A Civilized Evening

The thing about Monday night shows is that they always start early. Maybe this wouldn't be problematic in any other city, but it's hell on the L.A. music fan given that, at any physical point in the city, it can take half an hour just to travel half a mile at 6 p.m. Traffic was how we started our evening. My usual fifteen minute drive to the Henry Fonda Music Box Theater had at least doubled. Then I spent another twenty minutes driving in circles until I saw Amy B., my cohort for the evening, run towards the curb from the box office holding our tickets.

We were supposed to eat dinner at Carousel, which we love on account of the fact baba ghanoush helps maintain our Armenian good looks. We must have driven past the restaurant four times, always searching for the signage in the wrong strip mall, never looking across the street for the signifier, Jumbo's Clown Room. Once we drove as far as Vermont, turned right and, at the corner of Vermont and Sunset, got stuck at an extremely long light made entertaining by the one man political band on the corner. His signs were barely legible, all I could read were "Hilary" [sic] and "Huckabee" in what looked like a single sentence. Was he a Hillary Clinton supporter who wanted Mike Huckabee to be her running mate? Was he freakin' nuts? Dude ranted through a megaphone in Arabic, the only decipherable for the non-Arabic speaker being "Allah." Then, in the middle of his rant, he shouted "Islam isn't un-American." Dude was taking to the streets, showing Angelenos that religious proclamations made on Hollywood street corners in the middle of rush hour traffic isn't solely the domain of Christians.

I pulled my phone out of my purse and turned on the camera.

"Amy, take of picture of him."

"How do I do that?"

"Just press the center button."

Amy pointed and shot right as the light turned green.



At some point, we found Carousel, only to notice the sign on the window that read "Closed on Mondays." And so we continued to drive through Thai Town until we hit the corner of Hollywood and Edgemont and spotted Bamboo House.

"I could go for some pad Thai," said Amy.

I was so hungry, I could eat anything.

Bamboo House has the best Thai food I have ever tasted. I'm pretty sure that is not just the hunger talking. Amy and I split some fried rice (yummy), she got the pad Thai and I got a macaroni dish, the full name of which I can't recall right now. I tasted Amy's pad Thai and was impressed. I never really cared for the dish before because, at most of the restaurants I have visited, it's too sweet and leaves a sickly aftertaste that lingers in the base of my throat. This pad Thai, though, was flavorful and savory. My own dish was a scrumptious mix of macaroni, tofu, tomatoes, basil, red pepper and chili pepper. The heat didn't hit until after a minute of tofu-chomping. Then my nose started to run and my sinus headache dissipated.

After dinner, we headed back to the Fonda to see the Magnetic Fields. We arrived roughly five minutes before the main attraction.

When I first saw Magnetic Fields, in 1998, it was at a place called Threadwaxing Space in New York, which looked like it was also an art gallery. It was this small, white space with wood floors. At least, I think that it was a wood floor. Whatever it was though, everyone was sitting on it. Now, 10 years later in Los Angeles, there were cheap white chairs lined up across the bottom level of the theater.

This is how you know you are getting to be an old hipster-- when you go to seated events in venues that don't have seating to see a band that performs with an intermission alongside guys who think that they are classing it up by wearing a blazer with their jeans and stupid Urban Outfitter t-shirts, not realizing that they wore the same outfit when they screened their theses in film school.

When the band came out, Claudia Gonson, who plays the piano and sings, asked that we not applaud. Meanwhile, Stephin Merritt was motioning "cut" to the audience. Gonson tried to explain why we weren't supposed to applaud, but it was impossible to hear her over the cheers. I think something must be up with Merritt's ear because every time the crowd clapped, which was often, he would tilt his head towards his left shoulder and pull on his earlobe.

Regardless the band played at least two hours (I lost track), working in old and new songs plus pieces from the Gothic Archies and the 6ths. They were, as Amy noted, "way unplugged," which meant that they did not play my personal favorite "Long-Forgotten Fairytale," which I used to play a lot when I DJed, usually with Pulp or Pet Shop Boys. The band did, however, play some choice tracks, including "Grand Canyon," "Papa Was a Rodeo," "Take Ecstasy with Me" and "Smoke and Mirrors." The band also played two of the Gothic Archies tracks from The Tragic Treasury: Songs from a Series of Unfortunate Events and were joined by Mr. Lemony Snicket himself on accordion. The highlight was during "Scream and Run Away," when we were told to scurry our feet whenever Snicket said run and and slump in whatever position we wish to find ourself deceased in when he said die.

"It works better with second graders," he said.

Oh, but it was a loud crowd at that moment. Louder than one could imagine for a show where much of the night we felt burdened by the pressure to act like civilized music fans.