Real Life Rock (298 page)

5
Mary Davis reports from Manhattan (August 16)
“ ‘Is there a concert here tonight?' That was the first question I overheard as I joined the long line for entry to the free event in Liberty Hall at the Ace Hotel, which was explicitly not a concert, but a ‘Reading of the Letters, Poetry, Lyrics, and Trial Statements of the Jailed Members of Pussy Riot'—held the night before Maria Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich were convicted of hooliganism and sentenced to two years in prison.

“The mostly young and stylish crowd seemed attentive as the speakers—poet Eileen Myles, actress Chloe Sevigny, artist K8 Hardy, musician Johanna Fateman, and performance artists Justin Vivian Bond and Karen Finley—took to the spare stage without introduction to read statements and transcripts from the trial, and letters written by the band members to Patriarch Kirill and Prime Minister Medvedev. As the evening wore on, a gaggle of waifish young women wearing trendy shorts, airy blouses, and high heels—models?—appeared in the front of the house, where they whispered among themselves, checked out the room, then slipped away as a group. Meanwhile, Sevigny calmly read Alekhina's March 5 prison letter: ‘It's so cold in the cell our noses get red and our feet are ice cold . . . we sleep in our street clothes.' Myles seemed emotional as she recited the rousing letter the band wrote to Patriarch Karill: ‘What troubles us is that the very shrine you consider so defiled is so inseparably linked to Putin . . . In the prayer in question we express our grief, shared with million of Christians, that you allowed the church to become involved in a dirty political campaign.' Finley's fiery reading of Alekhina's closing statement honed the message: ‘The church loves only those children who believe in Putin. . . . I never thought the Russian Orthodox Church's role was to call for faith in any president. I thought its role was to call for faith in God.'

“Such clarity was not a hallmark of the band's statements, which tended toward exaggeration and self-aggrandizement: should the reference points for Pussy Riot be Brodsky, Kafka, Debord, Solzhenitsyn? Maybe that was the intention: the formal but über-hip setting heightened the sense that the event itself was an extended Pussy Riot provocation, simultaneously earnest and ironic—a dual sensibility likewise
suggested by the colorful
CBGB/FREE PUSSY RIOT
T-shirts sported by many in the audience. The show trial may have been in Russia, but there was a spectacle in Liberty Hall.”

6
Randy Newman, “I'm Dreaming” (Nonesuch/YouTube)
No matter what happens, Mitt Romney will not fall below 45 percent in the election because 45 percent of the electorate cannot abide a black president. “I think there are a lot of people who find it jarring to have a black man in the White House and they want him out,” Randy Newman said of his new song, his little intervention, or witnessing, partly sung to the tune of “I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas,” this time “of a white president.” “You won't get anyone, and I do mean anyone, to admit it.” The performance is quiet, cool, unashamed, the singer disappearing into his character, until he might suck you in, too, whoever you are.

7
David Segal, “You Had to Be There: Amid the Wonder, Some Wondering,” Olympics wrap-up, the
New York Times
(August 13)
“
WORST MUSICAL CLICHÉ
: The theme to ‘Chariots of Fire' played time and time again during medal ceremonies.
MOST WELCOME MUSICAL SURPRISE
: Joy Division's ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart' played in the Olympic Stadium during track and field events.” Especially the Draw-and-Quarter.

8
Bumper sticker, Berkeley, August 18
“FORGET WORLD PEACE—VISUALIZE USING YOUR TURN SIGNAL.”
Just above it: a version of the Shepard Fairey Obama
HOPE
poster with a face that could have been Herbert Hoover's.

9
Bob Dylan,
Tempest
(Columbia), and at the Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, New York (September 4)
On the surface of this album and far beneath it, a rewriting is going on—a rewriting of what, in his book
Chronicles
, Dylan called “a parallel universe . . . a culture with outlaw women, super thugs, demon lovers and gospel truths . . . streets and valleys, rich peaty swamps, with landowners and oilmen, Stagger Lees, Pretty Pollys and John Henrys—an invisible world that towered overhead with walls of gleaming corridors.” In the most intense and ambitious songs here, Dylan takes the folk standards “Barbara Allen,” “The Titanic,” “Black Jack Davy,” “Matty Groves,” and more, and guides them to places they have never been—places, you can imagine, the songs always knew were there, but that they couldn't reach. “In Charlotte Town, not far from here,” Dylan began his performance of “Barbara Allen” at the Gaslight Café in New York in 1962, changing the usual “Scarlet Town”; the eight minutes it took him to say what the song said then are matched now by the seven minutes of “Scarlet Town.” Here, fifty or five hundred years later, the suicides of Sweet William and Barbara Allen have left a curse on the town, a kind of ugly, alluring gravity, each step lifting a leg of a thousand pounds, a force, a specter one can neither accept nor reject—and you don't want to get to the end of it any more than the singer does. “The streets have names / that you can't pronounce,” Dylan sings in a slow, considered manner, as if to get you to believe it, to weigh the fact as he does; is it that as soon as you learn how to pronounce the name of a street, it changes? The lines may be as ominous and intriguing as any Dylan has ever sung—and while I fully expect someone to trumpet the discovery that they were taken from Sherwood Anderson, Tacitus, or the sixth-century C.E. Arabian poet Imru' al-Qays, if not Carl Barks, in this music they sound like a gong.

At the Capitol Theatre, Dylan did not play any songs from
Tempest
—which had gone up on iTunes that day, a week in advance of the album's official release—but he offered music that was just as new, if nothing like so old. With the acoustics of the less-than-two-thousand-seat hall shockingly bright—inside the storm of texting, flashbulbs, filming, phone calls, and constant chatter, you could hear every note of Dylan's piano, follow every curling riff on Charlie Sexton's lead guitar—the most effective performances were sly, insistent, rough, syncopated, harsh, and even scary: “Highway 61 Revisited,” “High Water (For
Charley Patton),” and “All Along the Watch-tower” were sent out in staccato bursts, with stinging, isolated rockabilly notes that were like flashbulbs in the sound. The most carefully written passages in the songs seemed to bring out the most in Dylan as a pure singer, alive to the way a word might call for a hesitation, a moment of doubt, a dive forward. Just as often he put the pressure not on words but on syllables, each one carrying an exclamation point, which suspended the ideas or dramas in the songs—the sardonic dread and idealistic cynicism in “All Along the Watchtower,” the Englishman, the Italian, and the Jew at the bar in “High Water”—even as the pace picked up with every chorus. Finally, the whole show was a matter of cadence—with “All Along the Watchtower” moving from
! ! !
to a kind of slow, doubting abstraction, the song dissolving into the miasma of a noir film like
In a Lonely Place
, where no one could tell who to be afraid of. Dylan has played this song at the end of shows for years; this was the best performance of it I've ever heard.

10
2 Days in New York,
directed by Julie Delpy, written by Delpy, Alexia Landeau, and Alexandre Nahon (Magnolia)
Chris Rock's Mingus to Julie Delpy's Marion: “He's mildly schizophrenic? What's mildly schizophrenic? He hears nice voices? He would have killed Ringo and not John?”

JANUARY
2013

1
Favorite election film: “You Don't Own Me” PSA (YouTube)
“I'm Lesley Gore,” says the sixty-six-year-old onetime pop star, “and I approve this message.” It's powerful to see dozens of women and girls lipsynching to the song that, so long after its moment on the charts (produced by Quincy Jones, #2 in 1964), has become such a touchstone—here, for abortion rights. As there is in the final-judgment almost–
Law & Order bang! bang!
of the music, there's a sense of menace in the pacing of the quick but somehow hesitating cuts from one woman, duo, or trio to the next—directed by Sarah Sophie Flicker and Maximilla Lukacs, the little movie has the feel of Nan Goldin's
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
. With the men in the “Top Comments” section hitting back (“Who would want to make love to the unlovable women hating men that open their big yaps on here?”), the spot, which is sure to be back, or remade, for all foreseeable elections to come, was an election in and of itself.