Real Life Rock (190 page)

9
J. F. Bizot,
Underground: L'Histoire
(Editions Denoël, Paris)
The strangest item in this oversize compendium of mostly '60s–'70s lore—mostly drawn from the pages of the magazine
Actuel
—has to do with pictures the late Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken made in Paris in 1952 and collected in his classic 1957 photo-novel
Love on the Left Bank
. He frequented a bar called Moineau's, where then assembled a group of sometime artists and would-be revolutionaries who named themselves the Lettrist International: the “provisional microsociety” chronicled in Jean-Michel Mension's recent memoir
The Tribe
. On the edges of their tiny milieu—their table—was an Australian siren named Vera.

Like many other men, van der Elsken was obsessed with her, shooting her dancing with Africans in nightclubs, undressing, looking at her breasts in a mirror. As in the
picture of her on
Page 21
of
Underground
, her head thrown back theatrically, everyone looking at her as if she's crazy, van der Elsken dramatized Vera as the ultimate bohemian, saint of her own self-destruction, doomed to forever wander the paths of desire and folly—until 1960, anyway, when as Bizot's puckish research proves she turned up on the cover of an album by ultimate professional San Francisco bohemian Rod McKuen. His
Beatsville
featured not only “The Co-Existence Bagel Shop Blues,” “What Is a Fabian” and the fabled “The Beat Generation” (which in 1977 Richard Hell & the Voidoids turned into “The Blank Generation”), but also a painting of van der Elsken's Vera beaming her kohlrimmed eyes at the would-be purchaser as an existentialist version of McKuen stared into his wineglass. She deserved better—an appearance sometime in the '70s in the stunning van der Elsken photo of a naked couple fucking on their farm as, on a side road, a motor scooter rolls by obliviously, a picture that takes up all of
Page 142
of Bizot's book. Which, for all you can tell, she got.

10
Cable TV in Hampton Inn & Suites, Columbus, Ohio (Jan. 8)
On nearly 100 channels there's no hint that it's Elvis Presley's 67th birthday (I missed the evening news, where Gov. Bob Taft, also born on Jan. 8, would have been mugging with Elvis impersonator Prentice Chaffin). But there is everything else. It's a utopia of repetition and reversal, repeats and revision, a nirvana of self-referentiality where you've long since committed half of what is set before you to memory, word for word, and are ready for everything else: a never-seen
Law and Order
starring Harris Yulin as a thieving physicist
click
a
Seinfeld
I can't tell if I've seen or not
click click click
one painful scene after another from
Saturday Night Fever click
the cliff-jump and
click Cheers click N.Y.P.D. Blue click
the final shootout from
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(“For a moment I thought we were in trouble”)
click
a relentless
Mad TV
trailer for
Leaving Metropolis
, with Nicolas Cage playing Superman as a stinking drunk
click
Faith Hill searching for her birth mother
click
to the void: Shania Twain, surrounded by thousands of screaming fans and perhaps half a dozen cameramen, barking out “Rock This Country,” cantering from one circus-like ring to another. Like a horse, she can count her steps but she has no sense of rhythm; she can't sing, but she can tease; she isn't pretty, but she appears representing so much money the idea is hard to form. To call the production cynically organized is to beg the question; sealed in silver Spandex, Twain's body is organized even more cynically—but not as cynically as her brace of fiddlers. Sawing away on bodiless, digitalized instruments, they appear in the midst of this extravaganza of trickle-down glamor merely as a sign of the traditional: to prove that the old ways are the best, if that's all you can afford. By then it was past 2, I was ready for
Videodrome
, but it wasn't on.

FEBRUARY
11, 2002

1
A. J. Albany, “Low Down,” in
Tin House
(Winter 2002)
The music issue of this adventurous literary magazine leads off with the extraordinary memoir of a now 40-year-old woman who grew up as the daughter of Los Angeles jazz pianist Joe Albany (“Albany's jumbled, idiosyncratic sense of time is almost all his own, and his solos are cliff-hanger explorations,” Richard Cook and Brian Morton write in
The Penguin Guide to Jazz
) and Sheila Boucher (“She was responsible for some of the best parts in
Howl
, something Ginsberg confessed to my father years after the fact,” Albany writes). Both were heroin addicts; Boucher was a prostitute who walked out when Albany was 6. “They were both bright and talented,” Albany says in her first published writing, “but always competing to see who could fall the furthest and the fastest down the ladder to hell. I have a photo of myself at one and a half years old, with my very pregnant mother. When I asked her about the fate of the baby, she was dismissive and said that had definitely been
some john's kid, who she ended up selling to a wealthy doctor and his wife in Bel Air.” Out of this Albany recreates a landscape, that of her childhood and of the smalltime L.A. jazz junkie, where misery is a faraway sound floating above a voice speaking in tones of affection, terror, rage, love and, most of all, a hipster's defiance.

Not a word is pushed. Albany goes back to the fleabag hotel where she and her father lived when she was 7. Her best friend there was a 9-year-old named LaPrez. “One night LaPrez came to our room and asked my dad if he could give him some help with his mother. When he opened the door to the room, she was sitting straight up in her Murphy bed, eyes wide and staring at us, scarf still tied around her arm. She was blue, dead at least an hour. In the hotel lobby, there was a TV set that three of the resident rummies had total control over, twenty-four hours a day; usually horse races or cop shows were on, but for this one fucked-up night, they sat us down on their smelly old-man sofa and let us watch cartoons.” Throughout, Albany pins her parents' crimes against her; when she forgives them, one by one—or, really, brushes them off, with a gesture that seems to freeze in the air—you believe her.

Nothing else in
Tin House
touches Albany, though in the course of a piece on Brian Wilson built around the 1966 John Frankenheimer movie
Seconds
Andrew Hultkrans comes up with one of the two or three best lines in the history of rock criticism (“Nietzsche would have hated
Pet Sounds”)
and Robert Politio's proposal that Bob Dylan's shadow career on bootlegs is richer than his official career on Columbia albums needs at least 100 pages, not 10 (the idea that the traditional ballads collected on the bootleg
Golden Vanity
might be more truly Dylan's music than, say, “Memphis Blues Again” is intriguing, but would anyone seek out Dylan's bottomless versions of “When First Unto This Country” or “Trail of the Buffalo” without having heard “Memphis Blues Again” first?). More characteristic are Shusha Guppy's deadly “La Chanson Française” and Lawrence Joseph's “The Music Is: The Deep Roots of Detroit R&B,” an unbelievably pedestrian essay that only occasionally rises to the level of soppiness. But unless Amy Jo Albany writes a book this is the only place you can hear her.

2
Britney Spears on
Saturday Night Live
(NBC, Feb. 2)
In her second turn as host she was smart, funny, shameless and fast—a step ahead of anyone around her. Playing a Barbie daughter, the latest third of Gemini's Twin or a doper Hampshire College student who can hold smoke in her lungs for six and a half minutes, she was closer to Jean Harlow or Uma Thurman than the body-snatched performer the world has grown to love and fear; as her own musical guest her IQ seemed to drop 100 points as soon as she opened her mouth to sing.

3
Cat Power, “Come on in My Kitchen,” on Sonic Youth curated
All Tomorrow's Parties 1.1
(ATP)
The Robert Johnson composition—from 1936, not 1932, as it says here—is one of the most delicate and unusual of all country blues pieces, and performers take it up at their peril (
The Best of Johnny Winter
includes a particularly ham-handed example from 1973). Chan Marshall sucks the song into her own drifting, solipsistic notion of the blues, and the tune emerges stripped of any association with the past, sounding more like a white, middle-class young woman embellishing her troubles in a very good writers-workshop story than a story once told by an itinerant young black man. You can hear that as a travesty, or you can just get lost.

4
Katha Pollitt, “$hotgun Weddings,”
The Nation
(Feb. 4)
After considering federal and state projects to push poor women with children into marriage—everything from $100 a month welfare bonuses to propaganda campaigns to “huge funding of faith-based marriage preparation courses” to “fatherhood intervention programs”—the colmnist and divorced single mother asks herself what it would take for her “to marry against my own inclination in order to make America great again.” Answer: “If the government brings Otis Redding back
to life and books him to sing at my wedding, I will marry the Devil himself. And if the Devil is unavailable, my ex-husband says he's ready.”