fitz and the tantrums

Cop Follies, Hiding in Plain Sight and One Man’s Anti-Douchewad Activism: That various powers and principalities downtown would like very much to wipe out every last unmetered good time in this city—right down to ripping the glowing roach from your slacktwisted face—is something we Night People know all too well. That’s why the nastiest work to this noble end is always done in daytime, like the meeting of the L.A. Police Commission on the 17th. A Facebook APB meant to bring out the dance-dance lobby to this midday confab at the police auditorium on 1st Street flushed me, Dance Commander (my onetime CityBeat intern notepad in hand for the Times) and one or two underground publicists as three men from the C.I.D. (Commissions Investigations Divisions) made a slick plea for a 90-day wait for dance hall permits—a measure that would put the last three-to-seven nails in the coffin of the L.A. party underground. The commissioners made a few noises about so lengthy a process, the cops punted most questions and all played kick-the-can, indicating a faster track might be used for longtime promoters. No one ever questioned if this was a worthwhile use of police power or why officials would ponder crushing yet another source of what little economic activity this city now sees, but, in better news, the underground continues to erupt in the unlikeliest places, such La Brea Avenue. There, behind an ordinary unmarked doorway up the block from Pink’s Hot Dogs and down a garishly painted corridor is a loud and art-flecked bonsai version of a downtown warehouse party space which was just then being dominated by a masked and almost naked brunette, a very lovely and limber woman who reminded me strongly of someone I know well until a different (and differently placed) tattoo removed all doubt. I entered at about the same time as Curious Josh Reiss, as we were both hailed as “legends” by David G., governor of the place. Tonight’s show was called “The Velvet Rope” and billed as a a performance art mashup of burlesque and bondage, two tastes that have tickling masculine libidos since the balmy days of Irving Klaw. As for crowd deportment, well, the people customarily invited to these things make even displays of lusty red-blooded primate approval look stylish, even 007-like. My own chick, ahead of her time as usual, went through a Betty Page b&d period, as photographic evidence abounds on the Internet or those little shops where they still sell late-1980s skinmags. I thought of her and her visit still a week or so away and adjourned to the New Beverly Cinema for a bit of the old ultraviolence. I was late, but the midnight showing of Inglourious Basterds had yet to start and the eminent Phil Blankenship was offloading his customary anti-douchewad address as I found a pew along the back wall. Strictures against smoking, boozing, talking at the screen and a generalized edict against asshat behavior aren’t necessary for New Bev regulars, but midnight screenings and Grindhouse nights oft draw a gamier element, five specimens of which staggered out of the lobby and filed into the row in front of me just as the lights went down. Giggling, Douchewad # 1 pulled a ganja pipe, fired up and took a loud wet suck at the aperture. Spring-heeled Phil was on him in a hot second, hustling him to the lobby with the brisk professionalism of a Manhattan bouncer. Already massively high myself on various non-potable chems, I settled in for a congenially jokey run of ballistics and bloodspray, content the priests of the Church of Cinema were there to safeguard my pious contemplation.

Excuse Me While You Mine the Sky: Most of the long Valentine’s Weekend was with spent with the Playmate within the concrete-and-glass retro-future of the Westin Bonaventure. Bliss it was to be alive in that giant Reagan Age monument to a then-solvent American Empire, a four-star hotel that requires an IQ test just to navigate the mezzanine. The Bonaventure was subject of a famously clotted and hysterical screed by postmodern guru Frederic Jameson I had to read back in grad school and it’s certainly easy to imagine a middle-class academic gaping up at the sheer Ming the Merciless science-fiction excess and writing the whole place off as an insult to oppressed proletarians everywhere after stumbling Jerry Lewis-like into the fountain. My lady was so (predictably) delighted by the place so we ventured out too late to catch any more than the scrag end of the one-day BiL conference—a picture-the-next-wave tech-utopia gathering in Long Beach (and obvious counter to the adjacent high-profile TED conference) where an oft-quoted software engineer who once appeared in Playboy is like someone out of a Robert Heinlein novel. This crowd of jolly futopians was politically better behaved than many other self-admitted anarchists and certainly better fed than any Marxists I’ve ever hung around (even in grad school) with one or two approaching the stockyard dimensions of the sci-fi freaks to whom I used to sell my zine at conventions of another kind altogether. The best presentation by far was a slick and forward-looking business proposal to mine the trans-Martian asteroid belt put forth by one Michael Heartsong. I have to give this onetime motivational speaker props for bearing (looking as he did like a square-jawed 1950s Universal monster-movie scientist) and balls, since his idea is one of those daunting-yet-plausible engineering projects like the Panama Canal and Apollo moon landings, but the idea of pitching it like summer-after-next’s blockbuster indicates how difficult it is to get anything but wars, credit-swap derivatives and John Travolta movies funded these days. We retired to At Last Café, an eight-table Orange Ave. bistro that is, since Acres of Books closed in late 2008, the best standing reason I can think for an Angeleno to venture down to Long Beach these days—haute Americana that is to ordinary diner food what Wolfgang’s downtown is to the Subway up Sixth Street from it.

Love at the Shrine Expo: Then it was back to the Bonaventure for nuzzling and drugs and we kicked our heels until a midevening cab ride to the Shrine Expo for Lucent L’Amour 2010. That this event has gone from quasi-underground warehouse party to demi-aboveground musical fantasia has less to do with any mainstreaming of Burner culture and more with the mark the DoLab’s made on L.A. nightlife. Lucent Dossier’s shows at the Edison and elsewhere—along with the yearly appearances manning water-cannons at Coachella—have expanded the troupe’s fanbase among the blades and chicklets you find at the Ed and there was little of last year’s pink debauch about proceedings at the Expo. Between the action on two stages with Bassnectar, Beats Antique, The Yard Dogs Road Show, Stanton Warriors and the roving stilt-walkers and dance commandos, the crowd was couples-oriented and sedate. The Playmate and I eventually got the idea and drifted curbside for a taxi back downtown, fading by degrees away from a throng of two-person utopias to our own temporary autonomous zone on the 18th floor of the Bonaventure. Lucent L’Amour is never less than romantically revelatory.

Honey Fitz: Monday the 14th, my girl left for San Fran and I had a distant Friday on my mind. Ruby Friedman Orchestra was playing at the Hotel Café at eight, the set concluded by a raucous and convincing cover of AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n Roll).” Ruby and I spoke briefly, she of her cheery blues and me of my desolate pinks, before the party adjourned to the Velvet Margarita, where I caught up with no less than Giddle Partridge, who regaled me with witty tales of Tinseltown woe—most of them hilarious precisely because they involved people I barely knew. You can see Ruby perform at “Six Degrees of Hunnypot” at 8 p.m. on this Thursday on the fourth floor of the Highland, but your chances of seeing Fitz & the Tantrums before South by Southwest have shrunk to seeing them at the Roxy this Friday. This old-skool R&B revue apparently laid ‘em out at the Echo the week before, so the house was packed to the walls by the time I cleared the front door, with a line stretching serpentine behind me up Sunset Boulevard on yet another drizzly weeknight. Men in rumpled black suits were piling up equipment on stage while the P.A. offloaded Curtis Mayfield’s “Move On Up,” and entered this steeple of beautiful people, all looking uplifted if compressed. Critics who know them only from their EPs invoke the great Guilt Gods of modern melody—McCartney, Wilson, Gainsborough, Elton John—in a attempt at moderating the needful gush, but they might as well have spared inventing a pop pedigree for stuff that sounds more like 1960s Stax-Volt-Motown than anything that might’ve influenced Ben Folds. By the time vocalists Fitz and Noelle Scaggs began to scale the heights on tunes like “Breakin’ the Chains of Love” all it took was closed eyes to convince any soul freak (s)he was standing in front of some open door on McLemore Ave. in Memphis, circa 1971. The tightly intricate Booker T.-style instrumentation as clearly shows this influence as much as the call-and-response vocal arrangements of the kind Hayes and Porter crafted for Sam & Dave. By the end, the hipster crowd was loose, howling and turned over in prime condition for Pop Noir, who loosed their own dense and hypnotic high-in-the-mid-eighties throb to a slightly diminished crowd who’d clearly came to bounce and wobble and now had room to do it. The room was beginning to bounce like Viagra-powered bedsprings as I drifted to the pavement.

Lines on the Twittered Accidental Non-Death of Gordon Lightfoot:
I can see him lying there
In a long black hearse
Or hear his golden oldies
Tho’ that’d be worse.
Sundown, your career’s not so sweet
If fans think you been breathin’ out your last Tweet.

—Ron Garmon