(1) Kelly Clarkson, “Already Gone” (from All I Ever Wanted, Sony BMG). Sometimes you want singers to wear their hearts on their sleeves. Especially when they sound like Sarah McLachlan.
(2) The Missing Person, written and directed by Noah Buschel (The 7th Floor). Matching its center of gravity—the way that with every scowl directed outward at the world Michael Shannon’s private eye pulls more deeply into himself, as if he can make himself his own black hole—the movie itself is dark and muffled. It’s hard to see and hard to hear. The plot is full of dead ends. But there is one moment of clarity, so full of unguarded warmth it seems to be from another film altogether, or another life: the detective and a woman who’s picked him up in a bar dancing in a crummy Los Angeles hotel room as the radio plays the Jive Five’s 1961 “My True Story.” “But we must cry, cry, cry,” Eugene Pitt sings, going up high, turning the swamp of the past into at least a hint of a future, and you think, yes, tell this story—while at the same time you’re wondering, OK, a thirty-five-year old Jive Five fan, he’s from New York, I can believe that, but how did he find a doo-wop station in California?
(3) Punk shoes from Giovanna Zanella (Castello 5641, Calle Carminati, Venice). Six-inch heels on black pumps with a Doc Martens sole and a red Mohawk that looks more like a weapon than a haircut coming out of the back.
(4) Herbert Bayer, Design for a Multimedia Building, in Bauhaus 1919– 1933: Workshops for Modernity (Museum of Modern Art, New York, through January 25). It’s all Regina all the time: on one face of the rectangular box, a fi lm projected from inside showing Ms. R. pulling her lips apart in a happy if brainless smile; on another, a huge gramophone horn protruding, broadcasting the new hit “Regina.” On the roof, a smoke hole emitting small black clouds that spell out… you guessed it. To the side of the horn, under an overhang, a man exiting, while the diagram helpfully indicates the In and Out. The whole looks like a valentine from Bayer to his girlfriend Regina, a modernist treehouse, or a De Stijl–infl uenced mock-up of an ad for a freestanding one-woman brothel. The playfulness and glee of the design perfectly catches the thrust of the exhibition as a whole: the story of adventurous, questing, ambitious people with their lives and a world to change before them, about to be crushed.
(5) Jenny Diski, The Sixties (Picador). If you liked An Education...
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