palewire

So I’m out on a casual stroll in downtown LA the other night, and what do I bump into? If you guessed an illegal rock show put on by a group of chicks armed with fireworks and dressed in bikinis, you guessed right. Photos below the fold.

The crowd wandered over after a show at the nearby indie club, The Smell. The noise brought down an angry loft-dweller from the nearby Higgins Building, and eventually the LAPD officer pictured below, who advised the musicians to considering holding future events a few blocks further down, away from residential developments.

For their part, the band — who go by the name Josh Taylor’s Friends Forever — played dumb, telling the cops that they didn’t realize so many people lived downtown these days.

After two years in Washington DC, I’ve picked up and moved to Los Angeles. The reason: a new job at the Los Angeles Times. I’ll be doing the same sort of geek work required by my previous job at The Center for Public Integrity, except for a larger audience. And in a more hospitable climate.

So, I guess I’m now officially part of the vaunted mainstream media. Try not to hold it against me.

This week marked the launch of Shawington.com, a new site focused on the Washington DC neighborhood where I live. Earlier this year it was named one of America’s “bloggiest” areas, thanks to a vibrant crew of writers who have turned online journalism into a significant new force in district politics.

Shawington is an effort to join the fun. There you can find a frequently updated feed of the latest posts from all the Shaw blogs, plus a mashup map I cooked up on one of our hottest local issues, the vacant buildings littered around the neighborhood.

I handled the programming and most of the design, but the inspiration and driving force behind the site came from my housemate and landlord, Martin Moulton. Bekah Raleigh provided vital guidance with the design. And not much of anything would have been possible without the great tools developed by Wordpress, the Planet Planet project, Sam Ruby at Planet Venus, Morten Frederiksen and, while we’re at it, the Google Maps people and whatever long line of saints made sure Python and Apache play so well together.

In the future we plan to expand our research on vacant properties and build out a couple more features. But this is what we’re going with at the moment. Let me know what you think.

Good news. E Street Cinema has decided to hold over their run of the restoration of Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett’s beautiful 1977 film about the Los Angeles slum Watts.

Part French New Wave, part verite documentary, it’s a long way from your normal movie. It’s a bleak and slow-paced. The budget was next to nothing. There isn’t much of a plot. The main subject is poverty. Many of the actors were amateurs.

But at several moments its dream-like passages capture feelings of longing, tragedy and frustration with a power I’ve rarely seen in an American film.

They don’t come in the emotional showdowns or tissy-fit histrionics required to draw attention in Hollywood today. Instead, this is a movie that sneaks up on you, its moments of clarity and beauty leaping up out of the gravel to catch your eye.

In its own silent way, the scene where our protagonists, a husband (Henry Sanders) and his lonely wife (Kaycee Sanders), ebb to and fro with Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth” is a quiet, romantic tour de force with more movement and punch than eight hours of opera.

And you’ll probably never have a chance to see it on the big screen again.

Here’s a band that’s discovered how to create a blissful moment, and have the good sense to try recreating it with every song they play.

It goes like this:

Set the beat. Repeat.

Build the volume.

Holler.

It always works, and somehow they’re now hitting the climaxes so strong that it feels like the room is completely filled and nothing could ever be louder.

Sunday night at the 930 Club, they played most of the material off of their new album, Sound of Silver, but my personal favorite remains the electro-stomp “Tribulations.” Have a taste.

The first time someone told me about The Clientele five or six years ago, refinement was the selling point. This wasn’t you average pop band. This was a following. An exquisite cause that rewarded the discerning few cultivated to appreciate its recordings.

Like previous favorites of the quiet and shy among us — Felt, The Field Mice, Galaxie 500 — the band’s style goes a good way toward encouraging this view. The music is soft and whispery with a warm, bedroom sound and a striking capacity to communicate yearning and dread. In other words, everything a mopey, young indie kid could want. Have a look.

So it’s easy to go along with the theory. That is until you see them live, as I did last night at Black Cat, a nightclub here in Washington. That’s when you find out that The Clientele has secretly been a pop group all along.

I doubt even the most delicate live show could recreate the gentle arrangements and heavily treated sounds from The Clientele’s recordings. Real life isn’t so tidy.

But during its lively and at times ramshackle performance last night, there was a easy embrace of things alien to the group’s early releases. Pop refrains happily leapt from Alasdair MacLean’s throat. Songs that lilted up from home speakers like smoke rings easily gave way to towering guitar wank. Lively banter between the group and a sarcastic, if adoring, audience. One guy clapping to the beat.

It was pretty cool. And still soft and lovely when it needed to be. Good show.

Have a listen to one of the new songs from the God Save The Clientele, which is out this spring. It’s downright upbeat!

Why does this band play quiet songs? It’s such a waste.

And it’s never more obvious than when they drop all the crappy leftovers from indie rock (precious self-denial, sad-sack cutup lyrics, distrust of rhythms and anthems), quit babbling vague Holden Caulfield mumbo jumbo and shake some serious action.

There’s one thing Arcade Fire do well, and they do it very, very well. That’s the crescendo. The percussion locks in, the tempo and volume push upward into fifth gear, and everybody chants their head off. You can just soak it in. And it feels great.

So why do they even bother with the other stuff? It was obvious last night at the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall, where the crowd slept through the dirge-filled middle section of the show, only to burst to life when the band got back to the loud stuff.

I walked up to see Hot Chip perform last night at the 9:30 Club. If you haven’t heard these guys, they got some solid love last year and even some mainstream video play thanks to the funky breakout single “Over and Over.”

Alright show. I dug the slackerish twist they put on Kraftwerk’s style of stagecraft and when things really got rumbling the music hit with serious heft. It reminded me a bit of the industrial shows from my Chicago days put on by Ministry and KMFDM.

The biggest thing missing yet are the songs. Even the group’s best material often ignores the model of rising tension and dramatic, climatic release capitalized on by the rhythmic pop music I most enjoy. Sadly, the new songs they played didn’t show much progress there.

Half of a cellphone conversation I overheard on the subway earlier this week:

“Oh my god. I am so tired. I’ve been lobbying all day.”

There’s another new link over there on the sidebar, this one called DC Music Stores. It leads to a map of what is billed as the definitive list of music stores in the DC area. All I did was pull down the list and throw it up on the map. I tossed in a couple other shops off the Post’s site too.

If something is wrong or missing or out of date, let me know and I’ll work to work it out. Enjoy. And allow me to recommend the CD Warehouse on M Street. They have an excellent selection of new and used CDs from Continental electronic musicians. Like Ellen Allien.

12.21.06 UPDATE: Yesterday this map was featured by the local blog DCist and subsequently linked by Wonkette, who summarized my creation as “kind of the most depressing Google Maps mashup yet.” For the benefit for my self-esteem, let’s just assume they were referring to the quality of DC’s music shops and not my craftsmanship.

But, either way, check out what all the attention did for my hit count.