Real Life Rock (236 page)

5
“Lee Greenwood puts heart into his pre-race performance to kick off this year's Daytona 500” (Pollstar, Feb. 15)
Heart may not be the word: as passed on by Steve Weinstein, who provided his own caption (“Lee Greenwood and choir giving quasi-Nazi salute at NASCAR rally—while presumably singing ‘God Bless the USA' in Aramaic”), the photo, shot just before George W. Bush proclaimed, “Gentlemen, start your engines!” showed Greenwood raising his right arm, high, stiff, and forward, while four
women dressed in blazing red clerical gowns and two men draped in yellow lifted theirs with at least a slightly ambiguous bend in the elbow. Or, as one could have read a month later in the program for the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Colorado Springs, which Bush addressed on closed-circuit TV (“You are doing God's work with conviction and kindness, and on behalf of our country I thank you”), “What Can 30 Million Evangelicals Do for America? Anything We Want.”

6–7
Lou Reed,
Animal Serenade
(Reprise) &
Live: Take No Prisoners
(Arista)
If you don't like Lou Reed, double live albums won't convince you. Whether onstage in New York in 1978 for the biting
Take No Prisoners
or in Los Angeles last year for the reflective
Animal Serenade
(what, an animal serenade without “Possum Time”?), he's not selling anything, and he takes whatever time he needs: 17 minutes for the relentless stand-up comedy routine that's the
Prisoners
' “Walk on the Wild Side,” nine minutes for “Set the Twilight Reeling” on
Serenade
. The highlight of the latter might be “Tell It to Your Heart,” which would fit David Lynch's
Mulholland Dr
. even better than Reed's version of “This Magic Moment” did
Lost Highway
; the benchmark for
Prisoners
, if not for Reed's entire presence over the decades, is “Street Hassle”—also included on
Animal Serenade
, and in a performance that seems complete until what Reed did with the song 26 years ago makes you realize the drama in the number can never be complete. Reed lets the scene where the singer is telling another man to get his dead wife out of the singer's apartment dictate the rhythm; with the bouncy Waltzing Matilda beat suddenly stripped back, it's a long, jittery moment of absolute naturalism. You forget that the lines Reed is speaking rhyme, that these are lyrics in any kind of song. It's a play, not a song, and the Brando in Reed is all the way out, walking back and forth across the stage. There is no stylization you can hear.

8
Walter Hopps at “Jay DeFeo and The Rose: Myth and Reality” (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Feb. 28)
It was a symposium on the San Francisco artist's painting
The Rose
. DeFeo (1929–89) began working on it in 1957; in 1965, the work having long since taken over her life, she and her husband were evicted from their apartment, and the unfinished painting, which by then had grown to more than 10 feet by eight feet and weighed nearly 2,000 pounds, was removed to the Pasadena Art Museum where Hopps, then its director, planned to show it—though it wasn't until 1969, when Hopps was gone, that it finally appeared. Before long it disappeared, walled up like a corpse in the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1995 it was broken out and restored; the next year it was at the Walker as part of the touring exhibition “Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965.”

This day in San Francisco, Hopps, now curator of the Menil Collection in Houston, remembered a night at the Fillmore Auditorium in the late 1950s, when he and DeFeo had gone to see Count Basie: DeFeo loved his “Hello Central, Give Me Doctor Jazz.” DeFeo was dancing alone in front of the stage; when the band took a break, Basie motioned her over. She came back to Hopps: “He wants me to go backstage!” She went. When the band returned, DeFeo reappeared, blushing. “Well, what on earth went on?” Hopps asked. “He asked me to go away with him,” DeFeo said. “What did you say?” “I told him there's this big painting I have to finish.”

9
Joe Rathbone,
I Can Hear the Windows of Your Heart Breaking
(Zakz)
First winner of the Rod McKuen Prize for Gross Metaphorical Elaborationism. And the music sounds just like the title.

10
Oliver Hall writes in:
“L.A. is having one of its occult fits of meaning again. Driving back from the polling place this afternoon in the lower-middle-class neighborhood where I've lived for the last 14 years, I found a street I'd never seen before: Barbara Ann Street. It only seems to go about a block, and there was nothing on it but an abandoned couch, a torn-up Camaro, and something covered in a blue tarp.”

APRIL
14, 2004

1
Salon
,
“Letters,” regarding the pending removal of Bob Edwards as host of NPR's
Morning Edition
(March 30)
The bemusement Edwards has for 25 years offered ordinary important events is of a piece with the
What seems to be the problem?
tone he adopts for absolute catastrophes. Neither is more than a genteel version of standard D.C. cynicism. But familiarity with anything on the air breeds resistance to change—that is, it breeds “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds”—far more readily than it does contempt. “For me,” one Edwards follower wrote
Salon
, “Bob Edwards has become the Mister Rogers of my adult life. His ability to report and explain all facets of news stories in an even-keeled, compassionate manner has allowed me to accept and understand even the most difficult and horrific events of the world with a sense of optimism.”

2
TV on the Radio,
Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
(Touch and Go)
This New York experimental pop band—credited as Tunde Adebimpe, vocals and loops; Kyp Malone, vocals, guitars, and loops; David Andrew Sitek, music—is never obvious. Some songs are too vague to notice, and they hide the ones that aren't—until a slowly building storm (“Dreams”) or a dragging but determined walk home in the middle of the night (“Wear You Out”) makes it clear this music comes out of a real city: an invisible city. Getting there is easier than reporting back, but these people are inventing a new language to pull it off.

3
Tom Perrotta,
Little Children
(St. Martin's)
The
New York Times
is pumping this diverting, evaporating novel about young couples with children in suburbia—probably because some
Times
writers who still think John Cheever and John Updike had something to say are thrilled to have their own suburbs reauthenticated in fiction. But this book doesn't touch Perrotta's high school novel,
Election
, which is nothing like the every-punch-telegraphed movie version, or for that matter
Joe College
, Perrotta's college novel. The new book
is
just like a movie, and you can hardly read a page without seeing Eric Stoltz and Maura Tierney as the leads.