Joel Sternfeld's Prospects and Perspectives

We were graduate students then, my (soon-to-be) wife and I, and though the word "poor" might be an insult to those who face true economic adversity, we didn't have a lot of money, especially not the money for coffee-table photography books. But when a copy of Joel Sternfeld's American Prospects was discounted at the campus bookstore--someone, perhaps one of us, had thumbed through it a few too many times, and the edges were getting dog-eared--it became ours. This book was my introduction to the notion that photography could engage a kind of meaning that existed beyond the box of family photos I had grown up with. It's a notion that has stuck with me since.

The first compositional quality one notices in these photographs is the broad perspectives: the wide angles that generally define each scene, that allow meanings to emerge over time instead of all at once. The viewer scans the pictures, looking at one item and then another, trying to figure out which detail is most important and how it might then be used to assert the overall significance of the image. The photographs in this book were taken in the late 1970s and early 1980s as Sternfeld criss-crossed the country over and over. He needed the wide angles to get in what the eye sees, what he saw as a traveler. These perspectives force the viewer to do most of the work, to figure out what there is to see within the frame and how to interpret it all.

The first thematic quality that one notices in American Prospects is a pervasive irony. It's generally a whimsical irony, not a bitter one--light and amused, sarcasm at a glance but not in any kind of depth--and it arises most frequently from the juxtaposition of the natural and the synthetic. In one photo, a wind-beaten basketball post stands forlorn on a barren plain in an Arizona landscape that otherwise bears no evidence of the existence of the human species.

Other photos posit stormy skies lingering over a gleaming new subdivision or a line of tourists on horseback , escaping the hazards of the civilization they have created, trailing through a scrub-laden Arizona landscape. Where does our authority end and nature's begin?

In this context, photographs that do not ostensibly push this theme can be seen as pushing this theme. Sternfeld's picture of Harris Ranch, a California ag-industry giant, displays a cattle pen densely packed with animals. There's not a single jot of green to be seen within the fencing, which makes us question the nature of this domesticated arrangement and its relationship with our now rather quaint notions of the pastoral. Several of the cows are lined up along the barrier, staring into the camera, it seems, or staring out at the space that lies beyond the palings. Then there is the photograph of a bald-topped man, what hair he has dishevelled, barrel-bellied in gray slacks and white t-shirt, seen from behind and off-center in the foreground as he stares across a runway at the space shuttle Columbia, preparing for its maiden voyage.
This image might spur thoughts on the nature of space exploration and the limitations of habitable human landscape, but more immediate to the viewer it creates a contrast between this dumpy looking man and the sleek new machine that he watches from a distance. He's probably the one who built the thing, the viewer might decide. Elsewhere, trains shuffle off beside Eastern hillsides lined with telephone wires and redbuds in flower, and everywhere in the West subdivisions spring up out of the desert floor like mushroom colonies after a sudden intense rain. In Cato, New York, two hogs gaze thoughtfully into the distance while a decrepit outbuilding slowly sinks back into the hillside. Nature is taking it back.

Many of Sternfeld's photographs do just fine without any human subjects; the existence of our species is implied well enough. Others treat people as just another part of the landscape, and others still serve as fine examples of portraiture in a particularly Sternfeldian mode. The most ennobling example of this in American Prospects is "A Blind Man in His Garden, Homer, Alaska, July 1984," which recasts Alaska as Paradise and a blind man (presumably, by his CAT ballcap, a former driver of heavy machinery) as the sole resident. His hollyhocks extend several feet higher than his head, and the whole garden is abloom at once: foxglove, columbine, daisies, all improbably tall and densely clustered.

Perhaps Sternfeld's most complex examination of human character can be found in "Solar Pool Petals, Tuscon, Arizona, April 1979." An older man stands in the foreground on the right side of the frame on a patio stair that leads down to a swimming pool. The pool is covered with the lily-pad-like disks evoked in the title. An untied tie drapes over the man's neck. We don't need anything else to tell us that it's the end of the day--if nothing else, the tie does it, but the light in the sky also suggests it. The man's hair is graying, and his stance and attitude are nearly identical to those of the man watching the space shuttle--standing in the "work done" position--but this man is not willing to go as far as stripping down to his t-shirt. His face is away from us, his hands on his hips. A woman of indeterminate age (somehow younger seeming) lounges on a chair poolside. Her face is also away from us, staring down the distance, assessing the day. They could be father and daughter, or they could be husband and wife. They could also be complete strangers, for all we know. The woman seems to be unaware of the presence of this man--or she is deliberately ignoring him (my wife is definitively for the latter interpretation).

Does he look at her, or does he look over the edge of the brick wall at the cactuses, palms, and telephone wires that stretch out along the hillside, the city faintly visible in the haze below in the valley? Perhaps he is looking out over the low wall only to try to see what it is that she sees. We could never know at this point. There are layers of perspective here: the woman's, the man's, the photographer's, our own. It's only that last one that we can ever be sure about, but then we notice the photographer telling us to look at the man again, and the man telling us to look at the woman, and then the woman telling us to look out at that distant vision of the greater world that is beyond us all. There's a story here, and we come so close to it, but we'll never know what it is unless we imagine it. The photograph stops just short of expressing a meaning that extends beyond a lesson in perspective, but if anything we might find it all the more meaningful for that.
Also along human lines, "Studio City, California, June 1982" portrays a punk-rock Adam and Eve in a mixed-up tableau, banished to the suburbs, an orange tree behind them bearing some kind of forbidden fruit. The couple might be seventeen, but the expressions on their faces could just as well have been at home on the faces of a couple married forty years. Under this Adam's mohawk is a stern but straight-ahead set of eyes, and this Eve with her short bleached hair looks slightly askance, the slightest touch of a smile--or is it a smirk?--touching her lips. This is their Garden. One wonders if they are still there today. Based on the photograph, you might say that it is at least a possibility.

Another photograph, "Member of the Christ Family Religious Sect, Hidalgo County, Texas, January 1983," more overtly grapples with a religious theme. A young bearded hermit in what we take to be rough woolen robes has emerged, from the torso up, from his simple hermitage: a hole in the ground covered with two-by-fours. Here is a seeker, a man encountering God and nature and the elements, finding out what life is about, whether it be mean or profound, trying to figure out how to get to where it is he wants to go when the time for going comes. The setting is Texas, but the hot-weather brush and the hard-packed dry-dirt floor of the ground evoke thoughts of the Holy Land. If there is a perfectly cultivated field, crops lined up in unerringly straight rows, in the distance behind him, we can come to terms with that easily enough: wilderness has its limitations, its end points, and cultivation is certainly a Biblical thing--parable of the mustard seed and all of that. But then we look closer and we see that, in the hermit's right hand, near the fold of his robe, he holds an orange. Oranges do grow in Texas, maybe even on one of the trees surrounding this rough hermitage. But there's something about that orange that clashes with our notions of Biblical asceticism, something that smacks of luxury. Something about it suggests cheating--locusts and honey, but not oranges. The piece of fruit serves as a knowing wink to the viewer. (Does our hermit have some connection to Adam and Eve in Studio City?)

More than any of the others, though, one photograph brings together all of the major elements at work throughout American Prospects. This is also Sternfeld's most famous image. I have done my own part to make it that much more famous by sharing it over the years with my English comp students as an exercise in attention to detail.


There are so many things going on at once in this picture, "McLean, Virginia, December 1978," and the chief irony, duly noted by all who look at the image, is the fireman picking out (stealing?) pumpkins while a house burns down in the background. There are leading lines going every which way here, so many things to look at that I won't bother enumerating them all, but I will tell a story, how I once showed this photo to a colleague who grew up in McLean, how he thought he remembered the place, the event, how he confirmed my theory that the burning house was being used for fire practice, he thought, but then he wasn't sure. Which is to say that this is a story about how memory plays tricks with suggestion, how we see ourselves sometimes as residents of a past time and place that, when we stop to think about it, we're not really sure existed. I experience the same thing when I see images of myself running along the beach in south Texas, three years old. I can't remember if I remember the event or if I just remember seeing the pictures, hearing people tell me about it. The mystery of what happened inevitably remains mysterious despite our best attempts at analysis.

There are so many other photographs here worthy of discussion: a beautiful stream of rusted-out automobiles spilling down a hill covered with sparkling aspens in the fall; a U-Haul parked in front of a new home construction, a family's furniture spilling out the back of the van, and sitting on a sofa in the midst of it all a mother with her breast bared feeding an infant child; the Wet 'n Wild Aquatic Theme Park in Orlando, pumping out shimmering articial blue waves just a few dozen miles from the ocean; a group of three domestic workers waiting for the bus in an immaculate Atlanta suburb.

This book provided my grounding in photography, so that when I first came upon Susan Sontag's claim, in On Photography, that this medium provides the "worst form of mental pollution," I could hardly restrain my ire. Words can do anything: they can deceive or tell the truth, though more often than not what they do best is something in between. American Prospects proves that photography can be as rich as any other form of communication, as full of meaning or deception or some odd admixture of the two.

Felix Feneon's Exercises in Compression

Has anyone read M. Feneon? Very few, presumably. More should join their ranks.

I refer here to Felix Feneon (1861-1944), and the above introduction was written with a glancing nod to the writing style he employed in the series of three-line vignettes pulled together in Novels in Three Lines, recently published by New York Review Books. The book collects Feneon's unsigned pieces written for the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906, and while the ostensible purpose of these tightly constructed micro-stories is journalistic, literary ambition is also definably present. Is it possible to write a novel in three lines? Judge for yourself:

"Arrested in St. Germain for petty theft, Joel Guilbert drank sublimate. He was detoxified, but died yesterday of delirium tremens."

"Love decidedly has a hard time sitting still. Emile Contet, 25 Rue Davy, pierced with his knife his wife's breast."

"In preparation for his journey to the United States, where he will be buried, M. Stillman (car accident on July 18) was embalmed in Lisieux."

Each item has its own narrative arc, its own climax. Some are missing the conclusion, but great literature is judged in part by its capacity for generating artful ambiguity--for setting off possibilities without causing confusion.

Why did Guilbert drink poison? What is the relation of his drinking poison to his committing petty acts of thievery? And then the irony--detoxified and, presumably, granted a reprieve from death, only to succumb to the lingering effects of the poison later on.

Contet's spousal murder is one of many that Feneon recounts, domestic violence being a staple of French society in the early 1900s, or so it would seem here. The way the illustration so startlingly and conclusively develops the theme presented forces us to acknowledge a kind of retro-active understatement in the first sentence when we re-read it. The dry, deadpan irony is wicked in its intent.

M. Stillman evidently intended to emigrate to America. The move was permanent in a way he never intended, though parts of him, it seems, are meant to remain in France.

What Feneon is saying, indirectly, in each of these cases is that he has told us all that we really need to know. Either we can figure out the rest, or the rest is unknowable and we stare right in the face of life's mystery.

Throughout the collection, Feneon's "novels" are shot through with irony, particularly understatement. Again and again, Feneon returns to the same subjects. In particular: domestic violence; theft, murder, and general criminal activity; suicide; fatal and near-fatal accidents; elections; strikes; love gone wrong. Occasionally, he discovers to us a tiny episode of serendipity or of tragedy averted:

"M. and Mlle Mamette were canoeing down the Marne. At Bibelots-du-Diable they capsized. Assisted by M. Oauliton, the brother rescued the sister."

Amidst so much squalor and turmoil the reader begins to seek out these events, count the pages between them. Such moments are indeed few and far between. The overall picture is bleak, French realism that complements Zola but with great terseness. When one entry announces a simple festivity, we wonder what darkness lingers just beyond the fringes of the report:

"In Caen, on the esplanade along the river Orne, the students' fair (dances, wrestling matches, etc.) was jolly despite inclement weather."

Seems innocent enough, doesn't it? Don't you believe it. When a woman's one-hundredth birthday is celebrated, you wonder what kind of awful secrets she has harbored, what she has seen in her life, but Feneon doesn't tell.

In Feneon's world, homemade bombs full of powder and nails are frequently left on doorsteps, but more often than not they fail to go off. That leaves the near-victim with cold comfort--it's unsettling to know that someone wants you dead--and it leaves the reader puzzled, because we are given no explanation as to why these anonymous acts of attempted terrorism are being perpetrated. Labor disputes? Anarchism at work? Unrest is the rule of the day; this is a volatile place in history.

Outside of the political, the cruellest of tragic ironies are delivered, in Feneon's words, like punchlines. This makes the jokes of poor taste but for all that strangely affecting:

"Catherine Rosello of Toulon, mother of four, got out of the way of a freight train. She was then run over by a passenger train."

Other novels skirt the edge of mystery. We come close to a truth, but never quite arrive:

"In a hotel in Lille, M. H. Hallynch, of Ypres, hanged himself for reasons that, acccording to a letter he left, will soon be made known."

But the reason is never made known. Presumably there is one, somewhere, but there's likely not a soul alive who is privy to it now.

Some entries exercise a kind of extended compression, as though Feneon was pushing himself to even greater degrees of compactness:

"Their horse reared, scared by an automobile, and ejected from their carriage M. Pioger, of Louplande, Sarthe, and his maid. Killed. Injured."

Names and places figure largely in these pieces. The onslaught of place-names is bewildering to one who is not intimately familiar with French geography, but such detail does nevertheless give a sense of specificity and precision to these events: we know that they are occurring somewhere, in a place as familiar to the characters who act them out as our own neigborhoods are to us. Feneon often refers to characters by last name only, as though we might know who they are--as though we were co-workers, comrades, or neighbors. This assumption of familiarity is sometimes chilling, as in the case of the neighborhood kids whose play borders on the fatal:

"In the course of a brawl among children in Gueugnon, Saone-et-Loire, Pissis nearly stabbed Fournier to death."

In all, this catalog of a world of woe is strangely compelling. It makes the reader question the nature and purpose of the news. It's no wonder, you think, that the upbeat human interest piece has become such a staple of reportage in our culture. Such stories, trite as they may sometimes seem in the context of a slicked-over television news production, fend off despair. But Feneon forces us to look. His mini-tragedies evoke fear and pity. We close the book glad that we are ourselves still in one piece. We promise to be a little more careful next time we cross the street against heavy traffic.

[With all due apologies for the absence of accent marks!]

Darjeeling's Limitations

To what end did Wes Anderson put together The Darjeeling Limited? This is a question that demands to be asked when viewing this film. Needless to say, perhaps, most good films don't demand that we ask this question.

Darjeeling boasts some nice segments, some clever cuts, nods to cinema techniques that were abandoned several decades ago and that now look fresh again. And no one could doubt Anderson's skill at using music montage: here it is The Kinks that make the scene, popping up to good effect throughout the film, though nothing could quite top Anderson's masterful sequence from Rushmore involving "A Quick One" by The Who. Anderson knows how to make music work on film.

Anderson's strengths also reveal his weakness: he's too hip for his own good sometimes, and much of this film reduces down to indie-cool posturing. Anderson's relentless reconfiguring of family-structure breakdown and rebuilding gives him something to work with, but by now his characters seem to be plodding through the landscape without any direction--which is alright as long as someone in charge (the director) knows where they are going. This is a journey film in which nobody (audience included) seems to have anything genuine staked on whether we ever get there or not.

Worst of all is the prologue to the main story, a short entitled Hotel Chevalier, the purpose of which seems to be to showcase the contours of Natalie Portman's body without actually showing any direct frontal nudity. It's supposed to illustrate the wound that is central to the inner life of Jason Schwartzman's character, Jack. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. It's hard to buy into the fiction that such a relationship ever existed. The brazen go-to-it-iveness with which Portman's character borrows Jack's tootbrush is the only redeeming moment.

Excursions into the quirky and the unexpected gave Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums a noteworthy charm. At this point, though, we have come to expect the quirkiness, and for this reason it has lost its charm. The tailor-fit retro fashions displayed by Anderson's characters once made style seem like substance, but now they just seem like style, which on its own inevitably falls out of fashion. In all, Anderson needs to strive for something different--something more substantive--next time around.

I'm Not There

Throughout I'm Not There, I was distracted by the music. If for nothing else, the film ought to be commended for making viewers want to listen to Dylan.

Otherwise, the film was hit and miss, nothing too profound in terms of insights into Dylan's character. For that, Martin Scorcese's documentary No Direction Home does a fine job. In No Direction Home, Dylan himself seems mystified at how he could have embodied so many different selves, and in this respect Dylan is just like the rest of us, negotiating through different personas at different moments of our lives, only Dylan's grappling with different versions of himself is (literally and figuratively) amplified--and Dylan just happens to be the genius who reinvented American popular music for his time. My own favorite Dylan is the cynical, disillusioned folkie (or perhaps ex-folkie) of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde--Dylan as the master ironist whose cutting remarks spare no one, not even himself. In I'm Not There, it is Cate Blanchett who somewhat improbably--but to great effect--takes on this role.

I can never tell if Cate Blanchett is one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen or one of the plainest. Regardless, she excels at playing a self-absorbed 1960s Dylan-esque asshole. Some of the other performances were intriguing or endearing, but Heath Ledger's 70s asshole Dylan ("Robbie Clark") made me want to run from the theater. There wasn't anything compelling about his louche debauchery or his casual affairs or about the Hollywood schlock that, supposedly, had torn him away from music and propelled him into a life of hollowness and vacancy devoid of any redeeming artistic quality sufficient to save him from himself. The gradual dissolution of his marriage to Claire (Charlotte Gainsborough) was too gradual for me: I couldn't wait for them to split and get it over with. I didn't sympathize. It seemed like we had seen this sort of thing done so many times already in other films, sometimes to much better effect, and the fact that its purpose in this film was to say something about Dylan wasn't enough.

Marcus Carl Franklin's turn as a black kid self-identified as "Woody Guthrie" ticks off some interesting interpretations of what Sasha Frere-Jones termed "musical miscegenation" in a recent New Yorker article (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/10/22/071022crmu_music_frerejones), and it's hard not to like Franklin when he's up there on screen. Richard Gere's "Billy the Kid"/Dylan doesn't do much except to add some interesting imagery, though Jim James' performance of "Goin' to Acupulco" during this segment is powerful, probably the best of all the Dylan covers to grace the movie soundtrack.

We admire the noble failure, and for me at least I'm Not There qualifies as such, though in the future I would appreciate more of the nobility and less of the failure.

"Great Adaptations" and Anglo-Saxon Epic Poetry

Sophie Gee's claim, in yesterday's New York Times Book Review, that both Beowulf and Paradise Lost are "now virtually unreadable" is the kind of thing I would expect from a high school student, not from a professor of English at Princeton (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/books/review/Gee-t.html?_r=1&ref=review&oref=slogin). Of course, as Gee knows, they are indeed readable, even if it does require assistance to read them. What Gee means, in effect, is that they do not reflect modern values--either culturally or in terms of our literary sensibilities. They are not written in our language, and they don't reflect the way we live our lives today. This does not make them unreadable. Rather, it makes them classics, reflective of attitudes that preceded and helped to shape our own.

According to Gee, not only has the screen adaptation of Beowulf "succeeded aesthetically," it has also given the story "the kiss of life." To indicate, as Gee has, that the new film version of Beowulf triumphs by "picking up on [the original's] weirdest and hardest-to-parse particulars" is a stretch. Seduction of the sexual variety is not an element in Beowulf--at all--nor is the hero's succumbing to temptation of any sort.

Women in this epic poem lament for the dead, but they do little else. To say that this Anglo-Saxon epic is dominated by the masculine perspective is an understatement, but at least the women involved aren't playthings or caricatures. In fact, we sympathize greatly with Hildeburh as she weeps over her dead husband and dead brother, slain in combat with each other, victims of the heroic code of vengeance (the wergild, or man-price) that pervades the warrior culture. Nobody seduces anybody, and Beowulf, manly man that he is, dies a virgin for all we know. He's too busy making war to make love, and it seems that the Anglo-Saxons admired him for all that. That's exactly the way they wanted him to be.

The lure of gold and its potential for corrupting even great men is a prominent element--but the great men in Beowulf never fall prey to this. Rather, they espouse the Anglo-Saxon ideal of great leadership: the great ring-givers share their treasure with their people. That Beowulf himself is morally infallible--but absolutely mortal--is part of the point, and to take this quality away is to misread the poem. Beowulf occupies a special place in the canon of epic literature: not only is it the only surviving epic of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, it is also perhaps the only epic that gives us a fully human protagonist in a natural landscape. Beowulf's skills, though remarkable, are simply the skills we have but amplified: immense strength, fantastic fortitude, an iron-hard will, but no supernatural protection. There are no gods in Beowulf as there are in epics of the classical tradition--only a distant and vaguely understood Judeo-Christian Lord. Even the monsters--Grendel, his mother, the dragon--are more like forces of nature, our archetypal fears (to borrow language from Seamus Heaney's introduction to his stunning translation of the poem) personified.

The twists of the new film, which according to Gee point to Beowulf himself not only as the founder of his own myth but also as a falsifier of the truth, may satisfy a postmodern audience's skepticism toward hero-worship, but they don't present character the way Anglo-Saxons saw it.

What you have when you change these elements may be entertainment. It may be good or--for all I care, call it what you want--even great film-making. But it's not Beowulf, and what bothers me about the film is not the modernization of an ancient story but the claims of authenticity that promotional materials for the film make. Gee, in her essay, seems amazingly unwilling (given her profession) to entertain the possibility that 10th century participants in the oral tradition might have appreciated the story as it is: "Purists will object that none of this is in the original, composed sometime between the seventh and 10th centuries. Well, maybe not, but it should have been."

What do we expect from the literature of past eras? Gee ought to know that rarely will it pander to our world views, our values, or for that matter our need to be entertained. As it is, Seamus Heaney's popular translation of the poem is imminently readable, even to high school students, and even without the added benefit of Angelina Jolie's presence.

I'm glad Gee at least enjoyed the film.

Modern Music: Panda Bear, Battles, Marnie Stern

Those were different times.
All the poets, they studied rules of verse,
And those ladies, they rolled their eyes.
--Lou Reed, "Sweet Jane"

Panda Bear makes music that often resembles the music Brian Wilson made over forty years ago. Many of the tracks on Person Pitch resemble tracks from the Pet Sounds box set that came out a while back: like most of the music has been stripped away, leaving only the vocals. Onto this, Panda Bear has added slight instrumentation and a lot of background noise, so that it sometimes sounds like you are listening to a Beach Boys song coming out of someone else's window. You strain closer to hear some more.

The similarities to Brian Wilson are more than surface-level: both Pet Sounds and Person Pitch are products of individuals who are clearly obsessed with sound. How many hours did Wilson spend layering track upon track in the studio? Probably more hours, overall, than Panda Bear spent at his laptop, but the obsession is the same. The inspired concept behind the bicycle horn on "You Still Believe in Me" takes on a much larger role for Panda Bear; Wilson's sonic epiphany--that any sound can make music--is a pervasive principle in much modern music. Panda Bear exercises that principle with a good ear, but he has traded in Wilson's fondness for layering instruments with one for layering found and created sound, only some of which you can place. On Person Pitch, you won't find a song with frailing banjo and baritone sax paired together for the instrumental break, but there is still a great sound to admire here.

If the brand of rock and roll favored by those of us who came of age in the latter decades of the 20th century is to have a future, that future is Battles. The thing about Battles is the groove, which finds expression in a curious but exciting dynamic between the organic (real drums, expertly managed by John Stanier, formerly of the metrically diverse metal band Helmet) and the digital (keyboards, looping stations, pedals of various sorts). For Battles, the human voice is truly just another instrument: most of the vocals are so processed that even when there are words (as opposed to ohs and ahs) only snatches of a phrase here and there can be deciphered. Mainstream popular music uses vocal technology as a substitution for the real thing--as a corrective for poor singing--whereas technology is, for Battles, the real thing. The music they play is active and intricate, functioning on several levels at once. The video for "Atlas" shows the members of the band grooving together inside a revolving, futuristic glass box. If Battles is visiting us from the future, let's hope that they decide to stay a while.

The fact that Marnie Stern seems such an improbable choice for indie-rock guitar hero exposes a latent sexism that persists in rock music. Despite the fact that the role of guitar hero (of the non-video-game variety) stills seems to be reserved primarily for men, Stern's finger-tapping guitar style can only be described as shredding in classic Eddie Van Halen fashion, but with a contemporary twist: like Battles and Panda Bear, Stern relies heavily on looping, and the pounding fury of drums (supplied by Hella's Zach Hill) that serves as her primary accompaniment places her more in the punk tradition than in the hard-rock tradition associated with Van Halen. Stern's songs are loud and stoner-clever. "Plato's F****d Up Cave" and "Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling" are worth more than a chuckle, though; they display genuine creativity, and the guitar playing is exciting. But it's the opening track, "Vibrational Match," that defines Stern's sound. Amid the sonic fury, her voice fits nicely, soothing and sometimes a little comic.

What's exciting about all three of these acts is that they prove the vibrancy of rock and roll as a musical idiom. All along--acoustic sidetracks by Neil Young and so many others aside--rock music is an embracement of technology, and the music has to change as the technology does. Rock was created by act and compulsion of history--though Link Wray's discovery that he could poke a hole in the speaker cone of his amplifier and get distortion was a key innovation. It's in the amplifiers, the cables, the magnets. The racket they make is so glorious sometimes that it's all anyone can do to get up and shout along with it.