the case study seesaw hammock house

I stumbled onto this very fun installation on the way to a very serious concert at the Redcat by Yasunao Tone, an electronic musician, art writer and all-around charming fellow. Part of the charm is that although it is supposed to be kind of miniature–extracting 1 feature out of an idealized California house, in the manner of the postwar Case Study houses–it takes 2 attendants to get it going, kind of palanquin-like.

It’s kind of like a lazy-person’s seesaw. Or a 2-lazy-people’s seesaw, really, as you really need another bum on the other hammock to make the weights work. The attendants remove some sandbag weights, and depending on your respective balances, they move them around, to make it roughly balanced. Then you can push-me and pull-you, tho it is a straight up and down motion, not the arc of a seesaw. Still, it made me laugh like crazy and was immensely fun, especially in such a ’serious’ space.

The installation, by the architecture/space firm Atelier Bow-wow, has 2 other components, which are even more silly/wonderful. One is an area that is like a porch w/stadium seating, filled with some barbecues. The other is a large reclining pit, with pillows, from which you watch (a video projection of) a sunset.

The ABW gets its name, I think, because of its interest in “pet architecture,” which is to say, the built equivalent of pocket parks, “charming, small and humorous,” like pets, as one of their books says.

and that was something completely different

From the official statement released today of Cramps’ lead singer Lux Interior’s death. In Glendale, not half a mile from my house.

Their distinct take on rockabilly and surf along with their midnight movie imagery reminded us all just how exciting, dangerous, vital and sexy rock and roll should be and has spawned entire subcultures. Lux was a fearless frontman who transformed every stage he stepped on into a place of passion, abandon, and true freedom. He is a rare icon who will be missed dearly.

Influenced by the burgeoning punk scene in New York with bands like The New York Dolls and The Ramones setting the standard the two decided they would start their own punk rock band, The Cramps. In contrast to other punk bands at the time however, they also mixed a heavy dose of Rockabilly and B-movie imagery to form their own unique image. It was during this time that Purkhiser took the stage name Lux Interior, taking his name from a car advert. He also created a unique stage personia, one of a complete honky tonky punk wild man, or as one reviewer put it “the psychosexual werewolf/ Elvis hybrid from hell”. The genre they helped create was later known as “Psychobilly” even though Interior denies that that is what their music really is. In 1978 The Cramps showed the world just how deep their love for the weird and the off beat went when they gave a free concert to the patients at the Nappa Valley State Mental Institution. The next year The Cramps released their first official EP, “Gravest Hits”. That same year they released their first LP, “Songs the Lord Taught Us”.

I saw them in SFO, it must have been 1992 or 1993. They were mesmerizing. The pacing was tight, saucy, sweaty, and fun as hell, decadent and seemingly indestructible. I always thought they were an LA band all around, but Cleveland makes sense.

And last but not least, cha cha cha.

ymo discommunicates on Soul Train

I’m still on something of a YMO tear. Here they are in a 1980 shoot of Soul Train, showing and telling one of my favorite Japanese words, discommunication. It’s not miscommunication, which often results in wounded egos and trade frictions. The ‘dis’ is not the same ‘dis’ of dis-respect, it just means that whatever came out of your mouth or pen or vocoder completely bypasses where it’s supposed to hit. The utterance goes off into outer space, and sender and receiver both go their separate ways. One example I like is what Faulkner said, in a 1955 visit sponsored by the State Department, aka his anti-Communist tour: talking to his hosts was like two people running at top speed on opposite sides of a plate glass window. You get that feeling, more or less, in this clip.

Here Don Cornelius leads in to the q-and-a by admitting to no notion of geography. I’m not sure where I would look to find YMO on a map, myself, given their penchant for city songs (T-O-K-Y-O), as well as chinoiserie (Tong Poo) and more chinoiserie with goofy breathy French dubbing (La femme chinoise). But I think his point was that YMO seemed like they were from really far away, and that if he had at least read the Encyclopedia Britannica memo, he might have had a better take on the mystical whatever of their five-piece combo form.

DC actually gives a really good example of techno-orientalism in this exchange. Throwing up his hands (metaphorically) in bemusement at the discommunication, he horses around with drummer Takahashi Yukihiro–a famous glam rocker who used to be in a Yoko Ono parody band that turned real, called the Sadistic Mika Band. After the band intros, he asks Takahashi to explain “Einstein’s theory of relativity.” This is 2 years after the Walkman debuted, and the portrait of Japanese man-on-the-street as the next-door neighbor of rocket science is well on its way.

I have to say that I found YMO’s plant in the audience, the guy designed to break the fourth wall between the stage and the dance floor (“Japanese gentlemen please stand up!”), to be a bit odd. A guy in a 3-piece grey flannel-ish suit does not seem to help their own purported cause much—the de-mystification of exoticism (yellow magic, fetishism), and its postwar Occupation stereotypes.

The customizing of lyrics, in the Archie Bell song they perform, “Tighten Up,” is kind of great, though–the narration is provided by a pretty famous Japanese radio guy, Kobayashi “Snakeman” (in homage to “Wolfman” Jack) Katsuya. The plant gets so into the actual show, as the band performs, that he keeps dancing and forgets his lines, which is also kind of cool, so I guess the whole image does get a bit unhinged. The keyboardist, Aki’s, buoyant hopping is pretty great, too.

like “befriending a porcupine”–Trout Mask Replica, 1969

Another beauty from the 33 1/3 people. I was at Skylight, looking over the wares, and got to talking to the other guy doing the same thing. He recommended this one.

It’s a bit different than many of the series. It does start with the “conversion narrative” beginning–how the world was forever made different, and given a direction, even a misguided one, by the acquaintance with the particular record. Writer Kevin Courrier recounts how the album was given to him by a speed dealer, earlier maimed by a train (it gets better in his version, trust me). Rather than meditating on the difference between trapped/stuck/mobile that such an opening sets up, and going into grotesquerie and irony, he turns to an exploration of the metaphorics of “fish”–as in Don Van Vliet’s persona, the trout–and “pond,” as a broad concept for the larger world and the world-lets within it.

The chapters follow how Van Vliet fashioned himself as a weird fish, a small fish, in the smallish pond of So-cal suburbia, “jumped” out of the pond, met and tangled and worked and collaborated with Zappa, and how in the end “everybody drinks from the same pond.” It’s not the most eco-friendly of ponds, but, hey.

Courrier succeeds in grounding Van Vliet in American/primitive/surrealist/blues counter-circles, at the same time he really conveys how the Trout Mask Replica album was just really out there. It was simply not devoted to being a “tissue sample” of its day and age, but is actually “an art album which actually forces the desert island experience on a listener, whether the listener wanted to retreat or not.”

Lester Bangs got at the extroverted anti-social-ness of Beefheart’s Lick My Decals Off, Baby pretty well. Typical of Bangs’ style writ large, his review is full of generative words, which in this case fit the affirmative desperation of DVV’s particular brand of freakiness. The Courrier book got to me in a different way than Bangs’ headlong apreciation, because it effectively dramatized how yo-yo’ing a feel it is to swim in DVV’s world. One minute you’re immersed, the next, because of some over-the-top control freak move, like twenty sleigh bells full of syncopation, you’re cast out by over-saturation. True story from TMR rehearsal history: you’re living in a communal house in the San Fernando Valley where your food is rationed, and you find yourself crawling into the kitchen under cover of darkness, to filch yourself a little something to eat: pancake syrup squeezed from a bottle into a mug, which you drink, sip by syrupy sip.

Indeed, the album is, as Courrier says, like “trying to befriend a porcupine.” Cf DVV’s description of a watch: “you see, a lot of people put this little circle on their wrists, which is really amusing: keeping time.” You see, such circles are for squares: in the DVV universe, you can sneak into the rhythms of time, outrun it, get people lost in it, but you can’t, literally, keep it.

I have this album on LP. While I find it a bit too polarising to say “Zappa was shrewd. Beefheart was a visionary,” I see why Courrier included this 1971 breakdown as a representative point of view. There is no doubt that a song about a girl who sits on a burning waffle iron may indeed have a hard time finding mainstream success. A bit of Crumb-style fear of cooties streams through the blues moans, but then again, 1969 was a mixed-up year.

The social context cross-over that I actually found most jarring and pinpointed that yo-yo effect, to illustrate the “cast out of the pond” feel of the record, was the song “Pachuco Cadaver.” I know the 60’s had an affection for metaphor. In general, we’re supposed to read the maximalist hostility as a kind of devotion, at least in the case of the girl/big-mama songs. She’s glam and can kick his ass, so she has to be a bit overwheming, preferably in a way that has a delicious payoff (as do most of the romances in DVV’s songs).

But this one seemed a bit too referential, for someone growing up in Southern California as DVV did. Courrier sees the title as misleading, that it is actually a “surreal love letter” to “the Zoot Suit era of the 40’s and 50’s.” (I think he means the WW2 era, especially between Pearl Harbor and the summer of 1943, but he is writing from Toronto, and might not have the micro-view of So-cal histories.) It is indeed truly a joyful song, like happy Swordfishtrombones. But in my listen, despite the loopy imagery and wild-westy story-telling voice that strive for intimate folksiness, the “pachuco” figure is purely decorative, and very much sidelined.

I get this impression because while the singer gets the girl, the other guys are left out: “pachucos got the blues.” Turning to the lyrics, in the form of the song, I heard what Courrier hears as tribute more as triumph.  The singer (DVV) casts the patchwork surrealist girl as a hybrid of people and objects (she is 99, she wears a bolero, and “She looks like an old squaw indian,” all at the same time). She is an inaccessible figure, even if she is tempting in her gaudy display of experience (“She wears her past like uh present”). And what she wears is a predatory belt-notching past that has not been easy on soldiers (“Got her wheel out of uh B-29 Bomber”). But in the end she goes, if in fantasy, with the folksy but ultimately white singer.

Drives uh cartune around
Broma’ seltzer blue umbrella keeps her up off the ground
Round red sombreros wrap ‘er high tap horsey shoes
When she unfolds her umbrella pachucos got the blues
Her lovin’ makes me so happy
If I smiled I’d crack m’ chin

Not quite the moral panic that was called up in the Zoot Suit riots of 1943, when, as Luis Alvarez writes, “As Chicano/s historians have demonstrated, hundreds, if not thousands, of young Mexican American men were violently attacked by white servicemen” (155). I know we’re not supposed to take loopy stream-of-consciousness surrealism at face value, but still, the song does stage a competition between the singer and the “Pachuco cadaver” left in the dust, a kind of drama of the (white-but-curious?) woman let loose to drive her own “cartune” during wartime, whose dalliances are now over, when the singer shows up.

I recently read Ken Gonzalez-Day’s history and photographic history  Lynching in the West, a history of unofficial justice between 1850 and 1935. Long story short, frontier justice was multi-cultural in its reach, and more executions and vigilante killings of Mexican Americans were conducted than of any other ethnic group. (The book contains some of Gonzalez-Day’s own photographs, a series he did of the “hang trees” where lynchings took place. It is a compelling outline of an under-known map of the city of LA and larger parts Californian/western.) So while I know “Pachuco cavader” is one of DVV’s “colorful” psychedelic throwaways, it bugged me, given the history.

Courrier does a great job of micro-mining the journalism and interviews for phrases such as this. The understatement and “blank space” he finds in descriptions of DVV the maximalist, who left room for virtually no “negative space.”  As a book that set its own terms, a system of metaphorics that goes way beyond the “conversion”/production/track-by-track structure of many of the books, I found it quite awesome.

the barter economy, five-and-dimed

Interesting LAT story yesterday on the new barter economy, people trading in goods and services rather than cash. I had no idea Craigslist had a barter section, but here you can even trade a “no-longer needed” engagement ring in for a motorcycle (sportbike preferred). Nor did I know that the going rate for a flat iron is five BB guns and 4 walkie-talkies.

I did note that all the people interviewed were white-collar workers: a writer, an actress, a violinist. The blue- or no-collar worker who does physical work does not seem to fare so well in this economy, either. Referring to the Pilates instructor:

She also barters for the smaller stuff. Rather than plunk down cash, she’s hoping to offer someone an hour of private Pilates instruction, which normally costs $150, to clean her house once a week.

An hour of Pilates instruction for cleaning someone’s whole houseful of a week’s worth of whatever needs to be cleaned? Even aside from the obvious “justice for janitors” issues of paying a living wage, can’t you get more than that in other sections of Craigslist for cleaning someone’s house, like, naked?

post-vivum

As opposed to post-mortem.

This is what I am calling an anatomy of something that you do in order to find out what makes that thing live.

See above (also: “victory, comma symbolic,” and “victory, comma pragmatic”). Tomatoes that I was not sure were going to make it, but that pulled through, kind of late in the game, to head into full bloom just yesterday on Election Day.

Voting at the big-top

It was a beauty of a day to vote. This shot from the tundra of asphalt between the polling place entrance and the actual spot shows off the vista nicely. Lucky for me I have two able-bodied legs and plenty of time on a Tuesday, since the polling place is shockingly inconvenient. It is baldly all-American, in a symbolic way–the “city on a hill” 16th-century element is present in the church locale. The postwar element shines through in the barracks construction, visible next to the big-top. And the 21st-century kick is provided by the tour through the Best Buy on the way to this open field of pavement you have to cross in order to go stand in line. It’s like time-traveling from the colonial era in a few tenths of a mile.

There is something so not appropriate about voting in a church. The church itself was very hospitable, and had very helpful greeters out to direct people to the beginning of the line. But I feel that incorporating religious institutions into a civic process–and select Christian ones, at that–exacerbates the whole unholy muddle of governance and theology (some of it very sinister or empirically crackpot, in the case of the current positions on science) that has conjured up many of the country’s troubles in the Bush regime, or at least blessed them.

Moreover, getting to the place is forbidding if you are on foot, old, a bus-rider, or any of the above with small children, who were numerous when I went at 8am. Anyone who might have difficulty motating the .3 mile from Los Feliz Boulevard to the polling place itself would be up a creek trying to make it to the big top without some serious help. I walked it, on my approach, but I was so mad about the placement of the polling place that I went back and clocked it in the car.

There are so many better, more accessible, and secular places to vote in Atwater. Hell, the car wash even has a nice little veranda, not to mention the library, and the many many garages.

nobel, schmobel, noberu, ノベル

Photo from the Guardian

I was a bit taken aback when I heard and read all the spluttering about how no Americans got within even shouting distance of the Nobel Prize for literature this year. The Los Angeles Times critic, David Ulin, took an extremely offended stance, and panned the winner, Jean-Marie Gustave le Clézio, as an “irregular” resident of Albuquerque, and “very much a writer of the moment.” It is hard to say who looks sillier, in all this mess. The gate-keepers of high literature, as characterized in the piece:

Last week, Engdahl, the Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary, called American literary culture “too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature” — comments widely seen in the United States as evidence of the insularity of the Nobel itself and proof that American writers would be shut out again.

or the affronted shock troops on the literary pages themselves. I would also note that the LA Times actually deleted its own book review section (a decision which cannot have made many people there happy, especially when one of the sections that replaced it, the glossy “advertorial” LA Times Magazine, has proven to be as dull as dishwater), so it has little to stand on as a defender against philistinism. I nearly fell off my chair when I read this:

It’s hard to say where Le Clezio fits into all this; I’ve never read his books. In fact, until Thursday morning, I’d never heard of him — and I’m not alone.

Ulin casts le Clézio as trendy and kind of boffo, as apparently living overseas and learning several languages can only be seen as trendy fiddle-faddle. But he does not bother to pick up his mouse and click on a library catalog (I recommend Worldcat.org, personally). Nor does he pick up the phone and call any of the number of French readers around town who might be able to loan him a copy of one of the best-known and -regarded writers in France, a country where people, um, actually read books. Le Clézio  is often taught in college-level French classes, as I was informed by a highly erudite and well-read scholar of French lit, to whom I often sit next on the bus. If he is on the radar of the LAPL, and any moderately alert nineteen-year-old in a foreign language class, he should be on the radar of a book critic of a flagship newspaper. If he is not, a simple run to the library can do the trick. Or Google can help, at the very least. A major newspaper should simply not have a headline announcing the selection of a Nobel prize winner titled “Le Clézio–Who’s He?” It’s indeed possible that the committee should re-think the kind of works it tends to pick. But complaining about the provinciality of the prize structure without actually reading the winning novelist’s work is untenable. It actually reinforces the impression of US provinciality.

I turned to my lazy-taxpayer’s weapon of choice, the LAPL catalog, and found–lo, fifty-two books! One for every single week in the year! In Korean, Japanese, Spanish, French, and even a few rogue volumes in English. Quick, if you move fast, you can still snap up the English translation of Oritsha, a semi-autobiographical novel about living in Nigeria as a child, while it is still on the shelf.

All of this is to say that literary critics seem to be helping with the nails in the coffin of literary journalism, these days, tapping the lid a little more firmly shut with their own closed minds. I can’t help but wonder about the reasons for such trivializing descriptions as the NY Times faint-praise description of le Clézio as “a French novelist, children’s author and essayist regarded by some French readers as one of the country’s greatest living writers” (italics mine).

The resentment seems to derive from the dreary out-dated Henry James complex about European-ness many US critics seem to maintain. The defensive attitude seems to be about defending the US candidates’ presumed social engagement from charges that it does not exist. To me, the difference is clear, given the historical tendencies of the Nobel committees to privilege the modernist engagé writer. Le Clézio’s books take place, in large part, in developing countries–Mexico ranks high, in terms of mise-en-scène, as well as Africa and parts of Latin America. Encounters with otherness are part and parcel of the stories, both colonial and geographic/linguistic others.

In contrast, neither Philip Roth nor John Updike seems high on the list of non-narcissistic engagé authors. I do love Roth, or late Roth anyway. And Updike provides a window into certain east coast psycho-pathologies of the suburban era, with doleful yet somehow self-congratulatory insights in highly stylized prose whose descriptions of quiet desperation I have learned a lot from. He can also be wickedly funny. But neither is especially social. I mean, The Terrorist was downright embarrassing. Rabbit, Really? I also really like Joyce Carol Oates, especially her non-fiction writing about boxing and the meanness of girl culture, which preceded the current buzz by, oh, twenty years. Her short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is on line here. It is breathtaking. It is not, however, gnarly modernism, of the sort favored by the prize committee.

All of the above is why I was thrilled today to learn something that killed two bad literary journalism birds with one stone. (Sorry about that sentence…) This announcement appeared on the 33 1/3 series blog a couple weeks ago:

Yes, it is the first Japanese translation of one of the 33 1/3 series, Jim Fusilli’s chapbook on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. That might seem to be quite a mind-meld, but given the many varieties of electro that ambiate in Japanese pop, it makes a good deal of sense.

The kicker is that the translator is probably Japan’s next big hope for the Nobel, Murakami Haruki. Now that is a new paradigm. Not the inward gnarly modernism of a Nabakov or Roth. Not the tragic “weighing in” of many Nobel writers, who seem more valued as pundits than stylists or engaged intellectuals. And proof that you can write serious fiction–like about death camps and subway terrorism–and have a sense of experiment and fancy. I am not sure the Nobel, founded by a dynamite magnate, will ever be ready to swerve from the tenets of modernist writing it seems to prize so dearly, and embrace a postmodern oeuvre. But this is truly refreshing, to see a seriously engaged writer also be seriously at play.

点と線–dots and lines

That is the title of an awesome detective novel by Matsumoto Seichô, about murders that are solved because the detectives know the comings and goings of train platforms around Tokyo. Their file-cabinet-like brains inform them  why the purse was thrown here, why coal dust mysteriously turned up there, and how the bodies got buried, especially that of the super-gifted telephone operator who accidentally intercepted the wrong call… I was thinking of that precision today, on my way to work, because my station @ Glendale is on the same line as the train that wrecked last Friday, killing a hundred plus people. Most likely because the engineer was texting to a couple of local “tetchans,” train enthusiasts. There is a big model RR club, actually, that meets regularly in Glendale, and seems to have a number of kids in it.

Today was kind of a weird commuting day. I showed up 5 minutes early to the platform, and went through a gateway of wreaths worthy of the Kentucky Derby, flush with flowers. There was a Metrolink rep there, hooking up passengers heading outbound, so they could make their transfer. I had a nice conversation with a diamond polisher while waiting and riding, about different kinds of tea. My train was almost an hour late, which threw off the ripple effect of transit relays, and got me to work just before class started, foiling my last-minute grading plans. Ugh. Later, on the way home, I heard that the inbound had been late because of the lateness of inbound buses, and overfull parking lots farther out than Glendale.

The way home was less pleasant, not only because it was more crowded, but because the crowds were bandying about their descriptions of who got flown, poleaxed, severed, in what part of the train, and how close they had come to what. Lots of idle speculation about what went wrong, which I am not sure anyone knows yet. One of the explanations hit a very sad chord, as it intersected with a very vibrant and fun exchange that had been going on, on one of my Japanese film BBS groups–films about trains. As you can imagine, these are manifold. From the pink “train pervert” series, to mad chases, to romances, to the genre that had been most compelling right around the time of the LA wreck–the genre that puts you right in the cab with the driver. Mike, a film grad student, posted some of his findings:

Any time you go to a major video store in Tokyo and look near the documentary or
special interest sections, you’ll find rows of DVDs with pictures of trains on the front and titles like “Untenshitsu tenbo” [Lookout from the front car] “Nihon no tetsudo [Japan's railways],” “Nihon no tokkyu [High-speed trains of Japan],” “Hi-vision ressha dori [View from the seat in hi-vision],” and so on. In Japan there are scores (if not hundreds) of DVDs available that will give you a conductor’s seat view of different train rides from all across the country; local and express, urban and rural, exotic and boring. Of course the ‘phantom ride’ stretches back to the very early years of film exhibition, but now you can finish a whole two-hour ride in color without any cuts as you listen to the conductor announce the stations along the way. There are also similar kinds of video games in Japan, eg Densha de GO [GO on the train!]!

A couple of months ago I went out for drinks with some of the staff and cast from Chikan densha daibakuha [a pink train movie]. I brought one of the train ride DVDs with me (an express going into Shinjuku–a line I used to ride as an exchange student years ago) and played it on the bar’s TV to see what they would think. At first they gave me a hard time and kept teasing me for being a “tetchan [train boy],” but after a few stops they couldn’t take their eyes off it. For
70 minutes all we talked about was what station we would pass next, whether or not the 11 a.m. express would stop at X or Y, what restaurants and shops we knew around the different stations, and so on.

In that spirit, a couple of nice scenes. One that takes you into the green, in a one-man car:

And one that takes you through the repertoire for the route, the Chûô-sen near Tokyo, before sending you off, back to the garage.　I find this one rather sobering, in its quiet flip through the options.

back on line

Monday morning came early, today, but the train was late. I turned in my badge–my parking pass for work–last month, and vowed to become a greener-and-improved commuter come August. I had padded my way up to the Glendale station this weekend, to see the scene, and check the times. It was shuttered, basically, except for a few schedule flyers, some vending machines, and a stack of flyers on a glass case containing trains, advertising an upcoming meeting of the Glendale Model Railroad Club.

It’s only a fifteen minute walk to the station. Or I’m guessing a five-minute skate, as I judge from watching the skatekid who emerged off the train just in front of me, as he bombed down under the railroad, down Los Feliz, facing down the traffic, crouched, his hands clasped behind his back. I was all hoped up for my inaugural ride on the Metrolink, but a bit crestfallen when, 20 minutes after ETA, the train still had not arrived. It was only because I happened to be standing next to a guy from Amtrak PR who had a direct line to the Burbank railyard that I knew it would be coming along, eventually. I had time to read my student’s near-final draft on her summer research paper, purple in some prose, and get plenty sunburnt.

The rest of the trip to and fro was a bit more/less eventful, the bus leg to school very friendly and fast, the return trip back along San Fernando on the train full of the commuter intrigues I know and love from other cities–peering at the crowd, considering where to sit, the rush of suits and heels and backpacks going places, the glorious mass anonymity of it all. The overheard conversations, about tripping up a guy on his purported travel details (by the girlfriend), and the x-ray technician who spent Saturday night taking pics of a woman whose teeth got busted by another woman wielding a beer bottle in a bar fight. As always, I am amazed at the number of people who 1) relate their credit card details out loud and 2) cut their fingernails while on public conveyances.

So, all in all, a success of a commute–cheaper, pretty relaxing, a bit longer, but includes a nice walk on either side. The LP version of what I have been doing is a bit longer, but would include:

–lots of reading and writing, primarily the book

–trying to outwit massive ant infestations. They got really random crazy before the earthquake, but are generally just kind of spazzy, intermittently in deluge form

–going up to Montreal for a couple weeks, and after being locked out of my apt, making some calls to Malawi, being taken in by hospitable friends, and getting sick, had a pretty good time catching up with people, though it is never long enough

–there, ending the live music moratorium with an amazing show at the Sala, organised by the friend of friends, by Las She Devils, mostly from Buenos Aires, and their bigger-band version, Las Kumbia Queers. Las She Devils played some genius covers, including one of my favorite earnest/randy teenager songs, The Undertones’ Teenage Kicks.

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