sunday bloody sunday

I met Ann Powers at a workshop at my school paper last spring and was so stoked that a living, breathing female music critic was actually talking to me (much less thinking I was the next Daphne Carr) that I held onto hope that our vague plans to get coffee and talk about summer writing prospects would eventually come true–even when summer ended. But then I found out that her husband got relocated and she moved to the deep South somewhere, inevitably getting lost in the thicket of backwards thought like the rich half of my family, which explained not only her lack of post-American Idol finale communication with me, but also her missing weekly musings printed in the Calendar section of the L.A. Times. Since her July disappearance, she has used her several returns to Los Angeles to write up expert assessments of big-time concerts (such as Pearl Jam at the Gibson and Thom Yorke’s recent dance party at The Orpheum), but today’s discussion of Sunday’s U2 concert at the Rose Bowl (which is so amazing, it’s not even posted on the Times’ website yet) is the most insightful yet.

Instead of writing about good-concert-bad-concert or “I love Bono” review fodder, Ann instead dissects what erecting $25 million dollar stages across the country means for the future of arena tours (creates a “welcome den”) and what the streaming of Sunday’s event on YouTube does for the concert experience (nothing compares to the real thing). I love Ann Powers because her dissections are infinitely more interesting than the concerts themselves and she never ceases to amaze me with her evaluations of the vast cultural web and finding important intersections that I see, but fail to find the words for.

Also worth playing around with: the Times’ interactive graphic of U2’s in-the-round stadium modeled off the LAX Theme Building. There are 12 guys that sit in its futuristic legs to control the spotlights and the LED screen expands to create a light show shower curtain that goes crazy during “Vertigo.”

RIP brendan mullen

Brendan Mullen died on Monday and with it, a piece of LA punk history. Not only did he skip out on the UK to co-own Hollywood hardcore-hole the Masque which was in 1978 what dingy-homegrown-music haven The Smell is today, but he also used that to catapult himself into a lifelong career as the only booking agent in town who actually gave a shit about the music. We interviewed him back in 2007 for our Masque 30th Anniversary Issue and discovered that New York sucked even back then and he still owns 95% of his old records. Flea wrote “an appreciation” of Mullen for the LA Times and it made me cry openly on the blue line as it rolled through South Central. I obviously didn’t know him personally, but his is a name that comes up again and again when talking of the underground’s don’t-give-a-fuck early days and because of him bands like X, The Germs, The Dogs and The Zeroes are still (in one incarnation or another) playing shows.

RIP Brendan Mullen

lbc’s lbt is omg

Dear Long Beach Transit,

You’ve really been on a roll lately. And yes, that pun was intended. I haven’t been on your cheap, urban bus system since that summer I was homeless and even then, it was only the 4th Street crawler to get me from downtown to Taqueria #4 at Redondo. But yesterday, you became the highlight of a trek that took me from the bus stop outside my apartment all the way (sorry to bare my soul here) through the Orange County of my past and into the arms of my simultaneous future–Long Island Iced Teas and bypassing hospital visitor hours included.

Anyway, what I realized on my mandatory ride on route 91 to PCH is that where Metro went wrong in its most recent bus upgrades, you went right and your board of directors is reveling in what I see as more model-proof that effective public transportation is possible in Southern California. But you’ve always been licking at new technologies, like the water taxi that blasts through near-stagnant ocean from the Alamitos Bay to Belmont Shore and your 2006 implementation of real-time satellite bus tracking available online or from bus stops.

Your newest fleet-vestment, however, tops it all!

In April, a new batch of hybrid-electric buses–Passport shuttles on Prius technology slathered in USC-pride steroids–were added to the fleet. In addition to windows tinted on the outside and acceleration that sounds like a fucking Tomorrowland ride, the new buses have extra butt-friendly seats (like the best motel bed you’ve ever slept on) and a route-specific recording of hypnotizing upcoming-stop announcements (in a Bond-lab-of-the-future sort of way).

My bus driver was barely out of high school and smiled even though I was unprepared for the 20 cent fee hike to ride on the eastbound clean-air machine. A balding ginger wearing a Lakers-jersey and green patent leather Dunks sat across from me. He had so many bags (one on a stick) that I was convinced he was The Hip-Hop Hobo Leprechaun I’d been dreaming of writing screenplays about. More people got on. There was no graffiti etched into the windows, no shitty tag names scrawled into the seat backs. The crackheads sang to themselves, the high school girls texted their 20 year-old boyfriends. Everyone said “Thanks” to the bus driver as they got off, even the ones that didn’t speak English.

It was a pleasant experience and I hate that word and never thought I would ever use it, especially in reference to something in Long Beach and especially not about a fucking bus ride, but it was. Everyone on that thing is a typical Long Beach freak–even me–and the experience of us freaks engaging in some form of civilized urbanity provided an uplifting feeling that betrayed the surrounding decay like a night at the Queen Mary Hotel.

So, I’m throwing up words here because I’m glad someone acknowledges what Metro never will: that even weirdos who ride the bus deserve privacy from the  gawking public, comfortable seating and a lulling directional voice reminding us of where the hell we are because sometimes, who knows?

Oh yeah, Long Beach.

–Mandy