Real Life Rock (215 page)

10
“All Along the Watchtower” (MSG, Nov. 11)
The second of two encores, it began very strangely, with guitarist Charlie Sexton rolling a few spare notes that seemed to call up a distant western—Jim Jarmusch's
Dead Man
, maybe, with Neil Young's improvised and timeless guitar soundtrack. It was in fact the opening of Ferrante & Teicher's 1961 twin-piano hit “Theme From
Exodus
,” from the movie based on Leon Uris' 1958 novel about the creation of the state of Israel. Whether you caught the reference or not, it took the song about to emerge from its own history—one of Dylan's most world-ending, from 1968, a year that over and over again felt like the end of the world—out of itself. Now the song was going to speak with a new voice: that was the promise that little introduction made.

It was impossible to imagine that Dylan ever played the song with more vehemence, or that, this night, six days after the midterm congressional elections, the performance was not utterly political, as much a protest song as “Masters of War.” Not when, after Dylan, Sexton and guitarist Larry Campbell led an overwhelming instrumental climb through the tune's themes following the closing verse, Dylan came back to the mike to sing the opening verse again in a wild voice, throwing the last lines across the seats and out of the hall like a curse: “Businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth / None of them, along the line, know what—any—any of it—any of it is—worth.”

JANUARY
2, 2003

1
Mendoza Line, “Sleep of the Just,” from
Almost You: The Songs of Elvis Costello
(Glurp)
Aren't tribute albums terrible? This one is really terrible—and the Atlanta band's view all the way into one of Costello's greatest recordings ranks with Eminem's “Lose Yourself” and DJ Shadow's
The Private Press
as the most undeniable sound of the year.

Maybe it was always obvious that the song is about the gang-rape of a local girl at an army base, with the woman looking back: “The soldier asked my name and did I come here very often / Well, I thought that he was asking me to dance.” Maybe the song was always about the woman cherishing his death when his company's transport vehicle is blown up: he's getting the sleep of the just, all right, the big sleep. In Costello's performance, though, the beauty of the composition makes the story into a fable, and the people in it float like ghosts.

Shannon McArdle is all flesh, still trying to wash off the stains after all these years. She makes her voice small and flat for the difficult shifts in timbre, removing any hint of professionalism. She's as off-the-street as the woman in the middle of the Human League's “Don't You Want Me,” and the naturalism of the performance—carried from the beginning by a solemn church organ that is even more damning when it plays pop changes—is almost unbearable. The woman has her satisfaction over the soldier's death, but that's all she has. He and the rest took everything else.

That a woman is singing makes all the difference. Costello himself could go all the way into the song, but McArdle goes out the other side.

2
Boomtown Rats, “I Don't Like Mondays” (Columbia, 1980)
Southern Tip reports from Tierra del Fuego, Argentina: “ ‘I Don't Like Mondays' was playing in a cab in Ushuaia. It sounded better than ever. I asked the driver to turn it up and told the person I was with he couldn't talk. It made me think that radio is the farthest reaching, most democratic medium for art there is. How bad can it be to live in the southernmost city in the world, which is on an island—a city that to reach by car you have to cross the Straits of Magellan and twice cross the Chilean border—how bad can it be when the DJ plays ‘I Don't Like Mondays'?”

3
Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer,
24
(Fox, Tuesdays)
If Bill Clinton was not, as Toni Morrison famously claimed, the first black president, then Dennis Haysbert—who has, for reasons not unrelated to the racism that is the deep sub-text of the Palmer character, received far more praise for his Sidney Poitier turn in the lifeless
Far From Heaven
than for his work here—is playing the first black Bill Clinton. It's in his apparent naiveté, the way he carries his size, and most of all in the angry self-control in his face as he realizes once again that he's been betrayed by one of his own, whatever “his own” means. As his estranged wife Sherry has been arguing since halfway through the show's first season, there's no such thing.

4
New Order,
Retro
(Warner Bros., 1980–2002)
Across four CDs of hits, remixes and live recordings, it doesn't matter that the Manchester dance band's 1983 “Blue Monday” remains the biggest selling 12-inch single ever. Compared to the Shep Pettibone mix of the 1986 “Bizarre Love Triangle” (where again and again, in moments memory can't hold, the sound shifts faster than a fast cut in a film), “Blue Monday” remains a soap jingle. And compared to the full, 8 minute 41 second version of the 1982 “Temptation,” probably the best 12-inch single ever made (a journey comparable to the Boz Scaggs/Duane Allman version of “Loan Me a Dime,” moving from delirium to contemplation and, so violently, back again), the Shep Pettibone remix of “Bizarre Love Triangle” is very nice.

5
Touré,
The Portable Promised Land
(Little, Brown)
The author bio promises the Brooklyn writer's first novel,
Soul City
, “soon enough,” but the best of the stories in this first collection are pieces of a novel
reaching for each other, then backing away. There's a lot of padding—credibility lists of negritude on the order of “The African-American Aesthetics Hall of Fame,” or “101 Elements of Blackness (Things That'll Make You Say: ‘Yes! That There's Some Really Black Shit!')” that were done better in Darius James'
That's Blaxploitation!
There are stories that don't take off. But the book drops all pose for the mystery of what happens when the borders between black and white begin to dissolve. In “Attack of the Love Dogma,” “The Playground of the Ecstatically Blasé,” the three-part “Black Widow Story,” “The Commercial Channel” and “They're Playing My Song” Touré stops moving characters like toy soldiers and lets them move him. “The Black Widow Story” is a superhero comic book, a trash race novel, Chester Himes influenced by Lester Bangs—you have no idea what will come next. Is Charisma Donovan, high-school queen turned femme fatale turned porn star, a version of the Black Widow, a white woman who becomes the female Tupac “on a dare after drama class,” or are they the same person—and could either tell if either were? “You remember,” Touré says as he sets the scene, “how things were last summer when Jamais was brand-new and like, the only thing the city was talking about. The French Bistro décor. The barefoot girl in the glass case behind the bar sitting on a pillow reading
Paradise Lost
, all night every night . . .”—and somehow you do remember. You're right there. And you don't like it when the author lets you go, too soon.

6
Joshua Clover, “Modest $100 Million Proposals, for Better or Verse”
(
Village Voice,
Nov. 27–Dec. 3)
On the $100 million-plus gift by rejected amateur poet Ruth Lily to
Poetry Magazine:
after three sensible notions on what to do with the money (“lobby for pro-education candidates,” “buy a million poetry books every year and give them away,” “free medical coverage to every poet accepted for publication”), Clover pulls out the stops. Such ideas, he says, “would burn a tiny fraction of the bequest: Instead of investing the remainder,
Poetry
could secede from the Union, purchase the Republic of the Marshall Islands (GDP: $99 million), and appoint their very own poet laureate, who would then meet the U.S. laureate in a battle to the death, wreaking unfathomable destruction across the landscape.”