Real Life Rock (122 page)

6
Robert McNamara at Elgar's “Violin Concerto in B Minor”
“The Architect of the Vietnam War”—or, if we give that honor to McGeorge Bundy, “The Contractor.” “Do you remember Mr. McNamara?” said the woman next to me, who'd come in with McNamara, who was sitting next to her. “He's had such a hard time lately, what with all the criticism,” she said, referring to the reception given the Kennedy/Johnson Secretary of Defense's recent I-Knew-It-Was-Folly-and-I-Wish-I'd-Mentioned-It-at-the-Time books. (“McNamara made a ‘bad guess'/‘Bad Guess' chorused the Reporters?/Yes, no more than a Bad Guess, in 1962/‘8000 American Troops handle the/Situation,' ” Allen Ginsberg wrote in his great Vietnam poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra”: “Your magic errandboy's/Just made a bad guess again/that's lasted a whole decade.”) Now he looked old, fastidious, resolute: like an executioner-monk.

7
Howard Hampton, e-mail report (Aug. 13)
“Wisecrack from the finale of
Mystery Science Theater 3000
, a few minutes into
Danger: Diabolik
, swinging '60s Italian-cum-Modesty Blaise send-up/ripoff, as a bunch of leather-boy motorcycle cops swarm by: ‘If Hitler had won the war and hired Stu Sutcliffe as a fashion designer.' Besides summing up the dream life of
Scorpio Rising
, that line seems to have bottomless pop resonance, even if there are only six people in the world who got it, and I'm not even sure I'm one of them.”

8
Bob Dylan, “Highlands,” Madison Square Garden, July 27
An audience tape of just the second performance of the song since it appeared at nearly 17 minutes on the 1997
Time Out of Mind
. In this 10-minute version the tone shifts from the original bitter weariness to something much sharper: sly, sinister, the sound of a scary old man whispering from a doorway. He could be a prophet; he could be trying to sell you dope. Only one way to find out.

9
David Lynch, director,
The Straight Story
(Disney)
In a bar where they're the only patrons, two old men who have just met have told their awful stories of fighting Nazis in the Second World War—stories of what they saw, what they did, stories about their own guilt. Jo Stafford's “Happy Times” plays in the air; the young bartender stands in the half-light, trying to fade into the woodwork, trying not to hear, not to invade the privacy of the men speaking in this public place, shamed by his own youth.

10
David Bohrer/
Los Angeles Times
news photo (Aug. 10)
The picture was carried in countless papers across the country: “Children from a Jewish Center in Los Angeles were escorted to safe ground yesterday by police officers after a gunman opened fire at the center,” in the
New York Times
' caption. The shot was from above, with an officer in the middle of a line of 10 children, all holding hands; the curve in the line made it seem as if the police and the children were dancing. It was a rare instance of true déja vu. Framed by the photographer and then chosen by editors, by intent or by a common, silent memory, the shot was a match for the famous image from the end of Ingmar Bergman's 1957
The Seventh
Seal
: men and women, holding hands, dancing off a hill, all led by Death.

SEPTEMBER
20, 1999

1
The Pale Orchestra conducted by David Thomas,
Mirror Man Act 1: Jack & the General
(Thirsty Ear)
The centerpiece of the 1998 Diastodrome! Festival in London, with impresario/composer/performer Thomas moonlighting from his band Pere Ubu: a live recording of what could have been called “Route 66,” because the journey the singers and musicians take across an America they're afraid of forgetting is that expansive. What's missing is that old Bobby Troup–Rolling Stones glee as the miles burn up and L.A. gleams in the distance. This is all backroads and, with Bob Holman's increasingly frantic monologues about how, no, no, no, don't you understand, that's not it—he's talking about gas prices and small towns and theme parks—panic. Then the tone shifts. A character something like Steve Martin's corrupt, dreaming traveling song-salesman in
Pennies from Heaven
emerges: Thomas, ready to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, or whatever bridge takes you from here to there. He convinces you that he has the right to do it, because he doesn't take the bridge for granted and you do. Suddenly you want to leave the house and get in the car and see if you can find the same country this company is finding—leaving the disc on while you're gone.

2
Pere Ubu,
Apocalypse Now
(Thirsty Ear)
A show from 1991, with David Thomas doing a stand-up comedy routine between songs (“I'm sure you'll be happy to know that one of our members onstage said to me right then, ‘That was actually good' ”) and whispering the secrets of the universe into the ears of the audience as the songs themselves are played. With melodies rising out of the clattering sound like the modal themes of old folk songs, the effect is stirring, Cleveland punks more than 15 years down the road with no lessening of their conviction that they have been chosen to change the world, laughing at how little they've been changed by it.

3
Anonymous: altered billboard (Gilman Street at San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, Calif., Sept. 8)
A pair of red dice, one with a skull, and this message, in clean Times letters: “Just because you survived ______ doesn't mean your children will.” The original word, still barely showing, was “drugs”; in the exact same typeface, it has been replaced by “Bush.”

4
Jonathan Lethem,
Motherless Brooklyn
(Doubleday)
A detective story where the hero's Tourette's Syndrome (unending waterfalls of tics, from the man's scrambled verbal outbursts to his fascinating need to straighten people's clothing) shapes the tale—allowing a rhythm in which the frenetic almost hides the islands of quiet where thinking gets done. Tourette's is a thing in itself here, a kind of invisible twin; thus Lethem (
Gun, With Occasional Music, Girl in Landscape, As She Climbed Across the Table
) writes in a double language, which opens up the mystery genre to the point that it's almost erased. As the hero tries to keep himself awake for an all-night stakeout, he recognizes “insomnia [as] a variant of Tourette's—the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance—as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.” His favorite song: Prince, “Kiss.”