Real Life Rock (300 page)

9
Iris Dement,
Sing the Delta
(Flariella)
Country, old-time, quiet, unassuming, all home truths. With one sting after another.

10
Second favorite election film (once removed): Jeremy W. Peters, “Strident Anti-Obama Messages Flood Key States”
(
New York Times,
October 23)
On
Dreams from My Real Father
, a DVD purporting to prove that Barack Obama's actual father was an American Communist Party activist and that his mother posed nude for a bondage magazine: “The film is the work of Joel Gilbert, whose previous claims include having tracked down Elvis Presley in the
Witness Protection Program and discovering that Paul McCartney is in fact dead.”

Thanks to Virginia Dellenbaugh

FEBRUARY
2013

1
Percival Everett,
Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
(Graywolf Press)
“Two black men walk into a bar and the rosy-faced white barkeep says we don't serve niggers in here and one of the men points to the other and says but he's the president and the barkeep says that's his problem. So the president walks over and gives the barkeep a box and says these are Chilmark chocolates and the barkeep says thank you and reaches over to shake the president's hand. The president jumps back, says what's that? And the barkeep says it's a hand buzzer, a gag, get used to it, asshole.” And in this novel, that's just the first chapter.

2
Bikini Kill,
Bikini Kill
(Kill Rock Stars, 1992)
The hurricane riot grrrl band will be reissuing all of their 1990s records. After their demo cassette,
Revolution Girl Style Now!
this five-song EP was their first formal release. With “Liar,” a snakepit redo of “Give Peace a Chance,” and “Suck My Left One,” which is both a declaration of independence and a girl's account of how her big sister protects her by giving herself up to their father every night, it's funny and harrowing, sometimes with no line, and no time, between the two. But it's also only a hint of how radical the group was onstage. A YouTube clip—“Bikini Kill wdc 1992”—shows lead singer Kathleen Hanna, bassist Kathi Wilcox, guitarist Bill Karren, and drummer Tobi Vail as Hanna stamps out “Girl Soldier,” the word
fuck
used for percussion as much as anything else. And then Vail—from her haircut to her T-shirt to her skirt looking exactly as Thora Birch's miserable punk Enid would in
Ghost World
almost ten years later—gets up from behind her drums as Karren sits down at them. She strides up to the mike, grabs it as if it's the only thing left to hold on to in the midst of a storm, and then she makes the storm. She releases a flood of glossolalia, or dada sound poetry, or a rage beyond language so fierce you can barely believe what you're seeing. Then she goes back to her drums as if what she just did was merely a passing moment of everyday life—which was the Bikini Kill argument about what life is.

3
Rihanna, “Stay,” on
Saturday Night Live
(November 10, 2012)
Torch song: small to start with, even on the big notes her voice thins as the song goes on, but the moral force behind it seems infinite.

4
Tracy K. Smith, “Alternate Take (for Levon Helm),” from
Life on Mars
(Graywolf Press, 2011)
A slowly building poem in which the writer (“I've been beating my head all day long on the same six lines”) wants nothing more than to feel like the singer must have felt as he sang—what would it have been? “Chest Fever”? “The Weight”? “You know how, shoulders hiked nice and high, chin tipped back / So the song has to climb its way out like a man from a mine.”

5
Jess, “Tricky Cad” in
O! Tricky Cad & Other Jessoterica,
ed. Michael Duncan (Siglio Press, 2012)
Jess (1923–2004) was a San Francisco painter and collage artist. From 1952 to 1954 he clipped
Dick Tracy
comic strips out of the Sunday papers and cut them up and scrambled them, until people changed heads and dialogue fractured. This marvelous book—full of more conventional collages made of advertisements and nudie magazines so detailed it would take weeks to decipher them—collects all five extant
Tricky Cad
casebooks (three are lost).
Dick Tracy
itself, Jess said, was “dramatic serious nonsense of the highest order, like
Krazy Kat
”;
Tricky Cad
was “a demonstration of a hermetic critique self-contained in popular art.” As in Case 1, the page titled
TRICKD
, with Tracy running a lie-detector test on a middle-aged woman with a white ponytail. She's furious and hysterical by turns; “
TELL THE LION AND THE SHIP TO COME IN
,” Tracy says. Two panels later her face is doubled by a younger version of herself, with another older version in the background, as she
shouts, “
WHERE DID YOU FIND IT
?” at Tracy—over a severed hand, still in its shirt cuff, lying on a steel table. “
A CROSS DIDN'T DO IT
!” she screams from a jail cell. “
LET'S HEAR IT ALL, PUNY,
” says a cop. “
I'M SCARED TO QUESTION YOU ABOUT ANOTHER SUBJECT, EVER
!” says Tracy. Followed by a series (“
KIT CARY
,” “
CRACKY I
,” “
IKICK ART
”) involving a woman smothering a man with a pillowcase, broken teeth, a missing baby, and a woman, the murderer, sentenced to a year in prison not for the killing but for “living at home.” And then it gets complicated.

6
Cleve Duncan, July 23, 1935–November 7, 2012
Soaring over the skipping piano triplets as if he didn't hear them, Duncan was the lead voice in the Penguins' “Earth Angel,” in 1954 one of the first Los Angeles doo-wop singles—a record that has proved as enduring as anything else America has turned up over the last sixty years, including Martin Luther King's address to the March on Washington, which was its own kind of music, the legend of Sylvia Plath, or James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
. The song came down to earth—and lived as true a life as in any other place or time—in Philip Roth's 1962
Letting Go
, when it played behind what might be the saddest line he ever wrote, and this time you could imagine that Duncan did hear Roth's young woman, just the sort of person who would have loved the song: “She could not believe that her good times were all gone.”