Pussy, King of the Pirates
In his philosophical-historical study Pirate Utopias, Peter Lamborn Wilson envisions the Barbary corsairs as a sort of radical anarchist collective on the high seas, putting into practice the maxim “Property is theft” and establishing their own laws and societies in uncharted territory. “The pirate,” he writes, “was first and foremost the enemy of his own civilization. And once again, ‘the enemy of my enemy’ just might prove to be my friend.”
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Moreover, the popular cartoon of the pirate doesn’t usually acknowledge the circumstances that drove sailors–already a distrusted working-class caste–into outlawhood. It’s part of Kathy Acker’s triumph in the 1995 novel Pussy, King of the Pirates to revive the desperate real-life situation of historical pirates: the girls who cast their lot with a pubful of degenerate female pirates are homeless outcasts with nothing to lose–they’re prostitutes and thieves who never had any chance at redemption besides what they made for themselves. The choices they make are not what social workers would advise–and that’s exactly the point. People in dire straits often choose an apocalyptic form of liberation; when the abused, overworked prostitute Jenny dreams of rescue in Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, it’s in the form of a ship of pirates who kill all her tormentors at her command, then take her away to the relative purity of the ocean.
Then Acker and the band entered. Tom Greenhalgh was decked out in hideous milkmaid drag, while Jon Langford dressed down in a grass skirt and mop wig, with patterns vaguely evocative of Queequeg’s tattoos Magic Markered on his bare chest. He looked especially incongruous when he picked up the Stratocaster. Acker herself appeared delicate in a black slip and platform shoes, but when she perched at her podium and started to read she fell fully into her characters–the naive O or the croaking, bitter Silver, who owns the Bald Head Pub–like a demented librarian at children’s story hour. Essentially presenting the album straightforwardly gave Acker room to deliver her readings straight-faced while the grotesquely clowning Mekons provided fun-house comic relief.
