One critic's day and night at the Coachella bop-'til-you-drop

~ By RON GARMON ~

Kanye West pulled faces out of the crowd, Cat Power was out-yowled, Sigur R

Will Coachella-goers fall for Madonna

Or, why a dead political journalist's old book is sooo relevant right now

~ By RON GARMON ~

Walter Karp is rarely referenced in the workaday ululations of the right-wing media, but name-check this long-dead American political journalist somewhere near Karl Rove, and watch a fat man jump. The president's supreme fixer, we're told, as much as created the public persona of George W. Bush out of an 1896 William McKinley kit with such spare parts as opportunity and Texas allowed. President McKinley put a fatherly, lunch-bucket face on Republican predation, sold his supporters on the hoof to Wall Street, and, by jackrolling feeble Spain, acquired the first essentials of American empire.

History, suitably stage-managed, would also turn Rove into McKinley kingmaker Mark Hanna, master of GOP, America, and world until end. As Rove has specifically compared himself to Hanna, (and, by extension, Bush to McKinley ) it would be wise to give a thought to Karp's greatest book, 1979's The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the Republic (1890-1920). Now back in print (from Franklin Square Press), this is your one-volume education in American Empire 101. Dead since '89, the flinty, meticulous Karp (who for years manned the arctic perimeters of liberal decency at Harpers) would be little surprised by the Iraqi charnel house or today's jail-bitch mainstream press. Here, he biopsies the puffed, gassy carcass of the American republic and holds readers' faces to where cancer met bone.

Bluntly put, we've endured more than a century of war and empire because that is how mainstream politicians kill democracy in America. In the late 19th century, big-money America (Karp's "mendacious oligarchy") endured bowel-melting shocks of Socialist agitation, labor unrest, and an agrarian depression that turned thousands of bankrupt farmers into an army of dispossessed tramps. One governing-class response was coerced patriotism; another, the Spanish-American War. Outfitted with Republican "large" foreign policy courtesy of McKinley, Hanna, and Teddy Roosevelt, monopoly capital decided war could be made to pay. We at large have paid ever since.

A tranquil polity requires gunfire and other brute coercions, but is usually inert through a combination of fear, continual searches for "missions" to go abroad and "act in the national interest," and our conditioning to expect nothing from the government but scorn. The Democrats of the era Karp examines obligingly went along with the program, engineering foredoomed presidential campaigns in exchange for keeping white supremacy safe in Dixie and similar baubles. Between the major parties, Karp notes some distinctions but no real difference.

The Democratic half of the act was perfected by Woodrow Wilson, upon whose tenure as president Karp dances a gory whipsong. America entered World War I in early 1917, after two years of Wilson's openly hateful diplomacy, the president taking care only to run for reelection in 1916 as the peace candidate. Resisting the temptation to pick Wilson's psyche that wrecked inquiries from Sigmund Freud to H.L. Mencken, Karp focuses on official words and actions, letting his modulated, high-literary prose boil to Miltonian temperatures. Describing the benefits adhering to business from the wartime federal crackdown on labor and free speech, he writes, "Everything seemed possible to the powerful and the privileged, so cowed by fear, so broken to repression had the American people become." What the war generation ceased to care about, their children would forget entirely.

Wilsons pathetic self-immolation at the close of his greatest achievement is now but a hot, rank breath on the hung-out asses of Rove, Bush & Co. Whatever fate such tender parts publicly suffer at our hands in November, the politico-military system they command will kill others and disgrace us until we at large respond with a No! loud enough to stop it. You're already living in Karp's reality, so you might as well read the book.

The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the Republic (1890-1920). By Walter Karp. Franklin Square Press, paper, 380 pgs. $16.95.

This still-relevant book review ran 02-19-04 in LA CITY BEAT
c) Ron Garmon, 2006

L.A. sits and spins at the top of the world

~ By RON GARMON ~

Angelenos live in a graveyard of dead futures, putting us once again miles ahead of the rest of the world. If architecture really is the secret Ozymandian dream of the human race, then the sum of L.A.'s great up-ended vanity box of design is nothing less than the entire spatial fantasy of the American Century, now unhappily past. No style tickles our zeitgeist more than the Space Age of the late-50s to the mid-70s, with its imperial retro-flash vying with Rat Pack nostalgia for ambience. This conceit, which promised technology would liberate the human spirit the same way Our Boys were liberating the Mekong Delta, found expression in the irresistible hoke of James Bond movies, Les Baxter film scores, and the revolving cocktail bar.

As America's premier city-of-tomorrow, L.A. is entitled to several of these pretties, including the BonaVista Lounge atop downtown's Westin Bonaventure and the endearing, silly Encounter bar and restaurant at LAX. Add to these a new/old site called West, the soon-to-be-reopened bar/restaurant on the 17th floor of the Hotel Angeleno (a former Holiday Inn), at the juncture of Sunset Boulevard and the 405. Built in the early 70s and empty since last October, the space is undergoing transformation "as a modern interpretation of a 1940s Italian steakhouse" at the hands of co-owner and designer Joanna Perlman. "It was inspired by the Italian, the Ralph Lauren, the Talented Mr. Ripley feel," she explains. "Walnut and cherrywood floors. Cherrywood ceilings."

Her approach to the existing site is ambitious. "The whole building was a 35-year-old Holiday Inn, and the restaurant hadn't been renovated since the 80s, when it was a hot spot, so we gutted it completely. There's not even a single reminder." Likewise, the project uses almost none of the previous design, but takes the original tiered seating and expands on it.

All this preliminary gouging and haulage is being done for the sake of the customer's ease-of-mind. Perlman's new look will emphasize "comfort, upscale, rich, warm, inviting 'handsome' is a word we use." Features will include "a huge, square bar that overlooks the view, with a huge lounge with built-in booths. There's a 300-degree view of Brentwood and Bel-Air. You can see the ocean with Catalina in the same shot as downtown L.A. and the snowcapped mountains," she enthuses. It's very, very comfortable and relaxed, but high-style design and a unique dining experience."

Perhaps. How well the local gentry and the tourist trade will take to the reality of a giant rotating cocoon will be known soon enough, since the space opens to the public in May. Even with 40 months passed since my last drink, the idea of a bar in the sky is, for me, more of a call to adventure, the pre-cred setting for an evening of stylish large life in Movietown. Sloe-eyed, dissipated leisure was how America rewarded itself for saving what it used to call civilization, so even as that post-Cold War world is running down, one makes the best of what's still around.

And best are the stern pleasures of the Westin Bonaventure. Its IQ-test floor plan memorably confused postmodernist critic Frederic Jameson, a fit of horror polysyllabic enough to make him the H.P. Lovecraft of academia. Approached more playfully, this mid-70s mirrored pile is a sort of definitive American High; part Philip K. Dick trickiness and part 007 movie-villain opulence. Through the somnolent maze of the lobby past the upscale junkshops to the rocket-to-the-sky elevators suddenly ripping a basin panorama across your eyes and up to the BonaVista, you enter a space that is one more spin of an old American Dream deliriously pursued. The city makes its once-an-hour turn in soft semidarkness with a selection of 70s chart hits strutting in the aural background. Hipsters, staff, and tourists pad by, unnoticed by you. Jameson might be right about the place being a monument to the late-capitalist mindset, but a less crabbed imagination could conclude that one good revolution deserves another.

first appeared in LA CITY BEAT 04-13-06
c) 2006 Ron Garmon
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=3598&IssueNum=149

The Lashes

THE RICH AND THE STUPID
Brock's take on the big money and big lies behind the conservative movement is obvious but disturbing

~ By RON GARMON ~

Why do liberals keep fouling themselves in public? This question is completely beyond the nose or forensic gift of ex-conservative hit man David Brock, so, in his current book "The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy," he contents himself with a dazzling reiteration of the obvious. Big Media (like Big Oil and Big Pimpin) likes the message that what is is good and wants it core-sampled into your cranium by the most stupidly direct means. This is a fiercely right-bent country, friend, sort of a Fourth Reich with TiVo, and there's nothing any latte-hugging, tree-gulping Left Coast progressive can do about it. We control the vertical. We control the horizontal. You are fucked.

Since the onetime star libeler at The American Spectator and author of a best-selling bio of Anita Hill (which he repudiated, keeping the money) helped invent this hustle, he could've milked the Kim Philby dodge for a while longer, but the fellow's plainly gone berserk. Following the money with the near-Marxian obsession of an SEC accountant, Brock uses his time inside the conservative giggle-works to good, nasty effect. Some raw psychopath you've seen jabber on cable news wears nearly every name in this book, and all the rest sign the checks.

Sometime after Barry Goldwater perished in a welter of uppercuts and bloodspray in the 1964 election, the moneyed right decided it was the commie-dominated news media what waxed their paladin, and the American people won't get fooled again. At about this time, conservative publicists, angered by the Civil Rights Act, resurgent feminism, and suchlike signs of national head unsticking from ass, were whooping up the white male "working class" backlash that continues to this hour. The slow public death of Richard Nixon occasioned the forced wedding of these two forces after a long, coy flirtation.

You know the rest. Brock knows it better. The entire conservative movement is a neo-fascist iron dream funded by a few very deep pockets and kept in power by systematic lying to voters dumb enough to believe in it. The lying, after all, was where Brock came in. The self-paroled hit man took the omerta at the Moonie-owned Washington Times (whose Wes Pruden, as editor-in-chief, rewrote and slanted enough lead grafs to get his Dickensian name verbed in the trade), but fired his most celebrated bullets from the Scafie-sponsored Spectator. Direct cash infusions from weird billionaires and funding from Heritage, Olin, and lesser-known foundations pay for bogus (and openly racist) "research" into social ills. This fodder, purveyed by right-wing media, goes into our great feckless cow of a national press to be spat into the public's ears and remasticated on the floors of Congress.

The good news is, the best their money can buy is David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Abigail Thernstrom. Though Brock probably doesn't realize it, his entire book is an indictment of the sorry tastes and venal stupidity of the U.S. uber-rich. If Fat City now thinks it smart to vend such shoddy weltanschauung to a people who've shown distressing disinterest over and again in renting space in the nation they have in mind, then American capitalism doesn't have many pages left in its checkbook.

The bad news is, getting rid of the status quo is going to be rough, ugly work, unfit for most liberals. Brock, for all his new faith in the "marketplace of ideas," takes us on this tour of filthy grotesques with all the glee of a headsman contemplating blue-veined necks. Sign up one more for the Revolution.

First run in LA CITY BEAT, 10-6-04

c) 2006 by Ron Garmon

Making the Scene
Rock critics are artists, too

Okie dokie, the Orb comes to Walt Disney Concert Hall

~ By RON GARMON ~

Some might find the idea of the Orb being slated to play the nouveau-fusty, quasi-hallowed space of Walt Disney Concert Hall mildly shocking, but I reacted with perfect equanimity. With its exploded-soda-can architecture and avant-pretensions, the Venue That Mickey Built is almost the perfect L.A. room to showcase the ambient-house pioneer cum

[being the vicious obituary I wrote for Ronald Reagan and the very last thing of mine to appear on the old website for my zine, "Worldly Remains: A Pop Culture Review." Watch for the revival of WR in '06!!]

Say Goodbye to Pruneface
Ronald Wilson Reagan, 1911-2004

He died! His death made no great stir on earth;
His burial made some pomp; there was profusion
Of velvet

Finding a use for Elliott Smith

~ By RON GARMON ~

As in every other art this town trades shares in, rock music has very visible casualties. We celebrate our walking wounded and early dead with scab-picking compulsion; from smarmy postmortem tributes to the megabuck dead all the way down to fanzine geeks burnishing the glory (and bearing the company) of some one-album genius of 40 years ago, the scene never forgets and never shuts up. Contexts change, scenery gets trucked to the warehouse, tastes shift perceptibly this way or that, but sentiment, like death, never changes.

Staring back at us from photos now as a charmingly raffish thug, Elliott Smith was a pop artist who wrote and recorded songs of surpassing delicacy and emotional range, which