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Lumirova at the Silverlake Lounge
Wednesday, May 16 2001
"Jeepers! They'd rather be looking at singing rodents than our zillion-dollar e-commerce site!"
Frank, my former colleague in the UK, sent me this excellent article delving into the psycho-economics of what was fundamentally flawed with the e-commerce applications people were attempting to build during the recent internet stock market bubble. There have been many articles of this kind posted on Netslaves, etc., but this one burrows into the heart of the matter like few others before. It turns out that the internet doesn't work well for the fat cats and huge centralized companies who have failed at exploiting it. The organizations and entities most empowered by the Internet are tiny, spread-out, and of like & very non-average mind.
Tonight I'll be going with John and Pinkis to the Silverlake Lounge to see that wacky retro-post-hippie band Lumirova. We'll be meeting up with Linda and Julian and, hell, it might even be fun.
In other news, at the end of trading today, the share price of my company's stock closed down four cents a share to 39 cents. Yes, for only 5.6 million dollars you can buy yourself an entire media company in Santa Monica, CA.
Most of the time throughout this vacation in Los Angeles, Pinkis has been doing nothing but sitting around, surfing the web, listening to Howard Stern on the local Howard Stern radio station, and occasionally watching basketball on teevee. Sometimes at noon he and John (and occasionally Gretchen's friend Jacob) go down to the Veteran's Park and play basketball with random strangers until Pinkis starts complaining about his ankle or Jacob runs out of his 20 minutes worth of juice.
During his long days indoors, Pinkis doesn't seem to care much about what he listens to in the background as long as it is talk. For example, I came home during my lunch break today to find the QVC channel on, with the usual close-up shots of slowly-rotating cubic zirconiums sparkling in the klieg lights. When asked, Pinkis swore he wasn't actually watching, so I asked him if maybe he could not watch something else.
While John is out tutoring kids in Beverly Hills, he sometimes assigns his sister Maria the task of "entertaining" Pinkis. This almost always involves taking him out to dinner. Today I tagged along and we had dinner at the Rubios up on Wilshire. Unexpectedly, we actually walked there, something I almost never do except with John or Gretchen. But suddenly Maria is also on an anti-driving kick, even talking about how much she'd like living in New York. Yeah, she's a big talker. She finds something to hate about every place she ends up living.
Later on John came home, all pumped up to see Lumirova at the Silverlake Lounge. We both cracked open some Old English 16 ounce cans I'd bought and started drinking them, and ended up chugging them just before hitting the road. As usual, of course, Maria didn't join us on our adventures.
The act playing as we arrived was called Shotgun of Khando. This female-fronted band was really loud and their sound quality was extremely murky. Definitely earplug music. Without delay I was pushing wads of napkin in my ear canals while John somehow got the bartender to give him free earplugs. One has to wonder how a band can get to the point of playing local venues without ever discovering the dynamics. A constant roar isn't really anything too impressive; a waterfall can do that too.
Probably because a large fraction of the bands playing tonight had female lead vocalists, there were a great many young women in attendance. The presence of so many seemingly unattached (though possibly lesbian) chicks attired in strappy revealing outfits definitely had John excited. But the only women we really talked to were a couple of dumpy horse-faced ladies at an adjacent table. Jesus, there were some ugly chicks in the crowd tonight. Some had such hideously ill-proportioned faces I found myself doing a double-take. Mind you, I'm not one to judge people based on such superficialities, but tonight it constituted a notable experience. For the likes of John and me, our fascination with the grotesque is such that a really ugly woman can often be a turn on.
Linda and Julian showed up just as Lumirova were about to play.
Lumirova was much better than the band that preceded them. Part of what makes Lumirova so great is the antics of their singer, "Ween" (aka Christine). She moves around her little part of the stage with a halting enigmatic style that John characterized as "the cerebral palsy dance." It's the sort of thing that is attractive just because it looks so wonderfully imperfect, like the mildly retarded look of Björk or the brilliantly idiotic declarations of Andy Warhol and Gertrude Stein. It's not something that can easily be described in words, but it's wonderful to watch. One can't help but fall in love just a bit. She's a born rockstar, that's why. The music itself, which I'd characterize as form of "indie-alternative psychedelic rock," is fabulous. It's complicated, it's often funny (especially the Hare Krisna song, which Linda insists isn't done with irony), and it's chock full of dynamics and oddities. More often than not, for example, Ween is holding up a little ghetto blaster to the microphone as she sings.
But poor Pinkis. He was lost the whole time, sitting by himself at the table while we danced a little in front of the band, and then, after Lumirova performed, wandering around absent-mindedly while Linda and Julian chatted with the band outside. The poor man looked like he had Howard Stern playing in his head.
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