Real Life Rock (160 page)

8
Leni Riefenstahl
2001 desk calendar (Taschen)
Speaking of legitimacy (“Riefenstahl's current de-Nazification and vindication as indomitable priestess of the beautiful,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1974, when Riefenstahl, who will turn 99 this year, could still pose as a nymph, “do not augur well for the keenness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst”), this is going too far—or coming too close.

9
Johnny Cash,
American III: Solitary Man
(American)
“I” and “II” in the Cash revival—put old man together with new songs—did nothing for me; here an inner depth combines with the deep voice to take some of the songs to places neither they nor Cash have reached before. Neil Diamond's “Solitary Man” was always a great record, but also a kind of whine; here it's a testament. Will Oldham's “I See a Darkness” is creepy as Oldham himself does it as Bonnie “Prince” Billie; now it's a premonition of death that lets you see through death's eyes. The thriller is U2's “One”: with Bono's bellowing gone it's revealed as a perfect tune. As the singer waltzes with himself in the studio apartment no one else has entered for months, only the pop lightness of the melody convinces you the song is something other than an old mountain air.

10
The Suburbans
,
directed by Donal Lardner Ward, written by Tony Guma and Donal Lardner Ward (Tristar 1999, HBO, Dec. 7)
Ultra-adorable record company rep Jennifer Love Hewitt facing terrified one-hitwonder '80s band now on tour for the first time in over 15 years: “So! We beat on, boats against the current, ceaselessly into the past!” Her telling the Suburbans she's quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald doesn't make them feel any better.

JANUARY
22, 2001

1
Don Asmussen, “San Francisco Comic Strip”: “This Week: President-Elect George W. Bush's Cabinet Nominees”
(
San Francisco Chronicle
,
Jan. 14)
For the first panel, a
Chronicle
front page: “
ASHCROFT
: ‘
I
'
LL ALLOW BLACK ABORTIONS
.' Bush's Attorney General Nominee Meets Halfway: Nominee's openness to compromise shows that Bush's promise of a new era of bipartisanship is heartfelt.”

2–3
Snoop Dogg, “County Blues,” from
Dead Man Walking
(Death Row) and Honeyboy Edwards,
Mississippi Delta Bluesman
(Smithsonian Folkways)
“The county gives plenty blues”—in a piece on police harassment with vocal and harmonica samples
that put it right back in the South of 70 years ago, the man with the smooth, trickster drawl walks the rhythm slowly down the street, looking back and forth to see which direction his ancestors are coming from. “They got me wearing county blues,” sings an old man again and again, as women's voices swirl around his like caressing hands, like snakes. “They got me wearing / Penitentiary shoes.” As for Edwards, who as a young man hung around with Robert Johnson, this handsome reissue of a 1979 session is proof the country blues can be as dull as anything else.

4
Pere Ubu,
The Shape of Things
(Hearthen, available through Ubutique)
Recorded from the crowd at the Mistake in Cleveland on April 7, 1976—when guitarist Peter Laughner, who would soon leave both the band and his life behind, steps out of the first number, “Heart of Darkness,” you understand why people who knew him still testify he heard things they never would. Just as memorable, though, are the two poseurs in the audience trying on British accents: “Band seems to be lacking a bit of
energy
this evening.” “Bit of
something.”
They're so callow, and it's easy to laugh—but then, you wouldn't have known it was a historic night, either. Where are they now?

5
Atmosphere,
Ford One
&
Ford Two
(Fat Beats, vinyl only)
A set of raps and dubs from Slug, a Midwesterner who shares Eminem's accent but moves as slowly as the Detroiter moves fast. The hard, cold, northern Minnesota autobiography “Nothing But Sunshine” isn't that far in mood from the Barbarians' 1966 “Moulty,” which you can find on the original
Nuggets
collection—until, with a sucker of a fan stuck in the throat of a sardonic, bitter man who's been fooled too many times, Slug starts warbling the Temptations' “My Girl” (“I've got sunshine / On a cloudy day . . .”), and no better than you might. The intrusion of the sound of ordinary life into the performance is as startling as it is when the woman starts telling her story in the middle of Human League's “Don't You Want Me.”

6
Robert Storr,
Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977
(Museum of Modern Art)
As I write, one-time Frankfurt revolutionary Joschka Fischer, now Germany's foreign minister, is testifying in the trial of onetime Red Army Faction member Hans-Joachim Klein, who is accused of complicity in the murder of three people in a terrorist raid on an OPEC meeting in 1975. Not long after, three of Klein's comrades—Ulrike Meinhof in 1976, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin on Oct. 18, 1977—were found dead in their cells in the maximum-security prison that had been built to house them. Richter's 1988 paintings of images of the Baader-Meinhof Gang alive and dead—crepuscular, black-white-gray underwater paintings derived from news photos—seem exploitative in the MOMA exhibit (which closes Jan. 30) this book explores; as big as 6 feet by 7 feet, they seem like absolute appropriations of another's being, like graverobbing. This doesn't belong to you, you want to say to the artist—it doesn't belong to
me
. The display is indecent. But what about the indecency of how these people were treated in life, deprived of sleep, subjected to constant white noise, all the forms of torture that leave no marks? Well, what about it? That's not the question; that's just to use word magic on the walls. But in the book, you can look into the pictures. Just as the paintings themselves took their subjects over, in book-size reproductions they seem to capture real people, people retreating from the artist's eye as from yours.