The Milk Run: June 15, 2012
Where I'd go and what I'd do this week if I were you.
This has been a good week for me since this website's now live, but it's hard to feel too celebratory when so many good people at The Times-Picayune lost their jobs. It was more touching than I expected when employees updated their Facebook status on the Friends of the Times-Picayune group as "-30-": end of the story.
On to the week ahead:
Live Music
Friday
The Stooges Brass Band, the Local Skank - Tipitina's, 10 p.m. - The Stooges are one of the city's top brass bands right now.
MyNameIsJohnMichael, the Breton Sound - One Eyed Jacks, 10 p.m. - A good night for well-constructed songs from both bands, and MNIJM showed how strong his new material is during his Jazz Fest set this year.
Helen Gillet - AllWays Lounge, 10 p.m. - Gillet has completed a new self-titled album that builds more pop-oriented material by looping and manipulating her cello's sounds.
Saturday
Bas Clas with Brother Dege - the Maple Leaf, 10 p.m. - The Lafayette-based rock band has reunited.
The 3-D Invivisbles, The Gories and more - Siberia, 9 p.m. - Two great garage rock bands from Detroit top the bill tonight.
Sunday
To Be Continued Brass Band - Blue Nile, 10 p.m. - One of the leading young brass bands in the city.
Monday
The Sword, Red Fang and Honky - House of Blues' Parish - 9 p.m. - A night of heavy rock from Texas.
Tuesday
Aziz Ansari - Mahalia Jackson Theater, 7 p.m. - Comedian Aziz Ansari's hitting right now, and he further made a splash when he followed Louis C.K.'s lead and posted his own Internet-only comedy special.
The Thing with Joe McPhee - Blue Nile Upstairs, 10 p.m. - Finnish group The Thing recently cut an album of avant-garde jazz covers with Neneh Cherry; they perform here with New York-based horn player Joe McPhee.
Clint Maedgen - Circle Bar, 10 p.m. - Clint Maedgen is a man of many musical interests, and he too has made new one-man music - a new EP titled Wildfire. He'll set up his gizmos and whatnot and make music in the sightline-improved Circle Bar.
Jonathan Richman, Tommy Larkins - One Eyed Jacks, 10 p.m. - Jonathan Richman hasn't sounded like The Modern Lovers since that album came out, but the child-like, semi-naive persona that he established with the sadly out-of-print Berserkley releases is still charmingly evident today.
Wednesday
The Mastersons, Shannon McNally - Chickie Wah Wah, 8 p.m. - The Mastersons accompanied Steve Earle for his Jazz Fest set this year, and McNally recently recorded The Wandering with a band that included Luther Dickinson, Amy LaVere and Sharde Thomas.
El-P, Killer Mike, Mr. Muthaf**kin' eXquire - House of Blues, 9 p.m. - El-P steps away from Def Jux and is hard as ever, but with burbling, faux-futuristic beats behind him lightening the load.
Other Stuff
On Tuesday, author Natalie Hopkinson will conduct a book signing at the Maple Street Bookshop in the Healing Center from 6:30-8:30 p.m. for her book, Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City. Go-go is a form of funk as firmly associated with Washington, D.C. as brass band music is to New Orleans, and it has a similarly strong root in the neighborhoods. When go-go pioneer Chuck Brown died, we ran my 2009 interview with him about the birth of go-go at OffBeat.
If you haven't seen it yet, check out the new web comedy Burning Love, a satire of The Bachelor written by Erica Oyama and produced by Ben Stiller's production company. The first five five-minute episodes are online as of this writing, and MIchael Ian Black nails the oily, voyeuristic nature of the hosts on the romance reality show. Ken Marino plays the firefighter looking for love with perfect obliviousness, and he has a line in episode four that provoked a rare spittake from me.
Rhino Records has introduced "Single Notes," a series of downloadable, chapter-length writings on pop music at a reasonable price - $2.50 or less. The first is Michaelangelo Matos' We Won't Settle for Less: Chic at the End of Disco, which uses Chic's "Good Times" as a pry-bar to get into the issues associated with disco at the point when its ubiquity caused the "disco sucks" backlash that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame still can't seem to let go. Matos has also posted his corresponding end-of-disco playlist on Spotify.
