Real Life Rock (259 page)

10
The Land Beyond the Sunset
(Google Films/YouTube)
A fourteen-minute film from 1912, directed by Harold Shaw, about the
New York Herald Tribune
's Fresh Air Fund—and the furthest thing from a documentary imaginable. There are the shadows of spirits on a shed, a magic book, and a child stealing a boat so that he can float off the end of the earth, just like Enid boarding her bus at the end of
Ghost World
.

NOTE:
In my last column, I said that the Adverts' perfect 1978 album,
Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts,
featured a sleeve that “showed the title on a billboard with the ugliest public housing in the city behind it.” The Adverts were much sharper than my memory. The billboard read
LAND OF MILK AND HONEY
.

Thanks to John Coleman, Tom Denenberg, and Tom Luddy.

JUNE
2009

1
Miguel João (Chiado Square, Lisbon, April 6)
A street singer with an early Springsteen look and an unusual style. Most people trying to sing songs on the order of the Wailers' “Concrete Jungle” or Bob Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone”—songs that are like whales in their power to displace everything around them—act at least slightly embarrassed. João strummed sharply, with silences, and sang as if he'd written the tunes the night before—as if, with great seriousness, he was fooling with them, experimenting, working them out as you watched.

2
A Canção da Saudade,
directed by Henrique Campos (1964)
At Leão d'Ouro in Lisbon, the literature professor Américo António Lindeza Diogo pulled out his iPod to pass around a perfect print of “the first Portuguese rock-and-roll movie.” Starring pop star Vitor Gomes and Ann-Margret lookalike Soledad Miranda, it's a parable of cross-generational conflict as expressed through—and ultimately resolved by!—music: traditional fado v. the new sound, which ultimately blend into a new new sound. What's so gripping about the film is that you may have already seen it a dozen times: with the same plot, the same faces, the same gestures, the same contrived, spontaneous songs and dances, the picture was made between 1957 and 1965 in the US, the UK, Germany, France—for all I know Canada, Mexico, South Africa, India, Brazil. All except for one stunning shot: the cast ringing a stairwell and looking down to the camera on the distant bottom, just like the Beatles on the cover of their first album.

3
“William Eggleston, Paris” (Fondation Cartier, Paris, through June 21)
From Atget
to Brassai to van der Elsken and beyond, in photographs Paris has always been a black-and-white city. The approach the Memphis color photographer takes is to all but escape Paris as a subject. His intent is not to capture a unique city but to let his eye move toward whatever attracts it, and the result is that the strongest images might have been made in Chicago, Beijing, Berlin, or Buenos Aires. One picture showed a tableau that could have come from any city where technology is advertising before it's anything else. Oozing confidence, health, and freedom, a man and a woman walk down a corridor of an ultramodern (which thus already looks out of date) gallery or mall or office building. But they appear superimposed, as if they're projections, not people—and seemingly superimposed over them is an Asian man on a cell phone, bigger, and if anything more confident. In the background, an older couple walks away from our gaze; they seem both symbolic and dropped in. In the middle, shadows of two men in an office discussing something in a relaxed way communicate almost subliminally. Was this picture
taken
, in the vernacular sense, or was it in a literal and not photographic sense
made
—and never actual at all? That's precisely not how Eggleston works, which makes you wonder what, if anything, this is a picture
of
.

4
“The Jazz Century: Art, Film, Music and Photography from Picasso to Basquiat” (Musée du quai Branly, Paris, through June 28; Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, July 21 through October 18)
A huge, very popular exhibition, with an overemphasis on visual art with a capital
A
instead of, say, a Billie Holiday dress or Duke Ellington's tuxedo. But despite a black hole almost before the show gets under way—positing 1917 as the year of the birth of jazz, when it had been all over New Orleans since the end of the nineteenth century, led by Buddy Bolden's band, of which there survives one photograph, because in 1917 the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first record with the word
jass
in the title, and the Navy shut down the Storyville red-light district (once upon a time purists would have called this the year of jazz's death, not birth)—there were highlights around every corner:

• In an opening wall of pre-jazz sheet music—coon songs, minstrel standards—a full-color illustration for E. T. Paull's 1899 composition “A Warmin' Up in Dixie”: black men and women dancing around a fire in the woods. It's where slaves would go to sing forbidden songs, which might be coded spirituals—“Daniel in the Lion's Den,” for one—but here it's a Devil's Sabbath, with the firelight reflected in the dancers' eyes turning each one demonic. Racist, but not about nothing.

• Sheet music for Bert Williams's “Nobody,” in 1906 a number one hit for nine weeks. “Latest Oddity Successor to ‘I May Be Crazy But I Ain't No Fool,' ” reads a tagline. Is it jazz? As music, no. As heart, all the way.

• A first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's
Tales of the Jazz Age
. A little band and lots of dancers on the jacket—it should have been a curio. But it was the thing itself, and it had an aura you could have touched if it wasn't in a glass case.

• Illustration by Aaron Douglas for the “Charleston” chapter of Paul Morand's 1929 jazz novel
Black Magic:
a black jazz club, in smoky grays. In the foreground, people at tables, dominated by a long arm and a hand resting on a chair, from the left; in the background, a saxophonist seated in a chair, a pianist behind him; in the middle, hanging down almost to the empty dance floor, a noose: more suggestive and shocking—because it was inside a jazz image—than the pictures of actual lynchings that bracketed the exhibition's illustrated time lines this artifact was part of.

• Cover story,
Etude Music Magazine
, August 1924: “The Jazz Problem: Opinions of Prominent Public Men and Musicians.”

•
Jazz Magazine
, October–November 1954, sidebar to an article titled “Bird Lives! Bird Lives! Bird Lives! Bird Lives! Bird Lives! Bird Lives!” (and he wasn't even dead
yet): the poet Ted Joans reporting on a “dada-surrealist party (poems by Breton, Prévert, Péret, etc.)” in Greenwich Village: “Parker arrived without a costume . . . but he improvised one”: taking off his shirt and shoes, rolling up his pants, and whiting up his face into a mau-mau mask. Who was this joke on? Who got it?

• And, among many film clips, perhaps the most explosive moment of all: the “Come to the City” sequence of F. W. Murnau's 1927 silent
Sunrise
, with the flapper seducing the married country man with tales of thrills, glamour,
jazz:
she kisses him in the marsh where they've been lying, and suddenly it all appears, with a pounding band right in your face, the conductor throwing his arms into the air, all of it overwhelming, with lightning superim-positions and tilted frames that perhaps more than anything in all of cinema say, This is what movies were for, this is why they were invented, to catch this movement.

5
Walter Mosley,
The Long Fall
(River-head Books)
On I'm Not Jim's
You Are All My People,
the Jonathan Lethem/Walter Salas-Humara collaboration “Walks Into” is an infinitely complex stand-up routine on the opening line of the all-all-American joke—and out of this cradle endlessly rocking comes a Mosley version, in his first novel featuring a black New York City private eye named Leonid McGill. One tricky, unstable theme of the book is that racism isn't what it used to be—but, McGill says as he walks into Oddfellows Pub, a white man's bar in Albany, “it wasn't 2008 everywhere in America. Some people still lived in the sixties, and others might as well have been veterans of the Civil War. In many establishments I was considered a Black Man; other folks, in more genteel joints, used the term ‘African-American,' but at Oddfellows I was a nigger where there were no niggers allowed.”