Real Life Rock (86 page)

9
David Lynch, director,
Twin Peaks—Fire Walk with Me
(New Line Home Video)
Though nobody needed the subtitled dwarf, this much-maligned film is a lot tougher than
Wild at Heart
, and also probably the greatest teen-jeopardy flick ever made. It opens on the corpse of Teresa Banks, the fiend's first victim, then focuses on the surprise and despair around her mouth, frozen by rigor mortis; the movie sheds its conceits when Laura Palmer, in a heedlessly extremist performance by Sheryl Lee, finds the same expression in life. Now the most ordinary situation is the worst: Laura's father taunting her at the dinner table because she hasn't washed her hands. You know he'll get rid of the dirt by the end, and in this sudden moment so does Laura. The disbelief in her face as he rails at her is awful, but not as bad as the belief that replaces it.

The composition of many shots is arty, the efficient production of effects that mostly call attention to themselves; the composition of others is so fine they all but leave the picture. Near the beginning, the FBI agent played by Chris Isaak stands in a trailer park, his feet on wet ground, a trenchcoat on his shoulders, mountains in the background: a last moment of contemplation and puzzlement before he disappears from the film like Bulkington from
Moby-Dick
. I rewound the tape, hit the pause button, and stared into a perfect picture
of the loneliness, the possibility of abandonment, implicit in American open spaces—where, as Lynch says here, anything can happen, and will.

10
Calvin Klein underwear ads, with Kate Moss,
In her uncanny impersonation of a brain-dead tadpole, you can see her future: supermodel for legal euthanasia. “W
OULD YOU WANT
YOUR
CHILD TO LIVE LIKE THIS
?”

APRIL
1993

1
Popinjays,
Flying Down to Mono Valley
(Epic/One Little Indian)
A snazzier, more expert Fastbacks goes to the circus, where the women run the trapezes like hopscotch squares, get harmonies selling popcorn and hot dogs in the stands, and make a quick exit: who were those girls, anyway? In this case, Wendy Robinson and Polly Hancock of London.

2
Elizabeth Armstrong & Joan Roth-fuss, curators, and Janet Jenkins, editor, “In the Spirit of Fluxus,” exhibition (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, until June 6, and traveling in the U.S. and Europe until January 1995) and catalogue
The best art out of Fluxus—a sort of ur-'60s conspiracy of minimalist careerists—was gestural: the discovery and performance of severe and extended gestures of (supposedly) enormous symbolic and (absolutely) no practical significance. It was the performance of life as a joke we play on ourselves. At the time, Fluxus struck me as an exercise in pose, the worst sort of bohemian condescension: a bet that the audience wouldn't get the joke. But in the Walker, among various not-overworried reconstructions of Fluxus sites and events (the founding performances of Nam June Paik and others at Wiesbaden in 1962; the week Ben Vautier spent in the window of a London art gallery in the same year), the feeling was stirring. You could catch the desire of disparate people from all over the world to do things that had never been done before, no matter how dumb they might appear at first, or ever after.

That spirit gets codified and ossified as the exhibit moves on from its first rooms; then it breaks out again in odd places. When you reach the
Flux-Labyrinth
, a full-size recreation of the fun-house-as-punishment contraption Larry Miller and the late George Maciunas built in Berlin in 1976 (Miller was at the Walker fine-tuning the monster), the spirit the Flux folk might have loved best is passed on, especially when you're stuck in the room with the piano. As Kristine Stiles puts it in her fine catalogue essay, “Between Water and Stone,” the “ostensible inability to do or to get things right is the source of amusement and release.”

3
Arthur Flowers,
Another Good Loving Blues
,
a novel (Viking)
In Mississippi, in 1918, Luke Bodeen, a bluesman, meets Melvira Dupree, a conjure woman. She seeks the mother who abandoned her, he seeks the “ ‘blues that will still be here touching folk long after I'm dead and gone,' ” and together they seek each other. There's a great sweep of history in this peaceful, steady-rolling tale: as Dupree struggles with the modern disbelief that saps her powers, Bodeen can remember a time, right about the turn of the century, “when there wasn't no such thing as the blues,” and he can remember when he first picked up hints of the new sound, as a riverboat piano man hired onto the
Stacker Lee
. Flowers never overplays a scene, not when Bodeen ends up a begging drunk in a public park, bereft of the dignity and moral purpose he'd discovered in the blues, and not when Dupree puts the hex on. “ ‘St. Louie Slick Miz Melvira. A lowlife pimp and gambling man,' ” says the mother of a girl seduced into prostitution. “ ‘Hurt him before he hurt our baby.' ” Dupree finds him in a barbershop. “ ‘St. Louie Slick?' ” she asks.

Slick stared impassively from behind silvered shades. He saw a good-looking woman with a open-necked jar in one hand and a cork in the other.

He smiled his professional approval. “Yeah baby, thats me, what can I do for a fine young thing like you?”

Melvira corked the jar as soon as he answered her and walked out of the barbershop.

She's taken his soul—and with no more fuss than if she were serving a subpoena.

4
The Troggs,
Archaeology (1966–1976)
(Fontana 3-CD box)
In John Duigan's lovely film
Flirting
—Beatleera teenage love in Australia—there's a moment when a wispy, insistently affectionate piece of music comes on the soundtrack. It's “With a Girl Like You,” a highlight of this collection. Here “Wild Thing” is just an immortal anomaly in a crude ten-year struggle to find the charts, and “I Just Sing,” “I Can't Control Myself,” “Gonna Make You,” and 10 or 20 others, the real, ordinary story. The immortal and the ordinary come together on the last disc, “The Troggs Tape,” 11 minutes 45 seconds of argument accidentally salvaged from a wasted session in 1970.

By then the Troggs hadn't hit the American Top 100 for two years—an eternity in those days—and you can hear plain desperation straight off. “It's a fucking number one! It is!” moans a young voice. “This is a fucking number one and if, if that doesn't go, I fucking retire. I fucking do.” “It is a good song,” says an older, much-too-relaxed voice. “I agree—” “But it fucking well
won't be
,” says the first voice, at once a general rallying his troops and a condemned man begging for one more day, “unless we spend a little bit of fucking thought and imagination to
make it
fucking number one!” And it goes on like that, the most profane pop document ever to surface, scared, hopeful, disgusted, doors slamming, instruments hurled to the floor, fights breaking out, a panorama of frustration, and aside from anyone's everyday life there's nothing like it anywhere.

5
Cynthia Rose,
Design after Dark—The Story of Dancefloor Style
(Thames & Hudson)
At first it looks like a particularly well-set-up picture book, covering clothes, record sleeves, posters, videos, faces, plus captions—but in Rose's text you'll find not gloss but an animating sense of detail and adventure. She gives style weight without letting it weigh down her subjects—the tribes of black and white Britons, some anonymous, some now famous, who in the 1980s remade leisure culture sideways—and the result is a little depressing. So much flair, so much energy, so many ideas, so many good smiles, and, finally, no power. Style changed but not society; no-future didn't move an inch from where it stood in 1977.