Real Life Rock (132 page)

5
Ed van der Elsken,
Love on the Left Bank
(Dewi Lewis)
This legendary photonovel, originally published in 1956, is set mostly in a small bar off St. Germaindes-Prés. It's the early '50s, and all the bohemian clichés are present—sex, drugs, violence, poverty, and bad art—but also movement, tension, the unknown. Looking at the way people stand, shout or pass out, you can feel the blank sense of freedom that followed the war all over the West now compressed into this one shabby cafe and nobody there having the slightest idea what to do with it. Or almost nobody. At one table, a few youthful megalomaniacs—among them Serge Berna, Michèle Bernstein, and Jean-Michel Mension, who are visible here, and Guy Debord, who isn't—were working on the problem. And you can feel that, too.

6
Nan Goldin,
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1976–92)
,
in “The American Century Part II, 1950–2000,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Lisa Phillips, chief curator (New York, through Feb. 13)
“Generation to generation, nothing changes in bohemia,” Nik Cohn wrote in 1968; that may be its allure. In 690 slides, Goldin takes the baton from van der Elsken, and while there's more sex, drugs and violence here—and, since the story goes on, death—the weightlessness of the boys and girls in
Love on the Left Bank
is missing. That's because the revolution those people counted on had, by Goldin's time, come and gone. The people in van der Elsken's book went on to make history; Goldin and her friends are stranded outside of it. In such a setting, it's fascinating, and heartbreaking, to discover which songs on Goldin's soundtrack emerge to take new power from photos of deadened lovers and defiant casualties, and which are just wallpaper. The winners, somehow made pristine: Dionne Warwick's “Don't Make Me Over,” Petula Clark's “Downtown” (equally alive as the liberation theme song in
Girl, Interrupted
) and “All Tomorrow's Parties” by Nico with the Velvet Underground. The first is a warning, the second a celebration. The third is a funeral: its strength is in its time shift, its elegy for what has not happened, its certainty that all tomorrow's parties have already taken place. And the last song is Dean Martin's “Memories Are Made of This”—which, following slides of cemeteries, coffins and a crude painting on a door of skeletons fucking standing up, can never have sounded so rich.

7
Michael Lindsay-Hogg, director,
Two of Us
(VH1, premiering Feb. 1)
A fantasy: in 1976, after years of estrangement, Paul McCartney and John Lennon meet at the Dakota in New York. They walk, they talk, finally they get out their guitars and then—Yoko calls. From L.A. Where she's gone to sell a cow for half a million dollars.

8
Degrees of believability in Paul Thomas Anderson's
Magnolia
(New Line Films)
1. Fulfillment of Exodus 8:2. 2. Julianne Moore trying to kill herself because she feels so awful about being unfaithful to dying fossil Jason Robards. 3. The whole cast—sentient, OD'd, in a coma, it doesn't matter—reverently mouthing the words to Aimee Mann's “Wise Up.”

9–10)
Troxel vs. Granville
before the Supreme Court, Jan. 12, and
Come Softly to Me: The Very Best of the Fleetwoods
(EMI)
If you followed the coverage of this case, re the right of grandparents “to visit with a child over the objection of parents who have not been shown to be unfit,” as Linda Greenhouse put it in the
New York Times
, you might have noticed one of the plaintiffs: a bald, stocky, tight-lipped man in glasses, Gary Troxel, 60. It was in 1958 that he joined with Gretchen Christopher and Barbara Ellis at Olympia High School to form the Fleetwoods—before Sleater-Kinney, the best band ever to come out of Olympia, Wash. Over the next three years, chasing
“Come Softly to Me” to “Mr. Blue” to “(He's) The Great Impostor,” they would take the most obvious and commonplace sentiments and, floating them through doo-wop patterns, put them out of reach. “I saw him at an oldies concert about five years ago,” Charles Taylor says of Troxel. “The ‘Fleetwoods' were on the bill. (I have no idea if the two women were the same.) I fully expected it to be another depressing act. And he was wonderful. The voice was the same, and suddenly I was looking at a middle-aged man for whom none of the uncertainty of those songs had ever been settled.” On the evening news shows, Troxel—whose son had killed himself in 1993, leaving two children with their mother, with whom Troxel and his wife were now in dispute—looked bitter, as if he had settled all questions in his heart and knew no one would ever feel as he did, as if he had nothing to say to anyone.

FEBRUARY
7, 2000

1
Mekons,
Journey to the End of the Night
(Quarterstick)
An end-of-the—or anyway their—world album, maybe the best the intransigent Leeds-to-Chicago punk combo has made, with Morris dancing hiding inside reggae rhythms and inside of that “Neglect,” which could be the Crests, climbing “Step by Step” in 1960, Rod Stewart in 1972 telling a woman he hasn't seen in years, “You Wear It Well,” but has a twist nice songs like those were made to deny.

2
The Need,
The Need Is Dead
(Chainsaw)
Olympians (as in Washington) Rachel Carns and Radio Sloan on a thrilling ride, down switchbacks in reverse. Freedom of speech is fine, but this is something else—in moments, as when they recapture the long-gone late-'70s London warble of Lora Logic's “Wake Up,” freedom of throat.

3
Christina Aguilera (Jan 30., ABC/MTV)
The blonde sensation's lip-sync job for the Super Bowl halftime show was creepy in a conventional, who-says-they-aren't-real? manner. It was no preparation at all for the low point of the two-hour biopic
Christina Aguilera: What a Girl Wants
, which followed: in grainy footage of a little girl on a public stage, mike in her hand, singing an adult love song and making adult tease gestures, the 6-or 7-year-old Aguilera was the image of JonBenét Ramsey, and her mother, popping in to say, Oh, it wasn't ME, it was what SHE wanted, was the image of Patsy Ramsey. Running simultaneously on the USA network was
The Mary Kay Letourneau Story: All-American Girl
, but in this night's depravity sweepstakes it didn't have a chance.