On the stereo

Continuing the trend that developed in New York, I've been hitting eBay to acquire some long-lost gems of my youthful era. Two obscure bands I've been rediscovering lately are the Reivers and Guadalcanal Diary. I have cassette copies of all four Reivers albums from '85 to '91, and I've set out to get them on CD – not an easy task. The Reivers were a jangly pop band out of Austin who scored big in late-'80s college radio; singer-songwriter John Croslin remains a player in the Austin scene, namely as producer of Spoon. A Reivers web site – go figure – reports that a Nashville indie label is reissuing Saturday and The End of the Day on CD in March, with bonus tracks. That leaves me with Pop Beloved and Translate Slowly, the first album (with their killer, snare-driven cover of Willie Nelson's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain"), both of which I scored through auctions. Guadalcanal Diary was to R.E.M. as Christian Slater is to Jack Nicholson – the poor man's version of the big star. The Diary, though, while evoking the obvious Athens, Ga., signature guitar sounds, hit harder and delved deeper into Southern Gothic subjects – and with much greater clarity. I started listening to their '85 debut, Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man, while in Okemah; it was a perfect match for the scenery, the good, naked earth and the roads full of ghosts. I've been trying to score mp3's from Jamboree – my favorite album of theirs and, alas, the one never released on CD – with a little luck but a poor prognosis for completion. In the meantime, I won an auction of Diary singer Murray Attaway's lone solo album from '93, In Thrall. It's fantastic: expertly produced, rich and suitably enthralling songwriting, and lots of help from talent such as Aimee Mann and Jon Brion. Attaway's voice is amazing, heady without being piercing, roaring without ralphing. It's a prize, and worth hearing, worth the delay.

Since I wasn't a critic for the first half of the year, I didn't compile a best-of-2001 list for the paper. There are, though, several albums from '01 that are worth talking about.

• First and foremost, the Strokes, baby. I hate to jump on a critical bandwagon, seeing as every critic in America has appointed them saviors of rock 'n' roll, but my God their debut, Is This It, is good. It's nothing new, by any means – it's just damn good New Wave rock – but it's so refreshing. The timing was right; as the world began tiring of squeaky-clean teen groups, we needed a shot of good, leather-jacketed Manhattan attitude, even if the leather jackets are Kenneth Cole.
• Tulsa's own Ester Drang finally released their debut, Goldenwest, and it is a challenger for my favorite album of the year. Ester Drang, a band of five, sometimes six, sheepish guys, crafts soundscapes like God himself. They should be on the road with Mogwai immediately.
• I bought the TV-hawked Paul McCartney and Wings collection, Wingspan, which is delightful. I always loved Wings.
• Rufus Wainwright's Poses did not hold the momentum he built up around his debut, but I like it more. It's more considered, more textured, and he's not chained to the piano. The song he co-wrote with Alex Gifford of the Propellerheads, "Shadows," is incredible.
• I adore King of Yesterday from singer-songwriter Jude. He's a soulful white boy with an amazing high voice – just perfect for his surprisingly unironic cover of Bread's "Everything I Own." The whole album is pretty and poppy, and quite intelligent.
• I'm sorry to say that R.E.M.'s Reveal is the first record from them that I actually don't like. There are some great songs, of course, but overall I don't enjoy the record. It's too busy, too fussed over, it's trying too hard.
• Other titles from ought-one that keep spinning me: Weezer's second self-titled; Semisonic, All About Chemistry; The Chameleons, Why Call It Anything? (they're back!); Jay Farrar, Sebastopol (featuring Flaming Lip Steve Drozd); Bob Dylan, Love and Theft; and, of course, Loudon Wainwright III, Last Man on Earth.

Serious Squeeze fans out there? Glenn Tilbrook's much-ballyhooed solo album, The Incomplete, has finally appeared via London's Quixotic Records label. It's good – bright, smooth, soulful. Tilbrook is one of the best tenors in pop music, and he's also grown older and had children without writing too many of the requisite boring ballads about the experience. The Incomplete finds him upbeat and frequently fashioning some kind of British version of Philly soul. He'll always be more Paul McCartney than Daryl Hall, but without the darker underpinnings of Chris Difford, his Squeeze-bound Lennonesque foil, Tilbrook is freed to romp a bit, burn up some spunk without going so far afield that the album overextends its style. The CD is more of a model of perfect pop songwriting than any Squeeze albums have been since Play, and "Interviewing Randy Newman" discusses the craft at length – marvelous!

On the playbill

Back barely a week, and our New York habits thrive: we go to the theater – a production of "Stop Kiss" by Tulsa's Theater Club at the funky Nightingale Theater in industrial northeast downtown. The play is written by Diana Son, a writer for The West Wing and was directed by Vern Stefanic, a friend of a friend. It's a fair play and one that explores a bit of the identity questions related to Daniel's incident above.

"One day, my husband and I were walking on the street," Son once said in an interview, "and because I have short hair and I had on a suede jacket and jeans, when we stopped to kiss, a guy called us 'faggots'." Such a moment made the Korean-American playwright delve into sexual identity in "Stop Kiss." The play see-saws back-and-forth through time in the relationship of two women, from the end of respective straight relationships through the blossoming of interest in each other to a bashing incident that challenges everything. Don't fret: I'm not giving anything away. The play's one weakness is its time shifts; by the end of the first act, you know how things are going to end, so you wind up waiting for the resolution and second-guessing your own suspicions. Good production, though, and fun for us since it takes place in New York. It's somehow comforting to hear someone mention the White Horse Tavern and realize I know exactly where that is.

On the magazine rack

To coincide with the release of the band's highly anticipated (and enormously overrated) new album, Reveal, my favorite music magazine, Q, published a special edition all about R.E.M. It's enthralling, not only because it's 146 pages of detailed discussion focusing on the greatest band of my generation (Cobain, Schmobain, and Radiohead is – I realize now – not my generation) but also because it's an amazingly designed and edited package of music journalism. The book starts with stories about the band's formation and a blow-by-blow account of the first gig at a college party under the name Twisted Kites. Some previous Q interviews are reprinted, along with some new ones and a typically amusing Cash for Questions column with the band ("What occupation do you think George W. Bush would be better suited to? – Heather Hartling, Canada" Mike Mills answers: "Rent boy"). They even pulled in notables to pen essays on the importance of each album; Stephen Malkmus writes about Reckoning, and Douglas Coupland remembers Green. It's a fine book, with great photos and more R.E.M. knowledge collected in one place than even that oral-history biography that gets updated every now and then. Plus, it's just in time for my annual autumnal plunge into the band's entire catalog.

Buy a copy of this special-edition mag here.

On the nightstand

My light reading throughout the summer was this heady title: Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jesus and Jefferson in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904-1920, by a North Carolina professor named Jim Bissett and published by the University of Oklahoma Press. It was a great follow-up to my Woody Guthrie studies, providing crucial exposition to the political climate in which he grew up down in Okemah. It's so much clearer to me now the kinds of ideas Woody must have heard bandied about along the wooden sidewalks downtown as he played his Jew's harp for pennies. He often told stories – and I think even later wrote a song – about the Green Corn Rebellion, a revolt against the draft which kicked off just southeast of Okemah.

It was also fascinating to learn about Oklahoma's radical history, which I don't recall being stressed in my junior-high state history class. Oklahoma once had more registered socialist voters than any other state. Bissett discovers the reason socialism took off like a grass fire here (and, eventually, burned out just as quickly). It was a beautiful compromise. Socialist organizers who came in from the east discovered that they had a unique quandary on their hands. Their political philosophy stressed the dichotomy between the worker and the land-owner. But this was farming territory, and the state was covered by farmers' unions. The question was debated: farmers owned their land (except tenants), but worked it – so were they workers or bourgeosie? The compromises reached to settle this confusion created a wholly unique brand of socialism, one that was working quite well and sharing a good deal of power with the other two parties until the first red scare during World War I snuffed out socialism across the country.

Rounding out my Lloyd Cole revisitation (see NYC page), I borrowed a hardcover from a friend, No News at Throat Lake, an airy little memoir written by Lawrence Donegan who played bass for Cole's backing band in the '80s, the Commotions. The book relates Donegan's madcap descent into rural Ireland after spontaneously quitting his job as a journalist for London's Guardian. He took a stinky old cottage in a small town on the north Irish coast and wound up working for the local community newspaper. The misadventures are amusing and make for nice casual summer reading, though the book doesn't come to much. Still, his anticipation of a Cole gig in Dublin matched mine in New York – and I actually talked to Lloyd! It's no Shipping News, but it was a colorful diversion.

I'm in a dangerous pattern. Most of the books I've been reading since I got home are stories of men who dropped everything and disappeared into the wilderness. Donegan's book was light, fluffy fare; Jon Krakauer's book is serious business. In Into the Wild, Krakauer pieces together the story of Chris McCandless, whose body was discovered in the Alaska wilderness in the fall of 1992. McCandless was a student from a well-to-do family, and after his college graduation in 1990 he gave his $25,000 to charity, burned the money he had in his wallet and hit the road. For two years, he tramped around the continent, working in graneries in South Dakota and piloting a canoe up and down the Gulf of California. In the spring of '92, he hitchhiked into the Alaskan bush intending to live off the land for the summer. He was successful until August, when he discovered that his route back to civilization was cut off by the summer flows from the mountains. Injured and unable to hunt, he soonafter starved to death inside the abandonned bus he was using as shelter.

It's a gut-wrenching modern tragedy; the character of McCandless is loaded with hubris, and Krakauer uncovers all the details that bring this boy's life to life. Krakauer originally wrote the story for Outside magazine, but it so intrigued him that he pusued it further and expanded it into this short book. I had heard of the book before, but I was convinced to pick up a copy at the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. Ellis Paul played a song he'd written recently inspired by the book. We talked about it later, and the tale of wandering America and shunning an upper- or middle-class past certainly resonated in those Okemah fields.

Hmmm. Could I do something like that? Could I drop out and hit the road? Could you?

My folks gave the coolest book for Christmas. It's called Manhattan Unfurled, and it's barely a book at all. It's instead a 22-foot fold-out drawing of Manhattan by architect Matteo Pericoli. You pull out the folded drawing from a hardcover case and, well, unfurl it. It's a line drawing of Manhattan from the perspective of the rivers – one side is the East Side, the other the West Side. It's unusually breathtaking despite its simplicity. It's intriguing to experience a view of the city in one complete dimension, not in clusters as we usually see it, or an aerial view. From the rivers, you see no streets, the city's arteries. Instead, you just see buildings and the waterways, as if Manhattan were a gargantuan Venice. Beautiful and unique.

The follow-up to all that: I've just started an Edward Abbey reader. Another tale of a man who dropped out several times to wander the wilderness and get dirt under his nails. I'm just a few dozen pages into his selections from Desert Solitaire (1968), but this passage from "Havasu," detailing a month he spent on his own in an offshoot of the Grand Canyon, an American Eden, is worth repeating:

On my feet again, I explored the abandoned silver mines in the canyon walls .... I climbed through the caves that led down to the foot of Mooney Falls, 200 feet high. What did I do? There was nothing that had to be done. I listened to the voices, the many voices, vague, distant, but astonishingly human, of Havasu Creek. I heard the doors creek open, the doors creak shut, of the old forgotten cabins where no one with tangible substance or the property of reflecting light ever entered, ever returned. I went native and dreamed away days on the shore of the pool under the waterfall, wandered naked as Adam under the cottonwoods, inspecting my cactus gardens. The days became wild, strange, ambiguous – a sinister element pervaded the flow of time. I lived narcotic hours in which like the Taoist Chuang-tse I worried about butterflies and who was dreaming what. There was a serpent, a red racer, living in the rocks of the spring where I filled my canteens; he was always there slipping among the stones or pausing to spellbind me with his suggestive tongue and cloudy haunted primeval eyes. Damn his eyes. We got to know each other rather too well I think. I agonized over the girls I had known and over those I hoped were yet to come. I slipped by degrees into lunacy, me and the moon, and lost to a certain extent the power to distinguigh between what was and what was not myself: looking at my hand I would see a leaf trembling on a branch. A green leaf. I thought of Debussy, of Keats and Blake and Andrew Marvell. I remembered Tom o'Bedlam. And all those lost and never remembered. Who would return? To be lost again? I went for walks. I went for walks. I went for walks and on one of these, the last I took in Havasu, regained everything that seemed to be ebbing away.

On screen

How can you not love a tango version of "Roxanne" sung by a fierce Argentian with a voice hoarser than Harvey Firestein?

I had heard wretched things about Moulin Rouge, but they've only caused me to re-evaluate my cultural network. In New York, I was tempted to see it just because it looked spectacularly bad – you know, one of those movies whose spectacular failure is worth making a spectator sport. Finally, back home, Daniel and his friend wanted to go, and I caved. I've never gotten more bang for a buck film.

It is the most audacious film I've seen in a long time, the height of over-ambition. But, to my surprise, it all holds together. The art direction is better than the effect produced by many hallucinogens, particularly in the beginning as the audience is introduced to the ragged glory that is the Moulin Rouge. The story is an old one – boundless love, the promise of money, a wicked duke – but in this film it remains gripping and fresh.

The madness of Moulin Rogue, though, is not only that Nicole Kidman and Ewan MacGregor can sing but what they're singing. It's a musical – a grandiose one – and the songs are all pop tunes. There's a saucy all-male scamp through "Like a Virgin" and a dazzling rake through Labelle's old hit ("Voulez-vous couchez avec moi, c'est soir?") with another song running countermelody – a chorus of old French fops singing the refrain of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (dandies in tuxes grumping, "Here we are now, entertain us!"). In an effort to explain his obssession with pure love, MacGregor's character cycles through an astonishing array of love-song lines from the Beatles to U2. After a while, I stopped laughing when I recognized the songs, because I fell into the flow of their use. It's as if the writer pulled out a series of records from his collection and attempted to write a narrative stringing them together. And it works! The use of the music is hardly ever hackneyed or contrived – perhaps only the use of the old Police hit "Roxanne," but it's given such a jaw-dropping rebirth as a gravelly tango that no one could seriously care. The effect of all this is a very healthy reality check. The musical genre is all about artifice, and this one tells it tale bluntly in updated language – the language of our radio. Victoire!