Funky Birthday

Someone got bounced at Carbon right before I pulled into the parking lot. I don't know what happened exactly, just that the girl who got bounced asked Edgar if he was gay, because he was dressed nicely, and tried to tip Carlos and though he were the guy sweeping up her mess in the parking lot, for reasons I don't know.. Also, there may or may not have been a dude on the roof.

We were there for Funkmosphere, the club where Joaquin Phoenix launched his hip-hop career (totally not kidding), on the occasion of my birthday.



Funkmosphere is arguably the best club in Los Angeles. However, as you might notice from this photo, it borders on sausage fest. That said, when a small, redhead girl walks into a bar, she is likely to get attention. Case in point: Melissa.

When I first saw Melissa walk up to our side of the bar, I thought she had brought a date. Turns out he was some dude she met on the walk from one side of the venue to the other and he wanted to buy her a drink. Due to the crappiness of the economy, and the fact that she just moved back to LA from Arizona and is still on the job hunt, she took him up on his offer. The dude, who was cut off by the bartender shortly after buying Melissa her drink, kept walk up to her and then walking away without saying much more than "How are you?" It inspired a new dance, called Melissa's Hiding.



For the record, Melissa titled this picture "I Should Have Spent the $10."

Funkmosphere's name implies everything that you would hear at the club. Lots and lots of funk played on vinyl. It's a head sort of crowd with a handful of pop-and-lockers. For some reason, I can never get a good photograph of those guys. I did, however, get some photos of my friends hanging around the bar.


Melissa and Edgar. This was the first time they met in person (I think), but once upon a time, they were familiar with each other through the AOL Britpop room, which, I should disclose, is where I met both of them somewhere in the neighborhood of a decade ago.


Yours truly and Carlos.


Javier and Serena looking cute in their winter gear.


Carlos, John and Nick mugging for the camera.


Kyle, my old KXLU buddy, with whom I saw Modest Mouse years before they were famous.


Juan and David looking cool at the bar.

The Adventures of Karl and Liesel

Things were looking pretty grim on Friday, too much work and not enough time. By Sunday, though, I got enough of it done to feel like something had been accomplished and so I headed down to the South Bay to hang out with Carlos.

We headed to Alpine Village for Oktoberfest, where we left our proper names behind and rechristened ourselves Karl and Liesel. This being a Sunday, the crowd was more family-oriented than what we had heard about the annual month-long celebration. However, by family-oriented, I mean that kids were running around with balloon swords as their parents chugged bier from mega-sized steins. We were disappointed to learn that biersteifel's were $50+ and sold out. 

An oom-pah band played throughout the day, encouraging the crowd of roughly 2000 people to scream "Zicke zacke zicke, hoi hoi hoi" and count "eins, zwei, drei" before chug a lugging their way through another 32 ouncer.  We tried the house brew, made by Angel City Brewery, and it was mild in flavor with no aftertaste.  Great stuff.

After we drank, we toured the Alpine Village shops, which have amazing lederhosen, if you have $300 to spare.  I picked up an Edith Piaf CD for my mom (yeah, I know she's French, but she was really popular in Germany) as she can't find the one she had and we saw La Vie en Rose last night.

Then I suggested that we head over to the closet-sized Aardvark outpost on Artesia Blvd., where we just so happened to find our costumes. I'm not going to give away Carlos, I mean Karl's ensemble, as it's too funny to unveil before Halloween. Since nobody except my otaku friends will have any idea what I am, here's a link for you. Here's her bio.

For the past two years, I have had to finish stories on Halloween and so I didn't even bother with costumes. That was really freakin' depressing as Halloween is the best day of the year. So nothing, I mean nothing, is keeping me from going out in my bad ass Halloween cosplay this year.

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.

Late Bird Special

T. was in the 'hood today, so we decided to meet up for lunch at DuPar's, not because Adam Corolla loves it, but because it's a Valley institution.

It was 3 p.m., and there were all of ten people in the restaurant, staff included. We were also the only patrons under the age of eighty. We were eating lunch. The others were eating dinner. I always associated DuPar's with old people, maybe in part because my late great-aunt swore by the restaurant, maybe because it's always old women inside the joint.

"So Golden Girls," I said to T. on the phone before we met.

"So camp," he said in the restaurant while eying the oversized white plates with the name of the eatery etched around the edges in brown.

Our waitress had dyed red hair even though she was at an age where she probably shouldn't be dying her hair red anymore. (To paraphrase my mother, when your hair is so gray that color fades after a week, you need to either let it go or force it blond.) She wasn't surly, but had this weariness about her, like she hated being stuck in this restaurant during the afternoon dry spell. The other waitress on call, the one who rung up our tab, was younger than us and almost too happy.

"I hope your food was delicious," she said.

It certainly was. That mushroom and jack cheese burger melted in my mouth.

T. is the second person I met when I started college. We liked to drink and smoke while watching movies like Pink Flamingos and tv shows like Absolutely Fabulous and we liked to drive into Hollywood and West Hollywood while listening to the B-52s or anything else that screamed 1982. Sometimes, we would go out to Beverly Hills so that we could get drinks at the martini bar inside Neiman Marcus and play Spot the Nose Job or Spot the Boob Job or both. Then, during summer vacations, we would retreat to the Valley and hang out at one of the million Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf spots on Ventura Blvd.

Back then, T. said "I'm so 310 and you're so 323."

And then one of us said, "And we're so stuck in the 818."

I was thinking about this as we sat in the restaurant and chatted. Twelve years have passed since we first met and we're still meeting up on Ventura Blvd, still bonding over John Waters and still watching the retirees who all seem to live spitting distance from the Valley's main drag.

From the Try Something New Files

Today, I was a guest speaker at a high school. For real, dude.

Now, I have spoken in public before, but never to teenagers (excluding my own high school class presentations) and, if I can recall correctly to my own youth, the 18 and under set is a tough audience. Even though I was talking to them about the teenage-friendly topic of music journalism, I was still a little nervous that perhaps no one would know any of the bands I mentioned. Apparently, everyone knows Justice so citing that band as an example of something that is covered everywhere in virtually the exact same way worked well.

I spoke inside a very small classroom at very small private school (seriously, the school covers grades 7 through 12 and has the same amount of kids that were in my graduating class at an apparently not-that-small private school). The desks were all filled with students and a handful even sat on the floor. I was pleasantly surprised by the turnout.

The students were exceptionally hip. They knew about places like the Smell and Pehrspace and one asked, "So what do you think of Cinespace?" meaning, of course, the Tuesday night party that draws in celebrities who think that they are really cool. I was brutally honest. I went to Cinespace once on a Tuesday night only because Editors played and outside of the band's set, I hated it and vowed to never return. I have, in fact, made good on that promise.

They seemed impressed when I mentioned that I interviewed Grandmaster Flash (hell, I'm still impressed by the fact that I was able to get that interview considering how long it took me to set it up and that it almost didn't happen) and the stories about Ozzfest (one of those "Everything That Can Go Wrong Will" tales) and Coachella (aka, how I accidentally met Tony Wilson, aka how I almost got kicked out of Coachella, the story is in Razorcake, available here).

There is a rush to public speaking, like the knowledge that people are actually listening to you works like a drug. It's interesting because, as a writer, I never really know how many people actually pay attention to my work, so, I suppose this was an interesting way to understand the whole concept of an audience.

I must say though, that the standout moment of the day happened before my presentation. I was standing in the school library and this girl was sitting down reading. I saw her out of the corner of my eye and noticed that she was wearing silver glitter tights and green Dr. Marten boots. This was interesting because I often wore the exact same thing with my uniform twelve years ago. (And, as I pointed out to the deans back then, it technically wasn't a uniform violation.) I guess some things don't change.

The Roller Rink Disaster of 1984 (or maybe '85)

Skateland now (DJ Curley, video originally uploaded by brandonnoonen)

Northridge Skateland turned 50 with a nice write-up in the Daily News.

Throughout elementary school and junior high, we were always going to Skateland, as most of us lived walking or short-driving distance from the rink. It was everything you might imagine from watching '80s films. Lots of sweatbands and lots of HiNRG, new wave and other assorted pop of the era. Over the course of the decade, Human League and Soft Cell gave way to Expose and Stacey Q, which in turn paved the road for Technotronic and M/A/R/R/S. Meanwhile, we changed from little kids in sweatbands and dolphin shorts to a motley crew of young teens that took our fashion cues alternately from Downtown Julie Brown, Kelly Bundy and Lydia Deetz.

I still have a souvenir of those totally '80s birthday parties and school fundraisers that took place as the skating rink-- a big-ass scar on my knee from when I ate it back in 1984 (or was it '85). Regardless, it was my own damn fault.

My best friend in elementary school was this girl, we'll call her Tracy, who despite being fairly small and and blond was the class tomboy. She was the sort of girl that would drink Del Scorcho out of the packet. Yeah, that kind of badass. Now being the bff of the class tomboy wasn't so bad, it kind of kept me from getting picked on for being such a nerd. The tough part, though, was dealing with Tracy's natural athleticism. See, I am what my grandfather used to call a "hoplamaz," which is Armenian for clutz, and have been since the day I was born. Amongst my earliest achievements in life were crawling out (oddly enough) unscathed from under the Christmas tree I pulled to the ground and walking into a table, a feat that left me with a huge gash in my right eyebrow (now you know why I wax them so thin). That I managed to succeed in dance class was no small accomplishment, but the biggest challenge of my childhood was being best friends with a member of Future Jocks of America. I tried, really I tried to keep up with Tracy, but the results always seemed to involve yours truly and a trip to the nurse's office (and, on occasion, the doctor).

So, this one time, when we were in second grade, Tracy decided that we were going to race from the tetherball courts to the church steps. I was running fast enough to keep us neck and neck, until we hit the basketball court and I tripped over my shoelace. My left knee hit the asphalt. Tracy helped me limp to the nurse's office, my leg a mess of blood, hanging skin and hot, black stuff that burned with every movement. Mrs. A., the best school nurse in the history of the field, cleaned me up, causing a pain worse than the initial injury(Me: "Ow!" Her: "Now, Liz, if I don't put this on, it's only going to get infected and hurt more." Me: "Thhhokaythhh").

Weeks later, the wound had healed into a large, dark scab. One of the boys, the one who, at the age of eight had already proved himself to be a major asshole, told me that I had birdshit on my knee. He did use the word "birdshit" as well, said it five times a day until I got so irritated that I picked off the scab.

"Why did you do that?" my mom asked me.

"Because I was sick of [insert name here] telling me that it looked like birdshit."

"Elizabeth!"

"Well, that's what he said."

But, this story is supposed to be about Skateland, right?

So, I had this non-scab wound on my leg and school had just ended and this other girl had her birthday part at Skateland. While we were on the rink, Tracy had passed me up and I wanted to tell her something so I sped up to meet her, at which point I fell on my left knee.

There was blood everywhere. I couldn't look around me without seeing red liquid slithering across the floor. My pants were ruined. The waxed roller rink floor was probably ruined. And everyone around me was trying to avoid a) tripping over a sobbing eight year old girl and b) slipping in a puddle of the sobbing eight year old girl's blood.

I think one of the grown-ups had to come out on the floor and help me up. My knee throbbed and at that moment, I was thoroughly convinced that I would have to go through the rest of my life feeling nothing but physical pain and humiliation.

Ten minutes later, after some bandages and a few rounds of Ms. Pac-Man, I was back on the rink. And I think we got the blood stains out of the pants too. But that scar on my left knee, it's still there.

A Tale That Had to Be Told

The slaying of teenager Lawrence King has been on my mind of late. As such, I wanted to share the following incident.

Brian* was the only openly gay kid at my high school. He wasn't the only gay student, but he was the only one brave enough to come out before graduation. Brian was two years younger than me, a sophomore, but we had a crew on campus that crossed grade barriers, mostly on account of the fact that we were all sort of strange-- goths, punks, nerds, hippies, whatever-- and we hung out on a the grassy area of the mission where our school was moved after the earthquake.

There were two cliques that hung out on the grass. In the other clique were a bunch of guys who all had the same first name. We often just referred to them by pluralizing said first name. For the purposes of this story, we'll call them the Jakes.

The Jakes hated all of us, one even threatened to beat me up for making a crack about his lame-ass tattoo, but they saved most of their rage for Brian. Now, to his credit, Brian had a mouth that pissed off everyone at some point, but the Jakes didn't hate Brian because of his knack for unintentionally insulting people, they hated him because he was gay. I know this because I was there the day that they tried to kick the shit out of him.

I don't remember how it started. After all was said and done, I had to recount the story to the girls' dean over what seemed like the rest of the afternoon.

We were just sitting on the grass-- me, Brian and two of our friends-- when they came towards us. The blond one, the one who would threaten me a few months later, walked towards us with his gang a few steps behind. He called Brian a "faggot." I remember the exact word because I had to repeat it as the dean quizzed and requizzed me as if she thought we made up the story and was trying to cause me to slip.

"I'm telling you, that's exactly what he said," I answered.

And then Brian mouthed off to him.

"He was just standing up for himself."

And the Jakes pounced Brian and he fell back or started to fall back but didn't quite hit the ground.

"It all happened really fast."

And then the two girls jumped to Brian's defense.

"Because everyone was freaking out."

And I ran over there too, and I tried to get everyone to stop, but then the deans hit the scene and we were all dragged over to the office-- girls with one dean, boys with the other.

And the girls' dean kept the questions coming, like she was totally convinced that this ordeal was our fault, like she couldn't stand the thought of having to expel the Jakes, which was the general punishment for a fight.

"Look, I already told you, they called him a faggot, they tried to beat him up."

I can't remember if I dropped the word hate crime or gay bashing, it was whichever was most commonly used on the news in 1994.

"And I think, just on those grounds, you should let my friends and I off the hook."

The dean looked stunned. Just goes to show that I did pay attention in Youth and the Law.

The situation ended up being a wash We didn't get into trouble. I think some sort of punishment befell the Jakes, just enough to keep them away from Brian for a while, but they weren't expelled. We went on hating each other until that June, when the Jakes and I graduated and we never saw each other again.

Just so that you know, this didn't happen in some stereotypical middle-of-nowhere town. It was the San Fernando Valley, a place where the LGBT community lived more openly in the mid-1990s than in other parts of the country.

I've thought about this incident a lot throughout the years and I imagine that it must have shaped a lot of the views I hold. I feel like it might seem as though I'm over-reacting if I say it was traumatizing, but when you see a gang of kids pick on another kid because of something he can't change, well, it makes an impact.

I know a lot of people have and will continue to say that there needs to be a focus on teaching tolerance in school. I humbly submit that this is a naive solution. You can't teach compassion in the classroom. If that were possible, then Brian wouldn't have been targeted on the campus of a Catholic school, where, by 12th grade, the Jakes would have heard the "love thy neighbor" routine enough times for it to sink in to their thick, nearly-shaved heads. No, kids learn by example and senseless murders like that of Lawrence King will continue until us adults start practicing peace.

* names have been changed