Rockstar vs. The World Crime League

High Weirdness: Coachella '08

rockstar77 — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:32:21 GMT

Pigs Enter Paradise By Ron Garmon It was blazing hot already when the car arrived for me and my driver bumped the mercury still higher. Mary-Jane is a platinum-haired vixen in leopard prints who makes the old men in my Boyle Heights ’hood quiver like cartoon lupines, so against a backdrop of skinned eyeballs, we bolted for the big noize n’ art party in Indio. I was sanguine my previous two years covering this high-Fahrenheit amalgam of dance marathon, open-air absurdist museum, and Dick Clark’s Day of the Dead would offer no challenge to my party-commando ass. Even ominous political signage like JOHN BENOIT: CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN dotting the roads betrayed only the obvious fact we were entering Planet Dubya, a place little understood by the international rock & roll set. Security inside the Coachella compound Thursday night was already amped to palpably uptight levels; rude officials in cheap polo shirts made already-burdensome activities like camping and parking a confusing welter of closed gates, long marches and barked orders about wristbands. Indeed, events staff seemed concerned with little else; any conversation with them that didn’t turn upon what strip of paper around which wrist was universally met with cud-chewing apathy and, by Friday, the general atmosphere among campers was heavy with fuming. A Do Lab neighbor and longtime Coachella vet noted, “There are a lot of new rules changes this year, and all of them for the worse.” MJ was indignant. “I didn’t come all the way out here to be bossed by some guy in a three-dollar hat!” she huffed. Friday lifted off magnificently despite the clampdown, and, by afternoon, the polo field was alive with dance kids and the rock fancy giggling gobstruck at the monumental art. The Do Lab’s acre-sized mist paradise was jammed with a pleasing variety of squirming half-nakedness and the grounds beyond were a sea of sweating goodtimers. American Bang tossed off an impressive series of Southern rock M-80s, as these Tennessee boyos went with brio after the young ’uns crowding the Mojave tent, jerking the kids around like marionettes. Outside, festival curator Phil Blaine’s upended toy box of outsized art obliterated the event’s iconic palm-ringed horizon. The Copper Droopscape gleamed like doubloons hung in air, while the Big Rig Jig – two 18-wheel tanker trucks welded together in a Peak Oil corkscrew – towered monstrously over the midway. MJ and I endured a series of young, clean-cut locals whose pleas to sell them drugs had a noticeably coplike briskness. We lingered under the Lab’s gigantically spreading petals until night fell. A skirl of bagpipes summoned Goldfrapp to the Mojave stage. Allison looked ravishing in a pink minidress, leading her band through frantic bursts of maximum disco ending with a chain-lightning rendition of “Strict Machine” splattering the air with sweat and pheromones. At the Sahara, Richard D. James of Aphex Twin presided over a lysergically creepy graveyard hum. Passing on Aesop Rock’s clotted hip-hop, we waded through the early-evening chaos to mainstage to tarry for every second of the Verve’s proud, soulful turn. Their first American performance since the breakup a decade ago was one of the most moving I’ve ever heard, as they spellbound a vast haul of old-line fans and blinking novices right up through “Bittersweet Symphony,” which front man Richard Ashcroft dedicated to the late Hunter S. Thompson. After such professionalism, the half-hour wait for Fatboy Slim at the Sahara seemed a bit steep a tribute for a mere iPod in shoes, so my girl and I adjourned to our tent, passing junk garage-rockers the Black Lips twittering at the Mojave some minutes before they wowed the NME by burning a guitar. Thrillsville. Saturday, security backed way off and attendance grew to record levels, with the L.A. underground contingent there in noticeable force. Daleydale and Shiranda operated a floating party back at camp, while Curious Josh the photographer told of having charged the mainstage the day before. The cream of the DJ set disported themselves at the Do Lab while Dance Commander got a long Jumbotron look from the mainstage cameraman during Minus The Bear’s freakish and fine set. MJ and I drifted back to camp, where we solemnly ate shrooms and wandered back out for Kraftwerk. The psychedelics came on slow, but lifted us both with decisive force. By “Trans-Europe Express,” the quartet’s celebrated cyborg disco seemed to transform a swirling hivelike crowd into dancing robots, with a long conga line of freaks clattering by at one point like unoiled, ill-coordinated androids. The atmosphere mainstage was still upbeat and party-hardy, until Portishead filled the acres all around with a stunning and magisterial gloom. I imagined the evening’s star attraction sitting backstage with a fine, foxy grin. Prince made us wait a good while after the Portishead funeral obsequies shut down, with the lights going up at the magical and modest time of 11:11. Then, aided by Morris Day, Shelia E. and an uber-slick cast, he uncoiled a stupendous Greatest Hits show, with “1999,” “U Got the Look,” “Cream” and a puzzling cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” rolling over the polo field. The star did several virtuoso guitar runs, occasionally mugging impatience with his own awesomeness. A prolonged audience demonstration fetched Prince & Co. back to close out the night with a ferocious “Let’s Go Crazy.” Sunday was hot and overcast, with only the hardest-core braving the last afternoon. I’m a huge fan of first-wave shoegazers Swervedriver, so not even wobbly sound and underamplified vocals took the propulsive shimmer off classic Swervie tracks like “Last Train to Satansville.” At the mainstage, gypsy punks Gogol Bordello were making the people move, with Slavic conga lines snaking through gangs of mazurka-maddened youngsters leaping in the heat. My Morning Jacket topped even this, turning in a complex and forceful set as the haze gradually dimmed to darkness. My girl and I briefly watched Syd Klinge’s twin Tesla coils stage a wattage brawl as temperatures dropped and tens of thousands gathered for Roger Waters’s two-and-a-half-hour performance. We shoved up front during the wait, surrounded by kids who were plainly aware this was the closest they’d ever come to seeing Pink Floyd. The golden geezer emerged to play a long set of old and new songs, with fans receiving “Have a Cigar” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” with open reverence. As intermission time approached, a plane dropped bales of confetti which turned out to be Obama flyers that papered nearby neighborhoods, angering locals. Gas torches blazed perilously close to Floyd’s familiar giant inflated pig wallowing over the crowd, its white hide festooned with anarchist symbols. Eventually, the pig was set free, receding into a dot in the night sky just as Waters came back on to perform Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. As the registers rang for “Money,” MJ and I split for home, with the rest of the album following us out into the streets of Indio. As we made for the 10,“Eclipse” rattled windows along Monroe Street, and we were well ahead of one mother of a traffic jam. Published: 04/30/2008 http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/high_weirdness_coachella_08/6971/

Earth Day High

rockstar77 — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:43:48 GMT

From the Farm to Your Baggie, Mother Nature Abides ~ by Ron Garmon ~ Homegrown’s all right with me. Homegrown is the way it should be. Homegrown is a good thing. Plant that bell and let it ring. American holidays ought to come complete with a rustic Jeffersonian hymn or two and Neil Young’s canniboid dirt-ditty celebrates the wake’ n’ bake spirit that rang in the first Earth Day. Proclaimed in San Francisco in 1970 as a temporal container for growing eco-awareness, April 22 inevitably became fixed in the public mind with the aligned cultural horrors of free love, burning reefers and planetary self-respect, with no less a bulwark of patriotic correctness than the Daughters of the American Revolution, with one matron warning Time magazine that “subversive elements plan to make American children live in an environment that is good for them.” Well, as noted linguist Sam Goldwyn once mourned, “We’ve passed a lot of water since those days,” much of it into plastic bottles for employers to sniff for illicit substances, chiefly marijuana. Urine-testing as a condition for employment is a $4 billion a year industry spun off from the War on Drugs, a gigantic federal effort seeking to do the same execution on dope-sucking as the War on Terror does on anxiety. Still, as bad environmental news continues to match ongoing physical and economic deterioration visible everywhere, awareness of the limits of industrial enterprise have become acute and we are back to 1970, an anno horribilis John Lennon proposed renaming Year One. Partisans of industrial hemp and other green-futurists point to the near-miraculous handiness of this non-psychoactive cousin to cannabis, with uses in plastics, packaging, construction, clothing, wood-pulp and biofuel. These glassy-eyed utopians have proven remarkably successful in convincing hard-headed farmers and bucolic libertarians in Kentucky, Michigan, South Dakota and elsewhere to unite in attempts to legalize cultivation. Results have been meager, but their efforts appear to be less product of the long countercultural march through the national mores than the first tentative steps toward a way out of the post-industrial impasse America has reached before any other country. Indeed, the stuff I’ve been smoking of late gives the lie to the myth of American sloth and ineptitude. Tribute to some unknown Cali hydroponist’s illegal art, this is thick, rancorous-smelling booj lightly bristling with purple fuzz, a last chunk wedging with difficulty into the hollow of a pipe already packed with the baggie’s last sweepings. Application of flame soon kindles an un-Bushian fire in the mind and I can see the broad swaths of hemp verdantly rolling over the former Rust Belt. Acres of greenhouse cultivation spread across the inside of my eyelids, all tended by resettled urbanites grown fat and prosperous as so many nosering Babbitts. Traditional Open Door trade policy will push U.S. strains of marihooch into the eager lungs of all humanity and a cheeba-based dollar will reign supreme over an increasingly blissed and distracted global market. This Earth Day, I urge Americans to toke for a better tomorrow. LA CITY BEAT 4-16-08 http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/our_special_earth_day_issue/6932/3/

Running the Voodoo Down

rockstar77 — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:11:50 GMT

Hipgenesis takes it aboveground at Circus Disco by Ron Garmon Hipgenesis defines itself in terms of a Phildickian consciousness coup or interdimensional ransom note: “Simultaneously a shadowy collective of artists and agent provocateurs, an increasingly disruptive series of horizonal events, and a word used to describe the transition point between reality and irreality.” This is talk to twitch the muzzle of a Homeland Security ferret but for the fact it refers to homemade debauchery, America’s last frontier and first excuse for itself. The idea is this: You belong to an elite cadre of hedonists and high-rollers convening at odd intervals in the remoter crannies of Los Angeles, out from under the ever-lengthening shadow of the Man. Few spots are too remote or improbable for operations, and by the time theme and locale ping your inbox, you’ve laid in a dozen gaudy costumes with components to mix ’n’ match for any contingency. Anon comes the night and all assemble at some unlikely one-shot venue – downtown fire station, a South Central warehouse turned love shack, or Burbank office block made over as interdimensional spaceport – for an evening of dancing, musical performance, and the more esoteric forms of socializing. The fun goes on until you emerge blinking into the post-dawn hours and startle early-rising goodfolk on your way home. A merry life, to be sure, and one I’ve led myself for the last couple of years, taking this comprehensive weirdness on top of my usual rock clubmanship. This sunless existence gave me a Lugosi pallor, a vast circle of friends and a distaste for the juiceless experience on tap at the local dance superclubs. Even so, the only downside to the Voodoo party Hipgenesis threw in the cavernous mainstream of Circus Disco in Hollywood on Saturday, March 22, was the 4 a.m. Hollywood curfew. Yes, yes, that’s what afterparties are for, but my own taste for such affairs was never great and dwindles every time some glitter-eyed civilian begs me score her some white-line yeyo. Not that I didn’t abuse some privileges. Standing at the foot of a long line arterially clotted with youngsters and novice Burners, my pretty companion and I were informed by a welcoming bellow from Security this was for peeps on the guest list. This was surmounted with no trouble by the magic word “Press,” a Gorgon’s head one tries not to unsheath in polite company. Inside, one room of the two-story concrete sprawl was being worked by DJ Fatfinger, noted funketeer working electro-trance-funk havoc from behind the decks. Going for a sort of Anne Rice gothique, Hipgen’s set decorators went for a vampiric Vieux Carre carnival, with a fortune teller set up and exquisite posing from the Wandering Marionettes, a parcel of sexy undead preening in ultra-slow caricatures of worldly vanity. Around me was a broad, tribal swath of hardcore revelers who show up at all these events. Most come from the Burning Man subculture; few bonds are firmer than with those who play with art that can kill. By midnight, Circus Disco was seething with the wild kids of Saturday night, and most of these civilians passed through our accessible- for-once party, delighted at the trimmings and taken aback at all the unclubby affection. Security was a bit laxer than in such well-upholstered penitentiaries as Vanguard, with even the guards trading hugs with us well before closing. Indeed, it began to get downright adhesive. In a long, stately approach to the exit, I was seized and loved-upon by dozens of freakishly-dressed, hyper-sexy friends, each breathing a goodnight benediction into my ears. It was like boarding the last train from Wonkaville, or as good as Saturday night in Hollywood gets. Published: LA CITY BEAT 03/26/2008

The Great Hollywood Peace Parade

rockstar77 — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:58:27 GMT

Antiwar Angelenos mark the fifth year of war by throwing a party By Ron Garmon A year and a half on, the self-immolation of Malachi Ritscher is due a reconsideration as terminal performance art. During morning rush-hour on November 3, 2006, the 50-ish Chicago musician lugged a video camera, a sign reading “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and a quantity of gasoline (then averaging about $2.25/gal. in the Windy City) to the “Blaze of the Millennium” sculpture on the Kennedy Expressway. There, in full view of gridlocked hundreds, he set himself on fire. Police didn’t identify the ashes for days and the news didn’t cover the act as protest at all. Almost a week later, Sun-Times film critic Richard Roeper editorially dismissed what the musician did as “sad” and “futile” as if the deed was merely one more occasion to measure thumbs with Roger Ebert. In the interim, Ritscher’s statement had become an underground sensation, with the auto-flambéed peacenik’s self-penned obituary and other leavings pored over by friends, acquaintances, and the generally stunned. That it took so long for big media guns like Roeper to open up allowed many to ponder the horrible significance of this “normal” suicide. Reports of “alcoholism” and “depression” helped depoliticize the act to the point where Ritscher is now scarcely remembered at all, save as one more doomed hippie. His was but an extreme manifestation of the apocalyptic helplessness now on display most everywhere. All recent economic news comes painted in uniform shades of horrible, with venerable investment banks collapsing, national debt spiraling and suburbanites torching their foreclosed houses for insurance. This familiar bankerly process of sweating the middle classes of equity takes place against a backdrop of inflation, stagnation, and threats of permanent recession. The choices this election year now narrow to whomever Democrats finally decide to pit against John McCain, who insists a century-long U.S. military occupation in Iraq would be “fine” with him. The war is an issue Democrats have decisively fudged. Barack Obama continues to radiate a genial Reaganesque mushiness on particulars, while Hillary Clinton runs TV ads suggesting she’d sit by the telephone at all hours, toothily eager to bomb the mortal shit out of anyone, anywhere. CBS/NYT poll numbers show nearly two-thirds of the American people disapprove of the way the Iraq war is being conducted, with almost 60 percent declaring it a mistake in the first place. Mainstream liberals remain sunk in gloom. Chalmers Johnson concludes in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic that Dubya’s blunders are simply the latest in a long series of imperial disasters that must eventually consume all traditional liberty and destroy popular government in America, leaving us to face “a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent.” Feminist social critic Naomi Wolf, in The End of America, draws the same dreadful inferences from press restrictions, secret jails, extraordinary renditions, cop surveillance, large-scale domestic spying, and constant trashing of dissent, terming it a “fascist shift.” Whatever her gifts as prophet, such a prognosis would depress even Pee-wee Herman. Mad Malachi Ritscher expressed similar thoughts in his online suicide note that ended with the homily, “The future is what you decide today.” That this sentiment can be put to more creative expression was shown to by marchers at the All Out! protest rally/street party staged in Hollywood last Saturday, March 15, by local antiwar coalition ANSWER-LA. Despite the lateness of the hour and very formidable excuses for citizen despair, antiwar activism is on the rise all across the political spectrum, with the radicalized trying new techniques, new alliances, and speaking out in startling creative ways about the looming national crisis. The accent is now on raucous dissent rather than moral outrage; a cheerful, two-fingered salute to the status quo. How the traditionally starchy antiwar left will absorb this new energy is but one question posed by the youngsters out in full puckish force. As the current cycle of antiwar protest heats up, it is well to remember the fate of the last wave. The State of the Movement Most of us remember the deafening passion of the antiwar movement at the outset of Team Dubya’s Iraq adventure a half-decade ago. The sheer unlikelihood of the administration’s claims of Iraqi WMD coupled with open-manufactured hysteria quickly made it the biggest antiwar movement in history, with the protest action on February 15, 2003, bringing tens of millions into the streets all over the planet. The New York Times intoned “[T]here may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.” Steve Mikulan wrote some impressive dispatches on the early demonstrations for the L.A. Weekly. “Well, at that point it was growing by leaps and bounds,” Steve remembered of 2003. “I spoke to Tom Hayden and he pointed out at that time that the antiwar movement was then far ahead of what it was in Vietnam. It took four or five years to accomplish what they did in a matter of months. I think there was a lot of expectation that this thing would keep building and get bigger. That didn’t happen, of course. I think part of the reason is that the mainstream media got a dose of what it perceived as patriotic duty and stopped covering these rallies, even though they were still attracting hundreds of thousands of people. The networks pulled all the antiwar commentators from talk shows and then stopped talking about the movement. You can only sustain energy at that level for so long and, in L.A., the ironically-named ANSWER-LA had no answers. Outrage will only carry enthusiasm so far.” Pinked Not everyone just gave up and went home. One of the antiwar movement’s most durable organizations is Code Pink, the prankish feminists whose giddy stunt-politics include “kiss-ins” staged near military bases (“Make love, not war”) and draping a 30-foot satin “pink slip” out of a window of the Century Plaza Hotel while the president was inside at a reelection 814 fundraiser. When I spoke to co-founder Jodie Evans, Code Pink was in the middle of planning various pre-rally actions, including an activist “training camp” in the wilds of Malibu and a series of demonstrations at the offices of selected local congresspersons. “I mean,” she laughed, “they shouldn’t go on vacation. We’re gonna take in visuals that show the amount each district has lost in not bringing the troops home. The other message that we’re carrying is that their votes are very critical on the Pfizer bill, which allows immunity for the phone companies to spy for Bush. So there’s actually a few members of the Judiciary committee ready to join Rep. Wexler to demand impeachment proceedings.” That the outgoing president may well be beyond Constitutional reach at this point scarcely matters. “You have to care as much about the war ending as soldiers care about putting their lives on the line fighting for it,” Evans put it grimly. “We spent the last year pressuring Congress to quit funding the war and obviously that’s not gonna happen. The people who are making money off the war seem to have more power with these members of Congress than the voting public. We’re modeling what it looks like not to pay for war by not paying seven percent of our taxes. You can see that on our Web site.” We spoke of trying to imagine a time when the war might conceivably end, but that seemed phantasmal, if satisfying to contemplate. “Unfortunately,” she sighed, “we’re all stuck like deer in headlights inside a war. The lack of imagination on everyone’s part is devastating. After we got back from Iraq five years ago, we went to see Hillary and she told us the reason she wanted to invade Iraq is to protect the people of New York.” Here she paused, then continued with care. “I said, ‘Are these the only two choices your mind can concoct?’” Poets and Paperback Writers Antiwar movements being much too important to leave to the politicos, I spoke to a wide assortment of committed Angelenos and found, as usual, the writers among the most militant voices. Lewis MacAdams is poet, activist, historian of Beat, and noted defender of the L.A. River. His “To the 43rd President of the United States” is a hard jewel of invective destined for anthologies, concluding with the lines: We must search our souls/To understand how/We could have/Lived all these years/And done all this work/And still allowed this to happen. “I wrote it just before the invasion, and read it a few times,” MacAdams remembered. “People were extremely enthusiastic. I read it at the Museum of Natural History, and a couple dressed very ostentatiously walked out and that was about it.” “I think the airplanes have to land in their bases and the troop ships dock and the soldiers, sailors and contract killers have got to get on them and leave,” he drawled, “We in America are going to be suffering, whether it’s this month or the month after next. But it seems very likely there’s gonna be a civil war in Iraq after we leave and it’ll be part of America’s sordid karma. We’ll get ours.” Lest anyone complain the literary tend to cluster at one end of the national political dial, I called my old friend – and sometimes writing partner – Brad Linaweaver. A science-fiction writer and Nebula award finalist best known for spinning bizarre alternate histories, Linaweaver is also a conservative-libertarian pundit Ronald Reagan was given to quoting on matters of doctrinal orthodoxy. Recent political writings and support for Ron Paul win him no friends in rightist circles these days. “The Republican Party should not pretend to spread democracy to the benighted regions of the world,” said Brad, who was in rare form, bellowing down the phone line. “That is not in the Republican party’s job description. He’s in the wrong comic book. Bill Buckley thought his Iraq policy “un-conservative,” a fact noted by Fox News in his obituary, which I thought unusually fair and balanced of them. “The left is completely failing to fight the war machine,” the novelist continued. “They won in ’06 and have failed ever since. They don’t understand even now how the corporate power-elite runs both parties. George W. Bush is such a happy man these days. Why? He’s done his job, serving his masters well, giving us a foothold in Iraq forever. We will never leave. McCain is being unduly optimistic when he said we’d be there a hundred years. We’ll be in Iraq as long as the American Empire exists. Bush went there for one reason – to stay there.” Echoing Jodie Evans, my old friend and antagonist charged the administration with the fantasist’s worst sin – lack of imagination. “They’d rather kill people than develop alternative energy,” he snorted. ‘Kush, Not Bush!’ Well, the idea that the fix is irretrievably in makes some cynical and gives others a reason to get up in the morning. If no one but the fractious, faction-ridden SoCal left had shown up for the ANSWER-LA rally in Hollywood last Saturday, the event would’ve been considerably less raucous than it was. Instead, the party had already started in the Red Line train when I got on at Pershing Square. Normal Saturday mid-morning service was glutted with knots of excited, jabbering young people. Most were dressed in ironical variations on military uniforms, stylishly-frayed tunics, and other fucked-up mufti. Some were carrying homemade signs, one reading “Drop Acid, Not Bombs.” Topside at Hollywood & Vine, the famous intersection was already piled with noisy revelry well in advance of the noon start time. Rows of prop coffins lay neatly, flag-draped to represent the returning dead kept carefully from view by the Bush administration. Clowns jostled with masked anarchists, costume performers and Fire Department officers ostentatiously photographing protesters. The venerable chant One-two-three-four/We don’t want your racist war! welled from the crowd, a sentiment grown fusty from decades of racist wars eventually replaced by performances by the likes of Mojo and the Vibration Army. The marchers were overwhelmingly young, with most of the Movement graybeards sprinkled among them looking as if they’d burst from unaccustomed joy. All was love and camaraderie, even for the media, even from the LAPD. Soon, the procession lurched forward and I entered the police cordon, walking backwards ahead of the mob and scribbling notes. The festive spirit even infected the counter-protesters; a half-dozen males in late middle-age, all with Christian slogans emblazoned on tees stretched tight over starchy bellies. “Hey!” one yelled at me through a bullhorn, “Don’t you write for the Communist World News?” I smiled and waved. It was just like old times. Another crooned, “This is treason! You are the new Al Qaeda!” Again, fierce hip-hop clattered out of the PA, drowning them out. News cameras honed in on a grizzled dingbat with a homemade John McCain sign, his jaws working rapidly as chanting and whoops smothered most sound. Indeed, ANSWER’s usual portmanteau of assorted left-wing causes was swept away as well. The kids didn’t seem animated by dialectical materialism, livestock rights, or the unhappy fate of Leonard Peltier. This was clearly not business-as-usual. Cops cleared a path and the march swung left down Schrader. By this time, many of the sidewalk gawkers had begun to join the parade, stepping out into a self-staged, self-conscious show, a delightful suspension of the rules. There was much amplified jeering as the party bore left on Sunset and the CNN building rose into view, its iconic logo long a symbol of corporate propaganda to antiwar leftists and libertarians. Angry fists went up at this citadel of The Man and hundreds of bawled “Fuck CNN!” Office staff gathered at the windows, dim shadows peering down at a vast Technicolor ruckus their organization looked to be studiously ignoring. I gave a friendly wave, wishing they could be there. Signs reading “Whores, Not War!” “Kush, Not Bush!” and the plaintive “James Buchanan, Come Home! All is Forgiven” flapped in the sudden high winds alongside placarded pleas for Obama, Ron Paul and others, the plausible alongside the ludicrous. The day belonged to the participants, since most of the promised star-power didn’t materialize. Organizers read a doleful list of no-shows from the speaker’s stand on Cahuenga. Marty Sheen, Jackson Browne, Ed Asner, and others all defaulted, and the redoubtable Gore Vidal was addressing the ANSWER rally in San Diego. Mike Farrell’s brief, tearful address that impressed many who weren’t born until after the actor’s run as B.J. Hunnicutt on M*A*S*H half a lifetime ago. Ron Kovic, the iconic Vietnam veteran now marking his 40th anniversary in a wheelchair, commanded attention for a few buoyant words – “I promise you,” he cried, “our time is coming! We will fill this street with people!” Eventually, the speakers shut down, and some guy with a megaphone started rapping for Obama. The LAPD, out in overly numerate force, were content to hang back and let this street carnival order itself, pausing to puzzle over performance artist Jade Thacker urging passers by to cut off pieces of the U.S. flag she wore as a dress. A performance troupe called Corpus Delecti performed a zombie butoh dance, writhing on the asphalt like undead worms. Bystanders drifted away slowly, but the atmosphere lingered on and I saw kids whooping and lugging signs later that night as far away as downtown. Channel 7 estimated the turnout at 1,500 participants, police put it at 2,000, and ANSWER-LA claimed 10,000. The latter figure was exaggerated, but closer to the truth as the unexpectedly large number of first-timers plainly startled and elated organizers. Despite histrionic warnings from counter-protesters, I saw no violence and police reported no arrests. Mayday Peace, it seems, is back. Five years of even a media-sanitized and conscription-free war were still quite enough to build a wave of revulsion in the young, who have as yet no place in a society that has long since numbed itself to the horror. Protest, long ridiculed in mainstream culture as being hopelessly ’60s and passe, is now retro and hip. This was inevitable, as there are only so many ways one can market greed and apathy, even to consumers offered little else. As this impulse organizes itself, more traditional elements of the left begin to flex dormant muscles. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union voted a “No Work, No Peace” holiday, stopping all work on the West Coast for eight hours this May 1 to urge “an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East.” Given the public’s surly mood, the idea of a mass-walkout of workers and the timeclock-bound could well gain traction as the hours tick off ’til May Day. After a half-decade of uneasy acquiesce to this latest, luckless imperial adventure, popular consent for war is being withdrawn and the peace movement has nowhere to go but up. The American people must, as usual, engineer their own rescue. Published: 03/19/2008 LA CITY BEAT Cover story Pic by Curious Josh Reiss

Circus in Winter

rockstar77 — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 08:33:12 GMT

For L.A. Burning Man, The Party Never Ends ~ By RON GARMON ~ "Floridly worded, the advertisement made claims which even Phineas Taylor Barnum might have hedged at advancing. It alleged for the show’s female personnel a pulchritude impossible to equal ... . Furthermore, the midway of the circus was replete with sideshows wherein were curious images of the netherworld on display, macabre trophies of ancient conquests, resurrected supermen of antiquity ... . Thunder and lightning would attend the ceremonies and possibly a slight earthquake would be felt." -Charles G. Finney,The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) Even before acquiring the Barnum & Bailey show one hundred years ago, Ringling Bros. maintained winter headquarters for their immense amalgamation of circuses in the brothers’ adopted hometown of Baraboo, Wisconsin. At the end of every touring season, legend informs, all the elephants, tigers, clowns, barkers, bottled atrocities, bearded ladies and dancing girls rolled into town in garish wagons drawn by barbered horses to button up for the long Midwestern night. Animals were quartered and tents folded up as the human flotsam and jetsam were paid off and departed for sunnier, cheaper precincts. Carney faded into Beat, into hippie and Yippie, into punk rockers and hip-hopperz of later decades. Popular entertainment underwent several weird mutations, preserved in formaldehyde on YouTube. A marked decline in showbiz standards created indie sensibilities and a D.I.Y. ethic, which, in turn, creviced out a permanent underground beneath contemporary culture. Somewhere, in remote facilities devoted to theoretical and applied Hedonics, the Brechtian fourth wall was breached and the audience became the circus. The most visible public manifestation of this woozy weltanschauung is Burning Man, the you-are-the-show arts festival held annually in a remote and lifeless desert in northern Nevada. Hell itself could be scarcely less inviting than the alkali playa the week before Labor Day, but last year sixty-thousand people crammed the gaudy temporary municipality of Black Rock City for seven days of Fat Tuesday. This year’s Satyricon came with an unsettling tinge of Altamont craziness, as suicide, freak weather, and the premature torching of the Man by a San Francisco performance artiste that didn’t seem particularly tetched by some scene anarchs. This individual was later caught by police allegedly carrying explosives near Grace Cathedral. Needless to say, the Los Angeles contingent in this Brigadoon is massive, from down-low showbiz types to suburban moms who come to spin flaming poi. L.A. Decom, a post-Burn street party staged late in mid-October under the Sixth Street Bridge downtown, drew thousands. Many had come down from San Francisco Decom days before and others would see the post-Burn season through to the end at San Diego Decom the week after. I was there too, taking my ease outside between labors of love one night when a dust storm obliterated everything around me. The Clash’s “Overpowered by Funk,” then cranking into my ears, seemed mercilessly literal. Decompression parties are Burning Man’s version of the Baraboo parade. Americans are devoted hobbyists, but even NASCAR fans eventually drink up and go home. One sign that Burning Man is more movement than pastime might be the party’s insistent refusal to ever really stop. Cre8tivity (hidden inside a former office building between Venice and Marina del Rey) has thrown some memorable blowouts in between troubles with authorities. At Dockweiler Beach, an informal crew known as Spirit’s Fire holds Saturday events irregularly throughout the winter with fire performers and DJs. The Terrakroma mob’s progressive-psychedelic roadshow recently appeared at this hippie A.I.P. Beach party, far from their usual haunts in an elegantly dilapidated warehouse on Pico near the long-empty Morrison Hotel. Politics and tradition push most of the really big parties downtown. These are the warehouse events that always attract vast, startlingly-dressed crowds without advertising. It seems few verminous, ill-lit corners of the Artist District haven’t sported at least one long line of freakish men and bombshell women over the past two winters. Once inside, most conventional social restraints relax. Not surprisingly for Angelenos, what transpires is discreet and decorous, if a bit uninhibited. Proceedings go on until after dawn or whenever a spectacular injury abruptly stops everything. Then there are after-parties already in progress at private houses or even privater permanent venues deep in warehouse Legoland. Wolfie, the eminent rock-breaks DJ, is a magnetically cheerful fellow who’s been throwing warehouse parties with the Hipgenesis crew for three years. “The first one was called ‘A New You,’” he remembered. “There was this pornographer who lives downtown, and in her building there was space for a one-time-only event. Carpets, pillows, everywhere. One huge hallway became the B room. When you came in, you had to write three things you needed on a sticker and wear it. A singer’s tag could read “I’m looking for a drummer, an agent and a web designer.” Everyone was hanging out to enjoy the music, but the conversations those tags sparked were just incredible. It did wonders for everyone who came to the party! All these people invented new things for themselves out of our event. There was a torrential rain that night, but everyone showed up. At one point, the power blew and everyone said Yay! It’s the underground! The lights went out! “At Burning Man,” Wolfie reminds us, “the art and the weather make a serious attempt to kill you.” True dat. The exhilaration that comes from riding a go-go cage perched swaying atop a convertible into a crowded dance floor isn’t seriously tempered by knowing that a sudden burst of speed or gust of wind could pulp one into infinity. The winter months allow Burners to test costumes, props, art and performance under optimal, almost studio, conditions. “There’s a lot of things we can’t do at Burning Man,” Wolfie is warming to the subject like a playa Fellini. “You can focus energy and make a budget mean something in a more controlled environment. Build the space, focus the energy. You get everyone out to an outdoor event, people settle in and are already where they’re going. There’s no shouting into the thunderstorm, like on the playa, with their crowds of people and a limitless number of things going on.” Civilians can get a taste of the experience at a new monthly party Hipgenesis is throwing at King King in Hollywood. The voodoo-themed circus on March 22 will be part of a take-it-aboveground trend in Burner culture of a scene still in the farthest Pellucidar of the deep underground. Its innermost recesses are the house-parties, province of a wastrel power elite who keep up with each other via e-mail and cryptic utterances on Tribe.net. That’s how I met “Mary-Ann.” An ever-smiling cheerleader beauty who radiates manic calm, Mary-Ann is the reigning queen of the Burner house-party. The “1970s porno” birthday bash she threw herself early this year was flash-flooded by rainfall, with guests spreading tarps and holding down tent flaps as an unlikely storm geysered the Hollywood Hills. “The house was specifically bought ’cos it doesn’t have curb appeal and looks like a lot of other houses,” says the hostess, drawing sleight-of-hand attention away from the riotous touches she and others put on behind the door. “Still, for two years we had people getting lost despite a blue neon sign with our street number on it! “I started throwing parties in the mid-1990s in Manhattan Beach. I’m not a Burner and have never been to Burning Man. I started throwing warehouse parties when they became too big for my house on the beach and I got invited to one that sounded very much like the ones I threw. That was the Blizzard of Oz, two years ago, the night I met my husband. People get into this community and it’s nothing they’ve ever seen or imagined, but what got me into it is that I was already expressing myself as a Burner would. It was like I’d been separated from it at birth! Up ’til that, I thought I was a drag queen trapped in a woman’s body!” Whether Burning Man proves the wave of anyone’s future, a mystery clown cult, a rehearsal for revolution or merely the American people burning while its Roman Empire fiddles must await the fine-ground judgment of time. The event’s L.A. office has already sent Brian Wilson’s melancholic longings for summer to the pop cult junkyard next to the Little Deuce Coupe. Summer, like the circus, is where you find it. NEW ANGELES MONTHLY MAR 2008 http://www.newangelesmonthly.com/index.php

Gone Underground

rockstar77 — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:03:33 GMT

A survey of local rock clubs suggests the pros are turning weirder By Ron Garmon Few smart people refuse an invite from Tequila Mockingbird. Though inbox and phone were crammed with Saturday night invites, lures, and inveiglements, no one else could’ve got me out of my house on the rain-sodden, deadline-riven eve of February 20th. The punkette aristo’s latest Fluffer party was being thrown at 01 Gallery downtown, but a (long) walk away for me. The South Los Angeles Street art space was already filling with a party-down cadre of art mutants I’d seen slurping Pinot onto half the cement floors in Gallery Row. The canvases ranged from the iconic (Overton Loyd, Gahan Wilson) to the witty (Gomez Bueno) to the trashy (the aptly named Mark Gash), and the vibe was getting looser by the second. Fellow CityBeat writer Mick Farren did a series of Bill Burroughs rants over electric guitar accompaniment, words and music walloped to mush by the concrete echo. The rest of it was like acidhead Ed Sullivan, with a chanteuse vying with a boy-ukuleleist for surrealism honors inside a room that was acoustically its own wah-wah pedal. DJs took over, the place began to fill with club kids, and a sweet thang tried to brace me for cocaine by the time I kissed the hostess goodbye and slowly made for the exit. Hollywood is certainly a town with no definite borders. Long March Through the Galleries: As the aboveground L.A. rock milieu contracts to traditional nodes, the underground continues to flex rude tentacles into the trendy, ever-growing local gallery scene. That amplified noise and cheap booze attract eyes to gallery merchandise is old news to curators, but the novelty of DJs fades quickly, so live music has begun to be imported, along with the artier local rockers. The Il Corral on Melrose is no more, but the curators reopened weirder than ever as Zero-Point in south Downtown. Echo Curio on Sunset will pick up the pace of their avant-rock events in mid-March with appearances by advanced likes of Cat Hair Ensemble and The Clang Quartet. As nearby Spaceland and the Echoplex grow into twin bastions of the indie industrial complex, hole-in-the-wall art galleries now replace the hole-in-the-wall dive bars as venues to see four-or-five bands for your five-or-ten bucks. A Man Named Carnage: Filmed during his frantic Monday nights at the old Il Corral, 40 Bands in 80 Minutes is director Sean Carnage’s compression-unto-pemmican of his stint as underground impresario. Bands like Faux for Real, Bipolar Bear and Dog Shit Taco did their gonzo stuff in condensed doses for his camera, like a three-day feedback festival experienced at B-movie speed. Carnage has transferred operations to Pehrspace, a gallery tucked inside an obscure strip-mall in Historic Filipinotown, where I saw Ema & the Ghosts. A tiny singer-songwriter whose odd, adorable ditties like “Whirly Kid” and “Rabbit Hole” bring to mind a milk-fed Syd Barrett, Ema paused briefly to introduce the empty stage as her “ghosts.” As she alternated on accordion and uke, a heavy-footed, mostly male crowd stood in awkward postures of fascination and love. Little could be further from removed from Sean’s 40/80 feedback howl, but the customers were poleaxed by a gifted performer just the same. Carnage understands this oft-unspoken taste for the arresting and the novel very well. As a dropout art history student at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University, he was decisively influenced by what he remembers as “these absolutely mind-blowing, life-altering Monday night concerts. I saw The Jesus Lizard, The Melvins, and Helmet all before they broke big and it totally changed by life. A friend and I published U.S. Rocker monthly for 10 years. The bottom fell out of the local rock economy and the paper folded. Cleveland had been a minor hub in the music industry and, until 1998, all the major companies were in Cleveland. In ’99, none were left.” Out here in “L.A., the center of the universe, and music commerce,” the puckish Mr. Carnage transplanted his experience, applying Midwestern horse sense to scene economics. “Bar owners have certain commercial expectations,” he notes. “All-ages spaces and galleries aren’t like that. They’re looking for a percentage that’s pretty relaxed. This is how I keep admission low-cost, and it relieves me of the responsibility of finding blockbuster bands. The dirty little secret of the underground is that there’s more money to be made off eccentric noncommercial bands than there is in the subpar commercial acts. At the very top, there’s all the difference in the world, but the very top isn’t large.” Mutaytor 2.0: As the house band for Burning Man, The Mutaytor enjoys an eminence approximately to that of Booker T. & the MG’s in the story of Memphis R&B. Like those soul grandfathers, these desert funkateers channel the swagger and sensibility of an entire milieu into one hyper-stylized musical signature. Poised as a Next Big Thing in 2005, the giant performance ensemble was hit badly when its founder was hauled up on Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” series early last year. The only conceivable way out was for the principal songwriting team of Buck Downs and Atom Smith to come up with a masterpiece, and that’s what has happened. "Yelling Theater in a Crowded Fire" is probably the most formidable work of art to come out of the Burning Man subculture so far, but that’s a secondary accomplishment. An unorthodox re-imagining of classic rock album structure provides the framework for a series of neutron-funk meditations on revolution, extinction, and fornication. A seamless musical Frankenstein with the heart of "What’s Going On" and the groin urges of "One Nation Under a Groove," this album is as much a raised fist for Change as all those ubiquitous Obama posters. “We probably started working on this record about two years ago,” Buck remembered, “Which coincided with probably the biggest touring year we ever had. Last year, with the media fallout, work began on it in earnest. Atom and I started dragging out our all-time favorite records, all the stuff considered the greatest, try to figure out how to make a very big and important sounding record.” The album will be available on the band’s site in a month, with proceeds from the first single to go to Burners Without Borders, a festival-related charity. Buck describes the difference between playing Black Rock City and L.A. as “like the difference between Holy Communion and the Last Supper. Everything we are goes back to that experience and context.” Heavy Purrsonae: Whatever Mutaytor’s travails, their catalog places them at the top of a ramshackle subculture. Providing the soundtrack for a cultural experiment is a handsome niche, but there are others as impressive. More traditional rock has not fallen on such degenerate times that a band like The Warlocks can’t release a masterpiece like last year’s "Heavy Deavy Skull Lover" even after shedding half their previous lineup. Dense and strontium-heavy even by the gravid standards of 2002’s "The Phoenix Album," this release’s monolithic drone is as comparable to trance or post-rock as Velvets-inspired drooginess. Their local disciples include Darker My Love, whose upcoming sophomore album was mixed by Tony Hoffer, who also did the honors for ex-labelmate Silversun Pickups’ apparently deathless "Carnavas." The latter, a durable slab of pavement psychedelia with two years on the charts, bids fair to become the "Frampton Comes Alive!" of indie rock. An equally startling venture into Sunset Boulevard Lysergia is Sabrosa Purr’s latest, "To the Crickets and the Ghosts." Will Love is still twisting his conventionally pretty rocker’s voice into razor-gargles and lynx-snarls, but the band has gotten slicker and glossier, making up in chills what they give away in stoner detachment. The insistence on big ’80s-metal riffs is most un-indie of them, but they contribute mightily to the force of songs like “Suckerpunch Kiss” and “The Lovely People.” The “Silver Lake scene” is probably a misnomer at this point. The hillside neighborhood has become too expensive for hardscrabble rocker kidz, as full as it is with respectably tin-eared bourgeois. What gives the name what cachet it still has is the undeniably brilliant haul of local indie rock still showcased at the Echo and Spaceland. Acts like The Minor Canon, Meho Plaza, and The Parson Red Heads would stand out in any assemblage and one like The Happy Hollows is no less than miraculous. The Hollows do upbeat pop of chipper angularity that makes light of weighty matters like the Panama Canal and the monsters hiding in your room. Vocalist Sarah Negahdari is cool as Kim Deal and squeals like her too, her little-girl ululations pumping yet more helium into the mix and giggling as the songs float away. Of course, The Pity Party invites Romper Room metaphors too, but ones from the Wednesday and Pugsley Addams end of the playground. This duo makes and distributes its own weird EPs, using whimsically recycled packaging and gnomic art to hint at the lovingly crafted and deeply strange sounds therein. “Dronebots and Peons for Eons and Eons,” to pluck one Dayglo trifle, is enchanting and willfully strange, with Maurice-Robert’s guitar rivet-slamming behind redheaded moppet Heisenfiel’s blankly tremulous vocals. The lady also plays drum and keys, often at once. Given a third appendage, I don’t doubt she’d throw in a kazoo or Sousaphone. The third show of their Monday residency was a gorgeous detonation in the Hindenburg manner. Film School was finishing up their polished shoegaze set in high style when I arrived and they were sent off with a brief roar of pleasure from the crowd, already drink-swollen and ornery. They clearly wanted to be Shown Something and, the Party provided it, plowing headlong into their set, the eldritch brio heightened by the singer’s flu-cracked voice. By the end, the guitarist walked off to blank faces, then thunderous applause as Heisenfiel’s head sank into her keyboard, making a minor chord that went on until she limped offstage. Punk as fuck. When I called up the lovely Ms. H a couple of days later, she was coughing in deathbed decrepitude and heartsick over a romantic matter. “Yesterday’s catharsis,” she croaked, the frog in her throat now volleyball-sized. “Monday’s show was the worst show I’d played in a long time. I was sick and distracted, but I have a sense of humor about it. It isn’t a tragedy, just a fact.” She and Maurice-Robert were theater kids who “like grew up together, did choir and music theater together and went our separate ways, he in New York and I here. We were talking long distance about a project we’d like to do, all very abstract. Neither of us had been in a band before.” Though clearly living up to experimentalist expectations, Julie insists “We have a lot of convention in us. Because of our backgrounds, we weren’t cool kids. We were listening to musical theater not Nirvana. We have a very structurally traditional aesthetic and do whatever we please tonally on top of that. We’re pretty conventional compared to some of the bands at the Smell and we were used to seeing the usual five-guy acts at Spaceland. So, we’re not crazy experimental. In some weird in-between land.” “To me,” Ms. H. summed, “the “Silver Lake scene” is the bands our friends are in and there’s no sonic cohesion in all of those. We play a lot with The Deadly Syndrome and Eskimohunter and Great Northern. Who am I leaving out? I dunno. We just all love each other and that’s what makes it what it is. It’s a happy fuzzy-feelings concept of a scene, which is kinda weird.” Published: 02/27/2008 http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/gone_underground/6756/

Maximum C&W

rockstar77 — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 08:55:01 GMT

Drive-By Truckers’ Hollywood hoedown at the Avalon By Ron Garmon 02/13/2008 “Why are men with clubs circling me?” A plangent question for the corner of Hollywood and Ivar on a Tuesday night, but the bald guy with the bullhorn wasn’t entirely accurate, since one of the two grinning security cops wielded only a video camera recording his spastic anti-Scientology harangue in front of the Hollywood Guaranty Building. “There’s no truth in this building! This religion was started by …” the overamped marble-mouth groped briefly for a suitable epithet, “a science-fiction writer!” Buoyed by this surreal invocation of standards (or verisimilitude, at least), I rounded the corner on Vine to the historic Palace – now known as The Avalon – only to endure a routine industry fuckaround at the door. We hillbilly boyz never stand when we can lean, so I absorbed much of the Pernice Brothers’ set through the venue’s elderly walls while chatting with some road guys from the North Mississippi Allstars. The Pernices were doing some choice wailing within for a sprinkle of boulevard scenesters and faux-rednecks within. Hundreds of their sartorial kinfolk were queued up outside, and the main floor was packed when the curtain went up on the All-Stars. Sons of fabled Memphis studio wizard Jim Dickinson, Luther and Cody woodshedded as thrash-blues punks DDT before forming the Allstars with bassist Chris Chew in 1996. A sophisticated amalgam of Delta blues, field hollers, Southern rock, and way-back-yonder funk that non-Dixie reviewers mistakenly term “raw,” their music is reportedly a tribute to the psychedelic stupor traditionally induced by corn squeezins, a beverage subtle as sake and lethal as Lithium. The long, epically-jamming set they uncoiled was pure busthead raga; a sustained and furious blast of roots-rutting boogie that set the crowd to swaying and feminine asses grinding along the balcony rail. The magnificent “Mean Ol’ Wind Died Down” seemed to go on for a lysergic eternity and “I’d Love to Be a Hippy” (off their new album Hernando) even longer, with Chew howling the vocals like Little Milton’s oversized ghost. The barflies dug on the paltry ambition of the title, chuckling and slopping their drinks with bongwater carelessness. I was sorry to see them go and sorrier still to endure the glacial wait for the headliners. Patrons got drunker, friendlier, flirtier, and more combative in roughly that order. The ambient social atmosphere began to feel like Bob’s Country Bunker out of the movie The Blues Brothers, and I saw more than one solitary male gnawing on his beer can, eyes glittering with distant mania. Finally, mellow sounds bubbled out from the stage and the lights went up on the Drive-By Truckers. Roots-rock revisionists whose 2001 Southern Rock Opera was a masterpiece of gumbo prog based on the career of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Truckers brought us all gently down with a little cry-in-your-beer psychedelia. The set slowly matured into a full-on three-guitar onslaught which faded into the screwhead old honk of “The Night GG Allin Came to Town,” a hilarious Randy Newmanesque account of Memphis reaction to the late punk rock cretin’s shoving a microphone up his ass in 1991. The audience was ecstatic by the end, letting loose a few Budokan whoops as it piled in front of the stage. I was lounging on a sofa along the back wall scribbling notes when one of the roadies from the Allstars dropped by. Regarding the tumult with some alarm, he leaned down and urged me treat the Allstars right in my review, heah? “Have no fear, Bubba,” I drawled. It’s a Yankeefied world out there and ol’ boys like us have to stick together. http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/maximum_c_w/6703/

The Mysterious Adventure of Irregular Rock

rockstar77 — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 16:56:53 GMT

Upsilon Acrux Turns Bottom of the Listings into Top of the World by Ron Garmon If you play the percentages and surf the weekly listings, you can still have a perfectly reasonable time as a rocker in Los Angeles. Your father’s Scene has many mansions still, most of them but a cymbal fling from Sunset Boulevard and tributaries, a length winding past big-box mainstream rock, indie boutiques and a gilt-edged boneyard of pay-to-play dreams. Any personable beard, nose-ring or knucklehead can romp this blest, oft-hymned strand and many do, capering in an Altman-sized milieu as fan, musician, hypester, or mutant compound of all three. The process is as inexorable as turning an underweight steer into Gaines-burgers, but a great deal more labor intensive. Then again, if you’re the kind of romantic who still seeks terminal wisdom in front of an amplifier, all this will begin to bore, and quickly. There will come a Monday when you’ve seen this month’s Spaceland residents a half-dozen times before their magic showcase opened; a state of jadedness typically setting in soon after buy-back guys at Amoeba start hailing you on the street as sworn kin. The odd names and dubious addresses in small print many inches down the Events column begin to take on hieroglyphic significance. Before long, you’re standing in a warehouse space with a crowd of sexy, unfamiliar freaks cheering on the fifteenth minute of an extended pedal effects experiment, as one single, epically-distorted note throbs with the rattletrap abandon that birthed psychedelic rock out of trackless suburbia and Yardbirds-stamped vinyl. Others of your newly-minted ilk stand in attitudes of prayer, even rapture, and soon you’re smiling at strangers, your hipster cred zeroed out. In theory, this tribal huddle around a barrel of burning feedback can be staged almost anywhere. As a practical matter, the requisite wide-open urban spaces and absentee neighbors push such gatherings into the downtown artist ghetto. The Il Corral clung to its ivy-covered hideaway near Normandie and Melrose for two years, staging noize mediations and art hijinks for a late-night crowd of puckish kids; the scene hilariously captured in the documentary 44 Bands in 88 Minutes. Their last show was in December, but the venue has since reopened in the warehouse maze near USC under the name Zero Point. Far less lucky and even further off the publicity grid was Zamikibo!, which nestled behind a blank storefront near Staples Center for a few months in 2005-6. A scrappy clientèle of mid-city punks, low-end gangstas and random crusted lunatics joined the braver elements in the under-21 party crowd for irregularly-scheduled no-wave performance art tarted up with the occasional onstage brawl. Patrons wobbled in and out of the draped side door, chugging 40s and cheerily slamming into each other, while couples necked and petted in the street outside. Approached from Pico down a long and lightless block, the place always looked to me more like a cavern of black Benzedrine bats than a nightclub, but I was made grandly welcome as the only rock journalist any there had ever seen. I knew it was too good to last and wasn’t surprised when a notice on the venue’s MySpace page announced the end. Located under a modest purple neon sign along a dim alleyway between Second and Third streets, this sedate all-ages hangout has lasted ten years on herbal tea and volunteerism. Avant-rock specialists like Deerhoof have played this converted auto barn, along with Carla Bozulich and the Black Heart Procession, with maudits like Polar Goldie Cats, Vomit Bomb and the estimable Hello Astronaut, Goodbye Television doing surreal turns before crowds of blissed-out youngsters. If there’s a prototypical Smell band, however, it’s Upsilon Acrux, “brute prog” artisans who fuse the junk parts and crazed imaginations of the venue’s art-noize aesthetic into tight precision-instrumental rock like Booker T. and the MGs let loose in King Crimson’s back catalog. Formed in San Diego at about the same time the Smell opened, UA had already moved to L.A. when their incendiary Volucris Avis Dirae-Arum was released to little notice in 2002. Tracks like “It Takes a Nation of Unicorns (To Hold Us Back)” and “When Satan Ruled the Ocean Jesus Made My Fish Tank Boil” were built around the clockwork smash of two drummers, with short Uzi-bursts of guitar and Moog lines coruscating around the stop-and-start din. The follow-up, Galapagos Momentum, came four years later after a drastic overhaul that left guitarist Paul Lai the only original member. Released on Cuneiform Records (home to such noteworthy imponderables as Birdsongs of the Mesozoic), the album is a masterpiece of proggy density and Stax-Volt compression. Losing a drummer made the rhythms less busy, while the guitar lines are sharper and more aggressive, recalling Vini Reilly’s ethereal breaks on the 1979 post-punk milestone The Return of the Durutti Column. Just don’t call it “avant” or “experimental.” “We’re now a more straightforward type of rock band,” says Paul Lai, “It’s like metal and rubber – we’ve just enough melody to give a grip.” I’m sitting in UA’s rehearsal space on E. Seventh Street with Lai and drummer Chris Mezler, as the guitarist unpacks what sounds like an old complaint “You saw us recently and it’s probably more rock in our presentation than we’ve ever been. We’re what rock would theoretically sound like without all the bullshit repetition.” That Acrux can make do with all that wiggy ya-ya was evident during the Smell’s weeklong anniversary festivities last month. The hour was late and the crowd much attenuated by a massive rainstorm, but a few score patrons stood sopping and enchanted by the band’s aloof professionalism and headlong attack. UA is looser and bluesier than before, but the refusal to truckle to indie neurosis or catchpenny pop lends their live act a ferocity that shreds the easy critical equation of skill with subtlety. “This band is about no compromise,” Paul is emphatic, “nobody outside this band has any say in what music we play. I don’t know why music has fallen behind other art forms in this. Whatever the vanguard is ... ” Paul lets his voice trail and shrugs, “It’s definitely not bringing in a paycheck. I’m not even bitching, it’s just a fact. This is my fuckin’ life and I see it on a daily basis.” If Upsilon Acrux is simply one of an imposing number of local bands that make up the Smell’s tonal universe, Paul nevertheless sees his band as part of an elite. “This is a place where me and my friends’ bands play,” he says matter-of-factly. “If there’s a place I’d call our home, it would be the Smell. I think we’ve played there every year of the last ten. If you’re an L.A. band that’s never played the Smell, I don’t take you seriously and don’t think you’re a real band.” Indeed. If the Smell is to be remembered as the CBGBs of Generation Dubya (likely), Paul’s lofty dismissal of the local rock power elite is an essential (and essentially snotty) assertion of scene identity. It’ll look good as a pull-quote in the liner notes of next decade’s Smell boxed set. NEW ANGELES MONTHLY Feb 2008 available here- http://www.newangelesmonthly.com/index.php and here- http://www.newangelesmonthly.com/pickup.html

The Dirty South's Gonna Do it Again

rockstar77 — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 01:04:05 GMT

This Super Tuesday, America is Dixie by Ron Garmon A proud Dixie expatriate and lifelong political junkie, I’m seldom less pleased to be away from home than the weeks before Super Tuesday. Although first coined to describe the three contests it took the doomed Fritz Mondale to put away his opposition in 1984, the ballyhoo term came to refer to yet another of the underhanded means the back half of the Mason-Dixon line uses to rig political life in the Republic to its favor. By 1988, the idea of frontloading the primaries of eight ex-Confederate states onto the first Tuesday in February looked good to Southern Democrats eager to catapult Al Gore into the White House. The net result was nomination of a Joe Friday cop from Massachusetts named Dukakis who lost the entire South to a snowbird Texan pundits now carefully distinguish as “Bush Senior.” Again and again, we’re asked by benighted non-Southrons why we do these things to America. Well, the short answer is we hate you. Events at Appomattox Courthouse figure into this. For a few nuances more, you can grapple with the curious historical paradox of a defeated, insular and violent people coming to dominate so much of American culture. Certainly, the region’s political literature breathes little save defiance, from George Fitzhugh’s antebellum tracts asserting white supremacy and slavery as a natural order, to the twilight musings of I’ll Take My Stand; a 1930 manifesto dedicated to preservation and extension of the Dixie way of life by the usual whatever means necessary. Poet John Crowe Ransom urged the region to go to cultural war against Yankeedom to subvert it. “It could be nasty,” he cooed with ancient ferocity. “And it could be effective.” Ransom’s wider of the mark elsewhere, declaring, “No Southerner ever dreams of Heaven, or pictures his Utopia on earth without providing room for the Democratic Party.” This was before the GOP inherited the regional Heaven’s mandate of white supremacy in accordance with the divisive and dirty Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon, a Californian so little revered in the South that Watergate-era House Republican counsel (and diehard Tricky Dickist) Fred Thompson had to chloroform his campaign well in advance of this Super Tuesday. The onetime Tennessee senator (and Law & Order TV actor), trailing badly in all polls and a narcolept on the stump, swore he’d let South Carolina decide his fate and withdrew after Palmetto State voters found him ineffective and insufficiently nasty on January 26. Last Saturday’s results leave doubts about how the South will jump in the February 5 contest, touted as “Giga Tuesday,” “Tsunami Tuesday” or “the Tuesday of Destiny,” but sadly diluted of its traditional Southern Comfort charm by the electoral bulk of California, New York, New Jersey, Minnesota and others. On the Democratic side, John Edwards, the one Southerner still standing, came in a gutshot third in a primary he’d won in 2004. The onetime North Carolina senator’s campaign is dying in a slow-motion hail of irrelevance and his post-Tuesday death agonies will be upstaged by more bloodletting between frontrunners Hillary and Obama. S.C. Republicans likewise deserted Bible and hearth in preferring crazy-mean Arizonan John McCain to friendly Arkansas preacher Mike Huckabee, whose own post-Iowa disintegration is leaving any stop-McCain movement to Yankee moneybags Mitt Romney and “America’s mayor” Rudy Giuliani, two candidates with nastiness to spare. Fatalism is big among we of the Blue Ridge hills, and Larry Sabato seems to regard this campaign season with all the enthusiasm of Pickett’s threadbare infantry looking at Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. I share an Appalachian background with Dr. Sabato, oft-quoted political guru, University of Virginia professor and director of the Center for Politics at Mr. Jefferson’s campus, and was unsurprised at his characteristic bluntness, particularly regarding the Clintons: “There’s some Clinton fatigue even among Democrats when it comes to Bill Clinton,” he allowed via e-mail. “He’s lost his temper more times than we can count this election season. It has caused even friends of the Clintons to ask: What is Bill going to do in and out of the White House with Hillary as president? Still, I’d have to call Bill Clinton a tremendous asset for his wife. It’s doubtful that Hillary could win the White House this year without Bill. Most of her support is derivative of backing for his presidency.” Nepotism is nothing new in Dixie politics, and the sight of relatives of great men helping themselves was old news when First Brother Billy Carter cashed his first paycheck from Libya. Of course, Hillary less resembles the father of Billy Beer than she does Lurleen Wallace, wife of Alabama Governor George Wallace whom the celebrated bigot engineered to succeed him in office. Bill’s attempt to pull a Lurleen is characteristically bold and infinitely better thought out than Mayor Rudy’s parade of expensive miscalculations, the latest being the 9/11 icon’s banking of the rest of his slender chances on the Florida primary. “Giuliani’s adopted a one-state strategy,” noted the professor. “So, he either wins Florida outright or he is toast. I doubt even a close second will suffice. Rudy made a major strategic error in not contesting New Hampshire, which might easily have worked. Rudy, not McCain, could have won NH. Rudy is trailing in the latest Florida polls, but we’ll see.” New Hampshire was not without portents for Senator Obama, whose campaign discovered an alarming difference between exit poll results favoring their man and the tallied ballots. Lefty blogs cried fraud, but this old Dixie trick was first noticed in Douglas Wilder’s narrowly 1989 successful run for Virginia governor. Majority-race voters wishing to be thought “liberal” often express preference for a black candidate to pollsters after pulling the lever for white supremacy minutes before in the voting booth, a simple trick of grits-eating hypocrisy Sabato calls “racial leakage. This phenomenon could easily reemerge in a major way in 2008. I’m convinced that it is one of several reasons why ALL the polls were wrong – and way wrong – in New Hampshire. Polls have error margins, but rarely if ever have nine first-rate surveys all been incorrect in the same direction, and massively so. Obama will have to sweat out every contest, at least in states that are overwhelmingly white.” If this bit of home-fried nastiness travels well out West, Obama’s Golden State wizards would do well to disregard poll numbers out of L.A.’s paler precincts. Worst of all, the entire purpose of Super Tuesday, the foreshortening of the process in favor of the South and conservatism, looks to have done a massive botch. The results likely won’t pick a winner for either party or even do much more than bump an additional one or two candidates from the race. Sabato, whose recent book, A More Perfect Constitution, offers a fistful of unorthodox mechanic’s solutions to the current partisan political deadlock, points out an obvious choke-point. “The system we have set up for presidential selection is arbitrary, in that a couple of small, unrepresentative states have far too much influence (IA and NH).” Out of this artificially maintained, rotten-borough rural bias has come the contest facing the electorate next Tuesday. Says Sabato, “Now we’ve created a monstrosity on Feb. 5th – a national primary that has too much on one day. No candidate can visit and get to know 22 states in a week, much less communicate with 150 million people in a useful way.” Meanwhile, the South’s long-term project of remaking the Republic in its image will suffer another loss, as Super Tuesday will leave them with no special bargaining power and a plague-wagon load of lifeless favorite-sons. The Reagan Age conservatism upon which it banked so heavily is turning into a historical curio everywhere else, and Dixie theocrats command less and less attention even within the movement’s besieged ranks. The long multi-generational task of avenging Sherman’s March will await the coming of another and worse day for America. Run in LA CITY BEAT 2008-01-31 Cover: "Ron Garmon's Southern Strategy" http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/the_dirty_south_s_gonna_do_it_again/6653/

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Wing Nut

rockstar77 — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:07:23 GMT

California's Duncan Hunter blames the media - the right-wing media By Ron Garmon Considered as spectacle, Campaign 2008 takes on all the dirty fun of an old-timey horror movie. Not high art like Salò, nor Freddy Krueger chaff, but one of those nasty bits of 1970s gothic sporting an ill-assorted cast of unlovable character actors getting butchered in imaginative ways by a chortling Vincent Price. Alongside the gory post-Iowa demises of Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, the lonesome death-by-media-freeze of Rep. Duncan Hunter is a lurid cutaway from the main action. A Vietnam vet who first won his San Diego district in the Reagan landslide of 1980 by the sturdy device of accusing his liberal Democrat opponent of being soft on defense. Hunter is a craggy, telegenic exponent of homey far-right semiotics he calls “GOP Classic.” His main influence on this political cycle was an insistence on a double fence along the U.S. border with Mexico. A sort of Great Wall of Aztlán, this project’s latest victory is the 2006 “Secure Fence Initiative” guaranteeing nearly 700 miles of barrier with the Department of Homeland Security in a position to waive all U.S. law in its construction. While one might reject this as crabbed atavism that meets terror by surrendering to it, there’s little doubting the appeal to the nativists and Birchers of the Sunbelt GOP. Hunter’s skill at pounding war drums made him chairman of the House Armed Services committee in 2002, which in political terms should’ve enhanced his hearth cred as defender of values and nation. Instead, Hunter got folded into the 11-card monte of the early Republican field and took but 1 percent of the Iowa vote. ABC News dropped him from the TV debate roster the Saturday before the New Hampshire primary and Fox followed suit on Sunday. Ron Paul was likewise excluded on Sunday and a mob of Paulists chased Fox pundit Sean Hannity out of a Manchester eatery. I laughed to hear Hunter call network news execs “knuckleheads” when I called him up before the Michigan primary. “They [voters] had seen me in all the debates up to that point and I wanted them to understand I hadn’t quit the race,” the congressman snorted. “I thought it was a dumb decision on the part of the corporate media with the election in 48 hours. The two debates were held Saturday and Sunday and voters went to the polls on Tuesday and it made them look bad. Fox’s trademark motto is, ‘We Report, You Decide.’ They now need to put a comma in there and the words, ‘Unless We Decide Early.’ The guys who pulled the trigger on that at ABC and Fox did a disservice.” To hear powerful right-wing politicians bitch openly in Noam Chomsky terms of a “corporate media” is to come out blinking at the other end of a funhouse mirror. Nor did Hunter fail to notice his rivals had jackrolled him of his principle issue. “When the debates started at the Reagan Library 12 months ago, my first statement was, ‘We needed to build a double border fence,’” he continued. “The last time I looked at a piece of Romney …” – and here my tape caught a delicate pause indicating a noun’s mutation from something much cruder and more accurate – “literature, a mailer,” he continued, “along with the last TV ad I’ve seen by Mr. Giuliani, there’s a tug of war. It’s between elements of the party loyal to corporations and multinational corporations, which have no allegiance to America, and that part of the party like the area of Michigan I’m campaigning in now; lots of family-owned businesses.” Hunter finished behind “Undecided” in Michigan and trailed badly in Nevada, a state so much like his San Diego district, he quit the race rather than soldier on to the February 5 California primary. I called Roy Tyler, an affable Texan who was GoHunter08’s national communications director, to see if he had any heresy to impart. “I’ll give ya my viewpoint and not that of the Hunter campaign,” he drawled. “New Hampshire’s the first primary and they have a tradition that goes back many years, the whole idea being that a man with little money and little known can go toe-to-toe with anyone because of the size of the market. They made the decision of who could be heard in probably the most important debates in that campaign. After that, people all over the country thought we were gone. Fox has always been touted with, at minimum, fair and balanced; and along with most conservatives, we thought of Fox as being on our side. We weren’t heard because Fox didn’t report on us.” Roy’s a pro and not given up on politics, however. He’s signed on to Duncan D. Hunter’s campaign as the incumbent’s son vies to inherit Dad’s seat in Congress in November. One thing is undisputed: 2008 is nothing if not a season of change. LA CITY BEAT 1-24-08 http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/the_loneliness_of_the_long_distance_wing_nut/6617/

U.S. Out of the Upper Midwest

rockstar77 — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 08:53:58 GMT

The Lakota Sioux start their own country ~ By RON GARMON ~ Look at me, see if I am poor, or my people either. The whites may get me at last, as you say, but I will have good times till then. You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hard-tack, and a little sugar and coffee. –Sitting Bull As we see, Sitting Bull didn’t do spin. Some of the celebrated Hunkpapa war chief’s modern-day Lakota cousins minced few words in taking their First Nation out of the United States last month. Four members of Lakotah Freedom Delegation, a small cadre of leaders from AIM (American Indian Movement, a longtime foe of U.S. policy towards indigenous people), declared the new nation of Lakotah out of treaty land in five states. Actor and longtime activist Russell Means declared, “This is a historic day for our people. United States colonial rule is at an end!” Critics back in the former Dakotas called it an “empty gesture,” with the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader making clucking sounds about “treaties their forefathers signed” in their coverage’s lead paragraph and right-bent bloggers everywhere dismissed the announcement as a stunt. LFD’s withdrawal letter laid out a tale of worthless treaties, rigged justice, stolen resources, and brute fraud, dating from the first agreement made with the Jefferson administration in 1805. Stunt or not, later visits with respectful delegations from Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, and South Africa drove the seriousness of the matter home. Last September’s non-binding Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples upheld the right to self-determination, even to the point of voiding existing legal arrangements. This underreported human rights advance, claims Lakotah Freedom, was a chance to nudge a generations-long struggle a necessary step forward. The Declaration was opposed by the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but 143 other nations supported it. I called up LFD and spoke to Canupa Gluha Mani (Duane Martin, Sr.) longtime AIM activist, veteran of the 1973 Wounded Knee standoff and one of the four delegates sent to Washington. “They can kill us if they want to,” he shouted, outrage venting through the receiver. “They can assassinate us. However, it’s up to them to understand what they’ve been doing since the treaties were signed since 1803. Our people have been living up to it subsequently to this God-forsaken day. The First Nations people wouldn’t have to do this if the colonial government in Washington lived up to its obligations. They lie, so we have to endure Third World conditions with five or six families living in a two-bedroom house. They never live by the treaties or else they would’ve stopped the flow of illegal alcohol coming onto the Pine Ridge reservation in June. That’s how much they live up to treaty. It’s an insult. We were promised a treaty ‘as long as the grass grows’ and we get this? Don’t be going into Iraq and killing all the poor people only to turn it into a big Indian reservation like they have here.” The sovereignty campaign claims a mandate from elders dating from the mid-1970s, but the project has its local critics, like Rosebud Sioux chairman Rodney Bordeux, who officially disavowed the whole enterprise. Means preemptively dismissed conservative tribal opposition as “Vichy Indians” and others talk grandly of issuing passports and driver’s licenses. The group’s website regularly posts updates, one confirming the bizarre rumor that Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin is considering recognizing Lakotah and another denying a rather more plausible-sounding tale of Dubya threatening to cut off federal assistance to communities within it. The Delegation released a map of the newly liberated zone on December 29, the 117th anniversary of the U.S. massacre at Wounded Knee. Expropriated chunks of five Plains states put physical boundaries on what was until now only a state of mind. Whatever else it is, this invitation to the Lakota Sioux to imagine an independent existence in a country less riven by violence and oppression is a brilliant stroke of conceptual politics, however slow the payoff. “This is the beginning to rebirthing,” LFD liaison Naomi Archer put it. “We’re not expecting the world to chime in tomorrow with full recognition. What we do expect is for Lakotah to be recognized as a nation. We’re indigenous, not a fraction within something larger.” “The majority of the people who think free, get it,” chuckled Mani. “The others who don’t, don’t. They love the conditions being inflicted on them. We encourage all nations in the western hemisphere to rise up and get back to traditional methods of reality. They can be free, they can do the same thing, but only if they stop relying on the enemy’s way of doing things. “ Run in LA CITY BEAT 01-03-08 (cover- "Ron Garmon on the Reservation")

Awestruck in Long Beach

rockstar77 — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 03:34:49 GMT

Acres of Books meets the twilight zone ~ By RON GARMON ~ Squeezed into oblivion by big-box rivals and the Internet, the independent bookshop will likely become a last-century curio before much longer. The puzzling part is how few appear to even notice. L.A.’s indie bookstores, once conveniently spaced literary oases dotting neighborhoods across the county, have now shrunk to a few great names and chance holdouts. Of the former, the best-remembered of all may well shut its doors after many thought it was already gone. A storied heap of print and paper arrayed behind a New Deal moderne storefront, Acres of Books has occupied the same cavernous address at 3rd and Long Beach Boulevard since 1960. That was 26 years after Cincinnati book baron Bertrand Smith relocated to Pacific Avenue in Long Beach and one year since he gave the city a two-volume facsimile of the Gutenberg Bible. Time passed, the postwar boom faded, municipal memories lapsed. Smith himself died in 1963, but the hangar-like retail space remained in family hands, with granddaughter-in-law Jackie Smith today running the shop she’s worked in since 1976. Stark lettering on the outside walls announce STILL OPEN and a few intense sobersided folk squeeze past each other in the aisles, alone in their stern bibliophile quests. Jackie and I sit in her upstairs office, a rickety eyrie perched over long, narrowing lines of absurdly high shelves. The skylight lends a dust-glazed glow, like a cozy mid-afternoon in Borges’ Library of Babel. The building looks ageless and, to Jackie, might as well be. “There are two theories,” she laughs. “The place was built in 1911 and 1922, but either way, it’s old. It was a wholesale market and then a car dealership, but when Bertrand Smith bought it, it was a Western bar and dance hall. Evidence of the western bar is the big painting in the music room, the cowboy wallpaper in the bathroom.” Acres of Books’ current woes don’t derive from market conditions and technological anomie, as much as the upscale condo-loft boom and a City Redevelopment Agency that wants the retailer gone. Again. “In 1982, we went through the same thing when they built the mall catty-corner over there, which has since been torn down and rebuilt. It was enclosed, like a prison. No windows on the outside, just a big brick megalith sitting there. Montgomery Ward’s and Buffum’s both went out of business and the whole mall just kind of crashed. There was a huge flap at the time and many, many people came to our defense. We got close to 10,000 letters of support. We went to the City Council and then the economy dumped.” No such campaign is materializing this time, despite the city naming Acres of Books a historic landmark in 1990 and the mass die-off of bookshops generally. There were reports of possible eminent domain seizure of the property, but Jackie claims the Redevelopment Agency is pursuing the cheaper policy of “making us offers we can’t refuse,” while demanding costly renovations. A collapsed real estate market saved them before, why not again? “I don’t know,” she allowed, “It could happen. In the meantime, what have we got around us? They’ve destroyed the street, there’s vacant lots here, empty buildings there. Why come all the way down here and fight traffic just to shop at the same stores you find everywhere else? We have a tremendous client base, but it’s amazing the number of our fans who think we’re gone already.” Failing a happy outcome amid general catastrophe, how long has her famous bookshop got? “A day to a year,” she smiled. “My husband and I spend a couple of days a week looking at properties to move to. I’d reopen it even if it was a Bertrand Smith’s Backyard of Books.” But what about this collection? “Books still come up with Pop’s price in them and he’s been dead since ’63, but they’ve been sitting there waiting for somebody to want them. We couldn’t do that in a smaller space, we’d have to keep the stock current. You couldn’t be sitting at the desk and hear someone say “Yes!” from the back. “It’s a way of life I don’t think will ever come back again,” she sighed. “It’s just gonna be something that’s gonna be gone.” After we spoke, I surrendered to ancient vice and roamed the stacks. Ray Bradbury once wrote of this place: “What could be more romantic than a million books?” At that moment, moving in the pale haze of the Fiction Room, nothing came to mind. Instead, some few billion words sang between yellowing covers around me like decaying music of the spheres. I felt like awestruck bibliophile Burgess Meredith in that famous episode of The Twilight Zone, only there would never be time enough at last. LA CITY BEAT 12-20-07

Miracle on 61st Street

rockstar77 — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 08:05:16 GMT

Fear and Exhilaration at the Southern California Anarchist Conference ~ By RON GARMON ~ The Library for Social Sciences and Research sits just into the Sixties on South Vermont, an area few would cite in defense of President Bush’s “Ownership Society.” A speck of mural-rusty cheer in a uniformly bleak urban landscape, the library took on an additional layer of gaudiness last weekend, as more than 200 mostly young activists filed in for the Southern California Anarchist Conference. It was a rare taste of both unscripted politics and revolutionary affirmation. Sponsored by several local groups, including Anarchist Black Cross, the AK Press, and the South Central branch of CopWatch L.A., the event was capped Sunday, December 16, with punk rock and polemics staged by Apex Union at Centro se Accion Popular across town in Taylor Junction. AU’s Rafael Camacho, a non-anarchist who promotes movement-related music events, described the conference as having little central planning outside of asking fellow SoCal radicals what they wanted to talk about and constructing a program around that. The result was not your father’s left-wing protest gathering, not that ghosts from movements past didn’t rattle a bone or two. Wan, middle-aged missionaries from oldtimey splinter parties like the Spartacists stood outside seeking to engage passersby with Cold War-era micro-Leninism. The kids swarming in and out gave even less attention to such three-card monte dialectics than I, an ex-sectarian who could’ve given these sadsacks pointers on technique. Such top-down midget totalitarianism is, to them, part of the problem. Anarchy, in practice and theory, is the new mode and ideal among an increasingly radical chunk of young America. This impulse will likely grow stronger once the consequences of the most recent economic crash make themselves felt. Frank, a comrade from the Central Valley, spied my tape recorder just after I brought it out and insisted on being interviewed. He stood behind two tables of eccentric homemade leaflets skirted by a banner reading, “Cook cops not meth, rob banks not each other.” Like most politicians jumping at microphones, Frank cared little for answering questions. “We’re out here at the conference supporting working-class self-organization and direct action against various systems of domination that exist in society,” he said forcefully. Why Modesto? I asked. “There’s a great deal of poverty out there and poverty leads to crime.” Frank’s face tensed a bit, like a Fight Club hardcase. “Just like everywhere else.” Most others around me seemed intent on materializing an unsupervised society in miniature. Small multiracial groups of close-huddled youngsters sat outside verbally groping toward ways of talking, realizing their own part in a cooperative commonwealth. All was that special fun-with-a-purpose sense of good cheer that always surrounds youthful activism. Passengers on MTA buses hurtling past glared in hostile disbelief at the harmony and goodwill vibes flowing out of the building into a street little used to it. Friday afternoon, many stopped to hear Comrade Lala of the Black Riders Liberation Party lead a floor debate on revolutionary violence. The BLRP, Black Panther-inspired militants active in South Central and Watts since the mid-1990s, is the target of a gang injunction, with three of its leadership being held downtown on undisclosed “weapons conspiracy” charges. One might expect agitprop defiance, but the lovely comrade instead outlined the traditional closely reasoned Panther case for neighborhood self-defense against the police in soft and honeyed tones. Finally, one brother from the floor asked, “Who’s up there with King and Gandhi who ever used violence?” Others of his herbivorous kind spoke against violence in the home and streets as manifestations of a system itself based on violence and repression. Still more demanded to know what right was ever wrested by force and the matter was tabled without rancor. Practical matters of organizing affinity groups (proven effective in staging street action during the ’99 WTO protests in Seattle) and revolutionary self-defense were taken up in later sessions. The latter was well-handled by Sensei Santo, a squat, heavily inked fighter who demonstrated various self-defense methods for breaking chokeholds, pulling arms from sockets, and disabling larger attackers. Friday ended with two original Black Panthers joining an animal-rights activist and an Internet anarchist to regale the young ’uns with tales of their stints as political prisoners. Late for the Saturday session, I was legging down South Vermont when an LAPD patrol car blocked the curb in front of me and two smiling officers emerged with news that I was, in fact, in South Central and could be very easily murdered. Since cops in my downtown ’hood regularly make the same helpful confession, I was little troubled, but thanked them for their trouble. In the main room, a brother was inaudibly droning some kind of historical lecture over a lunchroom din as conferees tucked into free vegetarian eats. Images of Bakhtin and Lucy Parsons Gonzales (widow of Haymarket anarchist Albert Parsons) flickered mysteriously on a nearby screen and I got the idea the latter was being posthumously heckled for insufficient feminism. There followed talks on whites organizing resistance to white supremacist groups like the Minutemen and Know Your Rights training from CopWatch. In the main room, some old-school Panthers were staging a reunion, with gimlet-eyed badasses like Ronald Elder Freeman prophesying in bone-yard terms of a political near-future of post-capitalist disaster, imperial reaction, and the likely martyrdom of many there. The collegiates and street kids alike looked awed, delighted even. Hours later at an underground party far away, I unexpectedly encountered a pretty conference attendee, looking quite out-of-context in panties and fox ears. “That guy I was with thought you was a narc!” she giggled. I suggested she tell her boyfriend to stop acting like he’s in jail already and went back to packing some excellent sativa. I had to spark up where the security guard couldn’t see. LA CITY BEAT 12-20-07 (Cover- "Anarchy in South L.A.")

Old Wave

rockstar77 — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 06:34:59 GMT

VHS or Beta rewinds to the ’80s at the El Rey ~ By RON GARMON ~ Sonic overspill from the crazed multi-decibel finale of Afrobots whipped up Wilshire like banshees out of a barrel. I was standing outside the El Rey Theatre on Sunday, December 2, slapping my pockets for mislaid tix and thus experienced it less as performance than melodic detonation. This local electro-dub haymaker rocked venue and street alike with a nice sense of impartiality, making passersby smile as Angelenos will when they get something for nothing. Inside, a sprinkling of early arrivals milled and stared pensively. Overwhelmingly young and pretty they were, and adept, even by Hollywood standards, at posing decoratively. These kids ranged themselves alongside the few aging hipster exquisites scattered across the ballroom like last decade’s character actors. So did cool regard cool as music rattled from the PA and ambient social temperatures sank to suitably reptilian levels. Persistent plonks and thuds focused attention on the curtain and it soon went up on Foreign Born. This San Francisco quintet moved to L.A. in 2004 soon after formation, self-releasing two EPs before Dim Mak brought out their debut full-length On the Wing Now last August. If there’s such a thing as optimistic shoegazery, these fellows are its avatars, making introspective, dramatic music that caught the ear of the crowd at once and sent more than a few dancing with gawky and uncool grace. Gangly mainman Matt Popeiluch presided over the lysergic uplift with courtly aplomb, bidding friends like Luke Top and Cameron Mesirow (from Glasser) onstage for a spine-chilling rush at “Union Hall.” FB’s set ended in a welter of jangle and happy vibes from the audience, as the band stepped off to cheers. Beauty and ferocity count for as much in rock as in any other brutal love and VHS or Beta deal out both with fine impartiality. Formed in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1997, the band was distinguished early by an original weld of hard-driving postpunk and acid house that moved the stickwood jades of indie rock to dance. Their style is distinctive, but the sheer propulsion recalls the ’80s dance new wave of Duran Duran and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Then, of course, there’s the brooding appeal of vocalist Craig Pfunder, a lanky, pretty fellow with icy charisma and credible Lizard King pretensions. “Is that a boy or a girl?” swooned a pixieish blonde on my left as the curtain went up. Soon the music sent her to a bright and bouncy place beyond such dull care and she was soon bounding happily across the floor as if spring-loaded. She wasn’t alone. This crowd came to party and VHS or Beta could’ve whipped them widdershins into the previous Saturday night without half trying. Instead, they gave 100 percent and set the room on a goodtime arc that was steadily rising when some Cheerful Charlie clambered onto the stage and stood there grinning at us like a leftover jack o’ lantern. From offstage waddled a meaty security cop who fetched the giggling sot by his collar and hurled him face-first into the audience with an air of hammy contempt. Three of his corn-fed confrères waded into the audience, nabbed the unprotesting fellow, and paraded him through the lobby and down Wilshire as if a cell awaited him at Gitmo. That broke the spell and customers began streaming out the door. The headliners had to sweat to make up for the buzzkill and their chewy, ominous music cranked louder and more frantic than before. The party came to life again and the quintet delivered a long, intense, fiercely cool set for those who remained. After a de minimus delay, VHS or Beta filed back in for the encore, winding up the evening with the incendiary sentiments of “Night on Fire.” Thankfully for the elegant old theater, this was not taken as incitement. LA CITY BEAT 12-06-07 (cover: "Ron Garmon Dance Party") http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=6594&IssueNum=235

Ya Ho Wa 13 Has Risen From the Grave

rockstar77 — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 21:49:23 GMT

Fun for kids, senior moments for hippies at the Echoplex ~ By RON GARMON ~ Her name was Mecca, and her Delta-bumpkin dress twisted in stylish frenzies as she danced. Whatever the psycho-dramatic issues at stake with her blonde moppet partner, the furious conviction of their performance at Echoplex stopped everything else going on. It was abandon and ravishment contained in choreography that led imperceptibly into the syncretic pandemonium of the night’s opening act. Psychedelic Pecksniffs might dismiss Hecuba as a beat-heavy update of first-wave L.A. hippie-rock, like Sweetwater or Kaleidoscope, but such revered ancestors are simply more chunks in a cauldron already brimming with punk, prog, hip-hop, and the kind of bracing dada typified by pixie-ish Isabelle Albuquerque cooing, “I taste the black/I taste the white/I taste the brown/I taste the Filipino.” Indeed. They shut down far too soon and we were left to our devices. The heavily-advertised rebirth of local 1970s psych-curiosities Ya Ho Wa 13 fetched a sizable haul of Hollywood neo-hippies and their crusty elders on Friday, November 16. There were many friends in the crowd, along with some accouterments of Burning Man subculture. The massage table and (V.I.P. only) chill space looked like bric-a-brac displaced from the Mutaytor show uncoiling many blocks west on Sunset at Safari Sam’s, leaving much slack to be picked up by hipsters, stoners, and assorted beards. Onstage, Entrance mainman Guy Blakeslee was taking care to set his microphone’s reverb at Tomb of Zuul levels, which made a hallucinogenic smear of between-song banter. The set was a long series of heavy psych jams, varied at intervals with Blakeslee’s shot-dog ululations echoing dismally off the concrete. Outside, a scabby 1970s animated version of Alice in Wonderland flickered on stretched canvas like a low-budget acid trip. Veteran rockers took things over from there. Sky Saxon had worked with a spin-off version of Ya Ho Wa 13 long after his brief fame as lead singer of the epochal 1960s proto-punk quartet the Seeds, his career bookending L.A. psychedelic rock’s weird history from first proto-punk snarl to last cosmic sigh. Roky Erickson’s recent stand at the El Rey showed off old-skool psyche’s still-potent charms to advantage, but Saxon just appeared tired and the hard-boy sneer of 1967 is now thinned to a conversational wheeze. Outfitted with a new band (featuring the ubiquitous ex-Germ Don Bolles on drums), Saxon presided absently over distended versions of Seeds hits like “Pushing’ Too Hard” and “I Can’t Seem to Make You Mine,” pausing at intervals to jabber obscurely of the cosmos and Arthur Lee. The great man eventually shut down to make way for the headliners. YHW 13 released nine albums worth of “spontaneous music” back in their brief mid-’70s heyday, as house band for the Source religious cult. The Source operated a trendy Hollywood vegetarian restaurant of the same name, and the albums they gave away for a dollar each at the eatery now command exorbitant prices on the vinyl underground. The cult slowly disintegrated when the leader, Father Yod, died following a 1975 hang-gliding accident after the Source cult decamped for Hawaii, but YHW 13’s un-nameable, ad-hoc combination of tribal drumming, folkie fervor, ecstatic chants, and deep-space musings borrowed from German kosmiche was too strange to stay buried forever. The catalysts for this unlikely comeback were Saxon’s tireless interest in the cult’s music and message plus publication of the Family’s memoir, The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Source Family (Process Books). YHW 13 was bright-eyed and full of excitement as they led us through an opening chant that ended with our taking 108 deep breaths. Tonight, they unlimbered a ferocious barrage of astringently abstract rock that sunk the audience into a swaying trance. These long white-noize ragas achieved a rare kind of ragged grandeur, even as the crowd began to thin perceptibly. The bedraggled Saxon joined at the finish, his suddenly stronger voice lifting the gentle cacophony skyward, toward that Yahweh who reportedly knows a good joke when He sees it. http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=6526&IssueNum=233 LA CITY BEAT 11-22-07 (Cover blurb- "The Cult of Ron Garmon" *snicker*)

The Better World of Jimmy Carter

rockstar77 — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 20:58:55 GMT

Improving life one nail at a time ~ By RON GARMON ~ Few world leaders present less of an enigma than Jimmy Carter. The tender Calvinist who was our 39th president is the subject of Jonathan Demme’s upcoming Man from Plains, with the director restoring him and his narrative in a few deft strokes. An old man miraculously free of guile, cant, and anger was once Our President and moves among us still, serenely advancing in years while reminding us, in his patient Emersonian way, of our ennobling duty to make the world better. These are tempting trade-goods in an era sick with bling materialism. Carter’s salesmanship is the same as ever. The unaffectedly warm smile, a Baptist’s sense of mission, the master-politician’s instinct of which end makes the better bludgeon. His single term ended in the spasm of windbag patriotism that climaxed with the Iran hostage crisis and gave way to successors who helped themselves to a series of offshore bloodbaths, and culminated in the ongoing gangsta-imperial nightmare in Iraq. His restraint in Iran seems attractive now, as do his suggestions to turn down thermostats and wear sweaters indoors that won him ridicule three decades ago. Such is the odd allure now of our national malaise and the punky late-’70s. In town last week for five days of labor on Habitat for Humanity’s three ongoing house-the-poor projects, the genial ex-president received the press at a San Pedro worksite Tuesday. Too long a life in Wild Town makes even an Appalachian hillbilly forget how cheerful Christians are in the morning, and I was the queasy worse for an extended weekend. The sky was a cheerless slate, most of the houses still only shells, but the Harborside Terrace development was a happy hive of undirected purpose. PR folks and Habitat staff were all courtly and many a Southern accent hung in the air, reminding me of long ago and better days. Small groups stood here and there amid the campsite, faces down as if in prayer. A scattering of heathen media had signed the check-in sheet (People magazine among them), but none were present when Carter arrived at the appointed hour, so the promised “press roundtable” became the two of us lodged in the back of a makeshift tent-bistro with the nice PR lady who’d asked me not to talk politics. The ex-president dimmed his Reddy Kilowatt grin to gracious amperage as we met, pausing to lift his denim work shirt to show off a gaudy belt buckle and partially zipped jeans. I reminded the Nobel Peace laureate of conditions at Tent City on L.A.’s Skid Row, a mind-bending human calamity unfolding nightly only a little more than a mile from my own house. “I don’t know if Habitat can solve that problem,” he allowed. “In L.A. now there are about 82,000 homeless that we know of and there’s no way Habitat can build 82,000 houses. Habitat has some criteria that we have to follow. First of all, the family has to be living in despicable quarters, not no house, like the homeless. Second, the individuals have to put in 500 hours of constructive work and then they have to be able to pay for the house over a 20-year period free of interest. The Bible says you don’t charge interest, so they don’t pay any. Private institutions, local and state governments may all use the Habitat concept and they do in other countries.” When I suggested this was “radical self-reliance,” he grinned. “That’s right! I can’t say that all families would assume the responsibility, but some would. A lot would.” What of the stigma of charity, supposedly so poisonous? “Well, there is an element, a problem on both the recipients and givers of charitable donations,” said Carter, sounding like a theologian who’d licked a very old moral problem. “The giver quite often underestimates the quality of the people who are receiving the help. What we found in Habitat working with low-income families who’ve never had a decent home, who are just as intelligent and hardworking and ambitious and their family values are just as good as mine. The superior attitude on the part of the giver is that the recipient isn’t as intelligent as I am.” I asked if the American people had changed since he gave up active politicking. Carter’s pale blue eyes grew wide and his voice strong. “Oh, I don’t think the American people have, but the American political system has, dramatically. For the worse. Nowadays, money tends to dominate every feature of our political situation. First of all, there’s no way to become the Democratic or Republican presidential nominee without by this time in the process raising at least $100 million. You even measure the competence of a candidate by how much money they’ve raised. With all the great competition, it’s almost like winning an election. Some of those contributions are completely benevolent. Others want back what they put in as an investment.” At this, Carter flashed a cobra’s version of the famous smile. In his day, friends like Bert Lance handled disagreeable fundraising chores, but present conditions make every politician his own bagman. “And once a person gets in office, say in Congress,” he continued, his voice edged with ancient scorn, “they raise a certain amount each week just to prepare for the next election. And all those people contributing money want something special.” As president, Carter took a costly reelection-year hit when FBI videotape of Democratic congressmen stuffing their pockets with cash-money ABSCAM bribes made the nightly news. Such retail corruption seems almost cracker-barrel homey today, but the contempt in Carter’s voice wasn’t just the leftover venom of old scandal. “A lot of the elements of democracy are having difficulties,” he concluded. My mere mention of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s recent indictment for torture in France provoked a look of the “long-distance sniper” whom Hunter Thompson detected when the famous Sunday-school teacher contemplated political foes. Only it was directed at me. “Well, I know Don Rumsfeld well,” he began, gimlet look fading, “and this is a new development on the international scene where people can be accused in a foreign country for crimes against ah … human rights. That was the case of Pinochet, who was actually put on trial in, ah … I believe Spain, and there have been cases of this as far back as Henry Kissinger and my hope is that nothing will come of it.” This was the only time the flow of confident speech was stemmed by hesitation. The international pursuit of miscreant U.S. officials is indeed something new under an ever-hotter sun. Carter, a most vigorous octogenarian, beamed suddenly, anticipating the next impudence and I was leaning into it when the nice PR lady cooed, “Last question.” I let Dubya, Afghanistan blowback, the high price of the Shah’s hide go and closed. What do the American people have to do to stop the war? Not surprisingly, Carter cut the American people out of the equation. “Do what the Lee Hamilton-James Baker committee recommended,” he said flatly, referring to the elite Iraq Study Group’s 79-point report late last year advocating a gradual U.S. pullback. “They studied the Iraqi situation for a year and almost miraculously the Democrats and Republicans voted unanimously the best way to get out of Iraq with honor and without abandoning our troops and, had the President accepted it, there would’ve been no further debate in Congress and we would’ve been out right then and there. But, unfortunately, the president rejected the only good solution to the Iraqi quagmire I know about.” The ex-President smiled broadly, muttered “Good questions” and we parted. Outside, a TV crew was warming up and a handful of other reporter-types milled awaiting their turn in the relay. The 83-year-old Carter seemed the livelier for our short workout and I wished him well for the coming ordeal by media. On Thursday afternoon, I visited the Habitat site in Vermont Village, a 21-unit project in South Central pulsing with the same happy energy as before. On Tuesday, Carter allowed that one of the enduring pleasures of his work “is meeting people, some of whom have been working on jobs for a number or years, kind of like a fraternity or sorority,” and this camaraderie warms the whole block. Allowed run of the place, I began threading through the complex, stopping briefly to watch the former president, sprinkled with sawdust and power tool in hand, pause briefly in his one-nail-at-a-time construction of a better world. In weeks, someone would enter this house justified. Run in LA CITY BEAT 11-08-07 http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=6441&IssueNum=231