Real Life Rock (297 page)

8
James Luther Dickinson and the North Mississippi Allstars,
I'm Just Dead I'm Not Gone
(Merless)
“When I leave here, just hang crepe on your door,” Frank Hutchison of West Virginia sang in 1928 in “Worried Blues.” “I won't be dead, just won't be here no more.” Dickinson, a storied bandleader and producer, died in 2009—“Three hundred pounds of barbeque,” as one of his friends lovingly said at the time. All that's missing from the spooky show he recorded in Memphis in 2006—with humor in every performance, resentment and regret coming up behind it, especially in a harrowing, last-will-and-testament version of Buffy Sainte-Marie's “Codine”—is a cover of the Hutchison song, with his “won't be dead” turned on its head.

9
Pussy Riot, “Punk Prayer,” Cathedral of Christ the Savior (Moscow)
One day in February, several Russian women—reenacting both Johnny Rotten's “I am an antichrist” in “Anarchy in the U.K.” and the action of one Michel Mourre, who, in 1950, dressed as a Dominican monk with his head in a Dominican tonsure, in Notre Dame in Paris, stepped up during a break during Easter High Mass to deliver an address on the death of God—momentarily seized a church. They were dressed in bright red-and-pink shifts, blue leggings, and yellow, mauve, orange, and turquoise-colored balaclavas. They genuflected, stood up, began to stomp and prance. They shouted, shrieked—attacking Vladimir Putin, attacking the Church, crossing themselves as they were pulled off by guards—and from the sound they made, clipped, sharp, harsh, joyful, the sound of people feeling, if only for a minute, completely free. Singing in Russian, they could have been the all-women Zurich punk band Kleenex (a.k.a. Liliput), singing in Swiss-German more than thirty years ago.

Charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, Pussy Riot members Yekaterina Samutsevich, Maria Alekhina, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were held in prison until August 17, when, after attending their trial while confined in a
box, they were found guilty and sentenced to two years in a penal colony; Tolokonnikova's defiant closing statement will be read in public squares and tiny apartments all over the world for years to come. But that's not enough. When the Plastic People of the Universe were mercilessly harassed and its members jailed under the Soviet puppet regime in Czechoslovakia, people smuggled their music out on homemade LPs. Today for Pussy Riot, you can go right to YouTube—but for a lot of reasons, something more tangible, an object, a physical fact, is called for. Kill Rock Stars, which reissued Kleenex and Liliput, not to mention their labelmates and punk comrades Essential Logic and Delta 5, has destiny waiting. Download their performance from the cathedral, put it on a CD, and send it out into the world.

10
Posting, Hammersmith, London (Jubilee Week)
In the early 1970s, Jamie Reid, by 1976 the designer for the Sex Pistols, put up little pink stickers in London supermarkets:
OFFICIAL WARNING—CLOSING DOWN SALE
, they read.
LAST DAYS BUY NOW WHILE STOCKS LAST—THIS STORE WILL BE CLOSING SOON OWING TO THE PENDING COLLAPSE OF MONOPOLY CAPITALISM AND THE WORLDWIDE EXHAUSTION OF RAW MATERIALS
. “God save the Queen / the fascist regime,” Johnny Rotten sang in 1977: “Your future dream is a shopping scheme.” Thirty-five years later, Danny Boyle, director of
Slumdog Millionaire
, now directing the opening and closing ceremonies for the London Olympics, included the Sex Pistols' “God Save the Queen.” But on a wall in London two months before, there was a better homage: either an ironic celebration of Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee, or just another ad. Or the Sex Pistols' latest trick: a poster screaming “
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN AND HER SHOPPING REGIME
,” promising a “free draw” for a £500 diamond. With graphics precisely mimicking Reid's mimicking of signs just like this one.

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER
2012

1
Robert Pattinson in
Cosmopolis,
written and directed by David Cronenberg (Alfama Films/Prospero Pictures)
This slight figure, in ill-fitting clothes, no matter how expensive they might be—he's supposed to be a financial titan, or monster, twenty-eight and worth far more billions than that, about to embark on a journey of systematically destroying everything he has. Can he carry a whole movie? It doesn't look like it. But as the film goes on, his face becomes at once more expressive and withdraws more completely into itself, and an Elvis ghost emerges around the smudged eyes, to the point that you half expect someone, maybe the cream-pie guerrilla, to say, “Hey, you're the Elvis of money!” But then the sun goes down, Pattinson sits across the table from his nemesis, and as his eyes go glassy—not blank, but a milky pool with no refection—you could be watching
The Manchurian Candidate
, with Laurence Harvey sitting across from Frank Sinatra as red queens cover the table between them and Harvey remembers what he's done. Except for Keira Knightley, Cronenberg's last picture,
A Dangerous Method
, seemed cast on autopilot, with Viggo Mortensen as Freud and Michael Fassbender as Jung; this, from Juliette Binoche's bouncing art dealer to Paul Giamatti reaching all the way down into his bag of losers, is displacing from the first moment to the last.

2
Cat Power,
Sun
(Matador)
There's always been an acrid, suspicious edge behind Cat Power's tone of voice; except with other people's songs, where she might drift, get lost, and not care, she doesn't let herself go. What's new here, as the songs, which are indistinctly outlined, slowly take shape, is what I can only call womanliness: a certain warmth, an undeniable lack of fear.

3
Matthew Friedberger,
Matricidal Sons of Bitches
(Thrill Jockey)
This is the other half of Fiery Furnaces' twelfth solo album, and the fifth this year. (“I'm supposed to make two records this fall,” the one-man orchestra Friedberger writes,
“one home made one and one ‘proper' studio one—I think of
those
as being from 2012. But they won't be out till next year. In other words, I'm confused by this.”) And that's not even counting the “ Table” series, which is said to include one album for each of the 118 elements in the Periodic Table. For the meantime, this is described as being inspired by Hollywood's Poverty Row, the no-budget fly-by-night letterhead studios that churned out countless B to Z pictures in the 1930s and '40s. You get a feel for the people hanging around the lots in Nathanael West's 1939
The Day of the Locust;
you can see what the style (form?) (junk heap?) produced at its most intense in Edgar G. Ulmer's 1945
Detour
. There's an undertow implicit in both the idea and the fact of Poverty Row, a sense of just-shoot-me surrender, people pressing on to the next shot because it would be too much trouble to stop, and Friedberger catches that, as a kind of memory still present around the edges of even today's most glamorous movies, as in the scene in
Mulholland Dr
. where Naomi Watts hires her hit man. There are forty-five tracks here; go to “I'm Sure It's . . . for the Best,” number ten, and “Disappointed Dads,” number twenty-four, first.

4
Beloved
(
Les Bien-Aimés
), directed by Christophe Honoré (IFC)
Frenchwoman walks into a London bar and hears a band playing a bloodless version of Bo Diddley's “Who Do You Love?” but it moves her—and then she sees the drummer, who moves her more. A year later, after she finds him in another bar with another combo, they head out to the street, singing at each other:
“Qui aimes-tu?” “Qui aimes-tu?”
The song has turned into a little French street ballad—with an urgency all over it that the bar band never imagined.