Real Life Rock (39 page)

7
David Feldman, “Astonishing Similarities Between the Death of Elvis Presley and the Death of John F. Kennedy,” (Alex Bennett Show, January 24, KITS-FM, San Francisco)
Not that astonishing: “Presley slept with Priscilla Presley;
Kennedy
slept with Priscilla Presley …”

8
Marshall Berman, “Why Modernism Matters”
(
Tikkun
,
January/February)
And why postmodernism never did.

9
Fall, “Kurious Oranj” (BMG/Beggars Banquet)
Pointlessness as its own reward.

10
Lee Atwater, Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, Percy Sledge, et al., “Celebration for Young Americans” (George Bush inaugural, January 21)
In which, led on guitar by the chairman of the GOP national committee, various black Americans took the stage to validate the institutionalization of their exclusion from their own society, simultaneously suggesting that political parties will soon sign up musicians just like corporations do. Best commentary: John Rockwell,
New York Times
(January 22); Ed Ward,
Austin Chronicle
(“The Ward Report,” January 20); and Thomas Schlegel, in a letter to the
San Francisco Chronicle
(February 2): “According to Atwater, ‘There is a place for black people in the Republican Party' … the same place that has been offered by the white establishment since Reconstruction, singing and dancing for the rich and scaring poor whites at election time.”

MARCH
31, 1989

1
Fine Young Cannibals, “She Drives Me Crazy” (I.R.S. 12-inch)
General Johnson (“It Will Stand,” with the Showmen, “Give Me Just a Little More Time,” with the Chairmen of the Board) fronting Hot Chocolate (“You Sexy Thing,” “Every 1's a Winner”)—well, not exactly, but they have HC's feel for rhythms that disguise their hardness, and like GJ Roland Gift has a
voice so determinedly eccentric he could never be mistaken for anyone else. This moves slowly, all muscle, until after a minute or two every change signals a release that Gift always returns to half-deny, a sweetness he can't accept. There are more words to this song than “She drives me crazy [doot-doot]/Like no one else/She drives me crazy [doot-doot]/And I can't help myself,” but there don't seem to be, and there don't have to be.

2
Elvis Costello, “Leave My Kitten Alone,” on
Late Night
(NBC, March 3)
Who else would be so unprofessional as to waste three minutes of network time with a Little Willie John tune when he could have been advertising his new single? Who else would be so professional as to respond to “How do you write your songs?” with an answer that nailed a
Spike
track in your mind more surely than the song itself?

3
Saints, “Grain of Sand,” on
Prodigal Son
(Mushroom/TVT)
A new wrinkle on Demosthenes: after 12 years, Chris Bailey sings as if that sand is in his throat, as if singing is the only way to keep it from turning into a pearl. He was a punk, after all.

4
Chuck Russell, director,
The Blob
(RCA-Columbia video)
For the scene where the yo-yo spinning projectionist gets blobbed. Someone comes into the booth to find out why the film has broken, then he looks up at the ceiling and sees a hideous face screaming silently out of the slime—and the yo-yo, dangling from what used to be a hand, still running up and down, perfectly.

5
Henry S. Kariel,
The Desperate Politics of Postmodernism
(Massachusetts paperback)
Most books with “postmodernism” in their title are once-removed frog-speak: Americans trying to squeeze a drop of insight or prestige not out of the world but out of Lyotard or Baudrillard, and with all the charge of a bad game of Scrabble. Kariel, of the University of Hawaii, writes in his own voice, and the desperate politics of his title are his politics. His arguments seek a thin cultural margin where he believes the possibilities for new kinds of speech and action are still alive. Whether or not Laurie Anderson, among others he talks about, is mapping that line, this book, as Charles Perry once wrote about what I don't remember, is like finding a hamburger in a medicine cabinet.

6
Eddie Murphy, producer, Thomas Schlamme, director,
What's Alan Watching?
,
pilot (CBS, February 27)
Alan is a teenager with a TV in his room; the show is based on the premise that changing channels is the primary cultural—no, social—experience of our time. Of all the wonders Alan turned up this night, most bizarre was footage on James Brown's incarceration: not, it seemed, as news, but as instant movie-of-the-week. Murphy played Brown, of course (also a “Free James Brown” James Brown clone); the bit was shocking both as a violation of decency and as a violation of media temporality. Alan didn't seem to know who James Brown was; I can't wait to see how
Almost Grown
follows up. On TV, generational fiction is now the milieu that counts; any real TV movie on James Brown is already irrelevant.