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Real Life Rock Top 10 | page 1, 2
"You want to dwell on this country's fuck-ups? Be my guest ... But you might want to remember that when you stomped into CIA headquarters waving your Freedom of Information Act permission slip you were not summarily hustled into a damp sub-basement where a jackbooted sadist with one eyebrow and tinted aviators Elvis wouldn't even fucking wear is smoking unfiltered cigarettes that smell like a skunk getting a perm as he clamps jumper cables on your nipples and starts humming the love theme from 'Midnight Express.'" Too true. On the other hand, there's that scene in "Top Secret!" where Val Kilmer is being tortured by East German secret police. Delirious, he sees himself wandering the empty halls of his all-American high school: He registered for a class, he forgot all about it, now he's trying to get to the final, but school was over last week, and ... and then he comes to. The East Germans crank the juice on the jumper cables, but a satisfied smile spreads over Kilmer's face: It was only a dream. 7) Surveillance Camera Players "1984" on "Surveillance Camera Players" ($15 cash only, to Not Bored!, POB 1115, New York, NY 10009-9998) This small troupe stages plays in front of surveillance cameras, often in subways, then films the action off public monitor screens. Here, with four actors, eight minutes (out of a 45-minute video) and a pidgin comic-book script (signs held up by a man in a grinning death's-head mask, I.D. placards around the necks of Winston and Julia), the story comes across: Because it's so familiar a few slogans and the right setting can call the whole thing back, especially when weird organ-like music is leaking in from another corridor, people pass by the show as if it's invisible, and the primitivism of the dramaturgy reduces Orwell's prophecy to the scale of litter. "WE ARE THE DEAD" reads the lovers' sign; Death's Head holds up the novus ordo seclorum Masonic pyramid from the dollar bill. "Can I ask you what you're doing here?" says a man with a security guard's menacing politeness. "Taping this," says a woman. "Do you have a permit for this?" Death's Head holds up "ROOM 101." "You don't need a permit to do this," the woman says. "You don't?" "Why are you guys doing this?" says a second man. "To show that surveillance cameras are everywhere," says the woman. "Yeah," the man laughs, "but who doesn't know that?" Death's Head shoots Winston in the head; from somewhere, there's applause. 8) "They Can't Sing ... But They Can Play" (Oakland Athletics TV commercial) The team's youngest ballplayers take turns on a ratty high school auditorium stage where a bored, smiling, middle-aged music teacher is playing the organ. With cracking voices and expressions of absolute sincerity they apply themselves to a song that was a hit well before any of them were born: Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair," here killed deader in under a minute than countless karaoke bars have managed in decades. 9) Rosie and the Originals "The Best of Rosie and the Originals" (Ace) For the 1960 "Angel Baby"; a lovely, previously unreleased cover of the Students' 1958 "I'm So Young" ("Can't marry no one"); and a study of how a group with one perfect moment in it tries to stave off the inevitable. 10) Ass Ponys "Swallow You Down" from "Some Stupid with Flare Gun" (Checkered Past) This is what the Twin Cites' TwinTone sound of the 1980s was for -- the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Soul Asylum and Babes in Toyland using guitars to render ordinary stuff heroic, tragic, a thrill -- but now it's 20 years later in Ohio and the guys in the band are promising a suicidal friend they won't walk away, not ever. They build the music until it's too good to let loose, so they let it sweep them up, riding a sunny, rising melody for "I won't let them swallow" -- and then crashing hard for "you down," paying off the loan the first five words took out on a pledge easier to make than to keep. This is what it's all for.
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