Ken Tucker’s Pop Culture

1. LAURA PALMER LIVES IN “THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME: PROPHECY AND THE AMERICAN VOICE”, (FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX): Greil Marcus’ new book is about how ”the country remakes itself again and again by means of the tension between its promises and their betrayal,” and finds examples in the work of everyone from Philip Roth to Pere Ubu’s David Thomas to director David Lynch. There are wonders on nearly every page, connections made and broken between history and pop culture, and always there is Marcus’ gift for summoning up an entire phenomeon in a single sentence. Take this one, on page 149, about Lynch’s most famous character: ”Twin Peaks made Laura Palmer a corpse; Fire Walk With Me, which is about her discovery that the demon who has been raping her since twelve is her father, is the greatest teenage jeopardy movie ever made, and even as she dies at her father’s hands Sheryl Lee is more alive than anyone else in the picture.”
2. ”THIS IS HOW WE ROCK IN AMERICA” , FROM JAMES KOCHALKA SUPERSTAR’S SPREAD YOUR EVIL WINGS AND FLY (RYKODISC) : Kochalka, a wonderfully playful yet acerbic cartoonist, is a thoroughly credible fake rock god. I already wrote about ”Britney’s Silver Can” (a touching salute to Ms. Spears) a while back, but now you can actually buy the album, featuring anthems such as ”This Is How We Rock in America,” Kochalka and his five-man band’s stirring throwback to Bad Company/Black Sabbath/Grand Funk sludge-rock.
3. TUESDAY WELD IN “PRETTY POISON”, (1968, DVD): By ‘68, Weld had already driven Warren Beatty nearly crazy as Thalia Menninger in TV’s The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis; in 1981, she would tempt James Caan to go straight in Michael Mann’s Thief. In between, however, she delivered this amazingly funny, lewd performance, and provoked Anthony Perkins into actually seeming turned-on by a blond cheerleader with lust in her eyes and the almost effortless ability to convince him to help her kill her own mother.