“Let Us Sit Upon the Ground and Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Kings”: I hadn’t been back in L.A. more than a couple of days when the King of Pop exceeded all expectations of his upcoming tour by dying in advance of it. The Vine Street star of the Other Michael Jackson, legendary local DJ (now on KGIL), was the scene of a tastefully-done spillover memorial I viewed mid-afternoon Thursday, a few hours after the K of P keeled over. Leaflets reading “STOOPID! His star is in front of Graumann’s! Do you think the real Michael Jackson would have such a shitty location?” added just the right soupcon of ratwit Boulevard irony. A onetime rock hater, the (still-living) OMJ graciously gave the gaffe his blessing, adding “[I]f it would bring him back, he can have it. He was a real star. Sinatra, Presley, The Beatles and Michael Jackson.” The LAPD chopper buzzing overhead mooted any other directions and the propwash echoing off buildings gave a nice tension as I walked hillbilly-slow down the Avenue of the Stars toward Highland. It was like Day of the Locust as performed by C.W. McCall- a sullen mob scene presided over by more cops than Dog Day Afternoon. Swamped amid this flashmob of mourners was detritus from some upcoming TV-op for Bruno, a new comedy which may well go down in history as Sacha Baron Cohen’s karmic blowback. A disheveled, starveling street preacher climbed up on some rigging near me and set to bellowing about death, damnation and Jesus. It was a poorly-done crackhead busker’s version of a tune I know very well indeed, so, at his peroration, I loudly offered “O death, where is thy sting?” The fellow blinked in surprise, peering owlishly down at me as a distant voice intoned, “Grave, where is thy victory?” There was laughter and the brother went back into his spiel, plainly a broken man.

EDC = TKO: A miss-the-memo blunder of the kind fatigue inevitably brings got me no closer to the Saturday night closing of Electric Daisy Carnival than nearly the entire circumference of the Coliseum. Shunted in a left-landed circle around the place in search of a presslist event staff swore was at just the next gate got me a jogger’s-eye view of another overpoliced pop-clusterfuck. The atmosphere was much more alluring, as acres of friendly girls in boy-shorts and angel wings crammed every egress, even the mid-evening shuttle management graciously offered to take me to Staples Center (some miles away) to get accredited. A sightly mother-daughter kitty-kat team made the ride diverting and I was beginning to feel the event when I learned the presslist had already departed. Bloodied by fortune, I bowed to the ladies and padded downtown in my velvet clothes (past the spot on Sixth Street where, about twenty-four hours before, I nearly had to pepper-spray some strapping asshole trying to muscle a woman in a minidress) and caught the 18 Metro to the Warehouse District. Walking into the monthly Plump party on S. Santa Fe was like attaining the very bower of Underground Paradise. DJs Patrico, Jacques the Ripper, Todd Spero and FatFinger vied for beaty honors as a delightful lady of mystic bent drew the big-city pizen from me, one nuzzle at a time. Sweet home L.A., at last.

“Will The Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down?”: By three the next afternoon, I was slumped exhausted in the back row of the Silent Movie Theater, as the last night of L.A.’s first-ever Jerry Lewis retrospective flickered to giddy life. The three hours of clips shown before the main feature were like a curated tour through a vast and quirky comic universe roughly the scope of those of James Joyce or Flann O’Brien, and (in America at least), about as little understood. The last living heir to the great line of Buster Keaton and Stan Laurel, Lewis remains problematic to American critics and I think I know why. Those clips showed he has the founding shuck of American masculinity down cold, with his smooth ciggie-chuffing characters pointing up the fraud even as his geeky dolts tear it down one squeal and triple-take at a time. This is caricature the Roger Eberts and Rex Reeds of filmchat might find more than a little discomfiting. Even Cracking Up (Jerry’s 1983 directorial swansong, which had trouble getting released in the U.S.) shows lightning flashes of surreal brilliance, as Lewis does his own Brechtian variation on theAirplane! movies. The result is a W.C. Fields-peculiar opus at once too vulgar and too highbrow-brilliant for anyone outside his (gigantic) fanbase to get. The crowd was overwhelmingly young film buffs roaring in unironic glee at the temporary shrine of a neglected master. A few questions from the audience about Lewis’ unreleased The Day the Clown Cried made me keen to actually see it, instead of relying on the oft-cited displeasure of some few who actually have. These include the screenwriter –a breed of artist familiar with discontent- and Spinal Tap’s own Harry Shearer, whose last comedy album ought to disqualify him from criticism, even helpful hints.

Choke Point: The Women is housed at an elegant old house on Crenshaw and kicks up the occasional stylish indie-rock rumpus right under the snouts of the LAPD. The last Monday in June was yet another installment of Sean Carnage’s traveling rock medicine show and NYC punks the Choke were about to wreak fury in the front parlor when I walked in. Fronted by blonde whirlwind Cameron Eve, this quartet claims inspiration from the Kinks, the Buzzcocks and the Shangri-Las, but none of these worthies ever flung their pretty selves into a houseparty moshpit, at least not at me. The Choke’s set is tight and lithe, with most of the power held pragmatically in reserve, as a contrast to the sloe-eyed dreaminess of Dalmachio Von Diamond & the Enochian Keys, a six-man karass of Echo Park aesthetes with a moody streak. Von D.’s vocals come on like one of those mood-drenched charisma-rock acts Elektra signed in the wake of the Doors. Imagine a whimsical Scott Walker fronting the Electric Prunes and you get the general idea. I left as the house began to fill with seemingly every rocker south of Hancock Park and east of Koreatown, with most arriving on foot. While it lasts, this is a cozy and first-rate quasi-underground encampment without a MySpace page and without a lot of hassles either.

A Little Night Orgy: Kim Fowley once famously recommended Hollywood as a place for the cynical who’ve fouled their nests elsewhere. While it’s impossible not to marvel at the agglomeration of shitheels hoofing it in this basin, few can remain cynical around the fellow’s female entourage, most of which were running rampant at his Lipstick Orgy extravaganza at the Knit last Wednesday, the 20th. The tall and glowering host, father of a hundred chart hits across the decades and busy these days as ever, left briefing details to Christie Blood, the entirely delightful mistress-of-ceremonies for further cozening. Fowley’s shows always remind me of mid-1960s A.I. P. joint Dr. Goldfoot & the Bikini Machine, in which Vincent Price attempts to conquer the world with an elite force of pulchritudinous chickbots molded to every kink in ruling-class chauvinistic taste. On the bill were Beat Killers, the Fabulous Miss Wendy and Zombelle, the latter a lone gothgirl performing “blasphemous doo-wop.” Scattered around the venue were scene-folk I’ve been tripping over for years in one likely venue or other, names less familiar than the same old faces grinning atop ever-gaudier hipster-wear. Anon came Fowley, laying on a little of his Crazy White Man improvisatory chant-rock, followed by lots of lascivious q&a with a nubile self-admitted virgin. I left before the lesbian slave auction, chary of taking on yet another commitment known to be wearing in the extreme.

Another Friday, Another Raid: Aesthetes of the post-noir hardboiled crime movie show too little love for Michael Winner’s The Mechanic, a nifty 1972 bit of hitman agonistes featuring an uneasy male bond between Charlie Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent —the verbose likes of David Mamet might well have given both nuts to author. This marvel was somewhere into its fourth reel at the New Bev the following Friday night when a text bade me meet various L.A. RECORDers at a downtown speakeasy. I hauled myself away from Mr. Majestyk and passed on a planned after-movie inquiry into just how the pluperfect fuck a tiny storefront like Echo Curio was going to get away with a performance by killer hodads Double Naught Spy Car with anything short of structural damage. (Accounts from survivors are welcome and should be appended below.) While we await reports, I can only relate this upstairs eyrie throbbed with some stupendously DJ’d hip-hop in the very few minutes my arrival preceded that of the Fire Department and grim-looking LAPD officers. Sight of the taxpayer-funded mold and spit of Kevin Tighe, Randolph Mantooth and the two zombies from Adam-12 putting an end to my night was anything but new to me. I thought the full helmeted regalia on the firemen a bit hammy, as was the big red LAFD engine flashing and howling down Broadway. As we left, cops were detaining the doorman. It had the exact feel of a clownshow staged for tourists, like Yakov Smirnoff’s run in The Producers, still with two weeks left at the William Castle Dinner Theatre in scenic East WeHo.

Red Lightning: Cynics might ask what anyone expects might come of running an unlicensed party in more-or-less plain sight downtown. Well, the habits of J.Q. Law are scarcely inscrutable either and his minions insert themselves into the damnedest contexts, like in the form of Sheriff’s deputies answering a noise call at the Red Lightning Temple fundraiser last Saturday night. The cause for jollification is construction of a huge and stupefying interactive art project for Burning Man 2009 involving the Tesla coil that merrily spat at passersby in the chill space. Things were just as frisky on the dance floor and in the Jacuzzi (where you really get to know your neighbor), as both were wracked by the action-adventure DJ pulsations of FatFinger, Jesse Wright and many more. Held at a onetime cowboy-music recording studio nestled high in some remote Malibu canyon, this marathon event was all but over by the time the noise complaint hastened on the chill portion of the program. That’s as far as the bad vibes went, Burner point-people being arch conflict-resolutionists. The near-impossibility of getting a fire engine out that way on a night not illumined by total incineration no doubt figured into their calculations. Needless to say, it was a first-rate party.

March Fourth into Memorial Day: Sunday was for sleeping late and a bit of the old groan-and-creak as my morning pot of coffee stretched into the late afternoon. The evening was already far advanced by the time I wandered onto a rowdy Whittier Boulevard, spiffy in purple ruffles and black velvet, to totter in an oncoming cubensis haze to Soto Street, where I met a number of chummy fellows eager to sell me cigarettes or buy my lighter. The 251 bus dropped me a fine stretch of the legs from SmashLabs, a longtime underground partypad situated in a neighborhood with close to no bipedal activity at this hour. The soundproofing is so good I didn’t hear the blistering hullabaloo that is March Fourth Marching Band. This Portland mishigas has been a favorite of mine since their lunatic Fellini parade through the campgrounds on Saturday afternoon of Lightning in a Boittle 2007. They’ve matured into a kind of Romilar-based version of the Bar-Kays, all loopy soul-horns and disco-squawk. It went on and on, the band up way into afterhours before some fairgrounds gig or other. DJ Wolfie led the dancefloor capers and I dallied long, chatting with charming ladies in this bastion of the old pre-hassle days, when a lone hillbilly had room to maneuver.

—Ron Garmon