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Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008
6) Ben Shahn, Farm Security Administration photo Oct. 1935 (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html)
From the FSA home page, go from Subject Index to United States-West Virginia-Welch, from there to United States-West Virginia-Scotts Run, from there to No. 30, and you'll find Shahn's picture of a businessman or government man -- dressed in fedora and three-piece suit -- sitting in a clearing next to a very handsome guitarist: "Love oh, love, oh keerless love," someone wrote down, attempting to capture the player's mountain dialect. His expression is at once wistful and impassioned, and his face is delicate, almost effete -- there's nothing of the weathering of Appalachia in his features -- which only makes the caption more odd: "Doped singer relief investigator reported a number of dope cases at Scotts Run." No audio, but listen to Lead Belly's 1935 recording of "Careless Love" (on "Midnight Special," Rounder) if you want to hear the morphine -- in the song, if not the singer.
7) North Mississippi Allstars, "Shake Hands With Shorty" (Tone-Cool)
In this juke joint, the old -- sometimes very old -- blues are part of the atmosphere. With the guitars, even a mandolin and a washboard, buzzing off the walls, you don't have to notice that the vocals are stuck in neutral, or if you do you can tune them out.
8) U. S. Postal Service, "1990s Celebrate the Century"
Sure, if you really want your letters celebrating cellphones and SUVs, virtual reality, computer art, "Titanic" ("A James Cameron Film" -- did they, which is to say we, have to pay extra to say that?) and a visual and conceptual vagueness that beggars the imagination: Take "New Baseball Records," which neither on the front of the stamp nor the explanatory back bothers to say what the records are or who set them. As for the "Seinfeld" number: no Elaine crawling out of somebody's bed, just -- a doorway.
9) Belle and Sebastian, "Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant" (Matador)
Myself, I'd prefer they walked like an Egyptian -- at least they couldn't maintain their coy folk melodies, their arch pre-Raphaelite narratives, if they had to do it at right angles.
10) Merce Cunningham Dance Company, "Interscape," with music by John Cage ("One 8") and décor and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg (Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, Calif., May 3)
After his molecules-in-motion pointillist backdrop for a dance set to Morton Feldman's 1958 "Summerscape," for the new "Interscape" Rauschenberg offered a typically bullshit collage -- disassociated images that connected to nothing, generated no tension, merely sat on their screen mute and still. In place of his "Summerscape" leotards, which in their lightness left the illusion of nakedness, he came up with outfits decorated with more meaningless images. It didn't matter. The music was rendered on what one might call a distressed cello (all scratching and dying chords, like John Cale's viola at the end of the Velvet Underground's "Heroin") and broken -- or, somehow, extended -- by long periods of silence, in which the dancers continued to move without hesitation, in the same stutter-step they used with the cello. The effect was no sense of mime, but an unnatural suspension of one element of life, which made life itself feel like a construct, invention or accident. At the end, Cunningham came out for a bow, appearing as the complete happy bohemian: Carl Sandburg mop of white hair, dark coat, dark shirt and striped baggy pants he might have bought off a village fool somewhere in central Europe in 1547.
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