Indie Rock God Ted Leo

ONE of my favorite indie rockers is Ted Leo, a man of great integrity who channels The Jam, the Clash, King Tubby and Thin Lizzy. He usually records and tours with backup band the Pharmacists, but this weekend he makes a rare West Coast solo appearance

HERE is my interview with Leo; the piece runs in Friday's LA Times.

We talked about his interest in Celtic music, the way he approaches melodies, how we're still stuck in Reagan's America, and the transition he feels his career is in these days.

Two of my favorite songs of his are "Timorous Me" and "The High Party." Check em out here.

The thing that defines Ted Leo for me -- more than his songwriting, his propulsive melodies, his political commitment, etc -- is his gift with melodies that keep unspooling. There's nobody like him. He's at the Skybar Saturday and the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts Sunday.

New Beer Shop in Echo Park

ONE of the Misread City's favorite LA hangouts in Colorado Wine Company in Eagle Rock: It opened shortly before we moved to the Eastside and has been a sort of neighborhood bar. Fans of the dedication to low prices and high quality -- as well as eccentric and small-batch wines -- this place serves up will be as excited as your humble blogger about the latest news.

John and Jen Nugent, who own the wine shop, will help launch and run Sunset Beer Company, which, with luck, will open on Sunset Blvd. next spring. (An article in Echo Park Now.) It's based on the set up of the wine shop, which includes a tasting area.

I should say that while this couple has turned me on to many fine bottles of wine, John is also responsible for introducing me to Belgium's wonderful farmhouse ale Saison Dupont and hence bringing back -- in part -- to beer.

Ths morning John sent out the following note about the new venture and his need for support:

Slated to open in Spring of 2011, Sunset Beer Company will happily live on Sunset boulevard in Echo Park.  The concept behind Sunset Beer Co. comes from many evenings of beer drinking (uh...tasting) on one of the most famous porches in Eagle Rock at the home of Jenna and Drew VonAh.  It's here that we tried Eagle Rock Brewery beer before the brewery opened and listened to our beer fanatic friends talk about the lengths they must go to to find their coveted beers.  Why not make the hunt a little easier by putting everything in one place?

Sunset Beer Co. is a partnership between Jennifer and John of CoWineCo and Jenna and Drew VonAh.  The concept will be quite familiar to you - a retail shop with a tasting area.  But the retail shop will be twice the size of CoWineCo featuring many hundreds of bottles of beer from around the globe (all properly chilled of course), and the tasting area will have taps instead of rows of wine glasses (but for you grape-centric die-hards, yes there will be wine available as well).  And I must mention, our nifty logo comes courtesy Evan Spiridellis of JibJab.com, an old friend who is also a lover of beer.

Do you like the idea?  Are you salivating and annoyed that this place won't open until Spring 2011? Well, you can help!  If you would like to express your support for this business either as a potential customer or as a current customer of CoWineCo who just wants the city to know that we run a responsible business, please write a letter or email.  Our hearing is very soon, so letters would have to be postmarked by this coming Monday, October 18th.  Any and all support will help us get our license in a timely manner and would be MUCH appreciated by Jenna, Drew, Jennifer, John, Evie, Walter, their cats, their extended families and that family of skunks living in their garage.

Please send emails/letters to our license expediter and they will be presented to the Zoning Adminstrator during our hearing:

Andy Inthavong

andy4artrodriguez@yahoo.com

or

Art Rodriguez & Associates

Attn:  Andy Inthavong / RE: Sunset Beer Company

709 E. Colorado Blvd., Suite 200

Pasadena, CA 91101

To celebrate the impending opening of our new store, we are revamping our in-store beer pricing at CoWineCo to match the format of Sunset Beer Co.  You can now enjoy any bottled beer at our bar for the retail price + $2.  That means that Allagash White that is $5-$9 a glass at every brewpub in LA will be $4.50.  So beer nerds, you will be very happy about our 30-40 beers at CoWineCo, and you'll be REALLY happy when Sunset Beer Co. opens its doors.

Green Shoots -- Eagle Rock

Neighborhood are complicated organisms – like a marriage or a human body, they can get better and worse at the same time as some aspects wax, others wane. That seems to be the case with Eagle Rock, the Northeast LA hood I’ve written about a few times, most controversially with this 2009 New York Times piece about the impact of the recession.

Overall, of course, the Los Angeles economy has remained grim. A number of the places I wrote about back then – hipster thrift shop Regeneration, stationery/gift shop Paper – have folded. The Big Blue Heeler space on Eagle Rock Blvd. has still not been occupied. I do more and more of my hanging out in Highland Park – The York pub, Café de Leche -- where rents seem to be substantially lower than they are on Colorado Blvd, allowing independent businesses to take off.

Other things have improved or at least arrived in Eagle Rock. Old Focals, with its retro eyeglasses and excellent design, is a welcome addition to the old Paper space. Four Café, on the same block, is my favorite new restaurant – fresh and seasonal ingredients turned into affordable sandwiches and salads. Very cool, accessible owners – there almost every night -- and some of the best desserts in town. Café Cacao, over by the Trader Joe’s, is non-obvious Mexican food – duck carnitas, excellent cactus salsa.

Some old favorites, like Colorado Wine Co., continue strong business, and the owners, John and Jen Nugent, they tell me, will open a bar dedicated to craft beers in Echo Park sometime early next year.

Last but not least: Last Saturday’s Eagle Rock Music Festival was a blast. In fact, it was so well attended I thought for a moment I must be in New York, London or a city more familiar with huge street fairs. (It's always a shock to see street closures in car-obsessed LA.) How many thousands of people was that gathering around the dub djs, the rockabilly bands, the trucks selling tacos and slices, signing up for local groups and greeting friends?

I must admit I saw just a tiny bit of most musical offerings, but caught a few deliciously Byrdsy songs by LA band Darker My Love.

One sad note: I’ve been so remiss in going to Auntie Em’s that I’ve lost track a bit of the staff at this funky bakery/café. The other day, stopping by to get sandwiches for the Pavement Hollywood Bowl concert, I found out that Jody Nauhaus, the enthusiastic cheese-monger, has returned to Arizona.

Jody is such a connoisseur of goat, sheep and cow’s milk cheeses she even made your (mildly) lactose intolerant correspondent into a lover of the wares of Cowgirl Creamery, Rogue and others. Jody was also an early admirer of my little son, born in 2006, from back in the day when we were there every week or so. Auntie Em’s will continue to be a wonderful place, but Jody will be sorely missed

Eagle Rock and Small Business

TONIGHT I go to a wake of sorts for Paper, a shop on Eagle Rock's Colorado Boulevard. The shop sold cool books, smart gifts, letterpress printed cards, and leather journals -- exactly the kind of combination that signals the arrival of a neighborhood into bobo heaven.

The closing of the store -- done in by the recession, of course -- is especially poignant because owner Shannon Bedell lost another shop about two years ago. Blue Heeler specialized in very stylish imports from Australia, from men's bags to a whole range of chick stuff, and added some flava to Eagle Rock Boulevard and to this side of LA in general.

Bedell has also appeared in two New York Times stories on what's called Northeast Los Angeles, which is sort of our Brooklyn. The first was about the arrival of this crescent of neighborhoods to hipsterville. The second, written by yours truly, came out about a year ago and questioned whether a newly cool neighborhood could survive the recession.

That question seemed complicated to me then, and seems no less complicated now. Since my story, two of my main sources -- Bedell, and Kelly Witmer, who ran the boutique Regeneration -- have lost their shops.

At the same time, a very fine gourmet Mexican cafe has opened near the Trader Joe's, and last night I had a Belgian style wheat beer made by the new Eagle Rock Brewery. (Their first batch seemed to have been released last month at the Verdugo Bar, a place I highly recommend. Especially now that The Chalet is gone) And of course, while no one is immune to the economy's chill, Colorado Wine Company continues to thrive and it's as hard as ever to get a seat at Auntie Em's.

Back to Shannon for a minute. She's exactly the kind of small business person -- social, curious, good taste -- any neighborhood needs, and her shops made Eagle Rock distinctive. I'm sorry to see her stores go, and hope she, and the neighborhood itself, rise again when things improve.

Photo credit: Colorado Wine Co.

"The Naked Pint"

AFTER years as a wine drinker, I've begun to reorient slightly back to beer -- I think this is happening to a lot of people, especially in LA. so I was delighted to come across the new book, "The Naked Pint: An Unadulterated Guide to Craft Beer." Author Christine Perozzi is a celebrated beer sommelier who founded beerforchicks.com and Hallie Beune helped manage Father's Office and taught at the gastropub's beer school. Despite a few moments of cutesy writing, the book is accessible, engaging and full of good information, including descriptions of international beer styles -- wheat beers to stouts and porters -- advice on cooking with beer, and instruction on home brewing.

I spoke to Hallie the other day. (This is the first, by the way, of a series of brief author q+a's, involving books with West coast themes.)

Q: Let's start with the obvious: Chicks and beer. Age-old stereotypes tell us women drink wine, men drink beer.

A: It's funny, we mention in the book that historically women brewed beer, even in ancient Egypt. When women were in charge of cooking, they were also brewing ale. So it's funny that women look at a pint of beer and say, 'No thanks, I'll have a white wine.'

But when we went through Prohibition, it made it hard to brew at home. And later, advertising showed that if a woman is around beer she has to be wearing a wet T-shirt.

Q: It seems like LA has come belatedly but quite strongly to the craft beer renaissance, after being a wine town for a long time.

A: New York has had this scene for a lot longer than LA. We're right next to wine country, and LA suffers from the fact that everybody's looking for something low in calories. All these cocktails made from fine ingredients are anything but low calorie, by the way.

But people here love food like they do in any city, and there's a more casual trend in dining these days. And it just doesn't make sense to have a mass produced light lager list next to a great wine list and a menu of locally sourced food. Once people try the craft beers they won't go back.

Q: What are some of your favorite places to drink, and your favorite California breweries?

A: We love Craftsman Brewery in Pasadena, he makes a beer brewed with hand-picked sage. Russian River does really interesting beers, up north. And Stone helped to spread the word about craft beers. There's a new brewery opening in Eagle Rock -- it's starting to happen in LA.

We also like the Verdugo Bar -- he's truly passionate, and you know you'll find something interesting. We love the Golden State, over on Fairfax, where they have a beer float. And we love the Daily Pint on the Westside.

The other cool thing is restaurants realizing they need to have a good beer list, like BarBrix in Silverlake and Mozza [Nancy Silverton's pizza shrine.]

Q: What do you hope people will do after reading your book?

A: I would love it if people who think they love one style of beer go through the book and see the variety of flavors. There's a beer for every dish.

If we could change the conception of beer around the country, that would satisfy us.

Photo credit: That's my pic of downtown LA's Wurstkuche.

Birth of a Wine Shop

ANYONE interested in wine, or how a small business gets off the ground, should check out this series of youtube videos about the birth of colorado wine company -- conceived as the dream of a restless young couple in brooklyn who left everything they had in new york to drive to eagle rock, LA, to build it from the ground up.

HERE is the first of the four little segments of the show "radical sabbatical." you can also cut to the chase with segment two. (maybe because it was recently passover, i read it too fast as "rabbinical sabbatical," which doesnt sound like quite as much fun.)

in the show, john nugent and his lovely wife jen talk about their ambitions, the hoops they're jumping through, upgrading an old space, their push to get open by christmas. there's more drama than you'd think. "here we are, the future location of colorado wine company," john says, without much confidence, standing in front of a papered-up storefront. you cant help shouting, good luck -- you'll need it!

what's interesting now, in 2009, is how many of their goals they've met. the place i know matches the original dream for it -- an accessible but still sophisticated shop that serves as a meeting spot for the neighborhood -- oddly well.

it's also hard not to feel a little sadly nostalgic watching this: the shop opened in 2005, in a very different economy. how many johns and jens out there have dreams they are not able to pursue, neighborhoods they are not able to enrich, because the economy was allowed to get so bad?

Photo credit: Colorado Wine Co.

Eagle Rock and Bourgeois Bohemia Imperiled

ON a crisp winter day, with snow glinting on the san gabriel mountains, air cleansed by a recent rain, and mighty oak trees looming over the quiet streets above colorado blvd, eagle rock can seem like the kind of place '60s bands used to write songs about. but these days, people aren't singing -- or if they are, it's in a bittersweet key.

over the last few years northeast LA has become a kind of socal brooklyn, with craftsmans and palm trees instead of  brownstones and maples. but things are slowing here as they are everywhere else. HERE is my new york times story on this neighborhood and how it may or may not survive the recession. (and here is a brief piece from the LAT written for the 2007 opening of larkin's, a new-wave soul food joint.)

i only regret that the tight pages of a newspaper means i didnt have room to mention by name some of the places that give ER its identity -- whether old (casa bianca pizza) or new (colorado wine company, auntie em's bakery/cafe, vegeterian restaurant fatty's, cool bar the chalet.)

my story suggests that this and other neighborhoods will suffer with the economic downturn -- this is a case where i am entirely happy to be wrong.

tonight, by coincidence, is what i hope is not the last-stand of hipster culture in eagle rock: the elusive kogi korean/taco truck is parking outside colorado wine co. to accompany a massively sold out tasting.

it looks like ABC news may be following the story as part of a larger package about the awful california economy.

what do my distinguished readers expect will happen to this and other on-the-verge eastside LA neighborhoods?

Photo credit: Flickr user 30 and Colorado Wine Company