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The Good: This summer has been a pretty good one as far as music goes. Los Angeles hosted the sixth annual International Pop Overthrow in late July/early August, a two week festival organized by a dedicated follower of pop named David Bash and held at various locations throughout Southern California. (Other locations, like Chicago and San Francisco have hosted the event, and this October one will be held for the first time at the Cavern Club in Liverpool) IPO featured a huge number of pop bands (somewhere between five and seven dozen) from all over the world. I only caught a couple of gigs, one a free afternoon show at a public park in Garden Grove and one a club date in my old stomping grounds of Silver Lake. The first gig was mostly a failure musically; the best groups were somewhat better than mediocre, the very worst prompted me to say to the friends I came with “This never happened. We weren’t here, we didn’t see this. If anyone asks, we don’t know who ____ is.” Even so, it was a beautiful day to attend an outdoor concert and it gave us a chance to pick up the program and 3 CD set(!) that are complementary at IPO events. Better yet, the program included a mini-CD from Rainbow Quartz Recordswhich totally blew my mind. If you like Nuggets style pop, you’ll be heartened to hear that Rainbow Quartz is keeping it alive. Anyway, a week later we attended another event and things were much better. I especially dug a band from Jersey called Billionaire Boys Club, despite the cheezy name. They reminded me a lot of early Cheap Trick. The night after that was the Kinks tribute at the Fold at the Derby in Los Feliz—the Derby was once one of the famous Brown Derby restaurants in Hollywood (Los Feliz is to Hollywood what Clintonville is to North Campus), hence the name. Not directly affiliated with the IPO, it was a complementary event that included a couple of the festival’s participants such as the 88 featuring the ubiquitous Quazar (the Brian Jonestown Massacre & Lutefisk are two that are probably best known outside L.A; I heard BJM on WCSB last time I was in Cleveland, very exciting). They were great, as were the other bands, with maybe one or two exceptions like this one guy named Ted Kane who played an acoustic version of “Last of the Steam Powered Trains.” Who let that bozo on stage? Caught an amazing jazz concert from Rob Brown and Henry Grimes the next night as well as a couple numbers from the indescribable Deerhoof (the latest issue of Sponic has a good article on them, plus an MP3 you can download) at the Derby before I had to hoof it myself to catch the last train to Long Beach. The Bad: You shouldn’t need me to tell you that Iraq is a disaster. All I can say is that I’m sure glad George Bush declared the war over; with our servicemen dying on what seems a daily basis, I wouldn’t have been able to tell otherwise. Seriously, though, I do see a silver lining in the erosion of support for the administration. Maybe Middle America is finally catching up to e.e cummings and starting to say “There is some shit I will not eat.” And what was up with the displaying of Hussein’s sons’ corpses? Whose idea was that, the producers of “Faces of Death?” Great, let’s sink to a new low—maybe this should be filed under ugly, but I already got something for there…. The Ugly: Surely you didn’t think this column wasn’t going to end without some comment on Kobe Bryant, did you? Whether Kobe is guilty of sexual assault or not, he’s shown himself to be the arrogant bastard in real life that he is on the basketball court. Gone from his young wife and child for 24 hours and he seduces and/or assaults the first attractive woman he sees. I think it is important to keep in mind that he’s innocent until proven guilty, but the ugly part for me is seeing the way this thing is playing out in the public and the press. More than presuming his innocence, the widespread belief in L.A. and in the media seems to be that he couldn’t possibly be guilty and that his accuser is, to use one of the nicer words I’ve heard, a golddigger. Reporters are going out of their way to discredit her before the trial, trying to find every possible piece of potentially damning hearsay against her they can find. The low point of the whole affair had to be when DJ Tom Leykis broadcast her name to a national audience on his radio show. Sure, I think the “Golddigger” theory is a possibility, but I think it’s at least as possible that he did rape her. When I’ve suggested to some people that the case is going to turn on physical evidence, I’ve heard all kinds of bullshit responses. “O, they had rough sex.” Right, in a half hour of being with someone sexually for the first time you’re going to get heavy into S&M. I don’t think so. “O, well maybe he was too ‘big’ for her.” To which I say, there is such a product as KY. Even absent that, it’s a luxury hotel, they must at least have a bottle of hand lotion in the bathroom—if nothing like that was used and there are signs of trauma, that doesn’t bode well for Kobe--the best thing that can be inferred from such a circumstance is that he’s a jerk who didn’t give a damn about how she felt. My guess is that she thought it might be fun to make out with a charismatic celebrity but didn’t want to go any further than that…young girls can be like that. As for Kobe, we’ve seen on the court that he doesn’t deal particularly well with adversity and we know he skipped college and has led a pampered existence apart from the real world. Maybe he didn’t understand what the word “No” means, having so seldom heard it. Whatever the case may be, the facts will be aired and, ideally, determined in court. The justice system is far from perfect, it’s susceptible to all sorts of corrupting influences—but it still beats Hell out of talk radio and the water cooler as a venue. |
