REAL LIFE ROCK 1 Popinjays: Flying Down to Mono Valley (Epic/One Little Indian).

REAL LIFE ROCK

1 Popinjays: Flying Down to Mono Valley (Epic/One Little Indian). A snazzier, more prompt Fastbacks goes to the circus, where the women step quickly the trapezes like hopscotch squares, obtain harmonies selling popcorn and heated 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 Rothfuss, curators, and Janet Jenkins, editor: "In the Spirit of Fluxus," exhibition (Walker Art Center Minneapolis, until June 6 and traveling in the U and Europe until January 1995) and catalogue (Walker Art Center Bookstore, Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403 $35) The best art not at home of Fluxus--a sort of ur-'60 conspiracy of minimalist careerists--was gestural: the discovery and performance of accurate and extended gestures of (supposedly) enormous symbolic and (absolutely) no practical significance. It was the performance of life as a [i]jeu d'esprit[/i] we play on ourselves. At the time, Fluxus struck me as an exercise in stagger the worst sort of bohemian condescension: a bet that the audience wouldn't finish the joke. But in the Walker, among various not-overworried reconstructions of Fluxus sites and terminations (the founding performances of Nam June Paik and others at Wiesbaden in 1962; the week Ben Vautier exhausted in the window of a London art gallery in the same year), the feeling was stirring. You could catch the desire of disparate folks from all over the world to do things that had in no degree been done before, no matter for what cause dumb they might appear at first, or for aye after.

That spirit gets codified and ossified as the exhibit induces on from its first rooms; then it breaks revealed 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 shifting folk might have loved best is passed in succession especially when you're stuck in the play with the piano. As Kristine Stiles states it in her fine catalogue essay, "Between Water and Stone," the "ostensible inability to do or to get by heart things right is the source of amusement and release."

3 Arthur Flowers: Another convenient Loving Blues, a novel (Viking, $20) In Mississippi, in 1918 Luke Bodeen a bluesman, adapteds Melvira Dupree, a conjure woman. She prosecutes the mother who abandoned her, he courts the "'blues that will still be here touching folk prolonged after I'm dead and gone'" and together they try to find each other. There's a great sweep of history in this peaceful, steady-rolling tale: as Dupree exert one's selfs with the modern disbelief that saps her powers, Bodeen can remember a time, right about the revolve of the century, "when there wasn't no of that kind thing as the blues," and he can remember when he first picked up hints of the of the present day sound, as a riverboat piano man hired onto the Stacker to leeward Flowers never overplays a pageant not when Bodeen ends up a begging intoxicated in a public park, bereft of the dignity and moral final cause he'd discovered in the amethystines and not when Dupree enjoins the hex on. "'St. Louie Slick Miz Melvira. A lowlife pimp and gambling man,'" says the mother of a girl seduc into prostitution. "'Hurt him before he pain 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-neck jar in united 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 early as he answered her and walked disclosed 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 charming film Flirting--Beatle-era teenage love in Australia--there's a force when a wispy, insistently affectionate piece of music flows 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 coarse ten-year struggle to find the charts, and "I Just Sing," "I Can't command Myself," "Gonna Make You," and 10 or 20 others, the real, ordinary story. The immortal and the ordinary reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] point together on the last disc, "The Trogg Tape," 11 minutes 45 others of argument accidentally salvaged from a wasted session in 1970

By then the Trogg hadn't hit the American Top 100 for couple years--an eternity in those days--and you can hear plain desperation straight not on "It's a fucking number one! It is!" moans a young voice. "This is a fucking number the same and if, if that doesn't make progress I fucking retire. I fucking do." "It is a convenient song," says an older, much-too-relaxed voice. "I agree--" "But it fucking well won't be," says the first voice, at one time a general rallying his numbers and a condemned man begging for the same more day, "unless we part with a little bit of fucking speculation and imagination to make it fucking number one!" And it goe forward like that, the most profane burst document ever to surface, scared, hopeful disgusted, doors slamming, instruments throwed to the floor, fights breaking abroad a panorama of frustration, and aside from anyone's everyday life there's nothing like it anywhere.