Merry Christmas

Found this clip featuring The Ronettes singing "Frosty the Snoman." Having never seen a snowman up close (although, I think we did try to make one that year we went to Shaver Lake, but failed miserably), I find the song strange and un-Christmasy. But, any excuse to play The Ronettes is a good one.

Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas. If you find yourself bored today, I suggest checking out the Christmas specials on Adult Swim. I recommend "A Very Venture Christmas," which is only ten minutes and has a hysterical, and totally unexpected, ending. If you crave depressing Christmas specials, both Moral Orel episodes should satisfy that urge.

Christmas Eve Notes

Yesterday, I realized why it doesn't feel like Christmas. Despite being an avid (though disgruntled) radio listener, I have not once heard "Last Christmas." It's not the holidays unless I have Wham! blaring in the car. 

Fortunately, super cool local band Pop Noir put up their cover of the song for a free download. I had downloaded it last year, but got a new computer, so I'm glad that they offered the treat again.

Now I'm going to use my holiday to catch up on the work that I missed whilst ailing last week.

The Soundtrack

Once upon a time, I always wrote to the radio.  I had my boom box plugged in and turned on throughout elementary school and on through college.  I typed term papers to the beat of Expose and then Depeche Mode, onto Prodigy, Nine Inch Nails, Chemical Brothers, Aphex Twin, Basement Jaxx.

I wrote to the radio because I didn't have to deal with flipping over tapes and albums or messing around with buttons every time a CD skipped.  I never knew what I was going to get, but I was certain that I would like most of it.

Then I started to hate radio (exceptions: Big Sonic Heaven on Indie, some KXLU shows that I haven't been able to hear since the Christian station took over and most of the weekend DJ mix shows in LA).  This, of course, made writing more difficult.  I tried writing along with the sound of the stations on my digital cable.  That worked for a bit, until I realized that the rotation was just as limiting as terrestrial radio.  I tried writing to the sounds emanating from my iTunes, but I didn't want to deal with creating playlists and I wanted to have that element of surprise.

Now I'm onto Pandora and it seems to be working out alright  I based my station on Hercules & Love Affair, the only band to emerge in 2008 that I flat-out, completely love.  That said, I get a good mix of Erlend Oye and the Human League, which makes me happy.  I have no complaints yet.

Update: Uh, it seems like Pandora repeats quite a bit as well.  That said, I'm making more stations.

Boo!

So, according to a video on Perez Hilton, the Katy Perry crazy-mom story is a fake.

Boring.

Funniest Thing I Read Today

I would like to go on the record and say that I cannot stand Katy Perry's song "I Kissed a Girl," on account of the production sounding too thin for my taste and the lyrics being, frankly, insipid.  However, this news bit about Ms. Perry pissing off her evangelical parents is pretty damn.  Yeah, it's always L.A.'s fault.  Every single time.  No such thing as girls kissing girls in Santa Barbara.  Not even on Halloween in Isla Vista.

The New Generation of Autumns Fans

My cousin is thirteen years younger than I am. I remember the day she was born because my mom had told me when she picked up my friends an I from an afternoon of theater-hopping R-rated movies at the Peppertree Theater. I was kind of excited because that meant that I would have a little cousin to whom I could teach the ins-and-outs of music geekiness.

My sister and I babysat her when we were teenagers. I remember us saying that we would never actually take her anywhere because she was so much younger than us that we didn't want anyone asking if she was one of our kids. So we would hang around the house-- either ours or our grandparents-- and I would always play Siouxsie for her. By the time she was five, she would walk in on holidays and say, "Lizzie, can you play some Siouxsie?"

I thought maybe my cousin would turn into a mini-goth, but she's actually pretty normal looking. She does, however, have good taste in music, despite being from a generation that thinks it's actually cool for people over the age of ten to listen to music that began on the Disney Channel.

So, today, we were at our grandma's house and she says to me, "Hey, have you heard of this band called The Autumns?"

I totally freaked out. Have I heard of The Autumns? So, I told her about how when I was maybe a year or two older than her, I first heard the band and lost my mind. I told her how my friends Robbin, Brian and I would go and see the band over and over and over again, how we were all working at Coven 13 and our enthusiasm helped get the band booked at the club. And then I told her how I've interviewed them several times and how they're plain old awesome.

Turns out she really likes the band too.

By the end of the 1990s, the L.A. music kind of sucked. I'm just being honest here. It was, on the whole, a lot of second-rate indie rock. And then there were The Autumns who were weirder and louder than most of the people we had grown accustomed to seeing on the stages of our fair city. They were our pride and joy and, to this day, remain a must-see around town (although they play infrequently right now). To hear that my college-bound cousin, who was just a little girl when I was listening to The Angel Pool for days on end, is now getting into the band gives me hope that maybe good music is not a thing of the past.

The above video is from one of The Rockit showcases we did last year. The show, I believe, coincided with a story I did for the publication and (full disclosure, I suppose), I helped book the party. Norton Wisdom is the guy painting in the background.

George Michael in the Times

Last week, Ann Powers wrote a very interesting piece on George Michael. It was the sort of story that leaves the reader, or at least left this reader, wanting more. And so, there was more, including a photo gallery with Michael's thoughts on ten of songs and daily blog posts featuring outtakes from the interviews transcript. The problem, though, is that it's horribly organized.

Essentially, if you read the feature, you can link to the photo gallery, but it doesn't link to the blog. Then, if you find one of the posts, you might be able to catch a link to the story or the photo stream or maybe one other blog post, but not all of them.

Here are all of the related blog posts I found.

June 25
June 24
June 23
June 19

I'm not sure if I found all of the outtakes. Quite frankly, it was a pain in the ass to find what I did, scrolling through days of posts that I didn't feel like reading.

It's quite odd that while mainstream media outlets are attempting to boost their online presence, they can't manage to do it right. On the sidebar of the Soundboard blog, there is a list of categories, none of which involve a series of related posts regarding on interview with one subject. It's like running a print story with a page jump that leads nowhere.

As much as print papers want to get into the blogging game, I think that perhaps some people have misunderstood the popularity of blogs. The success of the medium isn't just the frequency with which one can publish, nor is it the fact that one can write as much or as little as necessary without working around word counts. One of the major attractions of the blog is the ease with which readers can follow a story told in installments.

Let's look at Perez Hilton, for example. Today, he posted that Madonna was spotted sans wedding ring. Now, if you just stumbled on this and you didn't know about anything about the rumored split between Madonna and Guy Ritchie, you might be curious for more. So you click on the label that reads "Madonna" and it brings up all this.

I know I'm preaching to the choir when I say this, but the thing about Internet reporting is that it's typically read when people are at work. The stories need to be as easy to access as possible because you're dealing with an audience that is clicking between a Word document and your story while trying not to let the boss see. Easy navigation is key.

Think of it like the tried and true inverted pyramid. You put the who, what, when, where and why in the top paragraph to grab the reader. You follow it with the most crucial information and leave the least important information at the bottom either for editing purposes or because readers often don't follow the jump. Your main story is equivalent to the 5 Ws, the lead if you will, everything else is for those willing to read the entire story. Put it together and you have a cohesive read. Seperate the parts of the story and scatter them around the site without any correlation and you have a missed opportunity.

RIP Buddy Miles

Read the obituary here.


California Raisins commercial featuring Buddy Miles, originally uploaded by wdln.



Band of Gypsys 12/31/69, originally uploaded by Stratobendix81

When Something Actually Happens on the Sunset Strip

I loathe the Sunset Strip. This is no secret. The traffic angers me. The crowd makes me cringe and the thought of the amount I have to pay for one night on the Strip causes me to get lightheaded.

I wish I could tell you that the Strip is going under some sort of resurgence, but that would be a lie. It is still an airbrushed cesspool filled with rotten drivers and tacky suburbanites who scream things like, "Hey, want to party with us?" (Do I look like the sort of girl who would party with Linkin Park-loving ruffians?) The high cost of the Strip has gone down, however, $5 parking, $2 sodas and free gigs aren't enough to make me head west of Fairfax. Nope, I only go to the Strip for one reason and that's because I really dig your band, as with Pop Noir's gig at the Key Club last night.

I came into contact with Pop Noir when it was just a duo consisting of Manchester-born twin brothers Joe and Luke McGarry. I was DJing at the Airliner in Lincoln Heights and the band just happened to be on the bill. The style was minimal but with a strong pop sensibility, clearly the result of listening to New Order's Power, Corruption and Lies. In the two or three years that have passed, the duo became a trio with the addition of Chilean drummer Nico Saavedra and has grown in both musicianship and songwriting skills.

Last night was the final installment of Pop Noir's Tuesday night residency at the Key Club. The crowd was substantial, more than half full, and the band benefited from the only worthwhile feature of Sunset Strip clubs-- a good soundsystem. I have seen Pop Noir play at least ten times and can honestly say that I have never heard the band sound so good.



Pop Noir opened with a cover of "Waterfront," a British-styled arena rock anthem from Simple Minds. Despite being at the Key Club instead of Wembley Stadium, Pop Noir maintained the intensity of the original. It was a wise choice. I imagine many of the people in the club would be too young to remember the original (hell, I'm almost too young to remember it) and Simple Minds haven't really benefited from the '80s revival, so it isn't as obvious as working in a New Order or Cure number. Shockingly, the band learned the song less than a week ago and this was the second time it had been incorporated into the set.

The bulk of the set relied on original material, infectious pieces like "Don't Fool Yourself" and "Santa Ana" that feel like well-known radio hits were it not for the fact that they aren't.


Joe


Luke


Nico

The crowd was especially receptive to the set. Apparently, the guys in the front row had been to all four performances of the residency. They were dancing during the entire set.



By the end of the set, when the band busted into its cover of "Paint It Black," Luke was in the middle of the crowd.




I felt proud to see this young band grow so much in just a few years and hopeful that good things will fall Pop Noir's way in the future. This show was definitely worth heading out to the Strip.

Costume Changes

You don't have to be a mega-pop, mega-star to employ the art of the quick change in your rock show. Just ask the Fuxedos.

Carlos and I caught the punk cabaret act at Safari Sam's last night and, damn, that Danny Shorago sure knows how to slip in and out of masks and costumes without losing a beat in the songs.

Yesterday was Abraham Lincoln's birthday. In honor of the late president, Shorago emerged on stage in a George Washington mask. Hey, at least he drew a beard on it.

By the time I had fished my camera out of my handbag, the first of many, many masks had been cast aside in favor of a fresh-faced singer sporting Mickey Mouse gloves.



The Disney-esq quality of his ensemble was juxtaposed with his blood-splattered band mates.



After a few more switcheroos, Shorago settled into something a bit more appropriate for lady-baiting hip movements.



And then he changed into something a little more comfortable without leaving the stage.