Stew and The Negro Problem Return to LA

RECENTLY I had the pleasure to speak to two of the heroes of '90s indie LA, Stew and Heidi Rodewald. The duo -- then known as The Negro Problem -- have since moved to New York and become "show folk" with the musical Passing Strange. Spike Lee made it into a movie.

HERE is my story on the past and future of Stew and The Negro Problem.

Two LA shows -- Saturday at the Getty and Tuesday at the Echoplex -- are their first in five (!) years. See you there.

Los Angeles Noir Comes to Glendale

LOCAL culture vultures know Denise Hamilton for her work as a journalist and mystery writer. She's also edited two anthologies of crime fiction, Los Angeles Noir and its sequel, for Akashic Press.

The city of Glendale has just chosen the first book, made up mostly of new writing, as part of its One City/ One Book program. (The book includes pieces by Gary Phillips, Naomi Hirahawa, Michael Connelly, Janet Fitch and others.)

Here is my interview with Hamilton when LA Noir came out -- she speaks quite intelligently about the importance of tradition while recognizing that the changing art form and much changed city make it feeble to fall back on familiar fedora-and-dahlia imagery.

Stieg Larsson's "Girl"

THE international explosion of the Millennium trilogy -- which begins with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo -- remains baffling even to those who know and love the books. In fact, even Sonny Mehta, the Knopf head who brought the books to the States, considers their popularity a happy enigma.

HERE is my piece in today's LA Times about the books and their world takeover. (The story is timed to tomorrow's release of the third and presumably final of the Swedish films made from the books. David Fincher's first Girl is still to come; after seeing The Social Network I am impressed with Rooney Mara.)


A lot of the success, most agree, comes down to heroine Lisbeth Salander.


Salander – the survivor of an abusive childhood who resembles a Goth Pippi Longstocking – is a withdrawn, sometimes violent, sexually kinky computer hacker with a dark charisma. In the novels she collaborates, often warily, with Mikael Blomkvist, a left-wing investigative journalist who in many ways resembled Larsson himself. Noir authority Otto Penzler calls her “the most interesting character I’ve read since Hannibal Lecter.”

I should make clear that while I see these books as in some ways unlikely success stories, they're terrific. They're not without flaw, but when the plot engages they're like Henning Mankell's atmospheric Wallander books on speed. It's gratifying to see long, at times difficult books -- in translation, no less -- generate this kind of intense and widespread following.


It will be even more satisfying to see readers move on to Nordic crime writers like Mankell, Karin Fossum, Jo Nesbo, and so on.


Readers curious about these books and their characters -- and politics -- should check out this this smart and analytical essay by crime-fiction critic/blogger Sarah Weinman. 

Built to Spill in LA

IS Built to Spill the best indie rock band going? That's always hard to say. But of the indie bands that broke in the 90s, this Boise collective that resembles a team of lumberjacks has put on the most consistently inspiring shows I've seen. With their two- and three-guitar attack, they manage to take interplay to places even Television didn't dream. Their gig at the Echoplex not long ago was devastating, loud and precise at the same time.

HERE is my piece on the band from a few years back. 

"I don't really think of us as virtuosos," singer-guitarist Doug Martsch, a mellow, pickup-basketball-and-Noam-Chomsky kind of guy, told me. "It's more about a feel than putting out a bunch of notes; it's about emotions coming out of the guitar." 

They're at the El Rey Thursday night.

Announcing Postmodern Mystery

HERE at The Misread City we’re longtime fans of Ted Gioia, whose book West Coast Jazz recreated the worlds of Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck and others, reframing the way we looked at postwar California music.

Ted, who also writes on the blues and runs the blog Conceptual Fiction, which looks at the intersection of literature with fantasy and science fiction, has just launched Postmodern Mystery: New Angeles on an Old Genre.

He’s already posted on Borges’ Ficciones, Pynchon’s Lot 49 (!!), Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

This week, Ted writes about one of our favorite contemporary novels – Jonathan Lethem’s Lew Archer-with-Tourette’s novel Motherless Brooklyn.

Here’s what Ted Gioia tells The Misread City about the impetus behind the new blog.

There is a disconnect going on in the literary world when it comes to genre fiction.  These books have traditionally been marginalized or ignored by literary critics, academics, and even book reviewers.  Yet some of the most creative works of modern fiction draw on genre elements, either openly or subversively. 

When I launched my Conceptual Fiction web site two years ago, my aim was to celebrate some of the finer works of science fiction and fantasy, both straight genre works as well as literary fiction that drew on genre elements.  But I realized that the mystery genre was also widely misunderstood.  It had inspired a large number of intriguing, and often explicitly experimental works in recent decades -- books that turned genre formulas upside down and inside out.  For the last 18 months, I've been working on my new site Postmodern Mystery (www.postmodernmystery.com), which finally launched on October 7.

My Postmodern Mystery site looks at unconventional and experimental stories of crime and suspense.  Readers might be surprised to learn how many of the leading fiction writers of recent decades have drawn on elements of the mystery genre for their works.  My site has essays either published or soon-to-be-published on books by Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Auster, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Bolano, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Pynchon, Friedrich Durrenmatt, Flann O'Brien, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Bernhard, Truman Capote, Haruki Murakami, Gilbert Sorrentino, Witold Gombrowicz, Michael Chabon, Miguel Syjuco and a dozen or so other authors.  Soon I will be publishing a complete reading list and survey essays tying together the various threads of this body of literature.

I hope the site will spur a few people to read some fine books they might otherwise have missed.  But also I'd like to challenge conventional views of what constitutes important literature.  I believe that a shift is already underway.  Strange to say, the writers already understand what is happening.  If you have any doubts, just look at the works of a Jonathan Lethem or a David Mitchell or a Michael Chabon.  They understand that the longstanding division between literary fiction and genre fiction is both arbitrary and misguided.  I'm aiming to make the same point, but via a body of criticism.   

Smart New Cop Show From UK

FANS of The Wire will be especially gratified by the new BBC series, Luther, in which the man we once knew as Stringer Bell (Brit actor Idris Elba) becomes a brilliant/tormented police detective.

The show is dark, understated, and psychologically serious; the characters and their relationships are complex and well-drawn. The whole thing has a kind of brooding vibe to it: The Massive Attack song that plays over the opening credits sets the tone quite well.

HERE is my review from The Hollywood Reporter. The show made its U.S. debut last night and goes up Sundays at 10 pm.

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.