Real Life Rock (156 page)

3
Nov. 8, From the Ether:
A friend writes: “I went to sleep when the networks called Florida for Bush, woke up 90 minutes or so later to see they were recalling it again, down to 500 votes at that point—and, shortly, someone cut to a shot of an Elvis impersonator (in black street clothes, but with the sideburns/hair/aviator glasses), presumably in Nashville, clasping his hands in silent prayer. It was that kind of night.”

4
Al Gore, Huntington, W.Va., Nov. 4
Lest we forget, as we will, at the close of the campaign, with Gore taking up George W. Bush's truthful but (simply because of, in Bush's mouth, the accidental nature of its truthfulness) bizarre claim that “The people in Washington want to treat Social Security like it's some federal program,” Gore finally hit the note that had eluded him for so long: “It wasn't a slip of the tongue. It was an expression of ingrained hostility, a preference on the other side for a dog-eat-dog, every-person-for-himself mentality that—” And here the words vanish into the next four years.

5
Bono, “Foreword” in “Q Dylan”
(
Q Magazine
,
U.K.)
“The best way to serve the age is to betray it,” Bono says of Bob Dylan, quoting Brendan Keneally from
The Book of Judas
. He goes on: “The anachronism, really, is the '60s. For the rest of his life he's been howling from some sort of past that we seem to have forgotten but must not. That's it for me. He keeps undermining our urge to look into the future.”

6
Richard Carlin and Bob Carlin,
Southern Exposure: The Story of Southern Music in Words and Pictures
(Billboard Books)
Mostly pictures, from the 1850s to the 1950s—pictures of musicians who made the music that in the 1920s was already the last word of another world. It's the real world of
O Brother, Where Art Thou
?—especially on the cover, in a shot also reproduced inside. The photo is mottled, degenerating: it shows a dashingly handsome, dark-haired man with dark, hooded eyes looking you in the face under a broad-brimmed hat. Foulard tie, jacket, vest, watch chain: holding his five-string banjo, he is the dandy, the woman stealer. You wake up next to him and he's already gone. In Warren Smith's irresistibly slow, beckoning 1957 rockabilly tune he's the man with a “Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache,” but all through Lee Smith's 1992 novel
The Devil's Dream
, back from her to the Carter Family in 1940, forward again to Bob Dylan's 1992
Good As I Been to You
, he's Black Jack Davey. Given what stories, regrets, laments, fond memories or erotic dreams he might have left behind in Hope, Ark., where he stands as his picture is taken, sometime in the 1890s, he is also Bill Clinton.

7–8
Kasimir Malevich,
Dynamic Suprematism,
1915/16 and Bill Woodrow,
Twin-Tub with Guitar,
1981, at the Tate Modern (London, to January)
In a huge, insistently
conceptual long walk through 20th century art, these pieces jumped out. In the Manifesto Room of the “History/Memory/Society” sector, the old broadsides covering the walls shout and stamp their feet, announcing Futurism, the Bauhaus, Kandinsky's New Theater, Suprematism itself, while off in a corner Wyndham Lewis is Blasting England to bits. Among a few other paintings is the Malevich, a tilted but upright triangle; it's quiet, modest. From somewhere in Russia it pulls all the noisy declarations of the future into its own abstraction and silences them. In its abstraction, the piece at least seems to speak clearly—about the
ease
of remaking and rearranging the world, its constituent elements of life. If you keep looking, though, the triangle begins to look like a figure, an idea, a person, someone with a name. With the bars and squares that score the triangle now arms, eyes and hats, the figure gestures. It is now obese, absurd, threatening, its identity so obvious: Alfred Jarry's loathed and loved Pere Ubu, in Jarry's own woodcuts the same shape, the same fascist trod across whatever might be in his way—and now, with Ubu on the march into the New Day, somehow morally cleansed.

Ivan Chtcheglov, 1953, “Formulary for a New Urbanism”: “Given the choice of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people all over the world have chosen the garbage disposal.” Not so fast, says Bill Woodrow, born 1948 in the U.K., in his own room in the “Still Life/Object/Real Life” sector. For his piece he'd cut the outline of an electric guitar out of the grimy metal casing of a post-war Hotpoint washing machine but not removed it, so the two remain attached like a parasitic twin still part of its host. The curators comment: “The sculpture wittily combines two potent symbols of Western consumerism.” Not so fast: why not art out of functionalism, or the art hiding in objects of utility, the desire hiding in need? Woodrow himself: “The guitar was a pop icon and the washing machine was an everyday, domestic item. So it was bringing the two things together like a slice of life.” Not so fast: why not the urge to create sneaking out of the wish for comfort, and superseding it? There's no trouble imagining this as Pete Townshend's diddley bow, his first guitar.

9
Middle-aged man shaking a cardboard coffee cup full of change like maracas (6th Avenue and 13th Street, New York, Nov. 5)
He was hammering out a tremendously effective R&B number that sounded halfway between anyone's “C. C. Rider” and almost anything by Bo Diddley, and it wasn't until I'd added my change to his and was halfway down the block that the song revealed itself out of its own beat: Elvis Presley's first record, “That's All Right.”

10
Pere Ubu 25th Anniversary Tour (Knitting Factory, New York, Oct. 14)
“The long slide into weirdness and decay,” leader David Thomas announced. When synth player Robert Wheeler moved his hands over his two homemade theremins—to play the theremin you can't look like anything but someone casting spells—the small pieces of metal seemed less like musical instruments than UFOs, and the highpitched sounds coming from them, drifting through the rest of the music like swamp gas, nothing but the cries of the creatures trapped inside. Like any number of people other than myself must feel as I write, the day after the election.

NOVEMBER
28, 2000

1–2
Alan Berg and Howard Hampton on Election Eve and after
Berg, Nov. 6: “I am trying to cope with my jitters by listening to the five CDs of Dylan's Basement Tapes bootlegs and nothing else till it's over.” Nov. 9: “I didn't think I'd have time to listen to all
five
CDs. When things got rough, right before Pennsylvania came in, ‘Clothes Line Saga' came on and that took care of Pennsylvania. Right now it just went to ‘We carried you / In our arms / On Independence Day.' No question about what this will be resolved on: ‘I'm Not There.' ”
Hampton, Nov. 18: “ Today I played the only appropriate song I could find: ‘I Was in the House When the House Burned Down.' ”