I’m a 20th century man who only lately has been feeling the 21st century. With that in mind, most of my professional achievements are now old-school: from magazines I started such as Beach Culture, RayGun, Speak, Gravity, Revolution, from books on everything from geeks to music video to beach volleyball, from consultancies with companies like Disney, Rollerblade and Reebok. People have paid me to write, to teach, to skate and even to dance. But they never, not once, paid me for sex.
I readily admit, it’s taken me awhile to back into today. But I figure it’s time to pay attention to Marshall McLuhan and marry the Internet’s style and substance into something that makes a 20th century guy feel at home. If you can help, I’m all ears.
I’ve been promising to write about Compression, my favorite party in Los Angeles, for two months now but the problem is that while I’ve never yet had a bad night there, reporting on something in which everything works so well just makes for bland copy in the “great party, you shoulda’ been there” mode.
Of course, there is the angle that sometime nice guys do win. It didn’t seem that way about 18 months ago, when I first heard about Robtronik’s plan to bring old-school techno to Los Angeles, I told him he had lost his mind over the idea that hundreds of LA locals would come out to hear DJs like Juan Atkins, Kevin Sanderson and Derrik May trot out the old classics.
Perception is not always reality. No matter how often skeptics like to talk about the death of electronic music, Los Angeles’ scene is thriving. In less than 72 hours, in three different contexts, I heard successful young professionals, all with viable careers in some form of the media or education, independently go out of their way to explain that even though they worked to support themselves, “electronic music is my life.”
It’s not difficult to understand why. If you wanted, you could have seen Felix the Housecat at the Avalon or Dubfire, one half of Deep Dish, at the Vanguard on Saturday night. And from the size of the lines, thousands did. Or you could spend Saturday with friends, listening to 1970s records while talking about house music, and then, while the rest of the city tuned into the Academy Awards, Sunday on the roof of the Standard, watching Darren Emerson, he who was Underworld’s spark so many years ago, chain smoke and spin for less than 100 people at the always excellent Traffic pool party. Then,
Time moves so quickly in today’s world that the end of the Harry Potter series, so vividly anticipated less than a year ago, has already relegated the books into artifact status. So I surprised myself a few weeks ago when, after finally watching and, to my surprise, liking the fifth Potter movie, I decided to reread the book.
Although many championed the fifth book as the best in the series, it was the one that impressed me the least. Maybe it was the length or the fact that I had just reread the first four or the mood I was in. For whatever reason, I thought Rowling was, for the first time, treading water.
So, perhaps with minimal expectations, I found a battered paperback copy and figured I’d skim through it, as much to see what the movie left out than anything else. And while the book was leisurely plotted, I was dumbfounded by how much better the book was the second time around and how much more rewarding it was to read it at a leisurely, rather than a breakneck, speed.
Doing so lets you once again marvel at the level of Rowling’s accomplishment. In a time where ADD is the norm, Rowling has pulled off a Dickensian tale, with plenty of humor, sex and death. Even more, she has balanced a healthy disrespect for authority, the need for self-sufficiency and the loneliness and burden of righteous ambition within the confines of a “children’s book.”
I have said it before and will say it again. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is the most sustained literary achievement of our lifetimes. The one thing I haven’t said before is that installment number five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, may well be her masterpiece.
It's probably the best news I've heard in six years. Tomorrow, Feb 20, 2007, tickets go on sale for the long-awaited sequel to Delta Heavy, the Sasha and Digweed Spring Club Tour 2008. From Boston to Washington, throughout the Midwest and on down the West Coast, Sasha and John will be bringing their magic to a series of theaters and clubs that usually have to see them in larger venues. Even better to many of Sasha and Digweed's original fans, now with families and real jobs of their own, many of the shows will end, not begin, by 2 A.M., allowing event he most relentlessly mature Twilo-ites to relive their club days without needing a week to recover.
My Grammy weekend started at The Echo, one of Los Angeles’ best places to hear new music, and a set with Berkeley’s Morning Benders, a band that didn’t look old enough to buy their way into a club. Given their youth, the range of their references, inadvertent or not, was impressive, with everything from Sonic Youth to the Smoking Popes, on display.
Without really knowing why, I mumbled to the person next to me that they seemed “smart.” The singer’s mother later confirmed this when she told me he not only read books voraciously, but counted Nabokov’s impenetrable Pale Fire as his favorite novel of all time. That alone is enough to justify big expectations.
Almost two years ago, to the derision and disbelief of most of my friends, I decided to stop driving and prove it was possible to live without a car in Los Angeles for 12 months, just to see what would happen. At the time, I had hopes of sparking a pedestrian movement that would give bus riding a new face and fill the buses with cultural dialogue, historical information and consciousness-raising initiatives.
That enthusiasm lasted about a year. Through no fault of anyone’s but my own, I decided to abandon any lofty hopes and be satisfied with the idea of cheap, efficient public transportation. But even that has begun to prove unrealistic.
Granted, there are the rare days when everything works. The bus comes on time; the driver is civil; the seats are clean enough to sit on. But this, sadly, is the exception, rather than the rule. Instead, you just accept the fact, especially if you’re taking major thoroughfares such as the Wilshire, Santa Monica Blvd or Sunset lines, all of which supposedly come within 5 to 20 minutes, the bus is going to be filthy, the bus driver sullen and the timetable more a matter of whim than reality.
At this point in time, it would take a mass implosion of hard drives and iPods to get people back in the habit of buying CDs. That’s just the way it is. But, no matter how much you argue that it’s easier to hit click and drag a file into your computer than drive down to the store and let some piece of music find you, the loss of the record store as a community stomping ground is something that leaves us all a bit diminished.
If you live in Los Angeles and need proof of that, you have about three weeks to head down to the Rhino Records Store, a temporary showcase of the label’s considerable catalogue of real gifts on West Third, in between Crescent Heights and Fairfax. Unlike the original Rhino store, which opened as a used record shop on the outskirts of Westwood decades ago (and was one of the first of the signature shops to close), this is a beautiful designed art space of a shop, with comfortable couches and armchairs, a bar, turntables and records and rarities displayed, as they should, as art.
So, another year, another World AIDS Day has come and gone. If you’re like most of us, you probably didn’t even realize Saturday, December 1st was dedicated, as it has been
for all too long, AIDS awareness.
Fortunately, thanks to the good folks at LIFEbeat and celebrities such as Madonna, Beyonce, Jack Nicholson, John Travolta, Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, Whoopi Goldberg, Rihanna, Usher, Matt Damon, Jay-Z, Fall Out Boy, Yoko Ono, Jessica Biel, Jessica Alba, Jessica Simpson, Victoria Beckham, Vanessa Hudgens, Amy Winehouse, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Bill Clinton, Elijah Wood, Robin Williams, Hayden Panettiere, Joan Rivers and the like, you can still do your part.
- When the Light Goes by Larry McMurtry - The Raw Shark Texts by Stephen Hall - Teenage by Jon Savage - Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling - The Archivist’s Story by Travis Holland
temporary showcase of the label’s considerable catalogue of real gifts on West Third, in between Crescent Heights and Fairfax. Unlike the original Rhino store, which opened as a used record shop on the outskirts of Westwood decades ago (and was one of the first of the signature shops to close), this is a beautiful designed art space of a shop, with comfortable couches and armchairs, a bar, turntables and records and rarities displayed, as they should, as art. 
