the lives of others

The Monday-morning quarterbacking at the water cooler has come and gone. Now the"real" Sopranos fans are crawling out of the termite-infested woodwork, one of who altered series creator David Chase's Wikipedia entry: “David Chase (…) is a homosexual American television writer, director and producer.” Aw. c'mon, get over it. HBO, network of the Sopranos and many other highly addictive series, markets itself cleverly: "It's not TV. It's HBO." Well, as Fresh Air's TV critic David Bianculi said (more or less) in his post-mortem of the series finale on Monday, "It is TV."

Kudos to David Chase (flanked above by James Gandolfini and Edie Falco, who play Tony and Carmela Soprano, for anyone who's been living under a rock) for making us care so much about the conclusion of Tony and his famlies' stories. And bully for all of us in getting so involved, but at the end of the day, we all have our own lives to lead. The rabid Sopranos fan who felt compelled to deface Chase's Wikipedia entry is perhaps just a more extreme version of the viewers who couldn't hang with the fact that Chase didn't fashion an ending that would give viewers a sense of finality (Some of the righteous would have been cheered to see Tony buy the farm, others may have wanted him to name names and enter the Witness Protection Program). But David Chase was never about tying about loose ends in the way many movies, fiction, and TV shows do these days. Our culture loves story (and has from time immmemorial). And why not? The neat, narrative arc is seductively symmetrical.

When the story doesn't turn out in the way we expected, we are disappointed and sometimes even a bit pissed off. I've had the experience more than once vis a vis American Idol (yeah, I know, I know), most recently when the most excellent Melinda Doolittle was sent packing prematurely. I'm not much of a sports fan, but when Serena Williams lost at the French Open a couple of weeks ago to the positively feral Justine Henin (who happens to be ranked number one in women's tennis rankings), I was peeved and felt out of sorts for the rest of the day. No matter. We choose our heroes (or our anti-heroes, in the case of Tony and company), and we want to see certain outcomes. There's nothing wrong with that, I suppose, so long as we can maintain perspective, something the Wikipedia whacko was unable to do.

unsuffer her

I first saw Lucinda Williams perform 17 years ago at Slim's, a small club in San Francisco, as part of a singer-songwriter showcase. She was one of five performers, on a bill with John Doe, Dave Alvin, Butch Hancock (a member of the Flatlanders), and Syd Straw (hullo!). Lu was painfully uncomfortable on stage back then. Back in 1990, I had already been listening to her music for a year or so, thanks to a prescient friend who had her finger on the pulse of all things alt country.

Lucinda has long ceased to be a reticent performer. Though Lu will never be tapped to host SNL or the MTV Awards (well, why would that ever be the case?), she seems like she's enjoying herself on stage and is relatively relaxed. She's not big on patter, but I don't necessarily want to hear musicians talk. When she does talk, she's pretty funny and dry (and this fuels my fantasy of one day getting to interview her. Now that would be cool).

Just compare Lucinda with Kelly Joe Phelps, her boring opening act, at last Thursday's show at Oakland's Paramount Theater. After my friend Dawn and I suffered through too many of his meandering songs, we skipped out to hang in the theater's beautiful lounge and bar area. The Paramount, by the way, features incredible art-deco architecture and is truly a thing to behold. Maybe it was the sound system, but I couldn't make out some of KJP's lyrics. Not so with Lucinda -- though longtime fan that I am, most are etched in my brain after repeated listenings to her CDs. In concert, Lu spits out her words, and is often powerful, raw, and vulnerable within a single song.

Thursday's show featured songs from Williams' latest CD, "West," along with tunes from "World Without Tears," "Essence," and "Car Wheels." No Lucinda oldies, i.e., "Passionate Kisses," "Sweet Old World," "Changed the Locks," or my favorite from the eponymous CD, "Side of the Road." She started things off on a mellow note with a string of four or five ballads, and I wondered if this was going to be an uncharacteristically low-key concert.

One thing I found unnerving: Lu was packing extra pounds, like a prize fighter whose muscle had gone to fat. She's always been rail thin, but no more. She had a poochy gut, and more than a bit of booty. Superficial stuff, since Lucinda proceeded to rock and rocked hard. Highlights included "Everything Has Changed," "Come On," and "Unsuffer Me," from "West," and "Righteously" and "Ventura" from "World Without Tears." With these recent CDs, Williams has simplified her songwriting (well, to my ears). There's more repetition within some songs, and the lines are often short. When Lu sings them, the effect is often incantatory, like a Southern gothic preacher who's delivering her version of gospel for the pissed off and heartbroken. Or maybe it's a countrified version of rap? When I first listened to "West," "World Without Tears," and "Essence" (the post-Car Wheels recordings), I wasn't always initially taken with what I heard (hell, I thought she might be suicidal on first hearing "Essence"). Some of the songs' lyrics felt unnaturally stripped down, but with persistent listening, their simple beauty and genius became apparent.

Other highlights: A Delta-blues tune by Little Willie Jackson and "Marching the Hate Machines Into the Sun," with lyrics by Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne and music by Thievery Corporation.

Another aside: Dawn was seeing Lucinda perform for the first time, and was quite impressed. She thought Lucinda was much more compelling on stage than on CD.

Williams told the crowd at the Paramount that she's now content and in a relationship (apparently, she's engaged to be married). Then she played a couple of new, unrecorded tunes that inspired by that happiness ("Honeybee" and "Tears of Joy"). There were some slightly nauseating lines in the former (the new love's honey dripping on her stomach), but I can deal. Lucinda has shared so much heartbreak through her songs. (Imagine being her new guy and knowing that if things go south, your idiosyncracies will be immortalized in song.) Well, I hope that this time Lu stays happy. She deserves it.