Real Life Rock (140 page)

6
Bruce Conner, “Dead Punks and Ashes,” Curt Marcus Gallery (578 Broadway, New York, through Saturday)
In 1978 at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco, filmmaker-collagist-sculptor Conner—who more than a decade before orchestrated light shows at the Avalon Ballroom across town—stood at the lip of the stage photographing punk bands for
Search and Destroy
. What he liked most was to catch a group's first gig; after that, he's said, something, some measure of fear and a refusal to give into it, is lost. New York Eye, aka Emily Marcus (related to me, not the gallery), reports: “The few dozen black-and-white photos of actual punk people look like pictures of punks—costumed, rowdy and drunk, including a stoned and skinny Toni Basil (who 12 years before performed in Conner's film
Breakaway
). Weirder are the memorial collages for three local musicians who died, carefully but sparely decorated and surprisingly moving.
Ricky Williams: Dead Punk
(of the Sleepers) stands out (among
Will Shatter
of Negative Trend and Flipper and
Frankie Fix
of Crime) for its draped hospital tubing, catheters still attached, but the pieces work best as a group; it's nice thinking of the three of them hanging out together, and I get the feeling Conner sees himself in their eventual company.

“In the second part of the show Conner brings the doom home. Black-and-white photos of motel TV screens, caught in the middle of the late-night creepshow, welcome and deceive, but the real point of the room is a collection of immodest and unattractive photocopy collages of the artist's decline into illness, pain, old age and cynicism—autobiographical records that are not so much morbid as mundane. It's a dismal room, half full of distracting, barking TVs, with one wonderful exception, and the only piece in the show with a sense of humor: a brick neatly wrapped in an Ace bandage. Brings a smile to my lips.”

7
Sarah McLachlan, “I Will Remember You,” in Columbine High School Massacre video (Jefferson County, Colo., Sheriff's Department)
With her tune running under April 20, 1999, footage of pools of blood in emptied, shattered rooms, McLachlan sounds unspeakably facile and insincere. “I hope that just didn't destroy that song for me for the rest of my life,” a cop viewing the video said to a reporter for KRONTV in San Francisco. But what song wouldn't collapse under this weight? The Rolling Stones' “Gimmie Shelter”? Ice Cube's “Dead Homies”? Of course they would. Nirvana's “Come as You Are” probably would not—but maybe only because Kurt Cobain, too, is dead.

8
Neil Young,
Silver and Gold
(Reprise)
Given that Young works on a pendulum, this hilariously vapid collection of acoustic musings (might want to get Buffalo Spring-field back together, “give it a shot,” why not, why not row row row your boat down the L.A. River) presages great things in the future. For the time being, as an old National Lampoon
Radio Dinner
spot had it, “The last half-hour of No Neil Young Music was brought to you by . . .”

9
Bad Livers,
Blood and Mood
(Sugar Hill)
The quirky backroads duo digs deep into the country that opens up out of Harry Smith's
Anthology of American Folk Music
in order to . . . get really cute.

10
Velvet Goldmine
,
directed by Todd Haynes (Miramax, 1998)
I rented this paean to the Ziggy Stardust era to see what Christian Bale was doing before he turned into Norman Bates, and came away touched: by Toni Collette's impersonation of broken down Susan Alexander in the
Citizen Kane
interview scenes, by Ewan McGregor's heedless merging of Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain, by the dream their characters shared of a world redeemed by style. “We set out to change the world, ended up just changing ourselves,” McGregor's washed-up star tells Bale's reporter long years after the glam utopia has vanished. “What's wrong with that?” Bale asks reasonably, but as if he knows exactly what's wrong with it. “Nothing,” says McGregor without bitterness, “ unless you look at the world”—and the camera pulls back to show the bar they're sitting in, a place devoid of color, flair or self-invention, of Corin Tucker shouting, “Culture is what we make it” on the new Sleater-Kinney album, so roughly it sounds like she's saying “cut your ears.”

MAY
15, 2000

1
The Holy Childhood,
Up With What I'm Down With
(Gern Blandsten)
There's a cracked vision in this sprawling music—some drunk in his 20s conducting the Band with a few female friends to loosen the choruses, maybe—that reaches a pitch of experience and desire so expansive the whole thing seems to have been recorded outdoors.

2
Richard Belzer as Detective John Munch,
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit
(May 5)
For once, no joke, no conspiracy mongering, just a case that sucks him in and breaks over his head, leaving his nihilism boiled down to the coldest professionalism, rewriting his ruined skin, wire glasses and dark beady eyes into the most complete deadpan imaginable, so that the suspect has two choices: fall into the black hole of this man's face, or confess, fast.

3
Wire at Great American Music Hall, San Francisco (May 2)
Formed in 1976, they were from the start the most severely arty of all British punk bands, and it was their severity that saved them: their pursuit, it always seemed—as over the decades Colin Newman, Robert Gotobed, B. C. Gilbert and Graham Lewis went their own ways and reformed, dumping an all-but-unsolvable confusion of LPs and CDs off the charts—of form before and after anything else. Despite Newman's cutting accent (“London suburban art-school sarcastic,” according to critic Jon Savage), or the fact that in 1991, lacking Gotobed, the group recorded as Wir, their humor was all in their melodies, playing against the sense of espionage in their lyrics, against the harsh, absolutely selfcontained bass drums guitars rhythms of their ridiculously brief songs. In a word, they were perfect.