Oh, but that’s not to say that the Raincoats were not ON FIRE Sunday night. This was indeed a dream come true, one of those special moments that can’t be described as a “dream come true” because none of us would have ever even imagined that we’d get to see the Raincoats until those trusty little Part Time Punks posters started telling us we would. The most miraculous thing about the show was watching the dynamic between founding members Ana de Silva and Gina Birch. It must have been absolutely strange, thirty years after releasing a mostly-ignored record on Rough Trade, to find themselves playing a packed basement in Los Angeles for an audience made up mostly of people who weren’t even around then. But here they were, with personalities beaming!  Ana carried herself like a wisened journeywoman, arching over her guitar and occasionally staring coldly into the crowd, her wrinkled face looking like it came off the cover of a Johnny Cash record. Gina, on the other hand, was all ebullient joy as she buzzed through not only the set but between-song banter about her Ebay obsession and other cute idosyncracies. I apologize for using a cliche here, but watching the two interact was special in the same way as it’s special to go to a dinner party with a long-married couple. Ana’s eye-rolling was visible during Birch’s monologues, but it conveyed not a sense of annoyance but of sisterhood and an abiding and resilent friendship. I told Gina about my observation after the show and she wrote the following in a little speech bubble above her head on the back cover of the LP I bought: “We broke up after every record, but we love each other!”

The show was electric and beautiful. They opened up with my favorite, “No Side to Fall In.” I embarassingly stopped my full-throated sing-along about halfway through the first verse when I realized no one else was singing along. It just wasn’t that kind of an audience—everyone wanted to hear THE RAINCOATS sing those songs and seemed pretty content to sing along silently in their own heads and occasionally fist-pump on hits like “The Void.” The set was, understandably, skewed towards earlier material that fit more within the “punk” aesthetic of the festival. For all of the moments that the Raincoats bounced along messily, there were enough spot-on performances to keep the set moving along solidly. For me, the highlights were Gina’s opener from Moving, “No One’s Little Girl” (my only complaint is that this was the only song from Moving they played), Ana’s achingly frustrated “No Looking,” and encore-closer “Fairytale in the Supermarket”—which somehow raged even harder than it did thirty years ago. “Lola,” their heralded Kinks cover, was spot-on and powerful in a genuine, chunky-rock kind of way. Gina also offered up what seemed to be two new songs—a heart-wrenching number about having a dog instead of a baby, and a cheery and drunken manifesto about feminism, happiness, and being a “City Girl.” To be sure, they were both a bit longer and more repetitive than the early material through which the band was rifling—but they provided a stunningly honest portrait of their author, one that I think we were all grateful to see.

—Geoff Geis

“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.