Downtown Gentrification => Nostalgia

From the in-box, Brother "Brick" Wahl toots his own horn. (He's a jazzbo, whaddya expect?) Well, we thought, if he thinks so highly of it, why not share it w/ a larger audience than his e-mailing list? Then we realized his list is probably larger than Just Another Blog™'s audience. Nonetheless, this gives us the opportunity to believe ourself an actual editor, or publisher, even.

Fever Just reread an email I sent to an owner of a new club downtown (Crash Mansion) in answer to a jazz question she had. I found I had added this as a p.s. and forgotten about it. It was a couple days ago and I was a bit feverish from the flu. I like it. Apparently I need to get the flu more often. P. S.: I just read of your club somewhere. Nice to see all these nitespots coming up downtown. We used to haunt downtown in my crazed punk rock days...taking the last bus to Pershing Square and wandering the streets of skid row in search of loud music. Hanging out with Darby Crash at the Atomic Cafe. Smoking dope with some guys in back of the Brave Dog who were telling me about the band they had just formed called the Minutemen. Walking to Al's Bar when all those parking lots were spooky empty factories and the hotels were just a gleam in some architect's eye. That was 1980-81. Armies of beggars. Bodies in the street. Piles of blood and scabs and hair, like the Fear song said. A few years later we'd hang at Charlie's Obsession—now the downtown Charlie O's--and see killer bands inside as guys dealt smack openly outside. Lotsa fun back in the days. Too bad half the people I knew then are dead! It's a whole new world down there now. Have fun with it.

For those of you who live in or will be visiting the gluteus maximus of The Beast, Brother Brick's jazz & the like live music selections/advice may be read each week in the L. A. Weekly, under the rubric "Brick's Picks," where he, too, writes in the second person plural (editorial "we").