Real Life Rock (104 page)

4
David Evans,
John Heartfield—AIZ: Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung/Volks Illustrierte 1930–38
(Kent)
Two-hundred-and-thirty-seven antifascist photomontages—for all the good they did the first time around, a language worth relearning.

5
James Marsh, director,
Highway 61 Revisited
(Arena Television/BBC, UK, 1993)
Part of a “Tales of Rock 'n' Roll” series so far unseen in the U.S., this documentary focuses on one of Bob Dylan's most inspired recordings and the spine-of-the-nation highway it's named for. There are surprises everywhere: Dylan's great “Blind Willie McTell” orchestrates footage of the Civil Rights Movement, a specter dissolving the words of heroes; a rough, clanking piano demo of “Like a Rolling Stone” turns into the anthem everyone knows as New York City looms up; and on Dylan's old buddy John Bucklen's high school tapes, Bucklen and then–Bobby Zimmerman talk into the tape recorder self-consciously, as if they know someday we'll be listening, judging
whether Dylan's claim that Johnny Cash is more boring than dirt, or that Elvis was a thief, sounds sincere (not completely). Dylan hammers out Little Richard's “Jenny, Jenny” on the piano. He sings “Little Richard”—the song. His song. Good, too.

6
Colin McGinn, “Out of Body, Out of Mind,
Lingua Franca
(November/December 1994)
“From the fact that
we
cannot make sense of something it does not follow that
it
makes no sense. We know that consciousness exists and that it is robustly natural, though we cannot in principle produce the theory that would make its nature manifest. There is thus nothing mysterious about the existence of the mystery.” A philosophy professor at Rutgers, McGinn has been named a “New Mysterian”—a member of a minischool of mind-body theory named for ? and the Mysterians, who in 1966 forever altered the consciousness of all too many people with their immortal “96 Tears.” “What difference has being a mysterian made to my life?” McGinn asks, and answers: “It has released me from the uncomfortable sensation that philosophical problems have always stimulated in me—the feeling that reality is inherently preposterous, ill-formed, bizarre.” Rudy Martinez, a.k.a. ?, who after an eight-year hiatus is again performing under his philosophical name, with the original Mysterians, should be proud.

7
Juned,
Juned
(Up)
Four women from Seattle stick an old picture of ugly transvestites on their CD sleeve, then combine folkish, borne-upon-the-winds vocals with an attack that veers from the relentless to the casually experimental. The sense that they could go anywhere pops up again and again, but for the time being they just go from one place to another.

8
Marianne Faithfull,
A Secret Life
(Island)
Her much anticipated collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti, and the perfect accompaniment to her recent autobiography: the tone of exasperated, imperious noblesse oblige is the same.

9
Janet Lyon and Michael Bérubé “Living on Disability—The Upward Climb of Down Syndrome,”
Voice Literary Supplement
(December 1994)
English professors Lyon and Bérubé's breathtaking comment on their Down's syndrome son: “In the end, he's both like and unlike everyone else—part body, part discourse, part counterdis-course.” It's a stunning example of why so many find this sort of critical writing—flipping buzzwords like card tricks—an occasion for mirth, if not disgust.

10
Albert Zugsmith, producer,
Girls Town
(or
The Innocent and the Damned
), 1959, on
Mystery Science Theater 3000
(16 December 1994, Comedy Central)
The setting: a prison farm run by nuns. The star: Mamie Van Doren. The human and the two robots who trade wisecracks about the movies they watch in the
MST 3000
screening room might as well be lobbing spitballs for all the mileage they're getting out of this one—until escapee Cathy Crosby is caught, and boyfriend Paul Anka has to convince her to go back to the nuns without scratching her, or their, eyes out. “I'll visit you,” says Paul. Cathy manages a weak smile. “You tell me what your favorite song is,” Paul says, “and I'll come up and sing it to you.” From the peanut gallery: “You know ‘White Light/White Heat'?”

MARCH
1995

1
Alison Krauss,
Now That I've Found You—A Collection
(Rounder, 1987–94)
Going pop, bluegrass thrush opens up far more roads than she found on her most luminous recording, which isn't even here. Some performances are from her own records, some are more inaccessible: covers of the Beatles' “I Will,” and of Autry Inman's room-spinning “I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby.” Krauss makes you hope you never will.

2
Mark Merlis,
American Studies
(Houghton Mifflin)
In this unmannered novel, a 62-year-old man, Reeve, lies in a hospital bed, having been beaten nearly to death by a boy he'd picked up. He thinks about his old professor, one Tom Slater—a figure Merlis has based on F. O. Matthiessen, Harvard teacher, communist,
homosexual, suicide, and author in 1941 of the classic
American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman
, though here the book is called
The Invincible City
. All that Slater wanted from life—from love and politics made inseparable—is summed up in his affection for Whitman's magic word “camerado.” As Reeve thinks through the past, he nails its every vanity—of the left, the university, the famous book, of the closeted professor and his salon of golden youths. But no matter how distant, or evanescent, or false, the image of utopia the long-dead professor raised before his eyes cannot be erased: “The seminar above all, that famous seminar of his, that he first had the audacity to call ‘American Studies.' Nowadays that means dissertations on ‘Gilligan's Island.' But that wasn't what Tom meant at all. . . . For him there were, perhaps, three hundred Americans in as many years. They dwelt together in a tiny village, Cambridge/Concord/Mannahatta, Puritans and Transcendentalists exchanging good mornings, and Walt Whitman peeping in the windows. . . . He had made a little country of his own. . . . As Jefferson thought it would take a millennium to settle the continent, so we thought it would take forever just to cut a few paths through the forest primeval of nineteenth-century letters. . . . Even I felt, with Tom and his real students, like a conquistador, staking my claim on the imagined America that lived in that little room.”