Real Life Rock (120 page)

8
Tentacles, “Louie Louie Got Married” (K 7' single)
He'd be 43, but the people at the wedding don't sound a day over 17.

9
ELVIS at UCSF Medical Center (Nuclear Medicine, basement, 505 Parnassus, San Francisco)
A dirty white contraption in the middle of a corridor, 4 feet high, 3 feet wide—with a gorgeous black-and-white glossy of Elvis from
Loving You
laminated on the front. On the back is an Elvis tableau that, it turns out, changes with the holidays: On March 15 he's a leprechaun—why not Julius Caesar?—for St. Patrick's Day, an Easter bunny the next week. Signs on machine: “
DO NOT BRING ELVIS INSIDE
(
CUDA
)
EVEN IF NOT WORKING
” and “
NO LAB SPECIMENS IN ELVIS
.” Two yellow headlights on the front look like eyes.

A technician comes up and starts to press buttons. “What's this?” he's asked. “It's a robot,” he starts to explain, when a doctor passing by indignantly corrects him: “It's
Elvis!
” It turns out to be an autonomous refrigerated drug-delivery apparatus: i.e., it's full of drugs. You program it, it navigates the hallways to its destination. The eyes register obstacles; bumpers around the bottom protect the walls when the eyes don't work. You don't have to pay it and it doesn't get benefits.

ELVIS (“Some kind of acronym,” a pharmacist says. “Evasion/Sensory . . . I don't know where the ‘L' is”) took off down the corridor, eyes blinking. “Be careful he doesn't hit you,” the pharmacist said to a woman in the hall. “He's supposed to know better,” she said. “Elvis wouldn't hit a woman.” It just missed a wall, then smoothly turned a corner and disappeared.

10
Department of Yeah, Right, Death Trip Division, Midwestern Subsection,
San Francisco Chronicle
,
July 27
“Heat advisories were posted yesterday from Kansas eastward through the Ohio Valley and over parts of the Southeast. Temperatures throughout the region hit the 90s and reached triple digits with the heat index.

“The weather was blamed on eight deaths in Cincinnati over the weekend, 11 deaths in Illinois in the past week and five in Missouri.”

AUGUST
23, 1999

1
Atmosphere, “The Abusing of the Rib,” on
Stuck on AM—Live Performances on 770 Radio K
(No Alternative)
Drifting out of a studio at the University of Minnesota is a modest, unsettling, finally disturbing question: “What do you love?” The questioner is the earnest, smooth-voiced Slug, of the Minneapolis hip-hop collective Rhyme Sayers; off to the side is the gravelly, much older-sounding voice of Eyedea, a high school student. A piano runs a repeating, regretful line in the background, regretting that all questions were settled before the questioner arrived, but he doesn't buy it. Life has put him on the spot; he means to put you there, too. Still, he makes a beautiful reverie, and you can fall into it and forget yourself, until the very end. Somehow gathering up all the menace of Bo Diddley's “Who do you love” (God help you if it isn't him) and none of the flash, Slug's “What do you love?” becomes the hardest question he can ask. Now so much is at stake you can imagine that you or anyone might mumble, stammer, and then admit it: “Nothing.”

2
lunapark 0, 10
(Sub Rosa)
Beginning with a ghostly, unbearably romantic minute from Apollinaire in 1912, then thunderbolts from Mayakovsky in 1914 and 1920, avant-garde poets read the century, which seems to have finished prematurely; by about 1960 they're mostly talking about themselves.

3
Ad for
Notting Hill
(your daily newspaper)
Snuggled next to Julia Roberts', Hugh Grant's face takes you right back to the silent era, when leading men like Wallace Reid (king of the racing picture—
The Roaring Road
,
Double Speed
—before he became addicted to morphine) burst from their posters in unthreateningly fruity grins, mugs dripping with lipstick, rouge and the eyeliner that with Grant makes his eyes look like they were cut out of a magazine and pasted on. That's right, he's not human. He's not supposed to be.

4
Dusty Springfield, “I Only Want to Be with You” (HBO, 9:30 p.m. Sundays)
I have no idea why Springfield's 35-year-old fluffy first hit is so thrilling as the kickoff to
Arli$$
, spreading warmth and delight over the montage of Robert Wuhl's sports agent suffering Bill Bradley's no-look hoop, Jesse Ventura's choke hold, Katerina Witt's kiss. Maybe it was just a perfect record; maybe the release is all in the editing.

5–6
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, “Kandy Korn,” on
Grow Fins–rarities [1965–1982]
(Revenant) and
The Mirror Man Sessions
(Buddah)
An L.A. band's guitar piece, live from 1968, from the studio the year before, in both cases arriving from a future still ahead of us, a future momentarily circling back to look for a spot in Mississippi in 1930, but missing.

7
Nik Cohn,
Yes We Have No—Adventures in the Other England
(Knopf)
In this map of secret cultures hidden in plain sight—anarchistic and seeking cultures made by solitaries (a man requesting official recognition as the antichrist; Johnny Edge, now an old West Indian London hipster, in 1962 the Christine Keeler boyfriend who “detonated the whole Profumo affair, blew Harold MacMillan out of office, and so gave the Anglo club a whack from which it never quite recovered”) and groups (ravers, Odin worshippers, Elvis worshippers, travelers, Rastas, squatters, every form of contemporary heretic)—the novelist and pop chronicler has rewritten
The Pursuit of the Millennium—Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages
, Norman Cohn's soul-shaking 1957 study of medieval heretics. “The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one,” Norman Cohn wrote, “and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious”: what we call the present is a bridge over an ancient pit, a bridge built out of wishful thinking. Nik Cohn is more sanguine, but he is more than four decades farther from Hitler than his father was.