Real Life Rock (129 page)

6
Ann Hamilton,
Myein
(1999), at the Venice Bienalle (June 13–Nov. 7)
As you approached the American Pavilion, crossing a flagstone courtyard, you noticed the stones were stained red, as if someone had spilled paint. The neo-classical building was small and low, with two rectangular wings coming off a dome. The place, a sign in the entryway said, reminded Hamilton of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, so she decided to orchestrate the place as an American metaphor. The sign explained further: the bumps you would see on the walls of the wings would be Braille renderings of poems from Charles Reznikoff's
Testimony
, which were drawn from court records, while the whispering voice you would hear emanating from the ceilings would be Hamilton reciting Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address in “International Phonetic Code.”

In the wings the information dissolved into mere suggestion, like the title of a song standing in for words you can't make out.
The suggestion changed the dots on the walls from poems you couldn't read anyway into an abstract version of Lincoln's Second Inaugural as it's chiseled on a wall of the Lincoln Memorial—because it was now that building, not Monticello, that the Pavilion matched. Hamilton's voice-over was precisely a song where you can't make out the words, weirdly done in the style of one of these female heavy-breathing discs—Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourgh's 1970 “Je T'aime . . . Moi Non Plus” was probably the first—that's good for a hit every 10 years or so. The few identifiable words (“Oscar,” “November,” “Sierra,” “uniform,” “triumph”) seemed not to belong to the Second Inaugural, even if one of them does. So there you were in this surrealist memorial, noticing the difference between Lincoln's and Hamilton's: her walls were alive.

Down every wall, streams of dark pink powder fell to the floor, sometimes in slivers, sometimes in gushes, like the bleeding walls in
The Shining
. The powder piled up on the floor, inches deep; as people walked through the rooms, causing drafts, the powder spread across the floor, and people picked it up on their shoes. When they left the U.S. Pavilion for those of other nations, they carried a trail of blood—not, you could think, the blood of conquest, but of crime and punishment: “ Until every drop of blood drawn with the lash,” as Lincoln said of slavery in his Second Inaugural, “shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” The sign explaining the piece was neat, balanced, and formal; the thing itself was almost vibrating.

7
Bryan Ferry,
As Time Goes By
(Virgin)
Bryan Ferry is a god. This is the most boring album of the year.

8
Rage Against the Machine,
The Battle of Los Angeles
(Epic)
They have a victory strategy: beat it to death.

9
Alanis Morissette in
Dogma
(Lion's Gate)
Typecast as God, she opens her mouth for a scream only dogs can hear and blows off Ben Affleck's head. As I recall, that's pretty much what happened every time “You Oughta Know” came on the air.

10
Levon Helm's Classic American Cafe (300 Decatur St., New Orleans)
Is this where the road ends? Here at this defunct restaurant-cafe, even the word “American” communicates like a lapsed trademark. A “Live at Levon's” poster has an insert of a Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks poster and a design spelling out “
BAND
” to remind you; a spring 1999 calendar lists Levon and daughter Amy Helm with the Barn Burners, Levon Helm's Classic Blues Band, Levon Helm with Allen Toussaint, Levon Helm with James Cotton, Levon Helm with Cork, Levon Helm with the Dirty Dozen Blues Band. The creepy stuff is on the menu: “I'm a Lonely Boy . . . I Ain't Got No Home” Po' Boys; The Last Waltz Desserts; “Up on Cripple Creek” seafood—and, too perfectly, “King Harvest Has Surely Come” salads. After the big “
FOR RENT
” sign, a red and white sticker under the menu pages in the window seemed like the last word:

www.allmenaredogs.com

A Revenge Site for Women

DECEMBER
13, 1999

1
Beck,
Midnite Vultures
(Interscope)
This is embarrassing.

2
Gayl Jones,
Corregidora
(Beacon Press reprint)
Jones' first novel from 1975 about a blues singer singing a song no one's exactly heard before. “ ‘Songs are devils. It's your own destruction you're singing. The voice is a devil.' ‘Naw, Mama. You don't understand. Where did you get that?' ‘Unless your voice is raised up to the glory of God . . . Where did you get those songs?' ‘I got them from you.' ‘I didn't hear the words.' Then let me give witness the only way I can. I'll make a fetus out of grounds of coffee to rub inside my eyes.” On the other hand, Henry Louis Gates recently claimed the real significance of the book was that it introduced oral sex into fiction by black women.

3
Metallica,
S&M
(Elektra)
Recorded in April at the Berkeley Community Theater with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Kamen,
and glorious. On “Bleeding Me,” Led Zeppelin's “Kashmir” comes into view, but it's a mirage: the real vision in the music is far more desperate, Ronald Colman clawing his way back to Shangri-La in the last shots of
Lost Horizon
. Across two discs, the band isn't lost for a second; they sound like they're on top of the mountain.

4
Dolly Parton,
The Grass Is Blue
(Sugar Hill)
This is the best album Parton has made since
My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy
in 1969, and the killer is “Silver Dagger”—the pristine Appalachian ballad that in 1960 led off Joan Baez's first LP. Baez rarely again opened herself to a song so fully; Parton follows Baez like a girl following her mother through a field, wandering off the path, circling back, then disappearing into the woods. But now it's nightfall, everyone in town is searching and some people are already talking about haunts and ghosts. How it ends: the fiddler, Stuart Duncan, finds her.