Nuclear Rays From My Halogen Haze

music, politics, art, Elvis apologism

DUM DUM Issue No. 3 party this Saturday … February 6, 2013

Filed under: Bands,Blogs,Fiction,Lit Events,Los Angeles,Other Stuff,Poetry,Shows — D. M. Collins @ 1:10 am
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… and I am the DJ. Or, at least a DJ (there are a couple DJs, it seems, and 100 bands and 10,000 readers/performers).

You should come party, because if you don’t, it means you hate community and hate literature. It means you wish people would stop reading and start shooting each other with guns. It means you are flippant and vile. It means you’re a bigot. You’re a sad, petty, bourgeois blight upon the world, and the only value you have to anyone is as a dire warning, or maybe as future compost, a chunk of organic offal to insert into the ground to counteract the garbage you strew–though then again the chemicals you fill your mind and body with may very well poison our dwindling water supplies and make some poor crawdad somewhere die.

What a scumbag you are… but it’s not too late to change the course of your life and ATTEND this event!

ATTEND!

ATTEND! Make a last stand against the wretchedness and the filth that gurgles sick words of childish love to you when you look in the mirror.

ATTEND! Listen to readings by authors, real authors, people souls haven’t left their bodies and swum down the snaky pipe at the base of their own toilets rather than cling to the monster who birthed them.

ATTEND! Soyez présent!

DO IT IN FRENCH IF YOU HAVE TO! Take an Echinacea pill if you have to! For what better cure than a placebo for the world’s biggest lie?

ATTEND! ATTEND ATTEND ATTEND!

And stay until the end so you can dance!

 

the second Rrose Is a Rrose event is August 19 July 26, 2012

Filed under: L.A. Record,Lit Events,Literature,Los Angeles,Other Stuff,Performers,Personal Shit,Poetry,Punk,Shows,Songwriters,The Beach Boys — D. M. Collins @ 2:49 pm

It’s going to be Ogden Nash’s birthday, and you know what that means: wacky witticisms will abound, like poached eggs nicely brown’d.

And this time, we have a headliner: Stephen Kalinich, who recorded a fantastic album of poetry in 1968 with Brian Wilson, and also contributed many wonderful songs to the Beach Boys. Most of them have an almost child-like innocence, or rather maybe a defiant, radical optimism and sense of hope. But this one, co-written with Dennis Wilson, is anything but innocent; do you know how hard it must be to make Mike Love sound sexy?

Anyway, come out August 19th to the Hedgehog and see all these amazing writers, poets, memoirists, etc… Martin Matamoros, Paloma Alexandra Parfrey, Earnest Pettie, Marianne Stewart, Gabriel Hart, Erin West, Susan Burke, Katie something-or-other, and myself.

 

my return to the Garage, AKA the Virgil July 19, 2012

Filed under: dublab,Garage Rock,L.A. Record,Los Angeles,Other Stuff,Personal Shit,Shows — D. M. Collins @ 2:49 pm
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Tonight I am DJing an event with dublab at the Virgil. For those who know me, I used to DJ every week at the Garage, many, many years ago, and then had a set once a week at dublab. So for me, DJing a dublab event at the Virgil is a super double-backed reverse return to my much younger self!

If you want to see me with a youthful glow, or give me a youthful blow, come out to the Virgil tonight.

 

A Rrose Is a Rrose – A Feather Boa of Words for the Drab Throat of L.A. June 20, 2012

Filed under: Album Reviews,Art,Comedy,L.A. Record,Los Angeles,Performers,Personal Shit,Poems,Poetry,Punk,Shows,Songwriters — D. M. Collins @ 12:30 am
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Come on July 7 at 3 p.m. to the Hedgehog in Echo Park and see a full house of fierce literary talent! A Rrose Is a Rrose has everything, from poetry to confessional autobiography to music criticism to a marvelous idea for a new video game.

 

Pearl Harbour vs. Pearl Harbor July 17, 2009

Filed under: Bands,Los Angeles,MySpace Pages,Performers,Punk,Shows,Songwriters — orangehairboy @ 3:53 pm

Piper and Sky, a couple of L.A. youngsters, have a cool band called Pearl Harbour that’s playing out a bunch!

And now I honestly can’t decide whether they are better, or whether I prefer Pearl Harbor and the Explosions.  I think they should play on the same stage.  That would be fucking radd.

I’ve never seen Pearl Harbour play, but they’d be hard pressed to dance more awesomely than Pearl Harbor in her prime.  Actually, I did see Pearl Harbor about ten years ago, and she’d morphed into something oddly retro and not nearly as cool as in her power pop days.  Still, she could dust off the leotards and do it again!

 

Ty Segall August 3, 2008

Filed under: Garage Rock,Other Stuff,Performers,Shows,Songwriters — orangehairboy @ 11:14 pm

I just saw this kid twice in one week–one of my bands played with him under a bridge in Frisco, where he performed as a two-piece, and then I caught him playing at a house party in Echo Park Friday night just by his lonesome.  He’s been in a bunch of awesome bands, like Epsilons and Traditional Fools, but solo he was somethin’ else.  Especially as a one-man band, when he plays drums with his feet, keeping time to his own guitar riffs while playing bluesy four-four garage rockers, he made me shake my wiggle thang many times in a row.

It sounds like a simple formula, but the only thing I can think of in recent memory that sounds like this is the Reverend Beatman.  Not sure if Ty knows about him, but Ty’s bringing that same energy, but with less European obsession and more youthful transcendance.  Or something.

 

the Trashwomen at Mr. T’s Bowl July 13, 2008

Filed under: Bands,Mr. T's Bowl,Performers,Personal Shit,Punk,Shows,Surf Music — orangehairboy @ 11:22 am

We just saw the Trashwomen at Budget Rock at Mr. T’s Bowl.

Jeezuz Christ, was it good.  It was so good, it was like reliving some wonderful time in my life that never actually existed.  While they made a lot of mistakes, that only made it more authentic, more had-to-be-there.  It was like the surf rock version of hearing X-Ray Spex live: lots of omissions and power outages, yet somehow you feel the energy and the rock and the wonder of it all.  I imagine that some of the original surf bands had similar experiences in the Memorial Halls of yesteryear,  but these gals crystallized what was so wonderful about those old bands–the staccato reverb, the instrumental boom boom, the matching outfits, the confused singing. 

Oh God in heaven, sometimes I get the existential blues, wondering what the meaning of my life is when all humans live in isolation and there is no goal to attain in the afterlife.  But the Trashwomen reminded me that rock and roll is a meaning as rich as Jesus to the sacrament-minded athiest.

 

Winter Flowers and Schoolhouse Rock! July 3, 2008

Filed under: Bands,Country Rock,Folk,Los Angeles,Performers,Personal Shit,Politics,Shows,Television,Winter Flowers — prodigalsonnybono @ 8:08 pm

I had a blast at 3 Clubs last night, drinking tons of liquor and watching scores of rawkers do America-themed covers, some of them solo on them there acoustic-type instruments, as part of the Christof Certik curated “1st Annual Preindependence Day Musical Extravaganza”.  Whilst Darren Grealish’s anti-Bush tune and Sara Melson’s folk sing-alongs inspired a lot of hoots and hollers, by far the best portion of the night was when Winter Flowers (just a trio this time–Astrid, Gavin, and Christof) got on stage with a banjo and did a cover of Schoolhouse Rock’s “Preamble!”

Their performance was so amazing, I woke up in my car at six in the morning in a Hollywood parking lot!

 

Tom Petty is pretty awesome July 2, 2008

Filed under: Bands,Los Angeles,Performers,Personal Shit,Shows,Songwriters,Television — orangehairboy @ 10:38 pm

I don’t care what you say, Tom Petty has always been pretty rad.  At his best, he’s like Bob Seger meets Bram Tchaikovsky meets Cheap Trick meets the Diodes, a jangly straight-ahead chronicler of teenage chutzpah and beer-soaked splendor.  And that voice–it’s like Dylan and Roger McGuinn had a son together!  He’s probably my favorite “Americana” rocker of the Live Aid era, and my third favorite Traveling Wilbury. 

I’m excited because tonight I’ll be playing this song with my band, at the 3 Clubs.

It was weird, but learning this song was almost exactly like learning a song by the Clash or Wire, but maybe with one or two extra chords thrown in.

 

Cinematic Titanic–MST3K returns bigger than bejeezus! June 25, 2008

Filed under: Comedy,Movies,Mystery Science Theater 3000,Other Stuff,Performers,Personal Shit,Shows — prodigalsonnybono @ 4:53 am

Over the weekend, I took my honey lamb out to the Ford Amphitheater for a little Mystery Science Theater 3000 reunion called “Cinematic Titanic,” an event that had roughly 2/3 of the cast of MST3K talking over a movie, live.  It was kind of weird, hanging out with lots of upper-middle class people in their thirties and forties in a giant packed outdoor amphitheater, drinking wine and watching a show I used to watch while on speed in college, or while sitting on a dirty floor packed with teenagers in an old Tulsa apartment.

Anyway, there I was at the amphitheater Saturday night, and at the last minute, they announced they’d swapped out the actual film they were going to use.  Instead of Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman (which I’ve seen before, and really wanted to see get the MST3K treatment) they showed the Doomsday Machine, a film patched together in 1972 from footage taken in 1967, which had Casey Kasem and M*A*S*H* veteran/Patch Adams producer Mike Farrell in supporting roles.  The Wasp Woman was “just not shitty enough.” 

Needless to say, The Doomsday Machine was insanely shitty, and their dessication of it was incredibly funny.  And though I was never much a fan of the character Pearl Forrester on the latter-day MST3K episodes, Mary Jo Pehl was great doing voices in the film.  When a female Chinese spy on the big screen killled a woman and then left the room with an evil look in his eyes, and Pehl said “Now to break up the Beatles!” hey, that was some funny fuckin’ shit! 

For the next round, I hope they savage the movie they talked about doing when I saw the premiere of their own movie in 1995–an audience member then asked what “modern” movie they’d like to do, and Trace Beaulieu offered the idea of Cutthroat Island!

 

 
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