Nipples at the knit
By Ron Garmon
CITY HAUL: The Knitting Factory zoning hearing at City Hall should be over by the time this hits the street on Thursday, but since the web edition drops Wednesday, I can still call rockers able to stand and carry a lung to Room 1020 at 10 a.m. After talking to VP Morgan Margolis last week, I decided to give the brisk and efficient folk at Los Angeles Office of Zoning Administration their innings and spent a few minutes with two giant folders on the venue’s Conditional Use Permit case. The smoking gun of the case may well be the petition sent in by Bart Zacks, local security guard and self-elected goad of the rock gentry at the Knit. The petition accuses the venue of being a longstanding public nuisance that attracts “juvenile delinquents” to that end of Hollywood Boulevard. These vermin (along with others of similar kidney) engage in unsightly bouts of “public drinking, drug use, fighting, urination, defecation, vomiting, graffiti and harassment of innocent bystanders” in and around the premises. It was signed by 31 locals (19 of them giving the same two addresses) attesting to these horrors. Attached was also a précis of police activity in the area for the past three years – ordinary Boulevard offenses like sidewalk vending, boozing in public, and vandalism bumping chockablock with brawls, incitement to riot, and the occasional assaults on cops. Specific incidents these terse memos reference aren’t elaborated upon, but no conceivable negative spin can be put on full-color pics of fucking awesome chix offering up nips and booties to the camera with true rocker-baby abandon at Adult Media Play’s show last year. They’re magnificent, every one. The petition also alleges the Knit somehow put being a live rock ’n’ roll venue over on zoners and the ’hood, as a multi-stage performance venue running huge newspaper ads can’t possibly be the “upscale restaurant” it’s supposedly supposed to be. The photos of neglected grills and place settings looks like the Nikon exertions of someone trying to document a hallucination. City inspectors, who made detailed notes of every contact with the club, visited in mid-May of last year with a “security officer” across the street (possibly Zacks) who complained of patrons spraying piss. The inspectors took care to note all the males “dressed in black color and punk rocker style.” Sgt. Ronald Crump of the West Los Angeles Vice Squad weighed in with the usual tumid commentary re: breasts, nipple-pinching, and fingers in buttocks at the intriguing-sounding XXX party aforementioned and I found myself irritated as a critic that he never asserted presence or absence of lube.
A GIRL NAMED MOOBY: Though Plump was some hours distant, I was in Pasadena early Saturday night to visit a new ladyfriend, wandered away into an already blissful evening, lit the kush fantastic, got lost twice, yet loped at last into a raucous and very loud party. The White Moon Dreams Warehouse is hell and gone from Pasadena’s starchier precincts, but my friend Mooby was punctiliously correct in the pasties she’d MacGyvered out of black duct tape. A dark and puckish beauty, Mooby wriggled on my lap much of the night, fending off attention from over-friendly, overdressed males with a mournful, Russian-accented “Ees all in your mind.” Most of the L.A. Burner party elite was off at the Elysium festival in the wilds of northeast San Diego County, but enough remained to loosen up the Vanguard refugees crowding the event. The electro-techno-house-breakstuff went on ’til 5 a.m. or until sunlight beamed on the two of us collapsed on a sofa, the last patrons left as the cleanup crew pushed brooms, proggy strings swelled out of the DJ deck, and only dust motes danced in the dawn’s filmy light.
BUY MY PANTIES: The riotous Monday nights staged by Sean Carnage were a mainstay at the Il Corral during those few charmed months the quasi-underground venue deafened neighbors in fashionable Koreawood. The Corral kids have transferred ops out to the USC warehouse maze, renamed themselves Zero-Point, and throw their last event next Saturday night, unlikely victims of a noise ban. Meanwhile, skronk impresario Carnage soldiers on at Pehrspace, a onetime office-block secreted in the back of a tiny strip-mall in the downtown side of Echo Park, where I discovered him Monday last. Two bands hadn’t shown – something Carnage avowed hadn’t happened in at least “a zillion years” – but none of the 30-odd hipsters clumped outside seemed to mind, and any incipient frustrations could be taken out on Zaq Landsberg’s hypertrophied piñata. “You whack it and it craps one piece of candy at a time,” Sean marveled, as Portland’s Here Comes a Big Black Cloud!! loaded and plugged in. Dense sheets of advanced art-noize ensued, out of which swaggered a series of familiar ole blooz riffs just like Jeff Beck used to emit. The room heaved and roiled in the time-hallowed way, as some sweet one in a knit minidress began a frug right out of The T.A.M.I. Show, and anon came a cover of Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?” This traditionalist vibe appeared to briefly unhinge one of the lovably dorky guitarists, who gestured to the merch table and spieled, “We got CDs, tapes, panties! They could be yours!”
Published: 07/16/2008
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