Real Life Rock (167 page)

8
Julie Lasky,
Some People Can't Surf—The Graphic Design of Art Chantry
(Chronicle Books)
The most striking pictures in this handsome, well-written appreciation of the work of the former Seattle punk poster artist (whose own
Instant Litter
collection appeared in 1985) might be those of Chantry and Sir Francis Chantry—real separated-at-birth stuff, except that one was born in 1954 and the other in 1781.

9
Jon Carroll, “The Faith-Based Presidency”
(
San Francisco Chronicle
,
Feb. 22)
The moderate way to dissent from Bush's presidency is to complain that he acts as if he had been elected in a landslide, rather than not elected at all. Like Thomas Friedman's March 13
New York Times
column on faith-based air-traffic control, Carroll's picture of the unreality of present-day governance is a ghost story: “We now have a faith-based presidency. We need to have faith that we have a president. We have a person in the White House who is called the president, but it is hard to imagine him doing the job. Faith is the evidence of things not seen. We do not see him working, and yet we believe he is. We do not see him thinking, and yet we believe he is. We believe he is in charge. Our rational minds may waver. Always there is doubt. It is the challenge of the faith-based path to move beyond doubt. We cannot reason ourselves closer to the reality of the Bush presidency . . . we have the faith and he has the presidency.”

10
Heike Baranowsky,
Auto Scope,
in “010101: Art in Technological Times” (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, through July 8)
In a not-overburdened show of ambiences, recombinations, scans and a photo maze was this video, shot from a vehicle traversing the periphery of Paris and projected in four identical feeds. Speeding along, the assembled double-double images collapse into each other, so that each image is a mirror of itself—when trees come into the field of vision, the city becomes a series of Rorschach blots. There are moments of color, of ads and the bodies they feature, but mostly it's road, walls, apartment buildings, factories, overcast. “This is Paris?” someone in the room said. “It looks like Poland.”

APRIL
17, 2001

1
Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals,
Live From Mars
(Virgin)
This is the worst album I've ever heard. Not because it's more than 137 minutes long—it was the worst album I'd ever heard after 10 minutes. It begins with thick waves of insensate cheering (track by track, you can hear the engineer pushing the volume up at the end of every number)—and then, out of the maelstrom, comes this pathetic, strangled, self-pitying, self-righteous, melisma-crazy bleat, the voice of a sensitive man alone in a world where, as he puts it, “I'm not as afraid of dying / As I am of getting old.” It's an unsingable couplet, with that first “as” dissolving the first syllable of “afraid,” but who needs rhythm when your heart's in the right place, when you're against pollution and stuff like that? How low can you go when what you really want is to be the new Richie Havens? This record proves that no one knows, but I'll bet Ben Harper wouldn't have dared do “Sexual Healing” if Marvin Gaye were still alive.

2
Daft Punk,
Discovery
(Virgin)
The masked French techno duo makes oceanic dance music—music to dance to in your dreams. The 1997
Homework
seemed to have no bottom to it; this has endless warmth, an openness of spirit that asks only that you melt. Try to resist: the opening “One More Time” begins with a tinny sample, as if from an old, old radio. The radio begins to play a naive melody, and soon
enough you remember Kool & the Gang's “Celebration” never felt anything but good. With a bigger, deeper drum sound, the '80s are all over this record, in the thrilling “Superheroes,” a pounding Pet Shop Boys march with a big, uplifting finale, the Pet Shop Boys' cover of the Village People's “Go West” without the sadness, without the trick AIDS played on the song; in the endless wildness of “Veridis Quo.” This is the one. It's loud but never rushes; it reimagines George McCrae's already abstract Miami soul classic “Rock Your Baby” alongside the Italian disco group Cetu Java's gorgeous, somehow sinister “Adonde.” The pace is cool, but a sense of mission is never muffled, never hedged. The theme running over the drum sound seems to double back on itself, to generate its own accompaniment, to step back and listen to itself, to approve, to rejoin the gathering of tones and declare itself: Give me a riff and I'll save the world!

3
Duets,
directed by Bruce Paltrow (United Airlines in-flight entertainment)
Maria Bello is very good at saying, “I'd be pleased and honored to fuck your brains out”; this PG edit of the horrible Karaoke World picture dubs in a car revving its engine so you can't hear her. There is, though, a moment of instruction, when hustler Huey Lewis and recently met daughter Gwyneth Paltrow team up on Smokey Robinson's “Cruisin'.” Dion, speaking of Hank Williams in a
Fresh Air
interview last fall: “His commitment was so total. He'd bite off the end of words: ‘I got it now!' ” This is the opposite: the definition of plumminess, where a song exists only as a vehicle for the singer's vanity, where if the word “forever” appears it can only mean “So long, sucker.” So here “forever” is not bitten off but stretched out, into “Fou-ahhh-evvvvahhhh,” the singers forcing the melody to carry more than it can bear, until it can produce only lies. Time stands still: the commonplace effect becomes an absolute, raising insincerity to a transcendental value. The crowd goes as wild as a Ben Harper applause track, as it does for everything in the movie—except for Andre Braugher's weird, heart-rending reversal of the guy in the crowd screaming for “ Free Bird.”

4
Milarde
(Mediaset TV, March 18)
On the Italian version of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
(a milarde is a billion lire, about $500,000), a woman faced the final question: Albert King—Writer? Formula 1 driver? TV journalist? Musician? She chewed her lips, her fingers, twisted in her seat, and an aura of the fix came off of her in waves. “Well, I know
B. B
. King is a musician,” she said—as if, confronted with somebody named King, one would automatically think B. B. and not, say, Martin Luther. “Ah, yes,” said the host, “
B. B
.—‘Blues Boy.' ” One would have thought this promised an early resolution, but no. Angst, despair—finally the woman was led away, as if to perdition. Ten minutes of commercials followed. The woman returned. Over 15 minutes, she struggled with inner demons. Writer? Musician? It could have been
Sophie's Choice
for all you could tell from her face. It was fake—if it wasn't it was pornographic—and then, the answer. Yes, she will plunge into the abyss: “Musician.”