(1) Frank Fairfield, “Darling Corey” / “I’ve Always Been a Rambler” (Tompkins Square 7″ / myspace.com/frankfairfield). A young Californian who sings and plays as someone who’s crawled out of the Virginia mountains carrying familiar songs that in his hands sound forgotten: broken lines, a dissonant drone, the fiddle or the banjo all percussion, every rising moment louder than the one before it.

(2) There’ll Always Be an England: Sex Pistols Live from Brixton Academy with The Knowledge of London: A Sex Pistols Psychogeography, directed by Julien Temple (Rhino/Freemantle DVD). At the show, from 2007, there seems to be almost as much footage of the audience as of the band, and what’s odd, if you’ve been anywhere recently where fame is on the stage, is that you see almost no one holding up a cell-phone camera, taking a picture of an event instead of living it out, even if a thirtieth-anniversary show is a picture of another show before it is anything else. Instead, people are shouting, jumping up and down, shoving, and most of all singing their heads off. Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock (“You’re a lucky cunt,” Rotten says near the end, “because this is the best band in the world”) find moments they might not have found before. The old British tourist song “Beside the Seaside” is sung in full as a lead-in to “Holidays in the Sun”; in the fiercest passages of “God Save the Queen” and “Bodies” a true dada vortex opens up as words lose their meanings and seem capable of generating entirely new ones. But the real fun is in the “psycho geography” (“The study of the specifi c effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”— Internationale Situationniste #1, June 1958), which is the band minus Rotten taking us on a tour of its old haunts. Cook and Matlock look the same as they did in 1976, merely older, but Jones is unrecognizable. Onstage he looks like one of his own bodyguards; here, wrapped in a heavy coat, with dark glasses and a cap pulled down, he could be a mob boss or merely a thug with money in his pocket. The three are touring SoHo, checking the hooker ads in doorways. (Jones goes up, comes down: “That was great! But she made me wear a johnny.”) “It’s like a fuckin’ Dickens novel,” Jones says, surveying the sex shops, the dubious hotels, the strip clubs they once played (the El Paradiso, they remember, was so fi lthy they cleaned the place themselves). “I feel like a bucket of piss is going to come fl ying...