I almost blogged from a gig last night.
The urge was strong when I noticed computers inside The Tribal Cafe. I thought about the repercussions of such an action, how I would, in one click of the Publish Post icon, go from just being a nerdy blogger to becoming the blog equivalent of Comic Book Guy. No turning back, I thought. I then realized that the coffee house was way too crowded and didn't want to deal with waiting in line to use a computer.
Coffee houses make for the most laid back gigs in town. Since nobody can dance, there is no need to try and make people dance. We basically played what we wanted. Kid C. threw on Nina Hagen's "African Reggae," Rip Rig and Panic's "You're My Kind of Climate" and Talking Heads' "Girlfriend is Better" (and, as his girlfriend, I take special interest in the latter). I threw on some Pulp (a remix of "Sunrise"), the one song on the last Le Tigre album that I like ("After Dark") and a bunch of other stuff.
At some point during the gig, I realized that I miss coffee houses. Long ago, this town was populated with holes in various walls marked with names like Betelgeuse, Tuesday's House, Anastasia's Asylum and Van Gogh's Ear. I think Anastasia's Asylum still exists, but the others have since disappeared. The best of the dearly departed coffee houses, though, had a simple pun for a name: Common Grounds.
I grew up about a mile away from Common Grounds, so my friends and I would walk there most every night, particularly during summer vacation. It was located in a minimall next to a fairly large university, so the crowd was mostly college kids, old neighborhood hippies and high school goths. Most nights, it was packed with boys and girls carrying lunchbox handbags and wearing baby barrettes and striped tights. Characters abound nightly, but the best time for people watching was during the open poetry events. On one particular evening, my friends and I witnessed a Stewart Stevenson look-a-like in a purple tie-dye shirt reciting an epic poem based on D&D. No freakin' joke, dude. That same night, this skinny goth kid stood up in leather underwear, a white button down shirt and green lipstick and started pounding on his keyboard. He then screamed "I slash my wrists for you!" and sat back down to sip on his ice blended.
Nothing that exciting happened at The Tribal Cafe last night. Maybe coffee house nutjobs are a thing of the past. Or, more likely, perhaps they only existed in the corners of the Valley.

P.S. After the gig, we saw Jonny Lang on one of the 20 or so public television stations on digital cable. He's a Grammy-nominated, platinum-selling artist who harmonizes with his guitar, even hitting the highs. Some of the stuff is too AAA for my taste, but I dig the guitar solos.

For as long as I can remember, getting a mix tape from your significant other was a big deal. It means s/he took the time out to think of songs that made you come to mind. When I started dating my boyfriend, Julian, the first gifts we exchanged were mix cds. My effort was a two disc anthology of love songs which include tracks by Erasure, Garbage, Thelma Houston, Saint Etienne, Kylie Minogue and Pet Shop Boys. Julian's cd had tracks from R.E.M., Ryan Adams, The Shins, Bright Eyes, and Courtney Love. We both loved each other's cds. I was talking to my friend Melissa about it and she flat out told me that a mix cd is the way into her heart. I'm not surprised. There are so many songs out there that can convey our own feelings about love. Music says so many things to many people. No wonder people in love make mix cds.

Here's the tracklisting for the last cd I made for Julian:

• svefn-g-englar by sigur ros
  
• a hidden forest by bjork vs. the cure
  
• ladies and gentlemen we are floating into space (original elvis mix) by spiritualized
  
• the spanglemaker by cocteau twins
  
• babies by pulp
  
• undertow by lush
  
• black metallic by catherine wheel
  
• m by the cure
  
• the concept by teenage fanclub
  
• uncertan smile by the the
  
• walkabout by the sugarcubes
  
• tomorrow never dies by saint etienne
  
• a sorta fairytale by tori amos
  
• happy by ned's atomic dustbin
  
• cloudbusting by kate bush

In Bullet Point Form:

• Tomorrow night, 7/08/05, Kid C. and I are playing with records in between bands for Kill Radio's Humberto's new party at The Tribal Cafe. I have not yet been to a party at this coffeehouse in Historic Filipinotown (Temple and Union), but PDP-contributor Melissa M. tells me that it's a very fun space. This is an early party, starts at eight. and ends at the witching hour, so if you have other plans already, feel free to stop by here first. On the bill are Punkoustica, featuring L.A. punk rocker Alice Bag, and The Crash Deluxe (Jim Jet of Juarez Crime Scene). There is a $5 cover.
• Friend of the PDP, Nelson Sanabria, is playing at Spundae on Saturday night for the club's Localized event (get it? Local DJs). You can check out the details on Spundae's website.
• If you happen to find yourself in a bookstore this weekend and come across a copy of the latest issue of Outburn (Avenged Sevenfold on the cover), check out the interview with Funeral for a Friend, conducted by yours truly.

I guess that's it for right now.

For those reading this in London, our thoughts are with you.

For anyone anywhere looking for first-person accounts and updates, try this blog. The Wikipedia community has also provided tons of information, including transcriptions of speeches.

Yours,
The People in LA

Delaney
S/T
Pehr Records

Over the years, I have taken classes in four different languages, none of which were French. That said, outside of the two English tracks ("Hard Work Never Pays" and "Ready to Catch," respectively) and the title "Une Musique Tragique," I cannot understand anything on this debut from Parisienne Christelle Delaney, better known simply as Delaney. She could be singing about lost love, revolution or a pet cat and I would not know the difference.
However, language barriers can only do so much in preventing the mutual understanding of a song. On this self-titled release, what Delaney sings is actually less important than how she sings. Similar in tone to Stereolab's Laeticia Sadier, Delaney's voice is low and sometimes raspy with the intimate quality of someone singing a lullaby. Whether accompanied by an accoustic guitar, synthesizer or a full band, her words glide over the music and through the speakers, seeping into surrounding walls like clouds of smoke. The French language works in ways that English language vocals cannot, with "zh" sounds that start to sound like muted whistles weaving through guitar strings and "r" rolls caught deep in the back of the throat for a somber yet enticing effect. I listened to this three times last night and wondered why I cannot hear such things on the radio.

The new goth is the old mod. By old mod, I hark back not to the days when our parents wore Mary Quant and danced to soul 45s. Instead, I write of evenings in the late-1990s spent in clubs where Gloria Jones, The Jam and Supergrass went head-to-head-to-head and virtually every Fred Perry-wearing, Guiness-drinking kid in the club could admit to having previously attended Helter Skelter, which was *the* goth club of the late-1980s and early-1990s.
Moths are goths who later embraced mod/Brit Pop stylings, creatures who were all over Santa Monica Blvd. in the latter-half of the last decade, particularly on Thursdays for Cafe Bleu. It was an easy scene transition to make, I learned at the end of college, as black pencil skirts and square-heeled shoes work well in both settings and Brett Anderson is equal to Peter Murphy in terms of androgony. It was a necessary transition as well. By this time, the goth clubs were jokes infiltrated by hessians who just discovered Marilyn Manson and face paint. While it's true that goth probably hadn't been cool for ten years by this time, it went from just being sort of nerdy to really fucking embarrassing.
For the past few years now, it seems that the mod/Brit Pop crowd has being toying with its collective inner goth. Fortunately, this new goth has no need for crinoline and corsets. Instead, we see a return to the deep death gurgle guitars found on albums by Bauhaus, Chameleons, et.al. and throaty Ian Curtis howls. Some people want to call this post-punk. That's just because they don't want to admit what it really is.
I must admit that I enjoy living in a city where the new goth has run amok. Some people might say that there is nothing original about the sound, but is anything really original? Late night Fourth of July, we saw The Depression Party at Zen Sushi. The four guys in ties and pullover sweaters reference the artists mentioned in the above paragraph. They do it well, as if those were records of secret listening sessions held away from the ever-critical ears of hipster friends during the years in which Joy Division and Bauhaus were not fashionable. The performance was earnest and seeming to strive for something more than just "band that sounds like [such and such]." I hope to see them play more frequently and see how they develop over the next year or two. It should be interesting.

Many moons ago, I played records at a Saturday night indie dance megaclub in Los Angeles. As is the case with LA indie clubs, Pulp was ridiculously popular with the crowd, only slightly less so than The Holy Trinity and Blur. Most of the time, the crowd was wont to hear "Common People" and "Disco 2000." Frankly, after my first few months of a three-year stint at the club, I had tired of both numbers. There has to be something else, I said to my AOL Brit Pop Room friends.
Fortunately, there were enough hardcore Pulp fans to keep the floor from clearing when I played "Countdown" for the first time. It was an older track, initially released in 1991, and found on a compilation of the same name. I imagine that this song was quite unfashionable when it was first recorded. There is a pogo disco beat marked by snippets of Shaft-style guitars and Jarvis Cocker sounding like William Shatner with an Alan Partridge-accent (and you must understand that I mean this in the most complimentary fashion). In late-2000, "Countdown" sounded modern, right at home with Magnetic Field's "Long Forgotten Fairytale" and Ladytron's "Playgirl."
Sometimes, my Brit Pop Room friends would request "Death Goes to the Disco," the second song on this disc, and sometimes I would oblige, playing it early because of the slow, jerky beat. Pulp's disco dirge has a variation of the Soul II Soul beat-- the shake, shake, snare drum machine pattern present on virtually every song recorded between 1989 and 1992. I wonder if this was Pulp's attempt to fit in with the British scene after a few years of playing to little attention, an attempt thwarted by an electronic maraca sound reminiscent of the demos on mid-1980s Casio keyboards.
Whenever I listen to this two-disc compilation, I'm struck by the pure strangeness of Pulp. On "Down by the River," the guitar hits tinny notes that mimic a tone deaf choir girl. "Master of the Universe" sounds like the Mission (actually Simon Hinkler of the Mission once played with Pulp, but I am not sure if it is on this song). "Dogs are Everywhere" is bizarre in that the lyrics seem so innocent for Cocker, whereas "Little Girl (with Blue Eyes)" is sort of dirty in a tears-of-regret fashion. On "The Mark of the Devil" Cocker's croon kind of, sort of matches the dark new wave keyboards, similar to Soft Cell's work on The Art of Falling Apart.
Everything that made Different Class a staple of my high school music collection is here, but pieced together in a way that does not work quite so seamlessly. Countdown is the story of a band in progress and perhaps that is why I still listen to it with reverence.