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Recently in Salon Media

Media
Whither George? And what's up with Tina's Talk?
Hachette wonders what to do with George, post JFK Jr.; the new issue of Tina's mag isn't going to get people talking.
By Sean Elder
[09/17/99]

Media
Gilded ink
At the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, conspicuous consumption is a highly profitable commodity.
By David Carr
[09/10/99]

Media
Great balls of fire
The press got a little burned at Waco as well.
By Sean Elder
[09/09/99]

Media
The CBS-Viacom merger
Putting the sin back in television synergy.
By Sean Elder
[09/08/99]

Column
Real Life Rock Top 10
Real Life Rock Top 10
By Greil Marcus
[09/07/99]

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The centerpiece of the 1998 Diastodrome! Festival in London, with impresario/composer/performer Thomas moonlighting from his band Pere Ubu: a live recording of what could have been called "Route 66," because the journey the singers and musicians take across an America they're afraid of forgetting is that expansive. What's missing is that old Bobby Troup-Rolling Stones glee as the miles burn up and L.A. gleams in the distance. This is all backroads and, with Bob Holman's increasingly frantic monologues about how, no, no, no, don't you understand, that's not it -- he's talking about gas prices and small towns and theme parks -- panic. Then the tone shifts. A character something like Steve Martin's corrupt, dreaming traveling song-salesman in "Pennies from Heaven" emerges: Thomas, ready to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, or whatever bridge takes you from here to there. He convinces you that he has the right to do it, because he doesn't take the bridge for granted and you do. Suddenly you want to leave the house and get in the car and see if you can find the same country this company is finding -- leaving the disc on while you're gone.

2. Pere Ubu "Apocalypse Now" (Thirsty Ear)

A show from 1991, with David Thomas doing a stand-up comedy routine between songs ("I'm sure you'll be happy to know that one of our members onstage said to me right then, 'That was actually good'") and whispering the secrets of the universe into the ears of the audience as the songs themselves are played. With melodies rising out of the clattering sound like the modal themes of old folk songs, the effect is stirring, Cleveland punks more than 15 years down the road with no lessening of their conviction that they have been chosen to change the world, laughing at how little they've been changed by it.

Greil Marcus Real Life Rock appears on the Media site every Monday. Archives

3. Anonymous: altered billboard (Gilman Street at San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, Calif., Sept. 8)

A pair of red dice, one with a skull, and this message, in clean Times letters: "Just because you survived ______ doesn't mean your children will." The original word, still barely showing, was "drugs"; in the exact same typeface, it has been replaced by "Bush."

4.Jonathan Lethem "Motherless Brooklyn" (Doubleday)

A detective story where the hero's Tourette's Syndrome (unending waterfalls of tics, from the man's scrambled verbal outbursts to his fascinating need to straighten people's clothing) shapes the tale -- allowing a rhythm in which the frenetic almost hides the islands of quiet where thinking gets done. Tourette's is a thing in itself here, a kind of invisible twin; thus Lethem ("Gun, With Occasional Music," "Girl in Landscape," "As She Climbed Across the Table") writes in a double language, which opens up the mystery genre to the point that it's almost erased. As the hero tries to keep himself awake for an all-night stakeout, he recognizes "insomnia [as] a variant of Tourette's -- the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist too, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance -- as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off." His favorite song: Prince, "Kiss."

5. Quickspace "Precious Falling" (Hidden Agenda/Parasol)

U.K. drone band derived from th faith healers. (Thee Headcoats won their "e" in a poker game, I think they said.) Not as demented as that great combo (their 1993 "Imaginary Friend" remains the most blithelessly extreme music of the decade), but with a neat trick: fast drone. Squealing and clicking in "Hadid," they appear as naked people in a field regressing as you listen: regressing not to a pre-verbal childhood but to a previous species.

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