ONE of the Misread City's favorite LA hangouts in Colorado Wine Company in Eagle Rock: It opened shortly before we moved to the Eastside and has been a sort of neighborhood bar. Fans of the dedication to low prices and high quality -- as well as eccentric and small-batch wines -- this place serves up will be as excited as your humble blogger about the latest news.John and Jen Nugent, who own the … [Read more...]
Archives for 2010
Italian Rock Returns to LA
MUSIC from Italy is about more than just opera, "Volare'," and the songs of singing gondoliers. It's the goal of Hitweek LA to show Angelenos how wide the range is.Last year I wrote about the festival here, and spoke to the organizer and a few of the bands for an LA Times story."We have very successful artists, from rock to heavy metal to reggae to world music," Francesco del Maro told me. … [Read more...]
Bambi Kino at Taix
Just a quick post to say, Saturday night I went out after my bedtime to see Bambi Kino, a newish band formed around the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' first appearance in Hamburg and with the goal of recreating those raw early years. ("Slow Down" is here.)I've seen some great shows recently -- Sonic Youth, Pavement, Belle & Sebastian -- but in its very different way this was as thrilling. Even … [Read more...]
Teenage Fanclub On Its Way
RARELY has a band gone from overrated to undersung so quickly. But when the air went out of the "alternative" boom in the mid-'90s, some great bands got lost in the flood. Teenage Fanclub's Gram Parsons-flavored Songs From Northern Britain, from 1997, proved that this group was made of more than just feedback drenched irony. But almost nobody in this country heard it.So it's a real pleasure to … [Read more...]
Green Shoots — Eagle Rock
Neighborhood are complicated organisms – like a marriage or a human body, they can get better and worse at the same time as some aspects wax, others wane. That seems to be the case with Eagle Rock, the Northeast LA hood I’ve written about a few times, most controversially with this 2009 New York Times piece about the impact of the recession.Overall, of course, the Los Angeles economy has remained … [Read more...]
Tribune Corp, 2010
IN the spring of 2008 I was called into the office of the editor who was supposedly running my section, Calendar. He said good things about my previous year of output and how much he was looking forward to what I’d turn out next. (Nearly every day I had a story in the paper, he came by my desk with a smile to tell me how much he liked it.)The LA Times building after its bombing 100 years agoHe … [Read more...]
Daniel Ellsberg’s Secrets
THE home where the once-reviled Daniel Ellsberg has lived since the late '70s is hard to find: It's down a small redwood lined street and its address is out of order with its neighbors. When you review what Ellsberg went through in the '70s -- national manhunt, Nixon hiring thugs to break into his therapist's office, Kissinger denouncing him as "the most dangerous man in America" -- it's not hard … [Read more...]
Belle & Sebastian on the West Coast.
IT'S been four years since the Glasgow indie rock band Belle & Sebastian came to America. I remember that show, in which they were accompanied by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in part because of its sheer wonder. Also, because my wife and I were such fans we left our newborn son -- less than a full month old! -- to see the group. (Yes, we got a sitter.)Belle & Sebastian of course, are a band that … [Read more...]
The Avett Brothers’ Country Roots
SCOTT Avett plays his banjo like Will Sergeant from Echo and the Bunnymen played guitar. That's what the Avett Bros. manager thought the first time he saw this North Carolina band, which is both deeply rooted in Americana and on its own trip.ALT-COUNTRY heroes The Avett Bros. are in town tonight, Oct. 1, at the Nokia Theater. I spoke to Scott and manager Rolph Ramseur for this story in today's … [Read more...]
Alex Ross on Music and Noise
FOR my money, there is no more important and provocative essay about classical music over the last 10 years than an Alex Ross that begins this way: "I hate 'classical music': not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past." And he goes on: "For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture … [Read more...]