field as most of their friends and audience did. Out of this competition and desperation came some of the era’s most exciting music.

Poole was one of the scene’s biggest stars. He was born in 1892 in Randolph County, N.C., and by the end of World War I, he was working in a textile factory and playing banjo whenever he could. One day in June, Poole, his fiddling brother-in-law Posey Rorer and their guitar-picking neighbor Norman Woodlieff brought their instruments to work and played a few numbers on the factory floor before Poole announced, “Goodbye, boys, we’re gone.” A month later they were in Columbia’s New York studios, recording “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down.” Two months after that, the song was a hit, eventually selling 102,000 copies at a time when there were only 600,000 phonographs in the South.

Who could resist? Poole’s flailing banjo arpeggios and Woodlieff's choppy guitar created a pell-mell rhythm; Poole’s nasal tenor yelped out his boasts of having “been all around this whole wide world,” while Rorer’s fiddle danced around the melody, playing three or four notes for every one in the vocal. It promised a world of boisterous fun beyond the confines of listeners’ little mountain towns if only they’d refuse to let society’s pre-arranged deal go down. The song became a standard in the South, recorded by bluegrass acts like Flatt & Scruggs, Mac Wiseman and, eventually, rock ’n’ rollers Dave Alvin and Jerry Garcia (who would name his bluegrass quintet with Peter Rowan and David Grisman after another Poole song, “Old and In the Way”).

The success of that first disc enabled Poole to live out the song’s lyric, and he rambled as far as Montana, always returning to New York for recording sessions and to North Carolina for his hard-core local fanbase. Between 1925 and 1930, he recorded such landmark songs as “White House Blues” (the McKinley assassination song later covered by Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, the Carter Family, Doc Watson and Jerry Douglas), “I’m the Man That Rode the Mule ‘Round the World” (later covered by Uncle Dave Macon), “Leaving Home” (a lively version of “Frankie and Johnny”), “Hungry Hash House” (a hilarious satire of 1920s boarding houses), “Milwaukee Blues” (his last and perhaps most modern side) and “Flop Eared Mule” (a proto-bluegrass tune recorded 16 years before Monroe met Earl Scruggs). They’re all on the new box set.

By the end of 1930, the Great Depression had pretty much wiped out the hillbilly record market, and Poole’s worsening alcoholism made him an unreliable performer. Back at the mill by the end of 1931, he got a telegram that Hollywood wanted to use his music in a movie; he celebrated with a 13-week bender that ultimately killed him on May 21, 1931. He was 39.

You have to get by some obstacles to hear this music. You have to get past Poole’s thick, nasal drawl, past the constricted sonic spectrum of 1920s recording, past the cloying sentiment of the parlor songs, past the casual racism of the minstrel numbers. But if you can hear the liberating thrill of the driving rhythms and brash vocals, you’ll understand why some of the best music of the 1920s came from old-time string bands and why their revival is one of the most promising developments of our own decade.

I hated it when my dad’s job moved our family to Memphis in the mid 1980s. Living beyond the city’s eastern suburbs and enrolled in private school, I rebelled every way possible. After getting my driver’s license, I’d head into town, prowling the streets in search of a new hangout, eventually finding Memphis Comics and Records, a ’60s head-shop holdover—unquestionably the coolest place in town. Never mind I was a punk who hated hippies on principle—I browsed the store’s used vinyl and handed over cash for Mis?ts and Minor Threat albums but never ventured over to the comic-book side of the operation.

In time I was offered a job, and after the thrill wore off, I realized comic books meant big business. Every Thursday—New Comics Day—dozens of guys filed in to pick up titles from Marvel and DC, peruse the independent offerings from Dark Horse, and talk shop with my co-worker, Danny. Most of these geeks sat around endlessly arguing, “Who’s stronger: Hulk or Thor?,” pondering Spiderman’s secrets and bickering about Frank Miller and Alan Moore. At closing time, they’d bring their comics up to the girl running the cash register—me. “So, d’ya read Elfquest?” they’d ask. Occasionally, a brave soul plunked down Cherry Poptart and leered like a ravening wolf. I’d roll my eyes and deliver a snappy putdown, convinced comics weren’t my speed.

Then I began noticing other characters: R. Crumb’s big-hipped, fat-calved women. Dori Seda’s scratchy self-portraits. Jaime Hernandez’s punk-rock prototypes, Hopey Glass and Maggie Chascarrillo. Daniel Clowes’ teenage outcasts Enid and Rebecca. These feminine icons (interestingly, nearly all created by men) practically jumped off the cheap paper they were printed on. I don’t recall which comic I picked up first: Crumb’s Weirdo, Seda’s Lonely Nights, Hernandez’s Love & Rockets or Clowes’ Eightball. All I know is that I identified with these lustful, lively women. When Enid dyed her hair green, when Maggie busted the zipper on her favorite jeans, it was like staring into a mirror and I frantically turned the page eager for more.

Comics took over my life for a while. I devoured back issues of my favorite titles and revisited Charles M. Shultz’s Peanuts cartoons. Originally discovered in the daily newspaper, Peppermint Patty, Sally Brown and fussbudget Lucy Van Pelt were archetypes of my youth. I even tried on for size modern superheroines like Storm, Catwoman and Elektra. Before Lynda Barry’s utterly hilarious Marlys stories, I consumed Julie Doucet’s autobiographical Dirty Plotte.

No one shared my enthusiasm for these comics, all relegated to the underground X-rated department, regardless of sexual content. But I began understanding the collector dweebs who lived for Thursdays. I too waited for the truck to pull up to the backdoor and danced around impatiently as Danny unloaded our boxes. Spotting a new copy of Love & Rockets, I’d grab it and disappear into a corner for hours. I commiserated with Enid about her car, a bonafide “dorkmobile,” and cried over Dori’s drinking binges. I analyzed Hopey’s latest haircut and did my best with scissors. Sometimes I spent entire weekends boring human acquaintances with the crazy exploits of my comic-book character friends.

When I turned 21, though, and decided a “real” job was required, my days at Memphis Comics ended. I moved to another neighborhood, got a new boyfriend and slowly forgot about Thursday afternoons. I sold off my own comic collection, betraying Marlys and Doucet for a new outfit, a weekend trip or a good bottle of wine.

Since I first started reading comics nearly two decades ago, dozens more women have begun drawing—including remarkable talents like Shary Boyle, Sophie McMillan and Phoebe Gloeckner, whose Diary of a Teenage Girl rocked the publishing industry. Collections like Soft Skull’s Scheherazade and publisher Drawn & Quarterly compile newer artists’ work. Memphis Comics and Records shuttered its doors a few years ago, but one recent rainy afternoon, I found myself scanning a comics rack for familiar faces. I scored: Fantagraphics is publishing Schultz’s epic Peanuts strips, and the Love & Rockets saga is back in print. Today I’m 36 years old and back on a comic-book kick. Enid and Rebecca will remain forever young, but happily, Hopey and Maggie have aged right alongside me, avatars of coolness once again.

After scanning the (admittedly impressive) roll call of guest artists on White People, you intuitively ready yourself for HBMS’s attempt at cramming a whole wardrobe of experimental outfits into a tiny gym bag of a disc. Unfortunately the zipper bursts within just a few tracks and colorful chaos spills everywhere. As much as we all want to root for an album featuring Jack Johnson, RZA, Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos, De La Soul, Mike Patton, Cat Power and John Oates (oh my), in the end Dan the Automator and Prince Paul seem more invested in covering the spread of their rolodex than producing a coherent album. The songs are sprightly but not riveting, the beats competent but not galvanizing. Amusing but distracting skits from Tim Meadows’ Ladies Man and Father Guido Sarducci further clutter the proceedings. A cheerful but inessential jumble.

Is this Americana from outer space or extraterrestrial music from Earth? You know, either/or. Cathedral is a new entry in the burgeoning genre known as freakfolk, which is united less by the intentions of its adherents (I doubt Raposa considers himself a “freakfolk artist”) than by a tendency to regard traditional American music—folk, country and blues—as fodder for deconstruction and revision, not a rigid template. Castanets’ murky, swampy, patchwork morass of psychedelic porch music waxes and wanes as if acoustic pickers, creepshow organ grinders and rattling percussionists were spread out across a large room in which the ghost of a microphone flits around. Raposa blurs the filigreed elegance of Six Organs of Admittance into the coy menace of Devendra Banhart; the deadpan meditations of (smog) into the acoustic clangor of a Tom Waits interlude. Haunting and ephemeral, Cathedral vertiginously lulls the listener into a sort of languorous enchantment.

She’s fronted ultra-creepy Bloodshot Records outfit Trailer Bride for five albums, spent seven formative years with her Christian-missionary parents in Africa, and is obsessed with William Faulkner and Flannery O’Conner. So, naturally, I wanted to tell you Mississippi-born singer/guitarist Melissa Swingle is a freaky, tortured Southern Gothic weirdo. But fact is, that just ain’t true.

Swingle and new Moaners bandmate Laura King are kind-hearted, likeable women who love rock ’n’ roll. And after spending some time with them, I prefer the real thing to the overcooked image: They carry bottles of obscure-brand hot sauce in their purses, smoke endless cigarettes in rock-club backrooms, drink green mint tea at soundcheck, and get hassled by strange cops over Swingle’s bug-eyed, movie-star shades at late-night, highway-stop Waffle Houses. They burn incense to cover the smell of urine in the $30-a-night motel rooms they have to stay in when it’s an off night and the gig barely covers gas money, falling asleep with a faint beer buzz and watching Mallrats on USA Up All Night through the dreamy haze of leaden, half-cracked eyelids. And to top it off, King moonlights in a Neil Diamond cover band in The Moaners’ hometown of Chapel Hill, N.C. But most importantly, Swingle and King blast out blessedly raw Delta-blues punk and grungy, foreboding Southern Rock.

“I’d been wanting to do something different for a while,” says Swingle, sitting with King at a bar-side table in Asheville, N.C.’s no-frills Grey Eagle Tavern. “I was tired of being pigeon-holed as alternative country [when I was with Trailer Bride], because—except for Hank Williams and Johnny Cash—I never really loved country music that much. … I felt I was beating a dead horse. It was getting less and less fun, and the audiences can tell. I wanted to play faster and harder.”

And that’s where King comes in. The pair met two years ago at the Honky-Tonk-A-Rama festival in Chapel Hill, where King’s band, Grand National (fronted by fIREHOSE’s Ed Crawford), was sharing the bill with Trailer Bride. “I was blown away,” says Swingle of King’s drumming. “I’d never seen anybody, male or female, hit as hard as she did with such precision.”

Swingle began writing songs to fit King’s style, often tuning down to anchor the low end, and the drums-and-guitar duo began rehearsing. Yep Roc Records apparently saw the chemistry, too, and released The Moaners’ debut earlier this year. Recorded at Southern Culture On the Skids founder Rick Miller’s studio, Dark Snack was cut in just 10 days. It’s a lot more efficient and economical with just two people in the band, and this concept translates to the road, too. On “Hard Times” the bottleneck-guitar-slingin’ Swingle autobiographically croons in her trademark syrupy drawl, “A four-piece band just won’t make ends meet / Tonight baby, it’s you and me.”

“Musicians are going through some hard times in the last few years,” Swingle explains. “So having fewer people to split the money with definitely helps.” But there are artistic incentives as well, she insists. “[Playing as a duo] is liberating. With Laura, I can go on any tangent I want, and she doesn’t have to know what key we’re in. It’s made me a better guitar player. I’m doing my own leads now and having a blast.”

“She’s getting better and better,” says King of her partner in crime. “And I am, too. I’m feeling more creative than I have in a really long time.”

The emigrants who left Great Britain for America brought their ancient songs with them. As the songs gained citizenship in a new country, they evolved, with new shoots growing from the old wood. The cowboy song “Streets of Laredo,” for instance, has its root in an old ballad (variously “The Unfortunate Rake” or “The Dying Soldier”) about a syphilis epidemic that ravaged the British isles. “Will the Circle be Unbroken” was claimed by A.P. Carter of the famous Carter Family, but its chorus was carried nearly intact from a much older English song.

Some of the old songs have a complicated history and a varied pollination. “Matty Groves,” for instance, a bloody tale of adultery avenged, came to its maturity in England as “Little Musgrave” and “Lady Darnell,” then passed on to America (where some iterations allow the star-crossed lovers to live). But it was “a degenerate American version” that was covered by the English folk-rock group Fairport Convention.

Many of the best English ballads (but not the dirty ones) were preserved by the relatively priggish Harvard professor Francis J. Child in the late 19th century. The father-and-son team of John and Alan Lomax later collected songs and made early ?eld recordings.

Traditional music received another boost when the eccentric Harry Smith produced his revelatory Anthology of American Folk Music (released on Folkways in 1952). Without Smith, many of the old recordings might have been lost, which excuses the fact that the collection was originally what we would think of today as a “bootleg.”

The Rose and the Briar is a fascinating and occasionally frustrating collection of essays, short stories and even illustrations about some of the more famous ballads. The editors could have put more effort into their introduction, which name-checks Lomax and Child but never puts their colorful work in any context. An appendix with song lyrics would have also been helpful.

The contributing novelists seem to be out of their element. Sharyn McCrumb’s surrealistic ?ction does little to illuminate the song “Pretty Peggy-O.” Joyce Carol Oates take on “Little Maggie” exhibits all of her southern gothic strengths, but she’s no musicologist. Critic Ann Powers gets lost in literary allusion and allegory when dissecting the lovely song “The Water is Wide.” And it’s hard to know what Jon Langford, formerly of the Mekons, was thinking when he painted a series of garish panels aimed at “The Cuckoo.”

Others do much better. Critic Dave Marsh once wrote a whole book on “Louie, Louie,” so he’s at home with the ancient “Barbara Allen,” which was already well known in 1666 when Samuel Pepys mentioned it in his famous diary.

A highlight of the book is Rennie Sparks’ take on “Pretty Polly.” Like her lyrics for The Handsome Family, Sparks’ prose about this dark but enduring tale of love betrayed is full of spit and fire. The American Polly, stabbed by her trusting paramour in a lonely forest glen, is a strangely passive figure, like the swooning damsels in 19th century paintings. Sparks reveals that in earlier English songs like “Mary Colven” she had more spunk, pushing the murderous knight into the ocean when he turns his back (because he doesn’t want to see her naked!).

Commentator Sarah Vowell tells a story every American should know, but probably doesn’t—“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body” by abolitionist Julia Ward Howe.

The Rose and the Briar also illuminates the blues standard “Frankie and Albert” (also, “Frankie and Johnny”) was based on a real 1899 shooting. And according to writer Luc Sante, “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say” immortalizes the moment trumpet player Buddy Bolden ?rst used the phrase “funky butt” in public. Without Bolden, it might not be common coin to describe James Brown’s music as “funky.”

The Rose and the Briar doesn’t come with a CD but there is one available from Sony Legacy. The juxtaposition of such modern fare as Jan and Dean’s “Deadman’s Curve” with C.B. Grayson’s older-than-dirt version of “Ommie Wise” makes for some rather schizophrenic listening.

The Film: Filching Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight, Idaho centers on two street hustlers: Mike Waters (River Phoenix), a narcoleptic haunted by dreams of his mother, and Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves), the prodigal son of Portland’s mayor. The translation works well and gives street life in Portland a poignancy a more conventional approach would not.

The Signifcance: Several aspects make Idaho a Van Sant classic. First, the innovatory visual style—lyrical yet rough-hewn—is amazingly rich in meaning while remaining light, playful and beautiful. Second, River Phoenix’s performance is masterful (how tragic that he’s not around to inherit the master thespian mantle of the Brando/DeNiro/Pacino/Penn lineage); William Richert as the Falstaffan Bob also holds court in a powerful, unrestrained performance. Finally, the graceful dialog—with its flourishes of iambic pentameter (though occasionally stilted by Keanu’s delivery)—combines with the visuals to give the film an inimitable flavor.

The Features: This two-DVD set is deliciously extravagant, even by Criterion standards. The box, the 64-page booklet and the transfer are a feast to behold. Also with interviews, commentary and more