Real Life Rock (153 page)

9
Telluride Film Festival Diary: Wilkinson Library Dedication Stone, 2000 (Telluride, Colo.)
“Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission.”—Toni Morrison

OK—but it's a library. How about access to syntax?

10
Minimalist poet found hiding in
New York Times
daily TV log listing of
Law and Order
repeats (Sept. 21)

A&E, 6 P.M. “The Troubles.” Violence.

A&E, 11 P.M. “Silence.” Murdered.

OCTOBER
17, 2000

1
P. J. Harvey,
Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea
(Island)
There are dead spots: the helpless Patti Smith impersonation in “A Place Called Home,” the deadfish handshake Thom Yorke of Radiohead gives Harvey in their duet on “This Mess We're In.” But with “Kamikaze” and “This Is Love,” one number pounds on top of the other, thin sounds building until a wall you can't climb is staring you in the face. The plain fact that Harvey never uses all she has, never tells the secret, makes what she is willing to say a tease, a dare, a threat. But all of that seems far away on the first number, “Big Exit,” which could have come off the Band's second album if she'd been around to play on it. Along with the hammering beat she gets on her guitar, the verses scratch at the memory, until finally the Band's basement-tapes tall-tale “Yazoo Street Scandal” comes out of hiding. But the chorus is all Harvey, and Harvey in the air, circling the globe like Superman. “Baby, baby, ain't it true / I'm immortal / When I'm with you,” she wails, not a crack or a tear in her tone, and, yes, she sounds like she has been here for a thousand years.

2
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
returns to San Francisco 22 years after Kevin McCarthy is run down in the street screaming, “They're here! They're here!”: Natalie Jeremijenko,
One Tree
,
at “Picturing the Genetic Revolution—Paradise Now” (Exit Art, 548 Broadway, New York, through Oct. 28)
The installation (“Mixed Mediums Courtesy Postmasters”): eight putatively identical shrublike saplings in green containers. From explanatory material: “Cloning has made it possible to Xerox copy organic life and fundamentally confound traditional understanding of individualism and authenticity . . . ‘One Tree' is actually one hundred tree clones of a single tree micropropagated in culture. These clones were originally exhibited together as plantlets at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, in 1999. This was the only time they were seen together. In the Spring of 2001,
the clones will be planted in public sites throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including Golden Gate Park, 220 private properties, San Francisco school district sites, Bay Area Rapid Transit stations, Yerba Buena Performing Arts Center, and Union Square. A selection of international sites are also being negotiated.”

3
Croupier/Sing-a-Long Sound of Music
(Waverly Theater, New York, Sept. 30)
Where the warning label on the marquee reads “PG,” not “R.”

4
David Margolick,
Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights
(Running Press)
With lyrics by Lewis Allen (aka Abel Meerpol, adoptive father of the sons of convicted atomic bomb spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after the latters' execution), the anti-lynching song was both a hit and a scandal in 1939, when Holiday recorded it: “Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” Margolick somehow fails to mention this early version, regarding a lynch frenzy in Vicksburg, Miss.: “From gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers: till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees on every roadside; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.”

—Abraham Lincoln, “On the Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” 1838.

5
Almost Famous
,
written and directed by Cameron Crowe (DreamWorks)
The scene in the movie where lightning hits the band's plane and guitarist Billy Crudup happily starts singing “Peggy Sue” is fine; so is the whole crew picking up “Tiny Dancer” on their bus. But the acting by heroes Patrick Fugit and Kate Hudson is excruciatingly self-conscious—and so, in a way, is the script. That a midteen Cameron Crowe was able to chronicle the adventures of musicians so vividly that many of them refused to allow coverage by
Rolling Stone
unless Crowe was the writer is remarkable; the notion that Crowe did it by means of warts and all is absurd. Crowe's ability to convincingly portray rock stars as thoughtful, honest, fun-loving, caring, decent—and nothing else—had a great deal to do with changing the magazine he worked for from a journal that could throw the realities of Altamont in the faces of both its readers and its namesake to a magazine that would let cover boy Axl Rose pick his own writer and photographer. I don't doubt that Crowe wrote what he saw—or, rather, that he wrote about what he found most real—but there's more to reality than the belief that, as Anne Frank didn't put it, people are basically nice.

6
John Mellencamp, “Gambling Bar Room Blues,” from
The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers—A Tribute
(Egypt)
Top performances come from Dicky Betts, Iris DeMent and liner-notes essayist Bob Dylan (it's his label), but John Mellencamp is in another country, where the song is sung as if for the first time. To the inexhaustible melody of “St. James Infirmary,” a road bum in a good mood revels in cynicism, in a belief life doesn't get any better than this even if anybody else would call this shit. With an amazingly loose, '20s street-blues arrangement and cracked fiddle from Miriam Sturm.