Real Life Rock (141 page)

For the sold-out first show of an eightdate American tour they were instantly up to speed: terrifically loud but precise, with Newman's staccato delivery for “Pink Flag” letting every word stand out clearly. They were pure punk in shape and attack—punk as wish, as what it could be, as an ideal—but without any baggage as to clothes, attitude, history. Never big stars, they carried nothing more than their old or younglooking selves and their sound onto the stage. Nothing was mythicized; nothing happening in the music referred to anything that wasn't present, except to the degree that the music referred to, or in its way
reformed, the world at large. Expressions were dour. Movement was minimal. The four played as if they had invented punk—or had stumbled upon it the day before, as if their project was so conceptual it was completed before it was begun. Doubt and nervousness underlay every tune. The cryptic invitations of the words suggested code. That made the momentary release of the melodies in the likes of “Dot Dash” or “French Film (Blurred)” unbearably pleasurable, because even as you felt the pleasure, you felt it being taken away.

Remaining tour dates: May 15, Irving Plaza, New York; May 26–28, the Garage, London.

4
Wire,
Third Day
Five indistinct rehearsal cuts recorded last fall. Forget the “first edition: 1 of 1,000” printed, not stamped, on the sleeve (as I read it, that means there can be 1,000 first editions of limitless pressings each) and look for
On Returning (1977–1979)
(Retro/EMI, 1989),
Behind the Curtain: Early Versions 1977 & 1978
(EMI, 1995),
Chairs Missing
(Harvest/EMI, 1978, their best) and
Document & Eyewitness
(Rough Trade, 1981), in whatever configurations you might find, plus Ian Penman's fine “Flies in the Ointment” in the March issue of
The Wire
.

5
Richard Shindell,
Somewhere Near Patterson
(Signature)
I bought this glossy folk recording because of a fulsome
New York Times
review (“What does it mean to say a singer-songwriter is the best?”) trumpeting “the vocal equivalent of Shaker furniture.” Bet you didn't know “Shaker” was a synonym for “florid.”

6
Ben Shahn, Farm Security Administration photo, Oct. 1935
From the FSA home page, go from Subject Index to United States-West Virginia-Welch, from there to United States-West Virginia-Scotts Run, from there to No. 30, and you'll find Shahn's picture of a businessman or government man—dressed in fedora and three-piece suit—sitting in a clearing next to a very handsome guitarist: “Love oh, love, oh keerless love,” someone wrote down, attempting to capture the player's mountain dialect. His expression is at once wistful and impassioned, and his face is delicate, almost effete—there's nothing of the weathering of Appalachia in his features—which only makes the caption more odd: “Doped singer relief investigator reported a number of dope cases at Scotts Run.” No audio, but listen to Lead Belly's 1935 recording of “Careless Love” (on
Midnight Special
, Rounder) if you want to hear the morphine—in the song, if not the singer.

7
North Mississippi Allstars,
Shake Hands With Shorty
(Tone-Cool)
In this juke joint, the old—sometimes very old—blues are part of the atmosphere. With the guitars, even a mandolin and a washboard, buzzing off the walls, you don't have to notice that the vocals are stuck in neutral, or if you do you can tune them out.

8
U. S. Postal Service, “1990s Celebrate the Century”
Sure, if you really want your letters celebrating cellphones and SUVs, virtual reality, computer art,
Titanic
(“A James Cameron Film”—did they, which is to say we, have to pay extra to say that?) and a visual and conceptual vagueness that beggars the imagination: take “New Baseball Records,” which neither on the front of the stamp nor the explanatory back bothers to say what the records are or who set them. As for the
Seinfeld
number: no Elaine crawling out of somebody's bed, just—a doorway.

9
Belle and Sebastian,
Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant
(Matador)
Myself, I'd prefer they walked like an Egyptian—at least they couldn't maintain their coy folk melodies, their arch pre-Raphaelite narratives, if they had to do it at right angles.

10
Merce Cunningham Dance Company,
Interscape
,
with music by John Cage
(
One 8
) and décor and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg (Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, Calif., May 3)
After his molecules-in-motion pointillist backdrop for a dance set to Morton Feldman's 1958
Summerscape
, for the new
Interscape
Rauschenberg offered a typically bullshit collage—disassociated images that connected to nothing, generated
no tension, merely sat on their screen mute and still. In place of his
Summerscape
leotards, which in their lightness left the illusion of nakedness, he came up with outfits decorated with more meaningless images. It didn't matter. The music was rendered on what one might call a distressed cello (all scratching and dying chords, like John Cale's viola at the end of the Velvet Underground's “Heroin”) and broken—or, somehow, extended—by long periods of silence, in which the dancers continued to move without hesitation, in the same stutter-step they used with the cello. The effect was no sense of mime, but an unnatural suspension of one element of life, which made life itself feel like a construct, invention or accident. At the end, Cunningham came out for a bow, appearing as the complete happy bohemian: Carl Sandburg mop of white hair, dark coat, dark shirt and striped baggy pants he might have bought off a village fool somewhere in central Europe in 1547.

MAY
30, 2000

1
Eminem,
The Marshall Mathers LP
(Interscope)
Why is he so much more believable, funnier, scarier and for that matter whiter—a realistic voice—on Dr. Dre's
2001
than on his own record?