Real Life Rock (292 page)

2
Mariee Sioux,
Gift for the End
(Almost Musique)
Not as immediately arresting as Lana Del Rey's “Video Games,” but mapping the same nowhere, and without the metallic smell of early death. That isn't to say death is missing. Sioux, from the California Gold Rush country, sings softly, strums and picks, and you can't get a fix on her in any way. Even as she seems to come right up to you, you sense a distance that can never be bridged. That may be because the eight songs here carry the feeling of Grimms' fairy tales. “We've learned our lessons,” plead young girls, and you don't want to know what schooled them. In her most uncanny moments, Sioux is less playing her songs than swimming through them: “No rest, no rest, no rest, no rest.”

3
Jay Leeming, “Desolation Row,” from
Miracle Atlas
(Big Pencil Press)
The whole place has been torn down and “replaced / by the new civic center, a gigantic white building / funded by a Norwegian greeting card company.” No one remembers all those strange characters who used to roam the place, “though now and then their names / turn up on the newspaper's last pages: Doctor Filth / found strangled to death in the Brazilian jungle.”

4
Werner Herzog,
Hearsay of the Soul,
video installation, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (through June 10)
A highlight of the 2012 Biennial: in a separate room, in a five-channel, five-panel projection, landscapes of stone valleys and terraced stone mountains—manipulated seventeenth-century etchings by Hercules Seghers—frame the cellist Ernst Reijseger. Moonfaced, his head shaved, he plays hard, his mouth open like an electric guitarist writhing in the agonies of being moved by his own sounds, his eyes closed—when at the end he opens them, it's a shock. The landscapes, at first all panorama, are slowly explored so that nearly infinite detail begins to emerge. Where once there was only landscape, now there are rocks; where there were only rocks, there are solitary human figures, who look as accidental as the rocks. To Herzog, the Biennial curator Elisabeth Sussman said, Seghers's etchings are “the beginning of modernity”; with Reijseger, at the end of his piece sliding his fingers down the strings as if he's playing slide cello, time slides off.

5
?uestlove, “Put the Needle on the Record,” EMP Pop Conference, New York University, New York (March 25)
On his record collection, now reaching seventy-five thousand LPs, and the fetishism that goes with it: “I hated the orange Capitol label. I wouldn't listen to anything with it. So I missed
Pet Sounds
and post–
Rubber Soul
Beatles.” He started as a child: “ Album covers I was scared of, logos I was scared of, they'd go to the bottom of the collection.” “What was the first record you bought with your own money?” asked moderator Harry Weinger. “I had an adult's knowledge of music at the age of five,” ?uestlove said, “but I didn't have a job.” Then in 1979 “Rapper's Delight” came out and he had to have it. “I had three hours in school to borrow a dime,” ?uestlove said, “—from thirty-seven people.” That, he said, was the first record he bought with his own money, “borrowed money.” “Did you pay everybody back?” Weinger asked. “No,” ?uestlove said, as if it still bothered him, a little bit.

6
Bruce Springsteen, “Wrecking Ball,” from
Wrecking Ball
(Columbia)
“I don't know how you write something so affecting from the point of view of a concrete bowl,” a friend said of this song about Meadowlands Stadium, “but there you go.”

7
Penelope Houston,
On Market Street
(Devoted Ruins)
When not touring with the Avengers, her reformed and still-fierce late-'70s San Francisco punk band, Houston makes quiet records; here, a smoothly keening organ leads her through tired San Francisco bars and ugly San Francisco streets. The small voice is all knowledge, with the fatigue of not believing tomorrow is going to be any different from today. The bill comes due with “On Market Street,” where three violins and a cello stop all the other stories cold. Houston sings like someone watching, not a singer at all, warbling about the human wreckage she passes on her way to work,
composing a song in her head as she shows her ID to the guard, sits down at her desk, picks up a stack of papers, and hums.

8
“Bibliophilia: Collecting Black Books—The Archie Givens, Sr. Collection of African American Literature,” Elmer L. Andersen Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (February 6–April 20)
It's displacing to come face to face with the tiny first editions of Phillis Wheatley's 1773
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
, the 1845
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
, the 1850
Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave
, Paul Laurence Dunbar's privately published 1892
Oak and Ivy
, or countless other treasures you might never have imagined you would ever actually see. Along with LeRoi Jones tapes, Kirby Puckett memorabilia, toys, children's books, LPs, Black Panther newspapers, there are surprises everywhere you look: the blazing dust jacket of Zora Neale Hurston's 1934 novel
Jonah's Gourd Vine
, which seems to take its power not from the fervor of the gesticulating preacher but from the very few worshippers around him, as if they're the first or the last of a cult about to vanish. And all this can fade against the September 7, 1937, letter from Clara E. Stokes, a Federal Writers' Project administrator in Jackson, Mississippi, to Carrie Campbell, a field-worker about to conduct her first interviews with former slaves, and then three fragments of interview transcriptions on yellowed paper that look as if they'd crumble at the touch—the Dead Sea Scrolls of the New Deal. Two are in pencil, one in typescript, and while the edges of lines are folded or broken, the voice and the history it stands for come through: “She sure was good to us. And even so much as gave us a cow. If it hadn't been for that KuKlux. Lord how they did scare us. They had a song [unreadable]”—and it breaks off. Everyone I've spoken to who's seen this show has said the same thing:
This has to travel
.

9
Tom Jones, “Evil” (Third Man)
Howlin' Wolf recorded this song in 1954. Jones sings it as if he's calling 911.