The Last Shout of Yet Another Rock Band: The surrounding mallspace changes with the commercial fortunes of Hollywood Blvd., but the Knitting Factory continues to take on a fine patina of rockist grunge. The Tinseltown Knit is the last great Boulevard rock joint and if Hollywood itself faded into a John Carpenter movie hellhole, this place would be its Al’s Bar. Subdivided by genre, the main room boomed with club kids while about a dozen bits of hipster jetsam crammed the tiny AlterKnit Lounge for the reputed last-ever show by the Horse Thieves. Lead guitarist Alex Maslansky confirmed the terminal status by mumbling something about “the last temptation of the Horse Thieves” before his band twinkletoed off into a twee-country that might be called “cowpop.” Their MySpace page shows them fairly deft hands at Cali country vaudeville in the ironic-distance mode. At this transit lounge for distracted hipsters, the trio sped through despite complaints about the sound and an audience standing around in the usual flat affect. Even at the clipped length of sets at the AlterKnit, the end couldn’t come soon enough, so I left as the last song came loading into the chute, with Maslansky’s elegant hawgleg grunt receding as I zigzagged down the corridor.

Castellari vs. Tarantino: From there, I felt like a bit of regenerative ultraviolence, so I legged toking over to one of the last screenings of Inglourious Basterds during its long stay at the Arclight. I was way behind seeing this partially because I wanted to screen the 1978 Enzo Castellari original first, a full-tilt basher that never played the Southern drive-in circuit or much of anywhere else in North America. Basterd kin to The Dirty Dozen, Cross of Iron and Kelly’s Heroes and chock with affectionate shoutouts to all three, Inglorious Bastards treats American participation in WW II like a big-budget proto-Burning Man party, complete with hippies, guns, designer explosions, naked Nazi chicks, rockin’ individualized uniforms and more fuck-you attitude than a fistful of middle fingers. This is very likely the only punk-sensible WW II movie, as almost all the characters are in cheerful rebellion against everything but dismantling the Third Reich, itself a kind of ultimate in bummer Authority. This sensibility resurfaces in Quentin Tarantino’s epic in Brad Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine, a Tennessee hillbilly whose unstated-but-sufficient reason for hating Nazis is they’re such obvious and insufferable pricks. Basterds rebukes an entire substratum of WW II cinema of the 1950s-1970s that tended for Cold War reasons to “humanize” servants of the Third Reich; even Patton managed to make the Red Army look a lot less savory than the generic-looking Good Germans George C. Scott spent most of its runtime jawboning to death. The takeaway serves Q’s trademark sense of justice well—history too often fails to mark survivors with anywhere near the right degree of thoroughness.

Brief Dream of Decom: My experience of this 6th installment of Burning Man’s annual L.A. afterparty was short and full of wonder. A lady named Gypsy Goddess was visiting me that weekend and we took up where we left off when parting at Burning Man 2009. Consequently, we didn’t get out to the Cornfield (what the rest of the world calls Los Angeles State Historic Park in otherwise nondescript Naud Junction) on Saturday, until the hour was already well advanced. Decom has gone from a big outdoor art-party in the Warehouse District to a mini-BRC, with exhibits Patrick Shearn’s and Cynthia Washburn’s Holding Flame seeming to have the dust still on them. All the pals we saw looked to be recuperating, minds still blown and reeling from what everyone swears was a miraculous uber-Burn—seven days of bliss difficult to absorb even by the breakneck hedonics of the L.A. underground party set. I was informed my presence was required back in bed so we headed there, walking all the way back to Union Station as hippies and party folk streamed past us, their great glad Fellini smiles smearing the night like glowsticks. We were high by the time we passed through Olvera Street.

All Night Horrorthon: When the all-night horror marathon became part of U.S. culture, I don’t know, but the practice was already venerable and going full-blast in the South and Midwest of my youth. The surplus gross tonnage of horror/SF/giant-bug cinema produced from the sound-era on had already taken over Friday and Saturday night TV in most regions, with vintage flicker featuring Boris, Bela and Vincent buttressing the surreal slasher/cannibal/lesbian-vampire fests then unspooling at drive-ins. One of the best things about L.A. is that it hosts several such dead man’s parties every October, with the bill at the Aero on Halloween Night looking like prime slime for fans of Reagan/Bush I-era High Cheese. The New Beverly’s seven-feature hoedown on Oct. 10 showed the finicky hands of true gutbucket connoisseurs. Dog Soldiers (2002) is a nice U.K. howler about how well an out-on-maneuvers platoon of Her Majesty’s Own serve up as werewolf-feed. About a reel into The Burning (1981) came realization I’d seen this Friday the 13th knockoff back when it came out, but I stayed for every hack and gouge anyway. Future master-thespians Jason Alexander (sporting a riot of hair on his skull) and a pre-mummification Holly Hunter keep things moving, treating the between-slaughter bits as Catskills cabaret. This superior genre entry represents the first nickel Miramax’s Bob & Harvey Weinstein made in the biz and well-earned it was. After such slick popcult, nothing less than the high art of Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery (1981) would do. Among the most delirious of the late maestro’s films, the only difference between this and any academically recognized surrealist “transgressive” or avant-art masterpiece is the near-incidental horror claptrap of what passes for the plot. Few Ken Russell movies ever made the grindhouse/arthouse jump, but the ones that did (The Devils, Tommy, Altered States) all recall the balls-out gonzo Fulci applies here to the art of the body count. It ended with a flash of maggoty poetics well past the midnight hour and house lights went up on an almost-full room. The “surprise” movie turned out to be rare episodes of Tales from the Crypt, so I took a long, quiet walk around Hancock Park, toked up a monsteroso indica buzz and settled back in time for opening credits of Superstition (1982). A little-screened modern-witchcraft wheeze with many longueurs, a few interesting arty pretensions and scads of stylish murders, end credits flapped at about 4:30 a.m. and Fight for Your Life (1977) cranked up moments after. I’d read of this storied shock-morality fable and theatre management warned us of it in vague but emphatic terms many hours before. Nearly everyone around me was gently snoring when this worn print of the event’s oldest, cheapest movie started clattering. Its plot details an interval of rape and brutalization inflicted in the far suburbs on a peace-loving African American family by three maniacs—all gross racial stereotypes including an indolent Latin, a rape-crazy Asian and a windy, psychotic Southern redneck. The latter is a tour-de-force acting job by none other than William Sanderson, the backwoods idiot on Newhart with the two brothers Darryl. Nearly everyone in the movie is a voluble bigot and all own their hatreds lovingly at top volume, spacing bouts of low-budget Salo-like sadism with a kind of verbal violence that tends to make Angelenos of all ethnicities exceedingly nervous. The adenoidal sawing in the seats abruptly choked off and tight uneasy laughter welled up as one over-the-top offense to human decency chased another in a movie perhaps best described as a Last House on the Left for racists. Worse, as very likely the only authentic hillbilly in the house, I got a sudden, immersive sense-memory (total props to the brilliant Sanderson) of what old-school rednecks were like back in that long-gone day. The recollections thus let loose sent several nightmares back-projecting in my own mind, pulling me home to Gothic Dixie as the film clattered on in front of me. The abused family was about to take revenge and, from the far back, I could see heads beginning to sink and disappear below seat level when my (muted) cell throbbed and I bolted outside. At the other end was a tiny, tender voice calling from Caracas, where it was already mid-morning and all she wanted was for me to be careful going home tonight in crazy L.A. Thanks, baby. I incinerated the last shavings in my weed pipe before finally resorting to shrooms, the preliminary buzz of which hit sometime in the second reel of Galaxy of Terror (1981), last in the marathon. As pretty much your basic early-1980s Roger Corman B-movie, this welter of space-opera clichés sports nothing worse than a woman being raped to death by a giant slug. Sick. Featuring astoundingly weird acting (from Sid Haig, Ray Walston, Robert “Freddy Kreuger” Englund, Joanie from Happy Days and the stickwood son of Oliver from Green Acres) and dialogue even H. Beam Piper would reject as too unlike human speech, it was the kind of flick a roomful of semi-strangers could bond over and did. There was a Tom & Jerry cartoon afterwards, followed by an old TV sign-off message as a Soviet-looking ordnance parade rolled by to the tune of “The Star Spangled Banner.” As I slipped out the lobby for home, there was still a swarm of dazed and happy folks on the pavement outside, all of them wisely unwilling to leave this 12-hour temporary community for the slate-grey of another midtown Sunday morning.

Cali Countryfolk and Woes of a Cub Rockcrit: Outgoing L.A. RECORD photog and writer Scott Schultz says I’m “an L.A. institution” and I hope that’s not one of the reasons he’s off to photograph rock bands in China for a year. He cites the rotten economy and that’s certainly plainly visible in the local scene, as veterans like Scott are vanishing in favor of kids who’d be making bones elsewhere in the literary underground had not 1) the L.A. music scene blown up as it has in the past half-decade and 2) the economy hadn’t (symmetrically) imploded, making the reaches of urban deep-innerspace suddenly attractive as a Subject. Most of the local music writers around when I got my first rockcrit job a decade ago couldn’t be bothered with live music and almost all are now gone, replaced by striplings doing something remarkably close to what I did when starting out. A scheduling bump with the RECORD struck my name from the list at the “secret” Flaming Lips-o-palooza at the Montalban last Thursday, Oct. 15th, so Scott got to cover that and I wound up at the Echoplex instead, getting the joy of seeing one of L.A.’s wondrous little surprises, He’s My Brother, She’s My Sister. Cali country is something I love with the fervor of a late convert, since even Buck Owens was little more than some jackass on TV until I moved my Dixie-fried ears out here for an accidental steeping in the Bakersfield Sound and its many variants. Robert Kolar and Felipe Ceballos from tough indie wide-boys Lemon Sun contribute heavily to Brother/Sister, with the whole, shifting, multi-piece concatenation in the great line of Gram Rabbit and the Parson Red Heads in the insistence on coupling the High with the Lonesome. The Lemon Sun songcraft is certainly there, with harmonies and filigree from Rachel Kolar, Lauren Brown, Robby Delosier, Molly Collins and more making the crowd-lonely poetics of the genre sound fresh, even sociable. I snagged one of their 3-song EPs outside as fellow RECORD scribe Steve Slaughter from Cigarette Bums unloaded upon my geezer’s shoulders a doleful and familiar blues—bumped off guest lists, girlfriend logistics, erratic hours; the usual sleepless days and wasted nights. Steve, who made notes of everything and had even brought a tape recorder (something I’d quit doing years ago), longed for an exclusive on Devil Makes Three, and got one by my simple expedient of slowly walking out the door into the Echo Park night. He was happily interviewing one of the members of Brother/Sister as I went back inside for a linger before Old Man Markley. This passel of root-tooters were fresh from a gig at Brick by Brick, an oldtime San Diego dive I’m overjoyed to hear is still open. This unsigned gang of owlhoots packs a heavy reliance on trad instrumentation (banjo, kazoo, washboard) along with trainwhistle harmonies and a hellcat’s freight of regret. The place was full of tattooed girls and urbane cowboys already, like some peyote dream of Hoot Gibson, who used to shoot movies about four miles from here in some other America altogether.

—Ron Garmon