So I went to go see The Day After Tomorrow sometime last week (I think it was Friday). Before we saw the movie though, we went to go eat dinner. We find this great parking spot just a little bit down from the restaurant and pull into it. Once we park, we notice this car in front of us with his lights on and the driver’s gesticulating wildy with his arm. Dude gets OUT of the vehicle and proceeds to tell us that he was waiting here for the space and that it belongs to him.

Now, this is the classic pull-in vs. back-in scenario, but it wasn’t even that close. This wasn’t some simultaneous arrival deal like that episode of Seinfeld. We were parked in the spot, and if he was waiting to back into it, he sure took his sweet time. OK, so this guy’s out of his car and Kim’s giving him lip, because, well, she doesn’t give a fuck.

I kind of give a fuck, because I’m sitting shotgun and I’m not about to get in a fight with Mr. Roadrage. He eventually realizes we’re not about to pull out of a spot we’re already parked in and he goes to sulk in his car. He doesn’t pull off though, so we’re kind of like “what the fuck?” We leave anyway.

We actually end up in the same restaurant as Roadrage and girlfriend and dogs, which means he eventually found a parking spot, I guess. Unfortunately, nothing happened here. I figured he’d toss a crouton at us or something, but he never did.

We head back to the car and we’re expecting it to be burning to the heavens or possibly have a nice smashed windshield or a twisted fender. Nothing! So disappointing. WAIT! Not quite nothing! I checked the hood and there’s a nice scratch slowly drawn across the front edge of it. Mr. Passive-Aggressive had keyed the car! What a fucker. I would have respected him more if there was fire or smashed glass involved.

Oh, and then we went to movie. It sucked.

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While reading through the local weekly, cleverly named The LA Weekly, I stumbled across their nominations for their annual LA Weekly Music Awards. This list is theoretically the best Los Angeles has to offer for local music. While I don’t necessarily agree with all the choices, the list is representative of all that’s best and also what’s problematic about L.A. as any sort of music scene.

The list is fantastically diverse, showing the amount of excellent work being done here, in a variety of genres. I don’t think you can ever be too diverse, but it does mean that we really do lack any sort of real identity. There’s no trademark “L.A. sound,” but I’ll forgive that if it means that we can tout a singer/songwriter like Jon Brion in the same breath as DJ Numark from Jurassic 5.

Another thing I noticed was that there are quite a few acts that I never associated with Los Angeles at all. Bands like Mars Volta and Postal Service never felt like local acts, since they popped up on the national scene almost immediately from their inception and had roots from other cities. You’ll also get bands transplanted from faraway lands, like Metric, that eventually got their break by working the L.A. scene. Are they an L.A. band or are they Canadian? Well, they’re really both, but that’s true of half the bands here. Most of the people here are from somewhere else, and the bands represent accordingly.

So while I love it, the scene here lacks real definition. You know what’s definitive though? MIKE WATT. Any time anyone asks me about music here, I just point to Mike Watt. Obviously, he’s a legend from his days in the Minutemen, but if you ever check the listings he’s still playing in about five bands almost every night of the week. On Fridays and Saturdays it’s not rare to see him play a jazz show at 7pm in San Pedro and then haul ass in his Econoline to play in a cover band in Santa Monica at 10pm. I caught him one night on one of his off nights… you know what he was doing? He was trying to sneak backstage at the Sleater-Kinney show. He was turned away for not having a wristband, which prompted me to yell “FREE MIKE WATT” at the security guy for a few minutes. He ended up getting a wristband and heading back a few minutes later, because nobody’s going to stop Watt for long. The guy rocks 24/7, and his recognition for lifetime achievement is well deserved.

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Dodgers 10 / Diamondbacks 0

This wasn’t a bad game to go to for my first Dodger game of the year. Jose Lima, of all people, three eight innings of shutout ball and the Dodgers offense came alive for 10 runs. There were home runs for Beltre and Encarnacion, a 4-4 game from LoDuca and a really dazzling defensive play from Alex Cora where he dove for a ball, flipped it to Cesar Izturis, who then threw it to first to get the runner. Topping it all off, Eric Gagne came in from the bullpen to strike out the side in the top of the ninth to end it.

It wasn’t a very tense or exciting game, but when your team has been on a terrible losing streak a blowout victory is about as good as it gets.

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I just noticed that in my entry for “I’m The Man” in the May mixtape (my one year anniversary mixtape, btw) I used the word awesome three times in the span of two sentences. I wasn’t even using the repetition as a point of emphasis, I just ran into a lack of vocabulary. I should have snuck a floating opposite in there instead.

Jeezy creezy, how did I even graduate college?

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1) Miracle Drug – The Slow Wonder – A.C. Newman

The drums roll and guitars squeal, a hooky verse leads to an even catchier harmony rich chorus… are you sure Neko Case was the MVP of the New Pornographers? Carl Newman makes his case for being the mad genius behind it all. I can’t wait for this record.

2) Winter Storm ’98 – Introducing… – Cadallaca

I was working through old Sleater-Kinney stuff when I heard this track for the first time in years. Sarah Dougher leads the band with her trippy organ and a sweetly fragile vocal, joined by a beautifully subdued Corin Tucker.

3) Guiding Light – Marquee Moon – Television

I felt in the mood for some classic TV and I ended up with Guiding Light. No relation to the soap opera, though. Is it just me or does every U2 ballad sound roughly like this track?

4) Where Will You Go? – Down With Wilco – The Minus 5

The xylophone makes this song. That’s all there is too it.

5) The Days Take Care of Everything – All This Useless Beauty – Elvis Costello

This is on the extra disc of the Rhino re-release of All This Useless Beauty. It was written for Roy Orbison, but it’s not a perfect fit like “The Comedians” was. The lyrics and phrasing are all wrong for Orbison, not quite smooth or sad enough, but it’s somehow perfect for Costello, who accents the song’s bitterness and anger for fine affect.

6) The Seeker – The Ultimate Collection – The Who

CSI:NY decided their theme song would be “Baba O’Riley,” which is just a horrible choice considering this track was available. “I looked under chairs, I looked under tables, I tried to find the key to 50 million fables, they call me the seeker, I been searching low and high.” Is that just a bit too on the nose? Have you seen CSI?

7) The Happy Prole – Featuring “Birds” – Quasi

I always like to follow the Who with a little Quasi, to follow Keith Moon with Janet Weiss, who John Goodmanson once called “Keith Moon 2002.” That was in 2002, of course. I guess now she’s Keith Moon 2004. This is my favorite song about toiling at a shitty job ever. “You need the money, so you’ve got to play it dumb, but if you play it long enough it’s just what you become.”

8) The Angels’ Share – DaVinci’s Notebook – Ted Leo /

Pharmacists

This is one of the demos Leo put on his website after his first few days in the studio for the new album. It’s really raw, even for a demo, but it’s new Ted Leo. It starts off like a solo affair, with a squawky guitar and Leo’s deliberate vocal until the band breaks through the walls like the Kool Aid Man and the whole song goes into double time. It slows down for a bridge and then comes back even faster and Leo sounds like he’s losing breath keeping up. Oddly, the mp3 just sort of dies before the finish line.

9) Fagetarian and Dyke – Personal Best – Team Dresch

After seeing Donna Dresch play with her new band (Davies Vs. Dresch), I went back to check out some of her old band. For some reason I assumed it would be raw early riot grrrl stuff, but man was I off the mark. “Personal Best” is remarkably polished and Dresch’s guitar interplay with Kaia Wilson reads like a Sleater-Kinney blueprint. Hell, in some ways it’s more accomplished than Sleater-Kinney’s first two records. There’s a Team Dresch reunion at Homo-A-Go-Go and when they play Fagetarian and Dyke it will be the most awesomely gay moment in rock.

10) Entertain – 12/14/03 Showbox – Sleater-Kinney

S-K trotted out four new songs when I saw them, and this one’s a motherfucker. This is a semi-decent bootleg of it, but when they finally get this down on wax it’s going to be one of the great Sleater-Kinney anthems ever. EVER.

11) I’m The Man – Freaks and Geeks – Joe Jackson

The next four tracks are some of my favorite music cues from Freaks and Geeks, which I watched relentlessly this month. Nick Andopolis gets about 2 seconds to defend new wave and say “this bass player is awesome” before the gang gets in a wicked awesome car crash. By the way, this bass player really is quite awesome.

12) No Language In Our Lungs – Freaks and Geeks – XTC

Hearing XTC while watching Bill Haverchuck get passed over while they’re picking softball teams is practically unfair. This was one of those scenes that was so sad that producer Judd Apatow thought it caused their cancellation.

13) Poor Poor Pitiful Me – Freaks and Geeks – Warren Zevon

It’s hard to go wrong with Warren Zevon. I wish songs were more about interesting characters and told good stories more. There are so few people capable of writing good fiction in verse/chorus/verse. This is the original version, that includes the verse about sadomasochism.

14) Ripple – Freaks and Geeks – The Grateful Dead

This is the absolute very last song in Freaks and Geeks. I really hate the Dead, but put in the right context, the melancholy folk feels just right.

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I powered through the Lester Bangs compilation Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung this morning in one sitting (and some laying down). I read the other Lester Bangs compilation, Mainlines, Blood Feats and Bad Taste a few months ago and liked it enough. Psychotic Reactions, on the other hand, is a monumental piece of work.

Bangs is almost universally recognized as the greatest rock critic there ever was, and it’s pretty easy to see why. His rambling, tangent filled tirades are as entertaining as the bands he writes about. The thing that seperates Bangs from the rest is his honesty, and his absolute need for it. When he raves about Count Five, Van Morrison or the Clash, it comes from a real place, just as much as he truly despises James Taylor and Led Zeppelin. He was someone that couldn’t abide by phoneys and fakes and you never got the sense that he was ever trying to be cool with his choices.

He was also unafraid to get uncomfortably personal with his material. Greil Marcus compiles a series of essays and interveiws that Bangs wrote about Lou Reed, and there’s a genuine sense of betrayal and disappointment as the pieces go on. He loved the Velvet Underground as much as any band, and Bangs reaction to Reed’s solo career is a lovely and sad treatise on hero-worship. When they finally meet for an interview it is awkward and fascinating in all the right ways.

Oh, and the part where the President of Vietnam goes on and on about how Jethro Tull bites ass because they sound just like Vietnamese folk music? That’s just genius.

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I love Sleater-Kinney.

It’s not a big secret, but I figured I’d get that out of the way in case anyone thought this would be an unbiased review of their recent L.A. shows. I’ve seen them in concert countless times and in my off time I maintain the Sleater-Kinney Concert Review Archive, which stockpiles fan reviews and photos. Between reading all the press clippings and moderating the archive, it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve read more words about the band than anyone on earth aside from the band’s publicist and parents.

If you are somehow unfamiliar with the band… I dunno, go to a record store or something! They are Corin Tucker (guitar/vocals), Carrie Brownstein (guitar/vocals) and Janet Weiss (drums) and they rock me out of my head with disturbing regularity. The rest you can read on Allmusic.

The band’s currently inbetween records, so this tour was primarily set up to test out new material and keep the band warm before they head to studio later this year. I was doubly excited about the shows because the opening band was another favorite, Quasi. It also meant that Weiss was pulling a double-shift with Quasi and S-K, essentially performing as her own opening act.

The first night actually started with Davies vs. Dresch playing a short set of six songs before anything else. This was only their 4th show or so, and certainly the first before a crowd this of this size, but don’t confuse them for amateurs. This is the latest band for Donna Dresch, who’s work with Team Dresch is considered one of the landmarks of the Riot Grrl movement in the early nineties. Kristina Davies shares vocal and guitar duties with Dresch and their guitar interplay is the crux of the band, just as the band name implies.

Quasi followed with a bizarre opening set that saw a lot of improvisation and a freewheeling, jazzy session of fuzzed up pop. Even though Janet Weiss played twice, she didn’t half-ass it while playing with Quasi. Locked in against Sam Coomes and his pinebox coffin keyboard, Weiss’s drumming for Quasi was actually even more impressive than her S-K work. Her style is so much wilder with Quasi, and with the sparer songs she gets to user her drums with more melodic effect. The set was hard to focus on, with Coomes and Weiss playing a lot of musical games inbetween the actual songs, but Quasi’s so good at that stuff that I could watch it all day.

Sleater-Kinney hit the stage at about 11:00pm and played for a little over an hour. The setlist varied wildly across their catalogue, starting off with “The End of You” from The Hot Rock and ending with “Be Yr Mama” from their self-titled debut. Inbetween was a smattering of everything else, including four new songs that are being prepped for the new record. The set was humming right along until a fight broke out during “Oh!,” and the band cut their song short to restore order. It was a necessary stop, but it slowed the momentum a bit.

Lately, the strongest elements of the Sleater-Kinney live show have been the instrumental segues they’ve been using to string together songs. The main set closed with a continuous chain of “Bomp,” “Hollywood Ending” and then finally “Words and Guitar.” Tucker and Brownstein will turn away from the audience and just concentrate on the improv, and for three or four minutes at a time they’ll play like there’s no one else in the room. There’s something beautifully intimate about it all, and when they hit it right, the segues crescendo right into the starting chords of the next song. They weren’t dead on with it tonight, and doing three songs in a row seemed to sap the energy out of the audience a bit. The band’s talked about doing a whole set non-stop, and while it would be a sight to see, I think they’d outlast the crowd by a far margin.

The second night was reasonably similar to the first. Instead of Davies vs. Dresch, the warmup duty belonged to the local band Radio Vago. The last time I saw Radio Vago they were opening for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and they put in a similar performance here, despite changing out lead singers during that time. They play mostly downbeat, keyboard oriented dance tunes with fits and bursts of guitar noise crashing through. I think the noise element needs to be toned down because it has the tendency to overpower the rest of the band.

Quasi’s second night set started off with a drum solo and Sam Coomes humping his keyboard. Why build up to the humping? Just get it out of the way, they say. The set was decidely more song oriented and a lot more effective than the first night. Songs like “Good Times” and “It’s Raining” really popped, and Weiss beat her snare like it stole her wallet. The drums were mixed really loudly, so her blast beats damn near took my head off. There were even moments where Janet was going off so much that it put her partner in a daze, as if he was wondering “how can she hit drums faster than I can hit my keys?” Coomes seemed a little bit confused and out of sorts all night, which is just about perfect for the manic carnival feel of his keyboard work. Unfortunately, he didn’t do any head stands on it, which is the only thing I’ve never seen Sam Coomes do to his keyboard.

Like Quasi, Sleater-Kinney’s second night set also featured a lot less improvisation and was generally tighter all-around. The set started off with an inspired run of quick hitting songs, but a guitar cable fried during “Sympathy” and put a downer on everything. This is the third or fourth time I’ve seen this happen to Carrie Brownstein, and at this point I am willing to pony up my own personal cash to buy her a cordless radio unit for her guitar, because this constant technical difficulty thing is bullshit. I understand this is probably more frustrating for her than me, but COME ON! Uh, I’ll also reserve the right to be a total indian-giver on this if those wireless systems cost thousands of dollars.

If pressed, I’d have to pick the first show as the superior one. It was a little looser and a little sloppier, but I love all the instrumental stuff, and at this point I’ve seen Sleater-Kinney so many times that hearing “Turn It On” or “Dig Me Out” doesn’t have quite the impact that they used to. The crowd was considerably hotter for the second night though, plus they did a cover of the MC5′s “American Ruse,” so there’s also that.

The best thing about both nights was getting to hear the new songs. “I Don’t Care” is bratty and the poppiest of the new batch. “Everything” is based on a heavy, grinding riff and features a harsh clipped vocal from Brownstein and some top notch wailing from Tucker. I was standing pretty close to the speaker stack and the during the bridge of “Everything” I felt like Corin’s voice was going through my eardrum and coming out the other side. “Bomp” is the down and dirtiest of the new material and and Tucker brings back the scratchy, blood-curdling screams that have been mostly forgotten since Call The Doctor.

Of all the new songs, “Entertain” is the strongest, and could end up being one of the very best songs Sleater-Kinney’s ever done. It’s structurally exquisite, with separate elements being introduced over the course of the song before being brought back together during the second iteration of the bridge. The building tension and explosive dynamics are so perfectly rendered that it will almost certainly be one of the bands trademark anthems by the time it’s done.

Like One Beat, the new material looks to feature more of Carrie Brownstein on vocals, and she’s raising her game by leaps and bounds. She’s extending her range and power and she’s got much more interesting phrasing going on so far. If One Beat was their post 9-11 record, then musically there are some hints that this may be their wartime record. “Bomp” starts with guitars that buzz like a fighter squadron and Weiss’ drums echo the militaristic feel with its measured cadences and occassional volleys of artillery fire in the toms and snares.

Thematic speculations aside, there’s one message that’s coming in loud and clear from “Entertain” : “If you’re here to be entertained, please go away, please go away. I’ve got something to say, I’ve got something to say.” We get used to artists becoming progressively softer as the albums go by, as their lives get cushier and their worries lessen. With Sleater-Kinney I’m expecting them to get even harder and heavier musically, more stridently defiant lyrically as the world gets uglier and uglier. Trust ‘em, they’ll have something to say.

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A fun and fact-filled adventure of the most appalling presidency in the history of the United States

Take down the Bush administration before they use Voltron to destroy everything. The resistance includes Hulk Hogan, Mr. T, Howard Dean and Jesus. Recommended for everyone except Phil, since he’s a Republican.

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Wong Kar Wai’s sci-fi sequel to In the Mood For Love is finally done and apparently the favorite for the Palm D’Or at Cannes. It sounds absolutely stunning.

The story is a sequel to In the Mood for Love, Wong’s art-house hit of 2000. In the Mood told the tale of a journalist, Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), and a beautiful neighbour woman, Mrs. Su (Maggie Cheung), who live in Shanghai in 1960. When they discover their spouses are having an affair, they begin meeting clandestinely. In spite of their attraction, however, they decline to take the easy path. Actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai took a best-actor award at Cannes in 2000 for his performance as a man struggling to retain his composure.

The first couple of reels of 2046 seem maddeningly complicated, moving from animation to a film within a film and introducing several story strands. Then we get to Chow himself, who has moved back to Hong Kong after his divorce and his break-up with Mrs. Su. The refined noble man of In the Mood for Love has changed: He begins a freelance writing career, turning out pornography among other things. He drinks heavily, picking up women for one-night stands or paying prostitutes. He moves into a hotel, vacated by a nightclub performer he once knew.

Gradually, he crafts a science-fiction novel about the future named after his room number, 2046, with characters that are thinly disguised versions of the hotel manager and his daughter (Faye Wong), who has been suffering from severe depression since her father broke up her engagement to a Japanese man.

The plot moves forward in one-year increments, from one Christmas Eve to the next, moving through the 1960s. One narrative strand follows Chow’s tempestuous affair with a beautiful, bad-tempered call girl named Miss Bai (Zhang Ziyi). Another concentrates on the hotel-keeper and his daughter. A third goes back in time to when he lived in Singapore and met a tragic, mysterious woman in a casino (Gong Li). A fourth explores the world of his novel in a film within a film.

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Ira Glass of This American Life vs. Chris Ware of Acme Novelty Library.

The pair have been hitting the lecture circuit lately. They did a session at Royce a little while ago, but I think the tickets seemed really expensive just to hear dudes talk, so I passed. Luckily, someone transcribed the University of Minnesota experience into an 80 page monstrosity for anyone to read!

Chris Ware: There’s plenty of miserable, lonely people in the world and there’s not enough art about it, I don’t think. I, you know – I get tired of reading stories about sexual liaisons and, you know, and conquests and all that kind of nonsense, it just gets tiresome. There’s plenty of stuff, I mean. I don’t know, I guess I’m nuts or something.

Ira Glass: Happy-happy people have the Friends.

[some audience hissing]

Chris Ware: What?

Ira Glass: Happy people have the TV show Friends.

[audience chuckles]

Chris Ware: No, but I mean, you ride the bus, you ride the train and you see so many people that you know they’ll never meet anybody. I mean, you can tell. And it’s, I mean it’s–

Ira Glass: So you’re saying happy people have enough art? There’s enough art about the successful and happy.

Chris Ware: That’s all there is, it’s just art to make you feel better about yourself or something.

Ira Glass: David Sedaris has said that one of the things he liked about reading Jimmy Corrigan is that it was a book that when you were done, you could feel like your life was better than the guy in the book.

[audience laughter]

He said he found that kind of uplifting.

Chris Ware: Oh, that’s nice. That sounds … fair enough.

If you don’t know who these people are… you’re probably better off not clicking through. It is a bit dry, but I thought it was pretty neat.

[via Kempa]

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