Quicksilver Daydreams of Amoeba: Perhaps becoming wedded to routine, I was standing again at the silent movie bin upstairs at Amoeba Music when some favorite act went off. This time I was marveling over a $14.95 copy of Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler when Steve Earle abruptly croaked over the p.a., covering some mumbled profanity with “Who’d you rather have teach your kids to cuss, me or Dick Cheney?” That drew a big laugh and the scraggly firebrand began talking of his new album of Townes Van Zandt covers, starting the music with “Pancho and Lefty.” He played it as the late great master used to, simply and without adornment, relying on only a voice equally as seared. Earle closed off with a blistering run at his own “Copperhead Road,” itself a classic entirely worthy of the context and a song that irresistibly brings me back to bootleg doings long past midnight on backroads of the late Confederacy. The star smiled slyly and quipped, “There was a time when I wouldn’t have had the balls to do that” over a sharp round of applause. Sure enough, on Friday arrived forwarded from City Beat my very own copy of Townes, which gets my redneck-aesthete-maudit’s plaudit as likely the best thing of its kind since Nilsson Sings Newman; a wall-to-wall refit of a famously influential structure. The fifteen songs selected are Townes at his most philosophical (“Mr. Gold and Mr. Mudd,” “To Live is to Fly”), highest-lonesome (“White Freightliner Blues”) and doomed (“Lungs,” a cancer anthem even more harrowing than the original), a mix so close to Earle’s own longtime preoccupations the line between author and interpreter comes close to erasing. Harrowing, hopeful and essential.

One-Reel Comedy: Last week was the 80th anniversary of the first sound movie by the deathless duo Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, a secular miracle celebrated later that same Wednesday evening at the Hollywood Heritage Museum on Highland. The first show was sold out, with amazed staff blinking owlishly at an unprecedented turnout for Stan and Babe, two clowns from gentler times whose small local cult seems to all know each other by sight. While awaiting the promised second show, I faded up the stairs to the small park above, loping right a trio of surly methheads making threatening sounds. I smiled, showed them my can of pepper spray and was soon wrapped in splendid solitude, enjoying some pre-credit skempy and mumbling Dukenfield imprecations at a Tinseltown where gentlemen of the arts can’t even get decently high anymore. Turns out Men o’ War, the boys’ second sound movie, was shot in Hollenbeck Park, not far from my crib in dear old Boyle Heights. Before this delightful artifact rolled, a speaker urged us to never, ever go there after dark.

Sharpe Dressed Men: Well, what to do after dark downtown is an abiding question that ArtWalk answers only one Thursday a month. Part market for recession-wracked artists, part roving singles meat-rack, part experiment in social Darwinian set design, this event now features more music and more public mating rituals than ever, along with an uptick in cops and panhandlers, with the latter looking much better-heeled than the human scarecrows kept penned along the Nickel a few blocks away. I was in work mode, but every other unattached male had his game on, with even the most faux-negligent hipster-dude got up like Prince’s pet horse. The party shrank to a still-formidable throng holed up inside the Regent Theater and Art Walk had been over a couple of hours by the time headliners Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes took the stage. The temperature was already approaching sauna level as the heartland-indie ensemble sweated to squeeze big-sky theatrics into a sound system like a high-end transistor radio. Sharpe is gifted Ima Robot frontman Alex Ebert’s rebirthing exercise and, as self-recreation, beats all kinds of fuck out of Buster Poindexter. The mostly male crowd in the back was wilting when I left, but the kids up front were having quite the time, as Ebert led them with customary ease and charisma. Outside was the usual post-11 p.m. crypt, with even the panhandlers as gone as if officers had picked them up and mailed them to Arizona.

Imagine There’s No Cops: Contrast this with the near-total absence of duly-constituted authority encountered last Saturday night. May 16 came with a nice assortment of temptations, from the Doves/Wild Light hullabaloo at the Wiltern to favorites Dead Meadow supporting Mogwai at the Orpheum to a fancy private party with sexy girls galore at supersecret boho digs somewhere in Lincoln Heights. Still, I’d played with a new short story until the day was well along, not starting my weekend at all until the first cubensis sprig went down the hatch at the New Beverly Cinema while a program of vintage science-fiction movie trailers throbbed on the screen. The non-Keanu original of The Day the Earth Stood Still followed, and then I adjourned to the Wilshire Boulevard Metro stop, stepping off the 720 at Central and legging to the Plump “May Flowers” party already in progress at the usual secret hideout a mile away on S. Santa Fe Ave. Dallying until the small hours in the company of sexy pals and the spun action-adventure soundtrack of Shylock, DMT Underground and more, I did a shroom-laden Technicolor wobble home through a curiously active Wholesale District with nary a sign of cop, fire marshal or security guard. Only the sweaty togs worn by bus drivers reminded me uniforms existed at all.

Friedman, Fowley, and Monsters of the A-List: The Cult of Ruby gets a little larger with each Viper Room appearance, with La Friedman herself giving a dazzling glimpse of stadium-sized ability during the near-routine course of blowing the doors off the place Monday the 18th. She’s a kind of ultimate rarity -a dazzling chanteuse with a nuanced view of the world you can jump up and down to. She puts on the kind of shows people blog about on Facebook as life-altering experiences and so I felt refreshed enough even for Silverlake Lounge, arriving in time for a last kandy-koated taste of Amusement Parks on Fire. The Nottingham shoegazers are in town recording a new album, so this is perhaps not the last of such hole-in-the-wall appearances. I missed the next act pacing the alleyway in back chortling with producer/songwriter/icon Kim Fowley on my cell. In the course of giving a Molly Bloom-like “yes” to an L.A. Record interview, the Man Who Invented Everything brought me up to date on his return to Hollywood, finally unloading summary judgment on the pimps and no-neck johns lurking at A-list watering holes these degraded days, seeking whom they may bore. I fingered the nozzle on my pepper spray idly and agreed it all sounded perfectly frightful—the sort of thing one takes up wandering to miss.

—Ron Garmon